Rocket to the Moon

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Science Fiction becomes science fact. SpaceX booster hits the moon.

Detections by the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, show evidence of a plume on the moon caused by the impact of a SpaceX rocket on Aug. 5, 2026. (Image credit: Carl Schmidt/Lowell Observatory)

Star Trek Bridge Model

Hands-On with Star Trek's USS Enterprise Bridge Model!
Adam Savage’s Tested

I love Adam Savage for his enthusiasm and his energy. He probably makes more stuff in a day than I make in a year. This 'playset' is just glorious. It sounds like Factory Entertainment is planning on building these for sale, how many they are going to make is yet to be determined. I suspect the price is going to be something like a car, maybe ten grand, maybe twenty-five. Who knows? With the way inflation is going it might be a hundred. Whatever, this thing is beyond cool.

Gundam

RX-78-2 Gundam from the Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 anime

I picked this puzzle on a whim and at least partly because I couldn't make out what it was from the thumbnail. I'm still not entirely sure what I am looking at, a bunch of sci-fi war machines, I suppose. But why is the head of the central figure blacked out? It almost looks like it was deliberately censored, but all the other copies of this image that Google found all have the same black blob instead of a head. Weird.

Reading

N.Y. City III, Straight, 1981 - H.R. Giger

Tam recommended Idoru. I bought it a couple of months ago and I'm finally getting around to reading it and it's pretty great. 

There is a long section where Chia is meandering through an airport. It was so long I noticed, it was also very accurate. 

Now we're in Tokyo and when Laney looks out of his hotel room window he can see the newer nanotech buildings and they remind him of paintings of New York that were done by Giger. Giger is the guy who designed the stuff for Alien, the science fiction movie from 1979. I'm looking at these paintings and I'm thinking, yes, that is that could easily be the result of AI designing buildings. Modern high-rises are designed so that every floor is identical. Make each floor the same as possible as every other floor. Makes it really easy to draw up the plans and easy to build but if you got AI drawing the plans making alterations, it's no big deal cuz it can keep track of it all, right? So you can see that we're building this high-rise and some guy says 'I want six floors for a data center'. Okay, that's going to require some modifications. We'll run some cables on the outside and you can have your six floors. And then somebody else says 'I need three floors for Cold Storage for frozen food' and you say 'sure, we can do that', but that makes more complications and now you've got these two floors with vastly different requirements. We're going to have to reroute some plumbing and we're going to have to do this and do that but the AI is fine, we've got rules on how to deal with all that and the AI just does it and you don't have to waste a bunch of people's time fretting over details.

I finished reading Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. I started reading it and said 'this story sounds familiar' and then I went checked and it turns out I not only read it, I posted about it five years ago. I read it anyway, I didn't remember enough of the story to spoil it and it's a pretty good story. A little too intense for me maybe. Seems every couple of pages our hero is running into life threatening catastrophe and I would have to put the book down for a while. Guess I'm funny that way. 

Anyway, I finished the book and then there's some teasers tacked on to the back for following volumes  in the series. I'm reading them and I found a couple of passages that are pretty great:

Tool of War - Tool is a man-dog hybrid, a soldier.

Chapter 2 page 1 

        Tool's ears pricked, tracking distant gunfire, the comfortable conversational chatter of the Drowned Cities. 

        It was a polyglot language, but Tool understood all of its voices. The ratchet exclamations of AK-47s and M-16s. The blunt roar of 12- and 10- gauge shotguns. The authoritative crack of 30-06 hunting rifles, and a snapping of .22s. And of course, over it all, the incoming streak of 999s, the voice that ended all other combat sentences with booming punctuations.

        It was a familiar conversation that flowed back and forth - ask an answer insult and retort - but over the last few weeks the conversation had changed. Increasingly the Drowned City spoke Tool's language only. The bullet patois of his troops, the battle pack of the battle slang of his pack.

