Telling it like it is...

Here's a memorable note to include in a submitted assignment:

Translator's note: The Russian original is evidently the output of a character-recognition program that has processed a scanned document. Numerous errors exist in the Russian original (e.g., misnumbered sections, random characters and incomplete or misplaced words in the text, pathological punctuation, and unmatched parentheses, among others). The translator has taken the liberty of correcting these errors without having marked each such correction in the translation, both for the sake of readability and time.

I hope I never have to write a caveat like that again.

Cheers...

I wish I could write like that...

From The Bleat, Jim Lileks describes his reaction to some dweeb's comment on the radio Saturday, along the lines of: “What can a man do on Mars that a robot cannot?”:

On a day when seven brave people died while fulfilling their brightest ambitions, this was the wrong day to suggest we all stay tethered to the dirt until the sun grows cold. Are we less than the men who left safe harbors and shouldered through cold oceans? After all, they sailed into the void; we can look up at the night sky and point at where we want to go. There: that bright white orb. We’re going. There: that red coal burning on the horizon. We’re going. And we’re not sending smart toys on our behalf - we’re sending human beings, and one of them will put his boot on the sand and bring the number of worlds we’ve visited to three. And when he plants the flag he will use flesh and sinew and blood and bone to drive it into the ground. His heartbeat will hammer in his ears; his mind will spin a kaleidoscopic medley of all the things he’d thought he’d think at this moment, and he'll grin: I had it wrong. I had no idea what it would truly be like. He’d imagined this moment as oddly private; he'd thought of himself, the red land, the flag in his hand, and he heard music, as though the moment would be fully scored when it happened. But there isn't any music; there's the sound of his breath and the thrum of his pulse. It seems like everyone who ever lived is standing behind him at the other end of a vast dark auditorium, waiting for the flag to stand on the ground of Mars. Then he will say something. He might stumble on a word or two, because he’s only human.

And now, to work reviewing the document due shortly.

Cheers...

Notification of Resolution Modification

Okay, so I'm feeling a little bureaucratic.

Back when I was stumbling through college, I earnestly tried to change the world with ideas. It was an idealistic time, sort of. On the one hand, I often felt like Langdon Smith's cave man, whose crudely drawn encounter with a mammoth was meant to speak to others and make them understand why things were the way they were.

On the other, a major memory of freshman year was observing how the concept of "No finals!" trumped any other - and presumably more noble - reasons for shutting down the school in response to the shootings at Kent State and the invasion of Cambodia.

Maybe it wasn't so idealistic, after all.

In any event, I was fortunate in that my course load, while full, was not crushing (though I was an engineering major) and so I spent many early, late, and in-between hours reading Rand, Rothbard, Bastiat, von Mises, and others. Arguments for the cause of Liberty were pursued in pretty much the same time frames, mostly to deaf ears. For no matter how fervently I argued, no matter how avidly I wrote op-ed pieces for the college paper, I never could get away from the One Great Truth: Reasons rarely sway people; if anything, their reaction is to "dig in" even deeper into their intellectual foxholes, sandbagged with rock-hard premises.

"Check your premises." Isn't that what Ayn Rand kept repeating in Atlas Shrugged? So very few people do that nowadays, mostly because the idea of a "premise" escapes them, but also because any relationship between premises, on the one hand, and thoughts and actions, on the other, is axiomatic and bears little, if any, relationship to reality and Rand's famous "A" (which, you will recall, is "A").

(No, this is not anywhere near the same thing as trying to parse a sentence to figure out what the meaning of "is" is. Shame on you. Go read the book! :^)

And so, soon after graduation, I withdrew from the debate and lived my life quietly, avoiding idiotarians whose one sole mission in life was to spread their words to anyone with eardrums, and to make up in vitriol and ardor what their arguments lacked in sense and logic.

