This via Bruce Sterling: an experimental rocket engine that runs on methane instead of oxygen/hydrogen or solid fuel.
The point being that methane is cheap and plentiful in the outer solar system, so you wouldn’t have to haul all your fuel up out of earth’s gravity well:
Traveling further out in the solar system, methane becomes even
…
This is a tease. There was no hot gossip coming out of the party for the Time 100. But there were some huge power nerds there, including George Lucas, who reportedly called Spider-man 3 silly, which is something that I happen to agree with. He also mentioned the Star Wars TV shows — “they won’t have members of the Skywalker family as …
Ordinarily I don’t subscribe to a world-view that accepts that a single blog posting is sufficient pretext for my doing a blog post of my own to link to it. I make an exception for Wil Wheaton’s posts on TV Squad. Periodically Wheaton — who played Wesley on Star Trek: The Next Generation — will re-watch one of the old episodes and …
Stayed up too late last night reading Anthony Holden’s Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom. This is a sequel to Holden’s Big Deal, a book he published in 1990 about his year on the professional poker circuit (he played in the 1988 World Series of Poker). That was pre-poker-boom, when he was peering inside a little-known, hermetic …
It’s been about a year and a half since the last time I actually paid for the Internet. When I first moved into my apartment I slapped down my laptop, sniffed around for whatever free networks were in the air, found a few, and just settled in. That moment where I would actually suck it up and call the utilities and wait for the guy and …
I know Spider-man 3 made $148 million last weekend. I know. My fingers are clammy and twitchy because I know I should be blogging about it. I just really, really don’t want to see it.
I enjoyed the first one a lot. The second one I kind of white-knuckled my way through — I had to fast-forward (16X!) my way through the wise, melancholy …
I ran a panel about superheroes at the Tribeca Film Festival yesterday. On hand were: Zak Penn, screenwriter of the latter two X-Men movies, plus the upcoming Incredible Hulk; Andrew Cooke, who directed a documentary about comics pioneer Will Eisner; Joe Quesada, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics; and Thomas Haden Church, who is famous, …
Funny. Though it’s probably time they retired that record-scratch sound-effect segue.
I’ve been shirking my regular work-related subway reading in favor of a new anthology entitled When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School, consisting of personal essays by various writers about how awful high school was.
It is, like any anthology, a mixed bag, but the good stuff is truly good, rich with period …
A well-done comics-themed parody of the Mac/PC ads. Contents: one joke. But I like the second-order geekness of this.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av6fWfmugds]
I’m not a Web retailer, and if I were I would probably find this exchange more painful than fascinating, but as it is I can just sit back and enjoy the weirdness of it. Forbes has a piece up about “Google Hell,” which is where Web retailers end up when they fall out of the top Google rankings and into the search engine’s less accessible …
It never fails to surprise me when I see once-extinct franchises getting re-animated — you think they’re dead, then somebody finds a scrap of intact DNA trapped in amber, and before you know it you’re back to the box office all over again. Arrogant fools — have we not learned to leave Mother Nature alone? I thought the rumors of a new …
