Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it

I agree, I've some nephews/nieces in college and was talking to their parents about why they were getting them to start applying for tech internships in freshman year, sounded absurd to me. And I was telling them how they should be more adventurous with where they want to work and live after they graduate. But all they wanted to do was work in Silicon Valley ( they grew up around here, so I thought they would want to move and explore other parts of the country). But, no they did not want to. I think it was both risk-averseness and also sheer practicality that all the good tech jobs are here.

Walmart/Meth is a pretty strong exaggeration. Things aren’t great without a degree, but they’re not (yet) impossible.

Very little truth to what you wrote here. You can get into great universities with solid A’s. And you can certainly graduate from a state school with minimal to no debt.

I understand your point, but don't think the Walmart/Meth comparison is fair. Walmart is full of hardworking people doing honorable work that provides for their families and contributes to their communities.

> the A students maybe will finish college hamstrung with mountains of debt, and the rest? Walmart/Meth if they're lucky, prison if they're not.

This is the false dichotomy that’s causing students to incorrectly go to college when it might not be the best path. There is a massive gulf of the middle class you just glossed over between college and Walmart/meth: the trades. Working in skilled blue collar fields (electrician, contractor, plumber, diesel mechanic, etc) will likely give you a better life financially than someone who graduates with a 4 year BA.

>I don't know if this dean's observation is about helicopter parenting or risk aversion as much as it's about how bifurcated and ultra-high stakes

From my perspective, these go hand-in-hand. The Meritocracy Trap outlines how the ultra-competitiveness has led parents to invest more and earlier in preparation for college. Excellent Sheep described how many Ivy League bound have to essentially declare their intention in grade school to follow the templated path to reach that goal. This causes a formulaic existence, which is underscored by an increase in the number of young adults who look at college as vocational training rather than to build a life philosophy. Meaning there is very little questioning why and instead just following the inertia of a goal that was predetermined when one was in elementary school.

I blame the popularity service degrees. My great great grandparents were gilded age robber barons. Their children earned service degrees (doctors, lawyers) and split things up and sold them off. Their children earned service degrees and worked a little while living off their trusts. Their children earned service degrees and worked hard to run in place. I got an engineering degree and put every penny I could get my hands on into starting a manufacturing business. I will not have my children groomed to serve others who actually achieve.

It was originally a book, or actually a series of books, written and set in the 1930s. Great reading as a child, but to have such permissive parents - they barely make an appearance while their kids as young as 7 spend days at a time boating and camping - seemed as fanciful to me as Harry Potter. I wonder if it was really like that in the 30s.

I’m not old enough to know how this stunt affected public opinion (although I do remember when golf was an elitist sport).

This is the first I’ve heard of a connection between the golf swings and waning political support. Where can I read more about that?

> this only highlighted NASA's cultural bias

In 1971, even in the wake of the civil rights act, I don’t think many people cared about nasa being a whites boys club.

> Had NASA not allowed this, the landings would have continued for at least a few more years.

Hardly. The number of missions was primarily capped by budgetary constraints [0] and the fact that they had only budgeted to build 15 Saturn 5 launchers. Flights after Apollo 17 were used for Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz mission.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canceled_Apollo_missions

I would be interested in evidence that "mundane" activities were directly connected with the decline of the program, but I think you're inserting modern biases of race into the public sentiment of the 70s. I don't think people looked at golf explicitly as a "rich white man's game" in a pejorative sense, nor do I think the people that would, were pulling the strings in Congress or NASA.

My understanding was one of "Okay, we beat the Soviets to the Moon, now what?"

I really wish the people downvoting me would go read a book and not rely on Buzzfeed listicles of top 10 cool things we did on the moon and other crap pulled up via a five second Google search.

If you aren't old enough to remember, go ask someone who was. If you can't find one, then do some actual reading, or check out any of the thousands of documentaries out there. (That doesn't include the History Channel's Nazi Moonbase conspiracy theories.)

And test pilots regularly died in the old system, and come home to their children in the current one, so I prefer the current one.

The point is that it isn't "they were test pilots, so crazy" it is "in the 1950's and 1960's a lot more death was accepted and because of that, the standards were lower."

