Category: Uncategorized

I’m going to Europe! I’ll be on my own this time, as Sharon just could not get away from work, and the trip’s timing is pinned down per the explanations below. The map above sketches out the general plan, taking place over a total of 16 days. I’ll be in Paris for a day, seeing things that I haven’t yet in our previous two visits (Dec 2008 and Sep-Oct 2011). I arrive at 6am, and so will have about 12 hours to do stuff before I collapse right after dinner time. I can’t sleep on airplanes, so this is how I deal with the jet lag — pushing through that first day. The current plan is to see Pompidou Center, Musee de Cluny, Notre Dame and Pantheon, and if time allows I will check out the Luxembourg gardens and Ile Saint-Louis.

The next morning, I get on a train, well a series of trains, that will deposit me in Annweiler, Germany. This is the small town that my family hails from (on my mother’s side), and we are having a family reunion to celebrate the 50th birthday of my cousin Stefan. During my entire freshman year of high school, I lived in this town, going to the local high school with Stefan, so I’m obviously familar with it.

After the festivities, I’m hitching a ride with another cousin and her family back to their home in Heidelberg, overnighting with them and then catching a train the next morning to Geneva.

The main reason for this trip is the sailing, discussed below. The timing is dictated by the family reunion event. However, when planning this I saw that I would obviously need to travel between point A and point B, across the Alps. Looking for an opportunity to do soemthing along the way, I spotted Geneva …

Hmmm, what do I know that’s in Geneva? CERN! The world’s premier particle physics (read: atom smashing) research facility is located just outside Geneva, in a campus that sprawls across the countryside, actually straddling the French and Swiss border. I have been a close follower of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for years, including keeping up with the construction, the initial “beam on” of Sep 2008, the subsequent shutdown due to failure, startup again, and then most notably the triumphant declaration in July 2012 that they had confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson. These little particles are all rather abstract of course, but think of it this way — the LHC is the simply largest machine humans have ever built.

Anyway, I’m going there. They have public tours, however I don’t know that those tours actually get you down into the underground tunnel or any of the four colossal test chambers. So I’m trying to see if anyone I know knows a guy who knows a guy who can maybe get me in … While I’m there I’ll tool around Geneva for 2-3 days, seeing what there is to see — I haven’t actually planned that out yet! I’m leaving the exact departure day and time up in the air, to be flexible in case someone can get me into the LHC tunnel.

Next, back on a train to the French coast of the Mediterranean and some sailing! As I wrote about last summer, my uncle Andreas is a (mostly) retired German businessman who has a condo on the French coast and does quit a bit of sailing. His biggest boat is a 41-foot Euros, built in the 1970s by the French shipwright firm Amel. My uncle has had the boat for years and has gone on many sailing voyages with it (these pictures are from earlier trips).

I have been planning this sailing trip for about two years. Two summers ago, Andreas went on two-month trip around the Mediterranean, and was joined by friends and family at various times during the trip. I heard about this and declared my intent to join him someday, and we quickly made plans to target this summer for the trip (2013 was already off the table, I forget why).

Now, I really don’t know how to sail. I mean, I understand the physics of it, but that’s not worth much. So last summer I spent a month of Saturdays driving up to Acworth (Atlanta exurb) to take sailing lessons on Lake Allatoona at the Atlanta Yacht Club. They teach you the basics — what are the parts of a typical small sailboat, how does the wind work with the sails, what is the lingo used to communicate between the people operating the boat. They shoved us out on the lake in little “420” sailboats, each manned by two people, and we learned on the go. By the end I was pretty comfortable with it, although most days we had very little wind.

A few weeks ago, I had a refresher session with a friend who has a boat on that lake. We didn’t have much wind, but he and I are both into electric cars so we managed to pass the time 🙂

Sailing is quite a visceral experience, especially if the wind has kicked up. And with that in mind, I really do hope that we get some serious wind. I mean, I’m looking forward to lazing around in the sun, but also to some bare-knuckled tacks and jibes. I don’t think I’m suspectible to seasickness, but I guess I’m going to find out.

I’m not sure I want to captain the boat — I think I’ll be happy to just take orders and move the sails as I’m told. There will be three other people on the boat with Andreas and me — a friend of his, his young son (my cousin) and his son’s girlfriend. I know for a fact that they are all quite experienced at sailing, and so I hope they’ll let me do something besides run the radio.

The tentative plan, shown in this last image, will be to disembark from the home port (Port Camargue) and spend eight days workong our way around towards Corsica and back. I really don’t know much about the plan beyond this map, and am leaving myself at the mercy of Andreas and the others.

At the end of the sailing voyage (or at least my part of it) we will arrive in Marseilles, where I will catch a train back to Paris, straight to the airport and back to Atlanta.

My mother passed away suddenly in October 2006. In a small ceremony in April 2007, we took her cremated remains and set them in the ground around the base of a newly planted magnolia tree in the backyard of her house. The tree produced a single, full bloom the following spring. The next year it burst forth with over forty blooms, and has flourished since then.

