More Gasoline on the Gen Wire Fire

It looks like our friends in Generation Y have made yet another pitch to NASA. My thoughts are below.

Slide 3: As I've complained in a couple of places, Gen Y continues to harp on strategic communication. Yes, it needs to be addressed. But, again, they should be prepared for the cranky old dinosaurs to come back and say, "Fine, we'll work on our communication efforts. What are you going to do to contribute to the aerospace engineering NASA is doing?" Whenever this question is asked, Gen Y circles back to the communication thing: "How are we going to get interested in the engineering if you don't communicate better? Talk to us! Pay attention to us! We're important! It's all about me, Me, ME!" Okay, I exaggerate slightly. But my attempts to focus on Gen Y's potential engineering contributions have led to several of conversations like this. The young folks want to be listened to, the older folks want to know what the younger folks are going to do for them. There is little sense of reciprocity from these Gen Y presentations, and that is the biggest stumbling block to improving the dialogue.

As I predicted my generation has disappeared from their calculations entirely. Slide 6 differs from slide 30 of their previous pitch by eliminating Generation X. Instead of Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y, they now have only Baby Boomers and "Next Gen." Let's try this one more time, kids: despite Wikipedia's attempt to subdivide the generations, the Baby Boom Generation was born 1946 to 1961. Generation X was born 1961 to 1977. Gen X really IS different from Gen Y simply because we grew up without ubiquitous computing, nearly uninterrupted economic expansion, and electronic media until we were in our teens. Okay, the old guy needed his "ten miles to and from school in three feet of snow" rant. I'm good now. Moving on...

Slide 8 raised the following questions, which I will answer as I go along:

• What is the value of Gen Y in creating a "sustainable" space program? Theoretically, they should have a better command of computerized productivity tools, which should enable them to improve not just communication but also functionality.
• Is there a disconnect between NASA and NextGen? Obviously, or the conversation wouldn't have taken on such intensity.
• What does the hiring and retention data tell us? That NASA is losing people, through budget cuts, retirement attrition, lack of interest, and lack of qualified applicants. The best and brightest aren't attracted to NASA, because they don't perceive NASA as being "cutting edge" enough, other businesses pay better, or the path to working on actual hardware is too slow for impatient youths.
• Does Gen Y expect NASA to cater to them? In some ways, yes. I've beaten this horse enough that I should just let it lie there. However, I'll take another shot at it: insisting that NASA hire/promote you faster just because there are 70 million of you or because you can use MySpace better than the dinosaurs is not realistic.
• Do better communication tools exist? Naturally. And Gen Y is much better poised to exploit them. These tools might even change the nature of communication at NASA to become more open and transparent. However, some of the young'uns still need a few lessons in national security, ITAR, and proprietary laws.
• Why should NASA care? The reasons are already well known, but are worth repeating: Gen X and Gen Y will be the ones paying for, building, flying, and benefitting from the next generation of exploration vehicles and technologies. Or not. If these generations decide that the effort and rewards aren't worth the expense, then space exploration in America will die, and the Chinese, Indians, Russians, Japanese, and Europeans will inherit the solar system.

Slide 14: The following bullets are interesting.

We are asking that the focus on today’s urgent issues be balanced with the needs of tomorrow.
We realize that there is potential for increased risk on those projects but missions today must take the risk of raising young people and not just hiring already experienced people.

No argument with the first point. I am curious how Gen Y folks think NASA should go about hiring more of them when they're in the process of cutting 6,000 jobs in the next three years.

The next point is a little odd, either because they didn't have an English major on hand or because they had multiple purposes in mind: "Missions today must take the risk of raising young people and not just hiring already experienced people." The word raising amused me because it made me wonder if the presenters were looking to NASA as some sort of surrogate parent. But Gen Y also needs to face a simple, painful fact: few organizations are going to let you work on the very cool, cutting-edge, expensive stuff right out of college unless there are other circumstances driving the decision. In the case of the Apollo program, where the average age of folks working on the hardware was 26, the primary extenuating circumstance was John F. Kennedy's "before this decade is out" deadline. Otherwise, everybody starts at the bottom, doing small, thankless jobs first before they are given the opportunity to work on the bigger stuff. It was explained to me this way when I was starting out as a stock clerk at Osco: before I was allowed to be a cashier or work in the liquor department, I had to prove that I could sweep the floors, stock the diapers, and dump the garbage well. "Why should the boss trust you with more responsibility if you don't put in the work to do the small and simple things first?" It's called paying your dues, and everyone does it.

Slide 16 is interesting, and explains a lot about why Gen X doesn't have a large presence at NASA: right around the time a lot of us were graduating (1986 to 1994), NASA underwent a series of hiring freezes. As a result, a lot of us went into the dot-com business instead. Or, in my case, the service/hospitality industry.

