NANNOOKIE OF THE NORTH?

Also, three other trapped in elevator incidents:

2005 incident in The New York Times: Chinese restaurant deliveryman stuck for 81 hours:

http://tinyurl.com/4u22dd

2005: St. Louis woman and child trapped in elevator for 12 hours:

http://tinyurl.com/4c4pyz

2007: Chicago woman and grown daughter cleaning crew trapped in elevator for nearly two days:

http://tinyurl.com/3ehfb4

Do yourself a favor before commenting and actually read the 8-page article in THE NEW YORKER here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_paumgarten

The article tells the guy's story, and is interspaced with a lot of general information about elevators.

He was trapped in a box with no way out, which was trapped in a shaft with no exits for many floors.

Smoking did not set off alarms.

There was no way he could get to the locked access hatch.

It was an express elevator meaning there were no doors for many floors. Even if he had gotten to the top of the elevator, he could not have shinnied up the cable hundreds of feet. Even if he had, trying to get to a wall to pry open a door probably would result in a fatal fall.

He has no watch, but picture yourself when you've been in an elevator 10, 20, 30 hours. You've still got 11 hours to go.

Also, it's not quiet, there's an alarm ringing in the elevator, which after many hours was driving him berserk, so he disabled it.
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Of course, everyone can be a Monday-morning quarterback here.

He must have assumed the security camera wasn't working (and, as it turns out, 8 security guards came and went from the station and never noticed him on the camera), but, sure, maybe he could have written HELP ME with his own feces on the inner door.

Except, propriety probably stopped him. Thinking your coworkers would be saying, "Dude, you wrote words with your own poop after a little night in an elevator, what are you, crazy?"

I see a lot of commenters here either patting themselves on the back for their childhood being so much more rough and tumble than today's kids...

...or gearing up to throw some scorpions into their kid's bedsheets as a learning experience.

I would point out though that I don't think age 9 is really the problem. It's when the kid is age 12-15 (and beyond) and the parents are still driving them everywhere instead of having them ocasionally use public transport or walking that's the problem.

The next test of this would be to refuse the $1.01, send it back, and see if you really get your bric-a-brac back...

The important question is, is Black Sabbath's IRON MAN fight'n and smite'n with repulsor rays?

So I can assume from this that the global warming on Mars is being caused by Martians?

Also have to recommend John Varley's other work.

The Gaea Trilogy (TITAN, WIZARD, and DEMON) about a living space-habitat orbiting Saturn.

His recent time-travel yarn MAMMOTH.

And a lot of his excellent short fiction was collected in THE JOHN VARLEY READER: 30 YEARS OF SHORT FICTION.

You know, it's very easy today to say, "Oh ho ho, those silly 1950s people and their Senate Subcommittee witch hunts!"

But part of the reason that EC comics and TALES FROM THE CRYPT have the mystique they have today is exactly because of that forbidden fruit. Otherwise they very likely would have vanished into obscurity.

If you look over those 1950s comics, parents being concerned that these may not be appropriate for their children was a legitimate concern.

Remember, you didn't go into some SIMPSONS Comic Book Guy's cave domain in the 1950s to buy these, they were on a spinning rack in the drugstore next to the LITTLE LULUs or whatever. It's not That Crazy that some parents thought, maybe I'd like to not have the humorous vivisection stories there. Having some sort of Comics Code Authority stamp their approval, just like the movie ratings we have today, isn't that ridiculous.

Did they go overboard? Sure.

I note that there's recently been a new TALES FROM THE CRYPT comic, the first new "official" stories in over 50 years.

Possibly a new Senate Subcommitee would be useful to call people to testify why these new ones turned out so crappy.

Kurtmac (#22):
Since their headline focuses on "Most Distant Object Visible to Naked Eye" it would've been nice for the Space.com article to provide a star chart so we could actually try and see it with our naked eyes

It only flared for about an hour, so, if you go looking at Bootes for it, you're not going to see it.

