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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent independent analysis you don’t find elsewhere. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn’t influenced by donations by established companies or political movements. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:

 

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How a recording-studio mishap shaped ’80s music

An evening pause: Some technical rock music history.

Hat tip lazurus long.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

4 comments

  • wayne

    Suzanne Vega Records Tom’s Diner to an Edison Wax Cylinder
    Thomas Edison National Historical Park, February 10, 2012
    https://youtu.be/OankHVwXX3Y
    2:20

  • eddie willers

    Now I know who to blame.

  • Eddie Willers; concur.

    Wayne: I’ve heard wax cylinder recordings (via internet), and it’s not so much the recording quality (bad), but the fact it could be done at all. The highest of tech, back in the day.

  • James Stephens

    In the late 1970 into the 80s we experimented with bucket brigade chips and voltage controlled amplifiers and noise gates to achieve programmable reverb, on a budget. They didn’t mention spring reverb here which was used all over the place particularly in organs and guitar amps. The heavy compression used by radio broadcasters also emphasized the sound of gated reverb for drums. All hail the Orban Optimod!

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