Since music and science fiction are among my strongest passions, I would be remiss if I did not point out this site. (Link via Hobbyspace).

You will find there recordings of soundtracks inspired by science fiction. I am currently listening to the nine billion names of god, based on the story by Arthur C. Clarke.

Give it a listen.

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Rand Simberg points to a fairly new blog on space elevators.

If you haven't run across this concept before, a space elevator is essentially a cable stretching from the equator to a counterweight/station located in the geostationary orbit above the ground station. Read this for more detail.

Arthur C. Clarke first popularized this concept in his Fountains of Paradise. Kim Stanley Robinson took the concept to Mars and graphically described its vulnerability to terrorism.

Until very recently, space elevators have been purely speculative, as no known material is strong enough to bear the cable's predicted loads. But because of advances in carbon nanotube fabrication technology, science fiction authors are no longer the only ones talking about the idea. Now scientists and researchers are starting to advance the idea that this concept is technically feasible.

Professor Hall was all over this topic when it was hot about a month ago, and provides links to more information.

Be sure to check back here periodically for further developments.

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According to this report, size matters.

Based on their analysis of four large-scale studies (three in the USA and one in the UK), Professors Timothy Judge and Daniel Cable will report in the Spring 2004 issue of Applied Psychology that each additional inch of height yields, on average, an additional $789 in earnings per year. Good news for me, at six inches above the average male height stated in the article.

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According to this article (available in pidgin here), the chief of the Nubutautau tribe in the remote Fiji mountain village Tui Navatusila has invited the descendants of the Rev. Thomas Baker to Fiji to offer them a traditional apology. The islanders, you see, ate Rev. Baker when he touched the head of the chief of the village some 136 years ago. They left nothing but his boots, one of which is on display in the Fijian museum in Suva. Reverend Baker went to Fiji as a member of the London Missionary Society, a non-denominational body founded in 1795 to spread the Christian faith throughout the world.

As far as I know, Baker's descendants have not sued the village for reparations. Instead, it seems the tribe would like to lift a curse they have been under since they roasted the Reverend. Apparently, the tribe are now Methodists. I wonder if they will invite Rev. Baker's descendants back to their village for dinner.

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Yahoo keeps a list of odd news bits.

Speaking of odd bits, read this one.

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I always suffer a moment of cognitive dissonance when I hear people talking about Rush on the radio.

You see, when I grew up, Rush was almost never on the radio, (except for that summer of 1981 when they played Limelight and Tom Sawyer from this album all the time).

But now you hear about Rush on the radio all the time.

Rush is all over the news. But alas, the real news about Rush is not being widely broadcast.

My advice to Rush? Listen to Rush. Maybe Passage to Bangkok.

Oh, and Rush? Can't do the time? Don't do the crime.

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Yesterday Lileks related his encounter with an early 1990s CD version of Art Spiegelman's "Maus" done in HyperCard (an Apple hypertext program that I remember using on my old Mac Classic to organize term paper notes):

This Maus CD is something else, though. It hails from the early 90s, when CD-ROMs! promised to revolutionize the way we used computers. Thanks to computers, we would soon be experiencing . . . MULTIMEDIA! Which mean pictures and text and sound, all coming at you at once! Over six hundred megabytes of information - it staggered the mind. Why, that was 30 hard drives on a single platter! Think what you could do!

Remember, at this point "cyberspace" was still just a really cool consensual hallucination in William Gibson's Sprawl-based science fiction dystopia.

And as Lileks points out, no one wanted to read a "fancy-shmancy" book on their computer anyway and the concept died out. But this CD was apparently well-done despite the limitations inherent in the medium:

This Maus CD has some interesting features; you can see the rough sketches of the drawings (not very helpful, since Spiegelman's finished drawings still look rather rough; we're not talking Herge here.) Best of all: excerpts of the interviews with his father, the words that formed the basis of the story. The old man sounds exactly like you think he'd sound. It's a perfect example of what might have made the format work. . . .

