An evening pause: Another music history lesson to start the weekend. As she says, listening to baroque music played on this instrument explains a great deal about that music, and definitely tells you what that music was expected to sound like when composed, compared to playing it on modern instruments. Far more haunting, a word I would never have used to describe Baroque music before.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
An evening pause: I last posted a recreation in April 2017. Today, on Lincoln’s birthday, I present a recreation by Hal Holbrook, performed live on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 13, 1966.
As I wrote in 2017, “Listen to the words, however. This is no pandering speech, as we routinely see today. It is hard, muscled, and honest, bluntly recognizing that all, from both sides of the Civil War, must pay for the scourge of slavery.”
An evening pause: Something to ponder over the weekend. The video only includes two short clips from this 1964 BBC show, and thus picks two that have ended up to be largely right. And though Clarke’s predictions were not all right, he hit the mark an incredibly high number of times.
Hat tip John Jossy.
"The only thing we can be sure of about the future, is that it will be absolutely fantastic."#OnThisDay 1917: Writer, futurist and inventor Arthur C Clarke was born.
In 1964, he appeared on Horizon and gave some astonishing predictions about the future. pic.twitter.com/ID0X7idWyy
— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) December 16, 2023
An evening pause: My readers recommend so many organ performances I decided to start the weekend with short but entertaining primer on how pipe organs work. As always, there are surprises. Our narrator was the organist on Monday’s evening pause.
For the past five years the entire global rocket industry has experienced a revolution that has resulted in a rise in global launch numbers unprecedented since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. 2024 was no different, with the total number of successful launches topping 256, two to four times the average number of launches that had occurred yearly prior to 2020.
This success has almost entirely been driven by the arrival of many private rocket companies competing for government and commercial business — led largely by SpaceX — aided by the decision by governments worldwide to get out of the way and let private enterprise do the job. The result has been spectacular, so much so that it now seem possible in the very near future to see humans finally revisiting the Moon and even getting to Mars and the asteroids.
At the same time, 2024 saw some significant signs that this success is not guaranteed, and could vanish in an instant if care is not taken.
The graph below, my annual count of launches world wide, provides the groundwork for these conclusions.
» Read more
An evening pause: As we are in the middle of Hanukkah, and it is also Friday, here’s a hilarious send-off for the weekend, celebrating the holiday and the Jewish impact on American culture. Performed live 2002 on Saturday Night Live.
An evening pause: In this holiday season, a Hindu song grounded in Sanskrit. Performed live 2024.
Why did I appear in the womb
Now to sit here remembering?
I am you and you are me,
I am I and all there is.
The patterns of the fractal
To infinity.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
New research provides a more detailed and realistic history of the 100-foot-high statue from the ancient world called the Colossus of Rhodes.
The Colossus was a 30-metre-high bronze statue of the god Helios, built to commemorate the victory of the Rhodians over Demetrius of Macedonia, and considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Completed in 282 BCE, it fell in an earthquake only 56 years later in 226 BCE. The usual story is that the fragments remained untouched for 880 years until the invasion by the Umayyad caliph Muawiya I. However, literary and geological evidence suggest a more complex, and more likely, story involving several reconstructions, finishing with a devastating earthquake in 142 CE.
No one knows what it looked like or even the exact place it stood. The research ties its history however to the known earthquakes and later that had taken place at Rhodes, and thus provides a reasonable timeline for its destruction and removal. It also debunks this bit of “misinformation”:
In popular imagination, the Colossus stood astride the harbour entrance with ships sailing between his legs. This idea was first mentioned by an Italian pilgrim in 1395, who wrote that the Colossus stood with one leg at the end of the mole with the windmills and the other near St John’s chapel, later a fort. These sites are 750 metres apart, necessitating a statue 1500 metres high — a truly colossal edifice even by modern standards
The reason we don’t know where the statue actually stood is because the bronze used to forge it was exceedingly valuable. Once it was determined it could not be rebuilt that bronze did not remain in place for long.
I wrote this essay in 2018, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon. I have reposted previously, but I think it is worth reposting again and again, especially because stories about Apollo 8 still refuse to show the Earthrise image as Bill Anders took it. Even today, the Air and Space Museum did it wrong again, and it seems to me to be a slap in the face of Anders himself, who died this year while flying.
