Earth Return Vehicle

2007-04-19T15:15:00.000-05:00

Long time, no Blog... Yep.

This blog was read by too many people with competing agendas for my life, so it seemed appropriate to halt it for a time.

Since this began as the Earth Return Vehicle blog, chronicling my efforts do design a vehicle for The Kepler Prize, it seems appropriate to update that subject. I'm competing in a second, very similar, contest to Kepler, which was the event that started this blog in the first place. Kepler was hosted by The Mars Society. This new contest is simply called Mars Sample Return, or MSR, and is hosted by The MarsDrive Consortium. MarsDrive is an affiliation of several pro-space organizations that both works with them and has its own projects. MSR is a design for a vehicle that will fly robotically to Mars, grab a sample, make its own fuel to return with, then fly the sample back home. Whereas the judges for Kepler were Tom Hill (who started it and develops weather satellites for a living) and several other professionals in the field, MarsDrive is judged by what could best be described as leaders with The Mars Society and NASA, along with the MarsDrive organizer/judge in Australia. Tom, judge and founder of Kepler, is a contestant in this competition, with a small team (read: Gulp!). Again I compete alone. There are five teams total in this puppy. For Kepler, there were 20 that started, 12 that made it to the mid-term, and five who finished. They included two universities and three private individuals or teams. The criteria for MarsDrive MSR are tighter than they were for Kepler, and include cost and specifics about flights. Both emphasize the creative.

The contest judging is to be completed at the end of this month. Yes, I'm nervous. When I competed in Kepler, I was shocked I won, so I was hoping against hope to place if anything, or at the very least not come in dead last. I had no idea what the other reports looked like. I went with my strengths, acknowledged my weaknesses, and did my best. In the end, I wasn't completely satisfied with the results, but I was proud of them. It was innovative, but it wasn't idealized. It left no margin for error, which for a first effort is pretty much grounds for a redo. But it was beautiful, unique, and just plain cool. Its other strength was the degree to which it was based on existing designs or things that NASA had considered in the past - and while they took a different route, the fact that the real rocket scientists considered them and did some planning on those designs lended them validity. Also, I spent 5 of the 6+ months in the contest simply getting a huge spreadsheet to calculate values for me. It was clunky, but it worked.

My MSR design picks up where Kepler left off. The huge spreadsheet was streamlined into a single column and enhanced and validated. The column became twenty columns to compare values across different design options. The research base went from a few articles and books to dozens of each to choose from. The design, rather than being pushed to the limit, picked the safest spot in that matrix and built out one iteration of design detail from there, still only using 30 percent of the allowed margin. There is no single system that can fail and take the whole design down, or if there is, there is more than one way to fix it. Everything is either based on existing designs or rendered so simple that you could build a prototype in the garage with enough money and time. The ballistics, cost, and other new territories for me are allowed for. The system takes the best and brightest of current designs and rather than pushing them forward, scales them back to avoid cost overruns. The individual parts are tested, but the overall system is unique and intensely capable and harmonized to do groundbreaking science and exploration. It is robust in design yet bold in ambition - when it hits the surface, it does so like a native, not with timidity but with purpose, much like the next rover planned in 2009. The Kepler was good but it was incomplete, so I did three additional papers on parts of it I felt weren't fully explored. This design, Rigel, is good in my mind - no changes, just expansions of detail and margin.

It also crossed a line with me - it's CAD-worthy.

I honestly want to start digging into its innards and spending the time meticulously drawing parts. The design is so complete in my mind that it really ought to be rendered as such. Then structural masses can be calculated, along with stresses and centers of gravity based on fuel burn. It will take both the design and my ability to design to the next level. It can even be flown in a free simulator called Orbiter after that point, and/or rendered as a movie. Normally, you don't do things like this until you are confident things won't change. This design is complete enough that I don't believe, at least for the first pass, that it will change much. It does need some work on the amount of waste in the system (unburned fuel, unrealized potential in engine efficiency, etc.) that should be margined in in more detail, but that could be done fairly quickly. (It allows large margins for production on landing and during the surface stay, medium margins for mass all around, but little for consumption on takeoff - it's still good because it's ).

If this design is selected, I'll get a flight to Dallas to present it. This is the next big step for design in my world, the next level. The big leagues (for design anyway) - submission to the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). I've certainly read enough papers with an AIAA index number - this year, Lord willing, I'd have written one (assuming it's accepted).

I'll find out in 11 days, barring any extensions by the judges.

2005-11-22T21:40:00.000-06:00

Sing, Thou Sirens of the Deep
At this point, unless things change, Divorce day is scheduled for December 2, at 10 AM. What makes this really strange is that this was scheduled Monday, and today I got called by the dean of my old college to see if I wanted to be one of ten people (including the college president, other deans, etc.) at a leadership prayer breakfast in downtown Chicago.
After much soul searching, I'm thinking my last act as a husband should be to be there for my wife, such as she is. I'm also thinking that if I go to this because of the leadership part or the honor part, and not the prayer part, I'm using God as window dressing, and that's basically wrong. I could definitely go off on her about "this is how it feels to be abandoned" or something - she certainly deserves to go out of her marriage alone and abandoned just as she did me. I also know the advice many of you would give me, particularly those who know Theo and her tirades and so on. But she was there for me with Yakko's being put to sleep. When I needed her, despite everything, she did show up and hold me while I cried the terrible soul-crushed agony of a grown man loosing his best friend yet again.
I've linked to a painting I dearly loved when I first saw it as a print several years ago, but neglected to purchase because I thought it would send the wrong message about why it was placed in my home. I think anyone seeing it now and knowing my story would be less focused on the nudity. The Lament for Icarus, Herbert Draper, 1898.
Daedalus created wings for he and his son to escape the labyrinth of Crete and return to Greece, but Icarus - so excited by flight - flew too close to the sun. The wax holding his wings together melted and he fell to the sea and drowned. His father flew back and forth looking in vain for him, crying out for him, and so the legend ends. In this painting, he has washed ashore and is now wondered at and mourned by the sea nymphs - his drowned eyes not comprehending their tenderness or beauty, they lost in wonder - not comprehending where he came from, but recognizing that it must have been a beautiful adventure that went very wrong and separated them forever though they touch.
My childhood was not unlike that experience, with my father repeatedly warning me what not to do with an aircraft. I always saw a little gleam of Daedalus in his eyes when he warned me like that. I always tried to thank him for flight by letting my story begin like Icarus but not end like it.
Fortunately, my last two years of beautiful flights and agonizing losses has been met with such sea nymphs holding me on occasion and telling me I’m an adventurer and that my adventure does not end on these rocks, that someday someone will join me and fly with me again. And unlike Icarus, my ears are not so drown nor my eyes so separated from the gift of sight to not look back and thank you. So bless you, my dryads of the deep, you beautiful ones. For Icarus and the Icarus within every man, I bless you and will one day fly for you.

2005-10-27T20:15:00.000-05:00

Sox Win!

Just a quick observation...

Red Sox - 2004 World Series champs, after a lifetime of loosing.
White Sox - 2005 World Series champs, after a very long lifetime of loosing.
Cubs - no pressure, guys... really!

Or maybe a sign of the end of the world, or that old joke about the guy in Hell who the devil can't seem to make unhappy no matter how high he turns up the heat, so he turns it down to freezing, and the guy is delighted because the Cubs must have won the World Series .
Just stuff I think about when the world flips upside down.

Speaking of, the earth's magnetic field flips every 3 million years or so, so that south is north and vice versa on a compass. It has like clockwork throughout the geological record. This is interesting because A) we are due for a flip, and B) the poles have been migrating more quickly in the last hundred years or so, so much so that the north magnetic pole is no longer technically in Canada as of a year or so ago. Nobody quite knows what to expect when the poles flip. Does the field decrease to zero (endangering satellites and astronauts, who hide under it for radiation protection in low earth orbit), then come back on the other way? Does it just move like it appears to be doing now? There are no mass extinctions associated with these flips, but we didn't have electronics, satellites, and a space station before either.

Or baseball.

2005-07-07T12:17:00.000-05:00

Mind the Gap

I posted the following this morning to the IMAO comments section:

First off, condolences and prayers to our allies and brothers/sisters in London. You have been the haven of fighting for freedom since Nelson and Wilberforce. Make them proud.

Spain be damned. What works is repeated; what fails dies. Whatever aggression you reward with cowardice you will get more of. Whatever you resist you will get less of. Clinton gave us a strong and encouraged Al Qaeda after cutting and running from multiple attacks. Spain gave you this.

Britain should double its commitment to Afghanistan and perhaps Iraq. A pissed off Al Qaeda is better than a happy Al Qaeda any freaking day, considering what makes them happy.

If they attack again, double it again. While an American should find Bin Lauden, I think today if a Brit does, we’ll still be as happy (that, and you lost hundreds on 9/11 as well).

I fear for you, England. Not that you will bleed more, but that your blood will have been spilled in retreat. The land that gave us Churchill also gave us Chamberlain. Choose your path well. Your future will thank you for what you defended or curse you for what you let grow, just as it always has.

God bless Britain!

2005-07-05T19:45:00.000-05:00

Many Updates on My Life

Now that a year has past, I can legally admit my name and the bank I worked for when started this blog. My name is Kent Nebergall and I used to work for Washington Mutual. my e-dress is knebergall at ameritech.net.

Recently I haven't posted much. My wife left me for another man last December just two weeks before Christmas, then came back after he returned to his wife and kids, after six months of marriage counseling for our side that was going well until the end, she ended up leaving me for him again, and she's been away over two weeks now. We are getting divorced.

Many people are praying for me, hence my ability to sleep at night. I went to Cornerstone music festival last weekend and feel nearly normal during the day now. It's still a shock to see so much furniture gone and so many piles of what she left behind that is still her crap, so I'm getting by. Nights just suck.

When word gets out in Mensa, and I go to the Chicago convention to speak in October, I'll probably be awash in women who wish to comfort me. Unfortunately the ones who know me are older, and the younger ones don't necessarily know me enough to pounce. Oh, well. It only takes one. Odds are whoever I end up with I don't know yet. Or maybe I do. I'll be 37 on July 23. Not the latest age to start over. Young enough for kids. Still though. Damn. I hate this. Why couldn't she have been sane? Why couldn't she have seen me as what she wants and needs and stayed in love with me?

I'm at work late, and feeling feverish and sore along with this cold. I should head home - long commute, over an hour each way.

If you are reading this from IMAO, please continue to a couple more posts. I write well, better than this. I can also be very funny when I'm not bleeding like this, and sometimes when I am. Later I will write of the incidents that indicate (A) God isn't happy with her decision either, and (B) He has a wicked sense of humor.

2005-03-22T22:15:00.000-06:00

Touching My Father's Hand

I was listening to Rick Wakeman’s Out There album on the drive home. I’ve listened to it a couple times before, but it finally sank in with full force and left me smashed to jelly, and I only got through the first three tracks.

I was left with images of flying to orbit, then Mars, then Sirius, ever more fascinated yet alone. Dad isn’t coming back no matter how far I fly in this body. I won’t round a distant sun and have him say “here I am.” Nor will the dust of some distant icy moon spell more words of his love or advice to me. I won’t feel his embrace in an alien race. I’ll never forget my plastic gloved hand holding his cold swollen hand in the hospital as his heart beat its last, and my brother said “he’s gone”.

And tears fell as a soul rose. Reward for him, punishment for us to loose him.

“And as I look back on the stars,
It’ll be like a candlelight in Central Park -
And it won’t break my heart to say good-bye.”

God cannot be touched in the rocks of Mars, though his image is in the face of everyone.

Someday my soul will touch both father and Father, and my body will join me later, but for now…

For now…

There are rocks and faces to touch. Much to learn. Advice of wise Godly men and women. Things to learn from mud and stone and sky - things to learn from the vision where humans haven’t touched yet. Yet they have been touched by stars – the coherent points of sky-blue and amber light fires through the mind and heart. We are touched by the words of pens long stilled and hearts long since departed – poems from hundreds or even thousands of past years around the sun. Souls like ours, eternally climbing and sinking like birds in a thunderstorm, pressing on. Pressing on to land and safety somewhere. Answers… Beauty… Love… Understanding… The very ecstatic touch of God.

Words of God and Man passed through the course of human life, and genetically, before text began. Written in bones in stone, tracks written by centipede footprints in sandstone as they dodged dinosaur steps, worms beneath the Jurassic seas and filtered sunlight of shorter days. Speech of winds of suns exploding and casting fertile ash like zero gravity volcanoes making islands of the sea of light and dust, awaiting the life of God to speak and mould and breathe life into their soul-less molecules, making a timeless dent in the space time continuum. Making a moment aware of time. Aware of space. Aware of the breath itself. Aware of God.

They say a nuclear explosion is what happens when you take a pound of matter out of the river of time. Edward Teller said of the first atomic bomb, “At first I was disappointed. It appeared to be a little explosion. Then it flashed and grew brighter and brighter and brighter.”

A child is what happens when you place a timeless soul within the stream of time. Who is to say what is more powerful?

2004-12-03T11:07:00.000-06:00

Ritual and Flight
I recently learned from a Discovery Home Theater documentary that hot air ballooning and champagne were invented around the same time/place 210 years ago and closely related. The first balloonists in France were worried they'd be killed by farmers when they landed, who would be convinced they were aliens/demons/Brits or something, so they insisted the king give them something to give the farmers to prove they were of earthly/human/French origin, and champagne was the agreed-on payload. To this day, as they showed in this documentary about the balloonist festival in New Mexico, they drink champagne on landing and have a long ritualistic recited toast to go with it. I though this was cool beyond words.

A bit of a google search for more details, from Yankee Magazine:

Following in the tradition of the first balloonists, French thrill-seekers who
landed in vineyards, your pilot will offer a bottle of wine to appease the
landowner. There's another bottle, shared by all. (What's not to like about a
pastime that features champagne at sunrise?) And, always, the balloonist's
toast: "The winds have welcomed you with softness. The sun has blessed you with
his warm hands. You have flown so high and so well, that God has joined you in
your laughter. And he has set you gently back again into the loving arms of
Mother Earth."

I always thought there should be more ritual to aviation. Boys playing high school football get a marching band and cheerleaders, yet my flights as a kid were rarely greeted with so much as a handshake on landing, and usually a blank stare of "Oh, do you need gas now?"

My dad's last plane sounded like and handled like a Star Wars pod racer, with the two high powered engines pulling you on either side of your fuselage like mechanical horses pulling Apollo's chariot across the sky. Speaking of Star Wars, I always loved the flag parade at the beginning of the pod race - it gave ritual to it. I often heard the music from that in my head when we pulled the twin out of the hangar, so perfectly balanced on its wheels that one person could pull it's 5000 pound mass from the hangar doors and turn it 90 degrees on the pavement outside.

On one of those flights we were over-flying a parade, but we couldn't find the rest of the formation, and frankly we had no intention of linking with them because we couldn't slow down that much. So we flew around at top speed 200 feet above their altitude along the route. According to my nephew on the ground at the parade, we flew directly over the formation in the opposite direction at double their speed, so it worked.

At Dad's funeral, we asked for the flying club to over-fly the funeral, and they did with three Cessnas. We were moved to tears by the beauty of it. Ritual and flight should really be more joined. Maybe in another hundred years.

