Tag: NASA

We can do better!

We all campaign for our own survival and decency.

Our term limits are long, and the road is hard.

It was still dark when I got to the park.

A guy with backpack barely crossed the street. That early!

Then it hit me: the street is his home. He never got out of any house. So being around there early or late, geography is irrelevant.

America, we can do better.

Let’s tackle the issue (I blogged once, though unfairly, to make a point, that Curiosity Rover was looking for any sign of life on Mars, while on Main Street, all kinds of life are evident, but no one cares to lend a hand.)

The payload (admin overhead) for any program perpetuates itself. In short, we trample upon our own device, good intention or not.

So America sees its sons (and daughters) walk the street at dawn to dusk, with no specific purpose.

(ironically, the unemployment office is named “One Stop“) With 10 per cent of payroll revenue loss, America is bleeding by interest payment.  Next generation of homeless kids end up with scars and shame, fast food instead of fast track to college.

Think strategic. Think long-term. Think with a heart. America, ask not. We can do better!

Machine and Man

The Curiosity Rover landed intact. Mission Control jumped up and down. Machine and Man. One giant step. Let’s hug, even the meanest-looking of guys.

From Moon to Mars (better known as a candy bar), machine as modern-day Columbus.

Something in the way she moves.

Knowledge gap will be filled in the days ahead, on-screen and online.

Ask Not.

We are going places after running in place.

Some of us don’t run at all.

Austerity and sedentary.

Maintenance mode and screen-saver mode.

Let’s hope it’s just a temporary condition. What if it’s a new norm?

Industry anticipated deadlock. Companies scaled down orders, translated into non-expansion, translated into hiring freeze, translated into low consumer confidence and purchasing parity, translated into slower growth which feeds stagnation further on the downward spiral.

Stuck in high gear and high prices.  The harder you push, the more RPM, but no progress still.

Just revving noise.

Distraction (London) and attraction (Mars).

Summer breeze  for scorched Earth.

Wild fire and gun fires.

The State of the Union is not that good.

But no one is here to listen.  Even when they try “they do not know why”. Starry starry night.

From Moon to Mars.

Machine jolting Man to jump for joy. What happened in Mars got our full attention. What happened in Maine no longer triggers our curiosity despite its obvious and deteriorating “signs of life”.

Machine and Man.

 

Empty space

Void. Vacuum. Unfilled and unoccupied space.

Plenty of them, within and without.

So we fear its vastness.

We try to fill it up with stuff.

In the process, making ourselves mini-gods.

Co-creators of space-filling. Bed, bath and beyond.

Then give them away to Goodwill to make room for more empty space.

Everyone got problems with fitting everything into a suitcase before each trip.

If you leave me now, you take away the biggest part of me.

That “part of me” is abstract and intangible.

But real nonetheless.

So we have commitment. We honor faithfulness and loyalty. not betrayal.

We extol unseen virtues, unspoken agreement between two people.

That thing called love, duty and honor.

Old school.

But we search for it all our life.

Business world says “screw it”.

Real world says “search for it”.

Which is which?

Lonely at the top.

The dying and fading King.

Kingdom in disarray.

Gates wide open for invaders and looters.

Who is going to stand by you in the hour of need?

Empty space. God-shaped vacuum.

Time flows one way into infinity.

Space is just out there, with Earth older than previously thought.

Space is also inside each of us. All empty.

Until it is filled with joy and laughters. Of children’s nagging and giggling.

It’s not about occupying space.

It’s about validating existing one, granted in each of us. Inalienable if you will.

The right to exist, to breathe, to figure it all out for one’s self.

Business says “screw it, let’s do it” (Branson)

Church says “save it in the name of our Lord“.

Life says “you are to hold on to it, since it is going around only once”.

That empty space, regardless being occupied with Gucci or Goodwill,  is all we’ve got.

Love, hate and fear. All share that same empty and inner space, called Self.

Twice the romance

For almost a century, we have gotten used to Hollywood‘s sunset scenes of the Pacific (they could even make Skid Row desirable).

Now, fiction is trumped by recent discovery of a two-sun planet.

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/215013/20110916/planet-two-suns-star-wars-kepler-16-b-tatooine-seti.htm

Sunset scenes will need to be re-cut. Twice the work. But also, twice the romance.

As evolving species, we will adapt, both to adversity and austerity. Just eating in.

You might resent the new acronym (PIIGs), but wait until you have to go without pork (like in China in the time of inflation).

The Chinese are stepping up to the plate by offering to stabilize the Euro zone currency. with condition.

They failed to mention the arm shipments to Libya during Gaddafi‘s time (perhaps, already a market-economy exchange on that deal).

With every earth-altering discovery like that planet with two suns, we need to re-examine our assumptions.

What if we can also discover alternate energy out there? What if we can alter our attitude toward consumption and community?

Why would the damn vehicle always have to seat 4 people in “bowling alone” era (how about sidecar motorcycles; after all, Henry Ford was just tying two motorbikes together to make his first 4-wheeler, all in black, of course). As of this edit, Toyota concept EV is doing just that: three-seater enclosed vehicle.

What defines “hip” and romance (Gaga , the mermaid on wheels, w/ a “bad romance”).

