Some work of fiction, possibly Varley’s Steel Beach, mentions a service called First Footprints that takes tourists to untrodden parts of the Moon.
I’d pay extra for a temporary inflated tent so as to make bare footprints.
Most proposed calendars for Mars have 24 months, and various systems have been offered to name them. Here’s one more: use the names of the 24 brightest stars, in order of longitude right ascension (relative to the rotation axis of Mars), so that each star is conspicuous at night in the month named for it. ( . . more . . )
Dad has often mentioned that when he first got eyeglasses he was surprised to see that trees had discrete leaves; I never found that to be a big deal.
But now I sometimes find that blades of grass stand out with unnatural vividness. I wonder whether it’s because contacts can give a more accurate correction (because their position is less variable) or because, with this lateral bifocal arrangement, the contrast between sharp and blur is always subconsciously present.
By the way, if I ever use the construction The X is just that, a X, slap me.
I found an unintentionally funny bit:
Do you remember the old adage about how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Karl Marx didn’t.
Acton wrote that famous line four years after Marx died. – I always wondered what “corrupts absolutely” is supposed to mean.
The movie of Watchmen apparently changes Ozymandias’s costume from gold to greys. Whose stupid idea was that?