We’re currently under an Ice Storm Warning through noon tomorrow – the weather is bad enough that it’s even made the national news, and our Governor has declared a state of emergency. The last local report I saw indicated that we’d received over two inches of sleet and freezing rain. But by luck, there’s not a lot of accumulation on tree limbs and whatnot, so we’ve escaped the power outages which usually go with a big ice storm – so far. With more forecast through Wednesday morning, who knows what will happen.
Not that I’m terribly concerned for the short term – we’re set up to ride out these kinds of storms with minimal worries, thanks to a little advance planning and a working fireplace. Only if we had some kind of medical emergency would it be necessary to leave.
But I wanted to share something which happened overnight, while I was on-call: thundersleet. Not the fairly rare thundersnow – which I have experienced before. No, this was more like a regular thunderstorm – the sound of the thunder wasn’t suppressed the way that snow will do, and in fact I wonder whether it was augmented by the hard surface of the sleet on the ground, reflecting back more of the sound energy. And it was brighter than a usual thunderstorm, thanks to the white blanket of sleet on the ground. And it wasn’t just a few boomers – this went on for several hours (and meant I got even less sleep than I would have, being on call). Impressive!
Jim Downey
Following back a link to this blog, I came across a great source of space-related links that I thought I’d share: The North Dakota Space Grant Consortium links page. Someone has spent a hell of a lot of time to compile this – and it’s likely going to take me even longer to explore all these sites thoroughly. But I thought I’d share.Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, Art, Constellation program, Government, ISS, NASA, NPR, Predictions, Press, Science, Scott Simon, Space, tech
I have a special place in my heart for Scott Simon, the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday program. Oh, I’ve long enjoyed his reporting and work at NPR, but in particular it was the experience of being interviewed by him in 2001 for my “Paint the Moon” art project which endeared him to me. As it was just at the beginning of the media coverage of that project, and most people as yet didn’t understand what I was trying to do with the project, it would have been easy to mock the idea and portray me as something of a fool – but Simon was kind and considerate in his interview with me (which took almost an hour to do from my local NPR station facilities), and the end result was an interesting and insightful segment for his show.
Anyway, I go out of my way to try and catch the broadcast of Weekend Edition Saturday each week, and today was no different. One of the segments this morning was an interview with Pat Duggins, who has covered over 80 shuttle launches for NPR and now has a new book out titled Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program. In the course of the interview, Simon asked the following question (paraphrased; I may correct when the transcript of the show is posted later): “Are Americans unrealistic in the expectation of safety from our space program?”
Duggins paused a moment, and then gave an unequivocal “Yes.”
I had already answered the question in my own mind, and was pleased to hear him say the same thing. Because as I have mentioned before, I think that a realistic assessment of the risks involved with the space program is necessary. Further, everyone involved in the space program, from the politicians who fund it to the NASA administers to aerospace engineers to astronauts to the journalists who cover the program, should all – all – be very clear that there are real risks involved but that those risks are worth taking. Certainly, foolish risks should be avoided. But trying to establish and promote space exploration as being “safe” is foolish and counter-productive.
I am often cynical and somewhat disparaging of the intelligence of my fellow humans. But I actually believe that if you give people honest answers, honest information, and explain both the risks and benefits of something as important as the space program, they will be able to digest and think intelligently about it. We have gotten into trouble because we don’t demand that our populace be informed and responsible – we’ve fallen very much into the habit of feeding people a bunch of bullshit, of letting them off the hook for being responsible citizens, and treating them as children rather than participating adults. By and large, people will react the way you treat them – and if you just treat people as irresponsible children, they will act the same way.
So it was good to hear Duggins say that one simple word: “Yes.”
What we have accomplished in space, from the earliest days right through to the present, has always been risky. But for crying out loud, just going to the grocery store is risky. None of us will get out of this life alive, and you can be sure that for even the most pampered and protected there will be pain and suffering at times. To think otherwise is to live in a fantasy, and to collapse at the first experience of hardship.
I think that we are better than that. Just look at all humankind has accomplished, in spite of the risks. To say that Americans are unwilling to accept a realistic view of death and injury associated with the exploration of space is to sell us short, and to artificially limit the progress we make. I think it *has* artificially limited the progress we have made.
