THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Hal Clement’s classic hard SF novellas here about alien contact, Mission of Gravity and Star Light, with a couple of connected short stories thrown in, make for wonderful reading, and some free education in elementary physics and chemistry.
MG hardly suffers from being so old that the humans employ slide rules and [...]

The key to solving these alleged runaway Toyotas with their supposedly stuck accelerator pedals, is to shift the transmission into neutral. Let the engine race, if it will, while the car slows down until you can pull over.
Instead, this latest fellow reportedly told the 911 dispatcher he was afraid to do that ’cause the car [...]

Delighted to see a new confirmation of the postulated dinosaur-killing effect of the meteor (or comet) that splashed into Chicxulub on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula millions of years ago. University of Texas geophysicists, who have helped map the ocean floors, did quite a bit of work on the remains of the crater—all hidden today by water [...]

Over Mt. Jelm and the Wyoming Infrared Observatory.

I always liked this story of the first airplane to fly cross-country. In 1911. It’s a Wright EX pusher. It landed on its eighty-four day trip somewhere north of Austin, drawing a big crowd, as it did everywhere. Vin Fiz was a soft drink that fared worse than flying did, obviously. Ever heard of it? [...]

Birth control pills? The automobile? Antibiotics? Arguably. But in this case it’s radar, and Robert Buderi does a grand job of explaining why in the 500-plus pages of his sometimes technical, occasionally confusing, but always compelling 1996 classic, which I recently reread for the third time.
Perhaps it’s most compelling if you use your microwave (whose [...]

I’ve said this before about other things, but it’s worth saying again in a new context. I find this news of the Secret Service operating with outdated and frequently malfunctioning, circa 1980s computer equipment, quite reassuring, actually.
As an old friend, a former government spook, likes to say, while hooting at the latest conspiracy theory of [...]

One of the more amusing tales  of science fiction is the one where the exploring earthlings, who believe that technological survival requires logic and logical beings can’t be warlike, run smack into an alien warship whose star troopers proceed to eviscerate them. (See Larry Niven’s warcats.)
Comes now a similar argument from New Scientist (”Hello ET, [...]

And, as far the Dem congress is concerned, it’s that they’re also non-union:
“Don’t let Tojo turn you into a unwitting freeway kamikaze for the ‘Divine Emperor’! At the U.S. Department of General Motors, our G-Men are working ’round the clock to stop Jap sneak attacks on America’s publicly owned automotive industrial arsenal. But [...]

Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmidt:
“Recent disclosures and admissions of scientific misconduct by the United Nations and advocates of the human-caused global warming hypothesis shows the fraudulent foundation of this much-ballyhooed but non-existent scientific consensus about climate.”
Welcome aboard, sir.