M. Thomas Apple's Blog, page 11

Well, *that* was interesting!

OK, so my post about a big ole spider got the most likes of any post in ten years of blogging about science.

I have so not got the zeitgeist of the 2024 blogosphere lol – anyway, thanks, all, for the “likes”! Although one person used AI to write a very meaningless comment about arachnophobia. What’s the point, man?

By the way, back to science and space stuff. I forgot to post about the Europa Clipper project back in October.

So here you go. (It’s too late to add a message, but the project obviously is going to take some time arriving there, and you can supposedly hear US Poet Laureate Ada Limón read her poem online, although I’ve had trouble with the audio lately:

“Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book 
of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, 
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us, 
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made 
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, 
of a need to call out through the dark.”

This

Bloganuary writing promptWhat’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?View all responses

No. Way.

I have arachnophobia in the first place and can’t even stand those little spiders that jump all around.

I came in the house once after working in the garden and realized a spider had gotten stuck in my hair (probably from weeding under the tomato plants).

I feel freaked out just writing about it.

Just.

No. You couldn’t pay me enough to do this.

SLIM pickings! Back to work…

The craft is at a very awkward angle. A picture, captured by the small baseball-sized robot called Sora-Q – which was ejected from Slim moments before touchdown – showed the lander face-down on the lunar surface. 

That left its solar panels facing away from the sunlight and unable to generate power. The decision was taken to put the lander into sleep mode – and conserve what power remained – less than three hours after it landed. 

That tactic appears to have worked. A change in the direction of the sunlight has now “awoken” the craft.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68131105

As previously reported, JAXA did achieve its goal of a “precision landing” — as some put it, a “pinpoint” touchdown within 100 meters of the intended target — within 55 meters, although if all had gone as planned, it would have been within 10 meters.

That’s far, far closer than previous Moon landings.

Too bad SLIM is essentially standing on its nose. But at least this is a beginning. Japan has now become the fifth country (US, USSR, China, India) to successfully “soft land” an object on the Moon.

And the robots it brought with it are pretty amazing. And tiny.

”Bringer of Light” entering final proofing stage…

Now that I’ve got the manuscript completed, it’s time to search for typos!

Yup. Found some already. Oops.

I figure to rearrange and combine some of the later chapters as well. Look for a publication online in late March!

It’s taken nearly 9 years. Hm. Only 11 years fewer than Adam’s Stepsons.

Fortunately, I have outlined book two and started writing the opening chapters already. Hopefully it won’t take another 9 years to see the continuation of the Bringer of Light story!

Newly discovered cosmic megastructure challenges theories of the universe

The so-called Big Ring has a diameter of about 1.3bn light years, making it among the largest structures ever observed. At more than 9bn light years from Earth, it is too faint to see directly, but its diameter on the night sky would be equivalent to 15 full moons.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/11/newly-discovered-cosmic-megastructure-challenges-theories-of-the-universe

This is important because it contradicts the so-called “cosmological principle” that everything in the universe is basically evenly distributed.

Just thinking about it, though, it makes little sense to assume that galaxies are all evenly spaced. Assuming the Big Bang was a single point should not imply even spacing of anything.

FWIW the “Big Ring” is evidently more a corkscrew shape, directly aimed at us. Evidence of “cosmic strings”? Maybe.

This is not as interesting as technology that will allow us to build hotels and colonies at LaGrange points or communities on Mars, but it’s still interesting. Sorta. Maybe?

OK, I just *had* to answer this prompt…

Bloganuary writing promptList five things you do for fun.View all responsesWrite (duh). I mean, this is obvious, right? (why does WP have an AI function now? I blog. Why would I want NOT to blog? Or use AI to blog? I don’t get it)Read (duh). OK, read sci-fi and fantasy. And history. Especially ancient history.Cook (seriously — I started doing this when I had to be separated from my family in 2018 and I found that it helps me calm down, eat healthier, and actually enjoy experimenting a little bit)Play guitar (need more time for this — I find it more enjoyable to play bass but playing my faux-Gibson is more enjoyable bc I can actually play a whole tune lol)Go on long, long walks by myself around the hills and mountains near my house so that I don’t feel so guilty about the Irish coffee waiting for me when I get back…

Wondering now if I should write the “five things I absolutely hate to have to do but generally have no say in the matter” or if I should wait and see if there is such a prompt…

Where it all started…

My winter reading!

