I'm pretty sure that's been tried.

I would think it would foam up like a microwaved marshmallow.

First post in a new open thread. I feel special.

Second post, not so special.

Nothing to add, really, except that I couldn't get the Baroque Armor link in the sidelights to work.

Beg pardon, in Teresa'a Particles, I should have said.

I would worry more about the vacuum. They aren't intended to pick up items as large as bars of Ivory Soap.

Normally something that size would already have been cleared off of the floor before vacuuming even began.

I'd hate to see how messy your house is.

What WOULD happen if a human got shoved into the vacuum for a brief period? No, I don't expect something like Outland's in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-explode. I suppose ther'd be severe frostbite and capillaries rupturing, but beyond that?

Serge --

Your lungs work in reverse, so all the oxygen comes back out of your blood; you lose consciousness in about 15 seconds and you die quite promptly thereafter, long before you have time to get cold.

This happened to a fellow in a pressure chamber; someone hit the panic button in time, so he lived, but you lose consciousness fast.

rwellor, you beat me to it. I read the opener and said, it depends on how big the hose is for the vacuum.

Huh, rwellor... Groan... Your post reminds me of the Far Side cartoon showing the typical Gary Larson woman with the freaky beehive hairdo, walking down a deep dark forest and clutching the handle of her vaccum cleaner. The caption says:

Zelda belatedly realizes that Nature abhors a vacuum.

Thanks, Graydon. Fifteen seconds? That's awfully fast. I guess Kubrick's 2001 was stretching it a bit. Still, not as silly as Outland. (Ah, if THAT were the only silliness in that movie...)

it would get really, really big and melt even faster.

In 1990, there were about 15,000 vacuum cleaner related accidents in the U.S.

Approximately 30 billion cakes of Ivory Soap had been manufactured by 1990.

One wonders if these two facts are related.

Research question!

I'm writing a text adventure set in a computer camp, circa 1980.

The protagonist is maybe 12 - 14 years old.

What kind of bands might he have listened to?

A whole bar of soap in a vacumn? Amazing. Mine starts sparking and making noises if something as large as a penny gets picked up.

Did you know you can use woolen worksocks as replacement vacumn bags in a pinch?

That's what really happens to those missing socks.

*Sigh*

It is an utterly miserable rainy day in Portland. The lawns are turning to mush, the bark landscape mulch has floated away leaving mud everywhere where there isn't grass, and the sidewalks are rivers.

Now, I can take rain. (It rains more in Pittsburgh, where I lived for a year. It's just more spread out.)

But man, where's the LIGHTNING AND THUNDER? Flashes and bangs made rainstorms interesting.

Is Portland especially well grounded or something? I think I heard one thunder-rumble all last year.

No, kenzie... All those missing socks wind up on a shelf in Wong's Lost & Found Emporium.

What you want is one of those big industrial vacuums, like the Paris street cleaners use to suck up all the dog-doo.

Didn't the MythBusters once build a hovercraft surfer board using a superduper vacuum?

My daughter's crazy daffodils come out early: the first one opened on New Years Day. Since then a few Snowdrops have come up, and a Cyclamen is flowering too, and the daffadowndillies are up to a crowd of 20.

So, tonight we're expecting a hard frost, 5 or 7 degress below zero. Say 20-25 F. Stupid flowers: it's NOT SPRING YET!

One of my favorite episodes of the tv show Charmed had the sisters cast a spell for the return of lost objects. I forget what they were looking for, but at one point, one sister walks into the kitchen to find the table and counters covered in, among other things, sox. Lots and lots of sox.

"I'm writing a text adventure set in a computer camp, circa 1980."

WERE there computer camps in 1980? The protagonist is about the age I was then, and I never touched a home computer until college.

Of course I wasn't very technology-minded, either.

Stefan, regarding your research question:

I was 15 in 1980, and a major computer geek; my favorite bands were:
Talking Heads
Kraftwerk
Devo
The Cars
Pink Floyd
Sex Pistols

Hope that helps.

Does it have to be Ivory? what about Dove? I bet that would expand into a bird.

Stefan, I don't know what sort of music your camper listens to, but if it is pop, http://80music.about.com/library/pop/bl_1980.htm can give you an idea of what was popular back then. Google for top 40 music 1980 and lots of stuff will appear, most of it irrelevant.

It would get all covered with that gray dirt that vacuums collect, doncha know.

Thanks Jack & Shane.

I'm pretty sure there were computer camps in 1980, but it is worth looking into. The exact date isn't important. In fact, a year or two later might be better, because I want there to be time for the camp's original lab full of Commodore computers to become obsolete, setting the stage for the discovery of a PET cemetary off in the woods.

(google google) Aha, the first computer camp opened in 1977:

http://www.nccamp.com/history.html

And the PET came out in 1977 too. So 1980 would work.

(Backstory: The place was once Camp Lose-a-Lot. The character went there as a chubby pre-teen. I'm not sure if this has any plot implications.)

Melissa: Yes, there were computer camps in the 1980s. My very first paying job was as a counselor at a computer day camp. (Summer of 1982. Somewhere I still have my t-shirt.)

We mostly listened to the AOR stuff (Floyd, Journey, Boston, Chicago, Styx, AC/DC, ZZTop, The Cars, etc). No disco, not a lot of the Top-40 pop stuff. FWIW, that's what the band geeks at music camp listened to, as well.

The computer geek I live with, who was 12 in 1980 listened to Fleetwood Mac and Jethro Tull at the time. But he was weird even then.

Shane's probably got a more reasonable list, to which I would add Blondie since they were all over the charts at the time.

I thought socks were the larval form of wire coat hangers?

I wish I could help with the music question but I don't think I'm of any help at all pre-1986.

kathryn from Sunnyvale

In the thread on flu packs you said that you have a set list of food that you buy/donate to food banks on a rotating schedule.

