brainrow

Via Slashdot: NASA does a huge amount of photography on every Space Shuttle launch in order to assist in detecting problems and analyzing system behavior. Here’s a 45-minute video narrated by a couple of NASA engineers.

You may want to click the little four-arrow icon in the lower right corner of the video to view this full-frame.

And if that’s not enough for you, here’s another ten minutes worth:

Republicans don’t believe in coddling 9/11 rescue workers:

Republican senators blocked Democratic legislation on Thursday that sought to provide medical care to rescue workers and others who became ill as a result of breathing in toxic fumes, dust and smoke at the site of the World Trade Center attack in 2001.

So where did the notion come from that Republicans are somehow the stronger party when the nation is attacked?

Via TidBITS: Music video about cleaning a laptop fan.

Sadly, I don’t think modern Mac laptop fans are any easier.

Sixty-nine years ago today, Japanese carrier-based planes attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor.

Americans remember the date as the start of World War II, but the war in Europe had started more than two years earlier, when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Even before that, the signs of impending war were impossible to miss. In the Pacific, Japan had been fighting in China since 1937.

But to Americans, December 7, 1941 remains the “date which will live in infamy.”

Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, who planned the attack, supposedly said, “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”

He got that right.

For good or ill, the world we live in today was born the day Japan awakened the American giant.

The Denver Post has a collection of little-seen photos from the Pacific war.

A couple weeks ago I attended a NASA panel with Mercury astronaut John Glenn, Apollo 17 moon-walker Harrison Schmitt, and Space Shuttle astronaut John Grunsfeld. After the panel discussion, I got to actually step up and meet Schmitt and Grunsfeld.

Grunsfeld is probably not as famous as the other two, but he’s flown on five Shuttle missions. He’s been to the Russian Mir space station, and to the International Space Station (ISS). He’s visited the Hubble Space Telescope three times, doing eight separate space walks to perform maintenance and repairs on the telescope.

I asked something I’ve been curious about for years: did he think of the Hubble Telescope more as a thing, or as a place? Grunsfeld said that, strange as it sounded, he thought of it almost as a person. He had spent years studying the telescope, and felt it almost had a personality — perhaps the way some of us earthbound types think of our cars or our computers. He said the Mir and the ISS both felt like places.

While Schmitt took one of NASA’s most requested photographs, Blue Marble, I told Grunsfeld he deserved credit as a co-author of many of the amazing Hubble images which wouldn’t have been possible without the work he did to repair and upgrade the telescope.

Which brings us to the Boston Globe’s 2010 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar: 25 photos, with one new photo revealed each day until Christmas. (They include links to the advent calendars from past years.)

It’s a big universe out there.

Christmas cuteness:

Somebody’s a pretty skillful video editor.

A great moment from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

Join us next time, when I’ll tell you exactly how you should think for yourself.

I thought maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that gas prices have spiked since election day. This chart from GasBuddy.com makes me think something changed on November 2nd. Coincidence?

It’s also interesting to see what happened around the time of the 2008 election:

Update: I just realized that the 2008 drop coincides with the Bush economic meltdown — how quickly we forget. That was probably a more significant factor than the election.

I like to go out some nights to watch the International Space Station (ISS) pass overhead. (NASA has a site to help track the ISS from almost anywhere on earth.) It looks like a very bright star or planet, always moving west to east, sometimes trending northward, other times southward.

What do astronauts see when they look out the window on the ISS? How about this, via the Astronomy Picture of the Day site:

A docked Russian Soyuz spacecraft and parts of the ISS are visible in the foreground, apparently lit by a quarter moon. Above one of the solar panels of the Soyuz are the lights of New Orleans.

North (left) of New Orleans, a line of lights tracing central US highway I55 connects to Jackson, Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee. Of course, the lights follow the population centers, but not everyone lives on planet Earth all the time these days. November 2nd marked the first decade of continuous human presence in space on board the International Space Station.

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

Fifty years ago today, John F. Kennedy was elected the thirty-fifth President of the United States.

I was eight years old, and I was for Kennedy.

I don’t remember any political discussion during this election, except that one of my aunts was going to vote for Kennedy, because she was a Catholic. I didn’t understand. I thought perhaps “Catholic” and “Democrat” were two names for the same thing.

I was for Kennedy because I had seen a campaign billboard with side-by-side portraits of two men. Kennedy was young, smiling and handsome. The other guy looked old, ugly and mean.

Years later, I realized the other guy was almost certainly Lyndon Johnson, not Richard Nixon. Campaigns don’t usually post billboards of the two opposing candidates.

