Hello everyone! It's 12:08am on Monday, May 24th and I'm getting ready to go to bed after watching the series finale of Lost on ABC. I decided to post up a quick response to the end of this show, as well as a tribute to the show in general. The finale was great; not fantastic and not without fault, but neither was the rest of this show and I believe that the writers were able to capture the most vital aspects of the show in the last 2 and 1/2 hours. The finale was epic and encompassing and left you filled with wonder and awe (truly satisfactory substitutes for curiosity and knowledge). I was very impressed with this show in general. Although I only watched it for the first time a year and a half ago (and have been desperately clawing through DVD box sets and Hulu updates to get caught up ever since), I feel that a major part of my life has been shaped and influenced, however indirectly, by the sorts of questions and concepts this show forced me to confront. The acting was brilliant, the sets were brilliant, and above all else, the music was beautiful.
If you have avoided Lost because you feel that it is not your genre of choice, I urge you to watch a few episodes and experience the wide diversity of themes the show touches upon. If you have avoided Lost because you hate broadcast television and prefer the quiet, intellectual prowess of cable shows like Dexter, I would urge you to give Lost a try; you may be pleasantly surprised to find that it has comprehensively and consistently escaped the majority of stereotypical cliches that harangue network television programming. And if you have avoided Lost because you feel it is too complicated, I urge you to get a Netflix account or dust off your BitTorrent tracker of choice because once you start watching this show, it is very hard to stop. Luckily, I feel that the writers have provided an ending that satisfies and delights. Watch this show!
Good night,
Andrew
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The Work Bench
Hello,
I've opened up a new blog (don't worry, NOT a replacement blog), that I hope will serve as a place for me to chronicle all my DIY projects this summer. Please head on over there and give it a look!
The Work Bench
Best,
Andrew
I've opened up a new blog (don't worry, NOT a replacement blog), that I hope will serve as a place for me to chronicle all my DIY projects this summer. Please head on over there and give it a look!
The Work Bench
Best,
Andrew
Friday, May 07, 2010
Thoughts on Poetry
This post was originally titled "The Meaning of Poetry"; I just stumbled upon a blog that was filled with some pretty inspiring material. I knew it was inspiring because it forced me to think about what was being said outside of the context of myself. What I'm trying to say is, I stopped thinking about myself for a few minutes to read this blog. Afterwards, I started thinking about myself again, but for a few brief minutes I didn't. I don't like to think that my narcissism is at the pathological level -- I mean, I don't think it actually is, but I don't like to think about it either. The budding anthropologist, the evolutionary biologist within me says the following: Narcissism is vital to survival. Narcissism is simply the term humans invented when, upon looking backwards from their long journey of altruistic progress, were shocked to see that no matter how far they traveled from their primitive pasts, still had their roots firmly grounded in a reality sharply defined by the laws of nature. Eat or be eaten. We hate that, don't we? We have to. We don't like to think of ourselves as animals? This is where my thinking used to stop. I loved to think of us as animals. It would explain so much of the way my parents used to act when the doors were close and they didn't think we could hear them yelling at each other. It would explain the basic pleasure I used to derive from stealing food from my brother. Maybe the only reason I stopped was subconsciously I realized he had grown big enough to break my bones, to punish me for interfering with his own survival processes. This is where my thinking used to stop.
But now I can't help but reflect that we ARE different. We care about each other and we building gigantic monuments to commemorate the heroic actions of members of our community who travel thousands of miles away to get blown up by a mine -- defending too many people for us to explain. Definitely us, thought, right? At the end of the day, we can't think about the fact that our society has grown too fast for our sense of community to keep up.
On this train of thought, contemplating the defining characteristics of mankind, I started thinking about poetry. Our brains our firing constantly. Even comatose, disabled, vegetated people lying in beds in forgotten hospital rooms have brains that are constantly active. Synapse to synapse; microscopic lightning strikes. These storms brew and subside and boil and roar softly and loudly. Occasionally they force open the floodgates of our mind and we speak what we think and suddenly we have performed magic. Our bodies have transmitted electrical currents in one organ into sound waves in another and through this action we have increased the size of our population to 7 billion people. Our population is approaching the magnitude and complexity of our own brains.
