The Random Walk

Quick Observations from the Road

2004-08-11T17:01:00.000-07:00

The Democratic Convention: Bill Clinton was a rock star. Future Senator Obama, who will not be confused with America's most entertaining psychopath, Alan Keyes, was good. I didn't see Edwards in action.
Teresa Heinz-Kerry is a space cadet - "We sent men to the moon, and when that was not far enough, we sent Galileo to Jupiter, we sent Cassini to Saturn, and Hubble to touch the very edges of the universe in the very dawn of time." will go down as one of the geekiest sentences in any major political speech - and John Kerry was John Kerry (I missed the campaign's well attended stop in Flagstaff, AZ by one day). His convention speech was a very safe, rather banal, laundry list.

One thing that he is shading - improving fuel efficiently through better technology will in no shape or form reduce U. S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil. The Persian Gulf reserves are the most accessible in the world, and reduced demand by America will simply destroy the affordability of all the other potential oil sources. The only way to cut the link to Saudi Arabia are by increasing the price of all oil (i.e. raising gas taxes), embargo (a la Jimmy Carter's 1979 politically catastrophic sanctions on Iran) or letting the place go to pot (the end result of the Bush Administration's Grand Strateragy).

Of course, none of theses are going to happen soon (except for maybe the last).

AMTRAK: While I stopped in Flagstaff at 6:00 am Monday, the Southwestern Chief went on up the line to Albuquerque with my luggage. My errant bag, separated from a pile of Boy Scout backpacks, came back on the return train at midnight. In an interesting twist, that train was two hours late - apparently due to a plague of light fingered transvestites that forced the train to stop for a surprised sheriff in Kansas.

JPL: I will try and write more about my Planetary Science Summer School experience. A couple of observations. The place runs on thumb drives - which I had never really encountered before - due to a Lab-wide addiction to Macs contrasting with a substantial Windows investment.
Also, JPL's spacecraft are designed on Microsoft Excel - which might explain a lot. (I'm kidding)

Drinking: Done some (responsibly) over the last few days. PSSS finished at JPL's Team-X happy hour at Mc Murphy's Tavern, and then a small group of us headed out to an exclusive Hollywood nightclub situated under the neon lit ominous bulk of the Church of Scientology on Sunset Boulevard. Somehow my normal outfit was not up to scratch - so I ended up wearing exclusive Hollywood nightclub clothes contributed by a local Persian. Long story.
The next night was a subdued evening of watching HBO at the Pico Rivera Days Inn, while a loud Mexican wedding boomed mariachi music well into the evening. Attack of the Clones is still a terrible movie.
In Flagstaff I saw my first full-on bar brawl in these parts (seconds after Matt the Englishman commented on the lack of drunken fighting in America). The second night was composed of pool, karaoke , and politics, in approximately that order, with a large amount of beer and wine.
Might take it easy tonight - my train goes through Flagstaff at 5:22 am tomorrow - and they will not wait (unless there is another tranny invasion).
Update: Okay - 25 ¢ yellow beers at the dubious Joint bar undid that plan. Nice young English lass informed me that I resemble Jim Carry.

I frankly dont see it.

I did manage to get up at the required 4:00 am - but the Chief was delayed 6 hours.

Posted from Starbucks Flagstaff

Fair Play

2004-08-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

A fine photo of the POTUS back in his winger days...
Gratifying! (Via This Modern World)

Aurora Borealis

2004-07-24T22:51:00.000-07:00

Finally.

Returning from the Lakes 10 multiplex, after Nick, Jere and I had watched the CGI sparkle of Spiderman 2, Jere noticed a glowing curtain of starstuff hanging over the northern horizon. We drove out of town, past the street lights, into the fields and turned into a closed side road, as the curtain split into two, three, four sheets...

The sky flickered and throbbed silently - waves of grey light chasing one another through ghostly ducts carved into the sky, seeking heaven. Countless thin sinuous channels of darkness veined the dancing plasma in the zenith, imperceptibly shifting as the storm's front lines moved through the thermosphere. A black gulf beneath the great northern curtain was suddenly filled with a succession of new sheets blazing into life. Every so often, a filament, a fold of these new curtains would erupt brilliantly, and like a flame on a fuse, travel down the length of the delicate film.

Colours began to emerge. Oxide blue-greens, trimmed with nitric pinks and purples. The curtains to the north faded, but the pulsing rays above speared more intently into space. The battle between Sunspot 652 and the churning iron below had found a new focus.

Five days before leaving Duluth, I was getting my send-off.

It was cold. We pulled ourselves away from the erie half-darkness and returned to civilization's smothering half-lights.

Iapetus - giant crater still there...

2004-07-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

Cassini's ISS system records images with a depth of 12-bits (4096 gray shades) as opposed to the personal computing standard of 8-bits (256 gray shades) in any given channel. Since the human eye can at best resolve between 16 and 20 gray shades, 8-bits is fine for the web; however, the extra depth provided by 12-bits may prove invaluble for science. However, this means that the quickie raw images put on the web will be clipped by the automatic 12 to 8-bit transistion. Only after careful reconstruction by the folks at CICLOPS do we get the full picture.
Earlier this month, I observed that Cassini appeared to have picked up a large crater in the mysterious Cassini Regio, a region covered with reddish-black material that covers the moon Iapetus' leading side. CICLOPS has rescently released a reprocessed image of Iapetus. The large crater appears to be still there - the shaded eastern scarp is visible at the edge of the regio, and there are hints of an illuminated western edge and a central peak. Now visible is the odd circular feature Voyager 1 observed at the eastern end of Cassini Regio, as well as an unnamed medium-sized crater barely detected in Voyager imagery to the south of Cassini Regio.
Andrew Gray suggested on this USENET thread that the big crater in Cassini Regio might be Roland, a 144-km wide basin seen in Voyager 2 coverage of Iapetus' north pole. The thing I am seeing is on the order of 400-km wide, and further south.
I am less certain of the gravitaion capture of the ejecta senaraio I laid out in the earlier post - it may be that I had it backward.

35 years since the night that (unfortunately) changed very little...

2004-07-20T13:28:00.000-07:00

The U. S. House Appropriations Committee choose the low-key 35th anniversary of the landing of the Eagle to eliminate the new Vision for Space Exploration from the VA-HUD budget. Projects Constellation (which would build the new Crew Exploration Vehicle) and Promthemus (responsible for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter) are effectively nixed unless the Senate comes riding to the rescue. And in this election year, it is hard to see anyone defending the Shuttle-Killer or a flying nuclear-reactor, especially in this age of Yucca.

