Monthly Archives: April 2014

It turns out Saturn has a hexagon at its north pole.

A hexagon. On a gas giant. Space is so weird.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’ve gotten a little obsessed with the solar system and the history of space travel lately. I’ve been into it for a couple weeks now, so I give it another week or so to run its course. That’s about how long my obsessions generally last.

Past obsessions have included: flags of the world, A.I., statistics, Morse Code, calligraphy, drawing, Celtic knots, origami, juggling, zen, the history of Africa, geography, Vincent van Gogh, Linux, the board game Go, animation, the website Omegle, Super Mario 64, the art of baiting e-mail scammers, creating a webcomic, the Voynich Manuscript, and Iceland, to name a small percentage.

Some obsessions (A.I., zen, Go) become longer-lived pursuits. Others – most of them – run their course and then fizzle. Hotter flames burn out faster. I really have no idea what makes some stick around and some disappear.

But for now, it’s space, and I’m riding high on my little wave.

Did you know, for instance, that the first hominid in space – a chimpanzee named Ham – was born in Cameroon, and survived his flight none the worse for wear? Or that the first woman in space – Valentina Tereshkova – is still alive, a Russian hero to this day? Or that the Apollo astronauts played practical jokes on each other, slipping Playboy centerfolds into mission documents to be discovered once in orbit? Or that Enceladus – a place most people have never even heard of – is one of the most likely spots in our solar system to harbor life?

Okay, Brian. That’s nice. Take a breath.

What are your obsessions like? How long do they last?

My wife and I received this world map from her aunt for Christmas. We just put it up Saturday. It’s so big, it went up in three separate pieces, and we had to prime the wall and glue it on like wallpaper. By the time we got the supplies and prepared everything, it took several hours. Not easy, but then few cool things ever are.

I can’t get over how giant this thing is. It doesn’t look as big in the photo, but remember, I’m 6’5″. It’s massive.

Well, not massive. I mean, it’s paper. The mass is minimal. But it’s large.

So what are we going to do with this thing?

Maybe we’ll put up Post-It notes to mark cool places, or places we want to visit. (Iceland, here we come!) Or maybe we’ll just stare at it in awe and drag visitors over to make strained compliments. (“My, it certainly is…large?”)

This is the same wall that has the bookshelves, so it’s turning into quite the educational center for our house. But then, we’re geeks like that. We’re thinking of putting the solar system up in the kitchen.

Got any cool stuff on your walls?

Everything looks more futuristic with a dome.

Yesterday Betsy and I spent a couple hours at the Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio, birthplace of Neil Armstrong. The museum has a wide range of memorabilia from both Armstrong’s early life and the space program in general. Cool items included:

• Booklets where young Neil recorded his early flights. Dude got his pilot’s license when he was sixteen!
• Astronaut uniforms, astronaut food, and lots of other fun astronauty things.
• A postcard with Orville Wright’s autograph. Anyone else noticed that the first man to fly, and the first man on the moon, were both from Ohio? We rock!

The Gemini 8 spacecraft, flown by Neil Armstrong as part of the ramp-up to the Apollo 11 moon landing.

But the crown jewel of the museum was the Gemini 8 spacecraft, which Armstrong piloted in the first-ever docking of two spacecraft in orbit. Look at that thing, and imagine two people spending days inside of it. I’m reading the autobiography of Mike Collins (Apollo 11 astronaut), who explained that you literally couldn’t get out of your seat, because there was nowhere to go.

A moon rock!!! Turns out they look pretty much like earth rocks.

The moon rock was cool too. And you can go inside that white dome, and there’s a 20-minute video focusing mostly on Apollo 11. I never realized how many close calls Armstrong had in his career: cutting his Gemini 8 flight short due to thruster failure, ejecting from a lunar lander test flight just before it was destroyed, and landing the Eagle on the moon with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining. Guy was intense.

And of course, no trip to the gift shop is complete without astronaut ice cream.

Have you ever eaten ice cream and thought, “I wish this had less flavor and/or moisture”?

Not a bad place to visit for a town of 10,000 people.

Got any sweet museums in your area?

We know all about the surface of Mars. We’ve seen photos from the rovers: Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. We’ve even got photos from the 1970s, from the Viking missions. The red planet’s horizon is a familiar sight.

Venus, on the other hand, is far less hospitable. The surface has a temperature of over 800 degrees Fahrenheit, squished under a pressure of 92 atmospheres. Of course, no lander could possibly survive such a harsh environment. We’ll probably never know –

What’s that?

The Soviets did it? In the 80s?

Yes, the Venera missions successfully landed probes – plural – on Venus, and sent back actual photos from the depths of Hell:

Full gallery here.

People. Seriously. How did I not know about this?

It turns out we have photographs from the surface of no fewer than four extraterrestrial bodies. Mars, Venus, and the moon are three. Mad props to anyone who knows the fourth – leave your answer in the comments!

For $35, the Syma X1 quadcopter is a pretty good deal. Sure, it’s a toy, too light to carry a camera or anything else cool…but it flies. I’ve never done any RC flying to speak of, so that’s exciting all by itself.

What it doesn’t do is fly very well. I assume that’s pilot error. I really haven’t gotten the hang of not crashing yet. I can’t figure out how to just hover in place without drifting to the side, or up, or down. So as it drifts, I start trying to compensate, and then I overcompensate, and then *crash.*

Yeah.

Still, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Something about seeing a device defy gravity in the comfort of your own home is inherently exciting to me. My anthropomorphizing brain says it almost seems alive.

If I ever get the hang of this one, I just might buy myself a more expensive toy. You can go as high-end as you want with these things. My next purchase would definitely be big enough to hold a video camera. Then I could document my crashes in glorious HD!

Some people get really into this stuff. Go on YouTube and you can find quadcopters flying over Niagara Falls, soaring above mountains, or surveying abandoned theme parks. There are even people trying to put quadcopters on Mars.

As for me, I’ll settle for getting my crash ratio below 50%.

After a great deal of thought, I’ve decided that the next natural step for this blog is to post everything exclusively in single-haiku format. This will be the last prose post.

In the new world, today’s post would have been:

Purely poetry!
Savor the five-seven-five
regime, forever.

But I figured I’d give you one more non-haiku post for old time’s sake.

Why this change? Several reasons.

First, it forces me to distill my thoughts into just a few lines, enforcing the economy of words that’s so crucial to the writing life. My short stories will be much better with all the haiku practice I get here! (Of course, you won’t know it, because I’ll only be posting haiku.)

Second, it saves time. Sure, you’re supposed to spend hours agonizing over haiku composition, but we both know I’m just going to dash them off in a few seconds and call it good. Let’s be honest, I have better things to do with my life than write a bunch of crappy haiku. I give each one forty seconds, tops.

And finally, I’m just lazy. And it’s time I embrace that. Fighting one’s true nature isn’t very Zen, now is it?

Let me know what you think in the comments. (Haiku-only comments, of course – any others will be deleted!)

And, if you haven’t already guessed, Happy April Fools Day.