Home > Geeking Out > Archives > 2007 > November
November 2007
Visualizing Really Big Numbers
 Detail of Plastic Bottles by Chris Jordan Reproduced with permission |
200,000 Americans die from cigarrette smoking every six months. 8 million trees are harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs. Two million plastic beverage bottles are used in the US every five minutes. 426,000 cell phones are retired in the US every day. 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags are used in the US every hour. 106,000 aluminum cans are used in the US every thirty seconds. 60,000 plastic bags are used in the US every five seconds.
These are staggering numbers. So gargantuan that they are completely incomprehensible to us, and therefore lose their impact.
That’s why everyone needs to take a look at Chris Jordan’s online exhibit, Running the Numbers. It’s updated regularly, so be sure to check back on it every so often.
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“Within You Without You”
Tempus Fugit |
In the last second, cesium-133 atoms around the world oscillated through 9,192,631,770 radiation cycles in atomic clocks measuring International Atomic Time (TAI) * ). While you read the previous sentence, 400,000 billion neutrinos from the sun passed through you * . By the time you finish reading this paragraph, you will have inhaled nitrogen atoms that were also inhaled by dinosaurs 65 to 230 million years ago * .
In the last minute the world consumed 56,060 barrels of oil * , 42,000 plastic bottles, 350,000 aluminum cans * , and 1 million plastic bags * . 26 hectares of forests were cut and cleared, the equivalent of 37 football fields * . 582 cattle, buffalo, and calves; 2,283 pigs; 1,512 sheep and goats; and 81,811 chickens, ducks, turkeys, and geese were slaughtered as livestock * . 3.5 million bar codes were scanned1.
110 people died in that same time span * , 31 of them died of cardiovascular disease * , 13 died of cancer * , eight died of smoking-related illness * , six died of diabetes * , five died of AIDS * while 11 people contracted HIV * , three died of lung cancer * , two died and 95 others were injured in car accidents * , and one died from small arms fire * . One woman died from complications in pregnancy or childbirth * . Five newborns died * . 12 children died of hunger * , and two children died of polluted water and inadequate sanitation * . 11 people and one child went blind * .
The United States’ National Debt grew by $1.3 million dollars * . The world debt grew by $9.9 million dollars * . The world spent $2 million on its militaries * .
In the last twelve minutes a plant or animal species went extinct, vanishing from the Earth forever * .
245 people were born in the last 60 seconds * . 49 of them were born in India, 34 in China, and 8 in the United States. 389 women became pregnant * . 540 Viagra tablets were dispensed * . Each child born right now will see an average of 3.5 million minutes in their lifetime.
The world produced $124 million in goods and services, as well as 33 million kilowatt-hours of electricity * . The United States contributed $4,851 to the immediate alleviation of humanitarian emergencies worldwide * . $250 thousand dollars in student aid was distributed * .
184 thousand e-mails where sent, 76 thousand of which were spam * . 138 thousand people queried Google.com in 90 languages * . 120 new blogs appeared on the Internet * . Two books were published * .
At this moment there are 366,000 people flying in airplanes all around the globe * .
Over the last 60 seconds, the 6.5 billion human hearts currently beating on planet Earth pumped a combined total of 32.5 billion liters of blood * . These same human bodies produced 903.5 quadrillion new red blood cells * and burned 10.8 billion calories of energy * .
Just now, lightning struck the Earth 100 times * .
Every minute it took you to read this article, the Earth traveled 1117 miles of its yearly orbit around the Sun, the Sun traveled 9,320 miles of its orbit around the Milky Way, the Milky Way traveled 22,369 miles relative to the average velocity of the Universe, and the Universe expanded 11 million miles in all directions * * .
As George Harrison of the Beatles wrote, “…and life flows on within you without you. * ”
- Everything is Miscellaneous. David Weinberger, Times Books, 2007.
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Spinning Silhouette Optical Illusion
This Optical Illusion published at the Daily Telegraph is generating a lot of buzz on the InterWebs. Supposedly, the silhouette spins clock-wise or counter-clockwise depending on what hemisphere, the right or left, is dominant at the time. While I can’t make the silhouette change directions on command, I have found that focusing on something else in the page can cause her spin to change directions.
