I've had this as my desktop image for a while now. I like it for several personal reasons, but I just finally noticed the dates.

1722 DOB, that means he was in his 50s during the famous Revolution work.  40s and 50s back then was like 60s and 70s today.

Huh.

This morning in the Leeward Space Foundation group on LinkedIn, Jun Okushi posted a link to this Examiner article which reported Buzz Aldrin is no fan of the current Asteroid plan.  And, of course the comments raged from the Mars, Moon and Asteroid supporters (wait, there were no Asteroid supporters, odd).

If you're on LinkedIn, search for it but be ready for a slug fest.

With my two cents I was going to quote Mozart's exclamation to his wigmaker...

but I posted this instead ...

Lookie that, some fine soul at the Space Studies Institute put the High Frontier out on Kindle for a new age of Space enlightenment.  Oh, it was me ;-). 

Today I was introduced onstage at the Space Access Society conference in Phoenix by Gary Hudson, SSI President,  as the Space Studies Institute Evangelist, so I was honored to do the announcement of the release of the exclusive Kindle edition.

Go get it darnit.  It is truly an important and fascinating book.  Plus we worked pretty hard to get it turned into a nice Kindle version so, as a good good friend, you know that getting it and reading it will make me happy.

http://ssi.org/2013/04/the-high-frontier-is-now-on-kindle/

In the early 1970s America had proved its leadership in Human Spaceflight but among the nation’s youth an anti-technology mindset was growing.  Princeton Physicist Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, inventor of the revolutionary Colliding-Beam Storage Ring technology that is now the basis of all high energy particle accelerators, asked his students if they could come up with a working Space Colony system to permanently and happily house and employ tens of thousands of regular people AND cleanly power the Earth.

Yeah, win win plus win. 

Could it actually be done?  Here's a pointer you might like.

Time flies. 

I got two emails from budds saying 'you're on LinkedIn a bunch and your site hasn't had anything new for a month... you available?'

I'm on LinkedIn a bunch because old friends started doing the Recommendation Game (a great feature of the LinkedIn system, by the way... really gets you involved, and it's fun.), and I wanted to return their favors.

Do I want a gig?  Hmmm... everyone has a price.  But, I actually have one and it's pretty darned cool.

Amazon lists Dandridge Cole's Social And Political Implications of the Ultimate Human Society as unavailable. It is... but there is a way to get it.

After a good deal of investigation, I can assure anyone looking for this title that the search will be fun but fruitless... if you are looking for the exact title. There was a presentation at the 1961 AAS meeting and the book following the meeting (Advances in Astronautical Sciences Volume 8 - Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Astronautical Society Dallas January 16-18 1961) lists the article BUT the book itself only has a half page abstract with a note that the reason they didn't print the complete text is that it was published as a two part series in the September and October 1961 Space World Magazine under the title "Macro-Life".

I truly do dislike using Dylan as a catch, but it's tradition.  Unfortunately, this shows that it is not the only tradition that refuses to go away.

"Dear Editor:
The following may indicate what
the rest of the world thinks of our
space program:
I was in a park in Hakata in southern
Japan this summer wearing an
L5 Society t-shirt. A middle-aged
Japanese came up and asked me what
the t-shirt meant.
I replied in halting Japanese that it
was an international organization
promoting space development, space
manufacturing and building human
colonies in space.
The gentleman nodded, looked up
at my blue eyes, and said, "Ah, you
are Russian!"
Jack D. Kirwan
Tucson, Ariz."

That's from the September 1986 edition of the NSS's Space World magazine. 

Shhhh... there is something big quietly happening...

Tried to read this in high school, but couldn't get into it.  Tried it again recently because I was impressed by other RAH audiobooks.  As Neo once said "Whoa".  The audiobook took a little bit to get into but after sticking with it it started to smooth out and, OMG, this is truly more than just a simple book.  It is a handbook, a manual for many things or at the very least a solid threshing out of many of the tactics required but not immediately obvious as required in relation to achieving a major political and\or societal goal.

A few weeks ago I noticed that the media reports of the status of the former Eqyptian leader were almost a full overlay of the presentation of the Warden after the takeover.  Like the "new guard" had been following a playbook.  It worked in the novel and appears to have worked out here in the real-ish world.