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Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
- tbergeron 7y ago> Weird-Looking Freak Yet fails to show a picture of the weird looking freak?
- a3n 7y agoHe was physically described pretty well in the article. As for "weird" and "freak," you should probably load the 1971 context for full understanding.
- dkdbejwi383 7y agoWhat is the 1971 context, for this millenial's benefit?
- a3n 7y agoBeing different was itself weird back then, while it's almost normal now. Being long haired and stoned and consciousness oriented, among short haired short sleeved pocket protected engineering units was especially weird. "Freak" would have been the title editor's attempt to put a particular image of hippiness into a reader's head, justified or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_scene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_scene
- ssully 7y agoHeh, that article is interesting with how much it references Zappa. I am not his biggest fan, but whenever I hear the word Freak, I think of his song "Hungry Freaks, Daddy".
- kragen 7y agoI'm not the only one who, ever since I opened this article, has been hearing the lines: The rising tide Of the left-behinds Of the Great Society (too too too too too tee!)
- gwbas1c 7y ago> Weird-Looking Freak Where's the picture?
- dang 7y agoPerhaps pictures weren't considered necessary in 1971. Or maybe by 1971 everyone had seen enough freaks that a picture was superfluous.
- greenyoda 7y agoThere are a couple of pictures of Don Eyles and his colleagues from that period at the bottom of this page on Don's web site: https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html It looks like in those days, having long hair was what made you a "weird-looking freak".
- smartsystems 7y agoI'm not sute if I'll get much sympathy but I would SO much rather get a synopsis with maybe a couple bullet points and some relevant pictures (or graphs!) than an article. Let articles die. I just want to know what happened. I don't want to read the history or a flowery introduction. They just hide the point. This is why I believe reddit2 will use either an AI or the emergent intelligence of thousands of redditors to distill articles down to a short synopsis. I do not think reading the whole article is a sign of intelligence. If I want to read something that's going to take 30-40 minutes it will be a lot more planned out than just stumbling upon an interesting headline. I really think the article format has had its day but it will take a while for people to admit they don't like reading long flowery opinionated journal entries.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- neetodavid 7y agoAnd we should replace all of our meals with Soylent!
- smartsystems 7y agoIt's intellectual junk food at best.
- kingbirdy 7y agoGreat article. I was curious about the game mentioned towards the bottom: > At M.I.T. next door to Draper, some of the undergraduates play a game called “Space War.” To play “Space War,” you need a television screen, a computer, and a working knowledge of Newtonian physics. The TV screen shows a planet surrounded by spaceships. Each player fires torpedos from his spaceship, aiming them according to the laws of orbital dynamics. The torpedos must destroy either another spaceship or the planet. The game is enhanced by programming the computer to include such factors as time warps, so that a spaceship can disappear “for years.” Thanks to the magic of the internet, I found a few versions of the game (actually called "Spacewar!"[0]), both the original[1] without time-warp and the more advanced version described in the article which includes it[2]. However contrary to the article's description it seems only the ships follow Newtonian physics, the projectiles always travel in a straight line, and I wasn't able to blow up the star or planet you're orbiting, though perhaps a version with these features exists and I simply wasn't able to find it. Interestingly, the circular layout isn't just for the game, the screen of the PDP-1[3] Which ran it was circular because it was originally a radar screen! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar%21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar%21 [1]: https://spacewar.oversigma.com/ https://spacewar.oversigma.com/ [2]: https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/ https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/ [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1
- tomjakubowski 7y agoYou can also play Spacewar! on a real restored PDP-1 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. You may even get to play against Steve Russell. Highly recommended. https://computerhistory.org/exhibits/pdp-1/ https://computerhistory.org/exhibits/pdp-1/
- Wingman4l7 7y agoThe Living Computer Museum in Seattle had a Spacewar tournament a couple years ago, which I believe also ran on restored hardware.
