February 28, 2003
Things are good
There are some things out there that can turn a commonplace day into a really good day. There isn't a good reason why today should be so much better than yesterday, but it was. I woke up, I got some lunch, I talked to my mom and my brother on the phone, and we made plans for tomorrow. I did some cleaning, some homework, and some work for our upcoming high school quiz bowl tournament. But today was so much better than those bald facts communicate. I'm going to see my brother tomorrow for the first time in about a month, and we're going to the Michigan-Michigan State hockey game to yell like maniacs. We'll be relaying messages to Matt Migliaccio (see entry from February 14) from his mother commenting on his playing ability, and it will be great. A friend returned from her trip to North Carolina, so she came over for dinner and we watched the "West Wing" I'd taped the night before and most of "Driving Miss Daisy", which now apparently qualifies for Turner Classic Movies. It was just a good day.
February 27, 2003
I refuse to lose to cow-tippers
Last weekend, to kick off Spring Break we went down to that party capital Bowling Green, Ohio for the College Bowl Regional Championship Tournament. Historical Perspective: As I might have told you once or twice, we're a powerhouse program. We've taken home the College Bowl National Championship for the last 3 years straight, and 4 out of the last 5. We're a lot different from some team coming out of Wright State or Alma, which is usually an ugly surprise for them. We use an actual selection committee to determine the team composition. College Bowl, Inc. (CBI), has a sweetheart deal with the Association of College Unions International (ACUI), so there are a lot of smaller colleges we don't see at any other tournaments that come out for CBI. Their student unions run an IM tournament like they would any campus-wide bridge or pool or chess tournament. They send the winning team from their school off to regionals to get slaughtered by us and MSU. On the first day of competition, we destroyed everyone but Kent State. This is because they have a competent coach and they don't just send the winner of their campus tournament. Still, even with our ten point win over Kent State, our average margin of victory was 275 points. Eliminate that game, and we're winning by 320 points every time.
These are words I will never use again in this order: I was so happy that we were spending the night in Bowling Green. There, that's it. While we were playing, the rain had changed to snow and there were already four inches or so on our car and we didn't have a scraper, so we used our hands to claw the white stuff off of the university station wagon we had and drove the two miles to our hotel. The problem was that it was only 8:00 and we were in Bowling Green. We'd heard rumors of "nightlife" on Main Street, so three of us (myself included) headed out in the storm to see what we could find, which turned out to be nothing. When we pulled into the liquor store parking lot at 9:00 in desperation, looking for anything to ease the pain of being in Bowling Green, the store was already shut down.
In the morning, the playoffs began and only four teams were left standing: Us, MSU, OSU, and Kent State in a double-elimination tournament. We destroyed OSU 445-60, taking vengeance on them after someone mentioned this year's football game. In the meantime, MSU had beaten Kent State, so we faced off and took the first loss of any Michigan team at a Regional in five years, 360-260. To win the tournament and advance to nationals, we had to win three games in a row without losing another one. Kent State must have partied too much on Saturday night, because we torched them by 285 points. So it was back to UM vs. MSU. The Spartans only needed to win one game and they'd advance to regionals, but they couldn't pull it off. We took two nail-biter victories, 250-220 and 275-240 to claim our sixth straight Regional Championship.
Before this weekend, I was deeply ambivalent over the prospect of winning this tournament. Winning would mean missing graduation, and I was looking forward to being there. But when I got there, I knew I wasn't about to let down my teammates, my club, and my school. I wasn't about to let MSU win this one when I knew we were better than them. I wasn't about to go to UAC and tell them that they weren't going to be getting their usual $10,000 that we get from winning CBI Nationals. I had to do it. And now I might have found a loophole. I graduate on a Saturday night on the weekend of Nationals. The tournament runs from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. However, this year they're halting play on Saturday before 3:00 PM. I could actually fly back to Detroit, graduate, and then fly back to Philadelphia in time for play to resume on Sunday morning. And if I can't get funding to do that, Guster just announced that they'd be playing a concert that night that's even on the Penn campus. How sweet is that? Guaranteed entertainment, no matter what.
February 21, 2003
Warriors, not Rockers
On Wednesday I finally made it to a Sleater-Kinney concert. Doors at the Majestic Theater in downtown Detroit opened at 8, and I was there soon after. I needn't have hurried. The opening act didn't take the stage till 9:30, as my back and knees were starting to complain. They were Akron, Ohio's "The Black Keys", consisting of an anorexic drummer and a singer/guitarist that oddly resembled Trey Anastasio of Phish. Their influences were pretty clear: A heavy dose of Hendrix, followed by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Eric Clapton, and Led Zepplin. The good news was that the guitar player really did have a lot of talent. The lyrics were weak, but the music compensated and I felt that we fared pretty well in the opening band department.
Sleater-Kinney finally took the stage at 10:30 and launched into "O2" off of One Beat. It was a bit rough at first and though Carrie Brownstein was coming through right in time with the verses, the call and response chorus was a little off. I, on the other hand, was mainly thinking about how much lead singer Corin Tucker resembled my friend Sarah. Yes, I'd seen pictures of her before on the liner notes to All Hands on the Bad One and One Beat and I'd noted a general resemblance, but that didn't come close to the full-on realization that the two might be twins. Hair, same but for some highlights. Body type, same. Strong facial resemblance. But don't take my word for it. Look at pictures of Corin here and Sarah here. You know, I've never seen them in the same place at the same time . . .
