A Cosmonaut's Fiery Death Retold (2011)
npr.org
npr.org
And then - unbelievably - there is a link for buying it for "89 cents at Amazon.com".
At Amazon they're selling one man's last words of despair. And linking to that you are even advertising this. The whole thing is sick and sad.
The market is everywhere, and your emotion is misplaced.
Besides, this display of dead people similar to one in Palermo/Italy is macabre and mentally healthy people probably have emotions looking at dead people exhibitions, especially since one doesn't learn anything of it.
In contrast to http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/
I agree that the sale is in bad taste, but I think you go too far there. At the least some people find value in humbling reminders of our own mortality. In that way it is not entirely dissimilar from guided tours of battlefields, camps, etc. The information that you learn during those can be picked up in more 'sterile' books, but that lacks the emotional impact of actually seeing where something happened, or hearing something happen.
I would differantiate between battlefields and staging dead bodies.
To me the categorical imperativ helps evaluating those situations. Do you want your dead body being kept around as attraction?
If those poor souls didn't freely agree than we don't know their will, so no.
It is similar to keep a real skull around for the giggles, lack of respect.
Intentional? I doubt it.
Something they'd fix, if it were pointed out to them? I'd like to think so.
Why don't you write them a note, instead of offering your opinions here?
And it was published in 1998, when it would've been hard to find on the internet. That it's selling on Amazon is just part of a trend that most old media is sold cheaply on Amazon.
It has, in fact, been taken offline. (Along with the whole collection of "sound effects".)
[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmo...
[2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...
One of the things that I find surprising is the amount of time between when the breakup started ("8:53:46 (EI+577): Various people on the ground saw signs of debris being shed. ... Dialogue on some of the amateur footage indicates the observers were aware of the abnormality of what they were filming.") to last radio contact (nearly 6 minutes later).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast...
It seems those crew compartments were pretty damn tough.
This helps puts things in perspective when I'm obsessing over trivial things like the max length my RegExp will allow on some arbitrary form field. One of my user's phone won't blow up if he/she wasn't able to use five more characters in a message.
We should do our best to minimize the amount of bugs we code, but when we (inevitably) do code buggy software we can fix it relatively fast. Unless of course one is coding a GPS system for SpaceX or something of the such.
The final official transcript, for one, reads like propaganda.
Cast doubt on a Dear Leader's idea and all of the sudden you're shipped to a gulag or to the firing squad. Just like that....enemy of the people, support the US imperialists...trying to sabotage socialism, etc.
Ask an Eastern European or Russian that lived through the communist times.
Shifting to a different dictatorship, the case has been made in Burma that the only reason Aung San Suu Kyi was kept alive the whole time was that her father was very well regarded even by the military.
But then I've also read 1984 and remember the memory holes.
True, thy could away with more than others, especially since the leaders and the Party benefited from them (Unless they became a threat to replace the leaders etc..). But never underestimate the power of 24/7 propaganda and how they confessed to being CIA spies, how the risked lives of our comrades...blah blah. The higher you are the harder you fall.
For these guys the top leader would decide, but for the poor peasant complaining about the bread, a local communist bureaucrat would do to ruin his life.
They had statues built of them. Nothing a bulldozer can't remove :-)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management...
But it's in Russian nature to take stupid risks that are clearly not worth it. Авось.
The first thing you see is a large picture of molten human remains. That's just horrific.
This doesn't seem to make any sense. I think people might be a bit credulous when it comes to stories about the SU.
(not personally complaining about either one, just want to check the perspective)
I mean, the people responsible for this are almost all dead now, and the government that pushed to hard has long since dissolved. The lingering relevance is engineering and risk.
The second article is an update, and does not have the picture.
Of course, the Torre Bert story goes further, with a whole passel of cosmonauts going missing and unreported on except for these two guys in Italy, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, with a lash-up radio rig, who weren't influenced at all by all the publicity they were getting every time they reported a new cosmonaut dying in pain. Not at all. Also, in their world, spacecraft can just kind of 'drift' out of Earth orbit without any additional engine thrust.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2433/are-there-real...