Chapter 2 page 8

        Drowned Cities warlords had always valued the malleable qualities of youth. Savage loyalty was an affection of children; they're eagerness for clarity of purpose was easily shaped. All the soldiers of the drowned cities had been recruited young, brainwashed early, given etiologies and absolute truths that demanded no nuance or perspective. Right and wrong. Traders and patriots. Good and Evil. Invaders and Natives. Honor and Loyalty. 

        Righteousness.

Rock Monster

Rock Monster

The aliens in Disclosure Day were disappointing. Shoot, every science fiction show I have seen that has alien life forms that are roughly humanoid has been disappointing, and they are all like that, aren't they? Which got me thinking - what kind of alien life form might we encounter? So I got to thinking about those fungi the live underground in the forest and cover acres. How about a slimy, jelly like alien that lives in the cracks of rocks and actually has enough strength to push the rocks around. It could do things like reshape a hill or open or close a cavern. It it got tired of its neighbors, it could break free and become a rogue rock monster. Lego a variety of them, and I think Marvel has a character that is made of rocks. You don't always have to use humanoids for aliens.

Aye Captain

Bridge of the Roger Burlingame, by Paul Adams for Starhunt

Starhunt is apparently some kind of video game. I suspect this is Paul Adams.

I found two instances of Roger Burlingame. I don't know which one he is referring to.

1. Captain Roger Burlingame, I (1620 - 1718) early Connecticut settler.
2. William Roger Burlingame (1889 – 1967) was a prolific author. Served as the book editor at Scribner's Magazine (1914–1926).

Let's Play

Futuristic Arcade

Likely AI generated.

Poject Hail Mary - Movie Cinemark Theater

Project Hail Mary - Official Trailer
Amazon MGM Studios

Went to the theater yesterday afternoon to see this movie with my daughter. I read the book a few years ago, I recall it as entertaining but not that engrossing. The film, though, was pretty great. It bounces around from comedy to super serious to fantasy physics to mostly realistic spaceflight, not to mention the terrifying action sequences. Ok, maybe not terrifying, but certainly tension inducing.

The premise is totally contrived, but it makes for a good story. Our boy is shanghaied, drugged, stuffed in a rocket and sent to Tau Ceti. He wakes up after being in a coma for months (years?) and finds he's the only one left alive. The other two crew members (volunteers) died in their sleep. And what does he find at Tau Ceti? An alien spaceship with a single alien crewmember! What an outstanding coincidence! The alien is kind of cool, looks like a giant spider made of rocks. He is very talented at making things out of glass-like and metal-like materials. Xenon is apparently his favorite element for fabrication. Chemistry is wonderful. No, it's not, it's black magic.Whatever, it's a movie, and it's pretty great.

It's supposed to be a one way mission, there are no plans for any of the crew to return to earth, but we're in a movie, there must be a way back, and thanks to some help from Rocky (the alien), our boy figures it out. But then sometime after he takes off for Earth he realizes that Rocky is going to be in trouble so he alters course and goes to rescue Rocky. Me being me, I wondered how he could possibly have done that, being that Eridani, Rocky's home planet lies about nintey degrees from the direction of Earth. It would be pretty tough with the way rockets and space work. So I go rooting around on the net. I didn't find an answer, but I found a couple of cool things.

Hail Mary Stellar Map - David A. Wheeler

I Recreated Project Hail Mary in KSP! | Mission to Adrian & Kau Ceti
Bogue

"Kau Ceti" is a Kerbal Space Program (KSP) adaptation of the real-life Tau Ceti star system, frequently featured in player-created interstellar missions and mods. - Google

The Answer - Imagination Audio Books

The Answer
Imagination Audio Books - Topic

The question is 'who started the war of nuclear Armageddon?' An American and a Russian scientist discuss their plan to launch 50 kg of anti-matter high up and watch it as it falls back to Earth. What a good idea. 30 minutes is just enough time to wear myself out walking around the block. Could it be that the bomb that started the war wasn't a bomb made on Earth by human beings, but a chunk of anti-matter from another galaxy that just happened to strike Earth?

