Undignified Organ 0010 {the future moon bananas}
Reading time: around about 4 mins and 22 seconds
It’s the Undignified Organ, it’s the weekend, let’s do this,
Fly me to the moon
An amazing podcast from BBC World Service, hosted by Kevin Fong, it uses a combination of interviews & archival audio recordings to tell the story of the final 13 minutes of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, which used as a backdrop to tell the story of NASA’s entire Apollo program from JFK’s “we choose to go” speech to the landing.
The series culminates in the playing, in real time, of the thirteen minutes audio recording the NASA’s mission control Capcom communications loop.
More than fifty years on the achievements seems even more staggering in the light of some of amazing facts the series presents:
The average age of the mission control team was 27 at the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing
At the height of the Apollo program NASA was buying 60% of the total US output of computer chips.
The walls of the Command Module that actually landed on the moon were only 0.305mm (≅0.012 inches), about the thickness of three sheets of aluminium foil. Buzz Aldrin wrote in his memoirs that if you were of a mind to you could stick pen through the walls of the CSM.
The word software had not even been invented when the software to navigate the NASA rockets were invented.
In started the miniaturization and ‘thin-ovation’ that continues to this day. Before Apollo 11 people boasted about how big their computers were, after the moon landing they boasted about how small their computers were.
Only some of the computer’s memory was RAM. Much of it was Core Rope Memory, in which the computers memory was literally woven into the machine, with wire running either outside or through tiny magnetic “donuts”. The panels were manufactured in towns with big textile industrials as only they had the workers with the skills to perform this work.
Sugar free ice-cream alternative
The recent saw me eating, what felt like, a lot of ice cream. As an antidote to this, whilst still having something sweet and ice cold to eat I resorted to freezing whole bananas (skins and all), then cutting them into bite size chunks for dessert.
The caveat: you do need to have teeth that do not feel any discomfort from biting ice cream (which luckily I don’t). And if you do there are plenty of easy banana ice cream recipes out there.
The interesting discovery, for me, was that banana skins are not only edible but also potentially contain more antioxidants than the bananas themselves (you should wash them first however). Next up I’m going to try this recipe.
(Natural) History of the Future
Living through a period with an increasingly unstable future, with the sixth mass extinction and plant-wide ecological disruption makes the re-reading of a book from my childhood even more interesting.
Dougal Dixon’s After Man: A Zoology of the Future was the first part of a series ( which continues with The New Dinosaurs and Man After Man) that extrapolates known patterns and laws of evolutionary biology and climate change, to hypothesis what new species might emerge in hypothetical future fifty million years after humanity’s extinction.
And so we get written descriptions of new forms of mimicry (ground dwelling species descended from bats that pose as flowers to attract insects), adaptation (semi-aquatic frog-like apes), evasion and predation, all accompanied by
Dixon, a geologist and palaeontologist, is also responsible for the Alien Worlds series on Netflix