It's one of those funny things that you really can't seem to quantify or prove, but nevertheless that everyone seems to agree upon: the older you get, the shorter a year gets. No one knows why. But everyone I've ever talked to about it agrees that it's so.
Anyway -- here we are, again. Another new year. Another old one gone to the discard pile. Except that it doesn't really feel all that new. That's something else that happens as you get older. I remember there used to be a magical feeling about approaching midnight on New Year's Eve. Like there was something special about the numbers rolling over to zero. That vanished for me somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five, not entirely sure where.
Having a teenager might have had something to do with it. That'll drive you to cynicism, alcoholism, or (often) both.
But I'm here to tell you, it gets better. They do grow up. They even -- Deo Gratia -- become rational adults.
And so, without further ado, fifteen observations for 2015.
ONE -- I'm going to be doubting the wisdom of this motif come 2020 or thereabouts. Maybe even sooner.
TWO -- Henceforth, I will be referring to Kim Jong-Un as The Great Hambino. When his government stops acting like a hobo on crank, he can have his name back.
THREE -- Big year ahead in spaceflight. For me, the highlight will probably be New Horizon's Pluto/Charon encounter in July. They've woken the ship up from the eight-year hibernation it's been in since the Jupiter fly-by in 2007, and the team is getting ready to begin its science mission in February. This is an encounter that means a lot for those of us who grew up when Pluto was the ninth planet, and to date the only one we haven't seen close up. That ends in July.
FOUR -- But wait, there's more! Dawn will be entering orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres in March, having left Vesta in September of 2012. Despite having been launched a year later than New Horizons, Dawn will end up being the first spacecraft to have a close encounter with a dwarf planet. On the other hand, Ceres may not be as interesting as Pluto ... but then again, it might. We don't know ahead of time what we'll find, which is part of what makes the trip worthwhile.
FIVE -- While the Dragon 2.0 won't fly this year, tomorrow morning we'll get to find out if they can land a Falcon first stage on an autonomous ocean barge or not. SpaceX is saying they have a 50-50 shot of this thing working right the first time. But I sure wouldn't put money on them not being able to figure it out within a flight or two. Once they work the bugs out, this will allow SpaceX to recover, refurbish, and re-use an enormous chunk of flight hardware that everyone else just throws away. Good news for SpaceX, as well as its shareholders and customers; mildly worrisome for everyone else in the business.
SIX -- It will be a while before anything is known for sure, but my guess is that Scaled Composites will identify what went wrong with VSS Enterprise, fix it, and be ready to go back into test by the end of the year. But that depends on a number of things -- the final NTSB report and whether or not Richard Branson wants to press ahead being the two most important ones.
SEVEN -- And last but not least, the planet-hunter Kepler isn't down for the count, after all. They've managed to work out a mode of operation that will allow some observations to go forward, even with its reduced capability. It may be several years before my #4 observation from last year comes to fruition -- that'll probably require much more capable sensors than we currently have -- but I'm still optimistic we'll find a habitable world Out There fairly soon.
EIGHT -- Nothing new to report on the fusion energy front ... yet. But keep an eye on this. The fact that a company as big as Lockheed has laid its name and reputation on the line tells me that they've got a solid path forward. The odds are that we won't hear anything new until it's demonstration time. This points back to items #5 through #7 from last year, and I'll say it again: while concern is warranted about our power future, panic isn't. More and more, it's looking like we'll have the tools we need when we need them.
NINE -- This is a partial call-back to #5 above ... but I just wanted to point out how far 3-D printing has come. The thrusters they're going to use both for contingency aborts and precision landings? Made by 3-D printing, with metal. Not plastic, metal. Also, a 3-D printer has been delivered to the International Space Station. I wasn't aware that was even possible. Early 3-D printing technology required gravity in order to do its thing. Apparently, they've figured out a way around that. Interestingly enough, the first thing they made with their new 3-D printer was a part for the printer ... which tells me we're that much closer to being able to build a machine that can rebuild itself. Cool, and scary, all at the same time.
TEN -- Please, merciful God, spare us Clinton vs. Bush in 2016. Surely there are other candidates. But I fear that may be how the primaries shake out.
ELEVEN -- What a difference a year makes. Several years of 8-8 futility, and all of a sudden the Cowboys turn into an unstoppable-on-the-road juggernaut. Which sets up an interesting situation this coming Sunday in Green Bay -- the irresistible force meets the immovable object. The Cowboys are undefeated on the road. The Packers are undefeated at home. One of those streaks ends on Sunday.
TWELVE -- Somewhat related: is anyone out there still questioning the wisdom of drafting Zack Martin instead of Johnny Manziel? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
THIRTEEN -- While the lower gas prices are nice, something's going on behind the scenes that no one's quite figured out yet. We know that Saudi Arabia spun their taps wide open, what we don't know is why. There are a few possibilities, ranging from the highly likely to the improbable. Increasing the supply drops the price, that's obvious. Question is, who benefits? And who's hurt? Is this intended to put some hurt on the Iranians? Maybe, and a weakened Iran would be a good thing for the Saudis. Do they want to put a squeeze on the Russians? Maybe, insofar as they've provided Iran with backing. Do they want to drive prices low enough to put the resurgent American oil industry in a bind? I tend to think that's an unintended consequence, but I'm just guessing. Low prices put advanced recovery techniques, such as fracking and tar sands, at an unfavorable place on the price curve. But if they see that as such a threat, then ... maybe they're drawing down low enough that it's "smoke 'em while you got 'em" time. But if their reserves were getting that low, the smart play would be to lean it out as long as possible, wouldn't it? In any case, this bears close attention, and you should probably keep an eye on it.
FOURTEEN -- When Autocorrect gets good enough to make this site obsolete, then it's time to worry about Artificial Intelligence.
FIFTEEN -- (Added 11Jan15) Yep. Definitely regretting this motif.
Showing posts with label General. Show all posts
Showing posts with label General. Show all posts
Monday, January 05, 2015
Friday, October 31, 2014
Happy Halloween!
There are some people who claim that the last 20-odd minutes of 2001 were originally intended to have a score by Pink Floyd. It's hard to disagree.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
Friday, October 10, 2014
Small World, Musical Division
You never know what you're going to find when you go down a rabbit hole.
Each of the armed services has a different scheme for aircraft identification. They all use tail numbers. But they have two different ways of coming up with those numbers. The Army and Air Force use the same kind of scheme, where aircraft are identified by fiscal year, and then by sequence within the year.
If you look close at the tail, you'll see black letters "AF", then under those the number 67. This aircraft was procured in FY67, and was the 463rd aircraft procured that year.
The Navy doesn't do that.
If you look very carefully under the horizontal tail -- and I do mean carefully -- you'll see the number 165675. That, very simply, means this is the 165,675th aircraft the Navy has bought since 1940. It's a nice, straightforward system. The downside is that you can't tell by BuNo when an airplane was bought ... but that's a fairly minor quibble.
A couple of weeks ago, I found a web site where you can look up all of those Navy numbers. All of them. So, I got to thinking ... Could I find the TBF Avenger my Dad flew on in WWII? (Flew on, not flew -- he worked the ball turret.)
That list contains the disposition of each airframe, when known. And that first run of Avengers makes for mighty depressing reading. Those that didn't crash or ditch either fell off the catapult, or fell overboard, or were shot down, or just took off for a sortie one day and no one ever saw it again. It made you wonder how anyone survived a tour of duty in Naval Aviation, back in the day. But I did find out a few interesting tidbits that I hadn't known before. For one, air wings went from one ship to another with some frequency. Not all the time, mind you, but if one ship was laid up for repairs its air wing would embark upon an available ship. Which is how the USS Santee, CVE-29, was carrying Torpedo Squadron 26, that you'd ordinarily expect to be embarked upon CVE-26, USS Sangamon. The other discovery came when I stumbled upon a web site devoted to the former sailors aboard the Santee. What I found ... wasn't at all what I was expecting.
See that kid with the saxophone, kneeling on the right? You may have heard of him.
Yes, Tito Puente, the King of Latin Music himself, played with the ship's band when my Dad was in the Navy. And he never once mentioned this. I'm guessing it's because Latin Jazz wasn't his thing. I don't think it was racial. When Chappie James got his fourth star, he told us about how he'd been his crew chief in Korea. But anyway ... I just wish I'd have known sooner.
And that's the other thing I found out: Santana's "Oye Como Va" was a cover. Speaking of covers ...
Anyway, I never did find what I was looking for. But I've found a whole new area of music to enjoy, so it's all good.
Each of the armed services has a different scheme for aircraft identification. They all use tail numbers. But they have two different ways of coming up with those numbers. The Army and Air Force use the same kind of scheme, where aircraft are identified by fiscal year, and then by sequence within the year.
If you look close at the tail, you'll see black letters "AF", then under those the number 67. This aircraft was procured in FY67, and was the 463rd aircraft procured that year.
The Navy doesn't do that.
If you look very carefully under the horizontal tail -- and I do mean carefully -- you'll see the number 165675. That, very simply, means this is the 165,675th aircraft the Navy has bought since 1940. It's a nice, straightforward system. The downside is that you can't tell by BuNo when an airplane was bought ... but that's a fairly minor quibble.
A couple of weeks ago, I found a web site where you can look up all of those Navy numbers. All of them. So, I got to thinking ... Could I find the TBF Avenger my Dad flew on in WWII? (Flew on, not flew -- he worked the ball turret.)
That list contains the disposition of each airframe, when known. And that first run of Avengers makes for mighty depressing reading. Those that didn't crash or ditch either fell off the catapult, or fell overboard, or were shot down, or just took off for a sortie one day and no one ever saw it again. It made you wonder how anyone survived a tour of duty in Naval Aviation, back in the day. But I did find out a few interesting tidbits that I hadn't known before. For one, air wings went from one ship to another with some frequency. Not all the time, mind you, but if one ship was laid up for repairs its air wing would embark upon an available ship. Which is how the USS Santee, CVE-29, was carrying Torpedo Squadron 26, that you'd ordinarily expect to be embarked upon CVE-26, USS Sangamon. The other discovery came when I stumbled upon a web site devoted to the former sailors aboard the Santee. What I found ... wasn't at all what I was expecting.
See that kid with the saxophone, kneeling on the right? You may have heard of him.
Yes, Tito Puente, the King of Latin Music himself, played with the ship's band when my Dad was in the Navy. And he never once mentioned this. I'm guessing it's because Latin Jazz wasn't his thing. I don't think it was racial. When Chappie James got his fourth star, he told us about how he'd been his crew chief in Korea. But anyway ... I just wish I'd have known sooner.
And that's the other thing I found out: Santana's "Oye Como Va" was a cover. Speaking of covers ...
Anyway, I never did find what I was looking for. But I've found a whole new area of music to enjoy, so it's all good.
Friday, January 03, 2014
Fourteen for '14
Once again, we've broken the shrink-wrap on a brand-new calendar. We've seen off a grizzled old Father Time to a well-earned retirement, and welcomed in a smiling Baby New Year -- who, clearly, had no clue what he's in for. But he'll learn soon enough. Probably by, say, noon two days ago. And with that, we'll dive right into fourteen not-so-random thoughts for the New Year.
One: Holy God, Mr. Kim's a bad-un. We knew he was crazy. What we didn't necessarily know until now is that the guy has one hell of a mean streak. We probably should have gotten a clue last year when he had someone executed by mortar -- yes, machine-gunning wasn't enough, they used artillery -- for failing to observe a decent period of mourning for his late father. Then, he had a former girlfriend executed. And late last year, we found out that he had his uncle executed as well, for an alleged putsch-in-progress. Well, now details have leaked about the method. Kim Jong-Un had him thrown in a cage with 120 starving hounds. Along with five of his top aides. It's ... less than encouraging, knowing that someone with these kinds of anger issues even has a nuclear button to push. It's a little more reassuring to know that he's still got a ways to go before they can air-mail a batch of instant sunrise to anyone outside of North Korea.
