News You Can Bruise for 2008 February 8

(1) Fri Feb 08 2008 15:46 Connection:

Lady Velkor, wearing a green peasant blouse and green hotpants, looked around the geodesic Kool-Aid dome. A man in a green turtleneck sweater and green slacks caught her eye, and she walked over to him, asking, "Are you a turtle?"
"You bet your sweet ass I am," he answered eagerly and so she had failed to make contact—and owed this oaf a free drink also."

—The Illuminatus! Trilogy, p601-602

In comments on BoogaBooga it's pointed out that the Turtles also show up in The Right Stuff. I remember that now; I was going to write it down and post this entry several months ago, but I was on a plane with nothing to write with.

Fri Feb 08 2008 17:30 No Quarter: If future historians wonder why Jason Scott's ARCADE documentary wasn't finished until 2028, it's probaby because I turned him to sorting quarters. Similar to Duchamp taking up chess.

I went through my milk bottle of laundry quarters to gauge the quixotitude of this quest. I found:

11 quarters from 1985 or before
37 post-1985 quarters
1 dime

So it's not as hard as I thought to find these old quarters. The oldest one in my impromptu collection is from 1970 and it looks great.

Fri Feb 08 2008 22:42 Space Probe Watch: MESSENGER made its first flyby of Mercury recently, acquiring never-before-seen footage and high-resolution pictures of cliffs. We get two move flybys and then a year in orbit around Mercury. Cost of the mission for those keeping track: $427 million, about the cost of a Space Shuttle flight.

As I get more into this research I'm wondering where the raw data for all these probes is. I always had a vague feeling it was "online" somewhere but had never tried to tie it down to a specific URL. It looks like it's just all over the place. For instance here's a bunch of stuff from the 70s and from the NEAR Eros mission. This looks like a job for... Carl Malamud!