Apollo-course / Daily crono

Apollo-course

We had the honor to have Charles Duke as our guest in the Apollo-class today. He told us about Apollo 16, during which he was the Lunar Module pilot. He spend almost 72 hours on the Moon with Thomas Mattingly. His recollections were still sharp, his humor entertaining, and he was as fast and clever as a man can be. It was very interesting to hear about the science experiments they did on the Moon, and also the very real stories about how he was about to get space sick, and how he was almost too excited during Lunar descent to keep an eye on instruments. One thing, which is hard to comprehend is the amount of training Duke and others went through before their trip to the Moon: 6 years, including 3000 simulated descends to Moon, studies in geology worth one Master's degree, etc. And then on the Moon the important thing was just "geology 101, pick one of each color".
Duke was a student of professor Young, who is one of our teachers in the class. It seems that MIT has been blessed with many astronauts. And other interesting people: one Wednesday Bob Seamans is finally coming to the class.

Daily crono

After the workload became "normal", just having 4 or 5 classes going on, I seems to have developed a real problem of having too much time at hand. I took a long walk in the morning, and some nice pictures of some new flowers, then took off to MIT, where we discussed about air traffic policies for one hours, then Apollo, and discussion, and then I felt so happy, that I had to go and buy a CD (Horses by Patti Smith), and needed to have something European. So, I went to Sonsie, and had a very good mushroom pizza. The waiter knows me, and happily greeted me with "Sir, welcome back". It was two weeks since I was there last time - it seems that my appearance is kind of hard to forget. When I was leaving, the waiter said "Please come back again in two weeks", so he even remembered when I was there last time. It is nice and necessary to have places to frequent. After the pizza, I went to Deluga's to buy some beer. To my great surprise, they have more than decent wine cellar. When I was about to leave, an older lady came in, and the clerk reached for a 3 deciliter bottle of Absolut vodka even before saying hello to the lady. So, she must be frequenting the cellar. A while back, I saw another older lady in mink fur walking her dog with a nice glass of red wine. Old ladies have strange habits here in Back bay.
If you have extra time, you can spend it well by reading this story about Joseph Brodsky

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs April 2005".