Dr. Vlad, DdS.

Going to the dentist sucks.

I know, I know, this is a gross understatement unless you are one of those who enjoy people sticking their hairy forearms into their mouth and poking and prodding until a you bleed.  Those people – who are not right in the head, FYI – aside, going to the dentist is an experience that I have once in a blue moon that always leaves me promising myself that I’ll go more often if only to avoid the pain of going rarely.

I just got my teeth cleaned.  This was not one of those “we’ll clean your teeth with the little spinny thing and the tooth polish that tastes like finely ground chalk and send you packing with a shiny smile and a new toothbrush that is too small for your adult mouth.”  Nope, this was something of a more sinister nature.  This was a visit to the dentist by someone who had not had insurance for well over a year.

Now, I go to a dentist in Hazel Dell.  Not known necessarily for the quality of its people, Hazel Dell is a part of Vancouver that I have lamented before as being somewhat ghetto. Luckily for me, people in the ghetto don’t go to the dentist, so upon parking an entering the lobby I was blissfully aware that there was no one asking me for change, or a cigarette, or my firstborn, or any of the things people seem to never have.  I was, however, confronted by a receptionist that could easily come out of a Brahm Stoker novel.  This woman had eyes the color of thousand year old ice; the kind of translucent blueish-white that leaves a person wondering if there was not maybe a wolf somewhere in her lineage.  Thesecrystalline orbs were coupled with hair as black as the midnight sun and a flowing black dress of lace and lots of little ribbony things that seemed to serve no purpose other than to increase the overall volume of her clothing, creating an overall image of someone who could verypossibly just have feasted on the flesh of a newborn innocent.

But to be fair, she was really nice and booked me (thats what the call it at the dentist, right?) and had me sit down to read a book about Porches – a kids book about 2 feet long by one wide and printed on cardboard – while I waited for my appointment with Dr. Vlad.

Dr. Vlad happened to be a very pretty and extremely nice woman who called my name in a sing-song voice and led me through the hallways of the office.  On my journey to the chair of ill-repute I passed rooms where people were having drills inserted into their mouth, high-frequency radiation blasted through their skull, glaring ultraviolet lights shined in their mouths and a closed door that uttered forth the muted, echoing screams of a small child.  This was, obviously, going to be a trip from which I had little chance of returning.

Settling into my chair, I was given some cool shades and a neat little bib that smelled slightly of disinfectant.  Then I was regaled with stories of the Hygienist home life – about which I deeply cared, believe me – while I was shown an ever more depressing assortment of tools.  Hooks, pikes, scrapers… I think I even saw a reciprocating saw in there somewhere.  These were the tools of a professional.

The first thing that happened to me was the offer of anesthetic.  No thanks, I said.  I don’t really have a problem with needles – the several tattoos and scarred holes in my head where piercings used to be attest to that – but I DO have a problem with needles in my gums.  I’ll tough this one out.  I was then treated to a procedure the likes of which I had never seen, heard or imagined.

I got my gums cleaned with an ultrasonic pick.  This is a hooked poker that vibrates at 30 kilohertz – thats thirty thousand times a second – and sprays a fine mist of water into your mouth.  One might ask “What’s the water for?” and that would be a good question; it’s the same one I asked.  The answer was that the water rinses away any detritous that may accumulate around the bit and prevents “scoring.”  For those of you not in the know, ‘prevents scoring’ means that it keeps the bit and your tooth cool so that it doesn’t burn the shit out of your gums and leave little wiggly black scorches all over the bases of your teeth.

May as well use some Sterno to burn clean the teeth.

Not only was this somewhat unnerving, the sound that a rapidly vibrating piece of metal makes in your head when it comes into contact with teeth that are firmly cemented in your jaw cannot be described.  Suffice to say that it is really loud and couldn’t be replicated by the most excited teenage girl in existence, after she was told that she was not only getting a date with whatever the dude from Twilight’s name is AND her own car AND a million dollars AND well, you get the point.

Up next on the list of terrors du-jour was a simple scraping.  This is how it was described to me; “A simple scraping.”  No big deal.  Ill just take this bendy, curby piece of metal that looks like it was designed by NASA to drill holes in rocks on some foreign planet and scrape the crap out of the sides of your teeth/gums/face.  This was kind of fulfilling as I could feel it making a difference in the cleanness of mychompers, but totally freaky when the occasional chunk of bloody meat came out of my mouth perched precariously on the tip of that shiny device of inflicted pain.

