life, liberty, and the pursuit of purpose

Jailbreaking your Apple TV 2 to watch Hulu

2012-01-08T12:55:00.000-08:00

Below are the steps I took to get Hulu up and running on my Apple TV 2 (hereafter referred to as ATV) using the latest firmware 4.4.4.

Since it took some effort to get all the steps right, I figured I'd try to save someone else some time and post the instructions here.

(Credit where credit is due: This post has been largely based on an anonymous post at the Firecore blog comments section. That original post is available here:

http://blog.firecore.com/5180

The anonymous post was left at Tue Aug 30, 2011 6:51 pm, but was based on the 4.3 Firmware. So thanks to that anonymous poster!)

What you will need:

-Apple TV2 (Black)  with aluminum remote.

-Mac 

-Latest version of iTunes 

-Latest version of Seasonpass from Firecore, available for free download here: http://support.firecore.com/entries/387605

-A micro USB cable to fit the back of ATV (This did NOT come with your Apple TV, and is required to connect the ATV directly to your computer so you can perform the jailbreak. You can get this online cheap. Or perhaps you already have such a cable. . . they are often sold with Blackberry phones. Just make sure it’s a “micro” cable, NOT a “mini” cable. Here’s an example of one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001K7I62Q?ie=UTF8&tag=atfl-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001K7I62Q )

1. Download and install the untethered “Seasonpass” – Latest Version – from http://support.firecore.com/entries/387605. This is the software that will “jailbreak” your ATV, so that you can install non-Apple software on it. You can also read about this process to see what it does here: http://blog.firecore.com/6434

2. Run Seasonpass and follow instructions at this site: http://support.firecore.com/entries/387605

This may take 20 minutes or so. When you are done, read on below.

Your ATV is now jailbroken. (Don’t worry, if you decide you want to go back to the original factory settings, you can always go to “Restore” in the Settings section of your Apple TV.)

3. Hook your ATV back up to your TV and make sure it can successfully connect to the internet/your network. You should see a temporary Firecore emblem in the lower right corner of the menu, indicating the unit was successfully jailbroken.

Now you want to install some software on your jailbroken ATV. This will require the use of the Terminal app on your mac to SSH into your ATV. For that you’ll need to know your ATV’s IP address.

4. On your Apple TV go to Settings à General à Network and note the IP address. Should be something similar to 192.168.0.186

5. Open the Terminal application on your mac and type the following:

“ssh –l root 192.168.0.186” and hit return.

(Don’t actually type the quotes, just what’s inside them. And use the actual IP address of your particular ATV, which is likely different from the number I used above)

6. You will be asked for a password. Unless you have changed it, the default password is “alpine”. You are free to change this later if you wish, using the command “passwd”. But it’s not necessary.

7. Update apt sources - type “apt-get update” 

8. Install NitoTV - type “apt-get install com.nito.nitoTV” 

(NitoTV is a feature that allows you to easily install other programs on your ATV from the ATV’s menu system, so you won’t have to use the command line as much.)

9. Type “killall AppleTV”. This will restart the Apple TV menu system so you can see the new software (NitoTV) you just installed.

10. On your ATV, go to NitoTV and install XBMC, updatebegone, and openSSH. XBMC is the Xbox Media Center software which will allow you to watch Hulu. updatebegone stops the ATV from auto updating or nagging you about updating to the next Apple Firmware update, since you won’t want to update the firmware until the next jailbreak update comes out. (Otherwise you’d lose your jailbreak when updating to the next Apple firmware.) OpenSSH just makes it easier to install the Hulu plugin for XBMC later. (not completely sure that openSSH is necessary, but oh well)

XBMC has now been installed! But it’s not ready to stream Hulu just yet. . .

Now we need to install the bluecop repository, which is just a zip file containing “add-ons” that will augment XBMC and allow it to stream Hulu. You can see a post about this plugin, with instructions on how to install it, here:

http://www.appletvhacks.net/2011/03/02/how-to-watch-hulu-on-apple-tv-2/

If you are savvy enough with SFTP and the command line to follow the instructions at the link above, go for it and you are done! If you need a bit more explanation, see below.

11. Download the .zip file for the bluecop repository from the above link to your mac.

12. In the terminal application on your mac, exit out of the SSH session you started earlier with your ATV by typing “exit”. Then navigate to wherever the zip file you just downloaded is. For example, if the zip file went into your Downloads directory, you would type: “cd” and hit return to change directory to your home directory, and then “cd Downloads” (and hit return) to go to your Downloads directory. Make sure the zip file is in there by typing “ls repository*”. This will display the file (full name is repository.bluecop.xbmc-plugins.zip) if it is there. It will display nothing if you are in the wrong directory.

13. Type the following: “sftp root@192.168.0.186” (again, use the correct IP address) This sets up a SFTP: secure file transfer protocol session which will allow you to transfer the zip file from your mac to the ATV.

14. Type “cd /private/var/mobile/Media” (this will change directory to a Media folder on the ATV where XBMC will know to look for this zip file.)

15. Type “put repository.bluecop.xbmc-plugins.zip” (this will actually transfer the zip file from your mac to the ATV)

16. Type “quit” to exit SFTP.

17. On the ATV, go to XBMC. Then go to System --> Add-ons --> “Install from zip file” 

18. Browse to var/mobile/media (the folder where you put the zip file), find “repository.bluecop.xbmc-plugins.zip” and press OK (Bluecop is already enabled) 

19. Go to System --> Add-ons --> get add-ons, find “bluecop Add-on Repository” click OK, choose video add-ons, find Hulu and install it. Note that after it is “enabled”, you can select the plugin again and select “configure” to enter your Hulu login information. Whether you are a HuluPlus subscriber or just a user of free Hulu, the login can be handy because it allows you to configure your “subscriptions” (which shows you like) on Hulu.com via a computer and web browser, and then you can conveniently access just those subscriptions in XBMC on the ATV, instead of having to search or browse through thousands of shows using the remote.

20. Finally, back out to the front XBMC main menu and go to Videos -> Video add-ons. Find Hulu and enjoy (should work with both regular Hulu and Hulu Plus).

At this point you should be able to watch free Hulu on XBMC on your ATV! Life now has meaning.

P.S.: You may have noticed there are other video add-ons in the bluecop repository besides Hulu. For example there is one that is supposed to let you watch Amazon OnDemand content, one for ESPN that claims to allow you to watch live streaming sporting events via ESPN.com on the ATV. Feel free to install these and try them out for yourself.

Prop 23: "We're in a crisis at least 90% of the time!"

2010-10-12T00:21:00.000-07:00

Prop 23 on the California ballot this year proposes to repeal the climate change restrictions in the law AB 32 until the state's unemployment rate drops below 5.5%, and stays there for 4 consecutive quarters. It embodies the spirit of the "We're in a crisis!" mentality; that is, "We'd love to reduce our impact on the environment, but the economy is bad, so Now Is Not The Time!"

One might wonder, though, just how often does our unemployment rate drop below 5.5%, anyway?

The answer, as the plot above shows, is not very often. Out of the 416 months for which CA has kept unemployment rate monthly values (since 1976), only 81 of those months had unemployment rates below 5.5%. That's 19.5% of the time.

But Prop 23 goes further with its requirements: If it passes, then we will only be able to enforce the restrictions in AB32 AFTER we've had 4 consecutive quarters of unemployment rates below 5.5%. That means that you have to watch the unemployment rate for 12 months, and if it has been below 5.5% for all 12 of those months, then on the 13th month you can start enforcing the climate change restrictions, and continue to do so until the rate pops above 5.5% again, at which point you have to wait until it stabilizes below 5.5% for another 12 months before you can start enforcing the law again.

So, if we assume that prop 23 passes and that the next 34 years will be statistically similar to the last 34 years, how much of the time will AB32 be enforceable?

Answer: 4.8% of the time.

(Actually it depends on how you count the unemployment rates. If you are using monthly rates, and interpreting the "4 consecutive quarters" as 12 consecutive months, then only 20 out of the 416 months of the past 34 years would meet Prop 23's requirements, hence 4.8%. If you are using quarterly unemployment rates (3-month averages of the monthly unemployment rate), then 13 out of the 136 quarters in the past 34 years would meet Prop 23's requirements, which is 9.6% of the time.)

Thus, according to those who would vote for Prop 23, we shouldn't worry about the environment when we are in an unemployment crisis. . .

. . . and (oh yeah) we are in an unemployment crisis over 90% of the time.

Gee, it's almost as if the backers of Prop 23 (oil companies) chose 5.5% so that AB32, which was passed by a Democratic legislature and signed by a Republican governor, could never be effectively enacted. And all they had to do was get enough signatures to get Prop 23 on the ballot.

Vote no on prop 23.

(Data for the plot was obtained here: http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?pageid=164)

(More on prop 23 here: http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/nj_20100703_3065.php)

Some thoughts on the LOST season premiere. . .

2010-02-03T23:03:00.000-08:00

1.) That Juliet is such a great practical joker! When I die, I am going to wait until the last minute, then pull my family members close to me and tell them "I have to tell you something! It's REALLY REALLY REALLY important. . ." and then die right then. Man I'll be chuckling all the way to oblivion!

2.) I know that guy is a U.S. Marshall and all so he's rough and tough. . . but still. . . don't pick stuff up off the floor of the airport bathroom. That's just gross. Even Kate knew not to do that!

3.) So, let me get this straight. The leader of the temple Others can speak English just fine, but chooses not to and instead has his version of Mr. Smithers on hand to repeat every dang thing he says. What kind of a total jerk of a leader has the ability to speak English, and yet, during an emergency (like oh, say, a murderous smoke monster on its way to kill everybody) STILL shouts out his defense orders in another language while his English-speaking subordinates have to wait for Smithers to repeat it? No wonder the Others lost that war in Yugoslavia.

4.) Can anyone explain to me why a hydrogen bomb would have enough energy to disintegrate an entire island, and all the land beneath the island down 100+ feet below the ocean surface. . . and still not be able to damage that foot statue? What is that thing made of, anyway? (Also, was that the Dharma shark down there?)

5.) Apparently, the most secure way to send someone a message is to write it down on a paper note, roll it up, then build a giant wooden egyptian ankh around it. Slap that puppy in a guitar case, and it's good to go! Jacob clearly never went to junior high school. Can you imagine him trying to pass a secret note in class? Teacher: "Jacob! are you passing a note?!" Jacob: (holding a giant wooden ankh behind his back) "No. . .".

6.) It's nice to know that the enigmatic rules of time-travel and parallel-universe-hopping at least take convenience into account. Jack et al. time-jumped when the H-bomb went off because it would have changed their histories. But what a pain it would have been if that Volkswagon bus hadn't time-jumped with them!

7.) Oh, Charlie. How dumb are you? I've never taken heroin in my life, but even I know you're not supposed to try to inhale it until AFTER you take it out of the plastic baggie. I thought the way you died in the underwater station was dumb (with the door you could have opened OUT into the non-water-filled moon pool room), but this death would have been even dumber. Headline: "ex-Rockstar dies in airplane lavatory somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Choked on plastic baggie full of heroin." . . . come to think of it, that's actually kind of awesome.

The latest new Vision for Space Exploration

2010-02-01T16:28:00.000-08:00

The Obama administration released its plan for NASA's budget in the coming year today, and with it comes an attempt to largely change the goals for NASA's manned spaceflight program. I like the most of the plans for increasing funding for Earth and Planetary sciences, as well as Heliophysics and extending the operational life of the International Space Station. But I am highly skeptical that the plans for giving up on the Constellation program in favor of giving some seed money to small start-up space companies are a good thing.

I'm all for stimulating spaceflight innovation in the private sector, but not at the expense of the existing NASA plans for continued human spaceflight. I would much rather they continue the Constellation program and tack on some additional money to NASA's budget to be used for this X-prize-like private stimulus. Obama's current proposal means we just stop putting people into space using the tried-and-true methods we've been using for the past 49 years, and say "Here's some seed money, private sector. Reinvent the wheel for us while we sit on the sidelines and wait." I'd love to see the private sector come up with a cheaper method of getting people into space. . . but let them do it in parallel and demonstrate that it outclasses what NASA is already using. Yes, this would come down to increasing NASA's budget, but as we both know that ought to happen anyway.

Also, since we are extending the life of the ISS (a good thing), shouldn't we consider extending the life of the Shuttle program as well? The whole idea back in the '60's and '70's was to have a space station and a "shuttle" to ferry people and cargo to/from it. Now that we actually have both in operation, how does it make sense for the U.S. to announce a continued commitment to the ISS, but WITHOUT the ability to ferry either cargo or crew to/from the station at all? Bush's reasoning for cancelling the shuttle program was that we could free up money to use on human spaceflight outside of LEO, and it wouldn't be that big a deal because the ISS would only be around a few more years after the shuttle was retired. Obama is basically proposing we extend the life of the ISS without having the most useful tool for servicing it.

I predict this will only serve to lengthen the amount of time that the U.S. is without the ability to put people into space. Then, at some point, as India, China, and Russia are all able to launch humans into space, the American people will get restless and start to wonder why again did we just give up doing that? Congress will get spurred into action, and the next President will have his or her own new vision for space exploration that essentially returns to the idea of NASA creating and operating (through a big company like Boeing or Lockheed) its own manned spacecraft.

At JSC, in the ISS flight control room, they have several models of Space Station Freedom hanging from the ceiling. Each model looks a little different, and the joke we'd make when giving tours was that "this is the 100th Congress's plan for space station freedom, this is the 101st Congress' plan for space station freedom, this is the 102nd. . .". Just as Bush tried to overhaul the Vision for space exploration 6 years ago, and Obama is doing this now, so it will be overhauled again by the next politician. Sigh.

Tikit Rear Rack Affects Folded Stability

2009-12-20T18:17:00.000-08:00

I love my Bike Friday Tikit, but I had noticed that it wasn't very stable when folded. It would tend to lean to the side the front wheel was on, and the only thing keeping it from falling over was the handle bars acting like a tripod leg. This of course wore on the handlebar. It was fine sitting on flat ground, but if it was on a train or a bus, a turn would cause the bike to fall over.

I was a tad dissapointed at this, especially since everything I'd seen online had said that the rear rack made the tikit extremely stable when folded. I chalked it up to the fact that I also had a double-front-rack, which perhaps was making the front wheel side heavier, causing it to lean.

Luckily, the good people at Bike Friday called recently, out of the blue, just to see how I was liking my bike. Yes, seriously. I had heard tales of the great customer support at this smallish Oregon company, but I still wasn't expecting such attention. I mentioned the problem, and the customer service rep called the guy who oversees Tikit production (Tim) over from the other room. I described the problem to him, and took some photos and e-mailed them to him. He told me what he expected was the problem, and later confirmed it when he received my photos: My rear rack had posts that were too tall. This meant that, when folded, the rear wheel was being held too high off the ground, causing the bike to lean to the other side. This is evident in the photos I sent him (also in this post) by looking at how high the rear fender is held by the too-tall rear rack. Tim put another rack with shorter posts in the mail.

I swapped out the rear rack, and now the Tikit is rock-solid-stable when folded! I sent them back the too-tall rear rack in the same box, as they said they could modify it for future use.

See the comparison photos below:

Before. . . . . . and After!

Before. . . . (Note how high the rear rack is over the wheel)

. . . and After!

Note the difference between the two racks (shorter one is the good one; taller one makes the Tikit less stable when folded).

It's so nice to have a company that provides this kind of support. I had been willing to live with the annoyance of the leaning rack, but the company called to check on me just because, and now my bike works even better. So glad I went with this bike, and this company!

Dog on a Tikit!

2009-11-09T00:12:00.000-08:00

Success!

I took Lucy on a short (~2 mile round trip) ride to the local park and back, using the milk-crate I attached to my Bike Friday Tikit's double front rack with bungee cords (as shown in a previous post). Worked like a charm, cost me nothing (since I found the milk crate in a pile of stuff my neighbor was going to put in the recycle bin, and I already had the bungees), and it's easy to attach and remove. Perfect size for Lucy, who weighs about 17 lbs. I bet I could fit a slightly bigger dog in there, though.

My point-of-view when stopped at an intersection. I laid a couple towels down to as a cushion for Lucy to sit on. You might notice a slight skew comparing the handlebars to the crate. That is actually due to the handlebars being slightly misaligned, which I hadn't really noticed until this ride. Took 30 seconds to re-align them using an Allen wrench. The crate itself is quite stable with 5 taut bungees holding it in place, and doesn't shift around.

At the park. I could attach the crate to the rear rack, but I like having the dog up front to interact with, and I'm pretty sure she would get antzy in the back as well.

Attaching a Milk Crate to a Tikit

2009-11-05T23:29:00.000-08:00

My Bike Friday Tikit has basically replaced my previous bike, a cheap mountain bike that folds in half. That bike was ok, but it was really cheaply made, and I'm tired of expecting it to break while riding around town. The Tikit is well made and has been a great all-around city bike so far.

One thing my older bike could do that my tikit could not, however, was carry Lucy using a handle-bar mounted pet carrier. The Tikit's handlebar stem is not meant to carry much weight, so I decided not to use the same pet carrier on my little folder. Instead, I've been brainstorming about how to rig something up using the Tikit's double-front rack. That rack is really meant to support panniers, and I do use it to carry my Teeco Detours bag once in a while, but I wanted to use it to support a pet carrier on top.

As fortune would have it, I saw that one of my neighbors had put a milk crate by the recycle bin down in the garage, so I figured it was finders-keepers and snatched it up. A few bungee cords, and it is quite stable on my double-front rack. I put lucy in it and moved around a little, but I haven't taken her for a full-blown ride yet. Perhaps this weekend. I could mount the milk crate on the rear rack as well, but I like to be able to interact with the dog when stopped at an intersection, and I think she likes to be in front anyhow.

I used 5 bungee cords to secure the crate to the rack, as I wanted it to be as stable as possible and not wobble around. Might have been overkill, but it is indeed pretty solid. Don't want the dog falling off the bike!

Pics showing how I attached it below:

Solar power

2009-03-26T12:02:00.001-07:00

I was walking Lucy this morning and noticed that some neighbors just a few doors down from our condo are installing photovoltaics on their roof! A sign of the times? People investing in their home infrastructure with the future economy and the environment in mind? Either way, it was nice to see! With Los Angeles having so many days of sunshine per year, I hope more and more people make the investment to do things like this.

Interesting Day for Government Economics

2009-02-12T08:31:00.000-08:00

So the state of California is apparently close to resolving our budget crisis, thanks to a bunch of spending cuts (a compromise for Democrats) and tax increases (a compromise for Republicans). This includes major cutbacks to education funding, for all public schools in CA including the university systems, and we're all gonna have to pony up more money in the form of state income tax surcharges and increased sales tax.

But one tax increase I think might actually have a positive impact on society is the increased gas tax (an additional 12 cents per gallon), and increased vehicle licensing fees:

"Vehicle license fees would nearly double, going from the current rate of 0.65% to 1.15% of the value of a car or truck. The sales tax would increase by 1 cent, raising the rate in Los Angeles County to 9.75%. Gasoline taxes would increase by 12 cents a gallon. And residents would pay a new surcharge on personal income taxes, amounting to 2.5% to 5% of their total tax bills, depending on how much federal money California gets." (From the L.A. Times article)

All these extra costs are going to be hard to swallow, but perhaps the increased vehicle-related costs will encourage people to use their cars less and use public transit, car-pools, and bicycles more often. In a city like L.A., where so many people drive alone in their cars to work, contributing to pollution, dependence on foreign oil, and traffic congestion, a significant change leading less people to drive could have a major impact. We already saw that ridership on L.A. public transit went up by a whopping 10% in a year (hey, it's a big increase by public transit standards) from September 2007 to September 2008 due to the gas price increases through the summer, and then remained high despite gas price reductions, probably at least partially because people who changed their habits didn't trust that the gas prices would stay low for very long.

On the Federal side, it sounds like the Stimulus package has been put into its final form, with a big surprise for transit advocates: $8 Billion for the construction of new High Speed Rail lines. Wha?!? That's great, but it's a big surprise because the Senate Bill only allocated $2 Billion for HSR, and the House Bill didn't allocate any special funding for it. So, after each of those bills being crafted over weeks, to compromise between $2B and nothing, the Conference Committee bumped it up to $8 billion in one day?!

