Come On Elon, Baby Steps

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So, what to talk about tonight?  I’m kinda at a loss.  I’m not in the politics mood.  I haven’t figured out the next chapters in the stories I’ve been spinning.  Not much going on around the Compound today and even the First Selectman has been on his best behavior and hasn’t eaten anyone in a few weeks.  I guess things are in a lull right now.

So, I was thinking with all the talk about Elon Musk getting us to Mars was that really the space mission we need?  I think not.  What would be better and much easier would be to build a Moon base.  The space station we have now is a lame piece of junk that is more trouble than its worth.  And living in free fall is really bad for humans.  But a permanent base on the Moon is much easier than a Mars trip, much cheaper and much less risky for the astronauts.

Of course, the real reason why this base would be so valuable won’t appear until a magnetic survey is performed and a strange “anomaly” discovered.  Once this mystery is investigated and the signal is tracked back to a Jovian (or is it a Saturnian) moon the real exploration of the solar system will begin in earnest.  All we need to remember is not to drive the ship’s AI psychotic with conflicting mission requirements and also make a point of not teaching it to read lips.

But seriously (or semi-seriously), I think a Moon base is a much more realistic space project and putting stuff on the Moon instead of in Earth orbit is probably a good idea in general.  There’s just too much junk floating around up there.

As for the name, Luna City is one obvious choice.  I could be convinced that Sheepshead Bay would sound good.  After all there are a lot of Mares up there so a seaside name makes some sense.

But the most important thing that a lunar base would provide is a chance to see if space travel is useful at all.  Can a base on the close-by Moon come up with anything useful that can’t be done better and cheaper on Earth?

One thing I can think of are particle accelerators.  Maintaining a vacuum on the Moon will be a heck of a lot easier than on Earth.  And the lower gravity might have some advantages in certain kinds of construction.  And there are probably other scientific experiments that can be done better on the Moon.  Maybe the long lunar night would be a great time to do telescopic observations.  Instead of the Hubble and Webb space telescopes maybe we could build a really big telescope on the Moon and see right out to the edge of the universe.  Of course, we might not like what we find on “the edge.”  We might find that the galaxies are arranged to spell out the words, “TO READ BEYOND THIS POINT YOU MUST BUY A SUBSCRIPTION!”

Well, anyway, that’s what I was thinking.  The Moon’s the perfect compromise between the fantastically risky Mars mission and the useless and boring International Space Station.  Come on Elon, baby steps.

05JUN2025 – Quote of the Day

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You have ransacked every corner of Lower Saxony; but forty thousand German boors never can conquer ten times the number of British freemen. You may ravage—you cannot conquer; it is impossible: you cannot conquer the Americans. You talk, my Lords, of your friends among them to annihilate the Congress, and of your powerful forces to disperse their army: I might as well talk of driving them before me with this crutch! …If you conquer them, what then? You cannot make them respect you; you cannot make them wear your cloth: you will plant an invincible hatred in their breasts against you. Coming from the stock they do, they can never respect you…

William Pitt (the Elder)

Tomorrow is Another Day

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So today was a day of penance.  Sins of omission had to be paid for with sins of commission.  The pool fence has a gate with a closing/locking mechanism that requires the two posts and the door to be in rather finicky alignment to work properly.  Well, it’s been getting more and more out of whack for the last couple of years but I’ve been putting it off because … well because I’m a very lazy man.

But yesterday the pool guys opened up the pool so I figured I couldn’t stall any longer.  I had all my tools (drill, 200-foot extension cord, screwdrivers, pliers, wrench, two different socket sets and drivers, a small sledge hammer, wheel barrow, shovel, ear protection, eye protection, hacksaw) and the kits I was using to shore up the two posts and the hardware I needed to repair the gate.  The wheelbarrow and shovel were to fill a hole next to one of the posts.  I had dug it and filled it with large stones (~fifty pounds each) to hold the post in place but this wasn’t doing the trick.  So, I removed the stones and replaced it with dirt and compacted it with the sledge hammer.  But unfortunately, I couldn’t get at this post because of a large concrete planter that Camera Girl had filled with plants right on top of the post so I had to wrestle it out of the way.  Who knew concrete and dirt were heavy?

Finally, I could get to work on the posts.  But when I moved the planter, I must have covered over a hornet’s nest.  Because now they were looking for their nest and couldn’t find it.  So, they came looking for me!  So, I’m banging the reinforcing post into the ground and bolting it together and drilling holes into the post while dodging and swatting hornets.  So, I’m swearing and moving erratically to escape the bugs and Camera Girl sees me as she’s walking in the yard.  And she comes over to see what’s wrong.  But she blows up when she gets any kind of bug bite so I’m yelling at her to stay back.  So, she thinks I must be going crazy but after additional arm waving and hollering she retreats.

Finally, I finish with the first post and quickly manhandle the planter back in place and the hornets find their home.  So I go looking for Camera Girl to explain what was going on.  She yeah-yeahs me and tells me to get back to work.  The rest of the job goes fairly well.  Of course, I make approximately a thousand trips back and forth to my tool room in the garage because nothing fits and all the hardware is wrong.  But eventually the posts are square, the gate is straight and the lock works (more or less).  I put away all of the various tools and head to the pool to empty the skimmer for the first time.  But I can tell something’s wrong with the pump.  It sounds wrong.  I turn off the power and I see smoke coming from a union near a valve that the pool guys replaced yesterday.  The union cracked and the pump has been running without water for some unknown amount of time today.  I sigh.  Yep.  One step forward.  Two steps back.

