Skip to content

unrelated

I read a lot on vacations.

So I go to my public library, and cruise around, picking books that look interesting by authors I’ve never heard about. I do this because I’ve already read the library’s entire stock of books by authors I have heard about, because I’ve been frequenting this library since before I was 7 and therefore had to be escorted by an adult at all times.

The only problem with this strategy is that the authors I haven’t heard of aren’t famous, which means that they are rarely as good as the authors who are. In the case of the science fiction I like to read, this usually means they don’t check their facts.

What’s the difference between a closed tube rocket launcher all of whose fuel is used before it exits the barrel, and a cannon of equivalent chamber size?

Answer: The rocket launcher is less efficient, which means a shorter range and less damage dealt. The recoil will be almost as high, though.

… when you know a lot of trivia, elementary physics, and some electronics, it’s a lot harder to suspend disbelief than it used to be.


In other news, today my sister got accepted to Mt. Holyoke College. This, in and of itself, wasn’t too surprising, as everybody in my family is expected to attend college and she’d expressed interest in this one before. The really exciting part is that she went above and beyond to do this, as she is currently finishing up her junior year of high school and will be attending college next year instead of senior year. I, for one, think that’s really cool. Also, this gets rid of the grade gap between us. See, we were born two years apart, but I skipped first grade and have been three years ahead in school… until now. So I’ve got to scramble to regain my lead. Or at least that’s the theory; at the rate things are going I’ll consider things even if I manage to get my master’s degree before she does.

Funny how these things work.

RSS feed

Comments

No comments yet.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
http://corioblog.coriolinus.net/2003/05/18/unrelated/index.html
corioblog.coriolinus.net
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-22
40030
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5ZI6VZQTEUWJTOS4J5NE3XYN5XUEQW5R
<urn:uuid:c0a8b489-8db6-4b91-8607-c5f32e181358>
2018-05-27T21:36:33Z
207.38.86.91
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:IPJ2QCT2SEDAGL66IBP2RUFTBTCT5HEV
<urn:uuid:0c7fdb32-b28f-454b-a5de-c2c4bfe38111>
http://corioblog.coriolinus.net/2003/05/18/unrelated/index.html
response
<urn:uuid:9183c436-3087-4560-9094-531c4bff2b65>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-229-204-11.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-22
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf