Winchell Chung ⚛🚀

@pomarede@mastodon.social Someone was a bit optimistic in their estimation of wheel durability

@anja@chaos.social How do you deserve this? Because you give them unconditional love.

@Leszek_Karlik @ombialik @cstross @isaackuo Aye! Those were the days. Until came Eternal September...

@kelpana @hobbs @gsuberland I was quite impressed by how versatile that 555 chip was. Lots of different applications.

@juanfr@mastodon.social That headline is far more creepy now than when it first came out.

@FredKiesche @jdnicoll That Pournelle essay was actually "Those Pesky Belters and their Torchships", but who's counting?

@TheBreadmonkey@beige.party Sounds like the start of the Butlerian Jihad

@SFFMagazineCovers Back in the 1950's it was unclear if space suit gloves were even possible. You need to make the various protective layers thin enough to be able to fit between adjacent fingers. And with miniature constant volume cuffs at each finger joint. Some suit designers took a tip from deep sea diving suits and postulated mechanical pincers instead of gloves. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacesuits.php#glove

@coreyspowell@mastodon.social Sounds like a sinister and moody place to set a science fiction novel.

@mhoye I would assume that the fossil fuel industry is screaming their blasted heads off?

@pomarede Yeah. But I want to see the heat shield...

@Ann_Effes@berlin.social @pomarede@mastodon.social Ah! I stand corrected. It didn't occur to me that they would optimize to a specific number of years, instead of "infinity". Obvious in hindsight.

@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz That sounds like the start of a Steven King novel...

@SFFMagazineCovers@zirk.us Seabury Quinn is indeed a weird one. His short story "Roads" is a hallucinogenic fever-dream mash-up of Norse mythology, ancient Rome, the nativity, and xmas. https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?65371

@astrocampEU Even though it appears that the architect was Dr. Seuss

@kelpana @hobbs @gsuberland Yes, I think I had the blue Engineer's Mini Notebook, in English. Good times, I learned quite a bit about electronics. And soldering.

@hobbs @gsuberland My teenage years as well. I had a blue book with lots of 555 chip circuits. I adapted one to make a digital Dungeons & Dragons percentile dice

@cptbutton@dice.camp @SFFMagazineCovers@zirk.us You are correct, sir. Back in the 1950's it was unclear if space suit gloves were even possible. You need to make the various protective layers thin enough to be able to fit between adjacent fingers. And with miniature constant volume cuffs at each finger joint. Some suit designers took a tip from deep sea diving suits and postulated mechanical pincers instead of gloves.

@michael_w_busch @FredKiesche @jdnicoll That is true, traditionally in scifi the asteroid prospectors used low-thrust engines. But Larry Niven wrote about asteroid prospectors using absurdly powerful fusion rockets capable of one gee acceleration for days. Jerry Pournelle wrote a science fact article called "Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships", explaining in great detail how ridiculous a one gee fusion torch engine is.

@Crumbee My father was a navigator on the B-52

@Crumbee First at Clinton-Sherman AFB in Oklahoma. Then at Loring AFB in Maine.

@StefanEJones@dice.camp @SFFMagazineCovers@zirk.us And, yes, I had a copy of this book as well. Back in the 1960s

@StefanEJones@dice.camp @SFFMagazineCovers@zirk.us Yes, got it in one. It was in one of those Wiley Ley kids books about space exploration. 1958 https://dreamsofspace.blogspot.com/2021/04/space-stations-1958.html

@Npars01 @Lynnd "Why is the murder of historians & destruction of their work so critical to the powerful in the prelude to war?" Just like you said: "Something, something controls the past controls the future: something something controls the present controls the past. "

@vintagefantasyart@mastodon.social I love the flapper with the pistol, right next to the night-gaunt

@si_fuller Yes, Space Knights. NASA was also looking into that. Read about King Henry's space suit https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacesuits.php#henrysuit

@selfsame@tiny.tilde.website Oh! Isn't his cute little head the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen?

@jdnicoll And of course hard bitten science fiction fans know what other work was based on Shakespeare's The Tempest

@Cadbury_Moose @dymaxion @notsle I would watch that movie

@Haste Well, I'm so ancient that my website lacks all those technologies because they didn't exist back then.

@xs4me2@mastodon.social @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io

@SFFMagazineCovers@zirk.us He is painting the flag pole red, using the can of red paint hanging from his belt.

@GIFS_of_Puppets@ohai.social I remember seeing that Muppet clip on the Ed Sullivan show when I was a child. The machine keeps explaining it's features as the monster dimembers and eats it. When it is all consumed, you can still faintly hear it talking. That's when the monster, to it's horror, learns that the machine is a bomb. Which blows up...

@signalapp ...despite the app being deleted??!? 🤔 😠

@AlZheimer@framapiaf.org How to brush your cat

@aral@mastodon.ar.al "The abolition of armed forces had at once almost doubled the world’s effective wealth, and increased production had done the rest. As a result, it was difficult to compare the standard of living of twenty-first-century man with that of any of his predecessors. Everything was so cheap that the necessities of life were free, provided as a public service by the community, as roads, water, street lighting, and drainage had once been."

@michael_w_busch @FredKiesche @jdnicoll Not your fault. Ever since I was young anyone who pulled my leg would find it detaching in their hand. If you wanted to know what I was like, just watch a few episodes of "Young Sheldon".

@golgaloth IIRC that's the fossil creature which was so weird that paleontologists couldn't decide if it walked with its spines or with its wormy things

@pauldrye@spacey.space @GIFS_of_Puppets@ohai.social I am Not 100% sure I saw this in the Ed Sullivan show. But I do remember the monster screaming "oh NOOO!!!" before exploding.

@cosmos4u@scicomm.xyz Well, that does sound like an accurate prediction...