Slide 20: Another one that deserves to be answered respectfully, since the presenters are at last offering some suggestions.

We’re asking to create an environment where all NASA employees can leverage their strengths to push the limits of science and space exploration by:

Providing the current NASA workforce with infusion of fresh ideas, methodologies and technologies.

Providing the Next Gen NASA workforce the programs and experience today that it needs to be the leaders in the future.

Enabling enhanced communication and collaboration between NASA centers.

Getting more young people in the door.

Regarding "Providing the current NASA workforce with infusion of fresh ideas, methodologies and technologies," fine. Which ones? And NASA doesn't just want to hear about YouTube and MySpace. What about engineering software? Materials research?

Re: "Providing the Next Gen NASA workforce the programs and experience today that it needs to be the leaders in the future." I'm glad they included this. Maybe it's a sign that they get the "paying your dues" and "starting out small" concepts. Of course programs like this are vanishingly rare, and the NASA budget doesn't show many signs of unlimited growth. These kids need to vote, something people 18 to 30 historically have not done. If they did, Congress might pay more attention to them. I could add that they need to vote for presidential candidates who have an intelligent platform that supports space exploration and need to avoid candidates who just make them feel good; however, then I would deprive Barack Obama of one of his primary voting blocs.

Re: enhanced communication and collaboration between NASA centers. Yes, that would be nice, and it does happen. However, it does not occur at all levels, not at blinding speed, and not always with the same degree of cooperation between all individuals.

Re: getting more young people in the door. Again, NASA is about to cut 6,000 jobs in the next few years. What do the presenters suggest?

Slide 24:

We propose to engage the current workforce in cross-generation discussions at every center, cross-center discussions at the agency, and connections with the American Public.

Great! Looking forward to it.

Slide 29 recaps Slide 20 to show that they did, indeed, have concrete recommendations. Okay, great. And now what? The agency is not going to be changed by a couple of PowerPoint presentations, though I confess it's been awhile since I've seen two presentations have such impact. The old folks need more details and specifics. What kinds of new technologies? What types of programs do you recommend? Whose jobs shall NASA cut in order to make room for you? And if NASA does cut those jobs, how many experienced people are going to be around to give you the mentoring you want and need? These are some of the political realities the agency faces.

My Recommendations

While I've spent most of this posting busting Gen Y's chops, I'm not disregarding what they said. Far from it. I believe NASA needs to respond constructively in some fashion. The presenters, again, have made their concerns known. Great. Now NASA needs to sit down, honestly thank these folks for bringing these concerns to their attention, and then explain a few facts of life to the presenters. Next, NASA needs to engage in that cross-center, agency-wide dialogue consisting of multiple age groups, specialties, hierarchy levels, and technical backgrounds. This dialogue needs to have a concrete deliverable as a goal/output: a plan for integrating both the 21st century workforce and its technologies. Perhaps this will require two different plans:

• A technology improvement and integration plan. This should address both communication technologies (internal and external) and engineering and hardware tools.
• A workforce integration plan. This should address NASA's future workforce needs, by skill type and workforce size, as well as training plans for transferring institutional knowledge to new employees.

Who knows? Someone might even take these ideas seriously. Of course to be taken seriously, NASA would then have to act on the plans. But after that, once the doors are opened, it will be Gen Y's time to stand and deliver.

Book Review: The Historian

With her 676-page opus, The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova has written what, in science fiction fan terms, would be called a literary horror novel. What this means in practical terms is that the author has gone to a great deal of trouble to write something "literary" (meaning it is heavy on lofty, beautiful, or bewildering prose) that is at the same time not much different from any other book in the horror genre--in this case, the subgenre of vampire fiction. Kostova has done what several other SF writers have done before, including Harlan Ellison and Michael Crichton: write genre fiction but get it placed on the regular "fiction and literature" shelves at the book store. They have broken out of what some call the "science fiction ghetto."

Of course Larry Niven has a different perspective on this:

Okay, gang. What kind of a place is it that won't let outsiders join unless they meet certain standards; is expensive to belong to; that a member can leave at any time, to make a little money, then return to at whim; that people join for the company of their peers, the recreation facilities, the ego boost, and the security; that places a barrier between itself and the outside world?

I know that place. My Dad was a member.

Ghetto? That's the Los Angeles Country Club!

However, there is a literary snob movement out there that says, "If I just label my book as fantasy or horror, only those goofy looking kids with bad acne and weight problems will read it. However, if I label it as literary, some sharp, professional lady who belongs to the Oprah Book Club might read it, and I'll make a million dollars!"

