Jason's Bloglet - Tuesday 1 August 2006

I found this to be interesting. It's about a ten minute video of a guy who is a programmer giving testimony before congress about the possibilities of rigging an election. He wrote software to do it, in fact, in early 2000. One interesting sentence was approximately (I'm quoting only the gist, not the exact words):

I naturally sent the code to them with commentary on how to spot if this is done to the code. They gave me a call and said, 'you don't understand, we want to hide this from others.' _
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10:54:20 AM, Tuesday 1 August 2006

I think that what I miss most about St. John's is the time that I had to do things. Don't get me wrong, the classes were fantastic...but what I really miss is being in the woodshop with my rented cello, playing whenever my fingers were too tired to use the microplane on the one that I was building.

I realized this on Friday and managed to get my cello out and play it for a minute or two. It was nice.

Now, I just need a woodshop--and time to spend in it! :) _
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10:49:22 AM, Monday 31 July 2006

My girlfriend tells me that I'm whining about being bored without doing anything about it. Ah, well, I'm a bit silly sometimes.

So, on the Near Earth Object study, it's become quite interesting for me. The science of NEOs is amazingly imprecise, since we haven't been able to visit very many of them. The scientists have taken the meteorites that have fallen on the Earth and invented a classification structure.

The problem is, we can't really connect meteorites to asteroids easily. All we have is albedo (brightness), color, and spectrum (which tells us a bit about the composition, but isn't as accurate as we'd like). People have taken this and invented an asteroid classification system that we use now.

One of the proposed systems would be an infra-red telescope in space, looking the mid to far band of the infrared (say, 6-12 micrometers) where most of the sky is very dark, but a NEO shines like a star. From that we would at least be able to estimate at least their size more easily (with an error of say, 30%, whereas optical methods can get size within 100% error margin [meaning the asteroid could be between 50% to 200% of your estimated size]) by measuring how much infrared light is coming off of it. The reason that this works is because infrared is re-radiated energy--light strikes the asteroid, which then heats up, and the heat coming off of it (since there is no air to cool it) has to come off as radiated energy, which is in the infrared--so the amount of heat scales to the surface area.

Anyway, I've learned a lot in a relatively short time, and that's why I do actually like my job. :) I just need a new project to work on...so I'm going to go ask for one. Cheers! _
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11:00:02 AM, Friday 28 July 2006

Sometimes I feel like I'm waiting for my job to end--not for the day or the weekend or before a roadtrip (sounds like fun, Moss!)--but permanently so that I can go back at be a tutor at St. John's.

It's been very frustrating, being so near to the college, but not having the energy to go up for Friday lectures or concerts, or for special events. I desperately want to go up for the folk music thingie (I can't even remember what it's called, how sad is that) that Mr. Tuck, Ms. Seeger, Mr. Burke, and a few other tutors whose names I can't remember put on in the winter. I simply can't believe that I missed it last year when I lived closer than I do now.

I don't know that St. John's would even hire me, and I can't yet afford the kind of house that I would like in Annapolis, but sometimes I feel like I'm simply waiting to be able to afford that house...it's going to be a decade, and that seems like a silly length of time to wait for something.

And, to be honest, by the end of senior year I was extremely frustrated with St. John's--I don't know that I could really be a tutor yet, I still get restless very quickly. _
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10:41:57 AM, Thursday 27 July 2006

So what are you waiting for? _
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10:39:12 AM, Wednesday 26 July 2006

The Space Shuttle has landed.

The most complicated vehicle that has ever been built has completed another mission. Fraught with compromises, the Shuttle is not what I wish it were. It carries both humans and hardware; it is only partially reusable, and the reuse of a Shuttle takes several hundred person years of refurbishing time. It needed a larger payload bay than originally planned, because it could only get funding with military assistance--and that took a bigger payload bay. The political influence on the system made it a sub-optimal design.

