R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 113

Video Games

Last month was the thirty-second anniversary of the video game Pac-Man. It got me to reminiscing and thinking about my relationship with video games over the last three decades, especially since my thirtieth wedding anniversary is coming up later this month.

The first video game I ever played was shortly after I graduated from college. I had just finished my first year in my master’s program at UCLA. My roommate and I had gone to a pizza place and discovered a game called Asteroids. We dropped quite a number of quarters on it and made a point to play it any time we went out to pizza after that. It wasn’t long before we found more games, of course. By 1981 I had purchased my first home computer, a precursor to the Commodore 64 called the Commodore VIC-20. It came with a whopping 3 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 8 kilobytes. Pre-loaded with the BASIC programming language I soon learned how to program the machine.

There were but a handful of programs that you could purchase for computers in the early days and most came as cartridges that you plugged into the back of it. Eventually I added a tape drive that used ordinary cassette tapes to save and read programs. It was incredibly slow. dedicated computer monitors were a rarity. To use the computer, I hooked it up to a television turned to channel three.

I soon discovered computer magazines that had programs in them that you could type into the computer. Probably for the first ten years or so, even after I upgraded to a Commodore 64, the bulk of my time on the computer was spent typing in programs from the magazine. It was maddening, since typos were easy to create and you’d spend hours then trying to figure out what you’d done wrong. Until every last letter was typed just right in the program, the program would refuse to run or would run part way through before crashing. The first program I typed in to my VIC-20 was a baseball game. The player was a small glowing ball that blooped slowly around the bases when I got a hit.

Eventually I was able to upgrade to a floppy disk for my Commodore, which made the loading and saving of programs much, much faster and easier than the old tape drive. And by then, premade programs for my computer were becoming much more common.

Meanwhile, of course, I still spent time playing video games in the restaurants we frequented. By late 1981 I was dating the young woman who would become my wife, and many a date was spent playing video games after we had eaten our dinner.

My wife became especially fond of the game Ms. Pac-Man, an unauthorized sequel to the original Pac-Man. The original Pac-Man had been created by Namco, a company in Japan. Ms. Pac-Man was a bootlegged hack originally called Crazy Otto. Created by programmers employed by the General Computer Corporation, they eventually showed it to Midway, the American distributor of the original Pac-Man. So Midway bought the rights to it and the game became a big hit—and Namco became very angry. Eventually, to prevent the inevitable lawsuit that Namco would have brought, the rights to Ms. Pac Man were then turned over to Namco, which made a lot of money from my wife’s quarters.

My wife spent long hours playing Ms. Pac-man. When my wife’s friend Kayleen and her brother Chris were returning to Africa with their missionary parents, they spent an entire evening, well into the wee hours of the morning, playing an entire roll of quarters on Ms. Pac-Man. Given how good my wife and her friends had gotten at the game, it was a wonder they ever came home.

When my wife and I got married, we spent our honeymoon in Lake Tahoe. Unsurprisingly, for the two weeks we were there, we spent several evenings playing video games. The game we particularly enjoyed in Lake Tahoe was called Tempest. Like Ms. Pac-Man, it had been released in 1981.

After I finished my graduate program at UCLA, I got a Commodore 64 to replace my VIC-20. With 64 kilobytes of memory and much better graphics and sound capabilities, it turned out to be a great machine for playing video games. One of our favorites was a side scrolling 3-D game that we had originally played in the arcade: Zaxxon. It had first appeared in 1982 and was then ported to the Commodore in 1985. My wife and I and our friends spent many weekends playing the game. It was one of the few games I ever completely mastered.

Later, as we moved beyond the Commodore 64, we particularly enjoyed the early first-person shooters such as Castle Wofenstein, Doom, and its many sequels and knockoffs. Because of its humor, Duke Nuke’m 3-D became one of our favorites. Later, we became absorbed by Myst and its sequels.

Oddly enough, for the last fifteen years or so–maybe longer–I’ve played hardly any video games at all, while my wife mostly only plays Farmville on Facebook. Where before I had endless hours for video games, for some reason I now barely have time to work and read. I’m not quite sure where all my time has gone or why I seem to have so much less of it now than I did when I was younger. Probably has something to do with my children. Thankfully, if I ever do find my lost time, I’ve got Ms. Pac-Man, Tempest and Duke Nuke’m waiting for me on my X-Box 360–which is set to become obsolete when the new Xbox One comes out at the end of the year. I suppose the old classics will once again be made available for the newest hardware; after all, I can also play them on my iPAD–even Myst and the sequel Riven are on it. Of course, my children think the graphics are lame on all those old games. If I ever played any of them, they’d probably shake their heads laugh at me.

Torino Scale

Most people, especially those of us living in California, have heard of the Richter Scale, which measures the intensity of Earthquakes.

Much less well known is the Torino Scale.

What is the Torino Scale? It is a scale designed to measure the danger posed by asteroids in their wandering orbits about the sun: the larger the number, the higher the likelihood that a given asteroid is going to smack into the planet.

