Before and After in the Back Yard

Here are some before-and-after pictures of our back yard.

Before - my wife out training the baby miniature horse in her ancient electric wheelchair. It worked okay, though she tended to get stuck in soft soil, and eventually the controller had a major failure and it would only go in circles. Note the conspicuous absence of anything in the yard except for a few weeds and the one tree.

Digging the pool. Note the tree that the dump truck almost backed into - same tree as in the picture above. The guy running the excavator said "At least there's no problem with access on this property!" I should say not. They dumped the dirt off to the left and I ended up using all of it making flood control berms.

The back yard as it stands more or less today.

More of the back yard. Note the size of the tree now, which is on the left side of the picture.

We've done a lot over the years. But I wonder how much more I could have done if I hadn't spent two years dealing with cancer. Oh well. At least I'm still here to enjoy it.

It Is Haboob!

This has been a pretty active year for dust storms around Phoenix. Here's a view of a rather substantial dust storm about to hit - the picture is looking southeast, toward Phoenix, and the dust cloud is the solid light-colored bank in the distance. I was driving home from work when this thing was brewing and though I can't cite actual numbers, I do know that it spanned the entire southern horizon and must have been sixty miles long, if not more.

There's a certain amount of controversy these days about what to call such things. The local media has taken to calling them "haboobs", which is an Arabic word. Some people think it's unpatriotic to use Arabic words, or think that using them somehow insults US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. I personally think the uproar is kind of silly. English has been borrowing words from other languages since day one, and other languages have been borrowing words from English just as rapidly. If they think "haboob" is unpatriotic, maybe they'd like to give up other Arabic words like algebra, Rigel, alcohol, Betelgeuse, sultan... (Actually, some people really WOULD like to give up algebra, now that I think about it.)

As George Carlin once said, there are bad thoughts and bad intentions, and then there are just words, man. Haboob is just a word. If you don't like it, don't use it.

I confess that I generally don't refer to these sorts of things as haboobs. I'm used to the term "dust storm" and that's what comes most readily to mind, but it isn't an exclusionary practice; it's just the way my brain works. And it doesn't bother me if you do or not. Unlike the Thought Police that want to tell me what words I can and can't use, I hew to the line that the ultimate freedom is freedom of thought, and that means you can call them Floyd if that's what makes you happy.

Note the dry wash beyond the edge of the "cleared area". I grade the cleared area with my tractor every so often because that's where the garbage truck and mailman turn around, and it also serves as a firebreak. But I leave the dry wash alone (if I were in a sufficiently perky mood, I might refer to it as a wadi, another one of those dratted Arabic words). It doesn't look like much in the picture, but it's a wonderland of weird rocks, weird insects, and weird reptiles.

I go out in the dry wash - I mean, the wadi - with a metal detector from time to time. My master plan is that I'll find some enormous nickel-iron meteorite among all the rocks, and that isn't an entirely forlorn hope. But mostly I find bottle caps, nails, ancient steel Coca-Cola cans, the metal stubs of shotgun shells, and on one occasion an odd piece of wrought iron hardware that looks like it was once part of a horse-drawn wagon. And every now and then I find walnut-sized lumps of magnetite. Heaven knows where that stuff came from originally.

I also find a lot of tires. Someone upstream of me must have dumped a bunch of old tires in the wash, because every time it runs, a few tires come down with the flood and get beached in my part of the wash. I also suspect that that's how the shotgun shells and bottle caps get there too.

Practical Starships

You don't often see practical spacecraft capable of manned flight between stars. And you won't see it here either, because the ship shown above is not a practical starship. But it is a lot more practical than pretty much anything else I've seen in science fiction since the days of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is, of course, the ISV VentureStar from the movie Avatar. What makes it more practical than other things in sci-fi-dom?

For one thing, it isn't superluminal. It doesn't go faster than the speed of light, so it doesn't have to contend with things like warp drive, hyperdrive, hyperspace, wormholes, or any of that other hoohah. It gets there the hard way, by covering every damn kilometer between here and Pandora over a one-way flight of five-plus years.

