Below the break is a photo of pages 9 and 10 from this morning’s Washington Post. I don’t particularly care about these articles, but look at the headlines. The name of Jesus Christ may have caught your eye as it did mine.
Wednesday was Ken Mattingly’s 85th birthday. As I pointed out ten years ago when he turned 75, and five years ago after he turned 80, this retired admiral is the youngest among the two dozen who ever ventured farther than low earth orbit, all explorers of the moon. Twelve of them landed and walked the lunar surface, and the other twelve like Mattingly orbited the moon (or looped around it in Haise and Swigert’s case). Five of his peers have died in the five years since Mattingly turned 80, so now four of the walkers are still alive, as are seven of the orbiters. The oldest of the living, Frank Borman, is 93, and none who have died lived past 88 years old.
Five years ago I wrote that we had a decade or so remaining before their feats passed into legend. At that time I had no expectation that any new astronauts will venture again even 1,000 miles above the earth’s surface before all the lunar astronauts will have died. That is still the current trajectory, but there is a chance it may not be so.
Something I have kept in mind: After Amundsen reached the south pole at the end of 1911 and Scott did so a month later, it was not until the austral spring of 1956 that anyone set foot at the south pole again. After a 45 year pause, the last second of southern latitude has been continuously manned for 63 years now.
For unknown reasons as I was replacing parking brake drum shoes (which were naught but useless rusted steel, and had so been for at least the two years I have owned the vehicle until I finally got around to doing something about them yesterday), it entered my mind to voice the BYU Cougar fight song as if recited by Dana Gioia. As the sounds issued forth, they actually fit the intent.
I was introduced to Dana Gioia through a link from this site to the Gently Hew Stone blog five years ago, for which I continue to be grateful. With Seamus Heaney dead, Gioia was what I needed. So I hope the following, though done in humor, may be recognized as coming from an admirer and not a mocker. I somewhat wish I could use a faux Gioia voice instead of my own all the time.
So, here it is:
If you liked that, here’s another take with different strengths and flaws:
Finally, that which is naturally the culmination of this indulgence:
Pity the babe whose mother, having assigned a pet the status of “child,” hasn’t demoted the animal now that she actually has a child.
The media reports of a deceased voter casting their ballot in Newton County are inaccurate.
James E. Blalock, Jr. passed away in 2006 and was purged from the Secretary of State database that year. His widow, Mrs. James E. Blalock, Jr. has always voted under that name and continued to do so through this year’s election. (more…)
The abstract quoted below estimates the child car seat benefit to cost ratio at 57 to 8,000. Does this count as two posts in a row here connecting with La Llorona?
“Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.”
http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_18141649
Steve Sailer asks “What will Mormons do post Romney?” (more…)
We watched “Empire of the Sun” over the weekend, which I last saw in a movie theater 25 years ago. (more…)
NASA will crash two craft orbiting the moon into a mountain and examine the dust that flies up.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/news/grail20121213.html
According to the Sacramento Bee, “Nevada health officials no longer will send psychiatric patients alone on buses to cities across the county.”
“The Bee’s investigation found that Rawson-Neal purchased Greyhound tickets for more than 1,500 patients since July 2008, dispatching people to every state in the continental United States”
Here’s a bunch of them at Millennial Star going on about their wish that the LDS Church would drop scouting.
“By a conservative estimate, current concentrations [of greenhouse gases] are trapping an extra amount of energy equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding across the face of the earth every day,” according to Justin Gillis writing for the New York Times
This is a rather inapt comparison because a nuclear bomb releases energy over an astonishingly short time time scale, in a concentrated area, and leaves its surroundings drastically altered. It’s effects are not incremental, not continuously distributed through the day, nor distributed across the entire face of the planet.