———————————————
Earthrise, as seen by a space-farer
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the moment when the three astronauts on Apollo 8 witnessed their first Earthrise while in orbit around the Moon, and Bill Anders snapped the picture of that Earthrise that has been been called “the most influential environmental picture ever taken.”
The last few days have seen numerous articles celebrating this iconic image. While all have captured in varying degrees the significance and influence of that picture on human society on Earth, all have failed to depict this image as Bill Anders, the photographer, took it. He did not frame the shot, in his mind, with the horizon on the bottom of the frame, as it has been depicted repeatedly in practically every article about this image, since the day it was published back in 1968.
Instead, Anders saw himself as an spaceman in a capsule orbiting the waist of the Moon. He also saw the Earth as merely another space object, now appearing from behind the waist of that Moon. As a result, he framed the shot with the horizon to the right, with the Earth moving from right to left as it moved out from behind the Moon, as shown on the right.
His perspective was that of a spacefarer, an explorer of the universe that sees the planets around him as objects within that universe in which he floats.
When we here are on Earth frame the image with the horizon on the bottom, we immediately reveal our limited planet-bound perspective. We automatically see ourselves on a planet’s surface, watching another planet rise above the distant horizon line.
This difference in perspective is to me the real meaning of this picture. On one hand we see the perspective of the past. On the other we see the perspective the future, for as long humanity can remain alive.
I prefer the future perspective, which is why I framed this image on the cover of Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 the way Bill Anders took it. I prefer to align myself with that space-faring future.
And it was that space-faring future that spoke when they read from Genesis that evening. They had made the first human leap to another world, and they wished to describe and capture the majesty of that leap to the world. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Yet, they were also still mostly Earth-bound in mind, which is why Frank Borman’s concluding words during that Christmas eve telecast were so heartfelt. He was a spaceman in a delicate vehicle talking to his home of Earth, 240,000 miles away. “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.” They longed deeply to return, a wish that at that moment, in that vehicle, was quite reasonable.
Someday that desire to return to Earth will be gone. People will live and work and grow up in space, and see the Earth as Bill Anders saw it in his photograph fifty years ago.
And it is for that time that I long. It will be a future of majesty we can only imagine.
Merry Christmas to all, all of us still pinned down here on “the good Earth.”
An evening pause: Most of this season I honor the Christmas holiday for my Christian readers with pauses of beautiful Christian music. Tonight however I thought it would be nice to take a break and present this short video describing the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. This year Hanukkah begins on Christmas, December 25, and runs through January 2, 2025, so I am a little early, but that’s all right.
Like almost all Jewish holidays, part of Hanukkah’s purpose is to celebrate a victory over oppression. In this case it celebrates the revolt of the Maccabees against the Greek effort to obliterate the Jews. Or as Jews like to joke about all Jewish holidays, “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat!”
An evening pause: Uses nicely edited archival documentary footage and pictures to highlight to story told by the song, intercut with Lightfoot’s live performance in 1979.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
An evening pause: I posted this for Thanksgiving in 2012 and 2015. Time to post again. As I wrote in 2015:
The hope of America will always live on, even when America is gone. Ordinary people want freedom, love, family, and the right to live their lives as they wish, without harming others, so they can bring in “the blessings of harvest,” whatever that harvest might be. It must be our goal to allow that to happen, and to stop those that wish to prevent it.
The promise of living
With hope and thanksgiving,,,
The routes the Voyager spacecraft have
taken since launch.
Engineers have now manged to resume normal communications with the Voyager-1 interplanetary probe after it had shut down its main communications channel last month due to low power levels.
Earlier this month, the team reactivated the X-band transmitter and then resumed collecting data the week of Nov. 18 from the four operating science instruments. Now engineers are completing a few remaining tasks to return Voyager 1 to the state it was in before the issue arose, such as resetting the system that synchronizes its three onboard computers.
The X-band transmitter had been shut off by the spacecraft’s fault protection system when engineers activated a heater on the spacecraft. Historically, if the fault protection system sensed that the probe had too little power available, it would automatically turn off systems not essential for keeping the spacecraft flying in order to keep power flowing to the critical systems. But the probes have already turned off all nonessential systems except for the science instruments. So the fault protection system turned off the X-band transmitter and turned on the S-band transmitter, which uses less power.