Here's the basic mission profile. When it leaves Earth, it is propelled by enormously powerful lasers shining onto an equally enormous solar sail. When it gets to the halfway point, it furls or jettisons the solar said and decelerates using its own matter-antimatter engines. No warp drive here, folks, the matter-antimatter engines are just reaction motors of extremely high specific impulse. Once its affairs at Pandora are ended, it accelerates toward Earth using its aforementioned matter-antimatter engines, and then at the halfway point on the way back it deploys an enormous solar sail (or redeploys the old one) and is decelerated by the same lasers that drove it toward Pandora.

The proposal contains several interesting technical features. One is that the ship is a tension structure - the engines and the solar sail attach point are ahead of the rest of the ship, meaning that the thrust of the engines or sail pull the ship rather than push it. It's easier to make a tension structure light than it is to make a compression structure light.

Another feature is the whopping size of the radiators. Really advanced spacecraft engines have a problem in that they aren't able to eliminate enough heat in their exhausts to keep them cool. Chemical rockets can, and up to a point nuclear-thermal rockets can, but engines of this sort tend to produce way more heat than they can dump through the exhausts. So advanced spacecraft propulsion is often more a matter of heat-sinking and radiator design than anything else. (Incidentally, they knew this when they made 2001 and Discovery was intended to have radiators of similar size, but they eliminated them for the sake of visual cleanliness.) In this artist's conception, the radiators are still glowing red-hot as they dump the heat from several years of engine operation.

Another interesting idea is the use of what is called "r-squared" shielding instead of a "shadow shield". Matter-antimatter engines will produce a lot of pretty harmful radiation, probably lots of high-energy particles and even more hard x-rays. One method of shielding the crew from this nastiness is to put a hockey-puck-shaped shield between the engine and the crew compartment - a "shadow shield", so-called because it makes a "radiation shadow". But shields are heavy, and lugging a sixty-ton lead shield to Pandora and back isn't efficient. So the ship uses "r-squared" shielding, which means that you simply put the people as far away from the engine as you can, because the radiation drops at the square of the distance between the engine and the crew. (Again, 2001 had this right; the design of the Discovery is just right to exploit r-squared shielding.)

The ship also employs a recognizable variant of Whipple shields. An unavoidable fact of life is that colliding with dust motes and even hydrogen atoms at a high percentage of the speed of light is a bad idea. In Star Trek this problem is dealt with by the navigational deflector, which moves such gleefus aside so it doesn't hit the ship. In Star Wars, this problem is apparently not dealt with at all. The VentureStar uses Whipple shields, which amount to stacked layers of aluminum foil. The dust mote hits the foil and blows the hell out of it, but doesn't get through to riddle the ship (it's almost like spaced armor or ERA on tanks).

But it still isn't practical. The design contains at least four industrial-strength hand-waves.

The first is that achieving the accelerations required for relatively brief interstellar flight (say, seven years) with a solar sail is hard. The propulsion lasers would have to be both numerous and incredibly powerful, to say nothing of the "pointing problem", keeping all those gigawatt-class lasers pointed at a solar sail that might be only on the order of ten miles in diameter at distances of two or three light years. It isn't impossible, but it isn't something we can do right now, and probably won't be able to do until the advent of cheap and reliable fusion reactors and probably several hitherto unknown breakthroughs in free-electron lasers.

The second is that the hundred or so passengers remain in suspended animation throughout most of the flight - not for their convenience, but so that the ship doesn't have to carry food, water, and oxygen for them. Only four people remain awake during the voyage. Is that sort of suspended animation possible? I'm no biologist, but my sense is that it isn't impossible in principle, but the details are liable to be a bitch.

The third is that the ship uses matter-antimatter engines, largely as a means of getting around the depressing reality that lower-energy engines either don't generate enough thrust to achieve a reasonable flight time, or consume so much fuel or energy that the ship can't actually carry anything but fuel. Matter-antimatter engines are not impossible. I myself have indulged in the subtle joys of matter-antimatter reactions; every time I get a PET scan to monitor my cancer, chemicals in my body are undergoing beta decay and producing positrons, which are antimatter. They collide with electrons, they annihilate, and 511 KeV X-rays go shooting off through my tissues. So a matter-antimatter engine isn't impossible by any means. The chief problem is collecting enough antimatter to fuel a starship, and containing it years without significant decay.

