brainrow

While we await the launch of the Return to Flight mission of space shuttle Discovery, here is a moving essay on the people who fly these ships. On the final flight of the shuttle Columbia:

Perhaps ten minutes before eight am on Saturday morning, Rick Husband and Willie McCool started to pay attention to the data coming from the left wing sensors. It was 30 degrees warmer than normal in the left wheel well. Not much, considering the 2-3000 degrees on the leading edge of their wings and nose, but something to pay attention to. Anomalies are never good. There are no pleasant surprises in the flying business.

By 7:55 things were looking worse — a lot worse. Unbenownst to the crew, telemetry beamed to the ground showed that readings from the heat sensors in the left wing started to rise, and then dropped to zero. They were failing, in a pattern expanding away from the left wheel well. Tire pressures were way high on the left side, and then those sensors failed too.

Sensors fail all the time. But this was different. This was a pattern, and it was spreading. And something was starting to pull the ship to the left.

I don’t know the words he used, but I can hear the tone perfectly in my head, because it’s exactly the same tone I’ve heard dozens of times on cockpit voice recorders. It’s concern. Alarm, even. But it’s cool. Disciplined.

All right, we’ve got a problem here…

It’s a long piece, well worth reading.

Q: Why do firemen wear heavy-duty suspenders?

A: To hold their pants up. Each fire fighter wears and carries 59 to 130 pounds of gear.

See this New York Times story on the burden of saving lives:

Last week, the [New York City fire department] announced plans to outfit fire-fighters with a new state-of-the-art escape system, including steel hooks, Kevlar ropes and a modified rock-climbing device to slow firefighters’ descent.

The kit weighs about six pounds, including a harness that wraps around the hips and legs, and is worn at all times, since there is no time to put it on in an emergency.

Six more pounds may seem a minor inconvenience for a lifesaving system designed to get firefighters out of a building in under 10 seconds. But the weight will be added to an already cumbersome array of protective clothing and gear that has grown heavier in recent years and is worn in extreme heat. Officials say they will affix the rope device to the harness in a pouch, with the weight balanced, but still may have to issue stronger suspenders for the pants.

Click the link labeled “Specialized firefighting equipment” for photos and more details.

Tom Tomorrow has it wrong, I think — Superman isn’t working for Halliburton. He seems to be undercutting them on price. This is not going to sit well with Dick Cheney.

The Flintstones and The Jetsons are far more interesting now than they were when they first aired roughly forty years ago. It’s not because they’re funny or witty. It’s not because they have any lasting artistic value. It’s certainly not because they show us anything about the past or the future.

They’re interesting today because they provide an unwitting document of the American world view in the early 1960s. As someone who lived through the 1960s, that’s an embarrassing thing to admit.

I picked up a special edition of Life magazine called “Greatest Americans.” It’s based on a Discovery Channel poll and program series that asks viewers to nominate the hundred greatest Americans. That sounded interesting to me — I enjoy the Discovery Channel.

What we have here is another unwitting and embarrassing document of the American mind in the year 2005. We don’t seem to know much history. Even the categories come off looking pretty silly. Some names definitely belong on the list, and others are debatable, at least. But, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that this is our list of 100 Greatest Americans.”

Great Leaders

• George W. Bush
• Laura Bush
• Bill Clinton
• Hillary Clinton
• George H. W. Bush
• Barbara Bush
• Ronald Reagan
• Jimmy Carter
• Richard M. Nixon
• Lyndon Baines Johnson
• Robert F. Kennedy
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
• John F. Kennedy
• Harry S. Truman
• Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Theodore Roosevelt
• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Abraham Lincoln
• Thomas Jefferson
• Alexander Hamilton
• George Washington
• Colin Powell
• Condoleezza Rice

Great Statesmen

• John Edwards
• Barack Obama
• Rudolph Giuliani

Great Military Heroes

• George Patton
• Audie Murphy

Great Religious Leaders

• Billy Graham
• Joseph Smith

Great Activists

• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Rosa Parks
• Malcolm X
• Frederick Douglass
• Harriet Tubman
• Cesar Chavez
• Helen Keller
• Susan B. Anthony

