A Picture

I wish I could take a picture of where I am working right now.  I am in a large windowless room with about 24 other people at workstations arrayed in rows and along one side.  The workstations have two or three monitors each. The rows face one wall of monitors that are displaying for all what a few of the workstations have up on one display.  The displays are of live spacecraft telemetry, schedules, graphics of spacecraft orbit and ground system status.  The workstations are staffed with people whose jobs are to assess the performance of this new spacecraft.  A few days ago, it rode on top of a rocket from a standing start to thousands of miles per hour into orbit around the earth. The first few days and weeks after such a ride is when if anything is going to break, it will.  The team in place tonight is assessing the performance of the spacecraft in all its subsystems. Are the solar arrays providing power when they are on the sun, are the batteries taking the charge they need to power the spacecraft when there is no array power? Are temperatures staying warm enough to keep the propellant from freezing? Is the attitude control system keeping the vehicle oriented properly? Is that nagging temperature alarm serious or just cold fuel sloshing past a temperature probe? Is the orbit from the last delta-vee what we expected? Is there some brewing problem that isn’t obvious? 

The small patches of boring brown walls visible are offset by the colors on the screens, maps, and diagrams.  The room is a sea of colors on the screens and of the people.  The room is mostly quiet, some conversations here and there, some laughter, some groans from the hours of being in one place for too long, for the hour which is 1 am. Every now and then activity picks up as planned events fire up as the controller’s voice in Colorado comes over the speakers, announcing the next procedure, calling involved console operators to ensure they are ready to follow and respond as required.  Most of these events are low key data collects, memory dumps from on-board processors, small reconfigurations needed for the current conditions.  Some of these events are serious for the continued success of the mission.  None of that tonight.  But if something decides to break tonight, threatening the future of this spacecraft, there is a team ready to guide it back to health.

My screens have plots of battery charge currents, reaction wheel speeds, propellant line temperatures, command counts incrementing, and documents of schedules, logs, briefing charts for management on that troublesome temperature.  The background on my windows desktop is a picture of the instrument panel of my plane while flying over the coast. It shows navigation radios, airspeed and altitude, attitude and engine parameters.  I can only peek small parts of it in the window gaps, but I know it is there.  There is a contrast between flying my plane and flying this spacecraft.  In my plane, I am by myself with my life literally in my hands. Here I am on a team of people here and in Colorado who are, around the clock, striving to get this spacecraft turned on, tuned up, and placed into its final orbit and operational. The plane is always, gently, trying to dive into the ground for the few hours I am flying it. This spacecraft is going to be in operation for decades if we can help it.

Monstrous

The Trump adminstration separated children from their parents at the border.
They did this with no real means to reunite them.
They announced that DNA testing will be used to try to search for parents and connect them with their children.
I suppose this is a step in the right direction.

But separating kids from their parents without a plan or means to rejoin them?
This would be less monstrous if

• They had put RFID chips under the kids scalp.
• They had clipped livestock ID tags to the kids ears.
• They had tattooed a number on the inside of the kids forearms.

But no.  They didn't bother to keep track.

They are just brown children of brown people and not worth the effort to track.

The people who took care of the kids after separation seem to have some level of morals.  Most of them, not all.

The demonizing of "others" like immigrants and Muslims is a tool of fascism.  This whole immigration "debate" is nothing but fascist theater.  Immigration isn't a problem in the US.  We need the people, we assimilate immigrants better than any nation in the world. The fears of crime and job loss to immigrants is not based on evidence. 

But the fascists need a target because they've got nothing else.

Watsonville Fire In The Sky open house and fireworks

We had a WEACT and EAA119 Young Eagles booth at the open house this year.  The Red Cross guys next to us gave me some tips on how to take pictures of fireworks.  Came out ok!

Remembering Dad

Today would be Dad's (William Roger Hail) 85th birthday.  Since his passing away in December I've been trying to compose my thoughts. I knew the day was going to come but I wasn’t ready for it.
Dad had been in decline for years due to Parkinson's disease. I don't think it affected his personality any but it hit him physically and with hallucinations. He was frustrated as a person who had always been very active and busy; to see things that he knew (or was told) couldn't be there; to be unable to move or even read the way he wanted.  That is a hard way to fight the last years of your life. I suspect there is more I could have done to help him, I think I let him down in that battle.