Space and ritual? Only at funerals for astronauts, it seems. They added a verse to the Navy Hymn for space travelers, but I have yet to find it. I heard it on the C-SPAN coverage of (I believe) Alan Shepard's funeral and promptly wanted to find it. I should look again soon.

Another item - I found a used copy of the movie Dune last night. I remember seeing it the first time on television and being very struck by the scene toward the beginning where the shuttles are docking with the space station - and the station gate looks like it belongs on a cathedral. That's probably the moment when I realized flight and ritual where not as joined as they could be and should be.

Of course, if they were, maybe it would seem more a substitute for faith, so maybe it's not all bad that planes are treated like cars or more to the point, family boats with special storage requirements and so on. No, not even - boats are more ritualistic in the party sense than aircraft.

A pilot's toast? Somehow drinking and flying shouldn't mix in craft that can be flown again immediately, but there is the poem "High Flight", which many pilots know by heart. I made it a point to memorize it when I was a student pilot, and can still recite it.

High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

- Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941 at age 19 in a training accident

More history here

2004-11-09T19:47:00.000-06:00

E-Mail
I e-mailed James Lileks today. With any luck, he just read this sentence.
Yes, I will buy the dang books. Soon. I promise.
I’ve been getting bolder about that lately. I asked my old college if they wanted me to speak on winning the Kepler Prize, and they were very interested until they realized I wasn’t currently a student. I think eventually I’ll hear back from them, but I’m not counting the days by any stretch. I know them too well.
I also e-mailed the publisher of Apogee Press to ask when On To Mars Volume 2 would be ready, and anyone reading this could finally see my Kepler-prize winning design. He said he’d rattle Zubrin’s cage on it. I also asked if he’d be interested in me doing one of two book ideas. No reply yet.
I have to get this ambivalence to rejection thing to an art before I go writing novels.
Then again…

Halloweem 29
The Chicago Mensa convention was great, as usual, at least at a personal level. Friday my wife and I were in the stagefighting/swordfighting class and learned to make big scenes in restaurants. I suppose there is some practical knowledge in how to swordfight with one hand or throw a punch with nastiest effect. We have only been trained in medieval swordfighting, and that several years ago.
Saturday morning was a Mystery Novel Writing Workshop, which was hosted by Kathleen Anne Fleming. When we read our samples aloud, she loved mine, and really fell in love with the passage below, which was to follow a passage from another novel saying that the scents of the south and the warm starlight were not like the cold distant stars where the writer came from.

So I wrote:
“In the Manitoba winters of my boyhood, stars shown like ice and moonlit ice crystals in the omnipresent pines shown like stars, to the point where one could not tell fire from ice, impenetrable distance from frozen encirclement. In Manitoba, if you went far enough in any direction, it would be warmer. So the day he left school, he aimed his stride for the nearest railroad track, then kept the north wind at his back until the relentless howl fell silent, until the celebration of crickets replaced the distant mourning of wolves.”

I ended up buying one of her books (Demands of the Dead), and learned her style was similarly thick with imagery.

That morning, later, I did a lecture on the current and future state of space exploration, with a lot of good interaction with my audience of fifty. That afternoon we were to host a live MST3K style interactive riff on a bad movie, which I found out about only that week. I picked up a collection of bad movies, and settled on Star Odyssey, which was like a spaghetti western version of Star Wars with less talent than an elementary school play and a writer who either hated science fiction or needs to start doing so. The Mecha-Teletubbies were particularly horrifying. We had a lot of good interaction with the crowd, which is great, because I had so little time and energy to prepare. I'll have to photoblog this Lileks-style some other time.

That night, pretentious drinking – yes, that’s the name of it. We are limited to four shots, so I had seven, because people kept buying me shots. Someone frantically asked me a question on the molecular basis for magnetism in iron, during which I smiled with great intoxication at the fact that he thought I knew. Being Mensa, the next person whom he asked actually did know.

We entered a raffle to win one collection of wines and an auction to win another prize, which included a day with a local semi-famous French chief. We won both, so we had a lot of expensive wine making its way to the basement on our return.

Millie
Millie Stevens won a long term service award. This was significant here because Millie has a form of ALS and until the day before the award, we weren’t even sure she was alive. It turned out she moved, and my wife went to her house Sunday morning to get her and her wheelchair. Millie’s always been attracted to me, which is cute because she’s basically over sixty and five feet tall, and once looked up at me after I hugged her to say “Call me when your wife’s dead”. If you tell that story to a woman under fifty she thinks it’s horrifying; if you tell it to a woman over sixty she will laugh her head off, as my mom did last year. I suppose this is a common pickup line in the geriatric set. My mom, on hearing this, went to her collection of scrap writings to a poem called Life Begins at Eighty, about how nice it is to flirt with absolutely anyone at that age and get away with it.
Never a slouch at this, I found out later from my wife that Millie had commented on my cute butt at the award presentation breakfast. No comment on her standing ovation, her seeing her old friends and haunts when she thought this would be the first time in fifteen years she couldn’t come to this convention… just my butt. That’d be Millie.
And no, I don’t work out.

Just Curious... Do you read this?
On the off chance you actually read this and this blog is more than a diary I can get at from work, please e-mail me at knebergall at Ameritech.net, with the appropriate @ sign in place of the word. My efforts to find a counter to embed in the page haven’t come to fruition as yet, so I’m curious as to who reads this. Just a note, please. C sharp, perhaps?

And no, I won't send you pictures of my butt, even if you ARE a woman over sixty.

2004-11-02T11:18:00.000-06:00

Election Day
My wife and I voted on the way into work today, content in the knowledge we'd just cancelled out the votes of two outspoken Democrats at our respective places of work.
Currently, there is speculation that OBL will launch a terrorist attack, minutes after Bush wins, in a red state.
Does anyone honestly believe he'd call it off if Kerry won?
They might delay it. Or possibly move it. But cancel something they put that much work in? One last shot at the great satan?

Iraqi Insanity
Doonesbury was claiming Republicans are basically insane for thinking there are WMD in Iraq, still.
This ignores the fact that we've detonated two Hiroshima bombs' worth of conventional high explosives outside Baghdad Airport, a little at a time, every day at Noon.
And we have another A-bomb's worth on site waiting for detonation.
And we have seven more A-bomb's worth in other ammo dumps around the country waiting for detonation.
And these very same critics claimed we let HE ordinance used for making nukes slip out to the tune of 377 tons, give or take ninety percent.
And that THIS is dangerous if it gets in the hands of terrorists. Even though it's less than a tenth of one percent of what we've already detonated.

And did we mention the ten chemical warfare shells that were found? One doesn't build chemical munitions factories to create ten shells, then destroy the factory.

Or the missles that were banned? Or the mass graves?

FDR went into Germany looking for a nuclear program, found a missile program, and also found mass graves of ethnic minorities. Bush's only mistake was emphasizing one over the other two. I wished he'd admit to it, because it would call attention where it needs to be.

Back to OBL's Endorsement
And now, OBL is threatening us with destruction again, and offering a truce if we vote for Kerry, an attack if we vote for Bush. Because, you know, making OBL happy is what we really should care about.

I'm guessing at what an OBL attack would look like.
Gotta be an economic target in a red state.
Maybe a borderline one, such as Minnesota or Florida or Ohio, that may give Bush the win in the election, in an effort to push them back like in Spain. What would be an economic target in each? Mall of America? Disneyland? Not much in Ohio to compare to that - maybe King's Island? Maybe the latter is too low density a target for a truck bomb.
Alternatively, if it's a solid red state, and has a port, one could detonate an entire ship's worth of Iraqi explosives. Most ports are in blue states, so New Orleans? An oil facility? Then again, any coastal state from Texas to Virginia is solidly red, with the exception of Florida, and time will tell on that one.
Then again, in the school bombing in Russia they filled the building with explosives over a six month period, so any large building could be a target. I'd be running an explosive sniffing dog or two up and down the Dallas and Houston skylines, looking for front companies on lower floors.

Sorry - no comfort on this thread. It appears the terrorists may have worked out that attacking Democratic areas such as cities may not be in their long term best interest, since these are the very areas most interested in sucking up to terrorists. Unfortunately, we'll probably find out one way or another soon.

Incidentally, Michael Moore and OBL are pretty much sixty-nining each other in their respective statements these past few days. The Death To America/Vote For Kerry crowd has spoken in no small degree of unison. And let's not forget the Communists, who have killed over 120 million worldwide and stated that they would bury us. And the Iranians, who chanted Death to America while voting to enrich uranium, tried to lobby against Bush's reelection by quoting Michael Moore, and - wait, oh that's right - Kerry wants to send them MORE uranium. And cancel the only program, the nuclear bunker buster, that can possibly destroy their mountain nuclear factory without a massive American invasion, and thus take our only leverage away in negotiations.

Perhaps Moore would be wise - scratch that - shouldn't be in the same sentence - would be less foolish if he were to remember that Islam is Hell on Western Film Directors. Will someone PLEASE offer him a wafer thin mint? Or at least inform him that Yassar Arafat in a Fat Bastard costume is not a great look. I suppose he'll spend the $100 million from his last film on paternity suits from co-eds on his college tour.

I think part of our purpose as Americans is making life as miserable as possible for these mass murderers and those who cheer for them. Appeasement has never worked - it has only made the blackmailer stronger and the victim weaker. Show me one instance in history where it has not been so.

2004-10-19T09:12:00.000-05:00

In Memorial: Homer Nebergall

My Dad passed away Columbus Day at 10:40 PM. I got in a few hours earlier. Most of us children and our spouses were with him when he died. My wife didn't get in for a few more hours, but tried hard. Mom had went home, and we gave her the news that night.

The visitation was Thursday, and it was overwhelming. I knew dad had touched a lot of lives, but it was very heartening and inspiring to see so many people with so much love that he'd inspired and helped over the years. We stood for four hours while the line just kept coming.

The funeral was Friday. My brother Blake was trying to pull strings with the Air National Guard to get an F-16 flyover. That fell through in part because the military wanted to control the whole service, and Mom didn't want that. They did send a flag, and the VA will provide the headstone in a few months. Blake did arrange for the flying club to do a three-Cessna flyover in formation at the start of the funeral. The weather cleared just long enough for it to happen, thank God. The sight was beautiful, especially when you knew how many years those men had been friends with my Dad and Blake and I. We've always loved flying. When the three engines purred overhead with that much power synchronized and echoing across the graveyard, it was like aviation was loving us back. From the God side of things, there was a large eagle or hawk flying around the farm when we returned. I love it when He does stuff like that.

I'm doing well. I'm crying some now and then. I took a long hike in my old farm woods Wednesday to get myself grounded. I get a little nuts if I don't visit the farm every so often, so visiting for a whole week and seeing so many faces I hadn't seen in years was very, very comforting. Mom's doing OK. My brother will take another week off so she won't be alone. My biggest issue at the moment is that certain things set me off. I saw a cartoon with a character flatlining and it was harsh, since I'd seen my dad flatline six days before. I washed one of my cats with a special cat bath towel like a Wet One since he can't bathe himself very well. The good news is he liked it. The bad news is he smelled like he'd been washed with a medicated cloth, which is how Dad smelled during his months in the hospital. I won't be washing the cat with those again soon.

I suppose Columbus Day was as good a day as any, as it seems the perfect time to set foot in a New World. As the song at Dr. Ed Thomson’s funeral said:

“[But think] of standing on ground, and finding it Heaven,
Of touching a hand, and finding it God’s,
Of walking on streets, and finding them celestial,
Of waking up in Glory, and finding it home.
Oh, that will be Glory for me.”

2004-09-21T11:42:00.000-05:00

Kepler’s Ghostly Hand

Yesterday was interesting. I went to Best Buy in search of Brian Eno’s Apollo CD, not knowing A) it was 15 years old and B) that it wouldn’t be there. But I had read enough reviews at this point that I thought it belonged in my collection. As I searched, I did find Fresh Aire V – Voyage to the Moon by Manheim Steamroller for $11, and I’ve wanted that since college. I’d named one of my lunar projects from college Subvolva based on a note in this CD when my roommate purchased it. In the process of checking out the new age section, I also found Vangelis’ Mythodea, which is an homage to the Mars Odyssey mission from 2001 and Greek mythology in general. Apparently it was used for background music on a PBS special, but he music is so good it also came out as a concert DVD. I’d not heard the Vangelis one until now, and currently I’m on track 5 of 11 – it’s incredible.

While purchasing them I got a text message from my wife to pick her up. So in the car on the way home I’m explaining these purchases to my wife. “Fresh Aire V is based on Kepler’s Somnium, which was one of the earliest stories of space travel when written back in the 1600’s…” About this time I realize the tie-in to the Kepler Prize, which I don’t associate with Kepler so much as Zubrin, but now I guess I should. As my voice trailed off, my wife voiced the same thing, asking if I’d bought it for that reason. No, but I guess it is interesting that after looking for it on sale for 15 years, it would show up just now.

Mythodea is about Mars, but not Kepler, or so I thought. When opening the CD case there is a huge and seemingly meaningless quote from a scientific paper by Kepler on the elliptical orbit coordinates for Mars. It was so heavily footnoted it was very stupefying to read, yet here it was, taking up a whole page in the CD book for no apparent reason, rambling past footnotes that are no where to be found. In another burst of irony, I remembered Rev. James Heiser lecturing on Kepler at the Mars Society conference, and how the church has gotten a bum rap because Kepler was both fully accepted by the church and fully scientific in his conclusions. However, he made note that Kepler (or perhaps Newton, or both, memory fails me) had written books with all the illustrations footnoted in the back instead of in the text, because it was far easier to publish but far harder to read. So that explained all the footnotes, but what was it doing HERE? Before I answer, the bit about putting all the illustrations at the end is also a pain now for publishers, as that emphatic note by the publisher of our Mars papers proves out. They insisted we put all illustrations in the back of each paper and allow them to typeset them into place later. I suppose this makes some sense from an import prospective.

So why was it there? The last line mentioned musical resonances – the music of the spheres was thought to be actual music, with each planet’s orbit beating out a different rhythm and resonance. The ratios of orbital periods and rates corresponded to the relative string lengths or hole positions in musical instruments.

Track six now – beautiful opera – no lyric sheet or translations, with the CD or on the web. Painful. I’ll have to get the DVD just to see if it has subtitles.

So we arrive home, and the porch light is out, but I think I see a box. The globe had arrived! It’s beautiful – Daedalia Plania clearly labeled and covering a huge area. A book was also included, which I didn’t expect.

Earlier in the day I saw a news item from Europe’s Mars Express orbiter team that they had mapped where the methane and water vapor were coming from on the planet, and that it matched, implying that A) if it’s volcanic, then both water and methane are coming from the same outgassing events, so that makes sense as well as B) if it’s life, then life and water would be in the same place, so that also makes sense. Regardless, it was covering three large plains in the northern hemisphere (Daedalia is in the south, no overlap there). I noticed in the book that came with my globe that the crust of Mars is much thinner in the northern hemisphere, so that also makes sense.

In other words, the question is are there gasses that include methane boiling through the northern plains from the mantle through the soil, or are there nutrients identically boiling through the soil and feeding farting little Martian microbes in that very same area?