However, those compromises allowed it to exist. Government 'interferance' allowed a huge amount of resources to coalesce into what is today the Space Shuttle Transport System. While not particularly beautiful in and of itself, the Shuttle represents to me the tenacity of human endeavors--despite the problems we have on Earth, despite the problems Congress has to deal with every day, and sometimes despite common sense, we can and occasionally do manage to achieve what seems impossible. _
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01:06:03 PM, Monday 17 July 2006

An interesting "disturbance in the force" that pushes on asteroids is called the "Yarkovsky Effect," named after the person who suggested there might be an effect like this. Basically, an asteroid is in a dynamic equilibrium with the gravity wells that it's going through. The Sun is the primary source, of course, and Jupiter is the next largest. Oh; hang on, I have to explain something else first.

The way that orbits work is energy based--the more energy something has in it, the faster it goes; the faster it's going, the further out from the Sun it is; the further out from the Sun it is, the longer it takes to get around the Sun. The slower orbits overcome the faster speed, so the rotational velocity of, say, Mars is much slower (about 26 Earth months per martian year) than the Earth even though Mars is travelling faster.

So, there are certain orbits that Jupiter has a huge influence on. Any orbits that are whole number ratios of Jupiter's (i.e., anything that makes three revolutions around the Sun for every two of Jupiter's) gets thrown out of orbit and most likely collides with the Sun or with Jupiter. These 'resonance orbits' are completely free of asteroids, since the orbits are perturbed relatively quickly.

So, the rest of the asteroids are just floating around in their dynamic equilibrium with nothing external pushing on them, right? Not quite. The Yarkovsky effect is the effect that comes when an asteroid is warmed by the Sun's rays and radiation. As an asteroid rotates, its cold side comes into the light of the Sun. This slowly warms the surface, so the hottest part of the asteroid is right at the terminator, or sunset. (Remember there's nothing blocking the radiation, like the atmosphere on Earth.) As the surface rotates, heat is rejected into space. This is actually a big deal for an asteroid. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so this release of energy actually pushes the asteroid slightly. The effect is miniscule, but on an asteroid that is only a few hundred meters wide, it can perturb the orbit, say, an Earth's diameter, in only a few years.

This force has to be accounted for when someone is trying to figure out whether or not the asteroid is going to hit the Earth. The problem is, you can only anticipate this force accurately if you know the composition of the asteroid (how much energy it will absorb is determined by that), how large it is, what its shape is, and how quickly it rotates along with the direction of rotation (these last three determine how much energy it is exposed to).

We can only determine these things if we send a spacecraft to the rock, and it's very expensive to do that. The US is spending $4M/year to catalogue as many Near Earth Objects (asteroids and comets that come within 0.3 AU of Earth's orbit) of diameter >1 km as possible. We've found about 80% of the expected population in the last 8 years, and hope to get to 90% by the end of the program in 2008. So, we will have spent $40M to find 90% of the "planet killer" sized rocks that are in orbits where they might hit us. To characterize a single asteroid, to send a spacecraft to find out what it's made of, what its shape is, etc., costs around $400M. Very expensive. _
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02:51:17 PM, Thursday 13 July 2006

Robots are going to take over the world. I'm hoping that they'll improve my life while they're at it.

I can't wait to go out this weekend and get a roomba for my house. I dislike vacuuming. It's not horrible, but it seems like a waste of time. If I "pay myself" at the same rate that I get paid at work, it doesn't take too very long before vacuuming, say, 20 minutes twice a week, warrants buying a roomba. It pays itself back in a manner of several weeks. And I think that I should "pay myself" more for my time off, since that's really what I'm working for anyway, right?

I am going to buy a robot similar to the roomba for my pool, too. That pool is taking between 20-30 minutes every day to clean, and the cleaning robot is only about $100 more than a roomba. It pays for itself in freeing up my time in the matter of about three weeks.

So, the question that I have is this: as we get more and more labor saving devices, work itself becomes less 'important'--I mean, here, to turn the conversation around to what the future of society is as robots and machines do more of the labor necessary for humans to live. 2% of people now farm the land, whereas 250 years ago it was 98%. What happens when a robot is able to take our order at our local fast food place (and be more polite and efficient than a human would be)? What happens when we have "self-scanners" at the grocery store? Oh, wait, we already have those...a whole group of people are almost out of jobs now...

Do we put more people on welfare? Do we make up new jobs for these people to do? Do we let the rich people who invented the self-scanner get richer? Do we move more towards Marx's "ideal society" where everybody does what they want to do and things just sort of...work out (mostly because robots are doing the work)? Do we start giving out more grants for art and science to keep these people employed?