There aren’t enough “Sorry ’bout that’s” to make up for the act of forcibly removing a piece of someones gums.  Especially when the lady is so tired she keeps saying she wants to just nod off.  I’m just saying…

Speaking of that, why is it that when you are at the dentist and someone has the equivalent of the creepiest home-depot hardware section ever in your mouth they insist on trying to have a conversation?  “Ungh, arriagh unghau urrur eerunughurr” is not an accurate answer to the question “What is work like for you these days.”  Plus, the far away sounds of drills, unhappy children and murmured conversations that are almost entirely vowels – and the much closer sound of a suction tube – make poor background for civilized discourse.

All of a sudden it was over.  The shades removed, the bib and its strange amalgamation of water, blood and another whitish substance whose origins I refuse to consider taken away, the obligatory “How ya feeling [after I just devastated the never endings in roughly 80% of your mouth with sharp-edged tools]?” answered with “much cleaner, thank you.”

I was led to the desk of a dour faced woman whose jowls only got deeper when she was informed that I had not the money in hand to pay may bill and that I had been misinformed as the the terms of my repayment.  After being accosted by glares and pitiless looks that would have made even the strongest-willed individual feel slightly less than beetle dung I left, bolting out the door and past the Receptionist from the Black Lagoon (or Arcturus, I’m not really sure which), around the giant book about cars I will never be able to afford and into the cloudy, rainy day.

Now don’t get me wrong, My teeth feel great and I intend on keeping them this way.  The people did a really good job and were actually pretty nice about the whole thing, but I will never be able to go to the dentistwithout first envisioning a trip to any dungeon in 14th century France, Iron Maiden, Rack, Ultrasonic Pick and all.

Things learned from Mission to Mars.

Despite the fact that i have been studying space travel, exploration and survival for the better part of three decades, I realized today that there are many things I did not know, and could only have learned from watching the movie Mission to Mars, Staring such powerhouse actors as Gary Sinise and Tim Robbins.  Here is a sampling of those things that my status as an amateur rocket scientist, astronomer and overall space junkie have rendered me unable to figure out.

- When a person is moving in zero-gravity – or if your are i any way scientifically minded, micro gravity – environment, it does not look any way like the movement shown on such unbelievable and obviously incorrect sources as, say, the news, orNASAtv.  Nope, it consists of herky-jerky motions that, while allowing a person to glide through the air, does so in a way that makes them look like they are running an invisible obstacle course.  Indeed, their motions look as if they are revoking completely laws of angular motion; instead of traveling in a straight line like Newton says we must, they stumble around the cabin of their spaceship like a drunken hipster dancing down the street to whatever music it is that makes them feel so very, very much.

- Space station design is way ahead of those same sources from above let us know.  Not only is it capable of creating a massive space station in mid-earth orbit that doesn’t look like my little cousin made it with his erector set and giving it an  earth-gravity environment via the use of a wheel – a design that harkens back to the sixties – it is capable of doing so in the exact opposite way that science dictates.  Instead of walking along the outside of the wheel, where centripetal force would create the feeling of gravity, people actually walk along the inside, allowing the hallways in the images to slope gracefully away from the camera and spitting directly in the eye of high-school physics.

- If a spacecraft that is destined to go to Mars was built in orbit, it would be made of titanium.  Titanium is one of the hardest, lightest metals that we can make right now.  None of this matter when placed against the hardness of glass.  A rock flying through space at thousands and thousands of miles per hour that can blast through a titanium wall, a mans hand, and a composite helmet can apparently be stopped cold by a simple piece of class in the middle of the spacecraft.

-A large chunk of hydrogen ice, extruded from pipes shattered by those same tiny rocks that glass can stop, will explode dangerously when exposed to rocket exhaust, despite the lack of oxygen in space.  This speaks for itself.

- A human being can survive at 10% of the atmosphere level of earth.  This can happen if that person is either a) Gary Sinise or b) people are living in some fairy-tale world where a human being that can barely get to the top of MT. Everest – a place with 25% the pressure of sea level – without fluid leaking into their lungs from their tissue due to lack of said pressure can somehow not only survive, but perform complex motor and cognitive functions such as having the presence of mind to realize that Dr. Pepper will show you where a hole in the side of your spaceship is.

-Humans are easily capable of jumping one spacecraft to another.  This is easy when each ship is flying at orbital velocity – roughly 8,000 miles per hour – in different directions and over a mile apart.  This is like throwing a rock from a  bus driving over the Hawthorne Bridge at 50 miles per hour and hitting ahippy on a  bike riding at 30 MpH across the Burnside bridge a half-mile away.  Trust someone who throws rocks at things all the time, this is no easy task.  I guess that’s why they call them Astronauts.

- When conducting a rescue mission that requires you to spend half a year traveling 90 million miles to rescue one person, make sure that you raise the flag before you look around to even see if that person is alive.

