I found a box dating back to just before my freshman year. In it were a lot of things including letters from many universities that I hadn’t even opened. There were letters from:
Guess I was a popular guy back then. (also found denial letters from MIT and Caltech, not as exciting)
The proposition is that the current tax structure is designed to take away an equal amount of utility from each group of earners. While 20% of income is a large amount (in terms of overall utility) to a poor person, it is insignificant to a rich person because as wealth increases, the utility of each dollar decreases.
(Source: reddit.com)
Saw this this morning before going to sleep. New G.I. Joe trailer: Childhood favorite characters, a battle fought whilst hanging off a cliff on ropes, Bruce Willis cameo, what’s not to like?
From 1981 to 2009, the greatest accomplishment of the anti-government Republicans was not to reduce the size of the federal government but to stop paying for it.
- Bill Clinton in his new book “Back to Work”
If you are someone who knows me, you probably have some idea that I’ve been working off and on with some great guys to develop a working Rockoon for a few years now. I remember back in the Fall of 2007 when the SEDS chapter at MIT started throwing around the idea of building a Rockoon and even making a competition out of it. Late that year, the official announcement came out and I helped form up a team to investigate the idea at Iowa State where there was a rich history of rockoon designs that had never been flown.
Straight from the start, the competition (set up by SEDS) was a bit wishy-washy. The rules stayed in flux for months and in the end the final rules had thrown out many of the good parts of earlier versions. Still, there were at least 3-4 university teams that were interested and everything was good. We started trying to figure out the best way to make it fly while (we hoped) the SEDS projects chair and chairman were busy finding a location for the contest.
Fast forward a few years and there are now only 2 teams (from a high point of 6 I think and not including the MIT team that started it all) and we have some form of a good launch site in the Nevada desert, but have had issues with the projects chair dropping out at the last minute and our contacts in Nevada getting all non-responsive on us. Things are bad, good, and everything in-between. On the good side though, John Gottsacker took the reigns of the project from me with a lot of vigor and has since gotten boatloads of cash and, with a team of a half-dozen people, managed to make the rocket setup a reality (still waiting for the electronics to mature).
I have to say, it looks pretty awesome:
Now while these days it seems everyone is mad at everyone else and the two interested groups (IA and AZ) aren’t always working together, I still have high hopes that the Rockoon will fly. I have a ton of confidence in and appreciation for all the work John and Nick did on this project through their college careers, and though I had to wait around an extra year for it, I think this year is the year (fingers crossed).
In the end, I hope that everyone learned something from the project and that future projects set up by SEDS can find much more success after a rocky start. Here’s one more picture and the youtube test video from last spring if you haven’t seen it:
Well, I had a great weekend this weekend and it was much more exciting than most weekends this summer. First off, Tyler and Amanda got married, which was awesome! The service was very sweet and well done and the reception had great food and was very interesting and entertaining (I’ll have a few youtube videos that should go viral in a few days …). After that it was fun to treat Lisa to a wonderful little 21st party around campustown (just don’t spill beer on my carpet on Hyland, aaah!).
Today was great just to hang out with “the guys” (Jim, Hillary, Samuel, Doug, Nick, and Kristen), hunting gnomes, watching the soccer game, swimming a bit, and finishing with fireworks. Though what I thought was great was just taking the time to look up. We got to see a beautiful ISS pass just before the fireworks started (I was asked “can the astronauts see the fireworks?”) and somewhat remarkable to me were the comments of my friends while watching the space station blaze through the sky that went something like:
“Can you believe that we built that?”
“It’s crazy that there are people circling miles above our heads up there.”
“Just think, we’re probably the only ones out here that realize what that dot is going over our heads.”
“I think my favorite thing about coming out for fireworks was checking out the ISS overhead.”
It makes me realize that with the right info, the task of “selling space” to people is so simple (yet so hard). Nobody ever stopped thinking that NASA does amazing things, it’s just taken for granted. It isn’t until you stop and think “Whoa, what we have done is amazing!” that you realize the benefits of the space program.
I then had to drive home to Cedar Rapids, but as I went I knew I needed to stop just for a minute to take in the amazing view tonight. I pulled off the road outside of Toledo, turned off the headlights, and just leaned on the hood and gazed at the stars. I think most Iowans don’t know how special it is that they have such a beautiful nighttime view. To be able to look up and see more stars than can be counted is something that can only happen in small towns, farm fields, and open pastures and mountaintops. In the big city (where I’m from) it’s just a big haze of light pollution. So how do we get the urban 81% of the country to see through the haze to the beauty above? I don’t know, but I sure want to figure that out!
OK, two issues today. First, the issue of how politicians should act when voting in congress or in state bodies. Then the issue of people criticizing the Obama administration for their response to the oil spill.
So first off I heard on NPR about Tom Perriello, a freshman Democrat from VA who many Republicans are gunning for because of his way of using “conviction politics”. What he calls “conviction politics” is the fact that he feels that now he has been voted into congress, he should vote for what he feels is right for his district rather than “by the polls”. This has been blasted by Republicans right and left as he voted for the stimulus and health care bills. But hold on people, this is how our founding fathers WANTED congress to work. The reason congress exists is for a representative from the people to represent their people in votes, not to poll them on every issue beforehand. Congress specifically isn’t about which citizen can yell the loudest.
Whenever you vote in an election, you are giving the person you vote for the ability to speak on your behalf and represent you within a body representing the state or country. This is one of the reasons that I think party-line voting is idiotic. You need to vote for those that will best represent you, not those your party tells you to vote for. I also don’t like career politicians for the same reason. They live in Washington, so how are they possibly representing your “local” interests?
