August 2005 Archives

A few years ago, I read Walter Jon Williams’s The Rift, a just barely speculative disaster novel about a cataclysmic 8.9 earthquake on the New Madrid fault that runs under the southcentral United States. It’s a chilling book, and the scary bits aren’t so much the power-of-the-planet stuff -- though that certainly is frightening -- but the economic devastation and political turmoil across the country and the globe that occurs in the wake of the quake.

I’ve been thinking about The Rift a lot over the last 24 hours as I look at pictures like this:

How many millions of people are suddenly homeless and unemployed? How much will the prices of gas and heating oil soar with all those refineries offline? How much of a hit can the already precarious American economy take?

I think I need to reread The Rift.

I think it’s going to be a very very scary winter.

Man, am I glad I got rid of my car last year.

Now, I remember this from my childhood:

I remember sitting in my dad's Ford Fairlane waiting in a long line for gas, something I'm sure many Xers recall from their formative years. Though you might have thought that that politically motivated oil crisis, more than 20 years ago now, might have been the wakeup call America needed to begin a shift away from aggressive consumption of oil -- it was, in fact, fairly quickly forgotten. And for every indication that some folks are taking the current runup in gas prices as a wakeup call -- like the fact that hybrid cars are so hot -- there's a counterindication that suggests that lots of people are still asleep: like the comeback of gas-guzzling muscle cars, which were killed off their first time out by the 1973 oil shock. (These new muscle cars get around 16 miles to the gallon in city driving; a Hummer, by comparison, isn't that much worse, at around 13. A Prius? Somewhere in the range of 50 to 60.)

Perhaps the great thing Generation X will be called upon to do -- in the same way that the Lost Generation, our generational counterparts during the last great crisis, were the generals who won World War II -- is to lead a crash program in retooling our society away from its unsustainable thirst for oil. Maybe we'll build continent-spanning bullet trains run by nuclear power. Maybe we'll build walkable cities and towns. Maybe our Manhattan Project will learn the secrets of cheap, clean nuclear fusion. Maybe we'll do all three, and more.

Fasten your seatbelts and put your thinking cap on. It's gonna be a bumpy life...

...and this is what geeks do: we get together on Friday nights and order Chinese food and drink wine and watch Sci Fi Friday on the Sci Fi Channel, the official cable network of geekdom.

Except tonight, my geek buddy is off galivanting and it would be treason to watch Sci Fi Friday alone, so I’m taping the Stargates and we’ll catch up another night (complete with takeout and wine). And so I’m sitting here blogging about it instead of eating dumplings. So don’t tell me what happens on tonight’s episodes.

Mark Morford again:

Millions are doing it, especially the young. They are shucking "religion" and taking up "spirituality." They are mixing Buddhist meditation with nontraditional Catholicism, eco-friendliness with Jesus, racial tolerance with Allah, ancient mysticism with Judaism, divine sex with Hinduism -- with an overarching sense that there is far more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in most organized religion's meager philosophies. It sounds good because it is.

Of course, science is my religion, but that’s sorta sayin’ the same thing, isn’t it? Some divine sex should would be nice, though...

Mrs. Kennedy makes love to my friend Meaghan's jacket...

The idea that there’s more to the world than what we can see with our own eyes is hardly new. It underlies most religions; it inspired Plato’s cave; it has nagged at the consciousness of pop culture since its birth in the Victorian era, with works such as Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. It is the embodiment, perhaps, of all human spiritual yearning, religious or not.

Our grandparents shared Dorothy’s trip to Oz, for instance, in 1939, and probably felt that Dorothy’s mantra "There’s no place like home" applied to them, too -- after the trials of the Great Depression, and with war threatening to catch fire in Europe, home and family must have felt like a cozy retreat from reality. Sixty years later, though, that notion was turned on its head to encapsulate the geek/GenX mindset in The Matrix [click for my review]. Thomas Anderson doesn’t have a mantra: instead he has the disturbing wisdom of Morpheus, who says things like "You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad" and "The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Home is not a comfort to Neo. Before he discovered the truth, home was a place where he didn’t fit in; now home is worse: it’s a lie, a deception. The Matrix is "there’s no place like home" turned inside out, where you can’t be comfortable anywhere, and if you do, that’s probably not a safe place to be.

The Matrix was dismissed and derided and -- perhaps worst of all -- blamed for the Columbine massacre, as if over the course of the three weeks between the movie’s release and the tragedy a couple of well-adjusted kids could be transformed into homicidal maniacs because they saw a movie a few times.