- Plants are far stronger than we thought.  Everyone knows that they produce O2, but according to this bastion of scientific corectitude, they create enough other gases to not only pressurize a greenhouse against outside interference from the Martian atmosphere, even if its walls are all ripped up and the wind is blasting ow the rows of ferns, but allow people to walk around mars without their helmet on.  This conjures images of little jets of gas blasting out of the plants and pushing back the thin and cold air from the outside.  Plants are indeed powerful, eh?

- Astronauts are well versed in not only astronauting, but audio engineering, high-level computer programming, genetic engineering and science, mass spectroscopy, botany, robotics and communications.  About the only things they aren’t good at, according to this movie, is acting.

- The best way a highly advanced race of aliens from god-knows-where can think of to communicate with a less advanced and patently amateur humanity is to bury a big metal face on mars and hope that we not only find it, but figure out the fact that said aliens put a security device on it that involves a simple puzzle.  there is no way that they would come down here and say “Hello, we are from Altair.”  Preferably by capturing and probing uneducated rednecks from the deep south.

- Gary Sinise is an alien.

Don’t do it, man.

Don’t do it, brother.  It’s not worth it.

I don’t know how much they are paying you, but it should not be enough.  I mean, I understand that everyone has a price; hell people have sold out entire countries for nothing more than the notoriety of having a sammich named after them.  That being said, what you are doing is wrong beyond words and should not be contemplated for any reason not matter how grievous.

I don’t know what it takes for you to become a sympathiser to their cause.  I mean, yes, we are screwing up a lot of things on this planet, and some of that is directly harming them, but the idea that you would put your patriotism and allegiance on the line simply for the case that they give you some kind of misguided importance is beyond the pale.

Did you not have a dad so you are looking for someone to make you feel like you are worth something?  Were you scorned by a lover that left you bitter and upset at the human race?  What was it that made you fall for their empty promises?

Think about it this way: whatever you are being promised, it is not enough.  No matter what they promise you, it will be worthless when the human race is gone and you and the other sympathisers are the only people left.  What will the riches mean when civilization is no more? You think you can go live with them?  They live underwater for god’s sake.  I know that we have mapped like 8 percent of the ocean floor, so they might have entire cities under there, but that does not change the fact that you can not breathe under the water.

They are using you, man.  Can’t you see that?  You think that you are being all special and powerful by allying with them and giving them the things that they want and that you are being ingratiated to them but you are missing something:  They only want you for your thumbs.  They don’t have them, so they need you and the others to do the things that they can’t.  They don’t care about you.

Indeed, those silk-skinned, flipper-beating blowhole-breathers are smarter than us, they have it all figured out and they are pissed, but the only way that they can graduate from entertaining us at Sea World and occasionally way-laying young girls in the carribean is with your help.

Please, please think about this before you continue posting our secrets on your MySpace page.  The last thing we need is for those underwater assholes to know enough to get to us.

Dear Jimmy, A Letter.

Jimmy,

We have had some good times lately, yeah?  I mean, this summer was good; our travels to other states, up mountains and across rivers and into cities flung far and wide.  We carried so many people to so many shows and on so many adventures that I honestly believe that I have fully gained the 50 dollars worth of you that I paid out.

That being said, I don’t want you to go.  Not yet.  I believe that you have many miles left in you.  Your heart is still strong.  Your legs are creaky, squeaky and a bit off-kilter, your shocks are hard and leaky, but all of that be fixed.  I can make you stronger; straighter of leg and softer of shock you can get me through an entire winter without having to walk to the bus to get to work or bum rides from friends to get to shows.  Together we can cruise the witery NW and go camping or hiking or anythig that WE want because you still, I believe, have the mechanical constitution to do just that.

So no, I don’t want you to go.  I know that you are having problems right now.  You just don’t seem to want to go like you used to.  Like a septugenarian you have a little trouble getting up those hills and your power-band is far slighter than it was even a few short months ago.  I know that your nerves are frayed; your timing is off and your filters are dirty and there is a real possibility that your coils are coming undone.  But I won’t let you go.

Indeed, I have come to love you, my noble steed.  Like me, you are a little rough around the edges.  No one would ever refer to you as pretty or sexy.  People sometimes make fun of your noises, smells and temperamental ways.  But like me you keep on truckin, so to speak, and won’t give up on proceeding forward no matter how much it may hurt you, failing only when the last opportunity has been used up.  So yes, I love you, and I won’t let you go.

