The author states up front that he doesn't know anything about computers or networks, and that all of his information comes from interviewing "major figures" in the development of the Internet. Looks like most of them took the opportunity to do some serious image alteration.
The development of the Internet was not anywhere near as dependent on single individuals or pieces of hardware as the book makes out. The technical details would probably have come out differently without Bob Metcalfe or Vint Cerf, but the modern end-user would see nothing different.
The book spent *way* too much time singing the praises of Cisco and Microsoft, neither of whom was a player back when. And sometimes there was less - Bolt, Baranek, and Newman - BBN to most people - shows up a couple of times as sincere hacker-doodz blazing the trail to internet freedom, yadda yadda. The book didn't mention BBN has always been a partner of the National Security Agency, or that they were heavily involved in processing the tapes from the Kennedy assassination, or trivial things like that.
I didn't find anything that was an outright lie, but the slant was awfully steep. I'm more inclined to think it was because the author's "sources" led him around by the short arm than from malicious intent, though.
There was a slab of cast iron with threaded pressure plate holes, as usual. But the slab had about a dozen bolts around the perimeter, where it was attached to what looked like an ordinary automatic transmission flexplate! John said it was from an '86 Nissan Altima. Oh, and there was a .005" step between the friction face and the pressure plate mounting area, just for added weirdness.
After thinking about it for a while, it didn't seem as strange as I thought at first. The pressure plate bolts securely to the flywheel, as usual. The sheet metal flexplate *might* wiggle some... but the clutch disc floats freely on the input shaft, and the throwout bearing is guided by the transmission snout.
Hmm. I just had a couple of aluminum flywheels made up for 351 Clevelands. Getting all the dimensions correct for the crank hub, with its offset bolts, was a pain in the ass. For DIY, just bolting a chunk of steel to the back of a flexplate might actually be a reasonable way to make a flywheel, particularly for engine swap stuff.
However, there was one part where there were two SVR (successor to the KGB) thugs in the scene. Seven feet tall, 400 pounds, pig faces. For some reason, I noticed the watch one of them was wearing. I backed up the disc, went to step mode, and hit zoom. Click... click... click...
The thug was wearing a Mickey Mouse watch.
I don't know why, but noticing little details like that amuses me...
"The record for hand demolition is held by 15 British karate experts, who demolished a 6-room Victorian house in 6 hours with their bare hands."
"...Napier... 16-cylinder device called the Cub. This engine consisted of four rows each of four cylinders arranged in an irregular cross around a common crankcase, with the angle between each upper cylinder block and its corresponding lower block being 90d, the angle between the two upper blocks being 45d, leaving 135d between the two lower blocks. Improbable though it looked, it was an excellent configuration when combined with a single-plane four-throw crankshaft, giving firing intervals of 45d and perfect primary and secondary balance - whereas the broad-arrow layout of the 12-cylinder Lion was left with a slight horizontal secondary shake."
This X-16 layout is two 45-degree-overlapped V8s. The two lower banks aren't quite horizontally opposed, so there's extra room for intake or exhaust plumbing. If you were to make your own using, say, Kawasaki ZX-14 cylinder heads, they could be used as-is, with no machining, welding, custom cams, etc. A four cylinder crank also would dramatically simplify having the crank made. The engine would also be short; instead of a transverse V16 with a highly fangled transaxle, an ordinary ZF, Audi, Butfoy, etc. transaxle could be used as-is. I suspect the Cub had two articulated rods on each crank throw. Articulated rods have just over half the big-end weight of a pair of single rods, and the difference in piston position per degree of crank rotation is very small.
The part about "perfect primary and secondary balance" doesn't ring quite true; I think it would probably have a small secondary shake, as opposed to a true 90 degree X which would have perfect balance since everything would be mirror images of the opposite parts. The secondary would be less than half of a single plane V8. Given the stroke is well under 3 inches, it's probably a non-issue.
All I can say is, "wow!" The Mitchell trial was a classic Star Chamber. It is usually listed as a court-martial, but it wasn't; it was the result of a Presidential commission (Calvin Coolidge, who Mitchell had apparently pissed off greatly), sort of like the Warren Commission. Coolidge appointed a group of generals to act as judges; several of them admitted candidly after the trial that they had been instructed to find Mitchell guilty. Guilty of what? A catch-all called the 96th Article of War, which prohibited officers from embarrassing or demeaning the military or the government. Mitchell's public reports on the US' poor state of military readiness were deemed embarrassing, and therefore actionable.