If anyone recognizes what kind of magnolia this is, please let me know. I really have no idea. Click on the photos to see larger versions.

The three children (my two sisters and I) inherited the house from Mom, but my younger sister decided to “buy us out” and make it a proper home for her and her growing family. This summer she got promoted to a new job away from New Jersey, and so the house is finally going on the market after nearly 30 years in family hands. My mother actually built this house to her specifications in the mid 80’s, after getting divorced from Dad and shipping my and my older sister off to college. It really is an incredibly unique and well-built house, with lush landscaping.

So my sister and her family are cleaning house and getting ready to move out. I wondered about the memorial magnolia. Could we move a 10-foot tall tree that was nearly a decade rooted into the ground? We consulted with an expert and they advised that while it was possible, and there were techniques for uprooting trees, the truth is that it would likely not survive the move. And then we would have done something even worse — killed the tree, instead of just leaving it there to the fates. So scratch that idea.

Somebody suggested the idea of doing cuttings of the tree, taking small branch tips and rooting them into new pots. Hmmm, that’s interesting. We talked to professionals and it did indeed seem doable; in fact, my research showed that summer is the ideal time to attempt this. I could take multiple cuttings, to improve the odds of getting at least one to take, and the original tree would still be there.

However, there was the matter of transportation. I was going to call up a local pro and hire them to do the cuttings, and then get the results transported somehow after they’d taken root, but I was advised that you can’t really ship plants like this. That may or may not be true. But with other house cleanout activities, it seemed inevitable that my sister would have a car load of things for me to take anyway, so I decided to fly up and drive back. I’d load up the car with the rooted cuttings, and all the other junk, and drive it all down to Atlanta!

And so I commenced with research on exactly what I needed to do to get tree cuttings to root. Besides the obvious method of searching the internet, I got on the phone with plant expert up in that area and he walked me through the process. Actually I had originally wanted to hire them to do it for me, back before I realized that I really needed to do it myself.

On the designated weekend, I flew up and got a good look at the tree — it looked perfectly healthy, if growing a bit oddly. I took one cutting and headed to the local nursery and talked to that expert again (thanks Jeff at Rutgers Nursery!) My original plan had been to to all the potting work in NJ before the drive, but he advised that it would probably be better to just keep the cuttings in water and then do the potting upon arrival.

So on the day of departure, I went out with a ladder to claim some cuttings. I decided to take 12 cuttings, loosely filling a bucket with them, and put a few inches of water in the bucket. I had brought an old plastic spray bottle with me and filled that up with water to mist the leaves during the drive.

The drive back to Atlanta normally takes 13 hours, PLUS stoppage time. I’m old enough that’s it not worth the effort to pull that off in one shot anymore, so I decided to break up the trip with a stop in Washington DC. I’d drive the 3 hours to DC, then the 10 hours to Atlanta.

Of course, I had an ulterior motive, which was to stop at the Smithsonian. There is a new exhibit of some critical components that came out of the Hubble Space Telescope on the final servicing mission by the space shuttle in May 2009, and I had to see them for myself. It was utterly fascinating, and someday soon maybe I’ll do a seperate writeup about it. No, this excellent article from the Smithsonian does as good a job as I would, and the has exact same photos I took.

Onwards! I continued to mist the plants at every stop during the drive, and when I arrived at home late that night. The next day I went out and got some Perlite, rooting hormone and pots, and followed the sequence per all my research and notes. Cut just below the node, peel off all but the top two leaves, cut those two remaining leaves in half (to reduce moisture loss), apply rooting hormone to stem tip, place in pots via pencil starter holes, and then water via misting. Of the original twelve cuttings to come down in the bucket, I picked the six most healthy looking.

As I write this, two weeks later, it doesn’t look good. Of the six cuttings, five look pretty much dead, but one looks OK. The leaves are curled in an odd direction, but it’s holding its own, and I’m hoping that it’s generating roots down there. Per my reaserch, it needs to hang out in the Perlite for five weeks, generating roots in the Perlite, and then I can transfer to a new pot with potting soil. I wish I had more than just one cutting left to pin my hopes on, and I haven’t actually given up on the five dead-looking ones. I just wish I had a better sense of how much watering I should be doing; from my research I got the impression that I really needed to be sparing with the water, which makes me very nervous, especially since I’ve probably killed five of the six so far.

My original hope was to get three cuttings to survive this, so I’d have one for each child (me and my two sisters), but at this point I’ll settle for just one! It’s frankly going to be a minor miracle if this works.

PBS’s Nova documentary series recently re-aired an episode from 2013, that is so good I watched it again, and I’m compelled to write about it here. It’s a special episode called “Earth From Space” is viewable online at this link, for free, and I strongly encourage taking the time to watch it.

Here are some highlights if you can’t watch the whole thing.

