HELP!

I will begin updating this blog with my adventures in and around London, England.
Unfortunately, my wallet contains less money than I will need even to eat this whole month, much less enough to travel.
If any friends or family out there would like to help me to eat, feel free to push this button to donate five or ten dollars to my situation.

If any friends or family would like to see more of Scotland, Ireland, England, or even Europe, I can promise a slew of HD photos in return for the money to get there and back (generally plane and train tickets are dirt-cheap anyway), and I'll go where you send me.

I only have class three days a week, leaving four days to travel and learn. The way things are looking right now, though, I'll be spending those days in my room.

Winding Down

The Spring semester is over in 9 days. I have at least one major project and four major papers left to tend to, and then finals during the first week of May.

I lost my apartment recently for non-payment due to not having saved enough money to make it through more than a month of poor scheduling at work. I stayed in a motel for a few nights until I ran out of money, and am now staying with a couple of gracious friends. In nine days I'll be with my parents again in Euless.

It's official, though: I'm going to London in September for the Fall semester! There have been logistical difficulties . . . my girlfriend and I bought a blue and gold macaw last semester who we love very much, but it perhaps wasn't the best time in either of our lives to take on such responsibility. To be fair, I wasn't in school and was feeling a sense of permanency in Waco. I bought the bird for the same reason I bought a kitchen full of fancy implements and an apartment full of knick-knacks: I hadn't been able to before.

Theo is a wonderful animal though, and considering the usual psychological frailty of these animals he is absurdly healthy and outgoing. He's also a friend, and I want our relationship to last the full 60 years of his life-span. The struggle right now is that if Diane doesn't get an apartment next semester, Theo won't have a place to stay. It looks more and more like she will, so . . . great!

It looks like I'll be pulling in somewhere between a 3.75 and 4.0 for the semester.
Cash in my lockbox: $0

Cursed, Cursed Liberals

I am almost through with the first of the books I picked up from Baylor's library: The Voyages of Apollo, by Richard S. Lewis. I have five more in my first round of volumes to finish by the end of this month, but already I can feel the expert blooming in me. It has been both exciting and painful to read this account; getting to touch and feel and see the Moon from so close was invaluable to the future of human understanding and exploration, but spending $25-$30bn (I can't tell exactly how much yet) on a program that was ended prematurely meant fewer meaningful answers . . . "like buying a Rolls Royce and not using it because you claim you can't afford the gas," said Thomas Gold, astronomer at Cornell University, 1970.

Cursed, cursed liberals. There is so much left to know. At the dawn of the 1970's, a cry went up among the Democrats in congress with the refrain of "Sewers not Space!" This was and is, for anyone who remembers, the best excuse Congress has ever come up with for filling civil works bills to their festering brims with pork-barrel earmarks. One can, after all, complain that a bill has millions of dollars of federal tax money specifically yet sneakily designed for the personal interests of a few congressmen, but not when one is spending billions of dollars a year on projects that don't immediately benefit man -- who, by the way, was going through a series of interesting social changes himself in the late 60's and early 70's which decayed his interest affairs beyond his own atmosphere.

It's happened again. In early February, 2010, President Barack H. Obama suggested to the United States and Congress (two increasingly separate entities) that NASA's 5-year old program with 10 years to go, Constellation, be de-funded and indefinitely postponed while we work on more pressing social issues. His remarks suggested that the program is over-budget and behind schedule -- both observations that are only partially true to begin with. Public opinion, however, is on his side. Most of Congress agrees and it is unlikely that Constellation will continue past Fall, 2010.

More realistically, it is unlikely that NASA has continued the project past Obama's address. As of April, 2010, NASA is being chastised by Congress for using remaining funds in the 2010 budget for Constellation to shut the program down, notifying contractors and subcontractors to do the same. Pink slips are being issued nationally . . . NASA rightfully sees no point in wasting any more taxpayer money on a program a liberal administration won't allow to come to fruition.