The S-band transmitter had not been used since 1981, so it took awhile for ground engineers to find the very weak signal. Once found however it was possible to recover operations, though those operations will likely continue for only another year or two. The spacecraft’s power supply is expected to finally run out sometime in ’26 or ’27.
The lion now is roaring, quite loudly.
Photo by Travis Jervey.
In part 1 of this series I described how it appears the American public today is no longer asleep and is instead very aggressively participating in the political and cultural debate in ways it has not in many decades, noting how this shift suggests we are experiencing a much more fundamental societal change than a mere shift in voting demographics.
In part 2 of this series I described how this fundamental shift has begun to express itself within the courts and politics in ways unheard of only five years ago. This expression illustrates the bottom-up nature of America, whereby the citizen is sovereign and our so-called leaders can only resist what those citizens want for only so long. And when those citizens become energized, as they now are, that resistance will evaporate with amazing speed.
In part 3 today I am going to take a more pessimistic view, based not on recent events but on the longer view I take naturally as a historian. I do this all the time in my histories. In Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, in describing the political background behind that mission, I could not help noting how that mission changed America and its social goals significantly, for both good and ill. In Leaving Earth, I opened the book like so:
Societies change. Though humans have difficulty perceiving this fact during their lifetimes, the tide of change inexorably rolls forward, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
I then documented in detail the space efforts by both Russia and the United States in the decades after the Apollo landing and the politics behind those programs, with both providing a great window into how both societies changed in the second half of the 20th century. As I concluded, “They were like ships passing in the night.”
Similarly, the major cultural and political shift away from big government and the regulatory state that I think we are now experiencing in the United States is not going to change our country overnight. These things take time. People who firmly believe it is a good idea to “gender affirm” confused little kids by cutting off their breasts or castrating them are not going to change their minds easily. People who believe in big government — especially those who benefit from it — are not going to meekly allow that big government and those benefits to vanish without a fight.
The left’s long march through the institutions
» Read more
Skynet-1A, a British satellite launched in 1969 and out of commission since the 1970s, has now been found in an unexpected location in geosynchronous orbit, and no one knows how it got there.
Launched in 1969, just a few months after humans first set foot on the Moon, Skynet-1A was put high above Africa’s east coast to relay communications for British forces. When the spacecraft ceased working a few years later, gravity might have been expected to pull it even further to the east, out over the Indian Ocean.
But today, curiously, Skynet-1A is actually half a planet away, in a position 22,369 miles (36,000km) above the Americas. Orbital mechanics mean it’s unlikely the half-tonne military spacecraft simply drifted to its current location. Almost certainly, it was commanded to fire its thrusters in the mid-1970s to take it westwards. The question is who that was and with what authority and purpose?
The article attempts to suggest the orbit change was done for some nefarious purpose, but the most likely explanation is that at some point the British engineers who operated it ordered the required engine burns, but the records of that work are now lost.
Though the present location poses some problems for other geosynchronous satellites, Skynet-1A also now offers a great opportunity for a mission demonstrating a way to clean up junk in these orbits.
An evening pause: On election day, I give you the most concise and poetic description of what America has always stood for, first spoken on November 19, 1863. On this day it will either signal “a new birth of freedom,” or a sad funeral speech to a nation that was dedicated to government of the people, by the people, for the people, and successfully proved it for almost 250 years.
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang
Despite my headline, this essay is not intended to be entirely pessimistic. Instead it is my effort to accept a reality that I think few people, including myself, have generally been able to process: The country we shall see after tomorrow’s election will not be the America as founded in 1776 and continued to prosper for the next quarter millennium.
The country can certainly be made great again. Elon Musk’s SpaceX proves it, time after time. The talent and creativity of free Americans is truly endless, and if Donald Trump wins it is very likely that energy will be unleashed again, in ways that no one can predict.
The country can certainly become free again. There is no law that prevents the elimination of bureaucracy and regulation, no matter how immortal government agencies appear to be. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 proves this. Though Russia has sadly retreated back to its top-down government-ruling ways, the country did wipe out almost all its bureaucracy in 1991, resulting in an exuberant restart that even today is nowhere near as oppressive as Soviet rule.
Should Donald Trump win, we should have every expectation that he will do the largest house-cleaning of the federal government ever. The benefits will be immeasurable, and magnificent.
What however will not change, even if Donald Trump wins resoundingly tomorrow, is the modern culture and political ethics that now exist. That modern culture is fundamentally different than the America that existed during the country’ s first 200 years, and it guarantees that America can never be the country it once was.
