nopin

Thursday, January 23, 2014

"Hello, world!"

In the predawn hours of America's Jan 20th, the Rosetta Spacecraft woke up from a 2.5-year slumber, over 500 million miles away and at the end of a 10-year-journey, and tweeted home, "Hello, world". From here, it is going to continue on to rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, orbiting it, studying it, and eventually sending a probe to its surface to help suss out what the solar system was like before the planets were formed. In other words, what our mom was like in her hard-partying days before she had us.

My hometown rag, which has won numerous Pulitzers in its heyday, did not headline the momentous event. However, their headlines tend more toward the profane rather than the sublime. Today, for example, the front page looks like this:


And now I need to go lie down.

Edited to add: The gifted columnist Jon Carroll paid tribute. At least we got that.

2 comments:

Sarah said...

Hello from your follower in Georgia who teaches math and appreciates your scientific ways. It is a shame what qualifies as news... if this info were shared more kids might look into math and science careers cause it is way MORE interesting than some pop singers arrest.

mdr said...

News paper editors decide what to be on the news -- all depending what the majority readers want to read, and the newspaper stays in business to make money for editors pay checks.