Category Archives: Weird

Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary, Weird

“Off-World Vehicles Not Made On This Earth”

43 Comments

Well, things are getting interesting.

[Update a few minutes later]

As noted in comments, the grays broke the link. I’ve fixed it now.

[Update a while later]

How worried should we be that they’re buzzing our military assets?

As noted, the problem is not what we know about it, but what we don’t know.

[Late-afternoon update]

Today’s (other) fake news in space.

Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Weird

Which Is It?

18 Comments

This is a thing on Facebook, but I’ll do it here. I’ll list five famous people whom I’ve been within a few feet of, but one of them is a lie:

Mitt Romney

Buzz Aldrin

Fred Smith

Newt Gingrich

Bill Nelson

[Evening update]

All right, since everyone is guessing Mittens, I’ll start the slow process of elimination. I met him at the Conservative Summit in DC right after the disastrous 2006 election. I tried to talk to him briefly about space and advising him on it, but (as he later demonstrated), he didn’t give a rat’s patoot.

Monday-afternoon update]

OK, I’ve had enough guesses. I’ve known Buzz for decades; he used to call me in the middle of the night. I had lunch with Fred Smith at the Atheneum at Caltech in the 90s, when we were pitching him for funding for supersonic research. I talked to Newt for a while at a reception at the State Department a year ago. I’ve never been in physical proximity to Bill Nelson, or communicated with him.

Business, Economics, Education, History, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary, Weird

The Latest Misanthropy

19 Comments

I posted this on Twitter, but not here. But Glenn picked it up.

[June 26th update]

Bob Zubrin has read the book, so we didn’t have to. His review is sort of…excoriating.

[Bumped]

Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society, Weird

A New Cannonball Record

19 Comments

Less than 26 hours from New York to Redondo Beach, and he did it solo. That would be averaging over a hundred miles an hour, I think.

That’s the sort of thing I might have tried when I was younger and stupider. I did do a 24-hour drive thirty years ago, but not cross country. I started out in Reno, drove up into northern California, decided to go up and see Crater Lake in Oregon (which I’d never done), then came back down I-5. By the time I got to the Bay area, I decided there was no need to stop for hotel, since it was only another five hours to LA.

[Monday-morning update]

Seeing lots of stories in comments, so here’s one more, my funnest non-stop. I was about to graduate, and driving out to California in late August to do some job hunting. On US 40 in Colorado, somewhere near Steamboat, I saw a young woman hitchhiking. I of course picked her up, to prevent someone less…scrupulous than me from doing so (of course, I didn’t consider the possibility that she was herself a serial killer). It turned out that she was headed to San Francisco to see her boyfriend who was sick in the hospital.

I had been planning to stop in Salt Lake for the night, but she was in a hurry to get there, and knew how to drive a stick, so she drove through the night across Utah and Nevada while I slept. At daybreak we were in Hawthorne (Nevada, not California), and headed from there over Tioga Pass into Yosemite. We stopped by an alpine lake in the high country and had a picnic lunch, then headed down into Yosemite Valley, then down through Gold Country, across the San Joaquin and into the city. When we got there, she found a pay phone, and it turned out he was out of the hospital. I dropped her off in a parking lot where he was waiting for her, bid her farewell, and headed down to Mountain View, where there was a thriving spacer community based at Ames.