One of my very favorite movies is That Thing You Do. I’m not exactly sure why, but I never get tired of watching it. I could go into a whole other post about why I like it, but I suspect that it just put together exactly the right mix of fun music, (mostly) clever dialogue, compelling story line, and well-chosen actors to hook me.
post edited on July 28, 2022:
Starting at about 4:48 in this video, the detail I mentioned below gets pointed out!
21 years and who knows how many viewings later, I just now realized something new about Back to the Future with the help of the TiVo. I never noticed before that one of the consequences of Marty’s first trip back to 1955 was that Twin Pines Mall became Lone Pine Mall (as a result of Marty knocking down one of old man Peabody’s pine trees with the DeLorean). 🙂
Though it may seem so, I have not dropped off the face of the earth since last Thursday. I had a near data disaster with the house server that morning: the system drive decided it wanted to die. Fortunately, the SMART diagnostics caught it before it went under (yay smartmontools and nightly automated testing!), so I was able to get backups. I had a replacement drive that day, but I’m just tonight getting the system back to about 90% running. Part of what went away while that was happening was my feed reader. It’s back up now, but I see I have a LOT of catching up to do (especially since I just added a couple of friends’ feeds).
So, bear with me as I catch up. 🙂
For a long time now, I’ve been fairly annoyed with the media and political hyperbole surrounding the future use of hydrogen. Most of the attention I’ve seen seems to revolve around the (admittedly worthy) advances in the devices (fuel cells, mostly) that help us convert hydrogen into energy for use in cars, consumer devices, etc. That’s great as far as it goes, but it’s not the whole story.
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. The story behind it is a bit old now, but I’m just now feeling motivated enough to actually write it up.
Here’s the fundamental question behind this post: why are people surprised when they are fired for bad-mouthing their employer and co-workers on their web sites?
I spotted Revenge of the Sith on the HBO schedule a little while back. Since I didn’t watch it in the theater and had never bothered trying to get my hands on the DVD, I figured I would go ahead and have TiVo grab it for me. I finally finished watching it tonight. The verdict? It pretty much lived up to my expectations. I’ll warn you now, a lot of you won’t like what’s beyond the “more” link.
This has been a week of great wailing and gnashing of teeth in terms of computer maintenance here in the Amy & Jeff household.
modified 29 June 2024 (by JHM): I’m about to add a comment to this post that ties the text in the post to the Apollo 12 Mission Transcripts.
Amy is gradually getting better. With that, life begins to get back to the normal routine. We watched a bit of TV Saturday night, and the anniversary of the Challenger disaster meant that the History Channel was running a lot of space-related programming. We watched part of a program we had both seen before about the Russian space program. I set up TiVo to record the next program, which was a repeat of one I had somehow managed to miss. It was a 2-hour special based on Gene Kranz’s book Failure Is Not An Option. The special is all about Mission Control at NASA from the beginning of the space program all the way through the Apollo missions. I was riveted.
After my rant yesterday, I got curious and found a website (archived copy on archive.org) that has some basic information on the SSMEs, or space shuttle main engines.
These things really are fascinating. Be sure to click on the “SSME Incredible Facts” link down at the bottom. You know you’re talking about a big engine when its fuel pump produces over 70 thousand HP. They make the comparison that this is the equivalent power of 28 locomotives. Each engine produces the thrust equivalent (in vacuum) of just over 12 million HP, and the shuttle has three of them. If I ran the calculations correctly, each solid rocket booster produces the equivalent of over 75 million HP.
Geof, I just looked up the thrust numbers for the F-1. It looks like though the total thrust produced by all 5 of them used on Saturn V stage I is greater than the the total thrust of the two SRBs, the SRB appears to win hands-down on per-engine thrust. Is the SRB perhaps the most powerful single engine ever constructed?
You know, I’m not sure why I bother, but for some reason I just can’t help myself. When I’m in the truck and the local NPR affiliate is playing something I’m not interested in, I’ll sometimes flip over to a talk/sports radio station out of Birmingham. Inevitably, I end up turning the radio off in disgust (if not full out anger) within about 15 minutes. The people I hear on the air on this station represent possibly the most consistent collection of what I call “determined ignorance” that I know of. On the way out to lunch today I flipped over there, and this one was so bad I decided I had to post about it when I got back.