And He's Out!

     Not Elon Musk, who is apparently promising to stop by the White House from time to time in the future and lend Mr. Trump's government his own special stink.  That's practically moot, like bums urinating into a five-alarm fire.

     Nope, the latest departure hadn't even arrived: Jared Isaacman, nominated by then-candidate Trump to be the next NASA Administrator, has been de-nominated after what the administration is calling "a thorough review of past associations."

     As oligarchs go, Isaacman's not an especially bad one: he's a sure-enough pilot, with over 7,000 hours of stick time and is qualified on many military jet fighters, a notoriously unforgiving class of aircraft: there are old fighter pilots and bad fighter pilots, but old, bad fighter pilots are as rare as the dodo.  And he's genuinely space-happy, funding and flying aboard commercial orbital missions.  With Washington picking zillionares for the top jobs, he'd be a natural for NASA, one even I could tolerate.

     So what happened?  Here's a hint: White House assistant press secretary Liz Huston has said, "It’s essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda...."

     Just what did Isaacman do, you ask?  Support Hamas?  Hang out with agents of Red China?  Sneak in illegals to process credit card payments at his company, Shift4?  Cozy up to the Russians to buy MiGs at a discount?

     Um, no.  Open Secrets has the skinny: it seems the gazillionaire has been donating to Democrats at least as often as he has to Republicans, in keeping with America's time-honored tradition of letting rich men buy as many congenial politicians as they can afford.  In particular, he gave to state Democrat parties in Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2024, states with Democratic governors where the Republicans eked out a narrow Presidential victory.  That's too much Mr. Trump and company to bear, and so he's out, despite being reasonably well qualified, a close associate of Elon Musk and promising to go along with the Republican plans for NASA.  He'd've offered to rub red Huntsville, Alabama mud in his navel on stage during that city's Oktoberfest,* if that's what the job required.

     It wasn't enough.  The Party, like its many authoritarian predecessors, requires total commitment; hedging one's bets is grounds for expulsion.

     They'll name someone else for the job, possibly Marco Rubio or Stephen Miller.  Back to the Moon?  I wouldn't bet on it.  And it gets worse: they've hacked severely at NASA's budget.  Goodbye, Moon!
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* Oh yes they do.  You're surprised?  After all those paperclips?  The references to FTL travel via "Gobau-Heim-Droscher space" over at I Work On A Starship didn't happen for no reason, though I don't think any of them got recruited for U. S. rocketry.

The Way Forward

     I've been thinking about what to do next.  Four years of catastrophizing whatever comes out of the White House and Congress -- and the U. S. Supreme Court -- doesn't appeal to me.  Anyone who wants that can find it in plenty of places, often from subject-matter experts.  I'm not going to ignore it, either -- but no Commander in Chief is the boss of me.  All Presidents are temporary employees, hired for a term of four years with a possibility of four more, and then they're out.  And for those four years, the only time they're off the clock is when they're unconscious.  People figure Presidents they dislike are living large, but the job is its own punishment, especially if the office-holder works at it.

     In my opinion, the electorate just handed a machine gun to an angry chimp; but he's got it now and there's no pretending otherwise.  Life goes on nevertheless, with a new and worrying hazard.  There are still meals to be cooked, stories to be written, books to be read, carpentry and electronic projects to be built, maybe even a little sewing.*  I've got a retirement to figure out; I'll be poor no matter what, but if I work it right and the economy doesn't go too nuts, I won't go broke until after I'm dead.

     All of that is of more interest to me, and maybe to my readers, than politics.
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* I keep putting that off, I think for fear of being bad at it.  That's a silly reason; part of learning (or in this case, relearning) a skill is accepting that you're not going to be proficient right away.  The other part?  I bought my little Singer Featherweight folding portable sewing machine so I could easily carry it to visit Mom and sew.  That never happened; I was always too busy and all I have left is regret and memories of good advice. (Prices for these little machines have climbed steadily; Singer made around two million of them but they are in great demand from quilters and anyone who wants a small, full-featured sewing machine.)

