June 2025

Books read:

The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking by Leor Zmigrod
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (translated by Adrian Nathan West)
All Fours by Miranda July
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham

Trails walked:

Sprague Lake to Bierstadt Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park (June 11th)
Loch Vale to The Loch in Rocky Mountain National Park (June 16th)
Father’s Day picnic at Brainard Lake near Ward (June 19th)
Beaver Creek Trail near Ward (June 24th)

Song(s) of the month: The Beach Boys - God Only Knows and Sly and the Family Stone - Everyday People

June Summary:

Well we've reached the halfway point of this tumultuous year, 2025. Let's hope the 2nd half brings less war and destruction and hatred. My wife and I started watching a show called The Pitt, about an emergency room in Pittsburgh shortly after the pandemic. Our daughter, who was an ER nurse said it was the most accurate show about ERs she's seen. One of the scenes in a early episode brought back a bit of PTSD for me. The two hardest decisions I've ever made were both in a hospital ER; one in 2016 involving my dad, the other in 2022 involving my mom. I have two younger sisters who, thankfully, agreed with me in both cases, but as the oldest sibling I felt the weight of responsibility. My dad was admitted to the hospital with intestinal pain; a few hours later my sisters and I watched, horrified, as he was being coded by a team of nurses and doctors. After several resuscitation attempts, the doctor came to ask us what we wanted done. He said with the lack of oxygen to his brain, the outlook wasn't great if he was put on life support. Luckily we knew that neither of our parents wanted this, but the actual decision was still very heavy. We said go ahead and call it, let him go naturally, which he did after a few hours. In my mom's case, she had taken a bad fall in the memory care unit where she lived. The doctor told me that she had a broken neck and it could be repaired but they weren't sure she would regain use of her limbs. He also said that her heart was failing and she'd need a pacemaker installed. So, we could end up with a paralyzed mother with dementia and a pacemaker. What kind of life is that? He said that they could proceed with both procedures, or they could call in hospice with their vials of morphine to ease the pain and let her go naturally. My sisters and I again knew what the right call was, but they wanted me to make the call with the doctor. Another weighty conversation. After the decision, the doctor said it was the right call (probably something he's not supposed to say, but I appreciated it).

I still think about those decisions a lot. Deep inside, I knew they were the humane thing to do. But still, I was basically putting to death the two people that brought me to life. I'm shaking and tearing up as I write this. But I also know that this is a fairly common experience with people having to make these decisions every day somewhere in the world. It's why it was portrayed in that show, The Pitt. I hope my children never have to go through that process, but we have DNR instructions that will help to ease that pressure if the time comes. Or maybe I'll die peacefully in my sleep or torn apart by grizzly bears deep in the Alaskan wilderness.

This month my reading gave me a better understanding of our country's ideological/political divide, helped me understand the torturous minds of brilliant scientists, gave me a bizarre look into perimenopause, and provided a glimpse into the hubris of men involved in making decisions on our space program over the years. My rambling took me on beautiful hikes in Rocky Mountain National Park, the Brainard Lake Recreation Area, and the Indian Peaks Wilderness. Enjoy!

Things My Grandkids Say: My oldest grandson sometimes gets obsessed with death (sorry if that seems to be a theme for this blog post). He’s pretty smart, so it’s tough to divert him from this idea that has been the topic of philosophers for centuries. The other day he asked, “will you die when I’m a grownup?” Oof. How do you answer this to a 5-year-old? Possible answers:

I hope I live long enough to see you as an adult.

Of course not, I’ll always be here.

Yes, I probably will.

I don’t know the answer to that excellent question; would you like some ice cream?

I think I said something to the effect that everyone will die someday, but nobody knows when they will die. Then I said something about the movie Coco where people don’t really completely die until the last person on earth forgets the memory of that person (great animated show, by the way). Kids, they say the darndest things….

Song(s) of the month: The Beach Boys - God Only Knows and Sly and the Family Stone - Everyday People

We lost two music icons of the 60s and 70s music scene this month (we're losing 60s and 70s musical icons every month it seems): Brian Wilson, the musical genius behind The Beach Boys; and Sly Stone, front man for Sly and the Family Stone. Both were tortured artists in different ways, Wilson struggled with mental illness and Stone battled drug abuse. Both of these afflictions seem to be common traits of many great artists.

