JavaScript has two globally available metods for working with Base64: atob() and btoa(). Their names clearly look like they were borrowed from older languages. In C, for instance, the standard library includes functions like atoi and atof:

#include <stdlib.h>

char str[] = "123";
int num = atoi(str); // 123

atoi means ASCII to integer, and atof means ASCII to float (though in reality it returns a double).

So what do you think the atob function does in JavaScript? ASCII to Base64? In other words, converting a regular string into a Base64 string? Nope! It does the exact opposite: it converts a Base64 string into a "regular" string. And btoa, in turn, converts a regular string into Base64!

console.log(btoa('Famabara')); // 'RmFtYWJhcmE='
console.log(atob('RmFtYWJhcmE')); // 'Famabara'

Who thought it was a good idea to swap the names like that? Love JS.

Humans have been flying to space since 1961 - that's over 60 years now. These days, we even have tourist spaceflights. In sci-fi movies, people travel between planets, stars, and even galaxies.

But what is space from the perspective of aviation and astronautics? Technically, it starts somewhere between 100 and 122 kilometers above Earth's surface. The range exists because different organizations define the boundary of space slightly differently.

Is 120 kilometers really that high? The average diameter of our planet is 12,742 kilometers - quite a lot. Below, I drew a simple picture to show what a spaceflight looks like to scale:

See that tiny red dot? That’s our trip to "outer space". Not exactly impressive, right? For comparison, the International Space Station orbits at an altitude of about 418.2 km - on this scale, its point would only be a couple of pixels higher.

Human technology is still in its infancy. Legally, we can say we fly to space - but in reality, it looks more like what you see above. As for interplanetary travel, so far, only our robots have made the journey.

I have a friend who believes in the moon landing conspiracy - you know, one of those people who think the Americans never actually went to the Moon.

He's convinced the whole thing was staged, masterfully filmed by movie directors. Arguing with him is almost pointless - he says every photo is fake. The fact that even Soviet scientists never questioned the authenticity of the American Moon landing doesn't matter to him.

But there's one argument that made him stop and think. No, I didn't manage to change his mind, but at least I got him to shut up for a while - confused him, so to speak.

The argument went like this: "So what, they faked all their Moon landings?"
Funny thing is, he didn't even know that the Americans went to the Moon not once, but several times.

Here's the list of all Moon missions:
Apollo 11 - July 16, 1969
Apollo 12 - November 14, 1969
Apollo 14 - January 31, 1971
Apollo 15 - July 26, 1971
Apollo 16 - April 16, 1972
Apollo 17 - December 7, 1972

So according to the "logic" of Moon landing deniers, the Americans didn't fake it just once - they supposedly faked it six times, along with all the photos, videos, and even the Moon rocks they brought back.