Take a look and you'll see into your imagination

So, a bit about the 1978 Astronaut Class selection, from the book I'm reading:

Dr [ Frank ] Harnden, who was in the sixth group of candidates, also recalls the experience of two psychological tests. ``The `shrink` had a typical psychologist's office but with a somewhat disturbing difference. Although the upholstered armchair we were invited to sit in appeared normal, it wasn't; the whole chair was unusually large. It was so wide that one could not rest both arms on the chair simultaneously. And it was so high that one's feet did not reach the floor but instead dangled off the front. Presumably, we guinea pigs were expected to strike a `passable` response to this awkward situation. The other psych test was more fun: we got to choose a favorite song and favorite animal. My favorite song was Gordon Lightfoot's `Canadian Railroad Trilogy` and favorite animal, a seagull --- I'd recently read Richard Bach's account of Jonathan Livingston Seagull's flying.''

So I know it is traditional in STEM types, and in astronaut types, to have this dismissive, sneering view of the medical and especially the psychological experiments and experimenters. And I don't want to mindlessly join that. While it's easy to imagine them as fussing excessively over slight issues (who cares if a candidate might develop diabetes, if he hasn't got it now, and it's not like we don't even in 1978 have decent methods of keeping it under control?) I appreciate that they're mostly trying to anticipate problems in a circumstance that we can't perfectly simulate and that, if they get it wrong, would wreck a mission costing tens of millions of dollars (at least!), and maybe kill people in a manner that would be worldwide news and would be scrutinized and second-guessed for decades to come. So you're primed to try out every possible test you can imagine for every combination of circumstances you can imagine. Still, got to say, screening experiments like ``can you sit in the awkwardly large chair'' do not make it easy to defend the medical and psychological teams.

(Asking about favorite songs and animals seem like ... probably not going to turn up much. Except that a person may have an interesting reason why they like this or that, and discussing that could say something about how a person engages with the world, which might be good to know when you're considering locking someone up with six other people in a small airplane for three weeks.)

Now let's get back on the Aurora trail at Glenlore.

Continuing on the trail. I believe the banner here marked getting to a new quarter of the experience.

One of the few fairly open fields alongside of the trail. There were a set of posts that, when approached, would cause a tone, and would throw light into the far distance like this.

And here we enter into a spiral-cylinder wireframe tunnel. There's one like it on the bridge at a park along the riverfront downtown in Lansing, although its lights are not animated the way this one is.

Trivia: HMS Sheffield, the first Royal Navy vessel sunk by enemy action since the Second World War, did not sink until six days after the bomb that hit it exploded. (The ship was being towed home.)
Source: Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: NASA's First Space Shuttle Astronaut Selection: Redefining the Right Stuff, David J Shayler, Colin Burgess.

PS: How February 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog, always the most popular thing I publish in a month, for some reason.