Nothing to Protest

The best two words any of us get to say or write each day are “Thank you.” Thank you to everyone who reads this website, even if this post is the first one by me that you have ever seen: Thank you.

Yesterday, this website was viewed for the 40,000th time in 2016. About one month ago, the number of views this website received surpassed the number of views it received in all of 2015. Just under 34,000 views in 2015, and more than 40,000 in 2016.
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Today in History: December 7

Photo number AS17-148-22727 (above) was taken by the crew of Apollo 17—Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt—at 5:39 a.m. EST on this date in 1972. Soon after NASA released it for publication, it acquired a nickname: “The Blue Marble,” and it is one of the most frequently reproduced photos in history.

Apollo 17 had been launched about five hours earlier from the Kennedy Space Center and was in a parking orbit about 28,000 miles from Earth. About an hour later, the craft left that orbit and continued to the Moon. Apollo 17 remains the last manned mission to the Moon, the last manned mission to travel beyond a low Earth orbit.
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Today in History: Dec. 6

On the morning of December 6, 1917, the world’s fourth-largest man-made non-nuclear explosion obliterated the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada. It is estimated that the blast, the result of an accident, released energy the equivalent of 2.9 kilotons of TNT. (“Little Boy,” the bomb dropped over Hiroshima, released about 19 kilotons.) In the photo above, the explosion reaches more than two miles up. It is the photo taken closest to the moment after the explosion.

The explosion, combined with a tsunami it created in Halifax Harbor, was the most devastating man-made blast until the nuclear age. Almost 2000 people were killed and many thousands more were injured.
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