The plot thickens.

Here’s an image of the petition filed by the executor of the will. Note that it says that the daughter who wants to thaw and burn Mr. Williams was estranged and cut out of the will. So if, as this story indicates, the family is in negotiation, just what’s being negotiated? Is she perhaps extorting the other two siblings for a cut of the estate in exchange for allowing him to remain in cryostasis?

[Update at 7 AM PDT]

Natalie Solent has weighed in on the frozen soul issue as well (as is apparently the rule with blogspot these days, the permalink doesn’t work, so just go to her site). She basically agrees with me.

Rand Simberg’s picture of there being a storage facility for the “pending” souls is amusingly literal, but has the right idea. Don’t worry. God won’t be caught napping.

It had started off as a prank, but when Major Elyse Livesay discovered (during her solo space walk, no less!) the tarantula that the boys in the crew had slipped into her spacesuit, she knew that while in space no one could hear you scream, it was damn sure not for lack of trying.

That’s one of the many entries, simultaneously wonderful and appalling, in this year’s Bullwer-Lytton contest. I led with it because it was space themed. Never let it be said that I get stuck in a rut–I am the darned rut.

Here’s the contest winner:

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

It wouldn’t have been my pick. If you have the time, and need some side-splitting humor to provide a little break from our War On Terrorism that seems to be more of a War On Common Sense, when it should be a War On Islamism, go read them all here.

And to think that Brendan O’Neill thought that bloggers were bad writers…

The contestants to this contest are geniuses, indeed prodigies, of bad writing. We could all take a lesson from them.

(Thanks to Dave Trowbridge, who needs not thank me for the blogroll addition–it was long overdue–for the link.)

There’s an article over at abc.com detailing the travails of the International Space Station and Shuttle programs. There are a few quotes from spaceblogger Mark Whittington.

Not much new here, at least to anyone who’s been reading my weblog for a while, but it’s nice to see these things in the mainstream press. The reporter still doesn’t get it, though–she’s reporting it as though this is all a surprise, and news.

If plans for the space station crew aren’t expanded, the panel concluded, “NASA should cease to characterize the I.S.S. as a science driven program.”

Newsflash guys–NASA has lied about that from day one. It has never been a science-driven program.

“Congress needs to own up to what it had intended to do,” he says. “If they really want a space station program, they have to fund it.”

They did fund a space station program, which is all they ever wanted. Programs create jobs and constituencies.

What they’ve never cared about (and still don’t really, at least not at the expense of other things that they care about) is actually having a useful space station.

There’s an article over at abc.com detailing the travails of the International Space Station and Shuttle programs. There are a few quotes from spaceblogger Mark Whittington.

Not much new here, at least to anyone who’s been reading my weblog for a while, but it’s nice to see these things in the mainstream press. The reporter still doesn’t get it, though–she’s reporting it as though this is all a surprise, and news.

If plans for the space station crew aren’t expanded, the panel concluded, “NASA should cease to characterize the I.S.S. as a science driven program.”

Newsflash guys–NASA has lied about that from day one. It has never been a science-driven program.

“Congress needs to own up to what it had intended to do,” he says. “If they really want a space station program, they have to fund it.”

They did fund a space station program, which is all they ever wanted. Programs create jobs and constituencies.

What they’ve never cared about (and still don’t really, at least not at the expense of other things that they care about) is actually having a useful space station.

There’s an article over at abc.com detailing the travails of the International Space Station and Shuttle programs. There are a few quotes from spaceblogger Mark Whittington.

Not much new here, at least to anyone who’s been reading my weblog for a while, but it’s nice to see these things in the mainstream press. The reporter still doesn’t get it, though–she’s reporting it as though this is all a surprise, and news.

If plans for the space station crew aren’t expanded, the panel concluded, “NASA should cease to characterize the I.S.S. as a science driven program.”

Newsflash guys–NASA has lied about that from day one. It has never been a science-driven program.

“Congress needs to own up to what it had intended to do,” he says. “If they really want a space station program, they have to fund it.”

They did fund a space station program, which is all they ever wanted. Programs create jobs and constituencies.

What they’ve never cared about (and still don’t really, at least not at the expense of other things that they care about) is actually having a useful space station.

Other people are starting to pick up on the theme, first put forth by Jay Manifold (at least as far as I know, in the blogosphere) that asteroid impacts are a larger danger than they appear, because of the possibility of even a small one being mistaken for a nuke and setting off a war.

Wendy McElroy has a good column today taking a position that I’ve long shared. The state should butt out of marriages, except to enforce contracts that the couple agrees to themselves. The current one-size-fits-all mentality is a cause of much social dysfunction.

I was at a wedding on Saturday. It was a Catholic service, and as part of it, everyone was encouraged to bless their neighbor, including the grasping and waggling of hands.

I idly wondered how long it would take if we were required to do it not only with our immediate pewmates, but for everyone in the church. How many handshakes and blessings would be involved?

It turned out to be a simple problem, and one with a solution that wouldn’t have kept us there until the wee hours, but it would certainly have added time to the service, if the logistics weren’t well planned.

Say there were a hundred people in attendance. That meant that the first person would have to shake ninety-nine hands. The second person would only have to shake ninety eight, having already shaken the hand of the first person. Using the same logic, the third would only have to do ninety seven, and so on. Thus, by induction, the total number of palm pressings would be the sum of 1 through (N-1) where N is the number of wedding attendees.

So what is that sum for, say, N equal 101?

The obvious way to solve it is to simply start adding. But a seven year old boy once came up with a much faster way, when his entire grade-school class was tasked by a teacher who wanted to give them some busy work so she could get something else done. It makes it possible to do it in your head. The answer turns out to be 5050.

If you’re interested in how he (and I) got it, click on the link for “More.”

Continue reading Math Puzzle →

After wasting billions of dollars on things like X-33, NASA has awarded four small contracts (total of about ten million) to look into ways of providing transportation to the space station commercially. While the two remaining Usual Suspects (Boeing and Lockmart) got two of the contracts, the two others went to newcomer startups Andrews Space and Technology, and Constellation Services.

They got off two flights in a single day, and on both flights, they demonstrated multiple restarts of the engines in midair. This is in preparation for a demonstration at the Oshkosh Air Show.