Things that are Nerdy

Okay, I know the "breaking news: water on Mars" thing was kinda ridiculous. I mean, since it really was news, you probably saw something about from real journalists, and didn't need my link. What can I say? I was excited. In my opinion, nothing could possibly affect the course of history as much as life on other planets, whether human (someday) or alien -- even bacteria. And Stephen Hawking agrees with me. So there.

Meanwhile, Nasa's putting out press releases about plans for a moonbase.

There's a lot of "why" in the discussion that links to, that I really don't comprehend. Why go to the moon? Why hold the Superbowl? Why fight wars? Why try to build quantum computers? Why make Bond movies? When you think of all of the ridiculous things the human race spends billions of dollars on, doesn't a moonbase sound supremely rational in comparison? I know, people say we could better spend NASA's budget on things like aid for African countries dealing with famine and disease. But number one, we wouldn't spend the money on aid for Africa; we'd more likely spend it on weapons research. Or should we give it back to the taxpayers so they can spend it on tooth whitening systems and Christmas presents for their pets? You know it's going to get spent on something ridiculous regardless, right? And number two, even if it were going to go toward aid for Africa, it could only help a small part of single generation... Which is certainly worth doing, but isn't it also worth doing something that could potentially change the destiny of all of the human generations to come?

Um, just in case I offended anyone there: I've bought tooth whitening systems and presents for my pets too. I'm not saying there's anything horrible about that. Just the national teeth-whitening project we're all engaged in is perhaps slightly more ridiculous than a national space exploration project.


That's all the space news I've got, but there are a couple of more links I've been saving up, so I'll sqeeze them into this post as a part of an overall "nerdiness" theme.


Scientists trying to predict the future

Comic books: Joss Whedon is writing one apparently to be titled "Buffy: Season Eight".

For those who watched the Sci-Fi channel's reality show "Who Wants to be a Superhero?" the comic book based on the winner's character has been delayed again.

I'm planning to read both of those comic books, but right now the only one I read is The Walking Dead. That link goes to a review of the first issue that I agree with, so I don't have to write my own review. Except he says he doesn't like zombie movies, and, ever since I started hanging out with Ken, I do.

I do read lots of comic strips. And since I am a protophysicist, I'm gonna link to Zippy the Pinhead talking about string theory every now, and then.

I also think the Brewster Rockit Space Guy story line beginning here is funny, but the website is annoying. Just lie when they ask you for personal information.

Man, I am such a nerd.

Canals on Mars?

A riverbed on Mars where there was none before.

It might mean life, or it might just make life a lot easier for future Mars colonists...

A New Project

So, you all know by now that research is frustrating, right? The project that was supposed to be my thesis... Well, I was spinning my wheels on that for a long time. Couldn't get any traction. When we finally, finally understood the theoretical description of our problem, we discovered that 1: the experimental device we were trying to build wasn't going to work (although not for the reasons I had thought it wouldn't) and 2: the theory behind wasn't new. Other people had already done these calculations.

Ugh, that's very vague. I never know how much I can say about my actual research. I mean, in science, you're supposed to publish in peer reviewed journals, not blogs. But I think it's okay to tell you that I was working on a new kind of optical gyroscope.

Ordinary optical gyroscopes, usually called ring laser gyroscopes, are pretty simple, in principle. Basically, when you rotate a certain type of laser, the frequency of the light coming out of it changes. If you want to know how fast you're rotating, measure the frequency of your laser. This is useful for navigation. Keep track of how fast you're turning and for how long, and you always know what direction you're facing. You can know really accurately, enough to navigate by dead reckoning alone. So all of these airplanes and ships and satellites carry little lasers on board now; optical gyroscopes are pretty standard, apparently.

Anyway, we were supposed to be building a more sensitive optical gyroscope, capable of detecting even very tiny rotations. But it turns out that the effect we thought would simply enhance the sensitivity has a lot of other consequences as well -- like making the frequency measurement much harder to do accurately. And the conditions under which this effect happens turn out to be narrow and hard to realize in practice, and realizing them handicaps the sensitivity in other ways. Which explains why we never managed to demonstrate the increased sensitivity experimentally.