Choosing one Beach Boys song is practically impossible. Good Vibrations and California Girls regularly make the list of top 10 singles ever. But I chose God only Knows for two reasons: One, it’s from the album Pet Sounds, regarded by many as one of the greatest albums ever created. And two, because it’s played at the end of the movie Love Actually and it makes me cry every time I see that scene. Side note: The people in charge of selecting the music for Love Actually were brilliant. Not only for this ending scene song, but the scene in the movie when Emma Thompson’s character finds out her husband may have cheated on her is made even more powerful by Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now playing in the background. So good. Here’s that final scene of Love Actually with God Only Knows playing in the background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPdYBcaO3is

It was much easier to find one song for Sly and the Family Stone. Although Dance to the Music, Hot Fun in the Summertime, and Thank You were all hits, Everyday People is an iconic song about overcoming racism and hatred. I’m pretty sure it isn’t playing on repeat on the current White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s playlist….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUUhDoCx8zc&list=RDYUUhDoCx8zc&start_radio=1

The Ideological Brain by Leor Zmigrod – The author is only 30 years old, yet she’s won more science awards than most people who have practiced science all their lives. From her biography: Leor completed her PhD as a Gates Scholar at the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge. She was a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge and has held visiting fellowships at Stanford University, Harvard University, the Paris Institute for Advanced Study and the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. Leor was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 in the Science & Healthcare category. Leor won the 2020 Women of the Future Science Award and the 2022 Distinguished Junior Scholar Award in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association. Whew!

Also, according to her biography, her research explores the psychology of ideological extremism using methods from experimental psychology, cognitive science, political science, and neuroscience. In particular, she investigates the cognitive, emotional, and neurobiological characteristics that might act as vulnerability factors for radicalization and ideological behavior.

In other words, she’s the perfect person to go to in order to understand our widening political division in the US. In the book she says, “We possess beliefs, yes, but we can also become possessed by them…Human brains soak up ideological convictions with vigor and thirst.”

Some things she’s discovered:

Conservatives have larger amygdalas (the part of the brain that processes fear and disgust), but the science isn’t sure what came first, the large amygdala making one more conservative, or one being more conservative increasing the size of their amygdala.

According to her findings, the most cognitively flexible individuals are “nonpartisans who lean to the left.”

A dogmatic person’s low-level unconscious cognitive machinery is slower, but their high-level self-conscious personalities mean they make impulsive decisions. They will insist on law and order yet also revel in burning the establishment down. It’s this recklessness that distinguishes the right-wing extremist from the cautious conservative.

The nonideological person strives toward intellectual humility — continuously being open to updating their beliefs in light of credible evidence and balancing a healthy dose of skepticism…

Overall, she is very careful in making any conclusions. She realizes that much of this science is ongoing and the world is complicated. People’s ideologies are formed by a combination of their upbringing, their brain chemistry, their education, their peers, and what they read and view on a regular basis. I enjoyed her foray into the history of ideological thinking from philosophers, scientists, and politicians. Her writing is enjoyable to read and I never felt like I was reading a science textbook.

Here are some lines:

From fascism and communism to eco-activism and spiritual evangelism, ideological groups offer absolute and utopian answers to societal troubles, strict rules for behavior, and an ingroup mentality through dedicated practices and symbols.

This psychological lens allows us to ask what an ideology does to its believers and whom it most easily attracts. By spotlighting the processes happening within individual brains, we can probe when an ideology constrains its followers’ mental lives and whether it can ever liberate them.

If our ideological beliefs are related to our cognitive and neural patterns of responding, then we must face new questions about how our bodies become politicized and in what ways we are capable of resisting, changing, and exercising personal agency.

When my colleagues and I invited thousands of people to complete cognitive tests of mental flexibility such as this game, called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, we found that the people who are the most behaviorally adaptable on neuropsychological tasks are the same people who — in the realm of ideologies — are most open-minded, most accepting of plurality and difference. The people with the most flexible minds are the people who acknowledge that the intellectual realm can be separated from the personal realm. They do not viscerally hate their interlocuters — they may hate their opinions but they do not project that hatred onto the persons voicing them. In contrast, the most cognitively rigid individuals, those who struggle to change when rules change, tend to hold the most dogmatic attitudes. They hate disagreement and are unwilling to shift their beliefs when credible counterevidence is presented.

