Shuttle Press Release Drinking Game.

Fevric J. Glandules wrote:
Perhaps I should have said "the 50 states" rather than "the
continental USA", as that was my initial meaning, but I'm not sure
it makes any difference. To get somewhere other than Mexico,
Canada, or possibly Russia, to somewhere that actually has any
import, is a long haul.

That though is why the subjective nature of "import" or "major" is an
issue. For that matter, as presented, "long haul" is subjective.

It is ~2400 miles from San Francisco, CA to Washington, DC. There are
other coast-to-coast trips that are longer. Such trips are
routine. At the same time, the distance from Miama, FL to Caracas,
Venezuela is only ~1300 miles. Is 1300 miles a "long haul" when the
trips within the United States can be 2X that or more? Is Venezuela
of "import?"

rick jones
BTW, Washington, DC to Caracas, Venezuela is ~2000 miles...
--
The glass is neither half-empty nor half-full. The glass has a leak.
The real question is "Can it be patched?"
these opinions are mine, all mine; HP might not want them anyway...
feel free to post, OR email to rick.jones2 in hp.com but NOT BOTH...

Stuf4 wrote:

From Rick Jones :

That depends on one's definition of major doesn't it? For example,
going South past Mexico, would you consider Columbia or Venezuela
major, or would that have to be Brasil? *Right there I've already
assumed you would not consider anything from Panama on North to Mexico
to be "major" though at times Panama or Nicaragua have had a "major"
mind share.

Lessee... Alaska, last I checked, was still part of the North
American continent, and part of the US. Russia counts as major. The
Bering Strait is 50 something miles wide. And there are those islands
in the middle, the Diomedes. Therefore...

2.4 miles apart. Final answer.

[fx: google]

The Diomedes are Russian and American. So no.

Perhaps I should have said "the 50 states" rather than "the continental
USA", as that was my initial meaning, but I'm not sure it makes any
difference. To get somewhere other than Mexico, Canada, or possibly
Russia, to somewhere that actually has any import, is a long haul.

rwalker wrote:

I'd have to look at a globe. But if we restrict it to, say, permanent
members of the UN security council, I wonder if it would be closer

I think that's over-restrictive. I don't see any point in quibbling
over the definition of 'major', in any case. It'd end up being
arbitrary - GDP greater than this, and / or population greater than
that, and or biggest city bigger than that.

over the North pole from the US-Canadian border to Russia than it
would be across the Atlantic to Europe?

Rick Jones wrote:

Was my ass-u-me-ption that "next-but-one" meant "not the immediate
neighbor" but a country beyond that? IE that you were not looking for
Russia, Canada or Mexico or any country like that?

Exactly. Standing on any point of the main USA border (let's
leave Alaska out of it to simplify things, and in any case
the few people there are a long way from most of their fellow
countrymen), how far do you have to go before you're not in
Mexico, Canada, or perhaps Cuba, and in a country that's, say,
more economically significant than Brooklyn [1]?

[1] example arbitrary cut-off point.

On 7/22/2011 11:01 AM, Chris Jones wrote:

If I needed to get drunk fast, I'd drink on every "historic" out of NASA
PAO.

My favorite in that regard was Deep Space 1's ion engine that the PAO
said was the first time something like that had been done...other than
the two ion engines that NASA had flown on SERT 2 in 1970:
http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/sert-2.htm
It's still up there BTW:
http://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=4327

Pat

From Paul Madarasz :

In 1,000 years, only history geeks will remember "The United States of
America." *I imagine more than that will remember that humankind left
the Earth in the 20th century.

Huh?! Does anyone today admire the Great Pyramids, several thousands
of years later, without full awareness that it was the Egyptians who
did it? I am absolutely certain that America's due credit for Apollo
will never be lost on history. The flag is prominent in many of those
photos. And it won't take a history buff to figure out what those
stars & stripes represented.

The person who has near-vanished from due space history credit was
Adolf Hitler. There aren't too many swastika flags in today's space
history stories, let alone what you might imagine will appear in the
stories presented a thousand years from now.

Yet it was the Nazi's who got to space first. And it was a former-
Nazi SS officer who led the US to walking on the Moon first.

Adolf Hitler's leadership not only gave the world our first
spaceflight, but also our first national highway system (the
autobahn), our first jet aircraft (He178) as well as our first
operational jet aircraft (Me262). Today to go drive out on the
freeway to the airport to catch a flight, your life has been enriched
with invention after invention due to Herr Fuhrer Dolfie. And if you
happen to do that drive in a classic VW Bug, guess who deserves the
credit for that vehicle, the most successful car design of all
time... You guessed it, Uncle Alf (as Geli Raubal liked to call
him). Or any VW, by extension of the corporation's success brought
about by the Bug. It's Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. For all the
multitudes today who take such trips regularly, does anyone give a
single thought to Hitler for the benefits he brought into the world?
Hardly.

Yes, the USofA will LONG be remembered. And credited. Like the
Egyptians. Like the Romans. But the triumphs of the Third Reich are
already near-forgotten. Kill a few million Jews along the way, and
your legacy is screwed. Actually, I don't think it was that atrocity
in itself. The nail in his legacy-coffin was losing the war. Had
Barbarossa gone the other way, it's not too hard to imagine that the
legacy of the Swastika would have gone the other way too. And by
Hitler's own assessment (captured on audio tape here -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o64QOynq0_Q ) the reason he failed
against Russia was because France was not completed in '39, forcing
him to divide into two fronts. And his reason why conquering France
got delayed was merely the happenstance of bad weather. A couple of
clear days during that Sitzkrieg and all of history might have turned.