I'm Still Here

     Just not blogging much.  You know what I think of current politics, and there's only so much pointing-with-alarm one can do.  TV and movies of my youth led me to believe quicksand would be a far more prominent danger than it has turned out to be, but it also told me that dangerous religious fanatics would reliably be shaggy-bearded, wild-eyed, gaunt, white-haired patriarchs intoning Bible verses in a hollow bass; it told me political extremists would be kooks, bomb-throwers and never, ever gain elective office.

     It was all fatuous nonsense.  Except for the part about quicksand.  We have got problems, and they're coming from newly-emboldened fringes, trying to pass themselves off as the real center.

     Elsewhere, I have been busy with NaNoWriMo (I'm far, far behind schedule) and other writing; but I'm trying to write commercial stuff, which means I can't share it here.  And I am trying to keep up with my job.  My workplace changed greatly right before the pandemic and not, I think, for the better in terms of it being an interesting or engaging place to work.  But it still pays well and offers an excellent benefits package, so I'm sticking with it, enzombified as it now is.

Agency, Plus A Class

      SF writer Mary Robinette Kowal (The Lady Astronaut Of Mars and related books, among others) had a two-hour class or symposium today on story structure for seat-of-the-pants writers.  It was time well spent, including some ways of looking at plot that were new to me.  NaNoWriMo is coming up!

      Meanwhile, having finished The Peripheral, I'm rereading Agency.  It feels like I read it quite some time ago -- but the book was only published in late January of 2020.  I read it right before the COVID-19 pandemic reached the U.S. and began to ramp up, and my employer dispersed staff as much as possible.  It was before the 2020 Presidential election and the disruptive aftermath.  That was a whole different world in many ways and I shouldn't be surprised the time before seems to be a long way away.  I don't suppose we'll ever entirely get back to the way things used to be.

On Writing

      Subtext and implication aside, any sentence has one job.  A few hard-working sentences have two jobs.  But if you find a sentence that has taken on three jobs, that ornate, high-living son-of-a-gun is robbing bread from the mouth of at least one shorter sentence and probably two, and should be made to give them up and adopt a simpler lifestyle immediately.

Interesting Weekend So Far

      Made a little progress on some projects, grilled a nice steak dinner thanks to Tam's generosity (I'm just about out of the $$teak income bracket) and submitted a short story to a contest.  I hadn't sent it anywhere so far and if they bounce it, maybe I'll try elsewhere.

I Hit My Goal

      I have not, however, quite finished the Hidden Frontier story I'm working on.  The story was always going to take a lot of words.  It's at over 14,000 words, over half of that in the last month.

      There are a few more scenes yet to be written.  I have sufficient notes and outline that I know where I am going with them.  Once that's done, it'll be time to step back and have a look at the structure, see what changes need to be made, and start on revision.

      Averaging a page a day is a pace I think I can maintain.  It doesn't sound like much, but it adds up.

Still Writing

      Averaging about 260 words per day in Camp NaNo.  This is not a great pace, but the project I took on was a story that I'd roughly plotted, written the beginning and some of the middle, and had a pretty good idea about the ending.  The first draft was first person and I wasn't happy with it.  So I moved to close third person -- "looking over the protagonist's shoulder" -- and that's been better.

      But it was stalled.  I have been carrying around odds and ends of the manuscript for a couple of years.  Camp NaNo is a reason to do a more complete synopsis and outline, and start putting scenes on paper.

      Something over 12,000 words now, and plenty more to do.

Write, Write, Write

      I have been making good progress so far in "Camp NaNo."  Today may be a setback.  After two and  half days working around people, I'm exhausted.  I'm not used to it any more and I'm not sure I can get used to it again.  Having a large floater whipping around inside my right eye has not helped.  It's worse under office-bright lights.