And now we have The Traveler, by the mysterious and perhaps pseudonymous John Twelve Hawks, the literary phenomenon of the summer that was on the New York Times’ bestselling list last month and currently sits at the very respectable ranking of 675 on Amazon.com’s book list. It’s an elegantly written novel of contemporary speculative fantasy about an Illuminati-like group that controls the world, keeping an unwitting populace in submission through fads and pop culture and the daily grind, and the small group of people who oppose them. It’s even got a bit of 1984 thrown in, too: "There was no need to worry about religion or philosophy; the truth was determined by whoever was in power." It’s Matrix-y in the extreme; it is clearly science fiction, for all that, like The Matrix, it feels like it gets perilously close to a hard truth about how we as a society have abdicated genuine feeling and zestful living for

But that’s not the way it’s been treated. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, torturously attempts to frame the book as anything but SF: "Twelve Hawks’s much anticipated novel is powerful, mainstream fiction built on a foundation of cutting-edge technology laced with fantasy and the chilling specter of an all-too-possible social and political reality." (The book is also, PW notes, "the first in a trilogy," and if that doesn’t set off SF bells, then nothing will.) I’d call that a triumph for geek culture, a sign that that off-kilter philosophies that occup the geek mind truly have been acknowledged as something other than weird and cultish... but that’s not the case here. I mean, that is happening, certainly -- movies like The Matrix and books like The Traveler don’t enjoy this kind of success if they’re not pushing buttons for a whole lot of people.

The "problem" is that the people who think they’re the arbiters of culture -- like Publishers Weekly, like The New York Times, which recently featured this bizarre non sequiter in a review of books about Jimi Hendrix: "Drug use made him blurry and rambling, with an increasingly weird affinity for science fiction" -- aren’t ready to admit yet that the culture has changed. It’s ironic, actually, because they’re suffering from the same delusions as the people who live in the Matrix, and the people who remain ignorant of the Travelers. They think they understand what the world is all about, and they couldn’t be more wrong.

Because it's not easy being geek.

Xers don’t trust big institutions -- we knew that (and this site, which features an excellent rundown of the overarching characteristics of Xers, includes this as one of the defining ones). Sometimes it’s because those institutions want nothing to do with us.

I’m thinking of my pal Gabriel Shanks, a fellow online film critic -- he posts at Mixed Reviews -- a fellow founding member of Cinemarati and a regular poster at our new group blog -- and a fellow blogger, at Modern Fabulosity. He got married on August 14th, and because his beloved happens to be a man, he and his intended were excluded from participating in the usual civic and religious rituals that people in love typically participate in when they want to formalize their relationship.

But you know what? Gabriel’s wedding was the most moving I’ve ever been to. Gabriel’s a theater director (when he isn’t blogging and reviewing films) and his new husband is a singer, and they created their own ceremony, one bursting with poetry and song and ritual, and every single moment had personal meaning to both of them. I’ve attended some religious wedding ceremonies where every moment is dictated by tradition to the point where it all becomes nothing but rote regurgitation, and hence appears to have no overt meaning to the participants. But there were moments during Gabriel’s wedding that were so intensely emotion, so revealingly personal, that I almost felt I shouldn’t be watching.

The most remarkable aspect of the ceremony, though, was the exhilarating defiance in every word, every action, every kiss. This is what Xers do: when traditions don’t suit us, we create our own and make them really mean something important. It’s not always so fierce as it was at Gabriel’s wedding, but reinventing little bits of society here and there, where the old ways have either broken down or never suited us in the first place, is something Xers do deliberately, and do well.

You enjoy Klingon Fairy Tales, such as "Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears"...

You’re supporting Christophen Walken for President in 2008...

You actually look for confirmation that you’re a geek through things like Geek Test...

(FYI, I like Klingon fairy tales, I'm reserving judgment on Walken until his first debate with Christo-Republican candidate Mel Gibson, and I’m 42.20907% geeky, or a "Major Geek"...)

Birds are cool cuz they can eat all your scraps: the bits of fruit and veg you cut off and would otherwise throw away, the ends of a loaf of bread, some nuts, leftover Cheerios, whatever.

And then, all the money I save on bird food ends up buying some ridiculously expensive bird toy, even though -- like how little kids are often perfectly content to play with the box some toy came in -- the birds are often mostly happy playing with the newspaper lining their cage.

