Jason's Bloglet - Monday 17 April 2006

Fitness/running

Well, I burned over 2,800 calories last week. My intent is to increase that by 1,200-1,500 more calories over the next five weeks, then hold there for a month or two to see if I can lose some weight.

My weight gain has halted, but I am not losing weight, nor am I longer converting fat to muscle. Unfortunately, it turned out that much of what I thought had muscle building was an error in the scale's measurement. I think I was dehydrated, and the scale thought that I was more lean than I really was.

Still, I've lost 1/2 pound of fat and gained 6 pounds of muscle, so that's not too shabby for a couple of months of excercise. I need to start losing, though, eating carbohydrates again has triggered my weight gain--I've gained only about 15 pounds since going off of Atkins, but I had gained 25 pounds in the last year due to slipping off of Atkins over and over again. Plus, I never really did reach my goal weight...now I'm looking at the massive amount of weight loss that I'd really like to do and...ugh, what a bummer.

At least I'm really trying to do something about it now. That feels good. _
respond? (10)
04:43:51 PM, Monday 17 April 2006

Work:

I'm stuck in a 3-hour long telecon...ugh... _
respond?
01:28:32 PM, Monday 17 April 2006

On computers and AI

Moss said earlier in a response to a post that he hasn't seen anything even approaching thought in a computer, and thought that it would be a while.

Well, in Visions: How science will revolutionize the 21st century, Michio Kaku, deep thinker, scientist (co-creator of string theory, I believe?), and prognosticator, has shown us that there are computers that dream. Massively parrallel processors that learn from a bottoms-up approach have a period where they start to learn more slowly; the scientists lower the power on the processors, and they go into a state where they mimic the patterns of the human brain while it dreams. After a period of dreaming, the power is upped and the machine learns at its previous rate. (By "massively" parallel, he means on the 50-100 processor range.)

I one question, then, becomes when they will be indistinguishable from humans; I don't know if Kaku attempts to answer that, but it's an interesting read.

I suppose another question would be: are there any electric sheep around? _
respond? (8)
12:18:49 PM, Wednesday 12 April 2006

Post on running

I got into Pasadena on Monday morning and I ran around the Rose Bowl. I don't know if they planned it this way, but the ring road around the Rose Bowl is 3.1 miles long--exactly 5km, the shortest competitive foot race distance. It also happens to be the distance that I'm running every day this week.

Well, I ran around the 'Bowl, and it felt horrible. I don't know what was wrong, but my legs were tired, and it seemed like I was having to push myself extra hard to get around at only a moderate speed for me (a bit more than 12:30m/mile, I'm running very slowly to build my lactate threshhold even though I can run faster...) I was in a hurry, so I didn't stretch afterward, either. I think my difficulties had to do with getting only about 3 hours of good sleep before getting up to get on a 5+ hour flight from DC to Los Angeles, on which I slept another 2 hours or so.

Well, today I got up and ran around the 'Bowl again. It felt great, and I stretched afterward, so I feel even better. This week, I plan to run 18.6 miles, I've done half of that already. Another two times around the 'Bowl, and then Saturday I'll run in DC. I'm really beginning to enjoy this! :)

What's really neat, though, is this slow running is really having an effect. When I was running around the Rose Bowl 6 months ago, I was making it in around 36 minutes with my heart rate average of about 88% of my maximum. Today I made it around a bit more slowly, 37:30, but my heart rate average was about 78% of maximum, which is pretty phenomenal. There is an extremely technical and difficult article about increasing lactate threshhold at http://www.ffh.us/cn/part1.htm .

Basically, it says to spend a lot of time running at a really low heart rate both to increase your capillary density in the muscles that you're using, but also to increase the mitochondria in those muscles so that they can handle the increased lactic acid. It seems to be working, another month and I'll be able to run around the Rose Bowl at my previous speed while keeping my heart rate under 80%...then I'll start increasing the heart rate gradually and raising my lactate threshhold...I'd like to get to the point where I can really run, you know? _
respond? (7)
01:30:25 PM, Tuesday 11 April 2006

I just came back to DC from a small conference. I didn't really attend the conference, I just needed a place to get away from HQ and write my summary report from the LRAS study. I got 19 pages written, but that's actually not the point of this post.

