Bob Hayes Online

Buzz Aldrin is apparently more energetic than I thought. He has a crackling editorial in the Post today on getting on with Mars colonization. Hear, hear!

We went to the Moon. (If you disagree, don’t bother to post your ‘argument’. Buzz is an old man, he doesn’t have the energy to go around punching *everybody*.)

It’s time to go back, although not in the same way. We’ve done the Christopher Columbus thing – now it’s time to do the John Smith thing.

Although for some reason, Bruce never did seem to learn to echolocate.

But you can learn.

I knew some of these, but others are new to me. Great stuff.

I disagree about the BASIC one, though.

Sit at your desk or in a chair. Lift your right foot slightly off the ground, and start moving it in a clockwise circular motion. Keep rotating it throughout the exercise.

Now take your right hand and draw a “6″ in the air in front of you, starting at the top of the six and moving down (the way they taught you to draw it in elementary school). If you’re like most people (everyone in my house who tried it, at least), your right foot will reverse direction, quite independently of your conscious volition, and start going counter-clockwise.

From my field notes:

It also works for the left foot/left hand. It does not work for right foot/left hand or vice versa. If you draw the “6″ from the inside out (so that the top of the figure is the last segment you draw), it doesn’t work – your foot will maintain its direction of motion. This leads me to think that each side of your brain has a rotation-direction module, which does not multitask, so that body movements on the same side have to rotate in the same direction.

Even moving very slowly and with great conscious effort, I was not able to make my same-side foot go contra-cyclically with my hand. As soon as I tried to move my hand the other way, my foot either changed direction or just spazzed out. I had no difficulty making the opposite side foot move contra-cyclically or in the same direction – it seems clear that the two brain halves have independent circuitry for this.

Many years ago, when I worked at Microsoft, I had a coworker and friend named Rangarathnam Gopu from Madras in India. Nice fellow, very talented software engineer. Over the years we lost touch; I heard vaguely through the grapevine that he had gone back to India.

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine in Denver posted a note on his blog mentioning that he was traveling to India and asking for various bits of advice. I had no counsel, but mentioned in the comments of his blog post that if he was in Madras, and if he met a fellow named Rangarathnam Gopu, it would be nice if he would send my fond regards.

Yesterday I got an email from Gopu. He had been Googling his own name, as we all occasionally do (well, maybe not the John Smiths among us) and one of the top hits was, you guessed it, my comment. So he tracked me down via the comment, dropped me a line, and now we’re back in touch. Amusingly enough, he got sick of software right around the same time I did. His second career choice? Writer.

It’s a small world, if someone indexes it for you.

Every blogger in creation – even the ones who should instead be concentrating on earning money so they can throw Blogger Bashes – will be blogging about the inauguration of Barack Obama today. And rightly so; it’s a historic event and an achievement of which our country can justifiably be proud. If you had told me thirty years ago that one day a black man would be president…well, I wouldn’t have blinked, actually, because I was ten and very idealistic about America. But if you’d caught me a few years later, when the cynicism had set in, I would have been surprised.

Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me, Mr. Obama is not, to say the least, on my political team. There is no doubt whatsoever that within a month I’ll be spluttering at the TV news and pounding out spasmodically pained editorial pieces about the latest Obama disaster and how he’s the Worst President Ever. But bearing that in mind, I do find myself with an elevated spirit today.

This is an optimistic moment for America, and – whatever policy disasters Mr. Obama leads us into – this cannot help but have a bracingly salutary effect on the racial divide in this country, which for years has been a quiet cancer on the soul of the republic. Every black child in the United States is about to see a black man taking the reins of the most powerful country of the world – a slap in the face to the still-animate ghost of a racist social order that proclaims blacks are fit only to entertain or to draw welfare checks, and a crushing blow to the “progressive” rhetoric of permanent racial oppression. To the person saying “you can’t do that because you aren’t good enough” and the person saying “you can’t do that because they won’t let you”, Barack Obama is a shining counterexample.

It’s nice to find out that my ten-year old self was the one with wisdom. Good morning, Mr. President. God bless you and godspeed.

Wild.

Science: it works, bitches!

H/T AoS.

All cars, in fact, suck.

Unless they have this.

Of COURSE there’s a cake disaster blog. Don’t be stupid.