And really, who could blame an author for thinking that way? Michael Chabon, another "literary" writer, has written two excellent books that, in another world, would be on the genre fiction shelves: The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a semi-fantasy story about struggling comic book writers in the '30s through the '50s, and The Yiddish Policeman's Union, an alternate history story set in Alaska. By all rights, Chabon should be on the science fiction/fantasy shelves. However, his agent tapped him on the shoulder, took him aside, and said, "Look, SF is so common now, it's almost mainstream. The only people still reading books from the SF shelves now are serious geeks and throwbacks from the pulp era. Your story is written in such a way that normal people will get a taste for SF without realize they're reading it. The SF fans will pick it up anyway, but in the meantime, you'll wow the critics by not going too heavy on the technobabble, and you'll pick up more mainstream readers along the way." Again, I can't blame Ms. Kostova for this choice--it might not even have been hers--but it helps to call a spade a spade, and understand exactly what is going on here. This is a vampire novel in "Great American Novel" clothing.

And having said all that, in some ways, it's still hard to know how to judge this book. It took me a couple of months to read it, as I would pick it up, read a few dozen pages, put it down again, and pick up something else. What that tells me, as a reader, is:

• The story wasn't enough to make me want to finish it in one gulp. And like I said, it is nearly 700 pages. Ye flippin' gods.
• The writing style and characters were still enough to keep me coming back to see what happens.
• The editor, whoever s/he is, could have taken a big meat cleaver, cut 300 pages from this book, and made it even more engaging than it otherwise would be.

The best way I can describe the writing style of this book is "gentle." Part of the whole "literary" thing is that the reader is supposed to be (and often is) sucked in by the smooth flowing of the prose. Great, swell, she's got a nice writing style--could we move the story along a little faster, please? Another literary quirk of the author's is that this book is really a combination of vampire novel, history, and Eastern European travelogue. In fact, there are passages here that, when describing scenery, architecture, or local customs, might have come out of a Rick Steves sales pitch.

And having gotten past the literary/English major snob stuff, I suppose I can finally talk about the plot. Here, I must confess, I found the author strangely and, at one point late in my reading, amusingly lacking. Let's just ask this basic question: if you were an immortal vampire, what would you do with your life? As a possible means of answering the question, sit down, read or watch Interview with the Vampire, or read The Boat of a Million Years or Methuselah's Children (books on immortality, but not vampirism) and then try to slog through The Historian, and ask yourself if Elizabeth Kostova's answer matches yours.

So after all was said and done, would I read this book again? No. I cannot say the author wasted my time, but I can think of books that would have used it better--and did--in the time it took to read this one.

Democracy, Polls, and the Progress of Space Exploration

These came to me from my AIAA daily news feed, in this order.

Study finds U.S. losing space dominance.
India's ANI (4/20) reported, "A new study has determined that India and China, along with Russia, Japan and Europe are all set to reduce the dominance that U.S. has over space activities." The study was based on the Authoritative Guide to Global Space Activity by the Space Foundation and the 2008 Space Competitiveness Index by the Futron Corporation. According to the trends, "the commercial space sector will continue to grow in comparison to government space exploration and operations potentially becoming the most important driver of overall space activities." Futron's Index especially "points out that advantages the United States has historically enjoyed in all three major dimensions of space competitiveness -- government, human capital, and industry -- are being narrowed by a an emerging India and China, a robust Europe, a resurgent Russia, and a steady Japan."

Space exploration ranks low on tech poll.
Space Politics (4/18) reported, "The Fairfax County (Virginia) Economic Development Authority released a poll ranking the top priorities for 'technological breakthroughs' as perceived by the American public." Space exploration "made the list, but only barely: just three percent ranked it as their highest technological priority." A similar result was seen in the U.K. poll.

Democracy has its pitfalls. There was a time when this nation actually behaved like a representative republic, and the congress sometimes passed things for the good of the whole rather than following what polls were telling them. Alas.

***

Oh, and then there's this bit...

Richard Branson wants to conduct a marriage ceremony in space http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=560792&in_page_id=1773

Apparently Sir Richard is a notary public, in addition to all his other talents.

Think of the possibilities, though. Instead of going to Vegas for a quick marriage or Reno for a quick divorce, people could go to LEO or L5! There would be entirely new law practices set up to address the implications of zero-gravity legal transactions. Say one of the partners is afraid of heights--would that constitute coercion? Temporary insanity? The possibilities are endless!

What do you mean, nobody asked?