Two: Nut-cases like Li'l Kim are why theater missile defense is still a damn good idea.
Three: I'm provisionally going to call Number Four from last year proven. The key wording here is, "for a sufficiently generous definition of Earth-like." The closest thing to an Earth-like planet found so far, GJ 1214b, is a lava planet with an atmosphere containing zinc sulfide, postassium chloride ... and water. Still, the fact that we can actually sense its atmospheric composition from 33 light years away -- thirty-three light years! -- is phenomenal. Stupefying, even. On the plus side, Kepler-62e and -62f are about the right size, and about the right distance from their star ... but they're about 1,200 light years away, so it'll be a while before we have enough data to be sure. Again, wording is important: by the terms I laid out last year, that's close enough.
Four: Now, to raise the stakes: We'll find a true Earth-twin, and soon. Right size, right place in its solar system, right atmospheric composition, and yes, oceans of liquid water. Our instruments get better every year. I don't seriously expect it to happen this year ... but I didn't expect Number Four from last year to be proven out so soon, either.
Five: Research at the University of Twente has revealed a new way to wind superconducting cables that will vastly extend their productive life within a fusion reactor. You can read the whole paper here. Solid information about other ongoing projects is still kind of hard to come by. Since the Polywell project is run by the Navy, and the Navy is playing its cards close to the vest, we won't know more until they decide to exercise a contract option to continue the research. Still, it's worth keeping an eye on. Fusion's been a tough nut to crack. But if we can figure it out, our energy problems are just about over.
Six: One researcher, Joe Eck, has produced a superconductor that keeps its superconducting properties up to a temperature of 38C, or about 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Soon, they'll be pushing Tc up to values that will be useful for long-distance high-voltage power lines. Provided, that is, that the material is amenable to use in that capacity. The obvious advantages of superconducting power lines will lead someone to take up that challenge. As I've written before, we lose about two-thirds of the power we generate between the power plant and the end user. Meaning that, if we had superconducting power lines, at a stroke we'd triple the amount of deliverable electrical power. When I first started writing about this, it was a highly speculative prospect. Now, it's just a matter of time.
Seven: The three items above, together, lead me to the conclusion that while concern about our power future is still warranted, panic isn't. Relax, guys. We've got this.
Eight: VSS Enterprise, the successor to SpaceShip One that Burt Rutan is building for Richard Branson, made two powered flights last year, both going supersonic. On the second test flight in September, they tested the "feathering" that they will use for deceleration and descent from flights above 100km altitude. About 370 people have put a deposit down on their ticket, and 80,000 more are on the waiting list. No, I'm not one of them -- the quarter-million-dollar ticket price is too rich for my blood. Besides, the price is bound to come down sooner or later. The reason I'm writing all this is simple: after a few test flights to expand the flight envelope, I expect them to go for broke this year, all the way up to the Big Black. A steady stream of paying customers will follow, and the REAL Space Age will be well underway.
Nine: Meanwhile, Elon Musk looks on and says, "Suborbital? That's cute." DragonRider has passed its initial design reviews with NASA. SpaceX has announced a target price of $140 million, or $20 million per seat if all seven seats are used. So far, SpaceX hasn't announced any space tourist initiatives yet. Their primary customer for DragonRider is NASA, aiming to muscle Soyuz out of the crew rotation business. But the implication is obvious. If Branson proves that a market's there, someone will put two and two together, and pick up a phone to give Mr. Musk a call. It's only a matter of time, now.
Ten: The first astronaut of NASA's Group 20, Michael Hopkins, is aboard the International Space Station, and will be until March 2014. I find it remarkable that it only took two years after completion of training for the first member of Group 20 to get a flight. Then again, it has been four years since selection... Amazingly enough, there was a selection for Group 21, and it completely escaped my notice. The eight astronaut candidates selected in June will join the 47 astronauts currently on the active list. It looks like they're on a four-year rotation now, so we should look for Group 22 to be chosen in June 2017.
Eleven: Total radio silence so far on Johan Bruyneel's arbitration hearing, in the wake of last year's Armstrong scandal. Although, really, it's not fair to call it the Armstrong scandal, since Lance wasn't doing anything anyone else wasn't already doing. He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way by (a) turning all the dials up to 11, and (b) being a total jerk-ass about it. Everybody and his dog was cheating during those years. Mind you, he richly deserved to lose those titles, and no one else really deserved to pick them up. Still, once the decision is released, I expect the other shoe to drop. We know who, what, when, where, and why; we do not know how. How was he able to avoid the testing protocols so long and so well? And how far did the corruption go? We'll probably learn more in the year to come.
Twelve: It'll be interesting to see how well Lolo Jones does in bobsled. Bobsled and luge are my two favorite winter sports. But as you might have noticed, I have a thing for speed, and these are just about the two fastest muscle-powered sports there are.
Thirteen: Another season, another 8-8 finish for the Cowboys. I can haz new GM? Yeah, like Jerry's gonna fire himself. Maybe next year ... but probably not.
Fourteen: But wait! The primaries are coming up for the 2014 Texas Gubernatorial election! So far, the only entrants I've heard of are Wendy Davis on the Democratic side, and Greg Abbott for the Republicans. Presumably, there's going to be some competition, but my gut feeling right now is that it'll be Abbot vs. Davis in November. I'll dig into more detail on that in coming weeks, but this could be a fun one. Also -- looks like Governor Perry's ginning up for another run at the Republican nomination in 2016. No, don't laugh. His performance last time was an aberration. If he manages to show up properly prepped and briefed, he could spring an unpleasant surprise on his competitors.
And that's it for now. Happy New Year, all! And thanks for reading.
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Merry Christmas!
WE THREE CLODS (to the tune of "We Three Kings")
We three clods from Omaha are
Spending Christmas Eve in a car
Driving, drinking, glasses clinking --
Who needs a lousy bar?
Oh, oh ...
Drink to Charlie, drink to Paul
Drink to friends we can't recall
Swerving, speeding,
Signs unheeding --
Drink to anything at all.
We three clods are feeling no pain
Drunk as skunks with booze on the brain
Senses losing, 'till we're cruising
Into a wrong-way lane.
Oh, oh ...
Drink to Melvin, drink to Fred
Drink to those two trucks ahead
Headlights flashing
Screeching, crashing --
Drink 'till they pronounce us dead.
(This public service announcement originally brought to you by Mad Magazine, issue unknown. Don't drink and drive. It generally doesn't end well.)
Merry Christmas!
We three clods from Omaha are
Spending Christmas Eve in a car
Driving, drinking, glasses clinking --
Who needs a lousy bar?
Oh, oh ...
Drink to Charlie, drink to Paul
Drink to friends we can't recall
Swerving, speeding,
Signs unheeding --
Drink to anything at all.
We three clods are feeling no pain
Drunk as skunks with booze on the brain
Senses losing, 'till we're cruising
Into a wrong-way lane.
Oh, oh ...
Drink to Melvin, drink to Fred
Drink to those two trucks ahead
Headlights flashing
Screeching, crashing --
Drink 'till they pronounce us dead.
(This public service announcement originally brought to you by Mad Magazine, issue unknown. Don't drink and drive. It generally doesn't end well.)
Merry Christmas!
Friday, August 09, 2013
Rush To Judgement
For the most part, I studiously ignore talk radio in virtually all its forms. Virtually, I say; sports talk radio is pretty entertaining when done well. But news talk radio? Mostly useless.
I'm not going to go into why it's useless just right now. Suffice it to say that if it bleeds, it leads, and most media outlets try to lead you along by a steady diet of fear and/or outrage. I don't need anyone to tell me what I should be outraged about. What I need is someone to tell me what's actually happening out there. Outrage, I can work out on my own. (Or not. Unfocused outrage is also mostly useless.)
Anyway, my main point is that I mostly ignore what Rush Limbaugh has to say. Not because he's a conservative, but because his day job is to be a loudmouth schnook, and I already have as many of those in my life as I need.
Unfortunately, that means that when he does say something worth paying attention to, I usually miss it.
But even then, he often misses the point, like when he compared the Republican Party to Apple earlier this week. His point, near as I can understand it, is that just like mainstream tech bloggers often hate Apple, mainstream media hates the Republican Party.
What Rush doesn't actually get is why a lot of tech geeks hate Apple. The two words that explain everything aren't "media bias", but "vertical integration".
The reasons why Apple products have such a reputation for working so well, and the reasons why they're often so expensive, and the reasons why their competitors often end up with such a higher market share are all tied together in that one phrase. "Vertical integration" means that Apple owns it all. They control the entire user experience from cradle to grave. They build the hardware. They develop the operating system. They rule the APIs with an iron fist. If your app doesn't pass muster, it ain't going on their online store, no way, no how. And if it doesn't come from their app store, it isn't going on your phone. Computers are another thing entirely ... but the same broad principles apply.
Now, for the average Joe who wouldn't know a terabyte from a trombone, this is probably a good thing. With most Apple products, the rule of thumb is that something is either intuitive or otherwise immediately obvious, or it's just outright impossible. Which means if doing the obvious thing doesn't work, well, you don't have to waste time fiddling with it. That app just won't do that function, friend. Find another one.
But there's a breed of alpha-geek power-user out there for whom that's an enraging travesty. And a disproportionate fraction of them blog, or vlog, or post to YouTube, or otherwise make their outrage known.
Pictured: RAAAAAAAAAAGE!!!!
My point is that they don't hate on Apple because it's cool to hate on Apple ... although there's probably a bit of that going around, too. But that's beside the point. The point is that they rage against Apple's iron-fisted control over all things Apple, and are bellowing YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME! at The Man.
Vertical Integration ... doesn't exactly describe the Republican Party. Maybe it did, once upon a time. But their establishment -- their equivalent of Steve Jobs and his top software architects -- lost control of the party's message a while back, and are scrambling like mad to keep pace with the Tea Party fanatics who are mostly in charge these days. What's vertically integrated in GOP-land these days? Not the message -- the loon with the biggest megaphone owns it, whoever that happens to be on a particular day. Not the legislative agenda. And definitely not the nomination process.
No, if there's a tech company that the GOP resembles, it's ColecoVision.
Pictured: the reason WHY you've never heard of ColecoVision.
Hint: they made REALLY BAD computers.
It's ... not a path I'd recommend emulating. But it appears to be the one they've chosen.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Assorted Stuff
Once again, we're in the that part of Summer where God turns the oven on broil and goes off to tend to other business for a while. The unrelenting fury of Mean Ol' Mister Sun does tend to sap my ability for deep thinking, but even so, I do notice a few things going on.
1) Sharknado. It's a movie about a tornado full of sharks. But it was always advertised as a movie about a tornado full of sharks. If you tuned into a movie called Sharknado expecting anything else, you have no right to your disappointment. Understand, I'm not saying it was a good film by any reasonable standard of the term. But lots of bad movies have been made, like, let's say, Battlefield Earth or Zardoz. (Oh God, Zardoz.)
But they were just ordinarily bad. Sharknado, at least, has the potential to be legendarily bad. But that's beside the point. If you tuned in for the world premiere, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.
2) Sikorsky Prize Won. There were two prizes awaiting the first man-powered aircraft: the Kremer prize for the first man-powered heavier-than-air vehicle, and the Sikorsky prize for the first man-powered rotary-wing aircraft. The Kremer prize was won in 1977 by Paul MacCready's Gossamer Condor. The Sikorsky prize proved to be a much tougher nut to crack ... until now. The AeroVelo team, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, designed and built an enormous contraption that, nonetheless ... well, you have to see this to believe it.
