Sort of humbling to consider he was only ten years older than I am.
Very few people can say they truly changed the world. He did.
And, in the interest of providing actual content:
And this seems appropriate:
And here’s his commencement address to Standford University in 2005:
“We don’t allow faster than light neutrinos in here” said the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar.
(Stolen from NRO)
I root for the Texas Longhorns over interstate rival Texas A&M, but man, you can’t help but be inspired by this story about Aggie softball slugger Meagan May’s recovery from a near-fatal car accident to play again in less than a year. Especially given this awesome Borg-queen photo of her:
From Slashdot comes news that the local atmosphere heated up right before the Sendai earthquake, and that such heating can be detected (and presumably photographed) via infrared.
What struck me about this story was that it validates the deeply unlikely premise behind a mediocre 1974 TV movie called The Day the Earth Moved. In it, an aerial photographer takes pictures of desert landscapes using a flawed film that reveals where earthquakes will strike due to a red line running down the middle of the fault zone. Naturally, the pictures reveal that a quake will strike a local town, and the usual race against time ensues.
So congratulations to writers Jack Turley and Max Jack. You were one of those thousands of shotguns firing in the dark that actually hit something.
At lot of people, faced with record floods, would leave.
Then there’s this guy. He built a sandbag wall, then expanded it to a moat and a berm, with pump in the moat, all the way around his house and barn in DeValls Bluff, Arkansas. It’s not a work of particular complexity, but it works, and it looks like it took a Herculean effort to build.
Bonus: At about 1:30 into the second video, it sounds like Boomhauer from King of the Hill is in the boat with them…
Slashdot header: FBI Releases Document Confirming Roswell UFO.
Actual story: FBI declassifies document in which an agent reports that some guy claimed there were flying saucers found at Roswell.
It’s been known since the 1990s that the crash debris at Roswell came from balloons used in the classified Project Mogul, an attempt to monitor Soviet nuclear testing via atmospheric acoustics. While this explanation fits all the actual known data about the incident, most conspiracy theorists ignore it because a crashed balloon isn’t nearly as cool or interesting as crashed aliens.
Look, I know a lot of what appears on Slashdot these days is just flamewar clickbait. But do you think you could avoid actually lying about the link in the header? Is that too much to ask?
A few more bits of new on Sendai tsunami/earthquake aftermath:
And speaking of Ofunato City, here is footage of the tsunami coming in there:
Someone has put up a series of videos called “people trying to escape from the tsunami,” some of which I’ve never seen before, and all of which look entirely too close for comfort.
Here’s entirely-too-close footage of the tsunami coming in, including large tugboats and a van trying to escape, right before the cameraman decided he really needed to get to higher ground:
A video from Kamaishi in Iwate:
Tagajo City:
Finally, some much-needed happy news:
(This and all previous posts on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami can be found here.)
As someone who has bookshelves custom-built to my own specifications (8-high, adjustable shelves, etc.), I appreciate fine carpentry work. But this just takes it to a whole new level:
That’s the tool chest of 19th century piano maker H.O. Studley. I originally saw this linked from Fark, and knew I had to put up a video of it, if only to show Howard Waldrop (a man deeply appreciative of fine woodwork) the next time he’s somewhere near a computer.
I’m sure this is very old news to some people, as there have been many articles written about it in woodworking magazines. I think my jaw actually dropped open when they showed how the individual fastening drawers slid back and forth.
He actually lists exactly how much he made off the e-books edition of his short story collections Tides from the New Worlds (which, I should point out, I have one print copy of left over at Lame Excuse Books). His conclusion as a solid mid-list writer: You’re not going to get rich. Also, the magic 99¢ price point isn’t necessarily the profit-maximization point.
This was also pretty discouraging: “Collections are hard to sell in print, and I know from some discussions that many collections sell for $500 – $1,000 advances to medium or small presses, if you can sell them at all.” I know that short story collections aren’t going to make anyone rich, but I that that anyone who could actually sell a short story collection to serious small press (Subterranean, Golden Gryphon, PS Publishing, etc.) would be able to garner a (still paltry) $3,000-5,000 advance.
