I covered this moon landing in an earlier post, and now Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost has been on the moon since March 2nd. Data is starting to come in. On their YouTube page (here), they have weekly updates.
Seems they are quietly doing science on the moon…
‘We learned so much that we didn’t know’: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost moon lander mission was full of surprises
These are just excerpts, the entire article is worth a read here.
I received a surprise gift from QuiltingFool. She took a photo of Zander and turned him into a quilt block and I couldn’t be more touched. I still miss that guy. He’s hanging next to Bixby right now until I decide how I want to display him.
My eyes have really been bothering me this late in the evening, so forgive any typos. I should really be off the screens this late…
This is an open thread
moonbat
Thanks, TaMara! This is good and fascinating info,
Those quilting squares are precious in the old fashioned sense.
Kristine
Quilting Fool does amazing work.
Cool moon info. I’ve managed to miss a lot of it.
I keep Puppies Past photos on the fridge. Doubt I’ll ever take them down.
NotMax
Better the lunapix from up there than the lunatics from down here.
//
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team
Thanks TaMara, hope you get some good rest when you go to sleep.
sab
Just saying, without immigration American companies have no Jason Kims (I am guessing he is the child of immigrants.)
sab
@sab: Missed the edit time limit. I googled his name and there are dozens of Jason Kims in America excelling across the board: arts, science, engineering.
What is wrong with people (white supremicists) that they don’t want these other people here, enriching us. Left to the white supremicists we would still be living in caves.
sab
Very OT: Milwauke judge thing.
ICE clods coming through totally disrupted local justice and law enforcement. In Milwaukee that day. Across America now.
Also disrupted any sort of domestic violence enforcement. Had been : Guy you are being too rough and an asshole. Stop or we have bigger guns.
Now it is : wife if you complain we will deport the prime breadwinner in your family.
Works for asshole bully male partners. Doesn’t work for anyone else
ETA Possibly that was the point. Only dads count as people.
Kayla Rudbek
@sab: the white supremacists would still be running around the woods naked and painting themselves blue, as I would say whenever they try to slag on the Italians (usually followed up with “that’s what all your inbred ancestors were doing while my Italian ancestors were inventing half of ancient Western civilization”)
Gloria DryGarden
pretty much. That must be what will be great about America pretty soon.
of course, those supreme beings could go on ahead and start living in caves now..
Gloria DryGarden
@NotMax: clever!
sab
@Kayla Rudbek: A lot of what Italians “invented” they borrowed from Iraq and points east.
Like double entry accounting, so kings and merchants actually know what they have: what they have coming in as revenues and what they have promised out as expenses.
Middle East and India have had that since forever, but Europe only got it in the Renaissance. It made the Renaissance possible. Beore that they couldn’t afford to do what they did
ETA I will grant Italians that they saw a good thing and borrowed it and brought it West
ETA2 We knew that about Italians. Everyone has heard of Marco Polo.
Baud
@sab:
When you’re a loser, the last thing you want is to see is more winners.
Baud
@sab:
He invented that popular swimming pool game.
WTFGhost
Random note: if one’s eyes are bothersome, get some lubricant eye drops. Dry eyes can fool you; sometimes, you need a day or two of frequent lubrication for any hot-spots to cool off.
Ramalama
A guy asks Reddit where he can safely dig a hole with his friends. The comments made me laugh in bed. The weirdest post I think I ever read.
Baud
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Indeed! I used to say his name hundreds of times every summer.
Firefly Aerospace, huh? You can’t take the sky from them.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@lowtechcyclist: When I saw “Firefly” in the post, I perked up. Then I read further and perked down again.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Perking down needs to become a more utilized phrase.
Ohio Mom
@WTFGhost: Oh yes, I have lubricant eyedrops in my purse and on my nightstand.
When things start looking blurry I know it’s time to wet my eyes. Could be staring at a screen too long (for some reason, people don’t blink enough in front of a screen), a windy day, or I’m a touch dehydrated.
I also have some gel drops to use at bedtime and allergy drops for when my eyes get itchy from spring pollen.
The estrogen blocker I take and my RA make my eyes dry.
no body no name
@sab:
Nothing is new. Nothing in is unique to any one group of people either. You’d think people would realize that but they don’t.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@rikyrah:
Good morning
Matt McIrvin
@Ramalama: This reminds me of a video I saw recently about how a few people die every year by digging a deep hole in wet sand on the beach. It’s easy and fun to start doing; you can get down inside it, but such holes have a tendency to collapse without warning and bury you.
So all I know is, part of the answer is “don’t do it in sand on the beach”.
Ramalama
@rikyrah: Good morning!
@Matt McIrvin: Huh. I did not know this. Good thing those guys are in Western Mass and not on the coast, otherwise the temptation would be too great.