What is poetry but the venting of excess thoughts. Some people say poetry tells a story. I say, the only story that is told through poetry is the singly story of human existence: we communicate our inner-most thoughts, opaque and diffuse reflections of the mechanized action of our brains, in the hopes that one word in a thousand words will be heard by someone else and change the way that person thinks. Poetry is not beautiful or simple or elegant. Not in its true form. It's merely a precision, targeted attack of thoughts. It the breath-taking cloud that occurs when a sonic-boom surrounds an ICBM.
I had originally titled this post "The Meaning of Poetry", but I decided to rename it "Thoughts on Poetry" for two primary reasons: 1) To fit the internal organizational vernacular that is consistent throughout this Titanic blog. 2) To show that, at the end of the day, I don't really know the meaning of anything.
But now I can't help but reflect that we ARE different. We care about each other and we building gigantic monuments to commemorate the heroic actions of members of our community who travel thousands of miles away to get blown up by a mine -- defending too many people for us to explain. Definitely us, thought, right? At the end of the day, we can't think about the fact that our society has grown too fast for our sense of community to keep up.
On this train of thought, contemplating the defining characteristics of mankind, I started thinking about poetry. Our brains our firing constantly. Even comatose, disabled, vegetated people lying in beds in forgotten hospital rooms have brains that are constantly active. Synapse to synapse; microscopic lightning strikes. These storms brew and subside and boil and roar softly and loudly. Occasionally they force open the floodgates of our mind and we speak what we think and suddenly we have performed magic. Our bodies have transmitted electrical currents in one organ into sound waves in another and through this action we have increased the size of our population to 7 billion people. Our population is approaching the magnitude and complexity of our own brains.
What is poetry but the venting of excess thoughts. Some people say poetry tells a story. I say, the only story that is told through poetry is the singly story of human existence: we communicate our inner-most thoughts, opaque and diffuse reflections of the mechanized action of our brains, in the hopes that one word in a thousand words will be heard by someone else and change the way that person thinks. Poetry is not beautiful or simple or elegant. Not in its true form. It's merely a precision, targeted attack of thoughts. It the breath-taking cloud that occurs when a sonic-boom surrounds an ICBM.
I had originally titled this post "The Meaning of Poetry", but I decided to rename it "Thoughts on Poetry" for two primary reasons: 1) To fit the internal organizational vernacular that is consistent throughout this Titanic blog. 2) To show that, at the end of the day, I don't really know the meaning of anything.
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
A day in the life of a spaceman
His day began when he woke suddenly to the icy cold air and his ears burned with screaming, and there was not enough oxygen left. Much later, the man slammed the button, locking the door, and turned exhausted to slump on the floor next to the blinking panel. There was not enough oxygen left. Five inches of clear plastic lay sheathed in metal and rubber and outside of this the blue planet lay still and silent and beautiful and the stars rotated in their thousand-year orbits and everything was very quiet. The filters cycled softly and the rhythmic hum of computers wheezed and coughed and sputtered and the air was very clean, but there was not much of it left and the cabin was very cold. The man panted, slowing his breaths and rested his head against the steel door.
“For the love of god Sherman!” The voice shrieked and frantically clawed upwards from the ice and silence and penetrated two layers of re-enforced aluminum and the sound was pushed and prodded along in its laborious journey across the increasing vacuum by a sudden violent pounding on the door. Against wild thrashing, the door did not budge, and the man closed his eyes, weary from the ordeal. There was not enough oxygen, and there was not enough time. “For the love of god Sherman!” The voice cracked halfway through, punctuated by a low muffled sound as bones and flesh and clothes slumped defeated to the surface of the cabin on the other side of the door. The voice continued, low and moaning, but the man did not listen. He could not listen. He had a job to complete and he would not allow her to get in his way.
