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Friday, 27 May 2011

Friday Poetry Burst

Posted on 05:59 by hony
The two boys lean out on the railing
of the front porch, looking up.
Behind them they can hear their mother
in one room watching “Name That Tune,”
their father in another watching
a Walter Cronkite Special, the TVs
turned up high and higher till they
each can’t hear the other’s show.
The older boy is saying that no matter
how many stars you counted there were
always more stars beyond them
and beyond the stars black space
going on forever in all directions,
so that even if you flew up
millions and millions of years
you’d be no closer to the end
of it than they were now
here on the porch on Tuesday night
in the middle of summer.
The younger boy can think somehow
only of his mother’s closet,
how he likes to crawl in back
behind the heavy drapery
of shirts, nightgowns and dresses,
into the sheer black where
no matter how close he holds
his hand up to his face
there’s no hand ever, no
face to hold it to.

A woman from another street
is calling to her stray cat or dog,
clapping and whistling it in,
and farther away deep in the city
sirens now and again
veer in and out of hearing.

The boys edge closer, shoulder
to shoulder now, sad Ptolemies,
the older looking up, the younger
as he thinks back straight ahead
into the black leaves of the maple
where the street lights flicker
like another watery skein of stars.
“Name That Tune” and Walter Cronkite
struggle like rough water
to rise above each other.
And the woman now comes walking
in a nightgown down the middle
of the street, clapping and
whistling, while the older boy
goes on about what light years
are, and solar winds, black holes,
and how the sun is cooling
and what will happen to
them all when it is cold.

Astronomy Lesson, by Alan Shapiro, 1987
 
 
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Thursday, 26 May 2011

Harrison Schmitt is right for all the wrong reasons.

Posted on 06:14 by hony
Some of my most loyal readers know that I have a particularly juicy bone that I love to chew on called NASA. For the more recent visitors here, please do this Google search for "The Abstracted Engineer" and "NASA." Or you can read this smarmy post.

You can imagine my delight, after former astronauts lined up to defend NASA, that one astronaut totally agrees with me that the best way to practice fiscal conservatism and also make progress into deep space would be to just ax NASA completely and form a new NASA. I called this plan "NASA 2.0" He calls it NSEA, or the National Space Exploration Agency.

And while I am glad to see that people are coming around to the idea that NASA is best funded as a museum centerpiece...I have to take Schmitt's plan with a grain of salt. He wants to abolish NASA, form the NSEA, and...sigh...go back to the moon as soon as possible. To...sigh...keep it out of the hands of the evil Chinese...


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Tuesday, 24 May 2011

Joplin

Posted on 05:36 by hony
I pass a high school every day on my way to work. Today there were large trucks in the parking lot, and supplies were being loaded into them. I saw about several pallets worth of bottled water, more pallets of food, and tons of first aid equipment. Everyone was smiling. High school kids - smiling at 6:30 in the morning.

It is a strange truth that human beings are the most human in the face of disaster. I've argued before that I think that one thing that separates humans from animals is the ability to empathize with total strangers. What is it that drives us to help one another out? What benefit do we derive from it? Peace of mind perhaps.

But the mystic in me wonders if the invisible cords that bind every human to every other are strengthened by acts of kindness, and reinforced by acts of charity. Does my heart go out to the people suffering in Joplin because it is literally being pulled by them? Is it so hard to believe that somewhere inside this bag of meat there is the ability to feel the suffering of another human being? About the earthquake in Haiti, I wrote:
God acts through all of us, and the $19 million in online relief funds raised so far come because despite our best efforts, we feel a connection and empathy towards the suffering of all other human beings, and most of us find that suffering hard to ignore. Further, a part of us is physically rewarded when we sacrifice a small part of our fiscal stability in order to ease a small part of the physical suffering of others. This tendency, the urge to throw a tiny, inconsequential iota of cash at others, isn't because God whisperes "text 'Haiti' to 90999" into our ears, it is because upon seeing the devastation, and hearing how helpless and weak the people of Haiti are, the part of us that is separate from animal, the part of us that is absurd and complex and is interconnected with the similar parts of all other humans, the part of us that is bestowed by the Almighty, that part feels genuine pain at the suffering of others, and wants to alleviate their suffering, in an attempt to alleviate its own suffering.
No one wants tornadoes to destroy towns or Earthquakes to crumble cities. But I have to say, watching America's Youth happily loading supplies onto those trucks...made me feel as much hope for the future as I have felt in a long time.


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Monday, 23 May 2011

We put a man on the moon 40 years ago, so why can't we...

Posted on 19:47 by hony
It is a popular chime for Presidents. "My fellow Americans, the time is now for a Sputnik moment. We need a new Apollo Program to innovate in (insert technological area here) in order to stay competitive."

The reason these mantras do not work is because the "Sputnik Moment" for us was in September 2001. The whole nation, faced with an Axis of Evil, rallied. And now we're tired. Isn't that what the 70's were? The Cold War Hangover Decade? Really, the parallels between the Space Race and the War on Terror are striking. Both featured a serious event to kick things off, Sputnik and 9/11. Both featured huge amounts of government spending poured into building advanced machinery that would, through attrition or spending or both, defeat the enemy. Both had their moment about a decade later, Armstrong's landing/getting Osama. Both wound down after about 12 years. And both featured similar faces in the Defense industry getting tons and tons of money to deliver tech to the Government: The Apollo Lunar Module was built by Grumman, which is now Northrop-Grumman, which builds the B-2 bomber and the RQ-4 Global Hawk.The rocket used to launch the moon landers, the Saturn V, was built by Boeing. Heard of them?