University Student Launch Initiative





This was my first time attending this event. The USLI is a NASA-sponsored competition that gives college students an opportunity to launch rockets and payloads. They must design their own rockets and payloads and use off-the-shelf rocket motors. The event this year was held at Bragg Farms in Toney, Alabama, which is about a 30-minute drive from Madison, 20 minutes from Huntsville proper. Explanations will be provided as feasible. I showed up late because I had other chores, so I didn't get to see everyone's launch.





Nope, no kidding. This was a farm.
































Utah State's hybrid rocket parachutes safely to Earth. The goal of the launch was to achieve an altitude of one mile (not sure if that was one mile above Alabama's ground level or one mile above sea level). Utah State reached 4,400 feet. Apparently they would have done better, but their automated speed brake opened at around 3,600 feet, thinking it was at 36,000 feet. Given that, they still managed a pretty good flight--nearly a straight-arrow 7-degree flight. How do I know it was 7 degrees? Actually, I don't. However, that's about the same angle the Shuttle flies at, and the vehicle looked like it had that trajectory.



































Crowds were better than I thought they'd be--maybe a couple hundred people. However, the organizers (NASA?) didn't consider getting a count. The Student Launch Initiative for junior high and high school students will be next week; they might do so next week.
































The weather was decent when the sun was out, but the winds were going steady at about 20-30 miles per hour, and clouds made things quite chilly for those of us wearing t-shirts.





























The Ares folks brought their 20-foot (~1:16 scale) Ares I model. You don't realize how big that thing is until you put it next to a car.



































The stuff below is the avionics package for Fisk University's entry. In addition to all the avionics, the payload included a rover that was designed to move around on the ground after landing. While the aft end of their rocket nosed in for a perfect "lawn dart" landing, the rest managed to land in such a way as to allow the rover to do its thing. Impressive!

































Not surprisingly, Fisk's vehicle was the biggest rocket I saw while I was there.

































The Vanderbilt team prepares its rocket for launch.
































Here, the Vanderbilt team carries its rocket out to the pad. There was about a 500-foot separation between the crowd and the launch pads. Given the winds, though, that was hardly a guarantee of safety.






































Auburn's parachute opened rather close to the ground. This was done on purpose, I was told, so that the teams would not have to go running for miles and miles to pick up their rockets. The Vandy rocket's parachute took quite awhile to open, as it was set to deploy at 500 feet...above sea level. Why does that matter? Because, someone informed me, the plains of northern Alabama are at about 240 feet above sea level.

































We had a brief visitation from a UFO, but I was the only one who saw it, and we all know how unreliable I am with shooting my camera...

































I can't rightly recall whose rocket this was, but like all the others, it made an impressive roar off the pad. Nobody had issues on the pad, and while I was there, only one rocket "augured in."

Not sure whose rocket this was, but it was pretty. I especially liked the detailed work they put in to making their sensor hookups look "official."

Whose returning vehicle is this? The Shadow knows...











I believe this was the Vandy rocket after it was fetched from the corn field. That Alabama clay does stick well, doesn't it?
















This is Auburn's rocket. It was on the pad at the same time as the rocket from Menominee, Wisconsin. However, I was not paying attention to the right pad...












...because the rocket nearby was the one that was launching.











Crowd shots.






















We had an entry from the Midwest: Menominee (me-NOM-uh-nee), Wisconsin. They had a pretty sharp looking vehicle and a smooth ballistic flight. However, the winds took it in an unfortunate direction--toward the farm--and the parachute didn't deploy. One of the students reported that they were flying at 170 miles per hour when they cratered into the corn field. The pieces were cast into the back of a pickup truck, and a HAL5 guy and I joined in the post-mortem. The team's altimeters survived with minimal melting/scorching, but they were unable to get any data from them on-site. And did I get any pictures of this? Hell, no. And why not? Because the camera batteries chose that moment to conk out on me. D@MN IT!!!

Book Review: Beyond Reason--Using Emotions as You Negotiate

I asked a few friends for some inputs/books that might help me better work in and negotiate the various non-profit organizations I am a member of in my free time. One thing that's became clear to me as I've joined churches, professional associations, and non-profit advocacy organizations is that every human organization includes politics. And what's politics? In my world, it's simply the social battles that play out as individuals wrangle over a group's direction and use of resources.

Now in for-profit organizations (businesses), there is a particular set of control mechanisms (ownership, management structures) that reduces certain forms of politics. Businesses also include carrots/incentives and sticks/punishments that can encourage specific behavior. If you don't do your job, for instance, you can be fired or replaced. If you do a good job, you might get a raise, a promotion, or a simple "attaboy/girl." These carrots and sticks don't exist in non-profit organizations. It is nearly impossible to "fire" someone from a committee, unless one meticulously follows Robert's Rules of Order or Church doctrine.