One of the most common complaints I get about the world I envision in Communion of Dreams is that the exploration of space is too far along to be “realistic”. Nonsense. Look at what was accomplished in the fifty years that lead up to the first Moon landing. In a world filled with trauma, war, and grief, some risks are more easily accepted. In the world of Communion, post-pandemic and having suffered regional nuclear wars, there would be little fixation on making sure that spaceflight was “safe”, and more on pushing to rapidly develop it.
We can go to the planets, and then on to the stars. It is just a matter of having the will to do so, and of accepting the risks of trying.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Climate Change, Global Warming, Google, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech
I, and just about every other SF writer out there who has written about the near-term future (let’s say the next 50 years), have to some degree based our future on a so-called “hydrogen economy,” wherein hydrogen fuel has replaced fossil fuel for most of our energy needs. I don’t make a big deal of it in Communion of Dreams, but that was my basic assumption, and there are references in the text which show this.
Well, the future just got a little closer.
CHICAGO (AFP) – US researchers have developed a method of producing hydrogen gas from biodegradable organic material, potentially providing an abundant source of this clean-burning fuel, according to a study released Monday.
The technology offers a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen gas from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertilizer and treating drinking water.
Numerous public transportation systems are moving toward hydrogen-powered engines as an alternative to gasoline, but most hydrogen today is generated from nonrenewable fossil fuels such as natural gas.
There’s been a lot of hype about hydrogen – a quick Google search of “hydrogen fuel” will kick up about 1.4 million hits. A lot of the predictions made about the use of hydrogen have been overly optimistic, since there are real technical problems still to overcome for it to be put into widespread use. But this is a big step forward – news which should make everyone concerned about global warming or climate change or just ‘peak oil’ happy.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Government, NPR, NYT, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
. . . the one I have in Communion of Dreams about a military EM jamming device which shuts down all communications in a given area is actually pretty lame. This sort of thing has been a staple of Science Fiction just about forever, and in fact real radio jamming equipment has been used since the early days of radio. I remember back in the ’70s reading about something called an ‘Odien Coil’ which could be used to blanket all radio and television broadcasts for up to about a half-mile. For Communion, I just set a few different parameters for the device, and gave it the ability to disrupt all the electro-magnetic spectrum used to carry the data of a ubiquitous computing/augmented reality society, then allowed it to play an important role in the plot.
So, while my prediction in this regard is, as I said, pretty lame, I still got a bit of amusement out of the recent NYT coverage of cell phone jamming devices. It was mentioned again this morning on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, and that reminded me that I wanted to say something about it here, because while the tech is actually fairly old, how it is applied in a society becoming increasingly dependent on instantaneous cell phone communication is nonetheless newsworthy and insightful. From Matt Richtell’s NYT article:
The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States — prompting scrutiny from federal regulators and new concern last week from the cellphone industry. The buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers and, increasingly, commuters on public transportation.
The development is creating a battle for control of the airspace within earshot. And the damage is collateral. Insensitive talkers impose their racket on the defenseless, while jammers punish not just the offender, but also more discreet chatterers.
“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”
Bingo. We’re still in the early phase of this kind of communications tech. As I stipulate in Communion, one way such technology could evolve is to become even more personal, literally implanted into our bodies, making it completely unnecessary to speak above a whisper in order to conduct a call clearly. If this were to happen, it would solve the problem of idiots needing to chatter away loudly on their phones, and perhaps societal pressures would counteract the current situation. And if it wasn’t just a matter of politeness bringing about such a change, perhaps the application of jamming technology will push us in that direction.
One can hope, anyway.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Hospice, movies, Science, Science Fiction, Star Wars
When my MIL’s hospice nurse was here the week before last, she clearly saw a decline in my MIL, as I noted here. What I didn’t mention in that post was that one of the things she suggested we consider was to move to a transdermal patch to help alleviate some of the pain associated with the breathing difficulty my MIL is starting to develop. (When people start to develop pulmonary aspiration problems, the coughing and gagging can be quite painful and cause a great deal of distress for both the patient and care providers.) Pain relief and comfort are our primary concerns with my MIL, but choosing to go to a derm patch of a powerful drug could well contribute to hastening her death – a common concern about all opioid-class drugs with the elderly. My wife and I discussed the matter, agreed that it was an option we should consider if conditions worsened.
Well, when Lisa (the hospice nurse) came this week, it was clear that my MIL had continued to develop aspiration congestion in her lungs. And we’d seen several instances of very painful and frightening coughing fits, usually late in the day when she was tired. My MIL was exhibiting additional effort at breathing even when just sitting at rest. We talked it over again with Lisa, and decided to give the derm patch with the lowest dosage a try, in spite of the potential problems.