I had a very interesting conversation with NASA's chief historian. He mentioned a "post-biological" possibility for the future that some have posited. here's a link pondering his thoughts: http://ieti.org/articles/post.htm

What happens when we get an intelligent machine? What happens if we can download our mind into a computer? When will this happen? 1000 years from now? 100 years from now? 30 years? Of course, I don't think it will be like the Matrix or like Terminator, but what will happen? Anyone have any guesses? _
respond? (8)
11:01:44 AM, Friday 7 April 2006

I have the hiccups. _
respond? (3)
10:39:11 AM, Friday 7 April 2006

There's a debate within NASA right now about what fuel will be used for the ascent stage for the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM), the part that serves the same function as Apollo's Lunar Module, or affectionately referred to its original acronym, the LEM.

The LEM used what are called "hypergolic" fuels, two chemicals that react with each other and explode on contact. The benefits to this type of fuel are obvious: there's very little safety risk, all that has to happen is a couple of valves have to open, the engine will ignite, and the astronauts will not starve to death at 1/6 g on the surface of the Moon.

However, here are some things to consider: hypergolic fuels are less efficient, flying out of the back of the rocket at only approximately 90% of the speed that a hydrogen-oxygen rocket would. This 10% loss has to be covered by carrying more fuel, and the mass on the ascent stage of the LSAM is the most expensive mass on the system. It has to be carried out of the Earth's gravity well, all the way to the Moon, down to the surface, and then it is finally launched off of the Moon. Any mass that is on that part of the mission has to be pushed there, meaning all of the costs ripple through the system.

Another problem is that if we ever try to "live off the land," we'll need to have a system that can use the fuels that we can produce on the Moon, which means that we need to be able to use oxygen, hydrogen, or both--probably oxygen, as it's part of several different fuels. Hypergolic fuels do not use oxygen or hydrogen.

There may be other reasons, too, but there are some pretty serious problems with using oxygen/hydrogen, too: these have to be kept as liquids, because if they were gasses it would take too much tank room to store them; large tanks are heavy tanks. We don't really know how easy it will be to keep these things liquid through the whole mission. If they get warm, they'll boil off, and that may mean there's not enough fuel to get back home.

So, there's some highlights of a serious choice that's being argued right now...what will happen is anyone's guess. _
respond? (2)
06:03:15 PM, Wednesday 5 April 2006

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1803255

Delay is retiring. On the one hand, I am thrilled that such a staunch conservative has been forced to give up politics due to continuing scandals.

On the other hand, I am a bit sad that NASA's strongest proponent is leaving.

However, when it comes down to it, I can get another job if it's necessary...I can't get another government nearly as easily.

Hopefully, this will do some good, but I doubt it. _
respond? (1)
12:00:22 PM, Tuesday 4 April 2006

I ran 14 miles last week. I'm not losing weight...actually, I've gained about 7 pounds since starting. However, if you believe my fat % measuring scale, I've lost 3% bodyfat while gaining those 7 pounds...which means that I've gained about 11 pounds of muscle and lost about 3.5 pounds of fat, which is pretty cool. I'm up to 3 miles on my "long" runs now, and it'll be about two weeks of building up to 3 miles per day...then I start increasing the weekly long run by 1 mile per week. I hope to be able to run a good 8 miles in a few weeks, which should take me about an hour and a half. Other days I'll run 4 miles, or (I hope) about 45 minutes including warm up and cool down. We'll see...so far, no serious pains. My left ankle is a bit sore (muscles only, I've figured out what I'm doing wrong and am correcting it and it's getting better) and that's it for negatives. Onward and upward! _
respond? (7)
01:01:16 PM, Sunday 2 April 2006

Christopher said this in a reply to a previous post here:

Christopher | Thursday, March 30th at 10:52 AM That's great!

The problem of storing samples and keeping machinery functioning leads me to ask a question that I'm sure you've already asked - how do we store and handle industrial abrasives here on earth? (I don't know just how abrasive industrial abrasives can be, but I'm assuming that there is a need in industry for things more abrasive than, say, sand used for sandblasting.)

This is really interesting. I'm going to be spending too much time reading science in the immediate future. I blame you.

