Where I’ve been.

Mostly here, sitting in front of the computer, or outside, cleaning out the garage – a major project. It’s marching band arranging season, and my clients, like the springtime, are a little late in blooming this year, so I’m still writing. I should be finished pretty soon.

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Do we need to keep the ISS?

Bigelow’s design for a commercial space station

First, Putin invades Ukraine. Then, Obama imposes more sanctions on Russia. Putin sneers and goes about his empire-building business. Then, more sanctions. Then, NASA says it is suspending cooperation with Russia.

So, Russia says we can’t get onto the ISS as of 2020. Since the only ride we currently have is on Russian rockets, they don’t exactly have to change the locks. Trouble is, I don’t think they own it – we paid way more of the actual development and construction costs, and most of the big parts were taken up there on Shuttles. The actual cost of construction is pretty hard to estimate, apparently. But I think it is safe to say that we built most of it, some ESA, some Russian, a little Japanese, etc.

So how can the Russians say they are going to lock the doors? Well. because our manned launch capability is still a mess. Sure, Lockheed is building the Orion, but it is kind of an artisian thing – small batches, made slowly, by a few skilled folks. There’s no mass production – not even like the Apollos were built in the 1960s. Those are going to be the only NASA-owned manned vehicles by 2020, unless they buy or lease some from Sierra Nevada or SpaceX. They will probably opt to just buy seats, like they are doing with Russia now. On $ 17 billion a year they don’t have a lot of cash to throw around.

So, let’s say 2020 rolls around, and we have no better relations with Russia than we do now, and they say, sorry, comrade, but no, it’s ours now. Are we going to take it by force? Probably not.

Much as an orbital assault sound kinda cool, everything in space is just too damned fragile. You would lose too much space on a DragonRider if you had to armor the thing. Russian took firearms on the Almaz secret stations in the 1970s; I would expect they would find a way to put some weapons on the ISS, or maybe have a hunter-killer Soyuz variant ready to dispatch.

Frankly, blowing the ISS up in orbit would be easier than trying to board it, but it would leave a lot of pieces in orbit that would be terrible hazards to navigation. I don’t know which would get us into more hot water with the rest of the world – blowing up the ISS with Russians on board, or shredding everybody’s satellites with chunks, like in “Gravity.”

Fact is, the ISS costs over $ 3 billion a year just to keep it going. I say, if they want it, let ’em have it. It was a fairly good idea thirty years ago, but let’s build some purpose-specific stations based on Bigelow modules that don’t have to be all things for all people. We have learned a lot from building the ISS, and we can leverage that in building the new stations.

See, if the Russians have to shoulder the cost of the ISS completely by themselves, they may decide not to keep it running. Can it be deorbited safely? How much will that cost them? What if something lands on some guy’s house? Putin doesn’t seem to fear “world opinion” as much as we do, but the fireball in the sky caused by deorbiting the ISS will still be considered a massive waste, even by countries that have no designs on building a station of their own.

So let’s give Vlad the responsibility of figuring out what to do with the thing. That kind of decision comes with being Emperor.

And let’s get started designing some second-generation stations. Russia is giving us a chance to dump what will soon be a giant shiny white elephant. We can end up in better shape, for less money, and maybe even start building some stations that could really be prototypes for interplanetary vehicles.

Wayne Markworth on marching band show planning

My friend Wayne Markworth, retired band director from Centerville HS (OH) and a member of the BOA Hall of Fame, recently updated his web site, Shadow Lake Music. He also has an attached blog and on it he talks about marching band show planning. If you are engaged in such a process right now, you will certainly want to check it out. His book, The Dynamic Marching Band, is also excellent, and I recommend it to you very highly.

Oh, and some guy I know wrote this book on marching band arranging you might want to take a look at, as well. Even if you don’t arrange, there is a lot there about show planning and what to tell your arranger. If you buy stock charts for your show, you may want to review the book anyway so that you can choose wisely.

