Greetings from a rainy, chilly campsite in the French Alsace! It's good to have some time off. The weather is a letdown but we had a great few day's camping with the SO's parents out here, followed by a bunch of cultural visits to the loveliest of villages along the wine route, passe sanitaire ready but hardly needed. This region really surprised me with how beautiful it is. Yesterday we visited the Humanist Library of Selestat which had some incredibly cool renaissance pieces on display from Erasmus and Martin Luther. It also had this i-cant-believe-its-not-a-fairytale chainbound book: We go home in a few days, and now that I and most of my friends are almost or entirely vaxxed and Delta fairly under control, I'm cautiously hoping for a back to normal time ahead.
I'm making myself a new desk. Wife and I have been sharing her XXL once since we moved and my old one got pitched. I'm not comfortable using certain power tools while home alone and just using the pull saw with anything like dexterity is taking more and more effort. Still feels good to be doing something constructive. I fell Sunday. Thats 5 total. Its getting harder and harder to stave off unconsciousness when I feel the Black rushing up to meet me. My head rings and throbs then aches for hours after. 10 days until wedding number 2.
The reply to this keeps 502'ing on me so I will drop it here for kleinbl00 Your response pissed me the fuck off. Then I sat on top of my hill, and thought about this while watching the smoke from California and Oregon destroying the sky. Since I am camping out in the parking lot of a hospital after my injections, and have wifi access, I'll answer you. I am not nearly as good of a writer as you and I think we talked past each other, so let's see if I can expand our ideas here. You discount the visual astronomers that have died off in the last 30 years. I bring up people don't like space and you reply with the ultimate example of "pretty space picture nobody knows shit about." Why was this picture taken? What question was being asked? Yea Yea Yea first image with the Hubble Palette, whatever. Even here on Hubski, you and I are the only two people that know what "Hubble Palette" means, and I'll get to that in a moment. I've been in a room with Jeff Hestor http://www.jeff-hester.com/about-dr-hester/ and got to talk to him one on one a long time ago when I still gave a shit. He's a fantastic person, he's fighting the good fight for what it is worth. But the person and the idea behind the image means not-a-fucking-thing. Pretty picture on a college dorm, all that matters. PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE SPACE THEY LIKE PRETTY PICTURES There are five Messier awards in the Astronomical League Observing programs. https://www.astroleague.org/al/obsclubs/AlphabeticObservingClubs.html I have all of them. I have the Hershell 400 and Hershell 400 (2) awards. I have enough awards to start making a run at the Master Observer certificate if I feel like making that effort. I have used remote telescopes to assist with the confirmation of exoplanets to the point my name is on five scientific papers, and used my own gear back home to track two more that are still being worked on and may finally publish this year. I have a NASA placard on my wall thanking me for engaging in outreach to over 50,000 people. I also have a NASA award for organizing a science campaign during the 2017 eclipse where we rounded up 600 boy scouts to do real data collection backing up the pros in aircraft and satellites that is going to be published this year if not already out. Now that we are done comparing prom gowns and all the other girls think we are pretty, let's cut the bullshit and get to the point. Oh, and Hubble is in the news at least quarterly, and again PRETTY PICTURES; how many people outside of us even know what the hell Palomar is? People do not like space, they like PRETTY PICTURES. Never been to Griffin, but I've paid for a few nights with the 60" at Mt. Wilson twice. $1500/night for the group. The second evening myself and a few other people used the night to drag some impressive glass up there. I think between the ten of us, we had a combined $25,000 of eyepieces on us. And honestly, I think I had a better view through a 32" Obsession at the star party that got cancelled mentioned above. Of your 1.6 million visitors I wonder how many are there because the Griffin people used to whore themselves out to every movie and TV production they could wedge themselves into. 161 productions according to IMDB. LA is a city of 20 million people, that visitation number is impressive but let's not kid ourselves that the people of Los Angeles give a shit about Griffin, Mt. Wilson or any of these places. What percent of these visitors are out of state tourists? I have data on the state of astronomy clubs across the nation. Clubs with a combined 2700 members in areas representing 36+ million people in the USA. But some few rich people bought a $5000 coat rack they take out a few times a year means Astronomy is healthy? Are you going to seriously make the argument "rich people most effected" to me? Because if that is your argument fuck you and your fucking high horse. YOU.. FUCKING YOU of all people are better than that and I expect better from you. Note the numbers on those clubs. People in astronomy clubs are not even a rounding error on a statistical blip on the long tail. The older guys who did all the work either got Covid and died or noped out because they don't want to deal with the 40% of America that turns out to get its reality from foreign Facebook bullshit memes and flat earth groups. And fuck you, we don't show people galaxies at outreach we show open clusters and globular clusters like M3, M5, M92, M15, M11, M52 etc because those are easy to train someone to see quickly. You pull a "rich people impacted" argument on me of all people then toss around "elitism hur hur?" eat shit. Done the visual from dark skies, documented it, have the certificates and notebooks to prove it. Even