I was really quite upset to hear Red 4 was down. I watched the news - flicking between Sky and BBC with little hope. I saw him a month ago in the skies over Southport. Alas, I have no photos. I used the last of my battery charge on XH-558. The Red Arrows go on [...]
Posts under ‘One Day’
Let’s Rock!
I watched Ian Hislop’s “Age of Do-Gooders” on the telly a coupla nights ago. It alerted me to this chap…
In the late 1840s, Cruikshank’s focus shifted from book illustration to an obsession with temperance and anti-smoking. Formerly a heavy drinker, he now supported, lectured to, and supplied illustrations for the National Temperance Society and [...]
84 million reasons to be cheerful
I just heard some bugger scooped 84 Million quids on the Euro Mockery.
Wowsers! What would I do with that sort of wonga?
Decisions, decisions!
Obviously, firstly I would give a few quid to my family and ensure through wise investment that me, my wife and our little cat were set until the heat death of the [...]
Rolling Thunder
I will do such things -
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!
- William Shakespeare, King Lear Act 2, scene 4.
BUFFs parked up in the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, AZ.
The devilment I could make with them does not bear thinking about. And I have a [...]
Apollo
More than four years before I was born we got to the moon. Forty years later we have the International Space Station which is basically two Russians and a Yank having a caravan holiday no further away from me than if they were doing it in Sussex. They should have booked that with Haven. It [...]
Future Past
I have spent the best part of the last week rusticated in the Lake District sans net and with only sporadic Freeview (UK digital terrestrial) telly (is Freeview ever anything but sporadic?).
Anyway, I expect you’re expecting to be regaled with tales of the beauty of the English countryside and how it rained all the [...]
Balls
Ed Balls is worried that the recession will result in a rise in support for the “far-right”. You just can’t make this shit-up. For ten years he was Brown’s chief economics guru. So, frankly, he is as much to blame as anybody. Yet he can say with a straight face that this is gonna be [...]
Graphic Novel
Any of you junkies ever read The Probability Broach?
Whether you have, or you haven’t, try this.
Government can’t fight crime, government is crime.
“Illegitimate authority” is redundant.
The state is harmful to children and other living things.
I am not a national resource.
I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the [...]
Alpha Centauri Or Bust!
This sort of shit makes me mad as hell. I just, absolutely, cannot stand the later-day Wolfie Smiths of the Animal Rights fraternity. They’re not quite the most obnoxious of the assorted moonbats with issues that congregate in our city centres of a Saturday afternoon. That award, in my experience, must go to some very [...]
The Hills of the Chankly Bore
                            I
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’
They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t [...]
Space-Consciousness
Well, we’ve all been somewhat underwhelmed by space since Apollo. There have been some highlights like the Viking landers and the Martian rovers and of course Voyager and Hubble but in nearly forty years that seems a poor return. Oddly enough all the things I’ve mentioned have been unmanned. Manned ventures such as the Shuttle [...]
Post singularity II
Yep, I got to agree to at least some extent with Nick, we have already hit, passed and survived one Singularity. I had thought about the discontinuity in the past, but had never before thought of it in those terms.
Right up to the eighteenth century a Roman engineer would, on sight, have had no trouble [...]
Post Singularity
I have to disagree with my co-conspiritor.
I think we had our singularity. It happened in the late C19th. Think what we achieved then in such a short space of time! We got internal combustion, usable electricity, telephones, moving pictures, powered flight, recorded sound, radio. In short we got almost all the basics of the technologies [...]
Growth
A discussion over on Samizdata about regulation and its effects on science, technological growth and industrial change.
Yeah, regulation interferes with scientific research, technological change and industrial growth. We could be a lot further advanced in bioengineering if it were not for idiot media studies graduates scaremongering by labelling GM foodstuffs ‘frankenfoods’, and encouraging government regulation.
However, [...]
PETA Prize
PETA, the People who Euthanise Thousands of Animals, have noticed this matter, the potential of meat being grown in bioreactors from stem cells.
They have offered a prize of one million dollars to the first person/organisation to produce factory grown chicken meat as a commercially viable product. Given their conditions, I guess a million will be [...]
