johnkemeny.com

    

The Flag of Earth was first raised May 17, 1970, the creation of James W. Cadle.  He made it because, despite being a great patriot, he was disappointed that an American flag was planted on the moon in July 1969; after all we had won the Moon race, wasn’t it time for a more universal symbol? 

The Flag of Earth flies at many SETI locations around the world. It symbolizes the fact that SETI is carried out on behalf of humankind as a whole. The yellow part of the flag represents the sun, the blue circle the Earth, and the small white circle the Moon.

Below is an original picture of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon (notice the dirt on the suit), and a remarkable computer reproduction by Andrea Bertaccini of the Life Magazine cover based on that picture.  Maybe he will make one of Buzz saluting the Flag of Earth?

Jana Tylova beat the  odds, and, as the only woman finalist, solved the puzzle below (after many others) in under 15 minutes to win the first ever Sudoku Championship in Lucca Italy.

 

Hint: you need to guess to solve this final puzzle.

I am showing my (old) age, but an email from my HS alum association got me to looking at an extensive email list of fellow 1970 Science grads – lots of MDs and PhDs!  I looked up friends (who today probably wouldn’t know me from Adam).  Some I couldn’t trace.  Here are a few I found.

It is interesting to ponder that I often used to lunch with 3 doctors – Phil Bach, a heart specialist in Sacramento; Michael Fifer, director of Coronary Care at MGH (he works in the same building as Alice!); and Jay Turkewitz, a neurologist in New Orleans specializing in HIV.

         

I also knew Stephen Drucker, Editor in Chief of House Beautiful; Paul Mailman, who went to MIT, joined Mensa, and worked with my sister at Atex; Noah Mendelsohn, distinguished IBM research engineer, who was just as handsome as a kid as he is today; and Susan Wessler, disinguished Professor and plant genetics researcher – she has a lab named after her(!) at U of Georgia, who I, and every other straight male, had a crush on.

               

I don’t seem to fit with any crew very highly.  Guess I need my own craft & crew.

On April 6, 1906, 12 days before the San Francisco earthquake, cartoonist James Stuart Blackton and Thomas Edison released the first animation – a film of a man puffing cigar smoke while his sweetheart rolled her eyes in disapproval, a dog jumping through a hoop, and a juggler. They used Edison’s newly invented Kinestoscope (which Edison had patented the same year, 1897, as the phonograph ), and called the film The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. Blackton had studied Edweard Muybridge’s pioneering sequential photographs for inspiration.

You can study the book, Animation, The Whole Story by Howard Beckerman , animation professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Or you can read all kinds of stuff , the blog of Ren Hoek and Stimpson J. Cat creator and animator extraordinare John Kricfalusi (pronounced like my name, ‘JohnK’ :-O, he also happens to be of Hungarian origin, though he was born in Canada – ‘falusi’ means ‘from the town of’ and ‘s’ is pronounced ‘sh’ in Hungarian).

Ren was fashioned after Hungarian actor Peter Lorre , an inspiration for many cartoons (see Tex Avery’s wonderful rendition). During the Hayes Commission investigation of the late 40s, Lorre was asked to name anyone suspicious he had met since coming to the United States. Lorre responded with a list of everyone he knew. As a young man in Vienna, Lorre was a student of Sigmund Freud. Alice was a student of Sophie Freud, Sigmund’s granddaughter.

         

Actually, blahging original material, even if it is only collections of links (you do follow the links?), is hard – and I need to recharge.  So I am giving it up for Lent.  See you after Easter.

              

Egressing Black History Month, I thought I’d publish my intersection with famous Blacks in the Riverdale section of the Bronx (yes, it is in the Bronx). 

First, and foremost, I met the great Jackie Robinson at PS 81 on a campaign stop for Hubert H. Humphrey (the “Happy Warrior” who lost to Nixon).  This was less than a year before Jackie’s death (at my current age!).  There was something so very majestic about him – a much larger man than I expected, with white hair, and nearly blind. 

Apparently, Willie Mays lived in Riverdale for a time.

I met Stokeley Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), the father of “Black Power,” in an English class at the Bronx High School of Science.  He had graduated Science 10 years earlier, so what he was doing sitting in class I’ll never know – he didn’t talk to anyone.

Graduating Science in 1976, Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and distinguished Director of the American Museum of Natural History‘s Hayden Planetarium.