It’s Thursday, which means, as we know from Rebecca Black, that tomorrow is Friday. On this day in 814 (supposedly), Charlemagne died in Aachen. In 1521, the Diet of Worms began—a horrible though effective way to lose weight. (I’ll be here all week, folks.) On this day in 1813, Pride and Prejudice was published in England, and, in 1956, Elvis Presley first appeared on television. For you Canadians, it was on this day in 1965 that the design of the current Canadian Flag was approved. On this day in 1986, all seven astronauts on the Challenger Space Shuttle perished in an explosion; a sight I remember well as I was watching the launch on television. Finally, this year is the fortieth anniversary of The Selfish Gene, though I can’t name exactly which day saw its appearance; Matt Ridley wrote a nice appreciation of the book in the latest Nature. OUP is publishing a gussied-up edition with a new afterword by Dawkins, and is also reissuing, with a new cover, other Dawkins books and also Why Evolution is True. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dissimulating again. . .
A: What are you doing up there?
Hili: I’m checking whether the seeds for the birds got soaked.
Ja: Hili, co ty tam robisz?
Hili: Sprawdzam, czy ziarenka ptaszkom nie zamokły.
Leon is still on his Mountain Holiday, but I’m not quite sure if he’s taking long hikes. He is, however, going out in the snow on his leash. Notice how nonchalantly he stills along an icy ledge!
Leon: It’s time to stretch my bones.
Lagniappe: Reader jsp sends us a numinous photograph from Doc Hackenbush’s Twi**er feed:
When we talk of anniversaries it seems a bit strange. How can we equate a day from the old style calendar with than in a modern one? Britain retained the old Julian calendar after much of the continent had updated to the Gregorian, so there was an infamous 11 day leap forward, while in Russia the October revolution was in November…
Charlemagne – that great ethnic cleanser…
Which reminds me of… biorhythms. Remember them?
IIRC there were (presumably still are) 23, 28 and 33-day ‘cycles’ the body went through. (This is presumably genuine).
What was bogus was the conclusion that you shouldn’t make important decisions on days when your biorhythms coincided and – this is the really bogus bit – measuring them all from your date of birth. You could buy ‘biorhythm calculators’.
What? – and my biorhythms haven’t slipped one day in xxx years? I’ve been round the world on a ship and crossed the International Date Line – should I add a day or not?
Haven’t heard of them for years, though. Less useful than pet rocks.
cr
Damn – I knew I’d forgotten to do something before taking a jar full of a vigorously active roundworm which I acquired in Africa (probably). I really should have taken photos and videos before taking it to the quack for investigation.
Sorry – is it breakfast time?
Have you lost any weight?
Wikipedia doesn’t say if Luther lost weight but it did say he had to flea Worms and hide at Wartburg castle. I assume he lost some sleep over the whole thing, but he survived to go on translating the bible into German.
No weight loss – but a little discomfort, and a LOT of discomfort when I saw what was lurking in the pan.
That’s a good one Hili…we believe that.
Always remember where you were when certain events happened. When that Space Shuttle explosion occurred in 1986, I was on the road in Japan, halfway from Tokyo to Misawa. Saw a replay at a gas station.
I heard about it on the clock-radio alarm just as I was waking up. When the shuttle first started I used to watch all the take-offs and landings live because something would obviously go wrong sooner or later, but they were always scheduled for the wee hours (Sydney time) and often much delayed, so I gave it up. It was shocking and sad, but not unexpected by any reasonable means. That morning I drew a cartoon of seven stars in a shuttle-shaped outline captioned ‘Earth’s first sky burials’, but later learned that the bodies were recovered.
I’m probably the only American who didn’t learn about the Challenger explosion until several months after it happened. I was camping on a Mexican mountain for half a year doing bird photography. Little or no outside contact. When I left the forest (in May 1986, I think)I picked up a US newspaper somewhere and started reading. One article was about “NASA’s third launch failure of the year” and there was a throwaway line at the end saying something like “this follows the failure of ???? and the Challenger.” That throwaway line knocked me over.
There were many other throwaway lines in that paper which hinted at major world events I missed. “Marcos applies for visa”…He had his own country, what would he need a visa for? Ah…the Aquino revolution! Another one I still recall was “Radiation levels fall in Finland”…what??? Ah, Chernobyl.
Oh, just a side note on Marcos. I was living in Hawaii when the U.S. flew him and the wife out of the PI and he ended up staying in Hawaii until he died I think. One of the first things they did when they got off the plane at Hickam AFB was take them shopping at the BX.
