A crumb for breakfast
A little Sparrow with a crumb of bread for breakfast. This is the first photo I'm posting with my new Canon R8 camera.
Posts
If Neil Armstrong Were Your Engineer, You Wouldn’t Need Alerts
Apollo 11 didn’t lack insight — but it only succeeded when the right action was chosen. “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” — Most people are familiar with these words, but how many people know that Neil Armstrong was only seconds away from saying “ We didn’t land on the Moon because the computer kept rebooting” ? Apollo 11’s Eagle Lunar Module, in flight Minutes before the planned moment of the first landing, Apollo 11 was skimming the lunar surface at over 1,300 kilometers per hour. The astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were concentrating on flying their strange-looking lunar lander and making sure they weren’t running out of fuel. The last thing they needed was the computer flashing esoteric error messages on the LED screen. But at a critical juncture, the primitive dashboard on their onboard computer started raising an alarm. Not a single alarm, many. While the astronauts continued flying, the engineers at Houston Mission Contro...
This is my stick, there are none like it
A Glossy Ibis ( Plegadis falcinellus / מגלן חום ) collecting sticks for the family nest - and what a stick it's found!
A Night Heron... In the Day
A Black-Crowned Night Heron ( Nycticorax nycticorax אנפת לילה) hanging out in Ramat Gan's National Park.
Voyager and the Art of Graceful Degradation
Like a great celestial swan, Voyager 1 is flying — swiftly, boldly, albeit a little stiffly in places. NASA/JPL-Caltech It moves through interstellar space with enormous momentum, far beyond the planets that once defined its mission, carrying instruments that continue to report from a region no man‑made craft has ever reached. Yet every action it takes is constrained by a finite and steadily diminishing supply of energy, each signal carefully weighed against what it costs to send. There is a quiet elegance in that balance. Voyager does not insist on doing everything it once did. It does not pursue peak capability when conditions no longer allow it. Instead, it adapts -- releasing some functions so that others can continue, prioritizing what matters most over what is merely possible. In engineering, we have a name for systems that behave this way. We call it graceful degradation . On April 17, 2026, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a carefully prep...
Hoopoe Celebrating as Hoopoes Do
In honor of Israel's 78th Independence day celebration which took place this week, here's my annual picture of the national bird - the Hoopoe ( Upupa epops דוכיפת) - celebrating as Israelis do, by having a big meal in a park! Granted, the Hoopoe has not lit a fire to have a braii or barbecue as is traditional, but it's doing the best it can. As part of the 2008 celebration of Israel's 60th anniversary, president Shimon Peres announced the results of a national poll where the Hoopoe was voted "National Bird". How long ago that seems!
Ghostly Cranes in dawn's early light.
The muted light of early dawn required a 1/4-second exposure to reveal the birds and their reflections. As an added benefit, the longer exposure lent the birds in flight a haunting, ghostlike presence.
Artemis and Apollo: The Systems That Took Them to the Moon — and Brought Them Home
During the anniversary week of Apollo 13, I find myself thinking less about the explosion of the oxygen tank in the spacecraft and more about what still worked - before and after. Few moments in history illustrate the value of reliable systems more clearly than that flight. Watching the Artemis II mission last week, I was struck by some parallels - and differences - between it and Apollo 13. Artemis II’s Integrity landed back on Earth on the 11th of April, the same day Apollo 13’s Odyssey was launched. Externally, the two capsules appear similar, albeit Integrity is larger and carries a crew of four instead of three. Internally, however, over half a century of technological progress separates them. Nowhere is this more evident than in the computing power available to the astronauts. While computers are ubiquitous today, in the 1960s, they were in their infancy and the Moon landings were not only a triumph of human effort, ingenuity, and dedication, but also a triumph of one of huma...
Problems Before the Real Problem: The First Lessons of Apollo 13
Setting the stage Between 1968 and 1972 NASA sent nine Apollo missions to the Moon. Reaching the Moon was an effort that required a decade of work by 400,000 people, billions of dollars and an incalculable amount of moving parts. Of the nine missions to the Moon, eight were spectacular successes and one was a spectacular near-disaster. Apollo 13 launched on April 11th, 1970 and was meant to be the first of the Apollo missions to be dedicated to exploring the Moon, after Apollo 11 made the first landing and 12 had improved on it by making a pinpoint landing. On April 13th, a little over 2 days after launch, one of the two large oxygen tanks in the Service Module component of the spacecraft exploded, crippling the spacecraft on the way to the Moon. Over the next days, NASA’s engineers worked feverishly together with the astronauts to overcome the seemingly insurmountable problems and brought them back to Earth - safe and sound. ...
Excellence Is a Habit
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit .” -- Historian Will Durant, simplifying part of Aristotle’s philosophy. As I write these words, the crew of Artemis II has returned safely and successfully to Earth, after being the first humans to have reached the vicinity of the Moon in over 50 years. It is also the 56th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13, a mission known not only for the catastrophic events on the way to the Moon, but even more so for the Herculean efforts made to eventually return the astronauts successfully back home. Artemis II landing, April 11th 2026 (NASA) NASA’s foray to the Moon in the 60s and early 70s is the story of a long journey made step-by-step. The simple one-man Mercury spacecraft paved the way to the two-man Gemini craft which was a stepping stone to the twin Apollo space capsule and Moon lander. Between May of 1961 and April of 1970, NASA launched twenty five manned missions, a ca...