Lisa also recommended using an oxygen supplement for my MIL, to ease her breathing problems. We discussed it, and agreed to give it a try. Lisa left, saying she’d make the arrangements for getting the derm patches to us, and would have an oxygen set-up delivered to the home, both that afternoon (this was Friday).
The guy from the medical supply place called, then came over to deliver the oxygen machine. We got a back-up tank of compressed oxygen as well. He walked us through the operation of this machine, which concentrates O2 from the air and delivers it in a regulated flow at whatever volume you need. It’s about the size of a kitchen trash can and sounds just like the food cooker ‘Aunt Beru’ was using in the original Star Wars movie.
When my MIL got up from her afternoon nap, we got her settled in her chair in the front room, where she usually looks at magazine and whatnot. And we showed her the new oxy set-up, explained that it would help her breathe when she was sitting up. To say that she looked on it with a dubious eye would be understatement. I’ve mentioned before that Alzheimer’s patients don’t respond well to change, and as far as she was concerned, this new-fangled thing with the tubes coming up to her nose was just more than a little weird. But we convinced her to give it a try.
A short while later Lisa came by with the derm patches. We got one on my MIL, and discussed how we should change the mix of her other pain meds once the new drugs got into her system (a derm patch takes 12 -18 hours to saturate the system, then delivers a constant dosage for a period thereafter, in this case about 60 hours). Lisa also checked to make sure we had the oxy set-up correctly, just to be sure. Everything was fine.
So, results since then? The new pain meds have definitely helped my MIL. She has been sleeping better at night, and seems more free of pain. But she has also been inclined to just stay in bed more, particularly the last two mornings. The oxygen has also been a clear help, and she is working less hard to breathe when she is sitting in her chair.
The difficulty is that she pretty clearly doesn’t like the oxygen delivery system. The tubing coming up to a simple cannula is strange and distracting, and she wants to fuss with it or just take it off altogether. We told her that we wanted her to try it through this weekend, to see if she could get used to it, but that if she still didn’t like it, we wouldn’t force her to wear it.
Because while this would probably lengthen her life, if it is decreasing her ‘quality of life’, it isn’t worth it. It is the exact flip side of the ethical considerations of whether or not to use the transdermal patch, where quality of life is improved but there is a risk of shortening her life. And that’s not a neat and easy calculation to make. We know that she is entering the final weeks of life, but there are no clear mile-markers indicating just exactly where we are on this journey. We want her to enjoy as much life as she can, but that is a judgement call as to whether it is better to go for a longer period, or for more comfort.
And no matter what choices we make, we can never be entirely sure that they were the right ones.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to dKos.)
Made a routine trip to the big-box store this morning, to stock up on catfood. I got one of those large boxes of 48 cans of different flavors my cats like. And when I went to put it away, the “easy open” tab didn’t. Instead, I wound up just destroying the whole box, ripping and tearing, so I had access to all the cans included.
It felt wonderful to be so destructive.
There are days like that for all of us. After a trip to the store, dealing with idiots who don’t know how to negotiate a check-out line. Or sitting behind the twit at the stoplight who somehow misses that the light changed and the cars in the other lane are passing him, getting his shit together just in time to slip through a yellow light and leave you sitting there for another cycle. Whatever it is, you just want to take out your frustrations in a safe and relatively sane way.
I have these days a lot. Part of it is just the toll of being a long-term care provider for someone who has a tenuous grip on reality but can be amazingly stubborn and focused in her determination to do something unsafe (or just highly annoying). But part of it is simply the effect of long term sleep disruption/deprivation that goes with providing care around the clock. I’ve known this for ages, and written about it several times. Anyone who has had insomnia, lived with an infant, or just had a bad string of luck sleeping for a few days will understand completely how grumpy and intolerant it can make you.
Well, it’s worse than you thought. At least, it’s worse than the people who study neuroscience thought:
Walker and his colleagues had 26 healthy volunteers either get normal sleep or get sleep deprived, making them stay awake for roughly 35 hours. On the following day, the researchers scanned brain activity in volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed 100 images. These started off as emotionally neutral, such as photos of spoons or baskets, but they became increasingly negative in tone over time—for instance, pictures of attacking sharks or vipers.
“While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn’t predict they’d overreact as much as they did,” Walker said. “They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That’s a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok.”