started on the Urban observing programs because work was killing me and I was unable to travel anywhere. You know why visual observers go into astrophotography? I know 'cause I was one, and talked to dozens if not hundreds who did the same. LIGHT POLLUTION. You know how many people in the USA care about light pollution? NONE. Even the AMA cannot get traction on the idea of overlighting residential neighborhoods is increasing breast cancer rates and has a possible link to the rise in autism. Photography lets me at least pretend that I am doing astronomy even if photos are shit for experiencing the world around us. What would you rather have? Someone looking at nothing put pictures of the Grand Canyon, or actually GOING there and experiencing it. Would you rather have people looking a the moon with their own eyes, or relegate everything to flat images on a screen. I made my choice and walked away from the shit show becasue I see where the world is going; I don't want any part of a society that wants pictures but not the experience. Six years ago, I got invited to be a part of a focus group, as someone doing outreach and talking to the public. I got to have two days of talks with the folks making beginner telescopes. I think that I am still technically under that NDA, but the telescopes we thought up are now on sale. https://www.celestron.com/products/starsense-explorer-lt-80az They are on mounts that do not suck, the optics are "fine" and just enough tech to make it easy to use. This is what you should be recomending for kids with birthday money, or paper route money etc to get. And no I do not get paid to promote them, never did. Now that Orion owns Meade, I am hoping that the software guys on the Meade side make the Orion stuff better and easier to use. We also promoted the Starblast 4.5" table top reflectors and got some 20 put into the local library system. You almost certainly know that you can get a not-bad beginner telescope for roughly $250 which is a lot of money for someone on minimum income, but doable. You acuse me of eliteism, remember? I'm trying to get people to not buy shitty hobby killing telescopes at Walmart and target, you see to think all there is out there is $10,000 glass. Hobbies die when the people that have been around for a while stop helping the newcomers. Youtube vids are cool and all, but without someone to look at face to face and say "can you help me" you lose the new blood to the learning curve. Write all the checks you want, build all the shit you think you can get. Hell build public accessible observatories like I have done. No volunteers? You are fucked. Chase away the volunteers? Yer fucked. Have a lot of money but nobdy to do the work needed to keep the hobby/club/organization going? You die. Elitism is a minor problem compared to the lack of suckers and fools like I used to be doing all the work cause Duty, Honor, "the Cause," outreach, whatever. When the old greybeards stop attending gatherings, when the old timers like me walk away, when the apathy kicks in, the hoby dies. Make the rewards for doing an incredible amount of shit work not worth the squeeze, and your hobby dies just as dead as "elitism." Insult and berate the people on the ground doing the work, most of whom do it for the love and not much else, and your organization will die. The Devil's advocate question is this: Why the fuck would I do that? The college already showed that they would not back us up, after working with them for TWO FUCKING DECADES where their physics students got extra credit for hanging out with people owning better gear than the bloody university did! All that time of working with them to the point where the star party was a 400ish paying customer event twice a year. What in the HELL makes you think they would step in and help and/or support us in a new adventure? When someone shows me their true colours, and shows me exactly what value they place on my efforts, I remember that. My friends got thrown under a bus for a bunch of idiots chasing social media clout, people that would have forgotten the event even took place as soon as the new thing got more likes and upvotes. The people we worked for free to add value to their students, and asked for nothing in return other than the use of their name to help with the Park Service and the Dept. of the Interior were tossed aside without even an afterthought. Fuck ever associating with people like that ever again. The couple that ran the show since the mid 90's are rumored to put together a very private event with no advertising, no door prizes, no sponsors once the Covid shit is mostly over. The University and its students won't be welcome. The disconnect here, and this idea hit me in the middle of one of my drives into town to deal with society crap, is that you are not Human. Don't get mad, this is compliment, but I need to dig deep and make sure I am saying what I mean to say with that statement. You and I, and the people on this website are not human. Sure we are all homo sapiens with four limbs, 20 digits, forward facing binocular vision etc, but that "sapiens" part of the name? We are outliers looking in on the human experience. My county has a population of roughly 12K people. The county seat has a population of some 2500 people. There is a library in town, and since librarians are bigger gossips than any bartender I try to befriend them. In June of 2021 the total number of checked out books was under 200. Not 200K, TWO HUNDRED. This includes digital rentals as I specifically asked if there was an uptick during the pandemic. TWO HUNDRED BOOKS A MONTH. Between you and I, I bet we hit that in a typical year. Two people read more in a year than an ENTIRE COUNTY OF PEOPLE do in a month. Now, there are no bookstores in the county, I checked, not even a used book store! It is possible that everyone here, a county where 80% of households are below the poverty line, are buying books online or pirating PDF's, but I've met the neighbors and let's say I have doubts. YOU read more than just about anyone