The Next Apollo? Yeah right!

I recently listened to a Science Friday (NPR) podcast about innovation in American science. Their premise, in this episode, is that the United States is not sowing the seeds of innovation, by investing in basic scientific research, and is, instead, "icing the cake" that was baked 30 years ago.

The show's guest, Judy Estrin, claims that the internet couldn't have been invented without the work that was done decades earlier. While that's true (we do stand on the shoulders of giants), the way she talks about it makes it sound like someone planted a little seed labeled "Internet" 30 years ago, which then germinated at a later time. Purportedly, all we have done since then is just "icing". Well, how does she know?! How does she know that no research from the last ten years will germinate in 30 years? Lots of topics are researched, and few of those things are immediately and obviously useful (see, for example, Americium for smoke detectors). That's the point of basic research. I'm not debating its necessity; just that we don't always know what will bear fruit, including some of the "short-sighted frosting" of the last decade.

Among the solutions Estrin proposes for stimulating basic research and convincing the general public of its worth is that we need our generation's Sputnik and the equivalent Apollo program in response. Okay, superficially, that sounds good. Let's manufacture an international "crisis" and then spend billions of dollars to make sure we're ahead. Hmm, it seems that was tried earlier this decade... Seriously, though, if you're going to spend that money, you need a concrete and achievable goal that people are excited about. Estrin's idea: energy independence and a green revolution. Are you kidding me?!? These _are_ worthy goals, but they're NOT sexy! Getting a person in orbit? Definitely thrilling. Being the first people to walk on another celestial body? Certainly pulse-pounding. Moreover, these were tangible goals with a clear outcome (perhaps that was why the Apollo program decayed after the first few moonwalks?). And, finally, the Apollo program had the big, bad Soviets as villains thus keeping the all-important funds flowing. For Estrin's idea to work, someone needs to brand the green movement differently and give us a worthy opponent.

Edit: Loren pointed out the Crazy Green Idea competition. The Reduce Home Energy entry, by encouraging competition between communities, may provide a worthy opponent. The trick will be to make the goals tangible enough for everyone to buy into.

Damn, that's cool!

Your link of the day: Image processing in Mathematica. It all seems well-integrated into the MMA interface too.

It reminds me of how us physics majors in undergrad joked that e-mail capability was all MMA needed to be the only program we'd ever use again. Makes me wish I had a version of Mathematica newer than 4.2.

State of Le Pascal

"State of the _____" addresses are usually too long, so I'll keep mine brief.

1) I'm alive.
2) I'm still in graduate school, pushing experiments to completion, so I can (maybe, hopefully?) earn my PhD by the summer of 2009.
3) My hamstring is doing better thanks to extreme physical therapy (actually, over an hour of stretching per day).
4) I'm playing ultimate and soccer infrequently, but at least I'm out there often enough to subdue my competitive urges.
5) My girlfriend is awesome!
6) We're considering our options for places to move to when I finish my PhD and she begins hers.
7) It seems I'm spending New Year's in New Orleans. Good or bad idea?
8) I got a new plant recently. It's cool because its leaves (!) are the colorful bits.



Bonus item for my tech=oriented audience members (I do flatter myself by believing I have an audience of 3): my pictures webpage has its own RSS feed now.

Photographic Evidence

Yes, I have pictures. Lots of them. And they're forthcoming. Thanks for your patience.

Edit (2008/09/15). Here are Hurricane Ike pictures.

A Green, Powerless World

The rest of the day was a strange mix of manual labor (cleaning up), exploration (biking south to my apartment and Rice), and communicating with our extended circle of friends and family (lots of phone calls).

Not in any particular order, we managed to pile all the branches in one place on the lawn, we cleared several storm drains of leaves, and we raked lots and lots of those pesty leaves. Communicating with everyone by phone was a strangely cathartic experience. It's hard to convey the mixed sense of awe and relief that one has coming out of a storm like Ike. It will have to suffice to say that we appreciate the kind thoughts of all our friends and families.

The exploration part of the day deserves a bit more explication. We avoided clogging the roads with our car, opting instead to bike to check on my apartment just north of Rice. What we saw on the way was not unlike what we saw near Loren's house: many branches were down and some entire trees had fallen, but not too many vehicles or houses were directly damaged. This isn't to say there weren't such tragedies. For instance, the BMW crushed by the fallen oak that did manage to miss the corner of the house on the way down. Or the dead end street cul-de-sac blocked by five fallen trees. Or the corner of another house clipped by yet another tree. And wet, green leaves, though not tragic, seemed to coat everything, everywhere and provide some iconic definition of this storm to remember it by.

