Boston 2009 - Dennis Kenney



Boston Homecoming April 2009

By Dennis Kenney

Email: kenneydennis@

© March 2009 Dennis Kenney

Boston Homecoming 2009

It was spring by the calendar so I returned to Boston. I arrived at least a few weeks too early and was greeting by freezing and near-freezing weather. I enjoyed the annual trauma of getting my truck inspected. MIT is starting their spring break and the BU students are returning from theirs.

Shiloh Civil War Battlefield

The battle of Shiloh was named after the Methodist church on the battlefield. The Northerners called the battlefield Picking’s Landing after the disembarking point of many Union troops on the Tennessee River.

Marshall Space Center, Huntsville, Alabama

Next to the A-12 Blackbird at the old visitor’s center is a drone designed to simulate ICBMs reentering the atmosphere. The drone’s speed and altitude capabilities are comparable to the A-12. The visitor’s center is in a new building west of the old center.

A mockup of the Saturn V which delivered the Apollo astronauts to the moon dominates the missile display area. There are plaques for all of the Apollo missions and an additional plaque for the German rocket scientists of Peenemunde (Paperclip Germans) of Werner von Braun. The lady at the Huntsville information center mentioned that only a few of the 137 German scientists are still living. She described enemy (the Federals) action during the Civil War including the capture of Northern troops that were not in uniform on a mission to destroy the local railroad system. They were hung as spies.

MIT Maihaugen Gallery - The Fascination of Flight,

Balloons, wings & flying machines.

MIT Conspiracy Theories

I have never seen a flying saucer or a ghost. I did see a green meteor which was very bright green and appeared to be slow for a meteor. Busts of Vannevar Bush and Nikola Tesla adorn MIT building 10; Vannevar of Majestic 12 notoriety and Nikola with his death rays. (Elon Musk’s high end electric car, the Tesla, was covered by a shroud the day I visited the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, California in March.) I’ve gone to Roswell’s UFO Museum at least once every year for the past four years. Now I’m hearing stories at MIT of anti-gravity engines and UFO sightings. Very high electric fields and exotic dielectric materials assembled like slices of pie are needed for controlling the direction of thrust. I’ve always suspected that the latest remodeling of MIT building 6 was required because of a Philadelphia Experiment type accident. One of the writer wannabes at the speculative fiction Meetup that I went to in Vista, California last month mentions the Majestic 12 group including Vannevar Bush specifically – fact as fiction or fiction as fact? Van knows if ET landed near Roswell. Just when I thought I was out I’m being drawn back into the fringe. I’ll be in the Vannevar Bush building (13) and in the Bush room of MIT building 10 for the regional SEDS conference.

The 9/11 alternate conspiracy advocates had their day at Boston University itemizing their perceived shortcomings to the official 9/11 investigation. Their skepticism is a reflection of the blowback to the secrecy and policies of the Bush II administration.

Handicapped Parking

I’m sitting at a travel plaza on 128 drinking my senior coffee from McDonald’s. The first car that pulls into handicapped parking is a couple from New York who are now living in northern Maine. The wife is a little creaky from old age. The next couple almost sprint to the restrooms. They have my level of stiffness from old age. A blimpy couple gets out next to get some Honey Dew donuts. They are just terribly overweight and justify having a handicapped parking permit. They just barely were able to get out of their car. The next man is driving a van for senior citizens but isn’t handicapped at all. My friend in Wichita, Kansas thinks that it is a violation of property rights to require businesses to provide handicapped parking. [After many cups of senior coffee I finally saw one man park in handicapped parking whose mother was in a wheel chair.]

MIT Spam Conference 2009 - 26, 27 March

Comcast sponsored a reception at the Cambridge Brewing Company on Thursday.