So. End of story, right? So much for my thesis. I've been at loose ends now for a couple of months, wondering if I was ever going to graduate, if I had to start all over, worn out and kind of burned out by the whole saga of the gyroscope. (And meanwhile working on the trap, which is a two person job, with Ken. The trap is always, always frustrating. About two hundred pieces of equipment have to be working all at once in order to trap atoms at all, and optimizing them all takes half a day for two people, even when things are working well, which is not very often. And then when you change anything, it can take days or weeks or months to get the trap back, as you try to track down the problem among all those parts... We've recently changed some things. Ken found a better way of doing what he's trying to do with the trap, in some papers. But it's So. Much. Work.)

To sum up: Arghh! Damnit! Arrrrghh!

But the effect that was supposed to make the gyroscope more sensitive, the effect that other people have already discovered and written about? In trying to understand it, a question occured to us (well, to my advisor) to which we can't seem to find any answer in the literature. Nor is the answer obvious from theory. At first this seemed like bad news -- we still don't totally understand! But now my advisor has given me the assignment of attempting to answer the question experimentally. The fact that no one else seems to know the answer means that the result of such an experiment would potentially be publishable... And more importantly, could go into a thesis.

And that means that all my work so far isn't wasted. The stuff that I learned about this effect, even the stuff I learned about gyroscopes (because depending on the answer to our question, maybe some of those problems I mentioned can be gotten around someday), can still go into my thesis. These things are supposed to be about 200 pages long, but most of that is usually background material. I was worried that all the background I'd been learning was going to turn out to be totally irrelevant, that'd I'd have to start from scratch. So I am incredibly relieved to be given a new problem that is actually related to the work I've already done.

Now actually doing the experiment is going to be hard, don't get me wrong. I don't know where I'm going to find the time, considering that the trap is going to continue to be a two person job, and there are only three of us in the lab. And I've still got classes to take... And I'm already forseeing a million problems with trying to set this new experiment up, and the problems that you forsee aren't ever the bad ones, either.

But those frustrations are for later. Right now, I'm just relieved to have a new project that won't require me to start from scratch.

Sad Stories

Sometimes I keep links to stories that move me, but find it hard to work them into posts. Too serious to throw in with a bunch of links to space pictures or television trivia.

But this one really got to me, and I want other people to read it: "Laos had only two million people then. And we were later told that the U.S. and its allies dropped three million tons of bombs on us.."

"Eventually, nobody could survive here, anymore. Our houses were destroyed and our fields were full of unexploded substances. People were dying and so were the animals. We had to leave and so we decided to go to Vietnam, to search for refuge. But the journey was tremendously arduous. We were moving at night, carrying few possessions. During the day we were hiding from the enemy planes."
...
In this biggest covert operation in U.S. history, the main goal was to "prevent" pro-Vietnamese forces from gaining control over the area. But the entire operation seemed more like a game, overgrown boys allowed to play, unopposed, their war games, bombing an entire nation into the stone age for more than a decade. The result of that "game" was one of the most brutal genocides in the history of the 20th century.

Some of the most brutal bombing raids were done out of spite, with no planning. When U.S. bombers couldn't find their targets in Vietnam due to bad weather, they just dumped their load on the Laos countryside, as the airplanes couldn't land with the bombs on board.

More warcrimes: missing CIA prisoners.

From the Tribune -- `I have to make this right' "In 1997, June Siler named Robert Wilson as the man who attacked her. Today, she's convinced he's not and blames police for the mix-up."




You know what? That's enough sadness. The other stories I've got can wait for another time.

UPDATE:

A happy ending: Victim recants; convict to go free: "A Chicago man who had been serving a 30-year prison sentence for a 1997 attempted murder will go free today, a month after the victim in the case told the Tribune that she no longer believed that Robert Wilson was the person who attacked her."

But it's still a sad story, even with the happy ending. 1997 to 2006 is a long time.

Thanksgiving Poem

The Fire of Drift-wood
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

DEVEREUX FARM, NEAR MARBLEHEAD.

We sat within the farm-house old,
Whose windows, looking o'er the bay,
Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold,
An easy entrance, night and day.

Not far away we saw the port,
The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,
The lighthouse, the dismantled fort,
The wooden houses, quaint and brown.

We sat and talked until the night,
Descending, filled the little room;
Our faces faded from the sight,
Our voices only broke the gloom.

We spake of many a vanished scene,
Of what we once had thought and said,
Of what had been, and might have been,
And who was changed, and who was dead;

And all that fills the hearts of friends,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;

The first slight swerving of the heart,
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.