Yes, you saw that right. One dude, by himself, pedaled that enormous thing into the sky.
3) Photobombing Saturn. By the time you read this, it's already too late to participate, but someone noticed that one of Cassini's routine photo surveys of Saturn would include the Earth. So, someone at NASA HQ got the idea that everyone should go outside, smile, and wave to make it a proper photobombing. So I did. (I mean, why the heck not?)
4) For Sale: Rocket Engine, Used Once. Earlier, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos financed a salvage mission to try to recover some old discarded Apollo hardware from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Specifically, he was looking for remnants of the Saturn V first stages that were discarded after use, off the Florida coast. They found what they were looking for, but weren't sure what mission they'd come from yet. Well, after some analysis, they can report that yes, they found the engines that sent Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins on their historic voyage aboard Apollo 11. He doesn't intend to sell the engines, of course, but he does want to put them on display somewhere.
5) Zombie Satellite! A while back, the Kepler planet-hunting satellite lost another of its control gyros, leaving it with two left. Three has been considered the minimum number necessary to give the pointing accuracy needed for Kepler to do its job properly. I say "has been considered", because in a week or two, NASA will try a last-ditch effort to find a work-around for this issue. If it's successful, Kepler will continue hunting new planets for a little while longer.
And that's probably a good place to wrap up for now. For all the stuff and nonsense going on, it's worth remembering that we do live in a wondrous, beautiful world.
Wondrous and beautiful, even if it is a world with Zardoz in it.
1) Sharknado. It's a movie about a tornado full of sharks. But it was always advertised as a movie about a tornado full of sharks. If you tuned into a movie called Sharknado expecting anything else, you have no right to your disappointment. Understand, I'm not saying it was a good film by any reasonable standard of the term. But lots of bad movies have been made, like, let's say, Battlefield Earth or Zardoz. (Oh God, Zardoz.)
Pictured: Sean Connery wearing a mustache, a diaper, and an expression saying "I quit James Bond for this?!?"
But they were just ordinarily bad. Sharknado, at least, has the potential to be legendarily bad. But that's beside the point. If you tuned in for the world premiere, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.
2) Sikorsky Prize Won. There were two prizes awaiting the first man-powered aircraft: the Kremer prize for the first man-powered heavier-than-air vehicle, and the Sikorsky prize for the first man-powered rotary-wing aircraft. The Kremer prize was won in 1977 by Paul MacCready's Gossamer Condor. The Sikorsky prize proved to be a much tougher nut to crack ... until now. The AeroVelo team, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, designed and built an enormous contraption that, nonetheless ... well, you have to see this to believe it.
Yes, you saw that right. One dude, by himself, pedaled that enormous thing into the sky.
3) Photobombing Saturn. By the time you read this, it's already too late to participate, but someone noticed that one of Cassini's routine photo surveys of Saturn would include the Earth. So, someone at NASA HQ got the idea that everyone should go outside, smile, and wave to make it a proper photobombing. So I did. (I mean, why the heck not?)
4) For Sale: Rocket Engine, Used Once. Earlier, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos financed a salvage mission to try to recover some old discarded Apollo hardware from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Specifically, he was looking for remnants of the Saturn V first stages that were discarded after use, off the Florida coast. They found what they were looking for, but weren't sure what mission they'd come from yet. Well, after some analysis, they can report that yes, they found the engines that sent Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins on their historic voyage aboard Apollo 11. He doesn't intend to sell the engines, of course, but he does want to put them on display somewhere.
5) Zombie Satellite! A while back, the Kepler planet-hunting satellite lost another of its control gyros, leaving it with two left. Three has been considered the minimum number necessary to give the pointing accuracy needed for Kepler to do its job properly. I say "has been considered", because in a week or two, NASA will try a last-ditch effort to find a work-around for this issue. If it's successful, Kepler will continue hunting new planets for a little while longer.
And that's probably a good place to wrap up for now. For all the stuff and nonsense going on, it's worth remembering that we do live in a wondrous, beautiful world.
Wondrous and beautiful, even if it is a world with Zardoz in it.
What the HELL, Boorman?!?
Friday, May 24, 2013
Memorial Day, 2013
(Mostly reposted from 2009)
From the Lay of Horatius, by Thomas Babington Macaulay:
But the Consul's brow was sad, and the Consul's speech was low,
And darkly looked he at the wall, and darkly at the foe.
"Their van will be upon us before the bridge goes down,
And if once they might win the bridge, what hope to save the town?"
Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods,
"And for the tender mother who dandled him to rest,
And for his wife who nurses his baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus, that wrought the deed of shame?
"Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul, with all the speed ye may!
I, with two more to help me, will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand may well be stopped by three,
Now, who will stand on either hand and keep the bridge with me?"
Then out spake Spurius Lartius; a Ramnian proud was he,
"Lo, I will stand at thy right hand, and keep the bridge with thee."
And out spake strong Herminius, of Titian blood was he:
"I will abide on thy left side, and keep the bridge with thee."
"Horatius," quoth the Consul, "As thou sayest, so let it be."
And straight against that great array, forth went the dauntless Three.
For Romans in Rome's quarrel spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son, nor wife, nor limb, nor life, in the brave days of old.
We Americans celebrate three major patriotic holidays throughout the year. People tend to say the same things at each, forgetting sometimes that each one has its own character. On Veterans' Day, we celebrate the service of all of our veterans, honoring all who have taken their turn keeping the bridge. On Independence Day, we honor everyone, veterans and others, who have served our nation's institutions, faithfully bequeathing a legacy of freedom under law that, God willing, we will in turn bequeath to our children. But on Memorial Day, we specifically honor those who paid the ultimate price for our liberty.
Memorial Day is for Nathan Hale. It's for Sullivan Ballou. It's for Lloyd Williams, who led his Marines into that French forest that would be known forever afterward as the Bois de Brigade de Marine. It's for Rodger Young on New Georgia, Ernest Evans off the island of Samar, and Theodore Roosevelt Jr. on Utah Beach, each earning a Medal of Honor posthumously. And it's for Mel Apt, who was all too briefly the fastest man alive, until his X-2 went into an unrecoverable flat spin and hit the unforgiving desert floor.
Not many of us know that the Star-Spangled Banner has more than one verse. Francis Scott Key originally wrote four stanzas. The last one begins:
O, thus be it e'er when free men shall stand
Between their loved home, and the war's desolation!
The young men and women we have recently commissioned as Second Lieutenants and Ensigns have signed on to lead their comrades into making that stand, knowing full well what the cost might be. They have volunteered to stand their post upon that bridge, just as the Romans Horatius, Spurius Lartius, and Herminius did back in their day. Most of them will survive their experience. Macaulay tells us that all three survived the battle. But he also tells us that in some versions of the story, Horatius died holding the end of the bridge while his companions withdrew. Some of the young men and women we've commissioned this week will find that fate to be their own.
The task they leave to us is to honor their memory. We must never forget those things for which they gave their last full measure of devotion. We must remember their courage, their honor, their dignity. And we must teach our children to remember, to make these stories of bravery and sacrifice live for each new generation.
For as long as we remember them, they never truly die.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
From the Lay of Horatius, by Thomas Babington Macaulay:
But the Consul's brow was sad, and the Consul's speech was low,
And darkly looked he at the wall, and darkly at the foe.
"Their van will be upon us before the bridge goes down,
And if once they might win the bridge, what hope to save the town?"
Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods,
"And for the tender mother who dandled him to rest,
And for his wife who nurses his baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus, that wrought the deed of shame?
"Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul, with all the speed ye may!
I, with two more to help me, will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand may well be stopped by three,
Now, who will stand on either hand and keep the bridge with me?"
Then out spake Spurius Lartius; a Ramnian proud was he,
"Lo, I will stand at thy right hand, and keep the bridge with thee."
And out spake strong Herminius, of Titian blood was he:
"I will abide on thy left side, and keep the bridge with thee."
"Horatius," quoth the Consul, "As thou sayest, so let it be."
And straight against that great array, forth went the dauntless Three.
For Romans in Rome's quarrel spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son, nor wife, nor limb, nor life, in the brave days of old.
We Americans celebrate three major patriotic holidays throughout the year. People tend to say the same things at each, forgetting sometimes that each one has its own character. On Veterans' Day, we celebrate the service of all of our veterans, honoring all who have taken their turn keeping the bridge. On Independence Day, we honor everyone, veterans and others, who have served our nation's institutions, faithfully bequeathing a legacy of freedom under law that, God willing, we will in turn bequeath to our children. But on Memorial Day, we specifically honor those who paid the ultimate price for our liberty.
Memorial Day is for Nathan Hale. It's for Sullivan Ballou. It's for Lloyd Williams, who led his Marines into that French forest that would be known forever afterward as the Bois de Brigade de Marine. It's for Rodger Young on New Georgia, Ernest Evans off the island of Samar, and Theodore Roosevelt Jr. on Utah Beach, each earning a Medal of Honor posthumously. And it's for Mel Apt, who was all too briefly the fastest man alive, until his X-2 went into an unrecoverable flat spin and hit the unforgiving desert floor.
Not many of us know that the Star-Spangled Banner has more than one verse. Francis Scott Key originally wrote four stanzas. The last one begins:
O, thus be it e'er when free men shall stand
Between their loved home, and the war's desolation!
The young men and women we have recently commissioned as Second Lieutenants and Ensigns have signed on to lead their comrades into making that stand, knowing full well what the cost might be. They have volunteered to stand their post upon that bridge, just as the Romans Horatius, Spurius Lartius, and Herminius did back in their day. Most of them will survive their experience. Macaulay tells us that all three survived the battle. But he also tells us that in some versions of the story, Horatius died holding the end of the bridge while his companions withdrew. Some of the young men and women we've commissioned this week will find that fate to be their own.
The task they leave to us is to honor their memory. We must never forget those things for which they gave their last full measure of devotion. We must remember their courage, their honor, their dignity. And we must teach our children to remember, to make these stories of bravery and sacrifice live for each new generation.
For as long as we remember them, they never truly die.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Saturday, April 06, 2013
Twit of the Year?
I've resisted it for some time now, but I've taken the plunge and started a Twitter account. The feed is off to the side on the right.
So far, I've found out that it's a real challenge to express a coherent thought in under 144 characters.
Anyway, if there are other feeds you think I ought to be following, let me know at @McGahaTim.
Friday, February 22, 2013
A Fine And Enviable Madness
(mostly reposted from February, 2010)
"... it was, in fact, a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm." -- from The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
I love my job. I love the alchemy that takes the stuff of daydreams, and spins it into hard, tangible reality. What we have dreamed, we have done; generations of men dreamed of flight, and dreamed of touching the stars ... and when you look up tonight, you'll see airplanes drifting across the sky in exactly the way that a hundred tons of aluminum shouldn't, and five of our spacecraft are sailing out into interstellar space. Generations of physicians dreamed of a world without disease ... and in one singular case, the dream was realized. I've been vaccinated for smallpox, but most people younger than me haven't.
This is National Engineers' Week. We celebrate it during the week of George Washington's birthday, in honor of our first President's first career as a surveyor. The mechanic arts as they were called then were recognized early to be key to both our prosperity and our security. Whenever America has faced a steep challenge, her engineers have always answered, and delivered the goods.
It's a profession that could easily lead to a swelled head, if Nature wasn't always there to take us down a notch or three as required. We rarely enjoy the "luxury" of hiding our mistakes. An unscrupulous doctor might hide their mistakes in the morgue, and an incompetent lawyer's mistakes vanish into the prison system. But an engineer's mistakes? They tend to come unglued with a loud enough BANG to make the evening news. We never have to look far for accountability, it always comes looking for us.