But it didn't work, which leads to the gem of an observation that Lileks almost always embeds somewhere in his articles:

. . . in ten years I doubt my computer will run Hypercard. And that book on the shelf will still work the moment I boot it up - er, open it to the beginning.

When I read that, I immediately recalled Glenn's interview with Neal Stephenson last week, particularly this exchange:

TCS: I understand that you did all the writing on the Baroque Cycle books by hand, using a fountain pen. Did that make a difference?

NS: Absolutely. The key difference is that it's slower. It's like when you're writing, there's a kind of buffer in your head where the next sentence sits while you're outputting the last one. As long as it's still in your head, it's easy to manipulate that next sentence, or even to reject it. Once it's out, well. . . When you're using a high-speed output method there's less of that. In my opinion, the first draft quality winds up being higher with a pen. It's easier to edit -- to scratch out a word is easier than backspacing over it. What this enables me to do is to get words down in a way that's closer to the final version. And it's more stable: no hard-drive crashes, accidentally deleted files, and so on. Paper's a really advanced technology. That was brought home to me by working on this, when I read a lot of documents from that era, which were put down on really good, acid-free paper. They're all pretty much as good as they were the day they were made 300 or 350 years ago. This is not going to be true of today's electronic media in 300 years. There's a lesson there. (Emphasis added)

There appears to be a proto-meme working its way to the surface here. I know my wife has been making similar observations for the last year or so. Important emails, ones that would have been letters in a bygone era, she now prints (not sure if the paper is acid-free, but problems related to high acid content may be overstated and the remedies prescribed for it more extreme than the problem itself).

Paper persists.

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And what did the space policy bloggers do while China launched its first manned mission?

Debated who they would like to be in Star Trek.

Professor Hall links to a page with the Star Trekkin song by the Firm (and a brain-damaged claymation video), but neglects to link back to Lileks' brilliant Doctor Poppycock.

Who am I in the Star Trek universe? This says I'm a Harry Kim. This says I'm Picard. And finally, this one says Kirk.

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China has launched its first manned space mission.

Yang Liwei, a 38 year old lieutenant colonel in the People's Liberation Army was the sole passenger on the Shenzhou V, following in the steps of Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn as his country's first representative in orbit (remember, Alan Shepherd did not achieve orbit). Rand Simberg is ambivalent.

I am too, in a way. On the one hand, I am always excited to see more people in space. The child in me still envisions myself in the capsule of that rocket. I of course hope the mission goes well and that the Taikonaut (or, more appropriately, Yuhangyuan) returns safely to Earth.

I am happy for China and hope that, like the space race in the 1960s between the US and USSR, this is a peaceful way for China to assert its nationalism, as opposed to invading its neighbors. In a sense, this also creates competition, which is usually a good thing. But it is competition among socialist space programs (and I class NASA as a socialist space program), so I have mixed feelings about the long-term value of this venture. I am happy, paradoxically, that the Chinese effort appears to have quite a bit of involvement by the Chinese military because I would like to see the US military spurred to take more ownership of our governmental space efforts. (Others do too, perhaps. . .)

Long term, I am convinced that humans will only expand into orbit and beyond if it makes economic sense to the individuals doing it. The conventional wisdom has long been that space is too expensive or too hard for private efforts. Several entrepreneurs are out to prove that wisdom wrong. And their first flights are the ones I am truly excited to see.

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Dynamic Virginia Postrel reports that she will be on CNN tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at 9:30 EDT to debate Commercial Alert's campaign against McDonalds' sponsorship of Sesame Street. Virginia links to the offending commercial here.

I agree with her that it seems pretty innocuous. The local PBS affiliate here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area regularly runs about 5 minutes of corporate-sponsor mini-ads each half hour. Naturally, the ones in the morning are aimed at kids (and their parents!) And I speak from experience on how effective they can be. When our children were younger, we succumbed to their pleas for us to buy Juicy Juice, which was advertised before and after the PBS show, Arthur. While we had given money to PBS before, it was nice to be able to support the show we liked by supporting its sponsor. But that's nothing nefarious, just effective advertising. Run your ads when your target market is likely to watch them. Does that mean that we or our kids are mindless drones, programmed to eat and drink whatever swill our corporate masters manipulate us into buying? Absolutely not. However, Ralph Nader and his friends might disagree.