     One step at a time.  Two and a half days around others is all I needed to do this week, and I did.

NaNoWhat?

      The outfit that runs NaNoWriMo* every November also runs "Camp NaNo" every April and July.  Unlike November, the focus isn't on getting a novel on paper but on any writing project -- you pick it, set your own goals and try to meet them.  They don't charge anything, though they will happily sell you swag and they accept donations.

      This month, I'm participating.  I have been somewhat stalled on a couple of novellas or novelettes or novelobligattos or some such thing, so I picked the one I think is more plotted out and have been gnawing away at it.  Will Camp NaNo help me get it done?  I don't know.  But it's something.

      Both stories are set in the "I Work On A Starship" universe, one in 1961 - 65 or so and the other in the late 1970s, while the covert kinda-sorta war between the "Far Edgers" and Earth was still running.  It's an interesting stretch of time.
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* National Novel Writing Month, for those of us who chew our food instead of bolting it down.

Projects

      I have a set of bookshelves for the living room nearly done -- just a little planing and a lot of sanding left to do.  Hoping to put them in over the long weekend.  They'll replace a couple of narrow bookshelves that will go elsewhere, though just where is an open question.  These will hold reference books -- space travel, science, history, biographies -- plus some of the household collection of ancient laptops and interesting objects.

      Camp NaNo is running this month, a scaled-down version of NaNoWriMo: pick any writing project you need to work on, set a goal, and try to meet it.  My bar is pretty low: one page a day, on a novella that has been in progress for some time.  We'll see how it goes.

The Dreaded End-Of-Year Review

      It's that time again -- because who doesn't want to spend the week between Christmas and New Year's desperately digging for examples of having been useful for something other than keeping the floor from floating away?

      It's Agonizing Self-Appraisal time, which then goes into the corporate hopper and doesn't come back for weeks and weeks, at which time whatever frantic boosterism I come up with now will look pretty threadbare.

      "Due to superior willpower and an overpowering fear of not having medical insurance, overcame the strong impulse to resign before age has turned my mind to mush and my joints to stone," is probably not going to pass muster; it's not really a value-added service for my employer.  Besides, lots of my co-workers are already doing the same thing, and with more dash and élan.  H'mm, "Have not caused an utter disaster so far this year?"  True but moot.

      Better get to digging.  I must be of some use around the place.  Somehow.  I hope.

That Was Interesting

     So I went back to the main campus of the Skunk Workings yesterday afternoon and evening, helping to fill in for a vacationing co-worker.  My old desk was buried under nineteen months of trade journals, which I promptly threw away.  My spare fountain pen was still there, along with a few hastily-abandoned projects.  Most of them had been made moot by subsequent changes. (And I just realized I left one that I had intended to pick up.  Well, later.)

     One of the strangest things was walking in the formerly somewhat dingy employee entrance and finding the walls shouting at me!  There's an ongoing construction project on the second floor, with the usual mess, mud and clutter behind the building.  Perhaps in an effort to make up for it, the corridors just inside the employee entrance have been brightened up with colorful wallpaper and giant-sized encouraging slogans.  It's cheerful enough, but if you're expecting well-scuffed neutral tan walls, it's something of a shock.

     The one-way halls of the early pandemic seem to have been forgotten.  Mask-wearing is required in shared areas and people were generally diligent about it.  Water coolers and several doors have foot controls -- a simple (but clever) handle for the doors and nice dentist office type pedals for water.  The pandemic capper was when I visited the washroom, to find this sign on every other door:
DO NOT USE THIS STALL
FOR SOCIAL DISTANCING
     It's good to see the Department of Ambiguity is still on the job!

     Still pretty much the same old place,  though emptier and a little sadder these days.  I started my career in a part of my line of work which had been much larger, and facilities showed it.  I moved to a different segment of the industry, which was bustling at the time.  It appears I'll reach retirement much as I began, in the grand remains of a prior age.  Here's hoping it lasts long enough for a graceful exit.