The City Who Fought - Anne McCaffrey & S. M. Stirling

The City Who Fought - Anne McCaffrey & S. M. Stirling

Goodreads

Google summary:

. . . a 1993 science fiction novel, part of the "Brainships" series, about a "shellperson" (a disembodied brain) named Simeon who runs a space station and must use his hobby of wargaming to defend it and refugees from brutal pirates. The story follows Simeon and his new, strong-willed human partner, Channa Hap, as they work together to save the station and its inhabitants from the invading Kolnari.

Not the greatest book, but the exploration of the psychological aspects of the characters in the middle section was pretty good. There is a weak attempt at fitting Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel with local space travel, but why do you need cold-sleep if you have FTL? Yeah, and when you start looking at tactics, you really need details on how this flavor of FTL works, and that is pretty much completely missing. Never mind, all the important characters and important action are going on on the space station.

Some items that caught my eye:

Page 164 paragraph 3 new-to-me word: sicatooth - "... and I want you to start pulling together those tasty goods we're going to use to tempt the ... sicatooth ." Google can't find it. I suspect it means something like a wolf-like attacker, a pirate, for instance.

Page 184 new-to-me word: antiphonally - in a manner characterized by the alternation of musical parts in a responsive manner between two groups of singers or musicians

Page 184 also a sex scene without using any sexual terms. Clever.

Page 202 paragraph 6 - a new-to-me term: stranger'n - contraction of 'stranger than' I expect.

Page 203 paragraph 9 - new-to-me word: chatelaine - the mistress of a household or of a large establishment

Page 234 "lost her rag" - all the good people say it means she has lost her temper, but I like this explanation I found on English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

Men have always dismissed women who have lost their temper as losing their rags meaning they were only in a bad mood/short tempered because of their period.

Page 237 paragraph 3 - Another unknown word: precocity - it is just the noun version of the adjective 'precocious' which means 'exceptionally early in development or occurrence'.

Page 249 paragraph 10 - In the last sentence we get some clever invented slang from Joat, a renegade girl, describing crawling around in the station's maintenance access tunnels:  "Some of the places pinch grudly but they're in-able if you're sveltsome."

Page 276 paragraph 2 - Hebrides Suite. Hmm, there is The Hebrides, a concert overture that was composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1830, but there is also Clare Grundman's Hebrides Suite (1962), a popular four-movement concert band work based on Scottish folk songs from the Hebrides Islands. 

Page 276 last paragraph - whipped Jersey - Jersey cow cream is so rich that you can thicken it with a few good shakes (as used on an Irish Coffee), and whip it in no time at all. - Foodie Pilgrim

Page 287 and Page 288 fragments of three poems

• Ode to Duty By William Wordsworth
• Ode on Solitude By Alexander Pope
• The Waste Places by James Stephens

Page 293 paragraph 8 - Carmina Burana could be a medieval collection of poetry or it might be the a cantata composed in 1935 and 1936 by Carl Orff. Video. Includes O Fortuna. I suspect the cantata is the correct one here.

Page 313 top, fragment of a poem - The Quest by Rudyard Kipling

Victorian Spaceflight

Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie

I've been trying to spend more time reading science fiction and less time surfing the net. It's not working great, but I am making some progress. I read Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie last month and it's pretty great. Galaxy spanning adventure with a roboticized human who is ostensibly under the absolute control of his/her masters. The sex of any of the characters is never made clear, but it doesn't really matter. Anyway, about halfway through the story you realize he/she is lying. Ack! Now the story becomes very interesting. I think I read this once once before, like a zillion years ago. The part that stuck in my mind is a group of evil masters destroys a large military starship filled with thousands of troops AND THEMSELVES to keep some vital information from getting out. Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for them, our hero manages to escape before the ship explodes. Think that might have impacted her ability to be truthful?