Would you mind sharing your shopping list? It sounds like a good idea, and I'd like to see what sorts of things you buy to help plan my own.

You can e-mail it to me if you think it's too unwieldy to put in the comments.

Ivory soap, because it has more air bubbles incorporated into it than other kinds (that's why it floats).

I think the bubbles would expand; compared with the brittleness from the extreme cold, I think you'd end up with something like a stomped-on package of freeze dried ice cream (you know, that Astronaut Ice Cream they sell at Space Camp).

Well, nothing to do with soap, or vacuums. My father, Otto Sheller, died today. He lasted a little over a year after the death of my mother Ruth. Since he'd been failing fairly rapidly recently. it's not a great surprise.

Some of the regular posters here may remember them - they went to quite a few cons from the mid-80's to the mid-90's, including several Minicons and Marcons. Daddy's body is going to the University of Iowa med school, where Mama's went just before Christmas 2004.

1980 was in the disco music era. Saturday Night Fever made it to Thule while I was there in 1978, and the soundtrack of it was from the BeeGees or some such.

Disco, ugh.

Wikipedia's entry on the year in music, 1980 may give you a nice overview of what was going on. I see a lot of singles mentioned on that page that I didn't discover until my cousin opened up my ears in 1982 or 83. (Oh, KQAK, how dearly you are missed.)

I'd say your kid's list needs some Gary Numan on it. The Pleasure Principle was released in 1979. Ooh, and maybe some Kate Bush...

Graydon wrote: Your lungs work in reverse, so all the oxygen comes back out of your blood; you lose consciousness in about 15 seconds and you die quite promptly thereafter, long before you have time to get cold.

That may be a bit pessemistic, and depends in part on how much oxygen you have in your system and how abrupt the pressure loss is. Wikipedia quotes USAF numbers of 9-12 seconds Time of Useful Consciousness, meaning how long you can still function more or less intelligently, but notes that that complete unconsciousness takes longer. However, Clarke's estimate of a minute or more in _Earthlight_ and the sequence in _2001_ are decidedly optimistic.

Ivory soap, however, will lose consciousness immediately on exposure to vacuum.

(Now you've got me wanting to dig out a vacuum pump from the garage and experiment....)

Andrew, I don't think any American 12-year-old, no matter how geeky would have heard of Kate Bush in 1980. In 1985, sure, but in 1980 the only way any Americans without a direct connection to the UK had heard of Kate Bush was if they'd happened to catch her one and only appearance as musical guest on Saturday Night Live.

On 80s music, there's always Flashback Radio. Of course, if you're looking for 1980 specifically, you'll have to be really picky, picking from their archives.

The Ivory would sublime into the ridiculous.

I hope you all know this will be on the final. Bring two wrapped bars, a #2 pencil, and a pressure suit. "I used one of my bars to check for leaks" is not an acceptable excuse.

Stefan Jones: Meredith raises a point I was working toward: when you ask for "bands he might have listened to" in 1980, are you looking for the pop music of the era that he would have heard on the radio, or for something 'alternative' that will mark your character as someone with precocious taste in music?

As Meredith noted, "Wuthering Heights" had already been a huge hit in the UK, but I would add that it was not unknown here: college radio was certainly playing the hell out of her. So it's extremely unlikely but not impossible for your fictional 12-year -old boy to be listening to Kate Bush.

And now, a tangent: Is the new Kate Bush any good?

Anne, sorry about your loss. May your father rest in peace.

On an unrelated subject, here's something from the less known news:

http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/01/b84f149f-7911-4f94-b7cd-a43808f2fdb3.html

I served in the Russian army myself, still in the Soviet times. Things really are that bad.

When I bought my first house last fall the first thing my mother bought me was a sixpack of Ivory soap. I thought it was a really strange gift as I own my own soap business.

On the 1980 music question: I was 15 that year, not a computer geek but an sf fan, would have been more into gaming if there were more local gamers in Branson High School at the time. Heavily into certain "progressive rock" bands--Styx, Kansas, Queen, and Heart were particular favorites, also (among their predecessors) Yes, The Moody Blues, and of course the Beatles. (I'd probably have been a Rush fan as well if they'd gotten more local airplay.)

I also favored some of the smarter (or maybe just artier) "light rock" outfits--Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, the Steve Miller Band. Didn't get into punk/new wave for a few more years (after moving to "the big city," which in my case was Tulsa, Oklahoma), didn't get into disco or r&b for a few more, and didn't get into country music (very popular in the Ozarks, not to mention Tulsa) for quite a few more.

(It occurs to me that rap was just then beginning to catch on in New York, though "Rapper's Delight"--the first national rap hit--would not appear on record until very late in the year. Might be fun to have a supporting character from the South Bronx trying to explain what this rap business is all about, with his fellow campers laughing and saying it'll never amount to anything.)

A fair number of sf/gamer/hacker types I knew at the time (after I moved to Tulsa, anyway) collected sf/fantasy soundtrack music, especially John Williams's scores for the "Star Wars" and "Superman" movies (and "Indiana Jones" later on). I may have known someone with the soundtrack from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" TV series as well, but the show started running September 28, a little too late to figure in a summer-of-1980 setting. (Summer of '81 might be just right, though.)

Sorry for going on at such length; your question brought back memories!

I haven't been paying much attention to music lately.

I know this is kinda spammy, but if you feel like taking a minute to answer, I'd apreciate it.

Currently I have Sprint as my provider and an old samsung n400 as my phone. My contract is up and I am considering switching. I thought I would ask for some advice. I don't get Verizon here unfortunately. What cell provider do you use and why? What phone do you use and why? How much should I expect to pay?