Ironically, there is a big chunk of the southern highlands that also lends itself to life, according to one of the lectures at the Mars Society. There are ancient magnetic fields still bound up in the rocks that could help protect exploring astronauts (not to mention give beautiful auroras every night) as well as any native life. Further, it corresponded with other deposits, though I forgot what they were. There is no overlap with this and the plains in the north, with a one pixel exception that has 75 percent of the maximum reading but is down in the lower region. I’ll eventually have to find out where that is for the novel if nothing else.

In the novel I’m toying with writing, Mars is secretly colonized in 1970 by a military operation using Orion spacecraft. Their bases are hidden, but tell-tale gasses are released, resulting in the current detections. Now I have a rough idea as to where to hide my characters.

I think I’m going to write Rev. Heiser and ask if I can get his papers from the conference in softcopy. I think somewhere in my Great Books collection I have a Kepler, but it would be nice to have historical context for it.

Dreams and Visions, Looking Up Versus Looking Down
I finished Zubrin’s novel First Landing Sunday. It was my first goal after the Mars Society conference. He has a devout Christian southerner and an elitist atheist on the crew fighting like cats and dogs through a lot of the text. I suspect he put them in not so much to express his own views as to provide ongoing conflict. The Christian is named Gwen. In the end, and at the beginning, she saves the day quite a bit. An almost grudging respect is given by Zubrin here, even while he blasts other Christians in other places.

One song from To Touch the Stars is called Queen Isabella, which starts out characterizing her as “more than a little deranged. A bigot, fanatic, and greedy for souls. To baptize the world was first of her goals. But she bet on a dreamer, that’s how the wheel rolls, and afterward all the world changed.” It then spends the rest of the song lamenting her passing, since no one else seems to bet on dreamers anymore.

Incidentally, did you notice the language used to describe Isabella? Does wanting to lead people to salvation really constitute all of that? Granted, this was 1492 in Europe, in a country that in the same year had FINALLY pushed the Muslims back out of Europe's western edge.

With his long historical interest, it appears Zubrin gets the fact that no major move in science has happened without Christian leaders authorizing the quest and Christian taxpayers footing the bill. It also appears no secular leader has dumped a lot of money into anything grand outside of the metropolitan areas; only the Christian has had the vision to appreciate sending humans to distant lands.

Let’s compare:

Teddy Kennedy – $14.6 billion – The Big Dig to mildly improve traffic in Boston at a cost of almost $2 BILLION per mile. Estimates suggest it will take 50 years to pay off the debt on the project. Incidentally, this was one of those bills that Clinton and Kennedy snuck through while congress was in recess – something Bush only did once with a few judicial appointees after conservatives begged him to for years. Clinton and Kennedy were so proud they called a press conference and signed it publicly. Incidentally, it was originally estimated to cost $2.6 billion for the whole thing. You’d think it would take some heat off NASA with their 100-400 percent markups.

George Bush - $5 billion - to return to the moon and Mars. This amount is to be added to NASA’s budget over a five year period, with the remaining balance taken from the shuttle and station programs afterwards when both are retired.

Note to Boston – if it’s too crowded, do what everyone else in the history of the world has ever done down to the smallest microbe with a flagella – if it’s too crowded, LEAVE.

2004-09-10T14:28:00.000-05:00

Expecto Politicum!
My wife and I just concluded the Harry Potter series this morning on CD. Order of The Phoenix ends better and with more humor than The Chamber of Secrets, so I’m not disappointed as I was with that one. The only problem is she spends so many pages setting the stage for the ending that, dramatic as that ending is, you get the impression you’ve just paid a lot to see the biggest fireworks display ever, yet it took less than a half hour. It’s kind of like saving up for two weeks to have enough money for a parachute jump lasting ten minutes.

I suppose if I was given to wonder why conservative Christians were no longer opposing the series, I have my answer in the last two books. The media is as propagandist and petty towards the heroes as possible while ignoring the real danger of the villains. In Order of The Phoenix, the government has its head as far in the sand as Madeline Albright did over the North Korea and Al Qaeda. The overall Neville Chamberlain effect is very pronounced in both.

Cornelius Fudge in The Ministry of Magic is pure Clinton in his denial that the Dark Lord Voldemort is back, much as Clinton was with the rise of Osama and Kim Jung Il during the Nineties. He also spends his whole time attacking domestic opponents while all hell is about to break loose under his nose.

In these last two books, also note the French look shallow and silly, with none to few sympathizers with the dark side. I'm not sure if I can tack this up to further proof she is on our side, or the simple fact that she's British and the French always look rediculous from their prospective. Frankly, after reading the beginning chapters of Suprised By Joy by C. S. Lewis, I half wonder if part of the reason the British have a history of being so harsh and strict with children and by extension sailors and so on is in a fanatical effort to never, ever become like the French. The British child is beaten, chastized, publically humiliated, grows up, then takes one look at his French counterpart and decides it was all worth it.

The only thing that would have made the Harry Potter series more metaphorical would be if a bunch of witches were dancing in a sunwise circle singing “Give Peace a Chance” and claiming Dumbeldore was worse than Voldemort. For that you have to go to Seattle rather than Hogwarts.

The role of Dudley Dursley will be played by Michael Moore. Beatrix LeStrange by Teresa Heinz Kerry, Voldemort by George Soros, and so on.

With the recent word that 60 Minutes either faked memos condemning Bush just before the election or received fake memos and didn’t validate them very well, and standing behind it despite all the evidence, Rita Skeeter may be more real than one would think. Perhaps we should give out a Rita Skeeter award every month for the most malignant journalist or film maker. Every year would be too difficult, or not difficult enough.

In Harry Potter's world, things get straightened out with the politicians and the press, and attention focused on the real enemy. I find that harder to believe than flying broomsticks, personally.

Mars on My Porch
Each evening as I get home from work I pry my vision to see if a medium size box is on my front porch or a tag telling me to pick up said box is on my doorknob. I ordered a Mars globe two weeks ago from California and I’m still waiting for it to arrive. It will ultimately go behind the glass trophy on the glass bookshelf next to my desk at home. With the reddish backdrop, it will be possible to read the white on glass inscriptions on the Kepler Prize. Now with a white wall behind it, it’s barely visible.

Job Prospects
My contract back at the bank closes September 30 if not extended, so I’m job hunting. I’ve got two prospects at the moment, though one wouldn’t start until November 1. That one pays well. The other is pretty light in comparison. Both are consulting gigs of roughly six months. I do hate the lack of job security with being a consultant, but lately full time hasn’t been that much more secure. The light job they expect to go full time and it would be with a large company with a chance to move up with stability. We’ll see what bird ends up in my hand in the end.

I hope I’m past the idea of worrying about how God will provide or where he’ll place me, and often I feel that way. Perhaps I’m lazy in that trusting God in this circumstance is far easier and less work than worrying about my next and previous interview, fretting endlessly about mistakes that cost me something, and so on. Yes, there were mistakes in the last job search. But truth told, it’s better that they were made than not. I made more money in a better place than had I not screwed up. “God protects fools, drunks, and the United States”, Mark Twain said. I’m neither a drunk nor a nation unto myself, but being foolish seems to happen at least once each job search.

We also get to see what having so much Mars stuff on the resume does to an interview. It would be silly to ignore winning that award or presenting the papers, but at the same time, I’m sure it looks extremely odd. I keep reading the one paragraph summaries of “What is The Mars Society?” for that occasion, so I don’t come across as spacy in the negative sense of the word. We’ll see. Interviews should prove more interesting now, that is certain.

And Speaking of Patronus...
The link below is to the Hidden Harry Potter Patronus Generator. Mine is a Siamese cat if I enter my first and last name, or a Bengal tiger if my middle name is added. This is cute since I tend to identify with cats and have three. My wife always comes up otter. She’s very much the teddy bear, but in this case, she has the same Patronus as Harmonie Granger of the Harry Potter series – not bad, I suppose.

http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/toys/namegen/1282/?PHPSESSID=85b886d830354ff122dc46c4a2a3ea28

There is also a link for Your Harry Pottery Name – mine is Dean, my wife’s is Harmonie. She’s going to be thrilled, I think. Maybe.

Update: She's amused.

Here is the full list. Note – language warning.

http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/toys/namegen/

2004-09-01T18:36:00.000-05:00

A New Essay

Two weeks from today I do my Icebreaker speech for ToastMasters. This is my first "real" speech for our local chapter of 20 people at work. The current draft follows.

Blue Sky, Red Sky

“You’re not close enough! Give me that!”

It’s not an uncommon thing for a 17-year-old to hear from his father. But I hadn’t handled this particular piece of equipment for a few months and I didn’t trust my skill to go any closer. So I was too far away and I had to hand it back to my dad for the next pass so he could do it the way he wanted.

But this wasn’t a lawn mower or a power tool. I wasn’t parking the family car. I was co-piloting a Cessna 182 and we were flying 900 feet over the south edge of our farm at 150 miles per hour. I was supposed to come in at 500 feet so dad could check out the crops, but there were power lines a little farther south and I didn’t want to risk it. So after banking it on the left wing, turning three quarters of a circle, flipping it onto the right wing, and bringing it back West, dad took the controls and buzzed the house and North edge of the farm at 200 feet. Dad and I were always very close and this was probably the grumpiest he’d been with me all summer.

Dad had been a poor farm kid who grew up just down a gravel road from the farm where he raised us. When dad told us he walked three miles to school uphill both ways to a one room school house with holes in his shoes, he could point to the road along the back of the pasture and prove everything. With a steep valley in the middle, it really was uphill both ways. As soon as World War II ended, he became a test pilot and eventually a corporate pilot. He quit professional flying before I was born and was a banker my whole childhood. He built the hobby farm when I was seven as an A-frame chalet with pole barns in the back.

So I flew enough to be proud, and cleaned barns enough to stay humble.

I hiked in our woods behind our farm, plus another 500 acres of a wooded valley pasture beyond that owned by a neighbor. I grew up around aircraft and could name the pilots of many light aircraft that flew over by day. The stars are very bright downstate and I could name the planets and constellations at night.

When you grow up in aircraft, the sky is not an object but a place. I was fascinated with both flight and space and was drawing fairly complex spacecraft when I was twelve. I was also hiking farther and farther into those 500 acres and drawing maps. My dad once gave me an aerial survey photo that I photocopied at the library many times to use in planning each new adventure.

This was also the time when new missions to Mars and the outer planets flooded the Astronomy magazines with new maps and photos of distant worlds and artists conceptions of what a particular volcano or canyon must look like from the surface. As a child, I was doing my own explorations and even went so far as to take a World War II bomber altimeter dad had on a hike to determine how deep that valley was. It still worked. I loved hiking in winter because the barren plowed red soil looked more like the pictures of Mars that the Viking landers had sent around that time. My snowsuit was my spacesuit and the stars were bright, close, and familiar.
Luke Skywalker, being stuck on a farm in the middle of nowhere with a great pilot for a father and an occasional flight down Beggars Canyon, was more familiar to me than Chicago.

About this time I made two discoveries – I hate math and computers are cool. This rapidly changed the course of my life into computer science, and after learning I loved to write I ended up spending my professional career in technical writing. In High School I learned how to fly and soloed at sixteen.

I found my wife shortly after leaving college and becoming a technical writer. She walked in after her job interview where she was hired, in her business suit and makeup, looking gorgeous, and was introduced to our tiny all male Macintosh development house as our new intern. Her first act was to pull out a floppy disk and announce it contained sound clips from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. When she uttered those words, and held aloft those samples of my favorite comedy from when I was thirteen, my first thought was “That’s it; she’s mine.” After a couple of months we started dating, and nine monogamous years later we were finally married. My wife is supportive of my more adventuresome side, as was evidenced when we went hang gliding last Summer.

This past year has brought me full circle with that twelve-year-old. I was planning on buying a CD from a friend of mine at a science fiction convention, and ended up walking right past a book signing table for Robert Zubrin. Zubrin is the author of a study called Mars Direct, which dropped the cost of sending people to Mars from 300 billion to 20 billion, or close to the cost of the Shuttle program. NASA took notice and changed their reference mission accordingly, and the new Moon and Mars program has him as an advisor. He created a group called The Mars Society seven years ago to promote the idea, and he told me their convention was being held in Chicago this year.

I checked out the web site, and got honorable mention in an essay contest I’d entered. Later I entered a spacecraft design contest, and finally became a member last summer. I actually won the spacecraft design contest, beating out two university aerospace programs and two other independent teams, including one from England. I got a glass trophy a few weeks ago at the convention in front of 400 people. It was all the more shocking because I did 95 percent of the work.

My other prize is to go to the Mars Desert Research Station, which is a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert built by The Mars Society and used by themselves, NASA, and other researchers to study how various equipment and research methods work in the field. Sometime in the next ten months I’ll be placed on a two week crew, hike in Mars-like terrain in a space suit documenting research, maintaining equipment, and otherwise making the twelve-year old in me very, very happy.

2004-08-23T18:04:00.000-05:00

Mars Conference, The Short Version

Oh, dear, where to begin…

This weekend was the Mars Society conference. I presented my paper the first day, and all went well. There were about 30-40 people in the audience. It was well received.

The second day, I presented my “Saturn Direct” paper to a smaller crowd, though the room was packed. I only got one question, which made me wonder if the audience thought I was stunningly intelligent or frighteningly insane. Saturn Direct designed in the most basic sense a trade between the Earth, the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids, with the basic construction method for very large spacecraft broken down into smaller chunks. In the process, it creates a vision of very large craft plying the solar system, complete with their shape, mass, basic layout, and payload capacities.

The third day was the Why Mars paper. None of the Why Mars readings were well attended because they were all printed in the program book (in fact, it seemed half the program book was Why Mars papers). I read mine to roughly ten people, and only took ten minutes of the half hour slot, even with “directors commentary” strewn in.

That night, however, was incredible.

After a fake quiz show in which Robert Zubrin was put on a panel that was basically there as a prank (half the contestants were from a science fiction comedy troupe), and before the five finalists in the mars music contest, they gave out the awards. I was the last one. I got an etched glass trophy about a foot square with the Mars Society logo, the Kepler Prize logo, and the inscription crediting Team Daedalia, my team, with winning. It was set in a fake marble base with fake gold columns on both sides to hold the glass upright. It looks really, really, impressive, especially to the audience of 400. The build up explaining that 20 teams started, 12 made it to the midterm report, and five finished seemed to impress the audience as well.

My acceptance speech went something like this:

“I’d like to thank Janet Dornhoff who couldn’t be here tonight, the judges for all their hard work, and all of you. This contest gave me a chance to overcome math skill issues that have dogged me since childhood. There is a line on the To Touch The Stars CD that says “We can do it if we try” and we certainly can do it if we try, and I can’t believe I freaking won. I said it when I read the e-mail, and I’ll say it again – I… can’t… believe… I… freak-ing… won. Thank you!”

How often do you get a chance to give an acceptance speech in front of 400 cheering people?

I almost walked off the stage the wrong way – I had to be photographed by Dr. Zubrin and several others, including of course my wife. Dr. Zubrin’s reaction to the photo after taking it was to shug his shoulders, implying the photo was goofy. Maybe he’ll take a replacement before it’s published – if it’s published.

Speaking of published, I asked him how long I’d have to turn in the short versions of my papers. These are necessary for the publisher to include the maximum number of papers in the book. I have until the end of the week to trim my research papers to fifteen pages each, with illustrations on the back pages.

