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!

My summer: a tale of two cities

Much of the summer has been spent shuffling between Ames and Des Moines, between work at the science center and donations at the plasma center, between maintaining a social life in Ames (as well as natkaps) and starting a new one in Des Moines…

Des Moines, IA. The biggest little city in the world?

I feel like I just got moved in with Joe in Des Moines, but jeez, it has been over two months (truth be told, I’m not done moving). Hell, sometimes I feel like I just got moved in in Ames with Bret, but our year-long lease is about to expire!

I'm at that desk under the big purple sign. Working hard. Solving problems. Making new ones. Hi, I'm Adam.

I’m waxing nostalgic. But that’s not what this is about.

I wanted to write to say that this blog is being somewhat repurposed. Sure, I might still share cool stuff I find from time to time. Sure, there will probably be times when I go months without an update. So what will change?

I’m about to start medical school, which I’m sure will be a grand adventure and extreme challenge. I’d like to write about it. I will attempt to:

• keep it concise.
• not get whiny.
• not sugarcoat.
• provide insight.
• provide updates (but not journal).

If any aspiring med students run across my site, I hope they find my accounts to either aspire them further or scare them away. Hopefully not the latter.

And so it begins.

Jeshua Cottontail

Tis the season…

Adam on Adams

Putting together a single “best of Ryan Adams” CD is hard – lots of great songs to choose from. Nonetheless, I decided to try. I realize that this list could change from day to day or from mood to mood, but it’s still pretty solid.

What would you add/delete? Does anyone who stops by this site listen to Ryan Adams?

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.

Standing up for gay marriage

It’s a hot topic that stirs so much controversy and I will never understand why. Here’s my two cents:

People are generally against gay marriage for religious reasons. I could rant here, mostly about how an ancient book sprinkled with acts of pure evil shouldn’t ever be used to justify moral beliefs, and go further and state that our morals aren’t rooted in religion, but I won’t get into it. When people use religion to define marriage, they use religion to justify their homophobia. This very day, there are people protesting Iowa’s decision on the steps of the courthouse. I will take the anti-gay protests seriously as soon as people start protests about businesses being open on the sabbath, a sin just as sure to send you toward eternal hellfire (if you are in to that sort of imaginary stuff).

Opponents also use the fact that two people of the same sex can’t naturally conceive a child to bash gay marriage. As if the sole reason for marriage was procreation. It’s not. Besides, Mother Earth could use a reduction in the birth rate of the human species, but I digress.

I take no issue with same-sex couples marrying and having children. They could artificially conceive or adopt. The process of doing either of those things requires lots of proof that the couple is caring and emotionally able to care for children – heterosexual couples, on the other hand, can reproduce at will (or accidentally!), sometimes at the expense of the child’s well-being.

I’ve probably never felt the love that two people who are ready to marry feel. But I cant imagine feeling that way but not being able to act on it.

I am for any act of legislation (or removal of legislation) that allows for more people to be happier, provided that it does no harm. In other words, extending rights to others (so long as our own rights aren’t revoked) is okay. It’s noble.

Life is too short for these silly arguments. I am happy with the decision that Iowa’s courts made, and hope other states follow suit.

[For more on why this isn’t a big deal and not worth fighting about, see this post, and really take the time to let it sink in.]

Also, feel free to comment. I’ve enabled anonymous posting.

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.

Baracknophobia

This is worth a watch: Baracknophobia on the Daily Show.

P.S. The only thing worse than Sean Hannity is Glenn Beck.