     The changes in my workplace make writing I Work On A Starship stories a bit more of a challenge.  Increasing automation and improved equipment will tend to shrink the technical and operating crew of the USAS Lupine, too -- not as much or as quickly, of course, thanks to the sheer size of the starship and the essential nature of the geekery, but it's still inevitable.

Lots To Do

      Much to do, little time in which to do it. 

But Gee, What If We Fight?

      Nitwittery abounds when people try to predict the future -- and knowing a lot doesn't seem to help.  Hand humanity a new technology or idea, and people will take it and figure out things that the inventor never intended.  (Mass production lines give you cheap cars.  Cheap cars give you drive-in theaters and carhops and eventually, drive-through fast food.  Cars with bench seats give you kids making out in secluded locations.  This gives you all sorts of aftereffects.  And so on.  But who saw all that hitched to the first Model T?)

      Space travel has its own predictors of the future, back as far as Jules Verne and then H. G. Wells, and plenty of engineers not long after.  Fill your tank with Cavorite and settle the Universe!  The softer sciences were on that train, too (we can probably lay attracting their attention more at Mr. Wells's door than M. Verne's).  This (eventually) results in think-pieces like "Why We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space."

      Tl;dr?  That's okay.  The upshot is that the fellow who wrote it worries we -- and/or our institutions -- will mutate and this will result in distrust, wars and general awfulness.

     There are a couple of problems with this line of thought -- first, we've already done just that and learned to cope (however badly).  Second, it's straight-up racist.

      Yeah, yeah, I know, overused word, et cetera, et cetera.  It still means something.  The central thesis behind "We Should Think Twice..." comes crashing down here in the United States when you turn on your radio to listen to the jazz station while you drive your German car past the Japanese grocery store on your way to the Italian restaurant while remembering the wonderful French pastry you enjoyed at breakfast (and that's just in my neighborhood.  Yours may offer even more choices).  Yes, we fight -- we also raid one another's fridges.  If you can drink milk as an adult without discomfort after, some of your ancestors were milk-sucking mutants who drank from their herd animals instead of making cheese -- and lactose tolerance is a trick our species has worked out at least twice, in multiple places, with several different creatures, from goats to camels to cattle.  Humans don't all look alike.  Our cultures vary.  This does not doom us to nothing but an endless succession of wars: we trade.  We marry.  We steal -- er, "appreciate" -- one another's music and cuisine, fashion and religions.  

      Our descendants might do the same thing in space?  Well, so what.  Space is vast and travel is slow.  Barring someone figuring out how to cheat at physics (unlikely but humanity's full of surprises), interplanetary war is iffy and interstellar war is damned near impossible.  Sorry space-opera fans: it's too far to go, especially when you have a whole solar system right at home, full of sunlight, water (there's ice all over the place), metal and other useful material.  In space, we're more likely to be insulated from one another by distance and more likely to swap low mass, speed-of-light-transmissible songs, books and ideas than raw materials.  And the more widely humanity spreads through the universe, the more likely there will be people around to do the swapping.  Maybe they'll be blue-skinned, live on sugar water and smell terrible -- think what a nightmare monster you'd be at the court of Tiglath-Pileser, any of 'em, with your Raybans, Spotifty-blaring iPhone and crazy-tall height compared to most of them.  And that's before we get to what you're wearing (you left the house in that?) and how odd you'd smell to them.

     Let's get out there and make new homes in space.  Plenty of other people will stay home.

Sturgeon's Law And The Recommendation Engine

      A modern truism holds the "The Internet drives us apart" or "Social medial encourages extremism."  I think it's at least partially true -- but why does this happen, and how?

      It may be the intersection of two things: recommendation engines and Sturgeon's Law.