Having spent most of my professional life in businesses, I was unprepared for some of the challenges I've experienced in several non-profit organizations. Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro was recommended by dear friend, and I was duly grateful. Because, in the absence of the business world's usual carrots and sticks, most work being accomplished in the nonprofit world must be the product of negotiations.

Fisher and Shapiro are professional negotiators, working on labor, international, and business negotiations, which are similar in their human dynamics, regardless of specifics. Here are the "big picture" observations and recommendations from Beyond Reason:

• Emotions are powerful, always present, and hard to handle
• You should address the individual's concern, not the emotion
• Express appreciation--find merit in what others thing, feel, or do--and show it
• Build affiliation--turn an adversary into a colleague
• Respect autonomy--expand yours and don't impinge on theirs
• Acknowledge status--recognize high standing wherever deserved
• Choose a fulfilling role and select the activities within it
• Strong negative emotions can happen, be ready
• Prepare on process, substance, and emotion

I'm not giving away a whole lot here--you can find these points in the table of contents. However, the topics listed above really caused me to go back and think about my behavior and the behavior of others in my various enterprises.

For example, I know I was guilty recently of not appreciating the merits of a particular person's viewpoints recently, and the harder I pushed my point, the harder the other individual resisted. I wasn't taking the time to listen or find the possible merit of the other's arguments. I'm not the only one guilty of such behavior. I just need to find a better way to model the behavior and get others to follow suit.

Another point where I know I've failed is in respecting another's autonomy. This can take several forms. Have you or your "faction" within an organization ever taken action without consulting others? Or, have you or your group ever excluded particular individuals from the counsels of the whole because you dislike their opinions or behavior?

Acknowledging status is a recurring problem in the advocacy business. This is because many volunteers are often actual or self-taught experts in their particular interest. Lacking official ranks in a volunteer organization, we often establish our various pecking orders through expertise in this or that field. In a room full of such experts, each individual believes that their opinion is right, not just about their particular bailywick, but on every other topic as well. Furthermore, these individuals will occasionally or often disregard another's expertise because it doesn't match their own. And note that I'm not naming names, for the sake of diplomacy, but am including myself in the mix. I don't necessarily know how to fix this problem, but acknowledging it and taking steps across an organization or community to correct it would be helpful.

Preparation is something I need to work on in my day job and free time. This means being prepared for one's audience, establishing a process for obtaining particular outcomes, and being prepared for possible emotional reactions, such as emotional behavior or personal resistance to proposals. Again, without naming names, I can only say that I've run into these roadblocks on several occasions, and have always been stymied. Beyond Reason offers several strategies and coping techniques for dealing with negative emotions, your own and others'.

I picked up this book for my particular context, but I believe it would be of value to anyone in a negotiating role, and at one time or another, that includes all of us.

Why Space, Et Cetera

In my voluminous day-job reading today, I came across this article on "The Value of Space Exploration." This was a collection of answers by assorted bloggers on the topic. Being a part-time blogger myself, I thought I'd give it a whirl. Mind you, some of the reader responses to the bloggers were pretty darned depressing, but I need to think positively if I'm going to keep on this space-advocacy-as-a-lifestyle thing. (Yesterday, I briefly considered praying for intercession from St. Jude, the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.) So, here I go...

Why Human Beings Should Explore, Develop, and Settle the Solar System

The human willingness to create technology is based on several beliefs:

• That we are rational creatures.
• That we have and can cope with the environment around us.
• That we can make our temporal lives better here in this existence.
• That we can make tools or take actions that will make that better life possible.

This all sounds rather lofty for a bunch of geeky guys and gals who just want to get off the planet. However, there have been plenty of human philosophies throughout history that deny one, several, or all of the ideas above. The combination of these ideas has been made possible only in the West, through a combination of Greek science and Christian epistemology. Space exploration represents the ultimate expression of these ideals.

Now obviously Western beliefs in human rationality and free will are not unique, nor are they absolute requirements for putting human beings into space. Russian communists and Chinese communists after them have done so. Japanese collectivists and European socialists have launched satellites and planetary orbiters into space as well, as the laws of physics work for anyone, even Nazi fascists. Consider: if the United States had not won World War II, Wernher von Braun would have launched a German rocket and put the flag of the Third Reich on the Moon. That is reason enough to believe in a better, more uplifting philosophy.

What matters in the end is the type of society we, as humans, manage to put into space. Do we want a future where the government owns and controls everything, do we want a future that maximizes opportunity to the individual, or do we want a future that ensures the welfare of every individual? I believe, if the United States is to prove its worthiness to history, we must go farther, faster into space than any other society. The winner of the race will be seen as the wave of the future. If we allow the paranoid nationalism of China or Russia to beat us to the first Lunar settlement, or the regulation-bound European Union to control the resources of space, then we will be in no position to shape the future.

