Me and You and Don Mcleanvia Sandhill Trek. Thanks for the pointer to the site, Frank. Ray Sweatman is pretty good.
Don't know why I sing
after I come with you
Starry
Starry Night
Nor do I know what Vincent was trying to say
perhaps it’s what’s behind the paint
the moving strokes inside us
All I know
is everything comes alive
throbs and swirls and threatens
to break out of its frame
every blue every yellow
everything I knew of love
when I’m with you
Pretty, but still in that mega-maglev, pre-Edwards style.Nyein Aung is doing this, results posted to the Liftport Gallery. I'll zip over to the Liftport Blog and post on this there as well. Here is a taste to make Monte a happy guy.
Maybe I generalize too much from my own "conversion" experience, but I'd rather see more renderings of the small, bare-bones SE that might (given the requisite CNT material) happen quickly and affordably, and fewer of the $500B fourth-generation Clarke/Sheffield/Robinson Deluxe...
Artistic Impression - Wealth Generation MachineThe West is menaced not only by its declining fertility but by an assault on its intellectual core. We have become as the Ancients whose ideas of freedom went on to illuminate distant generations, but not their own descendants, who hastened to embrace the following dark.Worth reading.
Remember.It's been twenty years and we're still going nowhere fast with manned space. Time to drive that rivet and get with the program. VSE offers a plausible route forward. It's not everything, it's not perfect but it's something and it's better than what has come before.
But move forward, too. Light a candle, yes. But also drive a rivet.
After downloading NASA's CEV movie last Fall, I was disappointed that NASA had not done a better job in trying to sell its vision. Frankly, I've seen better out of a high school film group. I whined and moaned about this for a week or so and then decided to put my money where my mouth was. So, I bought "Final Cut Express HD" (only for Mac, sorry), installed it on my PowerBook G4 15", downloaded allot of NASA media, and made my own version of what I thought NASA should have done. I've tried to put NASA's new program into context with what has gone on in the past.It's pretty good. Worth a few minutes to download and watch. Amazing what an inspired private citizenry can do.
You can download the film, "Return to the Moon", at: http://www.orbitcode.com
You can't miss it. Enjoy it! It's free. And it's big--the film is over 41 Meg. Just unzip and play. It's a QuickTime/iTunes movie and is formatted for the iPod. I hope all of you like it.
Please send any criticisms and comments to me. But I'm not a film student or in the bidness, so you get what I caveat.
A real tragedy occurs when a young man, susceptible to the military’s appeal and nonetheless intelligent and creative, signs up to become cannon fodder. He’ll probably leave the military alive, but he’ll have been irreversibly molded, less inclined to dissent. Less intelligent people are better equipped for most military positions, and have far less to lose.Tommy Atkins to the front - you 'ave less to loose than our Mr. Bowles, Private. For 'e is clearly a scholar and a gentleman and we can't afford to lose the likes o' him. 'Es ever so much smarter than you lot - just ask 'im!
Critics in academia and business journalism—and many from the corporate world itself, most of whom are reluctant to talk on the record and thereby show “bad faith” regarding the law—have many complaints about SarbOx, from its picayune requirements to its overall cost. While all such guesstimates should be taken with a grain of salt, one financial consulting firm, the Johnsson Group, has put the 2004 costs of SarbOx compliance at $15 billion. The critics also argue that the law’s benefits are apt to be small.Think edge effects here. It is not the modest amount of productivity damanged or that the legislation doesn't do what it is intended to do. It is the affect it has on the rest of our culture.
SarbOx probably won’t cripple the American economy, any more than the Clean Air Act or the Americans with Disabilities Act did. But it’s bound to create bad incentives and unintended consequences. Far from increasing the efficiency of capital markets, it will discourage some businesses from going public, since most of its provisions do not apply to privately held companies; will encourage some now-public companies to go private; and will keep some foreign companies out of the U.S. stock market.
The costs of SarbOx compliance, while not driving anyone out of business, will siphon revenues toward legal and accounting work. That drain may, in the words of Forbes’ Rich Karlgaard, “succeed in stopping the next Enron, but…crib-kill the next Cisco, Microsoft and Starbucks” by leaving them less capital with which to expand.