Sprague Lake to Bierstadt Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park – After two weeks of doing hardly any walking due to many different reasons, I finally found a window to get back to nature. I wanted a fairly easy walk but not too easy, but also a walk with great views. I was still unsure what hike I was going to do as I pulled into Rocky Mountain National Park. I remembered seeing some trails between Sprague Lake and Bierstadt Lake so I parked in the Sprague Lake parking lot (normally easier to find a spot than Bear Lake) and headed towards Bierstadt on some connector trails that met up with the Storm Pass and Boulder Brook trails at what some people call Confusion Junction. From here I made my way to the Bierstadt Lake trailhead (about a mile from Sprague Lake). Luckily for me the trailhead parking area was closed for repairs, so not even the shuttle stopped here. That means fewer people, and I only saw three people at the lake which is very unusual in the summer. The trail up to Bierstadt was the only climb on this day, about 600 feet in a mile. I took it slowly as there are spectacular views all along the way. Once at the lake, I walked around it to the eastern edge where the views of the snowcapped mountains are great. When I got to the connector trail between the lakes I ran into a very large female elk. I first checked if there were baby elk around, but she was alone, so I glided past her and headed down to Sprague Lake where I circled it with all the other tourists. I did take about a quarter mile trail away from Sprague Lake where there was a meadow I remember, hoping to see a moose, but no such luck. I totaled about 7 miles today and got a bit of exercise, saw a big elk, and some beautiful scenery. Nice day.

Sprague Lake was my starting point

Big female elk very close to the trail

A trail leading to the most amazing views

Bierstadt Lake, my final destination

Crooked, winding tree

Great views on the trail up to (and down from) Bierstadt

Flowers and views

Sprague lake starting point below

Liberal, left leaning trees (they became conservative right leaning trees on the way down - flip floppers)

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut -

This fascinating look into the tortured lives of great scientists was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and included on the New York Times list of best 100 books of the 21st century. Some of the many scientists included were Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Neils Bohr. Some critics have said that this should have been classified as non-fiction since much of it is based on the actual lives of these scientists. But the author said that he took many liberties as he explained the various ways in which these great thinkers reached their ultimate conclusions.

John Williams of the Washington Post wrote that this novel "fuses fact and fiction to turn the modern history of physics into a gripping narrative of obsessed scientists, world-changing discoveries, and the ultimate results—often quite dark—of our drive to understand the fundamental workings of the universe."

I believe that the title comes from the great debate about quantum mechanics between Heisenberg/Bohr and Schrödinger/Einstein. Heisenberg eventually won the debate with his theory that basically said it’s impossible to fully understand atomic theory/quantum mechanics. Schrödinger/Einstein created formulas that not-so-neatly described it, but Heisenberg won the day, hence the title of the book (the world is too complicated to fully understand).

I think that the author also wanted to point out both the good and bad that great science leads to. His best example was Fritz Haber, who was the first person to create nitrogen out of thin air. This discovery led to the improvement of crops that likely saved millions of lives. But Haber also discovered the gas that was used to kill thousands in both world wars, including Haber’s own family members in the end. Here’s what the book said about it: “The night gardener told me that the man who invented modern-day nitrogen fertilizers—a German chemist called Fritz Haber—was also the first man to create a weapon of mass destruction, namely chlorine gas, which he poured into the trenches of the First World War. His green gas killed thousands and made countless soldiers claw at their throats as the poison boiled inside their lungs, drowning them in their own vomit and phlegm, while his fertilizer, which he harvested from the nitrogen present in the air itself, saved hundreds of millions from famine and fueled our current overpopulation.”

What I enjoyed most were his stories of the great scientists that nearly lost their minds trying to understand the most complicated theories of the time. His descriptions of their plights made for fascinating reading while also learning a bit about the science itself. A very different kind of novel. Here are some lines:

when (Haber) returned to Berlin, he had to face his wife’s fury. Clara Immerwahr—the first woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry at a German university—had not only seen the effects of the gas on animals in the laboratory; she had also nearly lost her husband when the wind suddenly changed direction during one of his field tests.