Well, whatever. I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. With this news and hopes that the Kerry HSR bill will eventually make it through congress, it's getting more and more plausible that the CA HSR system (which needs $10B from state bonds, $10B from the federal government, and $10B from private/commercial sponsors) will actually happen.

iPhoto '09 will have built-in geotagging and Flickr integration

2009-01-06T12:51:00.000-08:00

New geotagging and Flickr features in iPhoto '09!

Just announced at the Macworld Keynote: the new version of iPhoto (2009) will ship with the following cool feature additions (among others):

A "places" section that groups your photos according to where they were taken. This appears to be fully-integrated with google-maps, showing a map with a pin representing each geotagged photo you have, very much like Flickr's map. It also includes the ability to geotag a photo right there in the iPhoto interface.

Even better, the new iPhoto will have a simple "upload to Flickr" option, that sounds like it will replace the third-party iPhoto plugin I've already been using. Sounds like there will also be Facebook integration as well.

This is exactly what I've been waiting for. Now I'll be able to take care of all my geotagging, labelling, keyword/tag adding, and captioning in iphoto, and just upload my finished photos to Flickr in a one-step action, without any additional steps. Count me in.

Check out Macworld's coverage of the keynote for more information (the iPhoto posts are near the bottom of the page, as they were talked about early in the keynote address).

Shuttle Landed at Edwards!

2008-11-30T13:40:00.000-08:00

So this morning I arrived at my desk at UCLA and popped open a web browser to see a CNN article that said that the Shuttle Endeavour would be landing at Edwards Air Force base today at 4:25 pm Pacific time. As it was only about 10:30 am when I got in, I briefly entertained the idea of driving the 2 hours up to Edwards to see the landing. The shuttles are scheduled to be retired from service in 2010, and Edwards landings don't happen all that often, maybe once a year, so this could possibly be the last shuttle landing in California ever. I spent 20 minutes looking around online and reading about viewing locations, before I went to NASA.gov and found that CNN had got the times wrong: It would be landing at 4:25 EASTERN time, 1:25 pm pacific. Thanks CNN. And yes it was their mistake, not me misreading the numbers, as I had kept that browser page open and compared it with the NASA site. Serves me right for trusting CNN on details. Oh well.

I did get a shuttle-related treat anyway, though. I had heard anecdotally that you can hear the double-sonic booms from the Shuttle as it passes over the L.A. area on its way to Edwards. But I'd never heard it firsthand in L.A.. I remember back in college, when I worked at EarthKAM, wondering if we'd hear the booms in San Diego, but we never did. I guessed, at the time, that the shuttle was simply to high and too far away from our location on the ground to be able to hear it unless you are right under it. I know it also depends on whether the shuttle is approaching Edwards on an ascending (south to north) or descending (north to south) section of its orbit, as it will be coming in farther north if it's on a descending track.

Anyway, I expected I might be able to hear a soft double-boom if I went outside at the right time. So at 1:15 pm, when the NASA TV announcer said the shuttle was at an altitude of 20 miles and only 137 miles from the Edwards runway (which put the shuttle right over the coast, right around Oxnard) I walked outside onto the roof and listened. I waited for about 5 minutes, figuring that it would take less time than that for the shuttle to pass the area on its way to Edwards, as it was going about Mach 2.5 (~2000 mph). I waited and looked upward, listening. Nothing. A tad disappointed but not too surprised, I walked back toward the door, and was about 2 steps from going back in side when. . .

BOOM-BOOM!

It was unmistakable, and much louder than I had been expecting! I walked down the hall to see if my friend had heard it from his office, but he wasn't there. I then thought to call my friend Phil, who lives in Downey to the southeast. He had the same idea, apparently, as my phone was ringing and I answered to hear his voice: "My house just shook!". Next came a text message from Regan, who was in the valley. She had heard the booms, which she said were so lound it sounded "like a bomb went off". Curious, I texted my sister and called my mom, who both reported hearing the booms clearly all the way in San Diego. Apparently, everyone else in the Southern CA area heard it as well, according to the OC Register and LAist.

From the timing and from listening to the NASA TV broadcast, I gather the shuttle was somewhere between 15 and 18 miles (80,000 ft and 95,000 ft) in altitude when I heard the boom. So, since sound travels around 700 mph at sea level (~11.5 miles per minute), it makes some sense that Endeavour's shock wave took a couple of minutes to reach me. As the shuttle flew right over L.A., I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I could hear it. . . but I am impressed that my family in San Diego, another 150 miles south, could hear it so clearly!

Finally!

2008-11-05T07:53:00.000-08:00

I'm so glad the election is over. After nearly 2 years of hearing about this presidential campaign, it's finally over. We're getting a new president. A smart, inspiring, reasonable, Democratic president. I'm so glad! I have so much more hope for our country now! I think our standing in world politics, our reliance on science and reason for policy decisions instead of religion and tradition, our dedication to the Constitution, and our civic progress will all improve under Obama!

And, though Obama has been reluctant to play the race card throughout his campaign, all the emotion that comes with the fact that he will be our first African American President has come pouring out in me and in many others now that he has won. To think that, if we were living 150 years ago in this country, he would probably be a slave. To think that, if we were living just ~40 years ago in some parts of our country, he would have been a second-class citizen, with all the discrimination and "separate-but-equal" treatment that comes with it. And come January 20, he will be our president. Seeing Jesse Jackson's tears of joy as he stood among the huge crowd at Grant Park nearly moved ME to tears. Free at last.

I did not vote for Obama just because he was black. And I don't think most voters did either. If Americans were going to vote for a candidate because he was black, they had their chance with Jesse Jackson in 1984, and Al Sharpton in 2000. No, I voted for Obama because I agree with his policies, his positions on the issues, and I admire his background in relying on intellect and reason and dedication to the constitution. But, all that said, for the rest of my life I am going to be able to say that I helped elect the first black President in U.S. history. And yeah, I'm pretty proud of that.

John McCain's concession speech was excellent. It reminded me that I really do like that guy. He's probably my favorite Republican politician. And, if he had been running his campaign supporting the same ideals he had espoused for much of his career, I think I would have felt more sympathetic to his cause. But his switch to the more conservative of the far right side of his party, his changing positions on issues (like the Bush tax cuts) where I agreed with his former position but not his latter one, and his choice of a right-wing veep candidate, all heralded his loss. Of course, a huge reason why the country voted as it did is due to the economic crisis, and there's plenty of blame to go around for that crisis amongst the Democrats, the Republicans, and Wall Street. McCain just happened to be running for the party with a sitting administration. Well, he's a good man and I know he has more good work to do in the Senate.

As for California, I'm mostly happy with the results of our ballot measures. I'm especially happy that both Prop 1A (the high speed rail initiative), and Measure R (the L.A. County public transit initiative) have passed. As a result of those, my city and state are going to get a new, expanded, modern transit system that will help give people more travel options, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, reduce our emission of smog and greenhouse gases, and demonstrate California's leadership in civic progress. I already believed that California is a great state, but I now also believe that Los Angeles has a chance to become a great (not just big) metropolis! And with a Obama in the White House, and a hugely Democratic Congress, where Pelosi has hinted that she will try to make infrastructure funding a major part of the next stimulus package, I'm confident we'll actually get the federal fund matching we need to complete these projects.

Despite these other victories, I feel a huge bitterness that Prop 8 appears to have passed. I am genuinely surprised, first of all. I knew it would be somewhat close, but I did not actually believe it would pass. I had more faith in the awareness of the people in this state than was warranted, apparently. I've already explained why Prop 8 is unfair, wrong, and completely analagous to the racist "separate but equal" Jim Crow Laws that survived until the 1960's, so I won't go into all that again. (Except to point out that California's Supreme Court was the first in the nation to strike down the ban on interracial marriage as unconstitutional in 1948, and I was glad to see the Court repeat its wisdom back in May, despite the stupidity and bigotry of the voters.)

All I'll say is this: Those who voted for this initiative (apparently a majority of this state) are, in my eyes, as equally bigoted as those who supported the ban on interacial marriage that became law in California in 1850 and lasted until almost 100 years later. You do not get a pass on this just because your church told you to do it and you were too indoctrinated to think for yourselves and realize it was wrong. And when homosexuals finally are granted the same rights as heterosexuals, hopefully some time in the not-so-distant future, your legacy will be that you opposed equal rights, opposed equal treatment under the law, and supported discriminatory policies that were along the same lines as slavery, Jim Crow laws, and Japanese Internment camps. Shame on you. You made a horrible mistake. And I won't be letting you forget it.

Yes on Measure R!

2008-10-27T18:51:00.000-07:00

It's a political season. What can I say?

I already posted about prop 8 a few days ago. Now I'd like to talk about another important proposal on the ballot for L.A. County. It may seem more logistical in nature than the civil rights being addressed in Prop 8, but I think it can potentially be just as important to Southern California's future.

Measure R is a 0.5% sales tax increase for L.A. County. It would increase our sales tax from 8.25% to 8.75%, and generate about $40 Billion over the next 30 years. Unlike other sources of public transit funding, this money would be forbidden to be used for anything other than public transit in L.A. County, and a committee of retired judges from throughout the county would provide oversight to make sure the funds were not being diverted by the county OR the state of California to other projects (which has been a problem with public transit funds in the past).
Click here for the short, impartial summary of what Measure R provides over at smartvoter.org.
Or here for Metro's information guide on Measure R.

Ridership of each of the metro rail lines and of bus services has increased by around 10% in the past year. That is a major increase, likely originally caused by the rise in gas prices over the past year. Those figures are based on comparing September 2007 ridership numbers to September 2008, after gas prices had already started to go down again; so it's possible that people have established some gas-saving habits that they are now wary of changing. This is encouraging news, at least to me. Driving our cars less will help to solve so many problems: environmental, economical, geopolitical, you name it!

Measure R would do too many things for me to talk about in this post, though the highlights include finally building a subway under the uber-congested Wilshire Boulevard to UCLA, where 70,000 people arrive and leave every day. There's also the extension of the Gold Line at both ends (one into East L.A., the other through the San Gabriel Valley), the extension of the Exposition light rail (which is currently being built from Downtown L.A. to Culver City) all the way to Santa Monica, the building of Green Line connection to LAX, and various highway, bridge, rail, bus, bike and traffic light improvement projects throughout the county.

Instead of just listing all the things that Measure R would do, however, I thought I'd address the three main arguments against it I've heard made by a variety of people and organizations.

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Arguments against Measure R:
1.) "It unfairly puts the tax burden on the poor and lower class, while many of the benefits will go to the middle and upper classes! "

Measure R is a sales tax increase, which means that anyone in the county who purchases goods and services incurring sales tax will be contributing to this transportation fund. Now, let's think about those poor people in the lower classes: what are they spending their money on? At the most basic level of subsistence, they are paying for food, rent, and transportation. Well, there is no sales tax on food if it is purchased at grocery stores and markets, no sales tax on rent, and improving transportation access for all is exactly what Measure R is trying to do. Many of the poor and lower class take the bus because it is cheaper than driving, and Measure R includes a statute that will freeze the current fares for a few years longer than was originally planned (without R, the fares will go up in 2010), and keep the bus and rail fares for seniors, students, and the disabled from increasing before 2015.

Now let's think about the middle and upper classes; what are they buying? Meals out at restaurants (where sales tax IS incurred), electronics, flat-panel TV's, cellphones, maybe a new car, etc. They are contributing more to the transit fund because they are participating more in the sales economy, and that's because they can afford to spend more money on sales taxable items. A sales tax does not affect everyone equally across the board: it draws more money from those who can afford to pay more.

And, what's more, how does Measure R benefit only the middle and upper class? This is a claim I've seen made by a few organizations, chief among them the Bus Rider's Union (BRU), which is so pro bus that they oppose any contribution to public transit that is not a bus system. They are vehemently anti-rail, and anti-Measure R because: "The MTA funds rail projects (subways cost about $350 million a mile to build) that serve development interests and a more white, more affluent ridership not low-income, transit-dependent riders that are Latino, black or Asian-Pacific Islander, and more than 60% of them are women." --BRU and Strategy Center website

Ok, first of all, I posit that whatever members of the bus rider's union wrote that sentence have never set foot on the metro rail system. I've been on the blue line every week or so, riding between Downtown L.A. and Long Beach. If you're going to characterize the people on that train as "white and affluent", you're blind. I am usually one of only two or three "white" people in my train car, while the other 50 - 80 or so people are decidedly not.

It's true that trains are usually built along corridors that serve development interests, but that's usually because those corridors have already naturally grown to have high population density, and the rail would best serve the population by traveling in that particular area. This is the case for Wilshire Blvd, where the subway will be expanded.

Also, if you are in the upper class of L.A. ("white and affluent"), you have probably never set foot on a bus or rail line, and 65% of the funding appropriation in Measure R is for mass transit (buses and rail). Another 20% is highway expansions and improvements such as car pool lanes, and 15% goes to the individual cities to be used for light synchronizations and road maintenance. So only 35% of the funding in R is going to benefit the upper class who drive their cars on the freeways instead of using rail or bus. I wouldn't call that primarily benefiting the middle and upper class. Besides, buses need to travel on the roads and highways just like personal cars do, and so bus-riders would also benefit from that 35% as well.

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2.)"We should have increased income tax, gasoline taxes or traffic congestion fees to fund the MTA, not a sales tax!"

Why not an income tax increase? Because income tax is a state revenue. One of the major plusses about Measure R is that it ensures that California doesn't raid these public transit funds to cover budget shortfalls due to mismanagement. The state has done this in the past, but Measure R money would be safe, as it can legally only be used for public transit in L.A. county. If we decided to raise money for L.A. public transit by raising the state income tax, there would be nothing that we could do to prevent the state from dipping into that L.A. transit money for use elsewhere in the state. And why should people in Eureka be paying extra income tax for public transit in L.A. county, anyway?

Why not a gas tax increase, vehicle registration fee increase, or congestion fee? Each of those things would be great if they could actually happen. I challenge someone to try and get a measure to increase those fees or taxes on the ballot. My prediction: it will not happen. Most of the people in this county drive, and everyone is looking for the cheapest gas price they can find. I highly doubt that people who are so worried about having cheaper gas are going to vote to increase their gas price. People tend to see sales tax as the most egalitarian of the types of tax: Everybody pays. To quote the L.A. Times editorial:

"We'd rather see these projects funded by motorists, via higher vehicle registration fees or gas taxes. That would properly place the burden of relieving our traffic and smog problems on those who cause them. Sales taxes, by contrast, hurt low-income people the most and do nothing to discourage driving. Unfortunately, that seems to be the only politically tenable course. Tax increases require a two-thirds vote for approval, and polls show that the sales tax is the only funding source that comes close to reaching that level of public acceptance."--L.A. Times

So, if we want this public transit funding, the sales tax is the most likely way to get it. If we reject Measure R, it's unlikely that the same plan with a different funding source will be approved. This is an opportunity we shouldn't miss. And, besides, this is a city that has up-to-now embraced the car and the freeway system. We can't simply quit our cars cold turkey! For many people there currently is no bus or rail service that offers convenient service to or from their area, and driving really is the only option. Those people should not be penalized with higher car expenses when the current transit system is unable to meet their needs.

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3.) "It doesn't proportion the funding equally according to population! Region X has Y percent of the population of L.A. County, but only gets Z percent of the funding!" or "It doesn't do anything for the San Gabriel Valley!" or "It doesn't do anything for Long Beach!"

First of all, as a general philosophy: devoting money to public transportation corridors is a strategic endeavor. It involves evaluating the population density, concentration of residential areas, concentration of businesses providing jobs for those residents, and then finding the bus or rail route that will provide the highest ridership at the lowest cost. At any given time a sizable portion of the money needs to go into the highest priority transit corridor. The benefits then reach throughout the county, as the reason those corridors have such high population density is due to people from other parts of the county commuting in there to go to work. Even if a commuter from suburbia will never take public transit, the traffic on the freeway they're driving on will improve as other people do opt to use the bus or rail line.

Hence, the decision of where to distribute the rail lines and transit corridors has to be based on population density and need, not spread throughout the county equally. Still, I'll argue that most parts of the county, including the San Gabriel Valley, would be getting plenty if Measure R passes.

You can see for yourself what projects will be funded, according to region, here:
http://www.metro.net/measurer/region.html

The San Gabriel Valley (SGV) leadership has decided to take a stand and demand some pork from the county. They have their hearts set on an extension of the Gold Line all the way to Ontario Airport. Since Measure R does not include enough funding appropriation to do this, they are taking stances against it. Never mind that the Wilshire subway project will serve an area with far greater population density, to which many SGV residents need to commute anyway. Never mind that the Gold Line currently has the lowest ridership numbers of any of the metro rail lines, and has consistently been below ridership projections since it was completed. Never mind that the SGV will lose the opportunity for lots of other project funding if Measure R fails. Never mind that Measure R ACTUALLY INCLUDES funding for the "Foothill Extension" of the Gold Line, which will extend it from Sierra Madre all the way to Montclair, AND funding for the completion and maintenance of the "East Side Extension of the Gold Line, which is on time to open next year. They want an even higher priority for the Gold Line. This is unreasonable, greedy, and parochial.

Let's look at what the SGV will lose if R does not pass (you can check these for yourself in the Measure R info section of MTA's website), and thanks to Ken Alpern who summarized these points in a comment on the Bottleneck Blog:

-- Improvements to the 10, 60, 210, 605, 710 and freeways

-- The Alameda Corridor East grade separations, which would gets lots of trucks off the 60 and 10 freeways while keep SGV residents from having to stop at rail crossings as often.

-- Foothill Gold Line extension toward Clairemont

-- Eastside Gold Line extension BEYOND the Atlantic station (which will open next year), to stations farther east.

-- The Downtown Light Rail Connector which will allow Gold-line trains to connect directly to the Blue Line

-- Improved Metrolink service for the SGV area

-- Local bus service funding for the individual cities

-- The Wilshire subway extension to UCLA, which will have SGV residents as its second-highest ridership constituency

Regarding that last point about the subway: 22% of the people expected to ride the Subway to the Sea are residents of the San Gabriel Valley. They are the next highest constituency of projected riders after west side residents, who will make up only 36% of the ridership. Those figures are based on a ridership study done by the MTA to determine which parts of the county will benefit from a Wilshire Subway. It's on page 25 of the linked presentation:
http://www.metro.net/projects_studies/westside/images/2008_0505_presentation.pdf

Public transit project funding should not be appropriated according to population size. It is population DENSITY that matters. East L.A. and the San Gabriel Valley (SGV) are a large percentage of L.A. County, it's true. But they are spread out over an enormous area compared to West L.A., downtown, and even the San Fernando Valley. We would have to build many more rail lines, branching out in many directions, in order to provide improved access for most of the SGV. The reason the MTA is targeting projects like the "Subway to the Sea" under Wilshire Blvd, or a Green line LAX connector, or the downtown light rail connector, is that those projects would help far more people than the Gold line extension to Ontario, and so they are of higher priority.

The L.A. Times, the L.A. Daily News and the South Bay Daily Breeze newspapers have all published editorials in support of Measure R, while the Long Beach Press Telegram and the San Gabriel Valley Tribune oppose it.

I was so annoyed at the Long Beach Press Telegram's editorial that I left a comment about it on their website. For one thing, their opposition to Measure R seems hypocritical: Two previous countywide half-cent sales tax increases passed in the 1980's and 1990's, respectively. The funds generated from them went to build the blue line from downtown to Long Beach and the red line from downtown to North Hollywood, respectively. That means that, back in the 1980's, West siders were apparently happy to vote for a countywide sales tax increase that gave Long Beach a great public transit rail line. . . and now the Press Telegram is urging its readers not to return the favor? Sure, Long Beach has it's rail line, thanks to the residents of the rest of the county; why should it bother helping out other parts of the county now?

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4.) "Now is not the time for a tax increase!"

Yes, the economy is bad. But it turns out that big investment in public infrastructure projects during hard economic times is probably not such a bad idea. Paul Krugman, who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, says that now is a good time to invest in infrastructure. He says "The usual argument against public works as economic stimulus is that they take too long: by the time you get around to repairing that bridge and upgrading that rail line, the slump is over and the stimulus isn’t needed. Well, that argument has no force now, since the chances that this slump will be over anytime soon are virtually nil. So let’s get those projects rolling." We have plenty of old roads and bridges in L.A. and throughout the country that need repair. A good dose of government spending ala the New Deal and Works Projects Administration might be just what the doctor ordered. The Golden Gate Bridge was financed by a bond measure during the great depression, and there it is still benefitting the Bay area some 80 years later. And a sales tax increase is better than a bond measure because we won't have to pay double the cost in interest.

