The same super-fast laser technology that sent clear images of Mars back to Earth just cleared another hurdle closer to home by sending an image of the Mona Lisa to the surface of the moon and back again.
Scientists at NASA wanted to know whether they could use laser pulses to “communicate” with the lunar surface using the same tool that tracks the position of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The team sent a digitized version of Leonardo’s famously inscrutable signora from the Goddard Space Center in Maryland 240,000 miles up to a laser transmitter aboard the orbiting spacecraft. Pixels traveled one at a time and were adjusted for brightness by controlled delays in their arrival time. The team corrected errors in the image using common DVD and CD techniques.
Pretty much everybody knows what the Mona Lisa looks like, so maybe that’s why they picked her face, instead of, well, mine. Maybe NASA is hoping her name will be changed to Moona Lisa.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (explained above) began its lunar orbit nearly four years ago. Laser pulses beam down to the moon and then bounce back to form images of the surface. Like those startling pictures of Mars, laser technology is helping develop a crystal clear topographical map of the moon, including the tracks of two astronauts’ unsuccessful trek to the top of a crater and the site of a lost Russian rover.
The Mona Lisa’s trip to the moon is important because the image was sent at the same time as laser pulses that track the craft’s position—the first outer space conference call—and it sets the stage for future high-data transmissions between Earth and its satellite explorers.
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They were the intellectual power couple of the 20th century. Some have called Sartre the father of Existentialism. But perhaps it’s more accurate to call him the chief popularizer of the philosophical movement. And Simone de Beauvoir, she wrote The Second Sex, the sprawling 1949 tome that laid the intellectual foundation for second-wave feminism that exploded during the 1960s.
The two philosophers first became an item in October 1929, but it was never a traditional relationship. They neither married nor shared the same living quarters, and they famously had an open relationship. But, as de Beauvoir said, “The comradeship that welded our lives together made a superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves.”
They were a powerful couple, writes Louis Menand in The New Yorker, “with independent lives, who met in cafés, where they wrote their books and saw their friends at separate tables… but who maintained a kind of soul marriage.” Whatever your personal views, you need to consider this: The relationship worked for Sartre and de Beauvoir for 50 years.
Despite their celebrity, we’ve rarely come across footage of the two philosophers together. So we’re bringing you this — a rare clip from a 1967 documentary filmed at Sartre’s Montparnasse high-rise apartment, overlooking the cemetery where the two philosophers were eventually buried. Somewhat fittingly, we see the two intellectuals, but never in the same frame. You can purchase the complete film for educational use here.
S.G. Collins doesn’t trust the United States government. They “lie all the time, about all kinds of things,” he insists, “and if they haven’t lied to you today, maybe they haven’t had coffee yet.” Like some of those who express a similar distrust, he claims he has no way to verify that NASA landed on the moon in 1969. But unlike most of that subset, he doesn’t think the government could have pulled off a convincing hoax about it. In other words, America “did have the technical ability, not to mention the requisite madness, to send three guys to the moon and back. They did not have the technology to fake it on video.” Calmly, methodically, with a deadpan wit, Collins uses the thirteen minutes of Moon Hoax Not to explain exactly why, as improbable as the real moon landing sounds, a fake moon landing would have been downright impossible.
“The later you were born,” Collins says, “the more all-powerful movie magic seems.” Hollywood could now fake dozens of moon landings every day, but they didn’t always have that ability. Marshaling knowledge accrued over thirty years as a photographer, he addresses each of the points that moon-landing conspiracy theorists commonly cite as visual evidence of the supposed fraud. He also brings to bear facts from the history of video technology, such as 1969’s complete lack of the high-speed video cameras, needed to shoot the sort of slow motion necessary to create the illusion of low gravity. And what if they’d shot the entire Apollo 11 telecast on film instead? Collins also knows, and names, exactly the problems even the most ambitious, technologically advanced charlatans would have encountered, even—as in moon-landing hoax mockumentary Dark Side of the Moon—with Stanley Kubrick on their side.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It’s often remembered as the day the Sixties died. On December 6, 1969, the Rolling Stones and a group of West Coast bands put on a free concert at the Altamont Raceway near San Francisco. The concert was billed as “Woodstock West,” but instead of being another gathering of peace, love and music, it was more like a bad trip.
