From an interview with Robert Sapolsky on Boing Boing, this jumped out at me:

Baboons are perfect models for the ecosystem I study. They live in the Serengeti in East Africa, which is a wonderful place for a baboon to live. They’re in big troops, so predators don’t hassle them much. Infant mortality is low. Most importantly, it takes baboons only about 3 hours of foraging to get their day’s calories. Critical implication of this – if you are spending only 3 hours in a day getting food, that means you have 9 hours of free time each day to devote to being miserable to some other baboon. Like us, they are ecologically privileged enough so that they can devote their time to generating psychological stress for each other. If a baboon in the Serengeti is miserable, it is because another baboon has worked very hard to bring that state about.

A shot from 2006:

Backdropped by Earth’s horizon and the blackness of space, the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft approaches the International Space Station.

Working on a new draft of RED DRIFT so I’m going through my picture folders. I end up with a lot of mood images when I’m writing. I just about filled my office wall space again, but am thinking about a dedicated digital frame up there just so I can let this stuff cycle through 24/7.

I’m still processing this. It’s a blog post built atop an article based upon pure horror and I keep coming back to it to try and see around the edges of the thing that keeps blowing my mind. Haven’t got there yet.

This abstract “thing that is deep inside the reactor” is thus held outside of human contact, separated from experience by a provisional monument: the sarcophagus shell. Sheltered there, precisely because of its temporal excess, in a state of near-immortality—capable of interacting mutationally with living matter for up to a million years—the “thing” enters into a timeframe more appropriate for mythology.

Fuck.

If you’re not already doing so you should allow A Moment of Moore to fall into your RSS reader.

Click the panels to reveal one of my favourite punchlines ever.

SKIZZ was one of those things that could only have come out of 2000AD despite the initial rush to do something like ET. What Alan Moore crafted had more in common with Boys from the Blackstuff that Spielberg.

I think I was around 12 years old when this first appeared and I’m quite happy to nominate Roxy as one of the reasons why I never understood the appeal of most American comics.

She was so real…

I’ve been pondering the Western again lately. Been a while since my MA, but pulled down some of the books that helped me draw a line from John Ford to Cormac McCarthy and I’ve just been nudged to revisit Lucio Fulci’s spaghetti westerns. And I’m still thinking a lot about Red Dead Redemption (and to a lesser extent its horror add-on). Icons and their subversion, myth and revisionism… and over the weekend I think I’ll go back to Zane Grey.

So it was nice when my GReader offered up the latest from Golden Age Comic Book Stories:

Illustrations by N.C. Wyeth from Langford of the Three Bars by Kate & Virgil Boyles.
Published by A. C. McClurg ~ 1907

Big ass versions here.

Isn’t she beautiful?

That’s the asteroid Lutetia. Hermann Goldschmidt discovered her in 1852 from the balcony of his apartment in Paris and this month, some 158 years later, we got a much closer look. The photograph is one of several taken by the Rosetta probe. This is the one of Lutetia and Saturn that’s been getting all the attention:

This is the second asteroid that Rosetta has snuggled up to. The probe is due to to go into hibernation in just under a year’s time so that it can continue quietly on to its final destination, a comet named rather less romantically, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. But in 2014 Rosetta wakes up again and deploys a lander named Philae (although I’m gonna call him Phil) whose job it is to touch down on the comet itself.

Think about that. This isn’t lets just aim some metal and crash the fucker to see what happens – this will be the first controlled landing on an actual comet.

I get all kinds of excited about this stuff and I’m not even a full-on science nerd. It just taps into the kid part of me that just thinks everything we do in space is awesome*.

But for now we can have a good look at Lutetia. If we ever get our act together and make manned missions that far she’ll literally be the best touchstone between Mars and Jupiter…

Doesn’t it suddenly strike you as crazy that Kirk, Skywalker and all those other space types never seemed to carry a camera?

More info on the mission over at the Rosetta blog.

*The September NASA shuttle launch was rescheduled for November so I’ve revised my travel plans and hope to get out there then.