Christopher,

The problems on the Moon are much more challenging than they are on the Earth. First, let's look at the dust itself. It's thought to be similar to volcanic glass, not because the Moon was volcanic any time recently, but because the dust is created when a comet or meteor hits the surface. The basalt melts from the heat of the impact, and some gets turned into talcum powder sized particles and eventually fall back down. When another meteor hits, the "glass" created from the first impact is shattered, more basalt melts, and this glass talcum powder is thrown up into space to resettle onto the surface. Keep doing that for a few million years, and you end up with the Moon's surface the way it is today.

Second problem: there's no air on the Moon. So the glass partciles have these jagged edges that don't get abraded by air molecules. These jagged edges are only part of the problems caused by vacuum. The other part is that we don't know if these particles are electrically charged. They certainly have something about them that we don't know, because the astronauts on the surface said that the dust smelled like gunpowder, but that scent faded by the time the LEM docked with the Command Module and the third astronaut was exposed to the air in the LEM.

So, all in all, We just don't know how to store these things. The methods on Earth won't work, because we don't need to keep the particles in vacuum for days at a time, and we don't need to keep them from being exposed to light. Also, we don't normally have to worry about talcum powder sized particles (say on the order of 5 micrometers or so? I think that's right...) that are microscopically jagged. It might be very dangerous, but we just don't know, since the threads of the storage devices in the Apollo missions got this talcum-like powder on them and failed to hold vacuum...

Oh, and by the way, I feel no guilt whatsoever in getting someone to read science. :) _
respond? (2)
09:52:27 AM, Friday 31 March 2006

My latest study showed NASA HQ that they had booked too much money in robotic precursors to the Moon. To do the minimum necessary to characterize the environment, we should send only a couple of missions doing ... whoa ... environmental characterization. Dust, radiation, topography, all that stuff.

You'd think that we wouldn't need to do anything to go there, since we've already been there, right? Well, unfortunately, there were problems with the sample return equipment on Apollo. The lunar dust turned out to be so sharp and so small that the threads of the sample containers got damaged, and so air leaked in during the trip back, and air will often affect things like how toxic something is. Also, all of the Apollo landing sites were in the central planes near the equator of the Moon, and we are thinking about going to the polar regions, so we don't know what those are like. Plus, we're trying to stay for longer, and so we really do need to know if our airlock seals are going to work for 7 days or 14 days...or we'll have to redesign, which is expensive.

Anyway, the study--which used a process that I designed--may have saved NASA as much as a billion dollars over the next five years. How cool is that? Of course, we simply came to the expected answer, but still... _
respond? (7)
10:19:53 AM, Thursday 30 March 2006

I have gained a lot of weight, recently. For whatever reason, when I'm overweight, I am less happy. I've come to accept that as a fact and try to work around it. The problem is that I LOVE food. It's really hard for me to control portion size. That's one of the reasons that I started running...I've heard tell that if you run 25-50 miles a week that you can eat whatever you want.

I've had some problems with losing weight in the past. Excercising 45 minutes a day, 3 days a week, on a cross trainer, did nothing for me. I even did a 6-month period where I did at least 45 minutes of cardio three times a week and did weightlifting 3 times a week and nothing really changed. The 25 mile a week goal means that I would be running about 40 minutes a night 5 nights a week, plus a couple of hours on one of the weekend days. Since I burn between 180-200 calories per mile, I'd be burning nearly an extra 5,000 calories a week in direct effect, and possibly as much as another 2,500 in raised metabolism. This should cause some weight loss, I hope.

The problem comes with the fact that I have been running for 3 weeks and so, of course, I feel like I should be able to eat whatever I want now, right? I'm only up to about 12 miles, and I'm running those fairly slowly so as to build up my joints, muscles, and bones, so that I don't hurt myself when I start running long distances or running faster. 12 miles per week is simply not enough for me to lose weight if I'm eating like a horse--but it IS enough to make me more hungry so that I want to eat like a horse! Ah, well, it's only a few more weeks until I'm up to the number of miles that I want to run. I'll try to eat less while I'm getting up there, but if I gain some weight, I gain some weight...it'll come off later, I hope.