No Hazard 0 (White Zone)

The likelihood of a collision is zero, or is so low as to be effectively zero. It also applies to small objects such as meteors and bodies that burn up in the atmosphere as well as infrequent meteorite falls that rarely cause damage.

Normal 1 (Green Zone)

A routine discovery in which a pass near the Earth is predicted that poses no unusual level of danger. Current calculations show the chance of collision is nonexistent.

Meriting Attention by Astronomers 2 (Yellow Zone)

A discovery, which may become routine with expanded searches, of an object making a somewhat close but not highly unusual pass near the Earth. While meriting attention by astronomers, there is no cause for public attention or public concern as an actual collision is very unlikely. New telescopic observations very likely will lead to re-assignment to Level 0.

3

A close encounter, meriting attention by astronomers. Current calculations give a 1% or greater chance of collision capable of localized destruction. Most likely, new telescopic observations will lead to re-assignment to Level 0. Attention by public officials is merited if the encounter is less than a decade away.

4

A close encounter, meriting attention by astronomers. Current calculations give a 1% or greater chance of collision capable of regional devastation. Most likely, new telescopic observations will lead to re-assignment to Level 0. Attention by public officials is merited if the encounter is less than a decade away.

Threatening 5 (Orange Zone)

A close encounter posing a serious, but still uncertain threat of regional devastation. Critical attention by astronomers is needed to determine conclusively whether or not a collision will occur. If the encounter is less than a decade away, governmental contingency planning may be warranted.

6

A close encounter by a large object posing a serious, but still uncertain threat of a global catastrophe. Critical attention by astronomers is needed to determine conclusively whether or not a collision will occur. If the encounter is less than three decades away, governmental contingency planning may be warranted.

7

A very close encounter by a large object, which if occurring this century, poses an unprecedented but still uncertain threat of a global catastrophe. For such a threat in this century, international contingency planning is warranted, especially to determine urgently and conclusively whether or not a collision will occur.

Certain Collisions 8 (Red Zone)

A collision is certain, capable of causing localized destruction for an impact over land or possibly a tsunami if close offshore. Such events occur on average between once per 50 years and once per several 1000 years.

9

A collision is certain, capable of causing unprecedented regional devastation for a land impact or the threat of a major tsunami for an ocean impact. Such events occur on average between once per 10,000 years and once per 100,000 years.

10

A collision is certain, capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it, whether impacting land or ocean. Such events occur on average once per 100,000 years, or less often.

On the Thursday before Christmas 2004, asteroid 2004 MN4 was given a 2 on the Torino Scale, when preliminary measurements indicated it had a 1 in 300 chance of hitting the Earth. By the day after Christmas, the odds had dropped to 1 in 40 and it had risen on the scale to 4. Asteroid MN4 was about 1300 feet across (the asteroid that made the mile wide crater in Arizona that is now a tourist attraction was only about 150 feet across). Upon impact, it would have released 2200 megatons of energy. The largest nuclear device ever exploded on Earth so far was only 50 megatons. Based on preliminary calculations it looked as if asteroid 2004 MN4 was going to hit on April, Friday the thirteenth, 2029—only sixteen years from now.

By the next Monday, however, with more orbital data having come in, the scientists at NASA and a laboratory in Italy were able to determine that the asteroid’s orbit was not a danger to Earth at all and so there was nothing to worry about, at least from this asteroid. It dropped to 0 on the Torino Scale.

What one can worry about are all the asteroids that haven’t been discovered yet—like the one that smashed into Russia recently while everyone was looking at another asteroid that was swinging perilously close.

But the funding for looking out for passing space rocks is not large and it will likely be decades before all the potentially dangerous asteroids have been tracked and cataloged. So for now, we can predict large meteor strikes about as well as we can predict earthquakes. Asteroids are God’s way of asking us, “So how’s that space program of yours coming along? Might want to speed it up a bit, don’t you think?”

Emailed Gossip

Someone I know copied an email she got this week and then sent it to me. It had dire warnings in it about a nefarious plot to cancel a certain beloved television show because of its religious content. Unfortunately, there is no such plot and the show in question is not in danger.

The email was an example of what the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand has called an “urban legend.” We’ve probably all read one or heard one, whether it was a badly mimeographed letter warning us that a well-known corporation was run by a devil-worshipper, or that deep fried rats have been found in buckets of fast-food chicken. And they are usually come from someone we trust, who insists that “my friend’s cousin knew the guy this happened to.”

Urban legends are, in essence, simply a form of gossip. The book of Proverbs in the Bible says that “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to a man’s inmost parts.” And so we find such juicy tidbits of information very satisfying. They feed our fears and our hopes. They sound so good that they must be true, like the story of the woman who decided after washing her poodle that she’d dry it off in the microwave. Her results were not what she hoped. Of course, such a thing never happened, but what pleasure we get in sharing the tale!

