Graduation and Art on Saltspring

Jun 11, ’07 12:00 PM

I’m on the MV Chelan, headed back to San Juan from Saltspring Island, up in British Columbia. I went up for the weekend for a graduation and an art show. Kris’s son Julian graduated from Gulf Islands Secondary School this week, before heading off to Emily Carr in Vancouver next fall. I’ve known Julian all his life, virtually, so it was terrific to see him graduate and move onward. In a school which seems to cultivate individuality, Julian still stood out at graduation: tall, dressed in green sport coat and combat boots, and with a foot-high green mohawk, plastered into a rigid fin. He won four scholarships or bursaries — a strong performance even for a community which gave away dozens of awards totalling $80,000. At any rate, his parents and friends are very proud of him and can’t wait to see how he does at Emily Carr next year.

Yesterday, my friend Kim participated in the annual group photography opening at Artspring in Ganges. Four of her works, including a series of terrific close-scale landscape shots from Saltspring, were featured along with other island artists. Several folks had intriguing work as well, but the most interesting from my perspective was Janet Dwyer’s “scanography”: a technique where solid objects are arranged, sculpture-like, directly on the bed of a flatbed scanner, covered with black cloth to block extraneous light, and scanned at very high resolution. The resulting images are utterly stunning in detail and richness of color. Dwyer’s website isn’t up to date with many of these remarkable images, but if you’re curious her website includes contact information.

(I wrote this a couple of days ago and forgot to post it — when the WSF wi-fi installation finally includes us poor northerners sometime in 2008, it’ll actually be true that I’ll be posting from the ferry. But until then…)

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Gore and Keith Olbermann: Is the VP Running?

Jun 1, ’07 8:18 PM

If you haven’t watched the interview this week between Keith Olbermann and Vice President Al Gore, I recommend it highly.  Keith is actually on vacation this week, with Alison Stewart hosting instead.  But for the last three nights, in the absence of Keith live, the show has played "another part" of his interview with Al Gore, apparently filmed sometime last week.

In reality, pretty much the whole interview aired right after we all came back from Memorial Day weekend, and each night since, Alison Stewart’s job has been to re-play segments of the interview.  Mostly, the segments have been edited from slightly different sections of the interview, except one:  each night this week, Keith Olbermann asks Al Gore whether he’s running, gets the predictable answer "no" and then the predictable answer "I don’t rule it out" and then Keith asks when the "window closes." 

This is picture-perfect for Gore.  It’s a win-win situation.  If I were him, I’d be waiting for a serious "Draft Gore" movement to gain media coverage, and if it doesn’t, as Keith indicated recently, the ambiguity is helping book and DVD sales and thus exposure for his causes and efforts.

And if such a Draft Gore movement gains steam, he’s still got plenty of time to formalize a campaign staff (want to bet it’ll take less than a couple of days?) and organization, not to mention fundraising (1).

The Veep is playing it brilliantly.  Except for one thing.  He needs to figure out how to answer a question without verbal "footnotes," subordinate clauses, and long rambling asides.  Forget the blowjob – I’m having 2000 flashbacks and remembering why folks originally *liked* the directness of G.W.

If Gore is serious about maybe being serious, some folks better be sitting him down every morning and smacking his knuckles with a ruler every time he answers a question using semicolons and "one more point."

NOTES:
(1)  Yes, I know there’s a Draft Gore website and effort.  But as of today they claim 86,500 signatures, which works out to about 1700 people per state in the Union.  Or about 3K people for the coastal states, and about 500 people each in the middle of the U.S.  Whatever.  Wake me up when he gets a few million nationally — remember, he needs tens of millions of votes to win….?

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Fire in the Sky Redux

May 31, ’07 6:43 PM

Most of the time when launching a big rocket, like we did over the weekend at Fire in the Sky, Copyright 2007 Linda LantzyI don’t have time to get decent photos.  The entire flight often lasts less than a minute, and during the descent you’re mostly busy trying to triangulate where it’s coming down, taking bearings and trying to estimate distances, so you can narrow down the area of weeds, grass, or sagebrush you’ll be trudging through later on.
 