Of course, the immediate problem was that during my run last night my left ankle and my right knee were a bit sore at the end. I may have to take an extra day off this week, although I hope not. We'll see how I feel tonight. :) _
respond? (6)
12:31:33 PM, Wednesday 22 March 2006

So..."What is NASA going to do on the Moon?" is a question I get a lot, so I thought I'd address it here. It's an interesting problem. Griffin has stated that one of the big problems that we're solving by going to the Moon is that we're transforming an agency that has been operating spacecraft for 25 years into an agency that is building new spacecraft.

Of course, that's a bit of cheek--Goddard and JPL build and fly new spacecraft all the time. JSC, Kennedy, and Marshall, the parts of the agency that deal with the human spacecraft and human space flight, these are the parts that he's talking about. However, they've been building and flying spacecraft the whole time: each module of the International Space Station is, in fact, a spacecraft.

So, what is it that we're doing, going back to the Moon? Well, the Shuttle is limited to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). We've explored that pretty well. For us to explore further, we need to have spacecraft that are capable of leaving LEO, or leaving Earth Orbit completely. The Moon is the closest place that we can go that presents the appropriate challenge while still being doable. I'd love to see humans on Mars--but the challenges of sending robots there are so big that nearly half of all missions to the "Red Planet" have failed. Humans can't go to Mars until we've managed to build and fly spacecraft that can leave LEO...that's one of the big reasons why we're going to the Moon. _
respond?
08:41:25 AM, Monday 20 March 2006

I hate UPS.

I order a lot of stuff online. Right now, I have a couple of pairs of shoes being delivered to me. The driver won't leave my shoes at the door, and he won't walk the 20 feed down the row to drop them off at the office. No, he MUST have MY SIGNATURE, or recieve my instructions (every time I get a package) to drop off the package at the office.

I just called UPS and got in a knock-down, drag-out argument with the operator. I told him that I had never had a driver do this, that wherever I had lived in the past (multiple addresses in California, Maryland, Massachusetts...) had gone to the office with my package and dropped it off without being asked. I pointed out that it was in their own interest to do so--that way they would not have to return the following day. He said that drivers are not *required* to do this, and those other drivers were being courteous. My response, of course, was to point out that his statement meant that my current driver was NOT being curteous.

I wish that there were something that I could do about this. Perhaps from now on I will only make orders from websites that ship through USPS or FedEx. _
respond? (3)
01:08:56 PM, Thursday 16 March 2006

Lunar dust is an unknown. We just don't have any samples of it in good shape from the Apollo missions. It turns out that it was so sharp that it cut all of the threads on the storage containers that the astronauts used, and all of the samples were exposed to oxygen on the trip back.

This is becoming important for a couple of reasons: it's possible that the dust is electrically charged, or even poisonous, and slowly 'passivates'--becomes less poisonous or charged as it is exposed to oxygen. The astronauts said that the dust smelled like gunpowder when they first took off their helmets, but the smell rapidly faded away, and the man left in the command module in orbit around the moon did not smell this gunpowder smell when the LM docked. So, we might need to characterize the dust from a biological standpoint before we can send humans there for longer stays--the current architecture calls for 14 day stays, which is 4 times longer than Apollo.

The other problem is that the dust is sharp and gets into everything. Some of the Apollo astronauts couldn't hardly move in their suits after 3.5 days on the surface getting dust in the crevices and all over the surface of the suits. We also don't know what will happen with the dust on mechanisms on the Moon. The rover that the astronauts drove around in, for instance, might not work after a few more days in the dust...what do you do with a $100 million paperweight on the Moon?

So, the dust is a problem...but what can we do about it? We may not have money to send a robot to the surface to figure it out in advance...I hope we can do that, though, it's beginning to look like a real problem. _
respond? (3)
10:14:32 AM, Thursday 16 March 2006

Time is becoming more important to me. I really am interested in writing a book...I've written one before, or very nearly, but I never finished it, nor did I attempt to get it published. I've got ideas, but none of them are important enough to get up an hour earlier every day or not spend time with my girlfriend. I'd like to play my cello more often, too.

I'm running again and it seems to be going well so far, but what happens when I get time stressed? I drop the running and watch the Simpsons to help me laugh.

