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Readers!
The time has come for my annual short Thanksgiving/Christmas fund drive for Behind The Black. I must do this every year in order to make sure I have earned enough money to pay my bills.
For this two-week campaign, I am offering a special deal to encourage donations. Donations of $200 will get a free autographed copy of the new paperback edition of Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, while donations of $250 will get a free autographed copy of the new hardback edition. If you desire a copy, make sure you provide me your address with your donation.
As I noted in July, the support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. 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.
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For fun: An astronomer said that he read about the Moon illusion, that the size of the Moon on the sky seems to change much more than it physically does due to its eccentricity. It was claimed that one can cover the full Moon behind a fingernail on arm’s length, which is quite counter-intuitive. He calculated in his head that a 1 cm wide finger on a 1 meter arm covers 1/300 of a circle which is one degree. The Moon is only a half. But he had to go out and check if it’s actually true!
Astronomy is the dichotomy of theory and observation/exploration. Science can’t really “prove” anything, but mathematics can. And it is always reliable. One can’t check out a charm quark with the finger, but we know it’s there (or there). Still, human instinct has the urge to see if it can outsmart logic. I think it is a sound general distrust to claims that doesn’t make any exception for logic. Before logic was discovered, not too long ago, who would’ve thought that anything like that could be?