Coolidge's Commission met in a partially-flooded old building that was unheated and had to have the upper stories shored up to prevent the collapse of the upper floors. The enquiry was "public", but there was only room for a very small number of people. The prosecution was allowed to do or say pretty much anything they pleased; Mitchell's attorney was often unable to complete cross-examinations because the subjects were "secret", even when he produced copies of the Congressional Record and various newspapers showing there the information was not only not secret, but very public.
The Commission passed its guilty verdict up to Coolidge, who sentenced Mitchell to removal from his duties for five years, without pay, later amended to half pay. Mitchell resigned his commission and went on an extended speaking tour, and died within the year. (1925)
The biographer, Burke Davis, reported Mitchell's social life during the time between the end of WWI and the trial, but drew no inferences. Mitchell drew around $400/mo as a general; he had servants, airplanes, fast cars, several estates (as in, large enough to raise and train steeplechase horses, which he both sold and rode in competition), hobnobbed with various foreign military and political figures when in DC and abroad, and shot off his mouth a lot. He could do this because his wife and mother were wealthy and supported his lifestyle. Davis says nothing, but I figure many of his peers, eking it out on $400/mo, hated his guts.
Davis blandly relays various accounts of Mitchell's "heart valve problem", short illness, and sudden, quiet demise. The symptoms as described (partial paralysis, speech problems, inability to hold focus, rambling, sudden death) are classic symptoms of a series of strokes.
The excerpts from the "trial" were most interesting, though. A cross between a kangaroo court and something from Lewis Carroll, or maybe Gilbert & Sullivan.
Beyond the whole Mitchell thing, though, was the attitude of both the Army and the Navy: "We see no problems now, we see no problems in the future, everything is just fiiiine, no need to change from doing things the way we always have."
The whole thing differs only in minor detail from the attitude of the French government and military as described by Shirer in his "The Collapse of the Third Republic", about France between WWI and WWII. I had wondered why the French were so stubbornly ostrich-like in their refusal to acknowlege their danger from the Nazis; here it is in the States, except it's Mitchell and the Japanese.
In retrospect, at least various members of the British Parliament would periodically stand up and try to put forth the danger of the Nazi buildup, and though the RAF's struggles to develop into an effective air power were laughable, hell, at least they tried.
Mostly weird old electronics stuff, but down at the bottom of the page there's a section with some nice LANL photographs of some of the atomic bomb tests.
As far back as I can remember I was in the pro-nuke camp and thought the "Ban the Bomb" people were whackazoids. And I sort of resent the fact the government kept the public - me, in this instance - from seeing any of the tests.
That's one of the things I'd be willing to pay admission to see. The
flash, the earthquake, the shockwave, and the fireball... it's the
world's most awesome fireworks display. I used to have one of the Ivy
Mike (Bikini H-bomb) images as my wallpaper.
"The light of ten thousand suns challenges infinity, but is soon
gone."
- The Moody Blues, Days of Future Passed, track 5...
PS: the AEC claimed every test went off, which is likely true, but at
least one of the images on the site sure looks like a fizzle to me.
She wanted to watch it last night, so I gritted my teeth and prepared to go back to the computer after it got too bad.
Astoundingly, it wasn't bad. I had seen "Shaft" in the '70s and thought it bit, and part of "Shaft's Big Score" around the same time, of which the only thing I remember was he carried a Hi-Standard Model 10 shotgun. That's the one that looks like something Imperial Stormtroopers ought to carry. (but they carried modified FNs instead)
Anyway, "Africa" was filmed in 1973. Sharp focus, good static camera angles, no tricky editing work. A few black power comments here and there, but otherwise a typical early '70s style action-detective story that, for the most part, made sense. It got a bit strange at the end, probably because it was already a long film and we'd spent the first four hours (at least it seemed like it) in New York and Ethiopia, so the part in France got telescoped a bit.
There were a few uses of the F-word and some T&A shots that would probably have rated the movie as "X" in most places in 1973; other movies got the X for a lot less. Nowadays, nobody would notice if it was on cable.
