Wheat-dogg’s world
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A year ago this month, I decided to start a blog. My motivation was multi-faceted. I wanted to comment on science, especially physics and astronomy, but also other topics. I wanted a forum for the content that I never seem to able to work into my lectures and classes. And I wanted to write again. Ink is in my blood.

So, here I am, 12 months and more than 220 posts later. According to my Site Meter, I have had more than 4000 visits since mid-2006, when I installed it. Before I had to disable WPShortStat, it reported that I had had more than twice that many since January 2006. Someone, even if it’s only the Googlebot, must be reading me. I have risen slowly in the ecosystem of TTLB, so other blogs are actually linking to me. People leave comments.

So, while I am nowhere near the popularity of a PZ Myers, and while this blog has made me absolutely zero income, I have had some manner of success with it. I enjoy doing it, and wish I could devote more time to it. Writing is hard work — this I already knew — and it’s also time-consuming. How some of these bloggers manage to churn out so much copy each day amazes me.

In a way, this effort was a birthday present to myself. I started it just 10 days before my 50th birthday, and in a few short hours I will be starting another half-century on this Earth. With luck and perseverance, perhaps I’ll still be here blogging in ‘57. Wish me luck!

This weekend is a fateful one for space exploration.

Forty years ago today, the very first launch of the Apollo lunar mission ended before the spacecraft left the launch pad. A runaway fire took the lives of three astronauts as they prepared for a test of the Apollo-Saturn spacecraft.

Coincidentally, I screened the movie Apollo 13 for my physics students just last week, originally to focus on the zero-g scenes but later also to educate them. I was surprised to see so few students knew anything at all about the lunar missions of the 1960s and ’70s. So we watched the entire movie.No one died on Apollo 13, but they could have, had fate moved in a different direction. Although it is a tragic concept to appreciate, NASA learns from its mistakes.

Apollo 1 was not even planned as an actual launch on Jan. 27, 1967. The crew was supposed to practice a dry run of launch procedures to see if the Apollo Command Module could operate independently of ground connections. Pilots Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White were suited up, running through a well practiced check list.

Their suits — intended to protect them in an airless environment — were not fire proof. The atmosphere in the Command Module was pure oxygen, at normal sea level pressure. The hatch swung inward and was secured by 12 bolts. There was no escape rocket system atop the capsule. In retrospect, one wonders what NASA was thinking.

Today’s favorite personal music device is the iPod, an engineering marvel that has made Apple a ton of money. Back in the day, though, the wonder device was the pocket transistor radio.

My father ran a TV-radio repair business, and for my 6th birthday (not sure really) I got a Toshiba transistor radio, similar to the one pictured here.

To a six-year-old, this item was The Coolest Thing, since I could now listen to the radio — my radio — pretty much wherever I liked. The design of the unit was futuristic (well, for 1962, anyway) and even now has a certain retro appeal. It was simple to operate. A dial to turn it on and adjust the volume. Another to tune it. The tuning dial had only the first digit of the AM frequencies, using a “font” strikingly similar to that used in my father’s ‘51 Hudson’s speedometer and clock dials. Pinpointing any particular frequency was an art, requiring patience and a steady hand, but in the NYC area, signal strength was seldom an issue.

With the radio came a leather cover and an earphone. The earphone was too big for my child-sized ear, so I never used it. I’m not sure how long I had this radio, or how long I used it. Eventually, FM radio became more appealing, but I never acquired an FM set with the same size and panache of the Toshiba.

I’ve been sitting on this post since before Christmas. Now that I have time (and a working blog again) it’s time to let it out.

If you pay any attention at all to “New Age,” alternative religion, or whatever-you-call it pundits, you may have heard that, according to these experts, the world is due to come to an end sometime around Dec. 21, 2012. Why? Because the ancient Mayan calendar “runs out” on that date.

Now Christians have been playing this game since Jesus came back to visit his disciples. The two big dates for them were the milennial endpoints, 1000 and 2000 CE. Given, as we are collectively, to loving big round numbers, early milennialists figured that at the thousand-year mark, Christ would return and the righteous would ascend to Heaven, as predicted in the New Testament. It didn’t happen, or if it did, our ancestors missed the call.

It happened again in 1999. Big fuss. No Second Coming. (Hey guys! He did say that no one will know the time of His arrival. Stop trying to second guess the Man.) Yet the faithful keep hoping for His eventual return.
Meanwhile, in the alternative spirituality camp, lovers of things esoteric discovered that the Mayan Long Count — that civilization’s long-term Day Planner — ended on the winter solstice, 2012. Obviously, since the Mayans had such a successful and long-lasting civiilization, there had to be some Major Significance to that date. The Mayans were expecting there would be no need to continue the calendar past that date, since the world would end.

So, here’s the sad tale of woe and lamentations — all because of accursed comment spam — and operator incompetence.

A little more than a week ago, this site was chugging along just fine. I wasn’t posting much, but I did check every once in a while to see if all was well. Then on Monday the 8th, my site had the dreaded “your account has been suspended” boilerplate from the web host.

I scurried around trying to figure why it was suspended. My bills were paid up, and as far as I knew all the scripts were kosher. My host’s support staff only said (initially) that their server was running near capacity and that my site was hogging about 30% of the CPU cycles. Without any prior notification, they just shut me down.

I was pissed, of course. I complained, and they set about tracking down the source of the problem. I also tried everything to clear up the problem. Deleted the directories, reloaded the files, upgraded WordPress to 2.0.6, tried different browsers — all to no avail. Finally, I reluctantly decided to move the blog elsewhere. I was both frustrated and ticked at my hosts, and I was ready to leave them behind.

Fate intervened, however, and for the best, I believe.