Robert Bruen – ICANN Policy Enforcement

Residential Design and Construction 2009 – 1, 2 April

The tradeshow and convention for residential construction at the Seaport World Trade Center was well attended, especially considering the affect that the economy has had on home sales and construction. I was surprised by the evolution that smart homes have gone through with the advances in computers, flat panel displays, appliance control and portable control devices like iPhones. Coming from a background in aircraft automation and network administration I’m impressed with the programming of modes for entertainment and kitchen use. Control of lighting, temperature and security are minimal requirements for a system although entertainment is often implemented first. Geeks have always started with a home network. Simple water heaters and photovoltaic panels are cost effective and a good place to start if the cost and complexity of a complete integrated, converged, system overwhelms your budget. Maybe Bruce will let me

integrate the Mars analog habitat in Hanksville, Utah.

Yvonne Brill – Pioneer Rocket Propellant Consultant

Yvonne, the first woman giving the Lester D. Gardiner lecture worked at one of my favorite employers, Douglas Aircraft Corporation in Long Beach, California. She became a rocket scientist (research analyst) when Douglas got a missile project. Yvonne still works as a consultant. Yvonne’s Megabytes for the Masses presentation sketched the beginnings of remote sensing and commercial communication satellites. The shortage of men during WWII helped her to enter the male-dominated field of scientific engineering. She described her early years in the aircraft industry.

The reception after Yvonne’s talk was in the tent outside of the Hyatt Regency Cambridge hotel. I sat with Yvonne and her companion – we were all white wine drinkers. I felt like I was talking with my mother but the conversation didn’t involve line or belly dancing. Yvonne’s hands danced in the air as she described the variants of hydrazine rocket propellant. Yvonne is looking forward to retirement so that she can pursue her other interests but I doubt that industry and academia will reduce their demands on her time.

2009 SEDS Northeast Regional Conference – 4 April

The Students for the Exploration and Development of Space held their northeast regional meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The keynote speaker at the dinner in the Vannevar Bush room was Paulo Lozano of MIT’s department of Aeronautics and Aerodynamics. Paulo gave us a primer on rockets, propellants and orbital mechanics.

LSC and Department XVI presents a special film series

Stanley Kubrick et al - 2001: A Space Odyssey

It’s 2009 and man hasn’t met his destiny. Rather than Arthur Clark’s vision of space man is locked in low Earth orbit leaving the exploration of his solar system to robotic explorers. The icons of 2001 persist – HAL the egotistical self-aware computer going postal, commercial flight to moon colonies, artificial gravity in space stations, and contact with a super intelligence. Actor Gary Lockwood is looking more like his later images in the film as he sold autographs at Spacefest 2009.

Professor Deva Newman - Biosuit

Deva introduced the movie and gave some perspective on what the movie got right and the minor details of what was wrong given our experiences in space. Deva is developing a light, mobile space suit for use in space and on Mars which I saw on display at the Museum of Science during the One Giant Leap event May 13th.

Top Gun

Associate Professor Mary “Missy” Cummings will give a former F-18 Hornet pilot’s perspective on Tom Cruise’s interpretation of the Navy’s Top Gun school. Missy feels that pilots are obsolete and has written a book on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs).

Ron Howard et al – Apollo 13

Former shuttle astronaut mission specialist Professor Jeffrey Hoffman introduced the film of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, our “most successful failure” in the Apollo program. Jeffrey talked about trivia on the film, insider jokes and errors. I crashed a Tail Hook meeting in Pensacola NAS when Jim Lovell received an award. Jeffrey pointed out that in the Iwo Jima carrier scene Jim Lovell greeted himself (played by Tom Hanks) so I had to check this out during the screening. Jeffrey will relive his Hubble rescue and maintenance missions during the upcoming final shuttle flight to repair and resupply the space telescope.

MIT Short Film Festival 2009 – April 17 to 19

Kurt Fendt of MIT’s HyperStudio introduced the films and Generoso Fierro of MIT’s Comparative Media Studio served popcorn.

I grew up in Maine and raised my two boys in California. I lived in Germany for two years. There were more foreigners there than in either Boston or Los Angeles. The people working in the restaurants didn’t speak Spanish; they spoke something else.

Genetically I’m roughly a quarter French, a quarter English and the rest is Irish with a dash of Scotch. I have to be careful when I drink because I never know which part will emerge. I’m especially careful if only Guinness is available.