UPDATE:The star-spangled Curmudgeon notes that the Hammer (the House Majority Leader and the future representitive of Johnson Space Center) is pissed. But Rep. DeLay might not be in a position to do much.

UPDATE:The Adminstration spits the dummy. (Via Nasawatch.)

"If the final version of this bill that is presented to the President does not include adequate funding levels for Presidential initiatives, his Senior Advisors would recommend that he veto the bill."

Twenty Years since the night that changed everything...

2004-07-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

John Roughan reflects on New Zealand's bizzare Independence Day - the second of July, 1984.
The Wikipedia account of the implosion of the Muldoon Government is here.

Oh My G-d

2004-07-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

It had to happen someday. I get Adventist spam (truly a Great Disappointment):

Return-path: ...snip Received: from mail.com (ip-47-061.guate.net.gt [200.12.47.61] (may be forged)) by mac.com (Xserve/smtpin12/MantshX 4.0) with SMTP id i6DMlbCa027875; Tue, 13 Jul 2004 15:47:38 -0700 (PDT) Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:47:44 -0600 From: Adventist Friends Subject: THE PAPACY IS THE ANTICHRIST THAT IOS TRYING TO DESTROY THE LAW OF GOD. DN.7:25 Reply-to: adventist_believers@yahoo.com SUNDAY IS THE DAY OF THE BEAST, SABBATH 7TH IS GODґS TRUE DAY. EX. 20. ...snip ADVENTIST SENVENTH DAY DOCTRINE ...snip GOD SAID: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shalllabor... ...snip ...the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it." (Exodous 20:8-11) ...snip SABBATH =GOD`S HOLY DAY (SATURDAY 7TH DAY) SUNDAY= DAY OF THE SUN (1ST DAY) JESUS IS COMMING SOON , PREPARE THE DEAD WILL RESURRECT, THEY ARE NOT IN HEAVEN OR HELL John 5 28 ...snip JESUS IS THE WAY NOT MARY OR THE POPE ...snip JESUS IS THE CHIEF CORNERSTONE NOT PETER ...snip THE PAPACY IS THE ANTICHRIST . VICARIOUS FILII DEI = V(5)I(1)C(100)ARI(1)OV(5)S FI(1)L(50)I(1)I(1)D(500)EI(1) 5+1+100+1+5+1+50+1+1+500+1=666 ...snip - numeralogy!! Cool!! ALL THE CATHOLIC SYSTEM IS A COPY OF BABYLON`S RELIGION ITS THE MOTHER OF THE HARLOTS. SHE KILLED MILLIONS CHRISTHIANS ...snip CATHOLIC CHURCH IS THE ANTICHRIST THAT CHANGED THE LAW OF GOD . ...snip DON`T CALL FATHER TO THE POPE OR PRIESTS ...snip THE TRUE PEOPLE OF GOD KEEPS THE 10 COMMANDMENTS AND THE FAITH OF JESUS

Complete with anti-spamblocker spelling mistakes. I expect viruses with pressed white shirts and ties to show up in my inbox anyday now...

This is nearly as exciting as when I got my first dead-African-dictator spam!

Number 2! Number 2!

2004-07-11T20:13:00.000-07:00

Well that was a turnround! In the triangular West Indies/England/New Zealand pajama-party*, the Kiwis were unbeaten, dumped their hosts out of the final and went on to crush the Windies by 107 runs. The Black Caps are now second only to the World Champion Australians in the short form of the game.

*One day cricket, being largely derived from Australian media magnet Kerry Packer's failed attempt to buy the nobel game of cricket and turn it into a commercial cash cow in the '70's, differs from traditional Test cricket in that the teams wear bright uniforms of different colors (*GASP!*) instead of the traditional white, the teams often play in the afternoon and night under lights so the exciting bits end up in primetime (*SHOCK!*), and people actually watch it (*HORROR!*). The emphasis is on runs (points) rather than wickets (removing batsmen) so there is a lot of big hitting, conservative bowling, and spectacular fielding. New Zealand's traditionally fragmental bowling attack has always favoured the so-called "dibly-dobly" slow, accurate bowling that literally bores the opponent out of the game, and while New Zealand's batting is not terrifying, the fielding has always been consistent - and was the decisive factor in this tournament. Unfortunally Test cricket requires the Big Guns bowling, and while England had Steve Harmison, New Zealand's secret agent disintergrated at the start of the tour.
C'est la vie.

A mystery solved?

2004-07-07T02:41:00.000-07:00

After T-0, Cassini took distant images of all the major icy moons. The inspection was cursory, with the exception of Iapetus, which was imaged repeatedly with multiple polarizations and exposures from a distance of 3 million km. Iapetus, discovered by the original Cassini, is a solar system oddity. It is a cosmic heliograph, more than ten times brighter on one side of its orbit than the other. Arthur C. Clarke would use the apparent hemispheric difference as a major plot point in the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Voyagers would reveal that the leading hemisphere (in terms of its orbit around Saturn) of Iapetus is smeared with dark red material - similar to that which comprises the surface of Phoebe and (possibly) the sparser rings of Saturn. Establishing the formation of this material is one of the primary goals of the Cassini mission. While endogenic (volcanic) origins for this material, named Cassini Regio, have been proposed, exogenic mechanisms (where the stuff is dumped onto the surface from somewhere else in the Saturn system - probably Phoebe) seem more likely (e. g. Bell and others, 1985).

This image, the perhaps auspiciously designated N00006667, is the first image to show detail in Cassini Regio. An unfiltered short exposure, it plainly reveals a large multiring basin, almost directly on the Saturn facing point, within the eastern margin of the darkened area. Some speculations: if you dump a Phoebe equivalent at high speed into the 'near' side of Iapetus, most of the ejecta will head inward, and accelerate longitudinal with respect to the moon due to Kepler's Laws (not much will directly stick, as Iapetus' gravity is too low). But Iapetus' gravity will be sufficient to stretch out the orbits of ejected material, so a cloud of PhoebeJunk will end up in orbit ahead of Iapetus. This will then congeal on Iapetus' leading edge.

Cassini is scheduled for a close encounter with Iapetus, examining the edge of Cassini Regio in detail, during mid 2007, which will test this, and other hypothesis. But I suspect monolith-building aliens are now unnecessary.

Correction of the year

2004-07-06T16:03:00.000-07:00

CLARIFICATION: It has come to the editor's attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.

