I do a lot of editing on Wikipedia. A whole lot of editing - to the tune of 3500+ edits, plus 5300 more on Commons. Although I do a variety of work on there, most of my edits - particularly large, content-adding ones - are on articles about train stations. Most are about Boston's subway and commuter rail systems, though I do others when interested.
You probably don't understand why. I mean, of all the things to focus on, why train stations? With the exception of the big downtown ones, no one cares much about them. They're often just bare concrete platforms.
A few minutes ago, I showed my girlfriend what the Lawrence station article looked like before and after I edited it. Her response regarding the old version: "It's so boring."
My reply was this:
Yeah.
And I hate that.
I mean, the mass-produced articles aren't horrible. They're better than nothing, most have pictures (often thanks to me...) and they've got the basic info.
But every station has a history.
Often, there was - or is - a beautiful old depot.
Sometimes, there are remains hidden in the bushes, or down the line.
Every station has a story, and I am the electronic bard.
That's why I do it - it's always the history. Even new stations have a history - a former station on the same site, or the struggle to get a station at all. I aim to collect those stories, to tell them for the world to hear.
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Friday, December 23, 2011
Photography
"A picture is worth a thousand words."
Well, maybe. A picture can be worth almost nothing; take a look at 100 random images on Flickr, and you'll see that very few of the site's 6 billion images are worth more than a sentence.
But, when properly applied, a single image can replace thousands of words. I probably read through several thousand words of blog posts, forum posts, and old newspapers to trace the former Green Line branch that once surfaced at what is now Eliot Norton Park in the Theater District. Descriptions of streetcar lines and that "...the right tracks went under the grade of the left tracks and split, with the left branch going to City Point outbound..." are simply insufficient to describe a complex, multilevel three-dimensional track crossover - particularly one that has not been seen in 4 decades and thus no good pictures exist.
If I may toot my own horn a moment, then take a look at this map that I created. I designed it to quickly show a viewer which tracks went where, and in what configuration. In this case, it tells the reader as much as those thousands of words of prose and even more than the few grainy photographs available. It does not replace them; it cannot entirely replace a picture, however poor quality, that shows the actual tunnel rather than simply a schematic. It is helpful, too, to know that the Orange Line connected to the portal between 1901 and 1908, or that the #43 streetcar to Lenox Street was the last route to use the portal. Even when included with the images (as I did with the Orange Line), it still requires text. But the map both elucidates and replaces text, and thus the old maxim holds in this case.
Of course, pictures can replace words without being merely informative. A picture of, perhaps, a lonely pond can show desperation and loneliness just as a poem or story could. Our vision is one of our most powerful senses; like taste and smell, it can have a strong correlation with memory. How else, for example, could my father recognize a cousin that he had not seen in decades? His brain could combine old images with its knowledge of aging and provide a plausible composite which it then compared with each passerby until it found a match.
The human face, in particular, is a subject where image is superior to the written word. One ran write about a person and get a reasonably accurate portrait of their body, their mind, their mannerisms and even their voice. But the face is a masterpiece of subtlety; tiny variations cause huge changes in the way it is perceived. A few millimeters in the symmetry of the features and the relative locations of nose, mouth, and eyes is much of the difference between average and beauty, or especially between merely beautiful and truly gorgeous. Emotion is written almost entirely in our faces: the way the eyes change direction, the separation of the lips, and the minor movement of the eyebrows can signal almost anything. The features are difficult to quantify and even more difficult to describe in a nonvisual medium; the mediocre artist will find themself able to produce a tolerable if slightly lopsided facsimile of the human body, but the face will be downright unrecognizable. Much artistic skill is required even for the most basic outline, and even more if that outline is via prose, yet even the grainiest photograph provides instant recognition.
So a picture can be worth one word, or a thousand, or more than any writing could ever produce. A poor graphic, perhaps on a Powerpoint slide, can do more harm than good: instead of saving words, it requires more to explain it that it would to simply leave it out. When dealing with something complex yet quantifiable an image can disambiguate text and render only a caption necessary - but only if the image is in fact superior to the text. Only when dealing with subtle subjects: the face, or an object of beauty, or simply something beyond the ability of human language to render it - does the printed word fail completely.