Fritz Haber was declared a war criminal by the Allies, though they were no less keen in their use of gas than the Central Powers. He was forced to flee Germany, and he took up residence in Switzerland, where he received notice that he had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for a discovery he had made not long before the war, one that would alter the destiny of the human race in the coming decades. In 1907, Haber was the first to obtain nitrogen, the main nutrient required for plant growth, directly from the air.

“The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations.” - Alexander Grothendieck

Bohr could not tease out the strange logic that Heisenberg had employed in the creation of his matrices, but he knew the young man had hit on something fundamental. The first thing he did was notify Einstein: “Heisenberg’s latest paper, soon to be published, appears rather mystifying but is certainly true and profound and will have enormous implications.”

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised.

On the morning of Monday, October 24, 1927, beneath the grey sky of Brussels, twenty-nine physicists crossed the frost-caked lawn of Leopold Park and entered one of the lecture halls of the Physiology Institute, unaware that five days later they would shake the very foundations of science… Never before or again were so many geniuses united beneath the same roof: seventeen of them had won, or would go on to win, the Nobel Prize, including Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Planck and Marie Curie, who had won it twice and was overseeing the conference committee along with Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein.

Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.

Loch Vale to The Loch in Rocky Mountain National Park – I’ve walked past The Loch on previous hikes to Sky Pond and to Andrews Tarn, but this is the first time I’ve made this pretty lake my destination. I’m still working my way back into summer hiking shape so I thought this moderate 7-mile walk would fit the bill. Loch is a Scottish word for Lake and vale is a sort of more lyrical term for valley. So, Loch Vale describes this watershed that drains the Taylor Glacier into Sky Pond, Lake of Glass, and The Loch; and then along Icy Brook where it eventually merges with Glacier Creek (Glacier Creek tumbles down Glacier Gorge and drains snowmelt through Black Lake, Jewel Lake, and Mills Lake).

I had a 4pm permit to Bear Lake Road which meant that I probably couldn’t rely on the shuttle to get me to and from the trailhead since it stops running at 7:30. So I hoped I could find a spot at Glacier Gorge, or at Bear Lake as a backup. Signs along the way said the Bear Lake lot was full and to use the ParknRide which would not work for me this late, uh oh. Luckily there were a couple of spots available at the Glacier Gorge lot, which is the ideal place to start for this hike. I passed all the tourists heading up to see Alberta Falls about a mile up the trail. The falls were really gushing today as were all the creeks I crossed (Tyndall, Chaos, Glacier, Icy Brook, and Andrews). Once past the falls, the crowds drop off quickly. Some of the few remaining were heading to Glacier Gorge and Mills Lake while others were headed to Loch Vale, like me. This late in the day however, most people were headed back down. Once past Alberta falls it was another mile and a half to the junction of the Mills Lake/The Loch/Haiyaha trails. I headed straight towards The Loch three quarters of a mile further. I saw only two other hikers up here, both coming down from the big hike to Sky Pond. They were exhausted from navigating all the slushy snow up high. I walked a half mile along the lake to where Icy Brook flows into it at the inlet. It’s very pretty with so much water pouring into the lake. The high cliffs surrounding the lake make for some dramatic shots as you’ll see below.

It was a perfect late afternoon with temperatures in the upper 60s. Rain threatened but never fell. I didn’t spot any animals on the hike (other than mosquitoes and chipmunks) but saw some big elk on the drive out. Another great day in this beautiful park.

Alberta Falls raging during spring melt

Icy Brook below The Loch

Still lots of snow to navigate in June up here

Reflections of The Loch

So many reflections

...see?

So beautiful up here, and no people

This was the inlet leading into The Loch...still lots of water coming from up high

I loved this symmetrical reflection, like a giant arrowhead

Giant bull elk on the drive out

All Fours by Miranda July – This book has received many positive reviews and was short listed for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. And although the writing, and some of the story is interesting, I didn’t love the book. Maybe it’s because I’m not a woman, or an eclectic artist. It’s about a 45-year-old woman artist who is perimenopausal and questioning what remains of her sexuality. I just couldn’t relate to this woman at all, who seemed to always choose her sex drive and herself over her husband or child at every turn, even though she seemed to care about them. I was also annoyed with her referencing her child as them/they even though there were no mentions of why. It takes you completely out of the story when you realize that “they” meant this child and not some group of people. When someone in the story said she’d heard she had a son, her response was “Don’t gender my child!” Oy vay, this is part of what brought us King Donald.