- yarrel 7y agoI visited the LCM a couple of weeks ago and Spacewar was running then, it may be a permanent exhibit now.
- annoyingnoob 7y agoHow do we bring back the national enthusiasm for space again? Enthusiasm that spans across politics. Maybe I'm out of touch, it seems to take a lot longer to get things done and get something flying into space than it used to. I don't think we can be world leaders with projects like the SLS that never get off the ground anywhere near the expected date. Seems like we used to take more risks or have less bureaucracy or ???
- sbierwagen 7y agoApollo was not as popular at the time as commonly remembered. >Polls both by USA Today and Gallup have shown support for the moon landing has increased the farther we've gotten away from it. 77 percent of people in 1989 thought the moon landing was worth it; only 47 percent felt that way in 1979. >Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moondoggle-the-forgotten-opposition-to-the-apollo-program/262254/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...
- annoyingnoob 7y agoI think support has a lot to do with reporting and the stories we tell. The economy has an impact too. In 1969 we had a great story to tell, it was all over the news and everyone was paying attention. In 1979, the economy was crap and there probably wasn't the money to spend. In 1989 the economy was doing well. 1989 also saw 5 shuttle missions, again lots of news. From your link - "Americans might not have supported the space program in real life, but they loved the one they saw on TV."
- _bxg1 7y ago> Seems like we used to take more risks or have less bureaucracy or ??? More like we had a Cold War to win via technological showmanship. Today's world has more important, more fundamental political problems to solve (not that we're doing a good job on those either, but regardless). At the same time: > it seems to take a lot longer to get things done and get something flying into space than it used to It's never been easier to "get something flying into space" thanks to, surprisingly, private industry. Walking on the moon may be a different story, but significant progress has been made getting both objects and people into space.
- sli 7y agoDoes "weird-looking freak" really just mean "has long hair?"
- hownottowrite 7y agoDon Eyles breaks down his conversations with Apollo astronauts in this TEDx talk. Really great anecdotes: https://tedxbeaconstreet.com/videos/conversations-with-the-apollo-astronauts/ https://tedxbeaconstreet.com/videos/conversations-with-the-a... "What we had in common was a spirit of exploration." @17:10
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- greenyoda 7y agoDon Eyles has a web site, where there's an interesting article called "Tales From the Lunar Module Guidance Computer": https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html
- bovermyer 7y agoI was a little surprised to see his home address there. But that website made me happy. It evokes memories of a simpler era on the web.
- ghaff 7y agoI probably wouldn't personally put my home address online. But if you own a place and are reasonably identifiable, it's pretty trivial for someone to find given public records, etc.
- rst 7y agoHe's got a space at an artists' cooperative which is divided up into live/work spaces for a few dozen professional artists (including Don himself, who's now a professional fine art photographer). So the address is public already in a whole bunch of other places.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thewonderidiot 7y agoDon is still around, and is still awesome! His memory for events around that time is surprisingly sharp, for it being 50 years ago. He's been an invaluable resource for us at the VirtualAGC project [1]. He provided over half (!) of the AGC programs we've made available, including LM software for Apollo 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 15-17, plus several other ground development programs. He also was the source of a majority of the schematics that we used in the AGC restoration [2] -- I can say with 100% confidence that it wouldn't have been possible to get that computer working again without his help. He's got a book out now, Sunburst and Luminary [3], that is very good and goes into a lot of technical detail on the LM software, without getting too much into the weeds. I highly recommend it if you're interested in that sort of thing! [1] http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/ http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb59FWrLZfdlisi_x7-Ut_-w7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb... [3] https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html
- js2 7y agoHN, if nothing else, look through the photos and captions: https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLgallery.html https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLgallery.html
- Quai 7y agoSuch impressive work, in so many ways. The amount of knowledge and expertise you guys brought to the project is immense!
