THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Planning my trip to Israel in early October. I’m told to expect the weather to be much like Texas, a little warmer, maybe, but not much. I am wondering how big a melatonin pill I need to start taking 1-3 days before the flight? Also how much Vitamin C to ward off the colds and [...]

Run for your lives. The Mars Hoax is back. Coming to a forwarded email near you.

Plastic bags, which I greatly prefer to paper (which has a tendency to get wet and fall apart, dropping everything in the street) are under assault everywhere these days. Particularly in (where else) California, home of Queen Nancy, the botox pol a majority of us know and despise. So this little “mockumentary” is more affecting [...]

It’s been an amazing six years for the Martian rover Spirit. But the little robot may finally be dying in winter temps of almost seventy degrees below zero F. It hasn’t been heard from since March 22:
“The earliest date the rover could generate enough power to send a beep to Earth was calculated to be around July 23. [...]

Nevermind the $41,000 pricetag. Government Motors’ new Chevy Volt irks car-nut Iowahawk just for its cheesy advertising. “See the U.S.A., etc.” this is not. Buy a Ford, he says, for better songs. Me, I’ll stick with Honda, and skip the ads altogether.

“Every time we’ve encountered Mercury, we’ve discovered new phenomena,” said Sean Solomon, the [NASA] mission’s principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “We’re learning that Mercury is an extremely dynamic planet, and it has been so throughout its history. After MESSENGER has been safely inserted into orbit around Mercury next [...]

Researching my book on radar development in Texas, I encountered the Grumman F-3F, the last American military biplane fighter. Nevermind why. Pilots called it the “Flying Barrel,” not very affectionately would be my guess.

This is one paranoid hard SF novel by Greg Bear. A clear majority of his Amazon critics seemed to hate it. I rather enjoyed it, but it certainly was a weirdie. Did you know Stalin was still alive, barely, in a bacteria-filled tank in Manhattan?
Good thing I’m not a conspiracy buff, into things like [...]

I enjoyed this sequel to Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio—only about $12 for both on the Kindle. The sequel was as touching and affective as the first novel. I also appreciated the hard-science plot and the definitions and sources in  the back of DC. I had spent a fair amount of reading time wondering how much [...]

To a cut-no-slack federal bureaucracy overseen by a feckless president who’d rather golf, have “date nights” and throw White House parties. Whom Big Media has allowed to say nothing about the oil spill since June 22. What, isn’t New Orleans at risk, too? Isn’t that Big Media’s favorite place? Oh, that was just when Bush [...]