*related=http://videosift.com/video/Apollo-13-Lift-Off

Apollo 13 Lift Off has been added as a related post - related requested by PlayhousePals.

>> ^MonkeySpank:

What bothers me even is the stupid pawn shop show on the History Channel! Talk about a major WTF!


I like where they show "Real and Not" or something, where they show a historically-accurate movie about the Apollo program, culminating in Armstrong's first step.

Then they show 2001:A Space Odessey because like, there's like moon stuff in it.

>> ^critical_d:

You are a dirty..dirty bird.
>> ^deathcow:
but how do they drink in space
http://down.laifudao.com/tupian/d13694842.gif



MoooSQWAK!!!!

You are a dirty..dirty bird.
>> ^deathcow:

but how do they drink in space
http://down.laifudao.com/tupian/d13694842.gif

I thought he was already famous. Isn't that Apollo Anton Ono?

>> ^Reefie:

>> ^Yogi:
Great show, miss Frankie, BBC are a bunch of cunts that don't understand comedy.

BBC understand comedy, let's see there's Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Red Dwarf, to name just several classic comedy shows known and admired around the world. Blackadder, Porridge, Absolutely Fabulous, Only Fools and Horses, Morecambe and Wise, One Foot in the Grave, The Two Ronnies, The Young Ones, Fry and Laurie, My Family, 'Allo 'Allo, Yes Minister, The Vicar of Dibley, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, I could go on and on and on but I think I've established the trend... The BBC also spends a lot of money promoting new and established comedians performing at large venues like the Apollo, and also runs the BBC New Comedy Awards annual ceremony which is considered one of the highlights of the comedy calendar. Frankie is a gem and a fellow Scot so I'm biased in favour of him but let's not forget he left comedy behind of his own accord. Can't blame the BBC for that.
In fact if you're going to slag off the BBC the least you can do is come live over here for a year and pay your TV licence fee so a) you're contributing, and b) you actually have a leg to stand on if you're going to make ludicrous and offensive claims.


You're naming classic comedies that shaped the world...and do not apply in this discussion (The good ones, not the shit you listed). Just don't even bother making an argument next time if you're going to produce strawmen like this. Monty Python and Fawlty Towers are amazing...AND OLD! Really fucking old and were made at a time where the BBC wasn't run the way it's run now.

Frankie was constantly harassed and treated like shit on Mock the Week by it's Producers because they kept getting complaints from stupid people who think their opinion matters. Frankie was the funniest part of that fucking show, the BBC took him away, so YES they don't understand that saying offensive things is a comedians job. You don't have the right to not be offended.

I'm glad you're offended because you're fucking wrong. The BBC used to produce seriously funny shit...some of the most cherished shows ever. Now they produce crap, because it's an upside down pyramid of executives noting shows to death and killing the funny parts of others because some mother called in to complain.

You are whats wrong with humanity. You're a lowly wretch who defends morons who ruin things for the rest of us. Why don't you go work for NBC you evil monster.

>> ^Yogi:
Great show, miss Frankie, BBC are a bunch of cunts that don't understand comedy.


BBC understand comedy, let's see there's Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Red Dwarf, to name just several classic comedy shows known and admired around the world. Blackadder, Porridge, Absolutely Fabulous, Only Fools and Horses, Morecambe and Wise, One Foot in the Grave, The Two Ronnies, The Young Ones, Fry and Laurie, My Family, 'Allo 'Allo, Yes Minister, The Vicar of Dibley, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, I could go on and on and on but I think I've established the trend... The BBC also spends a lot of money promoting new and established comedians performing at large venues like the Apollo, and also runs the BBC New Comedy Awards annual ceremony which is considered one of the highlights of the comedy calendar. Frankie is a gem and a fellow Scot so I'm biased in favour of him but let's not forget he left comedy behind of his own accord. Can't blame the BBC for that.

In fact if you're going to slag off the BBC the least you can do is come live over here for a year and pay your TV licence fee so a) you're contributing, and b) you actually have a leg to stand on if you're going to make ludicrous and offensive claims.

I guess my point was missed, FWIW I'm not a luddite who doesn't see any value in handheld technology. I've been through about 6 iPods now and have come to rely on them, for music and for advancing my Spanish and Portuguese through podcasts.

