On July 20, 1969, two men born on Earth set foot on the moon. And, since they came safely home, then-President Nixon had no use for the speech In Event of Moon Disaster, prepared by William Safire. The full original text is here (pdf), but I found it appropriate for today, when we do have tragedy to mourn in memorial:

(abridged and slightly modified for the occasion)

Rick Husband—William McCool—Michael Anderson—Kalpana Chawla—David Brown—Laurel Clark—Ilan Ramon.

These seven men and women lay down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send her sons and daughters into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood

And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe.

We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted;

...and now for some musings about exploration that doesn't involve wanton destruction, murder, theft, &c.

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But as soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking. Who would once have thought that the crossing of the wide ocean was calmer and safer than of the narrow Adriatic Sea, Baltic Sea, or English Channel?

Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies—I shall do it for the moon, [and] you Galileo, for Jupiter.

h/t Abel Mendez at UPR; from an open letter from Kepler to Galileo (yes, those) in the Conversation with the Star Messenger, in 1610. Four hundred years later, space is far harder than ever expected, but the stars are now close indeed.

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Flattened polar projection; logarithmic distance scale; systems with potentially habitable exoplanets highlighted

A countdown clock that continued to increase past 00:00; a security guard whose face turned ghostly-white in an instant; a lack of response from the Columbia crew to repeated calls from Capcom/Astronaut Charlie Hobaugh; and the words of "Get ready," uttered quietly from the lips of Steve Lindsey, told me that it was time - time to be strong in the face of true adversity.

It was the most difficult day of my life; even harder than when my father died, as that was what we were expecting. I do my best to describe the day's events in my book, but suffice it to say I felt a huge emptiness inside and it is a burden I still carry today. That day changed me inside; it made me much more emotional than I can ever remember being. It tested my faith and it still tests me.

But it never dulled my dream to fly in space. It only strengthened my resolve. We (NASA) would figure this

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The Harvard Political Review reports that a Chicago nonprofit is scraping Twitter to pass on complaints about food poisoning in restaurants to the Chicago Department of Public Health:

Foodborne Chicago depends on human judgment in addition to computerized predictions. First, the algorithm "surfaces tweets that are related to foodborne illnesses." Next, "a human classifier goes through those complaints that the machine classifies, [...determining] what is really about food poisoning and what may be other noise." The Foodborne team then tweets back at the likely cases, providing a link for users to file an official complaint. In short, computers deal with the massive quantity of Twitter data, and humans ensure the quality of the result. According to its website, between its launch on March 23, 2013 and November 10, 2014, the Foodborne algorithm flagged 3,594 tweets as potential food poisoning cases. Of these tweets, human coders have identified 419,

First, meta of metas, if you like my takes on (some subset of) the week, maybe also check out other people's linkwraps that have come out in the last day or so:

• Unequally Yoked | 7 Quick Takes: Costuming, Conspiracy, and Counterfeiting (Leah Libresco is a one-time atheist blogger, now a Catholic blogger, and remains a devout rationalist. Unequally Yoked's 7QT's get the credit for convincing me to to BoL's.)
• My Biased Coin | Weekend Links (November 1 Edition) (Michael Mitzenmacher is currently my professor for Complexity and Algorithms, and often has insightful things