Ballads for the Age of Science
 Singing Science Records |
In July earlier this year, lyricist Hy Zaret passed away. His hit song “Unchained Melody,” earned him sufficient royalties that he was able to spend time making educational music dealing with science and politics.
One of his best sets of music was Singing Science Records or Ballads for the Age of Science produced in the late 1950s, which features Tom Glazer (On Top of Spaghetti), Dottie Evans, Josef Marais and Miranda. The entertaining and educational albums covered Space, Energy & Motion, Experimentation, Weather, and Nature.
Jef Poskanzer has transcribed all six records to MP3 format and made them available for download. They’re awesome for kids and adults.
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Happy Evolution Day!
 Charles Darwin (1809-1882) Photo by J. Cameron, 1869 |
On this day, 148 years ago, Charles Darwin first published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (wikipedia). Although the book and specifics of Darwin’s orginal theory have been improved upon, as the evolving body of scientific knowledge perpetually works out the myriad details of the proccess, natural selection, the mechanism or algorithm Darwin proposed as the driving force behind the fossil record’s clear-cut revelation of life’s increasing complexity, remains the dominant explanation for human origins and the origins for all life on Earth.
You can read the complete text and all of Darwins other works at the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online website…
…or you can download the complete 6th edition of the text in a variety of formats you can read on your cellphone at Project Gutenberg.
…or you can download the complete text in audiobook format from Librivox
Note: This is not to be confused with the flaky, New Age evolutionday.com, which comes up first in Google Searches on this subject.
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Desktop Astronomy: Astronomy Picture of the Day
 Dancing Galaxies Image Courtesy of NASA |
A daily dose of astronomy, from impact craters, space technology, celestial phenomenon like the two days a year Manhattan becomes like Stonehenge, colliding galaxies, and the like. They’ve also got an archive going back to 1995.
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Desktop Astronomy: Mars Exploration Rover Mission
Mars Rover take off to landing
Courtesy of NASA, JPL, and Cornell University
Mars Exploration Rover Mission
It’s amazing to think that, for the last three years, the human race has had two robots, Spirit and Opportunity, exploring the planet friendliest to human colonization and bringing everyone on Earth along for the ride. Check this site for the latest news, views, and struggles facing our two solar-powered geologists on the red planet.
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Desktop Astronomy: Google Earth and Space
 Google Earth: I Can See My House From Up Here Image Courtesy of Google Earth Drawn All Over by Ryan Somma |
With this free software, you can zoom into a satellite view of your house, Elizabeth City, or the Great Wall of China. With a new Google Space feature, you can now also browse all of the Hubble Space telescope images in the sky where they are located in actual space. I’ve spent many an hour browsing New York, the Forbidden City, the Eagle Nebula, Monocerotis, and other wonders on Earth and in the Cosmos with this fantastic tool.
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Desktop Astronomy: The Hubble Picture Album
here’s nothing like going out to the middle of nowhere at four am to witness the grandure of the Milky Way galaxy. We can’t see the river of stars spilt across our night skies here, where there’s too much light pollution, but out in the real country dark it’s an awe-inspiring sight.
There’s also nothing like what technology is bringing to us today in a steady stream of images, explorations, and other data from space. We have satelites all over the solar system, out in deep space, and roaming planets right now, all of it made available online. This week I’ll be sharing my top four favorite space resources.
 Cartwheel Galaxy Image Courtesy of NASA |
Today, I’ll begin with the Hubble Picture Album
This is the all-time most exciting NASA mission ever. For 17 years this telescope orbiting Earth has uncovered intricate details of our neighboring planets, fantastically bizarre galaxies, and even shown us the very edge of the Universe. Be sure to check out the Greatest Hits from this collection.
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The Cosmic Boondocks
I hate living in the boonies. No, I’m not referring to Northeastern North Carolina, I’m referring to our location on a scope that surpasses geography and ventures into cosmology.
Our sun is one of about 200 billion stars swirling around in a galaxy that’s a 100,000 light years across. If only 10 percent of those stars have planets, and 10 percent of those planets can support life, and 10 percent of those life-supporting planets develop life, and 10 percent of that life evolves intelligence, and 10 percent of that intelligent life produces technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space, then that’s still 20 million intelligent civilizations waving great big “We Are Not Alone” signs in just our Milky Way galaxy alone.
