Here’re some items that don’t get their own individual posts, but are still cool:
1) The Onion takes on Hubble. In a related story, I used to work with a woman for whom English was her second language. She was playing with a kaleidoscope one day, holding it up to her eye and shutting the other one. I told her they were originally named kaleidoscopes because people would walk around with them up to their eyes and bump into each other all the time. She looked at me, amazed, and said "Really?" and I laughed and laughed. I’m evil. But funny.
2) Emily has another cool image from HiRISE showing Phoenix on the surface of Mars. She fiddled with the raw data and produced amazing color results. The details are astonishing!
3) Darth Mojo — who works on Battlestar Galactica — has thoughts on the wane of scifi cons. I don’t disagree with him, but it seems to me a lot of cons are doing really well right now (I can think of others besides the ones he mentions) as well as many dying off. Are cons going extinct? I’m only just now getting back into them after a 20 year hiatus, so I can’t really say. I wonder if mismanagement is to blame; I see a lot of that too.
4) What to do if you meet your future time-traveling self. Good advice, though slightly NSFW. Thanks to Dan Durda for sending this!
5) NASA head Mike Griffin talks China and the Moon. I’m not sure what to think about this, except the idea of a space race scares me. It makes it too easy to think of the goal as beating the other guy, and look where that got us: an early death to Apollo, the Space Shuttle, the Space Station, and thirty years of low-Earth orbit. I’d prefer we took a slightly longer view than this.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
I guess if I met my future time traveling self I’d be able to take my ex up on her suggestion that I go do a NSFW activity with myself.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
You are evil! eeevil!
Are you going to tell be people that it’s misled (MY-zild) and not misled (MISS-led)?
July 16th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
I JUST LOVE THE IMAGE EMILY PRODUCED, AMAZING!!!
I was playing around with the massive raw image but the colors and sharpness Emily produced is incredible.
Excellent work Emily!!!
July 16th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
The race didn’t get us set back. Too much success did. Those who make their living from the votes of the poor saw that they could get elected if they promised to feed them with money taken from space programs. So two stacks of flight hardware and the prestige of a nation went to rot in the yard, and the people are now convinced we cannot do anything right.
If I were one of Fred Saberhagen’s berserkers, I couldn’t have come up with a better scheme to pin humanity down than reward the mediocre, as we have. If we can wait some more, until chemical reserves are squandered, we don’t have to worry about going anywhere at all.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
What if I meet someone and I suspect he’s my time travelling future self in disguise? Do you think I should still kill him? It would be irresponsible not to, I think.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Radwaste, that’s one of the most contemptible string of lies I’ve read in some time.
July 16th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Darth Mojo missed one major (in my opinion) reason for the decline in con attendance – high gas prices!
July 16th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
If you intend to go back in time to meet yourself, the best way to do it would probably be to pick a specific date and time. So, with that in mind…
brb – someone at the door
July 16th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
It’s been a number of years since I’ve been to an SF con other than WorldCon. (I’d much rather go to WorldCon than DragonCon given my tastes.) But I do keep up with SF fandom a bit and while I don’t have any attendance figures, I don’t get the sense that major regionals like say Balticon or Boskone or other will known cons are in trouble.
Phil, while you have only been in Colorada for a short time, what do you know about MileHigh Con?
Going to be at Denvention 3?
As for Kapitan K, I think what Darth Mojo laments predates the recent very rapid rise in gas prices.
George
July 16th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
“Radwaste, that’s one of the most contemptible string of lies I’ve read in some time.”
Be my guest to rebut. Start, if you will, with the obvious drop of viewership NASA experienced with Apollo news during the program. You should know that by Apollo 13, the video feed from the spacecraft went nowhere until someone could die. Present the Congressional reasoning for killing funding. Continue, if you will, with the layman’s keen understanding and enthusiasm today of CICOPS and HIRISE, as news of Britney outsells the entire aerospace reference section at Barnes & Noble.
Gee, go look at the flight hardware. It got salvaged for tourist viewing; a bunch of it is at KSC today in the Saturn V exhibit, which people find less interesting than pretending Mickey Mouse is real. Count those numbers. They’re a damned shame.
—–
Dragoncon set records last year for attendance – the Fire Marshal intervened several times. We’ll see this Labor Day. All 25 hotels Travelocity reports as “downtown” are also listed as sold out for that weekend but one: the Ritz, at $389 a night. That’s when I checked two weeks ago. There’s a ballgame in town, too.
