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On this day in 1954, J.R.R. Tolkien published the first part of his epic Lord of the Rings fantasy series, The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire saga, which appeared in three volumes, has sold roughly 150 million copies (pretty good for a boring Oxford don with a love of historical linguistics.(who do we know like that?))
Tolkien's draft for the cover
The-Fellowship-Of-The-Ring-Book-Cover-by-JRR-Tolkien_1-480.jpg
Actual First Edition Cover
The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring_cover.gif

Pearls Before Swine did a scary rendition of The One Ring's inscription!
 
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Well, SpaceX has landed succesfully in the sea, this evening.

The first 'splashdown' in 45 years. The last one was the Apollo capsule of the Apollo-Soyuz project, which landed on July 24th 1975. I saw it on TV (B/W!), then! Not realising, that this kind of a landing would no more take place in almost half a century!

It is strange, this word 'splashdown'! For my generations, it was a common word in the early space age! Today, I have seen papers and reels tha explained the word! To a generation that has only seen Space Shuttle landings.

Now, technically, there has been one other 'splashdown' after July 1975. It took place fifteen months later, but was not planned. On October 14th 1976, Soyuz 23 was launched, for a coupling with the Soviet space station Salyut 5. But technical problems with the approach system exhausted Soyuz' fuel and electrical resources, before the coupling was achieved. The cosmonauts had no other option than return to Earth. On October 16th, they made an emergency landing in Kazachstan, right on Lake Tzengis. The lake was frozen, but the ice was broken by the impact. Without floating equipment, the capsule sank to the bottom of the lake. The cosmonauts had to stay there a full night, without heating, before a rescue team could locate and recover them. This was the first and only landing ever of a Sovier/Russian capsule on water.
 
Well, SpaceX has landed succesfully in the sea, this evening.

The first 'splashdown' in 45 years. The last one was the Apollo capsule of the Apollo-Soyuz project, which landed on July 24th 1975. I saw it on TV (B/W!), then! Not realising, that this kind of a landing would no more take place in almost half a century!

It is strange, this word 'splashdown'! For my generations, it was a common word in the early space age! Today, I have seen papers and reels tha explained the word! To a generation that has only seen Space Shuttle landings.

Now, technically, there has been one other 'splashdown' after July 1975. It took place fifteen months later, but was not planned. On October 14th 1976, Soyuz 23 was launched, for a coupling with the Soviet space station Salyut 5. But technical problems with the approach system exhausted Soyuz' fuel and electrical resources, before the coupling was achieved. The cosmonauts had no other option than return to Earth. On October 16th, they made an emergency landing in Kazachstan, right on Lake Tzengis. The lake was frozen, but the ice was broken by the impact. Without floating equipment, the capsule sank to the bottom of the lake. The cosmonauts had to stay there a full night, without heating, before a rescue team could locate and recover them. This was the first and only landing ever of a Sovier/Russian capsule on water.
I watched it as well! Glad that it went of well!
 
Yesterday, August 3rd, in 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with a crew of 90 aboard three small ships (and one female stowaway) in search of a westward trade route to East Asia.
 
As you know, I can't quote physics, quite out of my depth.
I think there was a lot of interest in Hindu philosophy, especially Vedanta, among intellectuals in those days,
rather as there is in Buddhism now - and of course there are close parallels at the philosophical level.
And Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, the founder of quantum electrodynamics and according to Bohr "The Strangest Man" (the title of a biography) who ever visited his "laboratory" asked Oppenheimer why he wasted his time with that kind of thing. Dirac is certainly more prolific as a scientist than Oppenheimer (which given Dirac's stature says nothing at all pejorative about Oppenheimer), but Oppenheimer does have the atomic bomb to his "credit".
 
I watched it from my sick bed, chicken pox or measles I don't remember which now. It was interesting but they played it all day, and cancelled the Bugs Bunny show and others that I would normally have watched! I still have an educational pack that someone gave me at the time, with cardboard models of the rocket, the lander, fact sheets and all sorts of bits and pieces.

And where have we gone since, 51 years later? Nowhere :(

C'mon Elon, get a move on!



