Hi.

        Pull up a chair and set a spell.

                                                        -- Dave

Sunday March 5, 2006

Friday March 17, 2006

Good bumper sticker Dolores mentioned: "REMOVE BUSH'S FEEDING TUBE"

Saturday March 18, 2006

Yeah, Caltrans! I've got to send a hardcopy of this to Jay Leno.

Wednesday April 5, 2006

Breakfast this morning, on the ISA tab as was the room, included Agedashi Tofu, a delightful surprise, along with poached salmon, scrambled eggs with cheeese, potatoes, croissant, tiny blintz, a thermos-pitcher of good coffee, and reconstituted orange juice. The trip home was in slow LA traffic and a rainshower or two along the Foothills. Back to my office just in time to process our parts of Orbit Trim Maneuver number 57, a two second burn of Cassini's main engine out near apoapsis in Saturn orbit. The rocket ship is slowing down near the top of the "hill" from 5.3 kilometers per hour relative to Saturn today, to 4.2 km/hr next Sunday. By the time the craft has fallen back to periapsis on April 29, its speed will have built back up to 52,500 km/h.

After work, H&R Block finally had tax forms for me to sign. I sure wish the U.S. tax system were simple and equitable. As it is in my case owning a business on the side, there is no way I would want to remain familiar enough with the convoluted, contrived, ever-changing tax code to actually prepare my own returns.

In some vague and foreboding way, the tax code feels to me a little like the over-clogged, broken, nearly inoperative southern California transportation "system" does.

Yesterday's mail, that Mitch put in my "In Basket" while I was away, contained a letter from ArtCenter telling me I have been awarded the Faculty Council Stipend I applied for a couple of weeks ago, to build a "real" Gravity-Assist Mechanical Simulator to use in class. I love ArtCenter!

Friday May 19, 2006

This is of course based on the "W" Administration having lied us into a war of its choice, having recently dismissed all admonishments for torture, extraordinary rendition, and illegal detention of detainees, from the United Nations which the Administration despises (and to which it appointed an ambassador hostile to the U.N.). It is because we have been unwilling to lead the world in examples of democracy, fairness, or even legal action. We have been unwilling to move taxpayer-provided subsidies from the dirty, militarized, dead-end fossil fuel industries toward sustainable and renewable energy strategies that simply need to be implemented. But King George is fond indeed of diverting billions of taxpayer dollars to the churches, many of which face litigation and judgements for their fiddlin' pest-priests. All for shame.

And I am ashamed that our national administration is lately preparing to "Iraq" Iran. All of this, and many more of the "W" administration's actions, is very, very much on the wrong track.

Friday May 26, 2006

Took the week off from work, after going in Monday morning to wrap up my weekly ops report. Flew up to Seattle that afternoon, took the shuttle bus to Coupeville, and with the help of Laura Blankenship and friends, spent the week moving all of Beah's stuff out of her house so it can be called vacant by the end of this month. Beah is in the Whidbey Island Manor nursing home, a much better and more comfortable situation for her.

Lots of work. Beautiful location, view right across to the waters of Penn Cove and beyond, the house has tons of potential. Even though it's way too cold up there (aside from the summers) I'd love to have been able somehow to refurbish the place.

Saturday June 17, 2006

Mars and Saturn are being orbited, and right now there are DSN antennas pointed at them. Jupiter used to be orbited, and Mercury has an orbiter en route.

The only one missing, Venus, is up way earlier than I am in the mornings.

Happy birthday, Billy Harris.

Tuesday June 27, 2006

The emptied urchin half-shell measured 9.5 cm inside diameter, and it must have been half that in height. Many of the spines continued to wiggle for up to 5 minutes while on the uni-sashimi plate in front of me. Verily, there were FIVE (5) perfect lobes of light-tan colored gonad, consistant with the animal's 5-fold symmetry. Each lobe was about 8 cm in length. This urchin was full of it. I estimate 80% by volume (plus or minus 4%).

And delicately delicious, perfect accompaniment to the salmon-skin salad and ocha, all for a bill of less than one ATM money-unit coupon. Plus tip.