Speaking of Andy Stitzer...

The 40 Year-Old Virgin opens with its nerd hero wandering around his apartment, which is -- wait for it -- jammed with action figures and science fiction toys, all in their original boxes, with the implication being that of course a grown man who collects toys must be so inept with women that he’d still be untouched at the age of 40.

Clearly, the people behind this flick have never been to a science fiction convention. May, you wouldn’t believe some of what goes on at these things -- some fans even feel that newbies need to be warned about the environment.

If only Andy had taken himself to a con or two, he could have solved his little problem years ago.

Left to right: Don Juan DeMarco, Alvy Singer, and Andy Stitzer.

The army speaks geek these days:

We've also realized that the title "Private" is demeaning. It makes you sound shy and socially awkward and unable to function in society. That's not you, no matter what your guidance counsellor told you. Now, while we can't hand out "General" or "Supreme Allied Commander" right away, we can offer you a whole bunch of options. Through a special arrangement with LucasFilm, you can enter the armed forces as, for example, Sith Lord Wojoski or Jar Jar Sanderson. We even have an exciting design-your-own-rank program. One of our best new recruits is Neutral Evil Half-Elf Druid McCallister. And you know what? If McCallister believes his "Little Mermaid" poncho is a cloak of invisibility, we believe it makes him invisible, too. That's where we're at right now.

From The New York Times? The Onion? Nah, it’s from The New Yorker, a piece by Joel Stein with the deceptively bland title "The New Army Recruiting Pamphlet." Funny stuff -- check it out.

I dream, in my anarchist fantasies, of a day when firebombing a Wal-Mart will not be considered a crime but an act of humanity, one small step in ridding the world of that institution that embodies much of what is wrong with America today: corporations treating their employees like garbage, citizens in the thrall of mindless consumerism (like Robert Duvall and his fellow organic robots in THX-1138, purchasing crap just to throw it away, cuz it keeps the economy running), and the death of individualism not just in people but in the places where we live. Historic downtowns and town squares are decimated, and every place looks like every place else, an endless merry-go-round of the same big-box stores and fast-food joints. People say they shop at Wal-Mart because it’s cheap, but they have to shop where stuff is cheap because Wal-Mart killed off all the good jobs and replaced them with poorly paying ones. (Check out Wal-Mart Watch for some good scares.)

If we’re heading for a major crisis anyway, could we maybe take the opportunity to sweep this blight from the cultural landscape? You know, just as a bonus?

Wired’s got a great piece about the way the Web is, how it’s nothing like what was predicted 10 years ago, and where it might be going (even though part of the point of the article is that we have to be careful when making predictions about the Web). But the most interesting aspect of the piece is that it doesn’t seem to realize that it’s saying that geek philosophy is what made the Web the way it is.

There’s this, for instance:

Linking unleashes involvement and interactivity at levels once thought unfashionable or impossible....

The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the Web runs in this mode. One study found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion.

But anyone who looked at what geeks and Xers were doing before the rise of the Web should have been able to anticipate this. We write fan fiction and make fan art; we organization and attend science fiction and fantasy conventions; we run fantasy baseball leagues (which is nothing but sports fan fiction!). We’re creative and passionate and gregarious and love playing around in new ways with the stuff we love, and we really love getting together to talk about the stuff we love. So it’s no surprise that when we moved online, we created a space like this:

The deep enthusiasm for making things, for interacting more deeply than just choosing options, is the great force not reckoned 10 years ago. This impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking - smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action - into the main event.

The force was not reckoned with -- and still is not -- because everyone is too busy giving us metaphoric wedgies... perhaps because they’re afraid to acknowledge that while they were busy calling us names in high school, we were getting on with the creation of the new culture (even if we didn’t realize that’s what were doing at the time).

And that new culture?

In part because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture. Likewise, the worry about the Internet being 100 percent male was entirely misplaced. Everyone missed the party celebrating the 2002 flip-point when women online first outnumbered men. Today, 52 percent of netizens are female. And, of course, the Internet is not and has never been a teenage realm. In 2005, the average user is a bone-creaking 41 years old.

In other words, the average user is the leading edge of Generation X.

In an article in The Washington Post about the new magazine Make (which calls itself "the first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration"), writer Peter Carlson takes the opportunity to bash its readership as "gloriously immature"... that is, after deriding them as "geeks, gearheads, hackers, do-it-yourselfers and other folks" (with that snide "other folks" presumably a catchall for everyone else besides geeks and gearheads Carlson finds tiresome and/or offensive).