I thought it was a clever idea to have the woman plan this road trip to New York to sort of find herself. And it was even more clever to have her stop her road trip just 30 minutes away from her Los Angeles home and stay in a cheap motel for 3 weeks, pretending to her husband that she was still on road trip. She falls in love with a Hertz employee and has a very strange relationship with him that includes no sex but does include him changing out her tampon. I know! I did appreciate the friendship she has with Jordi who helps her overcome all her wild delusions. Jordi is the kind of friend every woman (and man) needs.

Jordi is probably the only person in this book I cared for. Maybe her husband, but he was strange too. I couldn’t help thinking how messed up her “son” was going to be, having been raised by this couple. Poor kid.

All that being said, the writing was good and that’s what kept me reading till the bitter end. Here are some lines:

extended trips, school holidays, a child being too sick to go to school, these things run a chill down the spines of working mothers whose freedom is so precarious to begin with.

Each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. You have to know yourself and fulfill the amount of untruth that your constitution requires.

Oh, life! Such a trickster! Always teaching you a lesson! I didn’t bother working out what the lesson was.

“Is it the kind of love where you can’t sleep?” “Well, it would be if I didn’t drug myself with three Benadryls every night.”

She’s a naturopath, a midwife, and an ob-gyn MD, which is something you can get in Los Angeles if you’re able to pay out-of-pocket.

My entire inner life—my soul—was disgusting, vain, profoundly selfish. [I certainly agreed with this statement]

“Okay, here’s my take,” she said. “Just ride it out. A lot of women destroy their lives in their forties and then one day they wake up with no periods and no partner and only themselves to blame.”

I saw myself staggering through the city in the dark, a toothless, ranting woman who had once had a good home with a husband and child but threw it all away for…no one can even remember. Something about pleasure.

Divorce, just the word, used to feel serrated like a knife, something to wave around dangerously. Now I associated it with taxes, paperwork, bureaucracy. It might make sense, eventually, but what a headache. Marriage, too.

“Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable,” Jordi said, “but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”

Father’s Day Picnic at Brainard Lake – My wife was playing the part of Springsteen groupie in Berlin and Prague, so, feeling sorry for me, my son and daughter-in-law invited me to join them and their three sons for a Father’s Day picnic at the beautiful Brainard Lake Recreation Area. This area, along with Rocky Mountain National Park and the Indian Peaks Wilderness contain the most beautiful scenery along the Front Range of Colorado. During the winter, only the Gateway parking lot is open (about a 2 mile walk to Brainard Lake). Normally in early June the Brainard Lake parking area is open, but you need to pick up a permit in advance to park here. Around July 4th, the rest of the recreation area opens up to the parking lots near the Mitchell Lake and Long Lake trailheads. We had a permit for Brainard Lake, so I picked up some sandwiches and packed some snacks and drinks and we headed up on this beautiful Father’s Day Sunday. Lots of people had the same idea as all the picnic tables near the parking lot were taken. So we walked about a quarter mile or so along Brainard Lake road (which was still closed) to another set of picnic tables that were available. Our little walk was rewarded with the appearance of a very large male moose who crossed the road just in front of us before we reached the picnic area. It’s always an exciting and slightly scary moment when you encounter moose in the wild, as they are so unpredictable. We gave him a very wide berth as he made his way to the lake for a drink and to munch on the moist plants near the shore.

We settled down for the picnic and then my oldest grandson and his dad tried their hand at fishing while I hung out with my daughter-in-law and the two younger boys. The 3-month-old was strapped to mom’s chest while I followed the 2-year-old up and down very slushy snow mounds that surrounded the area. It was a great day with perfect weather and was highlighted by spotting a mama moose and her very young (1 week old?) baby on the drive out. So cool.

Comparing moose-spotting binocs before the trip

Sporting cool shades ("they're pit vipers grandpa!")

