Because we aren't having a Space Race any more, and NASA is possibly the most excessively conservative agency on Earth.

I know, right? I'm a space nut and I work in the industry, but I still always forget what an amazing adventure Skylab was.

Something tells me you would also like Mitch Hedberg.

On a different subject, a dyslexic man walks into a bra...

Basically, with this episode, Agent Carter became the Marvel-universe remake of Alias. I found that a bit disappointing, despite the well-set-up interactions between Carter, Souza, and Thompson. Also, in general, I find mind-control plots to be weak.

A simple exercise demonstrates why the idea of mining asteroids for use on Earth is uneconomical.

Here's a picture from the Cairns Zoo in Queensland, just after the zookeepers foiled the Ewok wombat's attempt to dig an escape tunnel. According to them, this wasn't the first time she'd tried to make a getaway. I'm not sure how well-drilled they were, but after an hour-long struggle, the keepers won in the end.

I guess I'd rather have authors write what they're going to write, without a publisher's marketing team pushing them one direction or another to best fit into how they think people with eReaders are going to behave.

This seems like a strange rationale to me. I have no problem whatsoever reading a long novel in short chunks - over breakfast, before bed, what have you. I don't sit down to read Cryptonomicon all in one sitting.

I thought it was better than, say, The Chronicles of Riddick. But it's in that class. Way prettier, though.

When it melts on land, the runoff filters through the ground before it ends up in the ocean.

Ever go to an exhibit of Star Wars props and costumes? The costumes all look kind of deflated and sad (except maybe those moments when you suddenly realize, "Oh, that's a toothbrush glued on there?!" or similar). But then you get to Yoda. And he looks like he's just about to get up and start talking to you. Even…

If you spin your spacecraft, everything will be under tension! :)

We were looking at a magnetic interaction with high-temperature superconductors, called "flux pinning," as our enabling technology. Two spacecraft with complementary arrays of magnets and superconductors could potentially attract one another from a large distance, without using propellant or energy to close the gap.…

No problem. I did that work for an academic dissertation, so a ton of the information is publicly available. You can find some information on my personal web site, and more (including videos from microgravity experiments) on my former research group's archival site.

Cool - I'll have to take a look!

Yeah, that was sort of the idea behind my research: instead of your structural supports being mechanical linkages, you could use magnetic fields. There are some practical applications - for instance, docking and un-docking become a lot easier, as is changing the shape of your spacecraft. You could also use such a…

Aerospace engineering! I was lucky to have a Ph.D. adviser who was interested in boundary-pushing concepts and technologies.

Well, I saw it and I had a lot of fun.

Incidentally, my dissertation was on making spacecraft out of components that hover near one another, but don't touch. I had in mind something like the space station, but all the modules stand off from one another by several centimeters. (You can snake a tube across for the astronauts.) Our more reasonable ideas,…