Fatalities have gone down even for wars of similar intensities. More important is the improvement in battlefield medicine and body armor - the KIA/WIA ratio for the US military has plummeted, from around 1:1.5 during WW2, to around 1:3 in Korea after the introduction of helicopter evacuation and more refined frontline aid stations, to just above 1:10 in Afghanistan.

e.g. I strongly doubt that Tammy Duckworth's wounds would have been survivable on the battlefield in 1940, or even in 1970.

> First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the world"

Given that we’re discussing American test pilots/fighter pilots, this makes sense.

    First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the 
    world", does the same trend hold for the people on the other 
    side of these conflicts?

Yeah and no. It's so hard to measure the human cost of war because so many of the deaths are indirect.

Operation Rolling Thunder (50 years ago) was probably the last time the US took mass numbers of lives directly, with the high end of estimates approaching something like an average of 5,000/month.

Estimates of deaths from the Iraq War range from 150K "violent deaths" to 1mil "excess deaths" which would include all sorts of indirect causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

Those are horrific levels of loss but nowhere near the toll of WWII.

    Second, the number of people who fought in each of these    
    wars is also pretty different. Isn't a more direct 
    comparison something more like "deaths per combatant per 
    month" rather than "deaths per month"? 

It depends. Do we want to measure how risky it is to be a combatant, or how risky it is to be a human being on Earth?

If it's the former, then "deaths per combatant per month" is what we want. That would be interesting, though I question how broadly useful it would be. It would obviously be directly useful for combatants (or those considering becoming combatants) but is probably not useful as an overall indicator of "hey, how's the human race doing in general?"

If it's the latter, the stat we probably want is "war-related deaths per human being per month" or something like that. That would be a good indicator of overall levels of war and strife. It would take into account the increased population of the world as well.

Even if (heaven forbid) we had a conflict that results in WWII-like absolute levels of deaths today, that would represent a far lower number of deaths as a percentage of the human population lost.

On the first question, there is some scholarly debate, but as far as I can tell as an outsider the general consensus is that there are fewer deaths due to armed conflict than anytime in the last two millennia. Even something as terrible as the Syrian Civil War (~half a million dead over a decade) is the sort of civil unrest that was happening at multiple places across the world during the 17th century (see _Global Crisis_ by Geoffrey Parker for how horrible the 17th century was, all around the world). It's just the numbers are a lot less precise than we have for American deaths in military operations, so there is a lot more room for debate. This can be complicated even for something well documented and recent like World War Two: do you count the Bengal famine as part of the war dead? It killed ~2 million Indians, but not directly due to the war, it's just that the ships that in peacetime would have been carrying food to India to relieve the famine were instead carrying weapons (and food) from the US to Britain. Did they die due to the war? Or due to British colonialism and evil Winston Churchill? Well, a whole lot of the deaths in 17th century wars were due to war-related famine and disease, so if you don't count the Bengal Famine but do use the higher numbers for the 30 Years War it isn't a clean comparison, etc.

On the second question it's even harder to say. Would probably be a masters degree level of work to compute. There are all sorts of confounding factors: during World War Two, for the US Army, infantry made up about 20% of the personnel (half were in logistics, various other combat arms like artillery, tankers, engineers etc. made up the balance) but did the vast majority of the dying: something like 80% of US Army deaths came from that 20% of the force. So is the combatant count just infantry (and the small number of other combat arms who were forward of the gun line)? Similarly, about half the total US deaths during WW2 came during the Northwest Europe campaign (D-Day to V-E Day, France-Low Countries-Germany). The other half of the deaths came from the entire Battle of the Atlantic, the Bomber Offensive, Mediterranean and Pacific combined. So those 11 months were much deadlier than the rest.

This is the advantage of the straightforward monthly average, it can be computed in five minutes from Wikipedia. Trying to get more detail quickly becomes a whole bunch of tricky choices that reasonable people can disagree on, but which leave you with wildly different numbers.

A ball is clearly visible at 46s. Watching it again, he swings 4 times. I don't see a ball for the second swing, but they are clearly visible for the other 3.

I imagine the analyst found where 2 landed and the write up misunderstood that to be the number of shots.

The iron was an actual golf iron head, attached to the collapsible rod/handle of a sampling scoop.

It happens. NBD. My initial response was perhaps more snide than I intended, I should have at the very least ended it with a smiley to show I was only being playful. FWIW I don't feel your comment deserves to be downvoted, and this one where you acknowledge it certainly does not.