Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in beamjockey's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Saturday, July 11th, 2009
9:33 am	"We're about to see the first mile of the trip to Mars." On Wallops Island, Virginia, Peter Alway attended a NASA test launch this week. It was a test of an escape system for the Orion capsule, the Max Launch Abort System or MLAS. This was going to be the rocket-powered flight of the Orion spacecraft, and the first flight of the whole "Constellation" program" that might send human beings to Mars. And we were there at the beginning. Here is a NASA photo gallery for the launch. As Peter's brother bigbumble points out, a seemingly enormous number of parachutes was deployed. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
7:30 pm	Nicoll's Aphorism Spotted at Fermilab This thread reminded me that I should post these pictures of a bumper sticker I sighted near the Fermilab Auditorium, back of Wilson Hall. You may be familiar with James Nicoll's celebrated remark: The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. The paraphrased bumper sticker is from Pegasus Publishing, which, alas, does not attribute the quote to Mr. Nicoll. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
10:23 am	Insert Quarter to Save Your Ship! I was going to post something sarcastic when I learned that Hollywood is working on a movie based on the arcade game Asteroids, but it seems Io9 beat me to it. So did the New York Times. So did everybody, really. Quoting Io9: Anyone who is a fan of classic video games knows the familiar story behind Asteroids . . . which is that you are a triangle, and you are shooting a series of geometric shapes. Released in 1979, the game is a perfect example of extremely early and crude computer graphics. And seriously, there was no effort made whatsoever to have a story. Why were you shooting the asteroids? Were they controlled by aliens? Were you trying to break them up so you could mine them for nickel in their cores? It was all an 8-bit mystery. Here's a brief history of the game. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
7:29 am	Funeral Plans for Kay Mathews We've made funeral arrangements for my mother-in-law, Kay Mathews: Kay R. Mathews, age 72, of Aurora, IL died Monday, June 22, 2009 at Meadowbrook Manor, Naperville, IL. She was born July 5, 1936 in Little Rock, AR. Mrs. Mathews was an Occupational Therapist at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Little Rock for over 15 years. Upon retiring, she happily moved to a cabin in the woods by a lake in Henry, IL. She was a free spirit, great mother, and artist, who enjoyed working in numerous mediums including oils, pastels and mixed-media sculpture. When not creating art, she created vibrant gardens. She is survived by her daughter Dr. Kelline (William) E. Mathews Higgins of Aurora, IL; her son Theodore William (Diane) Mathews III of Des Moines, IA.; one brother, Jerry (Suellen) Roberts, Little Rock, AR; and her grandchildren, Theodore William Mathews IV and David Mathews. She was preceded in death by her parents Joseph and Pauline (nee Kelly) Roberts. A memorial service will be held at the Beidelman-Kunsch Funeral Home, 516 S. Washington St., Naperville, IL, Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 11:00 A.M. a potluck reception will follow until 1:00 P.M. After 1:00, the family will receive visitors at the Higgins home at 2404 White Barn Road in Aurora, Illinois. This map link includes the Funeral Home, the Higgins Home and local hotels. Memorials may be made to the American Cancer Society, 225 N. Michigan Ave. Suite 1200, Chicago, IL 60601, or the American Lung Association, 55 W. Wacker Dr. Suite 800, Chicago, IL 60601, or the Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development, P.O. Box 4569, Arcata, CA 95518. For Info call 630.355-0264 or visit http://www.beidelmankunschfh.com. Many have asked what "Gate! Gate! Para Gate! Parasamgate! Bodhi Svaha!" means. This is an excerpt from a Buddhist text called the Heart Sutra. It says, "Gone! Gone! Gone Beyond! Gone Beyond Beyond Fully and Completely." Svaha is the exclamation of transcendence. The overall sentiment is one of happy and complete transcendence. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
6:17 pm	Farewell to Kay Mathews My wife lost her mother last night. She writes: Gate! (Gah-tay) Gate! Para Gate! Parasamgate! Bodhi Svaha! Kay Roberts Mathews July 5, 1936 to June 22, 2009 Kay was a great mom, artist and healer (occupational therapist) in her life time. She was a fiercely free spirit. She died peacefully Monday afternoon after a brief battle with lung cancer. More information will follow as it becomes available. Thank-you all for your support. Kelley Mathews Higgins and William S. Higgins We expect to announce memorial service details on Wednesday afternoon. (26 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
