Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 84

TLPs (transient lunar phenomena)

Last night's astronomy club meeting was unexpectedly fascinating . . . the lecture was about the crater Aristarchus, of all things! From 30 March to 10 April I did five drawings of that particular crater. What are the odds? There are 30,000 craters on the moon. (To be realistic, only about a dozen as prominent as Aristarchus.)

I had my little hemp notebook with me, in which I had done two of the drawings, and afterward took it up and showed the lecturer. He was also impressed by the coi...

dromedaries of doom

I spent most of yesterday sitting on a hard bench at the County Courthouse. Summoned for jury duty.

Got there a little after eight. Sat until 11:00, reading. Then we were dismissed till 3:00. So I biked home for lunch. That made a 13.5-mile round trip, a little tiring but otherwise pleasant. Took back roads and admired the flowers.

Back well before 3:00. Judge appeared about 4:00 and thanked us for our "service," and dismissed us. So I won't be called again for a few years.

I've been cal...

space-faring folks

[Dave in sff.net noted that we may become a space-faring race, but the creatures who actually go out will be our cybernetic creations, not organic . . . :]


I agree with Dave re the restrictive use of "space-faring," but with one perhaps too-obvious exception -- if we come up with a new way to get into cislunar space, or even low-Earth orbit, without great expense, the rules will be different. Like chess if you only have to play the end game. Then you might have flesh-and-blood as well as AI s...

night launch

I'm sitting five stories over a luscious beach, from which we just watched the last "night" launch of the shuttle. Day was breaking, actually, and when we came up afterward to have mimosas, the cloud that had been generated when the solid-fuel boosters separated caught the rays of the rising sun and glowed with unearthly brilliance. I'll put a photo up on LiveJournal later.

It was a good launch, and passing strange. We've watched a couple of dozen, but never a night-time one from this angle....

Dutch ovens?

[In sff.net we got to talking about these venerable cooking instruments . . . :]

Liz, British kitchens may not have Dutch ovens, but in fact the term is British. Abraham Darby (an Englishman) copied a process of brass casting he observed in the Netherlands in 1704, eventually mass-producing cast iron kitchen "furniture"; a cooking pot with feet came to be known as a Dutch oven. They were made in England but became very popular in frontier America -- one source said that a chuck wagon without ...

poetry and lunacy

I couldn't think of a poem for Poultry yesterday and was running out of time, so I just used a couple of paragraphs I'd written for the sff.net blog, about the previous day's writing -- (stanzas 3, 4, 7, and 8 are supposed to be indented and in italics) --

At work on Earthbound

blank book and pens in the bike bag
and off for the morning's writing --
too cold for the normal long slog

to Coffee Culture, alighting
instead at nearby Bageland
okay coffee but bad spelling

to find out what my motley...

I get paid for doing this?

I seem to have written more than 750 words yesterday, pedaling and consuming carbs. I set out to go to my favorite place, Coffee Culture, but it was too cold for a long ride yet, so I ducked into the local Bageland, bad spelling but good coffee, and had an oatmeal cookie and two cups and wrote two small pages. By then the sun was high enough to get the temperature up to fifty, so I pedaled on downtown to Coffee Culture. There I hogged a delicious raspberry crunch along with another couple ...

moonlet makin' waves

Here's a fascinating little movie from CICLOPS, the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations. It was taken when Saturn's rings were edge-on to the Sun (which happens only twice each 30 Earth years). The tiny moon Daphnis, five miles wide, goes plowing through the rings in the 26-mile-wide Keeler Gap in the A ring, perturbing the ring material both in front of it and behind it. The A ring is only about thirty feet thick, and the waves being raised by the moonlet are fifty to 150 ti...

all this and tutu too

[Dave Nicholas, on sff.net, noted that he has very little sensitivity to tastes, and so all this stuff about cooking and eating is pretty alien to his everyday life . . . :]


Dave, you can take some comfort in contemplating the thousands of hours you've saved for other pursuits. I spend about an hour a day preparing dinner and other meals. (For instance, I prepare about ten breakfasts at once -- tabuli -- which takes about 45 minutes every week and a half. Gay just has cereal with milk and fr...

Alice and pot roast

Dave, I wasn't able to access the url of the aluminum-hat video, but it led me to something perhaps more uplifting -- a stampede of about two hundred pretty girls in bikinis, charging through a jungle and then down a beach, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x89xAXHd2l8&feature=popt00us0d
-- a parody of a commercial I haven't seen, but will watch for.

Went back to the Nautilus machines in the gym yesterday, having the coach set up everything at a low weight level first. It was nevertheless q...