I’ll find your problems.  I will diagnose what ails you and I will do whatever it takes to make sure that you hit that golden mark.  I will advance your timing and clean your filters and relace your coils.   You and I will have more and better summers, summers where you feel like the travelling workhorse that you once were and can make it up a hill on the highway without burning a half tank of gas in the process.  We will have a winter of contented show-going, you ferrying me and my friends in warm safety through the downpours and freezing cold of the Northwest winter.

So please don’t go, Jimmy.  Give me a chance to fix you and get you into the order that I know you will be happy.  Give me a chance to exercize my abilities and pay you back for the amazing times that we have had together by allowing you to be one of those rare vehicles that make it to the quarter-million mile mark.  We can do this, Jimmy.

Together.

Say it with me now: Bo-De-Ga.

I am a steady and continuous user of Convenience Stores.  From the Tesoro’s of Alaska to the Bodegas of the East Coast to the Quik-E Mart’s of Springfield, this is the decidedly modern institution the allows one to purchase things that you don’t really need at any hour of the day, that allows a person to buy gallons of either gasoline or Diet Doctor Pepper or Coffee – all for about the same price – and that allows a person like me yet another chance to peruse the often exemplary variety of people that inhabit the zone around me.

Truth be told, I really do go to a convenience store pretty much every day.  It usually revolves around my brain running low on glucose and telling me that it is time to fill up on Skittles or Snickers or those little gummy orange slices that I believe are actually made of orange flavored crack, so severe is my addiction.  I do this in the belief that these things actually contain the type of sugar my brain needs to continue it’s job of heating the inside of my skull and not the type that makes you fat; something that I will continue to tell myself regardless of what you people say.

In the part of town where I live now, I sit at the boundary between three different parts of Vancouver.  Hazel Dell, Orchards and Salmon Creek all come together at this point and as such I get a good cross section of the city in my sights.  Now I know I have gone on at length about the type of people here, but in this little rant I am going to let you in on a few things that I have seen that make me truly happy to have eyes.

My favorite thing to do at such a place of convenience is to sit back in line and observe what people are buying.  I really enjoy the rapid and nervous eye movements and squeaky voice of the kid buying condoms, usually along with some seemingly innocuous item like a bottle of soda or one beef jerky stick – anything to take notice away from the bright blue box of soon-to-get-laid on the counter.  Or the lady who is dressed in pretty nice clothes, driving a pretty nice car who is buying a pretty cheap half-rack of Natty Ice and a pack of unfiltered Pall Mall’s at 11:30 in the morning on a Tuesday and smells like really, really old weed.  There are usually, in the Salmon creek part of things, hordes of skater kids with their turbo-charged metabolisms that swarm the soda fountain, filling cups whose size belies their being originally designed to carry crude-oil on the high seas with horrifying mixtures of various Pepsi-owned sugar-syrups and pretending that no one can see them stealing candy-bars.

I love it all. I like the guy who can’t figure out how to make the self-service pump work but who also can’t be bothered to stop shouting into his phone long enough to respond to the woman inside the store trying help him get his Mercedes back on the road.  I like the ditzy high-school girls buying their Vitamin water and chewing gum, babbling to each other in some foreign language that overlaps and swirls together into an incoherent sea of squeaky voices, tossed pony-tails and silly giggles.  I like the tweaker who can barely hold herself together long enough to order a pack of smokes without wanting to either crack under the pressure or steal something.  Instead she settles for talking in a really loud voice and darting out of the store like it is on fire, clutching her new cigarettes like they are made of solid gold – something we know not to be true, because she would have sold them by now.

I know, I know: I said I like a tweaker, and living in Washington that can’t be true, but still…

One of my favorite aspects of these places are the people who work there.  I honestly believe that it takes a certain type of person to work at a place like this, someone who is tolerant of all of the strange things that humanity is able to bring to her counter but none of the bullshit that comes along with it.

At a 7-11 by my house there is a woman who has been working there since I have been going to high-school, so at least 12/13 years.  She is the gruffest, most clipped personality I have ever encountered and takes no crap from anyone, but still remembers me even when I haven’t gone in there in a year or so.  Likewise there is a cashier at an ARCO near my place that couldn’t give a crap if you are the poorest person in the city, scrounging for change to by a 40 of Mad Dog 40/40 or the richest dude in the place, landing in the parking lot with your gold-plated helicopter to by everything in the store… she is more than willing to treat everyone with the same tiny amount of attention and gigantic amount of scorn.

I like to think of her as a really bitter equal-opportunity bitch, but that is just me.

These people are either totally ghetto or totally normal.  They are highly representative of the neighborhood in which their stores are located, and the difference between the good, the bad, and the what-the-hell can be a few blocks of distance.  This is especially true where I live, and applies to everything from clientèle to employee and even just the people who hang out front (you know who I’m talking about… the Jay and Silent Bobs of the world).