Work is a huge time sink, but I kind of like it, I just wish that it only lasted 32 hours a week...that extra day makes a huge difference in happiness and productiveness for me. I dunno, I guess I've been tired and wrung out lately. I need a vacation, but my idea of a vacation would be to just stay home for a week and play with my cats. _
respond?
02:18:03 PM, Wednesday 15 March 2006

I'm in the (perhaps enviable, perhaps I envy others) position of informing real decision makers. Some of the studies that I've worked on have had real results that are being debated nationally by scientists, politicians, and others. I'm glad that I am in this position, but something interesting comes up quite often: the NASA budget is too tight for us to do everything that would be good, so we have to set priorities and do our best to follow them. That means that work falls off the table, sometimes very good work, sometimes work that I feel is the best work that NASA is doing...however, if we are going to change the agency to be a design, development, and flight agency...in short, an agency that explores space...we have to stop doing many of the things that we're doing well.

I guess the problem that I see is that the studies I am on may have a preordained answer because the top dogs have decided what direction to go, and I'm supposed to calculate the math that will show that they're right. Not that I can't disagree, it's just that the math will, in fact, show that they're right. So what exactly am I doing? It's kind of like walking outside on a sunny day and saying: "Sunlight is warm, the sky is blue, and if you want to walk over there, you'll have to go around or over that hill that's in your way." _
respond?
09:51:16 AM, Wednesday 15 March 2006

My girlfriend refuses to read the Harry Potter books. I did too. My mom did, too, but she had a part time job working as a teaching assistant to some young kids, and they read the first book aloud in class, taking turns--so she was forced to listen to the whole thing. It turned out to be good, and she got me a copy of the first two books one Christmas. I got *very* bored one weekend and finally started one of the books at 10pm...and finished it around 2am...and picked up the second book the next day around 10pm...and finished it around 2am...and went out and bought the next two books in hardcover because that's all the bookstore had...and finished reading them in a couple of days.

I just re-read the 6th book and am again impressed at how well written the novels are. I have re-read these books more often than any others. I think that they get philosophical enough to actually have a St. John's style seminar on them. At the same time, they are simply the most enjoyable books I've ever read, bar none. I still think that Crime and Punishment is the best book I've ever read, but then again I haven't read the 7th book in Rowling's series yet, have I? :) _
respond? (7)
10:20:53 AM, Tuesday 14 March 2006

Well, I've started running again. After a long hiatus, I am beginning to realize that I really love running, but I hurt myself doing it. I looked online and read many training guides and came up with the following logic: your cardiovascular system improves at a much faster rate than your bones, joints, and muscles do. So, start small, stay small, and be consistent. I've been running 1 mile, slowly, with warmups and cooldowns, so I take about 14 minutes to walk-warmup/run/walk-cooldown the course. After 6 times in a row, I am going to increase my mileage starting this Saturday. I will go from 6 one mile runs to 3 two mile runs and 3 one mile runs. Fun! :) _
respond? (2)
12:59:57 PM, Friday 10 March 2006

So....should I make the move to DC a more permanent one? I can probably work for HQ instead of JPL, and I enjoy the work more...but then I will never get the chance to work on a flight project (both good and bad, I think--very interesting work, but one has to devote one's entire life to the project...80 hour weeks are not uncommon), and I have to deal with having seasons again. Not to mention that I have to wear dress clothing to work!

I think I've found a neighborhood that I really like, community wise, but the houses are expensive and I am worried about buying if I'm going to have to move soon, since I won't be able to make a profit renting it out.

I am, as always when faced with a large choice like this, of two minds: one side of me wants to analyze the problem to death, the other side just wants to go with what seems better right now without thinking. I usually trust my instinctive side, but often have to do analyses to convince my rational mind...does anyone else have this sort of problem? _
respond? (10)
09:53:40 AM, Tuesday 7 March 2006

Technicalities are what engineers excel at.

For instance, it seems logical on the face of it that the Mars Rovers are doing very well and so we should just send a couple of them to the Moon as precursors to the next human lunar landings. However, the environment on the Moon is completely different than that of Mars: the Moon's gravity is 1/2 of Mars's, there is no atmosphere on the Moon, the Moon's "daytime" lasts for 14 Earth days and its "nighttime" lasts for 14 Earth days, and the Moon's "dust" is kind of like shattered glass: rock flows solidified then got hit by comets and meteors and this caused the volcanic glass to shatter. Also, there's no atmosphere, so no wind to blow the dust around to knock the edges off, so Moon dust is very sharp on a molecular scale, and it gets into everything--some "Lunarnauts" were barely able to move their suits after 3.5 days.