July 16th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
George Martin: I’ll miss WorldCon this year, even though it’s down the road. I’ll be visiting the Galapagos Islands at that time.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Phil,
Thank you so much for sharing that HiRISE photo. The last one you posted where you could actually see the thing dangling from its chute as it descended through the Martian atmosphere really caught my imagination and has been my desktop at work. I love explaining to my co-workers what the white fuzz in a field of blotty black is…and yes they DO think I’m a geek.
Best,
Charles
July 16th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Charles, there’s also an image that shows the lander and the heat shield on the surface. I can’t remember where I saw it the other day. Maybe Phil has it?
July 16th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Charles, found it:
http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0gDx7iW2Nug6x/610x.jpg
The top whitish blue dot is the lander, the black dot the heat shield, and the whitish mark at the bottom is the parachute. Pretty cool!
July 17th, 2008 at 2:27 am
Of course cons are going to fade away. The population that runs them is aging. The population that attends them is aging. Costs are through the roof. The economy is in the crapper (overheard a dealer this weekend at Shoreleave 30 in Baltimore saying he was passing on a con in Las Vegas for the first time in years because he had a $6000 nut to crack before he made a penny of profit). Even if you had a booming economy, there are lots more entertainment options and everyone (mostly) has the same stuff. It used to be neigh-impossible to come by this stuff, now it’s a mouseclick or two away. Don’t worry though, the kids will come up with something of there own–they always do.
July 17th, 2008 at 4:14 am
The Hubble Kaleidoscope took me right back to the 60s. Far out!
I check out the shots from HiRISE regularly they are SO COOL. Emily has done a superb job on this one. That may have to be my new desktop too. Please not another space race! If being first one back there means you have to ditch the science just to win then what is the point?
July 17th, 2008 at 7:07 am
I know that cons are strong in the southeast and while most of the are billed sci-fi, the majority of them are more gaming and parties than straight sci-fi. Far from dying out, there are new ones every year. I just went to a first year one over 4th of July weekend in Birmingham called Play On Con.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Meet your time-traveling self:
The funny part is, I came up with one back when I was 9 years old.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:03 am
The Hubble Space Kaleidoscope. Fermilab’s Particle Slingshot. Hee hee.
I think it’s a little unfair to note the demise of two overly ambitious supermegacatastrophe’s as the trend for all sci fi cons. I do agree he has a point about the internet taking away some of the advantages of the con. Having internet availability to online order any random gimmick reduces the dealer room draw, and internet chat and bulletin boards do provide fan interaction/debate. I think a bigger problem is the aging of the fan base and aging of the people running and attending. The younger crowds are more in to anime/manga.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:15 am
I don’t think cons will die out. They may become a bit more conglomerated, though.
See, I’m speaking as a San Diegan (albeit one stuck in NYC right now). Within the next two weeks, the San Diego Convention Center will be *entirely* swamped by geeks, dorks, and nerds of various flavors. Yes, it’s nominally a comics convention, and comics do take center stage, but there’s room for everyone, and there’s a number of scifi (often mixed with fantasy, admittedly, but I like ‘em both, so works for me) author panels as well as knowledgable booksellers. And of course there’s overlap between sci-fi and comics, too! Schlock Mercenary comes immediately to mind, and Howard Taylor’s been there every year I have. So, yeah, smaller cons may not last when the big ones have much more bang for your time spent (given bigger budgets and the ability to draw in headliners), but the convention itself is alive and well.
July 17th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Thanks for the heads up Michael. It’s just awesome having one spacecraft film another spacecraft. Just amazing.
July 17th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
# Michael L Says:
July 16th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
I guess if I met my future time traveling self I’d be able to take my ex up on her suggestion that I go do a NSFW activity with myself.
– - –
Heinlein did it first. David Gerrold did it second.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
@ Ronn! Blankenship:
Robert Forward managed to write about a involving a couple and TWO of the gentlemen’s older selves (I forget the title).
The older the gentleman got, the more he looked forward (har!) to the encounter, so maybe HolyJuan is on to something with the “older/fatter future spouse” bit.
July 18th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Hey, Phil, speaking about cons (and San Diego Comic Con International, too) I want to say that I’m really looking forward to seeing you at Comic Con next week! (At least, according to the online posted schedule you are going to be there!) Not only will you be there on Thursday, but the Mythbusters will be there on Saturday!
Maybe I’ll be able to tell you in person how much I like your site and blog!