The Audacity of Krope
At work this morning, I have been to this episode of the Latino USA Podcast detailing the full history if the situation with Kilmar Abrego Garcia including an interview with an immigration lawyer (don’t believe it’s his personally). Very in-depth and well done.
They publish every week and I have been loving this podcast. Last week was a retrospective on a Colombian(?) musician who died in a plane crash recently.
Overall, Spotify has been the news content savior I’ve been seeking for at least a decade. I was surprised by Spotify to learn I like NPR and the Financial Times. I’ve found a few credible independent reporting outfits.
This pleases me.
Professor Bigfoot
Good morning, all!
I love what Firefly(heh) are doing, but this headline triggered an obscure earworm.
Sunny and cool all day, so there’s lawn mowing and such in my future. Can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. :^/
Kayla Rudbek
@sab: as Eric Flint had one of his characters say in the Belisarius series, Rome took wisdom from the Greeks, the message of Christ from the Jews, and trousers from the Huns, and discarded everything that they must, and that was how Rome and its thousand years had survived and prospered (this was a Greek noblewoman from the Eastern Roman Empire speaking so that’s why she said a thousand years)
Professor Bigfoot
@Kayla Rudbek: Ah, thank you, there’s another series I need to revisit.
Although right now I’m in the middle of Harry Turtledove’s “Videssos” series and it’s great fun.
The Audacity of Krope
To hear my elementary education tell it, once the Western Roman Empire fell, nothing happened for the next thousand or so years and that dusty Eastern Roman Empire didn’t beat mentioning 🙄
sab
@Professor Bigfoot: @Kayla Rudbek:
Thank you both. I need a new (to me) series to read.
John Sterling
So is the May 17 get together still on?
Tony Jay
@The Audacity of Krope:
It’s plenty ridiculous. Rome hadn’t really been the functional capital of the Empire for a good while when Constantine picked Byzantium as the site of his New Rome, and it was the capital of the actual Roman Empire for much longer than Rome.
All the richest provinces. All the major trade depots. By the 4th century CE all the hard-nosed generals who turned it from a Principate into a Dominate. All the things that made the Roman Empire an Empire that could survive the barbarian onslaughts, they got from the east. Gibbon might have nailed the crippling effect of monotheistic absolutism, but when it came to his contempt for the ‘Greek Empire’, he can be safely ignored.
I say all this as someone who is going to Istanbul in a couple of months and is VERY MUCH looking forward to checking out the Roman relics.
Dorothy A. Winsor
The Audacity of Krope
I think the issue was that those thriving in the Eastern empire were…a little swarthy.
sab
@John Sterling: I sure hope so.
Citizen Alan
@Baud: Or as I recently put it, complaints about DEI and wokeness are nothing more than the whining of entitled, ill-educated and mediocre white people, mostly men, who are incensed about the fact that they are simply not up to the challenge of competing one on a level playing field with more ambitious and more talented people who would have been treated as second class citizens in earlier eras.
The Audacity of Krope
I just determined she is the director of the Columbia University Law School Immigrant Rights Clinic, Alora Mukherjee.
The Audacity of Krope
The latest rebranding exercise in the Republican War on Kindness and Consideration.
Tony Jay
@The Audacity of Krope:
To be honest, I think it’s a combination of that, plus it seeming a bit weird to acknowledge the actual Roman Empire existing right through the medieval period and into the start of the Renaissance, plus a hangover from backlash against the Ottoman Sultans claiming to be the successors to the Roman Empire and ruling over much of the same territory.
Plus, y’know, those bloody Christians. Can’t be a proper Roman Empire if they’re not feeding martyrs to lions, can it?
The Audacity of Krope
To hear those who have appropriated the term “Christian” tell it, they still are. America truly is the inheritor of Rome.
OldDave
@Matt McIrvin: Practical Engineering Beach Sand episode: video
Kayla Rudbek
@sab: it’s an alternative history SF (spoilers: basically take one of the greatest generals of human history, give him an opponent and a helper from the far, far future so the future of humanity is at stake, field of play runs from the Eastern Mediterranean to Egypt, Ethiopia, Persia, Arabia, and across the Indian Ocean into India and I think what would be modern Afghanistan. China and Southeast Asia get mentioned although not being major battlefields).
Kayla Rudbek
@Tony Jay: yeah, that was initially a thing that threw me slightly off, was that these Greek-speaking people were all running around considering themselves as Romans, but Irene’s speech really drove home the point that yes, she did think of herself as a Roman, all the way back to the she-wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus.
Kayla Rudbek
@Citizen Alan: “lord give me the self-confidence of a mediocre white man” is something that I wish I could teach to all potential inventors
Ramalama
@Professor Bigfoot: Oh boy, what ear candy was that?
It snowed this morning. No nothing to my lawn.