A fair evening of retro entertainment, though.
Old Yeller did very well in various racing events, trouncing the factory Maserati and Ferrari teams several times. Balchowsky built a couple more cars and farmed the driving chores out to a has-been named Carroll Shelby and a wet-behind-the-ears never-was named Dan Gurney.
Shelby liked Old Yeller so much he decided to build his own, and was negotiating to buy some of Buick's recent aluminum V8s, but the deal fell through when Buick discontinued the engines, so he wound up schmoozing a 221 cubic inch Ford Fairlane engine and power-schmoozing an engineless AC Aceca from England, and then his buddy Dean Moon fired up the torch and mated the two, whereupon Carroll and Dean, drunk off their asses, proceeded to take the car four-wheeling through some nearby fields because they were too drunk to keep it on the road.
Shelby's attempt to use the aluminum Buick was probably due to Moon being one of Buick's skunk works, and the fact that their businesses shared the same building. But the Ford connection panned out okay in the end...
[mostly from "The Cobra Story" by Carroll Shelby, the rest from published writings of former Shelby employees]
So, I find the right shoes, more or less. They didn't look exactly like the old ones, but they're the same part number. Close enough, I didn't feel like laying down on the floor and trying them on. The local Wal-Mall doesn't want you trying shoes on; they took all the benches and chairs out. Last time, I went to another department, got a folding chair, and carried it over to the shoe department.
Being paranoid, I opened the box to make sure the shoes in the box were the same size (10-1/2) and color (black) as the description on the outside of the box. One was. There was no other one. Aren't these supposed to come in pairs?
The "display model" shoe above was the correct size and color, and opposite hand from the one in the box. So I crammed it in the box and went to check out.
Then off to checkout, which is always an adventure. They *really* want you to use the "self checkout" lane. The only lane open was fifty yards away, the farthest from the door. I trudged down there, and there are six checkers - all black females - who are having a conversation and pointedly not going to break it up just because somebody wanted to check out. About the time I was ready to drop everything on the floor and walk out (something I've done before), one of them moved out of the way and flipped her hand toward the register. I dropped my stuff there, and she proceeded to go through the procedure without ever making eye contact, which seems to be normal nowadays. I had to reach across the counter and get my bags since she didn't feel obliged to move them out where I could get hold of them.
Sam Walton would be spinning in his grave, but the Walton Management Company doesn't give a damn. Which is why they sell damned little to me, and not very often.
Last night I got the urge to check it out again. I've clicked all over their web site, but as far as I can tell the web interface is gone. Now you have to download special Googleware binaries and install them on your computer. I'm coming to view Google are more of a Great Satan than Microsoft, but I have a fresh backup, so what the hell.
Click on "download"... and nothing happens. Click on "click here if your download doesn't start." It tries to send me a file with a ".dmg" extension. Since there are no instructions anywhere, I'm assuming it's supposed to be an executable file, because YaST sure as hell doesn't know what it is.
Apparently they're trying to autodetect my OS by interrogating my browser, which (according to the Konqueror) is returning "Konqueror Linux x86." To Google's famous programmers, this probably looks like Safari. Or maybe it's just broken.
Hmm... now isn't *that* interesting...
I know full well what the browser *used to* return for an ID; I just got:
Your User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.5 (like Gecko)
...from useragent.org. Apparently the ID string changed during one of the upgrades, since I've retained my home directory and settings across MDK, Fedora, and SuSE.
Going into the cartoon setting interface (the old one was much better; the new one is partially incomprehensible and requires far too much zorking around) I find a "Site Specific Identification" box. In it are "User Agent" strings matched to "Site Names."
google.com and gmail.com are preset for (the damned thing won't let me cut text of the window!) PPC Macintosh OS X.
Well, ain't that a kick in the head.
I picked this up figuring it would be really bad, like "Agent Red." I was disappointed. It was actually not too bad; it rates a solid 3 on the 1-to-5 Dave Arbitrary Movie Scale.