else I've even known, online or off. More importantly, you retain the info you ingest, can process it and explain it to others in context. That skill alone puts you in the top 5% of the smart people in this country. If you last name was gates, or bezos, or Boringoldmoneywhitedude the fourth, you'd have gone to an ivy league, made your business connections and almost certainly be running a Fortune 1000 class company by now. You exist on a level that at times I don't think you understand, maybe you do and just feel guilty or whatever and keep that offline. You and I got the shit rolls on the family dice and had to make due with what we were given. Yet somehow we if not thrived as least did not suck on a shotgun or die of a drug overdose or any other multitude of pitfalls that you and I have shared stories about. We are both retired, and let's be brutally honest here, most people in our generation are NOT going to retire until the last two years of their lives when the body and brain break down from over work and their employer can no longer accommodate their needs, so ship them off to die at home on government health care to keep the health insurance costs low for the rest of the drones in the factory. You and I are talking on a website with maybe 30 active users, four of whom have PhDs in the sciences, and this place is run by two guys using STEM cells to help prolong healthy living, a technology that I bet at most 1 out of 500 people even know exists. How many people know this place exists? 2000? Maybe? When you look at where we are, and where everyone else is, you and I are not even a statistical blip on the very end of the very long tail of human existence. How many people here are into what can be roped into pop culture? None of us, I mean I don't know what a Dinosaur Jr was and had to look it up, some meh band from 30 years ago. Talk to most people and all they spit out is tv shows and movies, and not much else. I could sit here for a few hours and list line item after line item that makes not just you and I but most of the people on this website outside the base human experience. We are "human" by the proxy of our biology, but if we walked into a city council meeting or a PTA meeting, how many people there would we be able to connect with? The problem you and I both have is that we are in a bubble. Might be different bubbles, but each of the bubbles we exist in protect us from the normal shit normal people go through every day. We can read a book, we can listen to a politicial speach and understand the language about the people they are rallying, but we see this all from the outside. We have the Time, money and privilege to be able to do something that in not directly paying the bills. You can watch your neighbors make poor choices about thier house, but talk about it as an academic exercise to explain the housing market to the rest of us outliers. You get to talk to the rich and wealthy, you mentioned you have had relationships working and otherwise with the famous etc. I've talked to people who have space hardware on the surface of other planets. I can pick up my phone right now and call someone working in mission control for the ISS. Kids I met at outreach events 15 years ago are now building Artemis hardware. This puts me in a VASTLY different head space when it comes to space and astronomy that just about anyone but the guy here that launched satellites earlier this year. Your reply to me really pissed me off until I realized you are coming at this as someone looking in from a 50,000 foot level. Do either one of us really remember what it is like to live on minimum wage? I bet neither of us has 50K in student loan debt. We both own where we live. Neither of us is living paycheck to paycheck. I was homeless living in Truck Center Parking lots off the interstates, and now can barely offer advice from that time nearly four decades ago. We both have expensive esoteric hobbies that the average person cannot comprehend the cost to get into. You can drop a few grand on some widgit thing for your watchmaking and not feel the dread of not eating for a month. Everything about you is outside of a normal human living experience in the current world except your family and upbringing. How many humans do you know that can build a $100K plus milling machine just because they want to fuck around a little bit? Hell, I can't do that, then again I have no income either. Once I calmed down and actually though about what you wrote, I realize you are not being a cunt just to be a pissant, you are just tone deaf and out of the loop of what is going on at the ground level. Congrats, you won the game.Okay grumpy old man you earned yourself some devil's advocacy.
That means the median visual astronomer was 30 years old when the HST went up, and 37 when WFPC2 went online.
That sounds about right - I was lugging a Coulter 10" Dobsonian around in the back of a Buick Skylark in those years where you could still pretend the ground was relevant. That shining period between billion dollar astigmatism and the Pillars of Creation shot. ... 'cuz I'm sorry - all the SBIG in the world will never fucking compete with that. Not ever. I tried a little game before I started writing this: I googled "most famous Hubble photographs" and "most famous Palomar photographs" and you know what? The Palomar shots are of Palomar.
Ever been to the Griffith Observatory? It's pretty funny reading their plaques trying to justify the place as if it ever did any real science. They pretty much boil down to "we stare at sunspots sometimes." 1.6 million visitors a year, beyotch.
I remember star parties out in the desert. We had good sky. The Pleiades are a loose cluster from the Sangre de Cristos, they aren't seven sisters. The Milky Way is a naked eye object from under a streetlamp. Rich fuckers, too, with like 12" Meades'n'shit. And what were things pointed at? ... and maybe some rogue crankiwumpus like you insistent on making people look away from the center of the eyepiece so he could claim he showed them M81.
