The military is being trained (for the first time in decades) how to manage without computers.
This is good, not just as a defense against cyber attacks, but because it will give them a lot more insight. Even when I started my career in aerospace, I worried that young people were being too confident in computer output, without understanding the fundamentals sufficiently to know whether or not it made sense.
Continues to diminish the achievement of Apollo 11.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: Apollo Shrugs.
[Late-afternoon update]
Treacher: Yeah, well, the Soviets sent women and minorities into space first.
[Friday-morning update]
More thoughts from Karol Markowicz (who was born in the Soviet Union):
Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags — but have you heard about their amazing space feminism and space intersectionality?
“Cosmonaut diversity was key for the Soviet message to the rest of the globe,” the writer, Sophie Pinkham, wrote. Her piece reads like something from an old issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda boasting of the achievements of the Soviet space program.
It’s not like this is anything new from the paper.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
It was a weird situation, but it wasn’t lonely.
“You put some Samoan on his little canoe out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night and he doesn’t really know where he’s going, he doesn’t know how to get there. He can see the stars, they’re his only friend out there, and he’s not talking to anybody. That guy is lonely.”
“I didn’t experience that kind of loneliness,” he said. “So I did not have Mission Control yakking at me for a full two-hour orbit — for 40 minutes or so I was over there behind the moon — but I was in my comfortable little home. Columbia was a nice, secure, safe, commodious place. I had hot coffee, I had music if I wanted it, I had nice views out the window.”
“To depict me as in despair or something and so lonely as in, ‘Oh my gosh, I could hardly wait to get back to the human voice coming directly up from Earth,’ yeah, that’s baloney.”
I always thought it was baloney.
It wasn’t recorded, but NASA has reconstructed what Neil Armstrong saw using LRO.
A history of the Siege of Vienna.
Saturday is the landing anniversary, but today is the anniversary of the launch.
Loren Grush has an article today on how Apollo set NASA back for decades, a subject I’ve written quite a bit about.
Yes, it is nothing to celebrate. Might as well celebrate the October Revolution, or the ascent of Hitler.
Anglo-Saxons (and other indigenous British peoples) deserve reparations.
Heh.
I disagree that the one that rolled off the line was the last one. I was a VW mechanic as my first job out of high school. As far as I’m concerned, VW hasn’t built a Beetle since 1978. If it doesn’t have a flat-four air-cooled engine with a number 3 cylinder that eats valves and rings due to having its airflow cut off by the oil cooler, it’s not a Beetle, regardless of a vague resemblance of body type.
Thoughts on identity politics versus reductionist politics.
As someone who is often called a racist because I disagree about a policy issue, I am enjoying the hell out of Nancy having the race card pulled on her.