I only need regular phone service, but I am thinking about trying something more exotic, like a high bandwith modem capable cell, or some other fun techno-toy. Thanks

Oops the link to my blog is on my name. So you don't clutter Making Light.

I wonder how Clarke's _Earthlight_ and _2001_ scenes fitted with the real knowledge at the time they were written? I certainly wouldn't be surprised to learn that the oxygen loss through the lungs was a later realisation.

I'm now going to have to time the movie scene.

Music in 1980? I was that hardcore, graceless, 14-y-o spod and I probably mumbled 6502 opcodes in my sleep. I listened to Kraftwerk ('Computerworld' had just come out. I had to buy it on general principles.) and a lot of two-tone (Madness, Specials, The Beat) because that's what was popular.

The singular delights of The Peel Programme were about a year into the future.

To Anne Sheller... My condolances about your dad. Mine went suddenly and I never got to say goodbye to him.

What about Pat Benatar? ABBA?

Rob T's comment about listening to sf/fantasy movie soundtracks... I used to listen to them a lot too, probably because in those days, VCRs were not common at all and there weren't many ways to relive a specific movie's experience when I wanted to, on my own terms. One other thing I did circa 1970 was take my hardcover-sized cassette-tape recorder and put it in front of the TV if it happened to be airing a movie I really liked. That way I taped the whole soundtrack, music, sound effects, dialogs, the works. I'd then play the movie back to myself again and again and again. That's something I had thought of on my own. But so did my wife who's also an sf/tantasy fan. How many of this site's pre-VCR posters also came up with that idea?

Anne, I'm sorry to hear that. Surprise or not, it's still not nice. Hope you and your family are okay.

Regarding music, I was too young at the time to be of much use, I just wanted to say it's the first time I've ever heard someone say Queen is prog rock... I suppose Bohemian Rhapsody, maybe.

Paul (currently listening to La Villa Strangiato, from Rush in Rio, and liking it a lot; much better than the album version)

Hmm. Question for Jordin and Graydon: do you suppose you could reduce or stop the O2 loss through your lungs, if you knew you were going to be spaced, by drowning yourself first? I'd expect a couple of lungs full of water would take quite a while to empty in vacuum, and while there's water in the way the diffusion rate is going to be a lot lower -- same pressure gradient, but the exposed surface area goes from something like a couple of tennis courts down to a couple of square centimetres.

Of course, recovery afterwards (when they hook you out of the airlock) is going to be a bitch ...

Wuthering Heights! I loved that song but I had never heard of Kate Bush at the time. Pat Benatar had a cover version of it on "Crimes of Passion" which I adored. That would have been around 1980, if memory serves correctly.

It was probably 10 years later that I finally heard the original Kate Bush version; my immediate impression was that someone had put the record player on the wrong speed.

I think it was Greg Bear's moving Mars that had a scene where someone's spacesuit loses a glove. The person doesn't die because the rest of the suit immediately seals the forearm from the rest of the body. But when they bring him (her?) in, the arm's skin is very red because all the capillaries ruptured.

Eighties music... The Police? Queen?

Had Annie Lennox started doing her thing by 1980?

Drowning yourself sounds like an . . .interesting way to stop the vacuum problem. I don't know how easy it is to breathe in and hold water, given the amount of fuss your body makes about even a little water in the airway normally.

What other gasses will come out of your blood under "zero" pressure? If you held your breath after your lungs were emptied, would they refill before your blood ran out of gasses? [And would that give you pressure problems again?]

Do your lungs, when exposed to vacuum, collapse and stick to themselves? Or is there enough gas from the "boiling blood" remaining to keep them open?

In a less gruesome light:

I was 10 in 1980.

1) Computers went obsolete slower then, I think.

2) I listened to my older sibs' music in the 1978-83 years (Scarsdale, NY for reference purposes.) Sister: The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and similar [well, similar to me. She had six linear inches of Dead records.] Brother: Meatloaf [Bat out of hell was '78], Tom Petty, the Outlaws, Blondie, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin. My sister bought "London Calling "and I think she listened to it once. I still listen to it, so that's the direction MY tastes went in.

I somehow avoided the Grease soundtrack that "all" the kids from my year were into.

There were definite, clear categories and identities. Metal was around [Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest] and even though the metalheads and the very few New Wave types both hated middle-of-the-road overproduced cheezy rock, they also hated each other.

I hope this helps.

Charlie: do you suppose you could reduce or stop the O2 loss through your lungs, if you knew you were going to be spaced, by drowning yourself first?

Sounds like "The Abyss" meets "2001". The water would boil off, of course, as soon as it was exposed to vacuum, but that would still take some time to happen, as the only exposed surface is the water/air boundary at some point along your airway (as you say, a couple of square centimetres).

I don't have the expertise to work out how fast the water would boil away. Water's liquid at body temperature down to about 0.01 bar, so a little vapour pressure in the airway (from initial evaporation or residual air) would be enough to keep the water in the lungs liquid. You could keep your mouth and nose shut against a 0.01 bar differential (not so a 1 bar differential) so simply letting most of the water vapour escape through your lips might be enough.

Better still, use oxygenated perfluorocarbon with a higher boiling point (or rather a triple point further down and to the left on the chart), so it would stay liquid at lower pressures and also keep you conscious. That works a lot better.

Anyone with more expertise care to comment?

serge, My memory of the re-entry scene in 2001 was that 15 seconds would have been enough. I think the time in vacuum was quite short. OTOH, it was in slow motion, so it's hard to calculate. I won't have time to find my DVD copy & check until tomorrow night at least.

A friend has just journeyed the 1,000 km (by bus) from Sydney to Melbourne to see the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image which finished yesterday. We didn't find out about it until last week, despite it being on since November 2005, so they're obviously falling down on publicity, because with more notice I'd have been there too, and possibly a few more friends who can't just drop everything and go.