There are two ways to deal with that kind of responsibility. Some find it too heavy. The rest of us accept the responsibility, and the challenge. We enjoy knowing that our work counts for something. We don't dread the possibility of highly-visible failure; that motivates us to make our work as clean and error-free as we know how. The challenge -- the satisfaction of having done a difficult job well -- is a large part of what gets us out of bed most mornings.
It can be a crazy life sometimes. Schedules get very unpredictable, close to delivery time. But on the whole I wouldn't have it any other way. It truly is "a fine and enviable madness."
Hymn of Breaking Strain
by Rudyard Kipling
THE careful text-books measure
(Let all who build beware!)
The load, the shock, the pressure
Material can bear.
So, when the buckled girder
Lets down the grinding span,
The blame of loss, or murder,
Is laid upon the man.
Not on the Stuff - the Man!
But in our daily dealing
With stone and steel, we find
The Gods have no such feeling
Of justice toward mankind.
To no set gauge they make us -
For no laid course prepare -
And presently o'ertake us
With loads we cannot bear:
Too merciless to bear.
The prudent text-books give it
In tables at the end
The stress that shears a rivet
Or makes a tie-bar bend -
What traffic wrecks macadam -
What concrete should endure -
But we, poor Sons of Adam
Have no such literature,
To warn us or make sure!
We hold all Earth to plunder -
All Time and Space as well -
Too wonder-stale to wonder
At each new miracle;
Till, in the mid-illusion
Of Godhead 'neath our hand,
Falls multiple confusion
On all we did or planned -
The mighty works we planned.
We only of Creation
(Oh, luckier bridge and rail)
Abide the twin damnation -
To fail and know we fail.
Yet we - by which sole token
We know we once were Gods -
Take shame in being broken
However great the odds -
The burden of the Odds.
Oh, veiled and secret Power
Whose paths we seek in vain,
Be with us in our hour
Of overthrow and pain;
That we - by which sure token
We know Thy ways are true -
In spite of being broken,
Because of being broken
May rise up and build anew
Stand up and build anew.
"... it was, in fact, a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm." -- from The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
I love my job. I love the alchemy that takes the stuff of daydreams, and spins it into hard, tangible reality. What we have dreamed, we have done; generations of men dreamed of flight, and dreamed of touching the stars ... and when you look up tonight, you'll see airplanes drifting across the sky in exactly the way that a hundred tons of aluminum shouldn't, and five of our spacecraft are sailing out into interstellar space. Generations of physicians dreamed of a world without disease ... and in one singular case, the dream was realized. I've been vaccinated for smallpox, but most people younger than me haven't.
This is National Engineers' Week. We celebrate it during the week of George Washington's birthday, in honor of our first President's first career as a surveyor. The mechanic arts as they were called then were recognized early to be key to both our prosperity and our security. Whenever America has faced a steep challenge, her engineers have always answered, and delivered the goods.
It's a profession that could easily lead to a swelled head, if Nature wasn't always there to take us down a notch or three as required. We rarely enjoy the "luxury" of hiding our mistakes. An unscrupulous doctor might hide their mistakes in the morgue, and an incompetent lawyer's mistakes vanish into the prison system. But an engineer's mistakes? They tend to come unglued with a loud enough BANG to make the evening news. We never have to look far for accountability, it always comes looking for us.
There are two ways to deal with that kind of responsibility. Some find it too heavy. The rest of us accept the responsibility, and the challenge. We enjoy knowing that our work counts for something. We don't dread the possibility of highly-visible failure; that motivates us to make our work as clean and error-free as we know how. The challenge -- the satisfaction of having done a difficult job well -- is a large part of what gets us out of bed most mornings.
It can be a crazy life sometimes. Schedules get very unpredictable, close to delivery time. But on the whole I wouldn't have it any other way. It truly is "a fine and enviable madness."
Hymn of Breaking Strain
by Rudyard Kipling
THE careful text-books measure
(Let all who build beware!)
The load, the shock, the pressure
Material can bear.
So, when the buckled girder
Lets down the grinding span,
The blame of loss, or murder,
Is laid upon the man.
Not on the Stuff - the Man!
But in our daily dealing
With stone and steel, we find
The Gods have no such feeling
Of justice toward mankind.
To no set gauge they make us -
For no laid course prepare -
And presently o'ertake us
With loads we cannot bear:
Too merciless to bear.
The prudent text-books give it
In tables at the end
The stress that shears a rivet
Or makes a tie-bar bend -
What traffic wrecks macadam -
What concrete should endure -
But we, poor Sons of Adam
Have no such literature,
To warn us or make sure!
We hold all Earth to plunder -
All Time and Space as well -
Too wonder-stale to wonder
At each new miracle;
Till, in the mid-illusion
Of Godhead 'neath our hand,
Falls multiple confusion
On all we did or planned -
The mighty works we planned.
We only of Creation
(Oh, luckier bridge and rail)
Abide the twin damnation -
To fail and know we fail.
Yet we - by which sole token
We know we once were Gods -
Take shame in being broken
However great the odds -
The burden of the Odds.
Oh, veiled and secret Power
Whose paths we seek in vain,
Be with us in our hour
Of overthrow and pain;
That we - by which sure token
We know Thy ways are true -
In spite of being broken,
Because of being broken
May rise up and build anew
Stand up and build anew.
Friday, January 04, 2013
Thirteen for '13
I don't do New Year's Resolutions. I haven't in quite some time. I've found that making up an enormous To-Do list of improvements all at once tends to set me up for failure. It's much better to make those improvements as I notice that they're needed, no matter what the calendar says. That said, the beginning of the year is a good time to take stock, and try to figure out where we're headed.
With that in mind, here are thirteen predictions and observations. Not all of them are for 2013. But they're all things that I expect, and fairly soon.
One: Soon, our cars will more or less drive themselves. It's already happening on a small scale. Where it gets interesting is when it starts to happen on a larger scale. What will happen, when thousands, even millions of self-driving cars hit the roads for morning rush hour? The obvious answer is that the car computers should be talking to each other, so that they can collectively de-conflict one another's routing. Centralized routing would work, in principle. But it would be dependent on a centralized processing system, and network, and the associated infrastructure. It would be far more efficient, and far more robust, if each vehicle were to be in contact with the few dozen or so in its immediate vicinity. That would be enough to co-ordinate lane changes, mergers, and getting on and off a freeway. That information would then automatically cascade up and down the roadway, because each car would be in contact with a different dozen or so, meaning that as traffic becomes congested, a car that's just now leaving the owner's driveway knows to plot a different path to the office that day. Best of all, there's no one point of failure that can be exploited or attacked. It's going to take some time to debug the system until it works properly, but I'm confident something like this will be in place before I retire.
Two: What's more, those cars will probably be electric. An important threshold was crossed last year that you might have missed if you weren't paying attention. The Motor Trend Car of the Year for 2012? The Tesla S, an electric sedan. Hybrids have won a permanent place in the automotive market now, where they were a novelty only five years ago. All-electic cars will soon follow suit. The big problem has always been the batteries: how to get enough of them, how to hold enough power for a decent range. The technology has gotten steadily better, though, and as more of them are recognized as simply being good cars to own, public acceptance will come. Because although gasoline is a convenient energy-storage medium, no one really loves it. An economical, reliable electric car with decent range will be welcomed, once it's available.
Three: Which leads us to the third point, going all-electric offers a significant set of challenges. I've written at length about this before, so I won't belabor the point again. But there are some encouraging signs out there. The Navy has been quiet about progress on the Polywell project, but what has been released seems to indicate that things are going about as well as they expected. To wit: the results match the theory, and the Navy has continued to supply funding so that the work can continue. There are good things happening in superconductivity research as well, although nothing that would make the headlines. Also, solar panels are getting cheaper all the time. Again, this isn't anything that I expect to break this year, but all the pieces are coming together. We'll have the tools we need, by the time we desperately need them.
Four: We will find an Earth-like extrasolar planet, and soon. At least we will, given a sufficiently generous definition of Earth-like. I'm going to define the term as a rocky planet, within a habitable zone, with mass and surface gravity within plus or minus 10% of our own. Within my professional lifetime so far, we've come from not even being sure that binary stars could even have planets, to finding planets in the star system next door. The techniques get better by the year. Instruments get more sensitive, capable of peering farther and farther into the cosmos, and also of finding smaller and smaller things nearby. We now think that the Milky Way Galaxy holds at least 100 million planets. Given that we also think that the Milky Way holds between 100 and 400 million stars, we now think that planets are at least as numerous as stars. I've written about the Drake Equation before, and I see little reason to revise ... much. I'm starting to wonder if the fraction Fp might be much closer to 1 than it is to my old guess of 0.5. If so ... then we might be able to find a pen pal out there, after all. (Since, by my estimates, N goes from 1.4 to 2.8 if Fp goes from 0.5 to 1.)
Five: 3-D Printing, coming to a corner mall near you! Again, this isn't something I expect for 2013, but I do expect distributed manufacturing to be part of the Next Big Thing. Consider: a shoe company that doesn't have to have factories, or warehouses, or any of that stuff, because the stores themselves have a 3-D printer that makes the shoes as the customers order them. They don't have to ship shoes, they ship raw materials and design patterns. They could undercut Nike and Reebok by 50%, and still make higher profits. Just about any retailer that deals in a line of relatively simple products could take advantage of this technology to radically streamline their logistical chain. To say nothing of the corner auto parts store, who can make weird parts to order, when the customer needs it. Need a water pump for a '53 Studebaker? Sure, pal, but it'll take us an hour or two to print one up...
Six: Two words: Google Glasses. Augmented Reality is coming, with all the benefits and horrors that will entail. But this is really only the next step on the road we've walked as a species ever since we started using fire, a quarter of a million years ago. We shape our tools, then our tools shape us, in an endless recursion.
Seven: Last year, we saw humans plumb the depths of the oceans, and the upper limits of the skies. The most awesome thing about this is that these efforts weren't sponsored by governments, but by private citizens. Don't misunderstand me, I'm no anti-government fanatic, but I think it's just incredible, and a beautiful thing, that the technology of exploration is becoming so democratized. And this isn't the end, not by a long shot. Last year, we saw a privately-financed spacecraft rendezvous with the space station, and begin routine cargo deliveries. This year, the deliveries continue. Next year, or the year after? Seats, man. We're that much closer to being able to buy a ticket. And how great is that?
Eight: I think it's worth mentioning that Elon Musk is responsible for two of the items on this list: the Tesla S sedan, and the Dragon spacecraft. Pay attention to this man. He's building a big chunk of the future.
Nine: The Great Gatsby is coming to the big screen. I'm conflicted ... On the one hand, did we ever need a Gatsby movie? But on the other, if done right (and this one looks like it might be), it could be great. (No pun intended.)
Ten: The Dallas Cowboys won't get any better until they get a new General Manager. Being that the current GM, Jerry Jones, is probably not going to be fired by the owner (also Jerry Jones), the odds of that are the same as the number of R's in "Fat Chance".
Eleven: And yes, it's going to suck to have to face RGIII twice a year for the next ten to fifteen years.
Twelve: The fallout from the Lance Armstrong scandal has been impressive, but the story's not over yet. His former boss, Johan Bruyneel, was also charged in the same matter, but has elected to go forward with arbitration. His case will be heard sometime this year. It will be very interesting to see how that turns out. Lance got all the publicity, but Bruyneel was central to the whole thing. He was the one who knew how to dupe the testers. We know who, what, when, where and why, but we don't yet know how. And that will be a crucial fact to have, going forward.
