The 23rd anniversary of the world not being destroyed

Wikipedia is one of my favorite sites. In its pages are an impossible wealth of information about darn near anything. For instance, on September 26th, 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet soldier monitoring his country's satellite early warning system, averted a fullscale nuclear war.

A few weeks before, their air force had shot down a Korean airliner that had strayed too far into Soviet airspace. 269 passengers had died onboard that plane, many of them American. The KGB at that time sent out a message to all their operatives, telling them to prepare for a nuclear attack. The entire government was on edge, preparing for a quick retaliation from an attack, and had a hairtrigger mentality. At 12:40 in the morning, Stanislov Petrov saw on his early warning system an American missile (which was a glitch in the computer). He had a few moments to inform his superiors of an imminent nuclear attack, but figured that if America was going to launch a nuclear attack, they'd send a lot of missiles all at once, not just one lone missile. He saw another one, and another, a total of five missiles being launched, all of which were computer glitches. He chose to trust his intuition and his instincts over his training, and saved the world from a nuclear cataclysm.

For disobeying orders and avoiding Armageddon, he was not rewarded, but neither was he severely punished. He was given a reprimand for improper filing of paperwork and reassigned to a less sensitive post, as his superiors found him to be unreliable. He now is retired in a small Russian town, and does not consider himself the hero that he is.

This information was made public in 1996, but very few people know about it. In 2004, he was awarded the World Citizen Award and given US$1000. In early 2006, he recived another World Citizen Award in a trip to the United Nations. A documentary will be realeased shortly (late 2006), called The Man Who Saved the World.

Incidentally, three months before was the movie WarGames, in which American missile command was given over to a computer, and through a series of apparent glitches in the program, a nuclear disaster almost happened. A few months after the event, ABC released the miniseries The Day After, in which people were suffering from the aftermath of a American/Soviet nuclear war.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, everyone! It's not a white Christmas here in Chicagoland, because we've had three, count 'em, three days above freezing. It would be, because it rained all yesterday, but that's just fine with me. Given the choice between a white Christmas and comparitively pleasant temperatures, I'll take the pleasant temperatures.

I've actually had all the Christmas celebrations I'm going to have already. My brother was up from Chattanooga last week, and my sister was going on vacation early on Friday, so we had our family gathering on Thursday. Heidi's family celebrates on Christmas Eve. After church today, we'll be heading up and spending some time with my mom, just so she's not alone on Christmas, but it's more a get-together than a Christmas celebration. Among the festivities today will include doing laundry and assembling a lego X-Wing for my nephew.

However, on Friday, Heidi and I got to enjoy the 45-degree temperatures and go downtown and bum around for a while. We saw this fascinating show at the planetarium on the Bethlehem Star, and their theories surrounding what the whole thing probably was (which coincide with my theories). Supposedly, the Magi was a common term for the Zoroastrian Astronomers of the time, and they were big into the astrological importance of things, which explains why foreigners had to come to Jerusalem to talk about the wonders in the sky; the Hebrews were frbidden to practice astrology. Please note that I'm going to delve into astrology here; I DO NOT believe in astrology, but the Zoroastrians did, and they came from Persia to Israel, and Matthew wrote about it. Anyway, Leo was supposed to be an important constellation in the Hebrew context, referring to the Lion of Judah. Regulus is a star in that constellation, a star commonly associated with kingship. Juipter was also associated with kingship, and Venus was associated with birth. A convergence of planets was when two planets came close together, and was considered important. Anyway, Jesus was probably born between 3BC and 2BC, and about a year prior to that, there was a convergence of Jupiter and Venus right near Regulus. Since Venus is a fast-moving planet, it moved away from Jupiter as Juipter slowly passed Regulus, but, because of the Earth's movement, Jupiter appears to double back for a little bit. The Zoroastrians knew this, but where it doubled back was interesting. It passed Regulus, backed up across Regulus again, and then passed back again, so crossing Regulus three times over the course of it's trek across the sky, and by the time it got to the western end (Israel is west of Persia), Venus came back in conjunction with Jupiter, but not just nearby, Venus came so close it sat right on top of Jupiter making one dot. Now, the zoroastrians had some prophecy about a king being born that would save the world around this time, but the prophecy was evidently a little vague about the location of the king, so this was pretty big news to these guys. Matthew never says the star guided them to Jerusalem, whch would make sense, because they headed out to Jerusalem to figure out some details, and the whole shebang moved under the western horizon. At this point, the story estimates actual months that the Magi moved out from various locations, because they had to go to Jerusalem to find out who the king is supposed to be, and Herod had to search the scriptures. If they left Jerusalem in Septebmber of 3BC (I think), the "star" would have "gone ahead of them;" the Regulus/Jupiter/Venus combo rose up in the east about that time, and if you're heading south and looking at a star/planet combo to the east, it looks like it's moving along with you. Kinda clever stuff. Still a theory, but a well-thought-out one.