My wife will be in all week, for which I rejoice, but I also know I’m going to spend a lot of that quality time redoing science papers. Saturn Direct is 25 pages, and a lot of that can be trimmed outright, but the ERV Kepler Prize design is 55 pages, and doesn’t lend itself to anything but a near-rewrite.

I also have to get my basic Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) information in to Robert Zubrin this week, most likely. I have a feeling I’ll be designated “documentarian”, what with the presence of documentation skills and lack of direct mechanical skills. As a farm kid with a pilot dad, I have assisted in repairing anything from a chainsaw to a twin-engine airplane, but have very rarely attempted to fix something myself and largely do not know how to do so. I know all the parts, just not the diagnostics. When it comes to machines, I’m a physiologist, not a surgeon.

My father’s surgery for a broken hip went well, but he’s got other issues that developed while I was at the conference. I’m watching that situation closely. Theo may have to go to the job site over the weekend, at which point I’d need to go downstate to spend time with my Dad.

My biggest concern was that I’d have to cut short the conference to go downstate if anything horrible happened. Now I’m concerned if I take a shift at MDRS at the wrong time, that may be cut short. I mentioned this to Brian Ecke and a person who works for Zubrin’s company in passing. I’d just driven them to my house in a logistic “first stage” to get all the Zubrin’s books, t-shirts, and other merchandise out to Colorado. Brian suggested it may be a good way to get away and clear my mind after that tragic day. I’d never thought beyond that day, frankly. Dad has been saying he’s “old and will be dead someday” since he was in his sixties, as if preparing us in his pessimistic way. Now we are dealing with a dad who can barely move and is asking my oldest brother how his car is doing, his Studebaker, which he hasn’t owned since he was a teenager or maybe his early twenties. In short, we saw this coming a mile away, but never considered the follow up. Now I have to pick a time when I’m available – not knowing my job situation after September 30, not knowing my dad’s state, not knowing any of that. When am I available? All the time and never.

I think I’ll ask for winter. It is a desert there, after all. I’ll leave it to Zubrin, which means leaving it to God, but not confusing the two. He’s to assign me where I’d be the best fit, and I’ll have to trust God that that’s what works with his plan as well.

Those who pray, pray for my father. And ultimately for my mother, my brothers and sisters, and I humbly ask, for myself as well.

2004-07-27T20:56:00.000-05:00

Venus and Other Distant Sites

Below is the script I intend to have roll across the bottom of the screen when I make a DVD of my video of the Venus transit last month.

Footage of the Venus Transit

June 8, 2004, at 5:40 AM

Shot in St. Charles, Illinois

By Kent Nebergall

…

The sound in the background is Kent setting up the other camera.

Venus should appear as a very small dark spot on the right top corner of the sun.

It will slowly move off the sun towards the top of the frame.

The total time for Venus to cross the sun’s disk is three hours.

Right now, at sunrise, the dusky overcast is obscuring this level of detail.

By now, we should be able to see it.

If it doesn’t appear soon, the overall brightness will wash it out before the transit ends.

…

Well, crap.

Unfortunately, I didn’t bring filters to help with this.

My sunglasses are in the other car, otherwise I’d try that.

Crap, crap, crap, crap, crappity, crap, crap, crap.

I got out of bed at 4:35 AM for THIS??

Oh, well, nice morning, anyway…

Relaxing…

The birds are singing…

The light hitting us is one thousandth less bright because of Venus crossing the sun’s disk right now.

And if we could just SEE it, that would mean something.

Really, it IS!!!

Why on earth else would I be out this FREAKING EARLY on a Tuesday?

I have to go to work today, for crying out loud.

I hope the still camera got something.

Let’s check, shall we?

(switch to still images archive)

Ohhhh-kay…. Maybe if we enhance it.

Wait a minute…

There!!! There!!!

No, just kidding…

I did that in Photoshop.

But the real transit should have looked like that.

Here are some shots from the web…

Which I could have gotten…

If I’d stayed in bed.

Next Venus transit in ten years.

If I don’t own a decent telescope in a decade, you have my permission to yell at me.

At least I can honestly say you’ve never seen coverage of the Venus Transit like this before.

Unless you, like me, are an amateur astronomer with no budget.

Thanks for your patience.

I’ll be planning a trip to Loch Ness for the follow up to this film.

Too bad John Cage is dead… He’d like this film.

I met John Cage once, when I was in college.

He was performing in Chicago, and a car load of us went to see him, and met him afterwards in a receiving line thing.

Really!

No, I don’t have any flipping pictures of that either, OK?

Just leave me alone.

Hit stop or something.

Go out for a beer. There’s some in the fridge.

Yes, there’s some after the transit… I didn’t drink it all!

You’re waiting for the film to run out, aren’t you?

Just patiently waiting for the next cute line…

Patiently…

Patiently…

How’s it feel?

A lot like the Venus Transit with no filter, right?

Yep…

I know your pain.

You don’t doubt me about THAT, do you?

I should put this together with my footage of the 1999 Solar Eclipse in Europe.

We filmed it on our honeymoon.

Almost all of it is out of focus because the auto-focus went haywire in the dark.

And my wife's camera ran out of film after one shot, and spent the rest of the elipse rewinding itself.

I’ll make a compilation DVD.

I’ll call it, “When Amateur Astronomy Takes a Dump”.

Hey, I need to get SOME use out of this footage, and in a sense, this is much more entertaining than a dot, isn't it?

OK, unless you count my cat named Dot.

In other news...

The Bank Does What I Want... BUT...

I got a call from my boss today. It was a call I'd have cut off a finger for at any point up until this month.

But right now, the only finger I want to give is in a rather less flattering way.

They want to fly me to the home office...
For two weeks, minus the weekends...
Which is three time zones away...
In a beautiful location...

BUT I HAVE TO SPEAK THREE TIMES AT THE MARS CONFERENCE THE VERY NEXT WEEK!!

AND ONE OF THE PAPERS ISN'T DONE YET!!!!

AND ONE OF THE WEEKS IS THE ONLY WEEK FOR THREE MONTHS MY WIFE WILL BE HOME!!!!!!!!

Well, for the first two issues, it appears I'll only really be able to work 9-5 on this job for most days (or so I'm told now), so I can spend my hotel time doing the papers instead of being distracted with cats and laundry and so on. It may be a good thing. As for missing the wife, there just is no way around that. I suppose it will be a dry run for her to be home without me when I do the Mars simulation. I do the housework and bills, normally.

And I'll finally do all those things in that town I've been wanting to do - restaurants, a museum, and finally seeing my boss and the rest of my team. One team member flew in this week to audit our documents. It was very good to meet her - I hope the rest of the team is that cool.

But even if they are, missing the wife-stuff really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really sucks a lot.

Yes, really!

2004-07-23T11:38:00.000-05:00

If a Man Falls in with a Mars Conference, Does He Make a Sound?

One of the rewards in winning the Kepler Prize is presenting your winning design at the convention. Now truth told, all contestants had the option to enter papers, so the organizer of the contest assumed the winner got a general session. Note that general sessions are a big deal, reserved for NASA project directors and celebrities, whereas the other sessions basically can be anything from “I have an idea, lets…” to reports back on those ideas tried in the field. In On To Mars, you can see examples of both great ideas and research and not so great ideas or research.

So anyway, Tom pushed to get me a slot speaking in front of the entire convention on Sunday morning. If I did so, I would have to upgrade my slides and do my best to be both professional and entertaining. It’s also a way to screw up big time, if you fail, in front of basically everyone who you’d love to work for someday. Considering the opportunity, I asked Tom to go ahead and ask. Given the risk, I wasn’t upset when it didn’t work out as such. Maggie Zubrin, who is in charge of the convention and is the wife of Robert Zubrin, basically said that if someone drops out, I could take a general slot, so bring two presentations (break out sessions are 30 minutes, general sessions an hour).

There is another prize I nearly forgot about the day I learned I won. That is taking a shift on the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the Utah desert. This is a simulated Mars lander in the desert from which crews of six volunteers simulate the tasks of living and working on mars to see what can be learned to refine the designs of real vehicles later. There is another simulated hab in the Canadian Arctic that was the topic of a Discovery Channel series. Both sites are the topic of the Zubrin book Mars on Earth.

Basically, you pay to fly to Salt Lake City, and they take care of the rest of your needs (food?, transportation to the simulated lander) for the two weeks you are on site. During that time, you do simulated mars activities, such as doing field geology and so on in simulated space suits. You are also expected to maintain the base (keep the generator running, etc.) during your stay.

It seems a good fit for me – on the one hand, growing up on a farm I’m familiar with hard outdoor work and maintaining small generators, etc. On the other hand, while not a field-anything, I’m enough of a science reader I could probably take instruction on that fairly well, and I have the tech skills to maintain and upgrade the computer equipment and telescope. Many groups go out with specific work projects, such as running a simulated Mars rover they’ve brought with them or simulating construction of mars structures with local materials. While not at that level at the moment, I’m certainly a good enough grunt at assisting in such projects.

Maggie informed me that assuming the project is funded this season, I have a slot. I just have to “talk to Robert and let him know my skills so that he can assign me to the appropriate crew”.

Not funded? Gulp...

What stunned me with this was the fact that in less than a year, I’ve went from reading this guy’s books and thinking maybe I’d go to his convention someday but not seriously planning to do so, to being on a first name basis of sorts with him and definitely his wife. How’s that work? If you’d told me this a year ago, or told me to do it a year ago, I would have been mystified. Winning a major contest, getting honorable mention in another, and helping with the convention and speaking on panels at other conventions - especially when no one’s heard of you except by name, and no one really has noted you outside of the staff at the home office – that must be slightly weird for them as well, just enough to be remembered. At one of the planning meetings, a guy I hadn’t met before was helping judge the posters from the poster contest. He seemed to have authority. He also seemed to remember me from meeting Robert Zubrin at Capricon – which was very odd. I don’t remember Zubrin being with anyone, though that may be an error on my part. Why would this guy remember me, or seem to do so?

Yep, it’s getting very Harry Potter-esque again. Only when I get there, I don’t expect anyone outside the committee to recognize me when I arrive – not the home office, not the guests. By the end, many will. What they think is up to them.

Oh, by the way, today is my birthday.

Pause....

Thanks! That's sweet of you!

Pause... Grin...

That's OK, I didn't remember yours, either!

In Space Politics...
In other news, a congressional group rather stupidly cut funding for the lunar return program. On the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. As of today, Bush is threatening to veto the bill unless it restores funding. Ironic that Bush and a lot of Moody Blues era liberals who now occupy space advocacy positions are so closely allied yet can't stand each other.

By the way, most space advocates are boomers approaching retirement - they remember the promise of Apollo. They are so prevalent in the movement they worry the whole thing will die out with them unless youth becomes interested soon. How odd is that? "I wanna be an astronaut someday." is an OLDER person's realm, not that of children?

2004-07-16T13:45:00.000-05:00

Desktop Update

I tend to take toys on my work desk and make visual cartoons, some more subtle than others. Typically it's just putting an angry and a playful figure in a fight, like when Samurai Jack and Spongebob faced off, or a character from Reboot stood off with Opus. Today I bought the stuff for my next big project.

Take one Elvis Presley action figure, holding guitar and singing at microphone.
Take one Alien action figure, with jaws extended and a few face huggers in the package.
Take one Halo action figure, with big freakin' guns.
Place alien in front of microphone, with guitar (six strings, six fingers - tis good!)
Put Elvis behind him with big gun, sneaking up as it were (the hands are in the right place from the guitar pose)
Maybe put a face hugger on the halo guy somewhere around.

And you have my new desktop joke, a scene the new movie from the directors of Alien versus Predator and Bubba Ho Tep (where an aging Elvis and a black guy who thinks he's JFK fight a mummy haunting their nursing home):

Alien versus Presley

"Whoever wins, we lose", indeed.

I'll see about photoshopping a poster and putting it behind later. It was inspired by the fact that they have the Elvis and Alien figs on the same posts at the store at the mall, and it was hilarious seeing Elvis singing with an alien peaking over his shoulder.

IT will go opposite Samurai Jack fighting Agent Smith in my The Matrix: Recast diorama.

If I find a Ripley figure the right scale, I may put it in the battle armor from Matrix and put a caption on it saying "This time, Ripley's not screwing around".

For the more dry of humor, I'm doing the sequel to my rock garden from when I used to work here. It will be a rock, paper, scissors garden.

Elvis on an alien world with a big gun was a major theme of the Red Dwarf TV show episode "Meltdown". I plan to show it at our movie night tomorrow, with the setup I described above sitting on top of the television or on the kitchen table with the food.

2004-07-13T16:57:00.000-05:00

Requests for Papers, ERV Simulators

To date, the following people have asked to see the ERV paper:

- My contact at NASA (directly from me)

- A Bulgarian scientist, who I think was one of the non-finishing teams (via the ERV group list – haven’t responded yet)

- A group called The Mars Direct Project, who is modeling the vehicles in a free program called Orbiter. (Stayed up late to send this one Sunday)

This last one is excellent, because if they build my design or something close to it, I can fly it on the PC! They said the next version will allow you to model the inside of the ship, so I could walk around it as well! Even if they don't use my design, I signed on to be on the team. I wouldn't mind having a crack at another ERV with my lessons learned from this one.

I was thrilled with this last one, as that was one of my goals when I originally started this project. The person there complimented me on the level of detail in the report. I knew I’d covered my bases well, where I could, but all this time I’ve been so focused on the areas I didn’t do right that I couldn’t possibly picture myself winning.

After letting the paper sit for a month, I reviewed sections of it today. I’d forgotten how detailed I actually did get. For example, here is a passage selected at random. It concerns thermal protection of the vehicle, starting with entering the Martian atmosphere.

The craft is angled into the atmosphere on a given side opposite the truck door, which is the largest opening on the craft. Engines are hidden on the leeward side as well. The command module and service module are the biggest challenges, as they have to withstand reentry heat at Mars twice and Earth once, nose first, with hundreds of days of exposure to Martian dust in the intervening time. The nose may be protected with additional ablatives or even a separate cover during the surface stay. A system on the base, first stage, and second stage that compresses Martian air and filters it, then uses this clean air to overpressure the modules to keep dust out, forces this air slowly out across the radiator panels for added efficiency.

OK, the grammar sucks because it was written late at night, but how many people would think to use a clean room technique they’d seen at Abbott Labs while documenting the IV bottle drug assembly line and apply it to keeping dust out of a Martian spaceship? And since this air is cold soaked by having been around all the fuel tanks, blowing it out past the radiator afterwards doesn’t hurt either. NASA probably would, but a grad student wouldn’t pick up on techniques from outside their field.

I guess this puppy is a winner, after all.

2004-07-08T06:05:00.000-05:00

WE WON!!! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!!!

The following arrived in my in-box this morning. (I deleted the e-dress of the contest organizer for anti-spam purposes).

Kepler Prize Award Winner 2004 Announced

The Mars Society announces that the first overall winner of The Kepler Prize for Mars Mission Design is team Daedalus, lead by Kent Nebergall. The judging panel decided that team Daedalus provided the best balance of material in answer to the criteria set in the request for proposal document. The prize award includes certificates for team members, a trophy for the team leader, and the chance to present their design to the assembled Mars Society conference in Chicago, IL.

The winner of the college division of the competition was The Personnel Earth Return Vehicle, a design submitted by an aerospace engineering design class at Penn State University. The team captain was Alicia Cole-Quigley. Team members will receive certificates, and the team leader will receive a trophy.