But what about something for which there is no equivalent in words? Some photographs are true art; they tell a message which is as clear as if it was spoken. They express ideas and feelings. But others simply exist. They are not high art, even if they are artistic in style. (And by 'artistic' I mean legitimately artistic, with attention paid to exposure, color, and framing - or developed by mere stroke of luck. The trend of 'tilt the camera, vignette the edges, and make it greyscale' is not nearly as artistically interesting as its practitioners would like to believe.)
Some would say that these are not worthy photographs, that they must either be useful or meaningful, and I do not deny that there may be merit in that statement. But I would like to believe that a picture can simply be.
I carry a camera everywhere and I take pictures because I find the subject interesting. The two following are from Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, where a friend attends. The first was a spur-of-the-moment shot; the second I saw in an instant but it took a few moments to align.
This was from my walk on Tuesday, where I followed Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square. I will confess to taking a color image here and converting it to greyscale. I did so not because I think it of artistic value, but simply because I wanted the silhouette of the church. Frequently I will use such digital post-processing to improve or modify my photos; it is one of the joys of the digital age. In this case, I actually created several copies and experimented with fill brightness, contrast, and shadows to produce the effect I wanted: a blank church against a mottled background of the incoming storm.
(A note: I wrote this and posted it on my other blog back in October, and I never cross-posted it here. I felt it was worth cross-posting.
It's also an experiment in style; check carefully and you'll find that the post is precisely 1000 words in length.)
Well, maybe. A picture can be worth almost nothing; take a look at 100 random images on Flickr, and you'll see that very few of the site's 6 billion images are worth more than a sentence.
But, when properly applied, a single image can replace thousands of words. I probably read through several thousand words of blog posts, forum posts, and old newspapers to trace the former Green Line branch that once surfaced at what is now Eliot Norton Park in the Theater District. Descriptions of streetcar lines and that "...the right tracks went under the grade of the left tracks and split, with the left branch going to City Point outbound..." are simply insufficient to describe a complex, multilevel three-dimensional track crossover - particularly one that has not been seen in 4 decades and thus no good pictures exist.
If I may toot my own horn a moment, then take a look at this map that I created. I designed it to quickly show a viewer which tracks went where, and in what configuration. In this case, it tells the reader as much as those thousands of words of prose and even more than the few grainy photographs available. It does not replace them; it cannot entirely replace a picture, however poor quality, that shows the actual tunnel rather than simply a schematic. It is helpful, too, to know that the Orange Line connected to the portal between 1901 and 1908, or that the #43 streetcar to Lenox Street was the last route to use the portal. Even when included with the images (as I did with the Orange Line), it still requires text. But the map both elucidates and replaces text, and thus the old maxim holds in this case.
Of course, pictures can replace words without being merely informative. A picture of, perhaps, a lonely pond can show desperation and loneliness just as a poem or story could. Our vision is one of our most powerful senses; like taste and smell, it can have a strong correlation with memory. How else, for example, could my father recognize a cousin that he had not seen in decades? His brain could combine old images with its knowledge of aging and provide a plausible composite which it then compared with each passerby until it found a match.
The human face, in particular, is a subject where image is superior to the written word. One ran write about a person and get a reasonably accurate portrait of their body, their mind, their mannerisms and even their voice. But the face is a masterpiece of subtlety; tiny variations cause huge changes in the way it is perceived. A few millimeters in the symmetry of the features and the relative locations of nose, mouth, and eyes is much of the difference between average and beauty, or especially between merely beautiful and truly gorgeous. Emotion is written almost entirely in our faces: the way the eyes change direction, the separation of the lips, and the minor movement of the eyebrows can signal almost anything. The features are difficult to quantify and even more difficult to describe in a nonvisual medium; the mediocre artist will find themself able to produce a tolerable if slightly lopsided facsimile of the human body, but the face will be downright unrecognizable. Much artistic skill is required even for the most basic outline, and even more if that outline is via prose, yet even the grainiest photograph provides instant recognition.
So a picture can be worth one word, or a thousand, or more than any writing could ever produce. A poor graphic, perhaps on a Powerpoint slide, can do more harm than good: instead of saving words, it requires more to explain it that it would to simply leave it out. When dealing with something complex yet quantifiable an image can disambiguate text and render only a caption necessary - but only if the image is in fact superior to the text. Only when dealing with subtle subjects: the face, or an object of beauty, or simply something beyond the ability of human language to render it - does the printed word fail completely.
