R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 114

The Telescope

The telescope is one of those items that people both rarely think about and take entirely for granted. 2008 was the 400th anniversary of its invention in 1608. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he didn’t have a spyglass to help him find land. It is younger than the printing press and the Protestant Reformation.

The technology that makes a telescope appears in such everyday items as binoculars, the telephoto lenses in cameras, and even in spy satellites. The planets Uranus and Neptune (among other things) had never even been imagined and would still be unknown were it not for the invention of the telescope. Oddly, we might still imagine that the sun revolves around the Earth instead of the other way around if it weren’t for the telescope—and chances are, there would never have been a space program: so no weather satellites to warn us of hurricanes, no GPS satellites to tell us where to go, and no communications satellites or satellite TV.

Lenses had existed for centuries, but until the 17th century, no one had thought of putting them together, one in front of another, creating what is today called a refracting telescope.

Hans Lippershey was credited with creating and disseminating the design for the first practical telescope. He applied to the States General of the Netherlands on October 2, 1608 for a patent that was subsequently denied. Lippershey’s device only magnified objects by three times. Almost immediately, telescopes were manufactured in large numbers and quickly spread all over Europe.

Galileo, the famous scientist, heard about the “Dutch perspective glass” in May 1609 while he was visiting Venice. Galileo wrote that he solved the problem of how to construct a telescope the first night after his return to Padua and he put together his first telescope the very next day. He then demonstrated his instrument to Leonardo Donato in Venice in the senate, who then set him for life in his lectureship at Padua.

Galileo quickly improved his telescope design, vastly increasing its magnifying power so that by 1610 he had an instrument that could magnify 33 times. With this instrument, he discovered four of the moons of Jupiter, saw the phases of Venus, sunspots on the sun, and mountains and craters on the moon. His discovery of the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter confirmed Copernicus’ theory that the sun was the center of the solar system instead of the Earth.

It was Galileo’s instrument that was first given the name “telescope” by an unidentified Greek poet and theologian present at a banquet held in 1611 by Prince Federico Cesi when Galileo was made a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, an Italian science academy in Rome. Thus, despite the fact that Lippershey is the actual inventor of the refracting telescope, it came to be called a Galilean Telescope.

Refracting telescopes like Galileo’s are not the most common astronomical instruments today. They suffered from several problems. Their lenses can only be made so large before they become too heavy to be held in a tube without deforming. Therefore, the largest refractor ever made is the one at the Yerkes Observatory; it is barely 40 inches across. Refracting telescopes also have trouble with aberration: that is, just as a prism splits light into colors, so a lens will tend to do that as well.

Therefore, refracting telescopes came to be generally replaced by a form that could be made considerably larger and cheaper without the color splitting problem: the reflecting telescope. Reflecting telescopes use a large curved mirror to do the same thing that a lens does. The ability of curved mirror to magnify and form images had been known for quite some time and in 1616 Niccolo Zucchi, an Italian Jesuit astronomer and physicist, produced the first telescope using a curved mirror instead of a lens. It was not the most practical instrument, since the observer had to look at the mirror and thus blocked part of the image with his head. Still, Zucchi was able to use it to discover the belts of Jupiter in 1630.

In 1672 Sir Isaac Newton devised a more practical form of reflecting telescope by adding a small flat diagonal mirror to reflect the light from the curved mirror up to a eyepiece mounted on the side of the telescope. This design for a reflecting telescope is still in use today and is called a Newtonian telescope.

A modification of Newton’s design was made by Laurent Cassegrain in 1672. He drilled a hole in the center of the curved mirror, and then placed a smaller mirror at the place where the curved mirror focused the light, directing that light back down and through the center hole to where the eyepiece was then affixed. These sorts of reflecting telescopes are now called Cassegrain telescopes. This is the most common design of all large astronomical instruments today (with modifications by several later scientists, such as Schmidt, Maksutov, Rictchey, and Chretein). Notable examples of Cassegrain telescopes include the famous 200 inch Hale reflector on Mt. Palomar in California, the giant Keck Telescopes in Hawaii (twin telescopes 394 inches in diameter), and the Hubble Space Telescope (94 inches in diameter) in orbit around the Earth.

One issue that ground based instruments suffered from since their invention was the distortion caused by the atmosphere on Earth: what makes stars seem to twinkle when you look at them at night. As a result, telescopes have been built on mountains where the weather and air are as stable and thin as possible, or in the case of Hubble, placed in space above the atmosphere. But in the 1990s a new technology, borrowed from the military, came into use known as adaptive optics. It works by measuring the distortions in the air with a laser and then compensating for that distortion by rapid changes of actuators applied to a deformable mirror or to a liquid crystal array filter. This allows ground based instruments to filter out the distortions caused by the air and allows them to see nearly as clearly as the Hubble Space Telescope—and in some instances better. However, the Hubble and its sister space scopes (such as the Spitzer) have advantages that can’t be overcome in any other way: they can see in wavelengths of light that are otherwise filtered out by the Earth’s atmosphere.

