ptalk > October 2003

Jellied Cats

Check out the animated short “Perpetual Motion”. It won an Academy Award.

Electronic disobedience

A group of students are practicing “electronic civil disobedience” to raise awareness of issues with both electronic voting and abuse of the DMCA as a tool for censorship.

Walking in the moonlight

I had a chance to reflect today on the events reported in Shoot the Moon. One of the most important aspects of what Dr. Houbolt did was that he stuck to his guns, and did not let the momentum of the NASA bureaucracy take it down the wrong path. Too many people today just go with the flow, leaving us with a load of mediocrity.

Fink Panther

Panther is out with X11, but they forgot to X-enable the emacs. Follow the instructions at Tales of the Racoon Fink to get yourself a working emacs.

Cow flop

Curses, foiled again!

Cowabunga

Do you think playing cowboy songs all day was the trick? What’s your favorite cowboy song?

Phone Home

Just had to change my phone number from 508-245-1487 to 774-454-8493. Why? What happened to number portability? Well, here’s the dark side of number portability: your land phone company will tell you that the regulators have declared that they must treat calls to cell phones as if the cell phone were based physically where the “office code” (that’s the middle 3 digits of your phone number) is tariffed. For my cell phone that was Bridgewater, which is a long distance call from Plymouth; so all of a sudden it was costing me 10¢ a minute to call my cell from my home.

What to do? Well my land phone company (Verizon) suggests that I call my cell phone company (Verizon, no relation, believe it or not) and ask them for a new number that would be local to Plymouth. Turns out they are happy to oblige. I don't suppose this has anything to do with the fact that the 508 area code, despite being newer than 617 is still an old code and is popular and full. I don't suppose it has anything to do with the new number being in the new, unpopular overlay code 774.

Snooping around on the net I stumble across some information from Bellcore (you remember Bell Telephone, which was broken up by deregulation) which is the company that makes sense out of all the various phone companies by keeping the master list that tells what physical switch handles each phone number. These are the guys who presumably everyone will pay when number portability goes into effect. These guys are the Verisign of the phone system, except they have been in business much longer, and they quietly do their job, efficiently, and presumably for a nice fat fee, since everyone has to use their service.

What did I stumble upon? Just this amusing anecdote: Where do you suppose my new 774 number is routed to? You guessed it, the same physical switch in Bridgewater that my old phone number was assigned to, it’s just that my new number is tariffed as if it were physically in Plymouth.

Saddle Sox

I’m listening to “cowboy” music today, hoping it will help the Sox get back in the saddle…

Shoot the Moon¹

Dr. John C. Houbolt

I’m travelling today to Champaign, Illinois to the University to participate in a celebration of my father-in-law, Dr. John C. Houbolt, who is donating his papers to the university library. John (whose pronounces his last name as if it rhymes with cobalt, despite what the university site says) is an unassuming man, his name is not the first that comes to mind when thinking about the moon landing², but he was actually a key figure in our getting there.

LOR Sketch

Dr. Houbolt did not invent the concept of “Lunar Orbit Rendezvous”³, but he was an avid mathematician, and in researching and teaching himself orbital mechanics (in order to teach others, including the astronauts), he realized that the concept of orbital rendezvous (Earth or Lunar) had far-reaching ramifications in simplifying the task and reducing the cost of getting to the moon. He felt this idea was so important that it became his mission to champion the idea.

John F. Kennedy

Dr. Houbolt promoted the concept of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous by demonstrating the weight and cost savings that would permit using existing booster technology, as opposed to the “direct ascent”⁴ method which relied on developing new boosters, or the Earth Orbit Rendezvous⁵, which required twice as many conventional boosters. Although he was mathematically sure his plan was the best, bureaucracy, politics, and fear (of losing the astronauts should the rendezvous in lunar orbit fail) hindered his proposal.

First Step

Eventually Dr. Houbolt had to resort to going around the chain-of-command to get his point across. Coincidentally, his actions occurred just as President Kennedy set the challenge to America to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Through Dr. Houbolt’s persistence, the bureaucracy was finally turned in the right direction, and at 16:17EDT on 20 July 1969, mankind first set foot on the Moon, using Houbolt’s Lunar Orbit Rendezvous plan.⁶

While John’s promotion of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous is perhaps his most well-known accomplishment, his career as Chief Aeronautical Scientist at NASA was long and productive. We have been told by the University, that his papers represent the foremost modern historical collection of their library.