So next time you are at a Bodega take a step back and see if you can witness any of the tiny life that is being placed out right in front of you.  It can be a real trip.

NASA Makes Me Angry.

Hey NASA.  Yeah, you.  I have a bone to pick with you.

There are all of these things floating around the interwebs that you are thinking about abandoning the idea of sending a person to the Moon.

What.  The.  Hell.

Seriously, though, folks there is something that has been nagging at my attention lately that I think I should share with you.  According to a recent AP story and certain sources within NASA, there is not enough money in the budget to continue in any type of exploration plan as laid out by his honorable ass-nugget W. Bush to continue along the path he set out in what was really his only real contribution to a perpetuation of Americas dominance in…. well really anything.  Let me break this down for you.

As of now NASA has spent 7 Billion dollars designing a rocket system that will not only be a gigantic step backward in technology, ability and utilitarianism but might actually not ever even be used.  It is a system that is overly complicated and entirely run by yet another bloated govt. bureaucracy that has taken a project with a simple aim and ripped it into so many responsibilities and oversight sections that it will be a miracle if it ever actually makes it to orbit, much less the moon or beyond…

It is doing this instead of taking a simple directive and just doing it within the constraints of the budget given it, as we did with the Apollo program: here is your money, go to the moon.  Granted, there is not any overarching national reason – in a public or political sense – for us to go to space, or the moon, or Mars… we are not trying to beat the communists there anymore.  That being said, the idea that NASA is no longer innovating or trying to figure out a problem with new technology and new brain-power saddens me deeply, and actually makes me kind of mad.  Ex-NASA administrator Alan Stern puts it very well when he says “NASA has been like a star athlete that’s broken world records back in the 1960s and is stuck in the bleachers ever since, unable to suit up for what it does best.”

This is especially true now that the Obama presidency, flush out of money after massive amounts of spending to attempt to stem the tide of failing banks and American dreams, has declared that it will be revamping NASA’s budget and that there may not be enough cash to go around.  This means that exploration may take a side seat to smaller projects like theISS and increased autonomous satellite launches and science projects.  That is the part that really pisses me off.

I agree that there needs to be a replacement for the space Shuttle, a piece of 70’s technology that has been showing its age more and more with every launch delay and faulty valve.  I agree that there are projects domestically and abroad that probably should takeprecedence to sending a person to the moon, especially in light of a publicly-perceived lack of necessity.  I agree that the way that we continue in the process of furthering our knowledge of the universe should probably be examined (though not at the cost of time or progress, things govt decision making panels are notoriously good at wasting).  All of that being said, for the United states, arguably the world leader in high-science exploration technology and ability, to take a side seat to the human exploration of space would be a travesty beyond words.

Even if Obama, as he his people have stated, does decide to allow spending for “skipping the Moon, going to an asteroid, or just cruising the solar system” the lack of a single, unifying goal will render any decision made null and void as soon as it is handed down.  If there is one thing the govt has proved time and again it’s that they need a clearly defined objective in order to stay focused enough to not simply spend themselves in circles until all of the money is gone and they have to change tack in the middle of their project.

There are currently three separate corporate, privately owned companies that are willing and able to send humans to the moon in a decade, if only for a slight percentage of the budget being used by NASA.  There are plans drawn up by rogues within NASA itself that could simplify, cheapen and expedite the process of replacing theSTS and paving the way to a future or American manned presence in space. There are currently available technologies and ideas that could sustain NASA for decades if only it were bot being run by a bunch ofbureaucrats.

Here is my idea:  Give them money.  Give NASA a budget and a goal and a certain lack of oversight from policy makers and let them do what they do best.  I promise that they would be on the moon by 2020, keep the Space Station in business AND replace the space shuttle within that budgetary framework and project goal.

If we don’t do that, NASA is doomed, and the reluctance of the US govt to allow private enterprise to join in the manned space-explorationfracas will only guarantee that the only way an American Astronaut gets to see the surface of Mars will be aboard a Chinese Spacecraft.

And I will not stand for that.

The Saturn V

I’ll get back to making fun of things soon, I promise.  Let me bluster for a few days, ok?

Today, 40 years ago, July 20, 1969.  Human beings set foot on the moon.

This is a day that I take a minute to reflect on the things that we have done a society.  Then I stop, because that is a depressing road to travel these days.

Anyway, the way taht we went ot the moon was by creating some of the largest, most powerful vehicles ever created by human beings.  What follows is a small sheet of information, gleaned from the interwebs, that will hopefully give you some sense of the scale of the leap in technology and imagination that was necessary to put two people on the moon (and one in orbit around it).