Summer

When I was in school, it was not uncommon for teachers to assign an essay on the question of “What did you do this summer?” as one of our first assignments. For that matter, we’d ask this sort of question of each other. But nowadays, there’s nothing to tell. Our buddies know everything we’ve been doing, unless their home computers and cell phones are busted, thanks to the advent of Facebook and other social networking sites. Not only do we share everything we do, however mundane, we include photographs that we took with our phones as it happened.

Personally, I love Facebook and email, texting and Twitter. I wish it had existed way back when I was a kid. In the old days, the only time you’d hear from your high school or college friends would be at reunions every ten or twenty years. The day I graduated from high school, my father warned me sadly that I should look carefully and think hard about everything and everyone on that day, because I’d never see any of them ever again. He spoke from experience. And indeed, I’ve never had any contact with anyone that I went to high school with ever again.

Thanks to Facebook, however, I’ve reconnected with several people from my college days. Had Facebook existed back in the dark ages, we’d never have fallen out of each other’s lives in the first place. Perhaps there would have been a few people I’d have been happy never to see again, but for the most part, staying in contact would have been a good thing.

In contrast, my children use Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. They text each other constantly. They are always connected to everyone they have ever known. I suspect that the only way they will ever lose contact with their friends is if they consciously choose to.

And I think that’s wonderful.

Computers have brought people closer together. If it weren’t for computers, I wouldn’t ever have started writing books for Quarto, a company in London. They’d have never heard of me and I’d have never heard of them. Thanks to the computer, my editors and I could exchange files and make necessary changes and corrections nearly instantly. The writing of a book is an international collaboration; I can cross an ocean faster than I can cross my office. Thanks to computers, it doesn’t matter where I live, or where the publisher is.

Three summers ago we had a foreign exchange student visit us from France for three weeks. At the time, she was fifteen years old; she had a great time. She remarked on how everything she saw in California reminded her of TV shows and movies—even our house, the way it looks in our suburban subdivision. Her first thought on her arrival was, “I’m in the house in Desperate Housewives!”

The tour group she was a part of took her to see most of the typical tourist sites, such as Universal Studios and Magic Mountain. We also made a point to take her to places that her group didn’t visit. My oldest daughter had a summer internship in the corporate offices of Guess that summer. So we took Lea to visit. We ate lunch in the Wolfgang Puck Grill on the corporate campus, then took her to shop in the corporate store so she could enjoy the substantial discounts available there. She happily contributed in a positive way to the American trade balance. Guess clothing is much cheaper in the U.S. than in France, and in the corporate store, she paid as much for the designer label clothing as she would have spent buying the cheapest no-name brands at Walmart.

We also took her up to see the Hollywood sign: not as most tourists see it, but up as close as you can get, within hiking distance. In fact, it wasn’t legal for us to get any closer to it than we did. We also took her to see Vasquez Rocks, a tumble of rock formations that are part of the San Andreas Fault. They frequently appear in westerns and in episodes of Star Trek—for instance the episode from the original series where Captain Kirk fights the Gorn, a reptilian alien that he finally bests when he makes gunpowder, stuffs it in a hollow log, and blasts him with rocks. Vasquez Rocks also served as a stand in for Vulcan during the first of J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek movie. But Lea didn’t recognize them from TV or movies. Instead, she told us she’d seen them in one of her brother’s video games, Grand Theft Auto.

She told us she doesn’t much care for French food; instead, she’d rather eat American style food. In fact, one of her goals was to eat hot dogs, which she did at every opportunity. The only uniquely French behavior we witnessed from her—besides speaking French when she was with her fellow students from the tour—was when we took her to a nice restaurant just before she left for home. She ordered a cheeseburger, but then proceeded to eat it with her fork and knife. She said that at fast food places like In-and-Out, it was fine to eat with her hands. But in a restaurant, she said it felt funny to eat that way. In France, she never uses her hands to eat–unless she’s at a McDonalds.

Since she left, we have remained in contact with her on Facebook; unlike most of the exchange students we had in the past, we’ll never lose contact. In fact, we first got to know her on Facebook, even before she arrived. And thanks to all of that, she and her parents invited my oldest daughter to come stay with her in France the following summer, which my daughter did. She had a great time and got to practice the two years of French she’d taken in High School.

Space Legends

One of the more amusing urban legends relates to the space pen. According to the story, during the space race back in the 1960′s, NASA needed a pen that would write in the zero gravity of space. Without gravity, the pens simply wouldn’t function—think about what happens when you try to write with a pen upside down. So NASA gathered their best engineers and put them to work. After hundreds of hours and millions of dollars, they finally came up with a solution: the “Space Pen.”