Dolph plays a Soviet Spetnaz who is sent to some African pesthole on a search-and-assassinate mission. He botches the mission and his superiors turn him over to the Cuban mercenaries the Soviets are using to try to overthrow the country's government. The Cubans plan to torture and execute him, but Dolph escapes, is befriended by some bushmen, and, after seeing Soviet CBW weapons wiping out entire villages, decides to side with the African nationals. They then wipe out the Cuban encampment.
Generic action fare, okay for disposing of an hour and a half.
They had expected scum and hoodlums; there were plenty, but a surprisingly large vandal class was the middle aged, well dressed whites. And not just males; they got one scene of a grandmotherly woman standing on a sink, trying to use her umbrella to lever it away from the wall.
At one previous place of employment, I walked into the bathroom to take a leak on a day when there were only three males in the building, the other 200-odd being of the female persuasion and, presumably, using their own facilities.
There was piss all over the floor and the fixtures. That's one of the things that sets me off, and since the Director of Information Services was just zipping up at the time, I opined that if they found out whoever had done it, they should be publicly humiliated and then fired.
At the time, I didn't think he was the one who'd done it, but after he turned out to be a weasel, I've seriously wondered...
What I'm noticing is that there are several sizeable areas in Arkansas with a cluster of towns, but only two or three small secondary roads in or out of county-sized areas. They're like little islands, isolated by the road system.
There are few optional routes to many places. It's 60 miles to Kenney's - hop on the freeway, grind through the permanent traffic jam and construction in the LR metro area, then hop off the freeway to Kenney's. I30/I67 is just about a straight shot. The next-closest route appears to involve half a dozen secondary roads going more or less in the correct direction, at approximately 110 miles. Memphis is 150 miles directly east; Highway 70 parallels it, but you're always within sight of the Interstate through flat farm country, nothing to see here, move along. The other alternate would involve perhaps 225 miles of zigzagging through flat farmland. The only advantage to either is not being beaten to death on the wreckage of Interstate 40.
Oddly enough, the mountainous areas of the state have *much* higher road densities than the southern Delta areas. I'm not sure what the construction criteria were; there's no obvious correlation between amount of road and industry or population.
*Some* of the roads were probably Cold War relics; at one time there were a bunch of ICBMs based in the mountains of Arkansas. A lot of the roads go through Federal or State parks, and might have been built to promote tourism. But, hey, I'm just glad they're there...
> It could be argued that he, on his own terms, single handedly reversed > the trend that constituted the liberal dictatorship of the airwaves. > The regular folks flocked to his stations like they were life > preservers, during the "time of troubles". I.E., before the advent of > Fox News.You're talking about Lush Slimebaugh?
I got through the first quarter of one of his books. The entire text up to that point consisted of "I'm just an entertainer and I don't think or agree with anything I say in my radio show persona. I'll say anything for ratings."
Well, thank you much, skag-boy. So glad you needed a whole book to make that clear. Good thing I only paid fifty cents for it at a yard sale...
So I wind up in court, and my "peers" are "thirteen people who were too dumb to avoid jury duty." Hmm.
It seems like another of those jobs Americans don't want to do; I guess that'll be the next thing to fall to the illegal immigrants. "Wow, thirty bucks a day and a comfy chair!"
Sometimes I think there are people out there with broadband and waaaay too much time on their hands. Sometimes, I have this sneaking feeling I might be one of them.
One result of this is that I have a new MAC address (the cause of much of yesterday's hassle). And now... Google doesn't know who I am. Which is interesting.
Some months ago I opened a gmail account to share between work and home. After that, Google always put "Welcome Dave Williams" at the upper right of their main page. I figured it had set a cookie and didn't think much of it.
Hmm.
A couple of years ago when broadband finally arrived in this area in the form of Comcast, I bought one of the online sign-up kits. It came as a cable modem and a CD that only ran in Windows. According to the instructions, the CD *had* to be run to configure the connection. So I plugged the Motorola Surfboard into the ancient Win95 P100 I keep around for no reason I can quite remember. The CD installed Ourhork Excess, Internet Exploder, configured an email address at comcast.com, and some other stuff. Then it was online. I moved the Ethernet cable over to the Linux box and everything worked fine. Later, I added a 4-port Linksys router to let the other machines connect if needed.
Somewhere in there, I wanted to get at the email and netnews accounts I was paying for. Comcast's support people told me it had all been configured into my system by their CD. I told them I wasn't running Outlook, just give me the server name and login ID. They told me they didn't support anything but Outlook on Windows, and hung up on me.