But what about something for which there is no equivalent in words? Some photographs are true art; they tell a message which is as clear as if it was spoken. They express ideas and feelings. But others simply exist. They are not high art, even if they are artistic in style. (And by 'artistic' I mean legitimately artistic, with attention paid to exposure, color, and framing - or developed by mere stroke of luck. The trend of 'tilt the camera, vignette the edges, and make it greyscale' is not nearly as artistically interesting as its practitioners would like to believe.)
Some would say that these are not worthy photographs, that they must either be useful or meaningful, and I do not deny that there may be merit in that statement. But I would like to believe that a picture can simply be.
I carry a camera everywhere and I take pictures because I find the subject interesting. The two following are from Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, where a friend attends. The first was a spur-of-the-moment shot; the second I saw in an instant but it took a few moments to align.
This was from my walk on Tuesday, where I followed Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square. I will confess to taking a color image here and converting it to greyscale. I did so not because I think it of artistic value, but simply because I wanted the silhouette of the church. Frequently I will use such digital post-processing to improve or modify my photos; it is one of the joys of the digital age. In this case, I actually created several copies and experimented with fill brightness, contrast, and shadows to produce the effect I wanted: a blank church against a mottled background of the incoming storm.
(A note: I wrote this and posted it on my other blog back in October, and I never cross-posted it here. I felt it was worth cross-posting.
It's also an experiment in style; check carefully and you'll find that the post is precisely 1000 words in length.)
Thursday, September 29, 2011
It Tolls for Thee
An early morning experiment in writing bad fiction, complete with the most overused and cliche 6-word opener of all time. Trigger warning for violence and suicide.
"It tolls for thee"
It was a dark and stormy noon as the distant bell tower finished its last stroke. He did not know where it was; it could be as far as Downtown or Needham, or perhaps the Mattapan church belt. It did not seem to matter which church it was anymore; after days of frustrating searching, he found that no bells within two miles could possibly play that pounding low song, haunted parody of a melody.
It was a deep sound channel, man, the hemp-soaked young man at the record store drawled to him. Like in the ocean, you know? Four years of “audio engineering” and he never learned to be professional. But the glorified roadie was all too correct. The tiny house at 38 Thorndike, it seemed, was just in the wrong place. Sound from that distant tower bounced off exactly from the wrong roofs and walls, combining at this improbable node and turning his modestly decorated living room into a hellish echo chamber fourteen times a day. On the hour, every hour, seven in the morning to eight at night, came that unearthly ringing. It stayed in his ears constantly, until he could barely tell whether it was real or imagined. Day or night, sun or rain, it was there.
Any sane man would have moved. Brought buyers in at half-past the hour and bought a house a few streets away. It was not that he was not physically strong enough; he was not yet a very old man. But this house was also the house where his wife had been. He was a practical man and did not believe in such things as ghosts, and yet he knew she was there. She was there in his head, in his memories. On at the threshold could he conjure the feeling of her tender lips; only in the cramped bedroom would her lusty smile surface in his brain. No, to leave this house would be to leave her – for the final time.
The ringing in his ears subsides for a moment, and he contemplates going outside for the first time in a week. If he could put her aside for an hour, then perhaps he could clear his head and-
And that that exact moment, the hedonistic thug on the other side of the thin clapboard wall chooses to power on his heavily distorted amplifier. His reaction is measured yet automatic, as if he has been mentally preparing for years. He reaches into an empty drawer and retrieves an ancient revolver. It is surprisingly heavy in his hands. He is unfamiliar with the heft; he has not touched except twice a year to blue the steel. From a yellowed cardboard box in the back of another drawer, he pulls out six small bullets a places them one at a time into their chambers. Click. Spin. Click. Spin. He knows exactly what will happen. In a few minutes, the hooligan will get bored of creating obnoxious screeches, and he will go to the corner store. He will walk down the sidewalk, directly in front of the man’s house. The man practices aiming, firing, turning the gun upwards. He spins the cylinder and stifles a laugh: he’s playing Russian Roulette with bullets in every chamber.
The low tones begin. It is one o’clock.