3:46 pm	Rocket 'n' Roll: Willy Ley's Recording Career Willy Ley (1906-1969) was a great science writer of the 20th century. He is best known for his books on rocketry and on biology. He sometimes served as science adviser for radio and TV shows and other projects. Until now, I had not known that Willy had a recording career. From a review in Billboard for 15 December 1958: Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel Written and directed by Willy Ley--Vox PL 11/120 The cover alone should sell this timely package to students and science buffs, with its striking color shot of a Jupiter rocket blasting off its launching pad. Inside, rocket veteran Willy Ley and narrator Arthur Hannes take listeners on a sort of guided tour of Cape Canaveral, complete with the complex noises of blockhouse "countdowns," the roar of rockets and on-location interviews by Ley of such notables as Dr. Wernher von Braun and Major General Bernard Schriever. Ley and von Braun also did The Conquest of Space from Vox, "Science Series Vol. 1," though it's hard to make out the catalogue number from the photo. The library of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, a repository of Ley's stuff, lists: The Conquest of space : a conversation between Dr. Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley. (New York: Vox Productions [produced by Ward Botsford], 1959) two 12in. 33RPM discs, 4 sides, in illus. slipcase (=Science series, v.1) Part I -- The Society of Space Travel Part II -- Peenemünde Part III -- White Sands Part IV -- The future Four sides. Wow. I'd like to hear these, wouldn't you? (By the way, "The Conquest of Space" was a title applied to a lot of things, some interrelated, some not. It was a famous coffee-table book, a George Pal movie, this record, a View-Master reel, another spoken-word record by William Laurence, et cetera, et cetera.) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
2:36 pm	About That Bomber... Exposing the Hoax! From Odds & Ends Consolidated B-24N found in lunar crater, according to WWN for 5 April 1988. In fact, this photo is a hoax. As you can see, the shadows on the plane don't quite line up with the shadows in the crater. It is clear that aliens have painted a picture of a B-24 on the floor of the crater! (7 Comments |Comment on this)
9:27 am	World War 2 Bomber Found on the Moon Found on Google Books! Google Books has added more magazines to its "serial holdings" since the last time I checked.     American Motorcyclist, Feb 1955 - July 2005     American Woodworker, Jan 1989 - Dec 1999     Billboard, Jan 1942 - Dec 2008     Boys’ Life, Jan 1990 - Dec 2005     Building systems, Jan 2000 - July 2003     Competition Science Vision (India), March 1998 - Dec 2008     Dwell, Oct 2000 - Dec 2008     iPod Handbook (Mac Life Winter 2008)     Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, 1947-2007     Liberty Magazine, 1971 - 1976     PHOTOVIDEOi, April 2005 - Nov 2008     Pratiyogita Darpan (India), July 2006 - Dec 2008     Scouting, Jan 1993 - Dec 2008     Torque, Jan 2006 - Nov 2008     Weekly World News (Tabloid), 1981 - 2005     Yoga Journal, July 1975 - Dec 2008 Weekly World News will be the most fun, if you like that sort of thing. I'm looking forward to exploring the music business in Billboard. Thanks to Eric Rumsey. If you spot a new magazine in the collection, please let me or Eric know. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
10:24 pm	A Thank-You Note from "gerisullivan" "I now know much more about butter sculpture than I knew when I woke up this morning." I live to serve, my dear. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
12:06 pm	Anthropological Scorecard for 2001: A Space Odyssey? At Duckon this coming weekend, I've been invited to participate in a panel called "The Space Science of 2001." A question struck me, though it's not quite within the purview of the panel: How good is the science behind "The Dawn of Man" portion at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey? I have seen plenty of books and online discussion of the space stuff in the film. I wonder whether there are good analyses of its portrayal of primitive pre-humans. Fred Ordway mentions that around 1965, while preparing 2001, he and Arthur Clarke dined with Louis and Richard Leakey, whose African excavations were making big steps in the study of our ancestors. Can anyone point me to worthwhile critiques of the hominid culture depicted in the film? [Edited to add link to Fred Ordway's invaluable account of working as science advisor to Kubrick.] (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 8th, 2009
4:50 pm	Idle Amazon Question: Transparent Spacesuits How come one can "Look Inside!" the paper edition of Russian Spacesuits but not the opaque Kindle Edition? Seems counterintuitive that the paper version is searchable, but the Kindle edition is not. (By the way, I vacillate on whether to use space suit or spacesuit. Googlefight says 118000 for spacesuit and 65800 for "space suit" (in quotes), so I guess the rest of the Web is also undecided.) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
