The sculpture on the Moon | Hacker News Reader

The sculpture on the Moon

slate.com

78 pointsanigbrowl12 comments

The lesson I take from this story (aside from the amazing accomplishments of all the people involved and the wonderful humanity of making the sculpture a tribute to American and Soviet astronauts alike) is this:

ASK.

No one had put a sculpture on the moon because no one had thought to ask. Sure, there were a lot of steps involved, but ultimately it was about one woman with an idea and the temerity to say "I'll figure out a way." Sometimes the seemingly impossible is just a matter of thinking to ask.

Yeah, that's really good advice for a certain kind of people. Let's call them "marketers" for short. A scientist or engineer won't do a better job by remembering to "ASK", they're facing a different kind of problem that can't be solved by convincing a powerful person to solve it for you. But a marketer can score some major wins, like freeloading some worthless piece of junk on the public space program and then never shutting up about their "accomplishment".

The remarkable story aside, I really enjoyed the styling of the article. While I wish the text were just a pinch bigger, it was truly a pleasure to read.

Some things I noticed in particular:

  - Subtle highlighting to connect names to photos
  - Unobtrusive but beautiful section headings
  - Anything not pertaining to the article pushed down below it[1]
  - Beautiful use of photography

I might be late to the party here because I don't often read Slate, but I enjoyed reading the article almost as much as the article itself.

[1] I can't be the only one who finds "You might like..." sidebars distracting. Particularly when they incorporate images, they pull my attention away from the text and strain my eyes as I read.

I would be more likely to contribute to add impressions if more articles on the internet were like this.

Really?

We'll probably have to agree to disagree, but I came into this thread specifically to comment on the styling of the article, and specifically, how distracting and irritating I found it. So imagine my surprise when I come in and find one of the only two comments being a comment about how GOOD the styling on the page is. I was going to comment that I've seen a few pages like this increasingly appearing, where a great deal of effort has obviously gone into the style/layout of the page, it looks very schmick in a "we paid for modern stylists" kind of way, but its overall effect on me has been negative.

The whole thing had this irritating "asymmetrical" feel to it that I just found disconcerting when i just want to read the article, and honestly just left me unable to read it, And for the love of god I will never accept the current trend of "Take sentence from text, blow it up, and insert in its own text box on same page" thing that is obviously taking the journalistic world by storm right now.

The quote technique you're referring to is called a pull-quote, and they have been around for decades. They may have seen a resurgence on the web recently, I couldn't say, but they've been used in magazines as far as I can remember.

Like any typographic technique, they can be used poorly, but I thought their use was quite tasteful in this article. They take for granted the fat that many people skim and they help draw attention to key quotes or ideas; I think that's reasonable.

I didn't get the sense of "asymmetricality", but to each their own, I guess.

In any case, it felt like an improvement over most news sites and blogs.

"You might like..."

My peeve is when they're about two paragraphs into the article. I've just started reading, why are you trying to get me to leave already?

Sort of off-topic, but the big banner picture at the top has a lot of obvious Photoshop rubber-stamping in the bottom left around the edge of the crater. It's presumably covering up blank bits from the photo stitching, but I worry it'll inspire conspiracy types.

(For the record, I think it's easier to land a bunch of people on the moon than to fake it convincingly with 1960s special effects and then successfully cover it up for 45 years.)

S G Collins claims it would have been impossible to fake the landing: http://www.openculture.com/2013/01/moon_hoax_not_short_film_...

For me, end of any ideas that the moon landings were faked, is faking it such that the monitoring Soviets would have been fooled, or that the Soviets knew it was faked and kept quiet. The USSR would have absolutely monitored everything they could have associated with the USA's adventures in space, and if they detected the slightest hint of US fakery, they would have used that to thoroughly discredit their great enemy. Even if not for some odd political reason, by now, the information would have leaked. But I cant see any way it would have served Soviet interests to allow the USA to get away with faking it.

Not saying other evidence doesn't prove that the US landed on the moon, just saying that for me, what ever theory any one wants to put forward to suggest it was faked, this one point is a 10ft thick lead wall in their way, and as yet I have not see a solid reason for the Soviets to play ball with a grand US fraud.

The part about Wikipedia was quite amusing.

> We ask: Why didn’t he get a friend to log in and correct the entries? He responds with a startled pause. “Is that right?

> I didn't know you could do that!”

Good luck with that. Those corrections would be reverted faster than you can say Jack Robinson. For the pages dealing with important historical events, it's quite a collection of petty kings they've got over there.

I learned about it watching this performance:

https://vimeo.com/23527768

I make his words mine:

"This is what space exploration should be. To sing space... not just measure it. To look deeper... not just farther"

Let's just hope Chinese and Indian astronauts will not be saying any think-tank generated "historical phrases".

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