Posts

Base Seven

Bruce Ediger

An intelligent species (or confederation of species) might choose to use base 7 for their numeral system, no matter the exact number or nature of digits at the terminal end of their manipulative appendages.

Even entities with 8 terminal sub-appendages might use base 7.

Wings Over The Rockies

Bruce Ediger

A Museum You Should Visit

If you’re in or around Denver, Colorado, you should visit Wings Over the Rockies. This museum has a flock of jets, airplanes, rockets and flying things.

You will see aerospace-related things there you can see nowhere else, and you’ll see them close up.

Von Braun's Lunar Trajectory

Bruce Ediger

In my post about Lester Del Rey’s 1956 sci-fi thriller Mission to the Moon, I criticized Del Rey’s cis-lunar flight orbital mechanics. Del Rey had his moon missions leaving from a polar orbit around the earth. This struck me as very odd - all real lunar and interplanetary missions have left from a more-or-less equatorial orbit, or maybe even fly directly into an interplanetary orbit. I thought Del Rey had completely misunderstood orbital mechanics, or had mis-read von Braun.

I was wrong.

Nameless here for evermore

Bruce Ediger

Have you ever tried to reproduce some text that contains a typo? That is, you try to type in some text that contains mistakes, for purposes of mocking whoever produced the original, mistake-laden rubbish?

You know how hard that is?

1984

Bruce Ediger

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I read George Orwell’s 1984 sometime during “Junior High”, which in the 1970s was what we now call “middle school”. My district, Adair County R-III, had grades 7, 8 and 9 in their own building.

The school library had a copy of 1984. I was busy reading a lot my 7th and 8th grade years, so I read it.