There are a lot stories to tell, things he did, places he visited and worked.  There are a lot of things I don’t know.  That is a hard part about losing someone, you think of things you didn’t know and now can’t ask. It is probably always that way unless you are a real tight family where there are few secrets with an open and honest relationship.  We weren't that in some ways.  Dad worked hard for us, he was out in the field a lot doing work he seemed to love.  I don't fault him for it, it was what was expected of his gender and generation but I grew used to some distance from him.  It also didn't help that I didn't share his love for hunting and fishing, I tried but wasn't into it.  The same for sports, Dad played baseball, football and basketball in high school and college. We went to games and watched on TV but for me it wasn't all that interesting.  Peter did a lot better in those departments although I think I ended up being a better shot.

Were we did click was military history.  He studied it like nobody else I know and because it was interesting to me, I picked up a lot of it. I could never study it like he would, reading all 15 volumes of Morison's History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, more than once for example.  He could answer any question I had about WW-I or WW-II or of many other conflicts in history.  He and I were never in the military but we had a sense for how conflict starts, how wars progress, mistakes that end up killing innocents, and the evil of those trying to remain in power.  I think he studied military conflict to understand who we are as people, not to be impressed by things being blown up.  He studied the planning, the execution, the consequences of action, and the leaders who were successful in honorable ways and and then showing them to me as examples.  I learned a lot from him, he definitely had an impact on who I, Peter, and Louise became.

His work was pulling out of rocks and mountains the secrets they had about water and where it would go and do.  From ranches in Lassen County to flooded Bengali plains to African deserts to a Caribbean island to Middle East deserts to Peruvian mountains to the US Rockies, he found his working knowledge of water and rocks to be a fulfilling and worthwhile career.  I think, I never asked that question, but I am pretty sure it was for him. I learned what it was to be an engineer by watching him work and on occasion going out to the fields with him.  He showed me responsibility, I could see his work led to important, expensive decisions that would be made from his data and conclusions.  I could see being precise and concise was important in communicating his results. And I could see, which is true in engineering, that many things don't have to be precise, that some things are not significant, they can be rounded off.  Not sweating the insignificant details is part of my engineering career. Not always a good thing in personal relationships I eventually learned.

And then there was the fishing. Everywhere, how was the fishing?  From the smallest creeks of Lassen County, to the Sacramento River, to any river running to the sea in Northern California, to Alaskan rivers, to Russian rivers on the Kamchatka peninsula, to rivers everywhere in the US Rockies, to probably every fishable river in New Zealand.