Apart from the exhibition, it included showings of his early shorts and other hard-to-see films of his. I remember being quite miffed that when boxed sets of Kubrick films were brought out, they only included big, well-known ones. You'd think they could put in one or two rare films one one disc in a whole set. Or perhaps there's a plan to only have them available in an expensive collectors' complete set, or high-priced 'education resource'.
(This sort of links into the "Life Expectancy of Books" thread.)

I remember hearing Dire Straits for the first time in the fall of 78. Stopped me in my tracks but as i was living in Brussels, it took a while to find out who the group was. The Police were big. As were Talking Heads. But I was still going to Dead and Bruuuuuce concerts, after I returned to the states in 79.

BTW, and utterly off onto another topic, I was hoping that our hosts would have some comments on the James Frey brou ha ha particularly wrt the actions of his agent and editor... I found the following elsewhere, but think that more could be said.

http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/

Sigh. Meredith et al. are right--a 10-year-old American Kate Bush fan in 1980 would be a long shot at best. I suppose I was trying to give the kid the head start on cool that I wish I could have received myself. (Bob O., Aerial is almost entirely great, and intermittently fabulous. It's worth your money, but it's not Hounds of Love [1985].)

In that vein: Eurythmics didn't hit the States until 1983; in 1980, Dave and Annie had just finished being the Tourists, and your kid definitely wouldn'a heard of them.

Interesting, but form your own opinion: http://www.canstruction.org/indexi.html

Stefan,
In 1980 my geeky friends and I would play DND and listen to Bauhaus.

Anne Sheller, sympathies on your father's death. Better for it not to be a complete surprise, I think, but an unhappy time either way.

I must have been at several Minicon's with him, at least, but I have no recollection of having met him, and I guess it's too late now.

Anne, my condolences. Your folks went to a bunch of Minicons that I was at, too. Donating one's body to a med school is a pretty cool gift to the future.

Meredith, I was a remarkably under-informed person in 1980, even compared to the other Wisconsin/Minnesota farm town kids, yet I had heard of Kate Bush -- by 1977, even. I believe there was an article about her in some US magazine that I would have read. This limits it to mainstream magazines, at that point, and I cannot recall which. I do remember that whatever it was, it mentioned her vocal qualities in a way that interested me.

i was 10 in 1980. and IIRC, I really liked AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Blondie, Tom Petty, Tommy TuTone, Greg Kihn, etc..

Read on Salon.com that Dianne Feinstein intends to support a filibuster on Alito's nomination. I guess all those phonecalls made a difference. I haven't heard how much effect my call had on my own Senator.

If thrown from a normal pressure environment into vacuum, wouldn't you also get the bends?

My understanding is that the common way of getting the bends is ascending too quickly from a SCUBA dive. In order to inhale at depth, the gas you're inhaling needs to be at high pressure. When you begin your ascent, the nitrogen that you inhaled under high pressure begins to expand as the water pressure around you decreases. The expansion of the gas is potentially a problem as your body isn't built to contain high-pressure gases.

If you ascend slowly enough, the now-expanded nitrogen can be exhaled. If you don't ascend slowly, the expanding nitrogen still has to go somewhere. What happens is it boils inside your veins, a painful and potentially fatal phenomenon known as the bends.

I would assume that something similar happens to the nitrogen in your blood when you go from sea-level pressure to zero pressure. (?)

Oh, hey, in 1980 Billy Joel was not yet "Easy listening." I remember being eight or nine, in the way back of the station wagon, with "Movin' out" playing on the radio. Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel had not yet gotten rich and become implied jokes to 13-year-olds.

In short, while it is attractive to make YOUR 13-year-old from 1980 listen to Devo and the Clash, it doesn't ring true.

Another question: I've been assuming this camp is in the US. Is it?

ScottH: you're talking about a 1 bar pressure gradient (Earth ambient to vacuum). IIRC, you get roughly an extra atmosphere of pressure for every ten metres you go underwater. You'd really have to ask a diver, but my understanding is that for short dives to that kind of depth, decompression stops aren't required. NASA do slow decompression of shuttle astronauts before EVA (5 hours to go from 15psi oxy/nitro mix to 5psi pure oxygen), but remember they're taking the partial pressure of nitrogen right down to zero and they want the astronauts to be able to work for several hours in low pressure. (The low pressure makes it easier to build flexible spacesuits.)

I'd tend to assume that worrying about nitrogen microemboli forming when you go into vacuum, as opposed to the slight lack of oxygen, is a bit like worrying about your ingrowing toenail when your leg is about to rot away due to gas gangrene.

Bob O., Aerial is quite wonderful, particularly the second disc. The first disc has some wonderful moments, but also two immensely silly tracks. It's well worth getting. (I was just gratified to hear that The Red Shoes was indeed an aberration.)

The nature abhors a vacuum joke was by Farley. There was such an outcry over the strip that he had to bring back the character, to show that she wasn't killed. Ms. Velma Melmac became a regular character in the strip. You can see her on the cover of the most excellent Fur and Loafing in Yosemite. And yes, right next to Yosemite National Park there really is a Hoover Wilderness.

I would tend toward the "Astronaut Ice Cream" hypothesis...except I wonder if there's a glazed layer on the outside that might prevent this.

Which brings me up to an old question on my part: Can you make a lighter-than air material by creating the equivalent of an aerogel in a vacuum, sealing the outside with a much less permeable material (not very significant for big enough spheres)? Has anyone tried?

I call dibs on the names "VacuGel(tm)" and "Cavorite(tm)" for it, and for that matter on the name "Nullkido(r)" for aikido adapted to a micro- or null-gravity environment.

Bring two wrapped bars, a #2 pencil, and a pressure suit.

Surely a grease pencil would be better than an #2?

