There's more than a touch of irony in military project that reached the ultimate high ground only to show us that the world domination game was not worth playing.

But I guess you had to be there to really grasp the significance of Apollo's role in the cold war. Personally I think the 1968 "earthrise" photo from apollo 8 was the most significant contribution, it's often credited with igniting the environmental movement (along with the book "Silent Spring").

The notion of the "pale blue dot" (google it) came out of that photo and exploded in our cultural consciousness several years before Carl Sagan gave it an eloquent voice. The Earthrise photo made it very clear in a lot of people's minds that there is nowhere else to go in the foreseeable future. It was clear that mankind had run out of territory to conquer on Earth and it asked the question at the height of the Vietnam war - why are we still squabbling over the spoils?

Earthrise and the PBDot are now popular cultural icons, they say something to us in the same way a red cross says something to a soldier on a battlefield.

I still have a copy of that issue. :)

The "mankind" thing was just poetry for a domestic audience, read Kennedy's speech and it's crystal clear that the Apollo project was a military response to the "threat" posed by sputnik.

The day they landed on the moon, I landed on a plate of spaghetti. I was 10, I had put my meal on my chair and gone to get some juice, I came back and was so enthralled with the TV I sat back down on the chair without looking.

I'm not sure which came first, the fake landing theory or the movie Capricorn One.

My bones say - close enough to 40 in round numbers.

Never played myself, I was 17-18 when I first heard of it. It appeared to me to have nothing to do with motorbikes or girls so it failed to hold my attention. We did however as younger teens play a (nameless) game that used a die, a ruler, an eraser, some pencils and a roll of wallpaper or similar.

The idea was to set up a battle, drawing in pencil the units of your army on your end of the paper. To move a unit you erased and redrew it, the dice determined how far a unit could move (in inches). To shoot you put the pencil point on your unit, put one finger on top of the pencil to hold it upright, and flick it with your fingers on the other hand. The pencil would leave a line on the paper which represented your bullet. Other than that there weren't any fixed rules, you could make up your own rules for each game...how small can a unit be, how many hits could a unit take, different coloured pencils for different bullets, a bouncing bomb is a series of pencil flicks, etc, etc. Had just as much fun playing that as a kid as I do playing WoT as an grandfather.

Have no idea if the game has a name or where it originated, it seems to be quite old, my dad showed us how to play but it was not his invention since I found other kids at school who had learnt it from their dad, not sure but I think dad played it as a kid in the late 30's, early 40's. While on the subject of kids games, here's something a bit geeky that will blow a grandchild's mind.

Keep your paws off my coffee mug.

World of Tanks and other titles from wargaming are IMO "free to play" in the original spirit of the idea, you can get the same in-game advantages with points as you can with a credit card. The credit card just means you progress in the meta-game much faster. But the meta-game is never ending, so who really cares how fast they progress?

Disclaimer: I have been playing video games on and off since ~1970-71, WoT is the only game I currently subscribe to, after a year of playing for free I was convinced they were a company worth supporting. Suitable for kids, no blood and guts. Speaking of teenage kids, don't ever let them use your credit card - end of story.

TFA is really about the human mind. We understand patterns as different forms of language, music is the most basic and universal, it lights up all areas of the brain, then you have spoken language built on top of musical patterns, then along comes symbolism in the form of writing and icons, math is our most recent and most precise form of natural language.

The take home message is, expose your kids to maths without boring them to death.

The same way Ronald Regan and the Iron Lady acted to reduce sulphur emmissions that cause acid rain, international cap and trade treaty. Cap and trade is a market solution proposed and implemented by the founders of the neo-conservative movement, that has actually worked as advertised. The problem today is that influential "conservatives" are sitting on coal mines that could easily become stranded assests ten years from now. Funny how the politics turns itself upside down if you watch for long enough.

I'm surprised they are not routing all traffic to Andrew Bolt's page.

The thing is there are very good feedback therapies, I saw an application recently that was originally designed to help dancers perfect their moves. A neuroscientists working near the Sydney opera house who was interested in dance found it also helped stroke patients, undermining 35yrs of her own work in the field. But like any real scientists she had found a "better answer", so her opinion spun on a dime.

The fact that scammers make similar claims for a $5 app doesn't distract from the real benefits "biofeedback" can have, it distracts from the app store selling it and the ignoramus buying it.

Agreed, the only thing they all have in common is bad taste. Ironic how a sex offended was the head cheerleader for the sex-offenders list in the US congress (until he was caught). I always found it suspicious when a male habitually goes into impromptu rants against sexual offenders, he who shouts loudest and all that....

There's a big ass fan at a local BBQ joint - Buz & Ned's. The thing is monstrous.

Nope!

Wikipedia:

"In the United States, possession of psilocybin-containing mushrooms is illegal because they contain the Schedule I drugs psilocin and psilocybin. Spores, however, which do not contain psychoactive chemicals, are only explicitly illegal in Georgia, Idaho, and California.[17] In the rest of the country, it is not illegal to just sell the spores, but selling them with the purpose of producing hallucinogenic mushrooms is illegal.[18][19]"

The underlying assumption is that you have to live in a cave and eat tofu if you want to be green, to do otherwise is to betray your own principles. AGW is a systemic problem but fortunately the economic trend of renewables vs FF is becoming such that coal mines will be virtually worthless in the not too distant future.