This collection of “ifs” is known as the Drake Equation, and no matter how you tweak the variables, it still comes out to a really big number of aliens in our cosmic neighborhood. When I’m not using my home computer, it goes to work analyzing radio signals from space for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, which has yet to produce conclusive evidence of space aliens in 47 years.
Why is that? I think it’s because our solar system is located on the outer edge of a tiny stream of stars called the Orion spur, stranded between the rivers of stars in Perseus and Sagittarius spiral arms. If Perseus and Sagittarius are Tidewater and Raleigh, then the Orion Spur is Elizabeth City, and our Sun is a farmhouse out in Weeksville.
 You are on the edge of the Yellow Dot Image Courtesy of Wikipedia |
Human beings are the slack-jawed yokels of the Milky Way galaxy. Rednecks, hillbillies, bumpkins, wahoos… choose your pejorative. I’m allowed to use all of them, I’m half West Virginian.
The point is that, from a cosmological standpoint, all the really exciting stuff, the bright lights and big to-do’s, are happening hundreds of light-years away, places so distant we can only fantasize about the technologies it would take to travel out there.
Or for them to travel out our way, and for what purpose would they want to visit us? Just imagine a gray—one of those classic bug-eyed aliens from The X-Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind—saying to another gray, “I thought I might go check out that pale blue dot out there in the darkness, orbiting that tiny yellow star. You know, the one the inhabitants call Soil, or Dirt, or Mud, Or something like that.”
Their friend’s antenna would quirk curiously, as if this were one New Yorker announcing to another their intention to visit Currituck, “Why would you want to do that?”
It seems obvious to me. Civilizations living in the Milky Way’s fast-lanes have much brighter night skies that are also much more uniform and boring. The skies way out here in this sparsely-starred zone of space are much darker, like the skies out in the country, when you get far away to where the city’s light pollution can’t block out the awesome view of our Galaxy’s river of stars spilling across our night sky.
We sometimes forget there’s a whole beautiful Universe to look at over our heads, pulling us out of ourselves with a down-to-earth perspective of our place in it. Colder weather brings clearer skies, take a moment to appreciate it.
Global Warming: What Me Worry?
Photo by Ryan Somma |
This is the road in front of my house at high tide. On the left, where there are now recently-planted trees you can’t see in this photo, I’ve been told there were once houses, but the flood zone claimed them.
Several locals tell me that it was foolish of people to build homes in a flood zone, but it just didn’t make sense to me that people would be so short-sighted. It’s not just a flood zone across the street from me, it’s a swamp.
So I did some research and found that sea levels have risen more than 10 cm (almost four inches) since 1950, around the time when the houses were built, and are expected to rise another 280 to 340 mm (nine to 11 ft) by 2100—if this average rate of increase remains constant.
So the swamp was four inches drier 57 years ago, a significant difference, but people don’t remember this. Dr. Jared Diamond refers to this as landscape amnesia or creeping normalcy, that we remember the past the way things look today instead of the way they looked back then.
You can see how you’ll fare with rising sea levels with this interactive online map (You have to scroll across the Atlantic from Britain). There are also these maps of the East Coast showing different sea level rises in detail.
You can check your current flood risk by entering your home address at this FEMA map service center.
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Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center
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I spent my last Saturday at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center. It’s been almost two decades since I last visited the tourist attraction, and I was instantly blown away by how much it had grown. Where previously there was a single tiny building with a dock leading out to the neighboring marsh, there was now two buildings with a football field’s worth of nature exhibits separating them, including several observation decks, Native American exhibits, and an aviary.
My sister and I checked out the 3-D IMAX film Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure, which follows a family of dolichorhynchops, and various archeologists examining clues in the fossil evidence to reconstruct the events in their lives. This film got added to my netflix, along with several other IMAX films in the same vein.
The aviary was pretty impressive for being a great big netted-in space, where most of the birds were allowed to roam free. Unfortunately, it was pretty cold out, so most of the birds were sleeping, leaving my sister and I to wonder if they would normally be migrating south, and how the center managed this.
There’s a wide variety of aquariums in the two buildings covering the myriad aquatic habitats surrounding our locality. Developing shark embryos, sea turtles, puffer fish, sharks, sea horses, and countless other species of life in all their variety made for fascinating observations. My favorite was an Atlantic Octopus, normally a very shy animal and very intelligent, came out of its den and let me take like a bazillion photos of it.
