can i have a cookie?

Holy shit, that was fun.

I spent a week at the U of I learning about Materials Engineering.  I was there with about 35 other kids taking one of 3 different classes, Materials Engineering, Biomedical something, and Film Interpretation.  Obviously mine was the funnest.  Basically we had 3 hours of class in the morning, usually the 'lecture' part, one of the professors would talk about polymers, plastics, different polymer processing techniques, etc.  After lunch we'd have another 3 hour session during which we worked on the project for the week which was to modify a remote control car to be able to handle several obstacles, the hardest and most defining of the project was getting it to be able to float and go across one of those kiddie pools filled with water.

Our car won, but it was really pure luck.  The counselors had bought 5 different remote control cars at Kmart, and we drew team numbers to decide in what order to pick the cars.  Our first and second choices were taken, but we got a car that we picked because it had higher ground clearance.  After opening it, we realized that instead of turning the front wheels to turn like a regular car, this car spun its wheels in oposite directions.  This meant it had a motor for each rear wheel, and therefore twice as much power.  Simply because of this, we won every event.

I missed the launch today, I had a trombone lesson and forgot to record it.  I don't know if I would have even recorded it, its just not the same if its not live.  Definitely glad to hear it was a success, though.

I'm leaving tomorrow for a week-long camp, NSA or something, the one where I learn about materials engineering.  I'll write something better and respond to comments when I'm not exhausted from work.

'Till then...

I went from disappointment to excitement back to disappointment this morning when I found out first that we would be spending some of the day at the new Des Moines Science Center and thus would miss the launch, then that they would be showing the launch there, then finding out, of course, that it was cancelled.  I think I'm working Saturday, can't remember...

After the Columbia asploded, there were lots of people who said that spaceflight was too dangerous, that 7 lives was far too much to risk on exploration and science.  Of course, the thousands of lives we destroyed in Iraq wasn't too much to risk on very little evidence of...anything.  But I won't get into that now.  They say that exploration is part of the human spirit.  That's true, of course, if it wasn't, we'd still be in mud shacks in Africa.  Maybe slightly nicer mud huts, but if we lived our lives in fear of the strange animals that had been said to take peoples' lives, if we sat and stared in fear at the impassable ocean and spent our money on other things, where would we be?  Science Fiction has caused people to take for granted the idea that 40, 50 years from now, we will be vacationing on Mars and teleporting to work regardless of what we do with funding now.  YES, vacationing on Mars could someday be a reality, I'm not so sure about teleportation, but maybe I'll be eating my words in a thousand years or so, but the point is that we have to start somewhere, we have to make mistakes and learn from them, and we have to accept the inherent risks of exploration.  Did every explorer make it back alive?  How many ships have been lost searching for new land, new people, new trade routes and been forgotten by history?  Or even remembered, I just don't feel like looking for examples.  These explorers, astronauts, knew the risks and accepted them.  They weren't just clueless civilians, bystanders, like the kids that have been killed in Iraq...ok, sorry.

I'm not saying we should only be doing this to vacation on Mars.  Let's look at population. Look at the chart.  Now think about how crowded we are.  Not just in Africa and third-world countries.  If you live in a big city, you know how crowded we are.  People are stuffed into crappy apartments, homeless people live on the streets, and we are not prepared to support a significantly larger population.  You might look at the chart and say "But Rob, that's only 2.5 billion people more at the bottom of the chart, hardly a 'significant' number".  That, however, is only 45 years in the future.  What about 100 years?  At this rate, can you imagine life continuing as we know it?  What about with 4, 5, 6 billion more people?  We need to start thinking long-term, and when you get down to it, mass anything-cide or colonization of the moon or Mars is our only option, and all of that starts with the space program.  Private or public, some kind of group that will get the job done.  The SpaceShipOne demonstrated the feasibility of private groups.  I suggest tax hikes for the wealthy and some kind of tax break for private companies trying to go into space.

What do you think?

I am pumped for the shuttle launch tomorrow. 3:51 ET, I think that's 2:51 central time.  I'll be watching it.

Next week I'm going to a camp where they teach you things about materials engineering.  I hope to be some kind of engineer, probably aerospace, so this is going to be awesome.  I think I've been suffering from a lack of intellectual stimulation this summer.

I want to respond to the comment left on my post about God.  First, thanks for the comment, I like to know that somebody actual reads this.  First, what I said about the passage in 2 Kings was just one example.  I looked for and found several others, which I have written down somewhere, I think.  And I have read almost the whole Bible.  The problem with the way Christians approach a religious argument is that they often immediately accept the whole Bible as truth. If we could do that, then what would we be arguing about?  It's as if they never even considered that there might be things in the Bible that are exaggerations and even straight lies.  If you put forward evidence or a view that God doesn't exist, or that events portrayed in the Bible never happened, they point at a verse and say "No, the Bible says...", "No, in Matthew, Jesus said...".  Well, I have a suprise for you... The Bible is just a book.  It's just some words that some person a long time ago put together.  Hell, the Bible doesn't even agree with itself!  Should we do what the Old Testament says, or the New Testament?  Why should we take things out of the Old Testament to believe when we ignore half of it?  And even within the New Testament, even the disciples disagree on what Jesus said and did.  I have given God time to prove hisself, I've given him 16 whole years.  I've read the Bible, studied the evidence for myself, heard everybody's viewpoint, and come to the conclusion that he is no more real than Allah or any of the other countless thousands of Gods who came before.

