Day: July 18, 2009

Categories
And Beyond The Infinite

It must really hurt to continually cut yourself shaving with Occam’s Razor.

As usual, I’m observing the anniversary of the first manned moon landing with a mixture of fond reverence and not just a little bit of melancholy. With all of the technological strides that have been made since 1969, in some cases building on the technology that got us to the moon, the pinnacle of human technological genius remains something that happened 40 years ago.

The thing is, it wasn’t just technology that got us there; it was a massive effort of combined national will, and I’m not sure we’ve seen anything like it since then. In the current climate where everydamnthing is politicized, I’m not sure it’s possible to muster that kind of massive expenditure of willpower in a single direction. I really find myself doubting that I’ll see man (or woman) on the moon in my lifetime. The final lunar landing occurred when I was mere months old. Now I’m thinking my son may be my age before we go back and set up shop to stay. That pisses me off – I want to see a real live moon landing in my lifetime. I really do. It would not only mean that we’ve come closer to perfecting the technology for doing so, but it would mean that, either as a nation or as a world community, we’ve gotten off of our asses and stopped settling for an intractible standstill during which everyone blames everyone else for anything for which they have the slightest distaste.

That would mean more to me than the technological aspects of it. I might even accidentally start to hope again if I’m not careful.

What galls me almost as much as the non-motion, and the notion that America may be in for yet another vast gap in manned spaceflight (like the 6 years between Apollo-Soyuz and the first shuttle mission), is that there’s a persistent and vocal bunch of wild-eyed conspiracy nuts who are adamant that the moon landings just didn’t happen.

NASA has slyly offered up some stuff in the run-up to the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing that, by all rights, should bring that kind of rumor-mongering up short…but we’re talking about a bunch of folks who haven’t let reason stand in the way of an arm-waving, look-at-me-look-at-me! rant in the past four decades. Why should they start thinking now?

If they want to keep insisting that the moon landings were filmed in a soundstage at Area 51 (I am not joking here!), they can keep their delusions to themselves. In the meantime, I’m really, really enjoying the stuff NASA’s cranking out this week which, while it celebrates the occasion, also quietly flips a space-suit-gloved middle finger at the crazies. Here are some links:

  1. Apollo Landing Sites as seen by the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – possibly the coolest of the bunch. The “descent” stages of the lunar modules – an inelegant but functional octagonal box which housed the legs, the moon buggies, and of course the rocket that eased the module to the ground rather than letting it crash – remained on the moon, serving as launch pads for the upper half of each module, which carried the astronauts and moon rocks back to safety. The descent stages are still there, clearly visible, casting a shadow due to the sun being at a low angle to the ground.
  2. Apollo 11 Radio – a live, down to the minute and second, continuous stream of the radio traffic between Apollo 11 and Mission Control – the sounds of the complete eight-day mission. The good stuff will kick in on Monday afternoon around 2 or 3 o’clock eastern. It’s the complete unedited audio on a 40-year delay. Why would anyone fake eight days worth of audio?

  3. Restored video of Armstrong’s first steps – from recently recovered videotapes of the direct transmission; this is likely as good as the picture quality’s going to get, given the age of the original media, but the improvement over what we’ve had all these years is more than a little impressive. You can also watch Buzz Aldrin coming down the ladder, Armstrong and Aldrin planting the flag, and Armstrong and Aldrin reading the dedication plaque. If/when there’s a DVD of all of this video restored, I’ll happily put money on the table for it.

I can’t fathom the conspiracy theorists basking in some absurdly convoluted “explanation” that includes Area 51, brainwashing, and secret government operations involving gazillions of people behind the scenes, not one of whom has ever spilled the beans.

There is a simpler explanation: we went. We did it. Because we wanted to, and because it was an important thing to do. We accomplished something abso-fraggin-lutely amazing from sheer determination and willpower and not just a little bit of pride.

Is that actually any less plausible than secret soundstages, black ops and brainwashed astronauts?

Man, it’s gotta be a bitch to constantly cut yourself shaving with Occam’s Razor.