Atlantic Octopus Photo by Ryan Somma |
The main draw for me was the traveling Our Weakening Web (PDF) exhibit, which featured many local species of wildlife that are endangered, and the Carolina Parakeet, only parrot species native to the eastern United States, that were driven to extinction in 1918 by farmers who considered them pests.
I’ve posted pictures of the aquarium to my flickr account.
Our Weakening Web runs until January 6th.
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Happy Birthday Toyota Prius!
The hybrid electric and most geektacular car of all is now ten-years-old.
 Hymotion Plug-ing Prius Image Courtesy of SoulTek.com. |
One of the cultural shocks I experienced moving to Elizabeth City from NoVa was all the ancient cars around town, Cadillacs from the 1970s, cast-iron pickup trucks, and vehicles whose only purpose seems to be to decorate the lawn. At the same time, I’m also impressed with the number of hybrid vehicles here too. For such a small-town, there are a lot of people who own Priuses (Okay. Okay. There are three people who own Priuses, and one of them is from out of town, but that’s still a lot for such a small town.)
According to this Seed Magazine Crib Sheet on Hybrids, charging a fully electric car “from a wall outlet would be equivalent to paying $0.75 a gallon for gasoline.” According to the CNET article Hacking your Prius, people are finding ways to make their factory-model Prius fully electric (although it’s not advised). Green Electric Companies are also looking into ways to have a Prius power your house. Hymotion is offering a $6,500 kit to convert Priuses into plug-in power.
Or is it “Priusi?”
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Camden Green Park
I was watching CNN Money Monday night, sinking ever-lower into my chair under the oppressive doom and gloom financial situation facing America. The sub-prime mortgage crisis… Oil prices spiraling out of control… The stock market swirling down the toilet… and with it my parent’s hopes of retirement.
Then there was this little ray of sunshine peeking through the overcast skies, the Winslow Green Fund, a mutual fund that invests in environmentally-friendly technologies and alternative energies, was doing great. Makes sense that, as oil begins to run out and soaring prices make it less appealing, people will be looking to the next thing, such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear powers.
That’s why the news of a possible Green Park in Camden County sent exciting tingles up my back. A Green Park is essentially an Industrial Park, but with a focus on Green technologies, which are the future of everything for a global community now running a 38 percent deficit on Earth’s renewable natural resources.
The Green Park is a fantastic idea, and would be something of a first for America. There are currently such parks in Poland, India, and Britain. Seattle is just breaking ground on their Green Park. Having such a park in NENC would make the community a leader in what’s going to soon be the next big thing.
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Free College Education
In his infamous classic Steal This Book, radical activist Abbie Hoffman explains how to get a free college education. It’s real simple: go sit in on college lectures. The vast majority of Professors don’t care whether you’re enrolled or not, and paying tuition is for people who want a piece of paper certifying they went to class. France has some of the most educated homeless people in the world, because they are allowed to sit in on college lectures to keep warm in the winter.
Still unconvinced? Then check out MIT’s OpenCourseWare, Webcast Berkeley, Princeton WebMedia, and Harvard @ Home.
Reminder: The One Laptop Per Child project is a great way to connect children all over the world to these college education resources.
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One Laptop Per Child Now on Sale!
 OLPC Logo |
I’ve ordered mine, have you ordered yours? All the cool kids are ordering one. Don’t you want to be part of the “in” crowd?
Not only does ordering one of these super-duper, ultra-nifty, best-thing-since-sliced-bread-cubed laptops improve your health, fortunes, and make you more appealing to members of the opposite sex in general, but every laptop you buy for $399 means that a needy child in third-world country will get one too!
Think of the children! Not only those in foreign countries, but your own children as well. How do you think they’re gonna feel when all the other kids have OLPC laptops and are networking away and playing games and learning stuff? I’ll tell you how they’re gonna feel, they’re gonna feel pretty dang-gone left out! That’s how!
Your child’s future doesn’t have to look like this, go donate an OLPC laptop today.
Sidenote: Major kudos to Electronic Arts for donating Sim City, the classic educational video game to the project.