Unser Täglich Brot – Our Daily Bread

This German documentary describes mass-produced food in Germany – factory farms for produce and livestock. The images speak for themselves; there is no proselytizing on the demeaning nature of the work and the model’s unsustainability or its dangers to public health. The business model for factory farms and processing requires cheap labor which recent busts show includes undocumented, underpaid immigrant workers.

Food, Inc

An American documentary about factory food and values.

Electronics New England Keynote – Anna Sylvan Jaffe

MIT Senior Anna of MIT’s Vehicle Design Summit described her vision of an awesome design world based on a global outlook.

MIT Bar Camp 2009 – 27, 28 April

This year’s Bar Camp was held in the Stata Student Center. Microsoft was one of the sponsors.

Drupal Design – groups.boston

Drupal is a content management development environment for social/community networks. The local Drupal SIG is having a design camp the 13th and 14th of June.

Sam Kounaves – Digging for Martians

One of the three Technology and Culture Forums scheduled at Tommy Doyle’s Kendall Square was a simul-café on Life as we don’t know it. Low attendance forced the reduction in number of the three simul-cafes to one at the Technology and Culture Forum to just Life at Tommy Doyle’s Kendall Square. Tuft Professor Sam described what life will probably look like if it is discovered on Mars. The finding on frozen water during the first scooping of Martian soil and the detection of methane plumes increases the chances that the life we find will be similar to what is found in extreme environments on Earth. In the event Life as we don’t know it Sam described what life might look like if it is found on Mars.

Bacterial (or multicellular) life on Mars might have evolved differently than on the Earth or even been a second Genesis. Life on the Earth developed in a primordial CO2 atmosphere but soon reduced the carbon dioxide to O2. The fossil remnants on the Earth (in the oldest rocks) are only slightly over 3 billion years old because of erosion and the tectonic recycling of Earth’s mantle. Molecular fossils, lipids peculiar to archaeans, are found throughout the fossil record, even in the oldest 3.8 billion year-old sediments in west Greenland. Bacteria dominate the fossil record during this time but we have no way of knowing what happened before that. Life started in an environment that would be considered extreme today, an environment that we consider natural to the surviving extremophiles of today. The primitive part of the Tree of Life, which may have been predominantly archaea, is lost forever unless part of the extinct species or their fossils survived on Mars. And, of course, life doesn’t have to be based on carbon or DNA/proteins.

Noam

MIT Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky spoke at the annual spring Palestine Awareness Week on Palestine-Israel May 4th at 6:30 in MIT 10-250. Unwavering support for Israeli settlements and policy in the Israeli occupied territories from America and the EU continues the anguish of the Palestinian people. Some spin doctors even suggest that the Arabs continue the perpetuation of the Palestine refugee camps to keep Israeli feet to the fire.

Parsec – parallel of one arc second

A parsec is equal to 3.26 light-years or 30 trillion kilometers. Promina Centauri, the nearest star to our sun, is 1.20 parsecs away. The distance in parsecs is 205,265 astronomical units.

The End of Detroit as we know it

I want a $20K all-electric car. In India industry and government have combined to launch the golf cart-like Nano. The French government and Renault have launched an all-electric car which will be deployed first in Israel since Israel will subsidize the required infrastructure. I’ll have to buy my electric car from Renault’s American factory.

The roadable Terrafugia Transition light sports aircraft is the only bright spot in America, albeit in a very small niche market. Several articles have given a suggested retail price of $200K. I hope that the Transition is displayed at Oshkosh this year along with electric Light Sport Aircraft.

Detroit fights to retain its sweet spot of $30-40K vehicles with hybrids and heavy government subsidies. I consider the whole inspection sticker procedure to have been captured by the automotive garages. I usually spend about $600 annually to jump through the artificial hoops created by the industry with the complicity of our politicians. This year the repairs were mostly justified even though I feel that the high cost of emission sensors is unjustified. I hope that electric cars will eliminate the market of emissions controls though I’m sure that the automotive part manufacturers will find a way to continue to sell unnecessary parts and repairs.