I remember most of the songs they played on Wednesday, but I can't remember the order, so here they are, grouped by album they come from:
I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone
Dig Me Out
The Drama You've Been Craving
Words + Guitar
Turn It On
The End of You
Get Up
You're No Rock 'n' Roll Fun
One Beat
Faraway
Oh!
Remainder
Light-Rail Coyote
Step Aside
Combat Rock
Oxygen
Hollywood Ending
Sympathy
They also played a great new song, based on the music. I didn't hear much of the words except that "entertainers" was often mentioned. Remember the John Travolta thing from "Saturday Night Fever" where he points at the ceiling as he strikes a pose? Well, Corin did something like that during this song and several other songs during their set, except in slow motion. Instead of jabbing at the sky, she took the hand holding her guitar pick and slowly unraveled her arm to the vertical, her elbow leading the way until her hand started traveling skyward. It was so rock and roll.
I was absolutely thrilled that they played "Sympathy", "The End of You", and "Dig Me Out", three of my all-time favorite Sleater-Kinney songs. The only song I would prefer to any of those three is "The Size of Our Love", but I would have been absolutely floored if they'd played that, especially to the crowd that evening. The Majestic Theater is located very close to Wayne State University, so the crowd was mostly collegiate. Their were exceptions, as I believe I saw a few high school students and at least two men who were over 40, one of whom resembled a short Kurtwood Smith. The real problem was that there were, as a guy standing near me said, "Too many f---ing scenesters". A lot of the people there weren't really there because they were devoted to the music of Sleater-Kinney, but because the White Stripes weren't playing anywhere on Wednesday. They wanted to be at the cool concert, and this was it for that evening. They'd pay the $14, but that didn't mean they felt the need to move around, make any noise, sing, or even give anything more than polite applause. I liken this to a fusion reaction. For a reaction to be self-sustaining, it must meet the Lawson Criterion for density, temperature, and confinement time all at once. If any of these values are too low, it's an energy-losing proposition. The population of scenesters prevented the density of fans from reaching critical levels, the scenesters wouldn't increase the energy level of the room, and whatever did get started usually died out before it could become widespread. I just hope that they come back, and that they play Ann Arbor instead of Detroit. I think they'd get a better crowd here and it might erase the embarrassing fools I saw on Wednesday.
February 16, 2003
BHQB 1: Black History Quiz Bowl in Trotter House
Today I ran what was called the "First Annual Black History Quiz Bowl" at the William Monroe Trotter Multicultural Center. I didn't know this was going to an annual event, but whatever. Our UAC/MPA contact moved up our pre-tournament meeting by an hour three hours before she wanted it to begin, so Ryan and I showed up at noon as directed only to be left on our own for half an hour while she dropped her brother off somewhere, which ticked me off, especially as there were some things that really needed to be addressed before we could set up. Since we thought that the packets would go very fast (we were estimating 10-15 minutes each), we agreed to play each match in one room, so it became a 15 round tournament. As usual, we had some people come late, and we even had one team not show up, which caused its own set of headaches.
We finally started our meeting half an hour late, at 2:30, with an introduction from an MPA and the intro sounded like a sermon on the conspiracy to cover up black history. I just wanted to apologize, as one of the four white people in the room (three from MAC plus the WOLV-TV cameraman), for all the oppression and everything. Then I began wondering how the unimpressive white guy would be able to follow this. I just settled into my rules and schedule routine, and fortunately there were a lot of questions, which actually put me at ease. Then gameplay started and my tournament mode took over. The only serious issue I had to confront was when some audience members decided to take over the spot vacated by the team that never showed up. We decided to let them, but they had to forfeit their first game. Some of the other teams didn't think it fair that their first round opponent got an unearned win out of it, but we disarmed the situation as best we could. The rounds went slower than anticipated, due mostly to the raucous nature of the teams and the audience. But that's part of what made it so much fun. We had teams and an audience(!) that were absoutely into what they were doing. It made for some compelling quiz bowl even when half of the questions were going unanswered. Our finals were CBI-esque, as the undefeated team lost to the team with one loss in the one-game final, but they liked their second-place prizes more than the first-place prize (Thanks for that idea, Mike).
There were some things that surprised me about the knowledge of the teams. None of them knew who James Meredith was, and only one team could answer "Little Rock Central High School". The others all said "Little Rock High School". In each game, someone knew Emmet Till off of "brutal slaying" and "1955", but few knew who Jefferson Davis was, even when he came up three times in the tournament. And in the finals, no one got "Superfly" until the question was repeated. I should get the questions out and look them over again, but they're in the car and I'm lazy.
February 14, 2003
SCORE-O!!!
I've just returned from the Michigan-Michigan State hockey game, where the Wolverines were victorious by a 3-1 margin.
Celebrity Sightings: Lloyd Carr was there, and I saw Tony Pape as I was leaving.
