Editorials

Elon Musk’s Age of Exploration

Syndicated Columnist

Next year on Mars. Well, not quite, but entrepreneur Elon Musk told the tech confab South by Southwest that the interplanetary spaceship he’s building will be able to do short “up and down” flights by next year.

Musk’s goal is to colonize Mars, a delightfully daft idea that has had a persistent hold on our imagination — German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun wrote a piece for Collier’s magazine in 1954 titled “Can We Get to Mars?” — and that is a fit object of Musk’s vaulting ambition.

God is With Us

Since the mass murder of 17 people on Feb. 14, I have seen the debate renewed. It has been renewed after every mass murder in a school.

The debate is whether these murders could be prevented if God were allowed in schools.

Fifty words for snow

They say the Eskimos have 50 words for snow. I don’t speak Eskimo, so I can’t verify that — but I expect it’s true, as I myself have developed quite a few snow terms.

Having lived in snow country since 1984, I’m intimately acquainted with the attributes of frozen precipitation. After all, I’ve been moving it around for over 30 years.