This is Vince Needham's personal page.
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New views of Mercury

Mercury and the Nobels

Early on the morning of Tuesday, 07 October the MESSENGER spacecraft made its second flyby of our innermost planet, Mercury. This flyby, a prelude to MESSENGER's eventual orbital mission, revealed parts of Mercury never seen before by a spacecraft.

At about the same time, the Swedish Academy of Sciences was making phone calls to this year's recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics (alas, not to me...). The prize is shared between Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi, and Toshihide Maskawa for work on symmetery breaking in subatomic particle physics. Visit the Nobel web site above to find out what that means!

The navigation bar to your left is your guide to my pages, and special content is highlighted below. Watch this space for the latest news!

Cricket Still Jacobs Tubbs

Genealogy

The Needham genealogy was updated on 20 January 2007. There are quite a lot of changes, which are outlined on the introductory page of the site. Besides updating the lineage, there are three new photo galleries and a variety of other added documents.

The Simmons family tree has finally received its long-promised update as of 20 June 2007. The big news here is the discovery that Daniel Boone is my sixth-great-uncle. The Boone line is a well-researched one, so many new families have been added to the database.

I've just discovered that I'm a ninth cousin of Presidential candidate Barack Obama. His mother, from Kansas, was a Dunham and descended of Jonathan Singletary/Dunham (1639-1724). I've also learned of a similar relationships to the Bushes, by way of John Prescott (1604-1681), and to Richard Nixon on both sides of the family through Henry Howland (father of Pilgrim John Howland) and Martha Strode (a grandparent of Daniel Boone). I'll get all the details posted to the family sites soon.

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon

Space Exploration

Every April Kansas State University hosts a Boy Scout merit badge conference, where local experts counsel Scouts concerning a variety of topics. I've counseled the Space Exploration merit badge for several years now. The first half of the class includes a PowerPoint presentation focusing on the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. After that, we go out and launch model rockets (usually into the teeth of a strong Kansas spring breeze!).

Several of my presentations are archived here. The requirements were finally updated last year, but since the Vision for Space Exploration is revolutionizing our approach to space travel, I'll be rather freely interpreting things to stay current.

What Else Is New?

Vince's word cloud This page's content in mid-July seen as a "word cloud", generated with Wordle. I also created one for the JRM web site's "About Us" page.

What I'm Reading

  • Stealing God's Thunder, Philip Dray, Random House, 2005
  • The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond, Harper-Collins, 1992

Last updated on Tuesday, 07-Oct-2008