Unsurprising Facts: Tony Pape is huge. Enormous. 6.5' is a lot when you're standing next to it. Scientists are currently investigating his effect on nearby weather systems. Also, Lloyd Carr can't play hockey. He was the special fourth shooter in Score-O tonight, and it was clear he's never seen a hockey stick that wasn't used by a collegiate or professional athlete. He wobbled the first one off to the left and would've sent another one that way, but he nearly whiffed and the puck nearly rolled into the net. Because he's Lloyd, he got third and fourth shots that he put some speed on, but went whizzing by the goal.
Tonight's game was one of those weird ones where they start off by letting things get a little out of hand on the ice, then clamp down hard. Tonight, they started clamping down on the Spartans, who were playing a chippy sort of game. Then they started calling some coincidental stuff. Then, unless one of our guys was being stabbed, every penalty was on Michigan. Apparently decking a guy in the back of the head is legal when you're losing.
The Spartans' replacement for Ryan Miller needs to do two things:
1. Shorten his name.
Migliaccio's six syllables are hard to get out in approximately the time it takes to say "Sieve".
2. Stop taking off his mask. He didn't figure it out until about the fifth time we started chanting "UGLY GOALIE!" This was two times after we chanted "STUPID GOALIE!" because he just wasn't getting it. He still took off the mask a few times, but they were much farther between.
February 11, 2003
Microbursts
Today in my Control Systems class the lecture topic was flight through microbursts. For those of you who aren't familiar with the stranger phenomena of thunderstorms, a microburst is an intense downdraft confined within about 4 km. Think of taking a bucket of water and turning it over very quickly so that you get a big circular rush of water straight down onto a ground. Now think of that lasting for about two minutes. Microbursts, as mentioned, have a diameter of about 4 km or less and within those limits you can find downdrafts approaching 80 km/hr. Back some ten or fifteen years ago, a Lockheed L-1011 was coming in on final approach to Dallas-Fort Worth, but it never made the runway when it encountered a microburst.
So how do you figure out you're flying through a microburst? Well, , first you encounter an updraft from the wind reflecting off the ground. Then you get socked by the full force of the downdraft. After that you have to deal with a tailwind and updraft. It's tough to call it a mircroburst when you encounter the updraft, but when followed by the downdraft you can be pretty sure what you're getting into. So what's happening to the airplane and what's the pilot doing/thinking during this time? I'll use "he" because it's a convenient pronoun, not from any inherent bias. He'll notice the updraft, tilt the nose down and reduce power from the engines to idle so that he stays on his intended glidepath. The aircraft will be in landing configuration, gear down with full flaps. Then the downdraft comes in. Power will be increased, but it takes time for the engines to spool up and increase their thrust. Flaps will be reduced and the gear will be taken in, but these too take time. Trying to stay on the glidescope, the pilot will raise the nose, losing more airspeed as the throttles are advanced further to compensate. The pilot will soon concede that the approach needs to be abandoned, the throttles will be advanced to full and it won't be a question of maintaining glidescope, but keeping from hitting the ground. The aircraft will probably make it through the heart of the microburst, but the tailwind the plane still has to get through could still rob it of airspeed, forcing the aircraft into a stall and a crash.
Current FAA literature instructs the pilot to immediately raise the nose, raise the flaps to takeoff configuration, and increase the throttle to full immediately upon realizing the presence of a microburst. It seems logical, right? However, it might not be the safest idea out there. What if, instead of trying to maintain altitude, the pilot went into a shallow dive? Insane, right? You're already very close to the ground, heading into a big downdraft, and you want to dive? Think of it in terms of energy. You need a certain amount of energy to maintain your position above the ground. You get this by maintaining an airspeed. But you're about to need more energy to maintain that position, as you're going to be hit by this big downdraft. You've got engines putting out a fraction of their possible energy, so you can definitely get enough to maintain your altitude. The problem is that you can't get it right away. You have to wait 7-8 seconds before you can get any of that energy, and the whole crash sequence takes 40 seconds. So where else are you going to get that energy you need? Well, you can convert some of your potential energy into the kinetic energy you need by diving. Once your dive is done, your engines will be spooled up and ready to give you as much energy as you need. It seems counterintuitive at first brush, but when you think it out it makes a lot of sense.
February 10, 2003
I won a hat
Today was frustrating, manic, glacial, and rewarding. I started off by going to my meteorology class, but it was cancelled. So I waited around for a bit and proceeded on to my CAD design class, which was interesting yet boring. I got home and went to get myself some lunch, only to find hundreds of ants on the counter. No sooner do I get rid of one pest than I'm inundated with another. This time I wasn't going to be taking any prisoners. I went over to Office Max and purchased a replacement ink cartridge that I needed and hopped over to Meijer to pick up some ant bait. Hopefully they'll all die, or at least decrease the population enough to make them think about moving somewhere warmer.
The rewarding part of my day was playing bar trivia over at Connor O'Neill's. For starters, Trishelle from MTV's "The Real World: Las Vegas" was sitting at the table behind me. I was assured that the constant stream of people passing behind me to briefly look at her was hilarious. So that's my minor celebrity sighting. Even though my team didn't win (we came up a mere 6 points short of greatness), I did go home with a Guinness hat for guessing that Norm Cash hit .363 for the Tigers in 1963, so I felt my $2.50 was worth it. Bully for me.