The very tones in which we spake
Had something strange, I could but mark;
The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.

Oft died the words upon our lips,
As suddenly, from out the fire
Built of the wreck of stranded ships,
The flames would leap and then expire.

And, as their splendor flashed and failed,
We thought of wrecks upon the main,
Of ships dismasted, that were hailed
And sent no answer back again.

The windows, rattling in their frames,
The ocean, roaring up the beach,
The gusty blast, the bickering flames,
All mingled vaguely in our speech;

Until they made themselves a part
Of fancies floating through the brain,
The long-lost ventures of the heart,
That send no answers back again.

O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned!
They were indeed too much akin,
The drift-wood fire without that burned,
The thoughts that burned and glowed within.


Or if your mood in the mood for something less reflective and more ridiculous, take a look at these turkeys drawn by psych students. Their TA added an extra page to the exam when making copies -- it said "draw a turkey." via MeFi.

Human Infrastructure

One of the last things I can see myself doing with my life, below "astronaut" on the list of unlikely careers, is managing a software company. Yet for some reason I've been reading the archive of Joel on Software recently. I find myself nodding in agreement with his descriptions of managment techniques that don't work, including musings from his days in the Israeli army about military-style management and why it's necessary and why it doesn't work if your people can quit. (What does he say works? Trusting the people who take pride in what they do.) Mostly the guy is just a good writer, funny and insightful, one good point per entertaining essay.

Anyway, one essay in particular got me thinking. It's called The Development Abstraction Layer.

He starts off with the story of a talented programmer who saves up enough money to live for a year and then quits his job to write a piece of software better than anything else on the market: "Flawless, artistic, elegant, bug free." Then he sets up to take orders from customers.

Of course, no orders come. Why?

"He's pretty sure he knows. 'Marketing,' he says. Like many young technicians, he is apt to say things like, "Microsoft has worse products but better marketing."

When uttered by a software developer, the term "marketing" simply stands in for all that business stuff: everything they don't actually understand about creating software and selling it.

This, actually, is not really what "marketing" means. Actually Microsoft has pretty terrible marketing. Can you imagine those dinosaur ads actually making someone want to buy Microsoft Office?

The real reason, he says, is the lack of infrastructure to support the product. Not just marketing to make people want it, but sales, to make sure they can get it, and customer service, to make sure they can use it, and billing, to make sure they pay for it, "and public relations, and an office, and a network, and infrastructure, and air conditioning in the office," and "accounting, and a bunch of other support tasks."

But this isn't limited to software development:

The level a programmer works at (say, Emacs) is too abstract to support a business. Developers working at the developer abstraction layer need an implementation layer -- an organization that takes their code and turns it into products. Dolly Parton, working at the "singing a nice song" layer, needs a huge implementation layer too, to make the records and book the concert halls and take the tickets and set up the audio gear and promote the records and collect the royalties.

.

While I was thinking about that, I read Teresa Nielsen Hayden's latest post on book publishing. Teresa works for Tor, putting out mainly science fiction novels. She sometimes uses her blog to explain how book publishing works, and why nobody ever reads books that have been "self-published" by their authors. Why, in fact, self-publishing is a scam, even if the people who print your book offer to help you "market" it.

Huh, I thought, a publishing company is like a software company without any programmers! The whole company is "infrastructure." The product comes from somewhere else. And no matter how great that product is, "self publishing" almost never works.

Then I thought about reality shows like "American Idol" and "American Inventor." The prize on those shows is, basically, an infrastructure.

Even the military works this way. Joel Spolsky says "It is not a coincidence that the Roman army had a ratio of four servants for every soldier. This was not decadence. Modern armies probably run 7:1"

All of this has opened my eyes a little. First of all, I am not going to think of "efficiency" in the same way anymore. When I hear that big charities spend 80% of their donation income on administration, I am not going to be appalled. Every effective organization spends 80% of its income on administration, according to Joel. An efficient organization is one in which the infrastructure works invisibly.

Secondly, I am going to try to be more respectful of the people who actually do all of this infrastructure work. I'm guilty of complaining bitterly about "bureaucracy." Of losing my cool with customer service people. Of noticing only when the secretaries and payroll people at my university do things wrong, and not all of the times they do things right. Of not appreciating that their job is both hard and vital. The lesson here is that the infrastructure is in some ways more important than the product. A bad product with a good infrastructure may succeed, but a good product with a bad infrastructure will not.