Tuesday July 11, 2006

Friday July 21, 2006

I found the delivery after coming home from work to take a quick shower before going out to another public talk. It's been three in as many days. A Rotary Club talk at noon on Wednesday warmed me up for Thursday evening's Von Kármán Lecture at JPL. Tonight's was a repeat of last night's, given in the Vosloh Forum at Pasadena City College. The last two were particularly fun, because they showed off some of the activities we do routinely in interplanetary flight operations. Taken for granted in everyday work, they're exciting when viewed from a few steps aback. All three talks went very well. At tonight's, I asked Cynthie to include today's news of citizenship when she introduced me.

In other news, yesterday in traffic I saw a bumper sticker with a U.S. Marine Corps emblem. Its words struck me as almost incredible: "Give War a Chance." It was apparently not a tongue-in-cheek statement, nor was it meant to be ironic, judging from another sticker beside it that also boasted a Marine Corps emblem, whose message definitely touted the advantages of wars in America's history.

I'll defend the driver's right to say that or anything. I'll defend the driver's right to display that Christian fish symbol alongside the Marine Corps stickers. But for me? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, thank you. I'd much rather give peace a chance. Unfortunately, that just doesn't seem to be in today's cards, what with the Cheney-Bush administration leading us along.

Please, please: Cease fire!

Saturday August 11, 2006

The Gravity Assist Mechanical Simulator is just about done, I'm waiting for a graphics board to be completed, before unveiling the whole contraption at Art Center next Wednesday.

Off to BestBuy now, to swap a firewire cable, and then to JPL to relieve the Ace and spend the afternoon with DSS 25 tracking Cassini at Saturn, which appears a few degrees west of the Sun.

Saturday August 11, 2006

Read Seymour Hersh's article in the new New Yorker this morning. Geez, no wonder the U.S. was loath to demand a cease fire. Our slimy secretive government has been planning with Israel all along, and Israel's "retaliation" served as a rehearsal of the neocon administration's plans to "Iraq" Iran. Of course the W admin denies it. This Cheney-W gang is W-ay out of control.

Thursday August 24, 2006

Thursday September 21, 2006

Got to class and did some more "Carrot Top" style demonstrations (in his comedy routines, he relies on a trunk full of props, one or more used with each joke or two). This was after gathering on the veranda looking west to the bright dusk to review last week's discussion about the Sun. We even had a look at Jupiter, low near the smokey horizon, in tripod-mounted binoculars. Then we spread out in the Wind Tunnel and deployed a 205-foot wide solar system scale model, with components the participants fabricated in ten minutes. This time I remembered to set the "C-Crawler" going at the scaled down speed of light. At its carefully calibrated speed, it would have taken it almost an hour and a half to crawl its way out to the Saturn site. It made for some really good discussion. A huge improvement over last time, when I forgot to take it out of its carrying case!

We talked a lot about forward-scattering of light, with demo, and about the Cassini images taken last weekend from deep within Saturn's shadow. After packing up, I talked to Dana about National Geographic wanting to film the GAMS, moved the seven black boxes to a corner for me to pick up the next day, and went home.

Wednesday October 18, 2006

There's this old olive tree stump that I see when I'm driving home from work. It's inside the gate and across the parking lot in an elementary school. I thought it needed a hat. It only stayed in place a couple of days, though.

Answered an email today that Bruce Balan had sent Monday. I was eager to respond, but wanted to read his entire website first. This took a while. Bruce is the one who bought our 46-ft 1969 Cross Ketch Almitra and turned her into Migration. I hadn't been in touch with him since he made the purchase back around 1992. Here's a picture of Migration. Bruce's website is great reading, if you click the picture.

Thursday November 2, 2006

Wednesday November 15, 2006

Finally got the Gravity Assist Mechanical Simulator installed on the first floor of the Space Flight Ops Facility at JPL. Space Navigators Jerry and Troy scrutinized my poster and mechanics, and didn't complain. It's been there almost a week now. The meetings and permissions and emails to get it there took a long, long time. But now I can put my car in the garage again! May it live out its days there while I design the busloads-of-kids-proof Museum Quality version to post online.

Saw Mercury for a few seconds as it was transiting the Sun, thanks to Jane Houston Jones's sidewalk astronomy in the mall at work last week.