Now let’s cut the chatter and go back there. It’s gotta be possible, because we’ve been there already.… Read more

Categories
Serious Stuff

As if modern journalism wasn’t already dead to me…

Walter Cronkite - July 20, 1969…poor old Walter Cronkite went and died on us at the age of 92 on Friday.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a reporter when I grew up. At a very early age, in grade school, I was inflicting home-made newsletters, none of them really reporting anything of any consequence, upon my classmates. In junior high, I quickly found my way into the journalism department, and by the time I was off to high school, things had gone really well – the junior high paper had gone from, for all intents and purposes, a typewriter thing to a computer layout thing. Granted, the computer was an Apple II, and the software used had to be all but abused into doing anything that looked really impressive (not unlike my experiences with the Avid many years later, come to think of it), but it was an enormous amount of fun. My friend Robert and I poured a ridiculous amount of effort into it all, and I was under the impression, by the time we got to high school, that we were rock stars. Just a little bit.

High school was a good deal more challenging – as often happens in the transition from junior high, even if you thought you were a rock star, you were lucky if anyone thought you were a roadie now. Still, the same pattern repeated itself, in a slightly more compressed time frame – our junior year was awesome. Our senior year was, on the other hand, a nightmare – we turned out three papers because the department was broke. I doggedly stuck with journalism as a major going into college, but by the end of my first year, this thing that everyone had assumed that I’d be spending my life doing was gone; journalism wasn’t my major anymore after what I’ll simply refer to as a spirited debate with the department advisor about writing down to a third grade level for a college paper (in short: I refused to do it).

Oddly enough, I wound up still working in news – in a way. Nearly ten years later I was writing and producing news promos. It wasn’t being a reporter, but by that time I’d found my calling sitting behind a computer and making stuff look cool.

One thing I remember from my very, very brief stint in college journalism, however, was the semester that was spent on journalistic ethics. You did this semester before you were allowed to write a single thing for the school paper. If you didn’t ace ethics, you were outta there. At the time, even though I did well with that semester, I thought this was a bit draconian: some perfectly good writers fell under the axe because they didn’t score better than a B in ethics.

Now I wish every freakin’ college journalism department in the nation operated that way.

The news media landscape today is something I find deeply troubling. Entities that in the past were reasonably impartial have, for lack of a better term, chosen sides. I’m not a big fan of “news” that leans heavily conservative or heavily liberal, because either way, there’s a slant, there’s a spin, and you’re no longer in the same room with the truth. It’s down the hall somewhere, having inconvenient bits lopped off in the edit.

This is completely at odds with what I knew halfway through my freshman year of college: that you don’t infuse a news piece with your opinion unless you have specifically been entrusted with that duty by the management. That you don’t just present one side of the story. That you don’t just regurgitate the official press release with no further research. That you don’t treat people accused of something as if they’ve already been convicted. And that you don’t play to the lowest common denominator and let tragedy or weeping victims – who have had enough by the time a camera was stuck in their faces – stand in for the full human impact of an event.

What happened to that kind of thinking? Are we about to bury it with Walter Cronkite? Is no one having to run a brutal, semester-long gauntlet of journalistic ethics in school anymore? Or is everyone going into that field now going in with the understanding that the public wants pundits more than it wants the truth?

What’s scarier is that, after the past decade or two, there’s a very real possibility that, indeed, that is what the public wants. In today’s media landscape, Cronkite might find himself shuffled off-stage because he couldn’t pop the ratings numbers. These days, outfits that are charged with telling us the truth are axing trained reporters to save costs – and inviting the public to send in camcorder “reports” in their stead.

I didn’t have the chance to grow up with Walter Cronkite narrating the mind-blowingly major stories of the ’60s, but he was enough of a rock-solid presence in the ’70s that a kid like me could watch him in action and say, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up.”

Walter Cronkite should be remembered in the same breath as Edward R. Murrow as a member of a generation of journalists who truly raised the bar for their entire profession. But who is there to provide my son’s generation with that same spark of inspiration by way of integrity?… Read more