I know I have a tendency to forget this. Which is one of several reasons why, though I notice bad managment all the time, I wouldn't make a good manager either.

A Small Blue Marble

Human civilization is a very new and very small and very fleeting thing in the universe. To help keep things in perspective:

Pictures of a near neighbor which is only 764 times larger than Earth (in volume.)

Two men who have gone farther from Earth than any others in human history, except a few of their friends who took the same trip. How far? About 1.2 "light seconds". (A light second is the distance light travels in one second.) Doesn't sound so far when you remember that the sun is eight light-minutes away, and the nearest of the stars, four light-years.

The Chicago Tribune has a little more with these two.

A bunch of people who are trying to do other things unique in human history... (involving pizza, and tea parties, and rattlesnakes, and Michael Jackson.)

There's a movie doing the festival circuit called Ever Since the World Ended.

After civilization ends, how will you be able to navigate?

A new group is taking votes on The Seven Wonders of the Modern World All man made, as were the originals. Six of the original seven are gone. The Great Pyramids remain, and I voted for them, along with the Great Wall of China, the Easter Island Heads, Petra, Stonehenge, the Colosseum in Rome, and the Acropolis.

Physics for Future Presidents tells world leaders what they need to know about "nukes" and radioactivity and the technologies that come from quantum mechanics...

Nasa shows us a movie of the Earth shrinking in the rear view mirror as one of their probes leaves for another planet.

Pictures of the shuttle lifting off from a unique point of view although probably not the ISS according to the MeFi thread that followed...

And finally, to provide a little perspective for US readers: how the rest of the world reacted to our recent elections.

Why I'm not Voting Straight-Ticket Democrat

Some of my favorite bloggers (Jim McDonald at Making Light and John Scalzi and Chad Orzel, who links to the other two) are urging people to vote straight ticket democratic, in an attempt to cause a shake-up in the Republican party, which is desperately in need of new leadership.

I share their aims but I'm not going along with their program. Because as one commenter at Making Light said, they don't live in Chicago.

Chicago shows what happens when the Democrats start taking your vote for granted. Specifically, in this race, we've got an incumbent governor who is under federal investigation for giving state business to certain companies in return for millions of dollars in kickbacks, and hiring unqualified people for state jobs either in return for campaign contributions or simply to build a network of cronies. Not to mention the fact that his policy decisions on things like toll roads and pensions have been plain stupid. And we've got a candidate for county board president who is the son of the man who won the Democratic primary. Two weeks before John Stroger won, he suffered a stroke. His family covered up the seriousness of the stroke until after the election, allowing voters to think he would recover enough to take office. They revealed his true condition at the last possible minute for changing names on the November ballot, and then arranged to get Todd Stroger's name put on instead. They have the clout to put names on the Democratic ticket at will because John Stroger has for so long been a very important cog in the Democratic machine in Cook county. I have no doubt that the kickbacks and hiring scandals and cronyism are even worse at the county level than at the state level, and that the Stroger family is a part of them.

So I'm not voting for either of them. But not only am I not voting for them, I am voting for their Republican opponents, both of whom are running on platforms of reform.

See, I have this theory about how the two party system works. It's based on the idea that the most important function of democracy is to allow the people to throw out a bad government without a revolution. To me this seems very difficult to do in a multi-party system. Either you've got three or more parties in a winner take all election, which means that a minority is enough to elect a generally unpopular person (ie, Ralph Nader helps get Bush elected) or you've got a proportional representation system, where, even if the bad government leaders lose their majority, they can keep part of their power by joining a "coalition."

By contrast, in a two party system it is possible to vote against someone, not merely for someone. And that's what I'm going to do. I'm a big fan of checks and balances, and two equally powerful parties act as checks on each other, ideally. I want to keep them roughly equally powerful. And they're not, around here -- I think that's the root of the problem.

Which is not to say that there are only two points of view on every issue. Just that, in the US, I think the multiple perspectives should be hashed out within the parties. The long list of candidates with the spectrum of ideas should appear on the primary ballot. And the elections which actually choose someone for office should be (and are) run-offs between the winners from the two long lists.

