Time for Gram’s digital birthday card, as today marks her 116th birthday. Here she is with her daughters, at what is presumably my older aunt’s first communion:

This might have been some other religious occasion– I’d know better if I attended Mass more than every third C&E– but it’s still a great photo.

Happy birthday!

Today would have been my grandfather’s 126th birthday, so I hereby post this year’s edition of the digital birthday card. Here he is with the family:

Based on the front axle and the bolts in the exterior dashboard, I’d say this was taken at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry in the early-to-mid-50s. The exhibit, “Yesterday’s Main Street,” depicted a 1910-ish city street scene, including a bunch of storefronts that would have been the bee’s knees back then. Grampa was old enough to comment on the veracity of the exhibit, though I don’t know if he would’ve been in downtown Chicago in 1910. Either way, it would’ve been neat to hear the commentary.

Don’t know for sure what kind of car that is, but while digging around online I learned that Sears used to sell cars manufactured by Lincoln. That shouldn’t be surprising; they used to sell houses, so why not cars?

Happy birthday!

I’m grateful that Artemis II has gone pretty smoothly so far. Not perfectly, of course; there were some problems with the toilet and Microsoft Outlook, and I’ll refrain from making the jokes that are already running through Outlook users’ minds.

The public communications– the announcements, the dialogues, the speeches– have generally been beautifully scripted. I don’t mean scripted in the paranoid and conspiratorial sense that some flat Earther might, I mean in the sense of conveying thoughtful sentiments and callbacks to past missions.

The line that has struck me most so far came just after the Orion capsule Integrity broke Apollo 13’s old record for greatest distance from Earth. The Canadian mission specialist Hansen spoke for the crew:

From the cabin of Integrity here, as we surpass the furthest distance humans have ever traveled from planet Earth, we do so in honoring the extraordinary efforts and feats of our predecessors in human space exploration. We will continue our journey even further into space before Mother Earth succeeds in pulling us back to everything that we hold dear. But we most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived.

“Make sure this record is not long-lived.” I heard that and flashed back to a certain few lines from President Reagan’s Challenger speech, which of course were in a completely different context:

We’ve grown used to wonders in this [the 20th] 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.

May the new wonders come soon enough and often enough that we grow used to seeing these records broken, and may we keep appreciating them.

I pray that the Integrity crew and capsule come home safely.

I hope that Artemis III and IV go to plan, which will mean humans walking on the Moon in 2028.

And of course, I hope the whole thing speeds up enough that when the time comes for me to slip the surly bonds of this Earth– later this century or early in the next– it’ll be because I’m blasting off towards retirement on Mars. Luxury suite, caveside resort, daily bridge.

…

I was going to title this “A great gig in the sky,” but then I heard the President’s phone call to the capsule and changed it up.

Many, many moons ago it was impressed upon me that either by coincidence or Providence, the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations were both published in 1776. Thus was I embarrassed to realize that amidst all the hubbub about America’s upcoming 250th, I neglected to watch for the anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations. Whoops. Said anniversary was two weeks ago on the ninth, so at least I got the month right.

Non-econ nerds probably won’t care one way or the other, and chances are most econ nerds won’t care either, but… I do.

Upon realizing that I missed the anniversary, I immediately flashed back to when I taught economics long ago, in the before times. I flashed back to placing blank sheets of transparency film atop my printed notes and feeding them into the thermofax–

the crackle of the film as I peeled it off the paper, hoping for cleanly burned, legible letters and numbers and diagrams–

my silent prayers that the overhead projector bulb wouldn’t burn out, and the students’ vocal prayers that it would–

timing the lecture so that the heat wouldn’t blacken the transparency beyond legibility–

Anyhow, I dug around for some of those old notes and transparencies. Not many of either survive to the present day. But the few I did find included the two best-known excerpts from the book, which Adam Smith wrote in plain enough English that modern high school freshmen could grasp it:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love and never talk to them of our necessities, but of their advantages.” The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter II

“[An individual] neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… He intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” Ibid, Book IV, Chapter II

The rest is worth reading, or at least worth reading about.

…

To bring things full circle: in the same book, published during the Revolutionary War, Adam Smith called for Britain to grant the American colonies their independence, but he seemed to believe that Britain wouldn’t actually do so. In Book IV, Chapter VII, Part III, he wrote this about the American revolutionaries:

“From shopkeepers, trades men, and attorneys, they are become statesmen and legislators, and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.”

An excellent call.

…

Very tired. More later.