seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Cyprus
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Latvia
seen from Brazil
Sir Alan Cooper of Pirate's Swoop, son of Alanna the Lioness and twin brother of Alianne Crow. Made his hair I think a touch too red oh well lol.
Hoping to make a fancomic (maybe!!) with him as a main character alongside my elemental oc Ammë (daughter/creation of the elemental Chitral) 🤗
May 15, 1963.
Astronaut Gordon Cooper climbed into a capsule barely larger than a phone booth and launched into space aboard Faith 7.
The mission was simple on paper:
Orbit Earth 22 times. Stay in space for a full day. Come home alive.
For most of the flight, everything worked perfectly.
Then, on the 19th orbit, the warning lights came on.
First, a faulty sensor falsely reported reentry.
Then the electrical system failed.
One by one, the automated controls died.
Guidance system: dead. Orientation system: dead. Reentry calculations: dead.
At 165 miles above Earth, Gordon Cooper suddenly had no functioning instruments to bring him home.
And reentry is unforgiving.
Too shallow, and the capsule skips off the atmosphere into space forever.
Too steep, and friction turns it into a fireball.
The difference between life and death was fractions of a degree.
Mission Control could only watch.
So Cooper became the computer.
He drew reference marks on the capsule window with a pen.
He stared at the stars he had memorized before launch and used them to orient the spacecraft by eye.
He strapped a wristwatch to his arm and timed everything manually.
Then he did the math in his head.
No autopilot. No navigation system. No backup computer.
Just a man, a watch, and the stars.
At exactly the right second, Cooper fired the retrorockets manually.
The capsule dropped into Earth’s atmosphere.
For several minutes, communication vanished as plasma wrapped the spacecraft in fire.
Nobody on Earth could contact him.
Then the parachutes opened.
Faith 7 splashed down just 4.4 miles from the recovery ship USS Kearsarge — the most accurate splashdown of the entire Mercury program.
Later, Cooper described it simply:
“I used my wristwatch for time, my eyeballs out the window for attitude.”
That’s it.
In one of the most dangerous moments in early spaceflight history, a human being outperformed the machines.
We live in a world obsessed with automation and software.
But Gordon Cooper’s flight is a reminder that when everything breaks, the final backup system is still the human mind.
Calm under pressure. Thinking clearly. Making the call when nobody else can.
It was true in 1963.
It still is.
2017 CHM Fellow Alan Cooper is best known as the “Father of Visual Basic,” possibly the most widely used visual programming environment in the software industry. But Cooper had significant accomplishments both before and after independently developing and selling what became Visual Basic to Microsoft in 1988. Cooper had been one of the first software entrepreneurs of the personal computer industry, alongside such giants as Bill Gates and Gary Kildall. And Cooper’s later work on interaction design blazed a trail for the user experience designers who help make our apps easier to use today.
Aka Sir Alan Cooper (son of George and Alanna, twin brother of Alianne Crow) and my Elemental OC Ammë!
Ammë was created after her father, Chitral, gave the Dominion Jewel to Alanna. However, the young elemental was never satisfied living in the Roof of the World, secluded from the human world, for despite her father forbidding her spirit to go amongst the humans, for reasons he would never divulge, Ammë developed a deep desire to live amongst the humans as a human herself.
When she saves Sir Alan Cooper from certain death while he was traveling the Chitral Pass, bonding the two together, her father reluctantly grants her a human body and the permission to travel the human world, so long as Sir Alan accompanies her as her guide...
Aka, my "The Little Mermaid" *inspired* Tortall fic/fancomic (?) that I really want to write one day!!
When ur girlfriend is an elemental spirit, the daughter of Chitral and sister to the Dominion Jewel... and she can literally descend from the wings of the wind into ur arms 🥹
Aka Sir Alan Cooper (son of George and Alanna, twin brother of Alianne Crow) and my Elemental OC Ammë
I hope to write a fic and/or a fancomic for their story soon :D
Basically, she was created to keep her father company in the absence of the dominion jewel, but always dreamed of entering the human realms as a human herself. Her father tasks Alan with being her guide through the human world, granting her a human body so she can fully experience the trials and joys of humanhood. So despite being created from a drop of essence from Chitral's own spirit, as a human she does has some limitations on her powers :) Still pretty powerful tho. Just not as much as she would be if she wasn't in a human body, as the limitations of human magic apply to her to a degree in this form.
Dances for Two brings piano magic (May 23, 2019)
T&T’s first ever two-piano duet recital, Dances for Two, will take place on May 25 and 26, at the Department of Creative and Festival Arts on Gordon Street. The concert will be presented by pianists Rosie Ward and Alan Cooper, and will also feature a number of vocalists and instrumentalists, with part proceeds going to the University of the Southern Caribbean’s (USC) Music Scholarship…
View On WordPress
Alan Cooper: Value of a prototype
“The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself.” —Alan Cooper.
"Lasciare Andare: Imparare a Lasciare Andare il Passato e Vivere Serenamente Nel Presente" di Alan Cooper. Una Guida per Abbracciare il Presente e Costruire un Futuro Luminoso. Recensione di Alessandria today
"Lasciare Andare" di Alan Cooper è una guida pratica e ispiratrice per chiunque desideri liberarsi del peso del passato e vivere una vita più serena e appagante.
“Lasciare Andare” di Alan Cooper è una guida pratica e ispiratrice per chiunque desideri liberarsi del peso del passato e vivere una vita più serena e appagante. Pubblicato il 10 novembre 2023, questo libro offre strumenti e tecniche efficaci per gestire lo stress, affrontare la rabbia e gli attaccamenti, e migliorare le relazioni interpersonali. La narrazione di Cooper è chiara e accessibile,…
