Let's go to Jupiter!

I watched the live coverage of the Atlas V launch of the Juno mission this morning. Good stuff. It made a vapor cone when it went supersonic! I love that. My twitter feed is just one message after another about the launch. Nicole Stott (@Astro_Nicole) wrote "Our view of Juno launch from Cocoa Beach. Next stop Jupiter! Beautiful! twitpic.com/61dgft" And I thought, oh, she's going to where my brother lives! You mention one town in Florida and I automatically think of the other one. I think she may have meant the rocket though, going to the planet. Wouldn't take 5 years to just go down the road 120 miles.

It kind of amazes me how fast the rockets clear our atmosphere. It is really very thin. I don't care how many times I watch a launch it blows my mind that they're clear of the friction of the air in a matter of hundreds of seconds but there is a lot of energy left to be expended before they're free of the earth's gravity.

Here's a summary of the mission by Phil Plait.

Photos up on Flickr by NASA

Some rocket specifics are here.

This mission was launched aboard an Atlas V 551 vehicle configuration, which includes a 5-meter diameter RUAG Space payload fairing. The booster for this mission was powered by the RD AMROSS RD-180 engine along with five Aerojet solid rocket motors. The Centaur upper stage was powered by a single Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne RL-10A engine.

Screen grab showing big faring around around the spacecraft and the external solid rocket boosters

The angle of this shot from the VAB roof makes it look like disappeared.
It's going away from the camera obscured by the smoke.

Talking about briney water on Mars makes me VERY ANGRY!

I just watched the live NASA press conference about the new evidence of water on Mars. (Here's Phil Plait's take on it.) I actually have a sore throat now from yelling at the screen. I am too touchy when it comes to ignorant people getting jobs covering NASA press conferences when I don't get to go. (I may be especially touchy when it's a blonde woman who shames us all. Actually, no, I would have reacted the same way if it had been anybody. I'm going to avoid referring to her in terms that draw attention to her appearance because that would seem misogynistic and would hurt my argument. Just so you know I thought about it. I'm trying not to do that.) It just hurts me that people sit in the presence of these scientists and insult them. Going to a press conference about geological evidence on Mars when you didn't pay attention in high school science class enough to know the most basic vocabulary is just insulting. It insults me as a person who did pay attention and can't get a job, it insults the people who tried to make their findings accessible to the audience they expected to be there.

So here's the science part. It was pretty straightforward. They have photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that show dark areas at the ends of gullies as though liquid ran out the end during the heat of the summer. There are other possible explanations but none that are related to the effects of additional sunlight.

Mars is salty. This makes perfect sense to me. Just look at it. If I went down to the dried-up creek near my house and found a dried up puddle that had been wet and then dry over and over and I licked it I would expect it to taste salty. I wouldn't expect it to be very salty, but I would sure be surprised if it was sour or sweet. If you filled up a pot and boiled it dry on the stove and did that over and over until you got a crust on the bottom from the minerals in your water and you tasted it wouldn't you expect it to be salty? And if you added back a tiny bit of water wouldn't you expect to get some kind of salty mud?

I don't understand how people are so ignorant. It's like they go through life without observing anything. And somehow they don't even care? It's socially acceptable now to be utterly ignorant of what everybody around you is talking about? So what happened in this press conference that got me in a rant is somebody claimed that as an "average reader" she didn't understand what they meant about the liquid behaving unlike regular water. Could they explain in terms of something she would be familiar with on earth? Was it like say, buttermilk? This is where I got a sore throat. Fortunately the NASA experts, or unfortunately maybe, have more experience with dumb questions I guess so they handled it very calmly and tried to explain what brine means. Has this woman never eaten a pickle? Has she never watched a cooking show? Did she sleep through her junior year of high school? Does she not realize she could go back to her cubicle and look this up on Yahoo Answers? It's not like I expect her to read Spasms of Accommodation, where I already explained this in terms of things that happen on earth.

What does salt do to water? 
 It lowers the freezing point.