These "folks" suffer from some other serious problems beside being interested in something besides football or the latest bread-and-circuses reality show:

Many of Make's projects are extremely difficult to execute and require a lot of skill and hours of work. The great American word "E-Z" is apparently not in Make's vocabulary...

Gee, these people have attention spans? Brains? What is this nation coming to?

And what sort of "gloriously immature" things are these "folks" up to? Well, the latest "MakeShift Challenge" ("applying creativity to solve an important global problem, and educating others as to how it can be done") invited readers to come up with a way to make contaminated water potable through the creative use of local materials that might be found in a remote rural village. Sheesh: how much nerdier can you get?

Meet Emmy, up top, and Leonard. They own my friend Brian. All cats act like they’re famous, but Emmy had her actual 15 minutes because of the circumstances of her coming to live with Brian: She was horribly abused by some rotten kids, who lit her on fire and were probably going to through her off the roof of their building (as they’d done with other cats they’d tortured), but she had a fortuitous escape, courtesy of the FDNY, and ended up at an animal shelter, where, Brian says, she won over the staff and "as severely injured as she was (looked like she'd been dipped in oil), she was still affectionate." Emmy was nursed back to health by Brian’s sister, a D.A. who happens to specialize in animal-cruelty cases. Brian says his sister "followed her around with evidence bags... so when Emmy's ears eventually fell off, they were preserved for use in the prosecution which eventually took place." Emmy got her name from her "Missing Ears" (M.E.), and she's been on the news and everything as a New York survivor.

Leonard was also a rescue, never abused but plenty sickly. He’s not doing very well lately, unfortunately, poor mite. He has an enlarged heart that requires regular medication, and it looks like his heart may finally be giving out. Brian says Leonard is "the sweetest, most adorable little creature."

No one has their finger on the pulse of the GenX mindset like The Onion, as with this week’s story, "Entertainment-History Buffs Re-Enact Battle of Network Stars." It’s funny cuz it’s true... or at least it could be true. I know when I bitch about "reality shows," I call them game shows, which usually leads to a reference to those cheesy Battle of the Network Stars "events" we loved as kids, which I’m sure none of us realized were merely giant advertisements for the networks’ own products. All I knew was, it was a chance to see Dirk "Starbuck" Benedict in shorts and making a fool out of himself.

And since Xers and geeks don’t merely consume pop culture but play with it, analyze it, and regurgitate it in ways that ends up serving as commentary on it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that some wacky gang of 30-somethings were reenacting Battle of the Network Stars somewhere.

But if The Onion has already done the self-deprecating, recursive re-digestion of this bit of pop culture for us, they’ve saved us the bother, and we can move on to restaging episodes of Land of the Lost.

Since everybody seems to be into the adorable little buggers this summer.

(From the left, that's one of the huggably soft babies from March of the Penguins, one of the escape artists from Madagascar, and Danny DeVito from Batman Returns.)

As a writer with a deep armchair interest in all things sciencey, I’ve always liked appropriating scientific ideas to use as metaphors in my writing. In my romantic dramedy script Bronx Cheer, for instance (which you can download as a PDF here), the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle becomes a metaphor for the mysteries of sexual attraction; in my recent review of The Dukes of Hazzard, I touch on the anthropic principle as well as a sort of Buckaroo Banzai-esque appreciation of the fact that the universe is mostly empty space.

If there were any doubts that I was a geek, I think they can be put to rest now.

So, anyway, some very clever, very geeky fellows have now discovered that quantum information can be negative:

Even the most ignorant cannot know less than nothing. After all, negative knowledge makes no sense. But, although this may be true in the everyday world we are accustomed to, it has been discovered that negative knowledge does exist in the quantum world. Small objects such as atoms, molecules and electrons behave radically different than larger objects -- they obey the laws of quantum mechanics.

What could negative knowledge possibly mean? In short, after I tell you negative information, you will know less. Such strange situations can occur because what it means to know something is very different in the quantum world.

I’m loving this as a metaphor for the great sucking away of interest in scientific reality as represented by the push to teach "intelligent design" in science classes. (I adore this site -- by which I mean it makes me want to cry -- which claims to be "seeking objectivity in origins science" by promoting the Christian creation myth as scientific.) You teach creation myths to kids as "objective science," you contribute, negatively, to their understanding of how reality works. If these ID proponents were serious about offering "alternatives" to evolution, they would not object to teaching the origin myths of Native America or West Africa, or the highly respected theory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as the primary cause of all that is.