"It tolls for thee"
It was a dark and stormy noon as the distant bell tower finished its last stroke. He did not know where it was; it could be as far as Downtown or Needham, or perhaps the Mattapan church belt. It did not seem to matter which church it was anymore; after days of frustrating searching, he found that no bells within two miles could possibly play that pounding low song, haunted parody of a melody.
It was a deep sound channel, man, the hemp-soaked young man at the record store drawled to him. Like in the ocean, you know? Four years of “audio engineering” and he never learned to be professional. But the glorified roadie was all too correct. The tiny house at 38 Thorndike, it seemed, was just in the wrong place. Sound from that distant tower bounced off exactly from the wrong roofs and walls, combining at this improbable node and turning his modestly decorated living room into a hellish echo chamber fourteen times a day. On the hour, every hour, seven in the morning to eight at night, came that unearthly ringing. It stayed in his ears constantly, until he could barely tell whether it was real or imagined. Day or night, sun or rain, it was there.
Any sane man would have moved. Brought buyers in at half-past the hour and bought a house a few streets away. It was not that he was not physically strong enough; he was not yet a very old man. But this house was also the house where his wife had been. He was a practical man and did not believe in such things as ghosts, and yet he knew she was there. She was there in his head, in his memories. On at the threshold could he conjure the feeling of her tender lips; only in the cramped bedroom would her lusty smile surface in his brain. No, to leave this house would be to leave her – for the final time.
The ringing in his ears subsides for a moment, and he contemplates going outside for the first time in a week. If he could put her aside for an hour, then perhaps he could clear his head and-
And that that exact moment, the hedonistic thug on the other side of the thin clapboard wall chooses to power on his heavily distorted amplifier. His reaction is measured yet automatic, as if he has been mentally preparing for years. He reaches into an empty drawer and retrieves an ancient revolver. It is surprisingly heavy in his hands. He is unfamiliar with the heft; he has not touched except twice a year to blue the steel. From a yellowed cardboard box in the back of another drawer, he pulls out six small bullets a places them one at a time into their chambers. Click. Spin. Click. Spin. He knows exactly what will happen. In a few minutes, the hooligan will get bored of creating obnoxious screeches, and he will go to the corner store. He will walk down the sidewalk, directly in front of the man’s house. The man practices aiming, firing, turning the gun upwards. He spins the cylinder and stifles a laugh: he’s playing Russian Roulette with bullets in every chamber.
The low tones begin. It is one o’clock.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
I am a Feminist
I am a feminist, and I am a man. I do not see this as a contradiction. I am a man because that is who I am; I did not choose to be a man. I am a feminist because I chose to be a feminist, because I believe in the apparently radical idea that women are people. People, just people, exactly as men are people.
Some people tell me this is a contradiction. They say that a man cannot be a feminist, because feminism is about women, and I am not a woman. Or they say that it is silly to be a feminist, because I am not a woman, and giving women equality will not give me anything. I find this to be ridiculous: should I not believe in the equality of black people because I am not black, or not fight for gay people to marry simply because I am not gay?
I believe that equality is necessary on its own merits, that no person should be denied an equal chance because of something as trivial as because they happen to be female. I do not need to justify its benefit to me, because having a fair society is worth anything I can do. But even the silly arguments make me think. What does feminism bring to me? Can it be justified on a personal level, in addition to a global level? It maybe is not important that it can – but it can absolutely be justified on any level. I am a feminist because I think it is good, but I am also a feminist because it is good for me.
I am a feminist, because when I walk into my job, I will have the very best possible coworkers. They will have been chosen at every level for their ability and creativity, their rationality and brilliance. There will be women there, because maybe they will not have been told at five and ten and fifteen and eighteen and twenty-two that women don’t become engineers, that maybe they should become a nurse of a teacher instead, because that’s what women do. There will be women sitting in the fancy chairs, because we will have purged from our collective memory banks the idea that only men can make decisions.
I am a feminist, because I will have sex with a woman, and I will know that we are having sex because we want to have sex with each other. It will be good sex, because she will have been taught that her body is good and she can enjoy it, and that sex is good and she can enjoy it too. I will not worry that she would rather be having sex with a woman, or with no one, or with someone else entirely – because she will not feel a pressure to ignore her feelings and have sex with a man – and I will know that we are having sex because she happens to want sex. She will not feel shamed by society for having sex, even if she has sex with other people too, or if she gets birth control so that she does not have to have a baby.
