ION, today's xkcd made me snort my coffee and now my sinuses are caffeinated: [link].

Teppy beat me to it. I was just catching up to post a link to that. And, yeah, the mouseover text FTW as smonster said.

Sad about Corey. I'm not surprised, but I thought it would have been Feldman first, not him.

Mom worked in title in the '80s...her assessment matches "Ashley's" It sounds like that business was fairly often like Sterling-Cooper without the cachet.

Watch a dissertation defense...LIVE

Do you like prairie voles? Are you curious about the process of earning a Ph.D.? Possibly just a touch of both?

Then tune in today, starting at 10 central, for what Science magazine's Science Careers Blog is calling the first live-streamed dissertation defense (at least, that they've ever heard of).

The adventurous academic is Danielle Lee of the University of Missouri, St. Louis. The dissertation is entitled: An Investigation of Behavioral Syndromes and Individual Differences in Exploratory Behavior of Prairie Voles, Microtus ochrogaster. There was some talk of live Tweets as well. However, Lee says she won't be Tweeting, herself, during the defense (that would be just a little crazy multi-tasky, wouldn't it?), but she is up for answering your questions once everything has been successfully defended. Just Tweet them with the hashtag #LeeDefense. Good luck, Danielle!

Sad about Corey. I'm not surprised, but I thought it would have been Feldman first, not him.

I watched a little bit of "The Two Coreys" when it aired and Corey F. seemed to have pulled his shit together very well and was genuinely frustrated at his inability to help Cory H. There are clips on YouTube.

I think I have to buy this book....

Better Than Apollo: The Space Program We Almost Had

SAN FRANCISCO — In the late 1950s, American space companies jumped into a headlong race to build an aerospace industry that could launch missiles across the world and rockets above it.

In her new book Another Science Fiction, archivist Megan Prelinger delves into the hyperbolic, whimsical world of the advertisements these early aerospace companies created to sell themselves.

Far from the dry, technical ads you might imagine, companies like Northrup, Ex-Cell-O, and National tried to lure the most talented young engineers into their cubicles by drawing on the mystique of science fiction. Ball-bearing, engine-part, and guidance-system companies didn’t sell themselves, but rather the grand vision of space exploration as the next step in mankind’s destiny.

The book is lovingly crafted and exhaustively researched. Unlike so many “big idea” tomes that skip over the details to deliver the PowerPoint version of reality, Another Science Fiction glories in the details, providing a complex portrait of the nation’s spacefaring ambitions. Prelinger’s analysis reaches outside the narrow confines of space boosterism to reveal the neural connections in the American psyche between the final frontier, the Soviet menace, and good, old industrial engineering.

We caught up with Prelinger at the wonderfully strange library she runs with her husband, Rick, to ogle old space stuff and discuss countercultural space utopias, alternatives to Apollo, and her hopes for a human spaceflight renaissance.

Sometimes I think I'd be happiest if I had been born 25 years earlier, and had worked for NASA in the '60s....

I would have loved to have worked at NASA in the 60s, other than the fact that women didn't, everyone smoked, and I'm guessing not too many of those NASA guys looked like Loren Dean in Apollo 13 (he was yummy there!!).

I forgot another weird thing I discovered while being up all night- The movie Blue Lagoon was based on a book. The Blue Lagoon with Brooke Shields! A public domain book (now).

[link]

It is really weird. I read some and the plot is very, very similar.

The movie Blue Lagoon was based on a book.

Oh, yeah. I read the book before I saw the movie. My mom wouldn't let me see the movie as she deemed in too mature for me, but she didn't pay much attention to the books I checked out of the library. I didn't see the movie until years later.

I would have loved to have worked at NASA in the 60s, other than the fact that women didn't, everyone smoked, and I'm guessing not too many of those NASA guys looked like Loren Dean in Apollo 13 (he was yummy there!!).

My mom worked at an MIT lab doing work for NASA in the late sixties and early seventies.

For some reason, when I was in middle school/junior high, they would play The Blue Lagoon on regular tv (we did't have cable) at 4:00 in the morning all the time. I was an insomiac back then, and I swear I watched it a million times. As I grew up, I thought I was imagining it, because what station in their right mind would play that horrible movie so many times, but it turns out my friend M and her brother remember the same thing. They would have really been in trouble, as their father would not let the watch 'The Facts of Life' because he thought it was too mature.