When Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin switched on the TV camera on the Lunar Module, three tracking antennas received the signals simultaneously. They were the 64 meter Goldstone antenna in California, the 26 meter antenna at Honeysuckle Creek near Canberra in Australia, and the 64 meter dish at Parkes.
In the first few minutes of the broadcast, NASA alternated between the signals being received from its two stations at Goldstone and Honeysuckle Creek, searching for the best quality picture.
A little under nine minutes into the broadcast, the TV was switched to the Parkes signal. The quality of the TV pictures from Parkes was so superior that NASA stayed with Parkes as the source of the TV for the remainder of the 2.5 hour broadcast.
Honeysuckle Weeks was born in Chichester, West Sussex, where also the WWII RAF fighter ace Roland Beamont is from. Beamont attended college in Eastbourne, East Sussex. Between Eastbourne and Seaford, also in East Sussex, are the white chalk cliffs known as The Seven Sisters. When “the white cliffs of Dover” are shown in movies or television, The Seven Sisters (west of Dover, Kent) are often shown instead.
The White Cliffs of Dover are best viewed from on the water, in the English Channel. They are not easily seen from on land. The Seven Sisters, however, are readily seen from on land and there are several walking trails in the vicinity.
Back in the 19th century, bakers were castigated for adding chalk to bread in order to make more loaves from a given quantity of flour. The practice was considered extremely unhealthy and rooted out and stopped.
In the 20th century, bakers were asked to add calcium carbonate to bread in order to increase its calcium content and make it more healthy.
Well, excessive consumption of CaCO3 is hazardous…
The white lines on a baseball field (and many playing fields) are lined with chalk. A typical, 50-lb bag of chalk is about what it takes to mark a line, 2" wide and 1/16" deep, that is 300’ long. Typical MLB field dimensions are a little over 300’ down each foul line, so it takes about 50 pounds of chalk to mark each foul line.
Chalk’s International Airlines, which flew Grumman seaplanes between Miami and Fort Lauderdale and the Bahamas, was the world’s only seaplane airline until it shut down after a 2007 crash. Until that time it had been the world’s oldest continuously operating airline, an honor now held by KLM, which kept its Caribbean services flying even during WWII occupation of the Netherlands. A Chalk’s Mallard was featured in the opening credits of the original TV show “Miami Vice”.
Jimmy Carter was inaugurated on January 20, 1977, and began the modern tradition of a U.S. President walking all or part of the inaugural parade route back to the White House.
Of the five China disasters on that list, four of them have been since 1887. The most recent was the 1976 Tangshan earthquake where an estimated 242,000-779,000 died. That’s #4 on the list.
#1 on the list? Floods in China in 1931, where an estimated 1M-4M died. The floods are generally considered among the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded, and almost certainly the deadliest of the 20th century (when pandemics and famines are discounted).
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are popularly known as Conquest, War, Famine, and Death – however, only the fourth horse (“Death”) is explicitly named in the Book of Revelation.
Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” appears in his first collection, Harmonium. It remains the only usage I have ever encountered of the word “concupiscent”.
Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” appears prominently in Stephen King’s novel 'Salem’s Lot, about vampires taking over a small Maine town in the fall of 1975.
The history of ice cream is not straightforward. It involves the Persians in 400BC and the Chinese as well.
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat asserts, in her History of Food, that “the Chinese may be credited with inventing a device to make sorbets and ice cream. They poured a mixture of snow and saltpetre over the exteriors of containers filled with syrup, for, in the same way as salt raises the boiling-point of water, it lowers the freezing-point to below zero.”
The ST: TOS episode “Arena” is taken from a story by the same name by Fredric Brown. The TV show made many changes, however, leaving only the idea of combat between humans and another alien race. In Brown’s story, the alien is a rolling ball, and there is a force field the separates the human from it so there can’t be hand-to-hand combat (they can, however toss inanimate objects through the field). The stakes are higher: the winning combatant will automatically win a space battle between the two races. There also isn’t any conveniently places saltpeter, sulfur, and carbon to fashion a gun.