Very tall bull moose way too close for comfort

That's better, farther away

Picnic

Snow mounds

Big brother showing the way up

Carrying their bags of chips

Mama and baby moose on the way out

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham – This is a terrific and riveting book that was published just last year. The Challenger space shuttle exploded in January of 1986 killing all seven members aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, the first non-astronaut chosen to go into space. She was a teacher and became famous prior to the launch for her intelligence, kindness, and easy-going way with the media, including this appearance on the Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. Watching that interview, when she said she wasn’t afraid, but might be when she got strapped in reminded me of this line in the book: “As he hunched over McAuliffe to inspect her helmet one last time, he looked down into her face and saw that her Girl Scout pluck had deserted her at last. In her eyes he saw neither excitement nor anticipation but recognized only one emotion: terror.”

In January of 1986, my wife was recently pregnant with our first child, and the Challenger explosion became ingrained in our lives with all the other emotions that come with having your first child. Eleven years later, on a trip back east, we visited the Challenger memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and the photo below is of our daughter, who was born in that fateful year of 1986, in front of the memorial.

But as much as that shuttle disaster was about Christa McAuliffe, this book was really about how the history of the space program’s successes, interspersed with relatively few disasters, led to this tragedy, and also to the Columbia disaster 17 years later. The main cause? The greed and hubris of a relatively few men in powerful positions. It’s also the story about the engineers who knew better and tried to stop the launch, only to be silenced by their management. I know this sentiment well. I was an engineer and manager in an engineering firm for 40 years. I also worked on multi-million-dollar projects that sometimes came down to engineers pleading with management not to release a product prematurely, only to be outranked due to scheduling and budget constraints. I actually remember saying to myself on more than one occasion that at least we’re not putting people’s lives at risk with this work.

The other aspect of the book that I found interesting was the fact that it was decided that the astronauts for the Space Shuttle program were going to look more like the general US population, so not only white men. Women and people of color were recruited into the program. Their stories were familiar to those that have studied racism and misogyny. They experienced a lot of challenges on their paths to becoming astronauts, even in the 1970s and 80s, after the civil rights movements of the 1960s. This quote from the book says it all: “Judy Resnik had been assigned to provide live commentary from the TV studio NBC had set up at the Cape, and smiled gamely through an early-morning interview in which Tom Brokaw asked her about “romance in space,” and whether she was “too cute to be an astronaut,”

Rachel Slade of the New York Times book review described this book much better than I can: “In Higginbotham’s deft hands, the human element — sometimes heroic, sometimes cloaked in doublespeak and bluster — shines through the many technical aspects of this story, a constant reminder that every decision was made by people weighing risks versus expediency, their minds distorted by power, money, politics and yes-men. It’s a universal story that transcends time, from Napoleon’s decision to attack Russia to the recent Boeing 737 Max debacle…At the end of the book, the thing that disturbed me most was that I didn’t remember the story of the Columbia. Some 17 years after the Challenger disaster, the wing of the Columbia orbiter was hit by a piece of foam insulation during launch, a recurring problem for the shuttle program that had yet to be addressed. During the two weeks that Columbia orbited Earth with seven astronauts aboard, engineers debated whether the vessel had been compromised by the impact. Predictably, the official determination was that it would be fine. Upon re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, the craft broke apart, killing everyone aboard. How quickly we forget.”

Here are some lines:

When asked what he was thinking about when preparing for launch aboard his Mercury-Redstone rocket, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had infamously replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.”

Instead of $14 billion, Congress and the hard-headed bureaucrats of Nixon’s new Office of Management and Budget agreed to allocate just $5.5 billion for development of the new vehicle. Based on NASA’s existing calculations, this amount was far too little money to create an experimental machine that would require the research and development of so much untried technology. But the NASA chiefs—who had come to believe that the future of US manned spaceflight, and the agency itself, depended on committing to an ambitious new spacecraft—agreed, regardless. It was the first of many fatal compromises.

