Clint's Blog

Of Nature and Us

Trapped and scared

The Earth has you

To be free of this

It's the way you view

Without its air

Down you go

Without the sun

You've nothing to show

Nature's caught you

In its game

When ripped from it

You're not the same

It has you wrapped

In its net

There is no life

Where there's no wet

Dependent on it

You struggle to hold

You tighten your grip

Until you get old

Then nature's last trick

Wears you out

Gravity has won

Your pitiful bout

But during your struggle

You created a child

She was born to you

Not to the wild

She fights your fight

Descends on the war

It will never end

No matter what you are for

But living on

Is enough for a win

Forever the battle will rage

Again and again

January 07, 2000

(I literally was 16 and this was deep when I wrote it)

To be honest, I did not enjoy hanging around my grandfather as a child or a teen. He was tough and felt somewhat rigid and emotionally distant. Like many older men in the 90s, he was a staunch republican, but surely you would call him a right-leaning centrist in today's world.

Yet, he was a much more complex man than I ever realized. I knew he wrote an autobiography in the 90's. I watched his wife, my step-grandmother, key the pages of handwritten text onto a primitive digital word processor when I would visit. I can remember the dot matrix printer churning out pages in their living room. I remember reading a few pages of it in my late teens/early 20s and being fascinated by how rough they had it growing up. I couldn't yet comprehend how rough it was, indeed, until I borrowed a copy of it and digitized the whole thing using OCR.

It was indeed very rough for him growing up in the 20s, 30s, and early 40s. Where they lived, there was no electricity. The wires did run down the main street, but they were farming a small rented plot of land closer to the river, along the railroad. No electric heat, or lights, telephone, or anything. The two oldest siblings died in infancy, their deaths due to diseases such as diphtheria and typhoid fever. My grandfather suffered from scarlet fever but recovered.

The writing has changed my opinion of him. At my age, I could have been friends with both of my grandfathers; unfortunately, my inexperience as a youth created conflicts with both. Although I do recall making inroads as I aged. And I have fond memories of both.

With that, I'll leave this passage, written by my grandfather, about a serious but funny situation he landed himself in, likely in the 1930's.

The P&LE R.R. in front of the house was a busy line, transporting coal, coke, and mill products. To warn engineers of other trains on the tracks, torpedoes were used. This was a lead foil wrapped packet of explosive fastened to the rails and was set off by the wheels of engines passing over it. One day, I removed a torpedo, took it into the cellar of our house, put it on a rock, and hit it with a hammer. It almost lifted the house off it's foundation and left me a deafened, shocked boy, scared but not seriously injured by some miracle. The shrapnel of the lead wrapper peppered me, but fortunately didn't hit an eye or artery. My parents were angry, thankful, and grateful that worse didn't happen.

The Business Cycle

First, you launch. Sometimes this puts you in the red.

Then you grow.

Then you shake out

Hit maturity

And eventually decline.

Feels so odd that the only way to avoid the decline is to try to grow again. But how do you do this with a mature setup?

People have likely studied these companies that have lasted for centuries, but the secret sauce is likely delayed gratification over generations.

The Moon

I've photographed the moon in so many ways at so many different times. It's very encouraging to see Artemis II fly out to and return from a swing around the Moon. In my entire lifetime, that is the first time it's happened. I've long been fascinated by it, watching many documentaries on the various Moon landings and wondering why we’ve taken so long to get back when we went several times and flew 24 people very close to the surface, from 1969 through 1972.

A little more than a decade later, I was born, and I still had to wait decades for it to happen again. I figured with so much activity, getting regular visits would be as routine as building new cars. Yet, that didn’t happen. Not to say that space exploration is easy, or that the money Earth has spent on it was wasted, but no Moon! People have set foot on and modified just about every place on this planet; you figure the moon is next.

Although there is a lot of space junk on the moon. I often wonder if future visitors to the moon will be able to trample on the spaces occupied by the lunar descent module lander stage, the instruments, and other memorabilia left on the Moon’s surface. Someone may even consider every footprint a historical artifact that shall not be disturbed. They are likely to last for a very long time, until some new crater on the moon throws dust over them. Or maybe they will dig them out and store them in a Moon museum.

That gets even more interesting when you consider Gene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt (Dec 1972) put 22 miles on their moon rover odometer. That’s a lot of old historic markings that are probably the same as they left them.

Either way, it’s exciting to see some progress. Artemis III was supposed to land humans on the Moon, but it appears it will be more of a test of landing-vehicle concepts. The SpaceX Starship HLS feels kind of nuts to me, because it’s so tall. I would not trust such an impractical design.

April 8, 2024; Solar eclipse

January 2019 Lunar Eclipse

July 2018

August 2017, covering up the sun

July 2015

February 2015

October 2014; eclipsing the sun at sunset.

August 2014

July 2014

June 2014

September 2013

August 2013

March 2012

September 2005

The Gundam Seed moon base

Systems II

Also, you get the more complicated systems. I see this happening right now.

Once upon a time, we had a large, complicated system, and even though it transported both water and electricity, and different customers consumed them, we still tried to move them through the same pipeline. Eventually, the system managers got smart and set up unique delivery systems for both products.

All were happy. The customers got their water; others got their electricity; and those who needed it got both. There was another subsystem that delivered natural gas, and demand was seasonal, but they decided to just put them with the water people. It worked, but the seasonal nature of gas vs water created some problems.

Then, suddenly, the managers thought things would go better if they tried to transport water, gas, and electricity using the same pipeline again.

Things are messy.

Systems

Systems are only as good as the components that comprise them. While I’ve seen systematic approaches championed many times, I’ve also seen failures when particular components don't hold up under the system's stresses.

A classic system diagram comprises a bathtub. This system has an input— the faucet —and an output —the drain.

The system uses water as the physical thing it drives.

The faucet is a junction for two water inputs: cold and hot. The user can adjust these components to create a wide range of water temperatures coming into the tub. The flow for each can go from 0 to 100%.

The drain has a similar configuration. The flow can go from 0 to 100%.

The tub can hold a certain amount of water before failing. Typically, the system can drain water faster than it can take it in, but bandwidth ranges can occur.

Someone can tell you that the bathtub is a perfect system. It does everything you want it to. But what happens if the user demands more water than the system can handle?

Well, it doesn’t work any longer. The tub overflows, or the faucets can’t deliver it. The user starts bringing in five-gallon buckets and dumping them into the tub. This helps to fill the tub faster, but the drain can’t handle the amount of water coming in.

If the buckets help fill the tub faster, then suddenly the drain can’t remove it any faster. If there is a demand to empty the tub faster, an engineer drills an additional drain, or users start manually taking buckets of water out.

Then, when the smoke clears, you have a bunch of buckets, a hole in your tub, but hey, you got it all done faster.

Are We Inside a Black Hole?

This isn't the first time it's been proposed. We could also consider hypothetical Gravastars.

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/james-webb-space-telescope/is-our-universe-trapped-inside-a-black-hole-this-james-webb-space-telescope-discovery-might-blow-your-mind

The idea of Gravastars somewhat complicates the concept of a universe within a universe. Gravistars are thought to contain maximized condensed empty space. You can't get it any smaller. So, how would we survive inside a black hole, a place with significant crunch going on? But I guess density could be relative. You could crunch more, just not so easily, in our own universe.

Concepts beyond me, but always fascinating.