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Happy Birthday Kurt Vonnegut!
Photo by Ryan Somma |
He would be 85 today. This great writer survived the firebombing of Dresden, wrote dozens of books and short stories, and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.
Although he objected to the description, Vonnegut wrote many science fiction stories. In his book Cat’s Cradle, he came up with the idea of ice-nine a molecule that converts other water molecules to it’s form, turning room-temperature water into ice. Although science fiction at the time, today scientists are aware of prions, which are protein molecules that convert other molecules to their structure. This is understood to be the mechanism behind Mad Cow Disease.
His book The Sirens of Titan all human accomplishments, from Stonehenge to the Great Wall of China, are revealed to be for the purposes of sending a message on behalf of a stranded alien requesting spare parts for its ship. His book Galapagos includes the evolution of people stranded on the Galapagos Islands into finned and feral animals after the extinction of the human race. His most famous book, Slaughterhouse Five follows a man “unstuck in time” as he visits different moments in his life. All of these books are precious for their statements on the human condition.
Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11th of this year from brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home.
There’s a bit of odd numerical synchronicity in this date of birth (11/11). In some parallel universe, where humans have an extra digit on each hand and foot, today would be Powers of Eleven Day. What a tribute that would be, for a writer who was so unique in writing and worldview.
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Port Discover presents Hidden Colors
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The children’s science center Port Discover has a program for Thursday’s this November in the spirit of fall:
As leaves begin to show the hidden colors of yellows, oranges and reds, Port Discover invites children to the afterschool “Think About It Thursday” program “Hidden Colors” to find colors that are hiding in everyday objects. What colors are hiding in your foods? What about hidden colors in clothing? Come and try your hand at experiments that extract colors from everyday items with science educator Marcella Kappesser Hidden Colors are Thursday afternoons from 3 p.m. - 5 p.m. on November 8, 15, & 29.
Be sure to drop by and check it out.
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String Theory in Two Minutes
Discover Magazine had a contest to explain String Theory, the current dominant explanation for everything that exists, in Two Minutes or Less. Here’s the winning video:
You can check out some of the best entries here.
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Improve Your Vocabulary While Fighting World Hunger
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Check out Free Rice!
This is an interesting and innovative idea for a charity website. They challenge your vocabulary using an algorithm that asks questions appropriate to your verbal skill level, keeping things just difficult enough to keep you learning. Each time the page refreshes, they get advertising revenues from the three ads at the bottom of their page, which they translate into grains of rice to be donated to the United Nations World Food Programme.
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How to Fly
“The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss,” Douglas Adams so helpfully explained in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. On the surface, this sounds silly, but that’s actually one way of doing it.
Doofy Drawing by Ryan Somma |
Confused? Then check out my article at the Science Creative Quarterly, How to Fly.
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Opening Education to Everyone
I really appreciated Lydia Harrell’s column this week Making the grade is all about how to play the game. As a member of Mensa, organization for people scoring in the top two percent of IQs, and as someone who got lousy grades in school (2.2 college GPA), I know first-hand that grades are in no way a reflection of intelligence.
The following paragraph especially impressed me:
It makes me ill to think about the poor children in Africa or the Middle-East who wish they could go to school and learn to read. For them education is an unattainable luxury. Few American students understand how fortunate they are to be offered the option of a free education.
I agree completely, and now there’s a way to bring free education to all those children, behold:
 courtesy of the One Laptop Per child Foundation Licensened Under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 |
The One Laptop Per child Project seeks to bring children all over the world into the online community, where they will find education, innovative solutions to improving their standard of living, and, most importantly, find a place to express themselves to the world.
The laptops include wireless internet access, automated networking, a hand crank to recharge its batteries, and, best of all, for a limited time, the OLPCF is offering a buy one for a needy child, get one for yourself deal starting November 12th!
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How Many Tyrannosaurs In a Gallon of Gasoline?
 Tyrannosaurus Rex at the Walking With Dinosaurs Show Photo by Ryan Somma |
Continuing yesterday’s energy meme. Here’s a fascinating thought experiment that appeared on Google Answers:
If you estimate the number of carbon atoms in one full-grown adult tyrannosaur, what volume of 92 octane gasoline would that represent? And conversely, how many dinosaurs could you build out of the carbon in one gallon of gas?
