Depends where you're coming from. For someone who was there at the time it was going on, and followed everything, it's pretty hard to imagine. But I could imagine, say, a high school student, even a college student now having honest questions about it. Especially with the idea that all generations seem to have, to the effect that previous generations didn't know anything.



Well, that is the proverbial elephant in the living room. How'd we ever fool them? For that matter, why didn't the Russians stage their own moon landing and fool us in turn? Or even if we weren't fooled, if we had done the same thing, we couldn't have called them on it openly. And yet somehow, the Soviets never went to the moon.



That's true, but I've seen lots of people who had the right answers who did the same thing. I think that's how the Flat Earthers survive, actually. People don't know how to answer them, except to say that the astronauts saw the earth. They call the astronauts liars, the other guys are out of substance, they get mad, and the flat earther cites this as evidence that they're right (somehow).


Buzz Aldrin hosted WWF Raw recently. I was hoping they were going to do a sketch where one of the wrestlers questioned whether he'd been to the moon and he decked him (you may laugh, but they had Bob Barker (of all people) beat up one of the wrestlers last year, and Aldrin at least has a history of this kind of thing). Unfortunately, no. The funniest thing was a mannequin in a space suit that had the WWE logo on it.

Here is an **excellent** commmentary by Charles Krauthammer concerning the current disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: -- "Whose Blowout Is It, Anyway?"


Chess Fan

One of the few good things to come out of the gulf oil spill is this report on "coral nurseries." I knew that coral reefs were in trouble due to a variety of environmental threats, this story (ignoring the threat from the oil spill) is encouraging and likely wouldn't have made the news under other circumstances.

There was just a big empty space at the local Wal-Mart where the seafood counter used to be. I assume it's related to this. Not sure why they physically removed the counter, though, instead of just closing that section down for a few months.

nit: an empty space seems more like a shut down than a removal to me.

It could be oil spill related, but the local grocery store is still selling sea food, so there must be more to it since sea food is still available to smaller retailers.

I'd like to think they are making some sort of political statement about over-harvesting the seas, but I just don't see that happening.

I don't see why they'd do that now, and if they did do it, the thing to do would be to buy less seafood, not shut the section down completely. Maybe I'm completely off base and they're just remodeling.

This really belongs in the book thread, but I didn't see it on quick perusal so it can also go here. Just finished reading Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure Almost Everything. Fascinating well-written book that explores the development of dating methods (age-dating, not romantic dating of course) including carbon-14, potassium-argon, argon-argon, etc. It talks about how they isolate and eliminated contamination, narrowed errors, and learned more about the properties of the samples themselves. It reads like a great detective story--how are they going to solve this problem?

I also hadn't realized they have a continuous tree ring record going back 12,000 years, and if they can link that record to some of the newer fossilized trees they may be able to take it back over 50,000 years. Essentially this tree ring record provides an excellent calibration tool for carbon-14 dating as it contains a record of the amount of C-14 in the air on a yearly basis.

This book was so enjoyable I read it in two sittings (only 250 pages or so), and made notes in the margins (updates, and some minor corrections in the area of biology--mainly for my sister's sake as she will be reading it next). The author assumes readers won't have background so the material is well-explained.

Anyone interested in understanding how dating is really done and how it is cross-referenced to other independent dating methods as well should read this accessible book.

How much is the book, Ken?

Cost 18 CND at a local bookstore, can get it for 14 or so at Amazon, maybe free in the library too.

Behold the potential future of U.S. politics. The stupid is strong in these ones.