Category: Diary

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I Blame Carl Sagan

As a young boy growing up in West Virginia, in the early 1970s, my family would take these road trips across the state. We went everywhere, usually with a Scotty camper in tow. Dolly Sods, Blackwater Falls, Bluestone River – everywhere. One day we were on another adventure when we passed a sign telling us to “TURN OFF ALL RADIOS” and as we topped the hill, we saw a valley filled with HUGE radio dishes. As an autistic child, I lost my damn mind, “CAN WE GO? CAN WE GO? WE GOTTA GO? CAN WE? CAN WE? PLEASE!!!!!”

Frank Drake in front of the Green Bank Observatory’s 8G5-1 (Tatel) Telescope. the first telescope built on site and used in the first SETI research – Project Ozma

My grandparents, to their credit, wilted to my demands and we took a tour of the Green Bank Radio Observatory. On the bus, we heard the tour guide, “this dish has a surface area of more than an acre,” “this is the dorm where the visiting scientists stay,” “this is the ball field where we wind down on weekends.” The ball field was filled with deer that day. The last thing she mentioned was that a visiting scientist was waiting for us in the auditorium and he had an educational film to show the group. The scientist, speaking with a distinct accent, gave a short lecture – setting up the premise for a film on SETI – the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence. He explained how our powerful radio waves have escaped Earth and continue out into the universe. Then he flipped it, “what if we listen for the signals that alien species might be broadcasting?”

In those days I was already neck deep in Ham Radio and I damn near lost my fucking mind when I heard his thesis. After the lecture, after the film – when the tour was over, I was a bundle of questions. The scientist patiently answered all of my questions. The last question (I was a dumb young kid from West Virginia), was why he stopped working in the hospital and decided to search for aliens? He smiled and explained “I am not a medical doctor, you can be a doctor in any subject.” I enthusiastically replied, “I’m promise I am going to get one of those!” I had no idea what I was talking about.

Years passed. My family soon moved to North Carolina. I was no longer serving time in the West Virginia Public School System. North Carolina education was light years ahead of West Virginia.

During high school, I had heard of this show on PBS titled “Cosmos”. I knew it was about space and that was about it. I geared up to watch the first episode. I had my cassette recorder, microphone, notepad and several pencils all set to record the knowledge of the universe there in our living room. And here came that man with that distinctive accent talking about the wonders of the universe! It was the guy! It was the guy that I met years previous at Green Bank. Wow, he was on TV! “I guess he finally made something of himself” said the dumb young kid from West Virginia.

I finished high school and charged my way through college. I took calculus-based physics back in 1984 and have been pissed off ever since. There were two brutal lessons I disliked in severe kinds of ways.

The first was entropy and the heat death of the universe. It won’t affect me directly or indirectly, I’ll never see it – it is something I could have understood and went about my life. But nope – a major depletion of serotonin and dopamine creeped into my autism-riddled brain. Greatly depressing.

The second one REALLY pissed me off and it is what pushed me down this path. In a greatly oversimplified description, in physics, we can know the velocity and vector of a particle, but we can’t know the temperature. Or, we can know the temperature and velocity, but not the vector. I get the realities of observational thermodynamics, but that doesn’t mean I am happy about it.

There has to be a way to know all three – there has to be a path to figure all of this out. We are taught that we are NOT able to know all three, but nature knows. The fabric of the universe can’t exist if nature doesn’t know. Physics would cease to work if nature was clueless about the properties of all objects. NOT knowing is an issue.

NOT.

Hmmm, “NOT.” That reminds me of something.

There is an idea there maybe -> NOT, NOR, AND, NAND plus many others added to calculus might create some interesting results.

At the time I took the physics classes, I had been studying Boolean Logic and circuit design for three years. We can’t come up with a way to know all three, but maybe, just maybe, there may be a way to narrow the answer down to where these values are NOT. And thus my exploration of locative calculus (Loculus) began.

Since those sad and angry days of 1984, I have continued working on Loculus – on and off, mostly off, ever since.

