I read a great article out of New Scientist from a link from Coast that Ad Astra is developing a plasma rocket called a VASIMAR. Or Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket. Now I’m no rocket scientist or expert but I’ve read about this in Wikipedia some years ago but that such a rocket is actually under development is fresh news to me. They say it would take 40 days to get to Mars using such a rocket. Wow! It produces a pound of thrust or 2 tons of cargo. The rocket in order to be fully developed would need 1000 watts of power. They have 50. Even to get to 1,000 watts in order to get to Alpha Centauri according to my math, under that example going to Mars at 49M miles away it would take 71,225 years to get within even striking distance of Alpha Centauri. Then you’d have to break. Still getting to Mars in 40 days isn’t too bad as opposed to 6 months. To get a VASIMAR rocket to get to Alpha Centauri in a reasonable amount of time would have to be more like a million watts of power.

More down to earth, we’re sitting at +27C today and temperatures could get up to +30C. I don’t mind it hot and I can take hot weather in small doses. Saturday should be about the same and Sunday and Monday about +27C. It’s hard to sleep in this heat, that’s the only thing I don’t like.

We are seriously considering “A Taste of Edmonton” this evening but we can’t realistically justify the cost, what with not having barely half of our rent next Friday and we still have to eat and get bus passes. We’re still going to have to go to the bank for our about 40% of our August rent and Anne is waffling even on doing that. And we still haven’t got the gst cheque in yet. She’s getting full hours next week but she’s almost at the point that she’s ready to go look for something else if the hours don’t improve at Pizza. Anne wants to go to “Taste” and we might still go but it would cost about $40-60 bucks between the two of us. I’d rather get a pizza and a couple of coolers and sit out on our balcony to beat the heat but I would like to go to “Taste” as well to sample a few items. It’s a great event and the City is hosting wear something red to support our troops night. If I get all my bonus money we’ll go ($!8 bucks) But we’re waffling.

I’ve been toying around with Google Books lately and it’s a real ambitious project. I typed in Science fiction and under fiction they list Science Fiction 2^nd from the top right under Literature. It lists books that are still under copyright. I still think Fantastic Fiction does a better job because you can see the book covers (in most cases) of all what the author has written, whether they are still under copyright or not.

Well the bank of Canada says we’re out of the recession but we’re still in recovery mode and on the news earlier they were saying that it’s our high Canadian dollar that could slow down economic recovery. They’re saying we need about an 85 cent dollar. Right now the dollar is at 92 cents. The other thing is the Alberta Government yesterday announced a hiring freeze and the unemployment rate is still sitting around 6%. Oil is at $67 which is nice. We’re out of a recession when I see the unemployment rate here in Alberta drop to something like 5%.

Anyway gang, that's about all for now......