Odd Lots
- While putting our Christmas decorations up a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me that I only hear the word “stocking” in connection with Christmas these days. Does anyone actually wear stockings anymore?
- Well, the best Christmas present we telescope freaks could ask for is a successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, now scheduled to head for orbit on Christmas day at 7:20 AM EST. Here’s the countdown page. I’m keeping it in a tab.
- My first car was a Chevy. As far as I’m concerned, this is the best car commercial of all time.
- Astronomers are finding a great many free-floating planets (FFPs), which are planets just drifting around without any star to circle. How they form remains a mystery; are they failed stars or ejected planets? And what sorts of stories could an SF writer tell about FFPs?
- Now here’s a headline that somebody waited years to write: Imaginary numbers might be needed to describe reality. You need to know more quantum physics than I do to understand the point they’re making, but it’s a marvelous headline nonetheless.
- Watching a video lecture twice at double speed can help you retain what you learn better than watching it only once. I dunno. I still prefer books.
- This is why we don’t live in the midwest anymore. Freezing rain? Our problem is evaporating rain. And you don’t skid on heat, heh.
- We’re short on snow here in the desert southwest. We have no shortage of tumbleweeds, though. And this leads to the obvious conclusion.
- I’ve posted a much cleaner version of my flash fiction story “STORMY Vs. the Tornadoes,” which originally ran in PC Techniques. The new copy is an excerpt from Souls in Silicon , my collection of stories about strong AI. $2.99 ebook, $11.99 paperback.
- Enjoy Christmas Eve. At our house we always had the Polish Wigilia (vigil) supper at sundown, when the first star of evening (the Gwiadzka) appears. Alas, in Chicago, seeing any stars at all on Christmas Eve was probably a one-in-three chance. We did our best. I’ve always considered this verse from Nehemiah 8 as a Christmas Eve injunction: “Eat fat, drink sweet wine, and send portions to those who have nothing, for this day is holy to our Lord.”
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · cars · christmas · fiction · humor · writing
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In Poul Anderson’s second “David Falkayn” story, “A Sun Invisible”, Falkayn tells a story about a “rogue planet” to impress a young woman. The body of Falkayn’s story is omitted, but the premise might be expanded.
Looking at that story, it seems astonishing that we have telescopes powerful enough to observe planetary bodies at a distance of 400 light years.
Another thought is that the planets detected were all detected by the infrared radiation from the residual heat of formation of the planet, which only lasts a few million years. Given cosmic timescales, there could be many more such objects which have cooled down.
George O. Smith would have rounded a bunch of them up and used them as artillery in one or more cosmic battles. I could see using them to stoke not-quite-big-enough-to-be-stars to a point where ignition would happen. The possibilities are endless.
Doc Smith in the Lensman books regularly bolted Bergenholm drives on lifeless planets to use as weapons against those eeeevil Boskonians. By the last books they’d found an alternate universe where C Was Not A Speed Limit, put a drive on one of *those* planets, and dropped it by wormhole on top of the Boskonians’ lieutenants. The result was “indescribability cubed”.
I remember that! It was how they took out Ploor. If Eddore were the Illuminati, Ploor were the mafiosi. Earth/Arisia took two free-floating planets, and mashed Ploor between them at FTL speeds. I think the Earthmen called it “the Cosmic Nutcracker.” Man, when I was in high school I ate that stuff up! The late and much-missed George Ewing said he never warmed to stories where they throw whole planets around. I, on the other hand, do it whenever I can.
Merry Christmas, Jeff. Good gift for us space enthusiass is that the Webb telescope successfully launched and unfurled it’s solar cell array. Now begins the 30 days of terror. Your fellow Arizona blogger Bob Zimmerman is following at his behind the black website.
I read him regularly, but as you might imagine, with today being Christmas I’ve had other things to look after. But I’ll catch up tomorrow.
Here’s a link to follow the progress:
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html
Merry Christmas!
And all our best wishes to you and Marcia, for Christmas and the year to follow.
I’m thinking the biggest market for stockings this day and age is strippers.
One wouldn’t think there are enough strippers in the world to support a product like that, especially since it requires yet another product (garters) to make it work. I would have said, “stage and movie props” since we watched A Christmas Story last night and all the women had proper seams-up-the-back stockings–but that’s not much of a market in terms of sheer numbers.
And to think they were once so common that our mother used to stuff pillows with the dead ones.
In the South before to shortly after WWII, no properly-dressed girl or woman of quality would go without stockings, which all had seams back then. But stockings are hot in muggy Dixie summers, so it wasn’t unusual for respectable women to seek out tattoo parlors (mostly seedy and not respectable, and sometimes even illegal) to have seams tattooed on the backs of their legs.
The onset of the miniskirt in the 60s led to women wearing tights/pantyhose to avoid flashing stocking tops & garters. I assume they continued using them with other fashions out of inertia. I’d agree at this point the main market for “classic” stockings is strippers and naughty bedroom attire.
Yes. Searching around to see if women still wear stockings took me to a few places I did not expect to go, heh.
RE: The Chevy commercial. As Maynard G. Krebs used to say to Dobie, “All Misty Dobb.”
I am going on 75 next year and regret to this day on selling my first car where I had my first date with the “girl” that I would marry. She passed nine years ago this past October and this video brought so many tears that I don’t think that what is left in Lake Mead would replenish the loss of water.
> Now here’s a headline that somebody waited years to write: Imaginary numbers might be needed to describe reality.
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Just with ordinary geometry things get weird. What’s wrong with our system of arithmetic; that such a simple thing as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter comes out as an irrational number? Why *are* there irrational numbers?