Today's New York Post might come close...

Titan tantilizes...

2004-07-06T01:06:00.000-07:00

The T-0 flyby, which had Cassini arcing under Titan, has confirmed some suspicions (ISS observations of Titan's south pole has a small system of cloulds, indicating that locally the temperatures in the moon's nitrogen atmosphere dive below the triple point of methane), but provided other problems. Scattering in the atmosphere will apparenly limit the use of the ISS cameras in two ways - scattering of reflected light from the surface as photochemical smog blurs abedlo details, and the same overcast washing out the sun as seen from the surface - meaning no shadows. All this means the believability of Titanian photointerpretation is going to be somewhere between Mars as seen by Lowell and Mariner 4.

VIMS, the lower resolution spectometer, however has managed to throw a spanner in the works. Previously, the thinking had been that the darker equatorial areas might be seas of ethane, produced by the photolysis of the methane in Titan's atmosphere (e.g. see Roe et al. 2004 , paragraph 11, or here (Ethane is liquid in the conditions predicted at Titan's surface). Apparently, though, these dark bands are composed of water (which at 94K is no way liquid), while organic material is strewn over the 'bright' temperate regions. Which means we literally had Titan backwards...

If it is true that the dark bands are solid, it increases the chances that the probe Hugyens will survive on the surface - liquid ethane's high thermal conductivity would quickly freeze the probe to death. Although the scientists involved might trade those minutes on the surface for a glimpse of an alien ocean...

The lack of obvious craters in the ISS images is also intriguing*, although the lack of shadows means that this hasnt been confirmed. The decider will be the RADAR instrument, a SAR much like than on Magellan operating at 2.2 cm wavelength that will scan Titan on the frequent flybys (at 338,922 km, this particular encounter was too distant). RADAR and ISS point in different, fixed directions, so they cannot be used at the same time. The results of this flyby may make the choice easier.

*a standard scientific word meaning we dont even begin to understand the data yet, but give us more money and we might be able to invent something.

Baghdad for a Night

2004-07-06T00:03:00.000-07:00

July 4th in Duluth was inconsistently wet and brutally overcast. Us travel deprived sorts gathered at the Langer's apartment and held forth over salad, cupcakes, light beer and barbecue adventurously grilled in the brief clearings. A good time was had by all, as shop talk was generally avoided. The postponement of the Main Event due to the relentless blah over the Twin Ports was offset by the fact Minnesotans have recently relegalised fireworks for themselves - and thus gone a bit potty. The evenings of the last week has been non-stop snap, crackle and BOOM, with a climax last night resembling Shock and Awe in Baghdad. Every street-corner, ridge top and patio, was blazing as the locals braved the rain to Blow Sh*t Up. In all directions. You never knew where to look - damn that slow speed of sound! And those trees that cover this town!
Standard dialog:

BANGCLATTERSIZZLE - "where was?!- There! Oh....behind that pine....sounded spectacular...

Occasional fireworks did make it above the tree-line.

I've always regretted the virtual banning of private fireworks in New Zealand - I have fond memories of the district of Ratapiko gathering to Blow Sht*t Up at the Corlett's farm, celebrating Guy Fawke's Day*. First they came for the Double Happies, then the skyrockets - before you knew it, you couldn't even get a sparkler to save yourself. But seeing Duluth dissolve into a flashing, sulfurous smog I have second thoughts...

I actually didnt know that the Main Event had been rescheduled for tonight until the windows of my office started bouncing at ten past 10. Again the trees were in the way but I did get this view from the top of the Alworth Planetarium.

*Either a celebration of the survival of British democracy or the burning of Catholics. Not that Independence Day is that much more morally superior: One of the whines in the the Declaration:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies...

is about those all those nasty Papists in the Lower Canada practicing their pursuit of happiness.

The picture above was taken last year in Washington DC - where I engaged in an orgy of bad photography/abstract art trying to capture fireworks on pixels. My conclusion 108 images later - use a tripod (unless you are pushing the whole abstract bit).

Day Two in Saturn Orbit

2004-07-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

Press conference: First announcement (from Don Shemansky of the UVIS team) - from neutral oxygen observation, the diffuse E-ring apparently doubled in mass (to 10, 00 tonnes of oxygen) in January - before returning to normal in a matter of four months. As the lifetime of 1 micron particles is estimated at 40 days, they estimate that 100 million years is required for the decay of the entire E-ring (gotta be some huge assumptions here). Speculation about meteor impact, no mention of the Obvious, Out-There Candidate - the snow-covered moon, Enceladus, that orbits at the heart of the E-ring. Is this evidence for geysers? Closer encounters with this target next year.

Shemansky is causing the press folk's heads to explode. "Plasma sheet", "Cluster ions", "Adiabatically" - MATH IS HARD....

VIMS - The composition of the rings - bright parts are water ice superimposed of a thin dark 'dirt' that fills the gaps. 'Dirt' is same ferrous iron stuff as found on Phoebe. No carbon dioxide or organics yet.

ISS - In the approach, a streamer of ring material was identified attaching the thin F-ring to the shepherd moon Prometheus.

Meteorology...Winds and temperature structure.

ISS again - Titan. Approach map at 35 km/pixel doesn't show impact craters. If the dark stuff is liquid, then Titan, like Mars and Venus, has an equatorial rift system. T-0 encounter will get a factor of ten improvement resolution over 360E/-65N - if the atmosphere is clear at the target wavelengths.

Newton's Symphony

2004-07-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

..Or Leibniz's punk-rock!!! This is apparently the edge of the Encke Gap - imaged at a couple of hundred meters per pixel last night in the frantic imaging after SOI.
Dark side of the rings, light is diffusely scattered sunlight, dark is void or opaque, and the rippled bizzaro crap in between is anyone's guess. The moonlet Pan is supposed to rummage through these part - I didn't realize that included rucking up the local carpet!!

UPDATE: Peter wonders what the hell I was smoking when I wrote this.

Briefly, "Newton's symphony" - Saturn's rings are basically an enormous gravitational musical instrument, being played by various moons via the father of differentiation's magical force. F=ma, g=GMm/r^2 etc. etc.

Leibniz, the inventor of intergration and the concept of energy, was his close Swedish rival and contemporary- and the complexity and apparent fubarness of the rings suggests melodies distinctly nonclassical.

SOI, is, of course, Saturn Orbit Insertion.