In any case, we've got our Sputnik moment, our Space Race, and our Khrushchev. We've won. Or lost, or whatever. We're ready to move on.

So the question comes back around to, as it always does, what the next Space Race will be. What will the next Sputnik moment be? Given that these moments seem to space themselves out by 4 decades, I'm guessing we don't need to worry about it for a while.


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Was the Apollo Progam an Outlier To America's Historical TechnoSlump

Posted on 18:46 by hony
(Tastefully named) Alexis Madrigal rightly points out that the Apollo Program, kicked off by JFK 50 years ago today, was probably an aberration in the history of American technological progress. He points to an Economist essay that concludes:
Putting a man on the moon was a brilliant achievement. But in some ways it was peculiarly un-American--almost, you might say, an aberration born out of the unique circumstances of the cold war. It is a reason to look back with pride, but not a pointer to the future.
On the contrary, massive technological achievement in the face of the enemy is peculiarly American. Just look at history. As we committed to World War II, our entire colossal economy quickly reorganized into a machine of war. We took rations, our women worked in factories, and our engineers designed fighters and bombers equal (or superior) to anything else in the field.
Then after the war, the race for control of atomic energy led us to harness and perfect the splitting of the atom, and within a decade we had enough nuclear weaponry to annihilate any threat, and turn the Earth into a lifeless rock. Then, as is alluded to here with the Apollo program, our rocket engineers once again pushed past all competitors as we achieved dominance in space.
If anything, the economist article undervalues Apollo. It only cost $150 billion, which I have mentioned before on this blog, is less than the current R&D cost America has put into the Joint Strike Fighter. That level of spending would barely keep NASA funded 8 years...which was the length from inception of Apollo to the first moon landing.
So while it pains me to say this...but the current "stagnance" of American innovation surely is not caused by our collective engineering but rather the fact that we don't have a clear enemy to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at in a single program. Oh wait.


More on Apollo in the next post.


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Friday, 20 May 2011

Self-Censorship

Posted on 15:36 by hony
Yes I just packed up and put away the last two weeks of posts. Yes I had a good reason. Every time I start to dip my feet into modern politics, I manage to really piss off the exact people I feel need to change their opinion, which only reaffirms to me that those people are never going to change. So there was really no utility in keeping those posts. They, like the feelings I had when I wrote them, are effectively worthless.

But hey, maybe next week something good will happen and I can write fluff articles about it.


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Monday, 9 May 2011

Creative Hiatus

Posted on 09:39 by hony
I really want to explore a few things on my blog in the next few weeks, namely the coming draw-down of military intervention in other countries - if it happens - and what it means for funding science research in America.

However, I just got the green light here at work to be the prime author on a $9.8 million proposal, so I will effectively not exist on the internet until the due day in early June. Abandon me not, loyal readers, I shall return!


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Friday, 6 May 2011

Friday Poetry Burst

Posted on 12:03 by hony
‘Tis hard for man to rouse his spirit up—
It is the human creative agony,
Though but to hold the heart an empty cup,
Or tighten on the team the rigid rein.
Many will rather lie among the slain
Than creep through narrow ways the light to gain—
Than wake the will, and be born bitterly.

-George MacDonald
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Quote of the Day

Posted on 05:45 by hony
"Apparently 'Fog of War' is a spell from World of Warcraft that makes you lie all the time." -Freddie DeBoer


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Thursday, 5 May 2011

Could We Really See Dyson Spheres?

Posted on 18:10 by hony
Both Dyson himself, as well as the author of this article, Dr. Dave Goldberg, seem to believe the best way to discover a civilization that has enshrouded a star in a Dyson sphere is to look for infrared radiation in the neighborhood of 10 micrometers:
Everything that takes in energy ultimately re-radiates it. This is true, on average, of the earth, for instance, and if it weren't we'd heat up at an alarming rate. Likewise, you absorb light and take in fuel and as a result, you heat up and glow in the dark, though not in the wavelength range that our eyes are sensitive to. You glow in the infrared rather than the visible. This is how night-vision goggles work. It's also how the Spitzer Space Telescope, which went up in 2003, works. Dyson knew that his eponymous spheres would be heated to (roughly) room temperature, just by assuming that all creatures are as fond of liquid water as we are. At those temperatures, the Dyson Spheres should all be radiating at approximately 10 micrometers, right in the middle of the range that Spitzer is sensitive to. Even if there were only a few Dyson Spheres in our Galaxy and Spitzer would still be able to pick them out. After all, they're still radiating the energy of an entire star.
I guess I'm not sure why they assume that a civilization that is technologically advanced enough to build a Dyson Shell (we're talking the shell here...a sphere isn't hollow) would just let all that infrared radiation bleed into space and not utilize it.
Yes, yes, the conservation of energy requires that eventually the power of the star which is surrounded by the shell must eventually leave the shell. But why does it have to leave by passive heat radiation? Wouldn't a civilization be better suited to converting it into...I dunno...a laser that they could fire at departing star ships to accelerate them? Or at approaching star ships to decelerate them?
Certainly, it is unlikely they would keep the outside of the Shell at absolute zero. But the danger in predicting the methods and engineering of an alien megastructure are that we presume to be able to forward predict the technologies - and lack of them - that an alien species would use.


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Monday, 2 May 2011

Quote for the Day

Posted on 08:53 by hony
"The Universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

- Randall Munroe


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