To all our loyal readers, Happy New Year, and may 2009 be a healthy, successful and profitable year to one and all!
From the monthly archives:
December 2008
Aside from the “bracing” climate, there’s also cheap gas
Image courtesy of the Sheridan Press (brrrrrr)
Dude, where the hell is Sheridan, WY? Right here
Ed: I can’t promise that this category will feature very often, but once in a while if something of curiosity scratches our itch, then hey…maybe!
From the Harvard Gazette;
Samuel P. Huntington – a longtime Harvard University professor, an influential political scientist, and mentor to a generation of scholars in widely divergent fields – died Dec. 24 on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 81.
Huntington had retired from active teaching in 2007, following 58 years of scholarly service at Harvard. In a retirement letter to the President of Harvard, he wrote, in part, “It is difficult for me to imagine a more rewarding or enjoyable career than teaching here, particularly teaching undergraduates. I have valued every one of the years since 1949.”
Huntington, the father of two grown sons, lived in Boston and on Martha’s Vineyard. He was the author, co-author, or editor of 17 books and over 90 scholarly articles. His principal areas of research and teaching were American government, democratization, military politics, strategy, and civil-military relations, comparative politics, and political development.
With ongoing grateful thanks to the Wall Street Journal for kindly providing such a neat summary, so for Saturday December 27th 2008, here’s what’s hot…..and what’s not;
This is the third and final part of our series on the historic moon mission by Apollo 8. You can see part 1 here, and part 2 here.
On December 27th 1968 at the end of a mission lasting 147 hours, Apollo 8 splashed down at 8 deg 7.5 min N, 165 deg 1.2 min W, 1,000 miles SSW of Hawaii and 5 km (3 miles) from the recovery ship USS Yorktown
The primary objectives of the Apollo 8 mission were:
- to demonstrate the combined performance of the crew, space vehicle, and mission support team during a piloted Saturn V mission with the CSM; and
- to demonstrate the performance of nominal and selected backup lunar orbit rendezvous procedures.
Apollo 8 also provided a fortunate opportunity to prove out flight control procedures at lunar distances. It gave NASA vital experience in tracking a spacecraft orbiting the Moon and also provided an opportunity to expand the photographic coverage of potential landing sites. It was a great confidence builder for the entire Apollo team; and it was shared with an international audience of hundreds of millions of people.
The 6 day mission achieved a total of 10 lunar orbits lasting a total of 20 hours, and during the mission, the spacecraft reached a maximum distance from Earth of 203,752.37 nautical miles.
Symbolically, the Apollo 8 mission brought a ray of light at the end of a dark, chaotic, and terrible year in our history……
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I’d like to wish all our readers a very Merry Christmas. I hope you’re all with family & friends on this day.
So, I’m sending not one, but two cards to loyal dogshit readers this year. Here’s the first for our dedicated readers of all things economic & market related 
and for the loyal geeks who stop by and wander through content on the site periodically, here’s one for you folks
Wherever you may be on the planet, Merry Christmas!
This is part 2 of our three part series on Apollo 8, and remembering that historic NASA mission to the moon. Part 1 can be seen here
40 years ago tonight, on Christmas Eve 1968, three men achieved lunar orbit in the Apollo 8 spacecraft. 69 hours and 8 minutes into their mission, Mission Commander Colonel Frank Borman (USAF), Captain James A. Lovell (USN) and Major William Anders (USAF) initiated the burn which would drop them into lunar orbit .
069:33:52 Lovell: Go ahead, Houston, (This is) Apollo 8. Burn complete. Our orbit (is) 169.1 by 60.5; 169.1 by 60.5.
069:34:07 Carr: Apollo 8, this is Houston. Roger, 169.1 by 60.5. Good to hear your voice. [Long pause.]
When the spacecraft came out from behind the Moon for its fourth pass across the front, the crew witnessed an event no one had ever seen — Earthrise. Borman saw the Earth emerging from behind the lunar horizon and called in excitement to the others, taking a black-and-white photo as he did so: Earthrise, seen for the first time by human eyes.
In the ensuing scramble Anders took the more famous colour photo, later picked by Life magazine as one of its hundred photos of the century. Due to the synchronous rotation of the Moon about the Earth, Earthrise is not generally visible from the Lunar surface. Earthrise is generally only visible when orbiting the Moon, other than at selected places near the Moon’s limb, where libration carries the Earth slightly above and below the lunar horizon.
Five orbits later, the Apollo astronauts lit up a television broadcast……
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Today I received a book for as a gift from a dear and cherished friend. George F. Kennan’s “American Diplomacy”. First published in 1951, this book remains as relevant today as it did among foreign policy students and professionals those 57 years ago.
George Frost Kennan is perhaps best known to most as the “father of containment” writing the outline of what would become official United States policy towards the former Soviet Union. He was a writer, diplomat, advisor, political scientist and historian. Truly, a man of letters, following his career with the State Department, he returned to academia (re)joining the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, with a prodigious output of written material until his death in 2005 at the age of 101.
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