Thirteen: It's way too early to start handicapping 2016, but let's start throwing some names out there anyway. Hillary Clinton has the inside lane to the candidacy, if she should want another run at it. I don't see a challenger of sufficient stature to make a real contest of it, unless Joe Biden should want a go at it as well. On the Republican side, a lot of the big guns that sat out last time will probably start testing the waters over the next year and a half. We'll also see some newcomers throw down for it, as well. The "It's His Turn" rule says that the nomination is Santorum's to lose, but the fierce desperation of having lost two in a row does seem to change the rules. And of course, a great deal depends on what goes down over the next two years. It'll be interesting to watch them begin jockeying for position.
Happy New Year, everyone!
With that in mind, here are thirteen predictions and observations. Not all of them are for 2013. But they're all things that I expect, and fairly soon.
One: Soon, our cars will more or less drive themselves. It's already happening on a small scale. Where it gets interesting is when it starts to happen on a larger scale. What will happen, when thousands, even millions of self-driving cars hit the roads for morning rush hour? The obvious answer is that the car computers should be talking to each other, so that they can collectively de-conflict one another's routing. Centralized routing would work, in principle. But it would be dependent on a centralized processing system, and network, and the associated infrastructure. It would be far more efficient, and far more robust, if each vehicle were to be in contact with the few dozen or so in its immediate vicinity. That would be enough to co-ordinate lane changes, mergers, and getting on and off a freeway. That information would then automatically cascade up and down the roadway, because each car would be in contact with a different dozen or so, meaning that as traffic becomes congested, a car that's just now leaving the owner's driveway knows to plot a different path to the office that day. Best of all, there's no one point of failure that can be exploited or attacked. It's going to take some time to debug the system until it works properly, but I'm confident something like this will be in place before I retire.
Two: What's more, those cars will probably be electric. An important threshold was crossed last year that you might have missed if you weren't paying attention. The Motor Trend Car of the Year for 2012? The Tesla S, an electric sedan. Hybrids have won a permanent place in the automotive market now, where they were a novelty only five years ago. All-electic cars will soon follow suit. The big problem has always been the batteries: how to get enough of them, how to hold enough power for a decent range. The technology has gotten steadily better, though, and as more of them are recognized as simply being good cars to own, public acceptance will come. Because although gasoline is a convenient energy-storage medium, no one really loves it. An economical, reliable electric car with decent range will be welcomed, once it's available.
Three: Which leads us to the third point, going all-electric offers a significant set of challenges. I've written at length about this before, so I won't belabor the point again. But there are some encouraging signs out there. The Navy has been quiet about progress on the Polywell project, but what has been released seems to indicate that things are going about as well as they expected. To wit: the results match the theory, and the Navy has continued to supply funding so that the work can continue. There are good things happening in superconductivity research as well, although nothing that would make the headlines. Also, solar panels are getting cheaper all the time. Again, this isn't anything that I expect to break this year, but all the pieces are coming together. We'll have the tools we need, by the time we desperately need them.
Four: We will find an Earth-like extrasolar planet, and soon. At least we will, given a sufficiently generous definition of Earth-like. I'm going to define the term as a rocky planet, within a habitable zone, with mass and surface gravity within plus or minus 10% of our own. Within my professional lifetime so far, we've come from not even being sure that binary stars could even have planets, to finding planets in the star system next door. The techniques get better by the year. Instruments get more sensitive, capable of peering farther and farther into the cosmos, and also of finding smaller and smaller things nearby. We now think that the Milky Way Galaxy holds at least 100 million planets. Given that we also think that the Milky Way holds between 100 and 400 million stars, we now think that planets are at least as numerous as stars. I've written about the Drake Equation before, and I see little reason to revise ... much. I'm starting to wonder if the fraction Fp might be much closer to 1 than it is to my old guess of 0.5. If so ... then we might be able to find a pen pal out there, after all. (Since, by my estimates, N goes from 1.4 to 2.8 if Fp goes from 0.5 to 1.)
Five: 3-D Printing, coming to a corner mall near you! Again, this isn't something I expect for 2013, but I do expect distributed manufacturing to be part of the Next Big Thing. Consider: a shoe company that doesn't have to have factories, or warehouses, or any of that stuff, because the stores themselves have a 3-D printer that makes the shoes as the customers order them. They don't have to ship shoes, they ship raw materials and design patterns. They could undercut Nike and Reebok by 50%, and still make higher profits. Just about any retailer that deals in a line of relatively simple products could take advantage of this technology to radically streamline their logistical chain. To say nothing of the corner auto parts store, who can make weird parts to order, when the customer needs it. Need a water pump for a '53 Studebaker? Sure, pal, but it'll take us an hour or two to print one up...
Six: Two words: Google Glasses. Augmented Reality is coming, with all the benefits and horrors that will entail. But this is really only the next step on the road we've walked as a species ever since we started using fire, a quarter of a million years ago. We shape our tools, then our tools shape us, in an endless recursion.
Seven: Last year, we saw humans plumb the depths of the oceans, and the upper limits of the skies. The most awesome thing about this is that these efforts weren't sponsored by governments, but by private citizens. Don't misunderstand me, I'm no anti-government fanatic, but I think it's just incredible, and a beautiful thing, that the technology of exploration is becoming so democratized. And this isn't the end, not by a long shot. Last year, we saw a privately-financed spacecraft rendezvous with the space station, and begin routine cargo deliveries. This year, the deliveries continue. Next year, or the year after? Seats, man. We're that much closer to being able to buy a ticket. And how great is that?
Eight: I think it's worth mentioning that Elon Musk is responsible for two of the items on this list: the Tesla S sedan, and the Dragon spacecraft. Pay attention to this man. He's building a big chunk of the future.
Nine: The Great Gatsby is coming to the big screen. I'm conflicted ... On the one hand, did we ever need a Gatsby movie? But on the other, if done right (and this one looks like it might be), it could be great. (No pun intended.)
Ten: The Dallas Cowboys won't get any better until they get a new General Manager. Being that the current GM, Jerry Jones, is probably not going to be fired by the owner (also Jerry Jones), the odds of that are the same as the number of R's in "Fat Chance".
Eleven: And yes, it's going to suck to have to face RGIII twice a year for the next ten to fifteen years.
Twelve: The fallout from the Lance Armstrong scandal has been impressive, but the story's not over yet. His former boss, Johan Bruyneel, was also charged in the same matter, but has elected to go forward with arbitration. His case will be heard sometime this year. It will be very interesting to see how that turns out. Lance got all the publicity, but Bruyneel was central to the whole thing. He was the one who knew how to dupe the testers. We know who, what, when, where and why, but we don't yet know how. And that will be a crucial fact to have, going forward.
Thirteen: It's way too early to start handicapping 2016, but let's start throwing some names out there anyway. Hillary Clinton has the inside lane to the candidacy, if she should want another run at it. I don't see a challenger of sufficient stature to make a real contest of it, unless Joe Biden should want a go at it as well. On the Republican side, a lot of the big guns that sat out last time will probably start testing the waters over the next year and a half. We'll also see some newcomers throw down for it, as well. The "It's His Turn" rule says that the nomination is Santorum's to lose, but the fierce desperation of having lost two in a row does seem to change the rules. And of course, a great deal depends on what goes down over the next two years. It'll be interesting to watch them begin jockeying for position.
Happy New Year, everyone!
Friday, December 16, 2011
Techniwockle Confoogalities
It's crunch time at the day gig. I should come up for air in a week or so.
Friday, April 08, 2011
It Could Be Worse
[Editor's Note: I realized a couple of weeks ago that April 12th would be a trifecta of anniversaries, and I didn't want to give any one of them short shrift. But in the meantime, I've come across a fragment of a possibly apocryphal transcript of a conversation between Houston and the Space Station.]
"Mission Control to ISS ... Cathy? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you and Ron have been furloughed. And, since you're not authorized to use Federal property while on furlough ... um ... well, could you and Ron step outside for a bit while Congress sorts this mess out? What was that? AND the horse I rode in on?"
"Mission Control to ISS ... Cathy? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you and Ron have been furloughed. And, since you're not authorized to use Federal property while on furlough ... um ... well, could you and Ron step outside for a bit while Congress sorts this mess out? What was that? AND the horse I rode in on?"
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Spring is Sprung
Springtime is once again upon us, at least for those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere. I've been spending more time enjoying the splendid weather than doing deep thinking. But I do have an assortment of thoughts about what's going on hereabouts:
1) I don't get baseball. I don't dislike baseball, I just don't really get it. In a strange way, baseball is a lot like space flight, in that participant spend most of their time standing around waiting for something interesting to happen. There are bits and pieces of the game I find entertaining. Such as, for example, the time Nolan Ryan had this fool twenty years his junior in a headlock, administering an impromptu lecture with his pointer knuckles on the virtues of respect for one's elders. Along with Zinedine Zidane's last play, surely this was one of sport's finest moments. But such things are few and far between. And it's entirely possible that I'd find baseball more interesting if my home team were anyone but the Texas Rangers.
2) I don't get basketball, either. If baseball is too slow, basketball is too fast. By the time I figure out what's happened, play has long since moved on. I've no doubt that I could figure it out if I really wanted to ... but I have no real desire to do so. I spend enough time on the couch as it is.
3) Andy Reid WILL rue the day. Granted, Philadelphia was in a rut, and had to do something. Making the move to your QB of the future makes good sense in that regard. But trading McNabb to a division rival? Someone you know you'll play at least twice every year? Sure, on one hand you could argue that the Philly defense knows all about McNabb, and you could say that this means they're not afraid of him. But, the flip side of that same coin is that McNabb knows the Philly defense inside and out. He's going to be powerfully motivated this year to fold their defensive playbook 'till it's all corners, and stick it somewhere it's gonna hurt. And he just might be able to do it, too. One thing I do know: the Philiadelphia-Washington games for the next couple of years are going to be good, old-fashioned grudge-ball. McNabb's return to Philadelphia, in particular, will be fine sport.
4) J. K. Rowling will be writing a new book. Exactly what it's going to be, no one knows. That said, I've daydreamed about what a sequel series could look like. We do know that Harry and Ron went to work for the Ministry as investigators of a sort. But you have to wonder: who would they be investiating that they'd be all that worried about? They'd already put paid to the biggest Big Bad that they're ever likely to find. So it'd be a more light-hearted series, with a couple of wise-cracking agents foiling the schemes of the bad guys. Now, where have I seen something like that before?
"The Man From U.N.C.L.E." plus wizards could be really fun.
5) Polywell marches on. I've talked about the Polywell project before. Last year, we covered the latest Navy research contract. We know nothing definite yet, but the indications seem to be that interesting things are afoot. They have not released any results, but they are seeking funds for development of a full-scale 100MW reactor. One of two things is true here: either they're running a scam, or they've got solid enough results from their Navy work that they want to begin work on a commercially-available version. I'm inclined to think it's the latter. And while I'm not sure that I want to donate, if they offer stock I'm damn sure buying. This could be the real thing, folks. And if it is, hold on to your hats, because the whole world's going to change. We'll know more in about a year or so -- the thing to watch for are the follow-on contract awards -- but at this point I'm guardedly optimistic.