Brunvand has collected the more common urban legends into a series of books with titles like, Curses! Broiled Again, The Vanishing Hitchhiker, and The Choking Doberman. He carefully documents them, where they first arose, and demonstrates their falsity. Additionally, websites such as snopes.com list hundreds of examples of such urban legends, documenting them in ways similar to what Brunvand does. The stories, unsurprisingly, get rewritten over the years, with name changes and other alterations of details to fit changing cultural sensibilities.

Most urban legends are just funny, or perhaps give some sort of warning to inspire better behavior and so are harmless. But sometimes urban legends can be damaging. For instance, back during the 2000 election, many people were claiming that Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, had the following quote on page 342: “Refusing to accept the earth as our sacred mother, these Christians have become a dangerous threat to the survival of humanity. They are the blight on the environment and to believe in Bible prophecy is unforgivable.” Of course in reality, Gore’s book nowhere contains such a quotation, nor would he, as a Christian, be reasonably expected to ever write such nonsense. But since most people never bothered to actually pick up his book and turn to the cited page, the lie circulated widely. Similar lies were told about George W. Bush and are now being told about Barack Obama.

Likewise, during a photo opportunity at a 1988 grocers’ convention, the first President George Bush was supposedly “amazed” at encountering supermarket scanners for the first time. This story was repeated numerous times by major news outlets to try to demonstrate how out of touch the now former president Bush was–and yet it wasn’t true at all! Later retractions by the newspapers which started the gossip never got the same traction as the original tidbit.

Some urban legends are dire warnings: don’t flash your lights at an approaching car. Gang members are known to shoot people who do that.

Um, no.

Urban legends often take on a life of their own, just like other forms of gossip. And even when confronted that a certain tale isn’t true, the gossiper will insist, “well, it’s consistent with what I know of him and while in this instance maybe it never happened, still, I know he does things just like that.” Regarding the health or safety warnings, the gossips will tell me, “well, it’s still good to know.” How? It’s not true. Why do I need to know it? Or they’ll say, “better safe than sorry.” Um, again, no. If it’s a lie, it’s not helpful at all and doesn’t make me safer.

Gossip hurts people. It’s never beneficial. Proverbs also warns us that, “a gossip separates close friends” and “without wood a fire goes out; without gossip a quarrel dies down.” Next time you hear a story that you just know has to be true, or you get an email from someone you trust, who swears that he got the story from someone who knows the person it happened to, be a bit skeptical. Perhaps take a look at some of Brunvand’s books in the library, or run a search on the web. It’s not hard. Spend the extra two minutes before you post something juicy. You don’t want to be spreading gossip, now do you?

The Trip

Last spring I went to visit my parents in Ohio. It had been a long time since I had seen them, though my mom calls me on the phone at least once a month. I had not flown in an airplane in more than twenty years before I flew last spring. And with all the issues that my youngest daughter has experienced over the past eighteen months, I’ve not had even an afternoon off for the longest time. Thus, it was a big surprise when, for my birthday, my wife and children gave me plane tickets to fly to Ohio to visit my parents for a week. It was my middle daughter’s idea: “You haven’t seen your mom and dad in more than five years. You need to see them!”

My initial reaction at the thought of being away from my wife and children for such a long time was stress. How would everyone get along without me? But my wife had scheduled my trip well: it would happen during spring break, so both she and the children would be home.

Any realistic worries I might have were non-existent. But I’ve never been all that fond of travel, though once I get to where I’m going, I usually have a good time. It’s just thinking about the trip that bothers me.

I had about two weeks to prepare mentally for being gone. I also had to get ready and packed for the trip: for instance, I had to acquire a case for my notebook computer and find a carryon bag for my clothing. The airline I’d be taking charged extra for checking luggage—and I didn’t want to pay for that.

My flight was scheduled to leave Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) at 5:45 AM on a Saturday morning. The original plan was simply to arise rather early that morning. But a week before I left for the trip, I’d done my mother-in-law’s taxes for her on her computer. I e-filed them and imagined I was all done. But thanks to a glitch in the program, the IRS kicked the return back. So I was going to have re-send them.

We decided I’d do that on our way to the airport, since my mother-in-law’s house was on the way there. We left my home in Lancaster, California at 11:00 PM for the two hour drive. It didn’t take me long to fix her tax return. In fact, the bulk of my time was simply spent waiting for her tax program to install updates. Soon enough, we were out of there and eating an early breakfast at a nearby diner.

The actual process of airline travel began with my arrival at the airport at 4 AM. Ticketing was easy: I already had an e-ticket on my cellphone, so there was no paper to worry about losing and no line to wait in. I just pulled out my phone and the airline happily scanned it.

However, though I escaped waiting to get a ticket, not all queuing was eliminated. There was still the matter of the security check by the Transportation Safety Administration. This was more time consuming and complicated than I had anticipated. For instance, I discovered that they expected me to undress and unpack all my luggage.