The Russians, of course, had a similar problem with pens not writing in zero gravity. They pondered a few moments and hit on a solution: they would use pencils in orbit instead.

It’s an amusing story which feeds our sense that the government can’t ever do anything simple, lacks basic common sense, and if it can waste money, it will. Unfortunately for the humor and message of the story, nothing like this ever happened. In reality, the Fisher Pen Company back in 1965 decided to develop what they eventually called the Space Pen. It took them awhile, and an unknown amount of the company’s money, but they finally came up with a pressurized pen that would work upside down.. They began selling them to the public for one dollar and ninety-eight cents. Then the contacted NASA to see if they were interested in using the pens, the Fisher Pen Company’s hope being that they could then advertize their new writing instrument as “used by NASA” and that had it had “actually flown in space.”

NASA turned them down flat and vetoed all their advertising hopes. NASA wanted nothing to do with the Fisher Space Pen. Throughout the Mercury and Gemini programs which preceded the Apollo program, NASA’s astronauts, like their Russian counterparts, simply used pencils. They worked just great.

Eventually, however, , during later Apollo and Skylab missions NASA did decide to buy and use some of the Fisher pens, since they discovered they worked in the cold of space; being metal, they would retain their heat for awhile and keep working. Also, NASA started worrying about the dangers associated with bits of pencil lead floating around in the cabin if a pencil point happened to snap. So the Fisher Pen Company finally got the advertising campaign they had hoped for. But, although NASA did finally wind up using pens in space, they got them cheap, over the counter, and didn’t pay a cent for their development.

One of the things that gets taxpayers riled are the seemingly excessive prices for common things that the space program or the military uses, such as toilet seats. On the surface, it seems nonsensical to pay hundreds of dollars for something that anyone could pick up at a hardware store for twenty bucks. But there is a reason that things can wind up costing the government more than you or I would ever spend.

The reason that many consumer items are as cheap as they are is because they are produced in enormous quantities. The military, by contrast, may need a very specialized item, designed to fit in a specific sized space, and they only need two dozen of them. Two dozen handmade specially designed parts are going to cost way more than their mass produced generic counterparts.

It happens with the cost of military aircraft and other military machines, too. The B-2 stealth bomber has been criticized for costing a billion dollars per aircraft. Of course, that billion dollar price estimate includes the years of research and development that preceded it’s manufacture. Once the things started coming off the assembly line, their per unit cost was really not that much more than for any other aircraft. The workers on Northrop’s assemblyline were not being paid any differently than such workers anywhere else in the aircraft building industry. And then Congress decided to let them only build about twenty-two of the things. Rather short-sighted, given that the bulk of the cost of the B-2 had already been spent by that time. Building the things was not where the majority of the expense had been.

Same thing happens with spaceships. NASA ordered a total of only five space shuttles. They didn’t exactly order in bulk, so they didn’t get the bulk rate. As always, most of the expense of making spaceships came from the research and design; the people that built them were paid the same hourly wage that Boeing was paying people to build 747s. But 747s cost a lot less than Space Shuttles, simply because Boeing makes hundreds of them. Imagine how much a car would cost if GM only made five every few years.

Planetary Resources

My interest in astronomy and all things space goes back to at least the age of four. I read my first science fiction book when I was in third grade. In many of the early science fiction stories asteroid miners, or “belters” scratched out a perilous existence on the hunks of rock between Mars and Jupiter. Gold and silver prospectors had been common in the old westerns and the science fiction authors had simply taken those old tropes and put them out in space.

With the advent of the twenty-first century many aspects of our lives match what we imagined from the Walt Disney broadcasts of the 1960s. But we’ve also suffered the disappointment of not having flying cars and not being able to vacation on the moon.

Every so often, however, something happens that raises the hope that the visions we had of tomorrow might actually be coming to pass.

On April 24, 2012 a new corporation announced its existence: a corporation that plans to do what until that moment had merely been the imaginings of science fiction authors and their readers. Planetary Resources has announced its intention to mine asteroids. In the long term they believe that by creating this new industry, they will wind up contributing trillions of dollars to the Gross Domestic Product. As they explained, their goal is to “expand Earth’s natural resource base.”

One’s first inclination might be to laugh, imagining that such a corporation was some eccentric’s pipedream, with as little hope of achieving its goals as a cow has of leaping over the moon. But it turns out that what the company intends to do is not only technologically possible, their expectations of being wildly profitable are also reasonable.

And the people involved in this new corporation are not wild-eyed dreamers—or should I say, not just wild-eyed dreamers. They are billionaires with the drive and the financial resources to make their dreams happen.