» Read more
Charles Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut
Yesterday I had to pleasure of getting my second tour of the Phantom Space facilities, located here in Tucson. Jim Cantrell, the founder of the Tucson-based rocket/satellite company Phantom Space, had last week graciously invited me to attend the event he was holding there, where astronaut Charles Duke, from the April 1972 Apollo 16 lunar landing, would be giving a talk to the company’s employees, investors, and customers. Duke had become an advisor for the company, and this would be his first visit to its operations.
First, the talk by Charles Duke, describing his life and Apollo 16 walk on the Moon, was as usual awe-inspiring, mostly because Duke spoke like every astronaut I’ve ever met so matter-of-factly about what he had done. During the second of three excusions on the surface with his commander John Young, they drove their rover up the slope of nearby Stone Mountain, climbing to an elevation of 500 feet, the highest any human has so far been on the lunar surface. From there he could look back and see for miles, including the entire valley where the lunar module was nestled as well as the mountains and craters that surrounded it.
When I asked him if he had had any sense of his remoteness from humanity, his response was a good-natured laugh. “We felt at home there!” They had done so much study of the terrain beforehand, including simulations, that from the moment they approached to land it all looked very familiar. This is where they were supposed to be!
Following Duke’s presentation we all were given a tour of the facility. My first visit there had been in 2022. At the time Cantrell’s effort was to aggressively succeed from his earlier failure at the rocket startup Vector, focusing this new company on building its Daytona rocket. After the tour I concluded as follows:
» Read more
How Democrats in Philadelphia celebrated
Christopher Columbus in 2022, placing
a box over his statue so no one could see it.
Now we know why the anti-Semitic left has been striving for years to cancel Columbus: New DNA analysis of the remains of Christopher Columbus now strongly suggests his ancestry was Jewish and that he might even have come originally from Spain, not Italy as has been long claimed.
“We have DNA from Christopher Columbus, very partial, but sufficient. We have DNA from Hernando Colón, his son,” [said forensic expert Miguel Lorente]. “And both in the Y chromosome (male) and in the mitochondrial DNA (transmitted by the mother) of Hernando there are traits compatible with Jewish origin.”
Around 300,000 Jews lived in Spain before the ‘Reyes Catolicos’, Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, ordered Jews and Muslims to convert to the Catholic faith or leave the country. Many settled around the world. The word Sephardic comes from Sefarad, or Spain in Hebrew.
After analysing 25 possible places, Lorente said it was only possible to say Columbus was born in Western Europe.
Though these results do involve a lot of uncertainties, they are very intriguing and indeed quite possible. If Columbus was born Jewish he would have had to convert in order to have any chance of obtaining work in Catholic Spain. He would have also done everything he could to keep secret his Jewish ancestry.
As this is Columbus Day, which for almost a century has been an American holiday to celebrate this greatest of explorers who changed human history, it is not surprising that this news was released just last week. It is also not surprising that the campaign to cancel Columbus continues.
» Read more
An evening pause: Performed live 1969 at Woodstock.
Hat tip both Mike Nelson and Wayne DeVette, who separately suggested this one day apart.
Click for full image, figure 1 from the paper.
Researchers have confirmed that three clumps of organic matter taken from a gravesite in northwestern China are the oldest samples of cheese yet identified — more than 3,600 years old — and are in fact a specific kind of cheese, called kefir cheese.
And it’s not just any cheese: Cow and goat DNA, as well as the bacterium Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens, has indicated that these clumps were in fact kefir cheese, providing insight into the history and evolution of probiotics and human health. L. kefiranofaciens is still a key microorganism in kefir soft cheeses. The researchers also identified the microscopic fungal species Pichia kudriavzevii, which is a type of yeast found in kefir grains today.
These kefir grains contain a host of probiotic bacteria and yeast, which is key in fermenting milk to produce kefir products that have been studied for their health impacts, particularly in the areas of the immune and gastrointestinal systems, as well as metabolic regulation.
“Our observation suggests kefir culture has been maintained in Northwestern China’s Xinjiang region since the Bronze Age,” Fu said.
You can read the published paper here. The researchers suggest the cheese indicates not only the evolutionary history by which humans began creating such diary products, it also suggests the historical routes this process followed across the European and Asian continents.