0 hours 36 minutes — Antartica and the surrounding ice shelf is a key driver of the global climate. The ice that forms around the continent squeezes out salt (brine), which is denser than the surrounding water, and that cascades down through ocean caverns and along the global sea floor. This brine flow (also known as the haline cycle) drives the flow of water and nutrients ultimately around the planet, in a massive global conveyer belt called the thermohaline circulation cycle.

1h 03m — African Saharan diatomite dust (the remains of ancient plankton) is carried by equatorial winds to the Amazonian rain forest, where it is rained out of the atmospheric, providing much needed phospates to fertilize the basin.

1h 14m — Oxygen in the atmosphere is obviously critical to advanced life forms including mamals like us. Satellite data shows that Earth has a daily “breathing” cycle, where plants receive sunlight during the day and produce oxygen, but also indicates that huge rainforests like the Amazon actually keep most of that oxygen (via reabsorbing at night). Satellite data is showing that the rainforest runoff produces massive plankton blooms, and they consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen that then finds its way into the atmosphere and is available to the entire planet.

1h 40m — The Sun’s magnetic field and interaction with Earth’s magnetic field, illustrated with fantastic animations (produced by supercomputers) that show the Earth being buffeted by the Sun’s activity. Without our magnetic field, Earth’s atmosphere would slowly get stripped away and the Sun would scorch the Earth. By the way, we now believe that this is what happened to Mars; it once had a magnetic field, which allowed it to have a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on the surface (implying life), but the magnetic field disappeared and the planet was transformed into the frigid, dry wasteland that our probes are exploring today.

1h 47m — Finally, satellite data is revealing how much human activity is now dwarfing Earth’s natural cycles. Our growing presence is now starting to interrupt natural processes that have evolved over billions of years. Nitrates from lightning, sulfur from volcanoes, dust from the deserts –all of these sources are now already completely overtaken and dwarfed by human industrial activity.

The difference between the natural processes and our own is that we make conscious decisions about what we do.

Sharon and I went to the annual (-ish) Moogfest music festival in Asheville, North Carolina. If I don’t write down what we did, it didn’t happen …

Thursday:

Wolf Eyes

Black Dice

Dan Deacon

(also Nick Zinner / Bradford Cox at art gallery)

Friday:

Dorit Chrysler

Scarface screening (Giorgio Moroder no show)

Kraftwerk 3D!

Giorgio Moroder

Tokimonsta

Moderat (Modeselektor+Apparat)

(also MIT Media Lab panel)

Saturday:

Chic with Nile Rodgers

Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks

Craig Leon

M.I.A.

(also panel on future of music visuals)

Sunday:

Epic drive back to Atlanta. I wanted to take a different route than the one we took up (of course), and wanted to include a stretch on the Blue Ridge Parkway. So I found a route that would do that, but it turned out to be rather long and remote. We nearly ran out of gas in the midle of nowhere. It took us an extra hour to get home (5 hours instead of 4, and two of those hours were tiring twisty roads) and Sharon was already sick, so unhappy Sharon. Sorry hon 🙂

I have been interested in solar power for decades. As I teenager I had a little solar cell the size of a postage stamp, with two wires poking out of it. I didn’t really know what to do with it, but it looked cool.

About a decade ago I started looking more seriously into solar power, when the various laws and tax incentives started to improve. But our house at the time was thoroughly shaded, so it was out of the question.

Three years ago we moved to a new house, and it has great southern exposure, thanks to the location on a southeast corner lot. There are three roof segments facing south, with the biggest “upper” segment getting blasted by sunlight all day long — almost no shade whatsoever. The second biggest roof segment had a gigantic oak tree shading it. The third and smallest roof segment had few shading concerns, but the panels would have been visible from the front of the house. I really wanted to keep the front of the house “clean”, and I wasn’t going to be able to fit more than 3 or 4 panels on that little segment. So I was debating whether to use that front roof, but the upper segment would definitely host the lion’s share of the solar system.

Then last spring the gigantic oak fell. Ouch. It took us a full three months to deal with that, but afterwards we now had a newly sunlit roof segment. That pretty much settled it — I wouldn’t have to bother with the little front roof segment, and so came up with a solar panel layout that fit 17 panels on the roof. And it would be pretty much maxed out with those 17 panels — any more panels would have to be located in places that got either morning or afternoon shade.

I could have gotten a smaller system, but I figured I’d do this once, and do it right.

Before installing solar, however, I needed to get the roof itself replaced. It was already over 20 years old and actually leaking in a few places. We finally got that roof job done in October, including some repairs that were needed when they got a look under the old shingling. After the holidays, we had some skylights put in to help bring some brightness to the second floor of the house, which was otherwise quite dark in places. All of the new sunlights were installed on the north facing roofs, in order to reserve all of the south-facing surfaces for the solar power system.

Finally, in February I was able to finish analyzing the competing bids from contractors and sign on the dotted line for the solar system install. Then it just became a waiting game, waiting for the panels and other parts to arrive from the manufacturers, and waiting for the weather and the installers’ schedule to line up.