7:06 pm	Amazon Proclaims The Heavens Proclaim Will Be On Sale Soon Amazon has started listing the Vatican Observatory's forthcoming coffee-table book, The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican, edited by Brother Guy Consolmagno. It's published to coincide eith the International Year of Astronomy. Contributors include a boatload of Jesuit scientists and several Popes. Thanks to Amazon, you won't have to visit the souvenir shops ringing St. Peter's Basilica to obtain a copy. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
5:00 pm	Getcher Moon Hoax Merchandise Right Here! Apparently, the 1835 Moon Hoax of Richard Adams Locke, serialized in the New York Sun, was so popular that it was commemorated in wallpaper. The wallpaper, according to Peter M. Millman, is deep blue, silver, and black. A specimen 14 inches high by 30 inches wide is preserved in the Nantucket Historical Association. According to Early American stencils on Walls and Furniture by Janet Waring, "Originally on the walls of the Jonathan Paddock house, Pearl Street, Nantucket, and referred to by Kate Sanborn in Old Time Wallpapers [1905, sadly missing from Google Books],p. 96." The Moon Hoax was popular enough to generate spinoffs: multiple editions of reprints, color print illustrations, and even snuff boxes. This is the first time that I have heard of Moon Hoax wallpaper, though. Actually, to me it looks like the terrestrial Moon-peepers are seeing a tropical scene with palm trees, water, and maybe a volcano in the background. At the modest resolution of the Nantucket image, I can't discern any man-bats, bipedal beavers making fire, sapphire temples, or blue unicorns. But Peter M. Millman assures us that it illustrates Locke's Moon Hoax, and if he could be wrong about something like this, they wouldn't have named asteroid 2904 Millman, would they? The snuff box, which resides in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, U.K., has a considerably better illustration of Locke's tale. (Here's a slide presentation by Prof. Ben Peperkamp about it, which is highly interesting but FRUSTRATINGLY INVISIBLE UNLESS YOU ARE BROWSING WITH MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER.) The South African super-telescope has projected an image of the Moon's inhabitants onto a table, and Sir John Herschel is inspecting it with a special illuminated microscope that allows him to see even more detail. A couple of assistants are holding a lantern attached to a bellows, presumably a source for the special illumination, and a little guy up in the corner is working some kind of mechanism. The scene resembles a table where 20th-century scientists might scan an astronomical plate or bubble chamber photograph... but Adams's inventive lie was written a couple of years before daugerrotypes were invented, let alone any application of photography to astronomical tasks. If you're not hip to the Moon Hoax-- which was a great annoyance to a great astronomer, but we can all laugh about it now-- you could read the whole thing (The Celebrated "Moon Story" (1852 edition)), or you could read about it on the Museum of Hoaxes site... ...or you could read ( a summary I wrote in 1984 for Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
12:14 pm	Datamining Worldcat: Bobbing for Authors It's kind of fun to play around with this: Worldcat Identities, now in beta. The idea of WorldCat Identities is simple: create a summary page for every name in WorldCat. Since there are some 85 million records in WorldCat and nearly 20 million names mentioned somewhere, this is a large-scale data mining effort that would have been difficult even a few years ago. We are working with both personal and corporate names, so you can see a page for the Beatles, as well as the individual page for John, Paul, George and Ringo. [...] Since we know when these works were published we produce a graphical time line showing their publication history. If we can associate roles (e.g., composer or translator) with the person, we display them along with the genre they work in (e.g., Psychological fiction) and subject headings (Novelists, American—19th century). I had fun looking at the graphs and lists for favorite science fiction writers. Though Lucian of Samosata (ca. 125-ca. 180 AD), who is usually credited with writing the first trip-to-the Moon-story, is rather fragmented across fifteen distinct "identities." (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
11:38 am	Plasma Wakefields, and Zeusaphones, Tomorrow Night at Fermilab It's time for the annual Fermilab Users' Meeting, and if you are within striking distance of Batavia, Illinois, you may be interested to know about some of the festivities. Tomorrow night, Wednesday, 3 June, Dr. Thomas C. Katsouleas of Duke University will give a public lecture on plasma wakefield accelerators, "Surfing on Plasma Waves: Can We Hang 10 All the Way to the Energy Frontier?." It's in the auditorium of Wilson Hall (our "highrise") at 8 PM. Five bucks. After the talk, in the parking lot of Lab 3 starting at 9:30 PM, Jeff Larson and Steve Ward give a Zeusaphone concert with their singing Tesla coils. I understand that "Dr. Zeus" (Terry Blake) will also demonstrate electrical phenomena. As you probably know, this is spectacular to see and hear. I will enjoy seeing how an audience of particle physicists reacts to the music of the dual Zeusaphones. Note that the performance requires dry weather, so rain will mean disappointment. Weather predictions are "clear" for tomorrow night. Lab 3 is in the Fermilab Village, a couple of miles east of Wilson Hall. It's on the corner where Shabbona meets Neuqua. I'll embed a Google Map; presumably the lab will also post helpful signs. I imagine one will need to park some distance away, elsewhere in the Village, and walk to the concert site. Click here for a Google Map. One can also click on the Village in this map and get helpful detail. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 1st, 2009
