There is Justice in the World

The Yankees are not going to the World Series.

A-rod struck out to end their season, send them home as losers.

Once in a while, life is sweet.

Boston!

I had an awesome day in Boston with mandachan and my family on Sunday. My awesome parents got tickets to the Red Sox game and we all drove up in the morning. We parked at the Hynes Convention Center and walked over to Fenway, stopping along the way to walk partway across the Harvard Bridge to take pictures of the famous smoot markings. (I'll have pictures later).

The Red Sox / Royals game was absolutely amazing. It was my first time at Fenway, so I was absolutely astounded by everything. The Sox won 8-1, with David Ortiz hitting a 3-run homer and Jason Varitek hitting a solo shot.

Afterwards, we all walked around the Back Bay area, including Boston Common and the Copley Place Mall. Just for fun, mandachan and I decided to ride the T out to the end of the Green Line where my folks would then pick us up.

We got on the Green Line D Branch at Hynes Convention Center, but there was a problem. Turns out there was scheduled construction down the line - but there weren't notices posted until the platform, by which point we'd already paid our fares. So, we had to get off at Fenway station, get on a free shuttle bus to Reservoir, and then get back on a Green Line streetcar (the Green Line runs modular light-rail streetcars instead of heavy-rail trains) to Riverside.

It only added about 15 minutes to the trip, and thanks to texting (and 2 bars of cell signal 20 feet underground, next to the ticket machines) I was able to keep in touch with my folks. So it was a bit of an adventure, but all was good, and it was fun. Whole day was tons of fun.

History Day!

It's been over a year since I did a proper History Day post. Which means it's time for the tradition to start again...

1804: John Deere - yes, *that* John Deere - was born.

1812: The strongest (Magnitude 8.3) of the New Madrid earthquakes destroyed the town of New Madrid, toppled buildings in St. Louis, made waterfalls on the Mississippi and changed it course, caused a wave to run UPSTREAM on the Mississippi, and rang church bells all the way to Boston.

Also 1812: Charles Dickens, great and intolerably boring Victorian writer, was born.

1867: Pinoneering pioneer writer Laura Ingalls Wilder was born.

1889: Harry Nyquist, a founding informational theorist, was born.

1906: Oleg Antonov, Soviet aerospace engineer, designer of planes from small biplanes to the monster An-225, and the founder of the eponymous Antonov design firm; was born.

1926: Konstantin Feoktistov, cosmonaut and spacecraft designer, was born.

1932: Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden was born.

1935: Monopoly is invented. Rainy Sunday afternoons become a little less boring.

1959: Baseballer extraordinaire Nap Lajoie died at 84.

1960: Igor Kurchatov, father of the Soviet atomic bomb but also an advocate of peaceful nuclear power, died at 57.

1979: For the first time since Pluto's 1930 discovery, its orbit brought it closer to the sun than Neptune.

1984: On the Shuttle mission STS-41B, astronauts Bruce McCandless and Robert L. Stewart performed the first untethered spacewalks using the MMU.

1990: The Soviet Union ended when the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party relinquished its power.

1999: King Hussein of Jordan, a skilled diplomat, peacemaker, democratic and civil rights activist, ameteur radio operator, pilot, and all-around awesome guy; died at age 63 after having ruled Jordan since age 17.

2010: A large explosion at a power plant in Middletown, CT - near where I live - killed at least 5 workers.

All information except the last item from Wikipedia.

Fun

Mandachan and I got to go to a AAA baseball game today - Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs at the Pawtucket Red Sox (Go PawSox!). It was an awesome game, even though the PawSox lost, and we had a lot of fun. We got to go out to dinner afterwards, where I had a delicious chicken sandwhich with bacon and mushrooms on it. Yum.

I don't like to appologize for my lack of posts, but I think I have to here. I've got a lot to blog about, but I'm just lacking the time. I'm tired from my unorthodox sleep schedule and lacking in time from band camp.

