Posts by Peter Howardson

Lesbians turn on lesbians in battle of Lesbos

Sappho and Aphrodite

I thought that lesbians got their name from the island being associated with the poet Sappho, who lived there and who was particularly noted for her poetry about other women. Anglicised references to her, obviously much later, referred to her as Sappho of Lesbos, giving English the words 'sapphic' and 'lesbian' through association with her.

Aphrodite would have had a big edge over her in a fight, being divine. Not exactly a fair fight. Although maybe Sappho could have taken inspiration from Sc...I'm going to have to look up the spelling..Scheherazade and repeatedly put Aphrodite off by composing poetry about her but not finishing it.

I could have brought the tone of this post down by ending it with the question "or did you typo when you wrote 'kick'?", but I won't.

Oh dear :)

NASA preps robots for future fake moon landings

A bad entry into the fiction market

I hope the writer was just trying to be funny, because if not then they've made of fool of themselves by repeating the strangely popular story that all the moon landings were faked on Earth.

i) There is no evidence that the landings were faked. You can find lots of "this proves it's a fake" claims online, but all that they prove is a lack of understanding of the circumstances on the moon and/or of physics.

ii) There is evidence that the landings took place, particularly the artificial items on the moon - how did they get there? Also there's the scale of the alleged hoax - thousands of people were involved and not one of them has ever spoken up? How likely is that? On the videos, you can see dust moving under low gravity without air...how is NASA supposed to have faked that over a large enough area in 1969?

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html will do for a start for anyone who has been taken in by this story.