      Recommendation engines?  The do great things when you're looking for a film or TV show to stream -- Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or whoever has been keeping track of what you've been watching, and provides a whole category of "things you might like."  The more you watch, the better those suggestions match your tastes. 

      Hooray, right?

      Well--  Musical acts (for instance) get sorted pretty severely.  To get onto the machine's to-be-recommended to people who like X, Y and/or Z list, they've got to be objectively good.  Untalented acts never break that threshold.  Unskilled musicians never break the threshold.

      That "threshold" is where Sturgeon's Law comes in.  The law itself cautions that "90% of everything is crap."  One of the origin tales has Theodore Sturgeon on a panel of judges reading short stories submitted for publication at a science fiction convention; the slush piles are high and the material is, well, not so great.  One of the judges sets down an especially bad example and says, "Most of these stories are crap!"

     Sturgeon agrees, "Sure.  But ninety percent of everything is crap."

      That's one version.  James Gunn remembers something both kinder and more pointed.

      Music is pretty well sorted for quality.  Films and movies, for me it's close but not great; there's a lot of chaff to sift through.  Book recommendations from the smart software are even more hit-or-miss.

      But head off in a less mass-audience direction and things get strange fast -- and that's a problem.  My Hidden Frontier stories rely on playing fast and loose with history; the FTL drive is independently discovered at least three times and stolen twice, and some of that happens during WW II and just after.  It only takes one video or web page about "WW II flying saucers" or the post-war Byrd Antarctic Expedition to end up with some very strange stuff coming up next, entirely ahistorical and often pushing offensive political ideas or worse.  And letting those play just points you at even weirder and crazier stuff. When people say, "It must be true!  I researched it on the Internet," that's the kind of "research" you can end up with: 90% of those recommendations point to utter crap.

      The software can only work with what's there.  Flood the topic with crazy, conspiracy-theory stuff and made-up revisionist history, and where do the recommendation engines aim you?  Yep -- right at it. Get two layers in and you're in Crazytown.

      Be mindful of it. It's a bad neighborhood.
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* As an experiment, I started with "Six Underground," got Zero7 after that, then a Chet Faker video I'd never heard but enjoyed (not what it first appears -- there's narrative depth there, also considerable degree-of-difficulty points), followed by Talking Heads "Psycho Killer" and White Stripes "Seven Nation Army."  The Rolling Stones are up next.  It's pretty good guessing.

Could Not Have Made Him Up

      Alexander G. Weygers was a man right out of the Hidden Frontier.  Have a look -- and scroll down for his fabulous flying vehicles.

Arrgh, Grr, Etc.

     My desktop computer having been afflicted with a world-class case of the slows for reasons unknown, I'm coming to you live and direct from the MacBook on my bedroom dressing-table/desk.

     This is supposed to be my quiet place for writing anyway, an escape from frustration that I badly need just now.  So it is serving its intended purpose.

     The I Work On A Starship universe is badly overdue for more stories. The good news is that I am working on them -- the bad news being that it is going very, very slowly. I ran aground on a reef called "seat-of-the-pants," writing with no plot or outline. When it works, it works well -- and "Another Day" is a good example of that -- but when it doesn't, or if you lose the thread, it's a struggle getting back on track.

Monday Already

     The long weekend is ended.  At least I got a few things done -- the biggest one being the fallen leaf accumulation in the front yard is raked up and the patio is raked clear.  I did a lot of laundry (though there is more yet to do) and even cooked beef stew.  If my day goes as planned, I'll have the last of it for lunch today.

     I even changed out the water fountain for the cats.  I couldn't remember where I had put the other one, but it turned out to be in plain sight, on the bottom shelf of a set of rolling shelves.

     It's more and more difficult to make myself leave the house.  I have fought social anxiety for years and it doesn't get any easier.  But, "no bucks, no Buck Rogers," or any other science fiction, either.