Hillsboro Library Friends Shop

On a recent visit to downtown Hillsboro, I stopped by the Hillsboro Library Friends Shop, a tiny little bookstore next to the Max commuter rail line. They seem to be stocked with surplus from the library, books that are no longer in fashion, maybe. Anyway, I picked up a couple of science fiction novels for cheap, like a couple of bucks each, less than the price of a candy bar. 

One of them is The City Who Fought by Anne McCaffrey and S. M. Sterling. It's not great, but it's not too terrible, so I'm plugging along. 

Anyway about a third of the way through, this giant spaceship comes hurtling out of depths, headed right for giant space station. Through masterful machinations, our heroes manage to avoid a collision. Bah, humbug. Makes for great drama, but statistically speaking it is nonsense.

Any star fairing civilization, as a matter of course, is going to maintain a scan of their entire sphere of view for possible interlopers. Shoot, we are barely getting off the ground and we are doing that now. That's how we detected the recent interstellar asteroid that came through our system.

If a starship was approaching Earth, decelerating at one gravity, and we just detected it by the time it crossed Pluto's orbit, it would still take 9 (nine) days to get here, which should give us plenty of time to move our space station out of the way. Even if it were decelerating at ten gravities, it would still take three days to get here.

Deceleration

Average Radius of Pluto's orbit	40	Astronomical Units
times	93,000,000	Mles per Astronomical Unit
equals	3,720,000,000	Mles
times	5,280	Feet per Mile
equals	19,641,600,000,000	Feet
Formula	Distance = (1/2) times Acceleration times time squared
Formula solved for time	Time = Square root of (Distance divided by Acceleration)
Acceleration	32	feet per second per second
Time	783,454	Seconds
divided by	86,400	Seconds per Day
equals	9	Days
Formula	Velocity = Acceleration times Time
Velocity	25,070,525	Feet per Second
divided by	5,280	Feet per Mile
equals	4,748	Miles per Second
equals	2.6	% Speed of Light

I want to see more science fiction stories about space flight WITHOUT warp drives. Stories about voyages that take months or years. Kind of like Patrick O'Brian's stories about commander Jack Aubrey.

DARK - Netflix Series - Season 1

DARK Season 1 Official Trailer # 2 (2017) Netflix Mystery TV Series HD
ONE Media

Feels like we have seen this show before. We've got a rainy, dark, forest, the small town of Winden, Germany, a smattering of school kids, big and little, and two missing kids. We've also got animals inexplicably falling dead, electric lights being flaky, a mysterious cave adjacent to a nuclear power plant and a mad scientist conducting weird experiments.

Winden Germany (Blue Marker) and Philippsburg Nuclear Power Plant (Red Marker)

Winden is about ten miles from the French border. There is a nuclear power plant 18 miles northeast of Winden.

Realized after the first episode that we had started watching it once before, but found that the story line included time-travel, and being as the boss was opposed to anything science-fictiony, we turned it off. I'm not a big fan of time travel, but some time travel stories are pretty good even though they are fundamentally ridiculous.

This one is just confusing. We've got a dozen or so characters, but we have them operating in three different times periods, so we have three different actors playing each character, one for each time period, which makes it challenging to keep the characters straight, never mind the plot. Wikipedia has a good cast listing.

Did I mention it's rainy? And dark? And the music is creepy. (Soundtrack) The whole show has a very creepy vibe. And because most of our characters are confused and upset, they spend an awful lot of time out wandering around in the rain without umbrellas or even hats. Amazingly, nobody dies of pneumonia.

One good thing is the elaborate clockwork time machine. We catch glimpses of it early on, but we finally get a good look at in the last episode.

Clockwork Time Machine
Image adjusted using Windows Image Viewer

The gyrations it goes through reminds me of the title sequence from Game of Thrones.