The first step was to define Boolean Look-Up Tables (BLUTs) and they were a nightmare. All my ideas seemed like they were fighting me. If I change this, the model changes to that and melts down in a white-hot mess resembling Satan’s taint.

“I’ll just set this aside for a bit,” I would say after the panic attacks subsided.

This level of pearl-clutching, neurodivergent behavior would continue for decades. In 2022, I started on my fifth college degree, BS in Electrical Engineering. I just needed a few classes to complete that chore – I hated it. Online education is the worst. Don’t even get me started on online testing proctors that will only speak to you in Arabic.

Yet, I survived and graduated while swearing that I am done with academics. I warned my friends and coworkers, “if you ever see me on another college website, I have one word for you – chloroform.”

Bastards let me down.

I keep pen and paper by my bedside in case I dream something noteworthy – long story. Suffice it to say, a couple of months after I finished my last EE class, I must have had some sort of crazed dream because I woke up with this written on my nightstand…


… and on that gayly pink post-in note was the key I kept missing, the Loculus Object.
After furiously writing day and night for who knows how long, I now have seven autism-powered papers pre-pub ready, I have begun looking for PhD By Publication opportunities.

IF I get these papers successfully published, and IF I find a school willing to listen to my madness, and IF they bestow a degree upon me, I will make a road trip to Ithaca, NY where Carl Sagan’s headstone lies. There I will recite my Loculus abstract.



That will close the chapter on the promise I made to Carl, all those many years ago.

Seems like “billions…”

Photographer Unknown
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Biting Off More Than I Can Chew

Just a brief note on my academic progress. I postponed my PhD By Publication work to finish up my 5th degree – B.S. Electrical Engineering. That on top of my day job in commercial space keeps me too busy. This has to be one of the least enjoyable times in my academic career. I have difficulty seeing the day-to-day grind as anything but a long slog.

I look forward to next year when I am clear of all the things I have going on.

  • Buying a house
  • Building a house
  • Moving
  • I have storage containers in three states that need to be shipped to the new house
  • Unpack everything
  • Finish my EE degree
  • Finish my Avionics MRB training at work
  • Plus add in all my photography nonsense

Gotta get clear of it all. It is obvious that I am biting off way more than I can chew this year.

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From Alice To The Mad Hatter: The Road To A PhD

If you spend just a few minutes on Twitter’s #PhD you will see a range of emotions displayed by those on the path to earning a PhD.

These brave individuals all seem to start out as shining little newbies, fresh out of the newbie bag – with wonder and star-struck innocence in their eyes, eager to start on their journey to increase human knowledge and be known as Doctor.

As they chase the white rabbit of their academic dreams, they soon realize they are spiraling down – not down a rabbit hole, but a deep, festering abyssal where dreams, happiness and wonder are exchanged for stress, tears, fear and abject frustration.

They battle multiple complications and obstacles, all coming at them at once, from all directions. Supervisors seem to produce the most anxiety and dread. Errant supervisors, abusive supervisors, absent supervisors, the handsy supervisor with a furry fetish – they all are problematic and add to the toil of getting a PhD.

Once you FINALLY make your saving throw against the bad supervisor, you get to read. Well, kinda read. Maybe read. You get to read all you want if you have access to Elsevier, if not you either have to get real lucky and find all your relevant research on open servers, find them available on the piratey Sci-Hub or sell a kidney. How science became so closed it has become a real disservice to humanity and modern civilization.

Then the clock gets involved. Days turn to weeks, months to years – and years turn into chapters. You see the end of the tunnel. Light harkens through the darkness, crawling its way to you – showing you a new future… no, fuck that, “major revisions required.”

And just as the funding begins to run out and your Xanax prescription has seen its last refill, you submit FinalFinalFinalThesis-Revision9-Version4-WithChangeNotesSierra.pdf to your supervisor – the second one. The first one took a job at Google. Well, they tell you he went to Google, you can’t exactly recall. You spent a few months in a black out drunk when you heard the news that you would need to reroll the saving throw.

Then…

Finally…

Submitted.

You hear nothing back for a few days.

Panic attacks.

You are now in full Mad Hatter mode. At this point, you are sitting naked, in a room only illuminated by your laptop, tapping violently on the keyboard as you try to explain the scientific method to the QAnon trolls on Facebook.

