Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

As I mentioned to dragonet2, C-SPAN captured a nice story told at JPL by the estimable Steve Collins, spacecraft wrangler, in 2005.

C-SPAN's clip-embedding doesn't appear to work on LJ (at least, not this week), so go here. The page will want to create a popup window with a Flash player. I've marked Steve's part of the symposium, which starts around minute 38 and goes to the end.

Google News says that the news of Secretary Ridge's departure is only four hours old, but I see it's already airing on C-SPAN 1 tonight in a few minutes:

06:26 pm News Conference: Secretary of Homeland Security Resignation
Department of Homeland Security
Thomas Ridge , Department of Homeland Security

Now I'm imagining a story whose protagonist hacks into the C-SPAN site and discovers that, by altering the scheduled events listed there, he has the power to change the real world.

07:00 pm News Conference: Osama Bin Ladin Capture
Pentagon
Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense

08:30 News Conference: Mars Base One Dedication
Mars Base One
Lance Bass, NASA

Alas, it would probably devolve into a heap of cliches. The Twilight Zone is dead. And they've already made The Lathe of Heaven into a TV movie. Twice!

(Favorite joke from The Daily Show, speculating months ago about Ridge's eventual resignation: "Sources close to the Secretary say he wants to spend more time at home, scaring his family.")

I am very glad that, in the same week, my taxes have paid for stealing a little bit of a comet and for evading the Martian defenses to plonk a robominion onto the surface. But I was away from TV and will now have to play catch-up on the science and tech.

C-SPAN ran the morning MER press conference from JPL, and I have taped it. Let's hope they continue to follow these briefings for a while.

Stardust and Wild 2 seem to have gotten overshadowed by the Mars fuss. (Also, I think I left my aerogel sample in Kalamazoo.) I probably should put together a talk about it.

Beagle 2 is still missing. Stumbled across a vicious column in a UK paper ridiculing the builders: "Yet it is a noble symbol of British incompetence and this glorious bellyflop must be celebrated." It's so dense with pop-culture references that I can't understand half of what is said.