A good public transit system is a sound investment that will improve the lives of people in this city for decades, even centuries to come. Keep in mind that the first train of the London "tube" subway system began operating in 1863, and now that city, which is arguably just as sprawled out area-wise as Los Angeles, has one of the best public transit systems on Earth.
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Wrapping things up:

What bothers me most about the opposition to R is this "try again next election" mentality. How much do you want to bet that whatever other distribution of funds is proposed at the next election, there will be just as many communities crying out that it is unfair? Sure, there are details in this measure that I don't think are perfect. But it's a comprehensive public transit measure, chalk full of language and details. OF COURSE some people are going to have problems with someparts of it. Sure, we could reject it this time and hope they put together another plan next election, but it's likely that another group of people will dislike some details about THAT plan, so maybe they'll say "try again next election". And this goes on until suddenly 10 more years have gone by and we're still arguing over the details when we could have had a new rail line built by then.

This passing the buck on to the next election is one of the reasons why, 20 years after the subway to the sea was first conceived, construction has still not begun. Sure, we can keep passing on good public transit for this city because we don't like this or that detail in the bill, while L.A. County's population continues to grow (expected 30% rise by 2030), and our roads get more and more congested, and commute times get longer and longer, and less and less tourists will want to come here because there is no easy way to get around town.

Or we can take some responsibility for our future and make a commitment to better public transit, and a better county for our children and our grandchildren; and we don't have to wait until the "next election". We can do this now.

So, if you live in L.A. County, when you have your ballot in front of you ask yourself this: Do you want Los Angeles to have a great public transit system like other great cities do? (Chicago, New York City, Washington D.C., London, Paris) Then why would you vote no on R? If it's because of some minor detail in the plan, ask yourself if that minor detail is important enough to delay these great projects even further into the future; to keep this city chained to it's car-based, smog-creating, oil-guzzling, time-wasting freeway infrastructure even longer. Let's quit wasting time and do the right thing.

Vote yes on Measure R!

Rocket Launch

2008-10-25T11:38:00.000-07:00

Uh, I guess I might have over-hyped the rocket launch last night. Sorry about that.

Reg and I went to the park with Lucy and watched the launch. Even though it was only an hour and a half after sunset, I guess it was still too late for the rocket to enter sunlight during its climb into orbit, so the exhaust trail was not lit up by sunlight, as it was in my photos from the launch a few years ago.

Still, the rocket's red/orange flame was clearly visible as it rose southward in the night sky. It was brighter than most other lights, save nearby planes, and you could see it blink momentarily as it dropped it's first stage.

Didn't really get a good picture, sort of just looks like a red dot rising in the sky. But it was still fun to watch!

Rocket Launch Tomorrow night!

2008-10-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Rocket launch tomorrow night out of Vandenberg! These tend to be lovely spectacles when they happen close to twilight, and this one should be visible for "at least 200 miles", weather permitting. IE: if you live somewhere in Southern CA, you will probably be able to see this if you have a clear view to the West. Actually, just based on the geometry of a typical Delta II rocket launch and a spherical Earth, the above map shows the range of visibility (the farther from the rocket you are, the lower over the horizon it appears).

Once the rocket climbs into sunlight, the exhaust plume and trail tend to be very visible! You can see pictures from a previous twilight launch a few years ago here:

If you're in Southern CA, just be outside looking Northwest (toward Vandenberg) at 7:28 pm on Friday (tomorrow) 10/24! The rocket should come from the Northwest and head pretty much due South.

Oh, and you can check for updates on this particular launch at the following website, which will have a launch video webcast starting 30 minutes prior to launch:
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/bls/missions/cosmo-3//

And this is a great website with lots of info on all-things-space for the Southern California community:
http://spacearchive.info/

(P.S.: These launches do sometimes scrub at the last minute, so if you're not seeing anything within 10 minutes or so of being out there, you might want to check the above update website to see if it was canceled.)

No on Proposition 8!

2008-10-15T22:03:00.000-07:00

When I was in High School, I remember distinctly taking the position that, if I could do one thing right in my life, it would be to never in any way get involved in politics. sigh.

The coming election is an important one. In addition to the president, the entire U.S. House of Representatives is up for re-election, 1/3 of the U.S. Senate is as well, and there are a variety of state propositions and county and citywide measures that will appear on our ballots.

I've been reviewing the propositions that will be put before California voters. Some are matters of logistical progress: Prop 1A is the high-speed train bond measure I discussed in a previous entry, Prop 7 and Prop 10 have to do with solar and wind energy. Others are the usual suspects: Prop 4 is the latest of many attempt to force doctors to notify parents 48 before a female minor has an abortion, a proposition that has appeared in at least the last two state elections, was voted down, but seems likely to pass this time, based on polls taken a few months ago, due to the inclusion of parental waivers.

Such propositions have a flavor of business-as-usual to them. They are either interesting ideas that need to be analyzed to see whether they are the best way forward, or old standbys on which I had formed on opinion long ago.

But there is one proposition on the ballot this year that gets to the core of the freedom and equality on which U.S. citizens often pride themselves: Proposition 8. This is important.

My friend Molly already wrote a great blog on her reasons for opposing proposition 8. All are good points. My own reason for opposing it is simple: it takes the right to marry away from a group of people. That is wrong. Inherently wrong. Disgustingly wrong. I feel as if the "separate but equal" Jim Crow laws that civil-rights era leaders of the 1960's fought to overcome are being completely forgotten by everyone who has been convinced to support this ban on gay marriage.

Prop 8 seeks to add the following words to our state Constitution: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." It's quite simple: the ONLY thing this proposition does is take a right away from a group of people because of their sexual orientation. That's it. It takes a right available to the heterosexual population away from the homosexual population. No matter what argument anyone who has been convinced to vote yes on the proposition makes, that fact will remain. Insert the word "white" in front of the words man and woman in the proposed language, and any cosmetic differences between this and the divisive Jim Crow laws fades into transparency.

It's bad enough that there are enough homophobic people in this state that Prop 8 has made it onto the ballot, what's infinitely worse is that, at the current rate, the proposition actually has a chance of passing.

It's interesting that recent polls show prop 8 gaining ground since the earlier polls this summer all showed it was likely to be rejected. It seems the "Yes on 8" community has struck a nerve with their recent TV advertising campaign. They use a form of fear-mongering and misdirection that is really working on some people.

The yes-on-8 ads, funded largely by the Mormon Church and the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic organization), allege that, unless we ban gay marriage, students as young as Kindergarteners will be taught that men can marry men in public school. Apparently this actually happened in Massachussetts for a class of 2nd graders.

Here's why this argument is misleading:

-Prop 8 has absolutely nothing to do with education. I already wrote above the entirety of what prop 8 proposes: to take away the right of gay people to marry. It only ads those 14 words to the constitution. Nothing about education. At all.

-If students are learning about gay marriage in elementary school, it is due to ambiguities in the state health education standards. The statute to which the yes-on-8 ads are referring is California Education Code Section 51890-51891, which lists the expected topics of instruction for school districts that want a state-funded health curriculum. Among the topics is the following:

"For the purposes of this chapter, "comprehensive health
education programs" are defined as all educational programs offered
in kindergarten and grades 1 to 12, inclusive, in the public school
system, including in-class and out-of-class activities designed to
ensure that:
(1) Pupils will receive instruction to aid them in making
decisions in matters of personal, family, and community health, to
include the following subjects:
(A) The use of health care services and products.
. . .
(D) Family health and child development, including the legal and
financial aspects and responsibilities of marriage and parenthood."

What this basically means is that, if a school district wants state funding for its health-education curriculum, it must, at some point between kindergarten and 12th grade, discuss the legal and financial aspects of marriage. The Code says nothing about exactly which grade marriage is to be discussed in. The issue of what topics are to be taught at which grade level is addressed in the Standards for Health Education, which doesn't mention anything about teaching marriage until it gets to high school:

"High School
As a result of health instruction in high school, all students will demonstrate the ability to:
. . .
HS.1.G.3 Discuss the characteristics of healthy relationships, dating, committed relationships, and marriage.
. . .
HS.1.G.10 Recognize that there are individual differences in growth and development, body image, gender roles, and sexual orientation. "

So, according to this, marriage and sexual orientation are to be discussed in high-school "careers and family studies"-type classes.

Here's the rub: though the standards clearly say that students should learn about marriage and sexual orientation in High School, they seem to also leave open the option to discuss marriage in earlier grades. It seems to be the prerogative of the school district:

"Section 51933

51933. (a) School districts may provide comprehensive sexual health education, consisting of age-appropriate instruction, in any kindergarten to grade 12, inclusive, using instructors trained in the appropriate courses. (b) A school district that elects to offer comprehensive sexual health education pursuant to subdivision (a), whether taught by school district personnel or outside consultants, shall satisfy all of the following criteria:
. . .
(7) Instruction and materials shall teach respect for marriage and committed relationships.
(8) Commencing in grade 7, instruction and materials shall teach that abstinence from sexual intercourse is the only certain way to prevent unintended pregnancy, teach that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, and provide information about the value of abstinence while also providing medically accurate information on other methods of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
. . ."

"Age appropriate instruction" seems to be up for interpretation. I included number (8) to show that some of the curriculum standards DO state clearly at what grade the instruction is to begin (in the case of birth control, it clearly states that it can be taught starting in grade 7). This does not seem to be the case for marriage, and leaves some leeway about when it can be discussed.

-Now, what does all of this have to do with gay marriage? Well, obviously, if gay marriage remains legal in this state, then it should be discussed and addressed whenever the school decides it is time to instruct the children about marriage. Those who oppose gay marriage probably wouldn't want their kids learning about it at a young age in public school.

The reason the fear-mongering ads of the "yes-on-8" campaign are misleading, however, is this: the age at which certain topics are taught to public school students is a matter that can be addressed by revising state school standards and codes. One could petition to make these laws more clear about only addressing the topic of marriage in junior high or high school, for example. Putting a "Beginning in grade 7. . ." before the bit about marriage in the Standards above would do it. One could also pull their child out of the class. One could discuss the interpretation of the state codes with the school district. All of these are better options for clearing this up then just taking the right to marry away from an entire population of people.

But no, the yes-on-8 campaign wants you to believe that the best way to solve this ambiguity in our state health education code is to eliminate the right of gay people to marry entirely. It's not right to take a civil right away from a whole population just because some people don't want their kids hearing about it in school. This is not the right way to address the problem of what kids learn and when.

And then there's a more fundamental issue: Why did this argument convince some people, who would otherwise have been content to leave well enough alone and let homosexuals continue to marry, that they should now remove that right entirely? Before these recent ads started running, polls were showing that prop 8 was likely to fail. After the school-ads, polls show it likely to pass. So some people who previously were against prop 8 suddenly were for it. If you are ok with it being legal for gay people to marry, why would you want to keep it a secret from your children? Say your child asks you if two men can get married; what are you going to do, lie to them? You can teach your children anything you like in your home and your church, but if you expect the public school system to preach inequality, I have little sympathy for you.
--------------------------------------

Sigh.

Underneath all the fear-mongering and obfuscation of the "yes-on-8" campaign, the primary motivations for passing this ban are religious. Well, marriage in the sense that we are talking about is NOT a religious institution. It is a civil one. And there are real differences between marriage and domestic partnership.

In the end, this issue is much simpler than everyone is making it out to be. Heterosexual couples enjoy the right to marry. Homosexual couples now do as well. Prop 8 would take that right away from them. It would be the first time I know of that an entire demographic would be stripped of their civil rights in a constitutional amendment in this state.

History does not look back fondly on those who support taking rights away from people. Think of how we regard those who espoused the "separate but equal" doctrine in the '60's. We think of them as racists. Those who vote Yes on prop 8 this November 4 will join their prejudiced predecessors in attempting to ensure that certain people do not get the civil rights and equal treatment under the law that is supposed to be guaranteed to all men and women in this country and in this state. Shame on them. They should be smarter than this. Don't let fear mongering and religious dogma cloud your judgment. Vote no on prop 8!

Race across London

2008-10-10T17:54:00.000-07:00

I've heard people compare Los Angeles to London in that both cities are sprawled out over a large area. While London has had a metro-rail system for over 150 years now, the rail system of Los Angeles can not compete, and probably won't for quite some time.

Anyhow, a friend told me about this show, Top Gear, which typically does car reviews. In this particular episode, 4 guys race across London using 4 different modes of transportation: car, bicycle, public transit (bus and rail), and a speed boat up the Thames river.

It's tremendous fun to watch, only about 23 minutes. Can you guess the order in which they cross the finish line?

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/129403.html

Scroll down to find out who won.

Bicycle, then boat, then public transit, then car.

SCUBA Cylinder Explosions

2008-08-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

So, we got a new compressor at the aquarium to fill our SCUBA cylinders with between dives. Unlike the old one, this compressor has some better safety features. For one, it only fills the cylinders when the door is closed and the cylinders are encased in a thick steel compartment; the idea being that, if a rupture were to occur, the extra metal would minimze the damage to the surrounding dive locker, where there are typically lots of people walking around. The process of loading a tank into the compressor and heaving the door shut before the compressor can start filling the tank reminded me of how the Ghostbusters would load their ghost trap into their "containment system" in the movie.

Anyway, I got curious about just how often SCUBA cylinder ruptures occur, and found some information on the website of Luxfer, on of the biggest manufacturers of SCUBA cylinders in the world.

Here is one of their charts, listing 13 SCUBA cylinder ruptures/
explosions since 1988, the most recent in 2007.
http://www.luxfercylinders.com/support/faq/sustainedloadcracking-australia.shtml#q5

It is unclear to me whether this is a list of only SLC (sustained-load-
cracking) ruptures, or all SCUBA cylinder ruptures worldwide. Either
way, it appears that many of them are due to a specific alloy of
aluminum (6351) that is more susceptible to SLC than other alloys of
aluminum or steel. Luxfer stopped making these tanks in 1988 (in the
U.S.) and in 1990 (in Australia), afterwhich they switched to 6061,
which is apparently not susceptible to SLC.

Still, statistically speaking the risk is low. . . but if you google
around for any of the events on the list, you're likely to find
personal accounts and photos of the aftermath of the explosions. On
the couple I looked at, the scuba-shop people filling the tanks
noticed no defects on the tanks whatsoever. In one case, the cylinder
exploded after being placed in a water-tank to be filled, but BEFORE
the staff member even opened the compressor valve to fill the tank
(IE: it exploded when it was not being filled, at least, according to
the account at this web site, near the bottom of the page).
http://biobug.org/scuba/scubatank/

Note that the energy contained in the compressed air of a SCUBA cylinder, relative to atmospheric pressure around it, is equivalent to the energy of about 2 hand grenades, according to the link above.

Not sure how reliable that account was, but, anyway, with the number
of cylinders we have being using in the dive locker, and the fact that
the fill station is right next to where divers and tour groups walk
all day long, I'm happy to have the new ghost-buster containment system.

Of course, a person is MUCH MUCH more likely to be injured or killed by driving a car, getting hit by lightning, having a coconut fall on his head, or getting crushed by a vending machine than being injured or killed by an exploding scuba tank. . . but I see no problem in mitigating risk, especially since the most likely time a tank would rupture is during the filling process.

Finally, for fun, I'd like you to use your current state of mind
thinking about exploding 3000 psi scuba cylinder to reflect on the
idea of a new "air car" that will be powered by an on-board compressed
air tank holding air at 4500 psi. . . situated right next to a fuel
tank. . . in a car that can drive up to 90 mph. All in the name of
saving energy. (Because I'm sure air compressors that can fill tanks
up to 4500 psi are highly energy efficient, right? ;) )
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/08/08/air.car/index.html

The Subway, The Earthquake, and the iPhone

2008-07-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

I was about 100 feet under downtown Los Angeles, when the earthquake hit.

On Tuesdays I commute from North Hollywood station all the way down to Long Beach to volunteer at the aquarium, using the Red line (L.A.'s only completely subterranean heavy rail) and the Blue line (a light rail that is only underground breifly at its northernmost station).

I think we were somewhere between Vermont/Santa Monica and 7th/Metro (where I disembarked) at the time of the quake. The reason I am unsure exactly where on the route we were at 11:42 am is because I DIDN'T FEEL THE EARTHQUAKE AT ALL. No one in my train car did, as far as I can recall. I do remember that, at one of the red line stops, the train was stopped for longer than usual (maybe 30 seconds), and the conductor said something inaudible over the speaker, but I didn't know what it was, and it didn't seem to matter much since we were moving again pretty quick, so I assumed it was some random delay. No one around me was reacting to anything (several were sleeping), so I think it's not just me on the train that didn't feel it.

(I am actually curious at why I didn't feel the quake on the red line. Was it simply because the regular vibrations felt when riding the train masked the vibrations from the quake? The red line feels (to me) like it has shocks cushioning between the wheel chassis and the car somehow, making it a smooth ride. Did those shocks (if they exist) damp out the jolt of the quake as well? I dunno.)

After disembarking the red line at 7th/Metro, I went up the stairs to wait for the Blue Line. This station is a double-decker subway station, with the red line at the lower level and the blue line at the upper level, but both still underground. After waiting 3 or 4 minutes, someone came on the station loudspeaker and said "(something inaudible) We are running all trains as normal, but (something inaudible) there may be some delays. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience."

I was playing a stupid game on my phone, so I wasn't really paying attention, and figured there was some random reason why the trains might be delayed. This didn't seem all that unusual, so I just waited as normal.

The blue line train showed up only a few minutes or so later than expected. I strolled onboard, still blissfully unaware that anything had happened. It was now around 11:55 or so. Once people had mostly sat down and had gotten quiet, the conductor for this train came on the loudspeaker:

"This train will be departing for Long Beach. Because of the earthquake, we will not be traveling faster than 15 miles per hour. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

Earthquake? There was an earthquake? Huh.

I pulled out my shiny new iphone, which of course gets no reception underground, and opened the web browser. As soon as we emerged from underground and were approaching Pico station, I went to CNN.com. On the top of the CNN front page was an alert in big red letters: "5.4 Earthquake rocks Los Angeles. Details soon."

Yeesh, I thought, talk about alarmist reporting! Here CNN is warning the nation of a natural disaster possibly destroying L.A., and here I am coming out from beneath downtown L.A. and I didn't even feel the darn thing. I then browsed over to the USGS web site and found out that it was indeed a 5.4 quake, whose epicenter was near Chino Hills, about 30 miles east-southeast of downtown. I figured, well, maybe it was too far away for us to feel it. Right then I get a text message from my sister in SAN DIEGO. "Did you feel the earthquake?", she asked. I responded that I hadn't, and she immediately replied that the room she was in (a classroom in a larger building) was "rockin' and rollin'". In San Diego. 113 miles from the epicenter! Everyone else I talked to that day definitely felt the earthquake. In a weird way, I feel sort of left out.

The main impact it had on my day was that the blue line was forced to run much slower, I guess as a safety precaution in case of aftershocks. We were going 15 mph most of the 30 or so miles to Long Beach. I could hear chatter on the speakers, which sounded like communications between the conductor and higher authorities. By the time we were street-running in Long Beach, it sounded like the conductor was given approval to take the train up to 45 mph, but at that point it was moot for me, since we were stopping at stoplights and such anyway. The 53 minute scheduled ride between 7th/Metro and the Long Beach Transit Mall instead took about 1 hr 40 minutes. Luckily I could call the aquarium and let them know I would be late so someone could cover for the first part of my volunteer shift.

While I was checking out news sites for more quake info, some guy sat down next to me, having just boarded at Pico. I asked him if he felt the quake. "Oh yeah," he said. Then he noticed that the train was going really slow, and I told him that it was for safety. He realized that, at this rate, he was not going to make to where he was going by using the train, so I used my iPhone and the MTA website to figure out an alternate route for him to take, using a bus that was scheduled to stop at the next blue line station we'd be stopping at in just a few minutes! Worked out kind of well, and he walked off the train saying "I need to get me one of those!". So I guess these things aren't just toys afterall.