You heard that right. Commercial Alert was founded by Ralph Nader in 1998 and claims as its mission the goals of "keep[ing] the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and [preventing] it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy." I suspect this is another area where the loony left can make common cause with the knuckle-dragging right, an area touched on in the opening chapters of Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies.

Thanks, Ralph, but I don't need you defining and controlling the "proper" sphere of commercialism for me. The proper sphere is whatever sphere the consumer defines it to be. As a parent, that means I need to help my children learn how to define it. First, teach them limits. Say no. Repeat. Repeat again. Repeat again. After several repeats, teach them scepticism. Ask why. Repeat as necessary. Teach them to say no to their impulses and then to question them. As much as the kill-joy culture (and food) police would like to make us (and trial juries) believe that we are not responsible for our actions and are susceptible to corporate manipulation, we are in fact responsible. We can make choices. My choice? Buy McDonalds for lunch tomorrow. Just to stick a finger in Nader's eye.

And now, a word from our sponsor:

Sunny Day - Sweeping the clouds away
On my way to where the air is sweet
Can you tell me how to get,
How to get McDonald's to eat?

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Robot go go!

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"Keitai" is Japanese for "mobile" or "portable" and is slang for mobile electronic devices such as phones, PDAs, walkmans, etc.

If you want a hint of what our keitai will look like in 18-24 months, check out this collection of galleries. I work for a Japanese company and thus have a chance to see the current (Japanese not-for-export) versions of phones, laptops, and PDAs on a pretty regular basis. The state-of-the-art in their screen technology is breathtaking; pictures displayed on the latest Japanese laptops look like barely-dry photos printed on high-gloss paper, while on my laptop screen they look like 25-year-old prints on matte paper.

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Yes, Mr. Phelps, it does appear that we have a coach.

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And that should go without saying, pretty much regardless of the topic. He sums up perfectly my feelings about science fiction thus:

If you headed to the past and wanted to find someone who could truly understand the world 50 years hence, look for the clerk who goes to the drugstore for his lunch break and reads Tales of Mars, not the guy who reads
the New York Times.

Read the whole thing.

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I would have bet against these [formerly] conjoined twins making it this far. But they appear do be doing well. Of course it is too early to predict the final outcome. What brave parents for trying to find a way to give their children a chance at a normal life.

Update: More here.

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Our weekend was wide open, the kids were on Fall break, the calendar was clear of sporting and other commitments. Finding ourselves with nothing to do, we headed up to Eisenhower State Park. Situated on the southern shores of Lake Texoma within 20 minutes of the birthplace of President Eisenhower, the park is only about a one-hour drive from our home in Plano.

We spent most of our time learning how to pitch our new 10-person tent (which means, of course, that only the five members of our family can sleep in it comfortably), building the cooking fires for dinner and breakfast, and cleaning up after dinner and breakfast. Throw in a 90-minute nature walk that included skipping rocks, picking apart crawfish shells, and catching crickets, and that was it. In other words, perfect.

I know that I had much more fun skipping rocks with my kids in the fresh, 70-degree autumn air than I would have had watching my beloved Longhorns surrender for the fourth year in a row to the awful Oklahoma Sooners.

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I wonder if the Dead Kennedys will re-release their 1979 hit with updated lyrics.

(But how do you replace "Jerry Brown" with "Arnold Schwarzenegger" and keep the same rhyme/rhythm scheme?)

(And how do you deal with your tasteless band name when the governor is married to a Kennedy?)

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One of my favorite parts of the movie Contact was the long, slow, "zoom" scene at the beginning.

Here is a website that allows you to zoom your perspective in and out by powers of 10. Don't explore here if you have feelings of insignificance when you
contemplate the scope of the Cosmos.

Update: Reminds me of the Total Perspective Vortex.

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Do you like Escher? Listen to this while reading this.

(You might take a shot or two of this, first, too).

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Lions and Tigers and Bears. Oh my.

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