Thoughts Before Sleep

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!

People Obviously Don't Understand Government

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.

New Commercial Spaceflight Reaches New Heights

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 Meetings are so Fun

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).

Good Packaging for Once

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?

My Issues with GSB Come to a Head

Ok, I'm trying to sort of out some different thoughts, so here's my story from today, start to end.

As I picked up the Iowa State Daily today and started to browse the stories between classes, I noticed a preliminary listing of Student Org budgets in the back of the paper. Interesting to me, as I have been a treasurer for quite a few years of my time at ISU and I of course have interest in the Space Society budget I helped formulate. So, I was a bit surprised to see that the budget that I'd confirmed the other day had a trip and our safety items cut to come to a balance of $1341.64, mostly for a new rocket system some members wanted to work on, had been cut down to $435.64. I was a bit confused because while $1300 is a lot of money, it's a lot less than the $2200 we asked for and the hardware for rocketry is expensive (these budgets don't include rocket fuel and transportation to launch sites folks).

Anyways, needless to say I was somewhat annoyed. There must be some amazing new expenses for GSB that have brought our allocations from $1,738.47 to $1,881.50 to $1,795.53 to $435.64. It's not like the club is doing any less than it always has to teach students about rocketry and astronomy. So I started looking. Now, keep in mind that I have been a critic of some of the things GSB funds for a long time before now (as soon as I learned GSB funded them), but haven't made much of a move to remedy the situation. So, maybe now the time has come that the junk stuffed into the GSB budget has to go. So I started to do what I love to do: look at the numbers.

After classifying each of the 2011 budgets as budgets for student organizations, student services, magazines, events, or other kinds of groups I have a few findings to present. Did you know that while when added together, Student Organizations' total expenses make up 18% of all requesting groups' expenses, but they only receive 4% of the total funds in the end? Where does that money go? It gets tacked on to pay for the student services GSB pays for like the Lawyer we have for advice, the counseling clinic we have for students, and Couple/Family Therapy (didn't know we had that one). It also goes to pay for events like the annual Rodeo, SUB entertainers, Winterfest, and subsidized tickets for Stephens Auditorium for students (to the tune of $80k). I also didn't realize that GSB has for years been providing a lot ($25k) of funding to the campus YMCA and YWCA, groups that I don't even know what they do.

I have to run to class soon, so I'm going to make this thought simple. At a recent conference for the Space Society I latched on to a phrase someone said. He said, "[our organizations] teach students what they don't learn in class". My feeling is that the funds provided to GSB should be used for groups and services that provide a fun and different learning experience outside of class. I am very in favor of groups like the Committee on Lectures etc, but costs like the $250,000 spent on a full time lawyer who can only give advice to students who ask is a unnecessary expense I feel. I think GSB should solidify what they do fund for students with students' money rather than providing the most money to services they feel are useful to the most students, though that may not enhance our learning. So anyhow, here's the short list of services/groups that I disapprove of (this is my opinion alone and probably would be my opinion even if I was not affiliated with groups like the Space Society):

• Student Legal Council
• ISU Theater
• YMCA
• YWCA
• Couple and Family Therapy
• FOCUS
• Performing Arts Council (maybe)
  
• Student Activities Center (SAC) (should come from elsewhere)
• Student Union Board (SUB) (Entertainment is good, but shouldn't be GSB's purpose)
• Winterfest (Social Event)
• Cyclone Rodeo (I was fine when this didn't go through allocations like a club)
• 4 Different Magazines + the Daily (feel that costs there could be cut somehow)
  

Don't Fear What You Don't Understand

These days I feel like many decisions made around me both locally and globally are made for crappy reasons. I haven't written a blog post in a while so figured I'd jot down some thoughts.

I feel that many decisions that are made on a personal and global level these days come at least to some extent more from fear than from understanding and logic. The country's reaction to 9/11 was almost animal in striking out in fear at the chosen perpetrator of the attacks. The latest GSB election here on campus was won by two engineering students and I feel that much of the reason they claimed victory was not on their merits, but on the fact that they were engineers and because we are an engineering campus and engineers understand engineers, that is how many of them voted. Lastly I am disappointed by the fear and prejudice against the underclassmen in Harwood during Kaleidoquiz this year.

On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by men seeking to strike terror into the nation (aka "terrorists"). Those men undoubtedly accomplished that mission, killing thousands, and making millions more people feel vulnerable and unsafe. Of course, in response, the US quickly lashed out at the home of these men (Afganistan) to destroy that threat. If the thought process was more logical, they would realize that you can't destroy a threat AFTER it has manifested into an attack. It does make me wonder though what would happen if Mr. Bush would have more cordially worked with Muslim leaders to analyze the difficulties posed by radical practitioners of Islam. A following metered or joint response by the US/Allies and Muslim nations against Mr. Bin-Laden and Co would have probably been much more effective in helping to eliminate future threats from those terrorists and improve US-Middle East relations.

Not only in the ISU student government, but also in national elections (Bush v. Kerry etc) it seems like fear of "the other side" has been taking a stronger hold than the concept of voting for wise and successful candidates. I can't necessarily argue that Bush isn't smart (grad of Yale and Harvard) or that Luke Rolling isn't wise (he probably is), but I will always be opposed to voting with no care for the merits of the candidate you have chosen but only because of that candidate's affiliation or because you dislike the opposing candidate. This is not what voting is for. Maybe it should be part of grade school requirements that students be instructed on how to vote properly, maybe more aptly "why one should decide to choose a certain candidate". The reasoning behind many voters' choices bothers me and should bother you too.

Lastly, I am very disappointed that so many people and so much talent and wisdom decided to abandon the Harwood KQ team this year. I definitely hope that a strong e-mail from the president of Harwood is not the reason for much of this behavior. I know how many of those people enjoyed their time living in Harwood and now have lifetime friendships or even have chosen partners based on all that they did together on Harwood. I wish that many of them would attempt, as I have, to give back to that group the same knowledge, stories and skills given to them by those that came before them. I feel like we had a great time participating in KQ, but most of my tired happiness and feelings of accomplishment were dashed by the rude words of some folks I ran into from the other team later on Sat night. The worst feeling I gleaned was that the work of this team of ex-Harwoodians was a "fuck you" directed at Harwood because they didn't understand the feelings of some of the returning sophomores on Harwood about KQ from the experience of the year before.

This is why I urge anyone willing to read this post to not fear and reject that which they don't understand. Whenever you don't understand something or someone, seek to learn more about them and who they are and what they feel rather than rejecting them or it out of hand. Moderating reactions to another person's action can go a long way. I encourage you to not accept fearful reasoning and to react carefully in whatever you do today and henceforth.