A name not much heard today, I grant, but once a super, mega blockbuster best seller. His futuristic novel Looking Backward  was a publishing sensation, outselling even Mark Twain and trailing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but it’s hardly read now, except by specialists. Bellamy’s novel tells the story of a Rip Van WInkle like Yank who falls asleep in the late 1800s and wakes up in the middle of the 20th century, to a world transformed into a Socialist dream com true.  Poor Ralphy would have a heart attack if we could conjure him up and let him see how things really turned out; corporate power in the saddle to a degree that would have made the old Robber Barons look like a bunch of church-goin’ wannabees. It’s Ralph’s B-Day, so you can hold a good thought and go down to Mulligan’s or the equivalent and down one or two in sad remembrance of a departed Idealist who was as wrong as could be. I guess RB, along with Marx, believed that the Locomotive of History was on their side. The locomotive is sitting a sidetrack, rusting away. That’s rather a quaint and dated image, by the way, isn’t it? When I was a kid, I used to go down to the Niagara Falls RR station and watch the trains come in.  You could stand on the track as close as you dared and get scared at the raw power of the steam loc pulling in and stopping. That was the very height of modern…

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/03/march-26-1850-birth-of-a-socialist-sci-fi-writer/

Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Count Ferdinand to give him his full title of nobility, received on this day in 1899 a US patent for his direct-able or “dirigible” gas filled aircraft. His name was soon extended as a descriptor for all items of this class and became a common English noun. Ask some guy on the street if knows what a zeppelin us and he’ll probably point up to the shy and mutter something…which is close enough. Zeppelin was an interesting guy. He had been the Prussian army’s observer in the American Civil War and had watched the use of tethered observation balloons.  Later on in his life he became aware of the ideas of a man named Schwartz, a contract worker for the, by now German, not just Prussian, army. The plans dealt with a steerable, rigid frame. Count Z. acquired the rights to all this from Schwartz’s widow, and then turned the concept into a reality, in fact, into a business. It wasn’t easy but finally Ferdl got the things to fly. He went on to found the world’s first airline offering regularly scheduled service. And the big, floating sausages made lots of trips around Germany on ‘air tourism’ runs, which were very popular.In World War I the zepps were converted to reconnaissance machines for the Navy and then into bombers. They made a number of attacks on London and scared a lot of people. But they couldn’t carry enough pay load to make them deadly…all that had to await more ‘progress’. Once the British figured out how to get high enough, the show was pretty much over. A slow, hydrogen-filled envelope on the one hand, and a pack of zippy fighters firing incendiary bullets on the other…pick the winnner.  After the war, zeppelin traffic really, dare I say, “took off”? Count Ferdinand’s company and its successor offered big, big ships flying back and forth to Noo Yawk and even South America, which was a real innovation. The zeppelins were aeronautical and mechanical wonders, but fixed-wing aircraft caught up and passed them by.They were too big, too slow, cost too much to build and run, carried too little payload. The explosion of the Hindenburg in 1937 was the end. Hydrogen is too risky and the USA wouldn’t sell helium to Nazi Germany. Better pack it in, then. Every once in a while some guys come up with schemes to bring back the dirigible, but I still haven’t seen any go commercial

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2012/03/march-14-1899-zeppelin-gets-patent-for-a-really-big-idea/

The triple calamity of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown occurred one year ago. The nation is still struggling with the effects of the disasters, and the path forward is still shrouded by many uncertainties. A lot of the actual debris has been cleaned up and carted away. And rebuilding is in progress in some areas. Great uncertainty surrounds the areas contaminated by nuclear fallout. The national government required evacuations from the zone around the Daichi plant, but the former residents are agitating for more vigorous action to allow them to return home.  I was listen to the radio last night as I fooled around in the kitchen. Some of the families forced to leave have connections to the land that extend back demonstrably for thirty generations.  Think for a second..Thirty. Talk about roots. Here in Texas, if you’re a seventh generation Texan, that’s considered something to boast about. But, it’s not even a third of the time those people and their ancestors worked the same land.  There was more on the show, which is called BURN and styles itself “an energy journal’.  There was a segment on construction of nuclear reactors in the USA, on new designs of  smaller reactors and on what to do with nuclear waste.  I;ve only heard it once. I thought it was good.

http://interactive.wxxi.org/highlights/2012/02/burn-energy-journal