An evening pause: Performed live in 1989, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower. What I especially like are the English subtitles, because for some reason this song is rarely translated. Knowing the meaning of what they are singing in the scene in the movie Casablanca makes that scene even more moving.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
The first page of the Constiution as eventually
ratified by the states.
One of only eight signed “ratification copies” of the United States Constitution and the only one known to be in private hands is now up for auction to be sold on September 28, 2024, the 237th anniversary of the day the existing congress (formed under the failing Articles of Confederation) voted to send it to the states for ratification.
The minimum bid is one million, but it will not be surprising if the auction produces a much higher selling price. The public will be able to view the document on September 13, 2024 from 1:00 pm to 4:30 pm (Eastern) at the Federal Hall National Memorial at 26 Wall Street in New York, the location where that congress debated and voted for the new Constitution.
The document’s recent history is intriguing.
This incredibly rare document was discovered in 2022 at Hayes Farm, a 184-acre plantation in Edenton, North Carolina. The property was purchased in 1765 by Samuel Johnston, who in 1787-1789 was governor of North Carolina and presided over the state’s two ratification conventions. In 1865, it was acquired by the Wood family, which has held it for seven generations. The document was found inside an old filing cabinet in 2022 when the property was being cleared out and sold to North Carolina for preservation under the care of the Elizabeth Vann Moore Foundation with assistance from the Edenton Historical Commission and the Town of Edenton.
If you want to register to submit your own bids, you can do so here.
In studying an ancient Hindu text called the Rig Veda that was compiled around 1,500 BC, scientists have found what they think is the oldest known reference to a solar eclipse, dated approximately 6,000 years ago.
You can read the peer-reviewed paper here [pdf]. From the paper’s conclusion:
We propose that the eclipse recorded in the Rig Veda refers to observations made of an eclipse around 4000 BC. By analyzing the description, we propose that the eclipse was the one that occurred in 4202 BC or else in 3811 BC. We propose that it was observed in Central Asia. To our knowledge, this is one of the oldest known references to a specific total solar eclipse mentioned in the historical literature.
The scientists came to this conclusion based on information contained and not contained in the Hindu text. The text noted the event occurred three days before the autmnal equinox, and that it occurred when that equinox occurred in the constellation Orion, when today the equinox occurs in the constellation Pisces. This reduced the number of possible eclipses to a small number during the time period around 4,000 BC. The text also lacked any mention of various Hindo myths explaining eclipses that appeared more recently, thus confirming this ancient date and telling the researchers that the nomadic people who compiled the Rig Veda were likely living in central Asia at that time.
The only two eclipses that fit the bill occurred on either October 22, 4202 BC or October 9, 3811 BC. This makes it the earliest known reference to an eclipse, far earlier than the possible eclipses that occurred in around 3340 BC and around 1300 BC.
Archeologists digging at Concord discover what they think are five musket balls fired in the first shots of the Revolutionary War.
Archeologists believe five musket balls unearthed in Concord’s Minute Man National Historical Park were fired by colonial militia in the famed battle moments that sparked the Revolutionary War. The 250-year-old musket balls were discovered in an area inside the park where historians believe British troops faced colonial forces at the North Bridge.
Analysis of the artifacts indicates they were fired by colonial militia members from across the river, and not dropped from British weapons when troops were reloading.
Since the Minute Men fired over a period of time, routing the British troops, there is no way to know if these musket balls were the first fired, or among the later rounds. Nonetheless, these artifacts are an actual piece of a moment of history that literally changed all of human history.
After years of procrastination, I have finally produced a new print edition of my classic history, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8.
You can buy the book as either a paperback or hardback directly from Amazon.
Or you can order it directly from me for a slightly higher price and get an autographed copy. The autographed price is $50 for the hardback and $40 for the paperback, plus $7 shipping for each. (These prices will go up at the end of this July fund-raising campaign.)
To place an order, either send the money by Zelle (using my email address zimmerman at nasw dot org), or mail a check, payable to Robert Zimmerman to:
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
“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
An evening pause: Performed live on the Dean Martin Show sometime in 1967-1968, during the height of the Vietnam War and anti-war protests.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
I posted this essay in 2022 on July 4th and reposted it last year as well. It needs to be reposted again today. As I noted last year, my hopes for the November 2022 election were not realized, and we have suffered by that failure the past two years. We now face an even more critical election in November 2024. I wonder if Americans might finally decide to vote to clean house. I am hopeful, but also recognize that my optimism has been proven wrong consistently for decades.
