All Systems Go, Brace For Landing

By: | April 9, 2019
crescent-moon-and-mountainside

On Wednesday, April 11, if all goes to plan, a small spacecraft from Israel will alight on the surface of the Moon. It will be the first time any probe has done so under a private flag — that is to say, it is not a taxpayer-built spaceship sent by a country in its own national interest. That makes it pretty unique. The community of lunar scientists and Moon enthusiasts is watching, and celebrated when the spacecraft successfully entered lunar orbit April 4.

The lander, called Beresheet, reportedly cost $100 million, including the price of its ticket to space aboard a SpaceX rocket. It has modest goals, including measuring the Moon’s magnetic fields, as well as testing a laser retroreflector technology for NASA. Such a setup could help future spacecraft land more accurately. But Beresheet’s main mission is pure excitement. Let’s do it because we can! (And because Sheldon Adelson will help pay for it.)

The lander was conceived under the auspices of the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition to land a privately financed spacecraft on the Moon and beam home some video. That competition ended last year without a winner, and I wrote an elegy for it, of sorts, which I thought I should share here.

The following originally appeared April 2, 2018, under the headline “We did not go back to the Moon, because it is hard.”

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The First Problematic Robot

By: | April 8, 2019
Sophia, the robot ambassador at UN conferences

Sophia the Robot has been getting a lot of hackles up for raising the spectre of female humanoids that have more rights than female humans; for the creepy child version that’s supposed to teach little girls to love science, tech, engineering and mathematics; and for the generally weird way her handlers conflate robot rights and human rights.

Well, long before Sophia raised hackles (and the small hairs in the nape of my neck), there was Francine, the artificial robotic child of René Descartes. Sophia might want to read up on how this story ends.

You’ve heard of Descartes. 17th century French philosopher; cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am); first principles of enlightenment philosophy and science and all that.

You might be less familiar with Descartes’ robot daughter Francine. The tale of her birth and gruesome death makes for a wild historical(ish) ride in its own right, but it is also finding new relevance in the 21st century. The people who study artificial intelligence and robotics are finding it a helpful tool in thinking through one of the most controversial problems now roiling these academic disciplines: just how humanlike should we make AI and robots?

Anyway let’s back it up before we all get a nosebleed. In 1635, Francine Descartes was born, the real flesh-and-blood (but illegitimate) daughter of Descartes and a Dutch servant girl. It seems that he loved them both so much that he broke with fairly serious convention to live with them. Just as he was getting ready to bring five-year-old  Francine back to France for a proper education, however, the little girl contracted scarlet fever and died.

And that’s when things got weird.

Photo Credit: ITU Pictures from Geneva, Switzerland

Trip Schooling

By: | April 5, 2019

I pulled my 6th grader out of school for a week to hit the road. I adore his public school teachers. They work their hearts out. But an oversized shoebox of a classroom is not enough to contain the curiosity or educational needs of kids who know there’s a real world out there that you can taste, touch, and smell.

In the 2010-11 school year, 51% of school districts nationwide reported eliminating field trips, according to a survey of the American Association of School Administrators. The numbers of field trips nationwide have continued to decline. They have been replaced by increased standardized testing.

The U.S. Travel Association conducted a study of 400 American adults, half having taken an educational trip away from home and school between the ages of 12 and 18, half who hadn’t. Regardless of gender, ethnicity or socioeconomic status, kids who went on trips had better grades, higher graduation rates from high school and college, and greater income. You see why I had to get him out. I’m a fan of school and good grades, but a much bigger fan of being on the ground. The brain works better out here.

We picked Phoenix, Arizona, as our location, and spent some of our days walking across the city using a chain of inner city mountain ranges, something that most people in this metropolitan area could do; free and relatively easy to access. Not a lot of discipline was involved, nothing particularly rigorous about our studies in local geology or the archaeological history of the region as we crossed through rocky saddles and climbed summit after summit, the city roaring around us. Our bodies worked. We sweated. We found gravel washes where we could lie in palo verde shade and nap.

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A Sweatshirt, A Memory

By: | April 4, 2019
Woman giving thumbs-up in a gray sweatshirt
2012: I was taking pictures with the self-timer and getting tired of serious poses.

Ten years ago this week I bought one of my most beloved articles of clothing: A gray hooded sweatshirt. A heavy one, mostly cotton, with “Alaska Ship Supply” on the front.

In April 2009 I lived on board the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, and, for the first few days of the month, it was tied up at the Coast Guard’s dock in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. A few hours after I bought the sweatshirt, we had our first of many, many safety briefings, and, a few hours after that, the Healy got underway.

I’d arrived two days before buying the sweatshirt, on a three-hour flight from Anchorage down the length of the Aleutian Islands. The plane was so small, all of the passengers had to sit in the back for takeoff. I watched the mountains go by. The flight attendant, who seemed to be about 20 years old, pointed out her hometown when we flew over.

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Sour Grass

By: | April 3, 2019
640px-Soursob

You’ve probably heard that California is in the middle of a gorgeous super bloom. News stories have been reporting both on the flowers and the flower-lovers who’ve flocked to them–causing traffic jams and, in some cases, stomping on the very blooms they came to see. (Some people even landed a helicopter in an Antelope Valley poppy field.)