Tell me what you think the future will look like, say, 25 years from now. _
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03:28:09 PM, Wednesday 12 July 2006

egads and little fishes. I have a pool. The pool was here at the house while I got ready to move, so it was...untended, I guess is the best word, for about a month. It rained right after I moved in, and after the first rain I put a cover over the pool. I then took a one week business trip.

The pool was green when I removed the tarp after returning home. Pools aren't supposed to be green! I got the water tested and they said that it wasn't that big of a deal, here, have some algicide, and put six pounds of granulated chlorine in the pool. I did that, but the water level had fallen too low to circulate. I put more water in. The pool was bluish but cloudy the next day. I took a week off to unpack, and checked the water's chlorination every day. It's down to 5 parts per million today--it's safe when it's between 1 and 4--so I went to clean the pool thoroughly today in anticipation of using the pool tomorrow or the next day...but it didn't go very well...

The first thing I did was set up the vacuum. There was a thick layer of brown gook on the bottom of the pool, and I wanted to get that out of there. Well, vacuuming the first half was fine, but the vacuum lost its suction after that. I went up to the filter and tried to clear it by "backwashing" it--what you're supposed to do when it gets clogged--but all that did was spit all that sludge back into the water! Argh!

Two bee stings and about an hour later, I found that there's another filter basket next to the pump, and that basket was full of small pieces of sticks and twigs. I cleaned that out and now evertyhing is working: the vacuum had better suction than it's ever had, the water is circulating and filtering (where the water comes into the pool, it's nice and clear; it's a bit cloudy in the deep end), and I hope to go for a swim tomorrow.

Maybe I'll go for a swim tomorrow after I go running for the first time in three weeks of moving and business trip hell! :) _
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06:31:08 PM, Friday 7 July 2006

Well, UPS has failed again. Verizon has sent me a DSL self-install kit. I wasn't home to receive it--in fact, I hadn't moved in yet--and so I took a half a day off of work to stay home and receive it. They didn't show up in the specified time. I phoned them to complain, and they said that what the driver writes on the notice isn't binding, it's just an estimate. Of course, Verizon shipped it with a "signature at time of delivery only" stamp on it.

I think I'll call Verizon and cancel the service and go with cable internet, since they won't have to ship anything to me. _
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02:41:37 PM, Friday 23 June 2006

So there's a new book out, called "The Hundred-Year lie". I just read the description of the book, which says that we have approximately 700 toxic chemicals in our system....so I went and got a diet Dr. Pepper.

It tastes so good and fizzy.... _
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02:05:03 PM, Thursday 22 June 2006

Well, moving sucks. I have moved almost everything out of the extra room, where I store a bunch of stuff. I am going to start on the kitchen today. I only get 10 hours with the rental truck this Saturday, and I haven't gotten anyone's help. Ah, well. We will have one sore Jason on Sunday when he goes to Colorado for work. :(

Also, refinishing floors sucks. I did quite well on my first two coats, but botched the third, so I will be sitting on the floor with some fine sandpaper for many hours (I'm guessing 8+) before putting on a final coat. :( Sorry no pictures yet, I've been busy. :( _
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11:14:26 AM, Tuesday 20 June 2006

Oh, My God. I must have really had to push myself last night, because today my legs felt like lead when I got out of bed, I'm still sore, and movement is more difficult. I think I'm going to stop running fast for a while. Running slowly was slowly working for me, I was running significantly faster after 7-8 weeks. The difference in how I feel is amazing: after running at <80% max heart rate, I would come back after the run energized and able to stay up a bit later with more energy and get more things done. After a fast run, where I run at >90% max heart rate, I come back feeling like a truck ran me over. At first, it felt great, but my body is having to repair too much and I'm getting tired in the middle of the day. _
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02:25:19 PM, Thursday 15 June 2006

Ugh. I just ran 2.1 miles, but it was supposed to be my "fast" day yesterday and I didn't get to run, so I made today my "fast" day, but I barely had time to run, so I went only 1.5 hours after eating, and I had to really PUSH it to get an average 11 minute mile for 9 minutes...ugh!

