Bay 12 Games Forum

So when I was a kid, I had one of those orange plastic sleds that you can just lie back on and go zooming down a good hill on. Kind of like a poor man's luge. And my neighborhood had some really good hills, even just in our front yards. We rarely got snow, being in the Southeast US, but one year we wound up getting like a foot of snow, which melted a bit, then refroze, then another six inches of snow followed by freezing temps for a week.

End result was close to three weeks out of school, and conditions wherein you had several inches of packed snow, covered by a hard-as-a-rock layer of ice about an inch thick, covered by another few inches of packed snow. Sledding Nirvana. You didn't even need a sled. If you fell down, and there was a slope, you would slide. We took what snow we could that wasn't rock-hard and used it build ramps, tracks, etc.

Two moments of awesome came out of that winter.

One: Sledding down a friend's rather large yard, towards the woods. The yard was shaped a bit like a bowl, so I picked up a ton of speed going down, and figured I'd just slow down going up the other side. As I started whizzing up the upslope (in towards the trees), I noticed a slight ridge under the snow, like something buried. And remembered to my horror that there were large landscaping timbers there, marking off the wooded area from the yard. A split second later the sled hit one and stopped dead. Being that the sled was luge-like and had no handles (and was arcing up at the time), I launched cleanly off the sled like I was fired out a cannon.

I screamed and flailed as I went airborne, fully expecting to either hit a tree or fly 50+ feet and break something when I landed. After several seconds I realized I wasn't flying anymore, and hadn't hit the ground either. I opened my eyes to find the world upside-down. Literally. I started to move my legs before my brain put two and two together, and WHUMP...dropped about 10 feet into a snowbank. Apparently, in my mid-air flailing, I had managed to wrap my legs around a passing tree branch and had been hanging upside down. Oh, if only someone had had a videocamera....I'd be rich.

Guys, the US still has a plan for a space program. Obama wants to send people to Mars by the mid 2030s. This isn't the end of the space program by any means.

It's not even economically feasible to turn off the space program, since they need people to set up all those satellites.

And Bush had a plan to send people to Mars too, which mostly got scrapped as soon as something shinier popped up and distracted him. Political will in the US is fickle about space funding, especially without the pressure of competition that we had with the USSR. It was once seen as a matter of vital national interest to keep our edge in the space race. Now, people mostly bitch about how many people Probe X could have fed, or how it's pork-barrel spending or even a "Southern jobs program" (since most of NASA's facilities are located in the Sun Belt). And from the other political direction, conservatives complain that NASA is a bloated Federal bureaucracy full of eggheads who don't do enough practical research.

As for satellites, much of that is already being offloaded to commercial launch vehicles and/or foreign space agencies. And no, I'm not thinking we're going to stop sending stuff into space period, just that we're going to stop sending people into space. Because it's way cheaper, safer and easier to send a robot probe. Look at how the way we fight is changing. Predator drones comprise the bulk of our actively utilized offensive firepower in Afghanistan.

Today is Velociraptor Awareness Day. This makes me happy, because we all need to be more prepared for raptor attacks.

Just finished re-reading The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Had forgotten how damn good it is, in part because it doesn't have much in the way of techno-babble. The protagonist is a soldier with a Ph.D., but because of relativistic time dilation, after his first tour or so technology has advanced past his education to where he just sort of gets the basic gist of how it works, so you're not bogged down with convoluted explanations.

Also glanced back over a Larry Niven series, The Smoke Ring and The Integral Trees. Pretty fun exotic setting--a clump of organic matter (including enough gases to form an atmosphere) scattered in a ring around a neutron star.

For a great sort of pulpy mix of sci-fi, fantasy and Victorian steampunk, try the Dungeon series (edited by Phillip Jose Farmer). They get progressively better with each book, except for the last. I'd recommend reading books 1-5 and then just imagine your own ending.

My take is that Xinhua is a government-run news agency, and they jumped the gun. Boilerplate stories of an expected event is common, even in the West. News agencies have "Team A/TeamB WINS Sporting Championship!" type stories ready to go the moment the final buzzer sounds.

I think there are some people who still just can't wrap their heads around the idea of a nation going from everybody riding bicycles to manned spaceflight in 30 years. Having spent some time there, I have no doubts that the PRC can accomplish whatever Beijing sets their minds to. If they want something built, they don't spend time with planning committees, environmental impact assessments, vendor bidding, oversight of the vendor bidding, etc. They just grab the nearest 10,000 people and say "Go build it." I stood in a cutting-edge university campus in Hanghzou that was 5,000+ acres and had a man-made river running through it. Then one of the local university admins casually mentioned that "Yeah, six months ago this was all rice paddies." Part of the reason they can do that is because they took the umpteen thousand farmers displaced from their land, turned them into construction workers, used them to build the campus, then either resettled them in farmland elsewhere, or put them in a city high-rise and left them as construction workers.

Now, I'm not saying that that's a necessarily great society to live in, or a benevolent way to treat your citizens, or even that super-fast construction is a great thing. But you have to admit that it's effective. If there's one thing autocratic governments are good at, it's directing resources towards things they really want. And they really want a manned spaceflight program.


My take is also that YouTube is full of stupid shit.

Hey, look at it this way...you got to see a lot more scenery.

Although personally, it I was stuck in Prague, I'd just drink beer and eat goulash till the volcano blows over. Could be months? Oh darn. 

In the end,typo or intentional publicity,It's not a big deal.Far more important things to make a fuss about than a cook book.

You've obviously never paid attention to human society. 

Funny thing is, the collector value of an original print of this cookbook just went up considerably.

When I was in high school, I had a tendency to kill celebrities by mentioning them. Some actress or singer of years past would come up in conversation, I would say something along the lines of "Aren't they dead?" and lo and behold, when I got home that evening, they had died.

I think that happened about three times in the span of a couple of months before I decided to never do that again. (At least until 2003 or so. Then I was tempted to just walk around around saying, "The President? Isn't he dead?" but realized that would probably net me a visit from the Secret Service.)