Besides astronomy and software design, I am also a movie buff. I typically prefer the ones from the 30s and 40s, but of course, love many of the offerings since then. And good ones I’ll watch several times, study the lighting, composition, visuals and how they all dovetail into a single unified presentation.   One such film was Cameron’s Titanic. It was the troubled child of Paramount, dragging on for months due to its complicated and...

In 1968  Popular Science magazine ran an article on a new film by the always enigmatic but brilliant director, Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick was known for taking on  very few projects, but the ones he did would force people to sit up and take notice. Serious notice. His latest “picture” (as Kubrick and indeed directors of old would refer to their medium), was as enigmatic if not more so than Kubrick himself. Based on a short story by noted science...

Growing up during the prime of the space-race oriented my nerdling interests for the rest of my life. As all cravings of sorts, I can either exercise my rather pedestrian will, or cave and feed it. In this case I chose to feed it against the better judgments of my bank account. So I collect NASA artifacts from the earliest days of the space program and even before. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Sotheby’s auctioneers had an event dedicated...

And now the second installment in the new craze that’s sweeping the nation: Weird Crap in Mike’s Place! I received a package last week that had two items in it that I strongly suspected had never, ever, shared the same shipping container. One of my hobbies is collecting space and aviation memorabilia. This goes well beyond models and a few pictures, and include flown hardware and rare documents. The holy grail of both Aviation and Space came up...

From time to time over the past couple of weeks a number of people who know that I like anything NASA (except of course for the cancellations of Apollos 18, 19 and 20. I still grimace at that like a three year being served escamoles, as does Joe Engle no doubt. Get over it Joe!)….and so what I thought of Gravity. I loved it, from beginning to end, in spite of the dozen or so fundamentally basic errors. Most of the problems in the show are...

Now for a semi-regular column that I am titling: Weird Crap in Mike’s place. Because, I have a whole lot of weird crap, nice crap, but still rather odd. So the first installment rolls the clock back to 2010. It was that fateful day that makes all Mac-heads go squeeee! April 3, 2010, launch day for the iPad 1.  Naturally I had to go and make the pilgrimage to the Palo Alto store and join the happy throngs waiting to get their collective mitts on...