My problem is with the techno-dweebs I know who get excited over any technology advancement. As long as it's newer, faster, shinier, smaller, with better audio/video/storage/bandwidth, etc, than last quarter's model I'm supposed to be impressed when they wave it around and rattle off its specs. Then they use it to look up Brady Bunch trivia or some such garbage.

The smug sense of "I have more computing power in my hand than the Apollo astronauts had" yet they can't construct a fucking correct sentence on their own if their lives depended on it. But I digress. >> ^Quboid:

I wouldn't have thought there'd be so many Luddites on the sift.
@ulysses1904, yes, your non-existent example of exaggerated uselessness is indeed useless. Something useful? How about checking prices and product reviews while in the shop? I can browse my local video store and if I see an interesting movie, I pull out my phone, load the IMDB app, take a picture of the BluRay case and learn all about it.
When I was in Italy a few months ago, I had language trouble when ordering food on one occasion - I pulled out my phone, typed my order into Google Translate and handed the phone to the waitress. That day, the human race was closer to having a Babel Fish than we have been in thousands of years of human development - but hey, it's just a gizmo, right? Who cares?
In fact, come to think of it, even your example isn't useless - that birther nonsense wouldn't have lasted long if everyone with a smartphone could have done that while watching Obama's inauguration.
@CheshireSmile, if that's all you need then fine, although I'm guessing your friends have rubbish keyboards on their phones. I don't need much, but I want loads and why not? If I'm waiting for a plane or something, I like to be able to web browse, check Facebook and Twitter, play games, whatever.
My Samsung Galaxy S 2 probably would not survive falling out the window of a moving car, however this has yet to cause me any distress - just out of interest, how often does your phone fall out of a moving car?

>> ^chingalera:

Who cares if it was real??! I wanna go spend some time on the ISS with this girl!!


In zero gravity, eh?

Saw MIB3 this weekend on impulse. It was okay, wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you want a seriously breezy and disposable movie. Definitely better than the 2nd one, which is not hard to do. If they make another one they need to open up the scale a bit. This movie's budget (admittedly with marketing) is reported at $250 million. That is insane. There are only two real money sequences: a chase to end act 2 that looks like the Obi-Wan and Darth Grievous chase in episode III, and the climax which takes place at the launch of the moon mission at Cape Canaveral in 1969 and looks a lot like Apollo 13.

This movie has some really dumb and small-scale choices. Smith's character is equipped with a device that requires him to plunge from a height in order to gain enough speed to "time-jump". The movie climaxes with Smith literally standing on top of the saturn rocket lifting off for the first manned moon landing. You'd think they'd have a money shot with Smith jumping off the rocket as it lifts off. Those things went pretty slow to start, you could survive the first 30 seconds it takes to get up to any kind of speed, and then jump off for an awesome looking stunt. Or, hell, if I were writing the movie, have him just stay on the rocket until it reaches the necessary ascent speed (something like 100 MPH or some shit.. I remember thinking it didn't sound far from 88MPH), which wouldn't take long after the rockets fire. Then Smith is transported into the future thousands of feet in the air and you have a post-climax gag where he's falling apparently to his death only to have Jones' character sweep in at the last second and save him in a flying car or flying alien bubble pod more likely. Smith's character would be like "How in DA HELL you know I was gonna falling through the air over Florida man!?!?" and Jones' character would put up the video feed that only MIB had access to of Smith riding the rocket and disappearing from 1969's POV. "We had a lot of eyes on that mission" or some shit. Do I have to write this crap for you Hollywood? It flies out of my butthole effortlessly. Instead Smith's character jumps into an evacuation basket and rides it down a zip-line... and this is not even filmed in an interesting way. A whole lot of this movie looked sort of non-commital, like 2nd unit did the whole thing.

They added a "poignant twist" to the time travel aspect which is the same problem with so many movie series these days... Star Wars, Star Trek, Spider-Man.. in a sequel, everything is revealed to have been previously connected.. connected from the start in fact! Oh yawn... more than 30 years later people are still trying to re-create the "I am your father" buzz from Empire Strikes Back. Always at the expense of cheapening the overall franchise and sapping meaning from the actions the characters took in preceeding films. What's worse, they layered on some spiritual/karmic hokum to support another cliche forced by executive interference.