Click here for the answer.
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Elizabeth City’s Energy Fair
Photo by Ryan Somma |
Elizabeth City residents pay some of the highest electric rates in North Carolina (PDF), this is largely attributed to the town buying ownership in an Nuclear Power-based electric company just before three-mile island caused nuclear power expenses to shoot through the roof. As a result, Elizabeth City residents face yearly electric rate hikes of up to 10 percent, unless the city absorbs the cost, as it did last year.
So it was no surprise when more than 100 residents showed up for Elizabeth City Electric’s Energy Fair, seeking ways to reduce their energy consumption. There were all the standard measures: CFL light bulbs, weather stripping, insulation, windows, and Federal Assistance. But there were also a couple of new ones I was unfamiliar with:
- First there was this really cool Attic Tent. A simple, yet fantastic solution!
- The city offers some nifty online tools for making your home for energy efficient at the Energy Depot.
- The city offers a free home Energy Audit to customers. Dennis Gordon, the city’s Energy Officer, said that he has never had a house pass this audit, even new construction. An interesting part of the audit that I had never heard of was depressurization, where air is vacuumed out of the house using a velocity fan (see right) and measurements taken on the thingamajig to find out how drafty the home is. I’m totally digging this contraption.
- The city Electric has also recently instituted a mandatory Cycle & Save program, where residents are required to let the city install a remote control switch on their water heater and air conditioning units so that the city can cut power to these appliances during peak load times. The program is understandably controversial. It was formerly voluntary and the city provided electric bill credits to customers who participated. Now the city is looking into penalties for those who do not.
Photo by Ryan Somma |
Of course the city, as a utility provider has every right to enforce this requirement, just as Microsoft and Apple have every right to enforce the terms of use of their software licensing agreements. If we don’t like it, we can go off grid. We can install solar panels and wind turbines to provide our own electricity, just as computer users can install the Linux operating system.
Elizabeth City’s poor business investment two decades ago may be a blessing in disguise. It has created a community increasingly concerned with energy efficiency, alternative energy, and looking to very novel measures to combat costs. This is a good thing. As America and the world face an impending energy crunch from peak oil (PDF Warning) and instability in the Middle East, Elizabeth City will be well ahead of the curve when it comes to switching to alternatives.
Communities around the nation are looking to nuclear energy as the solution to American oil-dependence, but it will be decades before any new plants can come online. Elizabeth City is sitting pretty. Elizabeth City’s prescient investment in Nuclear Energy is also starting to see a pay off, as, for the For the first time in three years, customers of Elizabeth City’s electric utility won’t face a rate increase. This is because Nuclear Energy costs remain stable, while Oil-Based energy costs shoot for the moon.
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50th Anniversary of Kudryavka (Laika)
“Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”
- Oleg Gazenko, leading scientists behind the Soviet animals in space programmes
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50 years ago today, Kudryavka, aka. Laika (Russian for “Barker”), became the first living passenger from Earth to reach space. She died from stress and overheating just a few hours into what was to be a seven-day flight, but the plan was always to euthanize her remotely at the mission’s end as the Soviets lacked the time and resources to plot her safe return to Earth.
This was because then Soviet leader Khrushchev wanted a second spacecraft launched in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, November 7, one that would top the recent success of Sputnik. The American press nicknamed her “Muttnik,” and it was long after the political ramifications of the flight were exhausted that her inhumane treatment became the focus of the debate.
Kudryavka lived as a stray on the streets of Moscow before her life in the Soviet Space program, where she was renamed “Laika” because it was catchier. Much of the inhumane treatment she and other animals suffered, such as long periods of confinement and intense training, were invaluable to planning human space flight; however, nothing was gained scientifically by sacrificing Kudryavka in a mission meant solely for political gain. Sputnik 1 was a fantastic accomplishment; Sputnik 2 was a complete failure.
Graphic Novel by Nick Abadzis |
None of this makes Kudryavka any less a hero in the canon of space explorers. First in space is first in space. “She is perhaps the only character in the Monument to the Conquerors of Space (1964), other than Lenin himself, who can be individually identified by name,” and numerous stories, music, and even a soil target on Mars carry on the name and legend of Laika.
More photos of Kudryavka on this discussion thread.
Wikipedia entry for Laika.