G = gin
T = tonic
I'm not sure what the M is for, Tree?
Well, we did go to Pluto. The probes to Jupiter and Saturn have caused all kinds of upheaval in geology. We do have robots on Mars. A lot of people ask what people can do that robots can't--at least as far as science goes. The "romance" of space flight is another issue. Someone said that "we sent men to play golf on the moon but didn't bother to leave an instrument to monitor the sun. This counts as a grave crime against science." It is true that we can learn from human spaceflight, but it's far more expensive and far more dangerous. And no one is going to any planet except possibly Mars any time soon.
("M" = "mixed with"?--that's something robots probably can't do as well as a skilled practitioner.)
 
Chandrasekhar’s work centered on the most basic question of his time in Physics and Astronomy – how does a large star survive.
The core reaction of conversion of Hydrogen in Helium by fusion had been deduced at the fuel of stars, providing the energy for the light. The process was ignited by the enormous pressure and temperature from the gravitational weight of the outer layers of the star. However, an important question remained. What happened when this fuel, hydrogen, ran out? Would the star slowly and quietly cool to a ball of cold gas (a dark dwarf, it was called)? That was the assumption. Continuing work started by Wilhelm Anderson and E. C. Stoner in 1929, Chandrasekhar, in 1930, at the age of twenty, made a calculation which, it is no exaggeration to say, revolutionized our understanding of stars.

Using advanced concepts of Einsteinian Relativity and Fermi degeneracy, Chandrasekhar calculated that any star with more than 1.4 times the mass of our sun, could not be supported by electron degeneracy pressure. That is, the gravitation weight of that mass of star could not be held up by any force known to science.

To step back a little. A star like the Sun is subject to incredible gravitational force driving it to compress further. This is prevented by the explosive force and heat from the central nuclear fires of fusion as mentioned above. This energy may be visualized as follows: 1,820,000,000 Tsar Bombas – the most powerful thermonuclear bomb ever built -per second!

This is all well and good, but like any furnace, the Sun will eventually run out of fuel. Then what happens? The traditional answer was the pressure of electron degeneracy. This is a fancy, Physics way, of saying that matter refuses to be pressed beyond a certain density. This resistance is provided by the electrons stubbornly holding to their quantum orbits around the nuclei.

Fine and Dandy. Then along comes Chandrasekhar. He calculates, that once a star, larger than 1.4 Suns, runs out of nuclear fuel, the electron orbit integrity is insufficient to resist the weight of the outer layers. This leads to a startling conclusion. Such a star must shrink forever, into zero diameter!

That is a lot of lecture. If anyone’s interested, I will add a post showing where this led Astronomers (to things like Supernovas, Neutron stars, Black holes, and how we have a planet that supports life.)
Ramanujan is a very famous Indian mathematician, who was trapped in England by World War I and died during the war ostensibly because his vegetarian diet couldn't be accommodated.
Chandrasekhar's theory of novae is the cornerstone of the two Nobel Prizes awarded for the measurements showing that the rate of expansion of the universe (Einstein's "cosmological constant, which he hated because he couldn't explain it, is not constant at all but increasing).
 
One hundred fifty-seven years ago, the great climatic charge that that marked the end of the greatest battle ever fought on American soil took place. Properly know as Longstreet's Assault, it is forever remembered as Picket's Charge. Preceded by the largest cannonade ever in North America, which was heard as far away as Philadelphia (111 miles away), the charge was made by almost 15,000 Confederate soldiers in three divisions against 6,500 United States soldiers on Cemetery Ridge, just over a mile of open ground away. Approximately 1,500 US casualties and more than 6,000 confederate casualties resulted. It is generally conceded to have been General Robert. E Lee's biggest military mistake.

A different way to remember it is in the words of William Faulkner, born in Byhalia, MS in 1897. He grew up knowing many Confederate veterans of the War. Widely considered the greatest writer to come out of the Old South, Faulkner often struggled in his writing with the ghosts of the War.

In his 1948 (the year I was born) novel "Intruder In The Dust, he wrote this:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances...
And Picket himself said of Robert E. Lee: "That old man slaughtered my division".
When the men in the Federal trenches saw what was happening, the shouted "Fredricksburg! Fredricksburg!", recalling the charge Federal general Ambrose Burnside had ordered against entrenched troops on top of a ridge. Colonel Joshua Chamberlin of 20th Maine fame was seriously wounded, but survived. He recalls thing that he needed to fall forward, so people wouldn't think he had been shot in the back.
Shelby Foote writes that at one place in the Federal line the charging troops almost found a hole. But a Federal regiment came running up, and as he put it the hole was plugged "at a price". "What regiment is this?" "First Minnesota". "Take those colors." The counter charge worked.
The Civil War was not a picnic by any means. No wonder it left so much bitterness, which is still with us today.
 
