Mastodawn

Update: The Vulcan Science Council declined to comment on whether any of their members ever served as science advisors for any of the series or movies. But to our surprise, we received an official response from the Expeditionary Group! They reassured us -- at great length -- that they faithfully followed the non-interference guidelines before Earth achieved its own warp drive. Reading between the lines, I think there are some non-Star-Trek sci-fi they want to make sure they don't get blamed for?

I'm used to science-fiction writers screwing up orbital mechanics (sigh...). But seriously, people, even Wile E. Coyote had more realistic falling scenes!!

In Star Trek: Into Darkness, the Enterprise has lost all system power and is plummeting towards Earth. [let's overlook how they forgot to park in a halfway decent orbit...] Artificial gravity is off. As the ship tumbles, everyone and everything keeps falling "down" whichever way is towards Earth. Cue the dramatic scenes of tumbling off catwalks, plunging to one's doom, running along what's normally the wall. None of which would even remotely happen in freefall!

Sensor readings from the "Kelvin timeline" suggest that the original #StarTrek science advisors may have been Vulcan. After the planet Vulcan was destroyed, that timeline's movies were clearly lacking in science advisors. They completely screwed up something as basic as How Things Fall Down!

(1/n)

#Artemis2 #ASL #History #TIL #Nyle_di_Marco

Her Doing Apr 14

Lovely Peeps! Your cool #history for the day! 🚀

(You might want to watch with sound off. The music has words & I found it difficult to hear the music, read the text, AND focus on the signing.)

If you want to just enjoy the signing, the full text is within this post. 😊

"Everyone’s talking about Artemis II. The first humans to travel to the moon in 50 years. Historic mission.

But nobody’s talking about the #Deaf men who made it possible.

In the late 1950s, #NASA had a problem. They needed to understand what weightlessness does to the human body. But every test subject kept getting violently motion sick.

So they came to #Gallaudet.

Eleven Deaf men. Most of them had lost their hearing to spinal meningitis as children, which also damaged their vestibular system. Their inner ears couldn’t be overwhelmed. They were immune to motion sickness.

NASA put them in centrifuges. Zero-gravity flights. A rotating room for twelve straight days. One experiment on a ferry in choppy Nova Scotia waters. The researchers got so seasick they had to cancel it. The Gallaudet Eleven? They were playing cards.

Their bodies gave NASA the data it needed to send humans into space.

No #Gallaudet_Eleven — no Mercury. No Mercury — no Apollo. No Apollo — no Artemis II.

Sixty years later, four astronauts just flew 252,000 miles from Earth & came home safely.

They stood on the shoulders of eleven Deaf men most people have never heard of.

Now you know!"

The downside to this Amazon-free approach is that it requires a computer, both to download the Adobe Digital Editions and to convert it with Calibre. In contrast, using Amazon's servers makes it easy to log into the library on my phone, check out a new ebook, send it directly to my kindle account, tether my kindle to my phone, and download the ebook. Which I once did when I ran out of books on a beach in Mexico! 🌴😎🏖️

The upside is that EPUBs don't fund Amazon and DRM-free ones don't expire.

I usually send my epubs to my kindle using the Send to Kindle app, or sometimes https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/ Those use Amazon's servers and will soon stop working for older kindles, but sending files via USB will still work. @jonobie: Any good tips for using Calibre to manage files via USB?

Send to Kindle

Once in a blue moon, special characters (e.g., apostrophes) will show up as gibberish on kindle. Fortunately, that's easy to fix.

In Calibre's preferences:
1) Common Options > Text and check "Smarten punctuation."
2) To make it happen automatically: Adding books > Adding actions and check "Automatically convert added books..." and "When auto-converting, convert even if the format being added..."

Now any time you add a book to Calibre, it gets converted to an epub with fixed punctuation.