So, basically, we can't put a Mars Rover onto the surface of the Moon, since its wheels may get all clogged up and its batteries couldn't last through a lunar night and the gravity is all wrong for the control algorithms and ... well, you get the idea.

I've been spending waaay too much time thinking about technicalities, they're fogging up my mind. I'm wide awake but feeling completely useless in meetings today, even though I've been participating normally...I think I need to go smell a flower or something. Or take a vacation. Too bad for Jason, though, since I'm on a study that finishes up on the 23rd of this month, and will probably be working at least one weekend day until then... _
respond? (3)
04:19:21 PM, Monday 6 March 2006

There are so many meetings that are "BOGSAT" meetings -- "Bunch Of Guys (or Gals) Sitting Around Talking..." The problem with this sort of meeting is that the person who is most eloquent usually "wins," or gets his or her point to be accepted by the group.

St. John's College was the perfect education for this sort of meeting, don't you think? Add the technical knowledge that MIT gave me, as well as 2.5 years of working in the technical, The problem is that I can't stand these meetings any more. They're exhausting (imagine an 8-hour seminar)!

Does this mean that I would no longer enjoy being a Tutor at St. John's? _
respond? (7)
11:38:18 AM, Thursday 16 February 2006

Well, I'm moving next Saturday...ugh. I hate moving. Ah, well, I think I'll like my new place better. It's amazingly important, where you live, isn't it? I despise Silver Spring simply because the intersections are all timed such that you have to wait at every single red light when you go to downtown from my place, and every single intersection has a "No Right on Red" sign. It takes almost as long to drive the 1.5 miles as it would to walk it! _
respond? (3)
12:36:41 PM, Monday 13 February 2006

Well, it's been a long time. A lot of work has been thrown at me, it's tough to find time any more.

A lot of my time has been consumed with how we here at NASA do research & technology portfolio planning. We spend nearly $2 billion a year on R&T development, but there is very little attempt to maximize the benefit...in fact, there's very little way to even measure the benefits! How do you compare, for instance, a new instrument that gets twice the resolution of an old instrument to an improvement in radiation shielding that would double the lifetime of the previous instrument? What about halving the power consumption of that same instrument? All of these new technologies would be "doubling" the state of the art in one way or another, but which is most important?

Well, regardless of how they are valued, what if all three of these are being done simultaneously for one instrument but nobody was working on other instruments that are equally valuable? Or if there are multiple people working on the same exact improvements for different instruments? Or different people doing the same thing for an instrument on one spacecraft and for a spacecraft part on another spacecraft?

I guess what I'm saying is that there's not much attempt at coordinating this $2B across the agency...but we don't know how much it would cost to do this coordination, either. A coworker and I suggested that NASA take a close look at this and see what else can be done...

Now I need to figure out how to even begin collecting data for all of these projects. An average project is less than $1M, that means there are likely over 2,000 projects...ugh _
respond? (1)
01:29:42 PM, Thursday 9 February 2006

So, there's this question I've been asking myself and others for a long time: What is art? I mean, we all know that Leonardo Da Vinci was a great artist, but what makes his works art and someone else's not art?

Another example. When I build a cello, I begin with what is in essence rough-hewn lumber. I carve various shapes out of it, glue them together, and call it a cello. A lot of people think that building an instrument is an art...but I don't. I follow a pattern, I've got a particular use for what I'm building in mind before I begin building it. Somehow, that seems less than art to me. I'm not sure that someone playing that cello is creating art, either--I think that the composer creates art, but perhaps the rest is just imitation...what are everyone's thoughts? _
respond? (28)
03:28:12 PM, Wednesday 4 January 2006

How I spent my summer vacation _
respond?
05:04:41 PM, Tuesday 3 January 2006

I'm pretty angry at my apartment managers. I live at the "Rock Creek Springs" 'Luxury' apartments--luxury apparently means that there's a washer and a dryer in the unit. The washer and dryer barely work, mind you, but they're there...it takes 90 minutes to dry two towels. Of course, that's not why I'm mad at them, although that would be a good reason. No, it's an entirely different thing.

