An InSight-ful Article

In case you blinked, the BBC has a well-written article to quickly get you up to speed on NASA's InSight Mars lander.

InSight is primarily a geology mission: seismometers, subsurface heat flow probe,  wobble-o-meter, weather station.  But don't worry, astrobiology fans.  The next round of landers in 2020 will look for those signatures.

Saturday in New Orleans

Bayou Bicycles – the CX bike needs a lot of work

[coffee interlude]

The Orleans Collection at NOMA – cultural tune-up

Blue Oak BBQ – no explanation needed.

[coffee interlude]

Drive home.

Consider This

From the Port St. Joe Star (the local weekly, if you're not familiar):
Hurricane Michael: Bikes program seeks boost

That first Christmas – in fact the entire winter – after a major disaster is always the worst.  This looks like a good way to brighten things up just a little bit.

ps: Send to Saturday, and by Wednesday there was a letter with (in order of importance) a thank-you note and a tax deduction letter in my P.O. box.  Good folks.

pps: Article on the results in the St. Joe Star. 

Perspective

From yesterday's xkcd:

First Mustang Coupe Headed to Auction

It'll likely go for something in the half-million range.  Article at Fox.  VIN = (buncha zeros)2

Not really my way to fly, but it does have its own cool factor.

Sticky Wicket: A New Podcast

Here's a new podcast four-part mini series, centering on several Louisiana politicians and the news media of their time, improbably named Sticky Wicket:

download page |  all about 

To date only the first episode, centering on Huey P. Long has been published, and so far it's really good.  Recommended listening for people of all political stripe.

Hat tip to The Darling Daughter for pointing this one out.

The Hobbit, re-read

Following up on last month's post about The Hobbit movie disaster, I took a little time this past week to re-read The Hobbit.  As always, it's a delight to go back through that book and enjoy it all over again.  If you've never read it, or especially if you've had the misfortune to have only seen the movies, you owe it to yourself to dig into this book.

Then, as with potato chips, one thing leads to another and now I've launched into a re-read of Lord of the Rings.  This one will take a bit longer.  Reading the intro chapters, it was interesting to see how Tolkien's retconning of certain small aspects of The Hobbit between editions were, by him, attributed to Bilbo's coming under The Ring's influence.  The most significant of these revolve around upgrading a simple turn-you-invisible prop in The Hobbit into The One Ring in LotR, and are discussed in some depth in The Road to Middle Earth.  Anyway, it was a nice twist by Tolkien to attribute the retconning of various editions of The Hobbit into being a malevolent effect upon Bilbo of The One Ring's reality distortion field.

It's a nice day here, so that's all for now.  Time to go out and have adventures of my own.