Great Innovators

• Thomas Edison
• Benjamin Franklin
• Alexander Graham Bell
• Jonas Salk
• George Washington Carver
• Nikola Tesla
• Albert Einstein
• Henry Ford
• Carl Sagan
• Walt Disney
• George Lucas
• Steven Jobs
• Bill Gates

Great Adventurers

• John Glenn
• Charles Yeager
• Neil Armstrong
• Charles Lindbergh
• Orville and Wilbur Wright
• Amelia Earhart

Great Entertainers

• Marilyn Monroe
• John Wayne
• James Stewart
• Tom Cruise
• Tom Hanks
• Bob Hope
• Bill Cosby
• Katherine Hepburn
• Lucille Ball
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Christopher Reeve
• Steven Spielberg
• Michael Moore
• Mel Gibson
• Clint Eastwood

Great Hosts

• Johnny Carson
• Oprah Winfrey
• Rush Limbaugh
• Phil McGraw
• Ellen Degeneres

Great Music Makers

• Frank Sinatra
• Elvis Presley
• Michael Jackson
• Madonna
• Ray Charles

Great Writers

• Mark Twain
• Maya Angelou

Great Athletes

• Jackie Robinson
• Muhammad Ali
• Babe Ruth
• Lance Armstrong
• Jesse Owens
• Michael Jordan
• Tiger Woods
• Pat Tillman
• Brett Favre

Great Entrepreneurs

• Howard Hughes
• Andrew Carnegie
• Hugh Hefner
• Donald Trump
• Sam Walton
• Martha Stewart

Neil Armstrong is threatening to sue his barber — make that former barber:

Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, used to go to Marx’s Barber Shop in Lebanon about once a month for a cut. That stopped when he learned that owner Marx Sizemore had collected his hair clippings from the floor and sold them in May 2004 to a collector.

That barber is a real class act.

Shortly after Charlie Chaplin died, his body was stolen from his grave and held for ransom. These days, it would have been offered on eBay as the ultimate Chaplin collectible.

I was all over Watergate.

I read the newspaper stories. I watched the Senate Watergate Committee hearings and heard Sam Ervin warn John Ehrlichman that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” I followed the House Judiciary Committee hearings considering Articles of Impeachment against President Richard Nixon.

When Nixon resigned, I taped his speech by putting my cassette recorder’s microphone right in front of the TV’s tiny speaker. The sound was tinny, but the tape captured the sound of car horns honking in celebration outside my apartment.

I even took a bus to Washington, D.C., and sat in Judge John Sirica’s courtroom through the second day of the Watergate trial of H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and several others.

I read many Watergate books. It’s been about thirty years since I read All the President’s Men. All the time I was reading the book, I was trying to figure out the identity of Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s “deep background” informant from inside the government. Reading the book’s account of one particular meeting between Woodward and Deep Throat, I felt a sudden certainty: I knew who Deep Throat was. It was so obvious, I thought Woodward and his co-author Carl Bernstein were being awfully careless with the anonymity of their secret source.

Through the years, I noted the many lists that folks compiled of people who were suspected of being Deep Throat. A few mentioned the man I knew to be Deep Throat, but most of them brushed past him quickly to dwell on other candidates. I would read the lists and smile quietly. I knew for certain that Deep Throat was FBI Director L. Patrick Gray.

I’m going to be drummed out of the Psychics’ Union for this. Not for being wrong, but for admitting it.

Pat Buchanan was sometimes on the lists of suspects. Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown, he said he knew none of the White House aides on the list could be Deep Throat, because Richard Nixon had helped each of them advance their careers. Apparently they were more loyal to Nixon than to the law. Not too surprising in the Nixon White House.

Had she lived, Marilyn Monroe would be 79 years old today.

