Moon Rocket Launched, Exercise, About BaseballTV

 On December 7th,1972, Apollo 17 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Being the sixth lunar landing mission, it would be 53+ years before a return mission was sent there.  Artemis II lifted off early yesterday evening without incident, and its passengers are well on their multi-day circling of Earth's unusual, unitary natural satellite.  It was still broad daylight at launch time, and while sitting in our front yard facing east we saw absolutely no sign of the spaceship or its trail for several minutes following the launch.  Obama said we didn't need to go to the moon because "we've already been there', which I thought was wastefully dismissive if not arrogant.  This morning I finally arose at six, running in place for four minutes and brewing a K-cup of coffee.  A man is coming over to our house to remove the old plastic shed and rendet the back yard a simpler place without such an encumbrance.  I read some pages in Joshua Khan's Shadow Magic, intending to go further into it today.  For me, it has too many convoluted plot twists: who's the real culprit, and how does its ending slide into the next book?And I plan to watch some MLB regular reason baseball on that subscription channel, come afternoon or early evening.  And a modest attempt at some c-v home floor exercise should do the trick as well.  And how about a little more sleep, no? Let's see, I'll do four more minutes running in place and then I'll give it a nice break...  

About Elon Musk

I'm not sure what to think about this super-tycoon Elon Musk and his assorted enterprises.  For years I was fervently supporting his SpaceX's efforts to ultimately send humans to Mars, a very ambitious enterprise to eventually to establish permanent facilities there.  I was also on board with his Tesla development of self-driving cars.  Starlink, a network of communications satellites under SpaceX, has transformed global communications. But after the mega-magnate turned hard-Trump with his politics last year, my inclination to support Musk's projects has taken a severe nosedive.  His rockets keep blowing up, and people who don't like him burn up his Teslas.  There's a conspiracy theory going around that Musk somehow used Starlink to steal the 2024 election for Trump, but I think there's a simpler and more obvious solution: the American voter is typically stupid, driven by emotion and susceptible to manipulation.  His recent decision to oppose Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" for increasing the national debt is laudable, as is his stepping back away from the national limelight as the president's right-hand man with a moneybag and chainsaw.  So what does the future hold for Elon...and me?  My plan is to take it all, one Musk action at a time, for better or for worse.  I really do think he is trying hard to do his best for the greater good...and sometimes he royally screws up in that regard.  One thing for certain: he is indeed a figure of history...

Just Finished Reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Andy Weir is a science fiction writer best known for his novel The Martian, adapted to the blockbuster movie hit starring Matt Damon.  Last year he published another space-based book, titled Project Hail Mary: my sister gave me a copy this past Christmas, and I just finished reading it.  I haven't read anything by Weir before, so I was pleasantly surprised at his deft, personable writing style.  After all, this is a "hard" science fiction story, meaning that an enormous amount of the narrative is spent describing often technical concepts that one would need to take advanced courses for in order to fully understand...yet the author made the narrative flow easily as the protagonist, a young middle school science teacher named Ryland Grace, takes the reins recounting his experiences in resolving a debacle of truly cosmic proportions.  It has been discovered that the sun is suddenly dimming, with its heat output projected to cause mass extinctions on Earth at an unprecedented rate...including possibly the eventual extinction of all life.  The cause appears to be a cosmically borne microorganism that thrives in a carbon dioxide environment and draws its energy directly from whatever star it has infected.  Grace, earlier in his career a biology professor having written on potential extraterrestrial microorganisms, is recruited by the hastily assembled international research and rescue team to plan a mission to another star system where a similar phenomenon is not causing the same effect as here...why the difference?  Weir toggles with Grace's narrative back and forth between the flight preparations and Grace's experiences on his largely automated spaceship after he is resuscitated from an artificially induced coma.  It's a mystery how he might solve the enigma of the Astrophage, as the organism causing all the harm is called.  And it brings into play the notion that we are not alone, and wouldn't it be a cool thing to make common cause with other life in the cosmos.  In spite of the technical material covered, I think you'd like this book even if you weren't a scientist or engineer...I'm certainly not, and I plan to check out The Martian (never saw the movie) and Artemis, which he wrote in between the other two books.  Thank you, Anita, for a thoughtful gift...