On April 8th, the install finally started. The installers first tackled the “upper” array — I was having them put 11 panels on the roof of the house addition. This roof is high up and at a shallow angle, so actually not really visible from the ground, unless you stand way back (e.g. on the neighbor’s property). It ended up taking them most of the day to do that array.

Each solar panel is about the size of a large coffee table (smaller than a sheet of plywood), and has a small “microinverter” mounted to the back to integrate the DC power coming out of the solar panel into the AC power system of the house.

Late in the afternoon they got started on the “side” array, which would have 6 panels arranged in a 3-2-1 pyramid pattern, and clearly visible from the street. For this array I was very sensitive to the exact positioning, because these panels would be very visible from the street, and I wanted to make sure they lined up perfectly.

The next day they resumed the construction of the side array. After that got completed, they worked on getting the wiring from the arrays over to the far side of the house. For safety purposes, the wiring from solar power systems has to first go to a safety disconnect device mounted on the outside of the house, next to the power meter. From there the wiring then feeds into the breaker panel, typically inside the house. The power connects into the breaker panel just like any other circuit (e.g. to your clothes dryer), except the power is flowing backwards, into the breaker panel.

Finally, they installed the indoor controller electronics. This is just a little wall-mounted device, like a big thermostat, that provides status on the solar system. The indoor controller is not necessary for the system to function, rather it’s just a device that keeps track of the equipment, and provides a very cool web page for purposes of seeing more. However I didn’t want them to mount it on the wall, rather in the wall, inside a new box, because that stairwell was already cramped and I didn’t want this new thing crowding it further.

And with that, at around 5:00pm that Wednesday afternoon, we flipped the switches on the system! One by one, the 17 panels came to life and started generating power. Within 15 minutes the system was generating about 1200 Watts, limited only by the fact that the sun was already setting.

Over the next few days it would hit a peak of 3600 Watts (3.6 kilowatts, or kW), which is exactly what was expected for this system. Officially the system is rated at 4500 watts, but that is basically an ideal number, and various real-world inefficiencies kick in to result in a more realistic peak power of 3.6 kW.

I have been wanting to do this for … forever. About a decade ago my mother took interest, and we had talked about putting a system on her house (in New Jersey) after I got mine done. New Jersey had very generous incentives in place until 2009, when they dialed the incentives back somewhat. Sadly, she passed away in 2006 so we never got a chance to take on the project, but I’m still happy to have completed our own system, at last.

I like to say that as an electrical engineer, I live three years in the future. Engineers tend to be working very hard on things that are about to become mainstream. In 2010, I got serious about electric cars and bought one of the first production cars in the country, becoming a local advocate for that technology. Since then, hundreds of thousands of EVs have sold and the cars have become as mainstream as hybrids were a decade ago. So now I am moving on to the next thing, which is solar power. The financials aren’t a slam dunk, yet. But I believe that within three years they will be.

For more information on solar, see the two-page fact sheet on my website here:

http://electrifyatlanta.com/wp/?page_id=192

Or stop by the house and grab a copy, and take a look!

After three years of intending to do it, and six months of serious planning, we finally got skylights upstairs!

Here are before and after photos that I took. The camera adjusted its exposure for the scene, so mostly what you see (besides the presence of the new skylight) is a change in color temperature. But it’s masking the fact that these rooms are now blasted with light, far more than they had before.

First up is the bathroom, which had several light fixtures so wasn’t so dark. But it really did need some natural light, and definitely needed a real exhaust fan (tucked up in the skylight chase).

bathroom: before	bathroom: after

Up next is the “vestibule”, the small area at the top of the stairs. It has one light fixture, and some natural light bleeding in from an adjacent room (crazy interior windows) but otherwise it was pretty dark. Notice how different the flooring looks.

vestibule: before	vestibule: after

Finally, the stairwell. This was a real cave, and impossible for anybody with imperfect vision. Again the camera is trying to adjust its exposure, but you can see how dark it was in the stairwell before — so dark that the camera couldn’t even really do anything with it. This skylight was actually a “SunTunnel”, a cylindrical skylight that is much easier to install than a classic rectangular skylight. The SunTunnel was needed here because there was too much stuff (e.g. air ducts) going on above the ceiling and it was nearly impossible to get access all the way up there.

stairwell: before	stairwell: after

These spaces are now even getting better lighting at night, by virtue of the night sky coming down through the skylights. No more tripping in the dark!

Three years ago today, I took delivery of my Chevy Volt. I had ordered it sight unseen, based only on research, and I ended up being the first Volt owner in the state of Georgia.

Today, the three year lease is up, and so yesterday I turned the car back into the dealer.

The Volt has been a great car for me. The 35-mile electric range easily covered my commutes and typical errands, and the gas mode took care of the odd long day that went beyond that 35 miles range. I burned gas about once a week (or three) and only had to gas up the car when we were out of town on a roadtrip (which the Volt handled fine as well). In fact, the last time I bought gas in Atlanta was for my previous car in December 2010. For the last three years, the gas I was always carrying around in the Volt was left over from the last roadtrip.