If you look at the stuff between the black (the Encke gap) and the density wave (the parallel lines) it is, well, weird. Cross cutting waveforms at the km scale. They look a bit like actual topographic features - corrugations on the ring plane at small scales. The gap itself is cleared by the 12-km wide moon Pan, which was found in old Voyager images in 1995.
A broader view of the gap is here ; the spiral standing wave is being spawned by Pan - rumoured to have been 20˚ of longitude away when the image was taken.

Lord of the Rings

2004-06-30T19:42:00.000-07:00

All going to plan, the SOI burn just finished (Saturn Time) - locking Cassini forever to Saturn. Cassini would then turn to Earth to bellow a minute-long triumphal arrival message through the tenuous D-ring. The remote sensing instruments, slumbering for the last, tense, week should be awakening, and then the great bulk of the spacecraft will begin to pirouette and summersault like an Olympic diver, before plunging back through the same ring gap it entered through.

The rings now frame the sun, as seen from Cassini, a grand gossamer bridge across the sky.

UPDATE: STUCK IT, as the Olympic judges say.

Through the Rings!

2004-06-30T17:49:00.000-07:00

..or not. We have to wait nearly two hours to find out if Cassini survived. The craft is now spinning around on its axis, pointing its engines in the direction of travel. SOI begins in ten minutes, Saturn time.

Much breath holding at JPL, one presumes.

The Death Star Approaches..

2004-06-30T17:12:00.000-07:00

Coming under the pseudo-Star Wars artifact Mimas, with its massive crater Hershel. Cassini will shortly underfly the G-ring before automatically pointing away from Earth and barging through the ring plane.
UPDATE: Under the G-Ring now - Cassini has turned toward the rings, using the dish of the HGA as a shield. This will be the deepest into the ring system that any spacecraft has gone.

Inside Titan..

2004-06-29T16:02:00.000-07:00

The plunge continues. Cassini is accelerating toward the inner Saturn system, which seems to lack the witches brew of organic molecules that darken (and in the case of Titan, may drench) the outer moons. It seems to be mostly water ice hereon in, though VIMS, UVIS and the main cameras of ISS will need to confirm this.

Live coverage of Saturn Orbital Insertion begins on NASA TV tomorrow at 8:30 pm CST - first pictures arrive at daybreak. This 96-minute braking maneuver may be the longest "live" chemical rocket burn in the history of space exploration - although Jupiter is far more massive, Galileo was able to use Io as a gravitational parachute to dump much of its excesse velocity, and only had to use its main engine for 49 minutes. Cassini will have something Galileo lacked - a spare rocket engine. The tale of Galileo's problematic engine can be found here.

Galileo's Unified Propulsion Module (built by EADS (then MBB) on behalf of the West German space agency) had a critical problem with the thrusters. In 1987, after Galileo was shipped back to JPL after the Challenger loss, a German comsat called TVSat 1 developed a stuck solar panel. To free the panel, the operators tried to shake it loose through prolonged firing of the thrusters. To their shock and horror, the thrusters blew up. Galileo had the same thrusters.
JPL's concern was that a prolonged burn (like the 49 minutes of JOI) would have lead to a bad day.

The fix was to limit all firings to short, minute-long pulses - including JOI - so Galileo burped its way into Jupiter space...

Cassini Closes In...

2004-06-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

Cassini just crossed the orbit of Hyperion - Titan will be next...

Surprise!

2004-06-26T21:46:00.000-07:00

John Ralston Saul, one of my favourite angry humanist philosophers, turns out to be Canada's First Lady. This is slightly topical as his wife, Canada' governor-general, will get to choose the winner of Monday's Canadian election.
In some ways the coming result resembles New Zealand's 1996 election, which forced a fragile center-left coalition and the right to battle for the affections of a 'plague-on-both-your-houses' nationalist party from somewhere off the political spectrum. Winston Peters, of course, chose to return to his Tory roots, prompting the messy detonation of New Zealand First two years later; it is not clear that the Bloc Québécois is quite so mercurial in nature, or riven by the same sort of weird chemistry as NZF, where Maori nationalists were conjoined with red-neck farmers and cops (ironically, it was the Maori MP's who would prop up the National Government after the Coalition crumbled - Winston's party of angry agriculturists was preserved when he survived Election Night in Fortress Tauranga).

Bugger!

2004-06-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

Cairns out scoring only 1 run. Englishman Thorpe gets a century despite Cairns' 4 wickets in the last innings. Massive humilating defeat for New Zealand with a day to spare.

Oh well.

Return to an planetary archipelago...

2004-06-12T17:43:00.000-07:00

In 1997, a Canterbury geology student named Kylie Eckersley decided to have a 'space' themed 21st-birthday celebration. My contribution (immediately prior to a scandalous game of chandeliers and subsequent, alleged and unremembered, debauchery) was to gather up signatures and send them to the Planetary Society. They made interesting reading, as people gave excellent advice to Aliens as to how to have a good time and who they should go kidnap. I wish I made a copy. The scrawls were scanned and copied onto a DVD, which was then bolted onto the side of the good ship Cassini, bound for Saturn.

Seven years later, Cassini has arrived at the outer isles of the grand archipelago of the outer solar system. Yesterday it passed the battered retrograde moon Phoebe (pictured), as the spacecraft catches up with the ringed planet in its orbit. At the end of the month Cassini will cross in front of Saturn, pierce the outer rings directly in front of the planet, and begin a 90-minute engine burn high over the bulk of the rings that will bend its path and thread it back through the ring system on Saturn's night side. Years of orbiting and observations will follow.

This particular ring gap is thought to be clear (Pioneer 11 in 1979 and Voyager 2 in 1981 survived the crossing, although Pioneer nearly discovered a new moon the hard way, and Voyager's camera platform chose that moment of high drama to seize up.) To be safe, Cassini will batter its way through the hopefully empty gap with its communications dish pointing troubles way, protecting sensitive instruments, fuel tanks, and the all-important DVD bearing drunken insults to the cosmos.

Rugby-powered Revenge in the House of Pain

2004-06-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

36-3!!! victory by the All Blacks over the World Champion English at Carisbrook Stadium, Otago.
Dale Bludge:

"After all of the pre-test talk of the powerful English scrum, the All Blacks put a big exclamation mark on their win when they blew the English scrum to pieces in the dying minutes."

Sweet.
More details at haka.co.nz...

And in the cricket, the last Test is in the balance as Chris Cairns, in his last test match, collects 5 scalps to slow England's first innings and give the Black Caps a first innings lead.

