The next time you're feeling blasé about human achievement, consider this: in 1997 we shot a very complicated machine the size of a school bus out into space. It flew past Venus (twice), then the Earth, then Jupiter—all in very precise ways that caused it to accelerate to the fantastic speed required to arrive at Saturn, 888 million miles from the sun, less than seven years later.

Once there, it split off part of itself and successfully sent this bit to land on a cloud-covered moon called Titan. Yes, we successfully landed a spacecraft on the fucking moon of a distant planet; we've got the photos to prove it. The mechanical engineering, software programming, and orbital calculations behind this achievement should make your brain melt like butter on a hot biscuit.

Now, nearly 13 years after shooting this insanely complex device into space, it's still orbiting Saturn in ridiculously complicated paths while sending back photos of what it sees. Wired magazine has collected a bunch of great ones from just the last few months, and they are amazing.

This is teh awesome.

Via Boing Boing.

...consult my wife. She has an answer for you.

Back in our Seattle days, each August brought Seafair—a massive orgy of petroleum consumption via hydroplane races on Lake Washington and flyovers by the Blue Angels overhead.

When a McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet passes a hundred feet or so above you, there's an explosively pants-soiling blast that shakes windows, terrifies pets, and triggers every fight-or-flight hormone available. And for anyone living on the perimeter of downtown Seattle during Seafair, there's virtually no warning of the blasts that recur throughout the day, because these marvels of American technology are flying so god damned fast and low to the ground.

But I'd never thought about how that insane roar might affect people who've been exposed to something far more real:

Last Seafair, I was assigned to work the inpatient psych unit at the Seattle VA. The Blue Angels tastefully used the VA building as a landmark on their strafing aerobatic runs over I-90. The psych unit is on the top floor. My ambivalence about the Angels was spent by the end of the long weekend of close passes...

A typical patient on that weekend had gone camping—deep into the woods if possible—on the preceding July 4th weekend. Combat memories and fireworks don't mix. But, you're new to Seattle. You don't know of the Blue Angels and Seafair. This is one trigger of the memories you didn't plan for. The horror starts to rise. You panic.

This sounds wishy-washy; it isn't. There is real neuroscience behind shell shock. The sound of the F/A-18's F404 engines is more than enough trigger for those struggling to put away their demons. So, no, I'm not the biggest fan of the Blue Angels.

Working Inpatient Psych at the VA with the Blue Angels (Jonathan Golob on Slog)

Over on Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder writes about his family's trip to Kyoto's Iwatayama Monkey Park:

After paying the 500 yen admission, we started up the hill. Signs warned us along the way about not interacting with the monkeys. Here, a map has the warning, "Entrance office. Please put paper bag here. Some monkey want to get it."

...As we got near the top, we saw our final warning sign: "Please push this button if you are scared to walk up because of the monkeys. Staff will be coming." There was no button. Maybe the monkeys took it.

A visit to Iwatayama Monkey Park in Kyoto Japan (Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing)

Amy and I are lucky enough to spend a little time on the beach in North Carolina every summer. Pictured above is our host, a fine fellow and friend of many years.

Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

"Letting Go" (Atul Gawande, The New Yorker")

This article made the list that Kevin Kelly recently compiled of The Best Magazine Articles Ever.

The follow-up discussion between Gawande and readers is here.

My Dad's take on this was a big part of the conversation we had the week before he died.

2010 has been a bumper year for beekeepers all around California, and here in Silver Lake it's no different. Now that we've had a few decent harvests, we've started sharing it with a few local restaurants.

Find out all about it on the new Feral Honey & Bee site.

A tiny fraction of them are in color, and they're beautiful.

More at denverpost.com's photo blog.

Mike Evans, a welder, at the rip tracks at Proviso yard of the Chicago and Northwest Railway Company. Chicago, Illinois, April 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Woman is working on a "Vengeance" dive bomber Tennessee, February 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Rural school children. San Augustine County, Texas, April 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by John Vachon. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

So many questions come to mind.

Were the models excited to hear that they'd been chosen for the cover?

When will the "10 Hot Ways to Stalk Your Ex" feature appear?

How many awards did the graphic designer win for that genius stroke with the O?

Since 1996? Really?

Is there any classier way to break the news to your (soon-to-be-ex-) spouse than to have this arrive in the mail?

Does the Winter/Spring issue feature a combination of savory comfort divorces and zingy fresh herby divorces?

A BBC photographer was stopped from taking a picture of the sun setting by St Paul's Cathedral in London. A real police officer and a fake "community support officer" stopped the photog and said he couldn't take any pictures because with his professional-style camera, he might be an "al Qaeda operative" on a "scouting mission"...

The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror. Every London cop who stops someone from taking a picture of a public building, every TSA agent who takes away your kid's toothpaste, every NSA spook who wiretaps your email, does the terrorist's job for him. Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy. There were two al Qaeda operatives at St Paul's that day: the cop and her sidekick, who were about Osama bin Laden's business in London all day long.

BBC photographer prevented from shooting St Paul's because he might be "al Qaeda operative" (Boing Boing)

This is my all-time favorite LA car-culture story. I guess 8 years is a pretty impressive lifespan for a piece of guerilla art that's probably been seen by more people than just about anything in LACMA.

Caltrans has quietly installed new directional signs over the northbound 110 freeway out of Downtown, in the process taking down one of Los Angeles' all-time great guerilla art installations. In 2001, in broad daylight, artist Richard Ankrom (wearing Caltrans garb) installed a marker on the overhead freeway sign that for the first time alerted northbound drivers to the upcoming turnoff to Interstate 5.

Nobody complained or even officially noticed for nine months, until the Downtown News broke the story. Caltrans left Ankrom's marker in place, but with the new sign going up this week its whereabouts are now unclear. Michael Schneider tells the whole story at Franklin Avenue, and here's Ankrom's web page about the original installation, which he called "guerrilla public service."

Guerrilla '5 North' sign replaced (LA Observed)