Sea ice is fresh. When the ice crystals form on the surface of the North Sea in the winter, for example, the salt molecules are excluded. Fresh ice floats on top of the salty seawater. If it's really windy and cold the surface becomes a strong salty brine and this water gets a good deal colder than 32°F or 0°C. 

I regret that I missed the beginning of the press conference so I didn't get the introductions with everybody's name. The first person who tried to answer her question kind of struggled. Then the lady at the end of the table gave a great example of freezing a bottle of soda. (I think it was Lisa Pratt, a biogeochemist at Indiana University, because that's the one woman they refer to in this article) You get a chunk of water ice in the middle and all the syrup is left unfrozen. They are guessing that the Mars water is like that. A non-freezing syrup.

Now that's a good explanation but I don't think the reporter who asked the question gets it. The one week's lesson in the phase shifts in water in high school science class is really pretty key. Unless you understand that you aren't going to get that adding salt to it changes where the transitions happen, or if they happen at all.

I think really she wanted to know if settlers on Mars could drink the water. Or get a spa treatment with it. I really think she was going for something she could relate to the "average reader." I just don't think she grasped at all that they were just talking about the most basic concepts of geology, nothing related to human beings whatsoever.

So they took some more questions then this same reporter had another question. "Could you explain what you mean by 'gully'?"

WHAT?! Kick her out. Just... she's out of there. I was not a journalism major but I'm pretty sure they teach you not to ask experts to define a word you can look up in an unabridged dictionary. Jot it down and look it up later. Clearly they are all talking about gullies like they are completely common and well known to everybody. I've linked to three articles about this press release and two of them avoid the word gully and refer instead to as "finger-like features lining certain Martian slopes." Phil Plait says gullies without any attempt to define them. I'm guessing it says "finger-like features" in the Science article. I know Phil was watching the press conference because I picked up the URL from his Twitter feed. The gullies they talked about were in addition to the finger-like features. Gully, like a natural ditch, erosion, have you NEVER watched water flow over the ground? Been to the beach and stood in the sand in the surf? Maybe it's just me that imagines where the water flows when I go hiking. I'm afraid it's just me.

So is it acceptable for a science reporter to be blatantly ignorant in front of her colleagues like this? Did I miss something? Are we not trying to be appear intelligent anymore? Is this why I can't get a job? My tendency to privately research embarrassing lapses in my expertise is out of fashion? I have to applaud her for not being shy I suppose. She was clearly thinking of how she was going to write this up for her audience, whoever that is. But it's like she wanted it all to be down in that spiral notebook before she even got out the door. She wanted the scientist presenters to do her job for her.

My expectation with these things is that there is a stair step of dumbing down. You have a Science article that is written for scientists. Discover and Discovery and PCMag bloggers dumb that down one notch for their readers. If a writer asks the original author to explain it at a People magazine level that's just wrong. Or at least lazy. Or ruins your job security.

The engineer in me thinks there has to be a solution to people getting into these press conferences and making me furious (NSFW link. I was EXTRA ranty when I wrote that one.) Could they give them a quiz or something at the door? A handy-dandy bridgekeeper? "What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" I would be sure to watch from the very beginning of the press conference if they would include highlights of the spring-loaded reporter exclusion device in action.

Expletive Weather

If you wondered why I haven't gone out and done anything interesting to take pictures to show you this is why. It has been like this for TWO MONTHS! It's like having a life threatening fever if you go outside. I've grown to actually prefer having one of my three day migraines because then at least I can just lie still and moan incoherently instead of fidgeting at the computer studying web sites about parks in Oregon. I saw a video on weather.com about rescuing a hiker who got lost on Mount Hood for 3 days. That wouldn't happen to me. Naw. Especially if I don't go. I calculated it would cost about $600 for gas to get there and back. Dammit I could fly out of here for that.