I'd like to explain just a few of the tasks entrusted to NASA's modern $25bn undertaking, before Obama promised to shut it down:

• The Space Shuttle, which has been in flight since 1982 and possesses a computer system far less capable than Apple, Inc.'s iPhone, is being retired in September, 2010 after 134 launches. This event is long overdue -- the consensus in Houston right now is that no one can believe they're still flying malfunction-free. The Shuttle is primarily used for docking with the International Space Station. Congressional intention has it that the private sector will pick up the government's slack . . . but only a few orbital rockets have been tested that weren't commisioned by Uncle Sam, and none of them have been manned. Constellation was supposed to create a new space vehicle, and largely has -- the Orion Space Module has been fully designed and mocked up, using advanced modern computers and various other state of the art technologies. It was to expand on the success of the Apollo program, adding what we learned in the late 60's and early 70's to what we know now. According to Obama's plan for NASA, it will never be completed.
• NASA promised a return to the moon by 2018 at the end of the Apollo program, and has since paid for a great deal of research regarding Mars and near-Earth asteroids. The Orion vehicle was to be capable of landing both on the Moon and those other places . . . at the current rate, it will take decades for the private sector to catch up to what NASA has been commissioned to do, for various reasons, not the least of which are defense regulations and secrets kept between NASA and its contractors.
• A rocket was to be, and has been, designed to be and more powerful and efficient, with a longer range than the Saturn V Moon rocket that took the Apollo program to our global mistress. The new Atlas rocket has been entirely designed but cannot be produced or tested under coming budget restrictions.

Sources indicate that NASA's smaller new budget, to be determined later this year, will be used primarily for environmental research.

I have drawn the conclusion that we will NEVER extend a permanent presence beyond Earth's orbit if we rely on our Government's guidance of our tax money. Public opinion changes too quickly, and a program lasting as long as Apollo was intended to last cannot survive the whims of more than a couple of Administrations. The only type of entity that has proven itself capable time and time again of directing capital toward a project's end, as necessary for a push into space, is the Corporation.

What's preventing that push? What's preventing the exploit of materials beyond the Earth's sphere of influence? What's preventing the escape of man from the "cradle of his species"? I'll spend the next long while figuring questions such as these and many, many more. When I'm done, you'll be the first to know.

-- Brandt

Stopping Future Criminals

Early in 2010, a man by the name of Eloi Cole was arrested near the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland while trying to disrupt the supply of sodas to vending machines at the facility. It was found that Mr. Cole had been organizing attempts to sabotage the particle acceleration project for more than a year, including a previously unexplained 2009 event that involved a piece of baguette which caused the machine to overheat and shut down for a day. Cole’s confession revealed that he had been sent back in time from a future where the LHC is the cause of a “too perfect” society – there are no energy shortages, every person shares the same plentiful resources, and upward (or downward) mobility in society is non-existent – all facets of a society which the fundamentalist Cole aimed – or will aim – to destroy at its roots.

This attack from the future is not isolated; evidence accumulates each decade which points to terrorism from the future as a threat to present affairs. Evidence on hand clearly suggests, for instance, that a future version of Lee Harvey Oswald was in constant connection with the then-would-be murderer long before the United States of America ever lost their 35^th president. In The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald: A Comprehensive Pictographic Record, by Robert Groden, dozens of conflicting photos are presented in which Oswald possesses radically different facial features (240-241), some of them likely belonging to an older Oswald – that is, an Oswald from the future who happened to be photographed on a few of his visits to 1960’s Oswald.

The threat to modern society cannot be understated. Where the predominant values and priorities of today shape our own vision of the future and provide for us a frame in which to pave our own roads to get there, the ideas of tomorrow might lead individuals from another era to travel back in time and “perfect” ours. From attempting to destroy billion-dollar scientific research facilities to assassinating our presidents, there is no theoretical end to what damage these individuals might cause, or for what reasons. Furthermore, there is little or no consideration in popular science for what damage these possible radicals might already have caused. Was the Hindenburg explosion caused by an accidental spark which ignited that massive Bavarian balloon, or did the future of airships somehow offend a fundamentalist group who took it upon themselves to stop the technology shortly after it got off the ground? We may never know, but we do know we didn’t know in time to save the Hindenburg.

Time travel is a difficult concept for us to understand, as man has not presently accomplished such a feat. And so, it would seem, things should stay; if we refrain from discovering a method for travelling across time, they will never have the technology to travel back and affect our affairs. However, this logic doesn’t stand up to the progressive nature of man – new technologies will continue to be regulated too slowly to prevent their discovery.

In order to prevent these terrorists from the future, then, from meddling in our affairs, we must learn what they look like and how they act. They are a clever lot, we can be sure; they know how to blend in with us because they have been us. The most we can hope for is that they have begun to forget about their past, and that hints of a culture we have yet to be a part of will bleed through their disguises. Here are some tells that our citizens should be on the lookout for:

1.      Clothes that look like ours but are slightly out of fashion. It stands to reason that someone from the future might miss a particular “in” style by a year or by a region. When Eloi Cole was arrested, he was described as wearing “too much tweed” – something that may have been stylish in 2010 in Cambridge (Massachusetts or England), but not in the middle of Continental Europe.