February 9, 2003
Death in Suleimaniya, or The Really Scary Part
Shawkat Haji Mushir was just killed in a small pocket of territory in northern Iraq that his faction, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, controls. It's a little patch of territory near the Iranian border that not a lot of people will run over in the list of places they'd like to visit.
Mushir, two of his men, and three civilians were killed in an ambush laid by the militant Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, suspected of having al-Qaeda ties. They were lured into the ambush by a group of Ansar al-Islam fighters who claimed they wanted to defect. It was a classic honey trap. Mushir and his men could reap the reward of information these men professed to have, but they had to put themselves at risk to collect that reward. This time it wasn't a risk worth taking.
So what effect does this have on geopolitics and who is ultimately behind it? The PUK has been accused by American officials of collaborating with the government of Iraq, though they deny it, so Saddam may stand to gain by weakening a Kurdish organization, but he probably isn't really behind Ansar al-Islam because, if he really does have the PUK brought to heel, he probably wouldn't want to rock that boat too hard. On the other side of the coin, Ansar al-Islam probably wouldn't want to dirty their hands by working with Saddam, as he's the least Islamic leader of the Gulf states. Turkey also probably isn't involved. They've had plenty of "trouble" with their Kurds, and they won't lament Mushir's passing. But this sort of thing would have to be arranged through an intelligence service or the army, and the army is very much interested in remaining a secular organization. Besides, they'd wouldn't launch an operation to mess with Kurds near the Iranian border that have limited ties to the Turkish Kurds. That leaves Iran. They have close ties to many Islamist organizations, including the similarly-named Jund al-Islam, which slaughtered several inhabitants of Halabjah in October. They don't have a problem turning terrorist organizations loose (see: Hezbollah), and they have their own issues with the Kurds, so they stand relatively to gain in all of this.
Now let's take a look at the of Ansar al-Islam:
1. They don't like the Kurds, specifically the PUK
2. They have as many as 1000 fighters in the mountainous terrain
3. They think they can get away with it. Saddam doesn't love the Kurds and he probably won't go nosing around Kurdistan on his own hook. It would demonstrate that the PUK really was complicit, which might further inflame the situation. Turkey isn't going to do anything either, especially near Iranian territory. Iran won't be terribly sad,
either. Ansar al-Islam is also counting on the PUK being too disorganized to mount any sort of campaign of retribution.
So now I'm at The Really Scary Part. The really scary part: On September 9, 2001, Ahmed Shah Masood, leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan was assassinated. Two days later came the attacks on America. September 9 was a Sunday. February 9 is a Sunday. We're better prepared now, and I'm sure it's just a coincidence. But it's still frightening. God between us and evil.
February 8, 2003
NAQT and Gandhi
I'm writing this on the laptop as I hurtle westwards along the Ohio turnpike, making my return in glory from the NAQT Great Lakes Sectional Championship Tournament, held today in lovely Cleveland, Ohio on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. The best thing about Cleveland is its proximity to Ann Arbor. In good weather, it's only 3 hours away, making it an easy after class drive or a piece of cake afternoon drive.
I'll begin yesterday (Friday), when things got off to a somewhat wobbly start. I was hoping to leave Ann Arbor at about noon, but that wasn't going to work for my compatriots and we decided to try for 1:30. When that time rolled around, issues precluded us from taking our leave and departure was pushed back 45 minutes, giving me nothing to do while I waited. I decided not to watch "Clone High USA" yet again, hilarious though it is, and had to find something else to view. I regretted having taped over almost all of the fifth set of the Roddick-El Aynoui match from the Australian Open and wished I had some tennis to watch. So I turn to ESPN2, and there's nothing good there except the promise to show the Deep Junior vs. Gary Kasparov match later in the day, so I try for regular ESPN and there's my Davis Cup action coming at me from Croatia. Home town boy Ljubicic was battling Mardy Fish in some arena. The crowd started clapping rhythmically between points like they were at a soccer match or something. Ljubicic had something nice going with his serve. In the first set he had almost 15 aces, compared to Fish's 7 or so and was pushing him around, not even bothering to play a second serve, instead choosing just to fire a second first serve. But eventually I had to leave, so I only saw that Fish had lost the first set and was in a bit of trouble in the second.
We drove off to Cleveland, arriving at the hotel at 5:15 or so. Our hotel was a Holiday Inn express that had been carved out of the National City headquarters, which was pretty neat. We dumped our stuff and went looking for some food, giving up on finding something inexpensive and settling for the Cleveland Chophouse & Brewery, which gave us a pretty good meal. Despairing of finding anything else to do, we watched "Blade" on TNT and marveled at the number of times they said "freaking", including "Freak you!"
Saturday was an early morning that included an unusually good Continental breakfast and an unusually biting wind around Case. We made it into the proper building with a minimum of frostbite and the tournament began within a half hour of the appointed time. Before lunch, we took losses against Michigan A and Michigan B, so it was A, B, C at the top despite the scares we suffered against Pitt and UWO. I had my first meal at a Rally's and we returned for the second half of the tournament, which was actually a second round robin against the teams we had already faced, and it came out the same way, although I helped pull out victories against Pitt and Cornell by correctly answering the last tossups on the Paris Commune and Lance Armstrong, respectively, while we also beat Rochester and UWO on the last tossup. So the tournament ended with Michigan A, B, and C atop the Division I standings and over in Div II, Michigan D had destroyed their competition. They had averaged 360 points per game, while their nearest opponents were scoring 157 points per game, showing their total domination. I knew that our team was good, but I didn't know that we could so totally a regional.
