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MarsBlog’s Ten Year Bloggiversary

…was actually last Thursday, but I’ve been so swamped for the past week I haven’t had time to celebrate.

The first post in the MarsBlog archives originated on Blogger, and had to do with the discovery of evidence of flood volcanism on Mars involving a volume of water the size of Lake Erie. In reality, I was proto-blogging via hand-coded entries on the Louisiana Mars Society webpage for about six months before this — this particular entry only documents the switch to a true blog platform, but it’s the only anniversary date I can claim. MarsBlog (as LAMSAccess) existed on Blogger for about two months, until a hiccup at the Blogger site caused blogs to be randomly cross-published on different URLs for some reason, after which I very quickly moved it to Moveable Type, and then to WordPress about four years ago.

It’s really hard to believe that I’ve been doing this as long as I have. I had come across blogs as early as 1999, if I recall correctly, but really didn’t “get” them until I discovered Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, USS Clueless, and Transterrestrial Musings on or in the days after 9/11.

Now the funny part…

I’ve been helping teach classes in blogging and social media for People’s Press Collective for three years now, but only today actually applied some of those lessons myself. Until about two hours ago, I hadn’t logged into Twitter (as myself rather than PPC) for over two years, but I decided it was time to take my own advice and use Twitter as a news ticker for space-related items so as to break my long blogging dry spell. Not that I can guarantee that will increase my posting frequency, but it sure as heck can’t hurt.

It’s also a bit past the tenth anniversary of the genesis of what became In the Shadow of Ares. Carl and I came up with the idea to write some form of Mars-related young-adult fiction at the Mars Society conference at Stanford University about two weeks before 9/11, and then worked out the core of the book’s plot in late January, 2002. Interestingly, the prologue involving a spacecraft suffering (fatal, as it turned out) atmospheric entry problems was written in largely its final form on February 18, 2002 — just short of a year before the Columbia accident. Hopefully it won’t take quite as long to write the sequel, whose prologue and first act are now in detailed outline form, ready for writing.

Posted on March 2nd, 2012 under Meta, Writing. Tags: anniversary, blogging, In the Shadow of Ares, marsblog. Comments Off

How I Celebrated Earth Day

Praze Gaia! I’m finally rid of my televisions completely, thanks to LM’s annual electronics recycling event. (Which, they pointedly remind employees, is not to be used for company-owned equipment.)

I’ve only had television service for about a year and a half of the past twelve years, and all three were SD models which could no longer receive broadcast signals, were the signals even capable of reaching my house. Good riddance – I now have a corner of my living room and a sizable chunk of closet space back.

So, I can say with all honesty that Earth Day isn’t a completely dumb idea. This year it actually accomplished something positive.

Posted on April 23rd, 2011 under Luddism, Meta, Miscellaneous. Tags: Earth Day, kill your television, recycling. Comments Off

Driving Lessons

This is the same video the rental agency in Iceland made us watch before they would hand over the keys.

If driver’s education here were as graphic as the segment on seatbelts at 4:38, I’m guessing we’d have a lot fewer traffic deaths.

Posted on April 5th, 2011 under Meta, Miscellaneous. Tags: Iceland, video. Comments Off

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Three weeks in Iceland, as seen by my GPS unit:

Posted on January 29th, 2011 under Meta, Miscellaneous, Useful Technology. Tags: geotracking, GPS, Iceland, Laugavegur, road trip, travel, vacation. Comments Off

Strange Aerial Phenomenon

Now that I have a little bit more time available, I’ve been working again on the time-lapse videos from the Iceland trip last July. Have largely given up on ever getting the bumpy spots satisfactorily “deshaken” with the software tools available, but I did discover something that I completely missed at the time and in the first attempt to render out the video — a white rainbow:

Oddly enough, we did see a white rainbow that day, down on the beach about a half hour after the still frame above was taken:

So, not only did we see a strange phenomenon for the first time that day, but twice (arguably, since I didn’t actually see it while driving).

Posted on January 15th, 2011 under Meta. Tags: Iceland, photography. Comments Off

On the Radio

I’ll be on 850KNUS here in Denver on Sunday, talking about In the Shadow of Ares with my PPC co-blogger Ross “Rossputin” Kaminsky.

