I didn't get the chance to go there on this trip, but the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon southwest of Portland says it has an SR-71 on display, along with the Spruce Goose, and an IMAX film about the Spruce Goose. I hope to visit it someday.

But where's the LOLCAT translation??

And inevitably, Klingon.

I like Robert Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice (4th edition) so much I carry an extra copy in my car to give to friends. I discovered it from the recommendation of Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway. Have you ever done something someone asked you to, and afterwards wondered why? Read this book and find out.

I'm excited to hear he has another book coming out, I'll look forward to reading it.

I'd suspect the dominance of stories from Analog and Asimov's in the Hugo awards is because those are voted on by members of the Worldcon, who in turn are often the sort of people who still read those magazines. (Which is not to say that they're not fine stories, or that the editors are wrong to select stories that appeal to the readers they have.) (Disclaimer: I don't subscribe to either, although I did read all the nominees online to cast an informed ballot last year.)

I've been thinking about the decline of the hardcopy SF short story market, compared to the exponential growth in anime fandom. As technology and networks have made it easier to download video, subtitle it, and share it, there's been huge growth in Anime fandom, which in turn supports companies to license and publish DVDs in English, because when you love something it's very natural to want to give someone money for it so they'll make more of that. It's trivially easy to point someone you think might like a show at a way of getting it, or burn a DVD with 2 dozen first episodes to sample.

But if I like a short story on paper, I have to loan the physical object to someone I want to check it out, then wait for them to get around to reading it and returning it before I can share it with another friend.

And there are very active online communities of fans discussing anime (and manga), with lots of info sharing. "Oh, you loved 12 Kingdoms? Then try Saiunkoku Monogatari!" Interaction breeds excitement and you get 30,000 people gathering to reinforce their sense of community.

Meanwhile, maybe 3000 people gather at a SF con to re-enact their wistful dreams of an age in which rockets mattered, and go to panels about their fears for the future.

I do both, but I can see which one is moving forward. Teenagers can be annoying, but they have a lot of energy!

I h

I had high hopes for Little Brother after hearing Cory read the first chapter at a convention, but it exceeded my expectations. I just finished the advanced reading copy I won in the icommons auction, and it was worth every penny. I feel pretty safe in saying it's the best book I'll read this year. It's a gripping story about likable characters being pushed hard and pushing back smartly.

But I'm over 25 so don't trust me, read it for yourself when it comes out in May. I'll be buying extra copies then to give to friends so they can pass them along to others.

BMW 5-series has an optional Head Up Display that can show the arrows for its (excellent) GPS Navigation system, but it's only on a portion of the window. Its optional night vision doesn't display in the HUD (yet).

They also have optional systems to tell you when you're leaving your lane (if it can tell) and an "active cruise control" to slow if the car you're following is slowing. The user manual is packed with warnings "But you're still driving the car and its your responsibility."

An interesting demo film at their website shows possible plans for a future wifi network between cars so one BMW can tell a trailing BMW about changing weather conditions, traffic slowdowns, and cops violating the 4th amendment with checkpoints. (OK, they didn't actually mention that last one.)

Eventually the technology will filter down into less expensive cars, the way anti-lock brakes and airbags did.

The link says it was a quarter-million, which is still enough to fill 2200 square feet 2 feet deep according to this handy ball fill calculator.

Now for "The Running of the Balls", in which people start out running ahead of them, in a fun hybrid of xkcd and Pamplona. That might be even more fun with superballs than playpit balls.

As someone once scribbled on a whiteboard at the MIT Media Lab, "Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer."

William Langewiesche's excellent book on Pakistan's nuclear program just came out in May 2007, The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor.

Sadly, Seymour Hersh's 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal & American Foreign Policy appears to be out of print. It documents at length who knew what when, and how the CIA came to understand it shouldn't tell the president things he didn't want to hear, even back in the 60s.

p180: "It was widely believed, the Israeli added, that the first warhead had the following phrase welded, in Hebrew and English, onto its exterior: NEVER AGAIN."