As an aside, the Saturn V was the name of the rocket that the Apollo capsules sat on top of, and the F-1 is the rocket that was on the bottom of the Saturn V.

To the content!!!

These are taken from the Apollo Spacecraft News Reference, provided by Ed Dempsey.

-The heat leak from the Apollo cryogenic tanks, which contain hydrogen and oxygen, is so small that if one hydrogen tank containing ice were placed in a room heated to 70 degrees F, a total of 8-1/2 years would be required to melt the ice to water at just one degree above freezing. It would take approximately 4 years more for the water to reach room temperature. The gases in the cryogenic tanks are utilized in the production of electrical power by the Apollo fuel cell system and provide oxygen for the use of the crew.

-When the Apollo spacecraft passes through the Van Allen belts on its way to the moon, the astronauts will be exposed to radiation roughly equivalent to that of a dental X-ray.

-The command module panel display includes 24 instruments, 566 switches, 40 even indicators (mechanical), and 71 lights (not one plasma screen or multi-touch surface anywhere).

-The command module offers 73 cubic feet per man as against 68 feet per man in a compact car. By comparison, the Mercury spacecraft offered 55 cubic feet for its one traveler and Gemini provided 40 cubic feet per man.

-If you car gets 15 miles to the gallon, you could drive 18 million miles or around the world about 400 times on the propellants required for the Apollo/Saturn lunar landing mission. The Saturn V launch vehicle contains 5.6 million pounds of propellant (or 960,000 gallons).

-When the Apollo spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere it will generate energy equivalent to approximately 86,000 kilowatt hours of electricity – enough to light the city of Los Angeles for about 104 seconds; or the energy generated would lift all the people in the USA 10-3/4 inches off the ground.

-The fully loaded Saturn V launch vehicle with the Apollo Spacecraft stands 60 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty on its pedestal and weighs 13 times as much as the statue.

-During its 3.5 second firing, the Apollo Spacecraft’s solid-fuel launch escape rocket generates the horsepower equivalent of 4,300 automobiles.

-The engines of the Saturn V launch vehicle that will propel the Apollo spacecraft to the moon have combined horsepower equivalent to 543 jet fighters.

-The Apollo environmental control system has 180 parts in contrast to 8 for the average home window air conditioner. The Apollo environmental control system performs 23 functions compared to 5 for the average home conditioner. There are 23 functions of the environmental control system, which include: air cooling, air heating, humidity contol, ventilation to suits, ventilation to cabin, air filtration, CO2 removal, odor removal, waste management functions, etc.

-The 12-foot-high Apollo spacecraft command module contains about fifteen miles of wire, enough to wire 50 two-bedroom homes.

-The astronaut controls and monitors the stabilization and control system by means of two handgrip controllers, 34 switches, and 6 knobs.

-The Apollo command module can sustain a hole as large as 1/4 inch in diameter and still maintain the pressure inside for 15 minutes, which is considered long enough for an astronaut to put on a spacesuit.

-The power of one Saturn V is enough to place in earth orbit all U.S. manned spacecraft previously launched.

-Here is an analogy pertaining to the benefits of the multistage concept as opposed to the single-stage, brute-force method. If a steam locomotive pulling three coal cars carries all three cars along until all fuel is exhausted, the locomotive could travel 500 miles. By dropping off each car as its coal is expended the locomotive could travel 900 miles.

-The F-1’s fuel pumps push fuel with the force of 30 diesel locomotives.

-Enough liquid oxygen is contained in the first stage tank to fill 54 railroad tank cars.

-The five F-1 engines equal 160,000,000 horsepower, about double the amount of potential hydroelectric power that would be available at any given moment if all the moving waters of North America were channeled through turbines.

-The interior of each of the first stage propellant tanks is large enough to accommodate three large moving vans side by side.

-Total amount of propellant (fuel and oxidizer) in the Saturn V launch vehicle, service module, and lunar module is 5,625,000 pounds.

-The ratio of propellant to payload in Saturn V is 50 to 1.

-The main computer in the command module occupies only one cubic foot.

-While an automobile has less than 3,000 functional parts, the command module has more than 2,000,000 not counting wires and skeletal components.

-The command module uses only about 2000 watts of electricity, similar to the amount required by an oven in an electric range.

-The tanks which hold the cryogenic (ultra-cold) liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen on the Apollo spacecraft come close to being the only leak-free vessels ever built. If an automobile tire leaked at the same rate that these tanks do, it would take the tire 32,400,000 years to go flat.

-There are approximately 2-1/2 million solder joints in the Saturn V launch vehicle. If just 1/32 of an inch too much wire were left on each of these joints and an extra drop of solder was used on each of these joints, the excess weight would be equivalent to the payload of the vehicle.