After awhile he felt his strength returning, ebbing back into his bones and muscles like a cautious ocean returning to shore. He pulled himself to his feet and maneuvered unsteadily in the low gravity of the room. Catacomb pillars pressed in from all sides, and everything was steel and plastic, but there was a single window that perforated the hull and through its thick and stodgy surface, the vibrant and energetic stars danced and threw their refracted beams of light carelessly and laughed at the plight of the man in the cold. He pulled himself to a station and forced practiced eyes and hands over a console blistering with controls and gauges and screens and buttons. His attention was drawn through the thin air to a cluster of instruments in one corner of the console. Moisture from the air had condensed on the surface of the glass during the disaster and had flash frozen when the heating systems shut off, when he closed the door. He scraped his fingernails across the surface in a stupid and unwieldy attempt to defrost the display. Peering through the microscopic glacier, he squinted in the dim light at the position of the dial, frozen in position. He smiled weakly and exhaled a breath of relief. There was not enough oxygen left, but not everyone needed to die.
The air traced lightly around his padded suit and legs as he pulled himself into the nearest chair. As he swiveled around to face the closest window, empty candy wrappers and playing cards formed an orbiting debris field around his cold and stationary body. He tried thinking about the long journey that awaited him, but he could not focus on the details. He tried thinking about his family, only several hundred miles beneath him, but he could not remember their faces. Instead he focused on the movement of the stars and planets. Sudden slamming on the door behind him jarred him awake, but taking a quick peek at the display in front of him reassured him that there would still be enough. “Sherman!” the voice shouted through layers of metal and rubber and thin air. “Sherman!” the door cried out, the screaming slowly subsiding into low moans. “SHERMAN! You don’t have to do this! Please don’t do this!” The voice penetrated deep and he remembered. It was her.
He hadn’t known her two weeks ago, and they had different specialties on board, so it was very difficult for him to ever get a chance to know her very well. He remembered her red hair and her eyes that would often dart up from sheets of calculations, gauzy and red-rimmed from coffee and stim-packs, but the center was clear and piercing and he felt stupid to talk to her, so he didn’t. The voice continued, arguing and debating with an empty mantle of silence. The voice argued about possibilities and calculations and alternatives and slowly it grew quiet and muffled, and the only sound was in the man’s head, and he replayed scenes and sounds from his childhood, which seemed to come easier to him than those from his adult life. He could not think about her or her desperate pleas. He could not alter or stray from the path. He recognized the cruelty of the situation, but he had performed every calculation flawlessly and had considered every possibility. He knew with absolute certainty that there was not enough oxygen for everyone. He hoped enough remained for one person. He had to be sure. The scientist in him was curious, although the part of him that had grown small gardens in college and later in life was horrified and turned away and examined the beautiful scene slowly rotating in absolute cold and silence to the galactic rhythms of impenetrable and innumerable scale. And the two halves of him spent their various energies and utilized their various faculties, and so the man passed the time, unperturbed by the low and soft feminine wails, the rocking ocean of tears and sobbing occasionally peaking with white crested waves that rose in volume and broke upon magnificent levels of emotion and then were lost again amidst the quiet and constant din of despair. The door was locked and the lock had been sealed and there was not enough oxygen left, and the man knew that, and so nothing about the situation was changed by the crying.