My way to honor this day.
In 1861, a month after the start of the American Civil War, a Boston regiment premiered a song using two folk tunes. One tune and chorus was Glory, Hallelujah, which had originated in Southern US religious camp meetings in the early 19th century. A later account of the authorship of the words:
“We had a jovial Scotchman in the battalion, named John Brown. ... [A]nd as he happened to bear the identical name of the old hero of Harper’s Ferry, he became at once the butt of his comrades. If he made his appearance a few minutes late among the working squad, or was a little tardy in falling into the company line, he was sure to be greeted with such expressions as “Come, old fellow, you ought to be at it if you are going to help us free the slaves,” or, “This can’t be John Brown—why, John Brown is dead.” And then some wag would add, in a solemn, drawling tone, as if it were his purpose to give particular emphasis to the fact that John Brown was really, actually dead: “Yes, yes, poor old John Brown is dead; his body lies mouldering in the grave.”
The song became widely popular in the US Army and was often improvised, but two standard lines were:
“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, His soul’s marching on.”
And,—
“He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord, His soul’s marching on.”
During a public review of the troops outside Washington, D.C. Company “K” of the 6th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, sang the song. In the audience was Julie Ward Howe. Howe was a fervent abolitionist and tireless advocate for women’s education and suffrage. She went back to her room at Willard’s Hotel and went to bed. Early the next morning, she awoke with lines in her hed. She sprang from bed, found a small stub of a pencil and jotted down the words in the near darkness. Comparing Slavery to the Biblical judgement of the end times, she drew references to Isaiah and Revelations. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic became the anthem of the anti-slavery forces of the North.

Howe's original lyrics.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

(Chorus)
Glory, Glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

(Chorus)

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal";
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.

(Chorus)

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Our God is marching on.
The music for this came from an abolitionist song called "John Brown's Body", after the abolitionist who went to Kansas to oppose with force its becoming a slave state. He was hanged when he seized the Federal arsenal at Haper's Ferry, Virginia, and sought to arm the slaves, who were wise enough to demur. The news was carried to Washington by a conductor on the Baltimore&Ohio. The great Republic scoured the capital for troops, and came up with a company of marines. Colonel Robert Edward Lee, 2nd US Cavalry, was on leave at his estate in Arlington, and in civilian clothes took the train to Harper's Ferry to take command. One soldier was killed in the assault. Brown was captured.
 
It feels incredible to meet a person on this kinky corner of the vast internet, who had the first-hand experience of the dark period that my country has come through - only a couple of years after the war, and a few years before the beginning of the series of military dictatorship, which would last more than two decades.

And yes, you really did something beneficial to so many people, including myself. Even though I'm increasingly getting frustrated about certain aspects of this country, I know that if it were not for the help of those people like you, the complaints I have today would be about something very different, such as the difficulty of finding food or the fear of being sent to a prison camp, for instance. (Of course, I love forced labour in a prison camp... but not so much when I can experience it in person :p)

So, thanks much @twonines. And please stay healthy as I hope to see you for a long time to come. :)
The United States fights with air power and artillery. That took a fearsome toll on Korea and its people. But to look at North Korea now and the gangster family which runs it, it is very clear that it was worth the cost in my opinion, even though the war was bungled by McArthur and his hubris. South Korea is one of the most successful countries in the world.
 
The United States fights with air power and artillery. That took a fearsome toll on Korea and its people. But to look at North Korea now and the gangster family which runs it, it is very clear that it was worth the cost in my opinion, even though the war was bungled by McArthur and his hubris. South Korea is one of the most successful countries in the world.
I tend to agree although I can't claim to be an objective judge on this matter since I'm a direct beneficiary of the U.S. intervention as you rightfully pointed out.

That being said, I'm also a bit reluctant to make a judgement on a historical event based on its end-result alone.