David R. Smith – MIT 6-120 11:45

Developments in Metamaterials and Transformational Optics

Negative refraction and David’s involvement in the field has received a lot of popular press recently principally since it involves the use of use of metamaterials to produce invisibility - a Romulan cloaking device or stealth-like invisibility to a person or vehicle. David explained that a small object embedded in metamaterials or an object on a surface could be shielded by metamaterials but these are hardly useful devices. David didn’t cover the subject but magnification of objects to resolutions smaller than visible light seems a more useful application for negative refraction in metamaterials.

Lisa Gilbert –

Seafloor volcanic and hydrothermal controls on ancient microbial life in an Archean greenstone.

Studies of porosity on the Quebec/Ontario state line and its interaction with Archael microorganisms is the object of the continuing fieldwork in the area. One site, the tractor site, is behind a John Deere franchise.

Maine – The Way Life should be

I found a motel in Ogunquit that posted a $49/couple rate. I don’t think that I’ve ever stayed in a motel in Ogunquit; I usually go to low-rent motels in Moody or Wells. I have fond memories of Karaoke at a restaurant down the hill towards the traffic jam in the center of town but I was too tired to walk down. The next day I stop in the McDonald’s in Wells for my senior coffee. They are playing my kind of music. My family had a winter rental on the beach in Wells when I was teaching school. There were only gringos in the restaurant, a far change from my usual haunts in Bedford or Salem, New Hampshire (or Socorro, New Mexico for that matter). My brother says that he and the Maine Militia are going to defend the border (yes, the New Hampshire border). I don’t want to spend the money or time right now to go to Bar Harbor, Mexico or Greenville. Now where do I find a cheap lobster?

I returned to Maine, actually Greenville, via Fryeburg, Mexico and Moscow. I had two restful nights in Greenville, ate roasted chicken at the Flatlanders and oatmeal at Auntie M’s with the beautiful waitresses. The airport is not public-friendly and there wasn’t any activity anyway. I stayed in Bangor the next night after some beans and red franks in Old Town and a spin through the deserted campus at the University of Maine in Orono. A veggie pizza was necessary before I turned off the TV and hit the sack. Cadillac Mountain will have to wait until next time as I headed for civilization. Think Maine Big.

It’s the next time. I jumped into the river in Bridgeton and spent the night in Lewiston. Two women from Somolia appeared to be managers at the Motel 6. Boston got the high-maintenance Russian Jewish refugees while Lisbon Street got the Somolians (or the Somolians got decepit Lisbon Street). I camped on the quiet side of Bar Harbor after a lobster at the Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound. We used to travel down from UMe for lobsters forty years ago at the pound which were cheap enough that we sometimes bought two. The pound and a quarter lobster went over $10 because of an 80 cent charge for butter.

I’m back at the Trenton Narrows for a second lobster at the Trenton Narrows after four more days at the Seawall Campgrounds and the Southwest Harbor Library. The week has been restful except for a warning ticket for speeding coming into town. The whole island is a minefield of speed limit signs if you get out of the rush traffic stream of speeders and tail-gaters. I’m heading back to Bangor which is having a hotel rate war like the western most sea coast of Maine and New Hampshire. The Motel 6 has raised its rate twice – off the seasonal rate plus the weekend premium. I go up two stars for about the same rate at the Holiday Inn.

Student Senegalese Rhythm Assemble - Rambax MIT

At first it looked like the MIT student drummers were having all the fun until Lamine Touré fired up the crowd. The clapping, singing and dancing of the audience built up to a finale that had all but a hand full of the audience on stage with the drummers. The ensemble is open to non-student members of the MIT-community. The performance at the Broad Institute May 9th included a few professional friends of Lamine.

MIT Physics Symposium – Pappalardo Fellowships in Physics

Five of the nine active Pappalardo Fellows at MIT presented talks on the research that they are presently involved in.