I was concentrating on relaxing my hips, one possible way of ending ITB syndrome, and my hip nearly came out of its socket! It didn't hurt, but it was disturbing, and I had to stop running and walk for a while. I found it *very* difficult to get back to running, but eventually got my heart rate up to over 90% of max again near the end of the run. All in all, it felt like a total failure...but I did get out there and run today, which has only been happening about 3 times a week since I started running again 3 weeks ago. So, it's a victory of sorts--every day I run is a victory of sorts. Still.....

Ugh. _
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08:44:39 PM, Wednesday 14 June 2006

How the hell does Karl Rove live with himself? with unjustly taking revenge on someone who tried to tell the american people the truth.

Then again, I guess the President himself probably sleeps at night. I don't know how he could. HOW did he get reelected? How can WE live with ourselves?

Meanwhile, in Iraq, more terrorists are being brought into the fold, who then kill people, damage lives...why are we there? Why did we go there? This whole thing has been a terrible distraction from the real terrorists, who were never in Iraq in the first place.

Anyway, I can't believe that these people are getting away with usurping the US. It's like a political coup, they have taken over the government and are doing whatever they want regardless of whether or not it's good for the country. Or perhaps they're just shortsighted. _
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11:06:46 AM, Tuesday 13 June 2006

Well, it looks like the work that I'm doing is worthwhile--a meteorite hit Norway last week, on Wednesday. It was an unpopulated area and nobody was hurt, but the impact energy was around 12 kilotons of TNT--about the size of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Here's a picture of it going across the "night" sky (midnight sun in Norway right now):

"Norway _
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11:49:26 AM, Monday 12 June 2006

Working on the house. I should take pictures. We're removing the carpet upstairs, and the floors are all uncovered--and all of the nail boards and (I hope) all of the staples (that held the carpet pad down) are gone. I've sanded all of the paint off of the bedroom floors, now all that's necessary is to sand the small hallway, get finish, finish the floors three times, and nail some 1/4 round baseboard around the place. Then some wall smoothing and painting and then I can move in...I hope most of the stuff will be done within two weeks.

meanwhile, Giny is working on the outside area quite a lot. She's planted flowers...I should take pictures... _
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10:47:08 AM, Monday 12 June 2006

Ugh. My morale is as low as it's ever been. I just had a long discussion with someone who worked on Space Station about how bad that was...and how much worse our current organization is. In Station days, we still had people around who had worked on Apollo; there are very few of those left, numbered in the tens I think. Now all we have, as far as people who have actually built human rated spacecraft, are those people who worked on Space Shuttle and Space Station. Of course, we're trying to go back to the Moon, but from my extremely limited perspective, we're doomed. Over budget, over taxed, over constrained, and at the whim of congress, with a very strong administrator but not strong enough to walk into a senator's office and say, "If you do this earmark on our budget, I will resign...go talk to the president about my resignation"...ugh. _
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01:22:04 PM, Friday 9 June 2006

I've gotten access to Google's online spreadsheet. It's kind of a neat toy, but it can't do much: no graphs, no advanced functions like Solver...so a lot of news articles are asking "Why would I want an online spreadsheet?"

I think the answer's very simple, and very obvious: I can build a spreadsheet at work and review it at home, or in an internet cafe, or when I'm in France if I want to, and I don't need to bring my computer with me. I don't really care about all the rest of the stuff that Google's touting, like easy collaboration. I just like the fact that I can work on something wherever I am, all I need is a password. _
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11:46:36 AM, Thursday 8 June 2006

I got waylaid earlier today. An acquaintance of mine introduced me to what must be the only other St. John's graduate at NASA HQ. Like most Johnnies, she liked to talk...and talk...and talk...it was 15 minutes before I left that hallway. Ah, well it was interesting to see that Johnnies are everywhere, just not in large numbers. There were several of us at MIT, including one professor. _
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11:11:38 AM, Thursday 8 June 2006