—————-
Why we really celebrate the Fourth of July
If you really want to know why the Fourth of July has been the quintessential American holiday since the founding our this country, you need only return to the words of the document that became public to the world on that day.
Below the fold is the full text of the Declaration. Read it. It isn’t hard to understand, even if the style comes from the late 1700s. Its point however is clear. Governments that abuse the rights of the citizenry don’t deserve to be in power. The most important quote of course is right near the beginning:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. [emphasis mine]
What a radical concept — a nation founded on the principle of allowing its citizens to pursue happiness.
Right now, however, we have a federal government in America that more fits the description of King George III’s Great Britain in 1776 in the Declaration. The corrupt elitist uni-Party of federal elected officials and the federal bureaucracy in Washington has for too long run roughshod over the general population. If you take the time to read the full text of the Declaration, you will be astonished at the remarkable conceptual similarity between the abuses that Jefferson describes coming from Great Britain and the many abuses of power that are now legion and common by the uni-Party in Washington.
When November comes the American public will likely have its last chance to overthrow the political wing of the uni-Party, led by the Democratic Party. The Republicans are no saints, but at least that party contains within it many decent politicians who honor the Constitution, the rule of law, and the Bill of Rights. Many are right now campaigning on those ideals. Based on the past six years, we now know that no one in the Democratic Party honors those values. What they honor is blacklisting, racism, segregation, anti-American hate, and above all power. If they are not removed from office, they will ramp up that power, in league with quislings like Romney and Cornyn in the Republican Party, to further corrupt our Constitutional government.
These people do not like losing power. The longer they hold it, the more they will work to undermine the election system to make sure they do not lose. The corruption and election fraud in 2020 election was merely a dress rehearsal of what these goons will do if they have the chance next year.
In fact, November 2022 might very well be the last election that has any chance of producing legitimate results. Americans had better not waste this last chance.
» Read more
During an on-going renovation at George Washington’s Mount Vernon home, archaeologists have discovered 35 glass jars from the 1700s, with most containing preserved cherries and berries that appear completely edible.
Of the 35 bottles, 29 are intact and contain perfectly preserved cherries and berries, likely gooseberries or currants. The contents of each bottle have been carefully extracted, are under refrigeration at Mount Vernon, and will undergo scientific analysis. The bottles are slowly drying in the Mount Vernon archaeology lab and will be sent off-site for conservation.
Only a small quantity of the preserved fruits has been analyzed, with the following results:
- 54 cherry pits and 23 stems have been identified thus far, suggesting that the bottles were likely full of cherries before bottling. Cherry pulp is also present.
- Microscopy suggests that the cherries may have been harvested by snipping from trees with shears. The stems were neatly cut and purposefully left attached to the fruit before bottling.
- The cherries likely are of a tart variety, which has a more acidic composition that may have aided in preservation.
- The cherries are likely candidates for DNA extraction, which could be compared against a database of heirloom varieties to determine the precise species.
- The pits are undergoing an examination to determine if any are viable for germination.
The last point is most fascinating. Imagine if a new cherry tree could be grown from a pit that was likely picked when George Washington was alive.
Ed Stone, who was the project scientist for both Voyager missions to the outer solar system and beyond for a half century, passed away at 88 on June 9, 2024.
From 1972 until his retirement in 2022, Stone served as the project scientist from NASA’s longest-running mission, Voyager. The two Voyager probes took advantage of a celestial alignment that occurs just once every 176 years to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. During their journeys, the spacecraft revealed the first active volcanoes beyond Earth on Jupiter’s moon Io, and an atmosphere rich with organic molecules on Saturn’s moon Titan. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to fly by Uranus and Neptune, revealing Uranus’ unusual tipped magnetic poles, and the icy geysers erupting from Neptune’s moon Triton.
Stone was also head of JPL from 1991 to 2001, during the time it built and flew the Mars Pathfinder mission, which sent the first rover to Red Planet. That mission revitalized the entire American Mars exploration program for the next three decades.
Stone was one of the giants of American space exploration during its formative years. He leaves behind a legacy that will be difficult to match, highlighted most of all by both Voyager spacecraft, which outlived him.