(My first thought reading this thread was that the soap would quietly vanish away. My second was that it's too bad I don't have my father's home-made vacuum chamber to try it out.)

True, TomB, the Nature/vacuum joke was in the Farley comic-strip, but it also showed up in the Far Side. I dread to say the following because somebody will probably looking it up, but I wonder how many cartoonists have used that joke since the first vacuum cleaner came to be.

What, Michael, no upsidaisium?

I would guess that the computer camp kids in 1980 would include three major types: (a) the kid with older sibs who listens to stuff above his/her head, all hip and whatnot, DEVO, Elvis Costello, Boomtown Rats, the Cramps, the Ramones, etc, etc, (2) the kid who listens to whatever the radio plays, which you would get from the sites linked to, and who would neither particularly care what was being played or particularly care if there was a radio on at all, and (iii) the kid with no sibs and no life who listens to his parent's records, so is hip to cool jazz and bad classical pops.

In any case, wouldn't the musical tastes of the counselors would almost immediately and totally overwhelm that of the kids? My own experience, as an elevenish nerd in 1980, at summer camp that had a computer room tho' not a computer camp, was that the counselors picked the music, and we all tried to be hip and pretend that we knew that stuff. I wouldn't extrapolate from that to a general rule, but there it is.

The one thing I remember we all agreed on, on the boys side of the camp anyway, was Dr. Demento.

Thanks,
-V.

Changing topics -- I just saw on CNN that playwright Wendy Wasserstein has died at 55 from cancer. The PBS version of her play Uncommon Women and Others was my first introduction to Mount Holyoke College, just before I went to school next to it at Amherst and later married an alumna of it. She was a great thinker and a great speaker -- I was fortunate enough to hear her in the summer of 2004. Probably some of the NYC readers here knew her...

In 1985, sure, but in 1980 the only way any Americans without a direct connection to the UK had heard of Kate Bush was if they'd happened to catch her one and only appearance as musical guest on Saturday Night Live.

I saw that! She sang "Roll in the Ball," right? I thought she was wonderful. But I wasn't 12.

In zero gravity, would a bar of Ivory soap float?

{whining}

I wish the color the links turn when they've been clicked was actually a different color than they are before they've been clicked. It is almost impossible to find the last post I read. (I read threads by clicking the most recent post and backtracking to the last one I clicked, a method recommended by another poster here. It worked, previously.) When threads get to be more than about 100 comments, it isn't worth it to try to figure out where I was, so I'm sure I miss some good stuff. I also can't tell if I've clicked links in a thread or not.

None of this is going to ruin my life, but it is annoying. Is there a reason this is set to a slightly different shade of the same color?

{/whining}

I think that in 1965, the hit parade included the Rolling Stones's can't get no satisfaction and Petula Clark's downtown. It's hard to imagine two such different styles making it today on the same hit parade. Especially if you remember who Petula Clark was.

To get absurdly physical, my guess is that not much would happen to the bar of soap. The tensile strength of the soap is probably enough to resist the internal pressure of the air trapped in small bubbles. After all, Pop Rocks kept the CO2 in quite nicely, despite the even larger pressure gradient.

Ann Sheffer: My condolences; the loss of a parent is hard to take. I was fortunate that I was able to say goodbye to my father a few months before he died.

In 1980 I was listening to Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Jacob Miller, Judy Mowatt and The Mighty Sparrow....

Continuing on decompression: as pointed out, if you were on an oxygen atmosphere you wouldn't get the bends. It is true that going from 2 bar (at 10m depth) to 1 bar at surface does not generally require decompression stops, but it's not a question of the absolute pressure; it's the proportional change. You do the last bit of the ascent much more slowly, because if you go from, say, 30m to 20m, you are reducing external pressure by 25%, while from 10m to surface it goes down by 50%, and so you have to take much more care not to blow out an eardrum - or get bent - because any trapped air bubbles will double in size in your middle ear in the last 10m.

But: what pressure would your blood be under if your skin were exposed to vacuum? The tension of the skin and blood vessels would still have it under some pressure (guess: less than 1 bar, but not much less). If 0.3 bar is enough to survive in a pure-02 atmosphere, I'm not sure dropping to 0 bar would do that much more damage in terms of bleeding, etc. (obviously bends not a factor)

You might lose both eardrums in vacuum. Watch out for that. Suggest you scream loudly as you are chucked out the airlock, to equalise the pressure.

Dave Kuzminski:

Re can art. When I was at Macalester College in the early 70's a couple of 'proto geeks' built a pipe organ out of coke cans. They called it a Cokenfloete, and it worked! IIRC, they got at least one tv appearance out of it.

Mike Ford writes:

The Ivory would sublime into the ridiculous.

"...because it is as pure as the sky itself!"

I hope you all know this will be on the final. Bring two wrapped bars, a #2 pencil, and a pressure suit.

Will travel.

Re: James Frey -- Someone called the library where I work and said that they didn't want the James Frey book we were holding for them, and that we could pass it on to the next person on the list. When I got home that night I heard about Oprah's denouncing Frey that day, and I figured out that the patron* had called pretty much at the exact minute Oprah's show ended.

* Yeah, we call them patrons. Well, they're not customers, and some of them do patronize...

Anne, I'm sorry for your loss.

The rapidity with which the topic turned from Ivory Soap in a vacuum to unprotected human bodies in a vacuum reminds me of my recent experience on a river cleanup.

We found a car in the river. Parallel with the bank, roof of the car about 6 inches under the surface.

The first thing to pop into EVERYONE's mind was, "I wonder if there's a body in that car?"

(Not being equipped for either swimming out to look or hoisting the car, we contented ourselves with photographing and reporting it. Never heard back any more info on how it got there or the presence/absence of cadavers.)

Thanks for all the responses RE 1980 music.