For example, the present prosperity of my country owes much to the policies pursued during a series of military dictatorship.

Those coup leaders had mercilessly oppressed the citizens or sometimes even massacred them. Still, somehow they managed to build the infrastructure upon which their democratic successors have successfully created a prospering nation.

Of course, I'm not trying to equate all those who risked their lives to help us fight back the N. Korean invasion to military dictators.

It's just that the Korean War was such an unfortunate disaster that consumed countless lives on the both sides. And even it was started by the ambition of that power-hungry communist leader from the North, not all those who had fought on his side were simple evil minions of him.

We all know how the story ended now: we can easily read all about the atrocities committed in the N. Korean concentration camps, or about how Lenin's experiment proved to be a failure with the collapse of the USSR about 30 years ago.

But for the people who lived in the 50s, especially in a country where you have minimal opportunities to learn what is happening outside the world, the judgement must have been a much more difficult one.

Both the U.S. and the USSR liberated Korea from Japan's rule. And they refused to acknowledge the Korean provisional government to seize the political power for themselves.

And while the Soviets were busy setting up and militarizing a puppet government in the North, the Americans did pretty much the same thing in the South, aiding the dictator to oppress and massacre his own people.

And Korea at that time had suffered from the class struggle which had lasted for a half thousand years. There were still a lot of former nobilities who owned a vast amount of land and exploited the former serfs to an inhumane extreme.

If I were born in that period, having received the kind of education they had, I'm not confident that I would have been able to predict the future and join the 'right' side which would bring the prosperity to the country half a century later.

Like in any other political strifes and wars, we had a plethora of conflicting ideals, motives, calculations, schemes, and greed from many different participants.

Some fought for freedom while others opposed them to liberate oppressed serfs from the greedy landowners. Some risked their lives to defend the democracy of a faraway country, while some others faced them in a battle to keep their ideal intact from the former imperialistic power which now supports a puppet dictator they chose.

I think that's an aspect that makes such a war even more unfortunate and tragic than it already is. It's always those who are willing to take a risk for other people, or for their ideals that are sacrificed in a fight. A fight fought between basically the same sort of people, differing only by the flags under which they get shot.

And the people who sacrifice those young idealists for their political gain and greed are hailed as a hero who had won the war when they didn't even have to step on the mud of a battlefield.

Maybe we can't really blame them since what usually put them in such a position is our own blind prejudice and hatred against a certain group of people who don't share with us a political ideal, religion, ethnicity, or whatever we believe to be a good enough reason to kill them.

That's why I'm usually a bit hesitant to make a judgement on such a historical event like war, based on what good it has brought to me in the end.
 
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75 years ago today, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Whether the decision was morally right or wrong is still debated and I can see the points on both sides. Would bringing Japanese officials to Alamagordo to see the test and giving them 1 week to surrender have been possible and, if so, would it have worked? There is no way to know. But the world was certainly changed irrevocably on that August morning 75 years ago.
 
I tend to agree although I can't claim to be an objective judge on this matter since I'm a direct beneficiary of the U.S. intervention as you rightfully pointed out.

That being said, I'm also a bit reluctant to make a judgement on a historical event based on its end-result alone.

For example, the present prosperity of my country owes much to the policies pursued during a series of military dictatorship.

Those coup leaders had mercilessly oppressed the citizens or sometimes even massacred them. Still, somehow they managed to build the infrastructure upon which their democratic successors have successfully created a prospering nation.

Of course, I'm not trying to equate all those who risked their lives to help us fight back the N. Korean invasion to military dictators.

It's just that the Korean War was such an unfortunate disaster that consumed countless lives on the both sides. And even it was started by the ambition of that power-hungry communist leader from the North, not all those who had fought on his side were simple evil minions of him.

We all know how the story ended now: we can easily read all about the atrocities committed in the N. Korean concentration camps, or about how Lenin's experiment proved to be a failure with the collapse of the USSR about 30 years ago.

But for the people who lived in the 50s, especially in a country where you have minimal opportunities to learn what is happening outside the world, the judgement must have been a much more difficult one.

Both the U.S. and the USSR liberated Korea from Japan's rule. And they refused to acknowledge the Korean provisional government to seize the political power for themselves.