Our electric bill went up about $5-$10 per month, a small fraction of what I would have paid for the comparable amount of gasoline.

For the first year, I maintained a website www.FirstVoltInGeorgia.com, a very simple website that introduced people to the concept of EVs, offered some specifics about the Volt, and generally provided a variety of EV information. Check out the pictures posted there. (Last year I started up the more general www.ElectrifyAtlanta.com and I have a lot more information there now.)

The Volt (and indeed just about any EV) is a pure thrill to drive. With full torque at zero RPM, it is raring to go at every stoplight, and without the roar of an engine to alert anyone that you’re having way to much fun out there.

Once GM dropped the price on the Volt (this year, by $5000), there was pretty much only one valid reason why someone wouldn’t get this car: it has two bucket seats in the back, not a bench seat. So you can’t fit three kids, which was a dealbreaker for some people I knew.

For the last year I’ve been evaluating what I was going to do next. I had two basic options: buy out the Volt lease, or turn it in and get another car. I decided I didn’t want to buy out the lease because while the Volt is truly a fantastic car, this particulr Volt was a very early unit, from the first batch out of the factory. As an engineer I know that they certainly found and fixed lots of little problems during the production, even if they don’t announce them. So I just didn’t want to be saddled with what could have turned into a problem car. By 2012 and certainly 2103, though, they had worked out the kinks, and added some key features, and now I say without reservation that the Volt is a great car for anyone. Seriously, if you are looking for a car, you have little reason to dismiss the Volt. At a price of about $28K after tax credit, it’s way more affordable than when I bought mine, it saves you money week after week, and it’s more fun to drive than anything else you’d buy in that class. It’s the perfect “starter EV” for anyone intrigued by the benefits but worried about getting stranded.

So, that left me with getting a new car. Certainly it was going to be an EV; I just wasn’t sure which one. Also I wasn’t sure if I really needed to get a “range extended” model like the Volt, that can fall back onto a gas engine when the big battery for pure electric mode runs out of charge. Through the summer I had three cars on my short list:

– another Chevy Volt (newer and better)

– a Cadillac ELR

– a BMW i3

Yeah yeah, the Cadillac. Ha ha, it’s an old man’s car. Look at the pictures, it’s actually a sports coupe. It was supposed to be an evolved version of the Volt, with two doors instead of four, more aggressive in styling and performance, and that sounds perfect for me. Over the summer I got a chance to get a look at it, and certainly it’s a nice looking car. But the drivetrain is basically warmed over Volt (no major improvements from 2010) and the ELR performs about the same as the Volt. Which means it’s peppy but I want a lot more than that. But the real howler was the price point: $75,000. Ha, you have got to be kidding! Well, with that pricepoint it might actually help to sell Volts. And Tesla Model S’s!

So it came down to the BMW i3. That’s a very interesting car, and I guess I’ll write about it some other time. For now, I needed to decide if I liked it enough to wait for it, because it’s not out until April 2014. Earlier this month I had a chance to test drive the i3, twice, and decided that indeed it will be my next car. I actually noted this on a Facebook group of i3 fans, and was then invited to write an article about it. You can read it at this link, but note that it was written for an EV-enthusiast audience, indeed for an audience of BMW i3 fanboys, so I zipped right past the background and even praise for the i3 and got into the nitty gritty: The First Volt Owner in Georgia Explains What He Doesn’t Like About the BMW i3… and Why He’s Buying One!

Now, since the BMW i3 doesn’t come out until April, that leaves me with no car for four months. And so, starting today, I am beginning a grand experiment in creative transportation. For the next three months I will be commuting without a car, meaning rapid transit or bicycle. Fortunately I live and work close to a transit (MARTA) rail line, and my commute distance is pretty short so I could even bike it in about 30 minutes. I’ll miss my car time, for sure, but it’ll be an adventure. (I will probably need to remind myself that it’s an adventure when it’s cold and rainy.) For errands that require a car, I will try to accumulate them together and then rent a car for a day — there happens to be a car rental business two blocks from my workplace and they have EV options …

Stepping back, where have we been and what has been achieved in the last three years?

Three years ago there were ZERO charging stations in metro Atlanta, and now there are over 200. Three years ago there were just a handful of electric vehicled (EVs) in the whole state, now there are around 5000 — and 160,000 nationwide. EV sales are exploding, thanks in part to the Georgia tax credit (which may go away, so don’t dawdle).

You might get into an EV because it’s better for the environment, or you are tired of giving your money to oil companies, or you are tired of sending your children to die in oil wars, or you are looking to save money on operating costs, or you just love the guilt-free thrill ride. Either way, EVs are a revolution whose time has finally come, and the haters just can’t hold back the groundswell any more. It’s not just a car, it’s a movement.

