curiosity

I was awakened to watch it. Age 10. Groggy memories. Wood cabinet black and white, northeast corner of the living room, from the sofa, surrounded by palpable attentiveness.

Borrowing from NASA and encountering other lunar tidbits.

This graphic shows the approximate locations of the Apollo moon landing sites.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

NPR story
Here.

Commentary on story
Here.

Hoax and Futurama
Here.

AMSAT Special Transmission

July 20 AMSAT-NA will mark the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing with a special event on AO-51. AO-51 will transmit a message commemorating the event Monday, July 20 during evening passes in the U.S. and Europe. The message will be transmitted on the 435.300 MHz FM downlink and will contain a Robot 36 SSTV image as well as a voice message.

Suggested by Alan WA4SCA.

Prompting Charlie N5TD to recommend a course offered by MetEd (Meteorology Education and Training): Space Weather Basics.

I've claimed 198 QSOs for my most serious SS effort since 2001. As the lines in the log filled, my attention increasingly went to the checks. So many from the 50s through the 70s and almost none from the present decade. My soapbox for the event simply says I'd plot the curve.

I don't have a plotting program and can't bother right now with trying to figure out if OO Calc will let me draw a bell curve, but a couple of key statistics are these:

Number of Years Since First Licensed
mean ±SD = 40.38 ±12.58

Just a single check from the 21st century. That's about one-half of one percent.

On the other end of the spectrum, it was very nice to work W4KFC, licensed 75 years in 2008 and 5-time CW Sweepstakes winner.

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

My Political Compass, circa 2008

See the post...

My Political Compass. The Gandhi connection is in the analysis here.

Economic Left/Right: -4.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.62

Questionable Ergonomics

It's her XO, but I was the first to share a Chat in the Neighborhood. She caught me demonstrating poor posture.

Time for an update on our OLPC G1G1 purchase. Though we ordered on day 2, we weren't even close to getting the XO for Christmas. No problem. We weren't counting on it.

The box arrived on January 3 and the exploration soon began. The true explorer is A, not me. It is she who should direct the process and I who should facilitate it at her request. A test of her enthusiasm and my patience. So far, so good. We're taking our time.

I've little interest in presenting a rundown here, but for guidance I have been frequenting...

• OLPC wiki
• OLPC News
• OLPC News Forums

Just rediscovered some notes taken after searching the Tunes section of thesession.org. Here are some tune-name tallies by habitat type:

• Fields = 11
• Woods = 7
• Woodland = 1
• Forest = 1
• Marsh = 3
• Ocean = 5
• Sea = 65, but this includes Sean and Seamus hits
• Waves = 9
• Meadow = 15
• Shore = 13
• Lake = 8
• Loch = 10
• River = 5
• Stream = 4
• Brook = 6
• Creek = 1