Now - I didn't drag 50lbs of sonotube above the frost line to stare at planets. I did my dark sky shit, and I enjoyed it. Doodled in notebooks by red light and everything. But I did that shit alone and I didn't expect anyone to come with me. The serious hunting? That shit is solitary. And you yourself, homie, spent half your time photographing and the other half processing. I've seen your shots. The social aspect pretty much demands a trophy. Sure maybe you can get some accolades for your dedication if you describe your adventures but the picture's worth a thousand words. And with the amount of post-processing that's been de rigeur in astronomy since Clyde Fucking Tombaugh, that means an equatorial mount or a steppermotored Dobsonian hack. And that means $$$$$.
Try and tell me Stellarvue was selling more than 200 scopes a year ever. I remember when the ex-Soviet Maksutov Cassagrains came out and holy shit you could do planetary astronomy for less than $4k. My family paid $400 a night to go to an astronomy B&B and they couldn't afford a 16" Dobsonian. $22k for a 10" MCT? Hot diggedy damn! You got anything aspirational for little shits like me who saved up half his summer's wages for a cardboard and particle board clunker with a telrad and a $150 Orion focuser?
Know what kills hobbies? Elitism. That's why vinyl still exists, and why skaters are still listening to Dinosaur Jr. 30 years later. That Icona Pop LP you bought at Whole Foods to play on the Salvation Army Technics you paid too much for because you didn't know any better? That's a gateway. So are those shitty Instagram-class Celestrons.
I'll betcha if you threw another one on the University grounds they'd shut up. Yeah you're right - nobody serious could see anything serious seriously. But nobody following Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter is ready to venture an hour into the hinterlands to pretend they can see Neptune anyway. Couple times *hanging out with their normie buddies? Sipping cocoa and schnapps while staring at things they could legit see through binoculars? That's another matter.
Elitist is elitist You're right - I'm currently sailing through life on a tailwind of moneyed self-actualization. Other than plague, fascism and the heat-death of the planet it's pretty goddamn delightful. But you're wrong - I spent fifteen years making reality television so while you can complain about the downfall of humanity I can give you the formula. One game we played was "who has the hardest time identifying vegetables" and it started with reality TV contestants failing to identify artichokes, then asparagus, then broccoli. Let's talk about disconnected - grown-ass men who don't know what broccoli looks like. Can you imagine? See, I don't have to: I participated in normalizing that to several million people in real-time. And half the control room didn't get the joke. I was there as the counter-argument to "you're lying" went from "I'm not" to "I'm living my best truth." You're cursing the idiots from the mountaintop. I blessed them from the fountainhead. But they're still human. Here's where we differ. You want people to enjoy astronomy your way. I want people to enjoy astronomy. They paid for the fuckin' tickets, bitch. Who cares why they're there? Out of curiosity did you scry IMDb to find other places used in 161 productions? Or did you just assign an n=1 purity test to invalidate 1.6 million visitors a year because you want to call them blasphemers in the True Church? You're right - no one can do a fucking thing about light pollution. I got a dear buddy whose landing page has been APOD for more than twenty years and he can't shut the fuck up about Starlink because given a choice between clear skies and non-DSL uploads, he'll take the broadband, thanks. Takfir AF but there it is. HERE IS WHERE WE FUNDAMENTALLY DISAGREE "pretty space picture nobody knows shit about" is 100% valid, should be encouraged, is worth tax dollars, and if you're going to insist that people are liking space the wrong way I get to call you an elitist. And mean it. In every sense. This is me, carving into an astrophysicist with two flown missions over the exact same elitism for the exact same reason. We're still friends, too. If you're gonna be a grumpy old man, I'ma call you out for being a grumpy old man. You deserve nothing less. Neither do I. Here's me realizing I have been utterly and completely wrong about Eurovision, for example. "PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE SPACE THEY LIKE PRETTY PICTURES" Has that ever not been true? Do you honestly believe that? You think "Martian canals" would be common knowledge for fifty years without art? If you had a Facebook, you would bemoan the fact that 90% of the "space" images shared by your "friends" are conceptual art, 90% of those being from NASA itself. The art sells the science. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever shall be. And the fact that you anchored on different art, and have now sailed so far into the unknown that you can no longer see the shore, has blinded you to the fact that someone who thinks HubbleShotz™ are science would probably be over the moon to find out more science to lord over his friends if you can just not be a dick about it. No. I do not know that you can buy a decent scope for $250. I looked into it and didn't really find fuckall. I was not involved in the design of Celestron's entry-level products, elitist, because I have other shit to do. I brought up Dobsonians and Buicks so it would be harder for you to dismiss me as a tourist who doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, not to compare dick size. I have already evaluated that you are dismissive of any argument that is not backed up by the requisite quantity of