An ode to NASA

Dear NASA, good message, but next time please consider physics when making a video campaign (R2 landing and leaving the ISS). ;-) Or is it only my eyes glitching again? [edit: the guys working for you today grew up with Fred Hoyle, Asimov, Lem, ... The reality can be disappointing for someone looking for a laser sabre or space jump button]


But there are those of us who enjoyed the old FLASH GORDON serials, Jack Williamson`s THE LEGION OF SPACE, and many other great swashbuckling Space adventure stories, not all of us are into the "nuts and bolts" type of Science-Fiction...Space Opera had always, and will always have a special place among the masses, no matter what some elitist sci-fi snobs spew negatively abouth it


I have not criticised the spacey-tale worshipping mob. Yet. But come on,

NASA is REAL. 

I highly respect their job that those masses have no idea of, and would think boring and "elitist" at the same time. I prefer watching decades old NASA footages to 3D IMAX bullshit. To see how they really MUST check every single nut and bolt with absolute passion and humility several times - otherwise great men will burn like a torch.

 This mob is yelling "you can't make a mirror" when Hubble fails - because of a 1.3mm error in a test device; "bastards" when NASA was forced to underestimate the known risks and did not dare to delay the launch again, etc, etc. I know this rant has no meaning to the people you refer to, and will not be popular either, but if there is one sentence to be taken home, it should be this one:

Real space is not for toddlers. 

 Even if they have big plasma TVs and "opinion", because a single one of them can ruin all the efforts of thousands of dedicated NASA people. So NASA should not look for, but be scared of them. This was my problem with this campaign, and I guess I have right to talk about it - and anyway, this will also sink in the guano of this current "internet communication". Take care! :-)



Oh, sorry if I dont bow to your "mighty" sapient, but certainly NONE of these things would be accomplished with at least a bit of imagination, a bit of child like wonder, HECK! even people like Glenn or Armstrong enjoyed so much things like BUCK ROGERS, or JOHN CARTER when they were kids...I have in great regard what NASA and the Russian Space programs have done, what I dont condone is the petty biased elitistic nonesense against certain type of fiction. It is what famous sci-fi author Brian Aldiss criticized in his anthology series "Galactic Empires", the "literalism" which sacrificed style for form, resulting into a grey and lifeless storytelling compared to the classics from the so called golden age of Science-Fiction, like Stanley G. Weibaum or Poul Anderson ...Even if this is not accurate a true intelligent person would UNDERSTAND the purpose for which it was made off, if I want something accurate I watch Discovery channel, or open a book on physics...Bye!



Strange, I don't see your last message under the video, but it worth an answer anyway.

First, I don't care where you bow or what image you have about me. I could use a bit of respect, if you knew what that word originally meant (when opinion and discussion also had meaning). Then, I should not remind you that I agree with you about the importance of imagination: it was there in my first message to which you "answered".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo78gb4EZ6Y

By the way, that is also not new, see for example: "... if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation..." (Andrew Fletcher, 1703, and yes, that more famous statement about money is only a derivate ;-) ). I think I know quite a lot about how and why "ballads", from the ancient Greeks, through Jesus and REAL sci-fi (where sci is for science and not for "tech voodoo you can't understand but solves everything for a happy end") formed the path of our civilization.

It all depends on the quality, which is not the CGI, popularity, dramaturgy or the shallow "message". A good ballad is a tool for head fake learning, it makes you look up physics and philosophy, makes you think, makes you feel bad about what we do today. A bad one makes you accept what you see, gives you not criticism but rotten clichés. I respect Armstrong, but he would be a race car driver without guys like those who imagined the LOR, the first was Kondratyuk in 1916. I repeat: in 1916! That IS science fiction that brings us forward. Compare it to movies, and their budgets that NASA could also use for something, I guess. Even if space cowboy fans would not understand a single word of it, and even if many of those experiments would fail at the end.

About head fake learning, my favorite expert is Randy Pausch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

All the best!


To show you the importance of that quality with a real example.

