Mars Post Script

The Phoenix has landed. I repeat, the Phoenix has landed.

I'll let the audio story in the link above fill in the details. What I really want to know is when NASA will end the conspiracy of silence concerning Calvin and Hobbes.

Random Thoughts, Beyond The Horizon

There is always something about horizons. From Ocean Beach, I always find my attention captured by cargo ships, incoming or outgoing, especially at night with their running lights splitting the fog as they approach the Golden Gate Bridge. This in spite of my reservations about cargo ships, and my leeriness in particular about cargo ships around our bridges, what with the spate of ships, big and small, that have been playing bumper cars with immovable towers of metal of late.

It just seems like such a lonely proposition, steering a hulking metal vessel into the night, across the ocean, even just down the coast.

I wonder where they are going, or where they have come from. There is a small, barely noticeable feature in the Business section of the paper that lists ships scheduled to arrive or depart that day, with their origin or destination listed as appropriate. And I always get a frisson of excitement when a ship's destination or origination is listed as "unknown." That's just too romantic for words, if hardly reassuring or entirely plausible in the days of Homeland Security.

These days, of course, horizons are hardly earthbound. Today at approximately 4:53 p.m., the Phoenix Mars lander is scheduled to complete a voyage started last summer by settling to the cold polar soil of Mars, in an effort to study whether conditions for life could once have existed. Here's the link to the mission's home page.

Space exploration is the proof that we are both capable of great and complex achievements, and also fallible, our efforts not yet perfect. Several recent attempts to land on Mars have met with utter failure.

There is also a strangely poignant quality to this program and the robots. Consider the following capsule summaries of recent missions, taken from the Press Democrat of 4/23/08:

Mars Observer: Communication lost in August 1993 before going into orbit.

Mars Global Surveyor: Orbiter arrives in September 1997. Battery failed in 2006.

Mars Climate Orbiter: Lost on arrival in September 1999.

Mars Polar Lander: Contact lost during arrival at south pole in December 1999.

There is something cold and sterile, yet also just a bit sad in those phrases: "communication lost"; "battery failed"; "lost on arrival"; "contact lost". What would it be like to be an operator on Earth, having spent months, even years, monitoring the progress of these robots, and one day seeing these eyes and ears flicker and vanish?

At the Sunday morning community market at the local school, there happens to be a retired professor who still acts as an adviser to the JPL, and who asked us this morning to keep our fingers crossed for the lander. I asked him if now that the mission is about to pass out of their hands, if there wasn't a feeling akin to watching a child graduate from college, and he agreed that it was something similar. After all, he said, having worked on the lander for so many years, he knows every nut and bolt on the thing.

It is not a simple process, landing a lander, at least not if you want it to remain a Phoenix Mars Lander as opposed to a Phoenix Mars Pancake. There is precise timing required for deploying a parachute, firing retro rockets, etc. The math is staggering to me. Any errors in the following attempted summary, or any incorrect wording, is entirely my own fault.

Frank explained it this way: there is a set of coordinates based on the shape of Mars, with a small target hole that is rotating, as planets do. This target is about 25 km across, which may sound like a lot, but remember the distance they have had to propel this lander, as well as the size of the target in relationship to the rest of Mars. They have wriggle room on this target area of about 1 to 1 1/2 feet, I believe Frank told me. So not only are they trying to thread the eye of a needle, they are trying to throw the thread through the eye of a needle which happens to be rotating constantly, and they are throwing the thread from, say, London, and the needle is in New York (That proportion no doubt does not work except for poetic license; I was an English major, not a mathematician).

Furthermore, they must time the descent and the changes of speed just so, with only a tiny margin of error. They also have to worry about the attitude of the nose of the lander upon descent. If the nose is too high, it will 'skip' across the atmosphere like a rock across a river; if the nose is too far down, it will descend far too quickly, and the atmosphere's friction will overwhelm the heat shield. I may have these consequences mixed up, but you get the idea.

In other words, there is a very good reason why rocket science is used in the phrase "It's not rocket science" or, alternatively, "You're no rocket scientist."

How freaking cool is this stuff?

A Larger World More Precious Than My Own

I sometimes forget the fact that I am a damn lucky boy. I live in a city I love, by the ocean, with friends, with enough money to make ends meet and have a few small pleasures here and there, and with easy access to the Sonoma Coast.