That's my philosophy. I like the two party system because I believe of all systems it makes it easiest to "throw the bastards out." So I'm voting to restore the balance of power in Illinois, and throw some bastards out.

But at the national level -- straight Democrat.

Scary Ideas

Happy Halloween! I've still got the costume I bought and never wore last year -- Natasha, as in "Boris and Natasha," as in "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show." It has a rubber wig and a tube dress, and really long fake eyelashes, and purple eye shadow, and bright red lipstick. It's scary, all right. If only I had somewhere to wear it...

Girl Hacker has posted a programming schedule for her personal television channel, and it seems like a good meme to steal for a post of my own. Rocky and Bullwinkle will be on it, of course. But mine's got to be much longer, because I really like television, and have watched a lot of it.


7:00a - Breakfast Time
(Wikipedia describes it as "an off-the-cuff morning show with lifestyle segments and 'roving reporters' who visited unique sites across the country each day. This was the network's flagship show and utilized every room of the [New York City] apartment [that fX used to broadcast from]. Hosted by Tom Bergeron, Laurie Hibberd and Bob the Puppet.")

9:00a - Game Shows
(Wheel of Fortune, Family Feud, Love Connection... Whatever. Game shows are good in the morning, a cheerful way to start the day. I'm scheduling three hours of them. Also: Blind Date and Fear Factor count as game shows.)

12:00p - Sports on weekends, or TechTV on Weekdays (These days its "G4TV". But back in the day it was Kate and Leo all day long from a single studio set, making it up as they went along. Obviously I'm not usually home at this time, but if I am, this is just the kind of friendly company and infotainment I'd like to have. Apparentely other people miss it, too. Better than court shows, anyway.)

3:00p - Kids' Shows
(Rocky and Bullwinkle, as promised, and also the Muppets, and You Can't Do that on Television, and Out of Control, and Clarissa Explains it All, and the Tomorrow People, and Spellbinder, and Liberty's Kids, and Danger Mouse and Count Duckula. Two shows a day.)

4:00p - British Comedy
(Monty Python, Red Dwarf, Blackadder, the original Whose Line is it Anyway, Have I Got News For You, etc. I think these are all half hour shows...)

4:30p - The Simpsons

5:00p - Sitcoms
(Roseanne, Dharma and Greg, The King of Queens, Malcolm in the Middle, The Dick Van Dyke Show, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Scrubs, and Get Smart. Because those are my favorites, not because they have anything at all in common.)

6:00p - Action Adventure
(The Incredible Hulk, MacGuyver, Dr. Who, The Bionic Woman, Star Trek The Original Series, Mission: Impossible, and Alias. Which seems to fit better with these older, more light hearted shows than with the "serious" later shows... I'll schedule some Due South in this slot too.)

7:00p - The Aaron Sorkin / Amy Sherman-Palladino hour
(The West Wing, Sports Night, Studio 60, Gilmore Girls)

8:00p - "Serious" New Shows
(24, Heroes, House, and Jericho, but Jericho'd better get better quick or I'm cancelling it. Maybe fill in with some CSI.)

9:00p - Buffy and Veronica etc.
(Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel (yeah, why not?), Firefly, and Veronica Mars. And shortlived Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls. And possibly Joan of Arcadia. I liked the little bit I saw.)

10:00p - The Daily Show

10:30p - M*A*S*H (or maybe sometimes "Moonlighting." I haven't actually seen that at all, but Ken tells me I'd like it.)

11:00p - Svengoolie and Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Overnight - More Sitcoms. Doesn't really matter which ones, but I'd include I Dream of Jeanie, Bewitched, and Mork and Mindy, for starters. And The Wonder Years, even though that's not exactly a sitcom.



Luckily, I'm married to the one person in the world who would actually want to watch this with me.

Things That Look Cool

* Close Up Pictures of Snow Crystals via Girl Hacker

* A photographer who made his famous subjects pose in midair via MetaFilter

* This is what the end of the world looks like Links to missile test pictures at MetaFilter

* Manhole covers of Japan via Making Light

* The Biomedical Image Awards We know lots of people in biomedical imaging these days... Also via Making Light.

* Photos of Mars they need your help cataloguing all the craters. Computers aren't good at it. Via User Friendly I think.

* The Sidewalk Art of Julian Beever via Making Light and User Friendly.