It's crazy to think the first movie turns 15 years old this year. I thought it would be an eternal classic, but the last time I watched it, which might actually have been when MIB2 was coming out a whole ten years ago, it did not hold up.

The actinides are, generally, "safe" to handle, like those Uranium Oxide pellets. You are more likely to damage the pellet with your nasty human oils than the uranium will you...unless you eat the whole thing, but its chemical toxicity will do you more harm that its radioactive toxicity. Uranium oxide just isn't that radioactive, that is why none of the containers or work areas were shielded in this lab.



Now, if they were dealing with a "hot" substance, one that has hard gammas (like when you do MOX fuel recycling), you have to take even greater precautions because then the radioactive problems really do start to show their heads. Not only will it damage your cells faster than they can repair, but it can start to take out unshielded electronics. This is generally only true for fission products, and a few actinides like protactinium which is highly radioactive AND chemically toxic, and generally only man-made (normal occurrences are less than a few parts per trillion in the crust).



These complications are pretty good generalization to why normal LWRs are not the best way to do nuclear, they just generate far to much waste compared to alternatives. You burn less than 1% of the mined uranium in current reactor tech and fuel cycle choices. With a thorium cycle in a molten salt reactor, you can burn greater than 90%, pushing up to 99% or higher if you try real hard. This means you generate an order(s) of magnitude less waste, and that waste generally is safe after about 300 years (radiation is about the same as naturally occurring radiation). There are also other alternates that use uranium in a faster spectrum that perform better than current tech.



A second age of the atom is fast approaching. Unfortunately, those great pioneers which made this industry in the shadow of "the bomb" failed to realize the full potential of e=mc^2. If nuclear power was developed along side the Apollo instead of the Manhattan project, we might already be in that future, alas...it was not to be.



Radiation is fascinating though! I used to believe what I read in the fear news about any radiation leading to death..turns out that isn't so true after all. The planet is a far more radioactive place then you normally consider, and FAR more radioactive when our primordial ancestors evolved. In fact, there are many people living today in what are dubbed High Background Radiation Areas that seem to suffer no ill effect, and some suggest, have lower rates of cancer than other groups. More studies need to be done, but initial findings fly in the face of the notion of radiation I grew up with (that it all is bad and it all kills you!) Some have even suggested that the creator of the entire model used for evaluating radiation risk knowingly lied about it. The entire basis for today's evaluation of radiological risk is evaluated by Muller's findings as supported by the National Academy of Sciences’ of the time. And in fact, might just be based in fear instead of evidence.



Perhaps ancient man went through the same struggles as he tried to adopt fire, some impassioned move against the dangers of fire prevented some groups from using fire and advancing their way of life. Fire, though, allowed the groups that adopted it to improve their life dramatically. The energy released from a fission event is over a million times more energy rich than any energy tech we currently use, imagine what that could mean for mankind. Fusion is over 4 times that of fission (but much harder), and antimatter over 2000x that of fission (and MUCH MUCH harder). Yes, the age of the atom has only just begun, and who knows were man will be a result? Don't settle for solar dandruff, the power of the atom will reign supreme.

I'm very happy you liked it. I almost deleted that post because I was afraid the whole thing was too pompous. But I figured, ultimately, who could argue with the sentiment..."Garfield" really was a horrible film.


In reply to this comment by ChaosEngine:
In reply to this comment by TheFreak:
Put a thousand fruit flies in a box and you can watch the entire circle of life, played out in multiple generations, in a matter of days.
Now, stand back far enough to view the entirety of human existence in one box and the objective eye will discern no greater purpose than the fruit fly. We live, we reproduce, we die. All of human evolution and technical advancement bent to the simple purpose of continuing to exist.

We are ultimately seperated from the fruit fly by one thing; a simple question,
"Why?"

The contemplation of our own mortality is undoubtedly the single factor that has inspired us to become more than the sum of our individual lives. The yearning to outlive ourselves, to defy the inherent pointlessness of existence, to deny the emptiness of the void that precedes us and remains, undisturbed, after we're gone. The human defiance of the finity and futility of life drives the greatest achievements of our species.

Humanity, alone among the animals of the earth, has taken the gifts of evolution and harnessed them to scream its answer to the empty cosmos with soul wrenching achievements of art and philosophy. Those creations of mankind that we experience as a feeling, rising up from inside us and overwhelming our minds with a beauty and perfection far greater than ourselves.