This quote is attributed to her:

Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

Recommended: The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot and The Misfits. The first two are brilliant comedies. The Misfits is not a comedy. Marilyn is extraordinarily good in all three. She had talent.

There seem to be some problems with the calendar and archive links on this page. Links to some months and days are missing. The entries themselves seem to be present. I’m investigating, and hope to have links working again soon.

Update: Fixed it. One post got filed out of order, confusing the programs that generate the links.

Too good to ignore, from Newsweek’s Perspectives:

“That’s unconscionable … I believe in family values.” —Seminole County (Fla.) Republican Party chairman Jim Stellings, testifying in the defamation suit he filed against a political rival who he says falsely accused him of having been married six times. The correct number of marriages is five.

Buy five, get one free?

I bought my first computer 22 years ago today, on May 11, 1983. Changed my life.

It was an Apple IIe, a minor 1983 update to the classic Apple II that had been introduced in 1977. The pace of technological change has accelerated since then.

The central processing unit (CPU) in my Apple IIe was a 6502 chip running at 1 MHz, just like the original Apple II. When I tried my hand at typing in programs in the built-in BASIC language, I was astonished at the speed of the machine. Error messages might flash by too quickly for me to see. My daisy-wheel printer could hammer out about 12 characters per second — very impressive compared to my own halting manual typing.

The computer I’m using right now has two CPUs, each running at 2GHz — 2,000 times the clock speed of my first computer. The CPUs are of a different design: they can deal with data in bigger chunks than the 6502; they use a RISC instruction set that operates significantly differently from the 6502. My new computer might be many thousands of times faster than my Apple IIe, or it might be only about 1,000 times faster. I’m sometimes frustrated that some operations seem to take too long. My expectations have changed during the past 22 years, but I’m also doing things with this computer that I never would have imagined doing with the Apple IIe.

My Apple IIe came fully loaded with 64K of RAM memory, the maximum amount of memory that could be directly accessed by the 6502 CPU. The Apple Writer word processor fit into a lean 16K, leaving ample memory for documents of about twenty pages. Longer documents could be saved in a series of files. Having plenty of RAM, I got spoiled. I’ve stuffed my current machine with 2.5 gigabytes of RAM — more than 40,000 times as much memory as my Apple IIe. When that’s not enough, the operating system on my current machine can use virtual memory to make it seem as if I’ve got even more memory.

My Apple IIe had two floppy disk drives, each capable of holding 144K of programs and data. A few programs were too complicated to fit in the machine’s 64K of RAM, so it was often a good idea to leave the program disk in one drive so segments of the program could be loaded as they were needed. The other drive could be used to hold any files I might create while running the program.

My current computer has two hard drives, totaling over 400Gb. That’s a little less than 1.5 million times as much storage as I got with my first computer. I have most of my CD collection instantly available on my computer. I can edit video clips and burn DVDs. Every now and then I look into adding more disk space.

I can’t prove this, but I feel fairly confident that when I bought my Apple IIe, I owned more computer power than existed in the entire world at the end of World War II — more than was used by the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, more than was used by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park to crack the German Enigma codes, more than was possessed by all the governments on both sides of the war.

It’s nice to have the latest and greatest hardware and software, but a fast computer is no substitute for a good brain.

A few days ago, griping about the media obsession with “runaway bride” Jennifer Wilbanks, I wrote:

Have we forgotten how to say, “It’s none of my business?”

Since then, I’ve realized that we say it a lot. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard, “I know it’s none of my business, but…” Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of minding our own business.

This blog doesn’t get much traffic, usually. But in the last 24 hours, there have been about fifteen times as many visitors as on an average day. Almost every one of them found the site by Googling for “Jennifer Wilbanks.”

So tomorrow I’ll be posting my stunning exposé on Britney Spears’ pregnancy. It’s all the news you need to know!

That should run up the hit counts a little.

I saw Jon Stewart performing live earlier today. He’s a funny guy. The audience laughed and applauded throughout the show.