So I've brought you to the present. I'd now like to switch gears and comment on the ficticious, namely MTV's "Clone High USA", the funniest new show I've seen in a year. It's an MTV cartoon, but it's neither as aggressively stupid as "Beavis and Butt-head", nor does it look down its nose as "Daria" sometimes did. Clone High is populated by the animated clones of major historical figures, centering around Abe Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Mohandas Gandhi, Cleopatra, and John F. Kennedy and it isn't afraid to reference the figures they're based on. However, the show itself plays out more like a "Dawson's Creek" parody than an episode of "Biography". Joan has a crush on Abe, who's lost his heart to Cleo, who flits between him and JFK while Gandhi provides some sort of comic relief. In the first episode, Joan gets advice from Vice Principal / Servant / Tea Cosy Mr. Butlertron that she should approach Abe and make the first move, but she sees Abe and Cleo making out, at which point the Paula Cole starts playing. Gandhi can be seen standing on a lifeboat in JFK's pool, at which point JFK pops up, condemns the no-good cheating tramp and says "Get off my dinghy!" to Gandhi and "Not you" to the young woman who pops up from between the rowboat's seats.
"Clone High" has drawn criticism for its portrayal of Gandhi, which doesn't surprise me. Any time you toy with cultural icons, someone will end up angry. I figured they weren't going to get in trouble because of Nostradamus or Lincoln, but they were on thinner ice with their Hispanic gang-banger-like Jesus Cristo, their borderline-retarded Ghenghis Khan, and their hyperactive Gandhi. As he says, he buckled under the pressure of living up to the legacy of the original Gandhi and became "a nonstop party animal", or at least that's his goal. He spent his whole summer working on his finger snaps and high fives to get the acceptance he so craves. He ate nothing but blue house paint and pancake batter for four days once and he enjoys sticking things up his nose. At his bar-mitvah (yes, he had one), he stuck the Torah scrolls up there, so I can see why he'd get in trouble with Indian-Americans if they completely missed the point. This Gandhi is not the real Gandhi, he just share's his DNA. He's the kid that comes loaded with ridiculously high expectations and overbearing parents who just cracks under the strain. He has to live up to the reputation of the father of his country, a man that fought for civil rights in South Africa, defied the British Empire through his campaign of nonviolence, and was murdered by a fanatic of his own race. That's a lot for a 15-year-old to live up to. Plus this Gandhi has ADD and ADHD (its hyperactive cousin). So he tries sometimes, but mostly wants to have some fun.
My favorite character is Mr. Lynn(!) Butlertron. Principal Cinnamon J. Scudworth created his robotic British servant and adorned him with a red cardigan, which he sports as he delivers words of comfort and wisdom to the student population. For some reason he calls everyone "Wesley", but Scudworth professes not to know why. During the first episode, Scudworth is assigned by the Conspiracy of Shadowy Figures (the secret body that finances and runs Clone High) to do a paper on what it's like to be a student. He decides to crash JFK's party with Mr. Butlertron and they disguise themselves, Scudworth with a Fat Boys t-shirt and Mr. B with a giant clock around his neck a la Flava Flav. He proclaims "Raise the roof! Raise it!" to the disturbed high schoolers. When this elicits a stunned silence, he kicks Mr. Butlertron, who in turn asks in his stilted, robotic voice "Where...are...my b-----s?".
February 5, 2003-February 7, 2003 (New content at end)
Knives out
So it's come to this. Again, critics of the space program are screaming that the shuttle is too expensive, too unreliable, and, now, too deadly. They make some good points. NASA was insanely ambitious when the program was announced, claiming it would be cheaper to orbit satellites using the shuttle and that there would be fifty flights a year costing only some $32 million a piece with turnaround times to make an Indy pit crew look up and take notice. Every space launch is still a major event that takes the better part of a year to ready if you only think about the shuttle alone. If you take the payload and other mission variables into account, you're talking about a three-year runup. There are still missions floating around that were scrapped when Challenger blew up. But no one really seems to acknowledge the things that keep the shuttle flying.
There's still something magical about manned spaceflight. Why do people still dream about becoming astronauts? Are they thinking, "Boy, I'd like to strap myself to a barely-contained explosion because I've got nothing better to do with my life."? I think not. It's because you get to go into space. You're up there in your all-too-frail craft, held together by the grace of God and the dedication of thousands of people who design, build, and maintain it. And then you look down at the spheroid you call home. Carl Sagan, although never a shuttle enthusiast, suggested in Contact that the reason they didn't let everyone into space was that once they all went up there, then everyone would see the world without arbitrary boundaries, and that would really create some political problems. Last summer I went down to Austin, TX to staff a quiz bowl tournament. We had some time to ourselves, so we went to a museum called The Story of Texas, which happened to have an IMAX theater showing "Space Station 3D". The narration by Tom Cruise was run of the mill NASA propaganda filtered through Lockheed Martin and it, of course, contained the requisite wacky footage of the astronauts/cosmonauts eating/drinking pudding/water/fruit juice/jello in zero-G. But then there were the external shots. In time lapse I watched the station bloom, the solar panels expanding to catch the rays of the sun. There were astronauts outside working on the shuttle and on their home. My heart pounded as I watched the most beautiful footage I've ever seen committed to film and tears came to my eyes. It leapt into my throat whenever they weren't clearly attached to something. It simply exalted in the glory of human achievement. We'd grown from proto-human mostly apes to a culture capable of leaving the bounds of our atmosphere to supply a manned outpost continuously falling around our terrestrial home, an object visible on a clear night sky and sometimes in daylight. How could anyone see something like that and not be moved? The space station itself is an ungainly collection of spars that the guys who built the Pompidou Centre couldn't be brought to look at if it were set down on Earth. But in space it becomes a work of art. The shuttle rising on a pillar of fire into low Earth orbit brings a thrill to my spine that I can't ignore.