10 Episodes, ~50 minutes each.

Severance — Apple TV Series

Severance — Official Trailer | Apple TV
Apple TV

Very creepy, very weird. On the inside, we have a sterile corporate environment with just a few people, endless hallways and apparently meaningless tasks. On the outside the world is normal. Problem is that people who have elected to be severed have no memory of the other side. Once inside, their only memories are of life on the inside. When they leave, a switch is thrown in their brain and now their only memories are of their life on the outside. Naturally, one guy has managed to reverse his severance and now we've got trouble.

Now that I think about it, most jobs require you to keep your work life and your private life separate, so this show is just pushing that idea to the extreme. Along with this we have all the worst aspects of corporate life, rewards that are less than trivial, opaque procedures, concealment of basic information behind alleged concerns for 'privacy', innocuous punishments that are apparently designed to drive people mad. Some of the characters thrive in this environment, others tolerate it, but Helly hates it and gets crosswise immediately.

Christopher Walken and Patricia Arquette are the actor's names I recognize. Britt Lower is a lovely woman.

Main cast:

Actor	Surname	Character	Surname	Severed	Lumon Employee	MDR Dept.	Notes
Adam	Scott	Mark	Scout	X	X	X	former history professor
Zach	Cherry	Dylan	George	X	X	X	enjoys company perks.
Britt	Lower	Helly	R.	X	X	X	rebellious
Tramell	Tillman	Seth	Milchick		X		Deputy Manager of the severed floor
Jen	Tullock	Devon	Scout-Hale				Mark's sister and Ricken's wife
Dichen	Lachman	Ms.	Casey		X		wellness counselor
Michael	Chernus	Ricken	Hale				author and Devon's husband
John	Turturro	Irving	Bailiff	X	X	X	stickler for company policy
Christopher	Walken	Burt	Goodman	X	X		head of Optics and Design (O&D)
Patricia	Arquette	Harmony	Cobel		X		Manager of the severed floor, outside of work uses the false identity of "Mrs. Selvig" and is Mark's next-door neighbor.

MDR is the Macrodata Refinement department

Severed employees only use the first letter of their last names when on the inside.

Spreadsheet here.

The SeveranceWiki cast list has over 100 entries.

Creepy atmospheric Soundtrack by Theodore Shapiro. No tunes as such.

Season 1 has 9 episodes about 50 minutes each. There is a second season.

Lucy

Lucy - Trailer (Official - HD)
Universal Pictures

The whole movie is available on YouTube.

Woke up at 3AM this morning. Great. What am I gonna do? Turn on YouTube and this movie shows up. Well, I'm a zombie, may as well give it a try. Funny, I was able to watch the whole thing. It's rare that I can watch a TV show or movie by myself. Most all the shows I watch, I watch with my wife. Odd, I suppose, but that's the way my brain works. Anyway the show is a little nuts, it's a mix of John Wick, psychedelic nightmare and basic evolutionary biology. From Luc Besson who gave us The 5th Element and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Great stuff.

P. S. Lucy is an American living in Taipei, Taiwan, who gets dragooned into being a drug mule who is accidentally dosed with a drug that activates a myriad of pre-encoded genetic conscious capabilities.

90 minutes

Cast:

Actor	Surname	Title	Actor	Surname	Role
Scarlett	Johansson		Lucy	Miller	our girl
Morgan	Freeman	Professor	Samuel	Norman	the voice of reason
Choi	Min-sik	Mr.		Jang	South Korean drug lord
Amr	Waked		Pierre	Del Rio	French police officer
Julian	Rhind-Tutt				polite British villain who sews drug packs into the mules
Pilou	Asbæk		Richard		Lucy's delinquent boyfriend in Taipei
Lio	Tipton		Caroline		Lucy's roommate in Taipei
Nicolas	Phongpheth		Jii		Jang's top henchman

The first four have the only persistent roles. The rest of them are memorable for their brief appearances.

Prometheus

Prometheus

I saw this movie in a theater back when it came out. I remember being impressed with the sets and scenery, not so impressed with the plot. I do remember the unexpected windstorm that caused some trouble for our intrepid crew. 