The competition required teams to develop a design for an Earth Return Vehicle (ERV), a critical portion of the Mars Direct mission architecture. The ERV lands on Mars without a crew, autonomously filling its propellant tanks. The crew arrives later and uses the ERV to return to Earth. The complicated power, landing, and deployment stages for the vehicle provided plenty of challenge for design groups.

A total of five teams submitted design documentation in time for judging…three independents (two from the US and one from England) and two college teams. Teams were judged within their division first, followed by a second round of judging between the division winners for declaration of an overall winner. All teams were invited to present their designs at The Mars Society conference this year as part of a 1/2-hour session paper, and some have expressed interest.

Teams took radically different approaches to solve problems associated with the mission requirements. The difference in approaches made it difficult for judges to pick the winner that combined the best of new ideas and old technology to design a vehicle that would work while keeping development costs as low as possible.

Judging criteria included Technical Merit (25 points), Publicity (20 points), Innovation (15 points), Simplicity (15 points), Completeness (10 points), Reliance on Current Technology (10 points), and Team Size (5 points).

As a public outreach project, publicity carried a lot of weight in the judging. At times a team's publicity efforts tilted the scales in their favor.

Currently, the release of reports is up to individual teams. If copies are desired, contact Tom Hill at the email address below, and he will connect interested parties with teams. Teams are encouraged to submit their reports to The Mars Society report archive, and inclusion in a future publication is possible.

The Kepler Prize competition started in 2003, with a kick-off presentation to the assembled Mars Society convention. The goal of the design contest was to get more people thinking about Mars mission design, while in the process producing a workable design for the Earth Return Vehicle. Teams were required to submit a mid-term report of 10 or less pages in December and then a final report of no more than 100 pages on the 1st of June.

Judges for The Kepler Prize included Brian Enke, Dewey Anderson, and the project director, Tom Hill. Frank Shubert provided special support to the project.

There is no Kepler Prize contest scheduled for the 2004-05 year, although others may be held in the future. For more information or to express interest in competing in future contests, contact Tom Hill.

---
"Imagination is more important than knowledge"
-Albert Einstein

2004-07-02T08:53:00.000-05:00

By the way... When Can I Read This Paper?

After that last post, I realized I've never said anything about how someone would actually READ my entry. After the announcment, I'll post sections of the text here. If I create a web site as I plan to, the full text will be there. Regardless, eventually it will be on The Mars Society website by Fall or so. It may be published as a chapter in an Apogee book someday as well.

The full versions would be PDF and have my lovely "God never intended Visio to do this" drawings at the back. If you know CAD, you'll be disappointed; if you know Visio, you'll be impressed.

2004-07-02T08:13:00.000-05:00

Why Mars? Prize Arrived

I got my prize for the Mars Society's Why Mars? essay contest today - it included not only the autographed book, but the To Touch The Stars CD and a mousepad. They also extended my membership another year, so the combined total is around $90 - not bad for Honorable Mention. The CD is both moving and funny, depending which track - I'm very impressed - it's not just more lame filk. I was in tears driving to it more times than I care to think about, and the song "Dog on the Moon" is now the must-play for many friends and relatives. It's very cute and funny and slightly Dilbertesque.

Ego Return Vehicle Lands (Hard?) July 8
The ERV contest announcement of a winner is July 8. While from the start I did not expect to win, and I know my competition includes an aeronautics program at a university, the full impact of loosing finally has hit home since the actually gave us a date on which it would probably happen. Of the original twelve entrants, I was confident I would at least beat SOMEONE, and was both pleased and disappointed that only five finished. It was rough work, especially when a lot of the math was unworkable until two weeks before the deadline (after six months of running this race). I have a feeling anyone I thought I'd beat has already dropped out. While in that sense, it is an accomplishment just to finish, and that puts me in the top half in itself, any victory I'd feel from that is slightly dampened in that "twelve teams started, only five finished" will probably not be noted by anyone but myself and the seven dropped-out teams. I hold out hope that I will at least beat SOMEONE, but with one winner and no mention of how they will rank the other four, I'm just not sure.

The contest emphasized creativity over math, and boy, did I! One could even accuse me of some creativity with the math, since every time (as was happening even at 10:30 the night before the contest deadline) the math said "This won't work" in some known area of the ship, I had to borrow weight from some area I could not accurately calculate to make the difference. I have a feeling that the lower stages of the vehicle went from being made of aluminum, to composite, to pure magic somewhere along this process. This fact was made clear in the "I can't work this" section of the report. All the same, it was heartbreaking to have to design something that slowly became more science fiction as the process continued. I just wish I could have come up with more ways to make the crew area lighter. I think a lot of the same techniques could have been used along with some "dorm room tech" of stacking the bedrooms on top of each other or something, but that would have meant a total redesign. Maybe if they have another contest next year, I'd have a leg up on that. Or I may just do it for myself.

July 8, I find out. July 8 I'll stop with the tension and get on with the disappointment or glory, or most likely some mix thereof. The Mars Society leadership is nothing if not gentle to its base. They know this whole thing is driven by people's excess energy, and they do as much as possible to feed that rather than cut it. If you are wondering, given the title of this blog - no, I won't stop writing on July 9 or after I present my paper in August. The next project is lecturing to Mensa in October, then I'll start the science fiction novel work that lead to me entering the ERV contest to begin with. Those vehicles are nuclear, though, and a bit of pure magic powering them is more acceptable in a sci fi novel.

The other paper, called "Saturn Direct" is stalled a bit at the moment with work and other demands. It's been a rough week. I saw dad, had a big fight with my best friend at work. All better now, but emotionally exhausted. This weekend is Cornerstone Music Festival, so I'm looking forward to being awash in Christian Nerdom at the Imaginarium tent. I want to also go to Flickerings - the filmmakers tent, but I'm not sure how much time will be available for that.

2004-06-25T14:02:00.000-05:00

Mars Essay

For some reason, the blog is the only web site I can see at the moment. I promised you my Honorable Mention essay, so here it is, slightly revised.

I’ve just sat down at a computer, removed my electronic key badge and my cell phone, taken a call from my wife a thousand miles away whom I dropped off at O’Hare airport this morning, and settled into this essay.

Had I went to the observation deck of the airport, I would have seen an airplane leaving every few minutes, each plane with between two and four jet engines, each engine with twenty-five thousand parts. If I sit long enough to drink a cup of coffee, I will have witnessed an ongoing spectacle as complex and expensive as the moon landings.

And this is nothing special.

My father was a production test pilot during the 1950’s. Of the roughly 1800 B-47 bombers assembled, he flew in 800 of them over four years. This six-engine stratojet was the prototype of all commercial jet airliners today. At the time, they also blew up for no reason, landed with entire wings on fire, pulled outside loops because of crossed control lines, and required their crews to withstand pressure blowout training each year. This training involved reducing pressure to that of the sky at thirty thousand feet, and then removing one’s oxygen mask until nearly unconscious. Still in his mid-twenties, my father left his job after four years because most of his friends were dead.

The concept of the commercial airliner we take for granted today was pure science fiction then, not because of technology, but because of reliability. My father thought the jet airliner to be absolutely impossible given the risks at the time. Flying like this demanded steel nerves.

Now it simply demands a photo ID and a major credit card.

Much is made of the idea that the shuttle is unsafe, experimental, and requires a lifelong career goal, perfect vision, and a Mensa card to even consider riding into space. The situation was not that different in 1950 with the multi-engine swept wing jet. Today I can’t look out a window at my house without seeing six contrails at any given time, day or night, rounding the VOR navigation beacon a mile south of my window. Even now, over one hundred people have flown in space on the shuttle.

But even NASA seems timid about the next flight level. They wish to build a station at low earth orbit, and another close to the moon, before touching the surface again. While the International Space Station is a valid world-class research laboratory in its early construction, other such bases would require structures and supply chains to sustain them that dramatically outweigh their advantages.

NASA needs to get over it.

If you want to go to the moon, you do so. You do not pass go, collect two hundred dollars, or otherwise waste effort at the pit stop.

If you want to build a 500-ton space station, you do not launch a 100-ton shuttle, with a 20-ton cargo capacity, forty-one times. You launch 100 tons on the shuttle launch platform five times and leave the space plane home. Similarly, if you want to go to the moon, you don’t first build a space station near the moon to switch crews. You either switch crews in orbit as we did in the Apollo era, or you land the whole thing on the moon. You do not waste effort on way stations. But NASA can’t break its orbital funk.

To go to Mars, you invest the same money and energy in going beyond earth orbit as you currently do to visit the space station. I’ve visited the space station, or at least parts of it, at Huntsville, Alabama where it was checked out. I took pictures through the observation deck glass of the Destiny module. It was very impressive, but it wasn’t Mars.

You need to give yourself, thirty or forty years from now, a routine that today seems like pure breathless science fiction. The first paragraph of this essay would have been perfectly at home in a Ray Bradbury story from the 1960’s had it been better written. Yet you found it boring and routine because in 2003 IT IS EXACTLY SO.

Much is made of risk and cost, but look at any major hub airport and count the cost and complexities of the aircraft alone. Describe a major airport to a risk management statistician and they will think you insane. Yet there they are running like watches. You see it constantly in every contrail that crosses the blue.

We are not to be kept in a holding pattern. Humans are designed to grow and explore. We must find new places as our ancestors have done. Most of our ancestors, either via a ship, a plane, or the Bering land bridge, crossed a vast distance for a better life away from the familiar. Many crossed because it was the only way to continue living.

Look at what my father’s era took for granted that astonished the mind of his father plowing with horses. Look at us with the electronics hanging from our belts and in our pockets, while we read files sent by chips that read magnetic signals from the hard drives using methods originally designed to pick up the radio signals from the Viking mars probes.

What do you want your children to do to astonish you in your old age? Will we give them more of the same, or will we let them grow? Will they have a chance to touch new worlds as we have touched the skies?

Do children still climb trees like in any bygone day? Do we with our fears and safety seats turned backwards still let our wee ones reach out among branches? I know it costs so to raise a child, in love and time and blood. But will children who never know the grass of their own backyards ever live on the moon or mars? Is a world where we only reach for the familiar flesh of others really safer than one where we use our hands to check for nicks in propellers?

At age 45, NASA needs to climb out the child safety seat and take the wheel. We need to put away childish things and strive again, and let someone else be childlike with wonder. Like children, for example. They need to dream, we need to do. If children do not see us model the human desire of exploration, why should they explore books or visions of distance beyond the crib? Will children who do not see challenges overcome really solve the problems that their generations will need to solve? Will they not want their children to take for granted two moons in a red sky and canyons the length of the United States? Will they not want their relatives back on earth to take for granted technologies invented for Mars yet incredibly practical in day-to-day living?

If we remain in a holding pattern for another ten years, someone my age could sit with his grandchildren watching the very same shuttles launch as he had seen at age eleven. They could grow up in a world where no one who had walked on the moon had not since died of old age.

Who could they ask what it was like to touch the moon above them? No one would know anymore. How could they hope to know if we before them have forgotten? Would could they touch that we had not? In short, what is there to live for that hasn’t been done? Stagnation is the enemy of the future.

Nations die this way. Many already have. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why.
- - - - -

As for the last paragraph, I believe the Bible says "without vision, the people parish.". Something drilled into our heads in public school civics class was the three phases of national distruction: Apathy, Atrophy, Anarchy. I meant to get the book "How Nations Die" about a decade ago, so I'm not sure if it's still in print. That was the inspiration for the actual line.

The poetic bit in the middle about children was actually written on my palm pilot about six months before, and seemed to fit here. It's nearly in verse. By modern standards, it IS in verse. It deals with the frustration I felt when in high school and I was flying aircraft, yet the druggies and those obsessed with sex thought I was missing out. While having some pothead crabbing at you for being a pilot is in it's own way self-validating, what exactly WOULD you say to someone who would listen? It came to me hard on a train ride home from a job interview two years ago, and those were the words I wrote.

2004-06-23T18:54:00.000-05:00

Something Martian This Way Comes

My wife and I have been listening to an unabridged version of the first Harry Potter book on tape on our commute that she borrowed from a friend. About a day after the whole scene with owls delivering Harry’s invitation to Hogwarts, I got word from The Mars Society that both my papers – Project Daedalia and Saturn Direct, had been accepted, and asked me what I needed for presenting them. They also pushed off the deadline for submitting papers for print until the conference itself. This was a great relief, as the second paper was in no way ready.

All the same, the e-mail arrived in my PC as if delivered by an owl. I would spend four days this August speaking and learning amongst my own space-enthusiast brethren. Almost everyone there will have paid between $150 and $550 to attend, plus airfare, so one assumes that these six hundred people or so are, well, serious about it.

It’s held at a posh hotel downtown, and James Cameron (yes, the director of Titanic, Aliens, and Terminator 2) will be there. Fredrick Pohl, the famous golden era science fiction writer, Eric Anderson (president of Space Adventures, who arrange tourist flights to the space station for Russia), and several other famous people should be there as well. I’m on the committee for the Chicago side of things, and am helping round up vendors and volunteers. I’m supposed to speak three times. I keep having recurring fantasies of Ray Bradbury being in the audience, though I’d settle for any supportive audience that outnumbered me.

Speaking of Bradbury, I found an old poetry book from him from the mid-Seventies at the Duckon sci fi convention. In two poems, he addresses “Why Mars?” in exactly those words. His reasons start beautifully but end up in Timothy Leary-Land. It’s a nice trip for most of the journey, though.

A co-worker named Annette, who is typically my lunch buddy, is also into this stuff, and is also attending. She regards me as a mentor when discussing space technology. She also got me into Toastmasters at work – I’m hoping that I can improve my speaking ability before the conference.

I’m not sure my wife will attend, or if she does, it will only be on the weekend. I’m thinking of organizing a Mensa field trip there on that Saturday to boost attendance and to help promote both organizations to each other.

My father was in the hospital twice in two weeks with a leg infection. After having been told he had six months to live five years ago, he is slowly loosing his mental faculties. I suspect the slow oxygen starvation over such a long time has a similar effect to acute oxygen starvation over five minutes – brain damage. He loves his family, but he’s loosing his memory. I’m going down to visit this weekend, and again part of next weekend around Cornerstone music festival.

I’ve been getting depressed lately at his condition. I tend to cocoon when that happens. Sorry for the lack of posts lately.

This Saturday night is fireworks at the farm, and a bonfire with hot dogs and so on. Dad is out of the hospital, so while he probably won't be doing anything much outside, he'll at least be home. Saying goodbye to your father is like taking off a comforting winter coat on an icy Fall afternoon in the deep woods, when you know you can't put it back on at night when the temperature will chill you to the bone. If he doesn't live through this convention I'll just snap - I want to tell him what I've done in person, not in prayer. I'm finally closing the loop of passions I had when I was twelve and designing spaceships on a drafting table in the exact spot in the parental living room where his lift chair contains him 23 hours a day. These passions faded and were replaced with growing up and college and career and marriage and homeownership and downsizing and all that mess. Now I'm twelve again, and I want my Daddy.

2004-06-01T22:06:00.000-05:00

The ERV is finally submitted.

