Author: Gary

Most of the people I’ve spoken with about my mid-life decision to go back to school have sort of had an odd look on their face when I told them what I’d be getting a degree in. Once your over 30, the only thing you go to school for is an MBA or maybe a law degree…..maybe finish your PhD. Getting a degree in Astrophysics of all things really seems out from left field…..and it is.

I’ve been fascinated with space since I was little. I can remember television images of Skylab astronauts and I remember watching morning television of the first images to come back from the Viking I. I absorbed everything about astronauts and space that I could. When in high school, I tried to get an experiment on the space shuttle, but my teacher wasn’t very supportive of it, so it never happened. (My project by the way, was to test methane production from microbes. No clue if it has ever been done.)

After that, I got hooked on debate and followed a path that took me down the road of economics (which I still enjoy). Something always nagged at me for not taking physics classes in college. After college, I said if I had to do it all over I’d either a) debate hard core and screw my classes, or b) not debate at all and major in physics.

Now, sitting at the age of 34 I’m going to do what I have wanted to do since I was 7. Everyone regrets what they never did later in life. I figure this way I can remove one regret off the list.

On a related note, President Bush announced a new space program this week. I watched the speech live on NASA TV at Apple Valley. I don’t go into politics too much on this website, but I think I’ll touch on it some here.

I like the plan in spirit, but if I was in congress I wouldn’t vote for it.

This program is just going to be a longer, more expensive version of Apollo. We’ll go, land, say something profound, and come back. Whoever’s foot touches the Martian soil first will go in the history books. Whoever touches second will go in the footnotes.

Money for space should go where it will get the biggest bang for the buck. If we have grand visions of colonization and terraforming, the first step is going to be to find a cheap and efficient way to get into orbit. Until we do that, nothing else matters and anything else will be too expensive to do on a regular basis. One positive result of this might be getting momentum to finally scrap the shuttle. Its 30 year old technology. Its expensive to fly and hasn’t come close to meeting its goal of regular flights.

The most profitable thing in space right now are satellites. Anything that can make that cheaper and easier can be a business. Anything that can do that, is also the first step towards long term colonization of space. We’ve taken the metaphor of Columbus and other explorers way to literally. Space is not the Americas. For starters, the new world had an atmosphere and people already living there. It required no more energy to sail the Atlantic than it did to reach the far points of the known world. Getting out of orbit needs more than tall masts and sails.

Communication satellites, GPS, and remote sensing have more than proven the value of putting stuff in space. The priority now should be on being able to do that cheaply and easily. The space shuttle isn’t it. The path to Mars isn’t a base on the moon, its developing craft to shuttle between stations at various orbits. Its developing techniques for conducting large scale engineering in space. Its getting down pat all the stuff we need to do close to home.

In the mean time, there is plenty that can be done in the name of science without sending people to mars. As the technology improves, the cost of sending probes and landers all over the solar system should get cheaper. We’ve learned a great deal from Hubble, and more telescopes at Lagrangian points would be even better. This approach would result in significantly more science, at a substantially lower cost.

This program will not result in a permanent moon base. I say the odds are good we will never make it to mars in 20 years. We are going to be facing a big demographic crunch in the next 20 years, and we have no way to pay for it.

Some good news:

1) I don’t have to take any liberal arts requirments, whatsoever.
2) Most of my math classes have transferred such that I’ll only have to take one lower level course.

My two classes for this semester are “Introduction to Astronomy” and “Sequences, Series, and Foundations”, the one math class I need. Given all the stuff I got taken care of, I can take 1/2 the classes and still finish the degree in the time a normal undergrad would.

I’m sort of excited.

I am officially a student at the University of Minnesota. The process of taking classes is dizzying compared to what you had to do at Macalester. In a small liberal arts school, your options were pretty limited. At the U, its crazy. Each department lists their own requirements in their own way. There are different colleges within the University, and different departments within the colleges. As of yet I have no clue how my past credits will transfer, but I find it funny that I could get a degree (with 3 majors nonetheless) from a semi-elite liberal arts college, yet possibly not fulfill all the liberal arts requirements at a big land grant university.

I’ve signed up for one course, but I think I screwed up already (which doesn’t bode well for me I guess) and signed up for the wrong course. I’m prepared to take 2 courses this semester, but no more. Given that I should have most of the math and liberal arts stuff done already, that shouldn’t be too big of a deal. Honestly, I never liked taking four classes in a semester because I could only really focus on about 2 classes seriously (plus being on the debate team).