Quote of the Week...from Elon Musk

 the bird is freed                                                      ---Elon Musk

I thought I'd keep the language sloppiness to this Twitter submission by the richest man in the world, who just bought Twitter and made it his own private company to do with as he pleases.  As is the case with business innovators and tycoons, I have a degree of admiration for Elon Musk and his vision for the future.  This is especially true with his SpaceX plans to travel to and eventually settle the planet Mars, and his Falcon 9 rockets kick major ass, to put it crudely.  One problem that seems to infect people of this stature, though, is that because they have shown themselves to excel in a few things, then that means they are geniuses in everything...which clearly isn't the case.  Musk says he wants Twitter to return to the old days during the Trump presidency when anyone could put out any disinformation on this social media platform with no accountability other than that of dissenting comments.  The only problem I see in this is that it's already been established that foreign governments hostile to the U.S. have used venues such as Twitter and Facebook to plant false narratives under fake identities in order to unduly shape public opinion and influence elections in favor of candidates more to their liking...I've heard no acknowledgement of this problem from Musk, though.  Well, although I tend to avoid making "tweets", I've been on Twitter before Trump, and stayed there during what I regard as a fascist demagogue's reign as our 45th president. I will continue to be there as well after Elon Musk's takeover, but I wish the dude would focus his attention more on his companies' wonderful accomplishments and plans in future technology and not be so full of himself...which I recognize is probably a complete waste of my wishing efforts... 

Just Finished Reading Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

In 2009 mother-and-daughter writers Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor collaborated on the book Traveling with Pomegranates, in which each of them recount through alternating chapters their travels together from preceding years through Greece, Turkey and France.  I just finished reading it and can understand the wide range of reactions I subsequently discovered about it on the Goodreads review site.  Especially with the mother, they have this privileged air about them that it's nothing to just take off on trips to exotic places and have the locals there expected to cater to their every whim while they are totally focused on themselves, taking every statue, exhibit, painting, or happenstance occurrence and interpreting them in the most detailed ways about their personal selves...yes, this got tedious for me in a hurry.  Before I began reading it I thought it would be something of a travelogue of these two women's experiences, and to an extent it was, making me want to see and experience some of the things that they did.  Although I feel the two went way overboard about personalizing everything and everyone they encountered, as a reader I also understood that each of us has our own personal voyages, and to us these voyages are of the utmost significance and interest: it's just that I think that others probably aren't going to remotely share my own interpretations with the same enthusiasm that they mean to me.  You know what I'm saying: just think of someone in your own life whose entire conversational style with you is focused on talking about themselves, and you're just an unimportant bystander whose role seems to be to receive everything spoken with vigorous head-nodding and affirmatory verbal utterances.  On the other hand, Kidd and Taylor's book is clearly autobiographical in its theme, and let's face it: folks who write autobiographies are talking about themselves, which is why they're called autobiographies: the root "auto" means "self".  This very blog of mine has strong autobiographical elements to it as well...I share experiences that I feel have a possible universal application to others, and I imagine that what this book's authors are doing is very similar.  Each of them discusses a change not only in their life phases...Sue entering her elderly years while unsure about writing her first novel while Ann is a young adult unsure as well of her own future and depressed about recent rejection...but also their changing relationship to one another.  Both of them use their travel experiences with Greek mythological characters like Athena, Demeter, Persephone along with the widely different representations of Mary, Jesus' mother in Greece, Turkey and France to symbolize their own identities and life direction.  One thing that struck me was that, especially with Sue, they felt the need to travel to some exotic locale in order to experience an epiphany moment, but I remember the Robert Pirsig quote, "The only Zen you'll find at the mountaintop is the Zen you took with you." To that effect I have discovered that while traveling in itself is fun and meaningful, the greatest positive changes I've made in my life, along with the most profound introspective moments that revealed who I was, came about during my ordinary day-to-day living and routines.  But to each his own, and I enjoyed Traveling with Pomegranates.  And you have to grant this concession to the authors as well: when someone is baring their soul to you in an honest manner, they will also be revealing aspects of their personality and character you might find just a wee bit disagreeable...that shouldn't detract from the reading experience, but rather challenge the reader with their own introspection... 