Yes, the Earth Return Vehicle design that lent its name to this blog has been sent in as a contest submission with The Mars Society. I spent my running on four hours sleep solving last minute math problems.
If you ever have seen The Chicken Lover episode of South Park, you may remember how Officer BarBrady had to overcome dyslexia to solve a crime, only to find out the crime was committed by someone trying to help him learn to read. The fundamentally clueless look BarBrady gave every time he had to view a book is much like me with the math spreadsheets, trying to overcome issues of chemistry, density, momentum, thrust, mass, geometry, burn rates, and volume. By the end I was able to fly across multiple pages cranking out revised numbers every five minutes. Impressive as that sounds, keep in mind these last minute recompilations were the result of missing things that I’ve known about for years, but somehow got lost or a placeholder number was never replaced. The result is basically summarized as follows: write, write, write, whaaaa? Crap!!! Rocket math, rocket math, rocket math, crap!, more rocket math, forty second depressed stare at monitor, math math math math pure fiction on what materials weigh, positive number!, recalculate, rewrite, update tables in essay, write write write repeat.

In short, it made it to the post office with fifteen minutes to spare today. I would feel like celebrating if I wasn’t feeling like the crew of Apollo 13.

By the way, I got honorable mention in a Mars Society essay contest last year, which means I get roughly $100 worth of stuff and an invitation to read it at the banquet in August. Knowing that got me through this weekend. I'll post the essay later.

2004-05-11T17:02:00.000-05:00

Back In Bank

There is an issue with the system where someone can see both my old identity and my new contractor identity. The old one does nothing, and is shut down. Yet it adheres to the standards everyone uses (first name, period, last name at bank dot net). The new one is id-number at bank dot net, which even I can't remember yet. I keep typing my old ID in accidentally.

I'm sitting four rows of cubes away from my old spot, but took the liberty of grabbing my old chair, copystand, and whiteboard. I went to the supply area to reclaim one of at least fifty staplers, one of which is my old one, but which one I have no idea. Yes, Office Space fans - they are Swinglines. It's a running joke about the drawer packed to the rim with Swinglines belonging to now-downsized employees. It's like extinguished torches on Survivor or stone tools in caves long empty.

There’s an Alan Parsons song called “The Three of Me” that seems appropriate these days (below). It’s basically about someone with multiple personalities, who isn’t quite sure if there are actually three of him or one, and how confusing it all is for himself and those around him. Looking at the words, I wonder if it means that there are three personalities, two of whom get it, and one who doesn't quite understand and keeps expecting the other two to show up.

As for being back at the bank, so much is the same and different concurrently, like that show Sliders I never watched. I keep thinking “this makes me feel like a ghost”, but I really don’t know what a ghost feels like. If I ever became a ghost, I’d probably think “this is like when came back to [the bank]”.

As for the bank's name, ten more months before I can say publicly where I am. Or who I am. In theory I could say one or the other, but since I'm far more likely to say who than where, I'll keep my legal obligations in mind.

The Three Of Me
[Pack/Powell]

There's a voice on the phone
Who just called in to say
"Mr. Jones isn't home
He'll be gone for the day"

So he pulls down the blind
To adjust his disguise
But it's all in his mind
Which he proudly denies

I turn the boat back from the weir
Where to go from here
I can't hide from each face I see
Looking out from behind them is me

I'm attempting to guess
What they meant when they said
"Mr. Jones and his guest
Won't be using the bed"

So if I take the rap
While they stay out of sight
I can spring from the trap
When the timing is right

One minute I think I know what I mean
The next I hear voices inside disagree
Why are they laughing at me?

So I pick up the phone
Someone's asking of me
Is the real Mister Jones
Mister One, Two or Three?

So I say that they're not
But it's not as I say
'Cos they're all that I've got
And I can't get away

As Alice waves us through the glass
Are we home at last
For tomorrow they'll be here you see
Locked away safe inside there with me

'Cos tomorrow they'll be here you'll see
Locked away safe inside they're with me

One minute I think I know what I mean
The next I hear voices inside disagree
Why are they laughing at me?

2004-05-06T16:49:00.000-05:00

Feeling Better
Much better yesterday. I almost feel completely normal today, though slightly weak.

I have the car, but Theo is working late tonight. I'm going shopping for stuff and I'm also going to get a card for my mom for Mother's Day and for Nicole for her birthday. I'm going to price some other stuff at Circuit City, as well.

Media Center of attention
Ideally, I was considering making a "Freevo" Linux box to store television, music, and pictures at the entertainment center. With A DVD-burner and some video software, you could really make this work quite well. There are problems, though, since you could not then play Windows games on the same system. In a perfect world, you would get a Windows XP Media Center Edition machine, but that's expensive. So I was considering a dual boot. Today I learned that the only video card (All in Wonder, $150) that seems to natively support the DVI interface for the television also includes Tivo-like software and video editing software. In other words, a pure Windows XP Home machine could do it all. For roughly a grand, one could assemble TIVO, DVD recording, DV video editing, PC gaming, MP3 library, and a photo library, plus all the PC stuff like web surfing and actual work, all connectable to the HD unit natively. This and a home theater with DVD and VCR built in (floor model, $400) and you would be set. All this plus the cable box in four simple silver cases. Incredible.

Apple already supports DVI natively on Powerbooks. If they don't support video recording soon, I suspect they'll be dusted again. We'll see.

Finding the time for space
With Theo working late all the time, even with my hours capped at 40/week, I'm not getting home in time to do much more than feed the cats and go to bed. The house isn't getting any cleaner. I am finally making progress on the Earth Return Vehicle design. So far I've pushed through the first parts.

I realize now why he raised the weight limit so much for the contest. The original Zubrin plan has the crew module weighing 7800 kg. This cabin must hold the four person crew for between 180 and (in an emergency) 680 days. This may sound reasonable, until you consider that the Apollo command module, which held three people for 14 days, weighed 5800 kg!

Unfortunately, we can't just leave everything the same and redesign the cabin. If the cabin weighs three times more, the stages get heavier as well.

I'm pushing through text for now. I have "@@" in place of any missing math. I'm also working on the spreadsheet for some elements, like the cabin mass. Eventually I'll work out the minimum the cabin can weigh, and do the rocket equasion backwards to find what I need. That really means the report needs to be written in a matter of a week or two.

2004-05-03T19:03:00.000-05:00

Strep or Not Strep
I spent the weekend in some misery. A sore throat became stabbingly acute, and Sunday I went to a doctor. Today, sometime, I’m to get a call on my cell phone telling me if it’s strep throat or not. If it is, I’m to take antibiotics and stay home a day (too late for that one – I’m already at work and Theo has the car). If it isn’t – skip the antibiotics and tough it out. I picked up the antibiotics preemptively last night so there would be no delay between diagnosis and treatment.
(4PM – I called them – it isn’t. Now I have useless antibiotics – at least I’m ready if the plague breaks out in the next couple months.)

Theo needs the car to finish her root canal at 1PM this afternoon. Knowing her, she’ll still work late afterward.
(6PM – She is, and still no word on when we’re going home.)

HD’s Golden Age
We got the HD cable installed Saturday. On the one hand, I’m really impressed with the few channels that it supports. On the other hand, I’m deeply disappointed it’s STILL not full 1080i or whatever resolution. If you run it in default mode, it’s high res, but only fills part of the screen. You have to blow it up to match the edges of the screen. Many local or network HD signals also letterbox either the top/bottom or the sides to compensate for a non-proportional image. The bad news with them doing so is that you can’t readily crop off the excess by adjusting the picture.

There are two channels – INHD1 and INHD2, which show nothing but HD programming and without much pattern other than consistent quality. In the course of an afternoon you could see a concert, a movie, and footage of shuttles looking back at earth or planes flying through the Grand Canyon in beautiful detail. In some sense, it’s like the single TV station in Alaskan towns that are blocked in by mountains and cannot pick up outside signals except by satellite. Those towns can only afford a single station broadcast point, so this station cycles through the best of all the networks without much regard for affiliation. With near 24-hour daylight at some times of the year, watching prime time at midnight is not such a bad thing.

There is undoubtedly a benefit to only putting the best programming in the most expensive format. If you happen to have HD now, you are lucky to have stations this good. As the price comes down, undoubtedly we will see the overall quality drop. As it stands now, Apple is supporting HD production in the latest prosumer video editing software. Now if they’d just settle on an HD DVD standard, it would all become open to everyone with roughly $10K - $20K to throw at the problem.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the golden age of HD by dozing off to Grand Canyon footage and drowning the pain signals from my tracheal wounds in visual beauty.

Perhaps it’s already happened. Later, they played Lynard Skynard live. While I respect them as a individuals and as a band, there is something wrong about this so early on. It’s kinda like when Country music first came out on CD. It seemed such a waste, especially considering what Country music was like at the time, to increase its longevity or fidelity. They had barely gotten Pink Floyd and Alan Parsons Project and other things out. For this music and for Classical, the full range was never experienced after the fourth vinyl listening until CDs arrived. Yet several months later, here is Alabama singing about there being stars in the Southern sky while archives of Yes and King Krimson remained on LP only. As for Alabama lyrics, I was unaware that the Northern sky lacked these bright objects. It seemed like they should have waited at least a year and got more classical and classic rock out the door.

Allstate One More Week
My start date back at the bank is May 10, which gives me one more week here.

Something I’ve failed to mention. For two of the three weeks here, they’ve piped hit music of the Sixties through the present into the restrooms. I suppose it’s better than what you normally listen to in a restroom. While the person in the next stall is having a final argument with last night’s dinner, you can pretend you are at a 1970’s wedding reception.

“Piped” is an interesting word in this context. Perhaps it’s a verbal throw-back to the times when people called a hotel desk via a metal pipe with a voice cone on each end, and “rang the phone” by blowing through a whistle stopper in the far end of the pipe. I’m not sure of where this technology started and ended, but I remember seeing it in a Benny Hill sketch years ago. At one point, there is a fire in one room (with smoke coming out the pipe) and a flood in another (with water coming out). Naturally, he connects the hoses together and yells, “Hold on, Missus! Help is on the way!” into the smoking pipe.

Recovery and Hippie Drinks
I’ve been drinking what could best be described as Hippie Health drinks at work these days. One, called Odwalla Superfood Micronutrient fruit juice drink, contains Spirulina, which I tend to like the effects of, and other such algae along with fruit juice. The overall effect is like drinking fruit juice with lawn grass clippings, which I thought was amusing until I read more of the label and found it actually DID contain wheat and barley grass pretty far down the list of ingredients. Which reminds me, the cats need Kitty Grass, and soon.

Both these drinks are like lawn/fruit milkshakes and are very soothing on a rough throat. The label says: “Odwalla was started in Santa Cruz, California by three musicians with a vision for a better planet. After 20 years, they continue that vision, bringing nourishment from the fertile soil of the nation’s fruit basket, straight to your soul.” – It kinda says it all, doesn’t it? Guys who have dropped more acid than pencils are trying to feed my soul with grass clippings from the nation’s “fruit basket”.

One could make similar tart remarks about they hippy lit on the back of Numi tea bags, which I’ve kept for several years just for their shear new age giggle factor. It seems James Lileks’ Gallery of Regrettable Food will continue to prosper for many years to come.

Later in the afternoon, I went to the gift shop in the next building to try to find supplies in case Theo was working late. I realized, in my attempt to find a non-acidic drink that would be better for my throat, that apart from milk and water, no such non-alcoholic drink seems to exist. Unfortunately the Odwalla stuff is in the now-closed café. Oh well, there’s always V8.

As you may have guessed, I have a love/hate relationship with hippie culture. On the one hand, the music was great, even a lot of the stuff I disagreed with. The intention to have a clean landscape and solar power are ingrained in me as a rural conservative, and ironically the only two groups really pushing this stuff in the late seventies were rural conservatives and hippie leftovers.

Rural conservatives, how do I define us – where do I begin? Dad, perhaps. During the fuel crunch of the late Seventies, there was a trend in farming to read Mother Earth News and dream of designing a still to make ethanol for the tractors from the very crop you used the tractors to harvest. It closed a loop, so to speak, and stuck it to the Arabs in a single burst. The land taken out of production to make the ethanol wasn’t truly out of production, because the mash by-products were excellent feed for livestock. One could also purchase wind power systems for the price of a typical pole barn, or diesel generators the size of truck beds that could run for years without stopping (and being diesel, would run on that same ethanol if you could make enough of it.) These systems, solar power and heat, and so on started to dot the landscape in rural areas and were built by more independent-minded farmers. Dad was one of them. When I was 12, I knew how to run all the chemistry to process alcohol from corn, and had done so in a commercial-scale operation in one of the buildings. By 13, we were planning a wind-plant with a 100-foot tower, and after dropping that idea we experimented with a diesel generator.

Dad is very much the World War II generation, Republican Rotarian banker Christian conservative. But he recognized the value of the concept of a commune. He made a distinction between what he called “moral communes” and “immoral communes”. The former could simply be the barter arrangement farmers had shared for thousands of years and that we shared with some of our neighbors. The later is what he called the hippie lifestyle, which spoke of beauty but mostly got stoned. From what I’ve read on the other side of the fence, that’s pretty accurate.

As you may have guessed from the length of this entry, I’m still waiting for Theo to get off work.
7:05 update – she’s en route. Time to post this puppy. Alas, no time to discuss Arcosanti.

2004-04-29T17:00:00.000-05:00

A Slow Banking Turn
I was told I would hear “something today” from the bank on when I would start, and so on. There is something about institutions where a fairly zen approach to such terms is taken. “Today” may mean this week, within the same Martian day of 24 hours and 37 minutes (yes, I have that memorized – yep: Dork factor eight, Mister Sulu), or some dog-year equivalent or something to do with Microsoft or game company release dates. I’m sure somewhere in the universe is a planetary system where everything works on corporate time. Unfortunately, their corporations are working on a strict 24-hour day and 365.25 day year, and their population is just as screwed.

Kerry and Rhetoric

Politics alert. Bear with me, or skip this section. I’m just really frustrated with what passes for logic in the public circle, and I’m not even seeing professionals on either side catching these pop flies.

I’m rather stunned about this whole mess between the parties on Kerry being patriotic. He was patriotic for six months over thirty years ago, and has trashed the military rhetorically and fiscally ever since. It’s like saying “no one who isn’t married can criticize my marriage. I was a great husband for the first six months. I served my time and got great wedding presents. Of course, after that I heaped verbal abuse on my wife for the next several years. Eventually we divorced and I fought like hell to keep her from getting any alimony or child support. But no one can criticize me who hasn’t been there, and knows the hell that marriage is!”

I haven’t served, either. But at least I don’t mind tax dollars going towards systems to keep my country safe, or body armor to keep the troops safe. I may not have spent six months of my life in the military, but I can safely say that even at 35, I’ve spent more than six months of my life earning nothing but tax money to keep the Defense Department funded. That alone should count for something in terms of representation. It’s also my freedom on the line if the military is mismanaged – that also counts for something.

I’m amazed that they claim that an attack on Kerry is an attack on all veterans of all wars. Good grief! How much acid do you have to drop to believe that? It’s like saying Hitler was a bad man after he was a painter, so if you criticize Hitler you are criticizing artists everywhere. It would be doubly so if Hitler’s first act on leaving the art world was to spend the next few years attacking artists as genocidal villains, then defunding the arts through his entire time in government.

I'm reminded of early episodes of South Park where Mr. Garrison is giving lectures on History. I think Kerry's invoking a non-existent pope for a non-existent theological statement to justify himself was pure Garrison.