So I didn’t get any pictures of my Giant Leap Elipse coming down, under the TAC-1 parachute, but another spectator at FITS did, and here it is!  The TAC-1 chute is big, and with anything smaller than a 3 inch airframe it wouldn’t even fit into the tube, but it’s strong and did a great (and almost as  importantly, visible) job of bringing down the rocket.  The small triangle you can see in the photo is a folded hexagon of Nomex cloth, which protects the chute from the heat of motor ejection while stuffed into the body of the rocket.  Much harder to see is the long Kevlar cord which ties together the two sections of the rocket, along with the steel quick-links (like small locking carabiners) that connect all the bits together. 

NOTE:  The photograph here is (c) 2007 Linda Lantzy, and is not covered by the Creative Commons License which governs other content on this website.  See Linda’s PhotoShelter site for licensing information.

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Fire in the Sky 2007

May 28, ’07 10:29 AM

I just got home from Fire in the Sky 2007 in Mansfield, WA.  FITS is Washington Aerospace’s spring high-power rocket launch, drawing folks from all over the western U.S. for three days of launches and extreme engineering geekiness. 

My friend Bill Barnes and I both tried for, and achieved, our NAR Level 1 certifications, allowing us to build and fly rockets requiring motors with more than 62.5 grams of propellant, and giving between 160 and 640 Newton-seconds of total impulse.  I flew the PML Phobos, with a 29mm motor adapter in the 38mm motor mount, to accomodate the H128W motors we used for certification.  Both of our flights went picture-perfect with motor ejection; I used a 36" chute with central spill-hole to bring the rocket down gently but fast and straight.  I don’t have a good picture of the Phobos launch, unfortunately — the H128W took it off the pad faster than I could hit the shutter release.  But Bill and Susan might have video of both our cert flights, so that might be forthcoming when we can get it transferred.

After trudging through the sagebrush and getting woozy from too little water, too much sun, and no
food, I recovered theDsc_0010 Phobos (with spotting help from Bill – thanks!) and we completed our cert. 

At this point, since I was covered by Kent Newman’s LEUP (thanks!), I was able to fly the Giant Leap Elipse.  In order to get the CG properly positioned about 4 inches ahead of the CP (center of pressure), I had to load fishing weights (and a couple of extra AA batteries) into the nose cone.  With the 48" TAC-1 parachute, MC2 flight computer, and a 38mm I357 motor, the Elipse weighed in at 7.5 pounds or so — a heavy rocket but the I357 had plenty of punch to get it off the pad The Aerotech I357 generates a total of 342 Newton-seconds of impulse, with a peak thrust of 432.8 Newtons.  As a comparison, if you’ve used the black-powder Estes model rocket motors, the D12 delivers a total of 16.8 Newton-seconds of impulse, and 29.7N maximum thrust — so the I357 is delivers about 20x more thrust than a D12.   

The Elipse launched perfectly and the TAC-1 chute was easily visible in red and black against the clouds.  I managed a picture of the launch itself (shown here, click for a bigger version), which generated a fairly impressive smoke trail and nozzle flame.  To get a sense of scale for this picture, the Elipse is 6.5 feet tall and 3 inches in diameter.  Recovery was easy since it drifted back towards the pads.  I’m thrilled at how the weekend went, and eager to build something new for August or October. 

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Greg Bear’s Quantico

May 25, ’07 12:01 PM

I finished Greg Bear’s latest, Quantico, the other day, as a break in between stacks of material for the dissertation and before I start the second volume of Proust for our group’s July get-together. I should say, at the outset, that Bear’s publisher sent me a copy of the book for promotional purposes, so that I’d write about it here on my website. So I’m also holding up my end of the bargain.

