And all of a sudden, I was ten years old

I am surprised at my reaction to the Artemis II mission.  I mean, it's a huge bucket of money to throw at well connected aerospace contractors - and one that imperils the astronauts because it's so expensive that they couldn't really test the heat shield.

And yet suddenly it's 1968 and the teachers are rolling televisions into the classroom so we can watch the spaceships return to Earth.

Sure, it's crazy expensive, but we just sent men people around the damn Moon.

And we did it without that ridiculous Metric System ... 

For a moment, America is the Old America that can do things.

Doris Day - Fly me to the moon

Yeah Artemis is crazy expensive, but it's still a big deal. 

And we love us some Doris Day ...

Miklós Rózsa - Overture to Ben Hur

When it was released in 1959, Beh Hur became the second highest grossing film in history (behind Gone With The Wind) - saving MGM from bankruptcy.  It won an astonishing 11 Academy Awards, including best musical scoring by composer Miklós Rózsa. 

It's good music for Easter.  I hope that you (like we) are enjoying it with family. 

Where's Borepatch?

The Queen Of The World's son is visiting for Easter, along with his best buddy Mario from Basic Training.  The weather was perfect, and so we met up with one of his High School buddies who happened to be here:

Anna Maria Island, off Sarasota Bay.  The High School buddy brought a drone and took this photo.  Yeah, I'm down there somewhere.

Man, I love Florida. 

I Didn't See This Until Today

 Obviously, I'm a couple of days late. 

The photo of the year for America's 250th birthday

Photo via The Silicon Graybeard.

Sure, NASA spends taxpayer money like a drunken sailor.  Sure, Congress is using this program to throw taxpayer money at favored corporations.

But today, no other country can do what we are doing, just like what Old America did half a century ago.  And no other country has a SpaceX waiting in the wings to drop mission cost by a factor of 40. 

Considering the epic amount of fraud from California's (and other states) Medicare programs (not to mention Learing Centers), all I can say is that this is waste I can get behind.

OPSEC

The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, the only nuclear powered carrier outside the U.S. Navy, is en route to the Mid-East as part of the French response to recent events in the region. As it is sailing into harm's way, security would understandably be high. The exact location of the ship would be classified.

Strava is a fitness app athletes use to record their activities running or cycling. It's very popular and can be used to allow athletes on training equipment paired with the app to compete with one another or share their individual results with friends or interested fans. Results can be published in near realtime.

The French officer that was getting in a 7 kilometer run on the deck of the ship is  was a Strava user. The GPS coordinates of his run pinpointed the location of the flagship in real time. The location was confirmed with publicly available satellite photos.

A French armed forces spokesman said the reported incident did "not comply with the current instructions" and appropriate measures would be taken.

 

 

 

Hector Berlioz - "Resurrexit" from Messe Solennelle

Holy Week calls for the Big Guns of classical music.  Hector Berlioz was one of these, and his Messe Solennelle is one of the great works of religious music.  Astonishingly, Berlioz was only twenty years old when he wrote this, and then destroyed the music for Messe Solennelle (except for the Resurrexit portion).

A copy of the entire work was discovered in 1991. 

LOL

I never looked at it that way. 

Apple's iPhones and iPads are now certified for NATO classified data

Wow.  And just plain-jane iOS, too.  Out of the box. 

As someone who ran across (into?) "Secure Operating Systems" more than once, this is a big deal.