6) START me up? I happened to be in a position to catch the signing of the new START treaty between the United States and Russia on live TV. The interesting thing is how little both parties actually give up. Nuclear weapons are acknowledged by most professionals as having little to no military utility. This wasn't true when they were introduced in 1945. Back then, atomic weapons were strategic bombing writ large; if I showed you a random decimated cityscape photo from WWII, unless there was a distinguishing landmark present or you were a dedicated scholar, you probably couldn't tell me if you were looking at a photo of Hiroshima, Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, or Berlin. The only difference is that in the first of those cases, the devastation was wrought with one bomb in one sortie. Now, however, if we want to shut down a city, we can identify a dozen or so weak points -- single points of failure in the infrastructure -- and destroy them simultaneously without touching anything else. What need, then, for nukes? They chew up tremendous resources without contributing anything really useful. Except, that is, for deterrence. Their only use is to stay the hands of those similarly armed. I'm not sure we'll ever be able to be rid of them entirely. That bell probably can't be un-rung. But, we can reduce our stockpile to the minimum required to present a credible threat. This treaty goes a good way towards that goal, provided that the Senate will ratify it.
And that's about it for now. Spring calls!
1) I don't get baseball. I don't dislike baseball, I just don't really get it. In a strange way, baseball is a lot like space flight, in that participant spend most of their time standing around waiting for something interesting to happen. There are bits and pieces of the game I find entertaining. Such as, for example, the time Nolan Ryan had this fool twenty years his junior in a headlock, administering an impromptu lecture with his pointer knuckles on the virtues of respect for one's elders. Along with Zinedine Zidane's last play, surely this was one of sport's finest moments. But such things are few and far between. And it's entirely possible that I'd find baseball more interesting if my home team were anyone but the Texas Rangers.
2) I don't get basketball, either. If baseball is too slow, basketball is too fast. By the time I figure out what's happened, play has long since moved on. I've no doubt that I could figure it out if I really wanted to ... but I have no real desire to do so. I spend enough time on the couch as it is.
3) Andy Reid WILL rue the day. Granted, Philadelphia was in a rut, and had to do something. Making the move to your QB of the future makes good sense in that regard. But trading McNabb to a division rival? Someone you know you'll play at least twice every year? Sure, on one hand you could argue that the Philly defense knows all about McNabb, and you could say that this means they're not afraid of him. But, the flip side of that same coin is that McNabb knows the Philly defense inside and out. He's going to be powerfully motivated this year to fold their defensive playbook 'till it's all corners, and stick it somewhere it's gonna hurt. And he just might be able to do it, too. One thing I do know: the Philiadelphia-Washington games for the next couple of years are going to be good, old-fashioned grudge-ball. McNabb's return to Philadelphia, in particular, will be fine sport.
4) J. K. Rowling will be writing a new book. Exactly what it's going to be, no one knows. That said, I've daydreamed about what a sequel series could look like. We do know that Harry and Ron went to work for the Ministry as investigators of a sort. But you have to wonder: who would they be investiating that they'd be all that worried about? They'd already put paid to the biggest Big Bad that they're ever likely to find. So it'd be a more light-hearted series, with a couple of wise-cracking agents foiling the schemes of the bad guys. Now, where have I seen something like that before?
"The Man From U.N.C.L.E." plus wizards could be really fun.
5) Polywell marches on. I've talked about the Polywell project before. Last year, we covered the latest Navy research contract. We know nothing definite yet, but the indications seem to be that interesting things are afoot. They have not released any results, but they are seeking funds for development of a full-scale 100MW reactor. One of two things is true here: either they're running a scam, or they've got solid enough results from their Navy work that they want to begin work on a commercially-available version. I'm inclined to think it's the latter. And while I'm not sure that I want to donate, if they offer stock I'm damn sure buying. This could be the real thing, folks. And if it is, hold on to your hats, because the whole world's going to change. We'll know more in about a year or so -- the thing to watch for are the follow-on contract awards -- but at this point I'm guardedly optimistic.
6) START me up? I happened to be in a position to catch the signing of the new START treaty between the United States and Russia on live TV. The interesting thing is how little both parties actually give up. Nuclear weapons are acknowledged by most professionals as having little to no military utility. This wasn't true when they were introduced in 1945. Back then, atomic weapons were strategic bombing writ large; if I showed you a random decimated cityscape photo from WWII, unless there was a distinguishing landmark present or you were a dedicated scholar, you probably couldn't tell me if you were looking at a photo of Hiroshima, Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, or Berlin. The only difference is that in the first of those cases, the devastation was wrought with one bomb in one sortie. Now, however, if we want to shut down a city, we can identify a dozen or so weak points -- single points of failure in the infrastructure -- and destroy them simultaneously without touching anything else. What need, then, for nukes? They chew up tremendous resources without contributing anything really useful. Except, that is, for deterrence. Their only use is to stay the hands of those similarly armed. I'm not sure we'll ever be able to be rid of them entirely. That bell probably can't be un-rung. But, we can reduce our stockpile to the minimum required to present a credible threat. This treaty goes a good way towards that goal, provided that the Senate will ratify it.
And that's about it for now. Spring calls!
Friday, April 02, 2010
We Have Met The Enemy ...
When it comes to your health, and the care thereof, your worst enemy isn't any political figure. It's not either of the major national parties. It isn't anyone -- or any agency -- within the Federal Government. Nevertheless, it's someone you're fairly familiar with. Allow me to share a story by way of illustration:
A longtime friend of mine has a hangnail. No, that's not quite accurate; he has THE hangnail. He's had it for a long, long time. It's old enough to vote, buy its own liquor, and qualify for discounted auto insurance. Most of the time, he ignores it. The rest of the time, he attempts to treat it himself with a terrifying array of hand and power tools. I don't think he's tried a soldering iron or belt sander yet, but really, it's only a matter of time. He's tried just about everything ... except, that is, the services of a qualified podiatric surgeon, which would pretty much fix the problem for good. But that's far too easy.
His problem isn't that he doesn't have insurance. His problem is that he just doesn't like doctors.
So: my worst enemy? Like just about everyone else, it's the fool that stares back at me out of the mirror when I'm shaving. He'll be the death of me if I give him half a chance. And at the end of the day, my health is my responsibility and no one else's. I enjoy the benefits if I take care of business, and I suffer the consequences if I don't.
I've been doing a much better job of that lately. I've learned a few things since I first got serious about this last summer, and this is as good a time as any to share them with you. It's possible that you've heard it before. Actually, in summary, you have heard it all before: diet, and exercise. But the summary omits a few important details ... such as a form of exercise that's vitally important if you're truly interested in re-making yourself.
But first things first: it must start with nutrition. Steve over at Nerd Fitness likes to say, "You can't outrun your fork." He's absolutely right. This can be really hard at first, but it's really important. Like trying to run your car on scented lamp oil, you won't get far without the right fuel. For some, this was an easy step. For me, it meant changing my whole relationship with food. This has been an ongoing effort for over ten years on my part, and I've managed to stop over-eating, and basically eat the "right" thing more often than not these days. However, this by itself is not enough.
The next layer is, of course, cardio exercise. What kind isn't quite as important as intensity and consistency. It has to be vigorous, and it has to be at least three times a week. It almost goes without saying that you really need to pick something you enjoy doing for its own sake, or at a bare minimum something you can tolerate. I hate running. But for some weird reason, my brain doesn't really interpret elliptical machines as running, even though it's basically the same motion. And I love cycling and swimming. So, ten minutes of each, three times a week, and there we are.
But, as I said earlier, the summary -- diet and exercise -- omits an important detail. There's a leg missing from the tripod: strength training. I didn't get serious about this until nine months ago. Until I saw what it did in conjunction with the other two, I never realized how important it really was.
Mehdi makes a pitch for the benefits of strength training both here and at his own site. At the risk of repetition, I'll put in my own two cents. Simply put, muscle tissue is denser than fat. If you build muscle, even if you don't lose an ounce, you'll look trimmer. But you will lose weight, because muscle tissue burns fat constantly, even at rest. But that's only the beginning. I find that I have more energy. I find that I don't get sick as often, and recover faster when I do. I sleep better. And I have the confidence that comes from knowing that I have never been stronger, not even when I was half my age.
I've found the StrongLifts program very useful. It has several key advantages. First, it's free. All you have to do is go to the website, write down the routine and/or download the free e-book, and it's yours. Second, compound exercises are a great time-saver. Bodybuilders spend hours at the gym, working one or two muscles at a time. But with compound exercises, spend 30 minutes a day three times a week, and that's all you need. And third, you can start small and build up. It's great for beginners. You feel a little bit silly the first few weeks, lifting nothing but the bar and a few tiny weights. But soon, you work up to some respectable amounts. Within six months, I was squatting my own bodyweight. I'm aiming for twice that, and will probably be able to within the year.
And while it's easier with a gym, you don't need much equipment to do good strength training. You don't actually need anything: Pavel Tsatsouline's book Naked Warrior shows you a solid strength routine that requires no equipment at all. And here's a kettlebell routine that requires only bare-bones equipment.
Life's hard. It's even harder when you're weaker than you need to be. Do yourself a favor, and look into strength training. It may be the best choice you ever made.
A longtime friend of mine has a hangnail. No, that's not quite accurate; he has THE hangnail. He's had it for a long, long time. It's old enough to vote, buy its own liquor, and qualify for discounted auto insurance. Most of the time, he ignores it. The rest of the time, he attempts to treat it himself with a terrifying array of hand and power tools. I don't think he's tried a soldering iron or belt sander yet, but really, it's only a matter of time. He's tried just about everything ... except, that is, the services of a qualified podiatric surgeon, which would pretty much fix the problem for good. But that's far too easy.
His problem isn't that he doesn't have insurance. His problem is that he just doesn't like doctors.
So: my worst enemy? Like just about everyone else, it's the fool that stares back at me out of the mirror when I'm shaving. He'll be the death of me if I give him half a chance. And at the end of the day, my health is my responsibility and no one else's. I enjoy the benefits if I take care of business, and I suffer the consequences if I don't.
I've been doing a much better job of that lately. I've learned a few things since I first got serious about this last summer, and this is as good a time as any to share them with you. It's possible that you've heard it before. Actually, in summary, you have heard it all before: diet, and exercise. But the summary omits a few important details ... such as a form of exercise that's vitally important if you're truly interested in re-making yourself.
But first things first: it must start with nutrition. Steve over at Nerd Fitness likes to say, "You can't outrun your fork." He's absolutely right. This can be really hard at first, but it's really important. Like trying to run your car on scented lamp oil, you won't get far without the right fuel. For some, this was an easy step. For me, it meant changing my whole relationship with food. This has been an ongoing effort for over ten years on my part, and I've managed to stop over-eating, and basically eat the "right" thing more often than not these days. However, this by itself is not enough.
The next layer is, of course, cardio exercise. What kind isn't quite as important as intensity and consistency. It has to be vigorous, and it has to be at least three times a week. It almost goes without saying that you really need to pick something you enjoy doing for its own sake, or at a bare minimum something you can tolerate. I hate running. But for some weird reason, my brain doesn't really interpret elliptical machines as running, even though it's basically the same motion. And I love cycling and swimming. So, ten minutes of each, three times a week, and there we are.
But, as I said earlier, the summary -- diet and exercise -- omits an important detail. There's a leg missing from the tripod: strength training. I didn't get serious about this until nine months ago. Until I saw what it did in conjunction with the other two, I never realized how important it really was.
Mehdi makes a pitch for the benefits of strength training both here and at his own site. At the risk of repetition, I'll put in my own two cents. Simply put, muscle tissue is denser than fat. If you build muscle, even if you don't lose an ounce, you'll look trimmer. But you will lose weight, because muscle tissue burns fat constantly, even at rest. But that's only the beginning. I find that I have more energy. I find that I don't get sick as often, and recover faster when I do. I sleep better. And I have the confidence that comes from knowing that I have never been stronger, not even when I was half my age.
