Discontent

It was 2015 already

and

The winter would just not quit...

There was that local city councilman who

called and got a ticket fixed – exposed by local news.

The tax hike pushed and passed by Republicans –

Then they promptly announced a new highway project.

Washington, D.C. legalized marijuana – and the mayor

got threatened by members of Congress.

There was Obama trying to get immigration reform done,

being fought tooth and nail by opposing forces.

That NFL player getting slapped down for swatting

his young son with a wooden stick.

Another famous person stripped down on stage,

during the Oscar awards celebration no less.

Scandal after scandal fueled much discontent.

and oh, yes, the weather was bitterly cold;

The outdoor environment was lousy too.

But –

Spring is right around the corner;

hopefully things will improve,

indoors and out.

 - end

Incremental wins the day

     It caught my attention the other day when some government RFP circulated for “game-changer” technology proposals for something or other, on a technology mailing list. Well, seems to me that most significant progress has been made in small steps. Rocketry had to start with black powder, then with rudimentary cryogenics. Scaled up to say, the V-2, it still took years to perfect. Then, scaled up further still, to orbit an astronaut. More years of hard work were required. From the early days of rocketry up to the first orbiting “Sputnik” took around 100 years.

The Internet could be said to have started with Morse code – the first effective transmission of information over wires, predating voice transmission. Sometime later the Baudot code was adopted for most teletype transmissions. This was a five-bit scheme of sorts. This was surpassed by other, denser communications technologies, culminating in the TCP-IP protocols used in the Internet today. From the earliest adoption of Morse Code up to early Internet experiments took over 100 years. (1844 to 1969-70).

The natural laws of physics we all are enfolded and entrapped by require us to go about things in a certain way. There is no “free lunch.” We must incrementally walk our development forward, in small steps. Eventually we get there. But the huge, amazing breakthroughs? Very rare, far and few in between. And often it seems we only make a major breakthrough because researchers have painstakingly laid the groundwork for us to do so.

Stunning game-changers would be nice. But it is the incremental groundwork that wins the day – in my humble opinion. Thanks for reading.

Cuttting Edges

Isis is the name of a two-edged sword,

with ideology to kill those it cannot convert.

The sword that slices will turn on its owner,

who will be diced and chopped by the errant

hands of fools wishing for paradise.

They rolled the dice and instead will be sliced,

sent to hell by those they would stick with malice.

The two-edged sword will turn on its owner,

slicing and dicing authors of religion by force.

Armaments of the west will crush the life out

of these desert vermin, leave remains for insects.

Sword that would slice, eaten by mere lice.

The worst human vice is to kill for paradise.

More charred, burned bodies in the desert.

Human flesh waste rots in the name of what?

No sense nor logic in fanatic religious beliefs,

they always seem to bring suffering and grief.

- end

distracted

Cold
Vacation fun
in a land of warmth and cacti and traffic.
Distracted
by all that life has to offer
and everything thrown at me

Takes time to duck and run,
or confront and deal with.
Takes all of my energy
to cope with the necessary.

So if you do not find a lot written lately,
it is because the author is on the front lines of life
dodging bullets
and firing a few of his own.
Peace out peace out peace out.

The state of Space Exploration

On the occasion of the good news I saw the other day – the fact that Obama is going to actually request an increase for the FY 2018 NASA budget – it seemed as good a time as any to ruminate on the state of all things space nowadays.

When one thinks of the unmanned probes and rovers, things are looking pretty good. Between the ESA and NASA, we have recently visited or are orbiting nearly every planet in the Solar System.   (The Voyager probes did fly by every outer planet except Pluto)  Messenger went to Mercury recently. The ESA orbited Venus with a sophisticated imaging probe for quite a while. Of course, NASA has rovers crawling around on the surface of Mars, and a couple of orbiters as well. The ESA sent an orbiter-lander combo a few years ago (Mars Express) , and their orbiter is still working. There is a JPL probe around Jupiter. Cassini was orbiting Saturn until very recently, and sent back huge amounts of information. The Huygens probe successfully landed on Saturn's moon Titan, and sent back photos.

In the Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the Dawn spacecraft is approaching Ceres, after visiting Vesta. These are the two largest planetary bodies in the “inner belt.” Then you get all the way out to Pluto, where the New Horizons spacecraft is rapidly approaching to snap some photos. A lot of robotic spacecraft are gathering reams of science data and images these days.

There are also some sun-orbiting observatories, and many Earth-observing craft.

The manned, or human-crewed expeditions are far fewer. Crews of three will travel to and from the ISS from time to time, and they are working on many science experiments. As of this writing, a Russian and an American are going to spend a full year in space, to see how people can do for that long in weightlessness.

Living in space weightless is hard on the human body. Bones degrade, fluids move around, sleep and well-being are affected. We need to better understand how to counteract these problems before more folks can live and work in space permanently. But the upshot is, there are currently no human missions to anywhere other than low earth orbit. There is always talk of visiting Mars with astronauts, or going back to the Moon. Testing is going on with NASA's Orion spacecraft, with a Human-crewed test slated for around 2017.

It is easy to envision a future filled with Asteroid mining, space colonies orbiting the Earth or on the Moon, or on Mars. Getting there will be a long, hard road. But it should be a fascinating journey, and this old baby boomer will be watching as long as he can draw a breath.

For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Solar_System_probes

or just go to www.space.com or www.spacedaily.com .     Thanks for reading.