It’s hard to believe those fifty years are more than a fifth of the time since the beginning of the American Revolution.

It doesn’t seem like a long time to me. The haircuts and the clothing styles still seem right. I can still watch some of the same TV shows.

Instead of iPods, we had transistor radios. Imagine — a radio you can carry in your pocket!

There was no satellite TV, no cable TV, no internet. People didn’t have computers. Banks didn’t have computers. To make a long-distance telephone call, you dialed the operator. The first Xerox photo-copier had just been released. The polio vaccine had been around only a few years. The first heart pacemaker had been surgically implanted only two years earlier.

Cars were big. They didn’t have airbags or seatbelts — or fuel economy standards or safety standards, either.

Those who worried about conserving natural resources, or about air and water pollution, were on the fringe. Always good for a chuckle.

A doctor was always a man. A little girl could grow up to be a housewife, a mother, a secretary, a bank teller, a teacher, or even a nurse.

Who could have imagined that might not be enough?

In some parts of the country, African-Americans were not allowed to vote, or to attend the best public schools or state colleges.

And yet 1960 feels familiar to me.

In 1960, you could easily have found plenty of people who remembered the world as it was fifty years earlier, in 1910: William Howard Taft was president. American women couldn’t vote. John F. Kennedy hadn’t been born.

Many features of the modern world existed then, but to most people, they were novelties, on the fringe of everyday experience: moving pictures, telephones, sound recordings.

Airplanes and automobiles existed, but who imagined they could be a practical form of transportation?

I don’t know how widespread the use of electricity was — or how common indoor plumbing was outside of cities.

Photography was well-known, but newspapers had not yet adopted the rotogravure process that made mass printing of photos possible. Radiotelegraphy would capture the public imagination two years later, when it brought news of the sinking of the Titanic, but it was a specialized subject in 1910.

But I think a 1960 person who remembered 1910 as I remember 1960 would say that the world had changed a little around the edges, but that the world of 1910 still felt familiar.

Take an easy stride back another fifty years, and Abraham Lincoln has just been elected the 16th President of the United States. The hot technologies of the day are the railroad and the telegraph.

Another fifty years, and Abraham Lincoln is not quite two years old, and James Madison is president.

We can keep going back, fifty years at a time, and I think we could always find an observer who remembers the bygone time as if it were yesterday, and who doesn’t feel that things have changed all that much.

Take just eight of these strides into the past, and we’re in 1610, the year Galileo used his telescope to discover four moons orbiting Jupiter. In England, William Shakespeare is writing The Tempest, and it will be another year before the release of the King James Version of the Bible.

Time flies, huh?

It’s not an original thought, but the one constant thing in the world is change.

I’ve known people who will conjure up something from the past — a gas-guzzling old land yacht from the fifties or sixties, for example — and say, “That’s the way life’s supposed to be.”

Nah.

Here’s the way it’s supposed to be: We look at the problems that confront us. We make our best, honest effort to foresee the problems yet to come. We consider what we have and what we need. We think. We act. We change.

Tomorrow we’ll change some more.

Update: Life magazine has photos of Kennedy on the campaign trail.

Psychic prediction: if Republicans win 50 Senate seats (a tie, which would be broken in favor of Democrats by Vice-President Biden), look for Joe Lieberman to switch to the Republican party.

(If pundits everywhere have been saying this for months, I haven’t heard it. I stopped listening to them back in early July.)

Via Boing Boing:

NASA attached a video camera to a Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) on a 2008 Space Shuttle launch. At the beginning of the video, we’re looking at part of the Shuttle’s external fuel tank and the underside of the Shuttle’s nose. We get a wider view when the boosters separate about two minutes into the flight. The video continues until the booster splashes down.

To me, the most astonishing thing about this video is the audio track, which grows quieter as the air grows thinner, and then louder again as the booster falls into denser air.

Spaceflight isn’t magic. Spaceships are physical things, built by humans. That becomes really apparent when you hear the creaking and clanking of the booster as it settles into the water.

Cartoonist Clay Bennett illustrates what divides Democrats and Republicans. (Click the image to see the full cartoon.)

Just got back from a Democratic fundraiser where President Obama spoke.

He said (paraphrasing), “When you want to go forward, you put it in D; when you want to go back, you put it in R.”

Gee, do you think he reads this blog?

Political cartoonist Pat Oliphant shows us the Republican election strategy for 2010. (Click on the image to see the whole cartoon.)

I agree with the little guy in the corner: try to snap out of it!