Unlike in the original story, this isn’t going to be just a ploy to get advertisers to help fund the first moon shot:
“If you’re interested, the logo of your choice could go lunar for as little as the minimum $46,000 bid. (Hurry! Bidding started two days ago.)”
Update, 24 July: For a very interesting discussion of the Apollo program, and the design choices taken, see Charles Stross’s blog post. Good stuff (even if I’m way late in linking to it).
This is quite a cool idea:
We’ve seen a lot of unexpected, and sometimes cool, iPhone apps approved by Apple, but today’s news might top the rest. Apple has approved a marijuana — that’s right, marijuana — app called “Cannabis,” which lets users find the nearest (don’t worry: legal) supplier of medicinal marijuana.
Created by the founder of Ajnag.com, which was founded in 2006 and was the first medicinal marijuana locater on the Web, the new app is quick and easy to use. Simply open it up on your iPhone or iPod Touch and you’ll see a map with the nearest distributors. The app gives you information on each of the locations, and even step-by-step directions with Google Maps.
That’s not all, though — the creators thought of everything. If you run into any, erm, legal troubles with your newly-secured marijuana, Cannabis also gives you the locations of the nearest lawyers who specialize in marijuana cases. And, if you happen to live in one of the 37 states where marijuana is not legal, the app also provides you with the location of the nearest marijuana activist groups — so you can do your part to promote reform.
To keen spacenuts like yours truly, the moonshot was a brilliant climax. That was the problem, it was THE climax. Nothing since has some close in daring or accomplishment. The moon, the wisemen told us, was only the first step. Mars was next, by 1990 surely. 1990 came and went. Whatever the scientific merits of sending men rather than machines to the planets, the spacenuts wanted Captain Kirk to follow logically from Neil Armstrong. It was the future. It was progress. It was inevitable.
We didn’t notice, until rather late, the problem with Apollo. The clever crew cut men, hard cold and objective, gazing at their computer screens — ancient to modern eyes, but so beautiful — using mind boggling math to do the amazing. Beneath the math, the engineering and the hard science was the dismal science. Apollo was a government boondoggle, a creature of politicians it died when its political masters saw that it was no longer a vote getter.
Publius, “Destination Moon”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2009-07-20
It was 40 years ago:
Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin left the Apollo 11 command module (piloted by Michael Collins) in orbit and performed a landing in the lunar module Eagle. At 4:18 p.m. EDT, Armstrong announced to a watching and waiting world that “The Eagle has landed.”
Six-and-a-half hours later, he stepped onto the powdery surface with the words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Aldrin soon followed Armstrong down the ladder to become the second man to stand on the moon.
The mission was by no means a slam dunk. There was real fear that once on the lunar surface the astronauts might end up marooned and beyond rescue. In fact, President Nixon had a condolence speech ready to go in the event things turned out badly.
Nostalgia is an interesting phenomenon . . . the very term “President Nixon” is pried out of deep archaeological layers of memory, yet the first moon landing still seems fresh and no-longer-new but still somehow “recent”.
If you’re still eager for more, Wired has a convenient round-up of Apollo 11-related sites and events.
Several years back, Elizabeth worked as an office manager at a vet clinic. She enjoyed the work, although it didn’t pay well. One of the most frequent complaints from the customers was the high cost of vet care. This graph from The Enterprise Blog shows that the rates of increase in healthcare costs are intriguingly similar between pets and their owners (note the different scales on the left and right side of the chart):
The chart [. . .] shows spending on veterinary care, which I pulled from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and national health expenditures (for people) from the National Income and Product Accounts. Two things are interesting here: first, the rate of growth of spending from 1984 to 2006 wasn’t all that different — and in both cases, spending grew faster than the rate of economic growth. As new technologies are developed for humans, we adopt them for Bowser and Fifi — because we can afford to and we think it’s worth it.
Here in Canada, where we almost never know the actual costs of the healthcare services we receive, the stark reality that healthcare costs money is a nasty surprise. We don’t spend anything like the same real dollars on our dogs, cats, and other pets as on ourselves or our family, and the fact that we don’t have a clue how expensive it is fuels the constant political demand that we provide more “free” healthcare.
On the other hand, in much of Canada, it’s possible to get X-rays, MRI, CT scans, and other diagnostic tests done in hours or days . . . for your pet. For you, weeks or months before you’ll get your appointment. If only there were some obvious conclusion we could draw from these data points . . .
I wrote about the pet health/human health disconnect all the way back in 2004.
BBC News has an article today on some recent photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), showing the site of the Apollo 14 landing:
Science instruments (circled left) and the lunar module lower stage (circled right) are connected by a footprint trail
A US spacecraft has captured images of Apollo landing sites on the Moon, revealing hardware and a trail of footprints left on the lunar surface.
The release of the images coincides with the 40th anniversary of the first manned mission to land on the Moon.
The descent stages from the lunar modules which carried astronauts to and from the Moon can clearly be seen.
The image of the Apollo 14 landing site shows scientific instruments and an astronaut footpath in the lunar dust.
It is the first time hardware left on the Moon by the Apollo missions has been seen from lunar orbit.
On July 20th, it will have been 40 years since many of us clustered around our tiny black-and-white televisions, watching the first moon landing (or for those of you of conspiracist leanings, a really convincing sound stage in Area 51). Why, after all this time, haven’t we gone further? Why, for that matter, have we not been back to the moon for over a generation? Ronald Bailey explains the real reason:
The Apollo moon landings have often been compared to the explorations of Christopher Columbus and the Lewis and Clark expedition to Oregon. For example, on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, President George H.W. Bush declared, “From the voyages of Columbus to the Oregon Trail to the journey to the Moon itself: history proves that we have never lost by pressing the limits of our frontiers.”
But what boosters of the moon expeditions overlook is that the motive for pressing the limits of our frontiers in those cases was chiefly profit. In his report from his first voyage, Columbus predicted that his explorations would result in “vast commerce and great profit.” The extension of commerce was also the chief justification that President Thomas Jefferson gave in his secret message to Congress requesting $2,500 to fund what would become the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Forty years later, as we bask in the waning prestige that the Apollo missions earned our country, we must keep in mind that humanity will some day colonize the moon and other parts of the solar system, but only when it becomes profitable to do so.
Back in 1969, my friend Alan Fairfield and I sat in fascination (at least in the golden memory, they do . . . we were nine: I doubt that we paid as much attention to the broadcast as his mother thought we should). Mrs. Fairfield told us that we’d be able to go to the moon ourselves by the time we were grown up. It didn’t turn out that way, and at the current rate of progress, it may not turn out that way for my grandkids.
But I still hope, one day . . .
(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005583.html.)
Just a few links to provide you with click-therapy:
Sure hope those were temporary tattoos!
(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005579.html.)
Ronald Bailey looks at the too-good-to-be-true claims made for caloric reduction as a life-extending tool:
Last week, two research teams reported to great fanfare that restricting the calories consumed by rhesus monkeys had extended their lifespans. Calorie restriction is thought to increase longevity by boosting DNA repair. The idea is that the mechanism evolved so that creatures on the verge of starvarion could live long enough to reproduce when food becomes plentiful again. But did the experiments really show the CR works?
In my earlier blogpost on the research results, I noted that some experts quoted in the New York Times were not convinced. Why? Because the difference in actual death rates between the dieting monkeys and the free feeding monkeys was not statistically significant.
This doesn’t necessarily derail the notion that calorie restriction may be associated with increased lifespan, but the way this study was performed does not appear to prove anything due to rigging of the data.
(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005577.html.)
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