Ohio was a “swing state” in last year’s election. Jon asked whether we’d enjoyed having presidential candidates visit every few days to tell us how much they loved us. He asked whether we’d seen any of them since the election. They used us, he said, then threw us away “after they’d done their dirty, dirty business.”

It wasn’t all politics. He talked about buying a new computer that the salesman assured him was “more powerful than the computers NASA uses to launch the space shuttle.” Jon said his shuttle was just sitting in the driveway at home because his old Tandy computer wasn’t powerful enough to launch it.

Mostly, though, there was a political edge. Paraphrasing very loosely, he said this:

The divide in America today is not between religion and science. It’s not between conservative and liberal, or Republican and Democrat, or red states and blue states. The divide in America today is between moderates and extremists.

We’re all moderates here. We’re not shouting slogans. Nobody here has their mouth taped over with the word “Life.” Nobody here is carrying around a can of red paint just to throw on somebody.

You don’t see moderates standing in front of a building chanting, “Let’s be reasonable!” You know why? Because moderates have stuff to do. They’re too busy to travel around the country staging vigils for the TV cameras. That’s why the extremists seem to be winning. Moderates have stuff to do.

We’ve had a lot of presidents — some really good ones, and some really bad ones — and our government has survived through all of them. It will survive through these guys, too. They may try to bring it down, but they’ll fail, and here’s why: when things get bad enough, all those busy moderates — the ones with stuff to do — are going to say, “You know, this stuff can wait ’til tomorrow.” And they’ll rescue the country from the extremists.

But he said it better than I did.

One of the tough things about being absolutely certain you have the one literal, immutable truth must be learning something like this:

Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

That would be embarrassing, I should think, especially if you were accustomed to making fiery denunciations of your enemies based on the Book of Revelation.

Dr. Aitken said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone’s name, she said.

“It’s a number puzzle — the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero.”

Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. “It’s a very political document,” Dr. Aitken said. “It’s a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it’s written in coded language and riddles.”

Oh, so using God’s name to justify your own agenda isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s a time-honored tradition. I guess I owe an apology to all those currently taking the Lord’s name in vain.

From HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher:

Confronting an assertion that the new Republican budget, cutting $10 billion from Medicaid and adding over $100 billion in tax cuts for the rich, was a necessary setting of priorities to cut our huge budget deficits, Martin Short asked:

Would you say that the rich have gotten poorer under George Bush?

Discussing new polls showing George W. Bush’s approval rating at only 44%, Bill Maher said:

The American public always wanted to vote for a guy — and Bush was the perfect guy — who they’d want to have over for pot roast. And George Bush is that guy. He does that well. You’d like to have him over for pot roast. He reminds you of yourself.

Well, now he’s been over, he’s had the pot roast, but he’s getting drunk, and now he’s talking about stem cells and Terri Schiavo and gay marriage, and now he’s the guest that won’t leave.

I’m a boomer. There was a time when I was proud of my generation. No more. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof explains why:

As a baby boomer myself, I can be blunt: We boomers won’t be remembered as the “Greatest Generation.” Rather, we’ll be scorned as the “Greediest Generation.”

…

As of 2003, the share of elderly below the poverty line had fallen by two-thirds to 10 percent – representing a huge national success. Retirement in America is no longer feared as a time of destitution, but anticipated as a time of comfort and leisure.

On the other hand, the proportion of children below the poverty line is still 18 percent, the same as it was in 1966. And while almost all the elderly now have health insurance under Medicare, about 29 percent of children had no health insurance at all at some point in the last 12 months.

One measure of how children have tumbled as a priority in America is that in 1960 we ranked 12th in infant mortality among nations in the world, while now 40 nations have infant mortality rates better than ours or equal to it. We’ve also lost ground in child vaccinations: the United States now ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio.

With boomers about to retire, I’m afraid that national priorities will be focused even more powerfully on the elderly rather than the young – because it’s the elderly who wield political clout.