——

For more background, see my earlier EV posts here, some of which have aged better than others …

part 1 from Sept 2008: my first thoughts on EVs

part 2 from April 2009: I test drive a Tesla Roadster!

part 3 from Jan 2010: the Nissan Leaf roadshow comes to Atlanta

part 4 from Mar 2010: grab bag of news and analysis

part 5: why I am buying a Volt

Oct 2010: “Electric Vehicles, part 6: the waiting game“

Feb 2011: “Electric Vehicles, part 7: loving the Volt, missing the Audi“

On our way through Florida, we made a “quick” stop at Kennedy Space Center, really just for two reasons: 1) to see the new Atlantis exhibit and 2) to see a SpaceX rocket launch. The Atlantis exhibit had just opened in June, showcasing the actual Space Shuttle Atlantis, retired in 2011. The SpaceX launch was just a fantastic coincidence — the launch had been scheduled for the prior week, but got delayed to the point where it was feasible for us to see it just as we were passing through.

Adjacent to the Atlantis exhibit is the “space shuttle experience” ride, which is entertaining and barely educational, but I’ve done that before and didn’t have a need to do it again. But below it, on the ground floor right next to the spot pictured above, is a collection of space shuttle simulators. They may have had these before and I’d missed them or forgotten, but … wow, they looked like a lot of fun.

Everything from docking the shuttle to ISS, to operating a robotic arm, to landing a shuttle … man, I need to budget WAY more time here next time I come, like two hours just for this exhibit!

On to the launch … SpaceX is a new commercial launch company that has been in the news a lot by way of their historic trips to the International Space Station (thus being the first private company to do so). But their bread and butter will be commercial launch services, meaning launching satellites for various customers. They’ve already had success launching into low earth orbit, but this launch that we were there for was to be their first launch to geosynchronous orbit, which is far higher and is where most “serious” satellites live. Further, it was to be the first launch of their upgraded “v1.1” Falcon 9 rocket. So in my world it was certainly going to be a big deal.

Anyone can “see” a launch from Kennedy or Canaveral … Just be within 50 miles (or even further, actually) and step outside and look in the right direction. But it’s really far away, and you don’t hear anything — the sound of the rocket blasting off dissipates completely about 10-12 miles from the pad. So there’s value in getting up close. Problem is, lots of people want to get up close, and the closest viewing locations (between 3 and 7 miles from the pad) are all on restricted NASA / Air Force property, so you need to get a special pass.

Back in the space shuttle days, these passes were extremely difficult to get. They would go on sale about a month before the scheduled launch, at 9am one day, and sell out within minutes.

So I was surprised when, less than a week before the SpaceX launch, there will still viewing tickets available. We weren’t going to be in Florida on the exact day of the scheduled launch, but these launches frequently get delayed, and a delay might put the launch into the window of opportunity where we would be able to to see it in person. What the heck, I bought a pair of tickets and hoped that the launch would get delayed.

And, ta-da, it got delayed. So here we were at the Saturn V viewing area, about 7 miles from the “launch complex” where SpaceX is doing all its Falcon 9 launches, LC-40.

Obviously there were a lot of people there, but these crowds were nothing compared to a shuttle launch. You could even buy tickets on launch day, so many of these people were casual fans, and that was confirmed by their general ignorance of what was happening.

The panorama above shows the launch pads from the perspective of the viewing area. Across the watere, miles away, were the launch pads of various different rocket systems. On the left you see the most famous launchpad of all, LC-39A, which is one of the two pads (with LC-39B) that all of the 135 space shuttle missions launched from. They now sit idle, awaiting future large rockets. (Coincidentally, two weeks after we were there, NASA announced that they would lease the LC-39A complex to SpaceX.)

To the right, just above and to the left of the plants poking out of the water, is LC-41, where Atlas V rockets launch out of. Atlas V is the heavy-lift workhorse for the US government, and is the rocket (and launchpad) from which many famous deep space missions have gotten their first big kick, including New Horizons (arriving at Pluto in 2015), Juno (Jupiter in 2015) and the Mars Science Laboratory (which arrived in August 2012, to much celebration).

But today’s launch was going to be on LC-40, which is just above and to the right of the plants poking out of the water. Can’t see it, right? It’s at the extreme right edge of the photo; you have to look hard (click to enlarge a bit) and it helped to have binoculars. Well, just about nobody knew where to look — most were looking at the larger LC-41 complex, which didn’t have a rocket on the pad but did have that big service building that most probably thought was the rocket.

I figured once the rocket lit up there would be a gigantic, collective gasp as everyone realize they had their eyes (and binocs, and cameras) on the wrong spot.

Alas, it was not to be. SpaceX had a one hour window to launch the rocket, and they ended up spending the whole hour dealing with one problem after another, and finally scrubbed the launch altogether.

And when the announcer said the word “scrub”, we witnessed the most amazing paniced run for the busses ever.

On February 15th, 2013, a meteor entered the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia.

