brainrow

I’ve gotta get me one of these:

“Those who really understand what we do here at Apple are going to love this new product,” Schiller continued. “Unless, you know, they happen to be totally lame.”

When you’re using something this advanced, some people look at you as if you were crazy, which just shows that they don’t “get it.” I feel sorry for those people.

“Are these the shadows of things that must be, or are they the shadows of things that might be?”

Joy of Tech warns me to repent before it’s too late.

Too late for me… save yourselves!

Joy of Tech has useful and informative warning labels for bloggers. Some should be printed out and stuck on the blogger’s own monitor, but a few should be prominently displayed on the blog page itself.

Via Pink Tentacle, the recent solar eclipse, as seen by a Japanese weather satellite:

There’s more than one Michael Collins.

There’s even more than one famous Michael Collins.

So, when I saw a song titled “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me” on Jethro Tull’s Benefit album, I never seriously imagined the song was about the astronaut Michael Collins, who orbited the Moon in the Apollo 11 command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin flew the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) down to the surface and walked on the Sea of Tranquility.

I played the record a number of times without ever paying much attention to that song. But I had it playing softly one night as I fell asleep, and in a lucid moment between sleep and waking, I heard this:

I’m with you, LEM,
Though it’s a shame
That it had to be you.

The mother ship
Is just a blip
On your trip made for two.

I’m with you, boys,
So please employ
Just a little extra care.

It’s on my mind,
I’m left behind
When I should have been there
Walking with you.

That was how I felt about the entire Apollo program: I wanted to be there. I wanted to experience zero gravity in orbit, and on the way to the moon. I wanted to glide in lunar one-sixth gravity over the rocks and craters of an alien world. I wanted to see the far side of the moon with my own eyes, and see the earth — the entire earth — as a blue marble floating in black space.

I think I missed the point. I think almost everyone misses the point.

One-sixth gravity is fun. Lunar rocks answered persistent questions about the origin of the earth and the entire solar system. The miniature on-board computers were technological breaththroughs. The earth, seen whole from a quarter million miles away, is poetry.

But I think the most important thing about Apollo was not the fun, the science, the technology, or even the mind-altering change of perspective it made possible. All those things are by-products.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade,” said John F. Kennedy, and to confront other difficult challenges, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Should we return to the Moon now? Should we set a goal of landing a man on Mars? I don’t know. How hard are they?

Is it possible to find a challenge here on earth that will demand the best we have to give? Can we find a challenge that we are willing to accept, unwilling to postpone, and which we truly intend to win? Can we do anything with the realization that this planet, our home, is a small jewel in a vast emptiness?

Happy Moon Day.

Barack Obama has been president now for exactly six months — January 20 to July 20 — and the country still has problems.

Golly, should I have voted for John McCain after all?

Rachel Maddow looks into The Family, a fundamentalist religious group that counts a number of important politicians among its members. She talks with reporter Jeff Sharlet, who spent time inside the organization, and wrote The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. (Video runs about 9 minutes.)

It’s the oldest Christian conservative organization in Washington. It goes back 70 years, when the founder believed that God gave him a new revelation, saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for two thousand years, and that what most people think of as Christianity, as being about, you know, helping the weak and the poor and the meek, and the down and out, he believes God came to him one night in April 1935 and said what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful, and that these powerful men who were chosen by God, can then, if they want to, dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle-down fundamentalism.

Rachel asks whether this sense of being God’s chosen explains why members like Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Mark Sanford, caught in scandals, have refused to resign. Sharlet notes that Sanford cited King David to help explain that he wasn’t going to resign.

That just struck a bell with me, because the King David story is a core teaching of The Family … One of the leaders of The Family was explaining why King David was important, and he said, “It’s not because he was a good man; it’s because he was a bad man. You know, he seduced another man’s wife; he actually had the husband murdered.”

And he wanted to explain why this was a model, and he says to one of the men in the group, “Suppose I heard you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?”

And this guy, being a human being, says, “You would think I was a monster.”

Well, the leader of The Family says, “No, not at all, because you’re chosen. You’re chosen by God for leadership, and so the normal rules don’t apply.”

Sounds like the Manson family.

More from NPR, including an excerpt from Sharlet’s book.

I just got back from a park near here. I stood out in the middle of a dark softball field and watched the International Space Station (ISS) fly over.

It looked like a bright star, but it was moving. If I hadn’t known what it was, I might have assumed it was a high-flying jet. But it was too high, and too bright, to be a jet. The sun had set more than an hour before. The ISS, orbiting 220 miles above the earth, could still catch sunlight.

I knew where and when to watch thanks to NASA’s ISS tracker site, and this Space Fellowship article, which I found thanks to Slashdot.

The marathon of space station flybys won’t stop until mid-to-late July (depending on your location). That gives space shuttle Endeavour, currently scheduled to launch on July 11th, time to reach the space station and join the show. As the shuttle approaches station for docking, many observers will witness a memorable double flyby — Endeavour and the ISS sailing side by side across the starry night sky.

So, watch the skies, and remember to wave.