There are a LOT of departments at the U. A fair chunk of them are bogus. There are no subject that I think are off limits in terms of academic research, but there are a lot of subjects that I think we produce too many graduates in. Speech is a good example. I know, by virtue of having been in debate, quite a few people who have Ph.Ds in speech communications. Speech is good. Everyone should take a class or two in argumentation and persuasion. However, once you get beyond some of the basics, I’m totally at a loss for its relevance or need. This is a sore point because I know I’m basically saying that the chosen career of some of the people I know is bogus. If you look at a course catalog, I think that 10% of the speech courses are really, really valuable, and 90% are totally bullshit.

Do we need to produce speech Ph.Ds? Yes. How many need to get churned out in a given year nationwide? I’d guess less than what is produced now, but I conceded I could be wrong about the demand. Its not just true in speech communications. There is a glut of Ph.Ds out there in the humanities and social sciences. The reason why you see a glut of Ph.Ds in the humanities and a shortage in the hard sciences is pretty obvious, yet something which isn’t mentioned often: math and science is harder than the humanities. Period.

I think I can speak to this because I have taken ample classes in both. Look at the foreign students at any given American university. They are overwhelmingly in hard science departments. Why? Science = real jobs. Since my last post, no fewer than three people have told me they are considering going back to school to get a further technical degree. Why? More money.

At Macalester, I didn’t take biology or chemistry, but I remember hearing horror stories from my friends who took organic chemistry. It was the class that separated the poseurs from the studs. If you came out of it with a C, you’d feel happy because you at least got out of it alive. There was no such class in Political Science. In fact, Political Science was what you did if you washed out in biology/chem. No one washed out in Political Science.

I took Pol Sci classes to boost my GPA. Period. I attended some Pol Sci classes drunk. Hell, I got drunk in the middle of some. (Sean, if your reading this, you can vouch for me)

There was no way in hell I could do that in math classes (or economics for that matter). Traveling with the debate team was no problem taking Pol Sci classes, but it did hurt my grades in Math classes. My lowest grades in college were in Math, mostly because I’d miss half the classes in some parts of the year, and you just can’t do that and expect to ace upper level math courses. (If I could go back and do it over again, I’d either not debate, or debate all out and actually cut some cards and not take math classes)

My advise to anyone going to college is whatever you do, come out with something technical (that would include foreign languages) in addition to anything else you do.

During my undergrad years, my goal was to get my PhD in economics. (and win the Nobel Prize) Somewhere along the way I decided not to. I think it was a combination of factors that pulled me away from the grad school path.

1)My politics (or lack thereof) didn’t really fit into a career path that would have allowed for academic advancement.
2)I have little tolerance for political bullshit you have to put up with in grad programs, and for jumping through hoops they require.
3)I realized that my love of economics didn’t require further study nor devoting myself to a career in it.
4)I’d probably have been forced down some route where I’d have to focus on some obscure minor area of research, and that just doesn’t interest me.
5)I really prefer being a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. The marginal utility I get from the time spent learning something brand new is greater than what I’d get out of yet another econ class.

My Aeron chair broke again. The seat cracked in the same spot. I know its the symbol of 90’s over indulgence and speculation, but I love the chair and now I have to sit on a folding chair until I can get it fixed and my ass hurts.

After many aborted posts, this time I’m going to actually put something up on the website.

Hall of Fame Voting
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I can’t argue too much with Paul Molitor and Dennis Eckersley being in the hall, but the BBWAA seems to be pretty stingy the last few decades with their voting. There are at least five other guys that are currently on the ballot that I think deserve to be in the hall: Ryan Sandberg, Bruce Sutter, Rich Gossage, Jim Rice, and Andre Dawson. Lee Smith just doesn’t do it for me, and I know he’s the all time save leader, but I don’t see that record lasting too long. He was never great, he just spent a long time being good….and if that was the criteria for being in the Hall of Fame, Rusty Staub’s autograph would be worth a lot more.

I really like the Baseball Hall of Fame. I’ve been there twice. Cooperstown is a great town. The museum itself is great. I love the controversy surrounding the HoF elections. While there are some players in the hall that shouldn’t be there, the baseball hall of fame is much more prestigous than the hall for any other sport.

I enjoy following baseball more than I enjoy watching baseball. If they didn’t have stats, I could probably care less about it.