The delays and disappointments of Columbia’s stumbling path to orbit couldn’t have come at a worse moment for the shuttle, NASA, or the United States. The growing sense of crisis on President Carter’s watch had only escalated since the beginning of 1979, when the Islamic revolution in Iran had added a new oil shock and spiking gasoline prices to the already roiling inflation at home and political turmoil abroad. In March, the reactor meltdown in the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania added to Americans’ feeling that they were at the mercy of forces beyond their control, and their dwindling confidence in their nation’s ability to master technology with which it had once led the world.

“Guys,” he said, “you probably don’t want to hear this, but I’m going to tell you anyway. It is my technical opinion that the precipitating cause of this event was temperature.” There was silence; then, from somewhere deep in the room, Boisjoly heard a single voice respond. “You’re right, Rog,” an unseen engineer said. “We don’t want to hear that.”

the concluding chart Lund had drafted represented the unanimous recommendation of all fourteen managers and engineers who would eventually gather in the MIC room, including even Jerry Mason and Cal Wiggins: Do not launch.

“It’s time for a management decision,” he said again. “Based on all the evidence that’s presented to me, I think that we should go ahead and launch.”

Back in New Hampshire, seniors at McAuliffe’s high school in Concord had again packed the main auditorium, holding banners, balloons, and noisemakers, joining thousands of other students in schools across the country to witness the launch live on the feed from NASA TV. “All of America is watching and waiting,” CNN’s space correspondent Tom Mintier reported in a morning news update.

At seventy-two seconds, the tank lost its structural integrity and tore apart, crumpling and disgorging the remaining liquid hydrogen—more than 300,000 gallons of it—which bloomed into a colossal fireball. Released from its aft anchors, the right-hand booster swiveled around its upper attachment point. Its nose smashed into the right wing of Challenger, and the liquid oxygen tank, tearing it open.

Emotionally exhausted, ashamed at being forced to admit how NASA and Thiokol had failed, and still distraught by the unnecessary deaths of seven Americans, when he stepped down from the stand McDonald found himself fighting back tears. As he walked to the door, Sally Ride rose from her seat to embrace him. “God, that took a lot of guts,” she said.

Seduced by their own mythos, and blind to the subtleties of engineering complexity that none of them fully understood, the nation’s smartest minds had unwittingly sent seven men and women to their deaths.

Tumbling gently in free fall, it took two minutes and forty-five seconds for the broken section of Challenger to hit the Atlantic, and it now seemed possible that the seven members of the crew might have been alive the whole way down.

In the years since the accident, almost every senior- and mid-level manager involved in approving the launch of Challenger had resigned or been reassigned;

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board delivered its report on August 26, 2003, and concluded that many of the lessons of the Challenger disaster had gone unheeded.

Beaver Creek Trail near Ward – Nearly all the trails in the Indian Peaks Wilderness and Brainard Lake Recreation Area are east-west trails that take you high into the mountains to view spectacular alpine lakes. The Beaver Creek trail is one of the few north-south trails in the area. I wanted to hike part of it on this day. My plans were to go 5 miles in (total of 10 miles), starting at Brainard Lake. But sometimes the month of June at high elevations will deny any plan one might have. After 3.2 miles, there was way too much snow/melting water/mud to safely proceed any further. I had already expended lots of energy walking off trail to avoid some of the obstacles. So I decided to call it a day…a very beautiful and spectacular day.

At mile one I reached the Mitchell lake trailhead which is where I’ve hiked many times to Mitchell Lake and Blue Lakes. At 2.3 miles I reached the timberline and views started exploding all around me. At 2.6 miles I reached the highest point of today’s walk at 11,400 feet. This also where the turnoff is to Mount Audubon which I hiked back in July of 2022. A few yards past this junction I stopped for lunch (brunch really) where I had a great view of Longs Peak and Beaver Reservoir. I continued on, and after half a mile gave up trying to walk around the mud and the snow and the water. This will have to wait until August.

But I tell you what, the views along this trail above the tree line are stupendous. I think I was able to experience most of this beauty because the trail was eventually headed back down into the trees. I would like to hike from Beaver Reservoir up to the point where I turned around here, so maybe a possible August or September hike. I saw some marmots up high and spotted a big bull moose very far below me in a meadow. Otherwise, no big animal sightings on this day; just the beauty of the high mountains and very few people. Also I got rained on the last mile back to the trailhead, so out came the rain gear; the thunder was echoing.