But they aren’t interested in that. They are interested in ensuring that students do not gain a real and useful appreciation of the curretn state of scientific understanding. They are interested in preventing the accumulation of scientific knowledge in the ordinary mindset. If that isn’t the promulgation of negative information, I dunno what is.

As a teenager, though, I fully expected not to live out my life without seeing worldwide nuclear holocaust, though in that self-preservationist way that you forget pain and trauma, the constant low-level terror of that expectation has receded. It comes slamming back when I rewatch ‘The Day After’ and ‘Threads’ and ‘Testament’ and ‘Special Bulletin,’ the four 1983 television movies that contributed in a big way to my adolescent nuclear neuroses. I'm 14 again, and lying awake at night wondering when the bombs were gonna come. There was a fatalistic inevitability to the certainty that was numbing.

On the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, I look back at the films of the 1980s that helped make Generation X a collective psychological basket case back then.

Meet Captain Nemo Tubbs, on the left, and his sister/companion/eternal tormentor Miss Nuala Boots. They live with my best pal and neighbor Bonnie. Nemo is quite possibly the sweetest, most gentle cat in the world: Veterinarians who’ve had to do terrible, painful things to him (for his own good, of course) have had to ask whether he’s been declawed (he hasn’t), because never in all their ministrations does he protest or take a swipe at anyone wielding a pointy needle or a rectal thermometer. Nuala (pronounced "noo-la" -- it’s Celtic for "Christmas") is jealous of the fact that everyone loves Nemo more, and so she takes it out on him: She is equally likely to attack him without provocation as she is to groom him in a way that makes his eyes narrow in pleasure.

Nuala recently took an interdimensional adventure that gave all of us quite a fright, but that’s a story for another Friday.

He's been a dandy, an Edwardian cricketer and most famously wore a long scarf. Doctor Who's togs change as he regenerates. So what are the fashion tips from everyone's favourite Time Lord?

Until now. When David Tennant takes over the role later this year, it will be in what he describes as "geek chic".

[from BBC News]

David Tennant: Generation Xer, born 1971.

It was round about that time the ol' Duke boys found themselves up geek's creek without a clue paddle...

The New York Times:

Tucked away in the Hollywood hills, an elite group of scientists from across the country and from a grab bag of disciplines - rocket science, nanotechnology, genetics, even veterinary medicine - has gathered this week to plot a solution to what officials call one of the nation's most vexing long-term national security problems.

Their work is being financed by the Air Force and the Army, but the Manhattan Project it ain't: the 15 scientists are being taught how to write and sell screenplays.

Damn. Don’t I, as an aspiring screenwriter, already have enough competition in trying to get my scripts noticed?

On the other hand:

Exactly how the national defense could be bolstered by setting a few more people loose in Los Angeles with screenplays to peddle may be a bit of a brainteaser. But officials at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research spell out a straightforward syllogism:

Fewer and fewer students are pursuing science and engineering. While immigrants are taking up the slack in many areas, defense laboratories and industries generally require American citizenship or permanent residency. So a crisis is looming, unless careers in science and engineering suddenly become hugely popular, said Robert J. Barker, an Air Force program manager who approved the grant. And what better way to get a lot of young people interested in science than by producing movies and television shows that depict scientists in flattering ways?

Making science cool is a good thing. I’m not sure that this is the way to go about doing it, or at least not the only way: there is an ingrained disdain for all things thinky in the United States that a few movies about cool scientists isn’t going to reverse.

On the third hand (three hands? I’m writing science fiction!):

Later, over meatloaf, the workshop participants batted around...

Meatloaf? These guys will never make it in Hollywood...

The radiation encountered on a journey to Mars and back could well kill space travellers, experts have warned. Astronauts would be bombarded by so much cosmic radiation that one in 10 of them could die from cancer.

The risks are smaller for older people because cancers have less time to develop. But women are always in more danger than men because they live longer and are more susceptible to breast and ovarian cancers.

[from New Scientist]

Where do I sign up? A 17 percent chance of cancer in exchange for walking on the surface of another world? I’m in.