I know this is my fault, but the way that they reacted was...double plus ungood. I do all of my banking online, I've only written a handful of checks in the last two years. I completely forgot about the rent, and I was on a business trip when it came due. I phoned them and explained the problem, and they were very matter-of-fact about it: I would have to pay a 5% late fee (no problem, I said) and I would have to provide them with a cashier's check (again, no problem). Oh, yes, and come the next business day (which happened to be Monday this time around) they would file suit against me in a court of law.

I tried to explain to them that I would have the check to them soon; they said, unless they had it in hand, they would sue me. She wasn't even really apologetic about it. It was automatic, she said.

I offered to go to my bank and get a cashier's check for the 105% of the rent and fax them a photocopy of it. I thought that would be enough proof that I had paid the rent that they wouldn't sue me, but no, she said, they could get phonecalls all day and that wouldn't pay the rent.

So, like I said, it was my fault; but the problem was the way that they handled it. They could have said, "Well, normally we sue people immediately the following business day, but if you can get back to Maryland by, say, noon and get the check to me by then, then I won't sue you." They could have given me another day. They could have explained that they wouldn't fill out the paperwork until Monday so if I could get there by 9am they wouldn't have time to sue me.

In the end, that last one is what I did. I'm now looking to move to Virginia, preferably into a condo. I've found a few for sale for about $200k, I think I can afford that and possibly even rent it out for a profit when I leave. _
respond? (1)
09:51:42 PM, Wednesday 28 December 2005

Ugh...so long since I've even made a comment! I've been amazingly busy. My good friend Jay and I just turned in a first draft of a study we have been working on for the last month. It was an amazing experience, actually. When it came down to it, and it looked like we were not going to finish on time, I took the lead and started telling Jay and our other teammate what needed to happen and we all pulled together and finished the draft on time. This seems unexeptional, except that Jay is the lead of the study. I think he was just tired and needed something to keeping him focused.

There have been a ton of rumors going on here at HQ. I have seen questioning online (mostly at NASAWatch.com) about whether or not we will fly the shuttle again. I have also heard there are senators (namely Kaye Bailey Hutchinson [I don't know how to spell her name, sorry if I got it wrong]) who demand that we finish the Station. I don't blame them, really, we have spent close to $100B to build what we have so far, and there isn't a lot of science that can be done on it as it is. But should we really throw another $100B at it, or just give up when we know we're beaten...allowing us to go on and at least try to do something good with that $100B? It's a tough question.... _
respond?
11:18:32 AM, Friday 23 December 2005

Well, things are going well here. I like my new place and have been buying neat stuff at Ikea, like mirrors and such. I ordered some furniture on Overstock.com and I hope it arrives by Friday, as I am going to try to have my housewarming on Saturday.

Which reminds me...anybody who wants to come to the housewarming who is reading this can email me at [my last name] at gmail.com. If you don't know my last name then you're probably not invited. I'm going to start at 7pm on Saturday the 3rd of December, hopefully with a new dining room table full of tasty goodies and some champaign and wine and such... _
respond? (2)
11:10:13 AM, Monday 28 November 2005

So the other possibility that I know of for advanced propulsion is fusion. It is possible to create an engine that uses hot fusion to create a small explosion of charged particles that then hit a magnetic field that would in turn push the spacecraft. This is a concept only, but the concept looks like it would work. The details are too scientific for this forum, I think, but the results are pretty amazing: an ISP of 70,500 and a thrust of 5,500 newtons. It would be possible for humans to travel to other planets with a system like this. _
respond? (13)
09:29:26 AM, Thursday 10 November 2005

Curiouser and curiouser.

I spent all last week at a meeting in Chicago. I tried to see Pamela while I was there but she was ill. Anyway, the meeting was about the future of NASA's nuclear programs. Funding for them has been drastically cut, since it's going to cost so much to go back to the Moon. That's neither here nor there, I told you that story to tell you this one: I met an interesting guy there who did his dissertation on matter-antimatter propulsion.

There are two measures of a rocket engine's power: its thrust and its efficiency, called ISP. Thrust is how hard it pushes, clearly, but ISP is a bit strange. It is, basically speaking, a measure (in seconds) of how long a kilogram of fuel could hold itself up against one Earth gravity. It's measured in seconds, and the larger the number, the better.