Mass Transit: California and Los Angeles

2008-07-20T20:44:00.000-07:00

EDIT: Thought I'd quickly add a cool link I found with information about metropolitan rail systems around the world. Has info on their history and the present day states of the system. Did you know that the first Metro rail system was the London Tube, which started operation in 1863? (!!)
http://www.urbanrail.net/index.html

As a follow up to my last post, I thought I'd talk a bit about transit issues specific to California and Los Angeles, in particular.

As for state-wide service, check this out: A high-speed rail (220 MPH trains!) system that will eventually extend from San Diego through Riverside and Los Angeles and San Francisco all the way to Sacramento. A trip from downtown L.A. to San Diego would cost $35 and take 1 hour and 20 minutes. A trip between L.A. and San Francisco would cost $55 and take 2 hours and 40 minutes. And we can vote to approve it in November's election! I'm glad that California government is taking the lead in trying to make this state more European in dealing with high gas prices and making long-range high speed rail transit more commonplace than it is today. I only hope the rest of the population will see the benefits that such systems can bring to their children and their grandchildren, instead of leaving their descendants to deal with the rising national debt we are incurring, and the environmental impacts we are causing, by continuing to rely on personal transport and fossil fuels.

In Los Angeles, public transit is a challenge. The city is a sprawl, with a huge number of people living in the San Fernando Valley, the west side, Santa Monica, Hollywood, East L.A., Pasadena, South Central, the South Bay, Long Beach, etc. L.A. Metro has a very difficult problem ahead of them: they are trying to expand and improve their network of rail and bus lines across a huge urban and suburban sprawl. Subways and trains are fast, reliable, and can keep to their schedules without having to worry about traffic throughout the day. Everyone would love a train that goes straight from their house to their job, but obviously we can only have so many rail lines. They are expensive to build, especially in areas where the region to be developed into a rail line is privately owned.

The regions that are too far from a rail station (most of the county) are served by buses. I can say from experience that the local versions of these buses are simply not worth it if you have access to a car. You will waste 15 to 20 minutes waiting at the bus stop (they are rarely able to hold to the schedule), and they make so many stops that you could almost always make the trip much faster in your car. And if you are only traveling ~5 miles or so, the distance over which you’d likely want to use a local bus, it’d be much easier to use a car.

Over longer distances, the “rapid” lines become quite useful. These are usually larger, articulating buses that make fewer stops along their route, allowing them to get you from one place to another much faster than a local bus. I use a rapid line to get from UCLA to my condo in Sherman Oaks.

L.A. Metro really is trying to make improvements and expand service. But of course, we only notice the little problems, and take the good things about the service for granted. The fact that the buses are not able to arrive and depart on the scheduled timetable does not really surprise me: the buses are subject to the same traffic fluctuations and stoplights that cars are. We can’t expect the buses to arrive within minutes of the time on the schedule; especially when it’s near the end of that bus’ route.

What I would love to see is something like Chicago has. A way for people to tell how long until the next bus arrives at the bus stop. Something that is accessible by cellphone would be great. Anything accessible online would work as well. If I could know how long before the bus will actually arrive at the bus stop BEFORE I leave my house or office, I could save a lot of time that I am currently wasting waiting at the bus stop, not knowing whether or not I have time to sit down and work on my laptop, or whether there is a bus coming within a couple of minutes.

The rail system in L.A. is actually very effective (see map above), but if you don't live near a rail station, it is useless to you. The entire west side of L.A. is not served by a rail system. The purple line (a subway) currently goes from downtown to Wilshire and Western, and it will eventually be extended all the way to Santa Monica. That will be great when it's finished, as it will take lots of car congestion off of Wilshire, Santa Monica Blvd., and I-10. But that is probably 10-15 years out. . . and I can not imagine having to deal with all the legal issues and property owners underneath and along Wilshire Blvd.

The MTA has a long term plan, and it is moving in the right direction, but I hope that the recent rises in gas cost will inspire some political motivation to inject even more money into the transit system here. This could be an even greater city if public transit were fast, affordable, and efficient. I don't expect that people will be able to live here easily without cars anytime soon, but reducing car usage by a large amount (as in, the ability to commute to work without using your car) would be a significant and attainable goal.

Rising gas prices and public transit

2008-07-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

I thought I’d spend a couple of blog posts talking (mainly to myself, I know, but it’s therapeutic) about public transit in general, and mass transit in Los Angeles in particular.

First, in general: It seems to me that one of the major economic problems the U.S. will be facing over the next few decades is the increasing cost of petroleum. I’ve seen many websites (some alarmist, others more reliable and practical) proclaiming that we are nearing the age of global peak oil. That is, within my lifetime (and probably within the next 30 or so years) we will reach a point at which humanity is producing oil for consumption at the highest possible rate, and after which the oil production rate will fall lower and lower. This time, called “Hubbert’s Peak” corresponds to the point at which we have used half of the crude oil that is accessible to humanity.

The fact that Hubbert’s peak exists for oil should not be surprising. It exists for any non-renewable resource. Crude oil is produced by processes of biological decay and geological compression that take thousands to millions of years, and we humans are using the energy from oil in much less time than it takes the Earth to produce more of it. Hence, on the timescale of human society, oil is non-renewable.

In his book “Out of Gas”, Caltech Physicist David Goodstein points out that we don’t have to wait until we are literally out of oil for a crisis to erupt. That’s because, as soon as we’ve hit Hubbert’s peak, and the rate of oil production begins to forever decrease, oil prices will be forced to continuously rise as the supply of oil decreases. In the 1970’s, oil production within the United States hit Hubbert’s Peak. OPEC realized this and, due to a variety of economic and political motivations, reduced the amount of oil they were willing to sell to the U.S.. The result was the Gas Crisis, with people waiting in long lines to get the small amount of gasoline available to them. We weren’t out of oil. . . availability just decreased for a time. And, when our car-based, consumer lifestyle continues to increase (along with our population), a small decrease in the availability of oil can mean real problems for the every day consumer.

Average gas prices in the U.S. have gone from the lowest (adjusted for inflation) real cost per gallon ever in 1999, to the highest real cost per gallon ever, right now. (See the plot above, collected from the U.S. Energy Information Administration) Though some types of governmental incentives and fiscal policies might cause the prices to go down by a few tens of cents at some point (the temporary band-aid of a "gas tax holiday" supported by McCain and Clinton), they will not be decreasing by half. Gradually, our gasoline prices will be increasing for the foreseeable future. Some people, including myself, think this might actually turn out to be a good thing. Check out this op-ed piece in the L.A. Times: The Joy of $8 Gas.

However, though it may be great that rising gas prices will encourage more people to use public transit, there needs to be a useful transit system available for them in order for the switch to work. This is where the U.S. gets hit in its weak spot. Use of trains and public transportation in metropolitan areas was high in the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century. But after the economic prosperity that came about after World War 2 and during the Cold War, and with the (temporary) availability of cheap oil, U.S. society changed. People moved away from the centers of big cities, and created the suburbs. This was possible because roads could be built out into suburban or rural areas, and people could afford to drive their own cars to wherever they pleased without the governments having to invest public funds. The federal government began investing much more in the interstate highway system, and much less in the train systems. Even state and city governments put more of their tax revenue into maintaining more and more roads, leaving less money to maintain (let alone expand) public transit systems. The U.S. became a car country.

Now we are finally seeing some of the error in our ways. If gas prices keep going up at the current rates, it will become economically unfeasible for many lower middle class families to use their cars to commute to work. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if our society were used to using a good public transit system. But we are not used to public transit. We are used to the convenience of personal transit. And most U.S. cities do not have a good public transit system, though it is improving.

Robert Reich, a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, sometimes gives commentaries on NPR. One of his recent suggestions (on the June 4 podcast) was for the federal government to enact some fiscal policy and inject a real economic stimulus package that amounts to more than giving each American $600 to put in the bank. Instead, Congress should vote to imbue a great deal more money into public transportation. Gasoline is not going to get cheaper, and hybrid cars are great but will only solve the economic problem for the upper middle class people who can afford to buy them.

A better public transit system, one that allows people to conduct their daily lives without having to use their cars as often as they do now, is the right solution. It will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, reduce our production of the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming, and give relief to those who find it more difficult to pay for gas.

ISS animation

2008-07-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

My advisor forwarded this animation to me today. It shows the completed and planned construction of the International Space Station in cool 3D animation, along with dates and flight #'s of the completed construction.

It's pretty awesome to see that, after all the criticism and obstacles, this international manned orbiting laboratory is getting close to being finished!

http://www.tietronix.com/anim/MoviePlayer.asp?myMovie=movies/assembly640x360.swf

Back from Utah

2008-06-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

So I was at a conference in Midway, Utah, for the past week. Stayed at a lovely resort called "Zermatt", with a very Swiss theme. It was a good conference overall. I got some good comments on the poster I was presenting from other space scientists specializing in the ionosphere and the magnetosphere. The resort was nice. . . it was mainly meant to be a place for skiing tourists to stay, but it didn't actually have ski slopes. . . Still, there was a putt-putt course (called the "executive putting green"), a nice pool, and right across the street there was a hot spring called "the Crater". I actually got to go SCUBA diving in this thing, which was basically a deep, water-filled cave filled with 95 deg F water. Kinda fun.

The "Midway Bear" depicted above in the statue that greets guests of the resort, was actually a guy who would dress up as a bear and play the accordian at town parades to entertain the children. That was a disappointingly reasonable story for a statue with such outlandish comic potential, I thought. Oh well.

Oh, and check out the creepy rabbit painting from my hotel room. I don't know why it freaks me out . .. but it does.

Science and the Manned Space Program

2008-06-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

It's great to hear that the Japanese laboratory component of the International Space Station, "Kibo", is being successfully installed. I remember being most impressed when I learned about that module years ago at JSC. They have a full-sized lab (like the U.S. lab, "Destiny"), but also a separate storage shed and an external palette for experiments exposed to space, with a dedicated small robotic arm! Seeing the perennial space station news pop up on cnn, it got me thinking about manned space flight and its importance.

When I worked in Houston, the International Space Station was talked about with the sort of starry-eyed optimism that had drawn me to NASA and space exploration in the first place. Everyone at JSC was proud of their association with the manned spaceflight program, and this drove them to work hard to be able to contribute. Every little job was a real addition to the body of work that went into keeping the station and shuttle programs operating.

When I came to UCLA and got into space physics, I found that the feelings of most scientists toward manned spaceflight was very different. Most saw the current manned space program as a waste of resources. Tens of billions of dollars spent on the ISS over a decade now ($25.6 billion from 1994 - 2005 according to NASA's site) and about $2 billion per year expected from now until 2017 when we are slated to stop funding ISS altogether. And that cost does not even include the budget for the Space Shuttle, even though the shuttle's primary mission has been constructing and servicing the ISS for a while now. For all that money and manpower, there have been very few significant scientific results to show for it. In contrast, NASA's unmanned space program, sending missions at usually a few hundred million dollars a pop, but rarely more than several billion over the lifetime of a mission. Missions like the Mars Exploration Rovers, learning amazing things about the surface conditions of Mars, Cassini-Huygens exploring Saturn, it's magnetosphere, and its moons, SOHO keeping a watchful eye on the Sun, Voyagers 1 and 2, which are still transmitting after nearly 30 years from beyond the termination shock of our solar system, and dozens of other Earth-orbitting and interplanetary spacecraft. Such unmanned explorations of the Earth, the Sun, the other planets, and the space in between delivered observations that have vastly contributed to our understanding of the larger environment in which we live, and at an annual cost much lower than the cost of the space shuttle and ISS programs. So many more scientific results, for a fraction of the cost. Seems like a no-brainer which program is more scientifically valuable: not the one where people continuously orbit the Earth only ~200 miles up.

Of course, there is likely some bias built into the criticisms of the manned space program, at least those coming from space scientists. Most space physicists are funded in some way by NASA, and so more money for manned spaceflight means less money available for useful scientific programs that don't involve astronauts. After Bush announced his new "Vision for Space Exploration" a few years ago, NASA went through a major re-structuring, and funds were shifted around, often away from science programs into manned spaceflight engineering and operations costs.

There is science being done on the space station, of course, though not as much as was originally envisioned. You can see a list of experiments that have been carried out on station ever since it first launched here. But the big question, of course, is "is it worth it?".

I think it is, personally. If the space station were never built, would there be more money available for non-manned space missions? Maybe. But maybe not. Many people are really only interested in a space program if there are humans going up into it, and all of these people in the U.S. can vote. The members of congress who approve the President's budget know that. Without a manned component, I am not convinced that NASA would get nearly as much funding as it currently does. It's not as easy to excite the voting public with data from magnetometers and spectrometers as it is to talk to floating astronauts in space. As much as some scientists and engineers might not like to admit it, there are non-scientific benefits to having a manned space program.

Take Apollo, for instance. We actually got a lot of interesting scientific results from our trips to the moon. I just learned last week that the first thing deployed after Apollo 11 touched down was not the American flag, it was the Solar Wind Composition Experiment, a sheet of special foil hanging from a pole, which collected ions flowing in the solar wind. It was of course returned to the Earth by the astronauts, giving scientists a better insight into the composition of the charged gas that exists in interplanetary space.

We still have ~80 lbs of moon rocks sitting in a lab at Johnson Space Center, from which cosmochemists often request samples for scientific research. (. . . and some unscrupulous NASA Co-ops try to steal and sell.) Analysis of these samples gives us information about the age and composition of the Moon AND the Earth, and tells us more about the nature and origin of the solar system. The "sub-satellites" deployed in lunar orbit by Apollo 15 and 16 yielded interesting observations of the gravitational and magnetic fields of the moon. The lunar seismometers that were deployed provided interesting information about the interior structure of the Moon, and remain the only successful seismographic experiment conducted on the surface of any body other than Earth. The Laser Retroreflector experiment is still used to this very day to montior the Earth-Moon distance, revealing interesting things about the interior structure of the Moon, the slow recession of the Moon away from the Earth, and the consistency of Newton's Universal law of Gravitation. These are just a few examples.

So, the scientific merit of the Apollo program is not really in question. And yet, would we have launched men to walk on the Moon for purely scientific reasons? Hard to say if we would have, but we certainly didn't. Apollo was really a cold-war program. A demonstration of U.S. technical prowess in the aftermath of Sputnik. If we could put people on the Moon, what level of accuracy might we obtain in launching nuclear missiles over the Iron Curtain? If any country was interested in militarizing space, the U.S. would not want to be left vulnerable. Without the Soviet Union as a looming menace, I'd bet that the Apollo program would not have happened.

And so we're left with this interesting viewpoint: Useful scientific results from a program with unscientific motivations. Science was just along for the ride. And yet how many young children were inspired to become scientists because of the purely political pictures of a human stepping onto another world for the first time? The same scientists who criticize manned spaceflight for its lack of efficiency in producing scientific results were likely inspired to go into space science by the idea of going into space themselves, seeing the Earth from afar.

And what about the scientific results that came from the Gemini and Mercury missions? These missions were necessary in developing the ability to put people in space and safely bring them back. What scientifically useful results in space science did these programs bring about? Virtually none. But the Apollo program would not have been possible without them. Today, as we look to the many successes (and the 50% failure rate) of sending robotic spacecraft to do science at Mars, we still dream of sending people there to explore on foot. I've heard it said that the amazing results obtained by the MER rovers could have been obtained much more quickly in situ if astronauts were walking on Mars instead. Do we WANT to send people to the Moon and other planets? My bet is that if you ask the citizens in this country, and many others, the overwhelming response would be yes. Sending people to Mars will likely require several years of interplanetary space travel, round trip. People are spending long stints on the ISS, and returning a larger and larger data set about the logistical requirements and biological side affects of keeping people in space for long periods of time. So, is the ISS not worth the cost, because it is not returning as much science as the unmanned spacecraft on the nature of the Sun, the Earth, the other planets, and interplanetary space, even though it is providing invaluable data and experience in human survivability in space and international cooperation?

And what about the space shuttle? It, too, has cost far more than was originally thought to maintain and launch. It turns out that having a re-usable manned spacecraft doesn't really save you that much money, because of all the maintanence required to keep it safe. But it, too, has contributed to our exploration and understanding of space. Take Hubble, for example. That orbitting telescope has been monumental in its opening our eyes to the distant reaches of our own solar system and the rest of the Universe. And yet, it was broken and myopic when it was first launched. But we have been able to fix and improve the telescope, extending it's life far longer than would have been possible otherwise, by sending humans up on the shuttle to service it.

Of course, my opinion should be obvious by now. Of course it is worth the cost. The ISS is teaching us how to deal with other countries in a huge project to do something that has never been done before, and requires more resources than any one nation is able to muster alone. This is invaluable experience that can be applied to future manned missions to the Moon, to Mars, to Near Earth Asteroids, or whatever we choose to do. The unmanned space program is far superior in terms of delivering broad scientific results, it's true. But that does not mean the manned program is useless. The two should work hand-in-hand when possible, and stick to what each is good at when practical. Both need to exist for our exploration and understanding of space to be useful. The investment in time, money, and sometimes even lives, is an investment in the future of humanity.

Ft. Lauderdale

2008-05-31T20:15:00.000-07:00

I just got back from Florida. I was in Ft. Lauderdale for the Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union. The conference went well. I gave a talk about the rotation rate of the Earth's plasmasphere, which seemed to stimulate some interest as I got lots of questions. I talked about research with a bunch of people doing interesting work. In my spare time, I did a bit of diving, a bit of relaxing on the beach, and a bit of hanging out with friends, old and new.

Pics and videos here.

Underwater Presentations

2008-05-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

A dive buddy and fellow volunteer of mine who works in cinematography shot some video of me doing an underwater presentation at the Long Beach Aquarium the other day. For those of you who haven't seen me do this, I thought I'd share. This is what I do every week at the Aquarium of the Pacific.

Video

Powerful Video

2008-04-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I forget how lucky I am to have been born in what happens to be the richest country on the planet at this time in history. I gripe about my "problems": Maybe I had a hard time getting a data analysis computer code to work, or maybe I get annoyed that a product I purchased doesn't work the way it is supposed to. But it usually does not take long for me to notice something that reminds me: I really have no right whatsoever to complain. One of those reminders of how undeservingly lucky I am showed up on a web page I was looking at this morning.

I was browsing fark.com, and found a YouTube video that held my attention. This is a CBS News report from 1975. It shows the last rescue flight leaving from Da Nang airport at the end of the Vietnam War. Apparently, the president of World Airways had been flying humanitarian missions, using his airliner planes to help evacuate south vietnamese to Saigon as the North Vietnamese troops marched into city after city. In the case detailed in this news report, a plane intended to evacuate women and children refugees was rushed on the Da Nang runway by mostly enlisted south vietnamese male soldiers, desperate to escape with their lives. They climbed aboard the plane, pushing each other out of the way in their panic. After the plane took off, they found that only 5 out of the 200-some people were women. Another world airways airline flying alongside informed the pilots that the bottom cargo doors were open during the flight (which was restricted to 10,000 ft altitude because they were unable to properly close the stairway door, which was damaged by the mob) and that those open cargo bays were filled with people.

I do not have problems. I am no more deserving of happiness than the refugees shown in this video, and yet, by pure chance, it is unlikely I'll ever have to endure one tenth of the fear and suffering that many of these people had been through in the ordeal that led them to be so desperate to escape.

Flickr has added video!

2008-04-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

Many of my friends (especially the bridge kids who check our group MySpace page) know that I am ga-ga over Flickr. It's a hand-dandy photosharing site that brings me endless enjoyment as well as the ability to quickly and easily upload and share photos with friends and family. For a long time, however, I was frustrated that Flickr did not allow you to also upload those little videos you can take with your point and shoot camera. Sure, you can throw them up onto YouTube easily enough. . . but wouldn't it be nice just to have photos and videos of the same subject matter side-by-side, organized in a way similar to iPhoto on the mac?

Yes. .. yes it would be nice. So Flickr did it! Just today they added the ability to upload video. You can tag, geotag, and comment on the vids just like the pics, and all the world is in harmony now.

check out my videos on flickr!

Back from Baja

2008-03-31T12:42:00.001-07:00

BajaMarch2008 - 35, originally uploaded by davidagalvan.