This leads to the fourth and final hand-wave, which is that the ship is said to employ the "unobtainium" mined on Pandora to contain the requisite amounts of antimatter for the requisite time. Unobtainium is an excellent plot device, but its physical properties on the face of it appear to violate the laws of physics. But don't take my word for that. I have a problem understanding the energy dynamics of magnets, which to my mind also appear to violate the laws of physics. You hold a magnet over a nail and suddenly the nail flies up to the magnet, against the pull of gravity. Okay, now where the hell did that energy come from?? The nail gains both potential and kinetic energy, and I can't for the life of me figure out where it came from. So given this critical failure in my understanding of ordinary physics, I may not be the person best qualified to say whether levitating unobtainium is bullshit or not. But I think it is.

Still, though, the VentureStar is an acutely interesting design and good food for thought, if nothing else. And I rather like the Valkyrie shuttles too, because they manage to get around all that hokey VTVL nonsense by employing dual-cycle engines capable of breathing air. But that's a whole different rant, innit?

Lament For My Feet

These are my feet, and one of my size-14 shoes. My poor feet are the main sufferers of chemotherapy these days. Chemotherapy causes all sorts of interesting and unpleasant side effects, but it turns out that for me, the longest-lasting side effect of them all is neuropathy in my feet. The chemo drugs damaged my peripheral nerves. In the heyday of chemo, I had neuropathy all the way up both legs to above my knees, and even in my hands, but since I stopped chemo, the damage has mostly healed. Now it's just concentrated in my feet, and it may never go away entirely. For a while my oncologist had me on Neurontin to help with the neuropathy, but drugs like Neurontin aren't without their own risks and we finally decided that the I'd be better off with the discomfort than with the drug.

What's it feel like? It's like my feet went to sleep and are just starting to wake up - endless tingling and prickling for the most part, but some days it's more achy and unpleasant than that. You get used to it and it isn't any particular badge of honor to live with this sort of neuropathy, but it does make me a little jumpy. My nerves are now uber-sensitive and the slightest touch on the soles of my feet makes me squeal and squirm. It's somewhere in between being highly ticklish and having an actual seizure.

A while back I was in my garage goofing around - barefoot, as I usually am around the house. I heard the garbage truck coming and decided to hustle the can out to the road across about forty feet of gravel. So I did, and such as my hurry that I didn't realize that I'd driven my entire nervous system into total collapse with that much overstimulation of my sad nerves. I couldn't walk. I could hardly stand. I was a seething, writhing pillar of acute nervous agitation, and I couldn't even move when the garbage truck swept up in a cloud of diesel smoke and dust.

I stood there, smiling blandly at the truck driver. The driver looked down at me. Moments passed. No, really, I'm fine, I'm just standing here like a fool because I'm very interested in how the truck's claws grab my trash can and hoist it. Nothing going on here. No nerves freaking out in my feet. By the way, there seems to be a minor leak in one of your hydraulic cylinders... He waved. I waved. Finally he seemed to shrug and hoisted the can, and I stood there the whole time.

It took me about fifteen minutes to pick my back across the gravel. I'd take a step and have to pause for about thirty seconds to let the nervous agitation wane a bit, and then I'd take another step. For a time I felt like a French Foreign Legionnaire in one of those March Or Die movies, tottering on my last remaining strength toward Fort Zinderneuf. I considered sitting down and sliding on my butt toward the smooth safety of the concrete, but then I became anxious about rasping the skin off my butt on that expanse of gravel. Plus the gravel was hot. It was a case of either making my feet suffer, or grinding my buttocks into Swiss steak. I suppose I could have stopped, dropped, and rolled toward safety, but how do you explain that to your neighbors? "It's okay, I decided to roll back to the garage. Suddenly I'm an eight year old boy again. Whee."

I suppose the moral of the story is that I should wear shoes when I go outside, but I often don't. Shoes hurt. Wearing shoes for any length of time makes it feel as though I've clamped my toes in a bench vise, and that isn't much fun either.