The researchers pinpointed this hyperactive response to a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe, a brain region that normally keeps emotions under control. This structure is relatively new in human evolution, “and so it may not yet have adapted ways to cope with certain biological extremes,” Walker speculated. “Human beings are one of the few species that really deprive themselves of sleep. It’s a real oddity in nature.”
In modern life, people often deprive themselves of sleep “almost on a daily basis,” Walker said. “Alarm bells should be ringing about that behavior—no pun intended.”
Gee, ya think?
Sheesh. I need to go find another box to destroy or something.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Failure, General Musings, Government, ISS, NASA, NYT, Predictions, Science, Space, tech
Here’s a prediction: more people are going to die in space.
Not exactly newsworthy, is it? When you engage in the sort of dangerous enterprise like spacetravel (or even just getting there), the learning curve is steep and marked with blood. I can’t see any other way around it – as carefully designed and tested as every component is, there are still going to be failures, and some of those failures are going to mean that good men and women die. I know it. You know it. The astronauts certainly know it.
But just as today’s cars and aircraft are *thousands* of times safer than early cars and airplanes were, so will spacecraft become safer through use and experimentation. Via today’s NYT, the opening paragraphs of this article by James Oberg seems to understand how this learning process works:
4 October 2007—Aboard the International Space Station, the three Russian computers that control the station’s orientation have been happily humming away now for several weeks. And that’s proof that the crisis in June that crippled the ISS and bloodied the U.S.-Russian partnership that supports it, has been solved.
But the technological—and diplomatic—lessons of that crisis need to be fully understood and appreciated. Because if the failure had occurred on the way to Mars, say, it probably would have been fatal, and it will likely be the same international partnership that builds the hardware for a future Mars mission.
The critical computer systems, it turned out, had been designed, built, and operated incorrectly—and the failure was inevitable. Only being so relatively close to Earth, in range of resupply and support missions, saved the spacecraft from catastrophe.
Oberg gives a nice, complete explanation of what happened and how it was overcome. But the concluding paragraph may come as a bit of a surprise:
It is dismaying that after decades of experience with manned space stations, Russian space engineers still couldn’t keep unwanted condensation at bay. But what’s worse is that they designed circuitry that would allow one spot of corrosion to fell a supposedly triply redundant control computer complex. Another cause for dismay is that when trouble did develop, the Russians’ first instinct was to blame their American partners. Such deficiencies need to be worked out in the years ahead, on the space station, before both the technology and the diplomacy can be thought reliable enough for far-ranging missions that replacement shipments wouldn’t be able to reach.
Why is he so harsh? Because, as his wiki entry explains:
During the 1990s, he was involved in NASA studies of the Soviet space program, with particular emphasis on safety aspects; these had often been covered up or downplayed, and with the advent of the ISS and the Shuttle-Mir programs, NASA was keen to study them as much as possible.
Ah. Got it – he’s professionally aggravated that the Russians *haven’t* been willing to learn the lessons of their mistakes. Because until you ‘fess up to the mistakes you make, you can’t learn from them . . . and more people will die, needlessly.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Cassini, NASA, Phil Plait, Saturn, Science, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Titan, Writing stuff
Via Phil Plait, news that in observation of the 10th anniversary of the Cassini launch, NASA has just released a bunch of very cool images and vids from the probe. Given that I set the bulk of Communion of Dreams there in the neighborhood of Saturn, I always find it stunning to see actual images which reflect what I envisioned. In particular, the scene in the book when the first research team is approaching Titan is perfectly caught in this image. Wow.
And here’s a passage from Plait’s post which precisely echoes my own sentiments, and would be prophetic if Communion was real rather than fiction:
We don’t go to these exotic locations in the solar system because we know everything that’s going on, or because we know what we’ll expect to see. We go because we don’t know. But we also go because we need to have our positions rattled, our notions shaken, our ideas tested. When we see Saturn from above, or co-orbit with a moon, or see a rainbow reflected in particles of ice a billion kilometers away, the only thing we can be sure of is that we’ll see new things, unexpected things.
Unexpected things, indeed.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Cassini, NASA, Saturn, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Titan, Writing stuff
My good lady wife sent me today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day of ice geysers erupting on Enceladus, one of the inner moons of Saturn. While I don’t mention any of the other moons in Communion, I would imagine that should Titan’s Mistress ever actually be filmed, then such images would be a natural.
Anyway, it’s a cool image, and I thought I’d share.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 