And while the Soviets were busy setting up and militarizing a puppet government in the North, the Americans did pretty much the same thing in the South, aiding the dictator to oppress and massacre his own people.

And Korea at that time had suffered from the class struggle which had lasted for a half thousand years. There were still a lot of former nobilities who owned a vast amount of land and exploited the former serfs to an inhumane extreme.

If I were born in that period, having received the kind of education they had, I'm not confident that I would have been able to predict the future and join the 'right' side which would bring the prosperity to the country half a century later.

Like in any other political strifes and wars, we had a plethora of conflicting ideals, motives, calculations, schemes, and greed from many different participants.

Some fought for freedom while others opposed them to liberate oppressed serfs from the greedy landowners. Some risked their lives to defend the democracy of a faraway country, while some others faced them in a battle to keep their ideal intact from the former imperialistic power which now supports a puppet dictator they chose.

I think that's an aspect that makes such a war even more unfortunate and tragic than it already is. It's always those who are willing to take a risk for other people, or for their ideals that are sacrificed in a fight. A fight fought between basically the same sort of people, differing only by the flags under which they get shot.

And the people who sacrifice those young idealists for their political gain and greed are hailed as a hero who had won the war when they didn't even have to step on the mud of a battlefield.

Maybe we can't really blame them since what usually put them in such a position is our own blind prejudice and hatred against a certain group of people who don't share with us a political ideal, religion, ethnicity, or whatever we believe to be a good enough reason to kill them.

That's why I'm usually a bit hesitant to make a judgement on such a historical event like war, based on what good it has brought to me in the end.
Yes, many communists during Stalin's time were idealists. (The depression only exacerbated that.) Rhee was certainly a dictator. Even J Robert Oppenheimer was purged from the government after the bomb's success because of his Communist leanings in the '30's.
I stand by my contention, however, that MacArthur was an egotist who ignored intelligence he didn't like and botched many of his campaigns as a result. He really didn't give a damn about people, either.
 
75 years ago today, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Whether the decision was morally right or wrong is still debated and I can see the points on both sides. Would bringing Japanese officials to Alamagordo to see the test and giving them 1 week to surrender have been possible and, if so, would it have worked? There is no way to know. But the world was certainly changed irrevocably on that August morning 75 years ago.
People have also argued that an attack on an offshore island or the ocean would have worked as well. I tend not to think so. There is a Japanese book I read in translation years ago called "The Day Man Lost". It points out that the Japanese Army was in denial about the seriousness of the destruction at first (one reporter early on the scene in Hiroshima said "you tell those bastards in the army...". They also argued that the Americans probably didn't have many bombs like this (the "matchbox" bomb, they called it). The United States could listen to cabinet discussions based on their deciphering of the Japanese diplomatic code and knew the Army (which had veto power) was dead set against ending the war. There was also discussion of holding out for terms allowing for continued Japanese control in Manchuria and Korea, and no occupation. American demands for "unconditional surrender" (later modified to allow the Emperor to retain the throne, a red line for the Japanese) weren't the main obstacle to peace. The Americans waited days before using the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki (the original target was Kokura but it had too much cloud cover). Even after the Emperor recorded his message accepting the Potsdam terms, diehard soldiers actually invaded the Imperial Palace seeking to destroy the recording. A Japanese historian in "Racing the Enemy" argues that the main motivation of the use of the bombs was to end the war quickly before the Red Army could win the right to share in the occupation of Japan (the Soviet attack in Manchuria on August 8--the only Yalta promise Stalin kept--certainly played a role in convincing the Japanese there was no more hope). The head of the Army committed ritual suicide. In a complex situation like this, there are indeed many motivations. Another was pressure to win the war quickly because of home front pressure to "bring the boys home", which was intense--European divisions with lots of combat experience were NOT moving to the Pacific but seeing their personnel discharged based on a point system of combat experience. Industry wanted labor too. But I still tend to think that the experience of Okinawa, the intelligence about the forces (hollowed out but suicidal) which would oppose the invasion of Japan, and the time required for a "starvation" naval blockade to work combined with the diplomatic intelligence made use of the bombs both inevitable and defensible.
 
every country today that desires a N-bomb has access to the science and means to build one (or more). It wasn't the same back then. Don't cloud the discussions with what we know now!
 
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