There is Larry Page, CEO and founder of Google, along with Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google. Charles Simonyi is another investor. He was at Microsoft Corporation from 1981 to 2002, where he was Director of Application Development, Chief Architect, and Distinguished Engineer. While at Microsoft, Simonyi hired and managed teams that developed Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and other software applications. He has twice visited the International Space Station. Ross Perot, Jr, whose father ran for president, serves as Chairman of The Perot Group, which manages the various Perot family interests that include real estate, oil and gas and financial investments. Additional investors include K. Ram Shriram, CEO and founder of Sherpalo, Rena Shulsky David, president and CEO of Shire Realty; Raymie Stata, entrepreneur and former Chief Technology Officer of Yahoo! and Kimberly Sweidy; and John C. Whitehead, former Chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs and 9th U.S. Deputy Secretary of State.

The co-chairmen of the corporation are Peter H. Diamandis and Eric C. Anderson. Peter H. Diamandis is an international pioneer in the commercial space arena, having founded and run many of the leading entrepreneurial companies in the sector. He is Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, best known for its $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for private spaceflight. He is also the Executive Chairman of Singularity University based in Silicon Valley. Eric C. Anderson is an entrepreneur and aerospace engineer who has pioneered the creation of the commercial human spaceflight industry since its inception. He is involved in a portfolio of innovative technology and spaceflight companies, including Intentional Software Corporation, Space Adventures, Ltd., and Planetary Power, Inc.

The president and Chief Engineer for Planetary Resources is Chris Lewicki, a project manager with NASA who worked on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers and the Phoenix Mars Lander. Chris Voorhees, Vice President, Spacecraft Development, has played an integral role in both the Mars Exploration Rover and Mars Science Laboratory projects for NASA.

Those who have invested in and who manage Planetary Resources have the finances and skill set to actually accomplish what they have dreamed. They understand the risks. They understand that full scale asteroid mining will take many years to achieve.

Some critics denounce the project, arguing that it is foolish and impossible. Others decry it as a waste of money: “why don’t they give their money to the poor.”

But if this corporation is successful, the poor will benefit far more than if they were simply given a wad of cash. If successful, Planetary Resources will create jobs and the American economy will grow. Jobs will be created. Consumer goods, medical technology, and commodities will become less expensive. And more will then be collected in taxes, and more will be donated to charities.

I wonder, frequently, at the general lack of knowledge about economics among those who criticize this sort of thing. The money invested in space is not being loaded into barrels and shot into orbit. It gets paid in salaries right here on Earth. The profits made will not get stuffed in mattresses. The rich do not use dollar bills for toilet paper. Profits go into research, and what gets invested gets used by other businesses, to create more jobs, more products, and more profits. It is, after all, the rich, whether individuals or corporations, small or large, who give most of us our paychecks and make possible most of the goods and services we take for granted.

Pilgrims

In remembering the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, from whom we derive the tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving each November here in America, we have mostly images derived from our grade school plays, cartoons on television, and similar sorts of legends. Rarely do we consider the reality of those early Pilgrims, how they lived, how they organized and conducted their lives in the new frontier.

It has been proposed that when we first send people to Mars, we should send them as colonists like the Pilgrims, rather than as explorers like the first twelve men to walk on the moon. Our lunar explorations were short trips, designed to get people on the surface of our nearest neighbor and back again. Some scientists have suggested that when it comes to Mars, we should think more like the Pilgrims and less like the Apollo program. The Mars One concept is designed to do just that.

When the Pilgrims came to America, they were planning on staying for the rest of their lives. They had no intention of ever returning to their homeland in England. They arrived with their families, their few belongings and supplies they could pack into their sailing ships, and they settled down to start new lives and begin a new civilization.

The Pilgrims in America faced many hardships: disease, deprivation, harsh winters, shortages of food. But they also faced the sorts of problems that any human civilization will face. The founders of the colony were separatists and Anglicans who were fleeing religious persecution and were searching for a place to worship as they saw fit. Keep in mind that they did not intend to establish religious freedom. They wanted freedom to worship as they wished, but they would quickly persecute anyone who dared worship differently than them.

Despite the fact that the Pilgrims who arrived in 1620 upon the shores of what would become Massachusetts were pious, religious people, they were still people. They had to find a way to govern themselves; they had to set up rules and regulations, establish courts and render punishments to those who behaved in ways that the colonists believed caused danger to their society. The court documents of the colony describe a variety of problems, ranging from theft to adultery and rape. Punishments consisted of flogging, the stocks or even hanging. The colony was established in 1620 and was disestablished in 1691. The population when they arrived in 1620 was only 99 people; by the end, when it was absorbed into the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony the population had grown to over 7000.

On January 20, 1632, only twelve years after the founding of the colony, the court records show (spelling and grammar have been left as they appear in the original document):

Robt Barker, serv[ant] of John Thorp, complayned of his m[aster] for want of clothes. The complaint being found to be just, it was ordered that Thorp should either forthw[ith] doth apparrell him, or else make over his time to some other that was able to provide for him.