Afterwards, CBS News’s 60 Minutes aired segment that provided a good synopsis of the event, and introduced the science behind asteroids. Sadly that segment is no longer online (shakes fist at old media types). Instead, here’s a short Youtube compilation of videos of the event:

Scientists and engineers have been thinking about the asteroid threat for decades, but it took the Chelyabinsk event to really shake the tree, and suddenly funding for asteroid research topics has TONS of funding at NASA. Woohoo. OK, so here we go …

As I’m sure many of you all know (just kidding) back in April 2013 the third annual Planetary Defense Conference was held in Flagstaff AZ. It opened with a public event conducted by the Planetary Society, meaning Bill Nye was the headliner. Here are the five segments of that event; watch if only to check out the wild adoration that Bill Nye receives pretty much wherever he goes:

public event part 1: Intros and What’s Up!

public event part 2: Meteorite Man Geoffrey Notkin

public event part 3: Bruce Betts Presents the Shoemaker NEO Grants

public event part 4: Bill Nye the Science Guy!

public event part 5: Panel Discussion with Bill Nye and scientists Brent Barbee, Amy Mainzer, Cathy Plesko and David Trilling

That evening event was then followed by two full days of conference proper, with dozens of scientists, engineers and private sector leaders giving presentations of various niches in the field of asteroid science. After the conference ended I watched ALL the session videos (some 20 hours) that they’d put up on Livestream. The presentations were fantastic! I’ll link to them here:

All 15 videos: http://www.livestream.com/pdc2013/folder

Example direct link to an individual video: http://www.livestream.com/pdc2013/video?clipId=pla_fe7856c5-495b-4e17-9312-e25344d2b849

In late September, NASA held a multi-day “Asteroid Initiative Workshop”. The sessions from the first day appeared on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJRJyljzwTA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INBt1iLJk_Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGhXcGztpI8 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoqesv4Cm68

* my personal favorite presentation is in this one, at the 27m30s point

I wondered, though, why the later presentation were nowhere to be found. Eventually I checked the NASA Asteroid Initiative Workshop website and found that the workshop actually had to shut down after the first day due to … the federal government shutdown! Riiiight, of course, the first day was on Sept 30th, just before the shutdown.

The workshop was eventually rescheduled for Nov 20-22, and those videos are all here:

Partnerships and Participatory Engagement, parts 1 2 and 3:

Asteroid Crew Systems, parts 1 and 2:

Cosmic Explorations Speakers Session:

Grand Challenge Panel parts 1 and 2:

Capture Systems parts 1 and 2:

Redirection Systems parts 1 and 2:

Deflections Demonstrations parts 1 and 2:

Deflections Discussion parts 1 and 2:

Crowd Sourcing:

Summary Plenary Session:

Obviously only someone very interested in this topic would watch all of the above videos! But even if you aren’t, know that thousands of scientists are working very hard on this problem. With thousands if not millions of asteroids out there, all bigger and far more lethal than the Chelyabinsk meteor, it’s only a matter of time, probably only a few years, before we identify a meteor with our name on it. And then everyone will be paying attention to this again.

Sharon had a professional seminar to attend in Pittsburgh, and once again I tagged along as the idle spouse.

Pittsburgh is a truly great city. In the early 90s I worked about 45 minutes northwest of Pittburgh at a nuclear power plant. I’d work long hours for 6 days a week, and on the 7th day I’d go explore Pittsburgh. I did this for several contracts, 5-7 weeks each, and learned that Pittsburgh really was the most underrated city in the country.

The entrance into the city across the Fort Pitt bridge (from the west) is unforgettable. Since the steel mills shut down, the city has cleaned up, and many years of public-private partnerships have resulted in a city humming with activities.

Monday

First up was a visit to the Heinz History Center. Sounds dull, I know, but they really did a great job. They had dedicated exhibits for “Pennsylvania’s Civil War”, the history of the Pittsburgh industrial boom, Andrew Carnegie, and the requisite corporate displays for Heinz and PPG (glass). I skipped the sports museum because two hours was enough and something had to give.

Walking through the “cultural district” (formerly red light district), I grabbed a slice of pizza at a joint and headed across the Allegheny River to the North Shore. The river is bridged by the Three Sisters, three identical bridges built in the 1920s and now named after Roberto Clemente, Andy Warhol and Rachel Carson. If you’re not impressed by anything else about Pittsburgh, they sure know how to name their bridges.

Meandering on the trail along the north shore of the Allegheny, I got a good look at PNC Park, where the Pittsburgh Pirates play. They had been in the post-season earlier in the month, and if they’d made it to the World Series we’d have been in the middle of it during this trip.

Farther along I passed Heinz Field, your basic football temple for rapid Steelers fans.

Finally I got to Carnegie Science Center, my last stop for the afternoon. Generally aimed at children, as most of these science museums are, the CSC has a particularly engaging and enlightening robotics exhibit, which one would expect since Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University is the recognized world leader in robotics engineering.