The good side: Band camp plus school will hopefully get me back into a normal sleep schedule. I've got lots of cool stuff to do and post on and I think I'll get some interesting stuff.

Topics that'll hopefully be coming soon:

• teaching myself HTML
• designing and building a 4" pumpkin lofter
• solar balloons
• mathematical oddities, including Reuleaux triangles and starting calculus
• EMRR reviews coming for the Jinx, Nike-Apache, Deltie Thunder, GBU-24 Paveway III, and more
• Chemistry
• building several cluster rockets as test beds

Eh. More randomness.

1) Congrats to Mandachan for a great game today. She went 1-for-2 in 4 AB and scored twice, reaching on a single, a walk, and an error. Too bad it wasn't a home game, though, so I could have watched...

2) Already I've made another modification to my simulation program: a simple subroutine that calculates and displays motor weight, propellant weight, burn time, average thrust, and total impulse in easily-readable form, using lowercase letters to display seconds and grams. Now I've just got to figure out how to encode available delays in the motor data files.

3) STS-125 is safely in orbit and headed towards Hubble. Prepare for 5 to 10 more years of mild-blowing images, incredible discoveries, and more.

4) Tennis match and Jazz band performance tomorrow, so chances are I won't have time to blog. Sorry.

The World's Craziest Cult

The House of David was a Jewish (?) cult formed in 1903 in Michigan. They were your standard apocalyptic cult: no meat, shaving, haircuts, or sex. Of course, their dear leader got in some personal troubles, the cult went downhill (there's still a few dozen left), etc etc. Oh, and they played baseball. Well. They fielded several semipro teams that toured the country playing exhibition games. Satchel Paige even played for them once - in disguise.

Obligatory Wikipedia Link

History Day!

Today is Novemember 3rd, or the 4th for those east of the US.
1493: Columbus 'discovers' Dominica.
1749: Chemist Daniel Rutherford is born. He later isolated nitrogen gas. Rutherfordium was named not for him, but for 20th centurt atomic chemist Ernst Rutherford.
1893: Edward Adelbert Doisy, codiscoverer of vitamin K, is born.
1911: Chevy enters the auto market.
1913: The US income tax is introduced. Productivity immediately drops to zero in mid April.
1918: Bob Feller, the "Heater from Van Meter", is born. His #19 was retired by the Cleveland Indians after he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962. He pitched a no-hitter on opening day in 1940 - the only opening day no-hitter ever. He is now 90.
1926: Annie Oakley dies.
1957: Sputnik 2 is launched in to space carrying the world's first astronauts - a dog named Laika.
1964: DC residents are allowed to vote in a Presidential election for the first time.
1971: Mariner 10 is launched towards Mercury.
1978: 485 years after its 'discovery', Dominica gains independence from Britain.
1982: The Salang Tunnel Fire kills as many as 2000 is Afghanistan.
2007: Pervez Musharraf declares emergency rule in Pakistan, effetively becoming a dictator.


That's all for today, folks.

Shout out!

I just wanted to direct y'all to

mandachan's blog

because it's awesome (usually) and she's the one who inspired me to start my own blog. It's mostly semicoherent ramblings about baseball, but it's pretty entertaining. She's been blogging for over 10 months (forever for a blogger) and hopefully directing all my precious visitors to her blog will appease her.

History Day!