At the time, the population of the Plymouth Colony was barely 300 people. In the following decades, we find people regularly being tried and convicted of homosexual acts, sex with animals, and adultery. Punishments usually consisted of flogging, while adulterers were additionally required to wear a badge prominently on their clothing for the rest of their lives with the letters AD to indicate that they had been found guilty of adultery. For instance, on December 7, 1641, when the population of the colony was around 2000 people, the court decided:

Forasmuch, as Thomas Bray, of Yarmouth, a single person, and Anne, the wyfe of Francis Linceford, haue committed the act of adultery and vncleanesse, and haue diuers tymes layne in one bed together in the absence of her husband, which hath beene confessed by both parties in the publike Court, the Court doth censure them as followeth: That they be both seuerely whipt immediately at the publik post, [and] that they shall weare (whilst they remayne in the gouernment) two letters, namely, an AD, for Adulterers, daily, vpon the outside of their vppermost garment, in a most emenent place thereof; and if they shalbe found at any tyme in any towne or place within the gouerment without them so worne vpon their vppermost garment as aforesaid, that then the constable of the towne or place shall take them, or wither of them, omitting so to weare the said two letters, and shall forthwith whip them for their negligence, and shall cause them to be immediately put on againe, and so worne by them and either of them; and also that they shalbe both whipt at Yarmouth, publikly, where the offence was committed, in such fitt season as shalbe thought meete by Mr. Edmond Freeman [and] such others as are authorized for the keepeing of the Courts in these partes.

Nathanial Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter is based on reality, after all. The people who came to Plymouth Rock were ordinary men and women, little different than the human beings we come in contact with every day. What makes them remarkable were their circumstances and what resulted from their humble beginnings, and those of the other colonies up and down the eastern coast of North America

Over a Cup of Coffee: Why History Matters

An old friend and I got together one afternoon to drink coffee and catch up; since she had moved to Colorado, it had been a few months since we had seen each other. As she picked up her cup, she winced. Did she find something about the coffee or the cup disturbing? Had I said something to upset her? So I asked her what was wrong. She told me about an accident at work and how she was going to have to have some minor surgery on her shoulder. It just hurt sometimes.

The historian, R.H. Tawney is quoted as saying that, “the world seemed an odd place, and I wondered how it got that way.” If I was going to understand why my friend winced when she picked up her coffee cup, I was going to have to learn what had happened to her when I wasn’t around. In the same way, we see the world wincing in various places. Why? Why can’t people just get along? Why the fighting and feuding?

Take one example: why can’t the Palestinians and the Israelis just get along?

Following the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of their temple by the Romans back in the first century, most of the Jewish people had been forced out of their ancestral homeland (perhaps ten to fifty thousand remained there at any given time, between the first century and the beginning of the twentieth century). Large numbers of Jewish people began moving back to Palestine in the early part of the twentieth century. This organized movement to return the Jews to their ancestral homeland was called Zionism. Why did they want to move to Palestine? After fifteen hundred years of being persecuted and murdered in European exile, some of the Jews decided they would be safer if they could have a country of their own.

Following World War I, Great Britain took over control of Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. Why? Because Turkey had fought against England on the side of Germany and Germany had lost. Great Britain issued what is called the Balfour Declaration, promising the Jewish people that they could create a Jewish homeland in part of Palestine. But the British gave contradictory statements to the Arabs of the region, promising them that there would never be a Jewish homeland there.

In 1948, following the end of World War II, the United Nations voted to establish two nations in the British protectorate of Palestine: a Jewish homeland, called Israel, and a Palestinian Arab state. Unfortunately, the surrounding Arab nations refused to accept a Jewish presence in the Middle East and immediately declared war on the nascent state and attacked from three directions. To the surprise of most, Israel managed to survive. What of the lands that were to be made into a Palestinian Arab state? They were simply annexed by Egypt and Jordan. Between 1948 and 1967, Jordan held the West Bank and Egypt held the Gaza Strip and treated them as their own territories. In 1967, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan attacked Israel again. Six days later, the war came to an end, with Israel now in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as the entire Sinai Peninsula.

In the 1980’s Israel gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty. In so doing, Israel gave up the only oil deposits to which it had access.

The Palestine Liberation Organization had been founded in 1964, three years before Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza. Its charter sets as its goal the destruction of the nation of Israel. A question: if the Palestinian cause is so precious to the Arab nations, why didn’t they help them form an independent Palestine when Arab countries controlled that territory? For that matter, why didn’t the Palestinians send suicide bombers against their Jordanian and Egyptian occupiers? And why didn’t the United Nations pass resolutions condemning the Jordanians and Egyptians, like it today passes against Israel?