As Scarlett O’Hara wisely observed, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Yellowstone Summer – Part 2

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Patricia (Pat) Tollens’ first week in Boghadair had begun less than smoothly.  Her first encounter with her new supervisor could best be described as a train wreck.  Tanner Carrero had encountered her when she attempted to hike in the mountains.  But instead, he had to rescue her from a marauding grizzly bear that she had incited by leaving her bear transponder in her car.  Things had started poorly.  And then they got worse.

From her point of view Tanner was a hopeless throwback to the stone-age patriarchy that no longer existed in her world.  Back at UC Berkeley if he had yelled at her the way he did on that trail, she would have had him brought up on charges; verbal assault, hate speech, and any number of micro-aggressions.  In fact, he pretended that she was the one at fault.

And now she had to work for this caveman.  She called up her advisor at Berkeley and requested that a grievance be opened up against Carrero by the school.  But she was advised that Typhon Industries didn’t work that way.  In fact, they didn’t even have an HR department.  They had something called “Personnel” and basically, they handled payroll and insurance paperwork and handed complaints over to local management.  If she wanted to lodge a protest, she’d have to talk to Carrero’s manager.  When she attempted this, she found an even older, more sexist man than Carrero who told her to stop making trouble or she’d be sent back to California by the next plane.  And just to make things completely transparent she was cc’d on an e-mail from his boss to Carrero telling him what she had done and recommending he straighten her out right away or send her packing.  Pretty bad.

So, on her first day of work she showed up at the small frame building that housed the survey team.  There was an office list and she found Tanner’s name and walked down the corridor to that room and saw him setting at one of the desks and approached with the bleakest expression that her face could produce short of actually being caught by a grizzly bear.

Tanner was sitting working on a spreadsheet but caught sight of Pat as she approached his cubicle.  His expression turned to a mixture of anxiety and embarrassment.  He had never liked “supervising” people.  He was an “individual contributor” down to his boots.  There was nothing he hated more than “onboarding” employees.  And now he had a problem that threatened to drag him into a world of paperwork.  Terminating an intern sounded like a nightmare of paperwork and he would avoid it by almost any means possible.

Tanner had booked a conference room for her first day to allow her to come up quickly to speed on the project by working one-on-one with him.  He asked her to follow him to the conference room and they sat down opposite each other at a small conference table.

Tanner coughed nervously and started, “Ms. Tollens, we’ve started off badly but we can move past the problems we’ve had if we concentrate on the work at hand.  My boss is sort of upset.  He’s probably more upset with me than with you but we have to show him that we can work together efficiently and hit our deliverables on the schedule.  If you think we can work together then I’m going to meet you in the middle.  But if you feel that I’m as bad a person as you indicated in your grievance then we should end this today and not waste any more of your time or this company’s.”

He stopped talking and waited for her reply.  Pat had listened with interest to his words.  Apparently, he wasn’t the monster she had assumed.  He sounded almost reasonable; confused but almost reasonable.  She thought, “Maybe this won’t be horrible.”  She wanted badly to get Typhon Industries on her resume.  Everyone in the mining industry knew they were light-years ahead of the competition.  She had heard they weren’t a progressive company but this Carrero guy might be honestly trying to work with her.  She decided to give it a try.  She said, “I think we can work together.”

Tanner let out a sigh and managed a half smile, “Good.  I’d like to have you go over our field work manual today and we can break that up by having you begin to attend the project meetings so you can meet the team and become familiar with the way we work.  In the afternoon I’ll meet back here with you to go over a field study I have planned for tomorrow.    I’ll provide you with the itinerary and also the gear you’ll need.  We’ll take three other interns along to get them trained too.  They’ll be at the meeting today so you can get to know them too.  The four of you may find some benefit to spending some time together to help acclimate yourselves to a new locale together.”  Pat nodded her head and said, “That sounds good.  Is there a laptop I’ll be using?  I’d like to take notes on the manual and figure out your e-mail system and other onboarding tasks.”  He said, “Sure, it’s the one on that side of the table.  There’s a folder with the onboarding information, including initial passwords and other IS gobbledygook.”  She looked a little anxious when he used the term gobbledygook but she didn’t say anything.

And so, they began.  Maybe not a ball of fire, not “Astaire and Rogers” but no one had been brought up on charges and neither of them had raised their voices a decibel over cubicle normal.  A new beginning!

03JUN2025 – Quote of the Day

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Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of Parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or to enslave your fellow-subjects in America, who feel tyranny, whether ambitioned by an individual part of the legislature, or the bodies who compose it, is equally intolerable to British subjects…What, though you march from town to town, and from province to province; though you should be able to enforce a temporary and local submission, which I only suppose, not admit—how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress, to grasp the dominion of eighteen hundred miles of continent, populous in numbers, possessing valour, liberty, and resistance? This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen: it was obvious, from the nature of things and of mankind; and, above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America, is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money, in England: the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution: the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America; who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defence of their rights as men, as freemen.

William Pitt (the Elder)