Bill Higgins— Retired Beam Jockey
@MrBeamJockey
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Physicist. Writer. "That's my secret, Cap – I'm ALWAYS pedantic." (Avatar: Ed Emshwiller)
Batavia, Illinois, USA
Joined July 2014
I'm on Youtube--my guest episode of the Vatican Observatory Podcast is enhanced there, illustrated with still images from time to time. Hear me AND see me... HT @AstroBalrog & @specolations. @VaticanObserv
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@SmalltimeJones @doctorow (Except for that time Hal Graham fell off a platform at Cape Kennedy.) These guys weren't daredevils. They were careful operators following sound procedures. They understood the hazards and limitations of the #RocketBelt.
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@LeilaBelkora I toured the Fabyan Villa Museum a while back. There is so much to say about the odd doings of Colonel George Fabyan that the tour guide spent only the final 5 minutes talking about cryptology--the part I had really come to hear about.
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Spacex Starship test: First stage returned, was caught successfully. The second stage flew like this:
Just saw the most insane #spacedebris #meteorshower right now in Turks and Caicos @elonmusk what is it??
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@Brit_in_Moldova It was fun while it lasted. And I learned interesting things from this account. See you in bluer skies.
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@Jack_Frodo I bought a bunch of the new Louisiana dollars, because the "invention or innovation" featured is WWII's Higgins Boat. Can you blame me?
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@harharko @ERCboxoffice If you had wanted to know, you could have googled in an instant, so it's kind of dumb for me to reply to this. But I can't help myself. It's a sequel to a Pixar movie about little people who live inside your head. Each personifies an emotion.
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@nyrath @GoodyearBlimp Stephen Hickman could have painted his own suit design, but evidently he loved Emsh's design. Which he embellished with further details from Heinlein's novel, such as the @GoodyearBlimp logo. He even reproduced Emsh's mistaken microwave horn.
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@GoodyearBlimp P.S. The drawing by Ed Emshwiller in my avatar is a teenager wearing a vintage surplus space suit. You might like to know that in his 1958 novel HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL #RobertAHeinlein informs us that the fictional space suit is a Goodyear product.
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RT @silentmoviegifs: The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) was a ground-breaking piece of animation. Creator Winsor McCay said it took him ei…
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I like it very much when friends remind me of jokes I once made that I have forgotten.
The massive tungsten counterweight reminds me of @MrBeamJockey ‘s old joke that the reason we want to make artificial gravity in space is that real gravity is too heavy to bring up from Earth.
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@BowTiedYukon I knew a guy who would allude to William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech—"I believe that Man will not merely endure; he will prevail"—and answer: "Enduring, but not prevailing."
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@hradzka Is Taiwan a piece, or is it, like the black keys onSchroeder's piano, just painted on?
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