Accompanied Charley making a pitch about PlanetTrek to the Pasadena Unified School District Board last night. Well presented, well received.

Sunday November 19, 2006

The Boston ivy has seen seven Aprils, and before it sees another one it will have lost its last leaf from the spring of this year. But the berries it has set, which look very much like little grapes, in fact the entire plant resembles grape, might last well into next spring.

Mockingbirds seem to be the only local wildlife that likes to eat them, and they go slowly.

Monday November 27, 2006

A few minutes ago I watched the program register on board Cassini. The Program ID is 720 decimal, indicating that the Orbit Trim Maneuver commands that I had sent earlier this morning had been received intact.

I walked outside onto the balcony looking north from the third floor. There are no windows in this building. Except on the computer screens. The morning is dark, silent, and cool. There's a barely perceptible mist falling, giving the still air a sweet aroma. Exquisite! I look up and north toward the "Meadows" neighborhood mesa where the house is. Mitch is at home, sleeping.

Back inside, I sit down just in time to catch a call from the DSS14 on the voicenet. The hydrostatic bearing that carries the 2.7 million kilogram, 70-meter diameter, steel dish slowly around from east to west in azimuth on a thin film of high-pressure oil, has hit a trouble spot and the brake has set. Almost immediately, the receiver, and the telemetry from the spacecraft, went out of lock as the Earth's rotation carried the big antenna's pointing away from Saturn, eastward of the planet. We turned off the 18kW transmitter so they could troubleshoot the hydrostatic bearing pad. One hour fourteen minutes and thirty-four seconds later, the spacecraft will have turned off Earth anyway, to fire its thrusters for a few minutes. We'll miss a little Ranging data, but that's ok, we're out near apoapsis where the range value is changing more slowly.

Sure enough, tracking resumed five minutes later, having gotten over the trouble spot at 135.1 degrees azimuth on the bearing race. Receivers and telemetry are back in lock, and the uplink was turned back on.

Now it's near the end of my 11-hour graveyard shift. The propulsive maneuver went fine. Firing four little 0.9-Newton thrusters for 165.2 seconds gave the spacecraft a delta-V of 0.2198 meters per second. The Navigators designed this to set up for the next Titan flyby, December 12, at 1000 km altitude above the 5000-km diameter satellite.

Saturday December 23, 2006

Humming under the power of the Sun, wind, and other renewable sources, the California System would shine as an example for other states, and other countries, to build upon.

Note that Bush's touted "Hydrogen System" is merely a continuation of the centrally-controlled 2006 system. Hydrogen is not in itself a strictly renewable fuel. Nuclear power generation can be made to produce hydrogen, but is a terrible source of very-long-term pollution, and closely linked to WMD production. Nasty.

As long as I'm wishing for a new energy and transportation paradigm, I might as well and go ahead and wish for something else California really needs... a Bullet Train connecting the San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco Bay areas, and a few points in between.

I sure wish more of our elected leaders would drink some of this Kool-Aid. And soon.

Saturday February 3, 2007

What I finally figured out is that the stuff we feed into a human body can be chosen to provide a high level of natural health. That, and a bit of walking and being active, as we've long known. But we do NOT need a humungous morbidly obese Pharmaceutical-industrial system that insists we whine at our Doctors until they give out a script for Whatevericol. What we need is much trimmer, and fit at minimum to the basic needs of every citizen.

Together with physical health, figuring it out includes finding that there is important knowledge and growth available. The Paradigm, the complete set of mental assumptions, that we make of the input from our senses is another area ripe for trading out. In my childhood I was assured by many of the adults, with the blessed exception of my father, that the local shamans could actually conjure up the almighty GAWD of the infinite universe in gold cup (give us more gold, please, and we will continue doing it for your Great Benefit, and for that of your many children). I let go of that little sub-paradigm around pubescence, though most of my aunts and uncles held onto it to the end. That paradigm requires little thinking. It becomes comfortable.

Knowledge that has come available in recent decades enjoys the benefit of being able, thanks to relatively modern global communication, to incorporate the paradigms different cultures have developed over the millennia. And growth is available, once the more important of the resulting keys have been gleaned and acted upon, all a process of separating and apprehending the grain from the piles of chaff.