In general, I liked the story. Greg Bear is a terrific author of hard science fiction, and anybody with his range (Slant and its predecessor are favorites of mine) deserves a read. Many of my favorite authors of speculative fiction are writing about terrorism these days, as you’d expect, and it’s always interesting to see alternative versions of how our own future might evolve. Bear’s version occurs in the very near future, after another major terrorist attack, but unlike more heavy-handed approaches to such a future, his version of the United States is palpably close to our own — but with additional crackdowns, additional surveillance, and additional hysteria. But all of these measures are very realistically haphazard, and Bear doesn’t flirt with overarching Orwellian schemes, preferring to show us the piecemeal evolution of our response to Islamic terrorism. In this way, his story seems quite realistic.

I won’t spoil the plot, because I definitely think it’s worth a read. Perhaps the biggest issue I had with the novel, however, is simply its size. Given the scope of the story he spins in Quantico, the book ought to have been a bit longer. The story feels a bit rushed, and certainly there is little time for his characters to truly develop. We get backstory but little evolution on their parts. Granted, it’s nice that not every author feels the need to deliver doorstop-sized tomes for every book, but Quantico would have benefited, I think, from a slower, more textured unfolding of its tale.

At the moment, I’m on the ferry headed for the mainland given the holiday weekend. I’ve got Richard Morgan’s new one, Black Man, in tow, freshly delivered by Amazon UK. I’m a fan of his previous Kovacs novels (especially the original, Altered Carbon), so I’m expecting a richly technological noir thriller.

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Open Letter to the Democrats

May 23, ’07 8:38 PM

Dear Democratic Senators and Representatives:

Yesterday you gave in to pressure and announced a compromise on the supplemental war spending bill that gives the President no enforceable conditions on continuing the Iraq War. Instead, you are poised to vote tomorrow on a bill that contains “optional” benchmarks, which the President is free to ignore. You promise to renew the fight this summer to bring the war to an end, bring our troops home safely, and hold the President accountable. After four or more months of heavy American losses and increasingly intense civil war.

Today, much of the Democratic “base” is outraged. Perhaps we’re outraged because you failed to make this “the beginning of the end” of the war. Perhaps because you showed every appearance of caving in. Or perhaps because you thought that we’d fall for benchmarks that were optional, and we’d think that you’d actually done your jobs.

You’d better hope it’s the first possibility — that you just lost this one, fair and square. Because quite frankly, speaking as one of the “base,” and a financial supporter of Democratic candidates in the House, Senate, and for the Presidency, you’d better convince us you weren’t simply weak, or even worse, that you were trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

Because you’re on probation. I don’t know how many other Democrats feel the same way, but I’m holding off writing checks for Democrats until I see who has backbone. I want to know which of you, if any, has real leadership skills.

I’m waiting to see which candidates know when losing a vote is the right thing to do, to make a point. I’m waiting to see which Democrats think that being on the winning side of a vote is more important than doing what you were elected to do. Who think that the American people aren’t paying attention, and that maybe we won’t notice the “optional” part of the benchmarks you worked so hard to pass. The first set of folks have my vote. The other two categories should start figuring out which lobbying firms still hire Democrats, because you’ll want to beat the rush and get your resume circulated.

Nobody I know expected you to end the war instantly. I didn’t expect that this vote would work miracles. I did expect, after the election last November, to see some folks step up and display leadership. Reid and Pelosi seemed to be going great guns, but of late you all seem to be going through the motions, with one, if not two, eyes firmly on the polls and your re-election prospects.

Tonight, in his Special Comment, Keith Olbermann said something potentially very prescient. The Democratic nomination for President in 2008 may very well hinge on how the Democratic candidates in the Congress vote tomorrow. Senator Clinton has always danced around questions regarding the Authorization for use of force in Iraq, and Senator Obama has been able — thus far — to safely criticize those who voted for the war, since he wasn’t around in Congress to vote at that point.

Well, tomorrow we get to see who’s learned what lessons from the last couple of years. Senator Obama, if you would lead this country, show us your leadership with your vote tomorrow. And Senator Clinton, here’s your chance to answer those critics who hound you about your AUMF vote.

As wrong as President Bush is, and has been, about this war, he’s never been afraid to be unpopular among substantial portions of this country. The Democrats need to take a page — but only this page — from his book. Do the right thing, and gain our support. Play politics as usual, and lose it.

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