Yang Liwei, 38, a Lieutenant colonel of the People’s Liberation Army became the first human being ever lifted into space by the Chinese People. China has unofficially announced plans to land a man on the moon and establish a lunar colony in the future. Congratulations to China.
From hoystory
ndy Smith, a seventh-grader in Irmo, S.C., wrote President Reagan in 1984:
“Today my mother declared my bedroom a disaster area. I would like to request federal funds to hire a crew to clean up my room.”
His response:
Dear Andy:
I’m sorry to be so late in answering your letter but as you know I’ve been in China . . .
Your application for disaster relief has been duly noted but I must point out one technical problem; the authority declaring the disaster is supposed to make the request. In this case your mother. However setting that aside I’ll have to point out the larger problem of available funds. This has been a year of disasters, 539 hurricanes as of May 4th and several more since, numerous floods, forest fires, drought in Texas and a number of earthquakes. What I’m getting at is that funds are dangerously low.
May I make a suggestion? This administration, believing that government has done many things that could better be done by volunteers at the local level, has sponsored a Private Sector Initiative program, calling upon people to practice voluntarism in the solving of a number of local problems.
Your situation appears to be a natural. I’m sure your mother was fully justified in proclaiming your room a disaster. Therefore you are in an excellent position to launch another volunteer program to go along with the more than 3,000 already underway in our nation—congratulations . . .
Sincerely,
Ronald Reagan
M.C. Escher’s Relativity in Lego.
Erin and I have an ongoing discussion about how every single magazine cover you see has been photoshopped to within an inch of its little transitory life. This site shows just how far this can go (rollover image to see the originals). Ladies, if you’ve ever felt inadequate after looking at the most recent cover of Cosmo, look at this page and remember, not even the supermodels look that good. Nobody does.
Beeeep. And just like that, it’s all gone. Every bit of computer code. Every DVD and CD, Every book ever printed. All your T-shirts blank, the Library of Congress empty. What would the world be like if you woke up tomorrow morning and all we had left was what was in our collective heads? Wow. Check it out.
If all you did was watch his blog, you’d think that Giles had dropped off the planet. Glad he’s back blogging. I almost got out of the habit of hitting his site.
Currently reading Ben Bova’s Venus. Like his Mars books, Bova takes a scientist’s view of our sister planet and tells a fictional (but very believable) story. One of the things I like about so-called “hard” science fiction. No faster-than-light travel, no laser guns, nothing that breaks physics as we know it. Hard Sci-Fi is all about what is actually possible today, using physics as we understand it. So far, Venus delivers.
Spent three hours with Erin tonight watching “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”. What a masterpiece. This is my 4th? 5th? Time to see it and I still catch new things. Peter Jackson, way to go. Erin and I decided that this trilogy will never again be filmed. What we have now is the best it can possibly be and we won’t see its like for the next 200 years.
Prediction: many in Hollywood will realize that there are only a limited number of popular epic books that can be committed to film. Expect to see a run on them in the next five years. My predicted book-to-movie conversions:
Ender’s Game
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
The Gap Series
The Mirror of Her Dreams
Riverworld (Sci Fi Channel did a 2 hour sucky TV movie that just completely missed it)
Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama saga
Ringworld series
Asimov’s Robots saga
In addition, many of Ben Bova’s books are ripe for cinematic exploitation (Venus, Mars, Moonrise/Moonwar). Bova is the closest thing to a modern-day Robert A. Heinlein. Starship Troopers notwithstanding, Heinlein is a great storyteller and the dean of modern science fiction. I’m surprised “Stranger in a Strange Land” hasn’t been done. Of course, it would absolutely tank as a motion picture (uh, Dune anyone?), but as a book it set the standard.
These saga/epics I’ve listed are only a handful of all the ones out there. Of these, I’d probably say the Rama series, Ringworld, and the Robot’s saga would make it to the silver screen. The rest just have too much in them to make the transition successfully. And the Covenant series? WAY too similar to the LOTR.