Dear History Channel:

You've gone in the crapper.

Regards,

Me.

I've had a whopper of a cold the last few days, and I spent most of today in bed. While I was there, I watched some of the History Channel's programming. Holy cow. I used to make fun of the History Channel by calling it the "Hitler Channel" since it was just one dull documentary about Hitler after another - Hitler's doctors, Hitler's women, Hitler's desk toys, Hitler's hemorrhoids. But the History Channel (and I use the word "history" reluctantly) has apparently retooled itself into the Whack Job Channel.

Reality shows about pawn shops. Not my speed at all, and I'd rather go to the dentist and have this troublesome tooth fixed than watch them, but at least they don't drive me mad.

Reality shows about ghost hunters, usually featuring some guy in a dark room blurting "Did you just feel that? I swear, it felt just like Elvis Presley pinching me on the ass!" Or the ridiculous EVPs that purport to be William the Conqueror muttering "Rosebud..." Stupid, but when it's a reality show about ghost hunters, you know what you're getting to.

Ancient astronauts. This is the mother lode, the thing that finally produced in me a state that I think is known to medical science as a "conniption fit". It isn't just that they're stupid. With a title like "Ancient Astronauts", you know what you're getting into. It's the wide-eyed credulity of the stupidity that gets me. Thanks, History Channel, you've put legitimate history and rational thought back at least a century, and made a mockery of yourselves.

I can't even begin to critique the shows point by point, because the lame stupidity piles on so fast I can't even keep up with it. And they have these guys, these "experts", mouthing the most ridiculous gibberish without any kind of accountability at all. They don't even get the jargon right, for crying out loud - how am I supposed to take seriously people who speak of "direct energy weapons" or "the constellation Sirius"? And that digital scale model of the Sirius star system has to be one of the most laughable things I've ever seen.

The History Channel executives will probably say "Hey, man, we don't make the shows, we just air them." Yeah? Well, you decide which shows you put on your channel, don't you? That makes you responsible.

The History Channel executives may also say "Well, we got you to watch, didn't we?"

True - but for the last time. If that's your idea of programming fit for something called "The History Channel", you can proceed without me. You've insulted my intelligence for the last time.

I used to think that TLC was the most lame cable channel - I even referred to it as "The Lame Channel". But now I'm going to call it "The Loser Channel" because in truth, the History Channel is now the lamest thing going on my satellite TV system. (Actually, the lamest moment in the history of satellite TV, as far as I'm concerned, was when the Sci-Fi Channel renamed itself "Syfy". But this retooling of the History Channel is pretty damn close.)

To The Movement

Dear Occupy Phoenix movement:

It seems to me that there are only two routes to social and economic change: revolution, or evolution. I'm not prepared to endorse a revolutionary agenda. Talking of putting the bastards up against the wall makes good copy, and it might be a consoling strategy when you're crying in your beer, but it isn't a viable strategy, and it isn't one that I support.

So that leaves evolution. Rather than destroying the entire social fabric and starting over, you alter the social fabric in little steps. To do this, you need votes. That's all. Specifically, you need the votes of moderate conscience-driven Republicans. How do you get those votes? By demonstrating that your cause is morally right to the point that people of good conscience cannot possibly oppose you, regardless of their politics.

And now do you do that? By demonstrating your moral rectitude in a public forum so that people of good conscience can see what you stand for, and be moved by it. By managing the face you display, by taking care to maintain as positive a public relations spin as possible.

I hear the complaints already. "This shouldn't be about spin, or PR, it should be about ideas!" True - and if we lived in a debating society, that might have merit. But this is the real world, and the real fact of the real world is that the average Repbulican ALREADY views you as a bunch of foul-mouthed Gen-X slackers. How do you propose to gain the votes and support of moderate Repulicans, whom you absolutely, utterly need on your side to accomplish anything, when they're already predisposed to see you as foul-mouthed slackers?

By proving that you aren't. And that means controlling the face you display to the public.

"But that's not fair! We should be judged for our ideas!" Oh, grow up. Life is unfair. Get used to it.

So you have a live feed. Good for you. But instead of using this live feed to display your best face, or present coherent arguments in favor of your cause, or to demonstrate the virtue of your cause, it's turned into an open microphone at a convention of anarchists. Lovely.

