Like natural oddities?

Interesting little article.

7 Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World | WebEcoist | Green Living.

Apollo 11 – Great Gallery

Click the picture for an amazing gallery. You won’t regret it.

Can’t… stop… thinking about the moon.

40 years ago yesterday we landed and stepped foot on the moon. I get a little over-excited about this sort of thing, just ask my coworkers.

Naturally, today I started reading Andrew Chaikin’s account of the Apollo program, A Man On The Moon. It might just be my favorite book ever… and I’m only on page 23. These two sentences struck me – hard.

The moon program had grown into an effort whose size and complexity dwarfed even the Manhattan Project. At aerospace contractors around the country, 400,000 people were hard at work on the moonships for Project Apollo.

We touched down on the moon in 1969, so if you think that NASA somehow used technology to remotely guide the probe down to the surface or that onboard computers made flying somewhat autonymous, you’d be wrong. Neil Armstrong piloted the lunar module from orbit to the moon’s surface. He was a talented pilot who needed to utilize all his skills and training.

Imagine the pressure he must have felt. 400,000 people whose jobs, careers, and lives were dedicated to the mission and they left it’s ultimate success in the hands of one man. Amazing.

The Apollo 11 mission was a daisy-chain of events that could have easily unraveled. But it didn’t. Never has humankind set such lofty goals and met them. Why be content with what we accomplished? Why not strive for more? NASA, if you happen to read this… Let’s go to Mars. I volunteer.

Apollo 11

Ever have one of those days where you feel like giving up? (Not suicide!) Where you feel like you will never accomplish what you want to?

When something seems impossible, remind yourself that…

WE WENT TO THE MOON. THE MOON! THE MOOOOOON!!!

[There is no font big enough or bold enough for what I just stated.]

40 years ago this morning Saturn V took off, circled the earth a few times, and then bee-lined it for the moon. Not bad for a day-trip.

The Saturn V rocket breaking the sound barrier (see that cloud of condensation around its neck?). There are people perched at the top of that rocket!

No wires necessary

In the picture below, those glowing rods are flourescent bulbs, they are lit, and they arent plugged in to anything. Cool! Click here for more pictures and a better explanation as to how this works.

Human beings: beautifully insignificant

You are looking at one of the most eye-opening, paradigm-shifting photographs ever taken. It changed my life.

Without context, this image is a shoddy piece of photography. The photo is notoriously called the “pale blue dot” and was made famous by scientist, science advocate, and supercool Carl Sagan.

So why so wonderful?

That little pixel is Earth! The picture was taken by Voyager 1. Launched in 1977, it turned around in 1990 (after traveling 3.7 BILLION miles -  as far away as Pluto) and snapped a photo of our home.

Carl says it best:

…you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known."

I honestly get a little bit choked up.

Seed: The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds

The amount of time the Earth has been around is too large to comprehend. Life as we tend to know it – a wide variety of multicellular plants and animals – is actually relatively new in the grand scheme of things. And the amount of time humans have lived on Earth? A quick blink at the very end. I like how this video puts things in perspective. Watch: The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds.

Anti-evolution bill in Iowa

NOOOOOOOOOOOO. I suppose it had to happen eventually. Creationists are trying to pass a sneakily-worded bill. It goes a little something like this:

It is therefore the intent of the general assembly that this Act be construed to expressly protect the affirmative right and freedom of every instructor at the elementary, secondary, and postsecondary level to objectively present scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution in connection with teaching any prescribed curriculum regarding chemical or biological evolution.

Basically it aims to give all teachers the ability to teach whatever they want in regards to evolution… essentially bringing religion into the classroom.

It’s kind of like a history teacher denying the holocaust.

Just because a teacher chooses to ignore all the evidence doesn’t mean you can infect the minds of all our students with your ignorance.

It will never pass, but I still hate to see this in my own state.

See the full article: Anti-evolution bill in Iowa – The Panda’s Thumb.

Happy Darwin Day…

…a day late. I’ve always respected Charles Darwin because he looked at the world around him and came up with an idea that was so simple and yet so novel. Evolution via natural selection is probably the biggest paradigm shift to ever occur in the biological sciences.

Darwin was the first to clearly articulate how all the diversity of life on Earth could have arisen without invoking a supernatural designer. There was so much evidence to support evolution that it was well-accepted before the discovery of DNA. Today, DNA evidence soundly supports DNA evidence confirmed. Evolution is not at all controversial within the scientific community.

Saying “I don’t believe in evolution” is like saying “I don’t believe that viruses cause colds.” Fine, you are entitled to your opinion… but what you say directly contradicts the evidence.

Natural selection and evolution are so poorly understood by most that I might have to sometime do a longer post on it… but not now.

Click to enlarge. Love the last pane...

A cornographic video

Good always has good stuff. Like this video shuck full of corn statistics. Worth a watch.