Using tiny movements of his eyes, the man raked his trained vision across the displays and smiled inwardly at the increasing concentrations of oxygen. Yes, there would be enough. Yes, now the plan had sustainability; had life. All was not lost, and this fact stimulated his mind and he rose out of the cold darkness and promptly fell, his weak legs crumpling beneath him. He laughed softly at the ridiculousness of the situation. How long had he been sitting there? Four minutes? Five minutes? He checked his watch, but the hands had frozen almost instantly when he had locked the door several hours before. Continuing onwards, he crawled slowly, pulling himself over the floor to the other side of the room and crawled up the very wall of the console and leveraged himself to a sitting position, his shoulders burning with the exertion. He checked the screen. A swirling matrix of lights and information restlessly assembled into an organized fashion and the man waited and saw that his window of opportunity was very slim indeed. He could not think about the numbers now, the advanced math he had spent his life mastering slipped quickly away from the surface of his brain. He was no fool; he had written them down hours before. His thoughts flashed briefly to his home. His wife had always despised his predilection for planning, a subtle but dark hatred at his quiet and meticulous manner. He lived in his mind, and now he lived only in his mind, and he thought no more of anything beyond the present as he awkwardly fumbled with his pocket and retrieved a crumpled piece of yellow notepaper. Half of the small sheet had been stained red, but it was not his blood and so he was not overly concerned. He shifted his weight and squinted and read the numbers and laboriously entered them into the panel, each consecutive depression of the keys throwing up a tiny sparkling shower of ice particles and dislodged accumulations of crystallized dust. The computers seemed slow. They seemed to share his feelings of morbid lethargy. After a short eternity, the computer beeped once and glowed a comfortable shade of green and the mission was complete. The numbers ticked down and the man turned around slowly as he sunk once more to the floor of the room, carefully modulating his breaths. The window now lay across the room from him and he resigned his mind to the quiet contemplation of the intricacies of the galaxy beyond, his view of which was restricted by the size and position of the window to several square inches. It was a pitifully tiny space, but it grew in the vacuum and gradually encompassed his entire vision, and as the blackness of the picture naively courted and danced with the dim shadows of the room at the edge of his vision, the scene of a handful of scattered stars erupted in their full beauty and showered the deepest parts of the man’s mind with the sheer scale of their magnificence. They put on a show that was unlike anything the man had ever seen before.
As the filters slowly cycled and the numbers ticked down slowly on the screen behind him, the galaxy was free and joyous and gay and the man became the first one of his kind to witness the true parade of colors and spectacles that lay behind the opaque and distant surface. He saw the birth of stars and the death of worlds and the entire cosmic spectrum existed, for a very short moment, as an intimate and warm personal drama; of family members interacting with each other as they went about their daily lives. The numbers clicked to zero and the screen flashed red and emitted a loud beeping, but the man did not see the change in color or hear the beeping, and he had forgotten long ago about the sound of the woman pounding on the other side of the door, and he did not notice the low and terrible shaking as the hull split cleanly in two and the door that had once separated the kitchen from the bathroom now separated both from the very essence of space, and the smaller portion of the metal box swung away in a low arc and disappeared into the cloudy, brilliantly blue depths of the planet below and was lost amidst a fountain of superheated flame and gases as the atmosphere, grumbling its angry acquiescence, allowed the saved ship-half to re-enter the thick and humid air below. This saved ship-half with its minimally tolerable concentrations of oxygen returned to the wetness of the planets oceans, and the life inside was saved for future nights of coffee and red-rimmed concentrations and laughter and sex and births and deaths. Floating in an eternal orbit above, the spaceman in the other half bore witness to none of this, and the screen behind him flashed twice and automatically turned off. His gaze remained fixed on the small window on the other side of the room as he, in absolute silence and amidst a galactic festival of color and light and beauty, returned home.
“For the love of god Sherman!” The voice shrieked and frantically clawed upwards from the ice and silence and penetrated two layers of re-enforced aluminum and the sound was pushed and prodded along in its laborious journey across the increasing vacuum by a sudden violent pounding on the door. Against wild thrashing, the door did not budge, and the man closed his eyes, weary from the ordeal. There was not enough oxygen, and there was not enough time. “For the love of god Sherman!” The voice cracked halfway through, punctuated by a low muffled sound as bones and flesh and clothes slumped defeated to the surface of the cabin on the other side of the door. The voice continued, low and moaning, but the man did not listen. He could not listen. He had a job to complete and he would not allow her to get in his way.
After awhile he felt his strength returning, ebbing back into his bones and muscles like a cautious ocean returning to shore. He pulled himself to his feet and maneuvered unsteadily in the low gravity of the room. Catacomb pillars pressed in from all sides, and everything was steel and plastic, but there was a single window that perforated the hull and through its thick and stodgy surface, the vibrant and energetic stars danced and threw their refracted beams of light carelessly and laughed at the plight of the man in the cold. He pulled himself to a station and forced practiced eyes and hands over a console blistering with controls and gauges and screens and buttons. His attention was drawn through the thin air to a cluster of instruments in one corner of the console. Moisture from the air had condensed on the surface of the glass during the disaster and had flash frozen when the heating systems shut off, when he closed the door. He scraped his fingernails across the surface in a stupid and unwieldy attempt to defrost the display. Peering through the microscopic glacier, he squinted in the dim light at the position of the dial, frozen in position. He smiled weakly and exhaled a breath of relief. There was not enough oxygen left, but not everyone needed to die.