The event was hastily put together by the Stones to celebrate the end of their American tour, their first with guitarist Mick Taylor. The stage at the venue was unusually low and was situated at the bottom of a hill. To keep the audience of 300,000 people from engulfing the stage, someone had the bright idea of enlisting the Hells Angels motorcycle gang to form a security cordon around the stage in exchange for (essentially) all the beer they could drink.
As the concert descended into chaos, the Hells Angels beat people with pool cues and motorcycle chains. A guitarist and singer for the Jefferson Airplane, Marty Balin, was knocked unconscious. When a man in the audience brandished a pistol during an altercation while the Stones were onstage, he was stabbed and beaten to death by members of the gang.
The whole sorry episode is captured in Gimme Shelter, the classic documentary by the brothers Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. The film was released in 1970 and can be seen above in its entirety. Gimme Shelter contains elements of a typical rock and roll documentary, with footage of the Stones on the road and playing a concert at Madison Square Garden in New York. But the main focus is Altamont. The Maysles brothers hired a large team of cameramen for the event, including filmmaker Robert Elfstrom, Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt and a young George Lucas.
Gimme Shelter is a fascinating record of the Sixties counterculture as it was falling apart. The last third of the picture is painful to watch but difficult to turn away from. The hubris and naiveté of the time are captured in a scene before the event, when Mick Jagger tells a group of reporters what Altamont is all about: “It’s creating a sort of microcosmic society, which sets an example to the rest of America as to how one can behave in large gatherings.”
Pope John Paul II had a mixed legacy. Some good, some bad. But whatever your take on him, you have to give him this — the Pontiff could swing a good bat. Visiting California in 1987, the 67 year-old Pope headed to the batting cages and started lining singles and doubles, maybe even a few triples. As the video proceeds, we discover that the switch-hitting Pope had previously honed his batting skills in the Vatican Softball League. The clip concludes with the gracious hosts giving the Pope the royal treatment, treating him to a nice 1980s-style energy drink in a styrofoam cup. Pretty posh. h/t Metafilter
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It seems like not a week goes by without The New York Times writing a gushing profile about Coursera. It’s hard to believe, but back during another day, there was another darling of the open education movement. And his name was Walter Lewin. In a 2007 profile, the same New York Times called him “an international Internet guru” and highlighted his wildly popular physics courses recorded at MIT. Those courses — find them in our collection of Free Online Physics Courses, part of our collection of 825 Free Online Courses — were widely distributed through YouTube and iTunes. Now the MOOCs have come along, and Lewin isn’t letting himself get swept to the side. On February 18, Lewin and his MIT colleagues will launch a new course on edX called Electricity and Magnetism. Drawing on Lewin’s famous lecture series, Electricity and Magnetism will run 17 weeks, requiring students to put in about 9–12 hours per week. You can reserve your free seat in the course today and watch Lewin do what he does best.
Above you’ll find find a clip from Wired In, a television show produced in the early eighties meant to orient viewers in the midst of that heady era of technological innovation. Alas, the program never aired; only a demo reel and some raw footage survive. But those remains feature no less a comedic luminary than Bill Murray, who even 32 years ago must have been quite a catch for a pilot like this. Though not known for his tech savvy, he has built a reputation for making anything sound hilarious by virtue of his persona alone. This skill he applies to a parody of the everyman’s anti-technology diatribe, as commonly heard then as it is today — or as it no doubt was 32 years before the shoot, or will be 32 years from now. “Who thinks up all this high-tech stuff anyway?” Murray demands. “They start with the digital watches. Tells you the time in numbers, the exact time to the second. 3:12 and 42 seconds. Who needs to know that stuff? I don’t!”