The great accomplishments of mankind that elevate the purpose of our existence:
The philosophy of Aristotle
The architecture of Angkor Wat and St. Peter's Basilica
The art and discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci
The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel and the humble beauty of Van Gogh
The feets of engineering; the great wall of china and Apollo moon landing
All the great works of the most inspired among us, who could encapsulate beauty, wonder, humor and tragedy into discrete works of brilliance:

Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Kepler, Gödel, Newton, Hippocrates, Bach, Wagner, Coltrane, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Tesla, Gutenberg, Frank Lloyd Wright...
...and Bill Murray.

Except for his work on Garfield.
That movie was fucking horrible.


My life is better for having read that comment.

In reply to this comment by TheFreak:
Put a thousand fruit flies in a box and you can watch the entire circle of life, played out in multiple generations, in a matter of days.
Now, stand back far enough to view the entirety of human existence in one box and the objective eye will discern no greater purpose than the fruit fly. We live, we reproduce, we die. All of human evolution and technical advancement bent to the simple purpose of continuing to exist.

We are ultimately seperated from the fruit fly by one thing; a simple question,
"Why?"

The contemplation of our own mortality is undoubtedly the single factor that has inspired us to become more than the sum of our individual lives. The yearning to outlive ourselves, to defy the inherent pointlessness of existence, to deny the emptiness of the void that precedes us and remains, undisturbed, after we're gone. The human defiance of the finity and futility of life drives the greatest achievements of our species.

Humanity, alone among the animals of the earth, has taken the gifts of evolution and harnessed them to scream its answer to the empty cosmos with soul wrenching achievements of art and philosophy. Those creations of mankind that we experience as a feeling, rising up from inside us and overwhelming our minds with a beauty and perfection far greater than ourselves.

The great accomplishments of mankind that elevate the purpose of our existence:
The philosophy of Aristotle
The architecture of Angkor Wat and St. Peter's Basilica
The art and discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci
The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel and the humble beauty of Van Gogh
The feets of engineering; the great wall of china and Apollo moon landing
All the great works of the most inspired among us, who could encapsulate beauty, wonder, humor and tragedy into discrete works of brilliance:

Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Kepler, Gödel, Newton, Hippocrates, Bach, Wagner, Coltrane, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Tesla, Gutenberg, Frank Lloyd Wright...
...and Bill Murray.

Except for his work on Garfield.
That movie was fucking horrible.


My life is better for having read that comment.

Put a thousand fruit flies in a box and you can watch the entire circle of life, played out in multiple generations, in a matter of days.
Now, stand back far enough to view the entirety of human existence in one box and the objective eye will discern no greater purpose than the fruit fly. We live, we reproduce, we die. All of human evolution and technical advancement bent to the simple purpose of continuing to exist.

We are ultimately seperated from the fruit fly by one thing; a simple question,
"Why?"

The contemplation of our own mortality is undoubtedly the single factor that has inspired us to become more than the sum of our individual lives. The yearning to outlive ourselves, to defy the inherent pointlessness of existence, to deny the emptiness of the void that precedes us and remains, undisturbed, after we're gone. The human defiance of the finity and futility of life drives the greatest achievements of our species.

Humanity, alone among the animals of the earth, has taken the gifts of evolution and harnessed them to scream its answer to the empty cosmos with soul wrenching achievements of art and philosophy. Those creations of mankind that we experience as a feeling, rising up from inside us and overwhelming our minds with a beauty and perfection far greater than ourselves.

The great accomplishments of mankind that elevate the purpose of our existence:
The philosophy of Aristotle
The architecture of Angkor Wat and St. Peter's Basilica
The art and discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci
The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel and the humble beauty of Van Gogh
The feets of engineering; the great wall of china and Apollo moon landing
All the great works of the most inspired among us, who could encapsulate beauty, wonder, humor and tragedy into discrete works of brilliance:

Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Kepler, Gödel, Newton, Hippocrates, Bach, Wagner, Coltrane, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Tesla, Gutenberg, Frank Lloyd Wright...
...and Bill Murray.

Except for his work on Garfield.
That movie was fucking horrible.