beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
As I mentioned to [livejournal.com profile] 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.
beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
Someone I know will be on BookTV this weekend: Douglas Beason, author of many mysteries, technothrillers, and SF novels.

He's a physicist with a long career in military research, and he's just done a book called The E-Bomb about microwave and laser beam weapons.

Tune in CSPAN-2 at 5:30 Eastern time Saturday, 29 October to see his talk. It appears to occupy a 90-minute timeslot.

Doug has co-authored a bunch of books with the staggeringly prolific Kevin J. Anderson, including a series of murder mysteries set at U.S. Department of Energy laboratories.
beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
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.")
beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
C-SPAN is set of cable-TV channels (I think they also appear on satellite receivers) devoted to government affairs and other public-interest stuff. I keep an eye on the C-SPAN listings to spot interesting lectures and such. Usually they announce this stuff on pretty short notice.

Today at 6:30 PM EST, 5:30 here in the Central Time Zone, we are promised that David Weinberger, Research Fellow, Harvard Law School, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, will speak on "Digital Future: Blogging" at the Library of Congress. The blurb:

Mr. Weinberger will discuss how and in which situations Web logs, or blogs, work and how and why they are valuable in children's education.

The series "Managing Knowledge and Creativity in a Digital Context" will examine how the digital age is changing the most basic ways information is organized and classified. The goal is to educate the public on what the digital age means to their lives. The events will include a featured speaker, followed by a panel discussion, and a question and answer session with the audience at the venue, and C-SPAN television viewers who email questions to the experts at digital@loc.gov.

Mr. Weinberger served as a senior Internet adviser to the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign. He is the coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto (Perseus, 2000) and the author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web (Perseus, 2002).

I haven't read these books, but I have heard good things about them. So I may tune in.
beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
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.

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