Toast for Brekkie

Le Weekend

Ah, Franglais. Proof that, as much as France's language police try to stop it, the French continue to borrow as much from English as we did from them back in the old days of French rule over England.

I have so much to share with you from this past weekend it's hard to find a place to start. How about some pictures? Everybody loves those.

Josh and Seth were in town for a week on Spring Break from UT Knoxville (that's them on the golf course with me last weekend). They're pictured here at the WORLD FAMOUS Dixie Crossroads in the thriving metropolis of Titusville, FL.

The food was so good I think the conversation stopped for a full five minutes. All you could hear was the clanking of silverware.

Josh shows us how his baby sister used to react when her parents tricked her into eating a lemon.

I also play the role of Safety Man on TV.

We managed to play a little Gran Turismo 4 this week. I must say the experience has been taken to the next level by the racing chair that Seth made me. He bought a racing seat on Ebay and designed, welded, bolted and powder-coated an adjustable steel apparatus to which I can firmly attach my steering wheel, pedals and butt. It's one step away from the real thing and gives new meaning to the word "immersive."

A few more things and I'll let you go, off to surf the boundless waves of the intarweb.

1) I ran across this site via an ad in Car & Driver. I'm not an SUV owner and I do take issue with their weight and gas mileage. But for those who do own SUVs (and props to those who actually take them OFFROAD), this site offers advice on how to avoid rollovers and overloading. What I really want you to see here is the site design and badical animation.

2) This article gives a good overview of the Iraq war from a British point of view. I know this is something all of you would rather hear less about, but one phrase in particular struck me: "Even the cost to the US tax-payer - $4.7bn a month - is something the American economy can easily absorb." I'll leave alone the issue of whether that money should be spent at all, but I offer this for perspective: the annual budget of NASA this year is $12 billion, for everything from the Shuttle to hypersonic flight research to astronomy. That means that we, as a country, are spending more every three months in Iraq than we spend during an entire year on the space program. Am I going crazy here? Where are our priorities? If you gave NASA $1 billion dollars a week, something the American economy can supposedly easily absorb, we'd already have bases on the Moon and Mars, we'd have designs ready for aircraft that could fly you from New York to Tokyo in 45 minutes, a couple of Space Stations, maybe a space elevator, and we'd be planning a manned mission to Jupiter like Clarke's 2001. Just imagine.

3) Speaking of imagination, I have one last thing for you: astronomy. Westerlund 1 is an example of the advances that are being made every day in our understanding of the universe. For some background: the closest star to our Sun is Proxima Centauri, about 4 light years away. The Milky Way is on the order of 100,000 light years across. Scientists and astronomers have just discovered a super star cluster (yes, even bigger than Molly Shannon's character) in our galactic neighborhood that contains a combined mass of stars over 100,000 times the mass of our Sun in a region only six light years across. Imagine for a moment that it's possible for a planet to exist among Wolf-Rayet stars, OB supergiants, Yellow Hypergiants (nearly as bright as a million Suns) and Luminous Blue Variables. Forget for a second that some of these stars are larger in diameter than the orbit of Saturn. If you found yourself on a planet inside this super star cluster, your night sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full Moon. Chew on that.

Posted by George at March 28, 2005 06:34 PM