The best mad scientist memoir of the year

Thankyou

I will be medically incarcerated for the next 2 weeks (starting Thursday), so this will give me something to read.

If it is as weird as you say, it will match the side effects of the drug treatments perfectly.

Mine's the one with the pockets full of prescription steroids ( I have to take 20 x 2mg a time).

Yeh Rite Like?

Using nuclear weapons to dig a newer, wider, better Panama canal.

Who'd ah thunk it?

Broke?

It's hard to see how one can characterise a group that is wasting that amount of money on its military as "broke".

Luckily he's Aspie then

"Would it be possible to blow up the entire Soviet Union with a launch-to-arrival time of two minutes, so there could be no possibility of retaliation on warning?"

I would have caved in the guy's head in the office with the paper weight in a heartbeat. And no remorse.

Fantastic

As title

Nitpickery

Call me pedantic, but a 'vomitorium' isn't 'somewhere you vomit', as implied in the article. It's an exit hall - a room designed to allow the rapid departure of a number of people from a venue, such as an arena. The act is named after the room, not the room after the act.

Also, the plural is 'vomitoria'.

Okay, I'm going, I'm going...

Re: Yeh Rite Like?

Ah yes, one of the "Ploughshare" projects or "what civilian purposes can we apply our enormous pile of nukes to?".

I saw a programme on this a while back, included that they'd tested this idea (dig line of holes, insert nuclear weapons, detonate, instant canal) in Alaska.

The test showed up a serious drawback, the canal created had significant levels of radioactive contamination. Who could possibly have seen that one coming eh?

@ Ian Emery

Good luck old chap and may you have a swift return to what passes for normality these days.

... and I thought *I* was a geek...

Hmmmmm....... Clearly the world is right about IT types...

"Best mad scientist memoir of the year" goes unchallenged...

Despite the fact that it is apparently up against some fairly stiff competition (so to speak).

http://tinyurl.com/ygyz5gj

{It's only the Guardian... assuming you count that as "safe for work"...}

why is this bad ?

And dropping on a nuke on middle earth is bad why ?

Truly fantastic absorbing read

Incredibly raw draft material at times gives an unique and genuinely stunning insight into the mind-set of someone who dared to believe in the dream and has the passion to chase it.

The story itself and the way Tony tells it really does stir the excitement of space exploration that I thought had been lost in the noise of popular science-fiction, thanks to Star Trek et al.

Amazing to find out that some of the core technology required for the IceShip and nuclear steam-ship propulsion has been around and tested since the 1960s.

The chapter on Epochal events is unnerving in many ways but explains much of what our technological age has been noticing as skill-sets become obsolete in less than a career-span.

Definitely one to read if you want your imagination fired. Highly recommended.

Now we know...

... what Dyson vacuum cleaners are really for. Cluster enough of them together and they will obviously go critical and take us into space. (I too saw the BBC4 prog, which emphasises that you need to build a big ship to make it work without killing the passengers.)