Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 109

Liveblogging Launch Pad

So I came out of the shower (at five-thirty this morning: apparently this hour is not after all a fiction in the mind of clockmakers) to find myself weltered in gore, as the cut on my nose opened up again. I may have latent late-developing royal blood; I seem to have forgotten how to clot.

Hey-ho. At present I am walking softly and carrying a big wad of tissues.



I will need to walk more, as the student union cafeteria isn’t open today or tomorrow. Apparently students don’t devote their weekends...

My First Computer – Scull-Tek CP/M

Beginning today, BVC begins a weekly series in which members wax nostalgic about their first computers. You never forget your first, right? Look for a new “My First Computer” post every Friday.

My First Computer

by David D. Levine

I got into the computer game early, because my father was a professor of Computer Science. From the time I was eight or ten years old, we had a chattering Teletype (all caps, yellow roll paper) in the basement, connected by a dedicated phone line to the timeshared comp...

Liveblogging Launch Pad

Conspicuous virtue would be the phrase, I think. We were in the pub last night, and nevertheless: the regular three were in place in the student union at seven o’clock this morning, laptops up and words aflow. One of us has very nearly finished a novel; one of us knocked off a thousand words in almost nothing flat; one of us ground out a mere 750 words in two and a half hours, but hey. I did also have to keep an eye on the Ashes. And we are at a Great Revelatory Moment in the Kipling story, a...

Liveblogging Launch Pad

One of the cool things about astronomy is the importance of the electromagnetic spectrum you use. A star viewed with an X-ray telescope looks quite different from the picture you get using infrared.

This same principle applies to the rest of life. Today at Launch Pad we went on a hike around Turtle Rock, a large local feature. It is enormous, and takes about two hours to walk around. Because this is the West I know much less than I would like about the plants, trees, birds, and so on. I do hav...

Liveblogging Launch Pad

Last night I stood higher on this planet Earth than I think I ever stood before. The Wyoming Infra-Red Observatory is in the proper place for such a thing, atop a mountain, at the end of one of the most hair-raising roads I’ve ever ridden up – rough dirt track, barely ever more than one car wide, hair-pins at atrocious angles, cliffs on one side and the fall right there on the other, always in the corner of your eye – and that end comes in at around ten thousand feet.

I’m a little surprised, a...

What Is Education For?

Every week or so I stumble on another study showing that higher income is correlated with higher education. People with college degrees make more than those without them, and people with advanced degrees make more than those who stop at bachelor’s degrees, and so forth.

Unfortunately, a lot of people who have seen these studies have leapt to the mistaken conclusion that the purpose of higher education is to prepare students for good paying jobs. And, invariably, that is followed by the argumen...

Best of the Blog: Free Climbing Naturists

Editor’s Note: This post by Chris Dolley from 2010 would be equally at home in our critter picture series that runs on Wednesdays.

Here’s a picture of the Cingino dam in Italy. The dam wall is 160 feet high and not that far off vertical. Would you climb it? Without ropes, climbing shoes or … clothes.

What, naked free climbers? Extreme sport naturists? Italians?

Take a closer look at the picture and you’ll see the dam wall is dotted with climbers – eighteen of them. And they do it every day. Not...

Liveblogging Launch Pad

This may be the first time I’ve ever been grateful for America’s early dining hours. We break for dinner at five o’clock; and by five o’clock, am I ever ready for a break. I don’t always want to eat (nor would you, if you’d seen the food; I’m eating an awful lot of refectory chilli, just as the least worst option), but my brain has had enough and would quite like to stop now.

This morning we studied binary stars and exoplanets (reasons to be glad of SETI, no 47: I already knew quite a lot of t...

Liveblogging Launch Pad

Heard while standing on the observatory roof in Wyoming:

Oh my god.

Holy fuck, there are stars!

Wow, there are a lot of craters there. Were there fewer in the Cretaceous?

Oh, wow. Like, wow!

Is this the bit you look through?

Use the neck strap. These things cost $1500.

The native Hawaiians call Scorpio’s tail the fishhook of the gods.

Oh wait, that’s a satellite.

Is it a spy satellite?

This is the double star in the handle of the Dipper. Actually the bigger of the two is another double, so there are ac...

Liveblogging Launch Pad

[written this morning, because Other Reasons]

Humans are pattern-seeking animals. Yesterday we were looking for patterns in spectral lines, which will hold true in perpetuity – sodium will always have two heavy bars of yellow; when that changes, it won’t be sodium any more – and then in the stars, finding the same constellations our forebears found. Our afterbears may not see them quite the same, but hey. They’ll look regardless. It’s what we do, and how we understand the world. Data is patter...