1976!

we watched the space shuttle flyover from school today from the outside stairs (i wanted to go inside, but cec insisted!)  i dug up some pictures i found at my dad's house last year:  the original space shuttle, enterprise, at ellington (?) air force base near houston, circa 1976. 
  that's me in the middle, in the houson oilers jacket, with my baby brother tudi and big sis mip.

a cool pic from the internet

the shuttle over the astrodome in houston

Dad loved writing letters to the editor! snarky, too...

Originally created 10/03/03

Iraqi oil falsehood perpetrated by 'Chronicle'

By Letter to the Editor

This is my comment on the Sept. 19 editorial, "Consider it a loan," about money the president plans on asking Congress for to pay for reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq.
You write: "...it's lunacy for American taxpayers to foot the bill for bringing Iraq's infrastructure into the 20th century, let alone the 21st, while Iraqis are sitting on top of the greatest supply of oil known to mankind."
Oh, really? Surely you know that the last part of the sentence is not true! And just to be sure that the multitudes are adequately misled, the editorial concludes. "...when they are sitting on all that oil...".
Please, sir! You are allowed your opinions; you may, sometimes, ignore the truth but you may not perpetrate a falsehood.
Or, were you just checking whether or not we are all asleep?
Anton Soosaipillai, Grovetown, Ga.
http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/2003/10/03/let_393603.shtml 

the library!

Alexandria is most famous for having been the site of the ancient library...Back in the days when people moved to information, instead of vice versa, this library attracted most of the most famous smart people in the world: the ultimate hacker, Archimedes;  the father of geometry, Euclid; Eratosthenes, who was the first person to calculate the circumference of the earth, by looking at the way the sun shone down wells at Alexandria and Aswan.  He also ran the library for a while and took the job seriously enough that when he started to go blind in his old age, he starved himself to death.  In any event, this library was burned out by the Romans when they were adding Egypt to their empire.  Or maybe it wasn't.  It's inherently difficult to get reliable information about an event that consisted of the destruction of all recorded information.

Neal Stephenson from the article "Mother Earth, Mother Board,"

 from Some Remarks:  Essays and Other Writing

you can read the full wired article here:  

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html