It seems that a lot of time on the live feed is spent debating whether to take the word "non-violent" out of the mission statement. Are you insane? What do you propose to do, hulk up and out-fight the police department? The authorities are already having elaborate fantasies about beating you all down with clubs and exiling you to the modern equivalent of Siberia, and you're going to actually *facilitate* that? Good luck with that.

"But there's no definition of what non-violent means!"

Sure there is. It means an absense of violence, physical or otherwise. And if you think otherwise, then you're already lost MY support, and since I'm already predisposed to support the goals of the Occupy movement, imagine how this sort of discussion plays with Republicans, who *already* don't like you and don't trust you. You think Gandhi succeeded in freeing India by screaming at British soldiers, or by scuffling with Indian riot police? Think again. He succeeded because people of good conscience were so sickened by the image of the authorities clubbing down unarmed, non-violent people that they said "This is wrong, this cannot continue."

But go ahead, change your mission statement, and get your anarchist rocks off screaming insults at the police. Just do it without me, and without my support.

Here's another problem you face. Nobody controls your live feed. Nobody enforces any standards of conduct or message, so you end up with some foul-mouthed Gen-X slacker screaming about how it's a free country and she can curse as much as she wants on the live feed. Is that really what the movement is about? The alleged right of some malaffected whiner to curse? I thought it was about social and economic justice, but suddenly it's turned into the right to say "fuck" on the live feed?

I don't care if people curse. I curse. Practically everyone curses. But the freedom to curse isn't the issue here. The issue is showing voters who don't agree with you why they SHOULD agree with you. And every time the movement gets sidetracked into some stupid postmodern rebellion against social norms and oppressive social expectations, you lose support. You hear that dribbling sound? That's the sound of you pissing away your support every time some rabid narcissist screams "It's my right to say FUCK as much as I want, because it's a free country."

It is a free country - and I'm free to choose not to support people like her in any way at all. And if she irks me, imagine what Joe the Plumber must think of her!

It's noble that you want to be fully inclusive and utterly democratic. But this isn't a debating society. This is the real world. And in the real world, money and votes matter. To get either, you need to manage your message, and sometimes that means not being democratic. Sometimes that means having someone responsible in charge of the live feed so that pseudo-anarchistic nitwits can't soil your public face with their intemperate shouting. Sometimes it means telling people "No, you can't take the words non-violent out of the mission statement, and no, you can't curse on the live feed, and no, you can't just say whatever doofus thing occurs to you, you have to think about what you're doing, and why you're doing it."

All you have, ALL YOU HAVE, is the moral rectitude of your cause, and if you don't make that the centerpiece of your movement, and if you allow yourselves to come off looking like a bunch of hardcore punk screamers, you're doomed. You'll never amount to more than a sad footnote in the big book of failed social movements.

And sometimes that means telling the screamers that they can either use their grown-up voices, or they can shut up, or they can go the hell away.

Harsh? Maybe - but this isn't a game, and it isn't some private rebellion drama where you earn points for being extreme. This is for real. This is a movement with real goals and a real moral message, and you should be constantly mindful of that.

More Of That

Whenever I start to feel that I'm becoming too bogged down in my own problems and the dull requirements of daily life, I like to think about things like the X-15, seen above not longer after being dropped from its NB-52 carrier airplane. The X-15 flew in the early to mid 1960s. Maybe that wasn't really such a great time, and it's probably dangerous to overly romanticize the whole thing, but there was a lot to be said for being young and innocent and living in a world where bold men flew these black aircraft to the very edge of space.

The X-15 was never meant to go into orbit. The engine lacked the power, and a combination of thermal and stability issues prevented it from re-entering safely from altitudes above about 360,000 feet (450,000 feet seems to have been the thermal limit, and 360,000 feet the safe stability limit; the X-15 tended to be divergent in yaw at high angles of attack and re-entry from above 360,000 feet would require an angle of attack so high the pilot wouldn't be able to maintain control if the stability augmentation system failed, which it often did).

It was really designed to perform basic research on the then-mysterious field of hypersonic flight, to answer questions like how does hypersonic flight differ from supersonic flight and are our theoretical predictions of heating, drag, and aerodynamic forces in hypersonic flight really accurate? Hypersonic flow is hard to achieve in a wind tunnel, and even then, shock wave interactions in the wind tunnel itself make it difficult to say anything meaningful about the behavior of the model. Nowadays we can use supercomputers and computational fluid dynamics to simulate hypersonic airflow, but even if they had had supercomputers and CFD in the 1960s, they wouldn't have known if the CFD models were valid or not.