Richardson, Fleming and Styris delivered a good first innings for New Zealand, but their second innings has had more patience than runs, thanks in part to some dodgey umpiring. Given the remaining batsmen, and the sad state of New Zealand's bowling attack, it will be up to Cairns to put some runs on the board tomorrow, and then break the English batsmen the day after, if he wants his last Test to be a winning one.

Given the fractured state of the New Zealand team, avoiding a white-wash seemed as unlikely as the sad Detroit Pistons holding the star-powered Los Angles Lakers to under 70 points in a NBA finals game - but patently absurd things do happen in sports. Which is why we watch.

Emma John scratches her head in Wisden/CricInfo.

Bam! Evidence that Auckland is too big...

2004-06-12T16:16:00.000-07:00

The City of Sails is famed for its suburban sprawl - it has expanded to the point where there is now a non-trival chance of being hit by a passing chondrite.
As reported in the Sunday Star*Times:

"'I was in the kitchen doing breakfast and there was this almighty explosion,' said Brenda Archer. 'It was like a bomb had gone off. I couldn't see anything, there was just dust. I thought something had exploded in the ceiling. Phil saw a stone under the computer and it was hot to touch.'"

Somehow the speeding fragment missed Mayor Banks ego.

UPDATE: The Archer's are evidently not geologists:

"Obviously it's a very rare thing to happen but it's just been a crazy reaction for a piece of rock," said Mr Archer.

Opportunity is dying!!!

2004-06-08T16:43:00.000-07:00

Maybe.
Mars Exploration Rover-B reached Endurance Crater about a month ago - but has been sluggish since then. Despite more favorable environmental conditions than at the Spirit landing site, a balky heater is chewing up much Opportunity's energy budget. The drain on the batteries is threatening the rover's ability to ward off the effects of the daily 100?C freeze-thaw cycle. The first likely victim - the beamsplitter on the MiniTES spectrometer. There had been ambitious plans to roam Meridiani Planum before committing to a decision regarding Endurance Crater, visiting the pitchains and the heat shield. But there is no power left for such ambitious drives.

Today's press conference apparently brings the news that Opportunity will be going into the crater, to specifically sample the banded material that underlies the sulfate-hematite evaporite "cap" examined at the landing site.

"'If we knew the rover was going to last for a year, we could run around and do other things before we went to the crater,' Squyres said in a telephone interview from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'But that's not the case. Every day there's a falloff in efficiency.'

Opportunity has been scouting the crater for about a month, looking for the best way down and the shortest traverse to the lower layers of rock, but Wallace said the rover's limited electricity has sharply curtailed activity in recent days."

There is a good chance that this is where the mission will end - although there is talk of keeping the rovers alive through to next year. (Funding will be another matter).

A Messy Disintegration

2004-06-07T18:53:00.000-07:00

0-2 to England. What a freaking miserable Test series by New Zealand. Although the close first test was a brilliant study in the refined tedium of Test Cricket, with extended innings of unrelentingly stunning boredom by batsmen Mark Richardson, Andy Strauss and the retiring Nassar Hussain, the problem was that the last two names belonged to England.
The second Test was catastropic however. Even though a day was lost to the rain gods, the Poms were able to wrap up the Kiwi's in less than four days. What was worse was the implosion of the New Zealand players themselves. And this after the hype of the first fully fit New Zealand team to tour Britain since the mighty Hadlee bestrode the earth. Secret weapon strike bowler Bond's spine failed to show up at Heathrow; batsmen Papps and McMillian have smashed pinkys; the Venerable Astle is having mysterious bouts of illness and the new big man Oram sides have given out. The captain has groin strain, and now Vettori's leg has apparently fallen off, robbing New Zealand of its only available spin-bowler.
The irony is that New Zealand's traditional human wreck, the old big man Chris Cairns, appears to perfectly fine for his last Test.

Caesar Rises

2004-06-07T17:36:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal discovers a Defence Department memo dating back to March last year, advising Don Rumsfeld how to get away with torture. Among such tasties as advising the Nuremberg defence ("I was only acting on orders!") is this statement:

"To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a 'presidential directive or other writing' that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is 'inherent in the president.'"

Discussed at The Intel Dump , Billmon, and and Josh Marshall, who suggests there is a time and a place, but only if Caesar is prepared to burn afterward.

Old special forces type Ken White says his piece here.

Ronald Reagan 1911-2004

2004-06-06T04:05:00.000-07:00

Point. Counterpoint.

And a surprising insightful remark here.

He was literate, self-depreciating and photogenic.

He was an ideologue who loathed ideologues, and an alleged enigma who liked people.

In late 1983 he nearly had the privilege of being the very last President of the United States. He (and everybody else) were lucky bastards.

He played a hawk with little concern for international niceties, whose greatest successes came with diplomacy and treaty-signing. His administration deliberately fueled genocidal blood-baths in central America, southern Africa, central Asia, and the Middle East. And he so hated the genocidal implications of Mutually Assured Destruction, that he tried to stuff the nuclear genie back in its lamp with expensive fantasy-and nearly succeeded. (Or maybe not.)

He also helped detonate the fiscal underpinnings of the United States. He stumbled on AIDS, and demonized welfare.

He traded with terrorists. He apologized for it.

He most likely meant well.

More Hubble

2004-05-20T01:45:00.000-07:00

Ten months after the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report came out, I think that some of its recommendations should be revised. The big one in my mind is the 2010 "recertification-or-shutdown" clause. Given the ban on night launches (which does make some sense, given the inherent susceptibility of the stack to debris) they can only get three (maybe four with a very quick turn-around) launches to ISS per year. There is no way NASA can finish the station by 2010. To try and do so goes down the same schedule trap that sealed the fates of Challenger and Columbia. That should be revised to "completion of the 14 A mission", which is the last scheduled station assembly flight. In the months that ISS is unavailable, NASA should fly SM-4, the planned (but now cancelled) fifth Hubble service mission, with the assigned rescue shuttle for the preceding station mission.

Rand Simberg favors a more aggressive approach, given the imminent phase out of the remaining orbiters. I can understand NASA's caution, though. The next shuttle lost will likely be carrying major station elements, and given the current 2010 shutdown date, it would be impossible to recover from another multiyear standdown. I understand that they are already ending some STS procurement programs. Loss of another shuttle ends the program.

Cost is not a huge argument against continuing Hubble missions. Breaking down the major costs:

The shuttle itself: One or two shuttle flight (at $70-$100 million a flight - as NASA are already flying the shuttle for ISS we can effectively write off the high fixed costs of the shuttle ($2 to 3 billion/year)).