I don’t have to go anywhere, though. We’re having a sour grass super bloom in my own backyard. Unfortunately, we have not had visitors here to trample the insidious yellow flowers. I pulled some today and all the little flowers that remained were laughing at the futility of this project. So I thought I’d try to restore my live-and-let-live attitude toward sour grass with a post that first appeared in 2014.

Oh, but I was proud of myself yesterday. The rain was coming, at last, at last, and I had an hour and a willing assistant and with these two things I removed nearly all of the oxalis flowers from my front yard. Without flowers, the seeds would not fall, the rain would not sow them, and our yard, for seasons to come, would have far fewer of these yellow flowers that seem to pop up like those whack-a-moles at pizza arcades.

Only: no.

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Controlling Cancer with Evolution

By: | April 2, 2019

The original version of this post ran June 2016. I’ve added an update to the end.

In 2001, Dean Spath was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He had surgery to remove his prostate, and for nearly a decade, Spath appeared to be cancer free. Each year he would visit the doctor to have a blood test and a scan, and each year the tests came back clean. “They thought they got it all,” Spath says. “I was hoping I was cured.” In January 2011, however, a blood test revealed that Spath’s PSA level, a marker of disease progression, was on the rise. By June a malignant spot had appeared on his rib. The cancer was back.

First, Spath underwent eight weeks of radiation. And then he began receiving an injection to suppress testosterone, a hormone that fuels prostate cancer. Next he tried a new kind of immune therapy. But no matter what Spath’s physicians gave him, they couldn’t eradicate the cancer.

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The Calendar Made of Earth

By: | April 1, 2019

La Sal Spring Sunset from Burn Canyon
Last night’s sunset in the La Sal mountains in Utah

This post originally published May 12, 2015

With a calendar and Google Earth on my computer, you’d think I wouldn’t need the horizon any more, but I find I need it more than ever.

After 15 years living in the same house tucked into the West Elk Mountains of western Colorado, I moved this winter a few hours southwest into mesas and canyons looking from the edge of Colorado into Utah. The first thing I did in February, as if out of habit, was start noting the sunset position on the horizon. It was south over the rims of the Dolores River, and week by week I watched it roll north, approaching the La Sal Mountains, a set of snow-topped Batman Wings on the farthest horizon. Last night I stood outside at about 8:15 pm, daylight hours having drawn notably longer, and I saw that the sunset was now firmly in the house of the La Sals. I was beginning the first steps of feeling at home, knowing where I was in the spin and swing of the heavens.

Living in a place of big horizons and sharply rendered landmarks is like having your own Stonehenge. The landscape naturally sets up alignments with the sky that people have recognized throughout time. The Southwest is decorated with pre-Columbian rock art placed where lunar and solar cycles manifest onto painted or pecked images, casting light and shadow through gaps in the rock. The whole landscape was a calendar and people recognized it with their art. Continue reading →

Moby Peep

By: | March 29, 2019

This post originally appeared on April 7, 2017. It’s always a good time to talk about whales and Peeps dioramas.

A diorama of Moby Dick, but with marshmallows instead of people and whale.
Thar she peeps!

I have a bit of a thing about whales. The shelf above my desk at home is full of whale art, and a National Geographic whale poster hangs in a frame above that. Along with that, I have a thing about Moby Dick, which is a book about whales.

So when it was time for my friends Joanna Church, Kate Ramsayer, and I to follow up the success of Hamilpeep and Knit One, Peep Two, I remembered my beloved whales and suggested: Moby Peep. Neither Joanna nor Kate has ever read Moby Dick – and, honestly, I haven’t read it in like a decade – but I think it was the Peep with a peg leg that sold them on it.

In the whaling boat

In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab (Peephab) is dead set on getting revenge against the whale. (Many people think this is what the book is about, but you and I know it is actually about whales.) So here he is, out in the boat with some of his top crew members to kill that darn whale once and for all. Because we are into historical accuracy, we included several lances for killing the whale, but because we have limits, we did not make any harpoons.

Let’s get a better look at those crew members.

From left: Our narrator, who asks you to call him Ishmael; Queequeg, the harpooneer; and Starbuck, the first mate (I am extremely proud of the logo on his apron – the mermaid is a peep).

The white whale

Kate spent many, many hours gluing mini marshmallows onto cardboard. Many hours.

The whaling ship

And way in the back there, rolling on the waves – you may know it as the Pequod, but the Peep figurehead and the tiny peep looking over the side should clue you in that this is in fact the Peepquod. Spoiler alert: The Peepquod doesn’t last much longer.

cutting a peep with a knife (to make Captain Ahab)
Experimental Peep amputation

We’d been so rushed on our previous diorama masterpieces, this time we decided to meet early and start working before the Washington Post’s annual contest was announced. In some Murphy’s law of contests, the Washington Post then announced that it is no longer in the business of fun. The Washington City Paper saved the day, announcing they would continue the contest! But, on the neverending emotional rollercoaster that is the Peeps diorama experience, Moby Peep didn’t make it to the finals. Alas. Almost as tragic as the ending of Moby Dick.

Photos: Helen Fields, except last photo, which is by Kate Ramsayer