I am a feminist, because I will watch movies, and I will watch television, and I will watch strong female characters. Except I will not even think of this, because strong female characters will be so normal I will not notice them, because they will not be an anomaly any more. I will watch these women have jobs and hobbies and talk to each other about things besides men, because that is how women act in real life.
I am a feminist, because I will hold doors for people. I will not worry about being expected to open doors for women simply because they are women, and I will not worry about insulting a woman’s strength by opening a door for her. I will open doors for people because it is basic human kindness, and I will be able to open doors for all people.
A note: this was originally written about 2:30 in the morning a few nights back. It's an amalgam of several nights of thought. It's written in a bit of an idiosyncratic style, I realize, and I refuse to have it any other way.
(Originally posted by me at Walking Boston.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Dear Google Chrome dictionary
Heterosexist and heterosexism are words. Transphobia and transphobic are also words. Thye're quite important words when we're talking about equality. Learn them, and don't try to tell me that they're not words.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
The Shuttle and what it means to me
In less than three days, the orbiter Atlantis will land back on Earth. It's a bittersweet moment for me.
On one hand, the Shuttle program has been a good thing, if not a total success. We never got even close to the weekly launches originally envisioned, nor can 14 lives be brought back, but there were 133 safe launches. Science was done; satellites were launched, and the Hubble Space Telescope was brought to space.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, which did for X-ray astronomy what Hubble has done in visible light. Magellan, which mapped Venus. Ulysses, which showed us the poles of the sun and explored cometary tails. Galileo, which explored Jupiter. All of those probes were launched by the Space Shuttle; without it, they could not have done their missions, and science would be weaker.
The Hubble Space Telescope has done more than any other telescope in history. By accurately measuring distances to Cepheid variable stars, it has provided the (then) most accurate estimate of the Hubble Constant and thus the age of the universe. It has provided crucial evidence for the acceleration of the universe's expansion. It has found black holes in the center of galaxies and proto-planetary disks in the Orion Nebula; it has watched a comet impact Jupiter in our own solar system, and taken the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, the deepest (furthest-looking) image of the universe yet. It's discovered optical counterparts to Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). And it was launches and repaired (5 times) by crews on the Space Shuttle.
The International Space Station has been brought up and maintained in large part by Space Shuttle missions; the Shuttle has also provided occasional orbit-boosting burns. We now have a miniature city in Space, and even without the Shuttle we might be able to keep it a while.
But it's a sad day for NASA. For the first time since October 7th, 1958, (when the Mercury program was announced), the agency has no real program for human spaceflight. The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 suggests a new booster by 2016, but funding is in doubt. The Constellation project was canceled after going far over budget. There's not public nor governmental support like there was for the Apollo program.
The Shuttle, like I said, also was not perfect. 14 astronauts died aboard on two separate incidents. Preventable accidents. 14 of 359 is a one-in-25 fatality rate, a death rate comparable only to heads of state. Officials estimated the chance of a fatality at one in 100,000; Richard Feynman (when serving on the Challenger investigation panel) was closer when he said one in 100.
Costs skyrocketed, always and every time. The original estimate was $640 (adjusted to 2011 dollars) per pound to orbit; the actual figure was more like $27,000. Russian rockets can do it for $2250 per pound.
But it's just about over. NASA is left with a nearly blank slate. Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is in big danger and may never leave the ground. NASA's budget is being razed for political purposes. There are serious questions as to whether NASA will have another program like Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, or the Shuttle program. There are even those who question whether NASA will ever launch another astronaut.
Unless there is another politically-based race to space - and there may yet be with China, a country that has shown interest in weaponizing space - there will not be another program like Apollo where the whole country and all the politicians throw their hopes on it. Not unless there's something extraordinary, on the level of extraterrestrial contact or the creation of a faster-than-light drive.
The future, it seems, is the private space companies. Scaled Composites made SpaceShipOne, the first private spacecraft, and now they're creating space tourism. SpaceX is making the first new heavy booster in a decade, and the first one not created directly for NASA or the military. They plan to fly humans before 2020 in a reusable spacecraft.