New instruments - Some are already built and paid for (e. g. WFPC3 and COS). Others might be competitively bid for as individual Discovery-class missions.

STScl - The Hubble control center will be running the Webb Space Telescope, so NASA can not save money by shutting that down.

Bruce McCandless (of iconic astronaut photograph fame) proposed in 2003 that SM-5, the sixth Hubble service mission which was then up in the air due to the Columbia accident, should use a standard shuttle-based service mission to practice precision telerobotic techniques - with astronauts onsite to lower risk to Hubble. This would directly bear on the much hyped human-robotic aspect of the new "Vision for Space Exploration" .

So the costs of continuing shuttle missions to Hubble are on the order of $100-$200 million over the next decade. No replacement high resolution UV observatories have even been proposed that I know of. Webb (even if it deploys successfully) fails to duplicate most of Hubble's capacities. I suspect that aesthetically images from Hubble will remain superior to those from the Webb (due to resolution and wavelengths used by the different telescopes).

So there is a good case for continuing service missions. I suspect it would require a new Administrator for the policy to change. Is this yet another reason to fire Don Rumsfeld - to give the current Administrator, Sean O'Keefe, a promotion?

Musical interlude

2004-04-21T21:09:00.001-07:00

Went and saw country music legend Merle Haggard play at the DECC last night.
Combined with the Strangers, his seven piece band of gray-hairs, there must have been at least half a millennium's worth of the Bakersfield CA sound incarnate strolling across the stage. Haggard hit some old favourites, including the one that got him a pardon from Governer Reagan in the seventies - the anti-hippy song Okie from Muskogee , as well as The Bottle Let Me Down , the autobiographical Mama Tried , and the poetic ode to grumpiness, Are the Good Times Really Over , which induced Merlegasms in many members of the largely middle aged audience.
Despite the energy of the raucous crowd, Merle petered out relatively gracefully after 80 minutes. There was only the one police intervention.

And thus I am introduced to country music.

Hubble to be abandoned

2004-01-16T15:07:00.000-07:00

In all fairness, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report carries some of the blame for this. NASA was mandated with insuring that shuttle crews could repair broken wing leading edge panels on orbit. This is very difficult when the shuttle is docked to ISS, and damn near impossible when the shuttle is on an independent flight. To come up with a means of doing this for only one flight between now and shuttle retirement (given that the shuttle will be retired in 2010, also for CAIB-mandated reasons) is a bit of a stretch. (That is not to say it is a pity about the Hubble - there is no guarantee that its replacement, the Webb, will work).

But the decision is defensible.

Here is the internal memo of the decision.

HST was only suppost to operate for 15 years anyway.

Duncan learns how to make panoramas!

2003-12-28T22:50:00.000-07:00

A Quicktime VR panorama of the former site of the World Trade Center (As viewed from the World Financial Center across the road) awaits those who click on the image below.

American liberal dispora invade New Zealand!

2003-12-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

Brad Wieners , one of many Amercan journalists on a New Zealand Government-sponsored LOTR:ROTK junket has drunken the Raro and wants to migrate. Apparently California is a potential source of refugees - heading to Aotearoa means escaping the exercise in cognitive dissonance that is the Schwarzenegger administration but still being able to see movie stars and enjoy the occassional earthquake on a regular basis.

Plus it is warmer than Canada.

However, he notes that we are "committed to civil liberties", evidence that the snow job is working well. Swearing over the phone is illegal - "misuse of a telephone" - as one unfortunate peace protester discovered; flag burning is illegal; libel laws concerning public figures still have real bite ; one of the Labour government first moves on election in 1999 was to propose making negative political campaigns illegal; its next move was to ban Members of Parliament from voting on an individual basis; and while it isn't Gitmo, the Ahmed Zaoui case continues to boil along. There is no equivalent to the First Amendment in New Zealand law (which makes regulating political speech much easier).

It is less a case of strong civil liberties as it is a national version of small-town apathy making such issues largely irrelevent.

Happy Stanislav Petrov Day

2003-09-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

Twenty years of civilization owed to one man: Stanislav Petrov. (via Nick Lang via Eirk Riker-Coleman).

We have him to thank for Pets.com, Tatu, Episode I and "Celebrity Holywood Squares."

Of course if the megatonnes had hit the fan, New Zealand Prime Minister Rob Muldoon of the time would have been Emperor of the non-glowing world by now.

And Colin Powell is suppose to be the good guy...

2003-09-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

Billmon frags the Secretary of State.

Drum Interviews Krugman

2003-09-16T08:23:00.000-07:00

Orange County weblogger Kevin Drum had an opportunity to interview Princeton University economics professor, possible Noble Prize candidate, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman a few days ago, as Krugman was shopping around his new book, The Great Unraveling.

Krugman was brought on board by the Times to document the great dot-com bubble of the late ninties.

Then something even scarier marched out of Texas.

The interview is a good read ... but hardly reassuring.

David Brooks is Really Very Subtle

2003-09-15T23:40:00.000-07:00

The New York Times's new op-ed writer, David Brooks, brought in as a non-loopy conservative voice, continues his recent trend of painting Howard Dean as the worse possible choice for the Democrats.

Apparently the former governor of the microstate of Vermont is both a ancien regime blueblood and a shrill, partisan socialist.

On CBS last Sunday I think the word was "hyperliberal".

Now the Vermonster's campaign has been developing speed wobbles as the press starts taking thoughtful sentences out of their respective paragraphs and analyses them for conflicts with Democratic Holy Writ. Dean apparently still has to internalize the fundamental rule of politics in the soundbite age - never allow your brain to interfere with your mouth while with the press - rely on Pavlovian reflex instead. But I would hesitate to call the gun-toting, frugel s.o.b. "liberal" in the distorted American sense.

The real issue for Brooks is an inablity to understand the anger Dean represents. For many conservatives, anger is reserved for those who transgress social norms without permission; violations of etiquette and class. It wasn't the thing with the intern that enraged conservatives about Bill Clinton - it was the perception he was "astroturf" white trash in an undeserved elite position. Otherwise "anger" is deployed as a cynical tool for maintaining power and manipulating public discourse. Anger gives one a perfect excuse to shout down other voices. Tom Delay as a case in point.

Dean's rage is something else - that something great is being allowed -encouraged- to wither, through neglect, incompetence, and above all, cynicism. I believe that something might be the idea of an America that is a boon for all its citizens.