Reg and I went to Bahia de Los Angeles last week with our friends Tim and Julie. Tim knows the area really well, and led us to various islands for kayaking, fishing, and snorkeling. It was lots of fun! Check out some photos at my flickr site! For now, it's back to work!

Antarctica

2008-01-13T18:39:00.000-08:00

I arrived in Antarctica on Friday, January 4th. My advisor, Mark Moldwin, and I have come here to repair and re-deploy a magnetometer that is based at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAISD). We successfully fixed the electronics box, and have been ready to go to WAISD to redeploy it since last Friday, Jan 11. Since then the weather at WAISD has been bad enough that every flight since then has been cancelled. Mark has commitments he must return to back in the U.S., and we are running out of time to get out to WAISD and get back to McMurdo, before then flying up to Christchurch, New Zealand, and on to Los Angeles.

At this point, we are just hoping to get a day or two worth of time at WAISD to re-connect the electronics box to the power, GPS, Iridium and sensor cables. If we don’t have time to raise all the elements of the magnetometer site, another trip down in a year may be required. We’re hoping it won’t come to that, not because I wouldn’t love to come down here again, but because of the extra cost of an additional trip just to dig out and raise the magnetometer site.

Here at McMurdo, the largest research station on the continent, life is similar to living at a typical university. There is a population of around 1000 people during these summer months, which drops down to about 200 during the southern winter. The sun, of course, never sets here. It just goes round and round in the sky, ranging from ~30 degrees above the horizon and due north at local noon, to about 10 degrees above the horizon and due south at midnight. I had my “Snowcraft Training” course, which involved learning to make a Kinsey (snow-cave), snow-block walls, setting up Scott Tents, using a high frequency (HF) radio to communicate with receivers up to 1000 miles away (we actually got to talk to people at the South Pole, just from our camp site!), and of course spending a night out on the ice shelf.

Mark and I have done several short hikes around “town”. It really is beautiful terrain when the weather is good. There isn’t all that much wildlife right around the station; I haven’t seen any penguins yet. Though an adelie penguin delayed our landing by being out on the ice runway when were supposed to be landing. We had to circle a couple of times while the airfield staff chased it away. I have seen probably 100 weddell seals from a distance, lying out on the ice shelf near melt pool and cracks in the ice. And there is the occasional skua scavenger bird (resembles a brown seagull) hoping to steal food from the people here in town.

It’s the height of summer down here, so the temperature hovers around 30 F, though it’s in the teens or single digits when you factor in windchill. The wind really does make all the difference here. The extreme cold weather gear (ECW) given us by the U.S. Antarctic Program is great though!

HDTV from the Moon!

2007-11-08T10:25:00.000-08:00

The Japanese spacecraft KAGUYA ("SELENE", in English) has taken the first high definition video from lunar orbit! Now it's even easier to imagine what it would be like to be in orbit around the moon!

Check it out the awesome video here:
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2007/11/20071107_kaguya_movie_e.html

And there's more information about the spacecraft here:

http://www.selene.jaxa.jp/en/index.htm

Giant Black Sea Bass

2007-10-01T00:14:00.000-07:00

Video:

2 weeks ago, I went out diving in La Jolla Cove to see if we could catch a glimpse of the black sea bass that are said to be in the kelp forests this time of year. We had no luck, mainly because we descended on the wrong buoy. This past Sunday, I went back in the water with my sister to look for the seabass at a different buoy. . . and we found 'em!

I dive with two of these black sea bass every week at the Long Beach Aquarium, but this is the first time I've seen them in the wild. This species can grow to as large as 500 lbs, though the ones we saw in La Jolla were probably ~150 - 200 lbs. We saw 4 of them at one time, and they were very cool to watch. Check out the video above, and take a look at some of my pictures from the dives at my flickr site.

Dawn and the pursuit of purpose

2007-09-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

The Dawn spacecraft launched this morning from Cape Canaveral. Dr. Russell, the Principal Investigator of the mission, is a professor in my department here at UCLA. Dawn is going to be the first spacecraft to orbit two separate planetary bodies (the asteroids, Vesta and Ceres) in the same mission. Its mission is to study these asteroids to determine their geophysical properties: whether their interiors are differentiated (like the Earth's), or undifferentiated (like a smaller asteroid or rock). It will send back data that will help us to understand the process of planetary formation.

One of the reasons I chose to go into space science as a career is stuff like this. The sense of true exploration; of finding ways to explore places no human has ever been before, and of using these observations to better understand the amazing and surprising universe we find ourselves in.

In my (possibly a bit melodramatic) estimation, organizations like NASA are important because they help to give humanity a purpose. At the end of the day we humans spend so much time, money, sweat, and blood fighting with each other over chunks of dirt, hurting each other because we don't believe in the same mythology, working hard to ensure that more members of the human race are able to live healthy lives, or simply finding new ways to keep ourselves entertained. But what for? All the military effort spent keeping us safe, all the medical science helping us to survive, all the time we spend on enjoying and accentuating our art and culture is essential and vital to our existence as a species; don't get me wrong. But should we be content with merely existing?

Increasing the percentage of the human population that can expect to live long, healthy, and happy lives is a noble pursuit. . . but it is ultimately all for the purpose of our continued existence. Assuming we humans continue to improve our ability to survive, to increase our population, to increase our quality of life. . . what do we intend to do with ourselves? Will we just sit on the porch and enjoy the existence our efforts have earned us, content to live out our lives happily, then disappear after our individual deaths?

It is efforts like exploration, or natural science simply for the sake of satisfying our curiosity, that can give humanity deeper purpose: to explore and understand our amazing universe. We are such an insignificant species, a result of an accident of physics and chemistry, on a tiny world in a vast, vast universe. There is so much in our world and beyond it for us to explore. Stretching our vision out into space is an effort in the pursuit of our purpose.

Dryer-sheets are like gremlins

2007-08-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

Today, on the bus on the way to school, I was standing up hanging on to a pole for dear life, still waking up, and I noticed in my reflection in the window that I had a dryer-static-cling-removal sheet stuck to my rear end.

That is all.

The Phone and the Dumpster

2007-04-20T13:57:00.001-07:00

Last night, I decided to clean out the car. Regan tends to leave junk and garbage in the car for months on end, while I tend to try and keep the car interior a bit more tidy. The typical routine is that the amount of junk in the car builds up for a month or so before I get frustrated enough to angrily put it all in a bag and throw it away.

As I was throwing papers into the bag for trash and Oprah magazines into the bag of Regan’s junk to bring upstairs, I was also juggling my backpack, my cell phone, and my telescope (which was in the car because I had just returned from a canceled star party). I closed up the car, tossed the garbage into the dumpster, and carried the rest of the stuff back up to the condo.

That evening I couldn’t find my phone in the house. I knew it was somewhere at home because I had called Regan from the car on my way home, so I figured I must have left it in the car. I figured I’d just get it in the morning when we went downstairs to leave for the day.

So, this morning, we get to the car and the cell phone is nowhere to be found. Confused, I went back up to the condo to look around again, with no success. Since I couldn’t find it in the car OR the condo, and I knew I hadn’t left it at school, I started to retrace my steps. As I was trying to remember everything I did last night, my eyes fell to the dark catacombs in the corner of our garage where the dumpster is kept. . . oh crap.

I didn’t really think I’d thrown my phone in the dumpster; instead, I figured it would turn up somewhere I hadn’t thought of in the condo in a day or two, but I figured I might as well take a look, just in case. I asked Regan (who was getting impatient sitting in the car waiting to leave while I took one last look around for the phone) to call my phone. I opened the big metal door that quarantines the dumpster dungeon, and peered over the rim into the dank, vile pit of refuse.

And there it was. Vibrating in the bottom of the dumpster was my phone, lit up and crying out to be rescued. I climbed into the great clangy trash-box, making sure I stepped only on large pieces of cardboard and newspaper, and retrieved the little fellow. It was only a bit dusty, but I made a note to wipe it off with a damp cloth later on.

Getting back in the car after emerging from the trash room, Regan asked if I’d found the phone. Yep. A pause. Regan narrowed her eyes and smiled slightly.

“Was it in the dumpster?”
“Yep.”

I know that this event will end up on a list of dumb things I have done, which will probably also include the time I locked myself out of my own house. But it’s important to remember the moral of this story: Keep your car tidy.

Lunar transit as viewed from STEREO

2007-03-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

Another cool vista from space. Check out this movie of the moon in a transit across the sun, as viewed from the STEREO satellite, which is in orbit around the sun, about a million miles behind the Earth in its orbital track.

So that was Christmas. . .

2006-12-27T15:36:00.000-08:00

. . .And what have we done?

Well, Reg and I just got back from San Diego for Christmas. Fun times had by all: Saturday was spent fixing stuff around my mom's house (Merry Christmas. . . here are some motion sensitive flood lights!), and then hanging out with K-lee and Dimitri in the evening; Sunday was spent trying to build a screen to replace a broken one at my mom's house, then hanging out at Reg's Grandma Jackie's for dinner, then midnight mass with my mom, sister, and the Plunketts. Holy Trinity has a new pastor, after the beloved Father Brian Corcoran moved to a different parish. He will be missed, but the new pastor seems like a nice guy. Christmas was spent at Grandma Jackie's in the morning, then at my mom's for the late afternoon and evening. Tuesday was a not-too-bad drive up to Long Beach in the mid-day, a few hours of volunteer diving, and then a not-too-bad drive home.

A decent amount of driving around, but nowhere near the hassle of a few years ago, when we were going to 5 different christmas events on the same day!

To Drive or Not To Drive. . .

2006-12-18T15:06:00.000-08:00

. . . that is the question.

So it's just before a new quarter at school, and I'm considering a question that man has wrestled with since before civilization began:

Should I take the Metro Rapid 761 bus to UCLA and back everyday, or should I pay for a parking permit and drive there?

It's basically weighing cost against convenience: If I buy a parking permit (as I have been for the last year or so), I can come and go when I want, and will have my car in the parking garage right next to my building at school. I can go between UCLA and our home in Sherman Oaks (~11 miles) via Beverly Glen, Sepulveda, or the 405, depending on traffic conditions, in anywhere from 20 minutes to 1 hour one-way. Also, on Tuesdays, when I go to the Aquarium in Long Beach, I can work at school for the morning, then hop in the car and drive down to LB in ~30 minutes on the 405, and having the car nearby in Westwood also frees me up to run errands on the way home (like stopping at the grocery store).

But a parking permit costs $171 dollars for the 12 week Winter Quarter, and of course, with gasoline costs, I end up paying closer to $300-$350 for gas/permit to get to/from UCLA all quarter. The alternative is to get a UCLA-discounted MetroPass, which would allow me to take the bus to/from UCLA all quarter for a total cost of $42.

So I'd save ~$300 over the quarter if I took the bus to school instead of the car, and of course I'd be producing less CO2 by not driving my car as much (the bus runs whether I'm on it or not), so the bus would be the "greener" option, I suppose. But I'd be sacrificing the convenience and freedom of showing up and leaving UCLA whenever I want. . . as well as taking slightly longer to get to school or home, given the bus' many stops.

Aquarium Tuesdays would probably be dealt with by me just working at home in the morning, and driving to Long Beach from Sherman Oaks, not going in to UCLA at all on that day.

hmmmmm . . .

Finally, an update

2006-12-13T15:00:00.000-08:00

. . .yeah. . . sorry about that. So I lagged on updating my blog a bit. By a bit, I of course mean 4 months. yeesh. Time flies.

Well, in that time the fall quarter of school came and went. I can't believe I'm starting my 4th year of grad school. My friend Dave just defended his thesis, and he was a 4th year when I came in. Crazy.

I've been working all quarter on this research project that I am having trouble actually finishing. Been working on it on and off for a couple years now, and I'm finally to the point where I think I can write it up and submit it to a journal. It's a statistical study observing the daytime increase in plasma density in the plasmasphere, thought to be due to heating and ionization by solar EUV of the Earth's ionosphere. One of those things that has been long predicted, but never reliably observed. If it gets published, it would be my first scientific journal article as first author (I've been co-author on a couple others already, but this project is all me, with help from my advisor and a collaborator in Arizona). Shouldn't get ahead of myself though, I still have some work to do on it before it's ready. Sigh.

Of course, I've managed to distract myself with other pursuits this quarter as well. For one, I took a classical mechanics course (last time I took classical mechanics was over 4 years ago in undergrad, and I wanted to brush up with the help of a professor I really respect.) This was also in preparation for an orbital dynamics course that's finally being offered next spring, and will be taught by the same professor that taught mechanics this quarter. I'm looking forward to this class, as its listing in the catalog has enticed me since I got here over 3 years ago, and this is the first time it's been offered in like 5 years.

Another distraction (though a very welcome one) has been my Scientific Diving class at Aquarium of the Pacific. I've been a volunteer diver at the Aquarium for a year now, target feeding fish in the exhibits, cleaning the exhibits, and giving underwater presentations. But this Scientific Diver certification through the American Academy of Underwater Sciences (AAUS) will allow me to participate in various science diving projects in the open ocean. We'll be doing fish counts, invertebrate counts, algae surveys and other projects throughout the L.A. and Orange county coasts, as well as on the oil rigs, Channel Islands, and Catalina. The class was pretty rigorous: 3 hours of lecture every monday covering topics from physiology and dive physics (mainly buoyancy problems: ex: if you want to lift a 200 lb object that takes up 3 cubic feet of volume from 100 ft depth in sea water, how many 50 lb lift-bags do you need and how much air should you bring down from the surface?). We also had some really interesting lectures about decompression theory, given by the head of the Catalina recompression chamber. Some of the stories the guy told about people with extreme cases of the bends, arterial gas embolism, and emphyzema were definitely enough to make me wary about using my computer and dive tables conservatively.

In addition to the lectures, the meat of the class was in the dives themselves: every Sunday from 7 am to ~3 pm. We practiced laying out transect meter tapes, using lift-bags for salvage, scientific data collection methods, etc. The final two dives were just plain fun: one was on the Ellen-E oil rig off Huntington beach, where we saw millions of brittle stars and strawberry anemones, as well as a few sea lions that played with us underwater. The second dive was a blue-water dive (ie: can't see the bottom or any other topography underwater, just out in the open ocean). We used a "blue-water-rig", which is essentially a connection point for tether ropes that everyone attaches to their BC's, so we can all stay together and at a given depth when collecting jellies or whatever (see picture above right).

Our group at the Aquarium is also partnering with an organization called ReefCheck, which is trying to train and use volunteer divers throughout California to consistently monitor fish, invertebrate, and algae species abundance at various sites just off the coast. Thanks to them, I'm getting better at identifying the various so-cal species.

I'm looking forward to going on some of these dives soon in the new year, both because it gives me another opportunity to do something I really enjoy, and because I actually feel like I'm contributing something useful by diving for a purpose. Goes along with that whole "pursuit of purpose" part of my blog title. :)

In other news, I'm looking forward to spending more time with family as Christmas approaches. Reg has gone into super holiday mode, mailing off cards and categorizing christmas lists. I'm sure this will result in at least 3 pages in her scrapbook! Seriously though, she manages our lives expertly. . . I shudder to think what my level of personal organization would be like without her.

And, probably most importantly, another major event has occurred in my life: Nintendo has finally released its latest incarnation of the Legend of Zelda. What with that and my addition to Survivor, Lost, Heroes, and (suddenly) Battlestar Galactica, I feel more secure in my nerdhood than ever before.

Travel Dance

2006-08-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

This guy had a good idea for marking the places he's traveled to! Wouldn't it be nice to travel around the world?

Bad Luck

2006-08-03T17:52:00.000-07:00

I don't believe that a person can be "cursed" or "blessed". It is certainly possible that a person can have things turn out badly for then more often than other people, but I dont think there is any explanation for that other than luck. Random chance and coincidence play such a huge role in our lives. It's unsettling to think we don't have absolute control over what happens to us. I guess how our lives turnout depends on how we play the cards we are dealt by chance. Chance handles about half the work, and your own attitude and drive takes up the rest. Someone could have bad luck for a while, but a great attitude about it, and it would appear that that person is doing A-OK. Others could have great luck and not appreciate it, and it would appear they are having a hard time.

I say: Do your best at all you do; that's all anyone can expect. And don't take things too seriously. The ability to laugh at or brush off a bad event or situation, and the willingness to get back up after falling could save your life, or at least make it a lot more enjoyable. Keep things in perspective.

I had a round of minor bad luck that started on Monday. Regan headed south to San Diego for a couple of days, so I was left to my own devices. In the past, before I was married, this would not have been a problem for me. Nowadays, I've let myself delegate certain tasks that I used to handle myself to my wife. Things like remembering the date of an upcoming event, the street-by-street directions to a certain location, reminding me not to forget my keys as I walk out the door. . . I'll return to that last one later.

As I was leaving JPL on Monday, I opened my windows to let the breeze in. I started hearing a periodic "clack, clack, clack" coming from outside the right window. Pulling over, I found that it was coming from my right rear tire, which was flat. A nail had been embedded in the tread, and was making the clacking noise as it hit the asphalt on every rotation. Looking in the trunk, I found I had a compressor(my wife must have put it there). I re-inflated the tire and found that the leak was slow enough to drive home on. A good thing, since it was too late to take the tire in to be fixed that day, and I had to use the freeways to get home (the tiny spare is not meant for speeds over 50 mph).

So there it was, some bad luck (flat tire) and some good luck (compressor in the back). No problem. Home. Bed.

Next morning I gear up for the day: directions to Discount Tire Co. to get the tires fixed and rotated, swimsuit, towel, and mask for aquarium volunteering, backpack for work, white car key. About that car key: I keep it separate from my main key chain, since I have my key to the other car on that chain and I don't like to have two keyless entry remotes on the same keychain (too bulky). Stepped out the door, twisting the knob lock, and let the door swing toward shutting. Put my hand in my pocket to get out my house key to lock the top lock. . . the keys are not in my pocket. . . *click*. The door shuts. I stand motionless for about 30 seconds. What should I do? My nearest source for another key to my condo is in San Diego. . . We have tons of extra keys. . . all on the other side of the door. My hand flies up and strikes my forehead with a thunderous SMACK!

Time is of the essence, as I have to get the tire fixed and then get on the road to Long Beach. I borrow a key to the garage and elevator from a neighbor downstairs, so I can get to my car. Then it's off to discount tire and down to Long Beach. I dive happily and give presentations and feed animals. I call Phil to ask if I can stay at his house in Downey for the night. I can. Sit through a 4 hour CPR class, then it's off to Downey to get to Phil's house. Get up early and drive to work. By the end of the day, I realize I have lost the garage key and elevator key that I borrowed from the neighbor less than 24 hours before. Regan gets home that night, lets me in, and all is well.

So, over just two days (those days when Regan was gone) I got a flat tire, locked myself out of my condo, and lost a set of keys lent to me by a good samaritan neighbor. On the bad side, I feel like a moron with bad luck. On the good side, I got to have a bit of an adventure, and I had neighbors and friends available to help me out.

I don't believe someone can be cursed or blessed. And I know the fact that these things happened only during the short period my wife was away was only a coincidence. But it sure didn't feel like it at first. It felt like I was cursed. The fact that I had people willing to help me made it easy to have a good attitude about it all, though.

Snakes on a Plane

2006-07-24T18:42:00.000-07:00

Much has been made about the upcoming Samuel L. Jackson movie "Snakes on a Plane". It has become an internet sensation. The title basically tells you the whole plot. No further explanation is required. With just those four words, and the fact that Samuel L. Jackson is in it, you can probably figure out the whole story. It's been spoofed and made fun of all over the place, and it has been said that the producers have even added the line "Get these motha****** snakes off my motha****** plane!" into the film after internet users imagined Jackson saying that line.

Very funny, right?

WRONG! It can happen to someone. . . anyone. . . YOU! Observe the case of one Monty Coles, a 62 year old private pilot who found a snake in the cockpit of his single engine Piper Cherokee. As he puts it, in what I think is a better line than the one imagined for Sam Jackson, " I had one hand full of snake and the other hand full of plane!"

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,197976,00.html

Real work. . .

2006-07-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

Reg and I headed out to Julian this past weekend to help the Parker family with the garage they are building. The plot of land used to be the site of Linda's parents' house, which burned down in the Cedar fire of 2003. Now the family is building a new house on the land. They're saving money by building it themselves in their spare time.