My new house is less than 30 minutes from work in heavy traffic. It's on 1/4 acre of wooded hillside, on a dead-end street, with a city park across the street that is basically a small forest, and only three other houses on the street. It's nearly 2,000 square feet, with hardwood floors upstairs (no longer partially covered by carpets) and a small fireplace downstairs. I'm pretty happy with it, but then agian I haven't had to shovel snow off the walk yet. My new house _
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03:21:29 PM, Tuesday 6 June 2006

I have a problem. I work at NASA HQ, but I am a JPL employee. My loyalties, just as everyone's at JPL, are to NASA second, JPL first. However, as a HQ person, I have to attempt to not be partisan towards JPL, which is difficult--especially in the current situation:

You see, there is a certain senator who impacts NASA quite a lot. In her district, there are a lot of NASA employees--and some employees of an FFRDC that sometimes does NASA work, and is a direct competitor to JPL. NASA's current Administrator worked for this FFRDC immediately prior to working as Administrator of NASA. The two of these things taken together, along with the President's Vision For Space Exploration, spell disaster for JPL--

First of all, the business base that JPL (and our "mysterious" FFRDC) gets work from--space science--is diminishing. Secondly, the Administrator would like to see any remaining work go to the place from which he just came. Thirdly, the most powerful Senator with respect to space science that is going to be done by contractors would like to see any remaining work go to the same place as the Administrator.

See, the problem with all of this business leaving JPL is that JPL is a NASA center, one of the ten NASA centers, whereas this FFRDC is not a NASA center. NASA owns the land and the buildings that constitute JPL; our "mysterious" FFRDC (names withheld to keep searches from pulling things up) is not in that situation. NASA provides 90% of the work that JPL does; NASA funds only 10% of the work of our Friendly Competing FFRDC.

So, here I am, a JPL employee being forced to watch machinations that might damage JPL, the only NASA center that has actually laid employees off, and what can I do? Nothing. Absolutely Nothing. If I do anything, my personal credibility will become nil.

Of course, I did something anyway--I very gently reminded someone who has access to the top people in the agency that JPL is a NASA center and our Friendly Competing FFRDC is most definitely not. That is the most I can do, and it's killing me to watch JPL--undeniably the most successful NASA center in recent history--be treated poorly by the top management of NASA. _
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10:13:32 AM, Tuesday 6 June 2006

So I spent the weekend working on my new place. I'm not going to move into it for a few weeks, I want to get all the carpets off of the hardwood floors (done), clean the floors (next), put the baseboard molding back on, then sand & fill the walls and carefully paint. Then I'll move in. Oh, and I have to do the downstairs, which involves new carpet in at least one room, I'd like to put in new bathroom sinks and vanities, and then I have the brick porch to take care of in the back yard...which will take many, many hours. Then I'm going to work on the yard, it's nice but could be a lot nicer....ugh, so much work! But it's kind of fun, too. Progress and all that. :) _
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11:19:53 AM, Monday 5 June 2006

So the pattern that I've noticed is that all of my speed gains in running have come the week after I've run fast on my previous run. The theory of running slowly is that it builds more mitochondria in your muscle cells and that allows them to be more efficient, so that you can run at a higher effective percentage of your VO2 max...well, hang on, I should explain this thing better. :)

There are two measures of someone's endurance fitness: VO2 max, which measures how well your system can transport oxygen through the blood, and your lactate threshhold (LT), which measures at what % of heart rate maximum (and therefore what percentage of your VO2 maximum) your muscle cells begin producing more lactate than the mitochondria can process and turn into ATP, the energy molecule.

So, there are two things that one needs to increase--the VO2 max, and the LT. The thing is, VO2 max's maximum value is pretty much set by genetics. You can get out of shape, which will lower the VO2 max, but if you train a lot you will get this value up to its genetic maximum within a relatively short time, say, 1-2 years of training. The LT can be raised to a *very* high % of your VO2 max, world class marathon runners can run in the 90-95% of maximum heart rate and still be running aerobically, producing a small enough amount of lactate that their large number of mitochondria can process it all.