Methinks Brooks doth protest too much. Reverse psychology is not his strong point - he might want to stick to being too clever by half.

Clark for President

2003-09-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

From the New Yorker via Crooked Timber

"I wanted to be an astronaut," Clark said. "That was back when we had a real space program. We all wanted to invade the red planet, right out of Ray Bradbury's 'Martian Chronicles.'"

The Oxonian looked puzzled, and Clark asked, "Are you familiar with Ray Bradbury?" He was not. "Not a science-fiction fan? What about 'Lord of the Rings'? "

Indeed, I always thought there was a passing resemblence between Possible Presidental Pretender Wesley Clark and last man on the moon, Apollo 17 commander
Gene Cernan

More dead people

2003-09-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

Just talking to Nick - how could I forgot:

Charles Bronson

Warren Zevon

Celebrity Carnage!

Long Time No Update

2003-09-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

I got blogger's choke sorting through the approximately 2000 images I took in NY and DC.

Sturgeon's Law especially applies to digital photography.

Anyway, I was just noticing the vast array of the famous and infamous popping of the mortal coil recently.

The inventor of modern advertising Leni Riefenstah.

The inventor of the end of the world Edward Teller

The inventor of the Man in Black Johnny Cash

The inventor of ripping-of-British-sitcoms-about-domestic-humiliation-for-American-comsumption iteration 1978 John Ritter [okay trying too hard there]

The one that was really shocking was the sudden murder of Sweden's foreign minister, Anna Lindh

Status

2003-06-27T13:03:00.000-07:00

I'm in New York (via Boston via New York via Seattle via Portland).

I've been spending my time sweating profusely and dealing with the fallout from the U.S. Geological Survey Mapper's Meeting last weekend (I have a map in production that needs to meet some new standards).

Saw X-Men II in Boston (I was seeking air-conditioning). I will be the 4,987,204th person to make this observation - will X-Men III have a character called Jean White?

By the way, Strom is gone - has a nice ring to it, doesn't it...

Off to tourize..

Posted from Starbuck's on 22nd and Sixth, Manhattan

Seattle!

2003-06-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

I am a pleasant hole-in-the-wall coffee shop with a practically pornographic mermaid for a sign in Pike's Place Market. In front a very good doo-wap group complete with herbal remedies and chef engaging in a display of open air culinary kung fu in which the spring onions and parmesan cheese are the loser.

Fresh produce. Mmmmmm...

I want to learn to cook.

Photos from Santa Cruz and Point Lobos in the Big Sur area are up.

NOTE: the great thing about this medium is that factual accuracy, grammer and spelling improve with time!

Posted from the original 1971 Starbucks, Pike's Place Market

The Great Northwest

2003-06-21T13:33:00.000-07:00

After an enjoyable interlude at the beach resort-hippie university town of Santa Cruz, I eventually flew ( AMTRAK?-long story ) to the drizzle of Portland, Oregon, as my gracious host in California, Heather "The Oracle" DeShon needed to complete her Ph.D (riding rollercoasters and sitting on the beach not being a requirement of such degrees even at nontraditional universities like UCSC). I think I have an analog for Santa Cruz in New Zealand - New Plymouth, Taranaki... as always, more later.

Apart from the gently descending sky waters, Portland offers hills, America's largest bookstore, red brick pavements, public transport, Chinatown, sushi, the largest and smallest city parks in the U. S., a river, and the arts district known as the Pearl. Being here for only one day, I hit Powell's City of Books (picked up Edward Tufte's influential Visual Explanation) and will now see Kiwi Niki Caro's much hyped film Whale Rider , before riding business class Amtrak to Seattle tonight.

I reckon I should be able to find a Starbucks there...

Uncaptioned Grand Canyon images can be found
here

Posted from Portland Borders Books and Music

The Southwestern Chief

2003-06-18T16:29:00.000-07:00

Retro blog

I arrived at the Chicago Union Station an hour before I needed to get there, a schedule mistake that cost me the Field Museum with Sue the litigious Tyranosaurus Rex and the stuffed man-eating lions of Tvaso (shot by Val Kilmer, as I recall). Like Amtrak, I have chronic problems with timing.

This time I got assigned an aisle seat. Window was held by a Spanish-based American sailor. An interesting, rather intense, fellow, he spoke in a detached deadpan punctuated by violent bursts of laughter. He was a railpass regular and was writing a travelog on Amtrak advice. His previous journey on this pass had been interrupted by the engine breaking down, domineering freight trains and the discovery of a legless corpse by the track (as first on the scene, the entire train had to wait 4 hours for the authorities). The trip before that had erased a car at a road crossing. He told me this as the current train sat high on a levy, stalled in the green canopy of a forest, ten minutes out of Metropolis, as a smoky wraith that once had been brake linings wafted out from under one of the cars. After an hour the train was moving once more - the worse to happen after that being the Chief's subsequent elimination of all but the odor of a too-slow skunk.

Somewhere about La Plata, Missouri the conversation turned to very meta. He tried to convince me that time did not exist, citing the New Age-y "Power of Now". I tried to convince him that language, and by extension, artifacts such as books and the Internet are as integral to memory as grey matter. Quantum mechanics came up, which is always a bad sign.

We sensibly turned to the America's Cup.

Having obtained cash for this trip, I discovered that Amtrak do take plastic on board - I now regret that one tip I left on the Texas Eagle. I decide to try the dining car for dinner. My verdict: the food was okay, but overpriced, but the conversation was worth it. On my first night, I shared a table with a retired couple from Kansas celebrating their fiftieth anniversary, and a twenty-year-old blond woman with the sparkly make-up now in favor, who had emerged from the 24-hour-party that was the smoking compartment. Like so many people I know, she was in the process of escaping Michigan (Kalamazoo, in this case). Her destination was her uncle's apartment in southern L. A. and an yet-to-be-determined job in southern California. As for the retired couple, she had been a nurse, and he had been a high school driving instructor. They were also both registered pilots and had owned a plane. Somewhat thrown for a loop, I asked (in not so many words) how the hell they could afford such a thing.

"Well, it was expensive, but if you like something enough, you make room".

A good philosophy. They recommended that I should get my pilot's license (Mum?); I noted that I should work on my driver's license first.