Thanks for reading my blog everyone.  Tell your friends!

I'm not feeling especially profound today.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/07/09/shuttle.countdown.ap/index.html

Me and anybody else who follows the space program is probably feeling nervous about the launch set for Wednesday.  That sentence was ugly.  Ima take a break and write more later.

A big TY to blog.com for making me the first feature blog, and 'hi' to anyone reading this.  Hey, blog.com, could you get me a permanent platinum account while you're at it?  And maybe a glass of milk?  : )

Oh yeah everyone, don't forget to comment!

I'm an atheist.  If you are one of my friends or family members and have happened to stumble on this blog and figure out that it's mine, congratulations, I don't care who knows it anymore.

I was born in a Christian family surrounded by Christian neighbors, Christian friends, and distant Christian cousins.  I went to church and Sunday School every Sunday when I was growing up. My parents read me Bible stories throughout my childhood.  I have every reason to be a strong Christian, but for some reason, I'm not.  What makes me different from other people? Why did I come to the conclusion that God was a myth some time in 9th grade?  I remember the exact place I was when I was violently converted to atheism.  I was reading Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein.  It refers to a passage in the Bible when God sent some bears to kill 42 kids for making fun of Elijah's bald head.  I looked it up, and sure enough, it was true. (2 Kings 2:24)  That passage by itself isn't enough to convince anybody to be atheist, but that was the moment when it struck me that God, Jesus, and the Bible are either exaggerated versions of real events, or pure myth.  You know how they say history is written by the winners?  Christians have won a lot of wars... how easy is it to add in things here and there about how God helped them because they were righteous and their opponents were sinners? And when challenged personally on whether or not god really was involved, how easy is it to make up "yeah, well, I saw him, he and some angels told me what to do..." in a pinch to defend yourself?  And when you promise eternal salvation, how easy is it to draw in the masses?  They think they're saving themselves by worshipping God, but really they're worshipping the priests.  They think they're giving money to God, but that goes straight to the priests' pockets.  And even 1000 years later, when corruption has straightened out, how easy is it to keep on the tradition without even thinking?  How afraid are you to question the God of your father's father's father's...?  How easy is it to take on a 'better safe than sorry' mentality, pass on the religion to your 5 kids and keep the cycle going?  And how easy is it to believe you should force your beliefs on all of society?  We live in a world where people don't need to think for themselves.  When every opinionated dumbass has staked out territory on one side of the political spectrum and gotten themselves a TV show, why should you bother to look at the hard facts and form your own conclusions?  How easy is it to pick a side that fits your uninformed personal views more or less closely and saturate yourself in their spun, twisted views?

Most people I know would call me a liberal, but I refuse to associate myself with either side, since I don't agree completely with the views expressed or tactics employed by right or left.  For example, I'm anti-abortion for completely non-religion reasons, but I disagree with the right on most other issues.

/rant

There's plenty of perfectly respectable jobs that start with 'astro-' but very few that end in '-loger'. 

Here is an article about a Russian lady suing NASA for $300 million for crashing that thing into the comet, I'm sure you've heard about that, but she says it upset universal harmony and deformed her horoscope.  That is total BS.  Horoscopes are BS, astrology is BS, and I'm not sorry if that offended anybody.  Anybody who believes in ghosts, astrology, magic, the occult, angels, god, Ouiji boards, etc needs to wake up.

Happy 4th of July!

I marched in the parade, sure felt good to get back into my natural environment (the school) for an hour or so. We played some patriotic medley, which I had to fake near the end as I ran out of chops faster than most people.

I got contacts today, took a while to get them in and out, but no problems.  They don't do laser eye surgery on minors.

War of the Worlds was an incredible movie.  Some critic said the actors who were the family sucked but I didn't notice that.  Go see it.

I went to my annoying friends' house to watch the fireworks. He had invited some of our other friends too but nobody showed up.  It was a big party though, plenty of other people there, adults and his brothers' friends.  We played computer games a little, and did stupid things with bottle rockets and bottles.  After the fireworks we went back to our house and set off some of the crappy fireworks we had bought in Illinois at Krazy Kaplans'.  They shot off little sparks 2 feet.  My dad 'doesn't like' bottle rockets but wouldn't give us a good reason.

I hung out with some of my friends at the 4th of July fair, carnival, thingy who I hadn't seen since school.  Fun.

I've been on TV for the Mediacom Academic Challenge that was filmed in May.  We beat two schools and lost to the third, if we had won we would have gone into the finals.  Channel 22 if you're in the Des Moines area.

Sometime if I'm bored maybe I'll upload a few of the more amusing clips of family video, or the Academic Challenge, or just some pickshures.