Furlongs Per Fortnight

     At work, the project I have been working on -- a replacement for the auxiliary or maneuvering stardrive, pretty much -- incorporates subsystems from all over the world: the control system, power amplifier and cabinetry was designed in Japan and built in Brazil; the exciters, the very heart of the electronics, were designed and built in Massachusetts and the output section has a high-power coaxial switch from New Jersey;* a multi-kiloWatt test load built in Ohio and a lovely RF filter and aluminum extrusion frame† made in Italy.

     If you're thinking that means at least two different measuring systems -- if not three, there's no telling what those heathens in Massachusetts might be up to -- then you're right; but this is 2019, standard equipment racks everywhere use 19" wide panels in heights that are dimensioned in units of 1.75" which everyone calls "1 RU" (so as to avoid admitting that they're measured in inches), and for everything else, you can look up the conversion online if you can't do it in your head.  Modern CNC machine tools move in incredibly fine increments and unless you measure it carefully, you can't tell the difference between something that was milled in millimeter-decimals or done in thousandths of an inch.  Right?

     Right?

     Well, usually.  That big coaxial switch -- and it's not even that big, compared to the typical sort in the stardrive business -- hangs from a mirror-milled slab of aluminum nearly an inch thick, supported by four nice, fat 3/8"-16 bolts--

     That is, it would be, if some machinist in Italy hadn't decided it would be better to be a few thou' under rather than over.

     Picture the scene: here's Your Correspondent, having admired the lovely slab of aluminum (vertical, by the way, and at a height to make a nice mirror) and the precise, countersunk holes through it; and having looked over the well-crafted coaxial switch; and having discovered mounting hardware was inadvertently omitted, she has located stainless-steel bolts of the proper thread and length: there she is, awkwardly supporting the heavy, fragile switch in one hand and trying to run a bolt through the shiny slab with the other, and the blamed thing won't fit.

     It looked like it would fit.  So obviously right I hadn't even questioned it.  I set the switch back down on the workbench and checked all four mounting holes with the bolt: it won't go though.  Will. Not.  Oh, almost.  The chamfered end of the bolt kind of fits; but there's no wiggling or lining it up perfectly to get it to pass through, it's a no-go.  Got out my cheap plastic dial caliper and measured: the hole is a 32nd under.

     One thirty-secondth of an inch less than clearance for a 3/8" bolt and I'm at a dead stop.  You can't redrill that with a hand drill; it will stick and bind and chew up the hole, if it doesn't break the drill first.  ("Drill bit," most people will call it, which is technically wrong.)  I can probably take the slab off the frame and drill it in the press, but even then, odds are good a twist drill will jam up.  A step drill would do the job -- if the hole wasn't deeper than the height of the steps, which it is.

     Most standard, tapered hand reamers used in electronic work top out at 3/8", a standard bushing size for volume controls and quarter-inch jacks.  I've got reamers.  I can use them to work the holes to size.  But I found the problem a half-hour before quitting time and the reaming will be very, very slow.

     Guess what I'll be doing today?

     And just as well: the counterbore won't clear a hex-head bolt anyway; it requires a capscrew head.  I ordered them yesterday and with luck, they should arrive this morning.

     Measure twice, then think it through and measure again.  Then cut -- once.  Or someone else will have to.
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* And I'll take the opportunity for a shout-out to the good people at Myat, who make a wide variety of high-power, arcane coaxial RF transmission line and related components.

† T-slotted aluminum extrusion is one of the more versatile notions ever dreamed up.  The most common version is square, with a T-slot down each face and an X-shaped cross-section.  A huge variety of fasteners and attachments let you build almost any shape while making only square cuts.  Available from multiple makers in inch and metric dimensions, in sizes from miniature up to 3" square and beyond, it's fairly standardized, strong and looks nice. The "frame" I refer to is nearly six feet tall, four feet wide and 30" deep, and arrived flat-packed like an Ikea cabinet.  Here's one U. S. source of the extrusions.