I've found the StrongLifts program very useful. It has several key advantages. First, it's free. All you have to do is go to the website, write down the routine and/or download the free e-book, and it's yours. Second, compound exercises are a great time-saver. Bodybuilders spend hours at the gym, working one or two muscles at a time. But with compound exercises, spend 30 minutes a day three times a week, and that's all you need. And third, you can start small and build up. It's great for beginners. You feel a little bit silly the first few weeks, lifting nothing but the bar and a few tiny weights. But soon, you work up to some respectable amounts. Within six months, I was squatting my own bodyweight. I'm aiming for twice that, and will probably be able to within the year.
And while it's easier with a gym, you don't need much equipment to do good strength training. You don't actually need anything: Pavel Tsatsouline's book Naked Warrior shows you a solid strength routine that requires no equipment at all. And here's a kettlebell routine that requires only bare-bones equipment.
Life's hard. It's even harder when you're weaker than you need to be. Do yourself a favor, and look into strength training. It may be the best choice you ever made.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Merry Christmas
[Ed. Note: I haven't given up on 2009 in Review, but am taking a short holiday break. Part One is here, Part 1.5 is here, and Part Two will be forthcoming shortly. Today, I'm sharing a repost about Christmas eight years ago. Enjoy!]
The story that follows is true. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
The year 2001 started out well enough, but with September began a bit of a slump, for reasons that should be obvious. Christmas left me with little to celebrate that year, newly unemployed and wondering what I'd be doing next. So, when we all decided to go to the midnight Christmas Eve service, that gave me something to look forward to. I had never been to a midnight service before. It promised to be something new, something wonderful, and something inspirational.
It lived up to the new part. I'm still not sure about the rest.
We had been attending the little Presbyterian church for about three months, maybe four. We had all enjoyed the experience so far. The interim minister had just preached his last service, and we were sorry to see him go. The new minister hadn't started yet. As I understand it, there's a list of pastors without regular commitments who will preach on an as-needed basis, and we had rounded up one of these. He came with good recommendations, and had done well with the earlier service. So, we settled in for a comforting, enlightening message about the Advent of our Savior.
Right away, it became apparent that something was simply not right.
You have to understand something about Presbyterians. They live and die by the Book of Order. There is a very specific sequence in which things are to happen within a service. You can almost set your watch by the order of worship. In, say, a Baptist service, the minister might well deviate from the plan if he thinks of something better; in a Presbyterian service you bloody well stick with it to the bitter end. It is simply the way it is done.
So, when the minister began skipping around within the order of worship, we suspected something might be up.
He called for the offering mighty early. He skipped around with the hymns, which flustered the choir director mightily. He even skipped a few hymns, I think. Parts of that evening are still a blur. But the staff rolled with the punches fairly well, and the thing hung together, up to the time he began his message. We settled back into our pews, expecting a sweet message on the miracle of Christmas, the birth of the Christ child.
Oh, no. It wasn't going down that way, not at all. Those poor, unsuspecting Presbyterians looked on in mute horror as the Right Reverend Punchy MacAngry regaled them with a fiery sermon on the Gospel of the Two-Fisted Fightin' Jesus.
"I hear all this talk about love, but no one ever wants to talk about SIN," he thundered from the pulpit. I thought this to be a decidedly odd way to begin a Christmas sermon. It went downhill from there. He went on to rant about his sister, who had apparently told him once that being a military chaplain wasn't a man's job. His response: "It takes more of a man to preach the Word of God than to be out WHORING AROUND!" I had never actually heard anyone curse from the pulpit before. Oh sure, I have heard ministers talk about Hell and damnation. But outright cursing is something I hadn't heard in that venue before that night. And the fist-shaking rage, the purple-faced profanity-laced tirades, which would not be at all out of place for a Marine Corps drill instructor, but not quite what you expect from a mild-mannered Presbyterian minister.
Me, I was bewildered and somewhat confused by all this. But I had been raised by a retired Senior Master Sergeant, cussed at by an experienced professional, and didn't take any of it personally. The other poor people in that room, who had not been so inoculated, stood transfixed like deer in headlamps. The white-hot profanity seared their ears like branding irons. When the tirade finally wound down to a conclusion, you could hear a pin drop.
The choir director somehow had the presence of mind to direct the conclusion of the service, Christmas hymns sung by candlelight.
It was more or less at this point that my sister-in-law's hair caught fire.
Part of our goal in going to the late service was to tire out the children so that they would sleep in the next morning. (A dismal failure, by the way. They woke up as early as they always do.) Problem was, they were so tired, they couldn't hold the candles without setting fire to themselves. She leaned down to help one of her kids hold it steady, and one of the locks of her hair dipped into the candle's flame. The fire wasn't big, thank God, but she had to beat it out or it would have spread.
After the last hymn, the crowd filed out in silence. Not the respectful silence following a solemn service like, say, Good Friday, but the stunned silence of the witnesses of a massacre. Not a word was spoken, until we were in the car, on the way home. Then, I think I turned to my wife and asked, "Did I imagine that, or did he really go there?"
And so it has come to pass that re-telling this story is now part of my family's Christmas tradition. A very surreal ending to what had been a pretty dismal autumn. Sometimes the things that happen make no sense, no sense at all, but you just have to get through them anyway.
Life does, after all, go on.
More Christmas cheer can be found in a piece by David Sedaris. Part One can be found here, Part Two here, and Part Three here. Or, if you would prefer not to patronize YouTube, the transcript is here.
Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!
The story that follows is true. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
The year 2001 started out well enough, but with September began a bit of a slump, for reasons that should be obvious. Christmas left me with little to celebrate that year, newly unemployed and wondering what I'd be doing next. So, when we all decided to go to the midnight Christmas Eve service, that gave me something to look forward to. I had never been to a midnight service before. It promised to be something new, something wonderful, and something inspirational.
It lived up to the new part. I'm still not sure about the rest.
We had been attending the little Presbyterian church for about three months, maybe four. We had all enjoyed the experience so far. The interim minister had just preached his last service, and we were sorry to see him go. The new minister hadn't started yet. As I understand it, there's a list of pastors without regular commitments who will preach on an as-needed basis, and we had rounded up one of these. He came with good recommendations, and had done well with the earlier service. So, we settled in for a comforting, enlightening message about the Advent of our Savior.
Right away, it became apparent that something was simply not right.
You have to understand something about Presbyterians. They live and die by the Book of Order. There is a very specific sequence in which things are to happen within a service. You can almost set your watch by the order of worship. In, say, a Baptist service, the minister might well deviate from the plan if he thinks of something better; in a Presbyterian service you bloody well stick with it to the bitter end. It is simply the way it is done.
So, when the minister began skipping around within the order of worship, we suspected something might be up.
He called for the offering mighty early. He skipped around with the hymns, which flustered the choir director mightily. He even skipped a few hymns, I think. Parts of that evening are still a blur. But the staff rolled with the punches fairly well, and the thing hung together, up to the time he began his message. We settled back into our pews, expecting a sweet message on the miracle of Christmas, the birth of the Christ child.
Oh, no. It wasn't going down that way, not at all. Those poor, unsuspecting Presbyterians looked on in mute horror as the Right Reverend Punchy MacAngry regaled them with a fiery sermon on the Gospel of the Two-Fisted Fightin' Jesus.
"I hear all this talk about love, but no one ever wants to talk about SIN," he thundered from the pulpit. I thought this to be a decidedly odd way to begin a Christmas sermon. It went downhill from there. He went on to rant about his sister, who had apparently told him once that being a military chaplain wasn't a man's job. His response: "It takes more of a man to preach the Word of God than to be out WHORING AROUND!" I had never actually heard anyone curse from the pulpit before. Oh sure, I have heard ministers talk about Hell and damnation. But outright cursing is something I hadn't heard in that venue before that night. And the fist-shaking rage, the purple-faced profanity-laced tirades, which would not be at all out of place for a Marine Corps drill instructor, but not quite what you expect from a mild-mannered Presbyterian minister.
Me, I was bewildered and somewhat confused by all this. But I had been raised by a retired Senior Master Sergeant, cussed at by an experienced professional, and didn't take any of it personally. The other poor people in that room, who had not been so inoculated, stood transfixed like deer in headlamps. The white-hot profanity seared their ears like branding irons. When the tirade finally wound down to a conclusion, you could hear a pin drop.
The choir director somehow had the presence of mind to direct the conclusion of the service, Christmas hymns sung by candlelight.
It was more or less at this point that my sister-in-law's hair caught fire.
Part of our goal in going to the late service was to tire out the children so that they would sleep in the next morning. (A dismal failure, by the way. They woke up as early as they always do.) Problem was, they were so tired, they couldn't hold the candles without setting fire to themselves. She leaned down to help one of her kids hold it steady, and one of the locks of her hair dipped into the candle's flame. The fire wasn't big, thank God, but she had to beat it out or it would have spread.
After the last hymn, the crowd filed out in silence. Not the respectful silence following a solemn service like, say, Good Friday, but the stunned silence of the witnesses of a massacre. Not a word was spoken, until we were in the car, on the way home. Then, I think I turned to my wife and asked, "Did I imagine that, or did he really go there?"
And so it has come to pass that re-telling this story is now part of my family's Christmas tradition. A very surreal ending to what had been a pretty dismal autumn. Sometimes the things that happen make no sense, no sense at all, but you just have to get through them anyway.
Life does, after all, go on.
More Christmas cheer can be found in a piece by David Sedaris. Part One can be found here, Part Two here, and Part Three here. Or, if you would prefer not to patronize YouTube, the transcript is here.
Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!
Saturday, November 21, 2009
A Ballad of Acceptance Test
I've been busy enough to wish I was triplets. But sanity should return to my schedule in a few weeks. Until then, I leave you with a ballad that should apply to all engineers working through the acceptance test phase of a project:
Friday, August 21, 2009
Doldrums
The Dog Days of Summer are upon us, the time of the year in Texas where God turns the oven on "broil" and goes away to do something else for six weeks or so. Mostly I try to stay out of the sun as much as possible. If I could hibernate my way through August, I would. But I can't, so here we are.
The relentless fury of mean ol' Mr. Sun has sapped most of my desire for deep thinking, but I do have a few quick thoughts:
(1) There's a part of the health care debate I find grimly amusing. Everyone says they're against rationing, but rationing is precisely what's going on already. It's simple, really; when you have a finite good and a near-infinite demand, you will have rationing. There's simply no other way. Health care is in finite supply: there are only so many doctor-hours in any given day. And it's also in near-infinite demand: who doesn't want to live longer and healthier? So, the question isn't whether or not to have rationing, the question is what kind. Currenly, by and large, we ration health care by the ability to pay. On the other extreme of the spectrum you have a pure first-come, first-served system. I find both extremes unsatisfactory. I'll go into the details another time, but the basic idea is that you almost never find the optimum point on the extrema of a curve. The balance point is almost always somewhere in the middle. The fallacy of the excluded middle is a perennial favorite in American politics.
(2) As part of my effort to reduce my need to consume health care, I have been spending more time in the gym. I am by no means a fitness expert, but I do have to say that, so far, the StrongLifts 5x5 program has been excellent. I've been doing it for about five weeks now, and feel magnificent. Better than I have in years, as a matter of fact. You do have to take care that you do the movements properly, or you're liable to hurt yourself; but that's the point of starting light and working your way up. Highly recommended.
(3) Apropos of this item I wrote about back in June, CNN has a piece today on the outing of anonymous bloggers. No need to repeat myself, except to say that anonymity brings out the Inspector Detector lurking within your opponents. With a handful of exceptions, it's more trouble than it's worth.
(4) Finally, The Augustine panel, appointed by the Obama Administration to review NASA's near-term human space flight plans, will report its results soon. It remains to be seen if the Administration, and NASA's leadership, take the recommendations as a plan of action. This may be NASA's last chance to regain the initiative in the manned space sector. Lately, most of the interesting headlines have been coming from private industry, not from government laboratories. This can change, but only if NASA is willing to change the way it does business. Can they? Will they? The next few years will tell the tale.