The show is on from 5 PM to 8 PM on 710 AM KNUS in Denver and 1460 AM KZNT in Colorado Springs. I will be on between 7:00 and 7:30PM. For those outside the Denver area, you can listen to the show online by clicking HERE.

Science fiction fans might want to tune in a little earlier, as one of Ross’ other guests this weekend is SF author and Tea Party figure Andrew Ian Dodge.

Posted on December 18th, 2010 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Meta, Science Fiction, Writing. Tags: In the Shadow of Ares. Comments Off

Vega – The Car, Not the Star

This article brings back memories. Many of them bad. My ride in high school and my first quarter in college was a pale green 1971 Chevy Vega, which my folks had bought mainly for us kids in 1980 when my great-aunt decided to spend more of her time in Florida. Said car had IIRC 2000 miles on it at the time.

So, what went wrong with this particular Vega?

The body: as noted in the article, rust was an unfortunate problem (an impressive anecdote later). The car had been garaged every winter of its life, but when it first experienced snow and road salt, it caught up with its siblings in the rust department with impressive speed. By the time it was handed over to me in 1985, futile attempts by my father and my brothers to address the rust had added a few more shades of green to the paint as accent (or highlight) for the assorted shades of dark red they were meant to repair/prevent.
The oil: the author of that article wasn’t kidding about the thing’s oil consumption. While ours didn’t go through a quart with every fill-up, it did go through about a quart every other week. At that point in time, cheap oil change stations had not yet become ubiquitous, so my father changed the oil on all the cars – at some point before I started driving the thing, my father gave up, and just started topping off the Vega with oil drained from the Ford Econoline and Mecury Lynx. (Yes, my family had a history of bad car choices, why do you ask?) I honestly don’t remember the oil being changed once in the two and a half years that I drove the car. And yet, the engine kept going and going and going, and was utterly reliable despite the leakage and mistreatment…well…except for…
The fuel system: the Vega’s problems with rust were not confined to the body panels. Somehow water would get into the gas tank, not enough to disrupt the engine but plenty enough to put copious amounts of rust — both as talcum-like powder and larger flakes — into the gasoline. Luckily, the engine’s fuel filter captured the bulk of it. Unluckily, the thimble filter needed to be changed out about every 6-8 weeks. Sometimes sooner. And it would announce its need to be changed by abruptly stalling the car on any incline greater than a speedbump (and sometimes even speedbumps themselves), which was an ongoing annoyance given that the steepest hill in town was on my usual route home from school.
The cooling system: I can attest to the author’s veracity in describing coolant leaks. While I don’t know if oil leaked into the coolant, boy howdy did coolant leak into the oil. The aforementioned “recycled” oil had the color and consistency of a melted milk chocolate bar due to the coolant mixed in with it, and checking the oil level was quite a tedious affair, requiring several dips and wipes to remove the creamy froth that would accumulate in the dipstick tube while the engine had been running.
The vinyl interior: until I had a long-term rental car with a black (real) leather interior while working in Palmdale some years later, the trauma induced by the Vega’s black vinyl bucket seats turned me off to non-cloth interiors. It turns out that real leather doesn’t stick to you, and while it can occasionally get hot (at least in the Mojave Desert), it generally doesn’t burn the imprint of the faux stitching into your skin. Through your clothes. And through a horseblanket slipcover…which you had to buy after that one particularly cold day when you climbed into the driver’s seat and discovered that yes, it can indeed get below the glass transition temperature of cheap carseat vinyl during winter in Michigan.
And speaking of seats…: the rusted seat slides that locked both front seats permanently into position. Luckily for me, that position was all the way back on the driver’s side. Unfortunately for my often similarly-tall passengers, that position was knees-to-the-steel-panel-where-the-glovebox-should-have-been on the passenger’s side.
The interior details: the attractive and always-something-new splits around the defrost vents in the soft safety cover on the dashboard, the delightfully unpredictable tendency of the passenger’s door panel to spring off, the numerous (and too-close) painted steel surfaces which, being black like the rest of the interior, were a source of trepidation not just for the potential for serious injury in a crash but also the possibility of third degree burns to the inattentive driver or passenger on a particularly sunny day. To this day, I still cannot make myself rest my arm on the windowsill of a car door for (irrational) fear of being incinerated.
The comfort systems: a bad, bad joke. Air conditioning consisted of push-pull vent panels in the front footwells, and the heater would have been better described as a “tepid-at-most-er”. Both systems seemed to have been tied into the exhaust pipe for some strange reason.

