In December of 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to leave our home planet and travel to another body in space. But as crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders all later recalled, the most important thing they discovered was Earth.
Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8’s historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. [See the original photo here.] Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts. The visualization draws on numerous historical sources, including the actual cloud pattern on Earth from the ESSA‑7 satellite and dozens of photographs taken by Apollo 8, and it reveals new, historically significant information about the Earthrise photographs. It has not been widely known, for example, that the spacecraft was rolling when the photos were taken, and that it was this roll that brought the Earth into view.
The visualization establishes the precise timing of the roll and, for the first time ever, identifies which window each photograph was taken from. The key to the new work is a set of vertical stereo photographs taken by a camera mounted in the Command Module’s rendezvous window and pointing straight down onto the lunar surface. It automatically photographed the surface every 20 seconds. By registering each photograph to a model of the terrain based on LRO data, the orientation of the spacecraft can be precisely determined.
This video above is public domain and can be downloaded here. In 1972, astronauts took another famous picture of the Earth, known as The Big Blue Marble. You can watch a film (“Overview”) that commemorates that photograph and explores the whole concept of seeing the Earth from afar. And, of course, you should always see the Carl Sagan-narrated film, The Pale Blue Dot, too.
I’m not saying Man of Steel depressed me, but I found myself pining for Richard Donner’s sense of humor recently as I watched Zack Snyder’s take on Superman for the first time. I thought of a scene—Superman has to go through immigration once he’s discovered. They won’t let him in. He’s too high-minded to resist, so he sleeps in an airport waiting room for six months. Plenty of dramatic potential there.
Less preposterous but still absurd is the story around the document above, signed by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins after they landed from the first manned trip to the moon. The three astronauts came down in the Pacific Ocean and were taken to Honolulu on July 24, 1969, where they supposedly signed the immigration form, declaring a cargo of moon rocks and dust.
The form, NASA spokesperson John Yembrick told Space.com, is authentic. And, he says, it was a joke. He does not, however, say exactly when the form was signed, either on the day the crew splashed down or sometime afterward. They did not actually arrive in Honolulu until the 26th. After their return,
The astronauts were trapped inside a NASA trailer as part of a quarantine effort just in case they brought back any germs or disease from the moon. They even wore special biological containment suits when they walked out on the deck of the USS Hornet after being retrieved.
NASA transported them to Houston, quarantine trailer and all, and they emerged from isolation three weeks later.
Astronauts these days mostly just need a shower when they touch down, although internet savvy International Space Station astronaut Chris Hadfield did recently tell some customs related stories on a Reddit AMA—maybe nothing so weird as the current space snorkeling up there, but still a pretty great read.
Several years back, the RSA (Royal Society of the Arts) created a series of distinctive animated shorts where heavy-hitter intellectuals presented big ideas, and a talented artist rapidly illustrated them on a whiteboard. Some of those talks featured the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Steven Pinker and Barbara Ehrenreich. Now RSA presents a new video series created in an entirely different aesthetic. Above, you can watch what will hopefully be the first of many “espresso shots for the mind.” This clip features Dr. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, providing some quick insights into the difference between sympathy and empathy, and explaining why empathy is much more meaningful. To learn more about The Power of Empathy, you can watch Brown’s complete RSA lecture here. You can also watch her very popular TED Talk on The Power of Vulnerability here.
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At least since that 17th century architect of the scientific revolution, Sir Francis Bacon (who was mostly right), people have been making predictions about the technologies and social advancements of the future. And since Bacon, scientists and futuristic writers have been especially in demand during times of great change and uncertainty, such as at the turn of the last century. In 1900, civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed to have surveyed “the most learned and conservative minds in America… the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning.”
Specifying advances likely to occur 100 years thence, “before the dawn of 2001,” Watkins culled 28 predictions about such things as travel and the transmission of information over great distances, biological and genetic mutations, and the domestic comforts of the average consumer. Several of the predictions are very Baconian indeed—as per the strange list at the end of Bacon’s science fiction fragment New Atlantis, a text obsessed with altering the appearance of the natural world for no particular reason other than that it could be done. Watkins’ list includes such predictions as “Peas as Large as Beets,” “Black, Blue, and Green Roses,” and “Strawberries as Large as Apples.” Some are Baconian in more sinister ways, and these are also a bit more accurate. Take the below, for example:
There will be No Wild Animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fattened hog of to-day. A century ago the wild hog could outrun a horse. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.
I would defer to ecologists and meat industry watchdogs to confirm my intuitions, but it does seem that some of this, excepting the extermination of vermin and horns, has come to pass or is very likely in regard to several species. Another prediction, this one about our own species, is laughably optimistic:
Everybody will Walk Ten Miles. Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.