It felt good to do some real, physical work. So much of what I do involves reading and computer work.

wOOt!

2006-07-17T16:10:00.000-07:00

The internet leads to the invention of a new word. . . sort of.

wOOt!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woot

Ahh. . . summer.

2006-07-13T00:40:00.000-07:00

The summer kicked off with the Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) conference in Snowmass, Colorado. I presented a poster on my research, and Regan came along to get some vacation time in, since she's off for the summer. That's one of the huge benefits to being a teacher: summers off.

After the conference we drove through Utah and stopped at Arches, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Parks. Beautiful places.

Also, Regan came with me to one of my volunteer shifts diving at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific last tuesday, and snapped some photos of me in the water.

Pictures of vacation and diving are at my flickr site:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgalvan/

Here's to a fun and productive summer!

Moons of Saturn

2006-06-21T17:39:00.000-07:00

Another cool movie has been released by NASA. This one is of three moons of Saturn as viewed by the Cassini spacecraft.

The center (and largest) moon is Rhea, and it is the closest. Further away is Mimas, the moon on top, and even further away (yet larger in size than the top moon)is Enceladus. Check out the link to see the movie in motion and learn more about it.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07804.html

Fun fact: Enceladus (the bottom moon) has been discovered to have sub-surface liquid water beneath its icy crust. The fact that this water sometimes escapes the surface (cryovolcanism) provides water molecules into the space surrounding the moon, and these water molecules become ionized by sunlight and travel through Saturn's magnetosphere. What an amazing system!

Proofs that God exists

2006-06-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I don't mean to offend anyone (yeah, all 10 million of you who read my blog).

My friends know (or maybe some of them don't) that I am agnostic when it comes to religion. I used to be a devout and faithful Catholic. Nowadays I'm not convinced by most of the arguments for the veracity of much of the mythology of Christianity or even the existence of God. I agree with many of the take home messages from Christianity (the Golden rule: treat others as you'd like to be treated, etc.), but I just don't subscribe to the stories of how the universe is set up. I prefer to claim ignorance and openly admit there are so many things that we don't understand. I don't need to substitute a God of the gaps in order to make the universe sit right with me, I just admit that I don't know. So I'm not an atheist either, because I think it's impossible to prove categorically that a God doesn't exist, and that wouldn't be scientific either.

All that said, I thought this website was funny:

http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/GodProof.htm

Dive Pics

2006-06-19T22:50:00.000-07:00

Click for dive pics at Flickr

From Catalina a week ago sunday. I think I need an external strobe to get rid of the backscatter and brighten things up. All in good time, I suppose.

Thank goodness for Garibaldi.

Roller Coasters

2006-06-19T15:46:00.000-07:00

Reg and I went to Magic Mountain last Thursday, and we got to ride the latest thrill machine: Tatsu. A huge and innovative roller coaster where you lie on your stomach, the train hangs down from an overhead track, and you get the feeling of flying like superman. It’s also cool because you are able to do the type of loop where you start off straight, then pitch down all the way over like a somersault, completely opposite the way most roller coasters loop. It was awesome.

I've always loved roller coasters.

They have a quasi-special meaning for me. My dad grew up in the tiny city of Fillmore in Ventura County, and so my grandparents and cousins on my father's side always lived there. Growing up, about once a year or so, we would add a trip to Six Flags Magic Mountain to the end or beginning of a weekend Fillmore visit. When I was very young, it was mainly about bugs bunny world and cotton candy. But when I was about 8 years old (that's a guess), Dad suggested the idea of going on one of the "big roller coasters". At this time in history, the biggest of the "big roller coasters" was Colossus. A huge, beautiful dual-track white wooden roller coaster that stood as the boundary between the amusement park and the parking lot, challenging anyone to survive it. I was just tall enough for the top of my hair to reach the "riders must be this tall" line. I was a little nervous about it, but I wanted to be brave like Dad, so I said ok.

The line was long, and it was just after dusk. The boarding station was a good 100 ft or so from the start of the coaster structure itself, so one could easily see the train departing toward the structure with its intrepid warriors, and returning with frazzled, laughing passengers. I kept the knot in my stomach mostly under control as we finally climbed into the train seats. Then it was out, away from the din of hundreds of people conversing, away from the sticky ground and dirty hand rails and rushing teenagers and Warner Brothers costumes, and up, slowly, into the windy sky. At that time, the top of the first drop of Colossus, at a little over 100 feet, was the highest point in the park, aside from the sky tower elevator. We could see the whole park; yet for all the visual lights and liveliness, the only audible sounds were the KA-CHUK KA-CHUK of the chain and tracks beneath our feet, and the low whoosh of the breeze. Then it came: the drop. I had really never done anything like this in my young life. Space and Thunder mountain at Disneyland were fun, but they produced nowhere near this level of dread and thrill in me. My stomach seemed to vibrate and resonate with the feeling of weightlessness as we plummeted down amid the screams of the other passengers. It was an odd thing to be feeling a very intense sensation, and have absolutely no control over it. Then it was back up, around, and down again as we made our way through the labyrinthine structure. I didn't scream at first, mainly because I didn't really know what to do in this state of thrill and distress except grit my teeth and hang on. My dad yelled at me before the next drop: "Scream, David! Just let it out! WOOHOOO!". And I did. It let me loose to enjoy the rest of the ride. It wasn't about fear anymore, but gusto. The giant wooden Colossus had challenged me, and I was answering its challenge. As the train left the structure and slowed down, heading back to the boarding station, Dad told me he was proud of me for being so brave (though I hadn't felt very brave at all before he said it).

That ride was all I could talk about for weeks, and from then on I would never shy away from any ride at an amusement park. It may sound cheesy, but I think that first ride on Colossus with my dad helped me to adopt an adventurous attitude about life. What had seemed like a scary challenge proved instead to be a worthwhile and thrilling experience. I feel like I’ve applied that outlook to other thrills in life. Whether it was going skiing for the first time (spending most of that day alone, with my closest companion being the hard icy slopes that were more than happy to smack me in the face repeatedly), learning to SCUBA dive in college, going skydiving or bungee jumping. Something scary out there? Give it a shot! Embrace the challenges, be they physical or otherwise, as part of life. I don’t know what happens after I die, so I’d better pack all the fun things I can into this life.

Gay marriage

2006-06-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last entry, and a lot has happened since then. I hope to post a blog about my trip to Puerto Rico soon. In the mean time, I was spurred to post about a news story I saw on CNN.com.

Again, I don't intend for this blog to become very political, but politics is (however unfortunately) a part of human life and cannot really be divorced from it, so to speak. But rather than give this article the knee-jerk political response I'd like to, perhaps it would be good to do some contemplation on the situation.

Bush and senate Republicans back Constitutional Gay Marriage Ban proposal.

Bush brought up the idea of a constitutional gay marriage ban before the last presidential election. After he was re-elected in 2004, the idea was not really mentioned again, implying to me that it was just a political move to guarantee him the presidential vote from religious conservatives. Now here we are in another election year, this time for congress, and the idea of a constitutional ammendment to ban gay marriage is back in the headlines. It appears the move is once again political: the amendment does not really have a chance of passing, as it would require a 2/3 majority vote in both Houses of Congress, and approval by 3/4 of the states. The GOP may have a majority in both houses, but they are still not strong enough to railroad a constitutional amendment.

Plus, many states already have this definition of marriage in their own laws. Shouldn't this be an issue that's left up to the states under the 10th amendment?

So what's the point of supporting this and Bush making a big statement about it, if the legislation won't pass? Politics. It seems to me that the Bush administration is going all-in. Support this idea again this year, polarize the voters again, and do all you can to maintain a Republican majority in congress. That way, even if the democrats get the presidency in '08, you've still got Congress.

What a game. The ends justify the means, I suppose.

As far as the idea of banning gay marriage itself, I'd say that it's an antiquated case of bigotry. The reason it's contraversial is because Americans have been so used to the idea of male-female marriage for so long that even those who would never try to prohibit marriage between a male-female couple of another race would think twice about allowing a male-male couple to wed.

Now here's an idea that's a bit uncomfortable: is this a slippery slope? If a state agrees to recognize a gay couple, should it also recognize a polygamous family unit? Why not? If traditional male-female couple should not be held high above other types of family, then why should a monogamous gay couple be welcomed into the club of recognized unions, but not a polygamous family? Perhaps it's better to say that all monogamous marriages are equal. . . but they are more equal than polygamous ones. . .? A bit unsettling, if you ask me.

Memories of Buddy

2006-03-15T07:45:00.000-08:00

Buddy was my first dog. He was a good friend and companion as I was growing up and through high school. As I went off to college, internships, and grad school, I would see him less often. But every time I came home he would greet me with excitement, a wagging tail and a warm tongue. As an addendum to my last entry, I thought I’d include some of my memories of Buddy throughout his life. Maybe it will help me to remember the details when I'm old and grey if I put the memories down in writing.

We trained him to go on a newspaper, and then outside. During his first few weeks, he slept close to me and would sometimes wake me up in the mornings by licking my face. As a puppy he had sharp little teeth, and he loved to play any game where he tugged on one end of a towel or toy, and you tugged on the other. He seemed to have a terrier’s desire to pull on things.

As he grew up, we tried to teach Buddy to “sit pretty” on command. He soon learned to use this trick to his own advantage, and he would come up to your chair while you were eating at the table and “sit pretty” without being asked. His begging earned him table scraps once in a while, especially from guests for whom his ploy had not been overused.

He also loved to play with a tennis or racquetball, though he never subscribed to the conventional sport of fetch. I’d throw the ball, and he’d go get it all right, but he had much more fun running away with the ball then bringing it back to me. He loved to be chased. He also became a pretty good catcher, and would reliably catch the tennis ball after one bounce on the carpet of hard floor. At one time, he could “juggle” several balls. I would bounce one ball and he’d catch it, then I’d bounce the next ball and he’d drop the first ball and catch the second without missing a beat.

Buddy loved to explore the neighborhood. He would get excited if he heard the word “walk” or was shown his leash. We didn’t take him for walks as much as we probably should have, and every time we’d open the front door, if we weren’t watching, Buddy would dash to escape. He’d spend his freedom sniffing and marking his territory around our front yard, and would sometimes even venture as far as a couple of blocks in our suburban neighborhood. Even on those occasions when we didn’t even know he was out, however, he would eventually return home, and a few times we were surprised to find him waiting outside the front door when we thought he had been inside the house.

At night, when I would feed Buddy his dinner, he would always come into my room a few minutes after he’d finished eating and spend a minute or two relaxing on my legs while I sat on the floor and did my homework. It always seemed to me that he was thanking me for dinner.

He was not mischievous by nature, but he did have moments where he’d get himself into trouble. At one of my birthday parties, we came into the kitchen after opening presents in the living room to find Buddy eating my ice cream pie from Baskin Robbins on the kitchen table. We stared at him in amazement, worried that the chocolate crust and frosting would prove toxic to him. As we approached, he saw us and began eating faster, trying to make the most of what little cake eating time he had left. I don’t recall him having any problems after eating the chocolate.

Buddy did not like to swim, and could barely dog paddle. We put him in the pool a few times to make sure he could get out if he ever fell in, but he couldn’t do much more than stay afloat. He did enjoy taking rides with me when I was in an inner tube, though. He liked to stand on the inner tube and float around the pool.

It’s always fun to see how your pets interact with each other. When we got Buddy, we also had our 10+ year-old dog Vida, Jack the rabbit, 2 year-old Wishes the cat and an aquarium of small fish. To Vida, I’m sure Buddy was little more than a young whipper-snapper nuisance. His only interactions with Jack were probably a bit distressing for the rabbit, as Buddy looked at him with interest from outside the cage. I do remember one occasion when we had let Jack out to roam the yard, and we accidentally allowed Buddy to get out the back door before we closed it. Buddy chased Jack around the yard for a minute or so, despite our shouts for him to stop. His teeth were getting pretty close to Jack’s puffball tail when I threw a ball at Buddy to get him to stop. It was one of those light, bouncy balls you get out of a huge bin at the supermarket, and Buddy saw it and stopped in his tracks to avoid getting hit as it whizzed between him and the rabbit. Buddy having stopped, Jack was still spooked and continued running until he smacked head-on into my ankle. Ouch.

I guess Buddy interacted the most with Wishes, as their lifespans overlapped for thirteen years. (Wishes died of a malignant tumor in June of 2003. She was 15.) Now, Wishes had a very distinctive personality of her own. One of her parents was feral, and she maintained a wild element of unpredictability her whole life. IE: you could pet her, but only in a spot and for a duration she deemed fit. She would inform you of these specifications by sinking her claws and teeth into your hand or leg if you did not abide by her rules. On the other hand, Buddy was always very friendly. This resulted in him getting swatted in the face by Wishes on several occasions. There were also times when I’d be looking out in the back yard and saw Buddy playfully chasing Wishes from right to left across my field of view. A few seconds later and Buddy would be running, in earnest fear, from Wishes who was now chasing him from left to right. The funny thing was, at ~ 3 times Wishes’ weight, Buddy probably could have pushed her around if he wanted to, but his personality did not lend to aggressive behavior. The exception to this involved food. When it came to scavenging, Wishes could not compete with Buddy. Buddy could swallow tablescraps in mid-air, while Wishes would always wait till they landed and then sniff them cautiously before nibbling on them. . . leaving ample time for Buddy to snatch them away from her. If Wishes ever got too close to Buddy’s food dish while he was eating, you would see the rare spectacle of a snap and snarl from the dog, though it was always meant as a warning.

Of course, I think Buddy’s favorite leisure time activity was being scratched. His lower stomach, the part of his back just above his tail, the small of his back, his underarms, and the muscular area of his neck, just above his chest were all prime areas. Find the right spot, and you’d know it by his stiffening muscles and his gyrating back legs.

Good old pup.

Farewell, Old Friend.

2006-03-05T16:29:00.000-08:00

There aren’t usually obituaries published for dogs, but I need some catharsis so here it goes.

Buddy was a lhasa apso and toy poodle mutt born in May of 1990. As fortune would have it, this was near the end of the school year on the year of my tenth birthday. Mom and Dad had told me I would get a puppy for my birthday that year, and that we should get it at the beginning of the summer so that we’d have time to train and look after it without school getting in the way for me or for Mom. After looking at a few pet shops and shelters for a puppy, we followed up on an ad in the newspaper and headed to a private residence where there was a litter of puppies for sale at $75 each. Each of the puppies had distinctive markings and different colors. Some were brown or black all over, others were black with white tummies. I chose a black one with brown eyebrows, a white tummy, white paws and a white tip at the end of his tail. He was 6 weeks old when we took him home.

Buddy died last Wednesday, March 1st, 2005, at about 11:50 am at the El Cajon Valley Veterinary Hospital. After about 5 days of problems with his digestive system, Mom and I decided that we had to let him go, much as we wanted to keep him around. He has been losing weight for over a year, and he was no longer able to eat or drink anything without throwing it back up shortly after. He had gone into advanced renal failure, and his liver was shutting down as well. This caused him to start throwing up every couple of hours on Saturday, and before too long he was dehydrated. I spent all day with him on Monday, and he seemed exhausted. He was so weak from dehydration and malnutrition that he could only walk several steps at a time before stopping to stand and rest for a few seconds. Anything he tried to eat or drink would be thrown up an hour or two later, despite anti-nausea medicine we were giving him, and eventually he stopped even trying to eat or drink.

In addition to the problems with his digestive system, he had congestive heart failure. We were trying to re-hydrate him at the vet from Monday through Wednesday, hoping he could get back to a point where he would eat and drink on his own, but the vets had to decrease the flow rate on his IV, since putting too much fluid into his system could aggrevate his weak heart and give him a heart attack. After laboring over the decision of whether or not to continue the therapy, Mom and I made him a meal that he would normally find delicious: finely cut pieces of chicken breast soaked in broth. He was not interested in that or anything else we offered him. That was that. We didn’t want him to starve to death, and sustaining him with nutrition intravenously would be traumatic and uncomfortable for him. At this point his kidneys had stopped filtering the toxins out of his blood stream, and his body was forcing him to throw up, even when he had nothing but bile in his stomach. There were just too many strikes against us. It was time to let him go.

I asked to stay with Buddy when he was given the injection that would end his life. I just wanted to make sure that he could at least perceive someone he knew during his last few seconds. I didn’t want himto be alone in an unfamiliar place and with unfamiliar people. As the vet prepared to inject the overdose of anesthesia that would euthanize Buddy, I looked into his eyes, held his head close, and told him over and over that he was a good dog. Buddy has been practically deaf for over a year, but maybe he could at least sense the vibrations from my loud affirmations of “Good dog. . . . Good boy!”, and feel my embrace. Dr. Paulsen squeezed the syringe, and perhaps it stung a little bit as it went in, as Buddy whimpered faintly. I held him a little more tightly. After a few seconds, his muscles relaxed and his breathing slowed. He fell limp, though his eyes stayed open. I had kept my face in his field of view the whole time, trying to smile and continuing to tell him he was a good dog. He died looking into my eyes.

It’s funny the way we become attached to our pets. Common sense might tell you that the loss of a pet should not be comparable to the loss of a human relative or friend. But anyone with a dog will tell you that they quickly become a part of your family, and that you often care for and interact with them as if they were your relative or friend. Buddy was a good friend, and a member of my family. He gave his companionship and affection willingly, and asked only to be cared for in return. The fact that his lifespan is naturally shorter than my own is what separates him from me the most, and little else. It was heartrending to seem him go, but I take comfort in the fact that he won’t be suffering any longer, and that we tried just about every humane way of keeping him both alive and comfortable. His life was not long by human standards, but I guess that, from his point of view, it was longer than he could remember. It was all of time.

Buddy was 15 years and 10 months old. He was a good dog, and I will never forget him.

Farewell, old friend.

Twenty four

2006-02-20T21:25:00.000-08:00

In recent times, I've found that there are just way too many TV shows of good quality to keep track of. Even with our handy-dandy DVR, I don't have time to watch all the good shows that are out there. I LOVE a good story, and dramatic story lines that are character driven really work on me. I think it's because I'm easily intrigued, and any mystery or unanswered question in a show will get me hooked. That's why I liked the X-files, and was the only person I know who stuck with it to the very last episode, only to be disappointed by all the questions left unanswered.

Now I am hooked on LOST. It's great because it is very character driven (each episode focuses on one character and reveals something interesting about their past), and there are tons of mysteries to be explored and discussed. I hope that it doesn't get bad like the X-files did, or like Alias has. So far, the writers have done a good job of satisfying us with some answers, but always leaving enough unanswered to keep us intrigued.

Anyway, the last few times I've seen my friend Phil, I'd tell him how cool Lost is, and he'd say yeah that's great, but 24. . . now there's a cool show. I never really got into that show, but had always heard great things. So today I busted through the first 5 or so hours of the current series of 24 (thank you DVR, for having roved and recorded them for the past month). Now I'm hooked on that show.

Making a real time show really seems like a good idea, and I wonder if it has ever been done before. I'll bet it has, but I don't know about a predecessor. It sort of ensures that the show can't be canceled mid-season, since one season is essentially a single 24-part episode.

My favorite character so far: Chloe. She's so surly and bitter! Reg and I discovered that her character is equivalent to Napoleon Dynamite. Every time someone tells her to do something she replies with something like "Fine!" or "I'm already working on it! . . . GOD!"

Try it! watch an episode, and whatever line she just said, pretend that Napoleon Dynamite just said it. It should have the same effect.

Example from a recent episode:

Spencer: "I need your help to get this signal decoded. . ."

Chloe: "I don't have time for your crap! Just get it done! God!"

Spencer: "You know, I don't care that you are both my lover AND my boss. . . NO ONE talks to me that way!"

Chloe: "Oh really? Too bad I just did!" (Touche Napoleon. . . I mean Chloe.)

Incompetence and politics. . .

2006-02-08T18:25:00.000-08:00

Politics. . . sigh. . .

Sorry to intrude on my usually apolitical posts with a political one, but this has me a bit miffed.

Slashdot has collected the major source material here. Read the articles yourself if you are interested. The text below is my own summary and rant.