....and ironically, with early German victory, there might never have
been a Holocaust. Hitler could have followed through on the far more
compassionate version of the Final Solution, being mass deportation
such as the Madagascar Plan.

A couple of clear days in late '39, and we all might be speaking
German today. Hitler (with a much cleaner legacy) would be revered
more than George Washington. He would not have been boxed in to
resorting to those most monstrous tactics. The war atrocities he
would have been accountable for as victor would have been seen as
forgivable as, say, LeMay's firebombing decisions. Hitler would have
emerged from WWII as the Savior of Germany. The Savior of Europe.
But for that lack of a couple of clear-weather days, space history
would have taken a dramatically different course as well. There would
have been no drive for an Apollo program, which was motivated by
Gagarin defeat, which was motivated by the Sputnik-led nuclear ICBM
showdown, which carried on the legacy of the Manhattan Project, which
was funded by FDR's leadership out of fear of Hitler. Trinity-
Hiroshima-Nagasaki would need never have happened. The Manhattan
Project could have been shelved, with enormous cost savings for the
US. A Hitler who contains France in '39, followed by triumph over the
Russians is a Hitler who then begins to appear as a plausible ally to
the USofA. Yes, the crystal ball gets fuzzy when attempting to peer
down that path, but it was the path advocated by prominent American
patriots like Sloan (of GM fame), Ford, Lindbergh, Kennedy (Ambassador
Joe), ...

And a path where Hitler becomes FDR's buddy is a path where it becomes
easy to imagine that Pearl Harbor never gets bombed. One analysis is
that the only reason that Japan "awoke the sleeping giant" is because
they needed US held territories in the far Pacific - the Philippines
in particular. But the US already had decided to let go of the
Philippines, and that gradual transition was underway. Had the United
States sided with the Axis powers, it would have been easy for the US
to transfer the Philippines over to Japan via a peaceful treaty,
instead of granting Filipinos their independence.

A couple of days of clear weather for the Reich over France in '39,
and there might have been no Pearl, no Hiroshima, no Nagasaki, no
Holocaust.

Now I've stated here in years past that I am not a big fan of
alternate timelines. But I'll make an exception in this case to
highlight how thin a thread the world turned on back in those critical
years. Also, it may help historians snap back to the actual facts of
history as it really unfolded:

- Nazi Germany is the country that succeeded in the world's first
rocket flight to reach space.
- It was know how from such Nazi's that enabled the United States to
succeed in humanity's first walk on the Moon.

Maybe some historians might even conclude that a person like Arthur
Rudolph was used by the US like a cheap whore. Yes, he did
questionable things. Von Braun and others did questionable things as
well. If we are going to use people like these to help attain the
highest accomplishments that the human race has attained, it would be
cases like these that are perfect examples of what the power of
Presidential pardon was created for.

So the shoulders of giants that got us to the Moon include shoulders
of Nazi's. Shoulders of people like Adolf Hitler and Arthur Rudolph.
Some like Von Braun lie within our reach of forgiveness. Of pardon.
Others, not so much. What are we to do with an accurate assessment of
history?

..

The question I have isn't whether 1,000 years from now the US will be
remembered for its Apollo accomplishment, it is whether humanity today
will have accurately learned the lessons of our past mistakes, and
successes, so as to avoid woefully destructive paths that lead to a
future where humanity isn't even around 1,000 years from now.


~ CT

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011 21:35:48 +0000 (UTC), "Fevric J. Glandules"
wrote, perhaps among other things:

Stuf4 wrote:

From Rick Jones :

That depends on one's definition of major doesn't it? For example,
going South past Mexico, would you consider Columbia or Venezuela
major, or would that have to be Brasil? Â*Right there I've already
assumed you would not consider anything from Panama on North to Mexico
to be "major" though at times Panama or Nicaragua have had a "major"
mind share.

Lessee... Alaska, last I checked, was still part of the North
American continent, and part of the US. Russia counts as major. The
Bering Strait is 50 something miles wide. And there are those islands
in the middle, the Diomedes. Therefore...

2.4 miles apart. Final answer.

[fx: google]

The Diomedes are Russian and American. So no.

Perhaps I should have said "the 50 states" rather than "the continental
USA", as that was my initial meaning, but I'm not sure it makes any
difference. To get somewhere other than Mexico, Canada, or possibly
Russia, to somewhere that actually has any import, is a long haul.


France is no further away than Canada.
--
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
-- Ed Abbey

Fred J. McCall wrote:

So define 'long haul' and 'has import'. I can fly from coast to coast

Shan't.

within the US and travel 2500-3000 miles. A flight of that same
distance will get me to Brazil, England, or France.

You make my point for me.

Paul Madarasz wrote:

France is no further away than Canada.

If you're in Goroka, Papua new Guinea, sure.

On 7/23/2011 3:30 PM, Fevric J. Glandules wrote:
Paul Madarasz wrote:

France is no further away than Canada.

If you're in Goroka, Papua new Guinea, sure.

I think he's referring to the French population of Canada.

Pat