Could it be that there is a little anti-Semitism at play here? For over fifteen hundred years the hatred of the Jews has been a common theme in the world, especially in Europe. It led to the ultimate horror of the Nazi Holocaust. In the 1930s, thanks in large part to the Nazis, much of that ancient European anti-Semitism made its way into the Arab world. Sad to say, it has been swallowed there in all its virulence: hook, line and sinker. Daily, the Arab media pour forth the old Nazi lies which are now widely accepted in that part of the world.

If a problem in the world were easy to solve, and uncomplicated, then it would have been solved already. Problems that have taken decades or even centuries to create, are unlikely to be solved overnight. If we can get a little historical perspective, we might be able to understand a little bit about why things are happening, and then, perhaps, we’ll have some chance of coming up with a fix.

Otherwise, like my friend over coffee, if I hadn’t found out about her work injury, I would never have understood why she winced, or I might have imagined a wrong cause.

The Philodendron

We’ve had problems with the alarm system at our church for a very long time and recently we finally got it back in working order. It brought to mind an odd incident from the past. About five years ago I purchased a philodendron for my office at the Quartz Hill School of Theology, which is a ministry of Quartz Hill Community Church. It was supposed to replace the plant that had died the previous summer when I was gone for a couple of weeks and I forgot to tell anyone to water it. The sudden motivation to purchase the philodendron came when I learned I would be interviewed by a local reporter about my book, The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, which had just been released. I decided a plant in that pot of dry dirt would look better than a handful of scraggly brown stalks.

The plant was healthy the day of the interview, though I did note that one of the leaves had fallen off and was lying on my desk. It seemed a perfectly healthy leaf but things happen. I picked it up and tossed it away.

The interview was on Tuesday. Thursday night, when I came in to teach class, I noticed a whole limb had fallen from the plant and was lying in the trash can next to my desk. Again, I thought that was a bit odd. But on Wednesday we have youth group. My office is in the church, whose facilities the School of Theology makes use of. So, I thought perhaps one of the teenagers, for whatever reason, had perhaps knocked a branch off.

Saturday, when I taught Hebrew, I saw a few other leaves off but simply tried not to think about it. Monday night, when I taught class, there were an enormous number of leaves missing. At that point I became convinced that it was my youngest daughter, who, for reasons known only to her, had perhaps gone wild with the plant and plucked leaves off of it. I even saw a pair of needle nosed pliers on my desk, taken from a drawer, and thought for sure that was the implement of my poor plant’s dismemberment.

But when I went to church the next Sunday morning, the plant was now only a shadow of its former self: a couple of branches and a handful of leaves. But my daughter had not been there to do anything: she had thrown up that morning and had not come to church since she was sick. And yet here my poor plant was nearly destroyed. Perhaps it was those inconsiderate teens from the youth group. Why would they do that to my plant?

Sunday night, I returned for our small group study. When I went into my office, I discovered my plant was now entirely gone: just roots. Every last branch, every last leaf had been plucked from it. On top of that, the wireless access point that had been sitting next to the plant had been knocked over. Very curious.

I carried the empty pot into the foyer and showed the few people there my now non-existent plant. “Who would do something like this?” I wondered.

“It looks like something that an animal might do,” suggested Kathy, our pianist, poking at one of the nubs barely visible in the dirt. Look, you can see chew marks.”

I looked. She was right.

“The squirrel!” I announced.

People in the foyer stared at me, not quite as if they believed I had lost my mind, since they’d known me for years and my oddness was something they’d grown accustomed to. More it was a look of, well, confirmation—as in, “ah, once again he demonstrates for us just how peculiar he is.”

But then I explained, reminding them of the then recent past. We had, over a period of about a month, suffered from the alarm system in the church going off repeatedly for no apparent reason. I would receive a call from the alarm company, tell them to shut off the racket, and then I would drive over to the church to see what was wrong. Every time, I would find the building secure: all the doors closed, windows closed and intact, and no evidence that anything was out of the ordinary. This happened two or three times a week and we simply could not figure out what was wrong. The alarm company had been unable to find anything amiss with the system.

Then, one Saturday afternoon when I arrived to teach a Hebrew class, I walked back to the library to set up the room for the students, and just as I reached the door, I saw two shiny black eyes staring at me from the middle of the carpet: they belonged to a squirrel. Startled, it stared at me, then flicked its tail, and scurried toward one of the book shelves. Recovering from my surprise, I walked into the room, at which point the beast scurried past me and darted down the hallway. I turned to follow, but when I looked down the hall it was nowhere to be seen.

So, the mystery of the random alarms was solved. And since we were unable to figure out how it was getting into the building, we began, after that point, to always set the alarm in such a way that the interior motion sensors were shut off. My discovery of a squirrel in the building had also explained a puzzling incident over the summer when we came into the church and found biscuits scattered all over the kitchen floor: someone had left a bag of them on the counter-top one Sunday and we found the mess when we arrived for Wednesday Prayer Meeting. Now it seemed probable that the squirrel was behind that dishevelment.