Keep watching, and that Wired In clip heads to Las Vegas to demonstrate for us the wonder of solid-state cartridge software for the Texas Instruments Home Computer. But if you’d rather marvel at more of Murray’s particular kind of craft, watch the full seven minutes of rant takes above. His riffs, seemingly scripted as well as improvised, of varying moods and pitched at varying energy levels, take him from those digital watches to automated car factories to R2-D2 to talking dashboards to the one idea he does like, robots that ride alongside you in your car’s passenger’s seat. “You know what?” he concludes, “They’ll never do it — because it makes too much sense.” The makers of Wired In clearly had a presciently sardonic attitude about the coming waves of tech-related anxiety; the pilot also includes a jab at the notion of video game addiction from “Pac-Man freak” Lily Tomlin.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In a previous post, we brought you what is likely the only appearance on film of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—an interview in which he talks of Sherlock Holmes and spiritualism. Although Conan Doyle created one of the most hardnosed rational characters in literature, the author himself later became converted to a variety of supernatural beliefs, and he was taken in by a few hoaxes. One such famous hoax was the case of the so-called “Cottingley Fairies.” As you can see from the photo above (from 1917), the case involved what Conan Doyle believed was photographic evidence of the existence of fairies, documented by two young Yorkshire girls, Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths (the girl in the photo above). According to The Haunted Museum, the story of Doyle’s involvement goes something like this:
In 1920, Conan Doyle received a letter from a Spiritualist friend, Felicia Scatcherd, who informed of some photographs which proved the existence of fairies in Yorkshire. Conan Doyle asked his friend Edward Gardner to go down and investigate and Gardner soon found himself in the possession of several photos which showed very small female figures with transparent wings. The photographers had been two young girls, Elsie Wright and her cousin, Frances Griffiths. They claimed they had seen the fairies on an earlier occasion and had gone back with a camera and photographed them. They had been taken in July and September 1917, near the Yorkshire village of Cottingley.
The two cousins claimed to have seen the fairies around the “beck” (a local term for “stream”) on an almost daily basis. At the time, they claimed to have no intention of seeking fame or notoriety. Elsie had borrowed her father’s camera on a host Saturday in July 1917 to take pictures of Frances and the beck fairies.
Elsie’s father, a skeptic, filed the photos away as a joke, but her mother, Polly Wright, believed, and brought the images to Gardner (there were only two at first, not “several”), who circulated them through the British spiritualist community. When Conan Doyle saw them in 1920, he gave each girl a camera and commissioned them to take more. They produced three additional prints. The online Museum of Hoaxesdetails each of the five photos from the two sessions with text from Edward Gardner’s 1945 Theosophical Society publication The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel.
These photos swayed thousands over the course of the century, but arch-skeptic James Randi seemingly debunked them for good when he pointed out that the fairies were ringers for figures in the 1915 children’s book Princess Mary’s Gift Book, and that the prints show discrepancies in exposure times that clearly point to deliberate manipulation. The two women, Elsie and Frances, finally confessed in the early 1980s, fifty years after Conan Doyle’s involvement, that they had faked the photos with paper cutouts. Watch Randi and Elsie Wright discuss the trickery above.
The daughter and granddaughter of Griffiths possess the original prints and one of Conan Doyle’s cameras. Both once believed that the fairies were real, but as the host explains, they were not simply credulous fools. Throughout much of the twentieth century, people looked at the camera as a scientific instrument, unaware of the ease with which images could be manipulated and staged. But even as Frances admitted to the fakery of the first four photos, she insisted that number five was genuine. Everyone on the show agrees, including the host. Certainly Conan Doyle and his friend Edward Gardner thought so. In the latter’s description of #5, he wrote:
This is especially remarkable as it contains a feature quite unknown to the girls. The sheath or cocoon appearing in the middle of the grasses had not been seen by them before, and they had no idea what it was. Fairy observers of Scotland and the New Forest, however, were familiar with it and described it as a magnetic bath, woven very quickly by the fairies and used after dull weather, in the autumn especially. The interior seems to be magnetised in some manner that stimulates and pleases.
I must say, I remain seriously unconvinced. Even if I were inclined to believe in fairies, photo number five looks as phony to me as numbers one through four. But the Antiques Roadshow appearance does add a fun new layer to the story and an air of mystery I can’t help but find intriguing, as Conan Doyle did in 1920, if only for the historical angle of the three generations of Griffiths who held onto the legend and the artifacts. Oh, and the appraisal for the five original photos and Arthur Conan Doyle’s camera? Twenty-five to thirty-thousand pounds—not too shabby for an adolescent prank.
Josh Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness
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