Perhaps a slight exaggeration. But all passengers were required to take off jackets, remove belts, empty their pockets and take off their shoes. Then we had to remove our medications, computers, and tiny containers of shampoo and deodorant from our luggage. We put everything into large plastic bins. While our belongings rode a conveyor belt through an x-ray machine, we passengers were taken through an imposing set of archways. Then, as if we were being arrested, we were told to assume the position: we spread our legs and put our hands up over our heads as our bodies were carefully scanned and examined.

The process is quiet and subdued. No one smiles, hardly anyone talks, but the TSA agents were polite enough. I had plenty of time to repack and get dressed before I had to get on the plane. I wandered down the aisle, stowed my luggage in an overhead bin, and found my seat. I was exhausted, but hopeful. My wife had told me, “You’ll be able to snooze on the plane.”

Not really.

I was in a middle seat, scrunched between a child and an overweight man, with no leg room.

After a four hour sleepless flight, I had to change planes in Detroit. In 50 minutes. It took me thirty just to run from the farthest gate in one terminal to the furthest gate in another, on the opposite side of the runway. Worn out and sweaty, I was the last person aboard: they slammed the doors and headed out within minutes of me plopping into my seat.

Thankfully the return flight did not begin so early in the morning. My layover in Detroit was much longer so I didn’t have to run. I didn’t have to do anyone’s taxes before I went to the airport.

And my parents were very happy to see me.

Titanic

When the traditional day for our taxes being due arrived last year, some of us remembered the 100th anniversary of another disaster: the sinking of the Titanic on a dark and cold night. Somewhere in the North Atlantic in that same year, 1309 passengers sailed a luxury liner on a 12 day journey repeating the route of that fabled vessel, minus the iceberg. In the theaters, the Oscar winning movie by James Cameron, which brought in 1.8 billion dollars on its first go around, reappeared in 3-D. My wife already made a point to see it in a premier showing in our local theater, while my youngest daughter and I re-watched it on DVD.

Artifacts from the long-sunk ship are being auctioned for exorbitant sums, while several books on the ship’s fateful voyage are scheduled for publication. Right now I’m nearly finished reading a novel of alternate history science fiction about a failed attempt to prevent its sinking by a time traveler. Written by David Kowalski, The Company of the Dead describes how a time traveler’s attempts to stop the sinking result not in saving the ship, but merely in it hitting a second iceberg after missing the first. The ship still sinks, but different people survive. The history of the world is radically changed: the United States never enters the First World War, so Germany wins. The world of 2012 looks nothing at all like the world we know and is blundering into a war of nuclear devastation. A group from the alternate reality attempt to go back to the time of the Titanic’s sinking to prevent the time traveler from preventing the sinking. It’s a fascinating book for person who majored in history in college who also happens to be a science fiction fan.

The Titanic sinking resulted in the loss of many lives. But there have been far worse disasters in world history, disasters that we barely think about now. The Japanese slaughtered 800,000 civilians in Nanking in 1938. Thousands died in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. And yet, for some reason, the sinking of the Titanic has captured our interest in a unique way that other disasters have not. I wondered why—and have come up with a handful of possible reasons.

One: it was the maiden voyage of the ship. For whatever reason, we don’t expect something to go wrong with something like an ocean liner on its first trip. This, despite the fact that we are surprised if the first attempt at launching a new rocket goes well and we consider being a test pilot for a new aircraft a very dangerous job.

Two: the hubris inherent in the attitudes of those who built and took passage on the voyage. The Titanic was described as “unsinkable.” And in keeping with that attitude, the number of lifeboats was only enough for half the passengers on the ship. It guaranteed that if their belief in the ship’s unsinkability was wrong, then half the passengers would die.

Three: the Titanic, in some sense, stands as a symbol for the end of an era, and the end of a way of looking at the world. World War I, the Great War, the war to end all wars was on the horizon in 1912. The optimism of an era that was seriously wounded with the sinking of the Titanic suffered a mortal blow with the Great War that began in 1914. The war saw millions of young men brutally killed with new weapons and techniques, while the great empires and kingdoms collapsed. When the Titanic set sail, monarchs ruled Europe. Within six years, most of those monarchs were either dead or in exile. Russia had gone communist, the Kaiser of Germany went into exile, the Hapsburg rule over the Austrian Empire ended—as did the empire. The Ottoman Empire ceased to exist with Turkey and other small nations—many now controlled by the victors of the war—arising in its stead. All was in turmoil. The sensible, orderly, optimistic world had sunk. The “war to end all wars” soon became nothing but a joke, a lying farce, when conflict increased. The voyage of the Titanic was the last moment of a serene, ideal world of order and supposed grace. It became a picture of what the world had done to itself. In some ways, the Titanic divides the nineteenth from the twentieth century, just as September 11, 2001 serves more to divide the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such events change how people see their world; they alter their perceptions of reality. Events are what divide times, rather than the arbitrary numbers of a calendar.

For my wife, she sees something “romantic” in the sad story of the Titanic. Like many people, she enjoys tragic love stories like Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers die in the end. The Titanic, thus, is the ultimate tragic love story: men and women are separated by the impossible circumstances. The men gallantly give up their lives to save their wives and children, forcing them into the lifeboats, parting forever.