You surely know, together with hundreds of millions(!) of human beings today, that captain Kirk was able to fix a broken reactor on starship Enterprise with some random kicks. He was heroic. Had nice flashing lights, great music. And even, he survived for the next episode! Yippieee...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yESWsgJ__dY

I wonder how many of them watched the story of K19, where a submarine reactor failed. There was no magic kicks, just the damned facts. And true death. OK, it was Russian, but if you think errors belong to "others" you can go to the Three Mile Island story, or recall that the crippled Fukushima reactors were designed by General Electric. (And if you are interested in the true fate of Kirky boy, it already happened in Idaho, 1960: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 )

Millions of people have the magic in their minds when think (or to be precise: FORGET) about Chernobyl, which results in Fukushima, and the upcoming disasters. (Why am I sure about that? Because while the causes are not fixed, the evidence and the consequences are straightforward. This is called "reasoning".) They have "opinion" and "vote", and blame anyone for "local failures" but think that "future" and "nuclear" can appear in the same sentence.

Thinking is harder than most people... "think". And ballads of today lead away from it.

[Fun fact: NASA removed this conversation from the YouTube channel. I guess the guy who pressed the "remove comment" button never thought about the amount of time and effort written into these comments on both sides. Lack of respect, I would say...]

Dust state

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/critical-new-role-system-simplification-specialist-roger-sessions

Roger, I could not agree more, with one note: the definition of "mathematically". I have not the best feeling about that term, ending in complex expressions with weird characters. It is quite easy to frighten away programmers like me with that, even though I know that with proper handling, that is the best way to express something. And even though at one of my workplaces, they always told me "this is not university, it has to work!" But they gave me time to make it work, and used it. Good old days.

I think the situation is similar to where we were before John von Neumann.

At that time, reacting machines were made as custom logical circuits, and they had to fight for every second with the slow and thirsty hardware. Then he came with his brilliant essay saying "don't solve the problem as a whole, but separate the components that are required for a reliable IT solution, make hardware for that, and instruct them to solve the problem."

That must have looked stupid for all engineers: make it even slower and more complicated? But their actual designs simply could NOT be verified, optimized, not to mention being built into chips, they had to build everything with their hardware tools, and their knowledge was buried in the metal. Solving real problems with direct building was so complex itself that higher level constructs were simply over the horizon. Simply put: the complete approach was not industrial.

Replace the "hardware" with "big software components, toolkits, platforms", and you have the IT world today.

Everyone hacks together big "systems" from big and custom components, there is nothing that you could rely on because all is done individually by someone, upon (and locked to) constantly moving tools, chasing constantly moving targets. There is no reusable terminology and actually working toolchain that you can use to express your needs on a higher level, above being locked to your tooling.

That part should encapsulate the complexity of atomic segments of problem solving, and offer the solution in a global, uniform, usable and efficient way. Nonsense. Unless you spend 20 years on learning to see the structures instead of the solutions, and for example, separate the needed code from configurations and repetitions. Like me. Unfortunately but naturally, this separates me from "the rest of the world".

I can show you a prototype of a system that contains its own definition, and much of my knowledge about programming. It can generate its own Java sources and projects, but is "theoretically" independent from the language itself. I had to create it because its design is so complex that the only way to make it work is to let it actually execute its own configuration.

Of course, it is not different from the Wright brothers' "thing". It is just a bunch of hacks compared to the super-sophisticated trains that we use to "solve problems" today. Okay, okay, it can fly, but who cares? Or who would waste time to understand its weirdness? How does it carry anything? This must only be a toy, huh?

The first "real" question is: how do you sell it? Well, if you understand what it means, all big names would die to have it and lock it in a box, because it simply changes the IT business. The next is: does this ever solve a "real" problem? Come on, your "real problems" are BORING, and exist mostly because of short vision, unforced design errors and mindless cult-coding... ("... you are so rude, Sherlock" ;-) )

So, regardless of the trust I received recently, it's on the waiting list. I now write a frontend to a webshop for the monthly wages and watch "transit gloria mundi".