And here's the bottom line for yours truly: the only way I am going to make it into space is as a paying passenger on a commercial flight. If I wait until I have the credentials and NASA has the astronaut space to allow me aboard one of their rockets, I might as well wait for Doomsday as wait to get to the Moon. Only a free, rich society capable of supporting a middle-class-accessible space economy will enable an English major and "space fan" like me to get up there. And right now only America, for all its berserk politics and social upheavals, is likely to lead and create that society. And when all is said and done, I want to go!

Book Review: Rick Steves' Europe 101--History & Art for the Traveler

Art history classes, as I understand them, are supposed to provide the attendees with a survey of the different styles and subject matters that artists have used over time. Having never taken Art History 101, I don't know if the classes also provide a broader historical context for the works in question, but I would like to think that the good ones do. If they don't, they should, and Rick Steves' book on the subject might serve as a jocular textbook.

The important thing to know about this book is that Rick Steves is, for all practical purposes, a travel guy, not an art aficianado. He and his cowriter Gene Openshaw write the way a somewhat-more-knowledgeable friend might talk to you about art history so that you know what to look for when you get to Paris, Rome, etc. Steves' writing is chatty and easily read. I got through its 500ish pages in about three evenings' reading. It does, however, have its drawbacks. In his attempt to make history and historical art forms accessible to 21st century American audiences, the book will age badly. Already his references to Gerald Ford and Joan Rivers would probably leave people under 30 stumped.

Also, if you do have more than a scholarly interest in art and architecture, Steves' book will leave you aching for more and feeling more than a little condescended to. It's as if he's saying, "This is as much as you can handle and as much as I care to write to fit European history into 500 pages. Anything beyond that, you're on your own." In which case, I'd highly recommend you pick up a few more books on European art history, because Steves only scratches the surface. However, given the interest and breadth of his topic, perhaps this can be forgiven and understandable.

Another mild point of disagreement I have is Mr. Steves' unabashed love and admiration for European socialism, which comes up as he describes "Europe Today." He glosses over things like declining birthrates, long lines for health care, and the politically correct unwillingness of Europeans to assimilate or confront the hostile Muslim populations in their midst. The Europe of Michelangelo, Martin Luther, and Christopher Wren is dying, and Mr. Steves doesn't seem to understand that their over-regulatory "social safety net" or excessive PC-based desire to avoid confrontation might be among the prime causes.

Those minor quibbles aside, I liked this book. Aside from its engaging style, it makes a solid argument for the connection between political, social, and aesthetic movements, and as such should be commended for educating in this fashion. For instance, the Age of Enlightenment (more or less the 1700s, when the U.S. was born) resulted from discoveries of ancient Roman art and architecture at the archaeological site of Pompeii as well as Graeco-Roman philosophical influences that sprang to life in the Renaissance. This, in turn, led to Greek-style architecture (called Georgian in England, neo-Classical in the U.S.) as well as Roman-style sternness in statues and paintings.

You have to read a few more books to understand some of the other contexts of European history more fully, since Steves is focusing on the art, but I found this book a nice way to round out my generalist's knowledge of the continent. Because, after all, I read the book to help with my vacation. It's not like I read all of the books on my reading list for general-purpose fun, ya know.

Happy travels.

Yuri's Night in Huntsville

Tonight was the first "official" Yuri's Night party in Huntsville, Alabama, which is surprising, given the number of space people here. Be that as it may, we started small, as most of these things do, with a party in a bar. The bar in question was Leeann's downtown. The crowd size was just about right for the amount of "stuff" we brought--giveaways, prizes, name tags, etc., though I think some of us overestimated the crowd size. Perhaps people were scared off by fallling temperatures?

Anyhow, I still haven't spent the time to learn how to use my overpriced camera correctly, so more than half my shots are barely visible due to lack of light. (If anyone knows how to make the flash on a Canon PowerShot S5 go on automatically, I'm all ears.)

Here's what our sign looked like outside the place.

This is the "registration" table. We gave out name tags for people to fill out, asked people to sign up for information about next year's party, and gave out free stuff (pins, patches, candy, etc.). I spent most of my time manning the table so I wouldn't have to go outside. Heck, I don't like the cold, either.

I have no idea who this young lady is, but she sat across from the registration table for awhile, and she was distracting enough that I thought I'd take her picture. She obviously didn't seem to mind.