Purity Points - that's why we're shouting at each other. You literally invalidated the interests of 20m people because they might also watch television. And that's what you gotta stop, homie. When I told a story - a first-person, experienced story - about cranky old men insisting that eight-year-old children squint at M81 in a parking lot you said It happened, buddy. I was there. Maybe you wouldn't do it? Maybe nobody you know would do it? But it got done. And you can gimme a ration'o'shit for dragging money into it but if you do, don't go if'n you want it to stick. I think what you do is valuable. I'm glad you're out there doing it. I'm a big fan. I am happy to have this fight with you whenever you crawl out of your HermitHole. I bear you no malice and zero ill-will and will happily accept your slag as the cost of doing business. I don't even mind being called inhuman - but I want to draw your attention to the reason you did it: it gives you an excuse not to listen to what I'm saying. Take 'em as they come, that's what I'm saying. Take 'em as they come, not as you wish they were. You can be angry about light pollution or you can adapt, like you did. You can be angry about the demand for bathrooms or you can recognize that some people really just need My Very First Star Party with cocoa and selfie sticks and that if you get one person out of twenty from that shitshow to follow you up into the mountains to squint at nebulae and pee in the bushes? That means you got ten potential new cult members. Stayed at a resort for the 4th instead of ripping up, working all day and then ripping back down (still did the "working all day" part, just cut out the commute). There was a family there in the pool. They were asking each other what time it was, because none of them were wearing their apple watches, and the clock on the wall had hands. Of the five teenagers, one of them attempted to read it, and misjudged by an hour. Now - I got a rich buddy who collects watches. He's a 1%er through and through. Likes watches that normies can't tell time on, dumb shit like this: My resort stay made me realize that for an appalling portion of the public, "hands" are elitist enough. So I got a choice: I can scream at the heavens for the downfall of humanity or I can acknowledge that my potential buying public is not as sophisticated as I surmised and recalibrate. It's not like I hold Urwerk to be a design inspiration anyway but it definitely made me realize that clarity and UI matter a fuckton more than most "watchmakers" think. Recalibrate, mutherfucker. It's too important to nurse a grudge on this one. I've never fucking heard of a "Hubble Palette". You're right - I can surmise what it is, just like I can guesstimate what Messier Awards are. But I also know you're living in an iPhones-through-eyepieces universe and you refuse to acclimate. And come down from the mountain more often. mk - notifications are getting stuck somewhere so I found this only by cruising comments.Of your 1.6 million visitors I wonder how many are there because the Griffin people used to whore themselves out to every movie and TV production they could wedge themselves into. 161 productions according to IMDB. LA is a city of 20 million people, that visitation number is impressive but let's not kid ourselves that the people of Los Angeles give a shit about Griffin, Mt. Wilson or any of these places.
And fuck you, we don't show people galaxies at outreach we show open clusters and globular clusters like M3, M5, M92, M15, M11, M52 etc because those are easy to train someone to see quickly.
I think between the ten of us, we had a combined $25,000 of eyepieces on us.
I did not call you inhuman. If that is your takeaway, then I accept the full blame as I am not as good a writer as I should be. The only people I will call inhuman all wear shity red hats made in china while spreading a pandemic Virus and eating livestock dewormer. I tried to say you live in a bubble outside the typical human experience. As do I, and everyone using this website. At this point we are talking past each other. I promised to give the internet six months, maybe I can come up with something not so inflammatory to try to get a point across before my promise is kept and I can go back to dying. Back in the old days when recycling our newspapers, instead of massive wholesale changes to our society, was going to save the world we could live on a minimum wage. barely, poorly, and not in a healthy way, but we could live. Can't do that today, hell people can barely live on $15/hr. The one good thing to come out of this pandemic is the rise in wages due to the labour shortage. I was raised to fight for people. The Catholic Church I went to in the 70's sent people to fight for civil rights in the South (while ignoring the local KKK and molesting kids, but let's just add that to the list of shit) I was raised to build the community you would be proud to live in. And for 50 plus years the entire world has shit in my face for trying. The emotional reaction I have to my life right now is that every cause I've joined has been destroyed demonized and mocked. Perot was talking about universal health care as a pro-business move, and that college was too expensive and a drain on the US economy in fucking '92 (30 years ago now). Howard Dean would have gone down as one of the best presidents in the 21st century. Even after the DNC let him die after the Fox "dean Scream" edit, he came back with a 50 state strategy that took back Congress... only to be kicked to the curb again and sent back to Vermont. Occupy is its own swirl of shit. Both non-profit education foundations I worked with died because we had to fight kick and scratch for money to keep operating, only to frustrate the people willing