Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

Today is the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on the Moon. These images appeared in my post on the 35th anniversary.

Labels: History, Science, Space

(Reprint of my July 20, 2009 post)

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"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." - Neil Armstrong, July 20, 1969, 8:17PM GMT (3:17PM EST)

This video shows highlights of the live television coverage of the Apollo 11 mission.



Checking with a U. S. Naval Observatory site on Sun and Moon data (hat tip to Chicago Boyz contributor Jay Manifold), it appears that the moon was visible in all the lower 48 states at the time of the landing. Somebody with enough foresight could have pulled off the ultimate photo-op - a photo of someone's living room with the moon visible through a window, with the TV turned on at the time of the landing.

[UPDATE: If the moon was just rising over California, that means it was setting, or close to it, over the Baikonur Cosmodrome. How's that for timing?]

John Derbyshire posted the opinion of a "long-time correspondent" - a former Soviet citizen - on Apollo 11's impact on the Cold War:

The space race, however, provided a clear-cut competition. And the Moon was the Big Enchilada, since poorly educated people are not much impressed by low Earth orbital stuff, but even African tribesmen are well aware of the Moon, can easily grasp the concept of walking on it and intuitively understand that it's not an easy feat.

The simple fact that the Americans walked on the Moon and the Soviets did not made both the elites and the populations question Soviet claims of their superiority and boastful promises of the inevitable victory in the Cold War.

One cultural legacy of the 1960s space program was the Major Matt Mason astronaut toys. I owned two action figures and Mattel's concept of a lunar rover - the red tractor-like Space Hauler and accompanying Space Bubble, visible at the top left on this page.

The History Place's Apollo 11 page is a worthwhile visit. For those of y'all with lots of reading time, this site has transcripts of all the Apollo 11 communications. The Air-to-Ground Voice Transmission transcript should generate the most interest.

Following are reprints of my 2003 post on this historic moment, and the images from the following year's 35th anniversary commemoration.

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July 20, 1969. The Apollo 11 mission was the first live news coverage of an event I remember watching on TV. I was eight years old and living in Gulf Breeze, a town on the southern edge of Escambia Bay across from Pensacola, Florida. My mom still has a 1969 issue of (either Life or Time, I think) featuring this image on the cover. (Other images available here.) Jay Manifold has some musings here.

I recall someone recently commenting that for the 20 minutes that Michael Collins piloted the command module behind the moon as the LEM was on the surface, he was the most alone that any human had ever been. May there come a day within my lifetime when space travel is far less solitary.

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Labels: History, Science

Gateway Pundit headline: FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY… Al Gore Predicted the North Pole Will Be Ice Free in 5 Years.

Freak snowstorm hits Egypt, Israel. The San Diego Union-Tribune has photos from Egypt, including one of the Sphinx.

Climate change segment on CNN: Mark Morano slam-dunks warming alarmist.

Labels: Science

Arctic icecap makes a comeback.

Labels: Science

I take some risk drawing lessons from a film I haven't seen, save the trailer below:



Synopsis: Earth is a slum. By government fiat, the elite few live in a posh space station with all sorts of amenities that include some really astounding medical technology, which - by government fiat - is unavailable on the surface. The protagonist wages a personal war to get access to said medical technology for himself and others.

I can't find the article, but I recall reading an interview of director Neill Blomkamp in which he stated that the film touches on universal themes of the haves keeping the have-nots down by force, that it is not intended to be analogous to any specific conflict. Personally, I think the atmosphere resembles that of East Germany more than anything else, with Elysium in the role of Waldsiedlung, the "secure housing zone" for the Party elite.

I also think of the third-season episode "The Cloud Minders" from the original Star Trek series, but the commonalities are only superficial - a flying city (atmospheric and not orbital in this case) and a laborer/elite caste system. The similarities stop there. Stratos city dwellers are a decent folk defending themselves against the violently antisocial Troglyte miners, not knowing that the Troglyte barbarity is a product of the psychoactive xenite gas in the mines. Once Kirk discovers the root cause and makes it known, the problem is easily solved with gas masks.

The haves can't keep the have-nots down by force unless they have the power to do so. How do they get such power in this film?

Not having seen the film, I lack a critical piece of information: how Earth managed to become a gigantic Somalia. I suspect that Blomkamp neglected to think this through, as Gene Roddenberry and J. K. Rowling had failed to conceptualize the economic systems within their respective franchises. From history we know that only command economies (especially Communist or Fascist) or constant warfare can create entrenched poverty on such a scale. Elysium seems to have managed to completely eliminate the middle class.

