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I frequently have to pinch myself over the fact that I get to know, work with, and be friends with so many amazing and talented human beings. One of those people is Bill Gurstelle. You don't have to spend much time with Bill to realize, as David Letterman likes to say: "He ain't hooked up right." But just as Letterman only reserves such a statement for crazy people he truly admires and respects, I mean this in the best possible way: Bill Gurstelle ain't hooked up right. Case in point: At breakfast on Sunday morning at Maker Faire, he was telling us about his desire to go to a place where he could eat Casu Marzu, the maggot-infested cheese where the maggots try and leap into your eyeballs as you eat it. The breakfast I had just finished took an interesting turn in my stomach, but knowing Bill, I figured I probably got off easy (at least the pancakes and eggs stayed in my stomach!). There's a method to Bill's madness, about risk, living life to its fullest, and the roll that risk/danger-seekers play in innovation, change, and probably evolution itself. He delves into more of this in his latest book: Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously.
Bill has also just begun a guest blogging stint on Boing Boing. It'll be interesting to see what sort of trouble he can get into there.
On page 5, Gurstelle asserts the Saturn V
rocket used solid fuel rocket engines. This
is profoundly incorrect. Solid fuel rockets
were NEVER used for manned missions before
the space shuttle, because NASA was too
worried that they would do exactly what they
eventually did to the Challenger.
The Saturn's 1st stage used LOX/kerosene.
The upper two stages used liquid hydrogen
and LOX. The command module and the LEM
lower and upper stages used liquid
hypergolics.
If he got something that simple and
obvious wrong on page 5, I can't hold out
much hope for the rest of the book.
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If I missed out on all I've learned from Bill, and all the thinking he's provoked in me, because of a single error he'd made, well, I'd have missed out on a lot. But YMMV.
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