Second Try Today to Launch 1st U.S. Manned Space Flight Since 2011

After a weather-caused delay of last Wednesday afternoon's scheduled launch of the Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station, another attempt is ongoing today, planned liftoff at 3:22 pm from Cape Canaveral, Florida.  Unfortunately, the first manned space launch from the United States since 2011 has for today a high possibility of being scrubbed as well, the meteorologists predicting stormy conditions at the site, Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.  Should the launch, carrying American astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and powered by the company's Falcon 9 rocket, be delayed once more it will take place on Sunday...weather conditions should be much improved by then.  I'm not sure which stations will carry the event other than C-Span and The Weather Channel...I've picked the latter since the weather is definitely the overriding factor determining a liftoff this afternoon.  C-Span's coverage will start at 11 this morning and The Weather Channel at 1 pm...CNN has an hour-long window scheduled at 3.  I think I'll check out C-Span when their programming kicks in and then switch over to The Weather Channel a couple hours later.  I've been able in the past to see nighttime Space Shuttle launches from here in Gainesville, but I'm not sure about the Falcon 9's visibility over such a large distance and during the day...still, I'll go outside and check it out whenever they do finally decide to give it the final countdown, assuming of course it's not storming here as well...

Some Reactions to Visiting Washington, D.C.

Our trip to Washington, D.C. last week made an strong impression on me...mostly favorable.  We as Americans truly have a very classy capital city, and we should all be proud of it...even if we're not too enamored with some of the elected politicians working there.  Here are a few of my reactions to the visit...

One of the things that immediately struck me as I began to walk the streets of Washington was the immensity of its buildings...everything there seems to be built on a grand scale.  Whereas in most major cities the downtown administration area is clustered with skyscrapers, our nation's capital city has an established ordinance that prohibits new buildings from exceeding in height that of the Statue of Freedom standing atop the Capitol building.  The result has many, many very long and wide government buildings and businesses sometimes occupying entire city blocks...and even going underground as well...

I live in Gainesville, Florida, and although the major intersections have pedestrian crosswalks with walk/don't-walk signals and numerical countdowns on the "walk" phase, it just seems dangerous crossing streets because...well, frankly a lot of drivers here either just don't look out for pedestrians and bicyclists or they act like they shouldn't be there.  In Washington, though, pedestrians rule: the intersections don't even have a button that crossers need to push, and they usually give a very generous amount of crossing time...

When Melissa and I got off the plane at Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia, we used an inexpensive bus line to take us to an outlying Washington Metro train station...we got on the Silver Line and it let us out just a short distance from our hotel a block from the Mall.  I have to say that I love the whole concept of the Metro...mostly underground...it's too bad that more cities refuse to invest in this sort of transportation that serves the people so well.  The only problem I had with it was that sometimes the entry points above ground are hard to find: Saturday morning, on the way back to the airport, we finally found our station while walking around in the rain after overshooting it and having to backtrack.  But yes, I really dig the Metro.  I also thought that Union Station, a few blocks north of the Capitol, was extraordinary...you can board Amtrak trains to other cities there as well as connect with the Metro and the architecture is stunning...

Well, that's some of my reactions to visiting Washington. More to come...

Weekly Short Story: A Suppliant in Space by Robert Sheckley

A suppliant is defined as someone who makes a humble plea to an authority or power.  Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley's 1973 short story A Suppliant in Space carries this meaning and provides a piercing satire on the state of our contemporary society with regard to doctrinally rigid social mores and militarism.  The inflexible dogmatism is from the world of Ferlang, in a nearby galaxy.  One of its inhabitants, named Detringer, has been convicted and banished to deep space for basically thumbing his nose at his society and acting out in a foolish manner.  He manages somehow to cross the void between his galaxy and ours...and lands on a planet about the same time that humanity's first interstellar expedition...replete with a military team in case they feel they have to destroy somebody...gets there.  And then the fun begins...

The dialogue between Detringer and Earth's bellicose Colonel Ketterman is classic, with the Ferlang exile twisting logic into contortions around the military man.  How it all ends...well, you'd better read it for yourself.  Instead I'd like to point out that the military and war have always been themes of not only our space program, but also of most of the movies we've seen about space exploration.  The race to the moon in the 1960s was an outgrowth of the grim competition in the Cold War between the East and the West for ballistic missile accuracy and range.  No doubt once permanent stations and settlements begin on the moon, Mars, and other worlds, the rumbles of war will never be very far away, sad to say.  Part of me is very enthusiastic about what seems to be America's renewed commitment to manned space travel and exploration...and part of me is anxious about the weapons of war spreading to space, not only creating the possibility of armed conflict there but also casting a threatening shadow over the only planet we currently have to live on, our precious Earth...