- zweizeichen 7y agoMike, thanks a lot for working on the restoration project! It was amazing to watch your progress and the ingenious tools and solutions you guys came up with. It also sparked my interest in AGC-related things and while I at first expected it to be a somewhat simple and elegant machine (easier to formally verify) I quickly realized it too like almost any engineering project was subject to reality/deadline-driven compromises everywhere (looking at you memory architecture). However, it is a machine which still 'fits in your head' compared to the historical achievement. We probably won't be able to do that kind of thing with the more recently developed, more complex systems we're going to use for the next steps in space exploration.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoTitle correction: there should be an exclamation point after "extra". As in "extra! extra! read all about it", not "extra weird–looking freak". Although it did make me laugh :)
- dang 7y agoHN's software should probably replace non-trailing exclamation points with something rather than nothing. I took the Extra bit out of the title for now, since it isn't needed and I suppose might confuse younger readers.
- ash 7y agoWhat does this "Extra!" bit mean?
- projektfu 7y agoWhen breaking news came out a newspaper would sometimes publish an extra edition to go out in the afternoon. The paperboys would stereotypically say, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”
- boulos 7y agoThe Wikipedia article [1] is to the point here, and even explains why they went away: the introduction of radio meant that a one-off printing for news didn’t make sense as everyone heard it on the radio. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_extra https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_extra
- dang 7y agoAt some point paperboys will need to be explained also, and some time after that, newspapers.
- projektfu 7y agoYou see, we had things called computers, which were like an interface between you and the network...
- droithomme 7y agoWhat a fantastic article!
- banku_brougham 7y agoMan the culture has changed a lot since the 70s. Great article.
- jkaptur 7y ago> What NASA needs most, he says, is some imaginative PR... The astronauts he has met could provide reams of picturesque copy; they are hard-drinking, fast-living, generally “wild and weird.” The editor of Rolling Stone was certainly paying attention! It sounds like they sent Tom Wolfe to cover Apollo just a short time after publishing this. His book, The Right Stuff, would cement the image of those first American astronauts in just this “wild and weird” frame.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- milliondollar 7y agoThe author was also a minor player in new journalism circles. He wrote "boys on the bus", an account of working with Hunter S Thompson to cover the 1972 presidential campaign.
- throwaway13337 7y agoSo what happened to the optimism for the "consciousness III society"? Maybe it was naive but It's a shame we don't have that same forward looking feeling today.
- pnathan 7y agothe 80s, basically. But, there was a reactionary swell that hit circa 1976ish, propelled Reagan into office and has continued in one form or another ever since.
- tudorw 7y agoyou, not we :)
- samplatt 7y agoThe climate happened, I think. Difficult to maintain optimism on the ultimate destiny of consciousness when the science is telling you there's an extinction event on your doorstep.
- johnnyforeigner 7y agoLiving through the Cold War brought us a constant and very close awareness of the potential for a nuclear extinction event so I don’t think it’s climate change. If anything it was scarier then because there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error in a highly complex socio-technical system. I’m of the opinion that much of the change in our culture was driven by a concerted pushback on the part of the “straights” to reassert the primacy of their worldview. The threat felt by those in power by the rise of the civil rights, anti-war and nascent environmentalist movement was a direct threat to business as usual. So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan, we have adopted a worldview that for decades has told us that happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success and conventional career paths.
- redis_mlc 7y ago> there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error Agreed, I was there and watched the "Duck and Cover" films in school. That only stopped when leaders realized that surviving the initial blast was one thing, and surviving a month later for most urbanites was unlikely. > So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan ... happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success I don't see a coherent argument here. You can ignore Thatcher, since she was the head of a bankrupted, hapless country (Britain had food rationing for 9 years after WW2.) Reagan was one of the most powerful leaders in world history. He wanted a strong America, both domestically and overseas. Can't really argue with that. We don't like people who utter words like "Evil Empire" [see Prof. Victor Davis Hanson], but somebody has to say it. Just be glad Reagan was on our side.