Well, fuck you, too.
AB signed up for Comcast's telephone service. We kept our existing number, got unlimited long distance, and it's $35/mo cheaper than the *basic* ripoff land-line service we were paying for.
But a "service technician" had to come to the house. They couldn't just send us a new modem with phone ports.
Wednesday they (two!) came, switched modems, and then wanted to fire up my computer and install some software. AB called me at work, where I said "fuck no!" Then they decided they didn't really need to get at my computer, and left.
I got home later, the phone worked okay, the internet was up, no problem.
Yesterday morning, phone works, no internet. I could see the blinky light indicating traffic on the cable loop, but I couldn't get any data.
SIX hours of comcast's fuck-you press-a-button machine and tech support later, my temper is approaching the critical point. The "first level" tech wanted me to plug the Ethernet cable from the modem directly to the back of the computer. No problem, that's what *I* would do; strip it down to the basics and work my way back up. I have an old Compaq with Windows 2000 that I use to operate my scanner, which I don't have Linux drivers for. Since I figured their brains would explode if I wasn't running Windows, I had dragged it out and installed Exploder on it.
After a while they decided the MAC address on my account didn't match the cable modem, so I had been locked out. The nice installation technicians (two of them, remember) didn't do whatever it was they were supposed to do. (data point: they apparently had some way to tell the big router at Comcast's data center to accept traffic from that MAC address... but it didn't take. Some kind of service override, I bet)
So they reset the cable modem, which killed the phone, which resulted in half an hour on the cellphone at 20 cents per minute before we got the cable phone back up. I can get out now, but all URLs lead to a Comcast page asking for a login. The first tech says her part is done and shuffles me off to another tech.
During all the time on hold, we have LOUD ADVERTISING, low mumbly advertising, some horrendous crapball 4-second tinkly music loop someone did on their child's MIDI keyboard, and then higher-quality, conversational-level voices which turned out to be more ads. Since the noises changed every fifteen seconds or so, it kept yanking my chain thinking someone was soming on the line; net result, extensive boring time on hold, adrenaline level rising.
So the second-level guy finally comes online. I have spent the time on hold putting the router back in the loop, resetting the router, rebooting the Windows box. No internet. The second-level guy has me plug the wire back into the computer. Internet. "Sorry, we don't support routers, you'll have to call Cisco." click.
Boil.
Move the wire over to the real computer. Zip. Nada. Nothing.
Boil.
Hook it to the router. Nothing. It's web-based admin interface can't get a DHCP address from the modem.
Plug the wire back into the Windows shitbox. Internet works.
Stop. Boil. Think.
There's a copy of Mandrake on the shitbox. Reboot into that.
We have internet. But only on *that* machine.
"Disconnect your router and hook the wire directly to your computer."
Now *how* did they know there was a router?
MAC address? They're supposed to be unique, and are also supposed to identify the manufacturer and model, as well as the specific individual unit.
I shut the computers down, pull the network cards (thankful the Compaq is too old to have had it on the motherboard, and the motherboard one on the big box never worked to begin with) and swap them.
Reboot. The Windows box is now blind, but the big box is online.
You shit-sucking bastards. TWO "installation techs" and TWO "support techs" jerked my dick on this one. Yes, Comcast's "Terms of Agreement" *DO* say "only one computer", but they don't prohibit a router. The new "Arris" cable modem had the ability to interrogate the MAC address of the machine it was connected to, which the old Surfboard apparently didn't. So the "first level support tech" knew, right there on her screen, that the shitbox had an Intel Ethernet Pro 100 card, and for that matter, exactly which one it was... and locked the account to THAT specific MAC address. Which is why it wouldn't work with any other computer.
Bastards. And then tried to send me off to Cisco for another day on hold.
I'll get even with Comcast for that, someday. It took AB a half day off work, and a full day for me. That's an expensive fucking telephone.
Oh, by the way. How long does it take for a default install of Windows 2000 with Internet Explorer, sitting on an open cable loop, to get infected?
About 45 seconds after I fired up Exploder, pop-ups started appearing on the screen. So add another few hours to reformat and reinstall that machine. Fuck, it took over an hour for the Lexmark drivers to install... that's bloatware at its finest.
