Category Archives: History

“You don’t want to be politically correct. You want to be right.“

The Washington Post: NASA: Legendary astronaut, moonwalker John Young has died.

“Young was the only spaceman to span NASA’s Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, and became the first person to rocket away from Earth six times. Counting his takeoff from the moon in 1972 as commander of Apollo 16, his blastoff tally stood at seven, for decades a world record.

He flew twice during the two-man Gemini missions of the mid-1960s, twice to the moon during NASA’s Apollo program, and twice more aboard the new space shuttle Columbia in the early 1980s.

His NASA career lasted 42 years, longer than any other astronaut’s, and he was revered among his peers for his dogged dedication to keeping crews safe — and his outspokenness in challenging the space agency’s status quo.”

There also is a MetaFilter thread about him, of course: The Astronaut’s Astronaut.

“An old tongue’s new tricks”

The Economist: The strange reinvention of Icelandic. “A language both ancient and modern.”

“In perhaps their most famous example of purist creativity, when a word for computer was needed in the 1960s, the planners coined tölva, combining tala (“number“ ) and völva, an old word for prophetess. When doctors started talking about AIDS using the English acronym rather than its long, literal Icelandic translation, heilkenni áunnins ónæmisbrests [spoken], the committee coined two shorter alternatives: alnæmi [spoken], something like “all-susceptibility“ , and eyðni, which sounds like the English term, but comes from the Icelandic eyða, meaning “to destroy“ . When Icelanders started saying “podcast“ , the council quickly responded with hlaðvarp [spoken], from roots meaning “charge“ (squint and you can see hlaða as a distant cousin to “load“ ) and “throw“ .”

“There were hundreds of letters, stretching over four years of war and beyond.”

The Washington Post: Brothers in arms. “Four siblings wrote hundreds of letters to each other during World War II. The story they tell of service, sacrifice and trauma was hidden away in an abandoned storage unit — until now.”

“We have been called out on air raid alarms the last few days, but you know as much about what was happening as I do, the radio is the only dope we get as well as you about them Japs and nasty Germans. Bastards are what they are, raiding without warnings, sneaking up at night and such wrong methods of a clean fight.”

There’s also a related podcast called Letters From War:

“Bringing the letters to life are modern U.S. military veterans. At key moments in the story, we’ll talk to them about how these letters compare to their own experiences — what’s universal about war and what’s changed. How they felt reading the words of these men who fought some 70 years ago. And why everyone who picks up these letters feels like the Eyde brothers become a part of their family.”

So far, a short introduction and the first episode have been published.

See also MetaFilter: Letters From WWII found in a storage locker.

“President Trump on Monday drastically scaled back two national monuments established in Utah by his Democratic predecessors”

The Washington Post: Trump shrinks two huge national monuments in Utah, drawing praise and protests.

“Trump’s move to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by more than 1.1 million acres and more than 800,000 acres, respectively, immediately sparked an outpouring of praise from conservative lawmakers as well as activists’ protests outside the White House and in Utah. It also plunges the Trump administration into uncharted legal territory since no president has sought to modify monuments established under the 1906 Antiquities Act in more than half a century.

His decision removes about 85 percent of the designation of Bears Ears and nearly 46 percent of that for Grand Staircase-Escalante, land that potentially could now be leased for energy exploration or opened for specific activities such as motorized vehicle use.

Trump told a rally in Salt Lake City that he came to “reverse federal overreach“ and took dramatic action “because some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They’re wrong.“

“They don’t know your land, and truly, they don’t care for your land like you do,“ he added. “But from now on, that won’t matter.“ “

Read Garret’s opinion on the matter over at dangerousmeta: Ignore the Administration. Ignore the media.

“At 13 billion miles from Earth, there’s no mechanic shop nearby to get a tune-up.”

JPL CalTech: Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

“Voyager 1, NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or “puffs,” lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980.

“With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years,” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.”

Link via MetaFilter.

Some eye candy: Voyager Images from the Odysseys (NASA Space Photos) (YouTube, 2:48min)