Those who know me well know that I am not a fan of the Bush administration. I think the man himself is not very bright, his policies de-emphasize science and the natural environment, he over-emphasizes religion and lets it drive his policies too much, and his administration bungled us into the Iraq war. All of these issues are big problems in and of themselves, and have been argued and discussed for countless hours in countless forums. The one I’m miffed about right now is his de-emphasis on science, mixed with political cronyism. Here’s what happened:

George Deutsch, a 24 year old college dropout, was appointed by the Bush administration to be in charge of astrophysics content editing for web pages intended for middle school age readers. He instructed a web programmer to place the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang on some of NASA’s sights, because he felt that without the extra word it would be implied that the Big Bang was fact. He wanted to inform the public that intelligent design is “the other side of the debate”, going on to say:

[The Big Bang is] "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

Well, he’s technically right that the Big Bang theory is not proven fact. . . BUT NEITHER IS ANYTHING INFERRED BY SCIENCE! This is an unfortunate result of scientific vocabulary which the American public really needs to understand: A scientific “theory” is an explanation of nature that has been supported by repeated experiment and observation. It is the highest level of certainty in science. There is nothing higher. You start out with a “hypothesis” (a proposed explanation of some natural phenomenon) then test it using experimentation. You get some results, make a few conclusions about how good the test was and what it says about your hypothesis. . . and then you test it again. . . and again. . . and again. Others perform more tests trying to disprove the hypothesis. Science is performed by trying to disprove things, and those ideas that have yet to be disproved after many experiments are called theories.

In science, “theory” is synonymous with “law”. The law of gravity and the theory of gravity mean exactly the same thing. So yes, the Big Bang is a theory, as are natural selection, gravity, relativity, and plate tectonics. Each of these has been supported time and time again by experiment, and has yet to be shot down with evidence, not for lack of trying. None of the theories listed above are controversial in the scientific community.

I expect that the majority of people attacking evolution as “just a theory”, do not understand the scientific method, and it is partially the fault of scientists for not making the definition more clear to the public. That’s another story, though.

Anyway, the guy had been appointed to this job as a reward for working so hard for the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection campaign. The New York Times broke this story on Saturday. By today (Feb 8th), Deutsch had resigned.

Oh yeah, I mentioned that Deutsch was a college dropout. . . The original NYT story stated that he was a Journalism graduate of Texas A&M. It turns out he never finished his degree. . . he dropped out to work full time on the Bush re-election campaign. This was discovered by an intrepid scientific activist over at Oxford, who had recently graduated from Texas A&M himself. Check out his blog.. The point is that this young man was obviously not qualified to be editing astrophysics content on NASA web pages. I don’t think that Journalism students are required to take many courses in science.

What? An unqualified person appointed to an influential position out of political cronyism by the Bush administration? Where have we heard that before? COUGH (FEMA). . . AHEM (Katrina). . . cough cough. Ahem. Excuse me.

The sad part is that this is just a smaller part of a larger issue, which is that various other Bush appointees in the NASA Public Affairs office have been attempting to censor NASA scientists, especially those attempting to explain their results on climate change to the general public. See article.

Ugh. Okay. I’m done ranting for now.

Calculicious. . .

2006-01-29T23:19:00.000-08:00

So I'm moonlighting as a substitute teacher for another couple of weeks. One of the teachers at Regan's school is on maternity leave, and so I've been teaching part of her calculus class. I really can't complain: there are only 5 students, they are all high school seniors (IE: basically adults, so no real discipline problems), and they are among the best students in their class. I'm doing my best to be clear in my lessons, but I've found they always need a bit more explanation than my original lesson plan entails. I think it's because I've been using this stuff since I started college. . . oh. . . 8 YEARS AGO!!! It's amazingly hard to remember what it was like when I was a high school senior, in terms of how much math I knew.

I'm doing my best, but it still seems as though I'm making the tests/quizzes a bit too hard. The students are smart, but they also want to do the minimum amount of work and reap the maximum amount of learning. I should aim for that balance as well. I'm pretty sure I made their semester final exam too hard, even though I didn't design most of it. Looks like a curve is in order. The regular teacher should be coming off of maternity leave in two weeks, but I get the impression she may take another week. That's fine. I could actually use the money.

Once my moonlighting as a substitute teacher is finished, I'll be able to concentrate more on my research. I need to make some progress and finish off this diurnal variation study, so I can put it behind me and move on to the next thing. I'm looking forward to the Puerto Rico trip in March! Mark is sending Dave and I down to Arecibo to install a field magnetometer for his MEASURE array. It'll be cool to get to see the Arecibo obervatory! That's the one they used in the movies Contact and Goldeneye. I'll bet it'll be tough to get the whole dish in one photo frame. . . Anyway, I'm going to San Gabriel Dam this wednesday with a group of engineers so I can learn how to set up one of these magnetometers. It'll just be two space science grad students fumbling around in the jungles of Puerto Rico in a month or two, and I need to be prepared. I wonder if we'll need machetes. . .

Rammed by a zebra shark, and happy as a clam!

2006-01-29T22:38:00.000-08:00

It's cool how a hobby can make the other parts of your life all the more enjoyable. Now that I've started doing this volunteer diving program with the Long Beach Aquarium, I'm just plain happier. I'm excited every Tuesday because I know I'll get to be in the water with tons of amazing sea creatures. Two weeks ago, the experience was amazing. Not only did I get to feed the giant black sea bass again, but I got to feed the trevali. These are medium size fish that just swarm all around you when you feed them. I was literally at the center of a seemingly impenetrable sphere of hungry fish. Also, the red snappers can be pretty aggressive. I would not want to be feeding most of these fish without my neoprene gloves. During the last dive, Karen, a more experienced diver, suggested that I try something. In the tropical reef tank, there is a large male napoleon wrasse. This fish is about 3.5 feet long, and a beautiful shade of electric aqua blue. (See the picture above) Apparently, he loves the tactile sensation of air bubbles on his skin and in his gill slits. I swam down to the bottom of the exhibit, near a wall, and just started blowing a steady stream of bubbles. Just as Karen said he would, the wrasse mosied on over and levitated just a couple feed above my head, sitting in my bubble stream as if it were some sort of inverse shower. He even opened up his gill slits to let the bubbles caress his gills. It was amazing!

After the dives we heard that, over in the shark tank, a sand tiger shark had bitten the sawfish right on the rostrum (nose). We went down to the shark tank to see how it was, and found the veterinarian and the aquarists keeping the sawfish wet while the splint thay had constructed dried. The splint was basically made of water-safe epoxy and popsicle sticks, and was basically keeping her rostrum from bending much, since the sand tiger had almost broken it. The shark expert saw us lowly volunteer divers and said "Perfect timing! We could use your help!". Since we were already in our wetsuits, he had us help lift the sawfish (a large fish about 5 feet long from tail to end of snout) back into an isolated area of the shark tank. 6 of us slowly lifted her into the tank, which already had two harmless zebra sharks swimming about in it. We carefully tried to step over and around them as they weaved between our legs, much as a cat does when you're trying to feed it. One of them got spooked by another person, and turned and rammed right into my groin. It smarted a bit, but with my wet suit I was fairly well. . . ahem. . . protected. Anyway, when I woke up that morning I hardly thought I'd be rammed in the crotch by a zebra shark while helping rehabilitate an injured sawfish! It was an amazing experience as we watched the anesthetized sawfish slowly start to swim again.

Then, just last week, I got to feed the leopard sharks again. They weren't nearly as interested as they were the last time I fed them. I'm told it's because the water temperature in the Blue Cavern exhibit has been brought down to a balmy 58 deg F. When the water gets colder, the cold-blooded sharks' metabolism slows as well, and their appetite decreases. They did eat a bit, but I kept having to move closer to them and basically put the squid or sardine right under their nose and let them take it from my hand. Also, it was a bit tricky since the halibut (who, I'm told, must be fed using tongs because when they strike their sharp teeth can "take your finger off") kept coming after me. I would typically block their attacks with my fin, or just turn around and swim to another area. . . but I always had to keep them in my peripheral vision.

Later, as I was just getting in for my second dive in Blue Cavern, Chris the aquarist came up to me with about 5 huge sea stars in his arms. He wanted me to swim them down to the bottom and place them on the rocks. No problem! I grabbed three and put them on my arm, keeping my other arm free for buoyancy control and ear-clearing. Down I went, set them on some rocks, and came back up to get the others. Only when I got back to the surface, I found about 10 more waiting for me! After a couple more trips up and down the water column, I returned to the surface to find that the last three sea stars had managed to turn over and were now bellies (and feet) face down on the underwater step. This was bad, because they had grabbed hold of the rocky surface of the step and did not want to let go. I couldn't remove them without hurting them, so I ended up leaving them there. Hopefully they will migrate downward, so they're not in the way of egressing divers.

I'm glad I followed through with this volunteer diving program. It took a decent amount of work: passing an intense swim test, renewing my first aid and cpr certs, getting an oxygen first aid certification, and sitting through several hours of introductory aquarium classes. But it breaks up the monotony that can sometimes arise when all you do is research and organization and, for another couple of weeks, teach. Just the fact that I get to dive every week, for free, among fish I would normally only get to dive with in the carribean or the south pacific, is such a treat that it makes me more enthusiastic about everything else I do. I enjoy my space research more now that it's not the ONLY thing I'm doing.

Dream a little dream of me. . .

2006-01-28T21:43:00.000-08:00

Have you ever had an epic dream? I mean a dream that seems so real, so long, and immerses you so deeply in its world that when you awaken you feel as if years and years have passed by. As if you have just lived a large part of an entirely different life, and have finally returned to your real life after a sustained absence.

I have them once in a while. I can remember having them maybe three or four times a year, but I suspect I have them more often than that and just can’t remember them after I wake up.

In my dream worlds, there is often an overwhelming sense of purpose. Life is simpler, because circumstances make it clear what must be done at any given time. Sometimes my companions and I are being pursued by some powerful governing force, and we must endure an epic pursuit, and often personal and hard-hitting casualties, in order to reach a goal and fulfill our roles in the story. Sometimes our roles are heroic, sometimes mundane. Often there is a theme that we have some sort of mission, and we must do everything in our power to complete it. There are battles sometimes, and chases. There are acts of selflessness, bravery, and love. There are multiple adventures, and twists of the plot. Sometimes the dream is not an exciting adventure, but simply an alternate life. A life in which I have made different choices, or where chance has taken me down a different path, or where the dream world is so different from the real world that it is almost incomprehensible by comparison.

The ending is not always happy, nor is it always a real ending, and sometimes I awaken feeling that my dream-world adventure has been rudely interrupted; and I wish I could go back to sleep and re-enter my dream where I left off. There are other times, though, when I wake up and, after the few minutes it takes me to sort out which events happened in my memory from the real world, and which took place only in the dream, I feel relieved that the dream was not real, and I am happy to return to my real life.

In these epic dreams, the main characters are sometimes formed from people I know in real life, and sometimes not. They are the people I know from different realms of my real life; some from work or school, others from my family and friends, others from my past, others, perhaps, from my future. Then there are those who don’t really exist at all in real life. . . as far as I know, anyway. There are times when one of those imaginary characters, who exists only in my dream world, is so important to the story that he or she actually solicits a real emotional investment from me. When I awaken in bed, as I slowly realize which characters are real and which were complete fabrications of my id, I actually feel a pang of grief that the imaginary ones are not in my real life. In that moment, I know that as the sun rises higher I will forget more and more details of the “people” who, moments before, had been so important to me, and I will likely never get those memories back. I sigh and say a quiet goodbye to those characters, and later all I can remember about them is that they did exist, though briefly, in a sense that was very real to me at the time.

There was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when the Enterprise comes upon a derelict space probe, which immediately paralyzes Captain Picard, and transfers memories to his brain. Inside his mind, Picard is transported to a distant planet and a different society. He knows, at first, that it is not his real world, and claims to the people around him that he is not who they think he is. But each of them tell him that he is their old friend whom they have known for many years, and they don’t know why he is acting as if they are strangers. He even has a house and a wife. Years pass in his mind, and he comes to accept his predicament and take this new reality at face value. He learns a trade, has children, endures the death of his wife and best friend, sees his children grow up and give him grandchildren, and eventually dies an old man. He finally awakens on the bridge of the Enterprise, and it takes him a minute or so to realize who he is, and to remember the people around him, his crew, who were so familiar to him many decades before. He is told that he has been unconscious for only a few minutes, and he realizes that the space probe transferred the experience of living in the alien society in order to preserve the memory of their existence. The people went extinct when their sun went nova, and Picard’s memories and the now broken space probe are all that remain to speak for their ever having existed. Picard experiences grief and sadness that the people who became so dear to him never actually knew him in the real world. That his children and grandchildren did not really exist, or at least, were not really his. But they were real to him. He also feels peace; a quiet happiness that he had the opportunity to live an entire lifetime (a happy one, at that), and is now able to return to his real life to live out that experience as well.

I love that episode.

The mind is an amazing thing. It allows us to reason and solve problems, to feel emotions and interact with other life forms and the natural world around us. Even when we rest, it works to provide us some way to interpret our situation, even by providing us an alternate reality for a time.

In the end, I am glad to have these epic dreams. Some are wonderful adventures; others are nightmares. In the end, I am grateful to have the chance to live out many little pieces of different lives, which may have nothing else in common besides the fact that they are all tied to my own. I don’t know what happens at the end of this life, but I know that my time is limited, and these dreams allow me to cheat death, and convince myself that I have had more minutes of life than I actually have. That’s an illusion I am happy to live with.

Welcome to ze undehrzea world. . .

2005-12-29T01:02:00.000-08:00

. . . as the late Mr. Cousteau would say.

Those who know me well may recall a time when I was obsessed with sharks, dolphins, and the rest of the underwater world. It peaked when I was in Junior High, so around ages 11 to 13. When I was much younger, as soon as I was able to think about what an astronaut was, I wanted to be one. The idea of exploring the universe, and helping to expand humanity outward into the unknown was exciting to me. In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded, and America's manned space program did a nose dive in terms of popularity and public confidence. As a six year old, my interest turned to frontiers of exploration that didn't involve the risk of dying in a ball of fire. I decided I wanted to be an Oceanographer. Like many children, I was interested in dolphins because I had heard they had intelligence that was comparable to our own, and because they were cute enough to be considered non-threatening and friendly. Perhaps unlike many children, I was also very interested in sharks.

If dolphins could be thought of as the friendly guides and helpers of the undersea world, then sharks fit the profile as villains. But they also had a mystery to them that attracted my interest. I used every opportunity to learn more about them, use them as a subject of a report in school, read every caption in the shark encounter at sea world, etc. I learned all about how sharks had been given a bad reputation in the public mind by movies like Jaws and by general ignorance and common misconceptions. They are wild animals, of course, and have the physical ability to overpower and kill humans. But so do many other life forms in nature. Why are sharks regarded with even more fear than other animals that cause more human injuries and deaths per unit time than sharks?

I think part of it is because the ocean is a place where we humans are out of our element. If you think about it, exploring the ocean really is like exploring a different world. The simple fact that the ocean's fluid (liquid water) is much more dense than the atmosphere's fluid (air) means that more life forms in the ocean can move in 3 dimensions (east-west, north-south, and up-down) than can easily do so on land. Shark's have had their physical form perfected by 300 million years of natural selection, and so can move much more efficiently underwater than humans can.

The first time I went Scuba diving, I knew it was something I was going to love. It literally exposes you to an entirely different world; one where you are free to move in all three dimensions. When you're diving, you can fly, move upside down, levitate, and move in pretty much any way you can think of.

While pusuing space science as a career, I've finally found a sustainable way to pursue diving/oceanography as a hobby. I've recently qualified as a volunteer diver at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific. As a lowly exhibit diver, I enter the larger exhibits (Blue Cavern, a Baja California Pacific exhibit, and Tropical Lagoon, an exhibit with creatures found in tropical waters) to feed the fish and clean the false coral. On my second shift, I was told it was time I learn to feed "the puppies". To my diving teammates, "the puppies" are the leopard sharks.

Now, leopard sharks are certainly nothing to fear. They don't really have teeth, per se. They usually just inhale their food like a ray does. They can be found at petting pools with bat rays and sting rays, where people can pet them without fear of being bitten. All the same, I had been told that the Aquarium's leopard sharks could be fairly aggressive at feeding time. People had been known to have their fingers nibbled while feeding a shark, or having them caught in the shark's mouth when it sucks in a piece of squid or a sardine, with the shark shaking its head like a terrier. Again, they don't have teeth like a great white shark's, so the key is to remain calm and just wait till the "puppy" lets go. The worst it could do was do give you a hickey (as had happened to other divers in the past) or a bruise. Still, there is a stigma about sharks in general, and several divers are simply unwilling to feed them, opting for other assignments instead.

So with a thorough briefing from an experienced diver, I entered the Blue Cavern exhibit with my bucket of sardines and squid, and dropped to my knees on the cobblestone bottom, about 28 feet below the surface. The puppies found me immediately, and knew it was time to be fed. They did all they could to try and get into the bucket, whose contents were protected by a neoprene cover. The other fish in the exhibit (sheepheads, barracuda, yellowtail, sea bass) were also very interested, and swarmed around me as well. It was all I could do to make sure that the leopard sharks got the sardines and squid instead of all the other fish. The leopard sharks were fun, though. They came up from underneath, down over my shoulder, through my Scuba hoses. . . One almost knocked my mask off my face! I reminded myself that they could do me no real harm, and did my best to give them their lunch. A few of the morsels were snatched by other fish, but on the whole the leopard sharks ate pretty well, and I was none the worse for wear. After I was out of food, I spent the remainder of my dive blowing bubbles and doing underwater acrobatics for the children watching from the other side of the glass. They waved and giggled. Perhaps some of them are future oceanographers.

It's funny how the different things we do in life fulfill us in different ways. In my involvement in space studies, I have been fulfilling one of my interests in exploration, but I have often felt the lack of fulfillment for that part of me that wants to be an oceanographer; to be embraced by nature. Though it may seem strange, being surrounded by 3 or 4 leopard sharks all trying to be fed certainly felt like being embraced by nature. Maybe the draw of this is much simpler. Maybe it's just the thrill of trying something new. Variety is the spice of life, and hopefully the resulting flavor is happiness.

My Arch Nemesis

2005-10-27T18:08:00.000-07:00

Who could it be? Who makes my blood boil? Who, when I approach them, knowing that only they can give me what I need, looks at me with an un-moving, in-human face, promising to make my life more difficult?

Answer: The copy machine. That diabolical contraption with hundreds of moving parts; built to help mankind, but somehow frustrates us beyond belief. The copy machine. For the past few weeks, it has been my arch nemesis.

This quarter, I am a teaching assistant for UCLA's course ESS 9: The Solar System and Planets. Every week on Thursday morning, I make 86 copies of the lab handout to give to my 86 students. Every week I put my fate in the hands of a whirring plastic-and-metal beast the size of a juvenile buffalo. And every week this beast arbitrarily decides whether to make my morning easy or difficult. More often than not, it's the latter.

I want to save paper. Save a tree!, they tell me. Ok. I will tell the copy machine to print all 4 pages of the handout onto two pieces of paper, by printing on both sides. 1 side to 2-side copying? No problem! shouts the copy machine, grinning a little too widely to be sincere, that's-a mah special-tee! 86 copies? Psh. Child's play. And here I go. . . I'm a making your copies. . . and out comes the first all nice and crisp. . . and here comes the second.. . and we're doin pretty good. . and BUZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!.

The instrument panel lights up like a christmas tree. Apparently there is something wrong with absolutely every part of the copy machine, and the LCD screen is kind enough to show me all 22 steps I need to take to un-clog the machination. Open the left cover, wind the spool to make it spit out the paper, open the internal door, careful don't touch that part because it will burn your skin off, find the paper that got crunched when the copier was trying to flip it over, rip the paper out and make sure and grab every last piece of it so it doesn't gum up the gearworks, now open the right cover. . . it just goes on like this.

Got me all unclogged? asks Mr. Copier as if it was my fault. Good, now I can continue. And here I go. . . out comes the BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!

Lather rinse repeat.