Friday morning I drove to Petaluma, had hot chocolate and a croissant outside, on a deck overlooking the river, then drove west via the Bodega Highway to the Pacific Ocean, and the coast that I have dreamed about since I was a kid. The jagged rock formations, just off shore, that in my dreams protrude from the water like shark dorsal fins. The arches that I saw collapsing in explosions of waves and wind.

I stopped at The Tides restaurant, long since remodeled beyond recognition of the site of a scene in Hitchcock's The Birds. Next door to the restaurant is a dock and a processing facility for fishing boats that trawl the bay and the ocean beyond. Sometimes sea lions are to be found among the pilings, lazily swimming and barking as they look for scraps from the fishermen. This Friday, there was one that must have been foraging at the bottom of the water, for all we saw of him were his flippers, pointing straight up out of the water as if he were waving to the humans at the railing. A little further out, a few of his friends were frolicking in the sun, flinging fish around like frisbees. Another sea lion, golden brown and long, emerged and submerged regularly, cocking his head to the right each time, as if to drain water from his ear.

I drove north lazily, stopping as usual at Duncan's Cove, just to watch the water and listen to the Counting Crows for a while. The water stretching out to the horizon, the surf breaking against the cliffs, the houses perched so precariously on the bluffs. It is a remarkable landscape, vivid and tranquil. It's a cure for the latent selfishness, a vanity or an insecurity, however you want to label it, that sneaks into my heart now and again. It just washes it away and makes me feel like a kid again, ready to play in the sand and the surf again.

At Goat Rock Beach, near the mouth of the Russian River, rope fences try to keep people back fifty yards from the water's edge that serves as a harbor seal nursery from March to July. You see them lined up like fuzzy sandbags, much less graceful on shore than in the water. Pelicans sweep and circle and plummet headfirst into the water, tucking their wings tightly to their flanks.

And today was my lucky day, as I saw something I'd never seen before. A few older seals undulated lazily through the crashing, curling waves, chaperoning a fuzzy pup, whose head kept popping up out of surf that looked much too shallow to contain anything thicker than a starfish. And a little ways down the beach from the swimming lesson, another seal was flolloping around in the foam, mostly on land, flailing a fish around in its mouth.

Days like Friday make me feel at once happy and scared. Given the pseudo-ethical behavior of the Environmental Pillaging Agency and their 'protection' of polar bears--named an endangered species, but with their habitat opened for oil drilling--it makes me wonder how the hell we can be so reckless with a world so beautiful as this. And what the hell can we do to protect it.

I wish I had answers. Here's one place trying to help.

http://www.marinemammalcenter.org

The Face In The Glass, Or Home

In the middle of the redwoods, nestled in fog and rain, with the distant sound of a sea lion's bark interrupting the silence, there is a house that my uncle designed and my dad helped build. Attached to this house is a long wooden deck, where you can lean against the railing and look down a hillside of madrones and manzanitas and redwood trees towards the ocean. This is the railing against which my dad leans to smoke, and I lean to nurse a gin and tonic.

I'm here this weekend for peace and quiet. I won't try to define what this home means to me, because you can't tell people what a childhood sanctuary means; or maybe you can, but it won't convey the same impact as it would to have them in that place with you, so you can share the physical experience. And even that is never going to capture exactly how you yourself feel about it.

Yesterday evening, I had my back to the ocean, and caught my reflection in one of the many sliding glass doors that comprise the wall.

Inside the house, there is a picture of my dad in his long-haired, mustached carpenter days, holding court before the fellow workers during the construction. And as I looked at my ghostly, mirrored image in the door, it made me think of that picture. That's when I took the above photos, admittedly blurry, admittedly taken with a cell phone's camera.

When I went back inside, my uncle said, "I have good news and bad news for you."

"What's that?"

"You're starting to look like your father and your grandfathers, both of them."

I guess that means this Sonoma Coast is home in the same way Montana is. And that is fine by me.

Mail Fraud

Some people always want to believe they can get something for nothing. That sort of wistful idealism/gullibility is part of what produced the subprime mortgage crisis. It's why some of us play the lottery, just because it WOULD be fun to get a million somethings for nothing.

It is a belief that can all too easily be exploited.

Working at a financial institution, I have recently encountered an attempted mail fraud scam in which people are receiving counterfeit cashier's checks with their names handwritten; often these checks are delivered by UPS. Sometimes there is no explanation for the check, but more often than not, they are asked to take the check as payment for online work or to help someone move from Brazil or some other reason, to deposit it and keep a percentage, then wire funds back to a third party.