The air traced lightly around his padded suit and legs as he pulled himself into the nearest chair. As he swiveled around to face the closest window, empty candy wrappers and playing cards formed an orbiting debris field around his cold and stationary body. He tried thinking about the long journey that awaited him, but he could not focus on the details. He tried thinking about his family, only several hundred miles beneath him, but he could not remember their faces. Instead he focused on the movement of the stars and planets. Sudden slamming on the door behind him jarred him awake, but taking a quick peek at the display in front of him reassured him that there would still be enough. “Sherman!” the voice shouted through layers of metal and rubber and thin air. “Sherman!” the door cried out, the screaming slowly subsiding into low moans. “SHERMAN! You don’t have to do this! Please don’t do this!” The voice penetrated deep and he remembered. It was her.
He hadn’t known her two weeks ago, and they had different specialties on board, so it was very difficult for him to ever get a chance to know her very well. He remembered her red hair and her eyes that would often dart up from sheets of calculations, gauzy and red-rimmed from coffee and stim-packs, but the center was clear and piercing and he felt stupid to talk to her, so he didn’t. The voice continued, arguing and debating with an empty mantle of silence. The voice argued about possibilities and calculations and alternatives and slowly it grew quiet and muffled, and the only sound was in the man’s head, and he replayed scenes and sounds from his childhood, which seemed to come easier to him than those from his adult life. He could not think about her or her desperate pleas. He could not alter or stray from the path. He recognized the cruelty of the situation, but he had performed every calculation flawlessly and had considered every possibility. He knew with absolute certainty that there was not enough oxygen for everyone. He hoped enough remained for one person. He had to be sure. The scientist in him was curious, although the part of him that had grown small gardens in college and later in life was horrified and turned away and examined the beautiful scene slowly rotating in absolute cold and silence to the galactic rhythms of impenetrable and innumerable scale. And the two halves of him spent their various energies and utilized their various faculties, and so the man passed the time, unperturbed by the low and soft feminine wails, the rocking ocean of tears and sobbing occasionally peaking with white crested waves that rose in volume and broke upon magnificent levels of emotion and then were lost again amidst the quiet and constant din of despair. The door was locked and the lock had been sealed and there was not enough oxygen left, and the man knew that, and so nothing about the situation was changed by the crying.
Using tiny movements of his eyes, the man raked his trained vision across the displays and smiled inwardly at the increasing concentrations of oxygen. Yes, there would be enough. Yes, now the plan had sustainability; had life. All was not lost, and this fact stimulated his mind and he rose out of the cold darkness and promptly fell, his weak legs crumpling beneath him. He laughed softly at the ridiculousness of the situation. How long had he been sitting there? Four minutes? Five minutes? He checked his watch, but the hands had frozen almost instantly when he had locked the door several hours before. Continuing onwards, he crawled slowly, pulling himself over the floor to the other side of the room and crawled up the very wall of the console and leveraged himself to a sitting position, his shoulders burning with the exertion. He checked the screen. A swirling matrix of lights and information restlessly assembled into an organized fashion and the man waited and saw that his window of opportunity was very slim indeed. He could not think about the numbers now, the advanced math he had spent his life mastering slipped quickly away from the surface of his brain. He was no fool; he had written them down hours before. His thoughts flashed briefly to his home. His wife had always despised his predilection for planning, a subtle but dark hatred at his quiet and meticulous manner. He lived in his mind, and now he lived only in his mind, and he thought no more of anything beyond the present as he awkwardly fumbled with his pocket and retrieved a crumpled piece of yellow notepaper. Half of the small sheet had been stained red, but it was not his blood and so he was not overly concerned. He shifted his weight and squinted and read the numbers and laboriously entered them into the panel, each consecutive depression of the keys throwing up a tiny sparkling shower of ice particles and dislodged accumulations of crystallized dust. The computers seemed slow. They seemed to share his feelings of morbid lethargy. After a short eternity, the computer beeped once and glowed a comfortable shade of green and the mission was complete. The numbers ticked down and the man turned around slowly as he sunk once more to the floor of the room, carefully modulating his breaths. The window now lay across the room from him and he resigned his mind to the quiet contemplation of the intricacies of the galaxy beyond, his view of which was restricted by the size and position of the window to several square inches. It was a pitifully tiny space, but it grew in the vacuum and gradually encompassed his entire vision, and as the blackness of the picture naively courted and danced with the dim shadows of the room at the edge of his vision, the scene of a handful of scattered stars erupted in their full beauty and showered the deepest parts of the man’s mind with the sheer scale of their magnificence. They put on a show that was unlike anything the man had ever seen before.