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In the early days of the shuttle program, there was the criticism that there was no special destination to which the shuttle was designed to travel. I see this as a result of having a space program that was so destination-oriented through the mid-'70's. First the goal was to get a man into space (to catch up with the Russians) and then to send a man to the moon and return him safely to the Earth (to pass the Russians). With those goals met, simply going into space seemed like a setback, even though it was a much more ambitious engineering project to put seven people into orbit in a craft that was reusable. See, there's this secret about spaceflight that very few people know. It's really hard. There's a reason that only the Americans and the Russians are the only ones who've built actual launch vehicles deemed suitable for manned spaceflight. The Chinese are close to duplicating the work of the spacefaring nations from the 1960's and will join them when the first tychonauts make it up there (Sidebar: I think that every tychonaut should be issued a silver nose. If you don't get the joke, e-mail me).
The idea that the space shuttle is a white elephant with nowhere to go should have evaporated. Of course, there's always that International Space Station needing supplies, fresh crews, new experiments. But then there's earth orbit itself. There was a prejudice that you couldn't do meaningful space science in the duration of a shuttle mission, which certainly explains the backlog of experiments waiting their turn for the shuttle ride.
NASA has sometimes been its own worst enemy. It keeps proposing grand schemes to get celestial riches and they'll let YOU in on the ground floor, 'cause you're a great chum. When the shuttle was being designed, they thought that a fleet of four shuttles would be making 50 launches a year and that each shuttle would have a lifetime of 100 missions, during which time you'd only have to replace the main engines (the largest reuseable engines ever) would only have to be replaced once. That would apparently be about the same time you'd be replacing the philosopher's stone inside the perpetual motion machine. Each flight was also supposed to cost less than a conventional rocket flight. They'd apparently all taken leave of their senses, because their math skills were undoubtably solid. One mission concept proposed during the early design phase was that the shuttle could retrieve broken satellites, which was a pretty stupid concept, but one that NASA did little to disabuse the general public of. It would only be useful in extraordinary cases, which was pretty obvious back in 1980. Lo and behold, it's done a mission like that three times with aplomb. The missions to retrieve Solar Max and to repair Hubble twice were unqualified successes. These missions worked because the satellites were in the same general orbit as the shuttle and were behaving themselves, not tumbling wildly around or anything like that. My point here is that if you come up with something that's actually within technical reach, the shuttle can do it. You can't treat spaceflight like it's a walk around the block, because that's just ridiculous. It takes a lot of time and money to make it happen. Although rocket launches could be a weekly occurence, the rockets aren't built in a week. That's why you can't expect the shuttle to take that kind of a schedule. You have to replace a lot of parts and refurbish more and you have to inspect almost everything. Essentially, NASA was promising Mars and delivered the moon. The delivered a vehicle that could take seven people to LEO, keep them there for a couple weeks, and then bring them home. It wasn't a "space truck" that would spend a quarter of its time up in space. It would do what was technically possible, but it wasn't going to be something you could pull out of the garage and take for a spin whenever you felt like it.
So why does NASA try to sell us these high-tech gizmos for three easy payments of $19.95? Well, what would happen if they didn't? What if we gave up on manned spaceflight? So NASA comes calling with a shopping list of space probes and Earth observation satellites. It doesn't have a lot of glory shots of space shuttles or space stations. It has the same old pictures of rockets that the Indians, the Chinese, the Russians, the Europeans, and the Japanese have. But it wants to go to Pluto this time, to go take some pictures. The probe will get there in about ten years, but no one's ever been to Pluto. This is NASA's top project, but it won't bear fruit for ten years. Will Congress give them any money? They've suffered a steep fall in prestige since giving up the astronaut corps, even though they're doing better science. It's even more important in some ways, since this is origin-of-the-solar-system type science, not can-we-grow-silicon-crystals-in-space-for-Intel science. But it's still not the sort of thing the public can fasten its attention on. And the anti-nuke community has it in for this one, because any mission like that would need a small nuclear reactor to power the magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters. And how are you going to get a TV anchor to talk about magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters? They can't even say magnetoplasmadynamic. So there's a few Earth-orbiting satellites and another mission to Mars that get funded, but we've already been to the well on that one.