That's about it for now. Is it September yet?
The relentless fury of mean ol' Mr. Sun has sapped most of my desire for deep thinking, but I do have a few quick thoughts:
(1) There's a part of the health care debate I find grimly amusing. Everyone says they're against rationing, but rationing is precisely what's going on already. It's simple, really; when you have a finite good and a near-infinite demand, you will have rationing. There's simply no other way. Health care is in finite supply: there are only so many doctor-hours in any given day. And it's also in near-infinite demand: who doesn't want to live longer and healthier? So, the question isn't whether or not to have rationing, the question is what kind. Currenly, by and large, we ration health care by the ability to pay. On the other extreme of the spectrum you have a pure first-come, first-served system. I find both extremes unsatisfactory. I'll go into the details another time, but the basic idea is that you almost never find the optimum point on the extrema of a curve. The balance point is almost always somewhere in the middle. The fallacy of the excluded middle is a perennial favorite in American politics.
(2) As part of my effort to reduce my need to consume health care, I have been spending more time in the gym. I am by no means a fitness expert, but I do have to say that, so far, the StrongLifts 5x5 program has been excellent. I've been doing it for about five weeks now, and feel magnificent. Better than I have in years, as a matter of fact. You do have to take care that you do the movements properly, or you're liable to hurt yourself; but that's the point of starting light and working your way up. Highly recommended.
(3) Apropos of this item I wrote about back in June, CNN has a piece today on the outing of anonymous bloggers. No need to repeat myself, except to say that anonymity brings out the Inspector Detector lurking within your opponents. With a handful of exceptions, it's more trouble than it's worth.
(4) Finally, The Augustine panel, appointed by the Obama Administration to review NASA's near-term human space flight plans, will report its results soon. It remains to be seen if the Administration, and NASA's leadership, take the recommendations as a plan of action. This may be NASA's last chance to regain the initiative in the manned space sector. Lately, most of the interesting headlines have been coming from private industry, not from government laboratories. This can change, but only if NASA is willing to change the way it does business. Can they? Will they? The next few years will tell the tale.
That's about it for now. Is it September yet?
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
What's in a Name?
There's quite a lot that goes on outside of my notice, especially if I've been busy with other matters, so I mostly missed the blog-scuffle surrounding the outing of Publius by one Ed Whelan. I wouldn't know either of them from Adam, to be honest. I only find the issue of interest because ... well, it brings back some memories. I've been on the 'Net in its various forms for quite a while now, and anon-pseudo-public question has always been there. You'll find proponents for each approach. And you'll find individuals for whom each approach is exactly right, and exactly wrong.
I got my start on the 'Net in 1992 or so with GEnie. Just about everyone had a handle. A handle was nothing more or less than the name you went by. For a while, I went by "Deacon Blues". But after about a year or so, I had an epiphany. I noticed something about the people online for whom I had the most respect. They were always courteous, helpful, good-natured ... and almost invariably, they went by their own names. I decided right then that I would do the same, and I've flown my flag proudly ever since.
It's a decidedly mixed blessing.
Nothing ever really dies on the 'Net. All of my Usenet escapades are still there, searchable all the way back to my first post, way way back when. So, if you roll this way, you really can't hide anything. If you Google my name, you'll eventually find it all ... plus at least two other guys, which really kind of surprised me. (It's not an especially common name...) Still, I knew that going in. I don't mind the accountability. It makes me think twice, so that I don't say anything that I'll profoundly regret later. I can take pride in the fact that, for the most part, I've written nothing I'd be ashamed to have my daughter stumble upon someday.
On the other hand ... Elsewhere here on Blogspot, you'll find my colleague Mr. X over at Chair Force Engineer. He speaks a lot more candidly about his industry -- maybe even his employer -- than I ever would, and probably has much to fear if his identity were compromised. I fully understand why he's adopted a pseudonym. Publius, a non-tenured professor of law, wanted to keep his professional identity distinct from his opinion writing. That's also a valid concern. And then there are people with legitimate concerns about attracting stalkers. There's no limit to the full-on crazy some people on the 'Net can muster. I can't complain about their choice.
On the other other hand ... Anonymity gives some people license to become the rude public nuisance that they always wanted to be, but never had the nerve. I can only think of a handful of "real" names that I can associate with genuinely unpleasant people I've encountered online. Most of the jerks, trolls, and oxygen thieves I've run into hereabouts have been cruising under fake names. They exist to derail discussions. They thrive on vandalism. You still see them on blog forums today, but let me tell you, their troll-fu is weak. The trolls of old could utterly destroy a newsgroup. There were two particularly bitter flame wars I remember, both about ten years ago, both instigated by anonymous trolls. In one case, the troll's primary victim was unusually diligent, and ended up cracking his real ID. Said troll vanished post-haste, and was missed by no one. But the damage had been done, and the quality of conversation never really recovered. The other one got really ugly. A complaint was filed with an ISP, which resulted in the guy losing his job. He stayed around, under his real name, but got in a second flame-war with -- get this -- another anonymous troll. That flame-war ended in a fist-fight one Saturday morning outside of the city limits. Yes, even with blog-trolls, the modern 'Net is an improvement. Usenet was an angry, angry place. I don't miss it.
Anyway, that brings me to another serious disadvantage of pseudonyms. People who disagree with you can become obsessed with finding out who you really are. They think it's like shaving Samson's hair, or giving Superman kryptonite underwear. They think that by outing you, they can get you to shut up. And sometimes they're right. That doesn't make it fair or honest, but occasionally, it's effective. Yet another reason I hoist my flag proudly: no secrets, no drama.
It's worked pretty well so far.
I got my start on the 'Net in 1992 or so with GEnie. Just about everyone had a handle. A handle was nothing more or less than the name you went by. For a while, I went by "Deacon Blues". But after about a year or so, I had an epiphany. I noticed something about the people online for whom I had the most respect. They were always courteous, helpful, good-natured ... and almost invariably, they went by their own names. I decided right then that I would do the same, and I've flown my flag proudly ever since.
It's a decidedly mixed blessing.
Nothing ever really dies on the 'Net. All of my Usenet escapades are still there, searchable all the way back to my first post, way way back when. So, if you roll this way, you really can't hide anything. If you Google my name, you'll eventually find it all ... plus at least two other guys, which really kind of surprised me. (It's not an especially common name...) Still, I knew that going in. I don't mind the accountability. It makes me think twice, so that I don't say anything that I'll profoundly regret later. I can take pride in the fact that, for the most part, I've written nothing I'd be ashamed to have my daughter stumble upon someday.
On the other hand ... Elsewhere here on Blogspot, you'll find my colleague Mr. X over at Chair Force Engineer. He speaks a lot more candidly about his industry -- maybe even his employer -- than I ever would, and probably has much to fear if his identity were compromised. I fully understand why he's adopted a pseudonym. Publius, a non-tenured professor of law, wanted to keep his professional identity distinct from his opinion writing. That's also a valid concern. And then there are people with legitimate concerns about attracting stalkers. There's no limit to the full-on crazy some people on the 'Net can muster. I can't complain about their choice.
On the other other hand ... Anonymity gives some people license to become the rude public nuisance that they always wanted to be, but never had the nerve. I can only think of a handful of "real" names that I can associate with genuinely unpleasant people I've encountered online. Most of the jerks, trolls, and oxygen thieves I've run into hereabouts have been cruising under fake names. They exist to derail discussions. They thrive on vandalism. You still see them on blog forums today, but let me tell you, their troll-fu is weak. The trolls of old could utterly destroy a newsgroup. There were two particularly bitter flame wars I remember, both about ten years ago, both instigated by anonymous trolls. In one case, the troll's primary victim was unusually diligent, and ended up cracking his real ID. Said troll vanished post-haste, and was missed by no one. But the damage had been done, and the quality of conversation never really recovered. The other one got really ugly. A complaint was filed with an ISP, which resulted in the guy losing his job. He stayed around, under his real name, but got in a second flame-war with -- get this -- another anonymous troll. That flame-war ended in a fist-fight one Saturday morning outside of the city limits. Yes, even with blog-trolls, the modern 'Net is an improvement. Usenet was an angry, angry place. I don't miss it.
Anyway, that brings me to another serious disadvantage of pseudonyms. People who disagree with you can become obsessed with finding out who you really are. They think it's like shaving Samson's hair, or giving Superman kryptonite underwear. They think that by outing you, they can get you to shut up. And sometimes they're right. That doesn't make it fair or honest, but occasionally, it's effective. Yet another reason I hoist my flag proudly: no secrets, no drama.
It's worked pretty well so far.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Memorial Day, 2009
From the Lay of Horatius, by Thomas Babington Macaulay:
But the Consul's brow was sad, and the Consul's speech was low,
And darkly looked he at the wall, and darkly at the foe.
"Their van will be upon us before the bridge goes down,
And if once they might win the bridge, what hope to save the town?"
Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods,
"And for the tender mother who dandled him to rest,
And for his wife who nurses his baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus, that wrought the deed of shame?
"Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul, with all the speed ye may!
I, with two more to help me, will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand may well be stopped by three,
Now, who will stand on either hand and keep the bridge with me?"
Then out spake Spurius Lartius; a Ramnian proud was he,
"Lo, I will stand at thy right hand, and keep the bridge with thee."
And out spake strong Herminius, of Titian blood was he:
"I will abide on thy left side, and keep the bridge with thee."
"Horatius," quoth the Consul, "As thou sayest, so let it be."
And straight against that great array, forth went the dauntless Three.
For Romans in Rome's quarrel spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son, nor wife, nor limb, nor life, in the brave days of old.
We Americans celebrate three major patriotic holidays throughout the year. People tend to say the same things at each, forgetting sometimes that each one has its own character. On Veterans' Day, we celebrate the service of all of our veterans, honoring all who have taken their turn keeping the bridge. On Independence Day, we honor everyone, veterans and others, who have served our nation's institutions, faithfully bequeathing a legacy of freedom under law that, God willing, we will in turn bequeath to our sons and daughters. But on Memorial Day, we specifically honor those who paid the ultimate price for our liberty.
Memorial Day is for Nathan Hale. It's for Sullivan Ballou. It's for Lloyd Williams, who led his Marines into that French forest that would be known forever afterward as the Bois de Brigade de Marine. It's for Rodger Young on New Georgia, and Ernest Evans off the island of Samar, and Theodore Roosevelt Jr. on Utah Beach, each earning a Medal of Honor posthumously. And it's for Mel Apt, who was all too briefly the fastest man alive, until his out-of-control X-2 hit the unforgiving desert floor. (If any of those names are unfamiliar to you, please take time to read the linked entries.)
Not many of us know that the Star-Spangled Banner has more than one verse. Francis Scott Key originally wrote four stanzas. The last one begins:
O, thus be it e'er when free men shall stand
Between their loved home, and the war's desolation!
The young men and women we have recently commissioned as Second Lieutenants and Ensigns have signed on to lead their comrades into making that stand, knowing full well what the cost might be. They have volunteered to stand their post upon that bridge, just as the Romans Horatius, Spurius Lartius, and Herminius did back in their day. Most of them will survive their experience. Macaulay tells us that all three survived the battle. But he also tells us that in some versions of the story, Horatius died holding the end of the bridge while his companions withdrew. Some of the young men and women we've commissioned this week will find that fate to be their own.
The task they leave to us is to honor their memory. We must never forget those things for which they gave their last full measure of devotion. We must remember their courage, their honor, their dignity. And we must teach our children to remember, to make these stories of bravery and sacrifice live for each new generation.
For as long as we remember them, they never truly die.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
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