Anyway, I remembered a "clone MAC address" line buried in the (incredibly slow, visually cluttered, and sometimes misleading) Linksys menu tree. /sbin/ifconfig told me the Intel's MAC address. I typed it into the router, zorked over to "renew DHCP", and both machines were back online.
Fuck you, Comcast. And now I'll go back to trying to choke the local loop with multiple usenet server connections while you play games blocking BitTorrent lusers...
Back to Google... the Surfboard may have been able to report the downstream MAC address too, but Comcast either wasn't making use of that feature back then, or I had the router by the time they got around to it. But I suspect they interrogated the router for its MAC address, and they passed it on to Google, which really, REALLY, ever more than Radio Shack or Kroger, wants the demographics of anyone who clicks anywhere into Google-Land. And now Google seems to think I'm in Australia; they try *very* hard to track user location, and can usually get it down to a specific DSL exchange or cable hub, and dial-ups, of course, to their ISP locations.
First time I log back in to gmail, the Greater Satan will know where I am again. Not that it's a big secret, but the sneaky way they find out annoys me.
This experience also leads me to another conclusion. Back in '92 when I first got internet access, it was still basically anonymous. Yeah, the university and telephone company could have figured out where I was dialing in from, but it would have taken a fair bit of work. I knew it had become less work, but I never thought much about it.
Now, if someone *really* wants to find you - like the NSA, or Google, or psychotic telemarketers - it's not hard at all.
If you're on dialup, all you do is traceroute to the ISP. If you're a Fed, you can just take the records under the new laws. If you're private, the ISP will gladly sell them your name, phone number and billing address.
If you're on wired broadband, the cable or phone company knows where you are, what hardware the modem can see, and so forth.
If you're on wireless broadband, same thing, except GPS can pinpoint *exactly* where you are.
Who needs the NSA when we have Google?
This kind of pisses me off. I had sometimes wondered where all the Brits, Canadians, Aussies, Zeds, South Africans, and other English-speakers were hanging out. Apparently, Google is severely filtering (censoring, as far as I'm concerned) non-US pages when they return search results.
The reason I went to Google was it was just a search engine instead of a "web portal", was dial-up friendly, didn't have hundreds of dancing ads, and seemed to work well. But now maybe it's time to forsake the Greater Satan.
Now I'm looking for a better search engine, hopefully, one that's not US-centric. Surelytohell they're not ALL in the USA...
It was spotlessly clean; so much so that I checked the MAC address (written in my little notebook I keep such information in) before I believed it was the dusty thing they'd removed.
I expect they planned to sell it to someone else.
> my novel sits someplace or another, growing green hair like a chia pet.
>E
You are at the front door.
>open door
The door is open.
>check mail
The mailbox is empty.
>drat
Unknown command "drat".
http://www.fleetwood-trawlers.connectfree.co.uk/tripx.html
I agreed the design firm screwed up, but when I asked why the college didn't design it in the first place, and why they couldn't fix it, I just got a blank look. UAF has the UofA architectural school *and* the engineering school - the only ones in the state system; the other schools are just prep schools for UAF.
Just for kicks, I tried "www.google.com.au". That popped up an Australian-oriented page. .nz, .uk, and .ca returned "unknown host" messages, though.
At the time, I'd sound several rotted 914s in the $500 range. I suggested he buy one, have it crushed into a block about the size of a hay bale, put a sheet of glass on top, and use it for a coffee table. He was moderately intrigued by the idea, but when he mentioned it to his wife she threw a catfit. Apparently she'd been thinking of something in blond oak.
It turns out it's the fourth in a series. I'd read the first, and it went in the 'away' pile.
Farren has made some *strange* stuff work, more often than not. "Necrom" is right up there with my all-time favorites; it's one of the books I always snag extra copies of when I find them, to give away. Who else could tie retired rock stars, demons, Haitian tontons macoutes, witchcraft, interdimensional Old Ones, and JFK assassination stuff into something that both makes internal sense and is fun to read?