Why does that image from the Titanic wrench romantic feelings from us?

We all want to believe that our loved ones would be willing to give up everything for us, even their lives. And we all wish to think that we would be willing to give up everything for our loved ones. The actions of the men aboard the Titanic demonstrate the overwhelming power of true love: it is a picture of our greatest longing. In the Titanic, we see our best selves. And so, we cannot forget the story of that tragic ship.

Strays

My oldest daughter likes bringing home strays. Sometimes it’s stray people. We’ve had a few of her friends wind up sleeping on our couch for a few days at a time while they were looking for more permanent digs. One young woman, for instance, had been kicked out of her adoptive grandmother’s house with nothing but the clothes on her back; she didn’t even have any identification—like a social security number—making it tough to get a job. My daughter helped her get new ID and ultimately helped reconcile her with her grandmother.

More commonly, my oldest brings home stray animals. Sometimes she gets the other daughters—and even my wife—to conspire in this process. For instance, a cat has been living with us for the past six years thanks to just such a conspiracy. My daughter and her sisters got her from a neighbor as a kitten. They made me look into its eyes. It wasn’t long before the kitten was purring on my lap. And they already knew I was inordinately fond of cats, a common failing among writers. So the cat stayed.

Her name is Halo. She is not named after the Microsoft X-box game; instead she is obliquely named after our previous cat, Angel. We had acquired Angel long before we acquired my children. A more neurotic cat you’d rarely find: terrified of people in general, she spent a good part of her day hiding under the bed. Angel had come from a friend who had married a sergeant in the Air Force who then got orders to go to England. She decided that she didn’t want to take Angel with them. The months of quarantine the poor animal would have had to endure seemed more than her fragile psyche could handle.

So my wife and I agreed to take the cat. Soon, thereafter, shortly after we had acquired the children, we also had a dog: a black Labrador mix that my wife brought home when one of her colleagues at work moved and didn’t want to take the dog—called Bear—with him. My wife’s colleague had been a smoker and Bear died of lung cancer about four years later.

Not long after that, we took in the high school-aged daughter of a couple from our church who were going through some significant problems. She stayed with us until she graduated from high school.

Our current dog is a poodle that my wife got from a dog pound when he was about a year or two old. He’s doing quite well and is completely devoted and attached to my wife.

Okay, so maybe my oldest daughter learned to take in strays because that’s what my wife and I do.

And, in the last month, my oldest daughter happened to notice a stray black cat in the neighborhood of one of her friends. Unusually friendly, the cat also happened to be pregnant. My daughter became concerned about her as the weeks went by and so one day she brought her home and set up a space for her in our garage. My daughter’s hope was that she would stay in her little bed that she had made for her and that she’d have her kittens there. My children, and even my wife, do not know cats all that well, even though we’ve had cats now for decades now. I knew what was going to happen, and of course it did.

When the time came for the mama cat to give birth, she found a place in the garage to hide and had them there. I knew she had given birth when she vanished for long periods of time from her normal bed, only coming out periodically to get food and water. My children and my wife were afraid that the kittens had died because they couldn’t see or hear them.

Of course, one day as we were cleaning the garage, my wife found where the mommy cat had given birth and where she was hiding her kittens. There were four of them. Three black, one dark gray (the mommy cat is a black cat).

So, my wife and oldest daughter moved the mommy cat and kittens to the bed that my daughter had prepared for her. She stayed there with the kittens about twenty-four hours and then promptly hid them again. This happened a couple of times, until the kittens got a bit older.

Now, my oldest daughter has created a larger space in the garage for the mommy cat and her kittens to wander about in; and since it has started getting hot, now she brings them into the house and puts them in one of our bathrooms during the day, returning them to the garage in the evening.

My daughters and my wife have already found likely homes for the four kittens once they get older, and for the mommy, too. I would not be entirely startled, however, if we somehow end up with at least one extra cat. Some strays never go away.

Pollen and Other Stuff

Pollen season continues to be upon us. March and April are the worst for me, though I suffer all year round. And then, the Powerhouse Fire that started this weekend was devastating for me. The air started smelling of smoke around my house, and the pillars of smoke rose over the nearby mountains signalling the start of something bad. I was mowing my lawn but decided to do only the front. Already I could feel some discomfort from the particulates in the air. In addition to having normal hay-fever, I developed adult onset asthma. It is primarily triggered by pollen, and specifically the pollen of the Mulberry tree.

In any case, I went inside after that and felt okay the rest of the evening. But then at 1:30 AM Sunday I woke up because I couldn’t breathe. If you’ve ever had the wind knocked out of you, then you have a good sense of what it was like. As I grabbed my emergency inhaler (which I always keep nearby), I thought to myself that this would be a really unpleasant way to die. I’ve been told that asthma can kill you. I’d never felt like that was really a possibility until that moment. Thankfully the inhaler worked and my breathing soon returned to normal. It was the worst asthma attack I’ve had in the last ten years. In fact, with my various medications I am mostly symptom free of both hay-fever as well as asthma. But not early Sunday morning. I’ve been just fine, since, thankfully.

