Don't worry. If it were imminently dangerous, Bill Higgins would tell us about it.

It's not. In my humble opinion.

(Bill gave me a rock that came out of the excavations deep under CERN. It's very cool.)

Under Fermilab, my dear, not under CERN. CERN are The Other Guys.

Your rock was from the MINOS near-detector cave, 350 feet underground, at the end of the NUMI neutrino beamline. Some good pictures are in this slideshow (PDF).

So it's not a functional computer, just a mocked-up idea?

Now that the Asus EEE is on the street, Kyle Bean should get to work on making this real.

Since Johnrynne mentioned Chicken Little in #11, I'm going to claim this is another echo of Doctor Alexis Carrel. Even if his perpetual-chicken-tissue experiment turned out to be bogus.

I think the "talking tape" is this thing. Basically, it's a linear phonograph record.

I became aware of these in the Nineties, as ribbons dangling from mylar balloons, but I had no idea they want back to (before?) 1958.

They're really quite a clever invention. I wonder what it would take to manufacture one out of an arbitrary sound file...

I liked this book well enough, but it was an all-time favorite George M. Ewing, the science fiction writer.

George is mad for do-it-yourself technology, and the spacegoing kids in the novel are just like George's gang of soldering-gun delinquents back in the Upper Peninsula in the 1960s.

Never mind "balloon," how are we supposed to pronounce "Zinke?"

They take a standard composite input to display reruns of Jem and the Holograms (or whatever you like provided it is truly outrageous)

I vote for Supermarionation!

You can buy one yourself for £99, provided you live in England.

I know a dollhouse collector in England who must be informed of this immediately!

(So is it PAL-only, then?)

There's a recent interview with Carl Malamud on Jon Udell's podcast. I recommend it.

Tom Neff at #485, you are correct; I wasn't sure you were that guy (whom I admire).

Since the subject of multiple Tom Neffs had come up, I was adding one to the pool. I e-mailed my answer to TNH's question "what's a uranium Tom Neff?" rather than posting it here.

I hope I have not introduced unnecessary confusion into the discourse.

Heaven knows there are plenty of Bill Higginses. Some of whom might be embarrassed to be confused with me.

TNH at #430:

Maybe. Frankly, I don't know. I presume they kept pouring it into the Blog, over and over again, until it was gone.

Oh, look, DD-B has a picture. That man photographs everything.

Perhaps this blog could use some grenadine.

#365: I am reliably informed that, after many years, the Minicon bar has finally run out of grenadine.

Tom Neff: I have reason to think you are the uranium Tom Neff.

Electronic parts have been replaced by a picture of electronic parts?

Could be a Hieronymus Machine.

At #32, Tom P: brilliant.

At #44, Takuan asks:

What legacy do we owe him?

Same as Heinlein, same as Asimov:

"Pay it forward."

The U.S. Navy really did conduct operations with a mooring mast mounted on the U.S.S. Patoka. The Zeppelins Shenandoah, Los Angeles, and the mighty Akron (which had its own fleet of scout planes, as Eevee described above in comment #11) all moored to the Patoka at various times.

See http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-p/ao9-d.htm for photos.

More pictures here, with details.

OM, are you out of the hospital yet? Good luck, man.

I remember hearing of a Batelle scheme to plant a farside forest of radio-telescope modules, using an automated rover. This was around 1988 at a conference on lunar bases. So the idea has been around for a while.

Batelle had its crawler spiraling out from a landing site in the big crater Tsiolkovsky, emplacing an array element every so often. If it finishes, you have a big radio telescope. If it fails, at least you have a small radio telescope.

The MIT press release does not appear to say whether their array will be emplaced by robots or by astronauts. Odd.

Another issue with plans like this is that, once you have enough space infrastructure to start building a farside scope, you will also have various spacecraft orbiting the Moon, and the radio sky will not be as clean as it is now. Gotta plan for that in designing everybody's lunar comsats, L2-point hardware, scientific orbiters, and so forth.

