Sputnik and The Dawn of the Space Age

History changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a basketball, weighed only 183 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. That launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age and the U.S.-U.S.S.R space race.

Related article:

Click here for an interesting timeline related to the space race.

Paint

The Physics, and Metaphysics, of Paint

Tim Brookes' wife wanted to relocate her therapy practice into an apartment added to their house. In his NPR monologue Tim said that according to T.S. Eliot "Between the idea and the reality . . . falls the Shadow." The remodel job led him to believe that in actuality it's not the Shadow, it's the Paint. Click here to listen to Tim.

Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the shadow – Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

Law Professor Emeritus on Universal Health Care

Major health care proposals ignore the 'Big Leak,' says health insurance expert

By Jessica Martin

Sept. 18, 2007 -- "Universal health care is getting the attention it deserves, but unfortunately the proposals receiving the most attention ignore the 'Big Leak,'" which is the enormous non-benefit costs incurred by health care providers who must match their billions of billings with thousands of differing private health care plans," says Merton C. Bernstein, a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. "Putting everyone under the Medicare umbrella would eliminate that leak," he says.

"Medicare's single-payer system would reduce non-benefit spending by doctors, hospitals, clinics, laboratories and health care insurers by about $300 billion a year, providing funds to insure everyone without additional outlays."

Bernstein is available to discuss current universal health care proposals as well as the Medicare-for-all option. His current comments on health insurance follow:

Health insurance companies, unlike Medicare, deal with vast administrative costs:

"Hundreds of private insurers offer innumerable differing plans," Bernstein says.

Giving patients a choice:

"Some contend that their proposals offer patients a choice," he says. "To start, patients don't choose their coverage, their employers do. Even when there are several plans on offer, the employer chooses which ones to include. Further, the employer chooses who administers the plans. That's where much of insurance competition occurs — who can offer the lowest cost to the employer/chooser; that turns on who can produce lowest benefit payout.

"The choice patients cherish most is who will be their doctor and which hospital will provide care. Many private insurance arrangements limit those choices. Under Medicare, the patient chooses."

Proposed plans rely on tax breaks and other subsidies:

"The major proposals depend upon tax breaks and other subsidies to make coverage appear more affordable," Bernstein says. "This merely shifts costs to other plan participants or taxpayers. This increase total costs and thereby make the programs themselves less affordable."

Marriage

Poem: "Marriage" by Marie Howe.

Marriage

My husband likes to watch the cooking shows, the
building shows,
the Discovery Channel, and the surgery channel.
Last night, he told us about a man who came into
the emergency room

with a bayonet stuck entirely through his skull and
brain.
Did they get it out? We all asked.
They did. And the man was O.K. because the blade
went exactly between

the two halves without severing them.
And who had shoved this bayonet into the man's
head? His wife.
A strong woman, someone said. And everyone else
agreed.

Molasses

Molasses May Help Hanford Scientists Convert Dangerous Chemicals

By Anna King

Richland, WA October 2, 2007 4:34 p.m.

Officials at Hanford are cooking up a new plan to stop hazardous chemicals from reaching the Columbia River. The plan involves a tanker truck full of molasses.














The water under the Hanford Nuclear Reservation contains large plumes of dangerous chemicals. One is chromium 6. Scientists have tried pumping and treating the stuff but that’s really expensive.

Now they are trying something new. Molasses.

Turns out the same stuff that’s good for making cookies is also good at growing bacteria. Scientists plan to dump a tanker truck load of the sweet molasses down a well.

Mike Thompson is a hydro-geologist with the U.S. Department of Energy. He says once the molasses eating bacteria dies off...

Mike Thompson: "The decomposition of that biomass will take the oxygen out of the water and when you take the oxygen out of the water you get the geo-chemical reaction that converts the chromium to a safer form."

The $1.5 million molasses project is part of an increased effort by DOE to clean up contaminates heading for the Columbia River.

Richard Russo's Small-Town America

Richard Russo's Small-Town America
(click above link to hear the interview,)

Morning Edition, October 1, 2007 · Author Richard Russo knows small towns well. He writes about them and grew up in one — Gloversville, in upstate New York. The town was named for the local industry, but by the time he lived there, much of the glove manufacturing work was being done in Asia and Europe.

"Gloves would be sent to have a couple of buttons sewed on so that you could sell them as gloves made in Gloversville," Russo says.

For Russo, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, seeing the town change in such a big way influenced the way he saw the world and how he writes. In his latest book, Bridge of Sighs, what happens in a small town changes the lives of two men in very different ways.



















"Bridge of Sighs is a book about somebody who stays and somebody who leaves," Russo tells Steve Inskeep.

Russo sees that dilemma reflected in his own life.

"I've always had the feeling that part of me left. I mean, the Richard Russo who grew up and became novelist is one person. But I've always had the distinct feeling that there was a ghost version of myself still living back in that place that's still so real in my imagination and that I've been telling fibs about all this time."

While attending the University of Arizona — a place he chose for its distance from home — Russo would return in the summers to work in road construction with his father.

"At the beginning of the summer I would think, 'God, I don't know if I can get into those rhythms of life again," Russo says. "But by the end of August, I would be so thoroughly subsumed into that other life — a very hard life that my father lived. But then at the end of the day, sitting at a bar and watching those long-neck bottles of beer line up sweating in front of you, and I would think to myself, 'Do I really want to go back to the university?'

"And as a result of doing that every summer, I think I bifurcated in some way. I've always thought that there was some other version of me sitting on a bar stool."

Russo says jobs aren't the only thing to have vanished from small-town America.

"The labor-oriented jobs in towns like these, the mill jobs, have all disappeared. But I think what's disappeared more and what's more harmful to America is the loss of the pride that came with those jobs."

Russo and his father worked one summer on the off-ramp exit in Albany. "When we would drive by that ... he would say, 'We built that.'"

"And I think that small towns, certainly ... my fictional small towns, have become places where people are hanging on to hope and hanging onto pride, and hanging on by a thread that seems to me now at least much more slender than it was when my father's generation came home at the end of the Second World War."

Portland Oregon Scenes

Photos by Webmaster