What if we were given another shot at life, with our current macro-economic vantage point? (the rogue trader is doing it again, this time in the tune of 2 Billion).

Planet Bollywood.

Las Vegas in Macau.

Ford auto assembly plants mushrooming along China’s Eastern coasts.

We only transplant and replicate what works.

A tweaking here, a tweaking there. Not an overhaul. Not a paradigm shift.

Until, it’s in our face, at planetary level.

Two suns.

A discovery that should silence both Galileo and Copernicus .

Before we know it, we will adapt and take the two sunsets for granted. We will long for thrice the romance, two off-line, and one line.

Enlightenment turns entitlement again.

Turn off the telescope and turn on the microscope to look inside. We will find the thing called desire. And it’s unquenchable, and our last frontier to be conquered.

The happiest moment might not be a  Hollywood sunset. The happiest moment lies in our selective memory, wired in our deepest part of the brain. There, you will find twice the romance. More than provided by the two-sun planet’s. It’s a remarkable discovery nevertheless. Go NASA!

Mars or marble

Have you submitted your name to be shuttled up to Mars?  Space and sea travel or your names on Mars and not marble. This is to show our preference for progress over permanence  – technology over religion.

While it’s good to sit on one of the benches with our parent’s names “in memory of…”, it’s better still for our grandchildren to travel in space to look for ours on Mars.

I found my parent’s graves without a hitch. Right here on spaceship Earth.

In the Far East, people want to travel back to where their ancestors were buried (as of this edit, I have just stepped on a bunch of fake dollars, burnt during an early morning funeral).

Thus, “the Last Train Home” documentary about Chinese factory laborers trying to get home for New Year via train, plane or automobile (their version of White Christmas).

Modernity forces huge displacement. South-South movement will be next, not Earth to Outer space (Indian mobile phone companies are buying up Middle Eastern phone companies to cater to fast growing African markets, while Vietel engineers are rebuilding Haitian and Myanmar telecom infrastructure).

When you are uprooted, your sense of identity suffers. One used to be known by his/her relationship in a communal network. Now, with new “ID“, he/she is known by an employee number. Welcome to KFC, how may I take your order.

With industrialization comes frustration (discontent): who is going to move in those Shanghai towers , and who will have to relocate to make room for the 5th-ring highway?

Uprooted dreamers.

No place to go back to. No bragging rights for aging parents e.g. “my son went to the city and came back a millionaire”.  Bentley in Russia, Ford in China. Wealth shift. G-20+ (make sure Brazil is included, since they know how to party).

For years, we saw a steady rise of “emerging countries”, but we still resort to yesterday’s play book. (Remember the Yugo joke?).

The poor was materially poor, but not in spirit or intelligence. From a near-zero base, the only way for emerging countries to go is to “emerge” i.e. create better-paying jobs, while union and progress in the West , once a blessing, now a hindrance in this post-Recession recovery.

Darwin was right: survival favors the most adaptive. Instead of fighting for a seat on “the Last Train”, those smart entrepreneurs already built alternate-energy bullet trains. It’s not your names on Mars, it’s the challenge to think beyond the marble which for centuries was the last stop for even the most famous of names. A Roman Emperor once hired an assistant, whose main job is to remind him every so often that: “Your Majesty, you will die soon”.  Memento mori.

Long tail

2,000 cars (Nano, by Tata) and $20 per gallon of gas?

HP printer and ink model.

Thin client, thick server.

I got it, I got it!

In the same vein, they should subsidize “Blu-ray” disc player, that way, more of us (late adopters) will get onboard quicker.

Mid-summer! Beach time. But not innocence time.

I notice some teenagers stopped by the Barnes and Nobles Woodstock display table.

To these folks, the Flower generation must have the same appeal as the Amish, i.e. the sub cultures America tolerates.

I notice two Op Ed pieces in NYT recently, which speak about “Meaning of Life”  (Richard Cohen) and “NASA 4 lost decades” by Tom Wolf.

The first piece was about an experiment on life prolonging (by curtailing your diet intake), but the other monkey which ate all he could appear to be happier and more vibrant (who wouldn’t show survivor’s guilt when all your party friends already dead, leaving you the dieting nerd as the last man standing). Joie de vivre!

I struggle a little bit when trying to make sense of the Race in Space. I remember the Regan’s Star War shield.

But as far as trying to “conquer” Space, it’s the stuff for Trekkie.

I can barely be a techie (being in technical sales).

However Wolf’s observation makes sense: if the Sun is to be blowing up at some point, at least for the human species to survive, we need to work on some contingencies, however costly and enduring those commitments might involve.

Maybe the premise isn’t strong enough to sustain itself through various administrations, with their own juxtaposing and opposing priorities.

Right now it’s health care (after the environment whose legislation got through last month).

All of the sudden, nobody seem to remember many of us still suffer the economic downturn, as Paulson put it,

“could have been worse”.  The stimulus itself has disbursed about 10+% as of this writing. Maybe it has a long tail too.

Why don’t GM consider using its bail out money to purchase Tata or Chery (Chinese auto company). We can always get it back in the long run with $20 per gallon of gas. HP did it with its printer sitting next to me as I write this.

 

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