As the filters slowly cycled and the numbers ticked down slowly on the screen behind him, the galaxy was free and joyous and gay and the man became the first one of his kind to witness the true parade of colors and spectacles that lay behind the opaque and distant surface. He saw the birth of stars and the death of worlds and the entire cosmic spectrum existed, for a very short moment, as an intimate and warm personal drama; of family members interacting with each other as they went about their daily lives. The numbers clicked to zero and the screen flashed red and emitted a loud beeping, but the man did not see the change in color or hear the beeping, and he had forgotten long ago about the sound of the woman pounding on the other side of the door, and he did not notice the low and terrible shaking as the hull split cleanly in two and the door that had once separated the kitchen from the bathroom now separated both from the very essence of space, and the smaller portion of the metal box swung away in a low arc and disappeared into the cloudy, brilliantly blue depths of the planet below and was lost amidst a fountain of superheated flame and gases as the atmosphere, grumbling its angry acquiescence, allowed the saved ship-half to re-enter the thick and humid air below. This saved ship-half with its minimally tolerable concentrations of oxygen returned to the wetness of the planets oceans, and the life inside was saved for future nights of coffee and red-rimmed concentrations and laughter and sex and births and deaths. Floating in an eternal orbit above, the spaceman in the other half bore witness to none of this, and the screen behind him flashed twice and automatically turned off. His gaze remained fixed on the small window on the other side of the room as he, in absolute silence and amidst a galactic festival of color and light and beauty, returned home.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Full Speed Ahead, Maniac Twins! (Pt. 4)
I pulled myself out of bed and pulled on a pair of casual slacks and a shirt, over which I pulled a sweater sporting logo of my alma mater. I soon discovered that the sun rose very early in that area, and that even though I walked out of my building to find the camp still caught in the lethargic throes of sleep, the sun was already high and shining quite brightly. It was a hot morning, and the gravel and red dirt crunched under my feet as I walked down the main road and explored the complex a little. My phone had accumulated a large number of messages during my trip the day before, and I spent some time pacing the perimeter of the camp, checking and erasing messages.
The entire complex, as I later learned, had been built from the relegated ashes of an old industrial complex, something that the Navy had used. The land was very flat in all directions, and I could view the beach from a small bluff that was within walking distance from the barracks. For days on end that summer I would meander down the dusty road that connected my set of buildings with the beach, and when I finally reached the coast I would sit down on the white sand in the shade of looming bleached palm trees and stare out at the ocean. It was a large and mysterious body of water that lay off shore, neither Atlantic nor Gulf waters. Many times large thunderstorms would blow in from the southwest, and gigantic gray clouds, darkened with their rainy burden, would appear as if by magic, rising from the horizon like ghosts levitating out of a forlorn cemetery. Camp Daisy was a little less than an hour south of Cape Canaveral, and numerous that summer I got to witness a rocket launch. Both times they were spectacular, and since they both happened at night, the fiery explosions and rocketing combustion of jet fuels illuminated the dense cloudbanks that loitered off-shore. I found the entire experience to be very exciting, and even from my sand-dune throne underneath the albino palm trees, I could feel the air quiver from the energy of the launches.