I recommend both of the above highly. Does anyone know of equivalent books about India, South Africa, or possibly Brazil's programs?

I haven't read Richard Rhodes' trilogy The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, and recent Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, but would like to get to them someday.

The technically inclined may also enjoy Robert Serber's The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How To Build an Atomic Bomb.

"Progress" also fits across the bottom better than "Hope". The propaganda effect of the use of red and blue is quite nice (see how Progress is all in blue?). I wonder if it'll start showing up at rallies and meetups. Very nice design.

@#4, "Hope is not a feeling. Hope is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what we are doing make sense, no matter how things turn out." -- Vaclav Havel

After 39 bids by 14 bidders the pass went for $33,850 to alanr0776, a new ebay account.

And not just overflight. If the plane were hijacked then it could threaten anywhere it could reach, so every country should have the right to put armed air marshals on any plane that can reach them.

Now the A380's 853-passenger capacity looks like a good idea!

On the plus side, the more trouble air travel becomes, the less carbon emitted, so maybe it'll all be for the best.

I think we have to draw the line at transparent TSA-approved clothing without pockets, though.

Isn't that what alleys are for in the UK?

Important safety tips are covered in the Sims2 training video "Male Restroom Etiquette".

It shouldn't really surprise anyone to think the US will still have troops in Iraq in 100 years. It's been over 100 years in the Phillipines, right? 60+ years for Japan and Germany, almost 60 in South Korea.

Especially if you told the tale of the great long-legged scissormen who run in to cut off the thumbs of children who suck their thumbs.

Why does someone have that many scissors anyway? Do they work for the TSA?

Maybe he heard Gever Tulley's talk at TED 2007 on 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do.

I'm absurdly pleased at figuring a way to link TED into this thread, but it really was a fun talk.

Another reason I don't recall seeing mentioned so far is that you can't grep dead goats. I have a copy of American Gods and the gorgeous Hill House limited edition with the author's preferred text, but if I wanted to find a quote or read the added scene with Jesus I'd have to read through the whole thing or at least skim it linearly.

If I had both versions in electronic form I could compare them easily, search for quotes if I only remember a couple of key words, all sorts of useful things.

So I applaud Harper Collins' first step at providing the book in free electronic form even if it's not in a form useful to me yet, and hope they'll be encouraged to do better, instead of going "ZOMG internet savages circle the wagons and ignore the future!"

Tor's free sample ebooks are in a more useful format, and Harper Collins could learn something from them.

Many roleplaying games are now available in both hardcopy and (usually) PDF, and in some cases you can buy both for one bundled price. I'd love to see that become more common.

I firmly believe that readers want to give money to their favorite authors, but that's hard if you don't know they're your favorite author yet!

I thought it was an excellent article, but then I'm a big believer in Seth Godin's views.

Jonathan Coulton seems to be doing pretty well with this approach, with people using his songs to post funny videos to Youtube, and others feeding off that creativity to do their own things, and then someone follows a link and buys a CD or MP3 online and shares it with friends and they ... and so on.

It's a lot easier to make a living from your art if you don't have to support a giant record company by paying for its executives' bloated salaries and for its lawyers to alienate your fans by treating them as criminals.

#14 has a good point about needing to build your tribe. I think there'll be room for intermediary companies (like LiveNation perhaps?) to take care of that sort of thing for artists that don't want to hassle with the details, but they'll be working for the artist, instead of treating the artist as a disposable face-of-the-year.

I think people want to give money to people whose work they enjoy, and they want to tell their friends who might also enjoy it. People want to belong, and they want what they do to matter. If the big media companies would give up some control and face the future instead of fighting it, maybe they could save themselves, and if not, things will move on over them.

Thanks for reading. We now return you to the monkey thread, already in progress.

There's a book Finis that's just the horrible endings, 40 of them, starting with "You decide to read the book". Profits go to Katrina-related charities, so its subtitle is "A Book of Endings to Give People New Beginnings."