Apple
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I want to like Apple. I watch every speech Steve Jobs gives online. I respect the company and root for them, but I don’t think I can bring myself to get a Mac. There are two reasons: 1) cost, 2) the UI isn’t as good as windows. I know its a cliche to say how great the Mac UI is, but honestly, while it had its start as the superior GUI, it never really improved. With Windows, I can look at my desktop and see what applications are running. I can’t with a Mac. You can shut a window, but the app can still be running. You need a drop down menu to see what is running. Also, the menu bar is common to every window, which really annoys me. I want each window to have its own menu bar. All the Linux GUI’s I’ve seen act more like Windows than the Mac OS, and I think there is a reason for it. For all I know, there might be a setting that lets you do that in OSX, but I dont’ know about it.

….that and the mouse with one button. While I know you can get a multi-button mouse for the Mac, if they solved the menu issue, I’d be very tempted to get a Mac. Very.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Its the one GUI issue that really sets the Mac apart, and maybe that is why they keep it, but I think it hurts them in sales. If they put an option in the OS to make it a little more Windows-esque while keeping the general Mac-ness of it all, I think a lot of barries might fall.

But that’s just me.

Back to School
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I’ve applied to the University of Minnesota. I’m not applying for Graduate School, but to get another undergrad degree. Most probably in Physics.

Why?

Why not. Getting a physics degree was something I always wanted to do and honestly, getting a second undergrad degree is really easy once you got your first one because you dont’ need to do all the dumb requirments for graduation. I wont be attending school full time, but it should keep me busy.

I’m actually looking forward to taking a class again. There is a certain freedom in knowing your just doing it because you want to. It’s not neecessary for my career, I don’t need to do it to get a diploma. I can just do it for the sake of learning….which probably means I’ll get really good grades.

Extemp
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Extemp is starting and I think as a whole we are going to do much much better this year. We have more people, a good head start, and talent. If any AV extempers are reading this, go to another website and print articles for the file. Move.

Diet
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I’ve stalled on the diet. I’m still on it and I haven’t gained anything, but the weight loss hasn’t been smooth. I’ve hit a point where my weight doesn’t move, then one day it will go down by a few pounds. I’m not too worried because I knew this would happen, but I’d still like to see it move some more.

Philip Glass
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I got the new soundtrack he did for The Fog of War. I’m listening to it now (after having immediately ripped it after I opened the package). Its not his best stuff, but its not bad either.

I’ve also been starting to listen to a lot of Arvo Part. More on him some other time.

I’ve been on a low carb diet now for about six weeks. I’ve lost 20 pounds.

Six weeks since I’ve last had any caffeine. Six weeks with no rice, bread, potatoes, sugar, not even a regular diet coke.

To be honest, its been pretty easy. The first few days were difficult but after that, I really have felt much better than I have in a long time. I’d say I feel calmer, but I don’t know if that is the most accurate way of putting it. Its not an emotional calmness, but the lack of blood sugar going up and down all day. Its something that I didn’t realize was there till it left.

One question I’ve gotten a lot is “what do you eat?”. Obviously, there is more meat on the menu, but its not all meat. I’ve been eating about one salad a day, with tomatoes and cucumbers. I’ve been eating stuff like pickles, sardines, and have recently added some nuts like walnuts and macademia nuts (not peanuts which are not really a nut). Asparagus, brussel sprouts and broccholi are also something I’ll have every so often. Most of the meat I have been eating is venison and fish.

In the process of doing this, I realized that I’m eating a lot of foods that people might have eaten a long time ago. Obesity in the US has been increasing for the last 100 years, yet fat consumption has been going down. Most of the processed foods we eat (chips, cookies, fries, soda) are loaded with sugars (carbs). Think what you would eat if you lived pre-20th Century. Meat, veggies, eggs, pickles, etc. Non processed stuff. Even bread would have been whole wheat, not processed white flour. Cane sugar was very uncommon. The trend in the 20th century hasn’t been eating more fat, its eating more processed foods loaded with sugar and carbs. I think you could get the majority of the benefits of this diet by just avoiding processed foods. Even when I reach the point I want to be at, I don’t see myself going be to eating junk food. I like how I feel now. I sleep better and I’ve had very little temptation to stray from it.

I can tell the weight loss more than others can at this point. Your body doesn’t lose weight evenly. You loses it in spots. i’ve been making an effort to do more cardio at the gym. I’ve set mini goals that I am slowly approaching. I can go 15 minutes on the bike at over 120rpm. One thing I’d like to do as a long term goal is to complete the Twin Cities marathon next year. I have no idea if its something that I could even do, but if I can do it, I will have had to achieve all my other goals.