This fall, I will be entering college, majoring in mechanical engineering with a concentration in aerospace engineering. At this point in time, it's what I want to do with my life. I love rocketry, I love designing things using mathematics, and I love solving problems. I can't guarantee that in four or five years I will still want to design space boosters or turbopumps, but I can guarantee that I will have a solid background in physics, mathematics, computer modeling, and design, and a degree that gives me a lot of flexibility to do what I want.
I also can't guarantee that I'll be able to get a job in aerospace engineering come 2015. The industry is going to be reeling from the end of the Space Shuttle program, and this is an industry that goes through heavy contractions on a periodic basis anyway. It's questionable how quickly private space launches of people and goods are going to grow the market for young engineers. It's a growth market eventually - lots of people and things are going to be sent to space, and they will need a lot of engineers to design a lot of rockets - but the question is when the sudden uptick begins.
And China has shown an interest in weaponizing space, which is problematic for someone who considers himself a pacifist. I haven't entirely codified my morals yet, but I think I would be very conflicted if I was to work on something that might be used not to launch a GPS satellite or a telescope or Captain Kirk, but instead to attack the other guy's astronauts or communications satellite.
But ultimately, this chronic pessimist is pretty hopeful. Whether or not NASA survives in anything like its present form, there's going to be a lot of space launches, and I believe I may be part of that. I'm definitely going to be doing something interesting. There is so much cool stuff out there, and I'm just optimistic enough to believe that space will be occupied, space will be colonized, and if we're very very lucky that it won't get weaponized. I believe that space will be revolutionized, revolutionized within my lifetime, and this revolution WILL be televised, in full-color 1080p 3D holo-screen view. I believe that the future can be as shiny as Star Trek even while the people are as real as Firefly. I want to be the one who designs the machines that make that future.
My name is David Sindel, and I'm going to be a rocket scientist when I grow up.
On one hand, the Shuttle program has been a good thing, if not a total success. We never got even close to the weekly launches originally envisioned, nor can 14 lives be brought back, but there were 133 safe launches. Science was done; satellites were launched, and the Hubble Space Telescope was brought to space.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, which did for X-ray astronomy what Hubble has done in visible light. Magellan, which mapped Venus. Ulysses, which showed us the poles of the sun and explored cometary tails. Galileo, which explored Jupiter. All of those probes were launched by the Space Shuttle; without it, they could not have done their missions, and science would be weaker.
The Hubble Space Telescope has done more than any other telescope in history. By accurately measuring distances to Cepheid variable stars, it has provided the (then) most accurate estimate of the Hubble Constant and thus the age of the universe. It has provided crucial evidence for the acceleration of the universe's expansion. It has found black holes in the center of galaxies and proto-planetary disks in the Orion Nebula; it has watched a comet impact Jupiter in our own solar system, and taken the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, the deepest (furthest-looking) image of the universe yet. It's discovered optical counterparts to Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). And it was launches and repaired (5 times) by crews on the Space Shuttle.
The International Space Station has been brought up and maintained in large part by Space Shuttle missions; the Shuttle has also provided occasional orbit-boosting burns. We now have a miniature city in Space, and even without the Shuttle we might be able to keep it a while.
But it's a sad day for NASA. For the first time since October 7th, 1958, (when the Mercury program was announced), the agency has no real program for human spaceflight. The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 suggests a new booster by 2016, but funding is in doubt. The Constellation project was canceled after going far over budget. There's not public nor governmental support like there was for the Apollo program.
The Shuttle, like I said, also was not perfect. 14 astronauts died aboard on two separate incidents. Preventable accidents. 14 of 359 is a one-in-25 fatality rate, a death rate comparable only to heads of state. Officials estimated the chance of a fatality at one in 100,000; Richard Feynman (when serving on the Challenger investigation panel) was closer when he said one in 100.
Costs skyrocketed, always and every time. The original estimate was $640 (adjusted to 2011 dollars) per pound to orbit; the actual figure was more like $27,000. Russian rockets can do it for $2250 per pound.
But it's just about over. NASA is left with a nearly blank slate. Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is in big danger and may never leave the ground. NASA's budget is being razed for political purposes. There are serious questions as to whether NASA will have another program like Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, or the Shuttle program. There are even those who question whether NASA will ever launch another astronaut.
Unless there is another politically-based race to space - and there may yet be with China, a country that has shown interest in weaponizing space - there will not be another program like Apollo where the whole country and all the politicians throw their hopes on it. Not unless there's something extraordinary, on the level of extraterrestrial contact or the creation of a faster-than-light drive.
