Loading...
July 17, 2009#

Remembering Apollo 11

apollo_11

“As I walked away from the Eagle Lunar Module, Neil said ‘Hold it, Buzz’, so I stopped and turned around, and then he took what has become known as the ‘Visor’ photo. I like this photo because it captures the moment of a solitary human figure against the horizon of the Moon, along with a reflection in my helmet’s visor of our home away from home, the Eagle, and of Neil snapping the photo. Here we were, farther away from the rest of humanity than any two humans had ever ventured. Yet, in another sense, we became inextricably connected to the hundreds of millions watching us more than 240,000 miles away. In this one moment, the world came together in peace for all mankind.”

- Buzz Aldrin in Apollo Through the Eyes of the Astronauts

I have tremendous respect for astronauts. To be so empirically brilliant and yet still have that ferocious spirit of adventure–extreme sports ain’t got nothin’ on ‘em, if you ask me. Most astronauts devote their entire lives to the study of space and keep up rigorous physical training without knowing if they’ll ever get the chance to even be part of a mission. See more of these amazing Apollo images here.

July 13, 2009#

“Multitasking is a Trap”

“Unfortunately multitasking is one of the surest ways to fritter away time. Our efficiency plummets when we try to juggle even two simple tasks at the same time, as Yuhong Jiang, a psychologist at Harvard University, demonstrated in an impressive experiment. She asked students to identify both colored crosses and geometric shapes, such as triangles and circles. At first, this task seemed laughably simple to the young academics at this elite university. But they changed their minds when they realized how slow they were and how many mistakes they were making. The participants needed almost a second of reaction time to press a button when they saw colored crosses and shapes at the same time. But if the students were asked to spot first the crosses, and then the forms, the process went almost twice as quickly. Other series of experiments have shown that multitasking also makes more errors slip in.”

– Stefan Klein in The Secret Pulse of Time

“The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.”

– Lewis Mumford