kip/bot/blog

There’s a small park just east of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I’ve played chess at the tables near the entrance literally dozens of times over the thirteen years I’ve lived in Brooklyn. But it was only today, while I was riding my bike along Eastern Parkway, that I looked at the memorial.

The park is named after Dr. Ronald Ervin McNair. I assumed that this was an inter-war physician who had done some service like setting up a clinic or been a benefactor of the community’s arts efforts. It turns out that McNair was, among other things, an astronaut on the ill-fated Challenger mission of 1986. The memorial, sadly neglected (like the park it is in), is pretty cool:

It’s a nice mix of air & space design, interesting sides to a modern personality (the karate kick next to the professorial holding forth confused me and a person standing nearby), and traditional monumental bronze imagery.

Other interesting things about McNair:

• Nichelle Nichols, Lt Uhura of Star Trek, was helping NASA recruit more diverse candidates to the space program in the 70s and McNair was one of those recruits
• He had a black belt in a form of karate and was regional champion several years
• He was an accomplished saxophonist and composed a piece of music with Jean-Michel Jarre before the 1986 mission. (McNair was supposed to record the saxophone part on the mission.)

Things learned from the trip:

• go that extra step — I’ve been in that park many times but never took the extra steps to find out who it was named after
• ride a bike — having a bike meant that I didn’t have to take extra steps to see this
• the internet needs a memorial project to remember people who inspired the dedication of parks, but not quite enough to maintain those parks.

But will it be my FB friend?

The Mars rover Spirit is being put to sleep, or “infinite hibernation” mode, as reported by the AP. Now begins the long process, where across decades and lifetimes, the small pulse of energy from the sign will be self-directed towards Spirit’s sentience. Like Vee-ger before it, Spirit will come back and let’s hope it’s not pissed. In ten years, someone will write yet another Mars colony book, in which it the colonists — a multi-culti mix of scientists, jocks, babes, nerds, a bureacrat, a rogue unfairly disgraced military, and an artiste of some sort — are terrorized by an uncaring, mercilessly logical machine that calls itself Brit.
This is a serious bummer, really. These Rovers have already lasted 16x as long as planned and it’s made very cool discoveries, took the highest res picture of Mars, and had Marvin the Martian on its mission patch. Cheap government wankers . . .

A Martian sunset, brought to us by Spirit.

MAKE Magazine reports from Toy Fair, a cool idea:  a gift card which buys time on major telescopes, time which you can control from your computer.

Telescopes have gotten amazingly good in the last 15  years and the ability to connect them to computers (for more precise movement and tracking), as well as advances in photography, allow for glorious pics.  Some dude I follow on flickr has some gorgeous pictures including the one below, of the Horsehead Nebula.