Flying High

Last Friday was fun. Kind of. It had been one of those weeks where you can't quite pinpoint where your time had gone, but you know it was longer around and along with it was all semblance of energy. So, after a long day of just of minimal activity I was invited to join a few of the flight surgeons on a little field trip to the T-38 simulator at the space center. For those of you unaware, a T-38 is an airplane. In fact, it's the type of craft used by the astronaut crew for flight training. It looks like this:


It turns out that we have a simulator at the space center. I did not know this. It just so happens that many of a docs are pilots themselves and one of them just happened to have full access to the simulator. So, if you want to know what made Friday interesting, I'd say it was being able to land a T-38 at Ellington airfield. Virtually, at least.

May the Force be with you

This post is a long time in the coming. Some of you may remember that I was in our nation's capitol for this past New Year's.
Good friends, good times, and good beer. A good time was had by all, no doubt. But that's not what I came here to write about.

As you all probably know, Washington D.C. is the home of one of our country's greatest national treasures: crooked politicians. If you get tired of them, however, there's always the Smithsonian. My favorite, not surprisingly, the National Air & Space Museum where you can see incredible feats of human engineering such as a model of the Apollo 11 Eagle moon lander.


Yes, surely something every space geek should see in his or her life. Now, as a special treat to all us NASA fans, our federal government has thrown a little money into the pot and opened up an annex to the Air & Space Museum located somewhere near Dulles airport. Fitting, really, since it contains what must be roughly a hundred different types of airplanes, including the one and only SR-71 Blackbird.


For those of you who don't know airplanes, the SR-71 was a top-secret military spy plane was that mostly known for it's ability to leak like a sieve. This was fortunately, ironically enough, since it wasn't able to actually take off with a full tank of fuel. But it looks really cool and it scared the crap out of the commies so it served its purpose.

Now, not quite as well known in the U.S. military spy fleet, but just as effective is this little gem:

It's a little known fact that this aircraft, dubbed the SR-72, actually won the second world war for us. Seriously. Would I lie to you?

Oh, you reader's are too smart for me. Of course, this is not actually a U.S. spy plane. Who was I kidding? It was a Naval battleship. Very advanced. Covert. Top secret.

Still don't believe me? I can never fool you guys. If you don't recognize it, it just happens to be the scale model used during the filming of Spielberg's Close Encouter of the Third Kind. If you've seen the movie then you know this is the truth. If you haven't seen it, then hop in your car and head to Blockbuster. It really is a sci-fi classic. What this is doing in the Smithsonian, I really don't know. However, I'm always up for seeing historical movie memoriabilia. What got my interest, though, was the plaque on the case of this exhibit:


Huh? Inside jokes, sure, but are they serious? Of course they are.

Now I've seen it all.

I stole this little snippet from an AP article written today. Let's see how many ridiculous things you can find in it. I've bold faced the more obvious ones.

In Pakistan, Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi announced the bounty for killing a cartoonist to about 1,000 people outside the historic Mohabat Khan mosque in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

He said the mosque and the religious school he leads would give a $25,000 reward and a car for killing the cartoonist who drew the caricatures — considered blasphemous by Muslims. He said a local jewelers' association would also give $1 million, but no representative of the association was available to confirm the offer.

"Whoever has done this despicable and shameful act, he has challenged the honor of Muslims. Whoever will kill this cursed man, he will get $1 million dollars from the association of the jewelers bazaar, one million rupees ($16,700) from Masjid Mohabat Khan and 500,000 rupees ($8,350) and a car from Jamia Ashrafia as a reward," Qureshi said.

"This is a unanimous decision of by all imams of Islam that whoever insults the prophets deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize," he said.

Qureshi did not name any cartoonist in his announcement and he did not appear aware that 12 different people had drawn the pictures.

This popped into my mind (a little Pink Floyd)...

...and you run and run, to catch up with the sun but it's sinking. Fritter and waste your hours in an off-hand way. The sun is the same, in a relative way, but you're older. Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Chuck Norris

yes, that's right. The title of this entry is Chuck Norris. Perhaps you've already seen this, but my favorite website these days is the random Chuck Norris Fact Page. You can find the top 100 here. Just make sure you're in a place where it's socially acceptable to just about wet your pants due to laughing so hard.

Who's the boss?

My blogging life is being cut short these days. Not for lack of caring, but for lack of time. Fact is, I find writing here very cathartic even if the threat of someone actually reading this is very low. The idea of someone enjoying is secondary; I write for myself, as an avenue for releasing my thoughts into a form I can sift through and sort out. If anyone else derives any insight from it then I consider a side effect though it would please me to no end.

If you haven't picked it up by now, my entries are about ideas for the most part. As a scientist I shouldn't be saying this, but facts bore me. Truth is easy to find (however disputable it may be) but the excitement lies between the lines, in that grey space that makes us question the words we say. I'm also terrible with them. Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that my memory is faulty at best, non-existant at worst. Whether or not I dislike facts because of a bad memory or because I have a bad memory because my brain just doesn't want to bother with them is to yet to be determined and undoubtedly not important. I have deep respect for the brain (mine in particular, of course) and if it wants to act a certain way, then so be it.

Given the incredible aptitude of the brain I know (or does the brain know?) how unwise it may be fuck with it. Now Dave, why would you say something like that? Is there something going on in your life that would bring up such a discussion? I'm glad you asked.

I've recently signed up to be a test subject in a particular experiment being performed at my company. Rest assured, all you concerned readers, that there is nothing funny being injected into my arm, no pills being placed on my tongue and, most importantly, nothing being shoved up my ass. No, this is a neuroscience experiment whose intent it is to probe into the inner workings of mind in order to reshape and train it to suit a scientist's hypothesis. My brain is being retrained for the sake of future astronauts who may one day being to avoid one of the unfortunate side effects of long duration space flight upon reaching ground: vertigo. I'll avoid the discussion on this other than to say that in space there is no up, down or sideways simply because there's no gravity. Over time, astronauts get used to this and when they finally come home their brains have to readjust, a process that might be avoided given the proper countermeasures.

But I diverge. The study consists of me walking on a treadmill in front of a giant projection screen. Upon this screen is projected a virtual reality-derived room or hallway, depending on the day. I walk on a treadmill for twenty minutes while staring at this screen. Sounds easy, right? I will also mention that today the room on the screen was rotating counterclockwise continuously as I stared at it. That is, the floor become the ceiling which became the floor and so on and so forth. I'd say it rotated completely every 7 seconds or so. As you may guess, it isn't easy to walk straight when you're brain thinks you are flipping upside down every so often. No, in fact your body starts leaning towards the direction of the rotation because your brain believes you are falling in that direction and it wants to keep up with the floor.

You can imagine how disconcerting that can be. It gets even worse once the screen stops rotating because your brain eventually gets used to it so when the motion stops, everything appears to be rotating in the total opposite direction. Now, the trippy thing is that my body and brain know I'm not rotating because they can sense that I"m not actually rotating. It's my eyes that are confused and they are sending their confused little signals to my brain who at some point understood where up was and now doesn't know my head from my ass. Like I said, it isn't wise to mess with your brian.

What's even trippier is the realization that I have absolutely no control of my body other than being able to not piss myself everytime I have to go to the bathroom. Even that I'm fully conscious of the fact that I am, and will always remain, perfectly upright during this experiment, my brain still has the gall to decide that this isn't the case. Everything in my being is cognizant of the fact that up is up and down is down and that the subterfuge I see in front of me is nothing more than a computer simulation. Yet, my brain decided otherwise. I think we know where the power lies in this relationship.

-Rube