In short, it sucked and then some. But on the bright side, I think I was the only one of my friends in high school who had a car of his own, and it was at the same time the type of car that tempered said friends’ temptation to bum rides. And for all its flaws, it was surprisingly reliable as long as I kept a wrench and a couple extra thimble filters in the car.

But one priceless illustration of just how bad the rust problem was happened on my last day of high school. Being a teenager, I had a terrible habit of locking my keys in my car, and did just that on the last day of school. But not to worry — while I was too large to do so myself, I had one of my smaller friends get down on the ground next to the driver’s door, reach up through a hole rusted in the floorboards, push away the piece of plywood and the floormat, and pull the keys out of the ignition. Problem solved!

The Vega limped along until November 1987. Since I couldn’t have a car on campus my first two years at MSU, there was no point keeping the thing around. So, we fired it up (barely, since it had been sitting in the driveway untouched since mid-August) and drove it to the junkyard — where we had to pay the guy $45 to take the thing.

Posted on December 2nd, 2010 under Meta, Miscellaneous. Tags: cars, chevrolet, chevy, general motors, government motors, lemon, vega. Comments Off

Rover’s-Eye View

A slightly-marsified version of one of my Iceland pics, from the wastelands near Emstrur.

It was easy to see why NASA sent Apollo astronauts to train here.

Posted on August 18th, 2010 under Entertainment, Meta, Settlement, Space Science. Tags: Iceland, lander, mars, moon, Opportunity, phoenix, photography, rover, spirit. Comments Off

But Is It Art?

I don’t know why, but I like this. If I were independently wealthy, I could see myself doing quirky things like this.

Posted on August 6th, 2010 under Entertainment, Meta, Miscellaneous. Tags: art, Entertainment, zimoun. Comments: 1

Mars Colonization Poll

Having just spent three weeks in close quarters in a Mars-like environment, this survey on attitudes towards Mars settlement conditions from Jon Goff (who I may actually meet in person this week) seems well-timed.

My answers to the primary questions:

Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it meant leaving behind wife and children?
Doubtful, unless there was a strong expectation that they (or at least she, if the kids were grown or nearly so) could join me at some later date. I don’t see how a super-long-distance relationship like that could be made to work out if the separation were permanent.
Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it meant working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week? 12 hours? 8 hours?
I think it depends on the nature of the work. Continual 8hr days are not that difficult to envision for most types of work I could see myself doing. For 12hr shifts, it would only be sustainable over the long term if there was some variety to the tasks, some mixture of hand work and mind work versus fully one or the other type. While I would be willing to do occasional or even frequent 16hr shifts, I can’t imagine any mixture of tasks making such long shifts sustainable for me over long periods of time. However, breaking a shift into shorter blocks separated by breaks would make the longer overall shifts a bit more workable, by helping to forestall fatigue, boredom, and inattentiveness.
It also depends on how long the 7-day schedule is maintained. If I was expected to work every day, a longer shift would make it far less appealing and less sustainable. Even with the 8hr shift, the expectation of working every day of the week indefinitely would be unpalatable. What could help make these hours more palatable is an overtime premium on pay, some sort of tangible/financial reward earned for working longer shifts.
Based on experience, I know that I can work regular nine-hour weekdays, plus a weekday or two of up to 12 hours, and twelve-hour weekend days with straight overtime, for about two months before I start getting burned out.
Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if the annual mortality rate was 50%? 25%? 10%?
No. Perhaps, if the pay was in keeping with the risk. Yes. Here again, it depends somewhat on the particulars. Are the stated mortality rates for all settlers, including in the pool the life-shortening effects of particularly high-risk activities that my occupation wouldn’t entail? 50% is pretty high under any interpretation, but for the lower percentages such particulars would matter a great deal in making a decision.
Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if the level of privacy were equivalent to a subway car? A submarine? Antarctic research station?
I’m going to interpret these three conditions in the following way:
Subway car = a group of settlers sharing a common space, with no real privacy and little or no recognition of a property claim to any particular portion of the accommodations beyond one’s own personal gear.
Submarine = a group of settlers share a common space in which a small degree of privacy such as a curtain exists and some element of private property is recognized (my bunk, my locker).
Antarctic research center = like in a college dormitory, a group of settlers shares some defined common spaces (galley, work room) while having a higher degree of privacy in and more exclusive property rights over other spaces which they share with a small subset of the group.
In the past three weeks, I’ve experienced all three of these environments – the first in the form of airplane travel and mountain hut accommodations, the second in the form of tent camping and hostels, and the third in the form of a guesthouse-style hotel. In the short term (obviously) I could live with any of the three, but over the long term, I could live with the arctic option pretty easily, the submarine option with a great deal of reluctance, and the subway option not at all. My threshold between short and long term would probably be the time it would take to get to Mars, and as long as there were some significant ”rest” periods separating them, I could probably accommodate myself to routinely doing short term stints in lower privacy.
Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it was just yourself? 10 other people? 100 other people?
Assuming this means being the sole occupants of one settlement among many: possibly, yes, and yes.
If it means I/we would be the sole occupants of Mars, no, yes, yes.
If the question literally applies to the outward trip to Mars: yes, yes, yes.
Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it meant eating food indefinitely equivalent to combat rations? TV dinners? School cafeteria?
Possibly on all three accounts. How happy I would be depends on how much variety exists (assuming the point of the question is about the excitement of the food) – even bland food can be palatable for long periods of time if there is some variety (ie: bland freeze-dried lasagna every night is far less tolerable than a random schedule of equally-bland dinners of freeze-dried lasagna, freeze-dried turkey and stuffing, and freeze-dried meatloaf). I would not, however, allow this to be the sole discriminator on whether or not I went if the other conditions were acceptable.
Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if there were significantly more people of your own gender than the other? Vice versa?
The supply and demand implications of being a man on a planet of women are certainly more pleasant to contemplate than a Martian sausage-fest, so trivially I would say “reluctantly and hell yeah!”, although I wouldn’t let either case decide for me if offered the opportunity. As with the other questions, though, “it depends” applies. How big is the group, and what is the ratio? Two women and one man is not the same as four women and two men, for example, or three women and one man, or two hundred women and one hundred men. Also, how long the initial demographics could be expected to apply would also have to be figured in – would the ratio favor men or women indefinitely, or just for a short period before balance was established (or the pendulum swung for a while to the other extreme)?

My answers to the “control” questions:

What is the longest period of time you have ever been by yourself? Separated from wife and children? Away from civilization?
Literally without contact, 4-5 days; cut off from friends and family and direct sources of support and assistance, three months. Not applicable. About two weeks.
What are the longest hours you’ve ever worked? How long did you work these hours? How long would you have been willing to work these hours?
See #2 above.
What’s the most dangerous work you’ve ever done? What’s the most dangerous activity you normally engage in?
I’ve never done any truly dangerous work. Hiking “fourteeners” in the Rockies.
What’s the lowest level of privacy you’ve ever experienced? For how long?
Probably living in university dorms for two years.
What’s the most bland diet you’ve ever experienced? For how long?
Probably three months in Germany living mainly on dried quattro formaggi and vollkornbrot. Somewhere between bland and monotonous.
Have you ever had to work for/with someone you intensely disliked? How long did this go on?
Oh hell yes, every job I’ve ever had there’s been at least one in the crew.
Have you ever had to live with someone you intensely disliked? How long did this go on?
A few times, but one particular three-month period living with a pair of man-hating feminists far and away outshines all the others (don’t ask).

Posted on August 2nd, 2010 under Meta, Settlement. Comments Off

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