Catholicism in the Culture – Jeopardy and Blue Bloods

As a Catholic, I like seeing instances in media that reference my faith. One regular contributor is the quiz show “Jeopardy”, which regularly features religious categories in the Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy question rounds. Yesterday, the Final Jeopardy category was “Catholicism” with this question:

A liturgical year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, which is the Sunday closest to the feast day of this “first apostle”

The answer is “St. Andrew”, which is neat, since my name is Andrew, and the feast of St. Andrew is today (November 30th)! Alex Trebek even referred to the feast day – neat again! By the way, no one got the right answer in Final Jeopardy….

The other prominent example is the TV series “Blue Bloods” on CBS. The main characters, the Reagan family, are practicing Catholics, and their faith definitely guides a lot of the development of the characters. One of the supervising producers/script writers, Siobhan Byrne O’Connor, is a practicing Catholic, and brings the faith with her in script development. The executive producer, Kevin Wade, is also Catholic and writes the dinner scenes where the Reagan family says grace before meals and discusses the issues of the day. I am glad that there is still a place for Catholicism in today’s media world.

 

Lengthy article on EM drive research at Johnson Space Center in Houston TX (NASA Eagleworks) (via https://www.eeweb.com/profile/max-maxfield/articles/impossible-space-drives-and-interplanetary-transport-networks) – hope this turns into something good!

I am helping Ron Chester with setting up a river of news on Bob Dylan, but some of the sites of interest do not have RSS feeds. This looks like a straight-forward example that could be used for those sites, I will try it out!

Processing satellite data – now anyone can do it!

I saw this post on the Amazon Web Services weblog (via Stephen Downes) about Amazon offering ground station services for people operating micro-satellites – amazing! Processing satellite data is now just another web service….

A long time ago, I was a volunteer for the Lunar Prospector mission (before it became a NASA Discovery Program), and I was in contact with John Champa (K8OCL, SK) about setting up a ground station network using ham radio operators to collect data from the Lunar Prospector satellite. We did not get far with the volunteer effort, and it ground to a halt. I did attend the NASA launch (fun!) and followed the mission from afar. Boy, if this Amazon service existed back then, it would have been cool!

References:

Lunar Prospector archive page from NASA (original site http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/ does not seem to exist at NASA or Internet Archive

Lunar Prospector book summary written by project scientist Alan Binder