The only way to test the theoretical projections was to actually build a plane that could fly at hypersonic speeds - to go that fast and see exactly what happened. The X-15 did a lot of research in hypersonic flight, of course, with a heavy emphasis on heating and drag studies. That was its main mission. But in the process, the program did a lot of other research on things like spacesuits, insulators, ablators, reaction control systems, cockpit instrumentation, energy management systems, inertial platforms, adaptive-gain flight control systems, hypersonic degradation of cameras, and other things.

It's dangerous to say that any one airplane was the most significant airplane ever flown. But I think it's safe to say that the X-15 program was probably one of the most fruitful aerospace research programs in human history.

But once you dispense with all the jargon and technical palaver, it speaks powerfully to me of a time when I was young and anything was possible.

Redemptive Engineering

I find this picture pretty striking. This is what NASA calls the "Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine." It's really a variant of the fairly venerable RL10 rocket engine, built to test various methods of modifying the RL10 to achieve wider throttle ratios.

Maybe the most striking thing about this picture is the lack of overall rumpus. The thing is running at full throttle and yet it seems as placid and harmless as the burner on a gas stove. No smoke, no roiling clouds of flame, no explosions. This is what a well-controlled rocket engine should look like.

Another striking thing is the blue color of the exhaust plume. I believe the blue color is produced by what are called "Swan bands", bands of light at specific colors produced by highly excited hydrogen atoms. Unlike the orange glow of a campfire, which is produced mainly by black body radiation coming from glowing bits of soot, the color here is atomic in nature and not any kind of black body radiation. It's the same blue color as a blowtorch flame, the characteristic blue of highly efficient hydrocarbon combustion.

But let's look a bit deeper. At high magnification, one can see that there are actually icicles hanging from the skirt of the nozzle. The nozzle is so well cooled that the superheated steam in the exhaust plume condenses into water and then freezes into ice, even though the temperature of the exhaust plume is on the order of several thousand degrees. That's some serious regenerative cooling.

The heat flux staggers the imagination. The temperature in the exhaust plume is high enough to melt the engine, but the cooling system can draw heat out of the metal nozzle so fast it not only doesn't melt, but it actually runs below room temperature.

Another striking feature of this engine is its "deep throttling". Throttling a rocket engine is exactly like throttling a car engine - making it produce more or less power as circumstances dictate. But unlike car engines, rocket engines are notoriously difficult to throttle. On the one hand, if your throttling system goes haywire on the high side, the engine can over-pressurize and blow up (though RL10s and other expander-cycle engines don't really have this problem, as the square-cube law means that even with the propellant valves thrown wide open, the engine can't really run away and blow up). On the other hand, reducing the engine's power creates all sorts of complications, like flow separation in the nozzle (bad), and periodic combustion instabilities like "chugging" and "screeching". Screeching isn't really a combustion instability; it's a regenerative acoustic effect, but it can happen by accident (it's always by accident) as you throttle an engine.

The X-15 rocket plane was designed to have a pretty wide throttle range, from about 30% to 100%. But the mission logs of the X-15 program reveal that the XLR99 engine just didn't like to run at low throttle. It wouldn't start reliably at low throttle, and would occasionally just cough and die when throttled back (and the X-15 fell so fast after drop that you didn't get many restart attempts before it was time to start dumping propellant and get ready to land the thing).

But this engine has been run from 8% to 104% throttle. That's pretty amazing to me. 8% is particularly striking - I can't begin to imagine how they do that without employing exotic variable geometry in the nozzle throat (my understanding of de Laval nozzles is that the gas flow rate through the throat must be sufficient to cause sonic choking. How they can keep the flow sonic at 8% throttle without necking down the nozzle is a mystery to me - either that, or the engine is seriously underexpanded at full throttle - or something...)

My point is that this photograph shows off some very advanced rocket science. Whenever I start to feel that modern life has turned into a cornucopia of dung designed to appeal to the least common denominator, I look at pictures like this and think "Man, we really are pretty smart, aren't we?"

Well, I'm not that smart. But I'm smart enough to recognize staggering engineering achievements when I see them, and be cheered up by them.