Allergies in general are the consequence of having an overly vigilant immune system. Or a stupid one. My immune system attacks harmless visitors with the same vigor it attacks bacteria. On the plus side, I rarely get ill. On the downside, I have a tendency to sneeze like crazy over nothing.

But my allergy medications have been very effective at soothing my overactive immune system. My allergy doctor tested me a few years ago to find out what I’m allergic to. His conclusion was that if it blooms, I’ll sneeze at it. He’s never seen anyone with worse allergies in all his years of treating patients. I always wanted to be top in my field, but that wasn’t quite how I pictured it.

One evening about twelve years ago I was feeling really gloomy, very despondent. I have a tendency toward depression as well as sneezing. Since I was also starting to get the sniffles—it was early March—I took my prescription allergy medication before I went to bed. In the morning, I not only wasn’t sneezing, I wasn’t gloomy anymore. Nothing had changed in my life, however, except taking my allergy pills to relieve my sneezing.

I began wondering at that moment whether there might be a connection between a life long tendency toward depression and my life long severe allergies. After doing a bit of research, I discovered that a link had been noted by doctors between severe allergies and a tendency toward depression, at least in some instances. The connection seems more definite for women than men. However, since I became aware of possibility that my despondency and melancholy might be connected to pollen exposure, I’ve been much more diligent and consistent about taking my allergy medication. My sneezing, runny nose, watery eyes have gone away; I’m essentially symptom free all year long now. Even more significantly, my depression is mostly non-existent now, too.

I’ve also been active in retraining my thoughts. Although eliminating my allergies eliminated the physiological basis for my with my depression, I still had a lifetime’s worth of bad mental habits to overcome. A depressive person has a litany of negative phrases that he will tend to play in his head like a demotivational tape. I had to record new thoughts for myself.

So, I adjusted my behavior. I began exercising more, made a point to get more sleep, and improved my diet. Three years ago I began writing a personal journal every night before I went to bed to recount the events of my day. It has shown me that the good actually outnumbers the bad in my days. To make sure I would keep up the journal, I email a copy of it to my wife and a friend every night. In addition, I regularly read poetry, reread certain passages of the Bible that encourage me, and practice regular prayer, and meditation. All these things have been helpful in correcting a lifetime of bad thought ruts.

The consequence is that I have eliminated my depression nearly entirely. I still have the occasional gloomy moment, but nothing like the pain I used to endure almost constantly.

If you have pollen allergies, Pollen.com is a handy place to visit. Just put in your zip code and you’ll get an idea of how bad the pollen is where you live, as well as what sorts of plants are responsible. You can even get free email alerts. Also, if you have pollen allergies, make an appointment with an allergist, a doctor who specializes in treating allergies. The medications and treatments available today are very effective and lack the side effects that the older medications used to have. There’s no need to “put up with” the discomfort.

If you suffer from depression, you should also make an appointment with your doctor. You wouldn’t imagine that you could “just snap out of it” if you had cancer or a bleeding ulcer. Why do you think depression is any less a medical condition? It is very odd that there is still a stigma attached to things like depression. Many people have a tendency to think that depression is something that you’d overcome if only you were somehow stronger or a better person. That’s nonsense. The fact of the matter is that depression is physiologically based, just as much as diabetes is. You’re not going to just snap out of it. And there are now very effective treatments for depression. Talk to your doctor.

If you have a friend or family member who is suffering from depression, encourage that person to seek medical attention. Offer to take them. If they were having a heart attack you wouldn’t just pat them on the back and tell them to “cheer up” now would you?

Positronic

The science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a series of novels and short stories about robots. Besides inventing the three laws of robotics, he also came up with the idea of the robots having brains running on positrons. He called these positronic brains. In Star Trek, the Next Generation, in homage to Asimov, the android character, Data, played by the actor Brent Spiner, is described as having a positronic brain.

Despite this fictional usage of “positronic,” the positrons that supposedly kept Data functioning are not fictional. They are quite real. What are they? They are the antimatter equivalent of electrons. And yes, despite the use that Star Trek made of antimatter to power its warp engines, antimatter, too, is quite real.

The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that makes use of positrons. Why positrons for a spacedrive?

Massive power in a very small space. When antimatter comes into contact with matter, both are annihilated in a flash of energy. It is a complete, one hundred percent conversion of matter into energy, unlike the nuclear reactions of an atom bombs, where only a paltry three percent of the bomb’s total mass is converted to energy. Antimatter-matter reactions are considerably more powerful than any nuclear bomb.

So, while tons of chemical fuel would be needed to propel a human mission to Mars, and hundreds of pounds of nuclear material would be needed for the same trip, just tens of milligrams of antimatter would do the same job. A milligram is very small. A single M&M weighs about one thousand milligrams. Thus, it would take only a tine fraction of an M&M’s worth of antimatter to power a human crewed spaceship to Mars.