The second dinner I shared with a effusive young mother and her two-year-old son, Ty, and a retired Vietnam veteran. She was Californian transplanted to Colorado; he was a Texan - I lived in fear of civil war. I managed to divert one conversation about taxes but then inadvertently returned to dangerous topics when discussing Southern Methodist University's rather obvious courting for the George W. Bush presidential library. Ty had the best comment:

"Oga baba jam wahumag oky dada laha CHOO CHOO!!!"

Posted from Heather DeShon's living room

City of Angeles

2003-06-16T17:30:00.000-07:00

I can't find a wireless hotspot in Los Angeles (Inglewood specifically), so again I cant connect my iBook to the internet. Great treteise are brewing reguarding Venice Beach and mall life, hostel people and bloody great holes in the ground, but they will have to wait for my next stop, tommorrow night - Santa Cruz, CA.

I am also reading Sun Tzu for the first time - and thus getting even more pissed of at the Bushies....more later.

Into the west

2003-06-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

I have limited web access, but the upshot is that after a sleepless but entertaining 30-hours on the Southwestern Chief en route to Flagstaff, AZ, I walked straight into a keg party at the excellent Du Beau International Hostel. Dude!

Grand Canyon tomorrow, and more details once I reach Los Angeles.

Posted from the Du Beau International Hostel

Chicago

2003-06-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

Not that I have anything against the Sears Tower (And of cource it was the sinister John Hancock Building that I spied on Sunday-not the tower that junk mail built). In fact I sent this from the lower concourse Starbucks, with half a million tonnes of steel, concrete and office worker above my head. It is big, but I am far from overwhelmed - not as awe inspiring as I thought it would be. I wasn't that impressed with Niagara Falls either, back in 1999. Being desensitized to scale is an occupational hazard of a planetary geologist.

That being said, I didn't go to the top - either because I am cheap, or because I am afraid of heights, I will let you decide.

I spent most of yesterday wandering around the Loop (the urban core of the city, necklaced by elevated train tracks), getting a feel for the layout of the city. I snapped away idly at the soaring verticality of the mixture of new and old skyscrapers, gleaming and crumbling - a virtual "mug me, I'm a tourist" sign affixed to my back. In the Loop, concrete and steel are not just superimposed on the sky - they are part of the sky, grey and black divided by street-shaped channels of blue and white. On Monroe Street, out east toward green Grant Park (the site of the 1968 convention riot that fatally wounded the old Democratic party) there was a spectacular panoramic view of the skyline (sans Sears), red cranes stately swaying above a yellow and silver Guggahime-esce structure rising from Millennium Park in the foreground.

I was also swaying - if not stately. Bad burrito on Sheridan Street the evening before. Vile. I took some photo of myself, blindly (my camera, a Cannon Powershot A70, is not one of those flip view finder cameras) in the small park by the Arts Institute. It was interesting to see (or in this case not see) the effects of the subtle, unconscious facial feedbacks that occur when looking in the mirror - I swear I did not look that bad that morning while shaving, when the Burrito was in full swing. The camera is cruel. Call it a theory for the non-photogenic. The Henry Moore sculpture I shared the park with looked much better.

I am staying at the Chicago International Hostel, way up to the north near Loyola University. In the ethnic geography of Chicago, I would suspect this area is Little India. The hostel is cheap ($17/night) with few distractions (as nothing works). It is convenient to public transport (the El train roars past my dorm room every 5 minutes day or night).

On the first night, as always happens in hostels, I ran into a fellow Kiwi. Richard from Taupo was a true Road Warrior in the geek sense - he worked as an IT consultant in New Zealand while simultaneously touring the world, his office being his 1 GHz Powerbook. Nice work if you can get it. On the second night, I talked with Nerish, an Indian student about to begin a Ph.D in economics at University of Illinois after three years in the corn fields of Bloomington, two hours to the south. We talked for a long time about academia, and the pitfalls of being a foreigner in this foreign land. That old tension for any international student came up: America is where the great professional challenges are, and it has its tremendous all-singing, all-dancing, all-consuming society.

But it isn't home.

Yet.

Posted from Chicago city center Starbucks

The Midwest

2003-06-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

Eastern Missouri was pretty. Limestone and lots and lots of foliage. Truely, a lot greener than I though it would be. Southern St. Louis, on the other hand, looked like Sarajavo - the city center is probably much cleaner, but AMTRAK didn't get to close to it. The nearest money machine was three blocks away from the train station. Having narrowly survived an experience in Florence, Italy where an idle detour lead to being on the other side of town relative to the train station with 15 minute to departure, I decided that I wasn't going to solve my food problems there . The one saving grace of the view from Union Station was the wonderfully tacky Sheraton building. Crossing the mighty Mississippi was a great view of the steel rainbow that represents St. Louis in stamp collections. I guess it rains aluminium in Missouri.

After passing a billion ears of Illinois corn, and yawing wildly over heat stressed rails, we arrived at Chicago six hours late. Looming in the distance was a great Mail Order Tower, dark, flaring toward its base, with two great ivory fangs piercing the sky. I will leave it to the geeks in the audience to figure out what I was thinking of.

Posted from Sears Tower Starbucks

Reunion

2003-06-09T10:45:00.000-07:00

It began inauspiciously. The Texas Eagle, train number 22, popped its front wheels off the line less than 30 meters from entering Dallas' Union Station, leaving me to contemplate the crazy-quilt skyline reflected in the windows of the Reunion Center. The resulting ninety minute delay, added on the the existing 25 minute wait put the lie to my desperate half-arsed packing-jump on DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit)-sprint to the AMTRAK counter maneuvers today. It also bolstered the rumor that schedule is not one of Amtrak's strong points. The service, however, has been good so far.

My previous encounters with trains was in Europe, and immediately the scale derived differences in design are apparent. 26 hours (as I am enduring on this Dallas-Chicago run) in the Paris-Milan style sardine sleeper, or the French Concorde-without-wings TGV would probably lead to murder or suicide. On AMTRAK, however even the coach seating is pretty expansive, with nearly enough room for a 6-foot high human being to stretch out. I have been lucky with seating - having a window to rest my head. The young fellow who eventually got my aisle is off in some other part of the train with his buddies (UPDATE: Said buddies were ejected from the train at the Missouri-Arkansas border for public drunkenness. Aisle guy has still not materialized). And despite the teeming masses of hyperactive, adorable moppets that were in Union Station, no crying babies interrupt my sojourn.

One thing I did forget is electronic money will not work on a train. So there is a good chance that I will starve before reaching the Windy City. If I manage to post this you will know that the buried Christmas toffee pop I found in my backpack was able to sustain me.

Posted from Sears Tower Starbucks