Need a new needle for your googlephonic hi-fi?

[mbarrick]

How's this for a segué from the pictures of stars back to pictures of New York? This is a moon rock kept at the Natural History Museum. It's a crappy picture, and even if it were in focus, it'd still be a rather boring picture of a rock. It's the story of the rock that is amazing. Stop and think about it. Three men in a glorified can atop a 55-storey tube full of intensely volatile supercooled gas. With math worked out mostly on slide-rulers (hands up anyone who has even seen a slide ruler, let alone knows how to use one - remember that the 19 men who died when the second narrows bridge collapsed during construction died because of a misplaced decimal place in math worked out on slide-rulers) these three men are going to be shot a quarter of a million miles up, and two of them are going to walk on the moon. Look at the moon one night soon. That disc is as wide as all of North America. Imagine Vancouver Island on one side and Newfoundland on the other. Now imagine those two men standing on it. They are the only people, the only anything alive on that globe. When they look up it's at the whole Earth, to them a disk that can be covered by your thumb held out at arm's length. One of them will break this rock off of a larger one with a hammer and bring it back. Back across a quarter of a million miles. Someone strapped his ass to a bomb and travelled half a million miles for this rock. This rock is special.