Thus the lessons boil down to these two: free markets and freedom from war.

While the causes of Earth's rampant poverty may be nebulous (at least they are to one who hasn't seen the film), other economic unfreedoms are easily spotted. First and foremost, government has allowed monopolies of technological know-how, particularly that behind the Med-Pods. Realistically, such inventions would have been developed simultaneously by different parties scattered among different nations. The government managed to corral and/or eliminate all that talent, like a cross between a medieval guild and the Mafia. So next time someone talks about regulating the Internet, slap them silly with a Matt Damon poster.

Second, the government has managed to prevent non-elite Earthlings from colonizing space. (Rand Simberg, please pick up the courtesy phone.) This may have been accomplished by a combination of anti-space-emigration rules and monopolies on key technological advances necessary for cost-effective space settlement. The decay of Earth would have occurred over a long time, and assuming sufficient technology, many in the middle class would have settled the "suburbs" of the Solar System - moons, asteroids, Mars, lower Earth orbit, etc. Some might have built cushy underwater habitats - a far easier task than going off-world.

Labels: Economics, Movies, Politics, Science

Sheldon Whitehouse vs. Fred Phelps.

Labels: Politics, Religion, Science

Someone found a green meteorite, which some theorize to hail from Mercury. Yeah, Mercury. That's it. No way it could have traveled halfway across the galaxy from that doomed planet Superman says he's from.

Labels: Science

Back in January, the Daily Mail reported that the Met Office (the UK's national weather service) had revised its global warming projections, predicting a flat trend until 2017 - which started in 1998. A March 16 article displays a chart that shows how far-off the warming projections have been.

In May 2008 I blogged on a Telegraph article about global warming revisions of that day: "Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: 'The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that.'" Well now. Back then the Germans were right about the trend (up to present). Wonder what they're projections are now?

Labels: Science

Students in a Johns Hopkins computer science class figure out how to game the grading curve - everybody gets a 0 on the test, therefore everyone gets an A.

Labels: Education, Science

10 Questions For the Science Deniers.

Question 10 caught my eye: "10. In 2005 the UN said there would be 50 million climate refugees because of rising sea levels and other effects of global warming by 2010. Where are they?"

Labels: Science

Not the meteorological science guy.

Labels: Science

Meet the new climate temperature data, not the same as the old climate data.

Paul Homewood reports the decision of Dr. James Hanson, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), to rely on a different source for ocean surface temperatures - ERSST (NOAA's Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature) instead of the "Hadley/Reynolds" (evidently referring to Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research and NOAA's Richard W. Reynolds).

Dr. Reto Ruedy responded to Homewood's inquiries, stating that the data changes "are well within [the] margin of error," and that "all our basic data (land and ocean) com[ing] from the same source...simplifies the description of what we are doing." Homewood states that GISS had "not given any reason for abandoning Hadley/Reynolds, or suggested there are errors or inaccuracies with it," and believes the change is outright data manipulation.

Homewood also discovered that original temperature records often do not match those recorded in the 2008 publication of the GISS historical data - meaning that there have been two sets of changes. Homewood also blogged on this at Watt's Up With That. Note that the graph shows the differences between GISS 2008 and GISS 2013 (brought about by the switch to ERSST), and not the differences between GISS 2008 and the original records.

Labels: Science

Andrea Mitchell flunks physics. Either that, or there's more to Felix Baumgartner's excellent adventure than we've been told about.

I left this snark at Twitchy (and also at Rand's): "Hey, they broke the FTL barrier. Now we can loot those blue jungle aliens to pay off our debt."

Labels: Media, Science

Some cool Instapundit links:

Ten macho movies every man should see. (Warning: Popular Science still hasn't figured out how to design a website that doesn't bog down your system).

Insane in the membrane.

Hope and change.

Elizabeth Warren gets pushy.

Labels: Movies, Music, Politics, Science

Any bets this will win the IgNobel in Chemistry?

Norwegian researchers say that lysergic acid diethylamide — also known as the hallucinogenic drug LSD — was used in a few clinics in the 1960s and 1970s to help some alcoholics, and should be revisited once again as a possible treatment, according to a study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Labels: Science

There's a new island in the Red Sea. How did it get there?

Labels: Humor, Science

Scientists have a plan to bring back the woolly mammoth.

Just think of the restaurant possibilities...

Labels: Science

Happy 41st birthday, Environmental Protection Agency. Your DDT ban is killing millions.

The article is six years old, but it tells the DDT tale quite effectively.

Labels: Science

Another batch of emails from the University of East Anglia has been leaked.

Labels: Science