Never heard it expressed quite so eloquently. I am a person of faith and I have my own spiritual walk, but public schools must teach empirical science, and only empirical science. What religious parties are attempting to do with public school curricula (i.e. teaching that evolution is only a theory, or promoting intelligent design) defies all logic.
Yesterday it was snake oil and LAS-I-CO tablets; today it’s the açaí berry and raspberry weight loss drops. Do yourselves a favor and stick to tested remedies. I don’t care if they are pharmaceutical or alternative… do some research and make sure you’re not taking some worthless camel ejecta just because a friend or a neighbor or Dr. Oz says it’s effective.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Alan Shepard, the first American in space and the fifth to walk on the moon, the only one of the Mercury 7 to do so.
I watched Project Mercury with amazement at the age of 10, as did all of America.
Project Mercury commemorative stamp mint sheet
Stamp detail
We watched one of the space program’s first nail-biters as John Glenn re-entered the atmosphere with his retropack still attached… controllers were worried that the capsule’s heat shield may have partially detached, and decided to allow re-entry without jettisoning the retrorockets so that the straps would help the heat shield stay on. As history records, the capsule returned to earth safely.
The Freedom 7 II Mercury Capsule 15B. Shepard had hoped to repeat his historic flight in this capsule, now in the Udvar-Hazy annex of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian, but NASA was by that time turning their attention to the Gemini program.
The original Freedom 7 capsule on display at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. The capsule is now on the road and will ultimately find a home at the Smithsonian some time in 2016.
Over 50 years after John Glenn’s historic flight in Friendship 7, the end of the space shuttle program means we now have no way of launching our own astronauts into space. The way things are going, it looks like private industry will be successful in coming up with new re-usable vehicles before our government ever gets back on the bandwagon. Somehow I think that’s sad, in light of the billions of dollars being wasted overseas on questionable military ventures and wasteful hardware programs.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Earth from satellites: Wikipedia
Earth from the moon: NASA
Earth and moon from 7.25 million miles (11.66 million km), taken by Voyager. September 18, 1977.
The Pale Blue Dot. 4 billion miles from earth. Voyager, Sep. 12, 1996
Seeing our planet from space has some interesting effects on people. This video about the “overview effect” is presented for your consideration.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
A tesseract, or a 4th-dimensional hypercube.
Just as the cube above is a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional object, this frame with its cubical central bubble is a 3-dimensional “shadow” of its 4th-dimensional counterpart. And it’s awesome.
Science gives me a hadron.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Found this GIF file the other day at a Russian picdump, and was pretty awestruck by what was going on:
A single search brought up the breathtaking video of what happens when a rocket sled traveling close to 700 mph meets a stationary object.
In effect, the vehicle, the sled, the 1-inch-thick steel plate behind the car, and a lot of the dirt simply cease to exist as we know them.
When emergency crews reached the site of United Airlines flight 93, they said there was almost nothing to recover; these sort of forces help to understand why. What we think of as solid objects are pretty much just liquid and gas at those speeds.
It also crossed my mind that the rocket-sled incident in “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” was pretty cheap compared to reality.
Scary.
The Old Wolf has spoken. 
Our local news station gives us the following forecast:
And AccuWeather adds insult to injury with this one:
Folks, it’s nowhere near 31° today. In Payson, the current temperature is 14°, because we’re sitting under one of these:
Image: The Deseret News
We live in a valley, and when a layer of warm air floats over, it caps the valley like a saucer on a bowl, trapping cold air (and ever-growing pollution) beneath it.
Image: waow.com
This is not uncommon in our area – we put up with it just about every year – but when it lasts a long time, it really sucks. People with respiratory issues are advised to stay inside, and it just keeps being cold, cold, cold.
The only thing that helps is a a low-pressure system which effectively “lifts the lid” and a good storm will scoop out the air, but we don’t look to get one of those until Thursday, and it will probably be a weak one.
Yuck.
On the upside, people at the ski resorts are enjoying divine weather, and many Utahns escape to the slopes as a respite for the cold hqiz below – which is good for the economy.
Marcel Leyat (1885-1986), born in Die, France, was an airplane designer and manufacturer. He began turning out airplanes in 1909. In 1919, he began manufacturing automobiles based on his experience with airplanes. The automobiles were built on the Quai de Grenelle in Paris.
Marcel Leyat in 1914
The first model was called the Hélica, also known as ‘The plane without wings’. The passengers sat behind each other as in an aircraft. The vehicle was steered using the rear wheels and the car was not powered by an engine turning the wheels, but by a giant propeller powered by an 8 bhp (6.0 kW) Scorpion engine. The entire body of the vehicle was made of plywood, and weighed just 250 kg (550 lb), which made it dangerously fast.
1921 Hélica at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris. (Found at Wikipedia)
In 1927, A Hélica reached the speed of 106 mph (171 km/h) at the Montlhéry circuit. Leyat continued to experiment with his Helica; he tried using propellers with two and four blades. Between 1919 and 1925, Leyat managed to sell 30 vehicles.
Hélica 2H, Series D21 (found at Frog Blog)
A page about Leyat (in French) can be found here.
This vehicle offers a practical solution for keeping bugs off your windshield; pedestrians who happen to encounter the Hélica would not fare well, I fear me.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
… and it didn’t even take 100 years. Those are smartphones there.
A Collector card from 1929
Credit: Museum für Kommunikation, Bern
It would seem that what the Jetsons represented as the 21st century is going to be more like the 24th… if we survive.
As a kid, 1984 seemed so far away… and the 21st century was an unthinkable dream. And now here we are; Big Brother is watching us in so many ways, and I still don’t have my flying car.
TANJ.
Playing in the World Game 