And to think my high school physical education instructor (who also "taught" the general science class) was content to watch me and other bumps on the log sit out the all of the sports activities, mainly because we hadn't been taught, or learned on the street, the right moves and rules of the game. Wasn't that his job? Naw, couldn't be bothered. Let 'em sit it out and sip Coke.

My Irish father would say, "Oiy, veh!"

January came and went. Started a new term at Art Center College, though with fewer students than last terms. Maybe I'll try to set up a "miniature" course, without the steep tuition, at JPL, making use of the facilities. It could be like a maximum of 9 adults, two hours one night a week for three or four weeks. I think I know how to go about getting it rolling.

Monday February 5, 2007

Friday February 9, 2007

(It was cloudy, so we could see Venus only from inside the auditorium.)

Monday February 20, 2007

The Our Mother

Saturn's Day March 17, 2007

My sign was different. On the front it read, "STOP BUSH" and on the back said "NO ENTRY," with "IRAN" written inside a circle-white-bar traffic icon.

But I can't go to Hollywood & Vine today, though I had planned to. I have a meeting at work this afternoon. I wish I could have gone. Jackson Browne was going to be performing!

I gave my sign, plus a bunch of copies of each, to Mitch, who will give them away in the crowd. Mitch, you're not wearin' the green today.

But may you attract the media anyway!

By way of elaboration, I fully respect and honor the members of the military who are fighting, carrying out their orders as they are expected to do. This is basic to the needs of the country... any country (my own military service was during the Vietnam war). My argument, once again, is with the leadership. We watched, helpless, as Dick Cheney and George W. Bush railroaded their neocon plans on Iraq from their first days in office. The 9-11 attacks only served to hasten and facilitate their misguided, twisted push to invade. Now the shameful truth is being pried out of the Administration's grip officially, bit by bit, substantiating what we all knew in 2000.

Sunay March 25, 2007

Today another occultation of Titan repeats. A previous radio occultation of Titan was carried out in 1980 by the Voyager team, when Voyager-1 passed behind Titan as seen from Earth, and its X-band and S-band radio beams were recorded on Earth as they passed through Titan's amosphere a billion kilometers away. Had Voyager-1 not succeeded with this, by the way, Voyager-2's trajectory was then to be altered to repeat the experiment. Voyager-1's success meant its sister ship would remain on course for Uranus and Neptune flybys.

Today's Cassini Titan Radio Science experiment will probe Titan's environs near the poles using beams of microwave radio energy in three frequency bands: X-band, S-band, and Ka-band. Today's Titan flyby also includes another experiment: bouncing the radio beams off Titan's surface (called a bistatic experiment) at a glancing angle that would produce a specular or near-specular reflection to Earth-bound observers if it hits the surface of any of those lakes or seas of cold liguid hydrocarbons.

Yesterday's session on the lawn south of Beckman Auditorium saw a few hundred people viewing the first-quarter Moon through a 10-inch aperture Dob after Sally Ride spoke inside. Randii said her talk was good. Lunar theme, thus the telescope on the lawn. The audience was a Beckman-full of grade-school girls and their families and teachers. I've learned to say, "Twist this focus knob a little bit and see if it makes the image any sharper" in my sleep. I did see Sally's ride. I had to follow this over-stretched Lincoln limosine with ten passenger windows, out the parking lot and through a left turn onto Del Mar. The windows, of course, were too darkly tinted for me to see Sally riding, though. But seeriously, reflecting on how today we know not only how the Moon orbits Earth, but we know basically that it was formed in a big collision of proto-Earths, and we also know how the whole solar system was formed. We know what those pinpoints of light in the night sky are.

What we know today, what we can grasp as we look out from this privileged vantage atop the enormous, honored shoulders of previous investigators, fulfils the soul with the knowledge of many things certain.

It answers a hundred deep-rooted questions from humanity's deep-rooted past. And while raising a hundred more, it places knowledge itself in context with the whole nature of human existence.

Friday May 17, 2007

Open house tomorrow for JPL. The Voyagers have been in flight nearly 30 years, and that's what we're featuring in the mall. Behind, ahem, Cassini, that is.

I hope Mitch goes to "Open House" at South Campus tomorrow!

Sorry for the big animated GIF. I hope it's loaded by now.

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