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Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

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Re: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

#91
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very little truth to what you wrote here. You can get into great universities with solid A’s. And you can certainly graduate from a state school with minimal to no debt.

I had pretty good grades but I couldn’t get into any great universities with my stats. Best I could do was UNC-CH. The bifurcation is extremely real in my experience, and I’m not in the charmed class.

But your claim is built on certain assumptions that there is a certain path to get in based on “stats”. Sometimes you can improve your chances because there are other paths to get in. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but years back schools were clamoring to get veterans. I know some who were accepted to prestigious schools despite relatively underwhelming “stats” had they applied straight out of high school.

I’m not saying military service is for everybody, just that there are more paths than the well-worn templates most people attempt to emulate.

Re: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

#92
post #88
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was originally a book, or actually a series of books, written and set in the 1930s. Great reading as a child, but to have such permissive parents - they barely make an appearance while their kids as young as 7 spend days at a time boating and camping - seemed as fanciful to me as Harry Potter . I wonder if it was really like that in the 30s.

Apart from the magic, Harry Potter is just the well-worn genre of "school stories" and the social structure of the school is basically that of a select British private school, complete with boarders and "houses" and so on. It really was like that in the 30s (see Roald Dahl's Boy , for another example, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalky_%26_Co .). I think Swallows and Amazons is a little stretched from what would…

Or pretty much any of Enid Blyton's books. As you say, probably an exaggerated view of childhood independence in upper middle class(?) England (and certainly there are American examples as well although boarding school is a less prominent feature), but not something wildly fantastical to many readers.

Re: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also important to note how much a bit of goofing around got the public engaged in the missions. It wasn't a dry, clinical, scientific expedition — real humans were on the moon, and took the opportunity to... be actual humans. Hitting golf balls. Jumping around. Those antics, even if they had nominal risk, are part of what got millions of people (especially young people) excited about manned spaceflight.

What in the world are you talking about?? That is actually completely opposite of what happened! As cool as this was to many of us, public support plummeted after seeing NASA "fooling around", and golf especially was seen as an elitist white man's activity. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, this only highlighted NASA's cultural bias. Political support, which was already waning, immediately fell off a cliff as well…

I would be interested in evidence that "mundane" activities were directly connected with the decline of the program, but I think you're inserting modern biases of race into the public sentiment of the 70s. I don't think people looked at golf explicitly as a "rich white man's game" in a pejorative sense, nor do I think the people that would, were pulling the strings in Congress or NASA.

My understanding was one of "Okay, we beat the Soviets to the Moon, now what?"

Re: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

#94
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they were meticulous and followed their steps precisely, even for quotidian things like making breakfast or pitching a tent. As for risk, Jim Lovell was asked, before he left for his second trip to the moon (Apollo 13), i…

> And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be, in large part because it got more professionalized. This seems plausible, but I wonder if what you calculated is the best way to measure it. First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the world", does the same trend hold for the people on the other side of these conflicts? At least in the past 20 years' examples, t…

On the first question, there is some scholarly debate, but as far as I can tell as an outsider the general consensus is that there are fewer deaths due to armed conflict than anytime in the last two millennia. Even something as terrible as the Syrian Civil War (~half a million dead over a decade) is the sort of civil unrest that was happening at multiple places across the world during the 17th century (see _Global Crisis_ by Geoffrey Parker for how horrible the 17th century was, all around the world). It's just the numbers are a lot less precise than we have for American deaths in military operations, so there is a lot more room for debate. This can be complicated even for something well documented and recent like World War Two: do you count the Bengal famine as part of the war dead? It killed ~2 million Indians, but not directly due to the war, it's just that the ships that in peacetime would have been carrying food to India to relieve the famine were instead carrying weapons (and food) from the US to Britain. Did they die due to the war? Or due to British colonialism and evil Winston Churchill? Well, a whole lot of the deaths in 17th century wars were due to war-related famine and disease, so if you don't count the Bengal Famine but do use the higher numbers for the 30 Years War it isn't a clean comparison, etc.

On the second question it's even harder to say. Would probably be a masters degree level of work to compute. There are all sorts of confounding factors: during World War Two, for the US Army, infantry made up about 20% of the personnel (half were in logistics, various other combat arms like artillery, tankers, engineers etc. made up the balance) but did the vast majority of the dying: something like 80% of US Army deaths came from that 20% of the force. So is the combatant count just infantry (and the small number of other combat arms who were forward of the gun line)? Similarly, about half the total US deaths during WW2 came during the Northwest Europe campaign (D-Day to V-E Day, France-Low Countries-Germany). The other half of the deaths came from the entire Battle of the Atlantic, the Bomber Offensive, Mediterranean and Pacific combined. So those 11 months were much deadlier than the rest.