I'm not going to get too specific RE what the viewpoint character listens too. He is necessarily somewhat a cypher, since the player to some extent fills his shoes.

I'm more interested in what music might be heard drifting out of the camp counselors' cabin, what band names might appear on stickers or graffiti . . . that sort of thing. What I've read above should help.

Right now I'm working on the dream-sequence prologue, to practice NPC automation. It begins with the character walking into his Junior High homeroom in his pajamas and ends with him being chased down a corridor by a faceless, chainsaw-wielding clown.

...chased down a corridor by a faceless, chainsaw-wielding clown...

We all have days like that. But sometimes a clown is just a clown, and not a symbol standing in for one's boss.

Lila, we had a case like that out here 10 days or so ago. Unfortunately, there was a body in the car.

TNH if this is too much of an ad, please accept my apologies and delete at will (not that you need my permission . . .).

I wanted to point to Amazon's 4-for-3 sale; thousands of paperback fiction books, SF/Fantasy/Mystery/Teen/Romance/Kids in a huge list, searchable and divided into genre--buy four, pay for three.

Lots of really great books are on the SF/Fantasy list. It's an easy way to try out someoene new you've been meaning to read for a while. Do check out the Teen list--some often overlooked but worthwhile books are there. Also a lot of what looks to me like manga. Lots of classic mystery authors, as well as newer stuff. And they've got little checkmarks by the titles to make it easier for you to go crazy.

Speaking of the 80's, I got a hold of the State of the Union Address a bit early and I thought I'd share it. Enjoy.

"My fellow Americans: Once again I come before you to speak of the state of our blessed union. I am happy to say that there are bright times ahead.

In the past few years, our great nation has been under siege by men of cowardice and evil. We are not a people to take things lying down. In the face of terror we stood up and took the fight to the enemies of freedom and liberty all over the world. Today, we are safer as a nation. When we started the global war on terror, I told the American people that “we will fight them there, so we won't have to fight them here.” Our actions overseas have been a resounding success. Some would have us pull troops out; have us cut and run. As long as I am President, the United States of America will not run. We will increase and expand our efforts in the name of democracy and freedom. WAR IS PEACE.

Our economy is getting stronger. The stock market has recently regained the strength it lost after the cowardly acts on September 11th. This is in no small part thanks to tax cuts I have given to large companies. This freed capital allows businesses to create more jobs, and compete in a free market with global labor. Some companies have also taken the initiative by reducing or removing health and retirement benefits. I plan to follow suit in order to repair a broken and failing social security and medicare systems. America is a land of employment and opportunity. Evidence of this is plentiful. Every day, people are scrambling to cross our borders in search of work. Giving corporations the power to thrive is key to growing our economy and keeping it the strongest in the world. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

Defeatist voices in our midst would tell us that our military actions cannot be sustained. They would say that our presence breeds terrorism. They would ask for all our dealings to be transparent and public. They would divide us against ourselves. In essence, they would give aid to our enemies. Unwarranted and unnecessary criticism hurts our troops and emboldens our enemies. Defeatists would have us ask terrorists permission to investigate them. Reckless media speak of civilian casualties, torture, and kidnapping caused by the American military. In order to safeguard the citizens of this great country, and in order to win the global war on terror, we must stand as one. We must not squabble over partisan politics. We must support the brave men and women overseas. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Finally, using powers given to me by congress during wartime, I have made us safer by ordering the NSA to conduct warrantless wiretapping inside our borders. Had we acted sooner, perhaps we could have stopped the tragic events of September 11th. Now, we can survey and gather intelligence on terrorists faster, with less red tape. Those evil doers with secrets have no where to hide. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

Thank you, and God Bless America."

(Sorry, I just needed to vent. Yes, I have too much free time.)

Stefan: Portland definitely suffers from a shortage of thunder and lightning to go with the rain, but we did get (a small amount of) rumbling from an earthquake the other night. A third of a mile from my apartment, even. I was certain the upstairs neighbor had dropped something until I heard a report on the radio (which mistakenly gave the epicenter as being in the West Hills. Not sure how they got the wrong half of the city at first.)

Clipped, without modification, from a Starwood Hotels e-mail:

Experience True RedemptionSM

Halle-verbal infix-lujah.

Rob T.: "Rapper's Delight" actually came out in the fall of 1979, not in 1980. I remember well sitting in the car parked in a DC alley with some friends, smoking a you-know-what. We were about to turn off the car radio and go indoors when "RD" came on. "Oh, wait, I love this song," I said. But instead of playing the short radio edit, which was all I'd ever heard, they played a full-length (8:00 or so) version, the existence of which was thitherto unknown to me. Thus ensued a classic sort of Cheech & Chong reaction among us all: "Wow, man, I don't remember this song being this long..." descending into giggling as it went on and on and on...

Anne, I'm sorry to hear about your father. How are you faring?

Ivory soap: I keep thinking about the interacting processes. All the bubbles would have to pop, right? The bubble walls wouldn't be strong enough to maintain atmosphere. At the same time, the water content would be sublimating. And would the soap freeze before it dried out, or vice-versa? Would a crust of freeze-dried soap form before the bar expanded to maximum volume? Would you get outgassing, or jets of extruded material breaking through the crust? Would the soap's final form be a large soap-popcorn, or a cloud of soap dust?

Furthermore, wouldn't exploded hyperexpanded freeze-dried marshmallows constitute a Damned Weird confection? Why hasn't NASA tried this?

Yog, what's your take on Charlie's "drown yourself to survive hard vacuum" scenario?

Music, 1980, geek: Shane's list sounds right to me. Other possibilities: Steeleye Span, Brian Eno, and the Grateful Dead would be my top picks; also Warren Zevon, Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Peter Gabriel, Television, The Tubes, The Knack ("My Sharona"), Shark Sandwich, The Clash (London Calling), and Richard and Linda Thompson if they're into folk. More mainstream: Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Dire Straits, The Police, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, and a lot of AOR. The Eagles and the Bee Gees were riding high, but they weren't really geek fare.

