Grab bag: MCA and the big C; Apollo at 40

Fingers crossed that MCA makes it through without complications.

Personal history of the Apollo program from Phil Plait. I feel the same way about Columbia.

Amateur astronomer discovers an impact site on Jupiter, where a comet or asteroid has crashed into the atmosphere near the pole.

“Cronkite understood that the ultimate role that journalism can be forced to play in democracy is, quite simply, to fight to preserve democracy itself, and that the greatest threat to our republic was when elected leaders choose to lie to the American people. That didn’t mean abandoning the core principles of journalism — aggressive fact finding, which includes first-hand observation and talking to all sides, as Cronkite did on his trip to Vietnam, or an innate sense of fairness and justice. But he knew that journalism was more than rote stenography –parroting the untruths that LBJ and the Pentagon said about the war and finding a political opponent to quote deep down in the story for “balance.” He knew there could be a time when the only way to inform the American people of a higher truth was to step outside the straight jacket of objectivity.”

John “JP” Park shows how he built a “mystery box” for Wired’s Geekdad columnist John Baichtal.

The chain of failure for Twitter’s internal documents, unsurprisingly, includes Hotmail, Gmail, Google Docs–and weak passwords and password reuse.

Stirring essay about Long Island’s ties to spaceflight and the construction of the lunar landers.

Talk about transparent. The White House blog announces webinars about the transparency provisions in the Recovery Act and provides a full schedule.

I’ll be providing some of the “weighty German rhetoric” next Saturday, singing the Brahms Requiem as part of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

It’s really, really hard to get good quality photos that meet the copyright test. There are a ton of articles I’ve written where there are no free images available for use.