I was in high school when the Challenger exploded. To help put the times in perspective for kids today…the rumor mill instantly assumed that the Russians were responsible. This being California, our “get under your desks” drills served double duty — earthquakes and nuclear holocaust. Hewlett Packard had some major manufacturing centers not far away so we all assumed we’d be goners.
Today, of course, the existential crises are climate change and peak oil…but, ironically, both are most likely to manifest as a repeat of the global recession caused by the oil price shocks of the ’70s leading to a renewed cold war that would bring us right back to where we were in the ’80s, with the big wonder being whether or not the cold war would heat up again.
…and people wonder why I’ve given up paying close attention to the news….
b&
One item of news you might like – the cost of solar panels has been dropping 10% per year and continues to do so.
That, and batteries (and battery-dependent technology such as electric vehicles) are on a similar trajectory. If thereâs to be hope for our civilization, thatâs where it lies. And there is hope…but weâre not exactly embracing alternatives to oil or seriously considering population control, so thereâs lots of cause for pessimism.
b&
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Solar panel costs have tracked something called an “experience curve”. This is a bit of industrial numerology that posits that doubling the cumulative production of some bit of technology decreases the unit cost by X% (for some X that depends on the technology; in other words, it’s a power law.) For solar panels X = 20%, and this has been true for many doublings.
Why this works isn’t at all clear (it may just be a self-fulfilling prophecy), but projecting it into future we can expect solar panel costs to decline by another factor of four or more by the time solar is providing a major fraction of the world’s energy needs. (Currently, cumulative PV installations are maybe 1/500th of world electricity generation, so there’s plenty of room for more doublings.) Not only would this be great for global warming, but it would be great for consumers too, since that cost would be remarkably low.
We are around the same age and I was in high school too but for some reason home from school. I either didn’t have class or I was sick but I was at home watching when it happened. I may have turned on the news after it happened, I can’t remember.
But being a Canadian who grew up under PM Trudeau (the current PM Trudeau’s dad), I never thought the Russians were to blame and probably the thought never crossed the mind of most Canadians. We knew, Canada would be physically in the middle of an air strike and that the US would shoot down missiles over us and the Russians would nuke our industrial areas so we were pretty much convinced we were screwed.
But, we didn’t think the Russians were as evil as they were portrayed to be….or maybe that was just me.
It was probably a reaction from reading Readers Digest that convinced me the Russians weren’t so evil.
That is, Readers Digest had this total phobia about the horrors of Communism (probably because it was atheistic), so once I started realising that Readers Digest was full of bunk, I concluded the Russophobia was bunk too.
Also, the Vietnam War – didn’t say much about Russia, but quite a lot (and not good) about the US…
But as for the Challenger – never crossed my mind that anyone might have done it deliberately.
cr
Birds from seeds seems like a good association. Hili is going to be upset in spring when the birds ‘rooted’ out of her reach.
Strictly speaking, Challenger didn’t explode. The stack came apart and the orbiter disintegrated as it was tipped sideways into the supersonic airflow.
The external tank’s propellant made a nice fireball, but that isn’t what destroyed the orbiter. And the SRBs survived the breakup still firing until their range safety charges were activated a short time later, rupturing their casings.
I thought it was one of the SRBs (solid rocket boosters?) that failed? O-rings and all that?
cr
The joint on one of the SRBs leaked, allowing hot gas to impinge upon the strut connecting the SRB to the external tank. When that failed, the SRB pivoted, puncturing the tank, causing the propellants to react and the tank to fail. At this point the orbiter (which hangs off the tank) was tossed aside and broke apart.
The SRBs, including the one with the leak, continued on. The casings of the SRBs are made of very high strength steel (“maraging steel”), so the leaking one didn’t rupture on its own even though escaping gas was slowly enlarging the leak.
Thanks for the clarification.
I guess this is an example of how misconceptions can arise (in this case mine) –
1. Challenger exploded
2. The cause was failure of a SRB O-ring (I think we’ve all heard of Feynman’s ice water demonstration)
The natural conclusion (but wrong) was that the SRB blew up.
cr
The SRBs destruct signal was sent at 110 seconds into the flight (the breakup occurred around 73 seconds.) The burn time of an SRB was 127 seconds. If the leak had occurred on the other side of the SRB it’s possible it would have held together until it burned out and the vehicle could have survived (although perhaps they would have been ordered to perform a highly risky return-to-launch-site abort.)
All of this makes it sound like we were a bit too much in a hurry. The political (and other) pressures to keep up the momentum of our space exploration effort, it seems to me, was the Achilles heel. A little more patience and we might have averted several disasters.