In that respect, the Triangulum Galaxy at 2.9 million lightyears away still holds "farthest visible object that you might actually be able to see." And you'd need a clear night and dark skies and it'd still be hard to spot.

The Andromeda Galaxy at 2.5 million lightyears away is the farthest object that you can really see with any regularity (put it this way; the one they knew about before telescopes).

Clarke couldn't pinpoint the exact reference that got him thinking about geostationary satellites. “One of the moons of Mars, Phobos, is always in a stationary orbit,” he mused. “That probably got me thinking.”

This isn't correct; Phobos is actually below geosynchronous (or rather Mars-synchronous) orbit.

Phobos orbits Mars faster than Mars rotates. Which from the surface would make it appear to rise in the west and set in the east, even though it's really moving in the opposite direction.
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Of course, this brings to mind a quote from Ray Bradbury that Arthur C. Clarke referenced in one of his essays, that went something along these lines:

One perfectly horrid boy came up to me at a booksigning and said, "You know in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES where you have Phobos rising in the east?"
"Yah." I said.
"Nah." he said.
So I hit him.

At one DragonCon in Atlanta I was at (maybe mid-1990s), Arthur C. Clarke connected via very early (and jerky) teleconferencing from Sri Lanka. Ben Bova hosted on the Atlanta end. When the teleconference connected, Clarke had placed some sort of tribal mask from his wall in front of the camera. "TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADERS" the mask intoned in a sepulcher voice. He may have hummed "Thus Spake Zarathustrathe" (2001 theme). "HELLO, THIS IS ARTHUR CLARKE." Then he laughed and took away the mask. I got to ask Clarke a few questions.

Shortly before this, he'd gone scuba diving for the first time in many years. By this time he was pretty much wheelchair-bound with polio aftereffects, but he managed to scuba dive with a bit of assistance. They showed a video of it.

"24 frames per second! We're gonna need a bigger pot!"

If you want to see the location of one of those giant sculptures, just paste this into Google Earth:

99.1850357056 W 19.3033313751 N

I got one once that read, You are interested in forward thrust and the future (in bed!)

I'd wager that more of those students voted because they had to march seven miles than would have if the polling place was a hundred yards away.

"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be - or be indistinguishable from - selfrighteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of time."

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

Also I recommend this YouTube video (From the 2006 E3 convention, I believe) where Robin Williams demos the game.

This was the first computer I actually had in the home.

I point out that it looked futuristic enough to be used in 2010 (1984), the sequel to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.

Roy Scheider is using one on the beach in an early scene.

RE: #16 Takuan: We already have the first surface probe images from Titan.

As for Mars Yeti, someone on the BadAstronomy discussion of this figured he's about three inches tall.

Sweeney MOD!

Oh, it's all fun, games, and dancing for the Eloi until the Morlocks show up!

LOLBOTS Unicorn Chaser!

So many questions. Why is this woman sleeping under foliage on some South Pacific island?

Is she maybe some sort of trap set by the Japanese, laden with VD? The femme fatale equivalent of a balloon bomb?

Or is she some sort of woodland nymph/dryad indigenous to the South Pacific?

If Donald Duck did have a condom, would he at least wake her up first?

Did the Australian army really condone relations between aquatic fowl and mysterious hot blondes?

I had to google and wikipedia to glean the significance of the phrase "unicorn chaser" with boingboing.

My first assumption, thankfully wrong, was that it was along the lines of a "chubby chaser."

I for one welcome our new arachnid overlords.

I'm advancing the theory that there is a geological phenomena that causes certain areas in strata to expand.

So all these giant bug fossils were just normal-sized insects, but over time the fossils have grown larger, the way a Gummi Bear will expand if left in water overnight.

Similarly, dinosaurs were actually the size of poodles!

When I said I wanted to get my ashes hauled on a Disney ride, that's not what I meant!