5:33 pm	From 1889: Transhuman Sheep! I was reading something from 1977, and was interested to note the author using "transhuman" (which I always think of as "tran-shuman") before it was very fashionable. Naturally I wondered how old this word was. I went hunting. The OED SF project has the earliest SF-related cite to be Robert Silverberg in 1967. Google Books can search within a range of years. When I found The Story of a Mountain by Uncle Lawrence*, published in 1889, I stopped looking for earlier citations. I felt an urgent need to share. * * * "I remarked one thing," said the painter, suddenly, to Mr. Monteil, "which leads me to believe if sheep had been hitherto dangerous to your mountains, they are so no longer, being replaced in part by the bovine race. Look! cows everywhere, and only here and there a few sheep." "Your remark would be a just one," answered the engineer, "if our pasture-lands only fed the sheep of the country, but every year there arrive here myriads of transhuman sheep." "Transhuman sheep!" cried the painter; "transhuman! There is a resounding adjective which must be applied to sheep of some very terrible character. What are transhuman sheep?" "Do you know Latin?" "I know two Latin words." "Two, only?" said Professor Morian, while everybody else smiled in surprise. "Yes; it is the name that Linnaeus has given to—" "I understand," interrupted Frank: "to the herring." "Exactly. Clupea harengus. Further than that I know no Latin." "Well, you certainly know what humus means?" "Humus is the earth." "Correct; humus, earth. Now, you also know that the prefix trans gives to words the meaning of translation from one place to the other, therefore the adjective transhuman is applied, in France, to sheep which go from one country to another." *Pseudonym of William Shepard Walsh (1854-1919). (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
5:24 pm	Come, Hear Mister Watson! From a 1914 cylinder recording: Thomas Watson describing the birth of the telephone in 1876. Watson's delivery is stilted, possibly by talking very formally and very loudly into a machine. But it's neat to hear a voice from so far in the past. I wonder: Can the voice of Alexander Graham Bell himself be heard somewhere on the Internet? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
12:53 pm	50 Years of Chasing Skirts In July in the UK, fans (and I mean that literally) will gather to celebrate the golden anniversary of the first Channel crossing by hovercraft. The Hovercraft Museum based in Lee-on-the-Solent has the only collection in the world of historic hovercraft! There are 60 hovercraft within several hangars on the Daedalus site. Every year we have a major Hovershow event when you can experience the thrill of hovercraft trips, displays of modern and historic craft and see many more on display. This year's event is special as it is the 50th Anniversary of the first operational hovercraft the SR.N1 which crossed the channel on July 25th 1959 with Sir Christopher Cockerell aboard. The inventor's daughter, Frances Cockerell, will open the show. Four days starting Friday 24th to 27th July 2009 with family entertainment, helicopter & hovercraft rides, refreshments, fair and stalls. There will be hovercraft services to and from the show, where the two largest hovercraft in the world will be fully open. Up till this moment, I didn't know there was a Hovercraft Museum. (But I'll bet gohover did.) I have zero chance of attending this event myself, but it would be fun for any student of novel transportation or paleofuturist. Let me know if you attend! (8 Comments |Comment on this)
9:29 am	W. Skeffington Higgins, Prominent User of the Internet Today's load of spam addressed me in a new fashion that I have not seen before: Prominent User of the Internet How are you today? Hope all is well with you and your family?I hope this mail meets you in a perfect condition. This is to inform you that a total cash prize of US $900,000.00 Dollars... Prominent Abuser of the Internet: How are you today? Hope all is well with you and your family. Please get lost. Courteously yours, WSH (Comment on this)
Monday, May 18th, 2009
9:50 am	The Sentiment "Comments Are for Sissies!" Is Not Entirely Dead From the FAQ: Is there a manual for Wolfram|Alpha? Wolfram|Alpha works by taking free-form linguistic input, so there's no need for a manual as such. Check out the Examples by Topic to get a sense of what Wolfram|Alpha can do. (3 Comments |Comment on this)