 

Don’t be that guy.

SpaceX signs lease with NASA for Pad 39A

After a bunch of fussin’ and fightin’, NASA finally signed a lease with SpaceX for the use of Pad 39A for the Falcon 9 Heavy. The first launch of the big booster is supposed to take place next year. It needs a better name, though.

The Falcon 9 Heavy is supposed to be able to lift 117,000 pounds to LEO; more than the old Saturn 1B and about half of what the Saturn V could lift. It will be the biggest launcher in the world when it’s operational, though; there isn’t as much demand for payloads that large in the commercial satellite market.

The boringly-named Space Launch System NASA has been pushing for the last several years should have a much larger payload capacity, but when are we going to see hardware? Elon Musk says he could develop the Falcon XX concept for $ 2.5 billion, about one-quarter of what NASA thinks it will cost to develop the SLS. I say pay the man.

 

Comparison of Saturn V and the various SpaceX proposals

And the Falcon XX would be an impressive beast. It would be worth it just to see that thing launched!

The best thing you will see on the internet today

I found it on io9.com: velociraptors replaced by cats.

I’m just thinking about other movies where this would be awesome…

My arranging book is now available!

I know, I’ve been teasing it for months, but it really is out now! It’s available as a pdf ebook from Marketing Vision Partners for $ 30. I invite you to go take a look! Here’s the Table of Contents page:

While I don’t think anything I put in the book is exactly controversial, I have included quite a bit of material that is based on my years of writing, judging, and working as a band director. One of my goals of the book was to help young band directors not make some of the mistakes I made, or that I have seen others make…hence the “Band Director’s Guide” part of the title. You don’t need to be a working band director to find value in the book, but if you are a marching band director, you will – even if you never plan to arrange a piece of music yourself.

There is an accompanying web page on my publishing site for owners of the book. I hope to expand the materials on this page in the near future so that it can be a resource for those interested in the art and practice of arranging for the marching band.

It took me about three years to write this, off and on, and I think now it has information you will find useful. I hope you enjoy the book!

How Obama’s executive orders threaten us more than anything else

I just did a piece on Obama’s executive orders over on Keep Americans Free. I invite you to read it.

“Who is John Galt?” Asked. Answered.

So finally some of the cast of “Atlas Shrugged, Part III” has been announced. The previous two installments had completely different casts, and this final chapter is no different.

This time around Dagny Taggart will be played by Laura Regan (above), who is, if anything, less known that the previous two actresses who played her. I liked Taylor Schilling from Part I a lot, Samantha Mathis not so much.

And Hank Rearden will be played by, of all people…

Yep. “Northern Exposure” Rob Morrow. This guy is about as unlikely a Hank Rearden as I can imagine. He’s a well-known actor, but either Grant Bowler (Part I) or Jason Beghe (Part II) would be better. (Beghe is currently starring in a new network tv show, “Chicago PD.”)

Francisco d’Anconia, who should be a couple of years older than Dagny, will be played by experienced character actor Joaquim de Almeida. He’s almost twenty years too old, but a good actor. I liked him in “Clear and Present Danger.” He’s been in a million things before.

But the big question is: who will be playing John Galt?

This guy:

I didn’t recognize him either. His name is Kristoffer Polaha, known for shows like “Ringer” and “Made In Jersey.” He has the look, and he is, in real life, the same age as the new Dagny. But he and Francisco and Ragnar Danneskjold were supposed to be about the same age, attending Patrick Henry University together. That part of the storyline will probably be downplayed in this film.

I liked other two films pretty well…I preferred the casting of the first one better, and the script of the second one.

The film should be out before the November 2014 elections. I look forward to how they finish it out. The book ends fairly depressingly, I cannot see how the film could end in another way. It’s a cautionary tale, after all. Too bad that generally, only those who already know that will watch it.

