moon traveller herald

MOON ALCHEMY - When the Apollo 8 astronauts were circling the moon on Christmas Eve 1968 I was probably having a little Christmas nuzzling with a girl resembling Monica Vitti. Attention to space mission detail was slipping, after the dedicated attention I’d applied in the young days of Mercury, umbilical days of Gemini, and heartbreak terror evening of Apollo 1. Viet Nam, riots and protests had taken the wind out of my stellar imaginings, as happened likewise for many others. Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Canned Heat and Velvet Underground (white light/feedback) were my soundtrack. I’d grown used to getting my space news on radio, and didn’t tune into TV for Apollo 8’s famed Christmas broadcast. Dad had just gotten home from a few weeks in the hospital with ulcers. (TV was Wasteland, and I almost missed the moon walk broadcast the next July). This all comes back in fits and starts, after viewing a Nova episode, “Apollo’s Daring Mission”. The moon project comes alive in this telling - th...

My son Jacob Vaughan and I look at some of the departed inkers, drawers and writers that went to comic book heaven in 2018.Astonishing Tail Spinners, they. - Jack Vaughan

James Burke came up in conversation the other day. You know, the British science reporter who hosted the late 1970s Connections TV series? On the show, he globe-hopped from one scene to the other, always wearing the same white leisure suit, weaving a tale of technological invention that would span disparate events - show for example, how the Jacquard loom or the Napoleonic semaphore system led to the mainframe or the fax machine. Its hard to pick up a popular science book these days that doesn't owe something to Connections. Burke of Connections had cosmic charisma - in his hands,  Everything is connected to Everything. You'll hear that again. Today I picked up Connections (the book that accompanied the series), looking, this being Christmas, illuminations. Not just the connections - but how the connections are connected. Cause its been a search for me over many years - I've stumbled and bumbled, but I have never been knocked on my heels more than this year, 2018....

On the fourth orbit, astronaut Bill Anders spotted the Earth emerging from behind the moon. He took a series of photos. This one has become an iconic image of the 1960s. pic.twitter.com/ByQg7YvlOU — Charles Apple (@charlesapple) December 24, 2018

Outta State, Man, Far Out.  Orbiting 11 billion miles from the sun, this tiny world offers additional clues in the search for the proposed Planet Nine. Think Pluto is far away? This new world is more than 3 times as far out. Thus, the discoverers call it Farout. https://t.co/xiuOl702Em — The New York Times (@nytimes) December 18, 2018

Growing out of academic and open source software efforts, the Grid was represented as a virtually distributed architecture where vast computing nodes worked on jobs as needed. Grid was an outgrowth of Utility computing.  Both terms were efforts to find analogies in the electrical power industry for hardware-software combos in the world of distributed computation. Grid never quite caught on. As it turns out, 'cloud' had the mystic revelatory power to launch a million apps.  READ MORE .

Riccardo Giacconi at 87. All I know is what I read in the obituary. But he certainly seems like quite a hero of astroscience. As described by Dennis Overbye, Giacconi’s scientific work took him  along the electromagnetic spectrum from X-rays, to visible light, to radio waves. It appears as though he was like Leslie Groves, the engineering father of the A-Bomb. That is, he drove (often) projects to success, ones that had a profound effect on our view of the universe. Giacconi came to the US in the 1950s having achieved his PhD. While studying cosmic rays at the University of Milan, HE studied at Princeton and Indiana. Arriving in Cambridge, Mass. in 1959, he became part of a consultancy that helped NASA detect X-Rays from high altitude nuclear bomb tests. He later helped create satellites that acted as Geiger counters a-wing, with the purpose to explore cosmic rays bouncing off the moon. They found something else instead - X-rays emanating from the constellation Scorpio. In the 1970...