Boston Museum of Science – One Giant Leap

Spencer Reiss of Wired magazine moderated the space bureaucrats on the panel who stuck on message detailing the future commercialization of space, COTS or Commercial Orbital Transportation System to the anointed. Spence did an informal poll at the start of the panel. Who had seen the new Star Trek movie which had been released the previous week? Almost all the audience raised their hands. Who had watched the Hubble repair live on television? A handful of the audience raised their hands. NASA has approved two partners so far – SpaceX and Orbital Sciences. I see nothing but the continued monopoly of space by sovereign nations and government bureaucracies like NASA and DoD.

“We need more women in aerospace.”

“The problems identified in the first Ares I test are being fixed.”

“No nation can explore space alone. Space exploration is international.”

“Space is a challenging, dangerous environment.”

“NASA did exactly what it was supposed to do.”

MIT Energy Initiative Colloquium – Recycling Nuclear Waste:

Addressing Nuclear Waste in the 21st Century

Senator Tom Carper, D-DE, hosted this roundtable, ostensibly to investigate options for the future development of nuclear power plants. The answers he wanted to hear were to start the building of the plants and that recycling of the nuclear fuel wasn’t feasible at this time. Consensus development will include public outreach and relabeling the nuclear waste dumps repositories, the start of consensus manufacturing. Tom described the low level waste repository in Carlsbad as a successful merger with a willing town on the Scandinavian model – Roswell had a large Army air field and was desperate to replace the jobs lost with the closing of the base and had conservative, patriotic citizens. Tom mentioned twice the jobs provided by the prison system in Texas and the competition from Texas communities to host the penitentiaries.

The participants, three MIT and one Harvard professors provided the desired political cover with minor wrinkles based on their various agendas.

Solaris

Russia’s answer to the sterility of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 describes an intelligent planet or ocean on that planet that interacts with the earthlings by sending visitors plucked from the memories of the explorers. One Arts person explained the plot as being highly spiritual though secular people like me might not see that. The filmmaker had to waltz with the thought-control commissars of the Communist Party. Being from the Science second culture of A & S, I saw it as a First Contact story with a very unhuman, intelligent life form.

This article is getting too long. It’s time to head north, south or west. The need for a passport in Canada will be a show stopper for me this year.

Dr. Mahtab Jafari – Plant Adaptogens – Science or Fiction

25% of adult Americans use herbal extracts. While about 20,000 herbs are used for medicinal purposes only 10 (garlic, ginko, green tea, aloe, etc.) have been studied systematically with only four (garlic, ginko biloba, St. John’s wort and Sow Parmeto) show statistical efficacy. Mahtab is especially interested in plant adaptogens, a class of compounds occurring in herbs. Her favorite is Rhodiola rosea which is considered the source of a super adaptogen.

A Crisis is a Precious Thing to Waste

The French debacle in Algiers forced France to go oil-less and 25 years later France had 200 nuclear power plants. America is a little slow learning this lesson but the present fiasco in Afghanistan and Iraq and perhaps Iran may make possible what was unthinkable ten years ago.

Ron Howard’s Angels and Demons

The Bad Science begins with a splinter group at the soon to be operational Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland using the high energy collider to create anti-matter which is stolen with the intent of using the material to blow up the Vatican and adjacent parts of Rome. E=MC2 says that the collider can create particles not large amounts of material. The techno babble continues with talk about the elusive God particle, the Higgs Boson which the collider has been designed to detect (not just or specifically).

Jared Spool – Web Apps

The Collision of Design and Business. “Don’t let business rules take away from the experience.”

Maine Aviation Museum – Bangor International (formerly Dow AFB)

I spent several hours at the museum. I’m especially interested in the history of the F-89 Scorpion interceptor with its nuclear-tipped Genie missile. There’s a Scorpion and a mock Genie at the air museum in Tucson. The volunteer at the Bangor air museum told me that all of the real Genies were too radioactive to let the public close to.

AOPA Safety Seminar – GPS from the Ground Up

A Global Positioning System can determine its position and time compared to an Inertial Navigation System which maintains information of its position by updating its initial position by dead reckoning computations. An INS measures attitude and accelerations deriving velocity and direction of travel by calculations based on the change of position with time. (A ring laser gyro measures angular rates and calculates attitude by integration.) A GPS calculates ground speed and the aircraft’s direction of travel by calculations based on the change of position with time. Both of these long range navigation systems exist in inertial space based on true north. VORs, compasses and runway headings exist in magnetic space.