Remembering the squirrel had solved the new mystery of my slowly vanishing plant: apparently the bushy-tailed creature finds philodendrons tasty. Though given the number of leaves and branches that were just scattered about rather than consumed, perhaps the squirrel merely has a personal grudge against them.

Mercury Seven

Fifty-four years ago, on April 9, 1959 NASA picked its first group of astronauts. There were seven of them and they instantly became household names: Alan Shepherd, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton. Called the Mercury Seven, they are also sometimes referenced as the Original Seven, or more formally, Astronaut Group 1. NASA’s latest astronaut class is now Group 20, which joined in 2008; Group 21 should be named sometime this year.

The Mercury Seven were famous before they did anything except train for their spaceflights. They appeared on television, in magazines, and newspapers and were treated like modern rock stars.

Since then, hundreds of astronauts have followed them into space. Very few of them are well-known. If you asked the average person to name a current astronaut, he or she would likely have trouble. Most of the astronauts since those first seven have flown in obscurity. The average person would be hard pressed to give the names of either of the two astronauts currently circling the globe inside the International Space Station. In fact, most people would be surprised to even know that American astronauts are currently in space, and in fact have been continuously in orbit since November of 2000. Seven is the normal crew size now of a single shuttle flight. And come May, seven astronauts—the sum total of the entire astronaut corps of 1959—will be flying to the Hubble Space Telescope to conduct its final repair and upgrade mission.

But in 1959, space travel was fresh and new and we were worried about the Soviet Union, which at the time seemed to be beating us in all things space-related. They had beaten us to orbit with the first satellite, Sputnik 1, launched less than two years earlier in October 1957. And in 1961, Yuri Gagarin , a Soviet citizen, would be the first man to orbit the earth, a feat that would not be matched until John Glenn rode an Atlas booster into space in February 1962, when he became the third person to reach orbit. The Soviets had managed to launch a second person into space before he made his first flight.

Interestingly, astronauts of the Mercury Seven are the only astronauts to fly aboard all the human rated spaceships that NASA has flown up to now. Six of the seven rode in the one-seat Mercury capsule. Three would go on to fly on the next generation spaceship, the two passenger Gemini. Three would fly on Apollo, the three person spaceship designed to go to the moon (another would die on the launch pad in Apollo 1, which never flew). One of those three, Alan Shepard, Jr. made it to the surface of the moon on Apollo 14. And one, John Glenn, would even fly on a Space Shuttle.

Of the seven original astronauts, only two of them are still alive: Scott Carpenter and John Glenn.

All told, as of January, 2013, only 530 human beings, from 38 countries have reached 62 miles or more above Earth and can therefore be said to have flown into space. Of that number, 527 have reached low Earth orbit (more than half were Americans). Only 24 have traveled beyond Low Earth orbit to either circle or land on the moon (and three out of those 24 did it twice).

John Glenn, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, besides having the distinction of being the first American to orbit the Earth, is also the oldest human being to ever go into orbit. He was 77 years old when he flew on STS 95 in 1998 on-board the twenty-fifth flight of Space Shuttle Discovery (and the 92nd mission flown by a Space Shuttle). Gordon Cooper’s claim to fame, as the last of the Mercury Seven to fly in a Mercury spaceship (Deke Slayton would not fly until he got a trip aboard the last Apollo mission, the joint rendezvous Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, in 1975), was to be the last American to ever fly into space by himself (not counting the suborbital trips of SpaceShipOne). Since then, there have always been at least two aboard any American spacecraft.

As of today, eighteen astronauts have died during spaceflight (not counting those who died in ground accidents). The loss of life occurred on four missions: thirteen Americans, three Russians, one Ukrainian, and one Israeli.

Only one of the Mercury Seven astronauts died on the job: Gus Grissom. He was killed in an accident in 1967 aboard Apollo 1 during routine testing on the launch pad. A fire, started by a spark from bad wiring, ignited in the cabin of his capsule, killing him along with his two crewmates, Roger Chaffee, a rookie who had never been in space and Edward White, the first American to perform a spacewalk.

The other four Mercury Seven astronauts who have died succumbed to illness and old age.

Jamaican Blue Mountain

Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee is a classification of coffee grown in the Blue Mountains on the island of Jamaica. It is a very mild coffee which lacks the bitter aftertaste one endures with most brews. The Blue Mountains of Jamaica are located between Kingston to the south and Port Maria to the north. Rising to 7500 feet, they are some of the highest mountains in the Caribbean. The climate of the region is cool and misty. It rains a lot. The soil is rich with excellent drainage. Nearly perfect conditions for growing coffee.