2.      Strange haircuts. A saboteur from the future may spend a substantial amount of time learning to blend in with us, but if our own past is to be a teacher, haircuts are an easily forgotten aspect of any era. Cole also sported a “strange hair style”.

3.      Odd dialects. There are still thousands of spoken dialects around the world of as many languages, and it’s unlikely that any one individual has heard them all. We cannot be too careful, though; if you can’t identify someone’s hailing region by his or her dialect, notify the proper authorities immediately.

4.      A terrorist from the future might, in a hypothetical sense, assume that something which was invented in 2020 already existed in 2012. If in conversation you hear a person alluding to or describing something that isn’t real, you should again alert the proper authorities.

In addition to measures which ought to be taken by individuals to ensure a society unhassled by saboteurs from the future, the international community and governments in general should implement programs to educate people about and otherwise prevent undesired contact with those of future generations:

1.      Law enforcement agencies here and abroad should adopt training which would enable officers to identify and deal with these threats. Furthermore, training to deal with advanced weaponry is paramount in securing victory over possible activities which are more militant than the subversive, one-man operations we’ve encountered so far.

2.      If it is suspected that a criminal at large could be from the future, based in part on the list above, his or her name should be posted at the top of international wanted lists. These terrorists have the potential to be far more dangerous than the terrorists of our time, and are more difficult to understand.

3.      At present, millions of dollars in research at leading universities has both directly and indirectly led to questions and even experiments concerning time travel. Our best defense against these forces of destruction remains dismantling their technology by never discovering or inventing it. We must criminalize efforts to understand and develop time travel so that our enemies might no longer have the tools to undermine our society.

These lists represent a global effort that must be undertaken, but are in no way comprehensive. We must discuss in our parliaments and congressional halls how best to tackle this problem. The freedom to design our own fate is the motivating force behind inventions like the Large Hadron Collider and the Personal Computer. Just as we cannot allow the terrorists of today to take our freedoms and our way of life, we cannot allow those fundamentalists from the future to guide us away from those very liberties that make us able to learn for ourselves.

Groden, Robert. The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald: A Comprehensive Photographic Record. New York: Penguin Group, 1995. 240-41. Print.

"Man Arrested at Large Hadron Collider Claims He's from the Future - Crave at CNET UK." Crave - UK Gadget and Technology Blog from CNET UK. Cnet.com, Apr. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2010. .

The Affairs of a Dragon

In 1989, hundreds of pro-democracy protesters were killed by Chinese government troops in Beijing. Despite these murders, China had been moving toward capitalism, if not democracy, since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Mao, subsequently, is restless in his grave.

 How do we approach these conflicting perceptions of China from the other side of the globe? I have some suggestions:

China's government can best be described as promoting market-oriented economy with a focus on private property while continuing to implement one-party authoritarian rule -- a relic of Mao's China. After all, how often does a ruling force that already has authoritarian power go about giving it back to the people on it's own volition?

Before the events of Tienanmen Square,China was already doing a good job of this. In the early 1980s, Deng Ziaopang's administration recognized the importance of foreign capital and began to open up Special Economic Zones, in which laws setting price and otherwise interfering with the capital process were relaxed to encourage foreign investment. By now, the situation in China has become the opposite: The places where such laws haven't been repealed are few and far between.

What's most interesting about Modern China is the rise of a genuinely middle class -- a group of people who have enough money, and a sustainable way of making enough money, to have control over their own destinies -- provided that the government doesn't hamper that ability. It seems as often as an angel gets it's wings in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, a Chinese citizen becomes a millionaire.

With that kind of money comes a desire for individual rights, and so like in the 13 colonies and in the Third Estate of France, there is increasing pressure on Hu Jintao and his administration to ease off the social mandates. Unlike the liberation movements of the 18th century, though, everyone in China is more or less on the same page -- there is a strong national identity which knows it will be the world's foremost economy by 2040, and so outright conflict between the people and the state is largely undesireable.

 What China stands to lose through capitalism and subsequent democracy is the ability to gain public opinion for and invest in Nationalistic goals, such as moving to annex North Korea should it collapse this decade, or putting an astronaut on the Moon within the next ten years -- both goals I'm sure the Republic could follow through with today, but perhaps not tomorrow.

I think China represents a vehicle into the next phase of human development. The imperative for progression is there in the form of an impossibly large population and a sudden influx of, well, more cash than there is in the United States (actually, they own a large portion of our debt). The Nationalist side of China may be scary to the West, but we should celebrate the Western ideas of capital and liberty that are taking off on their own in that country. China has been slow to change, but look how far they've come.