Secondly, the oil spill is a huge problem for everyone and probably will be for some time. The fact that some people are blaming Obama for not preventing the spill or not doing enough to fix it is crazy. As one like-minded person on BBC.com noted, Obama can’t don his Superman cape and fly under the sea to plug a stopper in the leaking pipe. He also can’t be blamed for allowing BP to cause the leak. The regulations regulating oil drilling were made far before his time. If there is any politician to blame, I might blame Bush and maybe Clinton for having some of the most lax regulations in the world on deep sea drilling. But now at this point, the only thing Obama could seriously do would be to provide the “Russian” option of dropping a nuke down the hole to fix the problem. I personally don’t think it’s a bad option, but it is a bit close to a lot of populated coastline for that. Other than that, BP and Transocean are the only ones with the technology to fix the problem. This issue simply isn’t in the playbook for a group like the U.S. Navy, though maybe it should be. As in all things, hindsight is 20/20 and maybe we can plan better next time. Better yet, we could regulate like Canada and force the drilling of a relief well in conjunction with the main well so that in the future we wouldn’t need to wait for months if an issue arises.
So, if you were asleep yesterday, you should know that Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX for short, conducted a very successful first test launch of their “medium-lifter” Falcon 9 rocket in Florida. This is a huge step forward for the companies that make up the “New Space” part of the space industry, namely new companies that seek to put payloads into orbit like the older existing companies, but to do it faster, better, and cheaper.
The short story is that many older aerospace companies launch mostly government payloads (thank you ITAR!, but that’s another post) and thus they have little incentive to develop new vehicles and advancements to bring things into space for lower costs because their current contracts are mostly cost-plus (i.e. they name their price plus get more money if they run into problems). This means that the cost of getting to orbit in the U.S. has actually been going up rather than down in recent years and decades. SpaceX and other companies like Orbital Sciences and Virgin Galactic are seeking to change that.
SpaceX is a company started by Elon Musk, who was one of the original founders of Paypal, which he envisioned as an online full-service bank (it since turned into something a bit different). After being bought out by Ebay, Elon invested his new cash in SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and a solar panel installer called Solar City (as well as some nice cars etc). Since then, SpaceX has been his baby and he has poured the vast majority of his fortune into making SpaceX profitable (which it now is).
The Falcon 9 is actually SpaceX’s second successful rocket, following their work on the Falcon 1 (the number designates the number of engines per rocket and more engines equates to a larger rocket). One more iteration of their Falcon rockets that we have yet to see is the Falcon 9 heavy lift version, but we may not experience that rocket for a few years. At the moment, there is a full line of customers waiting to launch on the Falcon 9, so depending on how quickly SpaceX can work, we should see a large amount of great launches in the coming years.
If you missed yesterday’s launch, here it is for your viewing pleasure:
So anyways, I thought it was a great flight and am disappointed by the few short-sighted (or maybe money-sighted) politicians who decried the fact that the Falcon 9 is around a year behind schedule. They should note that engineering is not an exact science. If they looked at other schedule-based programs they would see things like the Japanese H-II which (back in the day) was 2 years behind schedule, they could see the Ariane 5 that took 10 years and $7 billion to develop. In the end, this is a fantastic feat and I want to wish SpaceX the best in future launches and development of launch systems (would a job be too much to ask?).
GSB and apparently my senators in particular never cease in their ability to make disappointing decisions. I stuck around the GSB budget meeting tonight for a couple hours because I was working on other things simultaneously and regard it somewhat as a form of entertainment. I just had to leave because I was too disgusted with their decision to not provide a measly $750 of funding to the ISU Entrepreneur (or “E”) club for a conference simply because we happen to have a Entrepreneurial studies minor.
I would like to make the point to any of those senators that “yes” we have this minor, “yes” students do take it, but not every student who is interested in possibly being an entrepreneur takes it. I myself have major entrepreneurial tendencies and given the time and money would LOVE to take that minor, but the fact is that I can’t. Luckily there is a group of students devoted to discussing entrepreneurship and learning more about it in their free time from their main areas of study. Unluckily, GSB wants me to stick around for another few semesters and take the classes instead, because the club’s purpose is similar to the goals of the minor.
There seems to be some theory floating around GSB that any club that tries to teach you something that you “might” already be able to learn in a major needs to be zero-funded if possible. I would take the stance that EVERY club seeks to teach students something new and that almost every club could be linked to a major in some way. Obviously most of the people in the Tractor club are going to be agricultural-type majors. Obviously most of the students in the robotics club are going to be Electrical and Computer Engineering majors.
All these squabbles over a couple hundred dollars here or there are mere pennies in the bucket compared to things like events, which GSB is funding to the tune of $386,000 when I’m not sure that general allocations was designed to fund events in the first place (they have an events account for that actually). I would like to reiterate my point that clubs are there to allow students to learn and express themselves in ways they can’t in class and many times conferences can teach a student 10x more than they would learn in class anyways. I beg GSB to consider this in their budget practices, especially with clubs like the E-Club that does have a membership roster hailing from all sides of campus (not just a bunch of students with minors in Entrepreneurial studies).
I just wanted to do a quick post about the awesome packaging that Lexar put my latest flash drive in. You know that when you buy most piece of electronics, it is either in a huge oversize box or some clamshell packaging that you can’t get off. Recently I forgot my 8GB Flash Drive in a lab and someone took off with it (annoying), so because I had to use one for a speech a week later, I got on Amazon and bought a new Firefly drive from Lexar (Firefly drives are great, plus, they’re called “Firefly”). When my drive showed up a few days later, I sent out a tweet because I was so impressed with how easy it was to open the package. The thing just popped open and made me happy. It was awesome. Why can’t more manufacturers do that?
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