* Mars in 3-D I'm sorry, I forget the source.

* The Nieman Marcus Catalog featuring a cruise in a space ship.

* Light and line Great shots by Chicago Tribune photographers. Registration probably required.

* Our pumpkin. Ken suggested I try to carve this Bears logo, and it turned out great.

Bears Win

Did you see that Bears game last night? The Chicago Tribune called it a Monday Night Miracle. On national television, the Bears came back from the 20 point deficit they were looking at in the third quarter. The offense looked like amateurs and never managed more than three points in the whole game, while turning over the ball six times. But the defense and special teams proved they could win the game all by themselves. By one point. That one point lead wouldn't have been enough, of course, if the Arizona kicker hadn't missed his easy shot in the last minute of the game. Man, two and a half hours of painful, boring futility, followed by half an our of shouting ourselves hoarse, and a final minute of jumping and dancing and arm pumping. I guess American football can be as exciting as Ken says it is... And the Bears are still unbeaten.

But how does their defense do it? The Onion reveals their secret.

October Poem

October

By T.A. Daly

Come, forsake your city streets!
Come to God’s own fields and meet
October.
Not the lean, unkempt and brown
Counterfeit that haunts the town,
Pointing like a thing of gloom,
At dead summer in her tomb;
Reading in each fallen leaf
Nothing but regret and grief.
Come out, where, beneath the blue,
You may frolic with the true
October.

Call his name and mark the sound,
Opulent and full and round:
“October.”
Come, and gather from his hand
Lavish largess of the land;
Read in his prophetic eyes
Clear as skies of paradise,
Not of summer days that died,
But of summer fructified!
Here, O soul, his message sweet.
Come to God’s own fields and meet
October.

News of the New

Apparently a couple of Americans have won the Nobel Prize in physics. They worked on the COBE satellite, measuring the cosmic microwave background. Microwaves are, of course, just a kind of radio waves. The microwave background is nothing but static, noise. The point is that it doesn't have a source. It seems to come from all directions at once, from all over the sky. It was first discovered by accident by scientists at Bell Labs trying to build a radio reciever, who weren't happy that no matter where they pointed the thing, they couldn't get rid of the noise... But it's not quite the same in every direction, and that's what the COBE satellite measures. The little tiny differences. Since the only possible source for radio waves that come from everywhere is thought to be the Big Bang, studying it can tell us something about the beginning of the universe.

But the Nobel Prize people do more than just give out awards. They also create cheesy flash animation games. Certain members of our lab who shall remain unnamed have no problem playing this at work, since after all, it's educational! It's on the Nobel Prize website, and it's about lasers. We're supposed to be learning about lasers, right? Thanks to Chad Orzel for the link.

In other space news, did you see that Neil Armstrong got his line right after all? The story says

Some historians and critics have dogged Armstrong for not saying the more dramatic and grammatically correct, "One small step for a man ..." in the version he transmitted to NASA's Mission Control. Without the missing "a," Armstrong essentially said, "One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind."

The famous astronaut has maintained he intended to say it properly and believes he did. Thanks to some high-tech sound-editing software, computer programmer Peter Shann Ford might have proved Armstrong right.
...
In a graphical representation of the famous phrase, Ford said he found evidence that the missing "a" was spoken and transmitted to NASA.

"I have reviewed the data and Peter Ford's analysis of it, and I find the technology interesting and useful," Armstrong said in a statement. "I also find his conclusion persuasive. Persuasive is the appropriate word."

I, personally, am very glad to hear this. I know some people who would say that there is something to be learned from the original story about an embarrassing human error at the moment of a great human achievement, that it's the difference between real life and myth, and it's important to remember... I say we need mythic achievements these days more than we need reminders of human fallibility. I hope that history books from now on record the line as it was meant to be.

Not all of us get to walk on the moon, of course. But a few teachers got to experience weightlessness recently, in a special airplane like the one astronauts use for training. Sometimes called "the vomit comet," I believe... The idea was to get the teachers excited about science, so they could go back and get their students excited (and incidentally get some publicity for Northrup Gruman, who sponsored it.) But supposedly half of all people get space-sick their first time in zero g. And you only get thirty seconds or so of weightlessness at a time, not enough to acclimate. So you gotta think about half those teachers weren't all that enthusiastic about the experience... But hey, I'd risk it.