This is the advantage of the straightforward monthly average, it can be computed in five minutes from Wikipedia. Trying to get more detail quickly becomes a whole bunch of tricky choices that reasonable people can disagree on, but which leave you with wildly different numbers.

Re: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

#95
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're straying way off-topic here but I'd suggest that things are pretty terrible for significant numbers of people. As evidence (I'm not US-ian), I present this article [0], which actually tries to make the point that living standards have never been better. In my view, he fails, specifically with the following statement in para 5, "There would surely be a revolution in America if 90% of our citizens have suffered i…

Yea it was a little exaggeration, but the trend is in the wrong direction. If things don't change, we're going to have no middle class in 20-30 years and probably full-on Elysium in 50-70 years.

Too focused on relative income distribution, not enough on standards of living.

Americans live in bigger houses with fewer people living in them, they own smart phones, cars, huge TVs, appliances, HVAC, video games, plenty of clothes. They get their goods delivered straight to their door, they have their food grown and prepared for them. This is an accurate description of lower class Americans.

While income inequality is real and worsening, I'm still not seeing evidence that this leads to bad outcomes.

Re: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this dean's observation is about helicopter parenting or risk aversion as much as it's about how bifurcated and ultra-high stakes the university/credential-pedigree system has become, and how essential it is to optimize for a certain outcome at all costs. When I was high school age, the A students went to good universities and generally ended up with a good professional career, the B students went to…

> the A students maybe will finish college hamstrung with mountains of debt, and the rest? Walmart/Meth if they're lucky, prison if they're not. This is the false dichotomy that’s causing students to incorrectly go to college when it might not be the best path. There is a massive gulf of the middle class you just glossed over between college and Walmart/meth: the trades. Working in skilled blue collar fields (electri…

I've seen it said a few times that there's a reason why electricians, contractors, plumbers, diesel mechanics, etc send their kids to college and it's because all those trades are hard on your body and a bit dangerous.

Yes they are a route to financial independence, but there's a hidden cost that a banker, marketer, SEO expert, programmer, manager, etc. does not have to pay.

Re: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

#97
post #63
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're straying way off-topic here but I'd suggest that things are pretty terrible for significant numbers of people. As evidence (I'm not US-ian), I present this article [0], which actually tries to make the point that living standards have never been better. In my view, he fails, specifically with the following statement in para 5, "There would surely be a revolution in America if 90% of our citizens have suffered i…

So you don’t live in the US and only get your information from the media (who don’t sell clicks by saying everything is fine) but you’re willing to make bold statements about how we’re on the edge of a civil war?

Its often much easier looking in to see the problems than looking out. I would say that's also the impression I get too watching/reading your fox/CNN/CNBC channels.

Here in the UK we're suffering from the same malady and what brought this into focus for me was Brexit + the Grenfell fire.

Suddenly I saw people like those from my poor home town on TV (at one point it had the 3rd highest unemployment in the UK). And I hadn't seen anyone like that on TV for years. People with few opportunities, people ALL the UK media had been ignoring because they're not university educated and they say uncomfortable things.

When Jon Snow, a well know TV journalist over here, spoke about his experience meeting the Grenfell survivors and the accusations he had to face that they'd tried to talk to the press and been ignored, it really brought it into focus:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/aug/23/jon-snow-grenf...

Re: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

#99
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea it was a little exaggeration, but the trend is in the wrong direction. If things don't change, we're going to have no middle class in 20-30 years and probably full-on Elysium in 50-70 years.

Too focused on relative income distribution, not enough on standards of living. Americans live in bigger houses with fewer people living in them, they own smart phones, cars, huge TVs, appliances, HVAC, video games, plenty of clothes. They get their goods delivered straight to their door, they have their food grown and prepared for them. This is an accurate description of lower class Americans. While income inequalit…

So, lots of bread and circuses. Are they healthy? Are their grandchildren and great-grandchildren going to inherit a civilization that they would want to be born in to?

Re: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

#100
post #99
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too focused on relative income distribution, not enough on standards of living. Americans live in bigger houses with fewer people living in them, they own smart phones, cars, huge TVs, appliances, HVAC, video games, plenty of clothes. They get their goods delivered straight to their door, they have their food grown and prepared for them. This is an accurate description of lower class Americans. While income inequalit…

So, lots of bread and circuses. Are they healthy? Are their grandchildren and great-grandchildren going to inherit a civilization that they would want to be born in to?

If a dog is fat it's somebody else's fault, if a person is fat it's their fault.

> Are their grandchildren and great-grandchildren going to inherit a civilization that they would want to be born in to?

How should I know how people's unborn children feel about a society which doesn't exist yet?

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