Though withdrawn, I could not escape the role of spectator to all that happened (and didn't) in the world. I felt sorrow as I took in the fall of Saigon. I held my breath when one man in a white shirt stood in front of a column of armor in Tienanmen Square. I cheered when the Berlin Wall came down and I've walked in Red Square with the Russian tricolor waving over the Kremlin.

In the course of all of this, it occurred to me that the level of public discourse had deteriorated over the past few decades. The idiotarians have gotten louder. Indeed, had the global environment followed the intellectual climate, we'd be living - if at all - on a barren, inhospitable planet where Life would sputter a quiet defiance of the long sleep in the occasional hidden oasis.

But the Internet is a wonderful thing. (Thank you, Albert.) Should it survive the predations of commercial interests eager to hijack the medium and turn it into a fancy form of television (with all of the concomitant bennies... for them), it may represent yet another "great equalizer" (the first one was due to Sam Colt, remember?).

So, having reached that stage in life where, with the kids mostly gone and the warranty beginning to expire on various body parts, I am again reminded of a line from The Bridge on the River Kwai, which I posted in this LiveJournal a long time ago on the occasion of the passing of Alec Guiness, who played the part of Col. Nicholson in the film, but which is worth reposting now.

In the scene I'm recalling, the senior British prisoner of war, Col. Nicholson, stands with his captor Saito on the completed bridge and says:

But there are times when suddenly, you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning... and you wonder - you ask yourself - what the sum total of your life represents... what difference your being there at any time made to anything... or if it made any difference at all, really... particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thing's very healthy, but I must admit I have some thoughts on those lines from time to time.

I, too, now entertain such thoughts from time to time and, like Johnnie Rico's father in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, "I [have] at last found out what was wrong with me."

It's been a certain diffidence in engaging people in debate, as I stuck to producing and consuming and playing the role of economic animal, just as Rico's father did before he scratched his itch.

There's more to life, and there are things that must be said.

So, with regard to the resolution that reads, "I avoid ... useless political discussions," please note that my definition of "useless" has been refurbished.

Cheers...

Why we cried...

From Lee's LJ:

Called Dad, cried. I told him I was going to drop off some flowers to NASA, and he asked me to pick some up for him. I bought 14 red roses, and bundled them in pairs of two. I drove out to NASA and paid my respects. I didn't stay long because there were a lot of camera crews and reporters, and I felt that it would be insincere to be filmed mourning the loss I felt greatly, though did not know the people at all. As I left, I began to cry again.

My response:

You may not have known any of Columbia's crew, but unlike 99.9% of the population, you have hung out with astronauts and cosmonauts. You've talked with them at a level that transcends the stuffy environment of the schoolroom or other "official" event. To you, an astronaut is not some kind of abstract entity that one associates with even more abstract concepts such as "scientist," "explorer," or "hero"; they're flesh-and-blood people with a lot of skill and a lot of smarts, often with a sense of humor, and always with a sense of life to kill for.

And when something like Columbia happens, it makes no difference that you didn't actually know the people who cashed it all in. You know the type of people they were, and that is enough.

As for myself, my work with McCool and Husband was probably so insignificant in their schedules as to have caused them to forget I exist soon after we parted company. Frankly, even I've forgotten what, exactly, I did for them, though I do remember having done something. Was it a telecon? I don't remember, really.

However, I think my reaction - the personal one - was grounded in bedrock similar to that of your reaction: I, probably even more than you, know the type of people who died along with Columbia, and that, too, is enough and all anyone could reasonably ask for.

* * *
This photo was taken in April 1996, at a cookout in Mike Baker's back yard. (Left to right, standing: Mike Baker, Lee, Nikolai Budarin, Mike Foale, Talgat Musabaev, Charlie Precourt, Vasiliy Tsibliev. Left to right, kneeling: Victor N. and Jean-Loup Chretien.) Regrettably, I've forgotten Victor's last name; he's a member of the Russian training team. Besides him and Lee, everyone else in the photo is an astronaut or cosmonaut, and Budarin, in fact, is on orbit right now as part of the ISS crew.

Cheers...