The number of people out and about was astounding. For once, many people (though there were numerous obnoxious exceptions) went without the use of their cars. There were far more pedestrians and bicyclists than we're accustomed to seeing. Some people were simply gawking. Others were already hard at work clearing their yards and streets of Ike's detritus. Many people seemed inclined to chat about their experiences. If there's any redeeming social effect from Ike, it will be people having met their neighbors from outside the confines of an air conditioned vehicle. Hallelujah!

I also found the variety of reactions to clean up interesting. Some people just went to work. Others gawked and figured someone else would come take care of it. Others, like us, did a little bit of both. In our case, we hope that the city of Houston or the power company, will be able to take care of the still hanging, but broken branch near the power line. We did clear some storm drains and concentrate the mess into piles, but we still have a lot of work to do. The branches will need to be cut, and that fig tree will need to be sliced and diced for removal.

Finally, I'll tell you the story of two worlds. I intend no judgment of either because both groups of people worked hard today. The driveway of an apartment complex two doors down on our block was entirely blocked in by a fallen, 100 foot tree. The trunk was solid and there were numerous branches. A group of men went at the trunk with machetes flashing and handsaws jamming. Opposite our backyard, one block away, a smaller, but not insubstantial, tree had fallen over the neighbor's car. One man calmly brandished a chainsaw as he cleared his driveway.

The Aftermath

It was too quiet. That's what finally woke me up around 8:30. It was still raining, and the wind was still blowing, but at a dramatically reduced intensity.

Loren and I surveyed the house, and its environs, with some trepidation. First the back yard, with the fig tree. And the driveway with the cars. At first glance, all was well, though the fig tree definitely lacked about half its foliage. It was only later that we realized that the fig tree had actually broken off at its base, and keeled over in a way that made it look, from our vantage point on the porch, like it had only lost its top. There were several branches in the driveway, but nothing too crazy.

In the front, the house survived the pecan tree dropping about half of its midsize or smaller branches. Somehow, none of these branches landed on the roof, though they were strewn all over the front lawn and driveway. One branch hung limply over the street itself, broken, but not fallen. It was an impressively depressing sight, yet we possessed a certain sense of glee that the house (and we) had survived. We could only hope that Galveston, and other southeast Houston communities had fared okay as well.

Finally, the leaves. Did I mention the leaves that were everywhere? There was a veritable layer of green covering the deck, the driveway, the roof, the street... The trees weren't quite stripped bare, but I'm betting that there'll be about half the amount of shade there once was when the sun returns to Houston.

After a quick phone call to our loved ones on the west coast to announce that we wouldn't, after all, be moving on to the next life at this time, we fell into a much deeper sleep until late morning.

Ike's Visit

I lost my bet with Loren. The power went out at 1:10 am, only 20 minutes before the time when Loren supposed it would go. I guessed 11:30, so I was way off. :) We didn't, as I suggested, immediately break out the left over chocolate ice cream from the freezer. Pity.

By this time, the wind had picked up a lot, and it was raining hard. Staring out the window was almost irresistible at this point, even if all we could see were the shadows of trees whipping in the wind. Some places in Houston must still have had electricity, for the sky had an eerie gray-yellow back glow to it. Sleep was elusive. Too much nervous energy, really, coupled with a lack of information now that the power had gone out. We slipped in and out of consciousness and woke often, each time to the warm, stale air that filled a house that was all shut up with no air circulation.

We had set the alarm for about 5:30 am, some time in the middle of the period we knew the forecast had specified as having maximum winds. I woke up to the alarm, groggy as could be, having slept as well as if I were in the middle of the woods with no mosquito netting. The howling of the wind outside the house stirred me to action, though. I peered cautiously out the back window: some horizontal rain, lots of trees bending to and fro, and the omnipresent howl of the wind. That was the "safe" side of the house, though.

All the action lay at the front of the house, where the pecan tree loomed over us. Again, I peered out the window between the mini blinds. It seemed to me that more sky was visible between the branches of the tree...perhaps we were missing some branches. The street was completely flooded, and the rain was pretty much all horizontal. That was all the impression I allowed myself in the 15 seconds I looked out the window. The pecan tree's remaining branches waved about all too ominously.

Satisfied that the house was intact and that we were safe for the time being, we went back to sleep, or at least what passed for sleep the night of Ike.