The future, it seems, is the private space companies. Scaled Composites made SpaceShipOne, the first private spacecraft, and now they're creating space tourism. SpaceX is making the first new heavy booster in a decade, and the first one not created directly for NASA or the military. They plan to fly humans before 2020 in a reusable spacecraft.
This fall, I will be entering college, majoring in mechanical engineering with a concentration in aerospace engineering. At this point in time, it's what I want to do with my life. I love rocketry, I love designing things using mathematics, and I love solving problems. I can't guarantee that in four or five years I will still want to design space boosters or turbopumps, but I can guarantee that I will have a solid background in physics, mathematics, computer modeling, and design, and a degree that gives me a lot of flexibility to do what I want.
I also can't guarantee that I'll be able to get a job in aerospace engineering come 2015. The industry is going to be reeling from the end of the Space Shuttle program, and this is an industry that goes through heavy contractions on a periodic basis anyway. It's questionable how quickly private space launches of people and goods are going to grow the market for young engineers. It's a growth market eventually - lots of people and things are going to be sent to space, and they will need a lot of engineers to design a lot of rockets - but the question is when the sudden uptick begins.
And China has shown an interest in weaponizing space, which is problematic for someone who considers himself a pacifist. I haven't entirely codified my morals yet, but I think I would be very conflicted if I was to work on something that might be used not to launch a GPS satellite or a telescope or Captain Kirk, but instead to attack the other guy's astronauts or communications satellite.
But ultimately, this chronic pessimist is pretty hopeful. Whether or not NASA survives in anything like its present form, there's going to be a lot of space launches, and I believe I may be part of that. I'm definitely going to be doing something interesting. There is so much cool stuff out there, and I'm just optimistic enough to believe that space will be occupied, space will be colonized, and if we're very very lucky that it won't get weaponized. I believe that space will be revolutionized, revolutionized within my lifetime, and this revolution WILL be televised, in full-color 1080p 3D holo-screen view. I believe that the future can be as shiny as Star Trek even while the people are as real as Firefly. I want to be the one who designs the machines that make that future.
My name is David Sindel, and I'm going to be a rocket scientist when I grow up.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Macbeth Essay
Long and frustrating, though it's going well. A practice run for our senior critique / thesis paper, if you will. It's frustrating trying to read literary criticism, but I just have to remind myself that this is the last literature-analysis class I will take. (My only English classes at BU focus on communication in engineering and the writing of scholarly papers).
And, it's not all bad. I get to use multiple layers of nested parentheses (which are lots of fun (especially when you get to 2 and 3 interweaving layers)); semicolons are also in abundance in my writing. And Shakespeare does have neat things to say sometimes; who could remain unmoved by Lady Macbeth's command for the spirits to “unsex me here, / and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty” (1.5.48-50).
And, it's not all bad. I get to use multiple layers of nested parentheses (which are lots of fun (especially when you get to 2 and 3 interweaving layers)); semicolons are also in abundance in my writing. And Shakespeare does have neat things to say sometimes; who could remain unmoved by Lady Macbeth's command for the spirits to “unsex me here, / and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty” (1.5.48-50).
Back to work...
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Unparliamentary language
While researching my last post, I came across a very unintentionally funny page on Wikipedia: unparliamentary language. In a number of Parliamentary houses (including but not limited to Britain Canada New Zealand and Ireland plus serial commas), certain words and phrases have been banned.
Not as in super-injunction banned, but politeness banned. Remember that congressman here in the US calling Obama a liar? There's a word you're not allowed to use in almost any Parliament, at leats not when talking about a fellow MP.
Canada has a lot of banned phrases. I'd like to know the story behind them:
parliamentary pugilist (1875)
a bag of wind (1878)
inspired by forty-rod whiskey (1881)
coming into the world by accident (1886)
blatherskite (1890)
and especially, girouette (French for "weathervane") (Québec 2007)
The winner, though, is New Zealand, which has "his brains could revolve inside a peanut shell for a thousand years without touching the sides" and the priceless "energy of a tired snail returning home from a funeral".
Not as in super-injunction banned, but politeness banned. Remember that congressman here in the US calling Obama a liar? There's a word you're not allowed to use in almost any Parliament, at leats not when talking about a fellow MP.