I found A Suppliant in Space in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents the 1974 Annual World's Best SF (DAW Books).  It also features Detringer's talkative robot companion, who predates Star Wars' C-3PO by four years...as well as the socially-challenged scientist/civilian commander of the Earth crew. This story is probably in other collections as well...you'll probably get a kick out of it like I did...

Quote of the Week...from Elon Musk

It can launch things direct to Pluto and beyond. Don't even need gravity assist or anything.
                                                                     ---Elon Musk.

With the successful launch of Tuesday's Falcon Heavy rocket and the soft landing of two of its three booster rockets, SpaceX founder Elon Musk delivered the above reaction in a matter-of-fact manner, making me wonder whether his feet may be planted in 2018 but his mind is somehow off in the more distant future.  Musk picked as the rocket's payload his own private Tesla Roadster car, which will eventually settle into an orbit around the sun near Mars's orbit while playing endless loops (soundless in space) of David Bowie's space songs Space Oddity and Life on Mars.  Kind of reminds me of the dude in that Star Trek: First Contact movie who first develops and tests the warp drive...while loudly playing hard rock.  While the launch of Falcon Heavy marked a much-anticipated milestone within the space community, folks at large may at first have paid it passing attention but quickly put it far at the bottom of their collective priority list, below reality TV and Trump's tweets.  But that's people for you.  After all...

When you consider how different technological advances over the past couple of centuries have dramatically transformed the human condition, you'll notice that with each innovation it quickly gets adapted into society and is soon treated as if it had always existed, be it railroads, electric power, automobiles, airplanes, movies, radio & later television, computers, the internet, smart phones, etcetera.  And speaking of space travel, on only the third manned mission to the moon in 1970, television dropped live coverage for lack of viewer interest...that is, until Apollo 13 developed life-threatening problems creating a dramatic emergency ride back home.  During the next few years, if the launches generally go well as planned, we will witness another major change: people routinely traveling into space and to other worlds.  Initially it will be novel, but I predict (and will probably point back to this very blog article) that before hardly any time at all most people will treat it all as nothing much to get excited about.  That to me is one of the weirdest things about us humans...

Just Finished Reading Nemesis by Isaac Asimov

One of prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's final novels was Nemesis, which was released in 1989, three years before the author's death in 1992.  Set early in the twenty-third century, Earth is an overpopulated and seriously polluted planet with all sorts of environmental and social problems (no surprise here).  A number of Settlements, as they are called, have gone out into the Solar System...these are large, self-contained systems populated by thousands, many of whom are the product of generations living completely away from the original home world.  Rotor, one such settlement, has perfected the ability to travel at approximately the speed of light and, under the direction of its leader Janus Pitt, who is cynical and contemptuous of Earth, has decided to secretly depart to a hidden star system only recently discovered by one its astronomers, Eugenia Insignia.  She takes along her teenage daughter Marlene...who has the intuitive gift of intimately discerning others' hidden motives through their speech and body language...while sending her estranged husband Criles Fisher (and Marlene's father) back to Earth.  She does not know that Criles had been working as a spy for Earth to discern Rotor's intentions, and he is soon enlisted in the effort first to find the missing Settlement with the aid of the invention of superluminal (faster than the speed of light) travel by his new partner, Tessa Wendel.  Making it all a very urgent matter is the discovery that Nemesis, a red dwarf star only two light-years from Earth, is headed in the Solar System's general direction and, upon its passing, will disturb Earth's gravity enough to move its orbit and make it uninhabitable in just a few thousand years.  Is there a habitable world around Nemesis...and what happened to Rotor?  Young Marlene figures greatly in all of this, and her gift contributes immeasurably to the story's resolution.  Naturally, I'm not the one to spill the beans...you'll have to read it for yourself to find out what happens...

Breaking the light barrier in space travel has been a common theme in much science fiction literature, with it being supposed by many writers that humanity will eventually devise a means to bypass Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which sets an absolute limit on motion at the speed of light.  In reality, good luck with that project...sounds unfeasible to me...but it does open up the universe for stories and speculation.  Other themes that Nemesis incorporates are how to deal with life forms so exotic that they may be completely overlooked at first, as well as how they might communicate with us and see themselves and their environment.  Good stuff to muse upon, and this novel also presents some compelling characters with strong personalities and worldviews.  It also has a great epilogue, expressing the forebodings of Janus Pitt.  I found it to be one of Isaac Asimov's better works, and I've read a lot of them...