As George Bailey would have said, Attaboy, China.


[Some facts about China, taken from Wikipedia:
2010 Population estimate: 1,338,612,968
GDP: $8.767 trillion, per capita $6,549

Some facts about the U.S., take from Wikipedia:
2010 Population estimate: 308,991,000, 
GDP:  $14.441 trillion, per capita $47,440]

Frontiers and Opportunity Cost

In the year 1002 or 1003, a Norse explorer by the name of Leif Ericson landed his ship on the coast of Newfoundland, long before that land was "newly found" again. A small settlement was created as a base for discovery -- salmon were taken from the streams and grapes from the woods. Leif may even have found human life on those distant shores, but after perhaps a year abandoned that settlement and went back home to Greenland, then on to Norway, never to return to the Canadian coast. The Norse knew America existed, and for some reason that was enough for them. The risks must have seemed too high against the uncertain treasures of new discovery.

It would be half a millennium before Europe would reach out again for those western continents, when the voyages of Christopher Columbus generalized knowledge that they even existed. Glory must go to the Spanish for realizing what their new technologies were capable of -- getting across the Atlantic with less risk to life or property. Glory, and then coffee, and then cocoa, and cocaine, and bananas, and tomatoes, and hardwoods, and coal, and ... well, you get the idea. The sorts of things that didn't go to the Norse, because they didn't invest enough. They didn't want enough.

The risks of exploration, of course, are substantial. Early in the 20th century a cry of interest went up for the North and South poles of the Earth, and the Powers that Were sent their finest explorers to the coldest regions of the globe, where they found ... nothing. There were no economically appealing resources in sight, and so we quietly forgot the excitement of exploration and our motivation to expand. Treaties were signed declaring Antarctica an international territory to be put to exclusively scientific use, and not much more was said.

Something scientists have since become certain of is oil deposits beneath the icy surface of Antarctica -- possibly in globally significant volumes. We've lost our drive, though, and there's just no motivation to jump through all of the necessary hoops to drill in such a little-understood part of the world.

These situations are analogous to the new frontiers outside of our own atmosphere. Will we be like Lief Ericson, who left behind a continent of potential wealth? The combination of materials from the Americas and capital from new markets in Europe during the 18th century were instrumental in sparking industrialization at the beginning of the 19th. Could it be that more interest in America when it was first discovered by the Norse could have advanced our species by 500 years?

Will we be like the international community upon the discovery of the South Pole, uncertain and unwilling to continue our trajectory toward new discovery under the ice and rock of the most southern continent? Could it be that the energy concerns of the early 21st century could have been hampered by excess oil under an uninhabited land mass?

Are we content with the Apollo missions of the 1960's, and a static understanding of our Moon and Mars and Venus -- and leaving progress as a species to our 16th generational successors?

Or will we take the initiative and endeavor to answer the risks and concerns -- and either make a permanent presence on our neighboring bodies a modern reality or, at the very, very least, come up with a good reason why we shouldn't invest in our future?

Time in Spades

Today, this is what happened:

• I woke up at eight, as promised, and brewed a pot of coffee.
• By 8:30, I was at the library printing a project I'd finished last night.
• At 9:05, I was in my first class.
• At 1:20, I was finished with classes, and had managed a hasty breakfast somewhere in there.
• Between 1:20 and 2:00, I was on the far side of campus trying unsuccessfully to convince a department chair to sign my course equivalency form ... I only need two more signatures!
• After 2:00, I was on the phone with my parents, who agreed to lend me money for rent, which, as I mentioned before, was almost a month past due. Matter of fact, my electricity got turned off today. I was very sad.
• By 4:00, I had finished all of my homework -- the only thing I had left was to study for an exam tomorrow.
• Diane and I ate dinner around 5, ending my "work day". I wasn't scheduled at Diamond Back's tonight; I don't work again until Thursday.
• After 5, I sent a text message to a few co-workers to see if I could take a shift from anyone before Thursday. I then turned on the PS3, and played Oblivion for WAAAY too long. Yay electricity.
• My night ended with Wal-Mart and a late thirdmeal -- something I need to cut out of my schedule from now on.

The best part of today, I think, was the combination of coffee and getting up an hour early. I was just more alert for classes, and felt less beat up. In the morning I think I'll wake up at 8 and write then. I might be able to make that my blog hour.

I need to find books on the history and future of space exploration. I'm going to embark on my research project this weekend, and I just plain don't know enough yet.

I meant to go to the SLC and play racquetball tonight. I'll have to plan for that tomorrow.

I PROMISE this blog will get more exciting soon :-)

- Brandt