Definitely something worth looking into.

Admittedly, there are some problems with antimatter. For instance, most antimatter that has been produced is in the form of antiprotons. When these antiprotons react with matter, the energy releases massive amounts of dangerous gamma rays, which are deadly. Any spaceship using antiprotons for fuel would need a large amount of very heavy shielding in order to protect a human crew from being killed.

That’s where positrons come in. Positrons are anti-electrons, and when they react with matter, they do not produce the levels of deadly gamma radiation anti-protons would. So positrons are safer and save a lot of liftoff weight.

The other, more significant problem with antimatter is the difficulty of making the stuff. To produce enough positrons to power a spaceship to Mars would cost around 250 million dollars.

But put that in perspective. The distance from Earth to Mars is between 36 million and 250 million miles, so that makes the per mile fuel cost for a round trip to Mars somewhere between fifty cents and three and a half dollars. A bit more than current gasoline prices, but not quite as scary sounding.

Of course, the 250 million dollar cost of producing the positron fuel is based on current production methods. One suspects that if some effort were put into it, engineers could find a way to do it for less.

The big advantage of a positron powered spaceship is safety. It reduces the time of travel to Mars by a considerable margin. People could get to Mars could in as short as 45 days (versus 180 days using a nuclear powered ship), thus reducing the exposure of the crew to the debilitating effects of zero gravity. Even better, it would limit the crew’s exposure to deadly radiation from the sun (radiation that our atmosphere mostly shields us from on Earth, aside from the possibility of sunburn). Also, the positron powered ship would not have any radioactive waste products to worry about, unlike a nuclear powered ship, and there would be no radiation hazard at all from any mishaps during launch. The positron reactor would also be much less complicated than a nuclear reactor, and thus reliability would be greater: less to go wrong with it.

It is good that NASA is looking into alternate means of powering its spaceships, and rather exciting to think that spaceships in the not too distant future may have the same power source that the fictional Starship Enterprise enjoyed. And of course if Harold “Sonny” White’s experiments work out, the antimatter drive NASA’s working on might wind up powering his warp engine.

Orthodontics

Some of my less pleasant memories of growing up are my years of wearing braces. I was glad that I had them. I understood at the time just how critically necessary they were. I was, in fact, thankful for the privilege, even though I had to have four teeth extracted to make room for the rearranged teeth. Nevertheless, getting and having braces was not much fun.

Modern orthodontia has largely eliminated the need to removing teeth. So when my children got braces, their experience was much less painful and much less traumatic than mine. And while I had problems, early on, with my lips turning sore and hamburger-like from the drool, my daughters were spared that painful embarrassment as well. Nevertheless, my children would never call having braces a good time.

I have three daughters. And all three of them needed braces. This seems remarkable to me when I calculate the odds. Yes, I needed braces growing up, and my mom before me needed them. But all three of my daughters are adopted. All three of them came from different biological families. I would have bet that at least one of them would have been born with straight, well-fitting teeth. And I would have lost the bet.

So I have three daughters. The oldest got braces when she was in elementary school; the middle daughter got them about the same age, and finally the youngest, likewise, got braces as soon as the orthodontist said that she must.

We have excellent medical, dental and eye care insurance. It covers just about anything one can imagine. We pay nothing out of pocket for eye exams or glasses. We pay nothing for ordinary dental care, and we pay but a twenty dollar copay each time we visit a doctor.

But when it comes to orthodontic work, our insurance paid nothing. Thus, for the three years each of our three daughters needed braces, we had to fork over the money out of our own bank account.

My oldest got her braces off when she went to high school. The same happened to the middle daughter. And when my youngest finished eighth grade, the orthodontist removed her braces at last.

She was overjoyed. I was ecstatic. Not only was the financial burden of the braces finally at an end, so were the endless trips to see the orthodontist. I was so very tired of making the monthly trek to his office—and for a period of time, when all three were in braces, sometimes three treks per month.

Still, it was worth it. Not only do the braces make their smiles look better, there is a practical reason for the orthodontia: their teeth and gums will be healthier over the remainder of their lives. Not only did the wearing of braces force them to get into the habit of rigorous care of their teeth, it also pretty much eliminated any fear of the dentist for them. They’ve endured about as much discomfort over the years that anyone can experience from someone working on their teeth. Besides that, with their teeth straight and properly arranged, it will be easier for them to keep their teeth clean and healthy. Teeth that are misaligned and overlapping are simply harder to care for.

Although the time spent wearing braces may have some negative impact on self-esteem, it is relatively short lived. In contrast, having perfectly aligned teeth and beautiful smiles in high school and beyond should have a rather positive impact on them.

And frankly, braces are very common on children now. A sizable percentage of their classmates in middle school were similarly ensconced in braces. And unlike the braces I endured, modern braces are almost cool. For one thing, they are no longer just silver metal; now they are often plastic, and come in a range of bright and cheerful colors. I was constantly amazed at their smiles after a visit, when their mouths would glow pink, sometimes blue, and occasionally green or red. They seemed to like it.