So, I read a couple of articles that said to train slowly to raise your LT. This is a very good thing to do, it increases mitochondria and efficiency...but it can be very boring to run so slowly--less than 80% of max heart rate. So, after a month and a half of running slowly, I ran around a track and did my last lap as fast as I could--around 95% of max heart rate for 1/4 mile. I did that three times in one week, and *bam*, my speed the next week at the 80% max HR was faster by a minute per mile...I think I've let myself get so out of shape that my VO2 max needs to be increased, and to do that one has to run fast. Once I get my VO2 max up higher, then the LT training will be more effective at raising speeds...but running fast can cause injuries, so ... well, I'm stuck. I think I'm going to run fast twice a week, a long slow run once a week, and a short slow recovery run after each of those runs. We'll see how long I can go without an injury...hopefully a long time.

I start tomorrow, and will likely do a slow jog today because I've had a friend over and haven't run since Monday this week. Wish me luck. _
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10:05:34 AM, Friday 2 June 2006

I bought a new toy for running. I already had a heart rate monitor, but I had to have the newest thingummujiggy: a "wrist mounted" GPS. I bought it through CostCo's website, so it was something close to 30% off.

There's actually a good reason for this new toy--I mean, uh, new tool--when I travel for work, I often don't go running because I don't know the area well enough to map out a route. This heart rate monitor tracks where I am and where I started and then tells me how to get back home when I want to. It's not as good as I had hoped--the mapping software doesn't show a lot of streets, just major ones, and the "take me home" thingy just takes you along the path that you ran to get to the point where you turned around--but it's enabling, you know? I don't have to worry about getting lost as I turn around and go through places I've never been.

Plus, it shows me how fast I'm going based on my location relative to the GPS satellites! How cool is that?

Of course, with a new toy, you always have problems. I couldn't get satellite lock last night because I had driven to a new location and left it powered on, so it was looking for the wrong satellites. Ah, well, I'm going to go outside and turn it on fresh and see if it gets satellite lock.

Toys are fun.

On the health side, I ran last night virtually without pain, and I hadn't taken any pain killers since the day before, so I think my legs are pretty much back to normal. More on running soon, I have a pattern that I'm interested in getting comments on... _
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10:31:55 AM, Monday 29 May 2006

I have been running for about a week now, but I've lost almost everything that I gained in the 8 weeks that I ran before. I'm going to run only every other day from now on, and try to do yoga for strength and flexibility on the other days. I can't sit in even half-lotus position because my hips are too tight...and my hips hurt when I run...I think the two things are related, actually. My tight muscles might be restricting normal motion. _
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09:52:08 AM, Thursday 25 May 2006

I was on travel all of this week. It's really tough when you're going to places and you have meetings all day long, then you go back to your hotel and sleep for a few hours and then go back and have more meetings...then you get back to your home time zone and can't get up...ugh...

Anyhoo, I'm working on this really neat new project, where NASA is responding to this call for a paper from congress. They want us to examine how NASA could find 90% of all near Earth objects that are 140m or larger. It's pretty neat, I've been learning a lot. For instance, did you know that most asteroids are now thought to be "rubble piles" and not a single rock? Or that they rotate chaotically, not spinning in the same orientation all the time? _
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05:47:02 PM, Friday 19 May 2006

Well, Bobak said that I need to write another entry, so I will. I have somewhat medium-sized news: my detail to NASA HQ has been extended another year. Due to my glowing yearly appraisal and a lack of analysts here, they have asked me to stay another year. Since there's still a good chunk of the first year left, and I have found an area that is close in and pleasant to live in, I'm buying a house in Virginia. It's my first actual single-family home, the others that I've purchased have been duplexes.

Sorry, Bobak...be careful what you ask for... :) _
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04:29:01 PM, Friday 12 May 2006

So, running is out for another two weeks. After giving it a week off, I went running and cramped up again. It turns out that I've done a bad, bad thing to my leg...apparently, I've sprained a muscle. Funny, I thought that one sprained ankles, but there it is.

The good news is that I've been doing the right kind of treatment and therapy: 800mg of ibuprofin twice daily, rest, cooling the muscle, and elevating it as much as possible. I should be fine to run after the muscle has healed properly.

On another note, I am happy that Morbo will be visiting us again...I've heard (old news, I know, but the comments on my last post reminded me about it) that Futurama will be returning! Woo hooo!

