So the Number 20 bus broke down

What makes this noteworthy is that I had taken the 20 up to the Hydro to drop off the check I forgot to drop off this afternoon and the driver knew I was waiting for her to come back. Rather than have me wait for the next 20 to head out and catch me on the return leg, she insisted on being allowed to finish the route herself.

I missed an anniversary

As pointed out by anton_p_nym:

General Hull was almost certainly not a poker player.

Vesta's Snowman

New images from Vesta.

Mike Brown: Death of a Hypothesis -or- How Science Works

The redemption of Snow White

I'm linking to this more in sorrow than anger

Worldships: A Interview with Greg Matloffe

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Nicked from nihilistic_kid

The Economist looks at past moral panics and notes some striking patterns.

The memetic prophylactic recommended warning is for some of the comments.

Interesting evidence from white dwarf systems

“This means that planetlike rocky material is forming at Earthlike distances or temperatures from these stars,” says astronomer and study coauthor Ben Zuckerman of UCLA. Zuckerman notes that it’s still unclear whether the material is from a planet, planetlike bodies or an asteroid, but it is clear that there’s a lot of it.

As a side effect of waiting for the 20 last night

I got to watch the habits of bicyclists using that section of Victoria at around 11 PM. They were more numerous (6 over about 30 minutes) than I expected and fell into two distinct groups:

A: Helmet + reflectors

This group of three stuck to what appeared to be a bike lane.


B: No helmet, no reflectors, often dressed in black

This group of three stuck to the sidewalk.

Obviously small sample size (and how weird was it that there were three of each) but I was a little suprised that none of the helmet wearers decided to seek that little extra bit of safety by endangering pedestrians and that none of the hemletless bikers were careless enough about their lives to wander out into traffic.

Assembling a Reading List for Greg Matloff

From a previous post, which linked to an interview with Greg Matloff:

M: I found in the last 30 years maybe a couple of pieces, including Greg Benford and David Brin with Heart of the Comet (1986). People are hollowing out Halley’s comet and making it livable. The book also speculates about uploading of the human essence into a computer and things like that. What seems to have happened in science fiction in the last 20 or 30 years is to me many steps back. We’ve gone in the direction of military science fiction on the one hand and fantasy on the other. I go in looking for science fiction and would like to buy something but it’s very hard for me to find something in a Barnes & Noble that I’d like to buy. That to me is sort of depressing.

Now, I fired off a short list of books to Centauri Dreams but it seems to me that it could have been longer. At the same time, I am off to the dentist as soon as I post this so I don't have the time and depending on sedation the mental resources to deal with this right now.

I started off with the obvious recently published in English (semi)-plausible interplanetary adventure books you'd expect me to: The Next Continent, Rocket Girls (both books and a reference to the TV show), Cage of Zeus and a lukewarm reference to Wave of Ouroborus. I know there's lots more (McAuley's deep space boot stamping on the face of humanity forever books, for example). Suggestions welcome.

A Poll

[Poll #1770440]

A Poll

[Poll #1770440]

Another poll

[Poll #1770486]

Another poll

[Poll #1770486]

Something that I almost never think of when I am near a keyboard

A number of SF settings have rockets that can accelerate at multiple meters per second per second more or less indefinitely, with the result that delta-vees of thousands of kilometers per second are not out of the question. Obvious, the Ek of dust and such that the ships collide with goes up proportionally to the square of the increase in velocity.
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I was going to comment on the knock off of The Most Interesting Man in the World ad I saw

But I cannot remember what it was for and I've only seen it the once. I guess that answers the question I had when I saw the knock-off, which was to wonder how long it would take the cease and desist letter to arrive from Dos Equis's ad company's lawyers.