to volunteer. And these are just the big fights that maybe some people will recognize. If you meet an asshole in the morning, well you met an loser. If you meet losers all day long, look in the mirror. It finally took failing health to realize the things I believe in are not only not popular; some even have active well-funded counter movements. And I'm sick of the taste of shit in my mouth. I'm sick, literally in my case, of fighting and losing. It's not been amusing at all to watch the reactions of people to my decision to start saying "NO" and wanting to live at least a few years on my own terms. People I've known for 30 years and more now won't talk to me because I won't give time and money. The disconnect here between you and I, and I take the blame for not conveying my thoughts well enough, is that every hobby should have room for both. Every Hobby NEEDS room for both. I want beginners, even if I don't really "get" the kids these days as I shake my cane at them. But I also want my events of old farts where we can hang out and do our thing. If you walked into your fancy watch event and demanded they make digital watches cool again because the kids these days are all digital, you'd be laughed out of the event and blacklisted. there is an analogy there that I am butchering, hopefully it comes through. My fight is not with you. My disgust and anger is with (gestures around at everything with a pissed expression on his face) Your kid is above ground, you gotta fight that battle because otherwise you are a sociopath. I get it. Hell, I even hope you win more than you don't. Long after I'm forgotten, I hope that you and yours are surrounded by grandkids laughing at the idiots thinking shit was falling apart. I did. The things I like get destroyed so I started saying no more often, stopped trying to roll the boulder to the top of the hill, stopped fighting for people that hate me unless I write checks, started standing up for my personal well-being and stopped participating. When I try to defend the things I enjoy, I end up screaming past people in barely read internet forums. Call me a bitter old man if you want, hell I sort of agree with you. But I keep coming back to the old cliche of inside of every angry old cunt like me is the corpse of an optimist. NO.Here's where we differ. You want people to enjoy astronomy your way. I want people to enjoy astronomy.
I bear you no malice and zero ill-will and will happily accept your slag as the cost of doing business.
Recalibrate, mutherfucker
And come down from the mountain more often.
LOL. Okay, you do you. I can 100% understand that "up the mountain" is a substantially better time than "down the mountain" and if this wide-ranging conversation has made one thing clear, it's that your life should be more fun. And that's why I'm grinning through your outrage, coming back blow-for-blow and happily joining you in this discussion wherever and however you wanna have it. I haven't misunderstood you once. I've gotten your message every time. I just have the useful perspective of not being you so I can accept or reject your statements based on their intrinsic value, rather than the value you feel they have. There's a whole lot of loss in your life. That's clear. There's a whole lot of loss in your experience. There's a whole lot of loss in your stories. But loss isn't everything. Here, look: The mistake every esoteric hobby makes is presuming that if the old farts hang out in a room, that room will be welcoming to newbs. I don't care what the hobby is, I don't care who the old farts are, jargon exists for in-group bonding and our stories help to say who we are to each other, not to outsiders. The deeper in you are, the more important it is to throw a bone to the naifs. And I think astronomy is in a truly deep-shit place, frankly. I had a telrad 30 years ago and I couldn't find a decent goddamn scope on Amazon. Sure - you chatted with the Orion folx and think those things aren't garbage but they sure don't come across that way. Light pollution is worse now than it was then 'cuz if you can make an LED streetlamp twice as bright for half the voltage, you're gonna put in streetlamps that are 4 times as bright in the name of "safety." Meanwhile "astrophotography" has gone from "hypered film and mirror lockup" to "I spent twelve hours in Photoshop" at which point I can draw a nebula from scratch quicker so the actual joy of finding something is super-divorced from the experience anybody gonna get. Meanwhile the people who can give people these experiences are living every day like it's 1995 and figure the newsletter is too expensive to keep up because stamps are outrageous. What was is dead, man. It sucks. I've played coulda shoulda woulda about any number of things in my life or the world or anywhere else and you gotta deal the hand you're dealt. I'm glad you were raised to fight for people. I was raised that life is nasty, brutish and short and was literally taught that any playground dispute was to be resolved by striking first, striking hard, striking dirty, and continuing to strike until I was physically separated from my target by a superior force. Conflict is resolved through murder and you must do unto others before they do unto you. It's no way to fuckin' live. I've worked really damn hard for my bubble, thanks. It is my triumph. It's also clear. I can see out of it. I can feel the wind, I can feel the heat, and I'm hyper-aware of the rose bushes. So it's not that I don't see your point? It's not that I don't empathize with it? It's not that I don't feel - deeply - every emotion driving it. It's that I've learned to recognize what burdens to lay down. And I want more than anything else from these discussions is get you to consider that point of view.NO.