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So what would we do with our $7.2 billion that we're spending on manned spaceflight this year? There'd still probably be some more money going to NASA, as it's pretty much a 50/50 split between Human Spaceflight and Science, Aeronautics, and Technology. I don't think even Congress could be so ruthless as to simply strip that money away in the first budgetary cycle. So while the memory of the International Space Station deorbiting into the Pacific Ocean, burning up as it did so, is still fresh in everyone's mind, a few more big ticket missions will be funded, but they'll probably be to Mars, because everyone likes Mars. But $3 billion or so will be immediately taken away, and NASA will let 4,000 engineers and support personnel go so that they can go get those sweet temp jobs they've been hearing so much about these days. The ripples will echo up and down the aerospace industry, discouraging college students from seeing space as a discipline with a future, and not bothering to give the aero part a chance because the big aerospace companies have also let a lot of people go because they can't count on any more NASA work, now that they're trying to do everything in-house. So the geezers start retiring, and pretty soon there's a shortage of truly qualified people in the aerospace sector. By this time, NASA has been reduced to 50% of the level it used to be at, and we can get back to that $7.2 billion. This year the Faith-Based Initiatives will cost the US taxpayers $6 billion. Election Reform (buying new voting machines, etc.) will cost $1.2 billion this year. So between those two programs, the entire NASA budget for manned spaceflight has been swallowed, which is .34% of the federal budget. Personally, I'd rather learn about the origins of the universe than pay for faith-based initiatives which may or may not be unconstitutional depending on the makeup of the Supreme Court.
February 3, 2003
Happy New year. I'm still here, but I haven't felt compelled to write in a while. I guess I'll start by rehashing Penn Bowl, the last quiz bowl tournament I attended. Things started well when people showed up to leave within fifteen minutes of the appointed time, but getting out of Ann Arbor was slow, as is usual on a Friday at 6:00. After getting clear of most of the idiots, we stopped at a Don Pablo's in Salisbury, OH to get some food. That took a bit longer than I had anticipated, but I wasn't feeling even the slightest bit tired when we got back on the road for what is usually a spine-tinglingly exciting drive through the rest of Ohio. Did I say "spine-tinglingly exciting"? I meant "mind-numbingly boring". I really wish that had been the case this time.
We started picking up snow about an hour to an hour and a half after getting on the turnpike and things started deteriorating. Things got even worse when we reached Pennsylvania, as we now had mountains to contend with as well as the elements. Pennsylvania also has that moronic median systre it's just a piece of metal rail running down the middle of the highway. It does nothing to block out the (sometimes blinding) headlights of the other vehicles and I'm sure it's really going to stop that 18-wheeler that didn't see the turn. It started to get scary around Pittsburgh, so I slowed down to 55 on straightaways and less for curves. I really didn't want to give up before midnight, so we pressed on. I saw on one of those electric highway signs that there was an accident around New Stanton, but my knowledge of Pennsylvania Turnpike geography only extends to the fact that New Stanton is an exit. So we pressed on and eventually we noticed that a lot of 18-wheelers had pulled off onto the parking areas arranged along the turnpike and were snugging down for the night. Soon enough, we noticed a big traffic backup which we soon realized was a complete stoppage of traffic. We got out the trusty cell phone and called one of the other cars to see if they knew what was up. They were already in a hotel for the night and, coincidentally, were in New Stanton. Knowing of the accident and being part of the traffic stoppage, we determined to pull off for the night and wait for daybreak to continue.
We were ready for the road by 9:30, which was way better than I'd dared to hope for, as New Stanton is about five hours down the road from Philadelphia and I wanted to have a couple hours in hand when we got to the hotel. We pressed on through Pennsylvania, stopping a few times to wash the windshield, which was continually contaminated by the water kicked up by cars and trucks ahead of us due to the fact that temperatures were not far enough below freezing to keep the roads dry. So we rolled east, our car growing continually filthier. We passed Harrisburg, rolling past the Susquehanna with Three Mile Island looming on our starboard quarter, visibly steaming a great cloud. We continuously put off lunch due to the crappy quality of the service plaza fare, until an hour and a half outside the city we decided simply to wait until we got to the hotel. Due to my fine navigational skills (read: incredibly good luck), we didn't get lost and drove straight to the hotel without so much as a wrong turn.
Usually we stay at a lousy Days Inn located in Brooklawn, New Jersey, but we splurged this year on rooms at the Sheraton that's only three blocks from the tournament. This was very good news from the standpoint of obtaining food. We strolled over to Abner's, a purveyor of fine cheesesteaks located no more than four blocks from our hotel. After retiring to the hotel, fully sated, we checked in with the other cars. We'd heard that one had picked up a flat tire shortly after leaving New Stanton and were eager to hear of their progress. They'd gotten the tire changed in Donegal and we're heading toward Philly with just enough time to make it before the tournament started. Car #3 should have made it in shortly after us, but they were still on the road. They'd made a wrong turn and ended up in South Philadelphia, where they began making their way back towards the Penn campus. So we waited, and the two wayward cars eventually showed up at about the same time and we headed to the tournament.