Bob Merritt: I got so frustrated, it wasn’t worth coming to work. I’d
rather be the guy that holds the pole that the surveyor looks down than be CFO
of a public company.
Stephen Stanton: We actively encourage clients: Don’t change your
system; don’t upgrade anything; don’t change anything for the last three months
of the year.
Karen De Coster: The average accountant or corporate finance individual has
seen the light in regard to the sheer folly of it all, from having endured
microscopic attention to even the most insignificant tasks. The more ridiculous
the compliance procedures get, the more the average worker tends to
blow it off as frivolous.
Charles Wilson: SarbOx is definitely discouraging smaller
companies from going public, and it discourages good opportunities for
investing in little companies. I have friends running private companies who say
going public now would be just impossible.
Why did French President Jacques Chirac last week threaten to use non-conventional - that is, nuclear - weapons against terrorist states? And why did Iran announce that it would shift foreign-exchange reserves out of European banks (although it has since retracted this warning)? The answer lies in the nature of Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Iran needs nuclear weapons, I believe, not to attack Israel, but to support imperial expansion by conventional military means.There is more at the link. Certainly a more rational use than attempting to exterminate heavily armed Israelis. Israel would bite back. What will Azerbaijan do?
But if you ask me what is a human being, I'd say that we are the species that seeks to go beyond our limitations and beyond our boundaries. We didn't stay on the ground. We didn't stay on the planet. We didn't stay within the limits of our biology. And I would point out that, if it were up to the Luddites, human life expectancy would still be 37, and we'd still be dying from bacterial infections. Ray Kurzweil
The rationale for tax cuts -- "It's your money" -- makes sense to folk-Locke-ism. It drives folk Marxists crazy. Folk Marxists ask What's the Matter with Kansas?. They cannot understand why the oppressed do not see the advantages of higher taxes on their "rich" oppressors.
Folk Marxism can explain why some environmentalists do not like using taxes to control pollution. If you think of polluters as the oppressors and everyone else as the oppressed, then merely taxing pollution is not morally satisfying.
Interesing essay. I like the idea of driving folk Marxists batty.
Update: Now with correctly formatted block quotes and a link.Theoretically, mining and collecting solar energy in space for use on Earth hold tremendous potential. Solar energy can, of course, be gathered on Earth, but only about half of the sun's radiation ever makes it to the Earth's surface--the rest is either absorbed by the atmosphere or reflected back by clouds. As for mining, a 1999 study published in Science magazine calculated that the asteroid Eros contains precious metals--aluminum, gold, silver and zinc, among others--worth at least $20 trillion at current market prices.Calling Gerard O'Neill ..
But given our present technologies, it would take vast changes in our ability to reach for the heavens before either endeavor could possibility yield a profit.Damned niggly details.
"Where am I supposed to find coelacanths at this time of day" as a catch phrase deserves wider play, I think. See Goats for more comic goodness.Building a space elevator, or how I extinguished all life on Earth larger than a shrew.
There’s controversy surrounding the launch, because some folks think that putting plutonium on a rocket is too dangerous — a launch accident could spread radioactive material. Well… okay, it IS dangerous. But I’m with the scientists who think that ultimately it’s MORE dangerous to not learn as much as we can about our Solar system. It is, after all, only a matter of time before some wandering rock decides to play “Extinction Event Roulette” with us, and that’s only the beginning of the threats we know about.Howard Gets It, allrighty.
His job is to wait for me to point to a vendor who has threatened me, then go over, hit the vendor in the head with a brick, and then anally rape the vendor until a scream of “no lo contendre” is heard to echo out.There are worse ways to earn your daily crust.
He (Patton) rammed a submachine gun into the belly of a soldier collapsed from exhaustion on a North African beach, waking him suddenly to his explanation.So too the mention of anally raping people who fail to know their business and sick the laws on people busily creating more wealth and making the world a better place.I know you're tired. We're all tired. That makes no difference. The next beach you land on will be defended by Germans. I don't want one of them coming up behind you and hitting you over the head with a sockful of shit.That "sockful of shit" brought reality home more certainly than any other weapon he could have mentioned.
Meanwhile, if you go to this page, do not say I did not warn you. I expect you will hate me. http://chir.ag/stuff/sand/And he was right.