Compare John Kerry and Mr. Garrison's "And in 1970 Engerbert Huperdink became the first American to land on the moon".

And how does an old guy like Kerry snowboard, let alone with shrapnel supposedly still lodged in his butt? That alone makes me want to personally haul his butt into an x-ray lab. If he becomes president, and his medical exams from Bethesda are public, will doctors be sworn to secrecy if they don’t find the wounds he’s been flaunting for years?

It’s perfectly simple to put this to rest – Kerry needs to moon a conservative radio host. He’s been doing it rhetorically, anyway. If the pictures I’ve seen of him are any indication, it’s not the most undignified thing he’s done in public.

And if it is true, anyone who picks up that much shrapnel in that short a time has a bit of a red shirt factor. In an era of terrorism, do we really want Mister Explosion Magnet in a prime government building? It reminds me of the old joke about “Missing: Lost dog. Leg missing, blind in one eye, deaf, deep scar in hip from being hit by truck. Answers to Lucky.”

Thanks. Just needed to vent.

Someday, I'll have to do a post on being a South Park Republican in a family of Ted Nugent Republicans.

2004-04-28T15:39:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the many delays in posting. The following is a condensation of several posts that could not be sent earlier.

--April 16--
Mindgames Prep.
This weekend is Mensa Mind Games, and Theo, Janet the vet, Howard the bodybuilder, and I are all in the kitchen all weekend keeping 200 Mensans fed and happy, we hope. A lot depends on how well cooked spaghetti freezes. The dry weight of all the spaghetti we have made so far is 40 pounds. And then there's rice - 12 boxes of it, that Janet is cranking through today. At least A) I don't have to pay for anything since I'm helping and B) I won't be stuck reviewing games (most of which suck) for 18 hours a day all weekend.

--April 19--
October Sky in April
I got a call Monday morning from Laurel. Apparently Homer Hickam (yep, the October Sky dude) is speaking at Northwestern in Evanston this Wednesday at 7 PM. I have no details beyond that, but she is going to look into it and call me with more. Theo can't go.

MindGames in Review
Too little sleep and too much work this past weekend. Fed 200 people and had food available 24 hours. We did hobbit meals, breakfast, early lunch, late lunch, snack, early dinner, late dinner, dessert, snacks till dawn, breakfast, where's my shower?, etc. Theo's blisters have blisters, literally. She took the day off Monday. I did manage to play a few new games. They were Trime, Hexchess, Who? What? Where?, Whaddaya Know?, Campaign Secrets, and Cogno. A couple of the games I played with Amy. She’s one of the very, very few people our age who has been in Chicago Mensa a long time. She had long, thick, natural red hair to her waist. Until this weekend, when it was bobbed - it took some getting used to. Fortunately, she has the face to pull it off. It’s odd to spend so many years with someone and then play games with them for almost the first time so closely together. You learn a lot about people that way. As for the games themselves, they were not as sucky as I remembered. There were 60 games, and I only heard complaints about maybe five or ten of them. At least 20 were excellent. All but one or two were professionally produced.

I also met some really cool people and a lot of old friends. They are far too numerous and I suck at names, so I’ll leave this at that.

Both times Chicago has hosted, we've done great food. I didn't realize what an anomaly that was until everyone told us how they starved them at other MindGames conventions. The spaghetti, by some miracle, turned out really well.

The only issue is we never went home this weekend. I went from work to O'Hare and stayed last night as well, then directly to work this morning. I dread what my rugs look like, or will look like once the "Oh Daddy, I'm so glad you're safe and home! Now never leave again, ya bastard." cat fits start. We apparently were on Channel 9 news Saturday night. I'll see the tape Sunday if not before. (Update – actually, it’s April 28 and I still haven’t seen it).

At Allstate, it seems every day I get a month-long assignment, or one that could take that long. This morning was no exception. The odds on being extended went up slightly, but only slightly. Any fast-moving prospects I'm forwarding to Nicole until she's working. I'll have to keep all the ones that I think I can start at the beginning of June.

--April 22--

Bank Shot
As mentioned, I got a call from Steve, my old boss at the bank. They want me back at the bank as a contractor until at least September, probably longer.

--April 23--
We’ve started the ball rolling on this job shift. I’ve let my supervisor know here, and my consulting firm. I’ve also given them notice that this may take a while (the bank doesn’t move quickly no matter who is pushing).

--April 26--

Corporate America
A friend used the term Corporate America disparagingly in e-mail recently. Here is part of the response I didn’t send, mainly because the letter was too long and this was a rabbit hole that had nothing to do with the emotion and thought I was trying to convey. There are times when the mind is philosophical but the mouth must just shut up and deal with friendship as friendship.

There are big companies (Motorola, SBC, etc.) who ban the re-hiring of old employees. They are the ones who suffer for it in the long run. They are stagnant because no one comes back with new ideas. "Corporate America" is nuts, but I think it's no worse than any other stagnant institution. Corporate Italy can't make a VCR to save its life. Government America has this bad habit of blowing up space shuttles.

That said, Corporate America's flaws are frequent and well documented. I suspect that a hundred years from now, they will look back on the Internet and see its biggest benefit as being the central clearinghouse for institutional criticism.

--April 28 (today)--

Adventures in Drug Testing
I sent the letter below to my account manager at the consulting firm today. She called yesterday to let me know I should start with the drug screening and other paperwork. She said the project was nearly ready to go.

Oh dear, dear Lord, was that an adventure.

The road was closed to the office in Wheeling. The bypass takes you about ten miles in a circle. I got there and waited at least a half hour. I did my part, then the guy didn't have the special lids that allow the desktop analyzer to check the sample. He also didn't have the paperwork to send in the sample. So he sent me to the Elk Grove office. I went through a drive-through en route to restock the sample, so to speak, realizing later this was like loading water ballast in the Titanic. After some adventure on the phone finding the office (the guy didn't give me directions when I asked, other than "It's a half hour away." and pointing at a card with the address and phone number on it), I found it, waited another 20 minutes, dropped the cup, got another cup, left the sample, and found out that all the guy had to do at the Wheeling office was find the form online and print it.

I got home at 9:45, changed three litter boxes, emptied six waste baskets, packed two city garbage bags, went to bed, woke up early to take Theodora to the airport, dealt with several DSL outages while trying to get her itinerary, and finally took her to O'Hare and got back to Allstate.

Now I can rest.

Lessons of the day -
1) Dundee doesn't go through for now at the railroad tracks.
2) Russians have a very charming accent when open a statement with, "You're going to kill me, but..."

Her response was :

OH MY GOSH! I feel so bad!!! The good news is you tested NEGATIVE! We already have your results…thank you!

I joked with her that it would cost her a nice lunch. She was in the habit of dining me anyway in our past business relationship, so that was no big deal.

Hitting a Fog Bank
I returned a call today from the person in charge of the consulting system, who asked “would I be interested in the position?” I said yes, I’d already done the drug screening for the position, and she became slightly incensed and called my account manager and chewed her out. If this person costs me this job, I will happily publish her number in a future blog.

By the way, Nicole starts Monday on a multi-year contract. She seems happy about it so far. At least she’s taken care of.

2004-04-26T22:52:00.000-05:00

A short post on a chaotic subject.

I got the call to come back to the bank until at least late September as a consultant. For 25 percent more that I was making as an employee.

2004-04-13T13:58:00.000-05:00

First Post from Work

This morning, trying to force MS Word 2000 to do something found apparently only in later versions. I found myself ready to say "[expletive] Microsoft!", as I would have for the past twenty years.

That is, until I remembered that for the past six working hours I've been working for Microsoft.

The resulting mental trainwreck could be summarized as...
"[expletive] Microsof... Ip! Ip! Eeep! Dammit!!!"

I think it took me two hours to recover.

2004-04-10T08:47:00.000-05:00

Returning To Active Duty

I signed the paperwork for starting work Monday. Due to meetings, they want me to start at Noon.

The irony is that I can car pool with Theo, provided she drops me off on the way there and back. With her working 12 hour days on frequent occasion, I'm thinking either A) I will be doing a lot of overtime or B) the Earth Return Vehicle project will get some dedicated time each evening.

The Spaceship
My next step is a weight, balance, and power consumption spreadsheet. Every component, down to the microwave oven, will be integrated in a series of horizontal slices through the vehicle drawn in Visio, and integrated into a spreadsheet showing their location as X, Y, and Z moment arms. All will be averaged to show the center of gravity of the vehicle, and the total mass. In parallel will be power consumption peak, average, and so on. Any warnings or limitations can be worked out from there (such as "crew members should not use the microwave and waste disposal system at the same time").

Microsurfing
The job is with a company that contracts to Microsoft that contracts to an insurance firm. I'll refrain from mentioning the end points, but Microsoft is kind of key to the whole thing. When Theo and I were first in Mensa, we had friends who were die-hard, make-an-excuse-for-any-crime Democrats - you know, Carville without the accent. Chicago Democratic Machine purebreds. For any atrocity committed by a democratic politician, they had an excuse for it - it was seriously awe-inspiring to watch. They missed their calling as criminal lawyers. Anyway, conversation was usually about 10-15 minutes of verbal sparing over Clinton's and Gingrich's latest gaffes followed by a collective attack on a mutual enemy - Microsoft. Due to some ethical gaffes of their own, we've long since lost touch with these guys.

Once it came up that I would be working there, Theo jokingly has asked me little probing questions about selling my soul, and so on. I responded that some years ago when I did work for a company that handled telemarketing lists, my soul was probably already gone. Granted, one of the functions of this company was implementing Do Not Call lists long before they were legally fashionable. They were a mix of both the best and worst people I've ever worked with. After a few years, you even miss the bad ones.

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor working for telemarketers nor working for Microsoft, nor anything else in all creation, can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. But I'm not so sure about the telemarketers part." - Romans 8:38-39, New Internet Version

I found a Theo's old Microsoft coffee cup in the cupboard earlier this morning as I made coffee, Theo's breakfast, and Yakko the cat's insulin shot. I believe she got it during her certification training some years ago. I was wearing my glasses to let my eyes recover from having the leave-in-a-month contacts in a bit too long. I decided to have some fun. I was still unkempt from having just woken up, so this worked quite well.

After pouring coffee for myself in this MS Coffee(TM) cup, I went to Theo and stated "ya know, just because I'm going to be working for Microsoft, you act like I'm slowly going to turn into Bill Gates or something."

She laughed. "You WILL take a shower today", she demanded sweetly.

Back in the Eighties, I actually went to a seminar where Bill Gates spoke. This was just at the tipping point where he was telling IBM what to do, rather than the other way around. For the PC Revolution, this was a great victory. It was the very fulfillment of Steve Jobs dream, albeit done by someone else. Who would have realized then that eventually Lotus and IBM OS/2 Warp would be the underdogs used by independent-minded people, and that Microsoft would be considered the empire?

One also wonders, would it have been that much different if Steve Jobs would have won? Considering the way he ran his company, would a Jobs-driven IT infrastructure have been that much less cruel? Granted, software would be less buggy, hardware standards tighter, and so on. The overall code base would have ran better and faster, but there would have been far less of it.

The quality pyramid takes center stage, after all. Just the jokes would have been different.

2004-04-09T19:09:00.000-05:00

I posted to another blog a while ago - a Caption the Kerry contest. It took me three days to find it again.

I'll find out Monday who won.

2004-04-08T23:12:00.000-05:00

Floating Into The Martian Night

Theo is propped up watching Golden Girls on Nick at Nite, I believe. I’m listening to a Kraftwerk track I downloaded from iTunes (yep, that nerd thing kicking in again).

Speaking of nerd stuff, I did some searching on the liberation point where the gravity of Mars and the Sun cancel out. I need this for part of the ERV overall project plan. For better or worse, the satellite I was planning on putting there was already the subject of someone else’s paper. However, the much more detailed work this other group had done had more to do with a communications system, whereas mine had to do with a solar observatory. They mentioned a solar observatory function on their system in passing, however.

This is often a problem of mine. I get a great idea, and several months later find someone else has published it. It’s often an idea I’ve never spoken to anyone, yet it happens a lot and has since I was a kid. Apparently I had an inventor Uncle with many of the same issues. He came up with a number of ideas and didn’t tell anyone outside of the family, like using oil in solar collectors and steam injection to improve efficiency of engines. Of all his ideas, over the years I’ve found them all in print from other sources. Generational curse, maybe? Seriously, it is odd. I don’t know whether to find it defeating, since it seems no matter how clever I am, I’ll never get credit for it. Conversely, it’s validating that some of my weirder ideas are experimentally practical, and someone else did all the work without me paying them to prove that it would work. Of course, they get all the profit, but nothing’s perfect.

The bottom line - The liberation point is 1,081,000 km above Mars, and varies because of the eliptical orbit. And thankfully, I don't have to try to do the math on the gravitational mechanics. That much is very, very good.

2004-04-08T20:09:00.000-05:00

Of Wife and Teeth and Blind Workdates

Today was Escort Wife To Oral Surgery Day. Theo had her wisdom teeth pulled early this afternoon. First, she had to go into work to do a job interview for a new programmer. She did this during her pre-surgery fast and was already grumpy hours before. God help that poor man.

During the interview, I ran by the old job site and said “Hi” to some of my old friends. I had a funny feeling I wouldn’t be in a position to see them for lunch next week, but that’s what we planned.

Then we were off to Elgin for tooth extraction. By now, even though I was not denied breakfast, I too was starving. I was tempted to slip out during the blessed event to find a vending machine, but the procedure was only 45 minutes, and I had an article on the planet Mercury in the waiting room that demanded my attention.

Yep – space nerd. Guilty. But also very concerned about being too far from Theo while she was having parts of her mouth removed. I had mine removed in high school, and it’s a pretty solid memory after these years, especially the waking up part.

Before the procedure, they put Theo’s wrap-around x-ray on the light panel to show us details. Spread out like that, she looked a bit like Terminator. However, with the black background and black and white toothy spread, it looked much more like Aliens. Regardless of your sci-fi imagery, it was a spooky thing to have looking down on the assembly. Fortunately the doctor was about as gentle as an elderly angel. He is someone who makes all well just by walking into the room - a good skill for someone in his position.

The bottom line, if you get this impression from your dental x-ray, don't take it personally. Even the lovely and talented wife stuff can be made to look a bit scary when viewed transparently and warped 180 degrees.

As he walked in, my cell phone rang. I had a job. I’d never met the consulting firm, or the firm they were working with, or the client. But they saw my resume, salary requirement, and the agreement I finally signed after blowing it off for eight hours, and I had a flippin’ start date of Monday. After so many job contacts this week, I was racking my brain trying to remember ANYTHING about where I was to work or what I would be doing. One thing is certain – these people are decisive, my resume is impressive, and I’m probably not asking for enough money.

I went to the waiting room and called Nicole. She was critical of me for getting offered a job I knew nothing about. I could see where she was coming from. She had a recent nightmare contract at another company with a project manager who seemed to make more enemies than deadlines. The desire of a company to fill a position without an interview makes contractors suspicious. It seems to be a strong indicator of a nightmare boss or a nightmare project being somewhere in the mix.

When I got home, I found the e-mails telling me what to sign and where to bring it tomorrow (Friday). I only found one sentence describing the actual work. I’ll be asking a lot of questions tomorrow.