This idea that we should never take chances, never open ourselves up to risk is holding us back from doing the things we should be doing. When did we, as a species, stop being enthralled by the idea of discovery, of seeing and doing things that no one has seen or done before? We Xers are supposed to be particularly open to the idea of taking chances -- we popularized "extreme" sports, for instance, and we tend to disdain things like the financial and social security to be found in a corporate job. But it seems to me that extreme sports are only a return to the risky adventures we as humans always engaged in -- hunting woolly mammoths can’t have been risk-free endeavors, and the ice man in the Alps wasn’t out for a Sunday stroll. And if there was ever any security to be found in being a company man, that time has long gone.

Meanwhile:

Only 90 men made the first voyage of discovery from Palos Spain. The ships were quite tiny by modern standards--no longer than a tennis court, and less than 30 feet wide. The Santa Maria had 40 men aboard, the Pinta, 26, and the Nina, 24.

[from The 4 Voyages of Columbus]

It took Columbus’s ships 10 weeks to cross the Atlantic. How long would it take us to get to Mars with some clever application of our current technology?

Ten weeks.

(Can’t find a link to support this: I know I read it in a science fact article in Analog magazine a few years back, and the comparison has haunted me ever since.)

What are we waiting for? For us adventurous Xers to get into the positions of power from which we can make the decision to go, perhaps.

If you buy into the generational theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe, then we’re headed, in the next few years, for a social and civil crisis on a par with the Great Depression or the Civil War, if we aren’t already in the beginning of said crisis.

(And just to be clear: Strauss and Howe don’t pretend they can predict events, just that their generational-cycle theory of history can sorta take a guess at how people will react, in a general sense, to events that happen to transpire. The idea is that one kind of generation, raised in one kind of way, won’t let some spark turn into a conflagration, while another kind of generation, raised in a different kind of way, will fan the flames. Strauss and Howe don’t pretend to be able to predict how individuals will behave, either -- it’s more about seeing that the general tenor of the times tends to move in a cyclical way that’s predictable in a general way. It’s all totally fascinating, and I highly recommend their books Generations and The Fourth Turning for more info.)

So, the guys and girls up at the space station are gonna pull over onto the orbital shoulder and check some hoses on shuttle Discovery... so to speak. Astronaut Stephen Robinson is going to spacewalk out to the underside of the orbiter and fix or remove some material that may reduce the shuttle’s aerodynamics when it reenters Earth’s atmosphere, with potentially diastrous results.

This kind of repair has never been done before, and it made me think of SF author Allen Steele’s novels and short stories, some of which center around construction workers in space, whom he dubbed beamjacks. We have this image today of astronauts being elite scientists and engineers and pilots, but Steele’s beamjacks were just regular joes and janes doing a dirty job and generally being unappreciated for it.

And in that free-association way that Web surfing sometimes produces, I found Steele’s Web site, on which he has the entire text of his early-2001 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics about the new direction our efforts in space should be taking. The whole thing is interesting reading, and I found myself nodding in agreement throughout. Isn’t this all just basic common sense?:

This hypothetical agency, which I'll call the Commercial Space Administration (CSA), would be much like the present Federal Aviation Administration. Its primary purpose would be to foster private space enterprise; unlike NASA, it would have no launch facilities of its own, nor would it actively engage in research and development. It would probably be organized under the Department of Transportation, with major support from the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense.

By offering "seed money" to such fledgling companies, the CSA would assist private industry in developing advanced launch systems. Instead of having NASA pick one design over another -- such as in the case, several years ago, with the government-sponsored competition among four different major aerospace companies to build a second-generation shuttle, which in turn led to the ill-fated X-33/VentureStar being selected while the three competing designs were left to wither and die -- the CSA would encourage many different companies to build their own spacecraft without having to rely on NASA as its primary customer. In this way, free-market competition would drive the development of the advanced spacecraft.

Geeks are influencing the course of history. Savor the power.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times on Charles Ross’s stage show One-Man Star Wars, which is debuting in New York tomorrow, features this gem:

Mr. Ross, 31, looks like the last person you'd expect to create a 58-minute homage to Luke, Leia and Obi-Won Kenobi. He's poised, with a deep voice and tall, blond good looks.

Because, as everyone knows, no one who enjoys Star Wars could possibly be physically attractive.

I’ve seen Ross’s show, on video, and I’ve rarely laughed so hard in my entire life. I’m hoping to catch a live performance soon, and to interview Ross for the blog, so stay tuned for updates.

He is adorable, by the way. And he’s a geek.