Preventative action does not seem to apply here. The copier rolls dice to decide whether or not it will malfunction. Eventually, I'm able to force out all 86 of my copies, some with unsightly ink marks, others a bit crumpled from me yanking them out of the bowels of the machine. I turn on my heal, hard won copies in hand, and step solemnly away. I am at the mercy of this beast. I will be back next week to negotiate with it. I must have it's product. Despite it's shortcomings, it is the best copy machine in the building. It knows how important it is. It toys with me because it can. It is that for which I have the utmost contempt, and the utmost respect. The copy machine: My arch nemesis.

Good Night, and Good Luck.

2005-10-23T00:49:00.000-07:00

Reg and I went to see an interesting movie tonight. Film would be a more appropriate label, I suppose. People tend to use the term "film" to indicate that the show is worthy of a little more consideration intellectually; that it has merit beyond it's entertainment value. Good Night, and Good Luck was about the efforts of Edward R. Murrough, a newsman with CBS in the early 1950's, to expose Senator Joe McCarthy for his unjust and misleading methods of questioning those he would put in the spotlight as having ties to communism. The movie glorified Murrough for his brave decision to stand up and call Senator McCarthy out for doing something that should not be tolerated in a country where individuals rights are assured by the constitution. It reminded me of the parable about the Emperor's New Clothes, where an Emperor is convinced by a wily trickster that he is wearing the finest clothes in the land. The trickster acts as if only those truly worthy can see the clothes, and so the Emperor, not wanting to look stupid, pretends that he can see them, and his entourage follows suit. Everybody just goes along with the idea that the Emperor, actually naked, is wearing fine new clothes, until someone finally points out that it's all hogwash.

The news media certainly has its problems, but it is also vital in its influence on people's opinions (and votes) regarding major social and political issues in this country. It's nice to hope that not all people in the news media are simply after money and sensationalism, but the actual truth, and the preservation of the ideals of liberty. Since the invention of the television, and now the amplified power of the internet, the majority of the population bases their opinions on information that is presented to them by news organizations. The media have a great amount of power and responsibility when it comes to what happens in this country, and the freedom of speech is a vital part of the checks and balances that allow us to live without fear of repression. I am probably a bit of an idealist, but I like to think that people are generally good, and are motivated by either their desire to improve their own situation, or the situation of others. It may not always be a realistic view, but I can at least hope that there is a significant fraction of people working in the news organizations that are motivated by the latter.

It is interesting to me that George Clooney has written and directed this film, given that he has shown his political opinions about freedom of speech in the past. Terry Gross interviewed him on Fresh Air a few days ago, and he spoke about how he and other Hollywood celebrities were outspoken against the Iraq War in its early days, and how various politicians and news organizations referred to them as "traitors" because they (the celebrities) did not believe in the claims the Bush administration put forth about the reasons for going to war. Since September 11th, it seems that those who speak out with the cool voice of caution and reason are trumped (at least on the front page or in prime time) by those who cloak themselves in the veil of patriotism, which is used as a backstage pass for many actions that later seem a bit ridiculous. Those who don't support the Iraq War have been labeled as unpatriotic. I recall a debate between Bush and Kerry last year in which Bush said that Kerry was projecting a non-presidential attitude by implying he did not support the war. Bush was basically saying that the troops would feel betrayed if Kerry was elected, since Kerry did not support the war, and therefore did not appreciate the sacrifices they were making. Patriotism is an easy out for someone who wants the public to forego basic reasoning, and rally blindly to the flag.. . but I digress.

This film about McCarthyism may be as topical in today's political environment as Arthur Miller's The Crucible was in the McCarthy era; though it's unlikely this film will be as lasting or as well remembered.

Anyway, it was a good flick, and I thought I'd think out loud for a bit.

Good night, and good luck.

Sky rockets in flight, after-dark delight

2005-09-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

When it comes to launching spacecraft, the U.S. federal government has two main installations. The Eastern Range is comprised of the launch pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Kennedy Space Center in Cocoa Beach, Florida. This is where they launch the space shuttle and all other manned spacecraft. Also, all interplanetary spacecraft and any Earth-orbiting satellite with an inclination (angle the satellite's trajectory makes with the equator) less than 57 degrees launches from the Eastern Range. These spacecraft take off toward the east or northeast, taking advantage of the fact that the Earth already rotates in that direction, giving the satellite a boost of angular momentum. The 57 degree limit (which at least applies to space shuttle launches) comes from the fact that, if a satellite launched in a direction that is more than 57 degrees toward the north, it would be launching over populated areas of the east coast. People don't appreciate it when debris from spacecraft (or the shuttle's solid rocket boosters) fall on them from the sky. The ascent stages of these rockets need to occur over unpopulated areas, and the Atlantic Ocean fits that bill. Note: not all countries have that luxury in their spaceport location. Russian rockets taking off from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia, or Baikonour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, have been known to rain debris down over the rural plains. Farmers have been known to sell pieces of Russian spacecraft to supplement their income.

The Western Range is located at Vandenberg Air Force Base near Point Arguello, north of Santa Barbara, California. This launch site is less talked about, probably since no manned spaceflights are launched there, and no interplanetary missions either. This site specializes in polar orbitting satellites. The Eastern range can't deliver polar orbits, since there are populated areas both due north (east coast) and due south (islands of the Carribean, and South America). The Western Range, however, has a clear path over the Pacific Ocean to the south. Vandenberg also is the launch site for various military launches, including Minuteman ICBM's, which it launches (without armed warheads, of course) toward the South Pacific for test purposes.

Launches from Vandenberg can be visible by residents of much of the southwest United States, depending on the lighting conditions. Last night, Thursday September 22nd, there was an especially cool launch. At 7:24 pm Pacific Daylight Time, not long after sunset, a Minotaur rocket launched the "Streak" satellite (a DARPA - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project) into a polar orbit. Since the sun had set for southern California, it was nice and dark on the ground. As the rocket gained altitude, it re-entered sunlight. This resulted in the rocket's exhaust being illuminated by the sun, while the rest of the sky was dark. A beautiful sight. I took a few snapshots from the roof of my apartment building in Sherman Oaks. You can see the other snapshots at: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=l18zr2p.a18pmpx&x=0&y=nehon4. While Vandenberg launches something once every month or so, a nice, visible, dusk launch like this is a bit more rare, occurring every few years or so.

Having grown up in San Diego, I had seen the remnant exhaust trails of such launches before, but I'd never watched one while it was actually happening. It was beautiful! It looked like a giant comet shooting skyward.
For more infor on Vandenberg's rocket launches, and other space events relevant to the southern California area, check out SpaceArchive: http://www.spacearchive.info/index.htm

David Galvan and the Half-Blood Donation

2005-09-09T14:45:00.000-07:00

I think Samuel L. Jackson said it best in the fine piece of film de cinema, The Negotiator, when he screamed at the police helicopters, "You want my blood?! TAKE MY BLOOD!"

In the spirit of Mr. Jackson's enthusiastic endorsement of blood donation, I headed down to the UCLA Blood and Platelet Center in Westwood this morning to make one myself. A little background is in order here. The first time I donated blood was a little less than a year ago. It arose from two motivations: 1.) guilt for not having donated before, and 2.) the desire to overcome fear.

As to the first motivation, I do not mean that anyone should be meant to feel guilty for not donating blood. Such a donation is a very personal and heartfelt act (so to speak), and each person has their own reasons for doing it or not. Everybody certainly has the right to decide what to do with their own body, afterall. But, for me personally, I felt a little guilty. Many times in college, when working in Houston, and now in grad school, I had seen advertisements and solicitations to participate in blood drives. I had watched others come back from giving blood, knowing that there was no physical reason why I could not do the same. I also knew that blood donations were essential to helping people in need.

The reason I didn't donate is because I felt an aversion to the actual process. I don't have a problem with needles used for injection. Give me a tetanus shot or an innoculation any time. But there is something about sliding a needle into one of my veins and seeing my lifeblood flow slowly out of my body through a winding tube that gives me the creeps, even though I know it is completely safe for me. The fact that I felt this psychological aversion to the process, and that it was keeping me from doing something that could help other people, led me to feel guilty. That, in turn, led me to the second motivation.

Back in my days as a Boy Scout, I learned a definition for bravery, which is a part of the Scout Law. ("A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”) Bravery is not the lack of fear. It is the ability to take action and do what is right, despite the fear. I felt that the fear I had of donating blood was not well founded, and even a little selfish. So I decided to make a blood donation in order to overcome that fear.

My first donation went fine. I was sort of nervous going in, I tried not to look at my blood flowing through the tube, and I felt a little light headed afterwards, but other than that it was a success. I walked out feeling triumphant and manly. (. . . while munching my cookie. . . and sipping my Juicy Juice. . . out of a bendy straw. Ahem.)

My second attempt at a donation didn’t go as well. Five minutes or so into the donation, the nurse noticed that my blood was flowing rather slowly. This could be a problem since, the slower the blood moves, the more likely it is to clot at the needle, which would slow it down even more. She told me to clench the squeezy toy in my hand more often, to help pump the blood out, but it was no use. After a short time, the blood had essentially slowed to a stop. What’s more, they told me they would not be able to use the blood already in the collection bag. I asked why, and this is the answer I got: the collection bags have a certain amount of anti-coagulant in them to keep the blood from clotting while it’s being collected (the bag is rocked back and forth on a machine, to help with this as well.) The amount of anti-coagulant is based on the volume of blood the bag can hold (these ones expect a donation of ~400- 450 mL). If there is not enough blood in the bag, the ratio of anti-coagulant to blood will be off, which will somehow render the blood unusable for donation purposes. The nurse suggested that perhaps I had not been hydrated enough, making my blood was unusually thick. She said I should try to drink a lot of water next time. I left disappointed, but determined to try again.

Which brings us to this morning. I spent all week making sure I was drinking ~8 glasses of water a day, loaded up on fluids this morning, and walked into the donation center to make my great comeback. I warned my nurse about what happened last time, told her how I’d been drinking lots of water, and she made preparations to better coax out my blood. If you’ve ever held my hands, you know that they are typically pretty cold. I think I have poor circulation in my extremities due to low blood pressure, small arteries/veins, or something. Heat should help keep the veins from constricting too much, so I’m told, so the nurse gave me a microwaved bag of fluid to hold in my hand, instead of a squeezy toy. Aside from hydration, blood pressure (mine is a tad lower than average, but not by all that much), and heat, another factor that could affect the flow rate is the placement of the IV needle. My nurse clearly had many years of experience doing this, and she expertly slid the needle in place. It was quick and almost painless. She monitored the flow closely.

Things were going fine for a while. Then, about halfway through the donation, my blood decided to slack off again. She piled on more warm bags of fluid, did something to the tube that was supposed to help move the blood along, rubbed my arm, even gently changed the needle’s orientation a little, all to no avail. A couple of other nurses came over and puzzled over the problem, suggesting different things to one another as to how to get my blood flowing better. Everything seemed to have been tried. Again, we had to abort. I had not quite filled the collection bag halfway. The nurses shrugged and apologized that my donation hadn’t worked out, and I apologized that my blood was so lazy. The only other thing they could think to suggest is that I try to use a vein in my other arm (all three attempts so far have been using my left arm). As I walked out, nurses were still shaking their heads: “. . . never seen that happen two times in a row!” Great.

It occurs to me that I am not a physically impressive specimen of humankind. My visual acuity is 20/400, I recently learned that I have flat feet, and apparently I can’t even bleed right. What am I, some sort of mummy? At least I know I’m not very likely to bleed to death.

I do intend to try again. This is something small I can do to try and help other people. Besides, its personal now. What, my blood isn’t good enough for you? You want my blood? TAKE MY BLOOD!

The answer, my friend, is blowin in the (solar) wind. . .

2005-09-07T21:37:00.000-07:00

One of the challenges of being a graduate student in science is developing the skill to communicate your research to people of varying backgrounds. If a space physicist from another university asks me about what I'm working on, they get a fairly different answer than would a scientist in a different field, let alone another grad student, a non-scientist, a friend, a family member, or a barber. As many of my professors have told me: effective communication is all about knowing your audience. What are they really asking when they ask what you're doing, and what level of detail will allow them to understand, instead of just boring them enough to make them change the subject?

This is a skill I don't think I've mastered yet, and I'm trying to get better at it. Teachers and media spokesmen (news reporters, for example) have mastered this skill, and I admire them for it. What good is science (or information, for that matter) if you can't disperse the knowledge among many people?

Today, my friend Dave (sits in the cubicle next to mine, has the same advisor, and is a much better teacher than I am) forwarded me this link:

http://www.spaceweathercenter.org

It has several little Flash games about space physics and space weather. You can have the Sun fire a coronal mass ejection (CME) at the Earth, and see what sort of damage it causes. You can play a neat mini-golf game that teaches you how charged particles move in electric and magnetic fields. I swear, you don't have to be a nerd to enjoy these things (but it helps).

Explaining something so the person understands it is one thing, doing it well enough that they get interested is another, and making something fun. . . well, that's priceless. See, you can learn something from a computer game!

Messenger of the Gods

2005-09-05T17:54:00.000-07:00

MESSENGER is a NASA spacecraft whose mission is to study the planet Mercury from orbit. It should make its first flyby of the planet in 2008, and eventually enter a stable orbit in 2011. In the mean time, it has to get there, and it does so by making “gravitational assist” maneuvers near Earth and Venus. Because the spacecraft has to lose energy to go from Earth’s orbit to Mercury’s, it flies by Earth and Venus on their interior sides; that is, on the sides facing the sun. By doing this, it loses a little bit of its angular momentum to the planet, resulting in a lower energy orbit that brings it closer to the Sun, and hence closer to Mercury. (Note: spacecraft headed toward the outer solar system will do just the opposite, flying by the exterior side of Earth, Mars, or Jupiter in order to steal some of the planet’s angular momentum, and gain a higher radius, higher energy orbit. Since the ratio of spacecraft mass to planet mass is extremely small, the change in the planet’s orbit is not significant.) This clever way of navigating the solar system saves propellant, and likewise a little bit of taxpayer money. (the mission costs < $300 million, a bargain for an interplanetary mission)

Last month, while we were busying ourselves with our hectic lives involving family, friends, work, food, driving on the freeway, and television, the MESSENGER spacecraft was making just such a maneuver near the Earth. While it was leaving the vicinity of our planet, it took a series of photographs with its wide angle camera. These images have been strung together to form a little movie of the Earth as seen by the spacecraft, as it goes from near the orbit of geosynchronous satellites to past the orbit of the Moon, in a little less than 24 hours time.

Views like this are one of the reasons I love space exploration. http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_mission/flyby_movie.html

Chockets. . . that's right, chockets.

2005-08-15T15:29:00.000-07:00

What are chockets, you ask? They are pockets that have become chocolatey. I had one today because last night I forgot to empty my pockets of the after-dinner chocolates we got at dinner. I put on the same pair of pants today and, when I was putting my phone in my pocket I felt the warm mushiness of a chocolatey pocket. . . a chocket.

Didneh. . . Didneh land

2005-08-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

Regan and I didn't know what to do for our first anniversary today until a few days ago, when we decided to go to Disneyland. Also, since we know of at least two other times that we'll likely be going to Disneyland with family members within the next two months, we decided to purchase the annual passes. They pay for themselves after 2-3 visits, and they let you go to both Disneyland and the California Adventure park, so we shelled out the dough.

It was a busy day at Disneyland for several reasons: 1. It's summer, and just before alot of kids go back to school. 2. It's a sunday, and 3. It's Disneyland's 50th anniversary, so there's all these special parades and decorations going on. Everyone's buying the solid gold mickey ears. Well, not solid, but gold anyway. Space Mountain has been refurbished, and is worth a ride.

For those of you who are big on efficiency, it turns out that if you have a park-hopper pass (or an annual pass that lets you go to both parks in the same day) you can have one active FastPass ticket from EACH PARK at the same time. We were able to demonstrate this by going to D-land, fastpassing Space Mountain (standby was a 75 minute wait!!), then going to CA, riding Tower of Terror, fastpassing Soarin' over California, going to D-land, riding Matterhorn (which doesn't have a fastpass for some reason), coming BACK to CA, riding Soarin' over California, and finally coming back to D-land to use the fastpass on Space Mountain. After that we ate dinner at that Blue Bayou restaurant that's in the Pirates of the Carribbean ride. With Fastpass, park-hopping, and reservations (which were made the day before for the restaurant), a highly efficient and structured day of carefree, blissful Disney fun can be had.

The logistics of walking around in a crowded theme park can be interesting. I find that being in a big crowd where everyone is going in different directions inspires me to try to walk fast and get to where I want to go quickly. Thus, I end up weaving a serpentine path through the crowd, watching out for people coming from different directions, knowing when to speed up to pass a slow-moving family or elderly couple, or when to get out of the way when some crazy teenagers zoom past you while squirting each other with water. One of the most unpredictable obstacles in crowds like this are kids about 10 and younger. These kids will be walking along in front of you at a normal pace, and then suddenly stop dead in their tracks in the middle of the walkway. If they're short enough, you might be able to just step over them, or swerve around them and maintain your pace, but sometimes you need to skid to a halt yourself. Other kids will be moving toward you from another direction, but will have their heads turned 90 degrees away from their forward direction, not looking at all where they are going. You need to treat these ones like robot drones that will keep on moving in a straight line and will likely run into you if you don't perform some evasive maneuvers. A side dodge or a contortionist-style body bend may be necessary to get around these kids without disrupting your path to Thunder Mountain.

Another thing you come to notice when moving among thousands of other people and standing in lines for tens of minutes is the choices people make when it comes to bringing their kids to Disneyland. Personally, it seems to me that parents should use some thoughtful discretion when deciding when their kids are old enough to bring to the theme park. I say, if the kid is not old enough to walk around all day, the parents should wait till they are older. I saw so many parents struggling with strollers today, it made me vow that my kids will be able to come to disneyland when they can walk all over it. If they get tired, it's time to sit down, eat, or go home. If you're bringing a three-year-old with a stroller, chances are you'll just end up pushing a sleeping kid around crowded, tight spaces all day in the heat. Besides, it's expensive to go to theme parks these days; you might as well enjoy your time. Theme park kids should be strong, enduring, swift, and lithe enough to navigate the crowds, AND gracious enough to appreciate the fun without whining all day. I wonder if such ideal kids really exist?

First Blog

2005-08-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

Well, I have stood in wonder of my friends who write blogs for a while. What's the point of writing a blog? (for those who are confused: blog = short for "web log". It took me longer than I'd care to admit to realize that.) Is it just to record your thoughts and the events of your daily life, like a journal or diary? If so, why post it on the internet? Does the blogger post his or her thoughts so that they feel like other people are reading about them, and therefore acknowledging them? Is it sad for them to want/need that kind of acknowledgment? Or maybe it's just to maintain some low-cadence communication with friends and family, independent of their location. Is it to rant or rave about things they hate or love, and let the blogger feel like they said what was on their mind in a forum where others could hear them, but only if those others wanted to? These are the type of unanswered questions that kept me from having a web presence before. I think each blogger has their own reasons for putting their thoughts online, which may or may not fall into the narrow situations I asked about. Finally, I came up with a reason or two to have my own.

I've found myself using my free (or, at least, bored) time to read my friends updates and posts to their online journals, and realized I enjoyed hearing about their daily lives. I guess it's encouraging to hear about people thinking things I might also think, or having experiences that are like my own. It reminds me that people are deep, funny, clever, clumsy, emotional, apologetic, passionate beings, not just drones who go to work, then go home then go to work then come home ad nauseum. I've heard many people say "I've got nothing interesting to say, so I shouldn't write a blog", and yet when I read some of my friends' blogs, I'm interested in hearing about the little things that they themselves might think are uninteresting.

As I have reached my mid-twenties, I've begun to think about how I sort of wish I had kept a diary or journal growing up. I'd convinced myself that I don't have the time for or the interest in such things, which is not really true. I'd like to be able to look back on a day, years from now, and see what I was thinking about, how I was feeling, and what my hopes, dreams, and problems were at the time. I look back at anything written or said by my parents or grandparents when they were young, and I am fascinated. It's interesting to listen to or read someone's thoughts, and then see how life has changed them, or not, over time since then. Maybe it's a silly desire to want to preserve some of your youth (or lack thereof) in a journal, but I've been known to do sillier things.

So there you go: a rambling explanation of why I might want to start a blog. I intend to use this blog to post my thoughts, be they deep or mundane, silly or serious. It will serve as my journal, and my bulletin board. As so many have said for so many reasons: we'll see how it goes.