The disconnect here between you and I, and I take the blame for not conveying my thoughts well enough, is that every hobby should have room for both. Every Hobby NEEDS room for both. I want beginners, even if I don't really "get" the kids these days as I shake my cane at them. But I also want my events of old farts where we can hang out and do our thing.
This, boys and girls, is how a wordsmith comes back at you with the now classic "OMG WHO HURT YOU" retort. Thanks for the chuckle. Everybody's life sucks. Everybody has a life of loss and pain. Working on the Perot campaign a million years ago my eyes were opened to the reality that even the rich kid's lives had troubles and pressures and pain points. Some of us put up with it till we are dropped in a hole in the ground. Some of us suck on a shotgun. some of us take a long drive into a bridge pylon so it looks like an accident. Some of us WAKE THE FUCK UP and decide to not play the game anymore because life is too short to beat your skull against a wall for people that don't really care if you live or die.There's a whole lot of loss in your life. That's clear. There's a whole lot of loss in your experience.
And some of us are less worried about "OMG WHO HURT YOU" and more focused on not letting them hurt us anymore. There's a very simple choice here, and I don't care how many exchanges it'll take to get you to see it: You can live your life based on what was or you can live your life based on what is. You wanna talk old farts? Let's talk old farts. I like these old farts because they arrange speakers that match my interests, they attract collectors and vendors who have cool stuff and they have a wealth of knowledge that I can't easily get anywhere else. And right now, Seattle has two chapters: NAWCC 50 and NAWCC 135. Why? Ask the guy running it now and it's because "some people didn't like meeting on Sundays." Ask the last charter member of NAWCC 135 (1981) and it's because "people didn't want to drive all the way to Seattle." So I ask this guy where exactly 135 is. It's out on the Kitsap Peninsula. How many guys left? Like 8 or so. And this is why they really wish we could have "our" meetings where we were because they were walking distance from the ferry dock which meant it saved them $40 and 2 hours of driving. "Our" is in quotes because are those meetings 135 or 50? Well nobody really knows, and we haven't collected dues for two years because COVID and the simple fact that nobody knows which organization should actually collect them. So on the one hand, we got old farts with beef from 1981 keeping the organization from growing. On the other hand we started doing shit on Zoom anyway so two of our most worthwhile participants are from Oregon and San Diego. The only way this gets resolved well is if me, youngest guy in the club by 30 years, says "hey I'ma take this on and arrange it so that it works for everybody." And the only way I'm going to do that is if I'm not going to get a bunch of blowback for messing with tradition. Because some people can't let go of 40 year old beefs.
Pretty pictures and conceptual art are a core part of NASA's outreach. I used to work at NASA. Got to talk to and work with the illustrators and outreach people who were responsible for the public face of NASA. Much of what they did was work with artists on those aspirational images, like Moon bases, or people living in a space hotel. These artists talked directly to the scientists working on new technologies and concepts, and implemented key elements of those designs into their art. So yeah... it's a painting of a Moon base. But that glove the astronaut is wearing? The wheels on that vehicle in the background? The shape of the roof and walls, and where the door is located on the habitat? Yeah... all that is real. It is stuff being worked on today, for use 25 years in the future. The Hubble images? They come in 4 layers. None of them "color". Artists then work with the scientists to determine the primary composition of, say, a blob on the Horsehead Nebula, and determine it's primarily ionized hydrogen from the infrared signature. Then they look at what color hydrogen might appear to the human eye, and draw in that color for that part of the blob on the nebula. Does it actually look like that? Well, no. But does it inspire a feeling? Does it convey some information? Does it engage the general public with the science, NASA, and the pursuit of high-concept science and missions and aspirational goals? Absolutely. Today's APOD is an excellent example of everything all three of us has said about astro imagery and the general public, in fact. Synchronicity, man.
I feel like "cottage" is on a lake while "cabin" is remote and wooded but not on a lake.
Nearly finished building an extra room on a small annex. Fun time working with a knowledgeable friend, we built it from the bedrock up. Scraped the earth, build foundation walls, leveled gravel, placed insulating sheets, poured concrete floor, framed it, translucent roof, windows, doors, siding largely done. Still to do: finish siding, electrical, insulation, and paneling. It's going to be work room for our puzzle-making business. Very satisfied.
Building on bedrock is ... just such a strange idea to me. I mean... I'm jealous! But having lived on the West Coast for most of my life, with short stints in the flood plains along the Danube and Thames river... building on anything firm is novel to me! Every surface I have ever lived on has been transient and mutable and many of them rearranged themselves under me with some regularity due to earthquakes. "What's that crack in the living room ceiling?" "Ground shifted in the last earthquake. The house now leans an inch to the left on the north side." "Why is there a crack in the concrete floor of the basement?" "Foundation is sinking." "Don't tie those joists firmly to the house. Give them an 1/8th inch play, so when the ground moves it doesn't damage the siding..." Etc... And by the way congratulations on the successful puzzle business!!! I still do the Puzzle-A-Day every single day.... and usually get it... eventually...