You wake up on a random Wednesday, fending off a Redbull-induced stroke, to hear that your dissertation defense has been scheduled.

Can this be true? A smell of disbelief fills the room, reminding you you haven’t showered since you submitted.

The door to a conference room opens and you step through to see your second supervisor and other members of the dissertation committee. As the door closes shut you try to recall how you got there.

Time passes.

As the door reopens, the pressure seems to leave the room and the others congratulate you on a job well down. You are now a Doctor Of Philosophy.

This story may not be reality but it seems to be when I read the horror stories of others who have successfully, and sometimes unsuccessfully, traveled this path.

So now, it is my turn. PhD here I come! I have always wanted to earn a PhD ever since I met Carl Sagan. I love science, all aspects of it, all subjects – I cannot get enough. Even as I approach that time where cashiers will give me the “Senior Discount” I continue to be in awe at the things we have discovered. But I could never narrow down what topic to pursue. You can’t just get a PhD in “General Studies,” you have to be startlingly specific. Decades passed and I could never pick something; biology to chemistry, then on to astrophysics, then back to biology… maybe archaeology. I would read a new article or get triggered by advances in understanding of mycelium networks. Who wouldn’t want to do a deep dive on that? It wasn’t until I read the XKCD cartoon titled Purity that I got it.

With all of these subjects that I have an intense interest in, looking at this cartoon made the secluded seem obvious. Mathematics is the base code of the universe and a PhD in math would allow me to peek into the underpinnings of the classic sciences; biology, chemistry and physics. I should have known, but I didn’t. I was too busy in my autism loop process to take the accretion disk point of view.

I have decided that PhD by Previous Publication (PPP) is the best for me. The idea of it doesn’t trigger my autistic predispositions to testing or intellectual judgement. I kinda go at my own pace. I think about my project, write the papers that will take the reader through the story. Rinse and repeat until the body of work is sufficient for defense.

I believe I have a good idea. It is something I have been working on, and off (mostly way off), since my year studying calculus-based physics back in 1984. You know you are autistic when well-defended physical knowns are taken personally. “How dare entropy do that to ME?”

So here I go, one step in front of another, into the future – I mean, Costco to buy a pallet of Red Bull.

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The Day I Met Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan

I was born in 1963 and grew up on large doses of Apollo. Anything and everything that revolved around NASA, I consumed it with a hunger only a geek could produce. During the 70s my family lived in West Virginia and we would take these trips to various places in the state; Blackwater Falls, Dolly Sods, Pipestem – just about anyplace where we could hike, do a bit of fishing and pitch a tent.

On one such trip we took a wrong turn and happened upon the Green Bank Radio Observatory. My head exploded. I had no clue such a facility was in my home state.

There was a tour offered so we stopped in and took a short bus tour of the facility – the guide pointing out the frolicking deer, the softball field and the radio dishes as we went.

The last stop on the tour was in a little meeting room where we watched a short film and heard a presentation. The presenter, with a very distinctive voice, introduced a brand new film titled “The Power Of 10.” After the film, he gave us a short introduction to a program called SETI. If my young kid brain wasn’t blown by then it was blown now. I had never even considered that other civilizations could be using radio. At that period in my life I was an avid ham radio nerd and knew it was possible to pick up on interstellar signals. Only in ham radio, we called such signals “noise.” Whoever that guy was on the last stop of the tour gave me a lot to ponder.

A couple years later a new TV show about space titled “Cosmos” was announced and I was thrilled! Like the geek that I was, I actually had a notebook so I could take notes as the show went along. As the narration started I instantly knew the voice. Lo’ and behold, here was that same guy from Green Bank now on television telling us how Earth was the shore of the cosmic ocean.

So, I met Carl Sagan before he was “Carl Sagan.” I remember at the presentation he was enthusiastic and actually engaged with the tourists. Even then, his passion for teaching was memorable.

I really lucked out. I know this was not his day job. I am sure he was just at the observatory and couldn’t pass up a chance to give a new group of people a new insight to the stars.