What's a boy to do? Pour lots and lots of concrete, I guess. Or make someone else take the trash can out to the road.

But I kid my feet. They've actually been pretty reliable, considering the abuse I've heaped on them, and I wouldn't blame them if they gave up on me altogether. One day I might wake up and find that my feet have detached themselves and gone off to live with some rich guy who does nothing but sit in hot tubs all day. Who could blame them?

Pool Blues

I've been working on our swimming pool a lot lately. It's now about five years old, and for about two of those years I've been more or less completely out of commission and neglected some basic maintenance. So this year I've been trying to fix some of the things that have gone wrong with it.

It's a thankless task, because the pool builder put the control boxes in the worst imaginable spot, crammed into a corner formed by the house and a block wall. The only real way to get to the control boxes is to lie on your right side and work with your left hand, which means that unless you're a left-handed gibbon, there's really no easy way to get at anything.

Then someone (it might have been me, but I don't remember) covered the ground around the pool equipment with coarse gravel. Very coarse, as in one-inch screened stuff that I think was intended for septic tank leach fields. Every time I work on the thing I end up covered with bruises from lying on the rocks, and my knees look like they've been attacked with hammers. It's awful.

And then nothing is ever easy. To wit:

THE POOL LIGHT

The pool light quit. So I thought it was a bad bulb, and I wrestled the fixture out of the "wet niche" and got it out on the pool deck. The bulb was thoroughly dead - it rattled like a gourd when shaken. So I got a new bulb and a new gasket. Still nothing. So I get out my trusty Radio Shack DMM and take a few measurements, and note no AC going to the remote switch. Aha - the GFI outlet had probably tripped. But they put the GFI receptacle between two boxes in such a way that the hinged plastic cover cannot possibly be opened. Solution: grab the plastic cover with both hands and physically rip it off so I can reset the GFI. The light comes on. The light stays on for about two hours, and quits again. Grrr. At that point I had to go back to work and just had no time to work on it, so we had the "pool guy" come out to look at it. Turns out that the white replacement gasket had failed and the lamp fixture was full of water, and the GFI receptacle had also failed. One lamp, one GFI outlet, and one new gasket later, it was working. Only, it wasn't. The remote switch no longer worked. Turns out that the outlet it was plugged into had ALSO failed; its GFI mechanism had permanently tripped out. So now the remote switch is on the countertop in the kitchen, and the light works again.

THE CHLORINATOR

We have a salt-water pool, and I happen to like them. But tests revealed that there wasn't so much as an atom of chlorine in the pool, and the salt water generator control box was showing fault code 94, meaning no current draw in the generator. Oh, how hard could that be to fix? I replaced the fuse inside the box, which was blown, but still had a 94 fault. More poking with a DMM (again carried out while lying on my side, using one hand) revealed 28 VDC at the output pin of the box. So I thought it was perhaps a problem with the cell itself, perhaps a corroded or broken contact. So I tore the cell apart, which involves taking about about fifteen enormous screws with the biggest Phillips screwdriver I possess, and half-breaking my wrist in the process. Then thirteen (or so) plates fell out like playing cards, $600 worth of titanium and ruthenium oxide clattering around on the rocks.

By now it was getting dark, way too dark to figure out how to reassemble the cell, so I just screwed the cover back on and reassembled the plumbing. But in the process, a little rock got stuck in the o-ring groove and when I turned on the pump, a veritable Old Faithful eruption ensued. A great deal of struggling with enormous water pump pliers ensued, only because of the way the pool installer did the plumbing, the lower union was now in a pool of muddy water. It's enough to make a man scream. In the darkness. While lying on one-inch rocks.

The next day I did more electrical tests. Only the pool installer wired the disconnect strangely. The cell had a white and a black wire. The control box had a white and a black wire. But they crossed them at the disconnect plug, so the white wire connected to the black wire and vice versa, making a mockery of my continuity tests. For a long time this miswire made it seem like the fuseholder had failed, so I cut the shrink sleeving off it to get to the terminals, and then cut more shrink sleeving off the disconnect to get to the pins, and finally I figured out what they had done.

