Areas of Unrest

19 March 2000 - Interplanetary Rats

QOTD: "We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it, than to consume wealth without producing it." - George Bernard Shaw

Reading: Dervla Murphy, South From the Limpopo

Listening to: Enya, The Memory of Trees

The conference I just got back from was the most interesting work-related one I've been to in recent memory. The subject was planning and scheduling in space. Since the sensor scheduling problems I deal with are something I actually think are fun, I had high expectations and they were met. However, I also had a major attack of "imposter syndrome" beforehand. Most of the time, I work with people who I think know less than I do. (That sounds arrogant, and maybe it is, but it's a common attitude where I work.) But that isn't necessarily true at conferences and I always go through the whole "you're not as smart as you think you are" self-talk beforehand. This time, though, I found a cure of sorts. Instead of the sapphire ring I usually wear, I put on my brass rat.

A brass rat is an M.I.T. ring and provides instant identification between alumni. It's called that because the design includes a picture of the M.I.T. mascot, the beaver. (Just as the beaver is the engineer of the animal world, the M.I.T. student is the animal of the engineer world.) At the small scale of a ring, the beaver looks rat-like. If you get your ring in white gold instead of yellow gold, it's called a tin rat, by the way. The big ritual of graduation is the moment you turn your ring around, so the beaver shits on the outside world, instead of on you.

I wore my brass rat somewhat regularly right after graduation, but it's been a long time since I wore it at all. It's useful for job interviews, even though it doesn't tell anybody anything that isn't on my resume. Few of the conference attendees were likely to read my biography in the program, so it was a somewhat subtle way of adding to my credibility. It's sad to say how effective it was. Recognition of the brass rat came up in at least half a dozen conversations I had.

The format for the conference was an unusual one, too. The papers were divided roughly into ones dealing with theory and application. Each paper was assigned a commentator to address the other side. For example, the paper I commented on was a very theoretical artificial intelligence one. I was relieved to discover that several of the other commentators had the same problem that I had. Namely, it's easy to get lost in AI terminology if that isn't where your background is. I also think I did a better job than at least a few of the others when it came to understanding enough to say something intelligent. I saw enough nods of agreement when I presented my commentary to think that at least some people found the points I made to be relevant. Two people told me afterwards that they'd thought I gave a good presentation. I think I talked too fast but I'm still happy to accept praise.

What was really fun was getting to hear a lot about some of the deep-space work NASA is doing. There were several people there who work on exploration missions, so I got to hear a lot about the plans for things like the Europan ocean mission. Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter and there is some evidence that it may have a liquid ocean underneath a thick crust of ice. There are plans for a series of missions that will eventually result in drilling through the ice surface to look for signs of life near geothermal vents. I also heard a lot about attempts to develop a communications infrastructure for Martian exploration. One speaker referred to this as extending the Internet to space and creating the InterPlanet. There are also plans for interstellar missions, which could start as early as 2040. Which means its unlikely that I'll live to see us really reach another solar system.

Even though I find the exploration missions interesting, I wouldn't really want to work on them. The payoff is too slow. And the risk of there not being any payoff at all is too high. I also think that a lot of the NASA engineers become overspecialized. There are advantages to that sort of expertise, of course, but I like working at the systems level. Our ideal is the "T-shaped" person, with breadth across the field and depth in one area. That's not for everyone, but it suits me.

While I was up in San Francisco, I was able to get together with Saori and Bob for dinner. They wanted to take advantage of Elliot (their son, not my brother) being away at outdoors school to eat adult food. So we wandered around North Beach, looking at menus and smelling the air. We finally settled on a place called Tavolino, largely because its menu was different than any of the others. This proved to be an excellent choice, as it turned out the reason the menu was different is that it's a cichetti bar. