Each comparing existential threats

[austin_dern]

My mathematics blog has been quiet, with a bunch of low-key stuff even for these quiet times. I'm working on something for Wednesday. You'll se it on the RSS feed, or if you wait long enough, in a list like this:

• Reading the Comics, December 20, 1948: What is Barnaby's friend's name Edition?
• How do I do a matrix in WordPress LaTeX? (Nobody's had an answer yet, by the way)
• Iva Sallay's published the 146th Playful Math Education Blog Carnival
• Here's how to get rid of WordPress's Block Editor and get the good editor back

In cartoon-watching I've got 60s Popeye: Pest of the Pecos, containing one (1) Old West cartoon but that's done well enough.

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And now into a grab bag of photos from walking around town this January, often, here, looking for houses that still had their lights up.

Altu's is a fine Ethiopian restaurant that before the pandemic I would not have thought was in walking distance. So, one day I caught on the noon news that a car had accidentally hopped the curb and smashed into the building, so, here it is in a state of emergency repair. (It's now looking normal again.)

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More nighttime walking-about. Here's a nicely wrapped tree that seems to blend into the porch.

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The use of lights in the windows to decorate is nice and reminds me of our own Halloween decorations.

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Nice icicle lighting around the porch here.

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It only seems like everybody else has a porch and decorated their porch.

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But it does seem like I took a snap of every porch on the Eastside. I like how the TV upstairs, though not part of the decoration, still looks like part of the decoration.

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What's this? A snake somehow in the middle of the sidewalk in the middle of January? ... Well, no, someone dropped a rubber snake on the sidewalk, across the street from that late-20s manor house with the all-brick front and three-car garage I mentioned the other day. bunnyhugger noticed it too, on her walk that day.

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Though it's a week or so past Epiphany this house --- I shared a picture just a couple days ago --- still has everything up. And somehow though it's farther into winter we had less snow.

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These folks decided to decorate only the hardest parts of a Dutch Colonial house.

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Trivia: In April 1865, to celebrate the opening of its first Brooklyn shop, the Great American Tea Company (which would become the A&P supermarket chain) took advertisements filling the entire front page of the day's Brooklyn Daily Eagle, an un-heard-of volume of advertising. Source: The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, Marc Levinson.

Currently Reading: This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, Loyd S Swenson Jr, James M Grimwood, Charles C Alexander. NASA SP-4201. Okay. Um.

From the endnotes: ``Perhaps the most eloquent defense Wernher von Braun ever made against the inevitable shallow cynicism of critics who could not forget the Second World War was a widely printed article entitled `The Acid Test' which first appeared in Space Journal of the Astro-Sciences, Vol 1, No 3 (Summer 1958), 31-36. For background on the following discussion of the von Braun team's cohesive spirit, see Walter R Dornberger, V-2 (New York, 1954); and Dieter K Huzel, Peenemünde to Canaveral (Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1962).''

And, like, I understand that in the 50s and 60s they were doing a major weiss-washing of von Braun's history (the 1960 von Braun bio-pic I Aim At The Stars has this curious void explaining his life between 1939 and 1945) but wow. Just wow. The ``shallow cynicism of critics who could not forget the Second World War''. That is a take so bad I'm shocked I didn't find it on Twitter. I'd like to know how willfully ignorant Swenson et al were, writing this in 1964-65.

Comments

[armiphlage]

"The ``shallow cynicism of critics who could not forget the Second World War''" is a comment that might be appropriate in the 21st century to target those using historical conflicts to justify nationalistic trade barriers. Definitely not to use while still cleaning up from the conflict, to defend those who actively participated in the conflict, and who are still doing basically the same job they did during the conflict.

[austin_dern]

Yeah, exactly! I understand that they were writing at a time when von Braun's history was being extensively cleaned-up, and at a moment when it would be very hard for the authors to be honest about it and keep the working relationship with NASA they wanted. But still, it's not like the endnotes would have been inadequate had they skipped saying anything about von Braun one way or another.

[selki]

I hope the Ethiopian restaurant thrives! I get take-out sometimes from the next one over.

[austin_dern]

I'm hopeful enough for Altu's, which at least has been around at least fifteen years and survived two major planned renovations that I know of.