Coolest. Pictures. Ever.

Coming in to work this morning I was listening to NPR, and I heard that NASA had reconsidered its position that using one of the remaining shuttles to service the Hubble Space Telescope was too dangerous, and that a servicing mission was indeed going to happen.

Sure enough, MSN agrees.

On the one hand, I think fixing the Hubble is an excellent move. As I mentioned lo these many years ago, I think the Hubble may very well be the coolest piece of hardware ever created by humans. I mean...this is fabric of the universe stuff here. Fundamental questions of existence stuff. (And the pictures are so, so pretty.) And is it at all practical? Hell no! It's all about pure discovery and the advancement of knowledge. Simply letting the thing die, or more likely going to a considerable amount of trouble to de-orbit it leaving no replacement, would be just shameful.

On the other hand, I am a little bothered. Remember the foam business that ultimately destroyed the shuttle Columbia? Well...it hasn't actually been fixed. NASA went to a lot of time and expense in an attempt to address the problem, but failed. The main tank still sheds foam, which could impact the shuttle during launch and lead to a catastrophic failure on re-entry, just like the Columbia.

I get that NASA really needs the shuttle program, and that they spent a lot of time and resources trying to fix the problem that destroyed the Columbia, and that space flight isn't without risk regardless. But still. This is a known problem with demonstrably fatal consequences, and it hasn't been resolved, but they're still launching the shuttle.

My point here is, I was a little disturbed that the decision was made to take the risk anyway, and the old NASA decision was made for a good reason: if the foam thing crops up again on the Hubble servicing mission, then at best it's a huge deal, and at worst crew dies, spacecraft lost.

So, while I so very much want the Hubble servicing to go forward, I'm a little disturbed that the attitude of the new NASA administration here seems to be, "Risk? Meh."

Besides which I still totally want the job at JPL working on the teleoperated Hubble repair device.

Ooh, Toys!

When I first started my new job back in early July, the first thing they had me doing was designing analog circuits. Thing was, the circuits they had me designing would have been dead easy in digital, and I mentioned that to anyone who would listen. The response from mangement was pretty much uniformly, "You're probably right, but we need the analog circuits anyway because..."

"Because" could be complicated, but the upshot was usually that The Russian wanted it that way, and was pathologically opposed to digital anything. Probably because he doesn't understand it.

For months, whenever the subject came up, I'd say "You know, we should really be doing this in digital." ("Carthago delenda est.")

Well, the anaolog circuits got finished, and it finally became apparent to everyone that digital was the only way to go. (So we went to war with Carthage.) It also happens that I'm the only one around with any DSP experience, so I was asked to recommend hardware to make this new stuff happen.

So, I did my research and decided on one of these, a convenient single-board computer built around a TI floating-point DSP chip. I recommended it to management as the thing we want for my research (acoustic echo cancellation) as well as applications a few other people are going to be running.

So they bought it for me. It's sitting on my desk right now, running the idle process at 1800 MIPS.

This all makes me feel very adult. I saw a problem at work, agitated (no other word for it) for what I feel is the right solution, people listened to me, asked me to recommend hardware to do what we needed, I did some research and made a recommendation, the company bought the thing, and now I'm using it.

Actually, I'm totally playing with it like a kid on Christmas morning, on account of it's so cool! Which makes me feel somewhat less adult. But anyway.

I Think a Group of Them is a "Labour"

FYI, Monday was "national mole day," a holiday in honor of the "mole," which for you non-chemists is the conversion factor from atomic masses of atoms/molecules to grams, 1 mole = 6.02x10²³ particles. So, for instance, 1 mole (6.02x10²³ particles) of carbon-12 atoms will have a mass of 12 grams. Nifty, huh?

Well, some well-meaning but incredibly silly people actually did think it was that nifty, so they invented "national mole day" to honor this...um, sadly unrecognized unit. The holiday was to be celebrated from 6:02 AM to 6:02 PM on October 23. (6:02, 10-23. Gettit?)

They have Mole Day merchandise, "Ask Monty Mole" for all your pressing mole questions (don't ask him to do your chemistry homework, he hates that), and even gods help us a Mole Day Theme, which is every bit as insipid as you might expect.

You know...I'm all for educating people, but...yeah.

L-l-l-l-Lola

In the sorts of online games I play, it's common to have a visual representation of yourself in the game that other players see, called an "avatar" or "character" or "model" or "toon" (yish) or some such.

The avatars usually have gender, male or female. This opens the possibility that a male player could use a female avatar, or a female player a male avatar.

Some gamers do this regularly, and I'll confess to being among those. This goes back seven or eight years to Quake 2, where I sometimes used female avatars because I thought they looked better. Some people who knew I was male would freak about it, which made me start thinking about why it bothers other people that I and others do this, and why it doesn't bother me.

Well, there are certainly people outside this group who think that we inside the group...well, have "something wrong with them." Gay, gender dysphoric, or whatever. I am looking at you, Shannon, Ms. "You play a chick? Isn't there something...psychological about that?"

This attitude is also much more common about male players using female avatars. Female players using male avatars is apparently more alright in this mindset.

As for myself, it never seemed very important to me whether my avatar is male or female. I am what I am; the avatar is just pixels on a screen. As far as I'm concerned, anyone else I see on the screen could be male, female, binnaum from "Alien Nation," or maybe they reproduce asexually, how the hell should I know.

And why should it matter? When I interact with them by shooting virtual rockets at them, or helping them kill virtual monsters, or whatever, why is either of our genders relevant in that context?

Now, the fact of the matter is that to other people it does matter in that contect, and when they look at my female avatars, they're often making the assumption that I'm female and acting accordingly. So I'm making a choice that I know will lead other people to believe a thing that's not true, and as far as that goes, I feel a litle bad about that.

Though not bad enough for me to stop doing it, apparently.

The ways that people treat me differently when they assume that I am female have also been enlightening. Male (and female) players flirt with me very much more often than when I'm using a male avatar or known to be male. I once had a teenage kid who thought I was female call me a "drama queen," which just made me laugh. I've a couple times had the deprecating "you're just a girl" attitude leveled at me, usually by teenage males. on the more positive side, it seems to me (based on anecdotes) that female players are often more friendly, and male players are often less competitive.

As to why any of this is in any way relevant in the context, let me speculate. People are used to behaving, thinking about, and interacting with others based on gender. People are not used to doing that in a gender neutral/indeterminate way. So, reasonably they might try to shoehorn this new situation...where in the game context people are gender neutral/indeterminate...into the old mindset with which they're familiar. A sort of Homer Simpson "In times of trouble, go with what you know" situation.

It's also reasonable to expect that when it turns out their unfounded assumptions are wrong, they might get upset and feel decieved.

I'm sure there's also an element of the stereotypical heterosexual male homophobia here. This might explain why female players using male avatars is more accepted...that situation wouldn't lead to men unknowingly flirting with male players, see.

I have returned.

So, once upon a time I had a blog. I updated this blog on a daily basis, and wrote lots and lots in it.

Then I got...shall we say, distracted, and the time and inclination I had to write so often just evaporated. To my shame.

Well, my time and inclination have returned, and I once more may have things to write about that people would actually like to read.

So, let the fun begin.