I finally managed to get 1st edition copies of the famed Star Trek Readers, published in the late ’60s and early ’70s. My mother had copies when I was a kid, and they were among the first fictional stories I ever read.

The content varies slightly from the broadcast episodes, which apparently drew the ire of fans at the time. In defense of the British writer James Blish, he had not seen the episodes at the time of writing and was relying entirely on the scripts. As he himself wrote as an “Afterword” that appears (naturally) in the middle of the Reader II book, adapting script to prose is just as hard as adapting prose to scripts. Some scenes were skipped and dialogue boiled down to help the flow of the narrative, and fans were often upset to discover their favorite lines didn’t appear in the books.

The confusing part is the arrangement of each Reader into “books.” For example, Reader I (which has no label “I,” actually) consists of “Star Trek 2” (called “Book I”), “Star Trek 3” (Book II), and “Star Trek 8” (Book III). That reflects the original paperback publications by Bantam, but just makes things difficult. As a kid, I had no idea which episodes came before which. Not that it mattered! This was the first show I saw “in living color” — in the “TV room” of my grandparents’ house (we had a small black and white TV at home in the mid to late ’70s, so I never saw “The Incredible Hulk” (Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno) in color.)

All told, 59 of the original 79 ST: TOS episodes were adapted by Blish. Of the twenty not appearing in the Readers, “Mudd’s Women” and “What Are Little Girls Made of?” are odd exclusions. “Shore Leave” (the most childish of the first season episodes) is also not there. But there are still plenty to satisfy.

Two episodes were renamed by Blish for some reason; “The Man Trap” — the first episode broadcast but the third episode made — was renamed “The Unreal McCoy” (which gives away the plot), and “Charlie X” was renamed “Charlie’s Law.” The original pilot, “The Cage,” appears under the name “The Menagerie” as it was later broadcast (in two parts as part of the court martial of Spock, in which Star Trek characters watch Star Trek, but the novelized version omits the court martial framework — the “Afterword” comments that this script was covered in handwritten rewrites, making it difficult to work with.)

Most satisfying of all is the snarky dedication of Reader II — “To Harlan Ellison who was right all the time.”

Hah.

Dear Diary – February 12, 1998

That’s what we are, really; a constant turmoil between past and future, the mixing point of who we once were and who we are afraid we may become. We are constantly becoming — yet we never lose sight of the past, or if we do, we do so deliberately…but our past lies in wait, crouches and hides unbidden, always ready to pounce out from the mind’s darkness to set itself against future hopes and desires. Our previous selves eternally war with our future selves; it is the center of this conflict where we exist, and it is because of this inner turmoil we stay alive.

Japan lands on the Moon — for just a few hours

A Japanese robot has successfully touched down on the Moon but problems with its solar power system mean the mission may live for just a few hours.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) put itself gently on the lunar surface near an equatorial crater.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68035314

Or SLIM, if you want to actually write acronyms properly (snark).

Also, it’s JAXA, not Jaxa. And NASA and ESA, not Nasa and Esa. But I digress.

Anyways, kudos but too bad yet another space mission failed. At this point I’m wondering how on Earth NASA managed to land people on the Moon so successfully in the 1960s and 1970s without killing half of them in the process. We can barely manage to get a tiny robot rover the size of a marble to land (see the link above for the picture of the “hopper” and “shape shifting” ball…curious about the “shape shifting” bit…)

Another failure from the private sector

“We continue receiving valuable data,” the company said in a statement, “and providing spaceflight operations for components and software relating to our next lunar lander mission, Griffin.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/private-mission-moon-wont-land-lunar-surface-malfunction-rcna133082

Well, yeah, great. But the Peregrine lander still is a failure. Propulsion leak. Solar panels that didn’t open in time.

And NASA is counting on these privately operated products to get people back to the Moon? And they’ve delayed the Artemis again by another year?

When I was in school, we were all talking about people on Mars, living in permanent communities in the 2020s. And we can’t even get a tiny Moon lander to work right.

Sigh. And after BBC posted “Vulcan rocket” I so had my hopes up. (“The Vulcan rocket,” not “Vulcan rocket,” Spock )