Stefan, I don't know why the Pacific Northwest doesn't get violent thunderstorms, but I surely missed them when I lived there.

Niall, my rosemary has only lost the tips of its tallest branches, which is Not Right for this climate.

Lin, I once had a dream about the apocalypse in which lost things were found again, but what turned up were all the lost cats.

Leonid, that's appalling. Why does that go on? What's the point of it? If it keeps happening, someone must be benefiting from it; but damned if I can see how.

Just a note: I'm tuned to Firedoglake for real-time news reports about the battle at Dagorlad plains.

Quick thing about music, slightly alternative bent. 1980 was when I first heard Martha and the Muffins "Echo Beach" and started my 12 year quest for the album (yes, vinyl) "Metro Music"(picture repeatedly going into record stores, and being told "There isn't any such band as Martha and the Muffins, someone's pulling your leg" by the end, I had at least 9 of their albums) Also heard Police "Walking on the Moon." Blondie was big. Wall of Voodoo's "Mexican Radio" was almost an anthem for the band geeks (I was one) and also Dire Straits "Sultans of Swing" Billy Joel was very popular with the same crowd, I think "Allentown" was around 1982

Marshmallow aerogel. Mix with comet dust for a Kuiperfluffernutter.

My suspicion about the "drowning to live through outgassing" is that it wouldn't buy you enough time to make it worth doing (and it sure wouldn't improve your chances of making it to cover on your own). Back when HAL and Dave were having their little set-to, the estimate being knocked around was that you could survive about four minutes (which is longer than breath-holding time).

This doesn't mean you couldn't make use of it in a hardish skiffoid yarn, to buy the Essential Eighteen Seconds (and "Take a Deep Breath" appeared eleven years before "2001"), and of course it is on the Short List of Generally Applicable Rules that if you're confronted with an absolutely, positively Fatal Situation, (vacuum, immersion in molten steel, chosen to beam down with the Captain) then anything is worth trying. The Mythbusters have pretty clearly established that sticking your finger in the 12-gauge bore is useless, but it might be considered a bravura gesture.

One for the movie nerds... I just found from my cubicle neighbor that his maternal grandfather used to work as a character actor, mostly in silent movies. His nom de theatre was Bull Montana and usually played the bad guy's goon although he sometimes ventured into SF (of a sort), playing an ape man in the Wallace Beery version of The Lost World, and a monkey man in 1936's Flash Gordon.

Meanwhile I've been wondering if I could find a link between myself and 1973's Flesh Gordon. Took me less than 5 minutes, thanks to my having met various people involved in the original Star Trek. I once met George Takei, who worked with Leonard Nimoy, who worked with Sally Kellerman on the pilot episode. From there we take Kellerman to The Outer Limits's episode The Bellero Shield, where John Hoyt played the alien who's made of light. Hoyt played Flesh Gordon's father.

Fannish links to Flesh Gordon aren't terribly hard, since Tom Reamy worked props (and wrote a very entertaining essay about the making of the flick for Trumpet of fragrant memory) and Bjo Trimble did makeup.

Stefan Jones: what band names might appear on stickers or graffiti . . . that sort of thing

End of the '70s stickers? In 1977, Epic really got behind Elvis Costello's debut album "My Aim Is True", and sent out yellow stickers with the name and title.

When we opened the mail and discovered them, there was a race to put them up in my radio station's mens' room.

I'm sure they they were still there in 1980.

Andrew Willett, Meredith: thanks for the verdicts on the new Kate Bush. There had been a flurry of publicity that it was coming, and then a few mentions that hey, it, errm, has a song about doing laundry... but no real word about whether that was a good thing or not.

Beard5: I'm glad someone else outside Toronto has heard of Martha & the Muffins. If you're a completist, you should know that Martha's put out some children's records.

I knew that Trimble had worked on Flesh, John, but I tried a less obvious approach. Tom Reamy was there too?

Was Donna Summer still popular by 1980? I've caught her Last Dance on my local gym's TV monitors, twice, all within one week. That brought up weird memories.

About the MythBusters, John, did you see the recent episode where they showed that one can start a fire using ice?

At this point, I'm wondering if anyone around here has access to something that could make a near-vacuum and a bar of Ivory. (I'd supply the soap if needed.)

The next step would be to talk NASA (or maybe the Russians) to send up a bar to see what might happen in actual space. All in the name of Science with a capital S, of course.

Would somebody kindly tell me what Larry Brennan looks like, so I can hide if he comes looking for me? I wouldn't like to find out the hard way how far his dedication to Science with a capital 'S' goes ...

I was 12 in 1980...not the best years of my life, to say the least. One thing nobody has specifically mentioned is "Casey Kasem's Top 40 Countdown" which could be heard on many many pop stations every Saturday morning (I'm pretty sure it was Saturday, not Sunday). They actually did play most of the songs, so it ran for several hours. I have to confess that one song I loved that year was "The Pina Colada Song", though fortunately a friend soon introduced me to more new wave and alternative music....

As long as we're talking about outer-space related issues, I'll mention that a professor at my university is experimenting with boiling water in microgravity (click on "ug Boiling" button).

I have no doubts that people here have access to soap and vacuum-making-things. I'm not sure whether the gradual evacuation of a vacuum pump is exactly what we're aiming for, though. I could blow my chances of ever graduating by testing it-- but I'd rather drop it out the airlock and see what happens immediately.

Does it have to be Ivory? what about Dove? I bet that would expand into a bird.