 

 

Adobe Creative Cloud is a blessing and a curse…

About two years ago I needed to get a copy of Adobe InDesign for layout of my marching band arranging book, which is finally almost done! We looked at the prices for that and for Photoshop, and even though I could still sort of qualify for the education discount, it was pretty pricey. Then we looked at the Adobe Create Cloud service. The price per year was about the same as for buying two apps as standalones, and since it would update them and I had access to the entire Adobe suite, it looked like a pretty good buy. The educational discount ran out and it’s $ 50 a month now, but I’ve found I try (and use) apps that I never would have because I wouldn’t want to spend the money on something I might use occasionally.

The latest one I’ve worked with is Adobe Muse, which is a little WYSIWYG web page development tool. It’s easier than using DreamWeaver, especially if  you don’t need a lot of bells and whistles on your web pages. It uses an interface that looks a lot like InDesign, so I was good there. It’s sort of like a hybrid of those two bigger programs.

Muse isn’t available as a standalone, which is too bad. (Although you can do a monthly charge for it, separately, for $ 15 a month.) I’ve not had to do web page design for a couple of years, and using it is a lot easier than getting myself up to speed on the new version of DreamWeaver just to do a few simple pages.

The other advantage to the Creative Cloud service is that it keeps watching for updates and asks you when you want to update. At first the updater was somewhat buggy, but it seems pretty stable now.

Adobe CC isn’t for everyone, but if you use Photoshop and one more Adobe app, it will probably be competitively priced against the standalones. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone else likes or dislikes the Creative Cloud service.

Alternate Universes that we don’t think of as alternate universes

There are many books and short stories having to do with”alternate universes” – timelines similar to our own but in which a single historical even changes, and over time the results of that action have large consequences. There are the Sidewise Awards, given in both long and short form.

I won’t bore you with a history of alternate history. You can google it faster than I can write about it. However, you might want to check out the work of Harry Turtledove and Robert Conroy, at least.  Maybe one of these days I will list some of my favorites.

But here I’m talking about something else, primarily television shows. Almost all political series that take place in the present day could be called alternate history. Take “The West Wing,” which was running when the 9/11 attack took place. There wee references to it, but not much, and it did not profoundly effect the timeline in the show after that – even though it did in our timeline.

But here’s my favorite: “In the universe of “Star Trek,” no “Star Trek” ever aired.” I don’t remember where I first read that, but I’ve pondered it over the years in idle moments. For example, apparently manned space exploration continued in ST timeline more extensively than in ours – it was good enough to loft a sleeper ship in the late 1990s to get rid of Kahn Noonian Singh and his motley crew. There was that pesky nuclear war around that time, or after; and the Genetics War before Kahn was exiled, but even that didn’t keep Zephram Cochrane from building a warp ship from an old Titan missile.

 

Some like to say that ST inspires us toward that sort of Utopian vision apparently held by Gene Roddenberry. It’s more complicated than that, but I think it is safe to say that ST didn’t really inspire us to maintain manned exploration of space – the Trekkers couldn’t even get NASA to name a real space shuttle after the Enterprise. (The one they named was a test article used for glide tests.) Perhaps a series taking place in the nearer future would have done so more effectively.

Sherlock Holmes, in all his manifestations – novels, stories, films, plays, radio shows, television – existed in a particular world. Usually, as in the original, it was very close to actual history. Later versions had him fighting Nazis and working in a more steampunk Victorian England. The two contemporary versions – “Sherlock” in the UK and “Elementary in the US – apparently take place in a world in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about other things. Perhaps his medical practice took off faster, or maybe he decided to stay in London rather than moving to Southsea, and became involved in other activities.

Still, every time someone in “Elementary” is introduced to Holmes, their lack of surprise at the name, except for its odd sound, seems very strange to me.

Some interpretations of quantum physics imply that there is a multitude of universes. Maybe in one of them Barak Obama lost the Senate election to Jack Ryan, and he stayed in the Illinois General Assembly…