Google - Prometheus is a 2012 science-fiction film exploring themes of humanity's origins and purpose, serving as a prequel to the Alien franchise. The story follows a crew who discover ancient beings called Engineers, seeking to understand their creators and find answers to life's fundamental questions. 

 

Zorgop Knows All

Zorgop Knows All
Neural Viz

Short, slightly goofy science fiction. Neural Viz has a bunch more videos.

Ominous Spheres

One Hundred Hunters - Nigel Stanford
Nigel John Stanford

Beware the spheres! They're coming to kill us, enslave us or save us. Beware! 

Spheres in Chains

Several ominous spheres came across my screen recently. I thought they deserved a post.

This UFO Changes Everything We Knew
Lainey and Ben

Bogus Russian Weapon

This one is the splash screen for a YouTube video that does not include any video of this sphere.

Flying Machine

Flying Machine

I suspect this image was generated by an AI (Artificial Intelligence) computer program. Google did not find it posted anywhere.

William Gibson Reads Neuromancer

Stolen entire from Bearcave.com :

William Gibson Reads Neuromancer

The author Ray Bradbury is one of the early science fiction authors that moved science fiction into a literary form. As a writer Bradbury constructs beautifully written stories and novels. Bradbury's writing is in stark contrast to Bradbury as a speaker. The first time I heard Ray Bradbury speak was at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) yearly conference in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Hearing Bradbury speak is an almost painful experience. The pictures that Bradbury can paint with the written word seem to be entirely missing when Bradbury speaks. He is halting, awkward and does not seem to know where he wants to go in his talk.

In contrast to Bradbury, listenting to William Gibson has the feel of his written work. The same complex world view and sentence structure is there, although not as finely edited. An example of this can be found in the documentary made about William Gibson, No Maps for these Territories. This documentary includes extensive interviews with William Gibson. No Maps also provides a glimpse of the way Gibson looks at the interconnections and relationships in the world around us. This view of Gibson's mind shows us his genius.

The mirror between William Gibson's spoken voice and his written voice gives special force to his readings of his work. Early in his career Gibson did an abridged reading of Neuromancer, his first novel and the work that made him famous. It was in this novel that Gibson coined the term cyberspace. This reading was only published on audio-tape and is now out of print.

I hate the idea that Gibson's wonderful reading of Neuromancer should be lost or inaccessable. I was only able to hear it because the Mountain View (California) Library had a copy. Fortunately I've been able to find an MP3 copy of these audio tapes. They can be downloaded below.

I am only providing these MP3s because the original has been out of print for years. As a software engineer I believe that I should be paid for my work. If I hold this view then it is only reasonable that I should also believe that artist should be paid for their work. All of the software and music I own I have paid for (or is open source). I would prefer that the publisher re-issue the audio-tape of William Gibson's reading in a more modern format (perhaps CD) and that William Gibson collect royalties on this work. Gibson's reading has been out of print so long that I can only assume that this is unlikely to happen.

If you're a fan of William Gibson I hope that others will mirror these files as well so that they will never be lost.

This reading was published on four magnetic tape audio cassetts. These have been re-recorded in MP3 format:

Neuromancer (abridged) read by William Gibson

Tape 1, side 1
Tape 1, side 2
Tape 2, side 1
Tape 2, side 2
Tape 3, side 1
Tape 3, side 2
Tape 4, side 1
Tape 4, side 2

• An on-line copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer

  Neuromancer is one of the few books that I've read many times. All of Gibson's books are good (well, except for The Difference Engine, but that's Bruce Sterling's fault). Neuromancer is still in print, so you should go out an buy a copy if you want to read it. Writers pay their bills from the royalties from book sales. I've included the link above in case you want to get a feel for the book before you buy it (even paperback books are not cheap these days).

Via Detroit Steve

Science Fiction

1960s Space Age: Exploring Alien Worlds
Ai Fascinated

Just a little something to enliven your morning. I like the yarn creatures, especially when the big ones turn on the girls.