Part of the crowd in line at the table. We ended up handing out around 100-120 door prize tickets, which isn't a bad-sized group for our first time out. The "we" was a combination of HAL5, Huntsville Alive, ERC, and STEDTRAIN, which was collecting donations to provide teachers with money to educate K-12 students in the sciences. They did pretty well: STEDTRAIN collected around $1,100, and ERC was going to match whatever was collected at the event, so we did our good deed for the day.

Next year we'll probably get more grandiose. I myself would prefer a less smoky location, but otherwise I had a reasonably good time. You can market the hell out of something, but you can't make people come. In the end, that's up to them.

Finger-Lickin' Good: Oh, the Horror!

So my sister called me up this evening after a few adult beverages (fair is fair, I'd had a few beersh myself), and felt like talking a bit. At one point in the conversation, she griped about the fact that our mother had licked her fingers after eating something. "Oh my god! You can't do that!" she'd scolded Mom.

I said, "Well, I'm curious about where you got this belief. You obviously didn't get it from me and Mom. I lick my fingers as well."

Pandemonium! Weeping! Wailing! Gnashing of teeth! Apparently this is a bad thing. "When you go to Hooters," Sis explained, "You've got those big paper towel things. They're not for your mouth, they're for your fingers!"

I just kept chuckling, mostly because her moral outrage was too precious for words. I informed her, "I don't want to miss anything."

"You don't do that!" When she calmed down, we changed topics. But I can't wait until I have my next chat with Mom. What a hoot! Anyhow, apparently I'd better stop licking my fingers...around my sister.

Book Review: Founding Brothers

The Founding Fathers of the United States have assumed truly mythic proportions: Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Adams...the list of luminaries present at our nation's founding is truly impressive. Much has been made of the Revolutionary War, somewhat less about the Constitution; not much has been written, to my knowledge, about the history of the 1790s, that first decade of America's founding, when the experiment was still new, and these historical figures were trying to figure out how to govern this new nation.

Joseph Ellis, who also wrote the excellent His Excellency George Washington, has remedied this gap in our public education with Founding Brothers. The book covers the years 1790 to 1826 through a series of sketches of specific events within that period: the Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr duel, the first vote on slavery, George Washington's Farewell Address, the elections of 1796 and 1800, and the correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. What becomes clear is that American-style politics--with all of the overblown rhetoric, partisan press, and personal animus--began in this period. George Washington obviously hoped to overcome such factionalism, but aside from a universal respect for him personally, his fellow Americans had serious disagreements about nearly every other political question.

What Ellis makes clear throughout his several sketches is that Americans have always fought about the nature of government and what it should or should not do because the Founders themselves were not fully in agreement. One episode Ellis might have included to make this picture clearer was a story about the failure of the Articles of Confederation and the formation of the Constitution, which was, as he describes it, a political resolution of the faults of the Confederation. As Ellis puts it:

[T]he contested versions, if you will, of what the core legacy of the American Revolution truly meant, first became visible in the summer of 1790. The Constitution did not resolve these questions: it only provided an orderly framework within which the arguments could continue.

And the different arguments about government's role would become clear in the varying approaches to governing taken by the Federalists (Washington, Hamilton, and Adams) and the "Republicans" (in some books Democratic-Republicans, the source of the Democratic Party today), Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. The Federalists were aristocrats of sorts, believing for the most part that the nation should rise above factionalism and look to the national interest. The Republicans, led mostly by Virginians, still preferred the ultra-limited government of the Confederation. What a difference 200 years makes!

Jefferson and Madison also were the original pioneers--for good or ill--of American party politics, as Madison sought to thwart Federalist initiatives in Congress to centralize government functions, while Jefferson refused John Adams' request that he join his administration as a full partner and contributor. Instead of "bipartisanship," Jefferson revealed himself to be a member of his party first, thus starting off the first battle of political parties. However, he was not alone: Alexander Hamilton, the premier Federalist of his time, was doing everything in his power to establish a nation of moneylenders and merchants, even if those groups were not necessarily dependable in pursuing the common good. Hamilton also ended up clashing with Adams, leaving the second president nearly alone in his consultations except for his wife, Abigail.

Jefferson himself was a great admirer of the French Revolution, and used the French wars in Europe as a means of undermining Adams' presidency at home. Jefferson ignored the fact that the French Revolution sought to eliminate all forms of aristocracy, but eventually realized that the French were not reliving the American Revolution, as they sought to--and did--eliminate all signs of the previous regime, including the church and the laws. America actually had a less radical revolution than France, enabling it to avoid "devouring its own children," as Ellis puts it.

Founding Brothers is a worthwhile read, not just because of its brevity (248 pages), but as a fresh look at the Founders and as a reminder that American politics has always been fraught with peril and intensity because of the original perilousness of the experiment.