I told a neighbor we were going to Greece because we couldn’t find any place hotter without visiting a wildfire. Then wildfires broke out in Greece. Long afternoon siestas watching Olympics, napping, and reading In Xanadu in the hotel room support the This Is Fine hypothesis even when the sunset is blotted out. 
Not sure how planned your trip is or if you're even still there, but I hated Santorini and loved the islands of Paros and Naxos, Naxos more so if you only have one. Athens doesn't need more than a day either.
Work is going well. Just won another big deal that gets our products listed in a rather exclusive buying network of organizations that really want and need our products... and are about to get a BUCKETLOAD of money from the US Government in the new Infrastructure Bill. The timing is sweet. People are singing my praises. Yay. But my wife and I are part of the production team for a huge rugby 7s event happening here in Seattle on August 14/15. Forty five teams from all over the US (500+ players) will be converging for a weekend of more than 100 fifteen-minute games, for the Championship title. It's down to the wire, and we have a lot of work to do both before and during the event, to make sure we pull this off. But we have a LOT of support from the local club rugby teams and community. So it'll all work out because it's all volunteer run, and everyone wants it to be successful... but I forgot how much work producing events was! Sheesh... In other news, I've found an online guitar teacher who plays a Strandberg 8-string guitar as well, and am hoping we can do some Zoom lessons to help me get over the hump with some music theory and song structure stuff, as well as the simple mechanics of controlling this beast of an instrument!
Heritage is a trip. My grandmother was convinced she was a long-lost princess or some shit, mostly because she read two to three harlequin romances a day. Turns out her line through her dad, who was the Lost Dauphin in her head, traces back to a 1620 land grant in Virginia from King Charles I. Meanwhile the racist jew-haters come from down-on-their-luck Belgians. The woman my antisemitic Vassar-grad grand aunt idolizes married twice and got foreclosed on nine months after purchasing a dry goods shop. I grew up being told I was the mongrel of mongrels when in fact I've got the White Privilege Trifecta: Old 300 through one grandparent, Law of Return through another, DAR through a third. The ones that affected pretentious Harvard accents and looked down on everyone else are the Mudbloods. Census records prior to the Civil War tabulate the number of slaves in a household (for purposes of 2/5ths representation - how you like them apples). So far I hain't found none.
between Ancestry.com, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and a few other groups... finding one's roots is getting STUPID easy (and cheap/free) for most people of European descent. It's crazy how much information is out there, and they are cataloging it, linking it, and making it available.
Genealogy and family research is a trip. My dad's side is really straightforward; two farmer kids from Denmark met in the USA, got married, had kids. Their family were farmers in the Slesvig-Holsten area for many generations, with one minor change when they moved to the US of dropping the leading "Y" on the last name and going with the more modern/American "J" instead. My Mom's side was much more pompous... there's a signer on the Declaration of Independence with their last name (my middle name) that they claimed to be a relative.... but they aren't. And there was "George Washington's sword" held proudly by the family... until it turns out that there was a gimmicky thing the US Govt did where they handed out these things to people as tokens or honors, but they had nothing to do with Washington. That part of the family comes firmly from Scotland, with both Buchanan and MacGilivray blood well-established. So yeah. I'm a white northern european dude.
My damn ham string hurts from climbing, and I may be going on my most “serious” alpine rock climb to date next week. Other news: so far I’ve harvested four tomatoes I grew! I want a bigger garden next year.
Do you have other plants, too? I've been growing peppers in pots for a couple years now and have a good harvest of habaneros so far. New this year is my Carolina Reaper that's close to flowering. If I had a home and yard I'd make a garden, too.
That’s really it which is dumb because I have a yard. I am gone so often though that without a timed irrigation system it’s not worth it to grow much, as the plants will just die. That’s a this winter/spring goal, to install such a system! Would love to grow some peppers, maybe not reapers though...
My habaneros are grown from seeds from peppers I got at the grocery store and are at least three years old growing in pots. They're outdoors in the summer and under a grow light in the winter indoors. One of them is a total drama queen if I don't water it all the time, but otherwise I'm led to believe they're pretty easy plants to grow. The reaper was harder to get going; I probably planted ten seeds (from a pepper a coworker grew) and only got the one germination. That one has been fine, though. An irrigation system would be great.
Leaving for Atlanta on Saturday. Lots to be done between now and then. It's a two day drive and I'm excited for it because after months of stressing it's finally here and I can just throw the car in cruise control and not think for two days. Then moving in starts and stress comes roaring back. But Saturday and Sunday morning will be great.