MLT Club Member David Herrick
MLT Club MemberForum Replies Created
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I agree, Bill. One of the greatest unexpected benefits of this club is being able to learn from each other about whatever we’re curious about. We’ve all been around long enough to have acquired some expertise in something, and it’s great to be able to tap into that when needed.
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I was born and raised in Lexington, KY. I spent a couple of years apiece in graduate schools in Los Angeles, Rhode Island, and Indiana, and five years apiece at teaching jobs in two small towns in Kentucky. For most of the rest of the time I’ve lived in High Point, NC, initially just because of a job, and now also because of a wife who doesn’t want to leave.
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Tom, according to Wikipedia, the U.S. Space Surveillance Network is able to track about 20,000 objects orbiting Earth, only about 10% of which are currently functioning satellites. However, it’s estimated that there are about 130 million bits of orbiting debris such as paint flecks and rocket exhaust particles that are too small to detect from the ground.
Most of this debris is concentrated at the altitudes where most spacecraft are sent: low Earth orbit (below 2000 km) or geosynchronous orbit (about 36,000 km). The rest of space is pretty debris-free. Several spacecraft have flown through the main asteroid belt without recording so much as one dust grain collision.
You might think that hitting a piece of dust is no big deal, but it really packs a wallop when moving at a relative speed of thousands of miles per hour. Here’s what a paint chip once did to a window on the space shuttle:
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Of course, if imagination is involved, Sesame Street has it covered:
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I think I posted this one a while back on another thread, but it’s appropriate here as well. A lighthearted but aspirational song by the recently departed Michael Nesmith:
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Yes, Jung, and the design process began back in 1996. It’s not unusual for space telescopes and interplanetary spacecraft to span decades between design and fruition. And each year scientists and engineers have to keep their fingers crossed that legislators won’t vote to defund the whole thing.
Because of the expansion of the universe, the most distant (and oldest) objects have had their emitted visible light shifted to infrared wavelengths as viewed from Earth. JWST’s main capability over Hubble is that it is built to detect infrared radiation rather than visible light, and therefore able to examine the formation process of the earliest stars and galaxies.
This is actually one of the stickiest current problems in cosmology: Hubble showed us that galaxies formed surprisingly early in the history of the universe, and we don’t yet understand how the matter density evolved so quickly from almost perfectly uniform to very clumpy.
As you suggested, JWST will almost certainly show us a lot of cool things that we never even imagined. Just compare the photos in astronomy textbooks pre- and post-Hubble, and you’ll get a sense of how much of a revolution in understanding we’re in for!
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Continuing with Songbird, for Dec. 26th, V = 1867 and C = 5.1. For Dec. 27th, V = 1670 and C = 4.6. For Dec. 28th, V = 1379 and C = 3.8. For Dec. 29th, V = 935 and C = 2.6.
So compared to MLT’s last original release on YouTube (I Bought Myself a Politician), Songbird’s viewership has fallen off considerably faster. I kind of expected that, given the latter’s more introspective nature. It’s still a great song, of course, and it passes through my head several times a day. Too bad YouTube can’t count mental views.
I’ll be out of town and off the grid for the next few days, but when I get back I’ll compile the stats for December.
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I watched the launch too, Jung. It had kind of become a running joke how many times it had been delayed (launch was originally scheduled for 2007), so it’s hard to believe it finally happened! Here’s hoping they don’t discover a critical design flaw post-launch as they did for Hubble, because there’s no way to service it.
That video is probably the best five-minute summary of JWST’s capabilities that I’ve come across!
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Got my card today, just in the Saint Nick of time! Woo-hoo!
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Personally I only care for instrumental versions of the U.S. national anthem, largely for the reason you cited, Roger. My favorite is this one that they used to play on a lot of local TV stations each day at sign-on / sign-off:
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I got kind of a late start on this one, but for the final hour (New York time) of Dec. 21st, the number of views per day for Songbird is clocking in at V = 15360, and the number of simultaneous views stands at C = 42.3. I plan to do daily updates for the next week.
For Dec. 22nd, V = 14351 and C = 39.5. For Dec. 23rd, V = 6049 and C = 16.7. For Dec. 24th, V = 3551 and C = 9.8. For Dec. 25th, V = 2431 and C = 6.7.
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Yes, Juergen, we did learn in school about diminutive suffixes like -lein (Frau –> Fraeulein) and -chen (Magd –> Maedchen). I just didn’t expect the language to have a way to get cute with a word like Fisch.
You just reminded me of the song Ihr Kinderlein Kommet that we learned in high school!
I never heard of -le though. I do recall a textbook reading in which a boy named Franz was referred to as “der Franzl”. Is that an example?
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I’ve watched a number of those Sesamstrasse videos on YouTube, Juergen, as a way of testing my ability to understand in German some dialogues that I know very well in English. One of my favorites involves Ernie and Bert fishing in a boat. Bert is having no luck, and Ernie casually demonstrates how he can cause fish to jump into the boat just by calling out to them. In English he says “Heeeeere, fishy fishy fishy fishy!” But in German it’s rendered as “Hieeeeerher, Fischlein Fischlein Fischlein Fischlein!” I never suspected the existence of the word Fischlein.
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Hey, Juergen!
Anything JWST discovers will be a step toward understanding our universe better, and it will undoubtedly introduce us to new phenomena that require explanation, but in terms of the “known unknowns” I think the most intriguing and mystifying question is how the first generations of stars and galaxies formed. We’re trying to build a universe here, and a few pages of blueprints are missing.
