Like everyone else I'm glad they're being conservative here, but it's disingenuous to compare the many problems SpaceX has had with those of the early space program. Rockets actually were new technology in the 50s and 60s, but they're pretty old now. You would think that new designs would benefit from the tens of…

There are also 75 hits on IMDB for works with Jekyll in the title or description. Nemo only gets 22, excluding the Winsor McKay and Pixar characters, Huckleberry gets 25, and Moby gets 30. It's funny how these public domain properties seem to be so popular.

The whole scheme is known as the Canadian Caper, and is such a great story that I hope they do justice to it. I blogged about it here, and got some comments from Barry Geller, the original producer of the "Lord of Light" movie. He sounds unhappy about the whole affair, unsurprisingly. He still maintains the lordof…

Andrei Sakharov, a key figure in the Soviet H-bomb work, was under house arrest for six years in the 80s for protests against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The climate scientist James Hansen has been arrested at least 3 times for public protests, although I'm not sure how much time he's actually served.

Do the Nazi doctors count? At the Doctor's Trial a number of them received long prison terms and the death penalty, many for the experiments they carried out. The Japanese did similar research at the infamous Unit 731 in Manchuria. A few were imprisoned by the Soviets, but most of them got away with US connivance.

I can't see how this stands. It makes no sense that a small act of defiance has worse consequences than a large one. Could this sheriff fire people who looked at him funny? Who thought mean thoughts about him? The description of the judge's attempt to distinguish between outright defiance and the mild defiance of…

In the Wisconsin Dells you can also visit the Tommy Barlett Exploratory, which contains an actual module from the Soviet Mir space station. It's the ground mockup, of course, not one that burned up on deorbit in 2001. There's also a mockup of a Mercury capsule, and a "Highwire Skycycle", and of course the…

My prediction? Nothing at all will happen. Gas is already way cheaper than oil per BTU, and cars are already getting electrified. Planes can use biofuels. Industrial civilization has been through many energy sources changes already. There are currently lots of other ways to get energy, E.g. gas, fission, hydro,…

Well, we know how much it costs to get to the asteroid belt because we just did it - the Dawn spacecraft is currently in orbit around Vesta, and it cost ~$500M. It won't return to the Earth, but it could if the xenon tanks for its ion thrusters were a bit larger. Say that we beefed the tanks, and added something…

On the comics side, it's odd to include Grant Morrison and Frank Miller, and exclude Jack Kirby, an artist you can recognize in just, say, one shoulder of a costume.

I think this is brilliant. Stark is clearly an extreme case of a one percenter - hugely rich and responsible to no one. He doesn't even need workers to build his armor; it's all done with AI and robots. He's what the Chinese technocrats long to be. They're already even more unequal than the US, so who better to…

It doesn't appear to include voyages by American ships. There should have been a lot of traffic from the northeastern US in the 1800s, both for trade and whaling, and there isn't any. I think the original data set just didn't happen to have them. I would think they would be particularly valuable for climate data…

He was extraordinarily prescient with regard to comm tech, his specialty, but I don't think he got the social impact right. His claim that cities would dissolve because biz could be done anywhere is 180 degrees off. Cities are more important than ever as gathering places for people who need to interact, and in fact…

Or what could happen is what we see in the image up top - a mass of cliches jammed together in a way that no actual editor would tolerate. Let's see: lumpy spaceships, rayguns, bare midriff, dragon, glowing jewel, crenellated castle. Any author who submitted something with all that wouldn't even get the form…

The problem is not the end of the Shuttle - it should have been retired decades ago. The problem is that the US was not and is not willing to invest in a follow-on manned space program. There have been a lot of very cool attempts like DC-X and VentureStar, but they weren't supported. There has also been a vast…

Seems like a big commitment to your phone supplier to actually implant part of their device into your body. I guess people get Harley logo tattoos, but don't think Nokia inspires that kind of devotion.

"Sagramanda" was a big attempt by Foster to up his game, since he has mainly been known for media tie-ins. Unfortunately, it had a similar subject and came out at about the same time as Ian McDonald's "River of Gods", and his book looks pretty pedestrian by comparison. E.g. Foster writes about how the protagonist's…

Seconded on need for more deep sea research. Consider that the magnetometer studies of the sea floor in the 50s and 60s provided the proof of the theory of tectonic plates, which is pretty much the Unified Theory of geology. That's a science payoff that NONE of our space probes have matched. Consider the black…

Sure, sea walls will be built around valuable real estate. But consider this - the Army Corps of Engineers has already spent $1 billion protecting the 7000 inhabitants of Devil's Lake, North Dakota, from the rising waters of Devil's Lake. Good article from American Scientist here. That's about $100,000 per person. …