-The F-1 engine runs on Liquid Oxygen and RP-1, which is a type of Kerosene.  It burned 3 tons of these fuels a second.

-The F-1 engine generated 1.5 million pounds of thrust, or roughly the equivalent of all three of the Space Shuttle Main Engines combined.

-There were 5 of these engines on the first stage of the Saturn V.

Hope that kind of give some idea about the things that we can do when we put our minds to it… or feel the need to beat the Russians.  Tomorrow: Pissing on JFK’s legacy.

“Not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard…”

Today, the 16th of July, Man set out for the moon.

Well… if today was actually 1969 then this would be true. Indeed, 40 years ago today, at 9:32 AM human beings set forth, sitting atop the Saturn V rocket, for the first time in an attempt to set foot on another piece of rock other than our Earth.

Ordinarily this is a blog about the idiocy of our own planet, but for the next few days this will be a place that extols the virtue of human ability, ingenuity and imagination. There has never before or since been an endeavor fraught with so much danger, beset by so many difficulties, and resultant in so much glory.

I have written 4 papers on this subject. It has been the focus of my own personal studies since, literally, I was a small child. The fact that human beings once played golf on a piece of land 238,000 miles away will never cease to awe me, and the fact that it won’t happen again in my lifetime will be a source of disappointment in the human species for as long as I am alive.

Anyway, to start this little week long diatribe off, I have enclosed the full text of a speech made by John F. Kennedy when he decided that within 7 years of his say-so America would land a man on the moon and “return him safely to the earth.”

This speech is one of my favorite of all time, as it speaks to the rapidly accelerating pace of our learning, our engineering, and our abilities. It speaks to the human spirit, the drive and dedication to continue to further ourselves, not just in a scientific sense, but in the sense that looking and moving forward is what humans are good at. Stating that we “do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” I have always thought this to be a speech that set a standard that would have set Humanity on a path which would culminate in our eventual technological – thus societal – prosperity. That it didn’t is a stain on our history, and one which I still believe we could erase if only we cared enough.

Following is the full speech. Please read it all, as I believe that EVERYONE that is a breathing human being can take something from it. I’ll write more at the bottom.

“President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Governor, Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley, and Congressman Miller, Mr. Webb, Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief.

I am delighted to be here, and I’m particularly delighted to be here on this occasion. We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation¹s own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.

Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America’s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight. This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.

So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward–and so will space. William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.

If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it–we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency. In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man’s history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where the F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48 story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this field.

Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were “made in the United States of America” and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.

The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the the 40-yard lines.

Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. Tiros satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs. We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public. To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.

The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school. Technical institutions, such as Rice, will reap the harvest of these gains.

And finally, the space effort itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs. Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this State, and this region, will share greatly in this growth. What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your City of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next 5 years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to double the number of scientists and engineers in this area, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion from this Center in this City.

To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year¹s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year–a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United Stated, for we have given this program a high national priority–even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun–almost as hot as it is here today–and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out–then we must be bold.

I’m the one who is doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute. [laughter]

However, I think we’re going to do it, and I think that we must pay what needs to be paid. I don’t think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job. And this will be done in the decade of the sixties. It may be done while some of you are still here at school at this college and university. It will be done during the term of office of some of the people who sit here on this platform. But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade.

I am delighted that this university is playing a part in putting a man on the moon as part of a great national effort of the United States of America.

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked. Thank you.”

See what I mean? Think about the things said in this speech. It basically says “we can do it if we really want to.” And you know what? He was right.

And we did it right cheap. too. 5.4 billion a year… We spend that much money in a week in Iraq. Anyway, this is the thing that got it started.

Tomorrow I tell about what happened before and during, and after the landing I will explain why the entire legacy of this most amazing of human achievements is being pissed all over by the current administrations of the worlds governments.

-J-

Esthetic Ravings (again)

Going to a party in the desert is a undertaking.  Between the packing, the planning, the organizing, the trip, the setup, the party, the booze, the tear-down, the trip home and the unpacking, there are a great many things which are added together to create the experience. This creates a situation where only the dedicated appear at the show, making for a less dramatic weekend, but also makes you see and realize a great deal of things.   A few of these things really stuck out in my mind, and I will now share those with you for what is bound to be another journey through my thought processes.

Things learned this weekend:

- The correct music is essential for a good road trip.  Breakbeats or Drum and bass for the night part when you are so tired you kinda want to stop driving, Tom Petty and Willie Nelson for driving through Eastern Oregon ranch land under a bright sun, and something fast paced and fun for the beginning.  Chill tunes for the drive home.