I don’t want to give you a false impression of the nature of my stay in Florida. I found time to admire the natural, sun bleached, wind-swept beauty of the shoreline only during brief periods of respite. Upon arriving I was almost immediately conscripted into the services of a small engineering team that was working on fuel mechanics. At that point, these people were mostly private-contractors. I found that I had gotten myself involved in the beginning stages of a lengthy contract labeled Project Titan that had the primary aim of designing a satellite that was to be launched into low-orbit surveillance around its namesake, the most intriguing moon of Jupiter. The project had been started in the late 90’s by Nasa, but funding had been cut and the project aborted and moved into the basement of the Department of Defense. Apparently, a sub-committee swept up the project in a wide-scale search and rescue of abandoned ideas. On federal orders, they distributed the project to a variety of private contractors and research institutions with the simple idea of choosing the lowest, most cost-efficient bid for a program re-design. Jill couldn’t speak highly enough of this plan. In tones that reflected her exuberant mood and accompanied by a fierce concert of gestures, she would cry out, “The de-centralization of project oversight is essential in maintaining the intellectual integrity of privatized resources in the space program.” She always had something like that to say, and I began to predict, with uncanny accuracy, the type of inspiring or dramatic adjectives she would choose for her next tirade.
The end result of this bureaucratic musical-chairs was that a small firm from California proposed a bid that was a few million dollars shorter than the next guy, and that the federal government had proceeded to make an offer, whereby the funds and resources outlined in the proposal would be guaranteed by the federal government, and all research would be subjected to the oversight and review of the US Air Force. In addition, all research and testing would occur on US military property and there was an additional stipulation that all automobiles involved in the project must be domestic. I remember being very deeply touched by the irony of the situation; we were developing the newest breed of space technology, and we were being told in no uncertain terms that our automobiles must be domestic brands. It was these sorts of decisions that originally prompted my decreased respect for any sort of institutionalized collaboration between the military and the government and the private sector, and Jillian Weinstein capitalized on that fact very quickly.
I was assigned to a small team working out of an old airplane hanger that lay at the far end of an old cracked airstrip lined by palm trees. It was located about 15 minutes away from the camp, and I would often walk there in the morning carrying nothing but a knapsack and several gallons of insect repellant which I used liberally to ward off the hordes of aggressive mosquitoes. On my first day of work, I came dressed in a suit and tie, but quickly learned to wear a simple short sleeve dress shirt, shorts, and shoes. I also learned to do my laundry twice a week, or else the stains from sweat and the constantly pervasive moisture and dirt would become permanent very quickly.
I was working with 8 other guys; most were from the universities or professional industry, but a few were military-types. I found it funny that you could tell who was from the military not by their haircut or the way they dressed, but in the way they programmed their computers. Their code was simple and terse and tended to use unusual strands and language. Civilian engineers tend to flourish their code with unnecessary aesthetic touches. Military engineers wrote programs that were built like tanks; completely ugly but extremely tough. At that time, the project was still in its nascent stage and my team had been assigned to testing the position-control thrusters that would keep the satellite locked into a steady orbit over the relatively mysterious rocky geography of Titan. Our biggest worry was the electromagnetic poles. Very little data had ever been collected on the strength or location of Titan’s poles, and our biggest concern was flying our satellite straight through a magnetic storm and having everything on board knocked out of commission. So we spent a lot of our time in the hangar playing with giant magnets. Like curious school children we giggled while removing metal belts, cuff-links, and (in the case of one military engineer) knives, before entering the testing room were we would place instrumental pieces of the thruster apertures in the middle of large electromagnets and flip the switch. As a result, a large part of the initial work I performed at Camp Daisy ended up being very mundane; we would flip switches and laugh at explosions of sparks and dying machinery and as we played gods controlling domains of circuitry and computer chips we carefully took notes, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of our various creations and modifications. Like gods, we had little mercy for inferior machines and I cannot tell you how many innocents we would ruthlessly smite everyday in that rusty hanger at the end of the airstrip in Florida.
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