Month: February 2013

exorbitant: exceeding the customary or appropriate limits in intensity, quality, amount, or size (from Merriam-Webster)

Last Saturday was the annual Atlanta Open Orthographic Meet (aka spelling bee), held at Manuel’s Tavern every year on the first Saturday after Valentine’s Day. This year’s first round was about average — you could make a couple errors and still advance. I made my annual stupid mistake with “exorbitant”, spelling it with an “h” because I had “exhort” bouncing around in my head. My annual tradition is to obsess about stupid first round mistakes, so “exorbitant” it is.

Nonetheless, with only two mistakes (“ruching”?! WTF?!) I managed to make it to the second round, which I’ve done a couple times before but it’s fairly rare. All that does is postpone when I can relax and start drinking harder.

Joining us at our table this year was one of Sharon’s coworkers and her husband. This was the first time for Nedda and Keith, and Nedda turned out to do very well. She got 19/20 in the first round, and 10/15 in the second round, good enough to make it to the third round! Sadly, the proctors screwed up and didn’t announce that she’d made it to the third round, and lacking her sheet (people who are still in the hunt pass them in for scoring) she shrugged it off as a miscount on her part. Later in the bee the proctors realized their mistake, to some grumbling and even slight booing from the audience. Nedda wuz robbed!

Here’s a sampling of this year’s words:

Round 1: etiquette, corollary, echinacea

Round 2: tuff, acequia, intaglio

Round 3: chrestomathy, corybantic, labret

Round 4: cnidarian, nitid, khedive

I’ve written about this annual event before — click to see the 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 writeups.

I’m a big fan of The Planetary Society, in particular the blog run by Emily Lakdawalla and the weekly radio show hosted by Mat Kaplan. I listen to the radio show religiously every week (on WREK and online) for their great interviews with various scientists and other hotshots in the world of planetary exploration. The Planetary Society has been around for 30 years, fighting the good fight in Washington DC trying to protect funding for real science at NASA and doing lots of really good science outreach. Most people know who Bill Nye The Science Guy is, but they probably don’t know that he has been deeply involved with The Planetary Society for many years and recently became the CEO of the organization.

At the end of every show they have a quick trivia contest every week and occasionally, if the prize is good, I’ll enter it but I’ve never won. They typically receive plenty of correct entries, and simply resort to chance (via the random.org random number generator) to determine who gets the prize.

I won! Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Nye is now on my cell phone voicemail greeting. Have a listen:

Bill-Nye-voicemail-msg

Pretty freaking great, huh?

The trivia question was to identify the song that begins with the lines, “We had a lot of luck on Venus / We always had a ball on Mars.” I spent way too much time as a young teenager listening to my cousin Stefan’s record collection to let that one pass — it’s Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin”. Here’s a live performance they did in 1973. Uncredited in this performance: cocaine.

You can listen to the whole radio show here, and at the 25 minute point you’ll hear how I cracked up the radio hosts with my smartass comments. Of course you should listen to the whole show for lots more info, including their great coverage of space exploration topics, in this case the massive new telescope array in Chile that started coming online last year. And they name-dropped WREK for me!

I got to provide the script, which I’ll note here:

Hello! This is Bill Nye the Science Guy, CEO of the Planetary Society, and you’ve reached the voicemail of Chris Campbell. Whether it’s evangelizing about electric vehicles, or proselytizing for planetary exploration, or simply building satellite communications systems, Chris is apparently too busy changing the world* to bother answering his own phone. Please leave a message and he’ll get back to you shortly!

(* “Let’s change the world” is Bill’s tagline — he uses it every time he speaks.)

It’s a major award!

I’m a huge space nerd. I’ve written about the space shuttle here before, having witnessed a launch in early 2009, a landing in late 2009, and a final launch in 2010. In July 2011, on the occasion of the final shuttle flight, I wrote at length about why the space shuttle needed to be retired. I’ve been a diehard fan of space activities, both manned and unmanned, for my entire life.

I was listening in on the radio in January 1986 when Challenger was lost, and I was watching live in February 2003 when Columbia was lost. Ten years ago this morning, I was sitting in front of my computer at home, eating breakfast and watching NASA TV. The two-week STS-107 space shuttle mission was ending and the shuttle was coming home to a landing in Florida. I have watched every single launch and landing for many years and this would be no exception.

I tuned into NASA TV a few minutes before scheduled landing, right around the point that they usually start to pick up the shuttle on long range cameras. What I saw was a lot of camera shots of the Florida ground facilities and the Houston control room, because the shuttle wasn’t in view yet. But shuttles don’t run late — if there was no shuttle to see, then something was terribly wrong.

The public commentator on NASA TV wasn’t saying much. I listened in and heard the control room ask the C-band system guy for an update, and he reported that they were stilling running in a wide search mode. That meant that their big antenna was sweeping the Florida skies trying to pick up the shuttle, and not finding it.

Around this time, watching NASA TV closely, there was a moment when you could see a small scrum of people in the back of the control room briefly discussing some news they had just received over the phone — reports had started to come in from East Texas of a breakup in the dawn skies overhead. The live public coverage from that morning can be found here. Here is footage (that came out later) showing what was going on in mission control during that time — it starts getting weird at 4m45s. Here is an excellent second-by-second timeline of what was actually happening on the shuttle.

I finished up my breakfast and headed out the door. I was attending a meeting at a neighbor’s house that Saturday morning about a local issue, and intended to show up late so I could catch the shuttle landing. I didn’t say anything to anyone when I arrived, but at some point someone broke away to get something from the kitchen, and must have heard about it on the radio or something. She screamed “the shuttle exploded!” That pretty much broke up the meeting.

---

Wayne Hale is a big name in the space business. He was rising through the ranks of NASA management when Columbia happened, and went on to distinguish himself as one of the key people to lead the Space Shuttle Program out of the darkness and back into the light. He retired a couple years ago, and as his final act within NASA he led the effort to publish a book about the space shuttle, a tome of astonishing breadth and depth. He maintains a blog and a couple months ago started a series of posts recounting his experiences in the runup to, during and after the failed Columbia mission.

Here is the first one:

After Ten Years -– Why Write Now?

… and here is the whole series. Start at the bottom of the list and simply “next” through each post.

After Ten Years | Wayne Hale’s Blog

I can’t reach out and force you to read these, but I hope you will. He’s quite eloquent and has a unique perspective on the history of the space program.

Rest in peace, crew of STS-107.