"An explosion caused by a meteoroid impact on the moon a couple of months ago was visible from Earth with the naked eye, according to Science@NASA. But don’t worry if you didn’t catch it — it was only noticeable for a moment." —Ugh, they are totally right about the way desensitization happens. It used to be that a simple video of the moon getting walloped by space would have kept me sated for days, but after years of poring over each and every frame of hot rock-on-moon action it barely registers; I need something considerably more graphic and extended to excite me now.
It was 40 years ago when humans last made the effort to visit another heavenly sphere, on the Apollo 17 mission that launched on this day in 1972. But astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt didn't just walk on the lunar surface—they also drove around in a dune buggy, and also skipped around while singing songs. Nixon was so angry about this expression of joy that humans were banned from every visiting the moon again.
"Planting the vegetables when the moon was in different constellations, she discovered, resulted in their growing into different forms and sizes. Over years of research she concluded that root crops (including onions and leeks, which are not technically root crops) do best if sown when the moon is passing through constellations associated with the earth element; leafy crops do best when the moon is associated with water signs; flowering plants do best associated with air signs, and fruits did better with fire signs." —German gardener Maria Thun, who put the "biodynamics" theory of cosmic, occultist philosopher Rudolph Steiner to test in her garden and wrote a popular [...]
What's going on with that stupid piece of rock up in space? Earth's Moon appears seismically quiet: its major volcanic and tectonic activity is confined to its distant past, as evidenced by the lack of new large-scale features on the surface. However, recent images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have revealed smaller features that had escaped earlier notice. Several regions exhibit small ravines known as graben that are free of cratering or other marring, which indicates relatively recent formation.
A new paper in Nature Geoscience (by Thomas R. Watters, Mark S. Robinson, Maria E. Banks, Thanh Tran, and Brett W. Denevi) suggests these shallow graben may have formed [...]
"What would happen to the Earth if the moon was destroyed?" Apart from the MASSIVE REJOICING and WAVE OF GOOD FEELINGS BROUGHT FORTH UPON THE LAND, pretty much nothing. Things would get a little wobbly, but it seems like a fair trade-off. NOW can we destroy the moon? Please?
It turns out the full moon does not actually make people crazy, which is not the same as saying that it doesn't suck, because it does. It sucks so bad. Fuck the moon.
"As our closest neighbor in space, a time-capsule of planetary evolution and the only world outside of Earth that humans have stepped foot on, the Moon is an obvious and ever-present location for future exploration by humans. The research that can be done on the Moon — as well as from it — will be invaluable to science. But the only times humans have visited the Moon were during quick, dusty jaunts on its surface, lasting only 2-3 days each before departing. Long-term human exposure to the lunar environment has never been studied in depth, and it’s quite possible that — in addition to the many inherent dangers of [...]
This Saturday, at 11:34 PM, the moon is going to be all, "Hey, look at me, I'm so big! Come on, look at me!" I suggest we all stay indoors and ignore it, hurting its feelings so badly that it never comes by again. Suck it, stupid moon! Nobody cares about you!
"A century after the Titanic disaster, scientists have found an unexpected culprit of the crash: the moon." This is something of a quandary for me, because I also hate the Titanic, but I hate the stupid moon even more. So, DAMN YOU MOON! You made the old lady throw it into the ocean at the end! Etc.
"I think our generation is obsessed with the moon. When we were children, we were told that in the year 2000 we’d be in spaceships and living on the moon. Nothing like that happened. We felt betrayed. Now people stay home in front of the screen. But when we were kids we were supposed to be out of our home, out in space. So I feel like when I make records, I keep the dream alive." —Stop keeping the dream alive, guy from Air. It's an empty, useless dream.
Hey, can you see your favorite neighborhood spot in Cat Power's new video? Tompkins Square Park? Doyers Street in Chinatown? The basketball courts on Christie and Houston? Economy Candy on Rivington? Max Fish? The Prince Street subway station? No, you can't. Those places aren't in your neighborhood anymore because you moved to Brooklyn like all the rest of your friends. And you can never be Manhattan. Never again. You're old and you suck and you aren't even allowed to look at the moon anymore.
The wonderful news that NASA is deliberately crashing two space probes into the moon is tempered somewhat by the fact that this is actually an attempt to be a more careful steward of that useless satellite's surface. While we have been using the moon as a garbage dump for years—because that's the only thing it's good for—now the agency is concerned that the junk we quite rightly chuck onto that stupid rock might "come to rest in a historically significant place, like on Neil Armstrong’s footprints." You can IMAGINE how I feel about that. PAVE THE WHOLE GODDAMN THING ALREADY.
The new Bat for Lashes song is not another "Laura." (Which will rank high on my "best songs of 2012" list.) But it's certainly not bad. Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, it sounds quite a bit like that Gotye song that is good but that you're surely sick of by now. In other bat news, bats hate the moon. And rightly so.
"[T]he changing force exerted by the Moon as it orbits—the same thing that drives the tides—creates subtle differences in the position of the hardware within the [Large Hadron Collider]. The differences are tiny for any individual piece of hardware, but they add up when it comes to something as big as the LHC, which has a circumference of nearly 27km. Plus, the LHC hardware is very, very sensitive to being out of alignment, given that it has to accurately direct bunches of protons that are moving at nearly the speed of light. The net result is that the LHC's operators sporadically have to tweak the beam's alignments…" —All of [...]
"Everybody knows that there's just one moon orbiting the Earth. But a new study by an international team of astronomers concludes that everybody is dead wrong about that." —Somebody go read the rest of this and tell me what the deal is; I just don't think I have the strength to face it today.
Do you want to watch a 24-minute video about the birth of the moon? You do? Come here for a second. No, no, stand right there. Close your eyes. [GIANT SMACK] I'm sorry, but sometimes that's the only way to deal with abject stupidity. You really disgust me sometimes. Besides, all you need to know is right here. Idiot.