Canada has a lot of banned phrases. I'd like to know the story behind them:
parliamentary pugilist (1875)
a bag of wind (1878)
inspired by forty-rod whiskey (1881)
coming into the world by accident (1886)
blatherskite (1890)
and especially, girouette (French for "weathervane") (Québec 2007)
The winner, though, is New Zealand, which has "his brains could revolve inside a peanut shell for a thousand years without touching the sides" and the priceless "energy of a tired snail returning home from a funeral".
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
A better photo of the Nike-Apache
For one national scholarship, I had to write an essay about something or someone that meant a lot to me. I chose to write about the Nike-Apache and the Level One certification process.
Here is the picture I had to submit with the essay, in so-big-you-have-to-scroll-down-unless-you're-a-Mac-weenie-with-no-scroll-wheel-O-Rama:
Here is the picture I had to submit with the essay, in so-big-you-have-to-scroll-down-unless-you're-a-Mac-weenie-with-no-scroll-wheel-O-Rama:
Friday, December 17, 2010
Llamapocalypse
I'm a pretty darned left brained person. I like logic and order, science and math. But, sometimes I branch out. I play the trumpet. I tried acting for the first time last year, and I (disastrously) tried writing a short story for NaNoWriMo.
So, now I've branched out. I started a second short story, and now I've written three short pieces for drama. Two are short plays; the third is a monologue. Here is the current draft, in full.
So, now I've branched out. I started a second short story, and now I've written three short pieces for drama. Two are short plays; the third is a monologue. Here is the current draft, in full.
Llamapocalypse
They weren’t quite sure how it happened. Not that they had a lot of time to figure it out. It might have been a freak mutation, DNA gone wrong. Might have been some sort of sickness, a ruminantarian Mad Cow Disease. There was even speculation of malevolent action.
How it happened is beyond mattering now. Somehow, a small population escaped, and they multiplied like rabbits. They grow and breed at over ten times the natural rate. They eat everything organic, strip the soil bare.
They reached a critical point sometime in March, and the population exploded. Within a week, half of Nebraska was wasteland. Some folks managed to get out. Most didn’t. The military did their best, but they were ill-prepared to fight the massive herds. Three nuclear weapons barely dented the population. Biological weapons were useless. Somehow, the Joint Chiefs didn’t anticipate warfare against llamas.
It didn’t take long for the internet to dub it ‘Llamapocalypse”. Cute name, but no one was laughing. The rest of the world will survive; they quarantined the continent immediately. They finished dynamiting the Panama Canal bridges last week. But North America is reduced to a few defensive perimeters – New York, D.C., Denver. Some will hold. Life might return to the land someday.
As for me, well, it’s times like this that I really regret ever learning math. It’s the world’s worst word problem. If the tallest building in Cincinnati is one hundred meters high, and the llamas pile on an extra meter every single hour, will my meager food supplies run out before or after I become llama chow?
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Six Thousand Two Hundred Sixty-Five Words
Thats my final word count for NaNoWriMo 2010. Not a terribly impressive word count - I know folks who have written ten times as much this month, and it's only one eighth of the goal, but I'm pretty proud of myself. That's the largest thing I've ever written, by over half. I'd never really written more than a few hundred words of fiction before, and yet I managed to write something the size of a decent shorty story.
Next year, I'm going to try to actually complete it. Yes, I'll have college work, but I won't have induction to plan which took up so much time, nor application essays to write.
Next year, I'm going to try to actually complete it. Yes, I'll have college work, but I won't have induction to plan which took up so much time, nor application essays to write.
Monday, November 8, 2010
NaNoWriMo
So, I'm not a fiction writer. Not even close. Tried a couple short stories, never got anywhere with em.
So, what do I do? I attempt to write a 50,000 word novel. In a month. An absolutely ridiculous task, that only about 20% who sign up accomplish. Odds are, I won't be one of them, but I'm giving it a try.
It's called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.
At the moment I'm up to 3063 words.
So, what do I do? I attempt to write a 50,000 word novel. In a month. An absolutely ridiculous task, that only about 20% who sign up accomplish. Odds are, I won't be one of them, but I'm giving it a try.
It's called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.
At the moment I'm up to 3063 words.
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