Morbo congratulates our gargantuan, cyborg President. May death come quickly to his enemies! _
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11:51:25 AM, Wednesday 3 May 2006

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
- George Bernard Shaw _
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12:19:07 PM, Monday 1 May 2006

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." _
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11:03:16 AM, Tuesday 25 April 2006

Running woes:

Well, I went on a "fast" run on Tuesday, where I ran 3.1 miles at about 10:30 minutes/mile...and I got myself in a bad way. By thursday I was so tired that my calves started cramping and I just threw in the towel and walked. Fridays are my day off, but Saturday my calves really cramped. Today, Sunday, was better...but after about a mile, my calves cramped again. The cramps went away after walking a little while, but I'm going to take the rest of the week off and take a lot of anti-inflammatories and give my calves massages and run next Saturday. I'll start back about two weeks in the training schedule, so it's a total loss of about 3 weeks. Bummer, but not really a big deal--I'm in this for the long haul and a few weeks isn't really a big deal. :) _
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08:45:03 PM, Sunday 23 April 2006

Politics

Everyone is very upset that Iran is enriching uranium. They're frightened that Iran will get a nuclear bomb. They're frightened that Iran is lying when they say that they are enriching for peaceful purposes only.

The question isn't if Iran will enrich uranium and make a nuclear bomb, but when. If you were Iran, and you could build a nuclear bomb, you would be stupid not to. Nobody dares attack you if you can eradicate a city--that's what the cold war was all about.

But I hear you say: "Oh my goodness, it's against an international treaty!" -- yes, and so are a good deal of things that the US does. Abu Ghraib, anyone? Preemptive war? How about Bush's lying to the american populace so that he could send our sons and daughters off to die in a war? I think that's illegal, too...but he still did it, and he did it with the acceptance--nay, the enthusiasm--of the general US populace. In fact, he got reelected for lying to us.

So, Iran will have a nuclear bomb, some say within 16 days. There is nothing that we can do to stop it, short of destroying their centrifuges with a military strike. I guess the real question isn't what I thought it was: instead of "when," we should be asking "what are they going to do with the bomb when they get it?" _
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11:44:50 AM, Thursday 20 April 2006

Running

Ugh ugh ugh...I went on a "fast run" on Tuesday. It was great, but it made my sore hip very sore. I couldn't really run yesterday. I got started, but my legs were so sore and my hip hurt so I just stopped and turned around and came home. I walked about a mile, I guess, with detours on the way home.

It made me get my old book out, ChiRunning, which has some hints in it about how to keep your hips from hurting. I re-read most of the book and realized I haven't been running the way that I wanted to be running...I'm carrying a huge amount of tension in my legs and back and hips, while my stomach muscles are completely loose and flabby.

ChiRunning attempts to apply the principles of Tai Chi to running. Specifically, it tries to get more of the motion to come from your trunk instead of your legs; it can't do that, though, if your hips are tight. The motion of your lower spine sort of swings your legs back and forth if you're nice and loose, but I was tensing up and kind of hurt myself over time.

Well, back out there tonight, I hope, we'll see if my hips feel okay and if my legs are no longer sore. No more "fast runs" for me, though...I think I'll get up to my goal miles per week at a slow pace and then *slowly* increase my speed! :) _
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10:51:49 AM, Thursday 20 April 2006

Work:
I've just been put on a new study here at work: congress wants NASA to look at Near Earth Objects and potential ways of mitigating risk to the US and the world. Kinda neat.

However, I sometimes see articles like this one and I get a bit depressed about my job. The article basically says that the shuttle is a glorified bus to the space station, carrying milk, eggs, and the occasional experiment--and even at being a glorified bus, it's a total failure. Probably true.

Anyway, I wanted to ask all of you this question: what do you think of NASA, especially human spaceflight? Is it worthwhile, useless, or do you not even think about it during your daily life? _
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10:23:02 AM, Wednesday 19 April 2006

Croquet:

Croquet is Sunday at 1pm; there's a reception and fundraising and such on Friday at Francis Scott Key at 7:15; we friends of Moss are supposed to have brunch at 49 West on Saturday at 11am. Who all is coming? I'll call 49 West and let them know a large party is coming...

Moss, better ask on your blog too, more people read about your exploits! :) _
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10:19:34 AM, Tuesday 18 April 2006

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