Spacewalking NASA 'nauts hook up power and data cables to ISS Harmony module NASA astronauts clocked up hours of walking in the void of space on Saturday, as they continued to rig the forward end of the Harmony module and Pressurised Mating Adapter-2 with power and data cables. Terry Virts and Barry Wilmore routed 340 of 360 feet of cable during their walks, the U.S. space agency said. NASA added: …
Am I the only one that needs to spend quite a bit of brain-power to decipher these asinine headlines? Of course, all wasted when I find out that Ms. Lohan wasn't featured in the re-entry position.
Maybe the headline writers are delving deeper into the body of the message? Perhaps they are luring us into an intimate read of the actual content?
Back in my day, we 'ad to run 50 ohm coax ourselves, crawling through the ducts pulling the cabling wit' our teeth, breathin' in the asbestos insulation and positively relishing in the feel of fresh rat droppings squishing under our palms. An' when we completed our run, we 'ad to termite the cabling wit' our testicles.
Cat3 across the floor? Luxury!
When I was a boy all our networks
Were for hauling in fish from the sea--
Our bawd rate was eight bits an hour (and she was worth it!),
And our IP address was just 3.
And you kids who complain that the World Wide Web
Is too slow oughtta cut out your bitchin',
'Cuz when I was a boy every packet
Was delivered by carrier pigeon
Carrier pigeon? Lookshury!
All we had was an Iceland frozen chicken with a punched-tape message tied around its gizzard all wrapped up in shiny christmas paper to make a nice packet that we transmitted by throwing from person to person in a long line. Most of the time the 'transmission line' personnel did nothing (hence the term "bored rate").
This was obviously less than efficient - paying people to do now't I mean - and our Sheffield boffins developed a tube-based satellite message delivery system (under the codename "fookin' 'uge chicken tosser!") One cold fowl and a simple high-energy sub-orbital tube-based delivery system generally usable by numpties ("GUN") and we were at the freezing edge of chicky-sat comms ... In hindsight we could have stopped there with long distance KFC delivery systems and ruled the world. But as great British boffinery must advance! We were on the verge of testing it, and had already developed encryption (by cleverly tuning the chicken into a block of frozen chicken soup and encoding the message in vegetables) when development was halted by the Government. Just little errors like siting the secret test launcher in Iraq, pointing it at our reception desk in Tel-Aviv and calling it the Souper Gun ...
I barely missed those days and I'm glad of it. It was enough of a bitch troubleshooting that shit when one of those damn ring connectors got itself just a little bit loose. When I came aboard I think we only had 3 customers left using it. But that was more than enough to leave a bad impression that will last a lifetime.
...and stop me if I'm wrong, but didn't astronauts kind of start the whole "selfie" thing about fifteen years or so ago -- albeit inadvertantly -- by holding their cameras at arm's length and photographing the reflection of the Earth in their visors while on EVAs?
Of course, my all-time favorite space selfie has to be this one, taken nearly half a century ago by Jim Lovell aboard Gemini 12:
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