Monday, July 20, 2009 - Posts
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This morning, Buzz Aldrin and I got to pretend we were on the moon. The astronaut was in Washington for the unveiling of the new-and-improved Google Moon, a digital lunar model with the same fluid navigation as Google Earth. The guest of honor, however, didn’t stay on message. While he would “love to talk about Google and Google Moon,” Aldrin said, he felt obliged to make the case for heading to Mars, a point he emphasized by brandishing what appeared to be printouts of a PowerPoint presentation.
Back to Google Moon: Armchair astronauts can dip down to the surface, tip the camera to the horizon, and admire the topography. To help those of us who are not intimately familiar with lunar neighborhoods, Google Moon is indexed with the sites of the moon landings, the treks of various rovers, and a variety of geological landmarks. As you mosey along, you might chance upon a 3-D rendering of a lunar lander or run into a few astronauts. (They look like Lego men.)
The product, which you can download as part of Google Earth 5.0, is certainly fun to play around with, even if the scenery is a tad barren and monochromatic. On one point, however, I was sorely disappointed: Google cannot fly you to the moon. Presently, it can only teleport you there.
The only way you can get to the moon as of now is to select it from a dropdown menu within Google Earth. (Mars, rendered in much less detail, is also available.) There is no direct flight from the porch of your childhood home to the Paracelsus crater. This is a shame, because Google Earth’s killer feature isn’t its imagery. It’s the mesmerizing navigation—the fact that you can be wandering through downtown Tulsa, type in “Giza Pyramid,” and lift into space to take a giant leap across the ocean.
Fortunately, Google does want us to soar through space eventually. Brian McClendon, who is in charge of most of Google’s geography products, told me it’s a feature they’d like to implement once all the databases can be squared with one another. It seems as if it should be doable. We did put a man on the moon.
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It's worth remembering, on this 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's moon walk, that not all Americans viewed the event as an inspiring "giant leap" forward in human exploration. A rather dimmer view of the lunar landing is expressed in Gil Scott-Heron's classic 1970 protest song "Whitey on the Moon." A short, sharp poem drawled by Scott-Heron over percolating conga, "Whitey on the Moon" is an example of the black-nationalist-infused proto-rap pioneered by (among others) Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, and The Watts Prophets. Scott-Heron was by far best writer of the lot, and "Whitey on the Moon"—which contrasts the squalor of the inner city with the government largesse that put Apollo 11 in space—is one of the one of the finest, funniest protests ever recorded, an indictment of American racism as mordantly witty as any Lorenz Hart lyric:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With Whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And Whitey's on the moon
I can't pay no doctor's bill
But Whitey's on the moon
Ten years now I'll be paying still
While Whitey's on the moon
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 15: "Angelas Ashes." Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes, died yesterday at age 78. McCourt wrote the book chronicling his miserable childhood in Ireland after more than three decades teaching in New York City public schools. In 2007, McCourt wrote in Slate that "when the book was published in Ireland, I was denounced from hill, pulpit, and barstool. ... Citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost."
No. 46: "nomura s jellyfish." What's with July and huge sea creatures? Last week a 20-foot-long shark washed ashore in New York while jumbo flying squid terrified residents of Southern California; now massive Nomura's jellyfish are ballooning up from the deep off the coast of Japan. The jellyfish can grow as large as 6 and a half feet in diameter and weigh as much as 450 pounds—big enough to destroy Japanese fishermen's expensive nets. This is the third invasion in less than five years: During the 2005 episode, an estimated 300 million to 500 million of the jellyfish passed through Japan's Tsuhima Strait daily.
No. 59 "Michael Collins." As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin traipsed about the surface 40 years ago today, Michael Collins—the oft-forgotten third Apollo 11 astronaut—was sailing around the dark side of the moon in the command module. "I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life," Collins wrote in his 1969 memoir Carrying the Fire. "If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side."
Photograph of Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins courtesy of NASA/Getty Images