Science writer Carl Zimmer has a blog. It’s as good as one might expect, and I’ve added him to the roll.

There’s a discussion going on at Slashdot.

[via Alan Boyle]

Lileks demonstrates once again why he’s the best writer on the web today, as he describes a walk to and from downtown Manhattan:

Walked with my editor a ways until he had to head towards home. Said goodbye and marched south, down to the hole in the sky.

Late Saturday afternoon, almost five. Hundreds of people looking up at nothing. Hundreds of people looking into the pit. Everyone had come to see what wasn?t there.

Flowers stuck into the fence; journals and candles, gifts, votaries, offerings, messages. The daily crop, removed at dusk. To my surprise they didn?t just throw up a fence, but put up a series of signs that explained the history of the site, back to the Hudson Terminal Towers and beyond. The historical plaques, the fence, the reactions of the visitors – it felt like a death camp site. If you had no idea what had happened here you would know almost at once that it this place had suffered a hideous calamity. It had an emptiness I can?t describe, an emptiness made all the more obvious by all the congestion around the site. It was like entering a parlor whose walls and tables were filled with framed photos, and you notice that there?s nothing on the mantelpiece.

One building had a gigantic mural devoted to hope and remembrance. I?m sure it?s just an accident that this wretched culture of ours didn?t put up something reminding us to smite the bearded foreigners and run their blood into the gutters. An oversight. Last minute mistake.

Walked around, up the walkway. You look down and see the new construction; you see the naked subterranean floors still exposed, still raw. Back down the stairs, and there?s-a few square yards of painted wood, smothered with the words of the grieved, the widowed, the friends and neighbors and people who always bought smokes from that store in the concourse and only knew the woman behind the counter as Maria, and everyone else who probably brought a Sharpie intent on saying what they had to say, and so what if they paint it over, it?ll be there still. Something isn?t gone just because it?s buried.

As usual, read The Whole Thing.

You know, if CNN weren’t so brain dead, they’d buy the ad rights to this billboard in perpetuity.

My Fox column is up. It’s the post from last Wednesday on NASA’s forty-fifth birthday.

It would have been last week’s column (as it turned out, there wasn’t a last week’s column) if I weren’t an idiot. I forgot to attach it in my email to them before I got on a flight to Chicago and headed off to the northern Michigan wilderness.

Model rocketry, that is.

As I and others have noted, the hobby, which has spawned many careers in space engineering, and engineering and science in general, is dying, both as a result of competition from alternative (seemingly more exciting to many) activities, and needless and brainless overregulation in the name of the war on terror.

A web site has been set up to combat this. They badly need donations. It’s a worthy cause.

[Via Hobbyspace and emailer Andrew Case]

I’m a little late mentioning this, but if you want to find out the latest on what’s going on in the entrepreneurial space world, and you’re near LA this weekend, a fascinating way to do so, and meet many of the people involved, would be to attend this years Space Frontier Conference. I’ll be there, but you may want to come anyway.

Driving back from dropping Patricia off at the airport this morning, I was listening to Bill Handel on KFI, and they were joking about the upcoming Chinese manned launch. Their attitude was basically, it’s a Chinese version of John Glenn, forty-plus years too late. Big whoop (amidst lots of crude and dumb jokes in Japanese accents–you know, “velly solly,”–they apparently don’t know the difference).

Despite the hopes of some for a return to a space race and a vibrant space age that never really was, I think that this will be the reaction of the public at large as well.

We got home Monday night, but yesterday was spent getting Patricia ready to go back to Puerto Rico for a few weeks, so I’m just getting caught back up, with blogging and other things.

Well, the “foilage” (as Marge Simpson would say) was suboptimal and the weather sucked. Even in the UP, the leaves were just starting to think about turning (except for the Porcupine Mountains and parts near Marquette) and it was cold, windy and rainy. Looked like September, felt like November. I’ll be leaving just in time for Indian Summer, and the beginning of the peak up north.

Oh, well.

Had a good time visiting family anyway. Tomorrow we drive back to Chicago and then back west.