But they like being free of their braces better.

Of course, for a time after the braces came off, my children had to wear retainers. For the first month after the braces came off, they had to wear them all the time, twenty-four hours a day. After that, it was only at night, while they slept.

I remember a similar routine after I had completed my suffering. I didn’t much like my retainer: it resembled a pink crustacean with metal legs. But I dutifully wore it every day and night through high school and even through my years at college. I stopped wearing it sometime after I left college and have not missed it in the slightest.

Modern retainers no longer look like a monster that might appear in a J.J. Abrams feature film. Instead, they are simple, clear plastic. They remain remarkably easy to lose or break, but at least they no longer inspire nightmares. And the fact that my youngest will not have to wear it at school means that she is less likely to lose it, since she won’t be removing it and hiding it in a napkin while she eats—and potentially dumping it in the trash afterwards. I remember coming close to that on more than one occasion over the years.

So, for now, at last, my lifelong interaction with braces is over, both for me and my children. It has been a long time coming. I hope to never see the inside of an orthodontist’s office ever again.

Surveyor Program

Between 1966 and 1968, NASA launched seven unmanned spacecraft toward the moon. Two of them crashed, but five of them successfully landed on the lunar surface. Managed and operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, they were designed to show that it was possible to soft-land something on the moon, paving the way for human beings to follow. Until Surveyors got there, no one knew for sure if it was even possible for people to stand on the moon: was the surface solid? Or was it buried in soft dust miles thick that would swallow up man and machine?

Unlike the manned Apollo spaceships, the Surveyors did not go into orbit around the moon before landing. Like current unmanned ships to Mars, they took a direct route. Hurtling toward the moon, they fired their retrorockets for landing barely three minutes before they would otherwise smash into the surface. The first attempt, Surveyor 1, on June 2, 1966—forty-five years ago now—became the first American space probe to land on another world. It landed in the Sea of Storms, the same place where the Russians had previously landed a probe.

The Russians had beaten us to the moon with an unmanned probe by three months. Their Luna 9 probe had become the first craft to ever land somewhere beyond Earth. The Luna 9 probe had touched down on February 3. But it survived only three days. During its brief life, it transmitted a total of 9 images, including 5 panoramas of the lunar surface.

In contrast, the Surveyor 1 continued transmitting information to Earth for seven months, from its landing on June 2 until it finally stopped working on January 7, 1967. It sent over 11,000 images of the lunar surface back to the scientists in Pasadena.

The next American probe, Surveyor 2 failed to decelerate and crashed into the moon on September 20, 1966. It was followed by Survey 3, which landed once again in the Sea of Storms region of the moon. It managed to send back only around 6300 pictures of the moon’s surface. The rocks near its landing site were very reflective and had confused the lunar descent radar, so the engines didn’t shut off like they were supposed to. As a result, Surveyor 3 bounced twice on the lunar surface. The first bounce sent it back up 35 feet, while the second bounce sent it 11 feet. The bouncing damaged the camera slightly. Then, after the extreme cold and darkness of the first lunar night shut the solar powered craft down, it never woke up again.

Surveyor 3 was the first spacecraft to be equipped with a mechanical scoop, which allowed it to dig into the lunar soil and to perform some simple analysis.

Surveyor 3 stands out from the other seven Surveyor missions because the second manned landing on the moon, Apollo 12, purposely landed within about six hundred feet of Surveyor 3 on November 19, 1969. Pete Conrad and Alan L. Bean were the astronauts aboard that Lunar Module (with Conrad becoming the third man to walk on the moon, followed by Bean as the fourth). Conrad and Bean remain the only people to have ever caught up to and touched one of our robotic spacecraft on another world. So close had they landed, the Surveyor probe was coated with dust blown up by their Lunar Module’s descent engine. Conrad and Bean carefully examined the probe and photographed it. They also removed several pieces from it, including its television camera, which they brought back with them to Earth. Surveyor 3’s camera is now on display in the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

In 2009 the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched on June 18, 2009), an American satellite still in operation in orbit around the moon, extensively photographed the Surveyor 3 landing site. Besides imaging the Surveyor probe, it imaged the descent stage of the Apollo 12 lunar lander. Even the astronauts’ foot prints can be seen around the two vehicles. With no air, wind, rain or running water on the moon, those footprints should remain visible for thousands of years.

Following Surveyor 3, four more attempts to land Surveyor probes followed. The next attempt came on July 14, 1967, but it crashed. After that, however, there were nothing but successful landings. Surveyor 5 reached the Sea of Tranquility on September 11, 1967, Surveyor 6 reached Sinus Medii (Bay of the Center) on November 10, 1967 and the last Surveyor touched down near the crater Tycho on January 10, 1968. During Christmastime of that same year, Apollo 8 took three astronauts to the moon, where they circled ten times in orbit and returned safely. The next year, on July 20, human beings at last walked upon the soil where the five successful Surveyors had blazed a trail.