Navigational Data Bases and cockpit displays are what make the GPS and INS information useful and help the pilot maintain situational awareness. Additionally a Flight Management System, which functions like a flight engineer helps a single or pair of pilots to monitor the aircraft’s systems and details like fuel consumption and the health of the aircraft’s electric and electronic systems. What else? Real-time data can be data-linked from ground stations and displayed in the cockpit instruments. The data could be enroute weather, or changes to a flight plan or the military situation.

Autopilots are nice if your plane has one. An aircraft can get into unusual attitudes while the pilot is concentrating on a procedure or is changing the flight plan while actively engaging the controls.

FAA Seminar on Operations on Non-controlled Airfields

This seminar was in the tent at Sanderson Airfield on the second day of the Yankee Ultralight Fly-in 2009.

Robert A. Heinlein -

Have Space Suit – Will Travel (1958). I took a break from Chaiklin to take a trip to the moon with Heinlein and ended up at the Lesser Magellan Cloud by way of Pluto and the Vegan system. Is the human race worth saving or is it a menace to the inhabitants of our local tri-galactic strand?

Computational Immunology Symposium – Wong Auditorium

The emphasis was on the computational and multidisciplinary study of immunology and HIV/Aids.

Eugene Jarecki – The American Way of War

Eugene is the producer of the film Why We Fight. Not to detract from the theme of how we got into the quagmire of Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan why not call the book The Human Way of Violent Conflict? The book is one of the most nuanced description of the American extension of executive power under Bush II culminating first in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan culminating in the assault of personal freedom in the Patriot Act and its extensions. He asks where was the outrage from the electoral, judicial and legislative segments of America during the Bush II reign.

Colin Wells – Embedded Systems

Embedded real-time is one of those things that workers in the field recognize when they see it but have a hard time defining. Defining as well as designing and implementing autonomous systems is even more difficult.

Boston Linux & Unix SIG - Rooftops III

Kurt Keville and Brian DeLacey discussed the coming 8.11 (Mesh) standard and how it will impact embedded Linux distributions like OpenWRT and Robix. There was an afternoon pre-session mainly in the MIT Building 51 parking lot (more sunlight outside) from 12 to 6 which was a hands-on building of a solar-powered super computer that consumed 76 watts. Kurt and Brian recapped the progress in municipal wireless rollouts in the regular meeting session.

Instruments of State

We voted.

They counted.

They decided.

We marched, cried and died.

Praise God.

James Michener – Texas (1985)

I just finished reading Texas for the second time. Why was I subjected to all the Way We Think the World Should Be Bullshit all my life when I could have just read Texas? I spend about a month each year since I retired in Texas, mainly in Houston and West Texas and survived transitioning Texas in spite of being an anarchist, terrorist and godless liberal with a Boston accent. My high school English teacher, Miss Kersey, assigned me War and Peace for a book report after I’d used The Red Badge of Courage for a previous assignment. I wish that she’d have assigned me Texas. If I’d realized the way of the real world I’d have never butted heads with the people of the parallel universe by staying in Oxford county making paper or teaching.

What to do, what to do?

Only Spock can be in two places (times?) at once. Should I go to the Mars Society Convention or Oshkosh? It looks like MSC won the toss.

12th Annual International Mars Society Convention

The convention was from July 30 to August 2 at the University of Maryland in College Park. There was a be a special screening of Roving Mars with director George Butler.

AirVenture 2009 Oshkosh – 27 July to 2 August

The Airbus 380 came to Oshkosh and I missed it this year. Sorry, Irregulars.