DVD Review: Star Trek Fan Collective: Captain's Log

My DVD player broke a couple weeks ago, so I finally decided to buy a new one and, since I was in the neighborhood, some new DVDs; in this case, a Star Trek episode collection. A few years ago, Paramount got the bright idea to let the fans of Star Trek pick their favorite episodes of this or that sort ("pick your favorite time travel episodes...your favorite Klingon episodes...your favorite Borg episodes...etc.). The latest one out of the gate, so far as I can tell, is called Captain's Log, and it provided a new twist, by allowing "the captains" to pick their favorite episodes and the fans to do the same.

So what we're treated to here is a set of episodes from each of the franchises--the Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise--as picked by the lead actors and their fans, as well as some bonus material in the form of interviews with the actors. So are they any good?

Well, you either like Trek or you don't. And even once you accept that you do, some episodes are better than others. Shatner's favorite--The City on the Edge of Forever--is one of the few Trek episodes to win the Hugo. It is a classic of the genre, and deserves to be on anybody's "best of" list. The other two episodes from the Original Series, "Balance of Terror" and "The Enterprise Incident," might best be described as "Romulan episodes," as they deal with that alien race. I have the feeling that the fans' choices were limited to prevent too much overlaps with the other "Fan Collectives." The episodes are good enough, though, to warrant attention. "Enterprise Incident" features a classic bit of overacting, while "Balance of Terror" is a fine example of submarine warfare in space.

The bonus material for the Original Series disk--and I confess, as of now I've only watched the material for TOS and Enterprise--is about as expected. Shat spends some time answering questions like "What makes a good captain?" and "What is the function of the captain's log?" Complete drivel, of course, though Shat plays along as well as he can. At one point, the producers brought on Joan Collins to chat with Shat about "City on the Edge of Forever," and I had to fast forward to the show.

You don't realize how dim actors can be until you hear them talk about something intellectual like science fiction. I've met actors and actresses of various sorts and levels of fame, and on the whole they're nice, sensitive people. They are able to conjure up whole personalities based on mimicry, study, and "method," those mysterious activities that make up the actor's craft. But in the end, most of them are performing something that someone else--a writer--created. I won't begrudge actors their creative facility. It's a different kind of creativity from what writers do, but in the end, if they're not inventing the whole script, they are operating at second-hand.

Having said my piece, I'll move on briefly to the other shows' captains. Of all the series, Deep Space Nine has the best episodes picked, including the final episode, "What You Leave Behind," "In the Pale Moonlight," and "Far Beyond the Stars," which might be the only episode where Avery Brooks doesn't play a stoic hardass.

Next Generation's Patrick Stewart picked the first episode he directed, "In Theory," which has a middlin' science story and a clunker of a human interest story, as Data takes a shot at dating. "Darmok" and "Chain of Command" feature better stories and better acting all around. "Darmok" won a Newberry Award for its portrayal of alien communication while "Chain of Command" was a two-parter that featured Picard getting captured and tortured while a micromanaging hardass takes over the Enterprise.

The episodes picked for Voyager and Enterprise are lackluster--"The Omega Directive" and "First Flight" are the better ones--but you get the feeling that most of the best episodes have already been taken up by other Fan Collectives. For instance, I found it surprising that the last episode of Enterprise, "These Are The Voyages...", made the list, given all the griping I heard and read from fans. That episode had several things working against it: it was the last episode of a show that was cut off three seasons early due to lack of interest; it was a "dream" or "holodeck" episode, spun into the middle of an old Next Generation episode, "The Pegasus" rather than standing on the show's own merits; and finally, the two TNG guest stars, Jonathan Frakes (Riker) and Marina Sirtis (Troi) looked just awful and too old to be reprising their roles from 20 years earlier.

The bonus interviews with Scott Bakula didn't offer much illumination, though I found the man pleasant enough. I just got the feeling, as I have with several SF actors, that despite being immersed in technobabble for a few years, he just didn't get it and would prefer to talk about the characters than any philosophical implications of his work. And that's why, after viewing this DVD collection, I highly recommend the move Galaxy Quest, which, as a fellow space geek reminded me, might be the best Star Trek movie to come along in years.

Galaxy Quest features a troupe of aging sci-fi actors who are getting burned out by the whole fan convention thing when they suddenly find themselves dragged into a real space adventure. The movie points out one of the fundamental truths of SF movie/show fandom: in the end, they're just a job for the actors and just stories for the rest of the world. The importance of the actors or the stories they're helping to tell depends on how much energy you invest in them.

Another Vacation Reference Site

Got this one from a helpful coworker who swears by B&Bs:

http://www.sawdays.co.uk/