So many stories with Dad.
Fishing around Snag Lake.
Fishing at Bear Lake.
The cabin on Clear Lake.
Hunting Chukar at Pete's Valley.
Showing me fossil sea shells in a mountain range.
Forgetting the trigger lock key for my shotgun, having him look at me, roll his eyes and leave me at the truck to figure it out.  (I used the hacksaw blade on his pocket knife to cut the lock casing and then joined him on the goose hunt.)
Telling me not to shoot yet, I shoot anyway, the goose shakes it off and takes off again.
Snorkeling in the Caribbean looking for lobster and coming eye to eye with barracuda in the murky water.
Logging data from a water well test in the middle of a sugar field.
Listening to him tell ranchers that water witches are hooey.
Listening to him tell uncles Ray and Leo where to try to find water on their land and what was happening to the water table in the Susan River valley.
His smoking cigars and drinking scotch with grandpa Evan.
Talking to grandpa Bill about rocks and fishing.
Trying to teach me poker and cribbage.
My taking the head off the Ford Falcon engine and putting it back on, his amazement it ran again.
His telling me to turn that crap down when he caught me playing Black Sabbath too loud. (I thought the speakers were off, I had headphones on.)  Dad was a classical guy.
Taking him for an airplane ride for the first time in the Bonanza and the door popping open half way through the flight. The one door was right next to him.  Not a problem.
Snake charmers in our yard in Dacca.
He and I searching for the guys who tried to kidnap me in Dacca.
Taking me to the hospital after Peter ran me over with his bicycle.  "Hey Dad, I think I did something to my elbow."
Regrets for not flying to Fort Collins to attend his retirement party.
Going to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
All of us flying to Tokyo in 1966 on a Pan Am 707.
All of us climbing around the Acropolis in Athens.
The Imperial War Museum in London.
Riding a train up into the Bengali tea plantations.
Golfing around a Hindu temple.
Hanging around the pool at the club.
Watching a movie on 16mm film at the Embassy.
Watching a very unexpectedly raunchy cowboy movie.
Watching John Wayne movies.  He loved John Wayne.
Watching the original Star Trek original broadcasts.
Only getting to see so many cartoons Saturday morning until the basketball or football started.
Going to a Giants game with Willie Mays.
Having Raiders season tickets.
Watching Peter play football.
Vegetable gardening with the mali in Dacca.
Vegetable gardening in San Jose.
Vegetable gardening in Fort Collins.
The story of catching a goose by its leg.
The story of him shooting grandpa Bill in the foot.
Showing me how to clean fish.
Sliding off the road in uncle Glenn's station wagon one icy snowy night out of Susanville.
Throwing up on the road between Chico and Susanville.
Helping Jill birth her puppies.
Telling me I had to take my "tree house" out of the almond tree, which was probably crazy dangerous.
Showing me how to write the number four properly, as an engineer.
Letting me do what I wanted in college, as long as I was an engineer.
Backpacking in the Sierra Nevada.
Backpacking in the Cascades and he has a heart attack, we found out when we got back after three days.
Backpacking in the Rockies and denying we made those nice pine bough beds the nice ranger people found behind us.

I'm glad Dad is no longer suffering, I hope he was ready.  He lives on in my memories.  I am sure in many others.

Slander becomes the tool of the loser?

"When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser" -Socrates

Let’s disassemble this.

1. There is no evidence of this being a quote of Socrates. It has been attributed to him in various social media since 2008 but no scholarly source has it as a quote. But then experts.

2. Since it isn’t a quote, I’ll call it a phrase and we can parse it out.

“When the debate is lost” – What debate is that? Our Presidential election was a debate?  In the context of this posting that seems to be it.  So how was the debate lost? Trump didn’t have a landslide win despite what people tell him and he believes. 46^th out of 56 elections, since Kennedy in 1960 his win is better than only Carter’s and the two GW Bush elections and only 48% of the vote.  An election isn’t a debate in any case. It is a battle between competing ideologies and policies. The “winner” gets to try to implement their ideologies, that doesn’t mean in any way they are correct or that the “losers” are wrong.  That is a false dichotomy logical fallacy. But then logic.

3. “slander becomes the tool of the loser.”  slan . der  noun   the action or crime of making a false spoken statement damaging to a person's reputation.  So who’s reputation are false, damaging statements being made against? Trump’s? Maybe his policies or those of the GOP? First there is an assumption here that false statements are being made.  What would those be? That Trump’s campaign personnel talked with Russians before the election and lied about it? That Trump has made many trips to Russia over the last few years with no deals made and lied about it? That he owes millions to Germany’s Duetche Bank which has been fined 100’s of millions for illegal laundering of Russian criminal money. That Trump is making money personally from his being President, in direct violation of the Constitution? There are so many. Are any of them false? There are a lot of investigations ongoing that seem to be finding evidence. Any of this slander? They are valid questions, more valid than questioning Obama’s US citizenship for which “Slander! Slander!” was not cried. To say Trump is a child molester could be slander because there is… oops, there is evidence of that.  To say Trump was born in Peru of Peruvian parents would be slander.  But then Kenya.

4. The insidious part of this phrase is that it implies that the winner is right, the loser is wrong, and that the loser is lying. Not just lying, committing slander in a legal sense. To be shut up in a legal sense. This is fundamentally un-Constitutional and un-American, directly violates the First Amendment. If acted upon by the government, fascist. The first amendment establishes free speech against the government. Trump is the government now. He is in the big boy game now, not his New York real estate wheeling and dealing bullshit life. Slander is off the table for him and his supporters now. But then World War II.

5. But then emails!