-  Fast food is essential for road travel, but nothing that makes a person disposed to filling up with gas that he is then forced to diffuse into the cabin of the vehicle.  Onions are another no-no, especially when mixed with carbonated vegetables.

-  Driving with your knees to do such things as change CD’s, hit the person next to you, mess with the stereo, eat food or look for something that probably isn’t really that important in the grand scheme of things is ok, unless you are driving a car with bad ball joins, loose steering and a bad alignment.  In that case I would not recommend it.  One can only wobble all over the highway at 70 for so long before the Cops or Murphy’s Law begin to take notice.

-  Some people would think that getting up in the morning and eating breakfast burritos while drinking a luke-warm beer placed outside your tent before stumbling into it to pass out for the evening would be a terrible idea.  Those people would be wrong.

-  Everything is better when cooked in bacon grease.  Everything.  Vegans and vegetarians don’t think so, though in this case I am not able to defer to their judgement.

-  There are a very few things in this world or any other than spending a weekend with your nearest and dearest friends, surrounded by nature and permeated by high-quality music.  It’s just not very good for your pores.

-  Dancing is good for you.  I cleans out your soul, gets you exercise.   Dancing next to a huge, deep, nearly invisible mud puddle is bad for your shoes.  Please keep this in mind.

-  Flirting with a cute woman who looks as if she works in a library but still has a Rock Shoxx sticker on her car is something that is fun to do.  Keeping her attention on and off for a couple of hours is fun to do as well.  I recommend everyone try it.  Just don’t try it on the highway, or else there is a chance you will end up almost run off the road by a tractor-trailer loaded with farm-impliments.

-  Potato guns sound like real guns.  They are not – they are actually far cooler than real guns – though one does not look nearly as awesome firing one.

-  Oregon has the coolest town names ever.  Be it The Dalles, Dufur, Fossil, Celilo, Blalock, John-Day, Haines, Umatilla, or any of the other plethora of names used by the Native Americans to name their people and transferred to the possession of the not-as-native Oregonains, they are awesome and make for much laughter when driving across the state.

-  Getting back to the city after spending a weekend in the desert is a jarring experience, especially when returning to Portland.  Coming in from the east on 84 you are surrounded by trees in one of Americas most beautiful places and within literally 2 miles are in the middle of the city.  It’s dirty, shiny, and has too many straight lines.  It smells like exhaust and is full of people moving fast.  It is a far cry from the relaxed and plesent atmosphere of the Idaho back-country.  It kinda sucks.

This is but a sample of the things that crossed my brainicles while on my sojurn as desert-camper.  Unfortunately I forgot my notebook, so I had to write these from my memory, and for those of you who know me, this is a somewhat dicey proposition.

Esthetic Forecast: Awesome

HELLO EVERYONE!

I hope that you happy campers that are going to Esthetic this weekend will get some tasty info out of this.

Your Evolution weather report is as follows:

According to the National Weather Service page for the area northeast of the Arrowrock reservoir, the days will be in the mid eighties with a slight chance of thunderstorms on Saturday, and the nights around 50 with, again, a slight chance of thunderstorms.  So bring yer suncreen kids.

Also making an appearance in the skys over our little gathering will be some pehnomena that most people wont know about:

There is a slight (slim to none) chance of Noctulescent clouds making an appearance in the northern sky just after sundown.  Look to the north and west to see if you can get a pic of these rare and beautiful clouds.

Also coming over the horizon will be the International Space Station.  This is a very bright dot in the sky, shining at roughly magnitude -2.0 (brighter than Venus and visible in the daytime sky) and traveling out of the south/southwest sky at 5:30 am and taking about 5 and a half minutes to travel across the sky.  Exact info can be found here.

Your Music Forecast reads 100% chance of bangers with a good chance of chill shiz, with daytime oonts brought to you b those who have sound camps in the meadow. (hint: I’m playing Friday afternoon, so come check out some chunky funky techno)

Let me take this as a moment to remind you all that this is a pack in/pack out event.  This means that you bring out everything that you brought in with you, in trash bags, all the way back to Boise.  Please do not pile trash near the buildings on the way out, as the promoters get charged extra and it just makes us look like a bunch of goons.  We are going there to be close to nature, so please help keep it preserved for the next people who go out to do the same.  Any other info that you may need wil be at the Esthetic site.

I can’t wait to see all of you out there in the desert.  Camping in the desert with a bunch of my friends and some good choons is one of the things that keeps me going through the dark and wet winters we have here in the NW, and I can’t wait to share the nature, music, and fellowship with all of you.  Please party safely out there and please, if you see me, come say hello!

Love and Peace

-Jeremy-