- dilippkumar 7y ago> Eyles and some of his fellow Consciousness IIIers regard computer programming as a fine craft that might some day be elevated to the status of an art. “It’s possible to envision a time when there are professors of the literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a language there’s no audience for. It’s like Nabokov’s book about Gogol where at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol, there’s no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It’s sort of discouraging.” As I read this, I was aware that there is a steaming pile of JavaScript a single Alt-Tab away on my laptop. I think there's a profound lesson here - buried in the path between these dreams of programmers in the 70s and today's reality. This was a really good read. Gave me something to think about.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoTbh, for any piece of great poetry or prose or code, there are nine others which are crap, as noted by Sturgeon's Law. The steaming piles of yesterday have been forgotten, with only the memorable works remaining; thus creating an illusion of a Golden Age.
- lordleft 7y ago>It’s like Nabokov’s book about Gogol where at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol, there’s no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It’s sort of discouraging. As a programmer who loves Russian lit, this hit close to home. It's a dream of mine to one day read Tolstoy's drafts of his predecessor novel to War & Peace ("The Decembrists"), but my professor informed me that the copies that exist are entirely in russian. One day.
- kragen 7y agoThe 19th century contained writing like the writing of Gogol. It also contained writing such as dunning notices, calling cards, semi-literate love notes, graffiti, army regulations, and shopping lists. The literary quality of most of the latter may have been deplorable, but it certainly does not detract from the merit of the former.
- afarrell 7y ago
- Stratoscope 7y agoA recent discussion of straights and freaks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670128
- MichaelMoser123 7y agothat ride to the moon seems to have been quite a rough one - at each mission it needed some hero who had to save the mission...
- hudibras 7y agoUltimately, that's what made them stop: somebody (or most likely, three somebodies) was going to get killed.
- a3n 7y agoThree somebodies did get killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
- physicles 7y agoI’ve always heard it was because the budget dried up after we beat the evil commies to the moon. Could you point to a source that talks about the safety angle? I’d love to read about it.
- smoyer 7y agoIt's so funny to see an article from 1971 is on the same page as news (and ads) from 2020. If this were a printed newspaper, people would be very confused!
- dang 7y agoHistorical material is particularly welcome on HN. When an article shows up that's old, has never been discussed here, and strikes chords with the community, that's the best!
- smoyer 7y agoHopefully it didn't sound like I was complaining! ... I also love that Saturdays and Sundays have a broader scope of topics making it to the front page. I do appreciate having the date shown though ... I've read a couple articles and thought "that seems pretty passe" before I realized I was reading older materials.
- dang 7y agoIt didn't sound like you were complaining at all! I just felt like exuberating.
- eitland 7y ago> “It’s possible to envision a time when there are professors of the literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a language there’s no audience for. It’s like Nabokov’s book about Gogol where at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol, there’s no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It’s sort of discouraging.” Today computer languages are mostly easier to learn than a totally new human language I guess. I still thought this one was quote-worthy. Also: is it just me or was writing in some ways better before?
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoThe languages themselves, yes, but there's a lot more that comes into play besides the language. I'm working with Go right now and there's a lot of ground to cover with subjects like error handling, context, concurrency, web services, modules, and the whole ecosystem. I had the same experience with Java and its vast standard library and the community (e.g. J2EE, Spring). And with Javascript and the entirety of web development and (nowadays) package management and backwards compatibility. So yeah you can learn the words and letters - most languages only have a couple dozen keywords and characters anyway - but the language is much more complicated than just the words and letters.
- jhbadger 7y agoWay easier. It is hardly noteworthy for a programmer to know a half dozen programming languages well, but a person who knows a half dozen human languages well is.
- HPsquared 7y agoOne needs a lot more fluency than the other - there's a difference between what could be considered 'knowing' a programming language (where it's possible to slowly cobble together, or decode, a sentence over an afternoon with documentation to hand) and conversing 'live' in a natural language.