Underland... vampires working for the Fed as spies, Lovecraftian Old Ones, Nazi flying saucers based in the great caverns under the earth... it had all the ingredients for a Farren exravaganza, but it fell flat. Not to spoil it for you, but it's way too freaking long, as you've probably noticed, with the first 4/5 padded with mind-numbing detail. Everything is compressed into the last 1/5, is rather disjointed and short on plot, and when it ends leaving a bunch of stuff hanging. If it had been anyone else, I would have said "nice try," but I know Farren can do better.
"Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys" was pretty good, and "The Armageddon Crazy" wasn't bad. "The Long Orbit" was Farren-weird, highly recommended.
Then there are books like Tim Powers' "The Anubis Gates" and "Dinner at Deviant's Palace." Do *not* pick up anything else by Powers; these are brilliant-cut diamonds in an ocean of suck... both were single printings two decades ago, and rare even in used book stores nowadays. "The Anubis Gates" is chock-full-O-weird.
Robert Silverberg once wrote in one of his forwards that he had written a particular story as a "masterpiece." Not in the sense it is used today, but in the old guild-tradesman sense, where a "master piece" was an item crafted by a journeyman to show he was ready to move to master rank. He said something along the line of, "I postulated a society of prejudice and suspicion, so I gave them alien contact. I postulated a population explosion and shortage of resources, so I gave them potential immortality," and so forth. And then he set out to resolve all the conflicts within the limits of a short novel. Powers' "The Anubis Gates" is sort of like that; there are so many things going on it's hard to keep track of it all, but he ties each and every one of them up neatly.
Something else good is John De Chancie's "Starrigger" trilogy - Starrigger, Red Limit Freeway, and, uh, I forget the name of the other one offhand. They're hardcore science fiction in the old technoid tradition, utterly different from the rest of De Chancie's other stuff, which seems to be all sleazy pop-fantasy.
I've been meaning to mention Walter John Williams' "Aristoi" for some time. Williams wrote "Voice of the Whirlwind" and "Hard Wired," which are both excellent and highly recommended. He also wrote a bunch of other stuff, ranging from bad, to schlock, to the kind where you want to poke your eyes out with a pencil to relieve the agony. A few months ago I came across "Aristoi", which was written in the early '80s. It was *very* advanced for when it came out - virtual reality, nanotech, and the like were barely on the mainstream horizon then.
The book doesn't quite work; there are too many things unknown or unresolved, the plot is weak, and the prose is stilted. The book is wrapped around the concept of the Aristoi - a ruling class that's quite interesting, and he spends most of his time on what they were.
Imagine... half a dozen separate, deliberately induced secondary personalities sharing your head, each highly trained and specialized in some field, like mathematics or music. Plus a few artificial intelligences you can send off to do various tasks. It's easy to do this because you live in multiple bodies, connected by high speed communications, and you can direct the focus of your attention between them at will - or even run more than one at a time, with a multiple handling them when your attention wanders. Plus you live with all the other Aristoi, simultaneously, in a virtual reality world call the "Hyperlogos." Your consciousness would exist simultaneously in multiple brains, with vast arrays of computer hardware and data storage making sure you never forgot anything. And if any particular node were to be killed or destroyed, you would continue on, losing only a tiny portion of yourself.
Every single part of this is old hat SF. Williams' trick was tying it together with the multiple personality thing, then making a decent try to figure out what it would be like to live like that.
His description of it is fascinating, particularly to me, since I'm one of those single-track people who can only do one thing at a time. The book is worth picking up and boring through if you find a copy, but probably not worth searching out specifically.
It's not hot enough to kill an unprotected human, anywhere on Earth. But about half of the planet gets cold enough to do it.
"Mother Nature hates your guts."
As long as you can put up with GREAT BLARING TRUMPETS and voiceovers by loud emphysema sufferers, there's a lot of neat stuff there. Lots of stuff on Soviet-backed revolutions in Africa, the early US missile program (which was not very successful), Sputnik, lots of footage of Nixon as Eisenhower's VP, Khruschev trying to oust Dag Hammarschold, Gagarin, Titov, and Glenn, Eichmann's trial...
Forty-odd years later it's hard to tell if the stuff was just patriotic, or if it was propaganda, but it's a whole different media mindset - WE are the good guys, THEY are the bad guys, and WE are going to stomp the shit out of anyone who gets in our way.
You know, I can get into that mindset...
