I enjoyed reading Reamde, but at the end, I found myself wishing that Stephenson had spent less time tromping through the woods chasing terrorists and more time being Stephenson with T'Rain.

Anathem is freaking awesome. That is one of my favorite books.

Somehow, I almost wish it had stuck to the slapsticky parody, simply because I enjoyed that so much. But, honestly, Scalzi could only have sustained that for so long, and he did go off in a really interesting direction. As you say - very meta.

Reading: Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel. Man, if only I could have a conversation with Galileo Galilei nowadays. And show him a picture of Saturn.

Also also wik - if you like Mistborn, try Brent Weeks' Lightbringer books.

Consider trying The Dark Beyond the Stars by Frank M. Robinson. It's a rare coming-of-age book with twists that both come as a total shock when you hit them and seem like they make complete sense in hindsight. I think it fits your sorta-military, sorta-space opera criteria as well.

I'm amazed at how old some of these are - very cool. I tend to put a lot of effort into my own engineering data visualization; it's great to see that there's actually a rich history of doing so!

Especially when they lack keys or unit scales. Those definitely qualify as data-based art.

In a barchan dune, the point of the V faces away from the dune's direction of motion.

I agree. Except to add that she has a silly space cat and that the space combat physics are especially contrived in order to make it like eighteenth century naval combat.

Yeah, it's nice to hang out in educated crowds, but unfortunately the perception that NASA gets a much larger share of the budget than it actually does is pervasive in the general population. Here's the result of about sixty seconds of googling: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2…

That's a very strange explanation on the NASA page, because it says these dunes "appear" to be in a V shape and it mentions birds, but it doesn't actually make a link between the two. What's more, those look like classic barchan dunes to me, which would make the wind blowing from top to bottom in that image, the…

It's not funding space exploration at the same level that our society apparently values dumb apps!

According to NPR, the purchase also included $3 billion in Facebook stock for employees of the acquired company, making the total purchase cost $19 billion.

Just a quick comment: the cost of launching humans did not change substantially when the Space Shuttle program ended. It might even be cheaper now, and when the new commercial launch vehicles are ready it almost certainly will be cheaper.

Does anybody know if there are prints of this piece available somewhere? I have a nice big wall....

Yeah, they could have gone with the chaotic timescale of Pluto's orbit - it's gonna go crazy while the rest of the Solar System remains stable.

Why can't we have eleven?

They're not weird - they're just arbitrary!