Tag Archives: science

Forty Years Ago Today: We landed on The Moon!

On this day 40 years ago Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. astronaut_Apollo_11.jpg I’m not sure what else needs to be added to that statement: “We landed on the Moon”! How amazing is that?!?

Just for some frame of reference: The Moon is 238,000 miles away (384,000 km), if you were driving 75 miles per hour it would take you 3,100 hours. Keep in mind that’s speeding and you don’t get to pull over for any bathroom breaks or snacks!

Actually it took them more like five days to get there, so just dividing that out, that’s around 2,000 miles per hour (assume it took them a while to speed up and slow down).

When I was a kid, my mother purchased me a two record set of the mission. Lots of audio recordings of the launch and landing. I’m thinking there was some insert with a bunch of photos too. I played that a lot on my record player. I don’t have any idea what year she purchased that, but I’d say I was six or seven(?), and it was amazing to me!

It’s still amazing to me. Whenever I can watch a launch of some kind or another, I always turn on the TV and still get thrills and chills. I get chills just thinking about it as I’m writing this…

Apollo_11_bootprint.jpg
The sad part is we only landed six times and then we stopped.

Photos courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Day The Earth Stood Still – The Original

So I watched the 1951 version of The Day The Earth Stood Still last night and as I said last week it is still an amazing science fiction movie. I made Kelly sit through it so I was hoping it was as good as I remembered, it was (and she seemed to think so too).

The line this movie is the most famous for is

“Klaatu barada nikto”

It’s certainly not as mainstream as “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for”, but…

This was one of the first movie DVDs I ever purchased (maybe the first), it hit a good price on-line so I picked it up (I never bought movies for VHS but that’s about the time when I started for DVDs). I never watched it until now. THe sound was THX remastered and was very clear but the voices just weren’t as loud as the sound effects so if you turned it up to hear the next time the sound effects came on it was blaring. The good part was there wasn’t a lot where people were talking and there were effects.

One of my favorite quotes from the movie was

“I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason.”

It was definitely a thinking sci-fi movie…

Instant gratification: You can rent it from Amazon for your TiVo or from iTunes (but it’s only $7.50 to buy it from Amazon).

A Brief History of Time

I’ve been reading that A Brief History of Time has been made available in the public domain. Here is someone who converted it to several formats (web page, Palm reader, Microsoft reader, Acrobat), not all formats have images.

Found here at Palm 24/7.

What Sort of Intellectual Are You? – Meme

ScientificIntellectualYou’re a Scientific Intellectual!

Kind of expected but I even changed a few of my answers on the few that I couldn’t decide on to see if it would change, but still scored the same. I guess I pretty much answered enough in that direction so that my poetic or philosophical answers were still out weighed.

What Sort of Intellectual Are You? brought to you by Quizilla

Found at UltraBlog.

Rag Doll Physics

So this is a little disturbing, yet somehow compelling. Grab the doll and drag/throw it (or it’ll seem like much isn’t going on). Even when the screen refresh rate slows down it seems to keep the momentum (literally) going.

Stolen (title and all) from Rori.

What is something scientists need to invent? – Blogideas

I have two (2) thoughts off the top of my head:

  1. Some kind of magical wireless interactive communication system. For data and voice that reaches everywhere at a high speed and a cost effective price (for the data and the receiving hardware) for EVERYONE.
  2. Self-repairing roads! I think more places would build roads if they knew that nanotechnology (or something) could keep it repaired (and de-iced).

Sorry, I know it’s not world peace or something like that, but I was trying to be realistic!

From Blogideas!