The CSC also had the requisite space-themed exhibits, an interesting bicycle exhibit (hipster swoon!) and lots of kiddie stuff. Oh, and there was an actual World War II submarine moored in the river, but I didn’t have time to take that tour.

Meeting back up with Sharon after her seminar, we headed over to the cozy Shadyside neighborhood for dinner. Well, actually it was for a stop at the Kawaii store, where Sharon tried not to hyperventilate. We had dinner at an upstairs joint called The Elbow Room (recommended by a cabbie!), which reminded us of Nye’s Polonaise in Minneapolis.

Tuesday

The next morning was going to be mostly about the Carnegie Museum of Art. One of my memories of Pittsburgh from 20 years ago was of the brief time I spent in the CMOA, and so I knew I needed to set aside some time for it. But first I had to go check out a couple nearby electric vehicle (EV) charging station, including one run by a CMU group. The Electric Garage is a CMU-affiliated operation that supports EV interests, both by offering help with DIY conversions and by simply providing charging stations outside. The parking lot was jammed when I was there, and I pressed my nose up against the garage windows.

On to the CMOA … As it turned out, I was only going to have an hour or so here before I needed to leave for the next thing, so I knew I’d be back later or the next morning. So I tackled half of the museum. Once again the Hall Of Architecture, with its ersatz antiquities, is absolutely mind boggling. In the biennial proper, the adjacent sculpture hall was memorable, filled with the gunmetal art of Pedro Reyes, the utopian photography series of Joel Sternfeld, and the cultural spelunking of the Bidoun Library.

But I had to move on, as I had a date. I’m not sure how I came across it, but there exists a tour of downtown Pittsburgh that is conducted on Segways! Atlanta has one of these tourist operations as well, and I’ve had it on my todo list for a couple years, never seeming to get around to it. No time like the present! I bused and hoofed it to Station Square (south of downtown across the river), got the Segway operation training, and we were off! Our tour tour guide was fitted with a headset with mic, and the rest of with one-ear headphones, so she could lead the way talking in a normal voice and we could all hear her. She led us on what ended up being a 5-6 miles trek all over downtown, focusing mostly on the architecture of the city, which is pretty amazing because of the enormous amount of money that flowed through the city for over a century starting in the 1850s. We went across the Allegheny to the North Shore neighborhood (wish I’d planned for that the day earlier!), through the Gateway Park, and back south through downtown and Market Square to cross the Monongahela back to Station Square. Riding (driving, really) a Segway is certainly fun, but it is still somewhat tiring — your feet never really move off the platform so they start to hurt after a while. But we certainly were able to cover a lot of distance quickly when called for.

And back to the hotel to meetup with Sharon, but not before checking out a couple more EV charging stations for the national database.

Up next, Sharon’s seminar organizers had arranged for us to tour the Cathedral of Learning, specifically the Nationality Rooms (see the wikipedia links for explanation). Each of these rooms was essentially a true museum piece, but one that students actually took classes in, and usually in topics wholy unrelated to the theme of the room. Quite surreal. The main floor of the Cathedral is given over to studying area, also surrela in that you have this Gothic church environment with … sloppy college student lounging aorund with their books and laptops. At some point the therapy dogs made their weekly appearance, and that pretty much busted up the place.

Sharon and I bolted a little early, as we had dinner reservations at a restaurant up the Duqesne Incline, overlooking the city. Having navigated the bus system for two days now, I was reasonably comfortable with it, but I knew it would just take too long for us to get to our destination. So I was willing to spring for a taxi … but it turns out that Pittsburgh isn’t really a “taxi town”. Early I had called two taxi companies to schedule, and both were like, uhhh, we’ll get there in 10 minutes or maybe an hour. OK, fine, we’ll take the bus.

Which turned into the one spectacular debacle of the trip. Basically during a frenzied and confused bus transfer in downtown, I got us on the wrong bus, but didn’t know for sure until it was too late. Like our inadvertant detour to Juvisy when we were in Paris for the first time, this one resulted in us standing on the side of a dark road VERY FAR from Pittsburgh, trying to figure out how to get back with one cell phone dead and the other one dying. In the end, we made it back to town but had to settle for a truly awful bar-food dinner at the “almost famous” Primanti Brothers, the only place still open at 9pm. Every trip has to have some collosal failure of logistics, I guess.

Wednesday

After she finished her seminar, Sharon joined me at the Carnegie Museum Of Art, where we had a good 90 minutes to do some more exploring. Sharon pretty much stuck to the Museum of Naturl History side, and I finished off the biennial. Memorable pieces included Rodney Graham’ projection.

And that was it. We grabbed our suitcases from the hotel (nearby), caught the 28X bus back to the airport (busway! so cool!) and headed back home.

Regrets: not many. For a meal I had wanted to get out to the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern, a dive-y place that I frequented during my visits 20 years ago (I saw many bands there, including the mighty Tar). Obviously I have to be more careful with the bus system. I would have liked to get to the Frick Museum. Next time!