Finally, I found that the cable was bad. The white wire was open. But where? I had to slit the sheath of the cable along most of its length and finally found a spot where a squirrel had bitten through the insulation and exposed the conductor of the white wire, which had then corroded completely away. Half an hour later, armed with black tape and wire nuts, the cable was fixed. But now I had to reassemble the cell, which involved aligning all thirteen plates in twenty-six parallel grooves. I ended up using model railroad scale two-by-sixes as spacers to keep the plates aligned.

I guess the bottom line is that the light now works, the chlorinator is once again generating chlorine, and the water is now unbelievably clear, like glass. And my bruises are slowly healing. But the emotional trauma is still with me. So tomorrow I'm going to start the tractor and drag as much of that stupid gravel away as I can, and then get in there and get the rest of the rocks out by hand. And then I'm going to pile up the rocks and scream at them for a while, just because, and then invite the dog to piddle on them.

I look forward to that.

Spliced

I tried to watch the movie Splice. I was unsuccessful. I can't even tell you if it's a good movie or not, because I found the "male lead" so unappealing I simply couldn't continue. Was it the greasy, stringy, Severus Snape hair? Or the endless procession of uber-hip t-shirts? Or the ironic hip of him driving an AMC Gremlin? Whatever, he aggravated me to the point of anguish and I flipped to an old Western instead, where nobody wore any uber-hip t-shirts or drove a 1970s piece-of-crap car as a statement of ironic style.

My first car was an AMC Hornet, which was basically a Gremlin with a trunk. And I can assure you, there was nothing hip about a Hornet, then or now. They say people develop an emotional soft spot for their first cars. I didn't. My Hornet was a rolling mass of issues, including chronic electrical problems and torque converters that wouldn't stay together. My second car was a Ford Pinto, which was, if anything, even worse - it is impossible to think tenderly about a car that developed two horsepower (I'd tell dates "Hang on, I have to use both horsepowers now!").

The first car I really liked in any real way was a late-1970s Chevrolet Nova, mostly because when you stepped on the throttle, it would actually do something. The Hornet just vibrated; the Pinto spit and coughed. But the Nova would at least move. It wasn't a muscle car and wasn't meant to be, but it would at least get out of its own way.

The use of an AMC in Wayne's World was funny because the main characters were either too dumb or too self-absorbed to realize it wasn't hip. But the guy in Splice drove an AMC apparently because it was retro. But so are outhouses, and I don't notice a strong movement toward outdoor toilets as an expression of personal style.

I seem to have a pretty low threshold of pain when it comes to ironic retro hipness in movies. And I'm okay with that.

Curiosity

I see there's a new TV show called Curiosity. The tag-line, at least according to the ads I've seen, is "No question is off limits." I agree that in principle no question should be off limits. But some questions just aren't worth asking.

"Are we prepared for an alien invasion?" the ad asks. Well, that depends. If the aliens are two inches tall and are armed with thumbtacks, I'd say we're in good shape. If the aliens hit us with a twenty-ton iron projectile at .995 c, then we're in trouble. But is that an alien attack or an alien invasion? Does it matter?

It just seems to me that in a time when people are trying to kill the James Webb Space Telescope, the Discovery Channel could find better questions to ask than "Are we ready for an alien invasion?" Like, "Is basic scientific exploration worth anything?" Or, "If the Tea Party has its way and science becomes strictly a for-profit enterprise, are we better off?"

What's gone wrong with cable TV? Professional wrestling on Syfy? Storage Wars? A TV show about people who bellow a lot while they convert cars into Xtreme aquariums? Remember when TLC used to stand for "The Learning Channel" and not "The Lame Channel"? No wonder people believe crazy things when the supposedly highbrow cable channels are a wasteland of UFOs, ghost hunters, Nostradamus, and reality shows about pawn shops, storage units, and people who like to yell a lot.

I always liked the TV shows Cosmos and Connections (the one with James Burke), and I thought they were genius when they first aired. But against backdrop of the crap that passes for "educational TV" these days, their genius seems even more profound, and very badly missed.