reasons that i was going 9 mph over the speed limit today: the lumberjack in the big red chevy truck behind me on this double-lined road was in a hurry and also was using a slightly more powerful bluetooth radio to play his music, but he was using the same frequency that i use, and he was just playing Party In The Usa onrepeat, so every time he caught up to me my music started fading out and “i pUT MY HANDS UP THEY’RE PLAYIN MY SONG” started blaring from my speakers and i was justly running for my fucking life
In 1967, the Lunar Orbiter missions sent back exciting – but grainy and low-rez – photos of the moon’s surface.
But it turns out that the Orbiters’ photos were actually super-high-rez,
shot on 70mm film and robotically developed inside the orbiters, with
the negs raster-scanned at 200 lines/mm and transmitted to ground
stations using an undisclosed lossless analog image-compression
technology. These were stored on tapes read by fridge-sized $300,000
Ampex FR-900 drives. These images were printed out at 40’ x 54’ so the Apollo astronauts could stroll over them and look for a landing spot.
But these images were not revealed to the public because NASA feared
that doing so would also reveal the US’s spy satellite capabilities.
Instead, NASA deliberately downrezzed and fuzzed the images that the
public got to see.
Ryan Smith tells the amazing story of the preservationists who rescued
the images off of disintegrating FR-900 magnetic tapes starting in 2007,
under JPL’s Nancy Evans, who set up her team in an abandoned McDonald’s
building and dubbed the project “McMoon.”
The McMoon team refurbished salvaged FR-900 drives, homebrewed a
digitizer system, and painstaking recovered the 2GB/image files that the
system generated. Evans’s team has recovered 2,000 images from 1,500
tapes, all in the public domain and available for download on Moonviews.com.
‘ndIIIIII WOULD WALK FIVE [wheeze] DRED [wheeze] S’AND IIIIII WOULD WALK FIVE. RED [wheeze] JUST TA [wheeze] THE [increasingly out-of-breath wheezing] wHO [wheeze] ARE[wheeze] ZEND [wheeze] TU[wheeze] DOWN[wheeze] CHU doo-oo-orrrrrr
i am absolutely losing my mind over this article imagine living in the upper west side literally paying millions of dollars for a luxury apartment in the richest part of the greatest city in the world, you walk out of your complex with your thousand dollar stroller so connor or hunter or ashlyn can get some fresh air before their scheduled paleo snack when suddenly a fucking rat leaps into the thing like its being thrown by a stagehand in the bushes, a goblin achieving flight for a fraction of a second, scampering around in the shit and slime of the street and now its in your trust fund childs lap i am LIVING, new york freakin city babey!!!!!!!!!!!
Fuck, that’s actually true: “Mr Kissinger, who allegedly orchestrated the mass bombing in Cambodia in 1969 and in Vietnam and Laos in the 1970s as secretary of state under Richard Nixon…was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his efforts to conclude the Vietnam War. The award was described by critics as a move which ‘made political satire obsolete’. The Vietnam war was not over until 1975.”
The critic who said that was Tom Lehrer, who was known for political and social satire music (I highly recommend you look him up, he’s hilarious) and it actually did cause him to just.. stop.
this is… maybe the funniest thing that’s ever happened on television? i’ve never seen someone so thoroughly derail a late night talk show, i could honestly watch cardi b and john mulaney talk for hours