The catch, of course, is that the check would not be paid, so after the victim has sent off money to a stranger, the deposit would be taken away and they would find themselves out thousands of dollars.

Fortunately, most people are suspicious enough to call to verify that a check is valid, and most banks are alert enough to watch out for fraudulent checks. But as the economy worsens, people are going to get more and more desperate and less and less careful, and it only takes one careless person and one careless bank.

These scams are based on the same principles as phishing emails: someone, somewhere, is going to take the bait, either through distraction or carelessness or greed or desperation.

Phishers are clever. I recently got an email purporting to be from paypal, notifying me of possible fraudulent activity on my account that they wanted to verify. The email was clever, but the address was clearly weird: service@limited.org. I forwarded that to paypal's spoof email address.

It's important to be alert to these issues, and please remind anyone you know who gets one of these offers that you really can't get something for nothing.

Random Thoughts, Finding A Forum

So I took the chance of submitting an edited version of my last blog as a letter to the editor at the SF Chronicle. I need to put my voice out there as something more than preaching to a choir, I suppose, and the Chronicle qualifies as more than the choir, even if SF is probably a fairly friendly audience for what I have to say, assuming it is selected for publication:

"One line from the decision overturning the ban on same-sex marriage made me feel particularly good: "[O]ur state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person . . . does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation . . ."

The immediate reaction from those pushing to amend the constitution to make marriage only between a man and a woman is their right, of course, and is a vital element of a functioning democratic process.

But why make this stand that smacks of xenophobia? Two people expressing their love for each other through marriage in no way invalidates the love of any other couple.

Marriage as a sacred thing? What of marriages involving domestic abuse?

Marriage is only as sacred as the love that each partner feels for the other, and that sort of love is gender-independent.

Please tell me why you think gay marriage marks the end of the world, especially in light of the world ending for so many in Burma and China.

With the abundance of humanitarian causes available in the world, why work to deny someone a loving and publicly recognized relationship?"

A few fascinating questions emerged as I prepared this. What is the proper way to engage in a topic likely to provoke some yelling and screaming and pinching, with infants even worse? And is it worth the risk? Having started reading The Assault On Reason this week, I think it is worth it, though I don't know the right method. I'm trying to strike a conversational, non-antagonistic tone, something that might make people think. I don't know how well this would succeed. Any thoughts on how one might try to put his voice out there in a potentially helpful, non-divisive way?

And it is also fascinating how the editing constraints of a word count make you really reflect on the core message and your target audience. in less than 200 words, how do I say what I want to say in a way that might make people take notice and consider what i have to say?

If I have a purpose in life, it is to speak up for what I think is right. That doesn't help me pick a career, and might sound a bit pompous, and might sound like I have delusions of being able to change the world. But nevertheless, of all the things I question about myself and what I pursue, this is one area where I feel certain. And that small sense of purpose, even if it is a pebble tossed in a stream, is kind of a good feeling.

If only a letter to the editor was a PAYING proposition.

Random Thoughts, Love and Compassion: The Gay Marriage, Burma, and China Edition

This past week, the California State Supreme Court issued a decision that caused one or two people to sit up and take notice. They overturned a state ban on same-sex marriage, ruling that such a ban was unconstitutional.

From the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Ronald George (not that his party affiliation is relevant, but he is a Republican; the entire court is actually Republican-dominated): "[I]n contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights."

Finally, it seems, the idea of love and commitment is being given the lead role in defining a marriage, as opposed to what part of whose anatomy goes where and for what purpose.

There was, of course, an immediate reaction from conservative groups who are pushing a ballot initiative to amend the constitution to make marriage only between a man and a woman, which is their right, of course, and is a vital element of making the democratic process function.

But I just don't understand why they make this stand that smacks of nothing more than xenophobia. The fact that, say, Tim and John wish to express their love for each other through marriage would in no way invalidate or threaten the love of, say, Bob and Alice.

If you support this initiative, please tell me why you think gay marriage marks the end of the world, especially in light of the world literally and figuratively ending for so many in Burma and China, where figures estimate over 150,000 people are dead or missing following the two disasters.

What with the abundance of possible humanitarian causes available in the world, so many chances to make a loving and positive difference in someone's life, working to deny gays the right to marry not only seems mean-spirited and fearful, it also seems like the politics of the gated community, and while the gated community paradigm has been our model frequently throughout our history, I do not think we can maintain it any longer. There are too many political, economical, and even ethical reasons why we must give up this insularity.