I did force myself to go out today even though I felt like I was being baked. I actually burned myself on my car key when I pulled it out of the ignition. The car had been parked in the sun and it super heated the key while I was driving I guess. I thought the steering wheel was unbearably hot, but leather doesn't conduct heat like a metal car key.

I went to Whole Foods (underground parking) to walk around and practice not making eye contact with strangers and to work on wincing painfully when children squeal on the escalator. They had quinces. I'd never seen those before. They look like apples but smell different. Kind of like some sort of melon or pear. Apparently they're in the rose family like the king of all jelly making fruit, mayhaws, so that explains why they are preferred for jelly making. They were very fragrant. It's too hot to make jelly though. Just forget it.

There were some interesting heirloom tomatoes and these beets were as bright as in this picture. I didn't buy any of this stuff. I just like looking at it.

Thrown Away

I had my first 40 hour a week job when I was 18 years old. I was a sophomore at Georgia Tech and I was Features Editor for the newspaper. I was responsible for about 10 employees, determined their pay and everything. I recently had some beers with my old assistant editor after losing touch for 20 years and he pointed this out to me. Well, my career pretty much went downhill from there. I have a terrible resumé. No matter how I rewrite it there's never a smooth transition from one job to another one exactly like it with increasing responsibility. Back in the '90s I went to the career counselor at Georgia Tech for some advice on what to do about it and he told me to group my experience by topics like Management Experience, Technical Experience, Marketing Experience. But he warned me that people would still hate it. Anything besides chronology is foreign and weird and why should they bother when they can just go to the next one in line that looks the way they like it? I actually got my last job without ever showing them any kind of resumé. The head guys went to Georgia Tech and just assumed that any graduate of that fine institute could manage the job they needed done. After a few months I realized my boss thought I was an Industrial Engineering major.

Anyway, the other day I got an invitation to sign up for this new thing, a visual resumé. Here's the example, Ashton Kutcher. It's a start up and it's not ready yet, but I thought what the hell. I can do that myself, just to see what it's like.

I thought I'd throw something in Excel just to get my information organized. After I figured out how to get it to generate dates going back in time in quarterly increments I thought I might have to add that to the top as relevant engineering experience. Man, Excel is a bitch with dates. When I exported it to Google Docs it totally hosed them up, too. So there's a tip. Mac Excel dates are not compatible with Google Docs. I haven't looked at the details, but just be warned.

I messed with the fonts and column size until I got it one page wide and it was seven pages long. Oh good lord. As my friend Steve Leacock says, Excel is not a design tool. But at this point I was so disheartened by the truth in the image I didn't really feel like there was any point making it look good. The data on it would still convey the same cruel message. I am a has-been wanna-be. It reminded me of this scene from Better Off Dead. This movie came out when I was working for the newspaper and the studio sent me a package of black and white glossy stills. I ran a picture of Jon Cusack through the hot wax machine and stuck it on my Calculus binder. Seems we have come full circle, Lane Meyer.



Yes, that is Steven Williams, Mr. X from the X-Files.

I did export the Excel file and shove it into Illustrator to mess with it enough to get a GIF I could throw up here. I'm amused by scrolling.



In my daily comics email today I got this Peanuts that also reminds me of my situation, only this one is sort of sweet. It reminds me to thank those of you who read this blog and commiserate with me in my anxiety about the state of the world.

Thank you, readers. I'll try to think of something interesting to do next so I can write about it for you.

GOD:LESS

I saw this man this morning while I was waiting at the light to turn left. I stealthily got out my phone and took his picture. If you can't read it here's what it says:

HOME:LESS
     ANYTHING
WILL HELP
WILL WORK
 GOD:LESS

What does it mean? If I was holding that sign you could interpret it strictly literally and be right on the mark. Actually most people I know could agree that "less anything will help" at their home. I have too much stuff, don't you? I will work to get rid of it, too. I was actually on my way to patch sheetrock at a friend's house to help him sell the whole damn thing. And I am a big proponent of less God.

But I think context dictates this guy is actually after more stuff, ideally cash. So his sign just puzzles me.