The Coffee Industry Regulation Act of Jamaica specifies what coffee may use the label Blue Mountain. Generally speaking, coffee harvested from the Jamaican parishes of Saint Andrew, Saint Thomas, Portland and Saint Mary may be called Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee if it is grown at elevations between 3,000 and 5,500 feet. Thus, there is only a very small amount of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee in the world.

It is not a kind of coffee I drink very often. In fact, years–even decades–will pass before I imbibe.

And there is a very simple reason for my general estrangement from the best coffee I’ve ever drunk: given its rarity, it is incredibly expensive. It goes for anywhere between thirty and forty dollars per pound. Ouch! On the amount of money that I have to spend each month, the cheap store brand that sells for around a dollar or two a pound will be just fine, thank you very much.

When Lancaster experienced record low temperatures a few years ago, the pipes in our church building froze. This was not a good thing. When they finally thawed out, just as our morning worship service was about to start, we discovered that a pipe above the hallway outside one of the restrooms was leaking. We quickly shut off all the water to the building.

My task on the next Saturday morning was to repair that pipe. Or at least try. My motivation: that way we would have water in the building on Sunday morning—meaning that we would be able to make coffee. The cheap dollar a pound variety, of course. My church is not exactly flush with cash, either.

I had brought my tools for working with pipes with me when I arrived around ten in the morning: a butane torch, solder, flux, a jigsaw with a metal cutting blade, a hacksaw, and an extension cord. I met our pastor, Don Patterson and we got to work on trying to fix the problem. I got the ladder from the shed and then climbed into the attic where I could see two obvious holes in the copper.

So, we drove to Lowes and picked up a couple of clamps—metal clamshells with a rubber section that can be put over a leak in a pipe, then bolted shut. There were already five such clamps on that length of pipe, so this wasn’t the first time such a fix had been made up there. So I attached the two clamps we’d gotten and Don turned on the water. I immediately saw three smaller leaks I had missed before. He turned the water off.

Then we made another trip to Lowes, to get more clamps. Four of them. I used them all and found out about two more leaks left after we turned the water on again. Lowes had no clamps left, so we traveled to Home Depot. We found two there. I attached them. Don turned the water on. Still more leaks appeared.

Don went to a hardware store in Quartz Hill and found three clamps; however, only one of them was the right size. That left one unclamped leak. So we drove to two other hardware stores. No clamps in either place. All sold out. But we did find some epoxy stuff that was supposed to fix leaks.

I tried that. It didn’t work.

So what to do? I had two ¾ inch clamps which didn’t fit the ½ inch pipe. But, by folding some extra rubber strips, I managed to jury-rig one of the clamps and actually made it work.

Don turned the water back on. No more leaks! At last! I looked at my watch. It was 4:45 PM. All done. Well—except for making an unplanned repair to the ceiling in one of the classrooms. I had earlier slipped and plunged my knee through it. Thankfully I did not fall through the ceiling and land on the floor—although that would have made for a much funnier story.

Sunday morning before Sunday School, I learned that Don had told everyone about my fix-it job the day before. He had blabbed it from the pulpit during announcements at the first service and told everyone that they should bow before me in thanks. As I was making coffee in the kitchen, I commented to someone that my real reason for fixing the pipe had just been so I could drink coffee.

“Tell me,” said our music leader, “what’s your favorite kind of coffee.”

I admitted my fondness for Jamaican Blue Mountain.

“Then I’m going to go get you some.”

I warned him that it was very expensive, but he was not to be deterred.

Therefore, I was soon able to renew my acquaintance with the best coffee on the planet. A broken water pipe and a long day of volunteer work had turned out to be an unexpected blessing after all.

Model Rocket Launch

Today I went to my daughter’s school to launch a rocket for her astronomy class. The rocket I launched was a large one: my daughter had been telling her classmates about it and several of them did not believe in a model rocket more than six feet tall. My daughter was delighted when I walked into her classroom carrying the thing.

The wind was blowing much stronger than we had anticipated, and that created some difficulties in launching the rocket. In fact, I had a pre-launch incident that actually damaged the rocket slightly prior to launch: the wind took hold and pulled one of the launch lugs off the side of the rocket. Fortunately, I was able to do a temporary fix and taped it back on. Then we had trouble with the electrical running to the igniter: one of the clips pulled loose. But finally, in the end, all was well and we successfully launched the rocket and recovered it in an undamaged state.

Click on the PLAY button. Or, RIGHT CLICK here and SAVE AS to your computer, and then OPEN after the download completes.

Here are some photos of me with the rocket. First, is a picture just prior to launch. The wind really caught hold of my hair, demonstrating that I probably need to have my hair cut:

And here I’m trying to get the clips to stay put on the igniter:



And here is a picture following the rocket launch:



For those interested in such things, the rocket is a model available for purchase. The kit was manufactured by Estes and can be purchased through Amazon.com.

I used the largest recommended rocket motor for this launch, an E9-6.