The best chemical engine we have right now is the Space Shuttle Main Engine, which provides about 2.3 million newtons of thrust, and about 450 seconds of ISP. There is a new type of engine that ionizes a gas and throws it out the back--it's called electric propulsion, and it provides 2,000 seconds of ISP, which is very good, but it only provides milinewtons to a few newtons of thrust. This sort of engine is great to put on an autonomous spacecraft (like Deep Space 1) that can thrust for months, or even years, but it's not very good for humans--you spend too much time accelerating and get exposed to a lot of radiation.

Antimatter propulsion would be a wonderful thing. Reading this gentleman's papers (the guy that I met at the conference--see, we got back to him eventually) has been interesting. It could provide as much as 60,000 seconds of ISP and 250,000 newtons of thrust--a very efficient medium thrust engine. The thrust level isn't enough to launch a rocket (you'd have a problem with radiation released into the atmosphere, anyway) but it becomes possible to travel with humans to other planets pretty easily with those numbers.

The problem with this, of course, is that it is theoretical. We produce only about 10 nanograms of antimatter every year, and we would need kilograms to fuel a planetary spacecraft. I believe that the sun turns into a hard, dark lump of coal before we finish getting a kilo of antimatter. There are other possibilities, though, one of which I'll try to talk about late this week. _
respond? (4)
12:54:11 PM, Monday 7 November 2005

heh. Serena just pointed out an interesting editorial comment that Google is making. I don't know how long it will last, but try going to Google, typing "failure" in the search window, and then hitting the "I'm feeling lucky" box.

Actually, I wonder if it's not an editorial comment, but rather the search engine doing its normal PageRank... _
respond? (3)
08:00:09 AM, Saturday 5 November 2005

I'm siting here in my new apartment, which is completely devoid of furniture (I slept on the floor last night with the towels that I had put into Whiskey's carrying cage as blankets,) waiting for the movers to come, sipping instant chai tea out of a water bottle that I cut the top off so that I could have a "cup" ... and I'm remembering one of the philosophies that someone, maybe Moss, told me about while we were both at St. John's: if you have more stuff than fits in a backpack, then you have too much stuff and your stuff owns you instead of the other way 'round.

I'm thinking that you'd have to choose your stuff very wisely, and it probably wouldn't include instant chai tea.

I probably should have brought a pillow and a blanket in my suitcase instead of having them all moved by the movers, for instance. _
respond? (6)
08:39:47 AM, Monday 31 October 2005

Well, I went up to Boston and had a great time for the few hours that I was there. It was good to see Adam and his girlfriend Natasha again, even if I only got about 3.5 hours of sleep.

I went running to explore the residential area of Silver Spring near my apartment. It's beautiful! There are these amazing houses that are built of stone in the style of English tudor mansions. I think they may actually be inside of DC proper, I'm only about a block away from the border of Maryland/DC. Anyway, they're near the big park in DC, Rock Creek Park, and they are beautiful. I want one. Too bad I don't have the cool million it would take to buy one! :) _
respond?
05:32:47 PM, Sunday 30 October 2005

There are some at NASA who see the NASA world as divided into 1) Civil Servants; and 2) Contractors. Since JPL is a NASA Center, but managed and run by Caltech, all JPL employees are technically contractors even though JPL is a NASA center--as I've said before, NASA owns the land and the buildings at JPL's physical site.

Well, I have discovered again that I am a second class citizen today. Because I am a "contractor," I am not allowed to use the NASA-owned gym at the HQ site, although I am allowed to use the NASA-owned gym at JPL.

I am actually very upset about this, probably because I don't think anything can be done. _
respond? (3)
12:27:09 PM, Friday 28 October 2005

So...sabbaticals seem like a good idea. Vacations are too short, a full year off the job is sometimes needed. Right now, I think I need a vacation...but I am feeling the desire to just, I don't know, go buy some land in Montana or something, build a log cabin, and forget the "real" world. I could spend more time with my cats, which would be nice.

How does one regain that inspired feeling that is in the beginning...the beginning of starting St. John's, the beginning of a relationship, the beginning of something useful and neat? Does one just slog through and hope that feelings change? _
respond? (2)
09:01:54 AM, Thursday 27 October 2005

older entries

site & script courtesy of Moss