As usual, it was something of a madhouse and Samer was trying desperately to keep everything from collapsing into total chaos. Due to his efforts, we only started an hour late, followed the signs to the wrong entrance to Williams Hall, and then had to wait twenty minutes for him to show up and moderate our first game. Welcome to Penn Bowl, this kind of thing happens every year. We (Michigan B) ended the first day of competition at 11:30, having lost only once, to Yale. It also was the night I was the happiest I've ever been to see Byko. After having our first round moderated by Samer, who is a pro, we had the slowest reader I've ever had in my life when we played Case Western. I'd be amazed if it took him less than 45 minutes to get through that round. So after we were done with Slow Indian Guy, we were happy to see a replacement reader. Speech Impediment Girl, though she was a lot faster and tried very hard, wasn't superior to Slow Indian Guy. At least you could understand him. Speech Impediment Girl had trouble pronouncing r's through the thickest New Jersey accent I've ever heard. Oh, and we had to play Yale A next, so we promptly lost that game. Our next rounds were with Byko, and we destroyed whichever poor saps had our vengeance visited upon them.
We were all pretty hungry by the time the games ended, so we went over to Chili's to unwind. They were still open, but were obviously trying to close down, as they weren't sure how many baskets of tortilla chips they'd be able to provide for us. It became even more obvious when they put on a Dave Matthews album and started to crank it. We could tell we weren't wanted, so we got up to leave. As we were walking out the door, the volume noticeably dropped on the stereo system. So much for subtlety.
The next day, we continued to sweep through the prelims, ending up in a circle of death with Case and Yale, all of us tied at 8-1. After lunch, we found ourselves in bracket with Michigan A, Chicago A, Boston, North Carolina, and Virginia A. Of course, we had to play Michigan A right off the bat. A little history for the casual reader: In 2000, my freshman year, there was an event at Penn Bowl that will forever be remembered as "the Chuckwagon". Dr. E.T. Chuck of Case Western wrote a packet for Penn Bowl that was used as the first round of the single-elimination playoffs. Michigan A, Maryland A, and Illinois A, three of the top teams in the nation, all lost on it, mainly due to the preponderency of questions on subjects like A.A. Milne, tapioca, and the children's classic "The Chocolate War". Thus it was dubbed "the Chuckwagon", as in "they were all carted off on the Chuckwagon". We'd seen him wandering around the 2003 edition, so we thought it would be hilarious if he were to read for us this round and that it would guarantee victory for Michigan B. So we started chanting "Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!" for a while and stopped a few seconds before the door opened, and in he walked. At one point we were down by 175 points, but we crawled back and won it on the last tossup after Michigan A negged on "Unsafe at Any Speed" with "Silent Spring". The Law of Penn Bowl had been obeyed: Michigan A has to lose a game under weird circumstances to a lesser team. At least it wasn't in the single-elim part of the playoffs. We eventually finished 8th and Michigan A went on to beat Berkeley to take home the championship, so everyone was happy at the end.
The drive home was hellish. Things were pretty clear our first night of driving, but the roads started to get a little sloppy before we pulled off for the night in Breezewood. In the morning we continued on into lake effect snow due to Lake Erie. Conditions were such that it became terrifying to pass a semi, because for up to five seconds you could be completely blinded by the spray from its wheels while you worked your way past. Things got even worse when we made it into Ohio. We were closer to the lake, so the snow was thicker and there were many sections that had a lane buried under the snow. Still, we pressed on, stopping only for lunch and listening to the most insane Super Bowl pregame show I've ever heard. These guys from Cleveland were supposed to be talking about the game, but mostly ended up talking about playing Madden on Playstation and their two-on-two basketball games. I guess it's hard to fill up all that airtime.
We started getting better conditions about an hour east of Toledo, so we were able to pick up the pace by a lot. We stopped off in Dundee, MI to get the last few gallons to allow us to actually make it home and made it back a couple hours before kickoff.
I've identified what compelled me to write tonight. We've been having a small rodent problem here in the apartment. On three occasions, I'd seen a mouse run between the stove and the refrigerator, so I finally picked up a pair of traps. I baited and loaded the classic Victor traps shortly after 9:30PM. By 11:30PM, both had found victims, which says a lot about mice. Now I was left with the task of disposing of the corpses. The first mouse was next to the stove. I heard one of the traps SNAP and wondered if it had gone off on its own, or if it had been tripped. Then I heard wood scraping the floor for a couple seconds, then nothing. I peered over, and there was a small body caught in it. I felt triumphant that I'd done it right and that I'd caught our little invader, but saddened by its limp tail and crumpled body. The trap had worked perfectly and had caught the mouse just behind its head. I could tell this from across the room by the massive dent caused by the bar just in front of its shoulders. I walked over to it and its eyes were swelled to enormous size by the blood inside them and were wide open, looking terrified and imploring me to do something to save it. I shuddered as I released the bar and the tiny corpse fell into the garbage.
The second mouse bought it near the back of the refrigerator, near a heat register. The first thing I saw was that the trap had flipped over, with the mouse underneath it. I used the broom to sweep it over by the trash, then used my gloved hands to flip it over. This mouse looked deflated. It had been attacking the food from a thirty degree angle, and so it had received the angled part of the bar behind the shoulders, breaking its back. Its eyes were closed, so no more than dark slits were revealed. Its little paws were extended, like it had just stretched out for something that was no longer there. I tried to just lift the bar to release it, but I had to shake it a little to set it down into the garbage, which nearly sent me into convulsions. I'm just not cut out for this sort of thing.