That video clip cheats a bit: It intercuts helicopter footage of Disneyland. And the soundtrack has not only music, but jet-turbine sound effects, which sound nothing like rocket belt. In reality, one hears a roar of white noise. Check for the real thing on Youtube.

I'm not sure who the pilot is, but I'll guess either Bill Suitor or Bob Courter.

To see even better footage, take a look at what Tom Lennon, Bell's photographer, and his team cooked up when they mounted a camera on the RB, rigged model rockets under the control arms, and went over to Fort Niagara for the scenery:
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/video/277-let_s_go_flying_old_rocketbelt_footage.html

The Disneyland flights of 1965 were a turning point in the rocket belt story, for it was there that Nelson Tyler met the Bell Aerospace pilots and enthusiastically posed for snapshot after snapshot with them. Years later, they learned that Nelson had surreptitiously placed a scale in every photo-- the better to measure dimensions on every part of the rocket belt-- and constructed a duplicate. Tyler's belt was still flying years after Bell shut down their rocket belt business.

David M. Stein pointed out another Japanese commercial McDonald's that's twice as weird. See:
http://drzarron.livejournal.com/399276.html

I heartily recommend the album Girl, his collaboration with other-dimensional Texas dance band Brave Combo.

Not least for the swing version of "Stairway to Heaven."

I believe it's the Queens Museum of Art, not the Queen's Museum of Art. The Queen is welcome to visit there if she likes.

Cool-- the Bacon article contains a shout-out to "Dr. Alexis Carrel and his chicken heart," about whom I have recently written:
http://beamjockey.livejournal.com/69932.html

Speaking of wet blankets, I run into a paywall when I search the "premium archive" for, let us say, "The Science of Science-Fiction" by John W Campbell Jr. in May 1948, pg. 97.

Am I missing something? Or is the free stuff only a selected portion of the Atlantic collection? If so, your headline should perhaps read "The Atlantic Monthly sets (a portion of) its archive free."

By odd coincidence, I spent part of the weekend discussing Ford Model T ignition coils. Why? Because Kevin Dunn, author of Caveman Chemistry, was Science Guest of Honor at Confusion, a venerable science fiction con in Troy, Michigan.

On Friday night, Kevin gave a stirring speech in which he explained that Model T ignition coils are the gateway to all electrical knowledge, and recounted his successes in learning about them (very old science books in the local library); obtaining them (the books' advice "go down to your local garage and buy one for $1.25" did not work in the Seventies, but he stumbled upon four at an antique store for nearly the same price); and experimenting with them (siblings make excellent test subjects in studies of high voltage).

Kevin tells it much better than I do.

For the technically curious, IEEE Spectrum recently ran a good series of articles on tasers.

As a major center for the weaving industry, Lyon was the home of Joseph Marie Jacquard. His punchcard-controlled loom inspired Charles Babbage, after visits to Lyon, to design his Analytical Engine to be programmed by punched cards.

The 19th-century proto-hackers of Lyon designed card stacks that produced amazing fabric illustrations, some with thousands of threads of resolution.

If PNH's Hugo fills you with admiration, it would be nice for you to credit the designer of the Hugo base, Kinoshita Takashi of Kaiyoda.

Every year new copies of the classic shiny Hugo rocket are made and attached to a newly-designed base. The original 1953 design is due to Jack McKnight and Ben Jason. For many years Peter Weston has manufactured new Hugo rockets. A photo gallery of vintage Hugos may be found here.

If you have an interest in this sort of thing, Michael Abrams's recent book Birdmen, Batmen, and Skyflyers: Wingsuits and the Pioneers Who Flew in Them, Fell in Them, and Perfected Them is an extensive rundown, covering both historical and contemporary batmen.

Put Teresa on, now and then.

Odd that the Wall Street Journal would do an article on space elevators without mentioning Liftport, the company that has been attempting to make a business out of space-elevator development. They ran into serious trouble with their financing earlier this year, but may not be entirely dead yet.

Link: http://www.liftport.com/