Which leads one to speculate about an alternate creation myth involving Elder-of-the-Universe types flitting about just after the Big Bang, seeding the universe with (proto)protoplanets by visiting appropriate spots in the accretion disks of various stars and chucking bars of Lava out the airlock.

Well, here's one Larry Brennan picture (via), and another group photo (via).

These may be of some aid to both fans & avoiders.

Serge: And George Barr did the movie poster for Flesh Gordon.

This made me laugh. From soap in a vacuum all the way to Flesh Gordon.

Jeff

Lux Fiat: and a bar of Irish Spring every so often to jumpstart the process? (No, I don't use it: too much perfume for my tender airways.)

Mike, surely leaktesting the p-suit requires liquid Ivory?

>computer camp, circa 1980.
>The protagonist is maybe 12 - 14 years old.

Holy geek alert, batman, do I get a royalty
if you're writing my life story?

>What kind of bands might he have listened to?

In order of supergeek to less geeky:
Pop Muzik - M
Cars - Gary Numan
Funkytown - Lipps Inc.
My Sharona - The Knack
I'm Alright - Kenny Loggins
(Caddyshack was released July 1980)

and of course, there would be the geek anthem:

Whip It - Devo (1978)

Also, in a completely geektoid related
bit of trivia, Empire Strikes Back was
released 21 May, 1980

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080684/releaseinfo

So, one of them might have the soundtrack
to the first movie in their cassette library.
At which point, "Luke, I am your father"
becomes the standard geek greeting, and the
true geekphreak would probably start playing
the cantina song from Episode 4, on their
tinny sounding portable. Soon thereafter,
a simulated lightsaber fight would erupt,
and would not end until someone lost a hand.

or... at least... that's what I would imagine
it would look like...

Greg

While I'm at it:

> What would happen to an unwrapped bar
> of Ivory Soap in a vacuum?

Upon re-entry, just before it vaporized,
it was heard to mutter
"Oh no. Not again."

> What would happen to an unwrapped bar
> of Ivory Soap in a vacuum?

It would evaporate and precipitate again as Ivory Snow

Michael Turyn: Can you make a lighter-than air material by creating the equivalent of an aerogel in a vacuum, sealing the outside with a much less permeable material (not very significant for big enough spheres)? Has anyone tried?

Yes, and yes. Lawrence Livermore Labs developed a lot of aerogel technology, much of it during the years I was there, despite JPL getting more press. Among other things, they came up with an organic variant called SEAgel, made from seaweed (agar), which could indeed be made with a mean density less than air at STP and still support 15 psi.

I forget which tech show it was where I helped staff LLNL's booth, but we had an inverted empty fishtank with some pieces of seagel in it, floating at the top. You could (gently) tap them down and they'd float back up.

It's not a very useful technology for balloons, though; the density is only just a little less than sea level air, so even at sea level it has only a fraction of the lifting power of a helium or hydrogen balloon, and the lifting power goes to zero at a few thousand feet.

Epacris - Happily, not me, although I may resemble the one on the left.

Indeed, none of the images on Google Images is of me.

Charlie - You need not worry about my dedication to capital S Science. At least not until you give up on the writing thing...

Jordin -- I immediately thought of three variant ways to use the blimp aerogel for Evil (by which I mean genuinely bad things, not, you know, Fun Evil), but then, that's what I get paid for.

Of course, as you note, if Tommy Lee Jones simply stared hard at the stuff it would disintegrate, so we're probably safe.

And besides, Evil, like many science fiction writers, is a lazy bastard. It's far easier to throw a brick through a window than to first figure out how to make an aerogel carry a brick through a window* and then make the stuff, just so you'll get a bit of grudging admiration on BoingBoing.

*No, I don't have a way to do this, though I'll bet there'd be a nice DARPA grant in it if I did. High risk and payoff, as they say.

To get absurdly physical, my guess is that not much would happen to the bar of soap. The tensile strength of the soap is probably enough to resist the internal pressure of the air trapped in small bubbles. After all, Pop Rocks kept the CO2 in quite nicely, despite the even larger pressure gradient.

Soap has tensile strength? Viscosity, maybe, but I have trouble seeing it take any sort of load. Ivory is particularly soft, but I wouldn't expect any soap to have the resistance of Pop Rocks.

Niall, my rosemary has only lost the tips of its tallest branches, which is Not Right for this climate.

The Boston Globe said that so far this month has been 6 degrees above average, which I find believable. (That may even have been before the mild weather this past weekend.) OTOH, I've never seen anything like my first winter off campus: several January days over 60.

That should be μg, not ug.

Oh, well...

Randolph the Picky

About the MythBusters, John, did you see the recent episode where they showed that one can start a fire using ice?
"Fire and Ice" is a Pat Benatar song from the very early 80s. I knew we'd be able to connect the two halves of this thread eventually!

An earlier text adventure I wrote can be downloaded from here:

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/Radley.z5

It is a haunted house adventure, rated PG-13 at most.

Running it requires an interpreter:

http://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/windows.html

I had to wait until Xmas to listen to the new Kate Bush album - I was advised with dire threats not to go buy it for myself. My opinion is that it is Very Good Kate Bush, but not quite up to Supreme Kate Bush, which would be Hounds of Love or The Dreaming.

I happened to be discussing it with my ex-officemate yesterday, while I was in the NOC dealing with a server crisis (now as a paid conslutant, thank Bob.) We both agreed that this is one of her better albums, despite one slightly embarassing kind of song. I thought it was as good as The Sensual World, he thought it was much better than that, but it turned out the reason for that difference is that I like The Sensual World much more than he does. It's much better than The Red Shoes, in my opinion.

Finally, I should note that Kate Bush singing the digits of Pi in her breathiest and most sensual voice is like pure hardcore porn for an old math geek.

Finally, I should note that Kate Bush singing the digits of Pi in her breathiest and most sensual voice is like