- Gene_Parmesan 7y agoI think the main determining factor here is vocabulary. Modern programming langs have fairly small #s of reserved words, and when you add the standard library on top of that, you essentially have all the 'vocab' you need to use the language well. This is because (a) a large part of programming is the act of creating new vocab via writing new APIs/libraries/functions, and (b) the time pressure is significantly lessened; there's no issue with consulting docs for the interfaces you forget. Meanwhile, human languages are essentially unusable without a fairly extensive vocabulary, and importantly a vocabulary that has to be memorized and available at a moment's notice.
- jimhefferon 7y agoGood article. No picture, though.
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago>>> “They passed a resolution with a lot of whereases and things in my honor. I was introduced to Monsignor somebody-or-other. I was stoned out of my mind.” 1971. What can I say :-)
- sneak 7y agoMy favorite part: > “Look,” he says, “they’re devoting three billion dollars a year to curiosity that might yield good results in the long run, and eighty billion a year to the Defense budget — to killing. I’d be for a bigger space budget as long as the money came from the Defense budget. That’s the one to cut. Wish we had more people talking this way these days. Instead, they’re militarizing space.
- a3n 7y agoWe do have more people talking this way. The other people aren't listening. Society might benefit from peaceful pursuits in the long run (and individuals will in the present), but people with piles of money will make bigger piles of money from war in the short run.
- sildur 7y agoThis is the first time in many many months I’ve read an article from begin to end, in one sitting. And then I looked the date it was written: 1971. We don’t have shorter attention spans. We simply cannot handle the utter crap that passes by articles today.
- eropple 7y agoThere's plenty of great long-form stuff out there. You just have to know where to look. This one came to mind, from 2016, but it's just what was at the top of my stack: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-pri...
- iron0013 7y agoWhenever longform articles are posted from more recent dates, the HN comments are full of people complaining that the article is too long, takes too long to get to the point, employs flowery prose, etc all of which this article would be just as guilty of—were those valid objections to begin with.
- throwanem 7y agoI don't know about that. Modern longform articles all seem as if they're trying to be The Atlantic, with a very specific style that seems heavily informed by the conventional language of cinematography - and does not translate well to the written word. In thirty frames a second, it's quick and easy to do establishing shots, for example. Starting an essay with one takes a couple of paragraphs, and once you've read enough such pieces to start noticing that they're doing it (that they're all doing it), it quickly becomes tiresome. In such circumstances, you don't get impatient because of pull-to-refresh Twitter poisoning; you get impatient because your time is being wasted. This Rolling Stone article, meanwhile, isn't like that at all. It starts by quoting four quick stanzas of doggerel to briefly set the tone, and then it's right into the meat of its subject matter. Four sentences in, you know exactly what it's talking about, and if the subject matter interests you at all, you're engaged. It's written with a respect for the value of its audience's time that is nowhere evident in the modern longform style. If I had to put the difference briefly, I'd put it like this: the Rolling Stone article is an example of genuine craftsmanship in nonfiction prose. It has a point to make, and it does so, in a way that's interesting and enjoyable without overstaying its welcome. Conversely, the Atlantic style, in which modern longform is conventionally done, is an example of performative prose-stylistry for its own sake. It screams "Look at me! I'm a writer! Look at the way I paint pictures with words!" Maybe you enjoy that sort of thing. If so, you're welcome. But saying "look at me, I'm amazing" is not the job of journalism, and it's hardly a surprise that people get impatient with journalists who behave as if saying "look at me, I'm amazing" was not only part of their job, but the meat of it.
- 72deluxe 7y agoThere's mention of him in this article regarding the source code (printed on white and green paper). He wrote about 2000 lines for the Lunar Module. I often wonder how many lines of Javascript I load every day just to browse the web and watch images fade in and out and animate etc. and all the megabytes of framework garbage I load just to display some content. By comparison, it's depressing.