WE WILL NEVER FORGET…
…Until we are too old to remember.

Yesterday was precisely 65 years after Pearl Harbor, along with several military and naval installations, was attacked from the sky by Japanese bombs.

Only 8 percent of Americans are old enough to remember.

"Most of us have to be 5 years old before news events imprint themselves in our memory," according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article yesterday. And Census Bureau estimates drawn up last year show that only 26 million Americans are old enough to remember the monumental attack. That group comprises only 8 percent of the population.

For today's Americans, the Pearl Harbor equivalent is the terrorist onslaught of Sept. 11, 2001. In all, 276 million of us — or, 93 percent of the population — are old enough to remember Sept. 11.

NASA's Plans for Permanently Manned Moon Base
Space agency NASA this week announced that its plans for returning people to the moon — an objective called for by President Bush in 2004 — include establishing a permanent outpost that would be used to prepare for a manned trip to Mars.

Reports CNN:

The base would be built in incremental steps, starting with four-person crews making several seven-day visits. The first mission would begin by 2020, with the base growing over time, beefed up with more power, mobility rovers and living quarters.

NASA's lunar architecture team decided it would be better to establish a base than to conduct individual missions to the moon, as in the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s. Team scientists believe astronauts could use the moon's natural resources to maintain the outpost, and could use the base to prepare for a trip to Mars.

Patented Auto-pilot Landings
Boeing has patented an anti-hijacking device that will automatically fly and land commercial airliners if the flight crew is incapacitated or killed. The anti-terrorist system lands the plane automatically if the crew is killed.

According to Canada's Ottawa Citizen:

The "uninterruptible" auto-pilot would be activated manually by pilots or co-pilots flipping a switch, by sensors that detect excessive force against locked cabin doors, or remotely by airline or federal aviation and security officials on the ground.

Once initiated, "no one on board is capable of controlling the flight," say documents related to the patent application by the commercial jetliner manufacturer.

Wet Land is Not a Myth! We Have Seen It!
Pictures of Martian gullies taken years apart strongly suggest that liquid water still flows on the surface of the planet, scientists announced on Wednesday.

The New York Times reports:

The photographs by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which fell silent last month after almost 10 years of observing the planet from orbit, show what appear to be light-colored deposits in two gullies on crater walls. They were not present in earlier photographs.

The deposits appear to be materials left by water that percolated to the surface and flowed down the gullies, said Michael Malin, chief scientist for the spacecraft's camera system. The water would have quickly evaporated on the planet's surface because of low atmospheric pressure and temperatures, he added.

"These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, in the NYT article.

Also good is the sub-headline: Man also charged with assault, kidnapping.

How Engineers Make/Shake Milkshakes

According to MAKE:

Take a powerful DC amplifier, connect it to a large woofer, feed the system with a signal generator, and at the end, just add milkshake. Of course it is also possible to measure the g-force of the shaking.

Best Labor-related Article Lede of the Month:

Forget the minimum wage. Or outsourcing jobs overseas. The labor issue most on the minds of members of Congress yesterday was their own: They will have to work five days a week starting in January.

The horror.

(via The Washington Post)

Mistletoe or Legal Woe?
Finally, because the big holiday season is upon us, we can expect the office parties to begin. However, if you are going to attend a work-related party, you should be aware of today's increased odds of your being sued by another attendee. One in five (20 percent) adults will host or co-host a holiday party this year at which alcohol will be served," according to a national phone survey reported in this article.

And alcohol, being the social lubricant it is, will open up all sorts of possibilities for legal recourse: drunk driving, legally actionable sexual advances, stumbling eye-first into the mistletoe, etcetera, etcetera.

As such, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick hilariously urges you to "affix the following notice to every holiday-related invitation":

WARNING: You are herein invited to attend a Holiday Party. Should you choose to attend this event, you are herein advised that you do so at your own peril. Food served may be manufactured in factories that may contain machinery that may have touched peanuts.

Once again, we wish you and yours a very happy holiday season, and hope to make this year's office party the best ever.

Enjoy yours.


Cheers.