Re: Wow

[Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>]

Good morning,

Last time, as I recall, I was a sophomore in High School, and rumors were
flying around school all morning (I recall scoffing "of *course* the Shuttle
*can't* blow up, don't be silly.  It's *NASA*."), and then during fifth period
German, while Dr. Novosad was pointing out European country names in German on
a pull down map in front of the class, the principal came on the PA system and
made the announcement.  Dr. Novosad said something like "may they rest in
peace" and went back to the map.

It's funny, though, I read about a study where some psychologists asked people
20 minutes after they heard about it to write down where they were and what
they were doing, and then went back a year or two later and asked the same
people again, and a significant fraction of them got it wrong, despite all of
them claiming to remember it like it was yesterday.  The brain is a very funny
thing, and memory doesn't really work the way we often think it does.  So who
knows if that memory of German class is correct?

The explosion this weekend certainly cast a pall over our celebration of
getting our telescope up and running.  Although I think Astronomers and Space
Science people are probably pretty sanguine about it.  The sense among my
colleages was that the shuttle crew were heroes who knew the risks they were
taking but still believed that the cause of human exploration of space is worth
those risks.  And besides, driving your car to the store is more risky, in a
statistical sense, than flying in the shuttle, and yet many people don't think
twice about popping back to the supermarket to get that pint of milk they
forgot.  So we hope that this tragedy will lead to more care and better
standards, but not a crippling of the space program.  We honor their memory 
by going forward in the quest.

See you later,
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                 http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

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