18th Annual Yankee Ultralight Flyers Fly-in 2009 – July 10-12 (18)

The fly-in is, as usual, was at Sanderson Airfield in Greenland, New Hampshire. The fly-in is a warm-up fly-in for Oshkosh as it was for me two years ago. The public fly-in and the motorcycle rally are over. I rode in the van last year for the annual motorcycle outing, which went to Mount Washington. This year’s annual rally Monday was 251 miles long on the fourth sunny day in a row and counting. As reported in the AOPA newsletter, there were three evening candy showers. There were also several burning brain storms over the bonfire, one brain burning spectacularly as it rose into the starry heavens. The campers at the bonfire were buzzed sporadically by neon UFOs. This fly-in was the most successful in the chapter’s history in terms of attendance and the weather the fly-in was blessed with will be hard to duplicate in the future.

The volunteer, EAA and flyers segment of the fly-in will continue until the 19th with the EAA chapter meeting tonight, the 14th. I’ll be heading to the Mars Society Convention in College Park, Maryland if I’m accepted as a volunteer or to Oshkosh 2009 at the end of this month. MSC won the toss as of today.

Defense Systems Seminar Series 2009

America is involved in a never ending war. I don’t mean the War on Terrorism although that is part of the picture. Just as economic competition is part of government (don’t say industrial espionage) cyber attacks and defense are part of what are called covert operations. Russia didn’t think any apology was required for its cyber attacks on Georgia as part of its military incursion in 2007.

Andrew Martin – GI Zhou Newsletter 88

In this newsletter from Down Under Andrew describes the equipment used by China’s internal security and counter-terrorist military and civilian units which were expanded to cope with the demands of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The Chinese handled the anticipated protests over Tibet but fell short during the July 5th and 6th Urumqi riots in which 156 people were killed by official Chinese count with no police casualties. The Chinese government gave large monetary compensation to the families of innocent civilian dead to dampen the civilian outrage at the security force’s use of lethal force.

Noisy British Misusing Bird Hides

As I’m preparing for the bird season with sandhill cranes and Canadian geese I learn that I may have to contend with Brits along with automotive horns and boom boxes. Loud British couples have been pleaded with to use the bird hides properly or at least not be so noisy. Please don’t advertise the Festival of the Cranes in the British Isles.

Bonanza Store and Restaurant – Methuen, Massachusetts

I need a periodic fix of Dominican Republic beans so I dropped into the store around brunch time. I couldn’t see any beans so I ordered some scrambled eggs and a portion of chicken. I miss New Mexico-style scrambled eggs with green chili but these eggs were even better with mild flavoring, green chili and tomatoes. I just got to get the recipe. I love spicy, tasty food but can’t handle hot food. The beans and scrambled eggs at the Bonanza suit my taste perfectly. My Spanish is improving too.

AIAA Space 2009 Pasadena – 14 to 17 September

Amphibian Fly-in – Greenville, Maine

I missed the fly-in because my truck was improperly worked on by H & W Auto Repair in Cambridge and I had to take the garage to small claims court. Neither the Haitian mechanic nor any other principal showed up at the court.

Enchanted Sky Star Party 2009 – October 14-17

I hope to return to the land of green chili this winter.

Festival of the Cranes 2009 – November 17-22

The cranes were a little late arriving but the flock steadily increased in size during the week as the cold snap up north motivated them as it had motivated me. On a few mornings the cranes had to break a thin sheet o ice on the pond before taking flight.

Bucket List

It’s just a matter of convenience that skydiving, butt propping and flying are first on my list.

Learn the three chords to Rocky Top

Buy trainer R/C plane and learn to fly (Socorro)

Volcanoes and telescopes on the Big Island of Hawaii

Volcanoes and thermal energy in Iceland

Hush house (Robbins Air Force Base, Georgia)

Environmental chamber at Eglin AFB.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Summer solstice at Stonehenge

Telescope mirror facility at the University of Arizona

Aviation museum in Marietta, Georgia

Author Info

Dennis Kenney is the author of Star of Fire, an alternate history of the exploration of Mars. The novel can be freely downloaded for non-commercial use at . The Word version of the paperback has the latest revisions. My vanity Website is . As of the 40th anniversary of man’s first landing on the moon it looks like I’ll be heading to the Mars Society Convention at the University of Maryland at the end of the month. All those twits tweeting.

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