Today held two of the best battles in history. In 1881, Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday took on Frank and Tom McLaury, Billy and Ike Clanton, and Billy Claiborne. The McLaurys and Claiborne were killed. The fight has been in every other western since then.
In 1944, a far worse battle took place in Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. The US and Japan clashed in three seperate but connected battles. The superbattleship Musashi was sunk, US forces landed on the islands, the imperial Japanese fleet was effectively demolished, kamikazes were first used, and Taffy 3 took on a superfleet. 6 light carriers, 3 destroyers, and 4 destroyer escorts, collectively known as tin cans, took on 1 superbattleship, 3 battleships, 6 heavy cruisers, 2 light cruisers, and 11 destroyers. We lost 4 ships; the Japanese lost 4 sunk and 4 seriously damaged. The book The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors is a great account of the battle.
In total, the battle killed over 11,500 men. 64 years.
In other news:
1797: Giuditta Pasta, one of the world's greatest female opera singers, is born. Thousands, sadly, laugh at her name.
1825: the Erie Canal opens
1861: the Pony Express ceases operations
1940: the P-51 Mustang makes its first flight. It will go on to dominate the skies of Europe.
1943: The German Do.335 with propellers in front and back flies, amazingly. It will go on to dominate the 'Albatross attracted to airplane' category.
1947: Hillary Clinton is born. No comment.
1948: Killer smog kills 20 and sickens thousands in Donora, PA. Ken Griffey Sr. is three years old and survives the smog.
1955: Austria declares itself permanently neutral
2001: George Bush signs the Patriot Act into law. Any action beyond breathing is automatically illegal.

Cape Ann

Good book: The Last Fish Tale by Mark Kurlansky. It's about Gloucester, MA, a fishing city 10 minutes from Gordon College and my sister. This is a great history of Cape Ann. I have personally climbed on two of the rocky areas shown with sketches in the book - the Bass Rocks:
View Larger Map
The view in the book is looking from the rocks out to Thatcher Island and its twin lighthouses. I can't pinpoint the exact location. The other location is on Wingaersheek Beach on the north side of the cape. The view in the book is from the base of the big rock piles on the right looking towards the rocks on the left.
View Larger Map
While I'm on the subject of Cape Ann, a few other cool places:
Rockport, a neat touristy fishing village on the tip of Cape Ann. The main peninsula is Bearskin Neck, a lovely tangle of shops and fishing shacks. The larger squarish projection out from its bottom holds the famous Motif No. 1:

In the middle of Bearskin Neck are Top Dog, with very cool and unusual hot dogs - mac-and-cheese on a hot dog, anyone? - and Helmut's Strudel, the best pastry I've ever had. Next to the tiny parking lot at the tip is a 20-foot seawall, easily climbable. The greyish and green peninsula on the right side of the image is the Headlands, with lots of climbable rocks. Somewhere down from that is the house where the first transatlantic cable came ashore.
View Larger Map
At the very tip of Cape Ann is Halibut Point State Park - the closest point in the US to Spain and therefore to mainland Europe. The big pond is an old quarry. Granite was mined in a failed attempt to make a breakwater offshore to make Rockport in to a big shipping port.
View Larger Map
The breakwater can be seen offshore:
View Larger Map
There's also an old WWII artillery spotting station, intended to protect Boston in the event of a German invasion. It's now a mini-museum, with a 16" Artillery shell as big as me in the lobby. You can go up about 20' in the tower.
For a better picture of the pond and tower: go here
And finally, Gordon College, current locale of my awesome sister. It was founded in 1889 by Adoniram Judson Gordon, named after missionary Adoniram Judson (Gordon's name is thankfully abbreviated as AJ). It moved to the Fens in 1919 to about 1500 feet of Fenway. In 1950, it moved again to the small town on Wenham. It's a small nondenominational Christian College with about 2000 undergrads.

View Larger Map
See! An informative and interesting post with nada about rockets!

Update

More notes from around the countryside:

• I added a new pen-tip nose cone to my Pen Rocket. I attached this one with Kevlar thread so it'll stay on.


• I've started on my 2-stage MMX rocket. It'll be about 5" high, made from a red pen. I have #s 2 and 3 of 6 fins gluing right now.


• I've decided that I will buy and scavenge an Estes Hi-flier kit for my 18mm Machbuster. Any suggestions as to how I should paint it?


• The White Sox are going to the playoffs, if anybody cares. Anybody? Didn't think so. Oh well, the Red Sox play tonight.

Gotta go to school. Only 9 days, ~8 hours till I see my sister. Yay.