2004-04-07T20:25:00.000-05:00

Job Hunt and Thoughts on The Naked Tax

I had an interview yesterday with a start up. Long hours, downtown, but nice people – very cool. I have a good feeling about this, but it’s very tempered with both experience and reality. Also, am I ready to invest 50 hours a week plus twenty commuting by car, train, and foot for a company that may collapse? It is a relatively short contract, but it may go full time. As always, with job hunting, open all floodgates until someone gives you a financial reason not to, in writing.

This pretends I will be selected, and that if selected they want me full time. That said, it’s been a good week – I’ve been submitted by two different consulting firms for bank-related tech writing jobs. That doesn’t suck.

After organizing everything in the home office except the music CDs, I organized them today. I think we have over 300, but I’m not really counting. This does not include the ones Theo has somewhere randomly placed. I think there is a stack in the garage I missed, plus the dozen or so in her car. I’m realizing the number of CDs without cases and cases without CDs that may never return to their mates. Does this mean it’s safe to throw out the cases if the CD hasn’t made an appearance in a year? Is this the quickest way to make a CD appear?

I’m also using the term “organized” very loosely. There is an upstairs collection and a downstairs collection. The downstairs collection is the stuff you would admit to owning, or that you wouldn’t necessarily mind your spouse playing, or that is Christmas related and may actually be played at a party once a year. The upstairs collection is largely one hit wonders and other flotsam, like the last two Rush albums you bought to fill out the collection before you realized that this was jumping the shark in a big way. Fortunately I bought them used. Unfortunately they suck so badly that the money would have been better spent on a Big Mac Extra Value Meal.

Speaking of Canadian rock, I saw parts of an article on the Canadian Music Awards. They seemed to give an award to every Canadian band I’d ever heard of, and many I hadn’t and probably never will. It’s as if they said “Hey, we didn’t say GOOD Canadian Music Awards, did we?”

It came up because Alanis Morrisette came out in a body suit with fake breasts and presumably pubic hair and made a “big” speech about how Americans are afraid of nudity. Damn right we are. I have a theory that the more the government allows public depictions of nudity, the higher they can raise taxes and get away with people thinking they have great freedom.

Look at Europe. In Paris on our 1999 honeymoon, there were full frontals on billboards going down the highway and on commercials, interspersed with ads for children’s cereal. It’s quite surreal.

In Sweden again full nudity everywhere and tax rates that can exceed 100 percent.

In Britain, less suffocating taxes, though outlandish by American standards. Breasts are shown in some newspapers and briefly on television, but not much else.

Miraculously, the more feminine nudity, the higher you can raise taxes without revolt. It’s as if the public is too busy staring to realize that six out of eight hours a day, they are working for the state and not themselves. It’s like being a sharecropper… no wait... they keep half. Yep, slavery is roughly it. The only thing worse is a labor camp, but Sweden’s tax rates seem to approach the later.

It's not restricted to women in France. It seems men are not merely allowed, but encouraged and in some ways required to urinate in public. How else could you explain the picture window, at crotch height, next to the urinals in the Autostar rest room. Or the doors being removed from all the stalls in a restroom in a downtown Paris mall.

Recently someone said that they allow breasts on Canadian Television, though Alanis denied this. She did glory in it being "censor-free" up in the Great White North. Perhaps that explains why everything costs 10-50 percent more than in the US (except drugs, of course - a nation has to have priorities). I thought this was a function of transport across so much empty space at first. I thought Alaska would be the same. When we got to Alaska on a road trip in 1987, the prices plummeted. So we bought as much as we could in Alaska before our brief foray back into Canada and hoped to hold out from Prince Rupert, BC, until arrival in the US slightly East of Seattle.

When asked about the costs, Canadian shopkeepers become very argumentative. Maybe arrogance is linked to tax rates as well.

So Alanis freaks out about US Congressional hearings on public nudity on the airwaves. I rather consider it good government. It is the function of the congress to set federal tax rates, and as such, to determine exactly how much nudity we can deal with in broadcast television.

2004-04-05T08:49:00.000-05:00

Offshore Outsourcing – Half the Argument

I’m sure by now you’ve read protectionist/union/information worker arguments against offshoring of industry, and the managerial/economic arguments in favor of it. We are hearing the same argument from the Seventies in manufacturing again. Unfortunately, like armies training for the last war, we are missing the point on both sides.

Most economic arguments in favor of offshoring involve Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. Basically, supply and demand naturally force costs down and productivity up over time as technology moves forward. In the case of labor, work naturally flows into economies where labor is cheaper. Therefore labor flows from the United States to India and from Europe and Japan to the United States. Apparently in manufacturing this is a net gain for the US. I highly doubt it is a net gain for information services, however. Counter-protectionists seem to always lump them together.

Many alarmists behind this argument in favor of offshoring state that we cannot become protectionist, because by doing so we will block jobs coming into the US as well as out of it. There is a big apples-to-oranges problem with this argument. We could still construct “roach motel” standards that allow jobs to check in from Europe and Japan in the manufacturing sector but not check out so much to India in the IT sector. Since they are different continents and different sectors, why would this be so difficult? Will Europe punish us for what we do to India? I doubt it. And even if they try, can we not punish them in return? Isn’t it at least worth trying?

Europe already wants to punish us with tariffs for having “abnormally low taxes” and stealing their jobs, so I truly doubt any US policy towards India makes a difference to them. Europe doesn’t need an excuse to hate us – envy does quite nicely. France, despite recent clammor to the contrary, has hated us for liberating their "godlike" nation since they kicked American troops out in the Sixties. But that's another topic.

There is a second issue that is far more dangerous, and far more insidious, that makes Adam Smith’s argument from The Wealth of Nations (1776) a tad obsolete. In his time, all was labor and material – just as a materialist would have told you all was energy and matter. Today, both in the fundamentals of economics as well as cosmology, there are actually three vectors – labor (energy), material (matter) and INFORMATION. While the crafts of 200 years ago contained innovation and product secrets and so on, they were minimal compared to the information-heavy infrastructure of today. Adam Smith has no place in his theories for it, or for what it does to the economic and military security of a nation.

In a slightly extreme example – let’s assume I’m an Islamic extremist who has recently taken over Pakistan. Since I “ran on a platform" of using the nuclear arsenal in the service of Allah, where will I get the most bang for the buck in terms of nuclear target? If I nuke a US city, I risk retaliation on a region wide scale. I could target a major Indian city, since they are the hated enemy of my nation. How about both? I could target Bangalore, wipe out a thriving part of India’s economy, and take out a vast amount of the West’s information architecture in a single blow.

There are other issues, much softer of course, in this track. Do we really trust someone in another nation with medical records, banking records, and so on? Blackmail and identity theft are hard enough to control within our borders – what about in a third world nation with minimal extradition and investigative ability?

A Modest Proposal

The first two have to do with simple security. The last four have to do with basic disaster recovery. Both are highly regulated in banking, yet supposedly the top ten banks offshore - fancy that. (Truth told, Bank One's CEO froze all offshoring some time ago, but since then they were taken over by another bank that is strongly in favor of offshoring. Source: Chicago Tribune)

1) Ban the offshoring of medical and financial information for consumer protection purposes. A democratic politician in California is catching hell for simply suggesting that companies that offshoring medical information DISCLOSE that they are doing so. That is, they can still do it; they just have to admit to it. As a conservative Republican who feels truth is important; I back her 100 percent on this issue.

2) Ban the offshoring of military and finance information for security purposes. Basically – if it’s covered by The Patriot Act, don’t take it outside the US. The Clinton administration was justly criticized for giving away the store in terms of military secrets to the Chinese – something they had to steal by forcing down a E2B spy plane after he left office. But I suppose that’s “politics by other means”, isn’t it? That said, aren’t corporations doing the same thing now with other critical data and processes?

3) No company, subject to audit, may offshore a working HUMAN knowledge of how its internal processes work, practically down to the line of code. The company must have human knowledge of how to restore and maintain that capacity within its US offices.

4) All code, processes, and documentation must be backed up within the US.

5) Projects done offshore must be documented at a minimum ISO 900x standard and the processes recorded and audited in the US. In other words, the audits must take place here, not there. No fox guarding the henhouse.

6) A recovery scheme must be in place to A) function without the offshore facility immediately if it becomes cut off and B) can be replaced within the United States before the lack of support becomes an issue impacting the company economically or in terms of security.

This simple common sense – the extension of disaster recovery and ISO standards to offshore work. To do otherwise is to fix a fence in your yard while letting your children play in the street.

In a related security issue, we have already let the barn door wide open when it comes to chip manufacturing. Taiwan is a much lusted-after target of the Communist Chinese, who would love to both consolidate their grip on the last of the Republic and take out the vast majority of our microchip industry in a single pounce. I’m sure we would be several years just getting the basics of chip manufacturing restored in the US if we lost Taiwan. If you are THAT upset about labor costs, fine, put it in Jamaica or somewhere close, but FOR GOD’S SAKE, at least have 10-year-old chip foundry equipment in a in a salt mine somewhere. Perhaps there should be a regulation that if the electronics fail, the car, truck, or train still operates using cruder methods. Only aircraft have this security built in by using WWII technology.

What military incompetence does quickly, a politicians and capitalists can do slowly with sufficient pointy-haired boss-ness and lack of moral prospective. Capitalism is like Democracy – it doesn’t need regulation when it has wisdom. But where wisdom is lacking, regulation needs to limit the influence of foolishness and in some cases evil, both from within and without. Now if we could just regulate the foolishness of the legal profession. However, the two can play against one another. If all law were put to this standard, that of limiting foolishness and evil or not existing, we would have far fewer laws that make far more sense, and would move us forward as both an economy and a civilization with minimal drag.

But law is an issue for another day.

2004-04-01T19:44:00.000-06:00

Welcome to my world.

Such as it is...

I was downsized from a large bank a month ago today. I hugged my remaining staff (named Nicole) goodbye and carried out my last bag of stuff (a box of Earl Gray teabags, a folding cube with company loyalty terms, and my coffee mug). I went to my Grand Am and drove the hour and twenty minutes home.

The next day, I went to a freelance gig for a two-week project at a company where I’d worked for eight years prior to the bank. Then I filed for unemployment. The first check arrived today.

Yes, my job effectively went to India. The projects I worked on were offshored, and while technical communications (my field) is hard to offshore, the programmers for the projects are effectively out of the picture, so my job was as well. The rationale by upper management was that “the business analysts can do the documentation”. However, in my experience A) business analysts suck as writers, let alone technical writers, and B) they are too busy doing the work of three business analysts, since the BA staff was downsized as well.

I’m not allowed by my severance agreement to say where I worked in context with any criticism, so to avoid the risk, don’t expect such posts until March 2, 2005.

I am considering a web site with a countdown clock, however…
And videos… and a parody song or two… and a lot of commentary…
Yet it was the best group of people I’ve ever worked with, and we still cry like Israelites being dragged to Babylon.

While I was working at the aforeunmentioned bank, I never seemed to get out of the office on time to hear the one hour of Hugh Hewitt every night from 5PM to 6PM, which is all they carry in Chicago. Now that I’m home, I listen to all three hours on the web. Today they discussed blogs, and had my favorite blogger, James Lileks, as a guest. At the very end the mentioned this site, and so I decided to finally put out a blog. As a writer, the idea of blogging is something I’ve toyed with since the advent of the Internet but never done. As an unemployed writer, I really need to keep typing before my writing skills suffer. I promise not to subject you to technical writing in its boring sense.

My adventures this summer will include designing an Earth Return Vehicle for a contest hosted by The Mars Society. The Kepler Prize has nine international teams competing, of which I’m 95 percent of the work for one. I hope to score in the top three. I have until June to get my design fine-tuned and put into a 100-page paper, but it’s been slow going. Next week I’m going to work earnestly on weight and balance calculations from the nose to the tail. I’m also working out power requirements.

My other main adventure involves finding a job in Chicagoland. Chicagoland is the term for Chicago proper and its 400 or so suburbs and older cities. My definition of older cities are ones that existed as long or longer than Chicago and have been either engulfed or edged-up to by suburbs, so a city that’s been around 30 years is next to a city that has been around since the Lincoln-Douglas debates and to the new resident are indistinguishable on the map. I live in St Charles, an older city. I grew up downstate in Canton, Illinois. This is also an older city, but one in deepest decline.

Finding a job… Yes. This will consist of roughly equal mix of interviews, Odd Todd adventures, and the guilty pleasures of the intellectual, such as downloading Jules Verne novels as computer-voiced MP3s from Project Gutenberg and listening to them for six hours at a stretch.

My wife, Theodora, is a director of software engineering who, despite some time as a catalog model in her younger years, scored higher than ANYONE she knows on The Nerdity Test (82.4 percent, if you are wondering). And no, gentlenerds, you can’t have her.

Right now, the Austin Powers song "BBC" is playing in iTunes on the laptop, which is putting out the sort of graphics that are A) deeply appropriate to the Sixties, and B) a strong indication that the 1970’s Apple job application question “How many times a week do you drop acid?” is probably still in play on some level.

Despite the current situation of being stuck at home with three cats my life is interesting - at least at the thought level. A child character from a novel wandered away from his usual place in school and was asked by a concerned teacher, “where is your classroom?” His response was basically “Where is my classroom? On the farthest star, in the smallest atom, within the woods and cities, among the friendly.” I’ve misquoted that entire thing and frankly at the moment can’t even remember the novelist, though my friend Jonathan has this memorized. Perhaps that version is mine.

I grew up among woods downstate under very starry skies – the son of a former test pilot turned banker and an artist. Growing up in the middle of nowhere with a formerly great pilot as a father, we both flying Cessnas now and then, made Luke Skywalker's life very much my story. Father not in great health, and has gotten to the point where he cannot remember conversations from the day before, so I’m thinking whatever adventures he’s carried all these years are already lost. Fortunately, I have interviews with him on video tape for the grandkids.

Until these days, he has reminded me of that line from Blade Runner “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the Shoulder of Orion... … all those moments will be lost in time… like… tears… in rain.” His face is still there and he still loves me and I love him. But I think those moments are lost. He remembered the fuel capacity of the tail tank of a B-47 until last summer, at least, after his last flight in one fifty years ago.

I soloed when I was sixteen, but shelved it until after college. On my second "first" solo flight in my early twenties, I flew over my hometown as it was shrouded in the light foglike haze. A few hundred fireplaces were putting smoke trails through the haze before they each joined it at roughly the same altitude. On the flight towards my farmhouse going away from the sun, this was unremarkable. On the flight back to the airport, into the sun, the haze glowed with sunlight that was interrupted by a forest of smoke columns above each house. It was amazingly beautiful and utterly impossible to paint or draw, since it was a play of transmitted rather than reflected light. I saw something the people in those houses wouldn’t believe. There was a beauty in the skies above them they each contributed to and yet of which they were completely oblivious. They sat in their homes, played with their children, argued, watched television, threw in more logs, and got romantic, but they had no idea, to a soul, of the forest of smoke columns extending hundreds of feet above them playing on November afternoon light and shadow.

I think of the moon landings and how the memories of those steps will be lost in time. That is part of the reason even a small push towards the moon and mars is needed. Once those soils are touched, should no one know what it is to touch them?

So welcome to my world, such as it is. Or worlds, as the case may be.

By the way, I call it Earth Return Vehicle for multiple reasons. The first is obvious. The second is a reference to this particular crash-down in my career. There are more. You will see.