We’re much closer to the future of Pixar’s Wall‑E than anything resembling this scenario (unless you live in the world of Crossfit). Another prediction is both dead on and dead wrong at once. Claiming that there will be “from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in the Americas and its possessions by the lapse of another century” did in fact turn out to be almost uncannily accurate—current estimates are somewhere around 300,000,000. The “possessions” alluded to, however, display the attitude of blithe Monroe doctrine expansionism that held the nation in its sway at the turn of the century. The prediction goes on to say that most of the “South and Central American republics would be voted into the Union by their own people.” A few more of Watkins’ predictions, some prescient, some preposterous:
Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world.
Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles.
Hot and Cold Air from Spigots. Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times.
Ready-Cooked Meals will be Bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of to-day [see the above Wall‑E reference]
There will be No C, X, or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.
Aeriel War-Ships and Forts on Wheels. Giant guns will shoot twenty-five miles or more, and will hurl anywhere within such a radius shells exploding and destroying whole cities.
How Children will be Taught. A university education will be free to every man and woman.
Ah, if only that last one had come true! To read all of Watkins predictions in detail, click on the image above for a larger, readable, version of the full article.
As an arts major who doodled my way through every required science course in high school and college, I am deeply gratified by filmmaker Michel Gondry’s approach to documenting the ideas of Noam Chomsky. Having filmed about three hours worth of interviews with the activist, philosopher, and father of modern linguistics in a sterile MIT conference room, Gondry headed back to his charmingly analog Brooklyn digs to spend three years animating the conversations. It’s nice to see a filmmaker of his stature using books to jerry-rig his camera set up. At one point, he huddles on the floor, puzzling over some sequential drawings on 3‑hole punch paper. Seems like the kind of thing most people in his field would tackle with an iPad and an assistant.
Gondry may have felt intellectually dwarfed by his subject, but there’s a kind of genius afoot in his work too. Describing the stop-motion technique he used for Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, he told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, “I have a lightbox, and I put paper on it, and I animate with Sharpies, color Sharpies. And I have a 16-millimeter camera that is set up on a tripod and looks down, and I take a picture. I do a drawing and take a picture.”
A pretty apt summation—watch him in action above—but the curiosity and humanity so evident in such features as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mindand The Science of Sleep is a magical ingredient here, too. He attributes biological properties to his Sharpie markers, and takes a break from some of Chomsky’s more complex thoughts to ask about his feelings when his wife passed away. He doesn’t seem to mind that he might seem a bit of a schoolboy in comparison, one whose talents lie beyond this particular professor’s scope.
As Chomsky himself remarks in the trailer, below, “Learning comes from asking why do things work like that, why not some other way?”
Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? is available on iTunes.
Ayun Halliday puts her lifelong penchant for doodling to good use in her award-winning, handwritten, illustrated zine, The East Village Inky. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Last month, the UCSD Neurosciences Graduate Program held a little party at a local bar, and the invitation (above) came in the form of a video based on Daft Punk’s popular video/song “Get Lucky” (below). Writes a local San Diego newspaper: “In sweet, funny and saucy ways, [the video] shows the stress and madness grad students go through in trying to come up with new data for scientific studies. The students released the video to coincide with this week’s Society of Neuroscience meeting at the San Diego Convention Center.” Enjoy the clip and find more grad school oddities below.
Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein, the chair of Columbia University’s Biological Sciences department, rejects any metaphor that likens the goal of science to completing a puzzle, peeling an onion, or peeking beneath the surface to view an iceberg in its entirety.
Such comparisons suggest a future in which all of our questions will be answered. In Dr. Firestein’s view, every answer can and should create a whole new set of questions, an opinion previously voiced by playwright George Bernard Shaw and philosopher Immanuel Kant.
A more apt metaphor might be an endless cycle of chickens and eggs. Or, as Dr. Firestein posits in his highly entertaining, 18-minute TED talk above, a challenge on par with finding a black cat in a dark room that may contain no cats whatsoever.
According to Firestein, by the time we reach adulthood, 90% of us will have lost our interest in science. Young children are likely to experience the subject as something jolly, hands-on, and adventurous. As we grow older, a deluge of facts often ends up trumping the fun. Principles of Neural Science, a required text for Firestein’s undergraduate Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience course weighs twice as much as the average human brain.
The majority of the general public may feel science is best left to the experts, but Firestein is quick to point out that when he and his colleagues are relaxing with post-work beers, the conversation is fueled by the stuff that they don’t know.
Hence the “pursuit of ignorance,” the title of his talk.
Given the educational context, his choice of wording could cause a knee-jerk response. He takes it to mean neither stupidity, nor “callow indifference,” but rather the “thoroughly conscious” ignorance that James Clerk Maxwell, the father of modern physics, dubbed the prelude to all scientific advancement.
I bet the 19th-century physicist would have shared Firestein’s dismay at the test-based approach so prevalent in today’s schools.
The ignorance-embracing reboot he proposes at the end of his talk is as radical as it is funny.
If you want to get familiar with the material covered in Hadfield’s book, I’d encourage you to listen to his recent interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
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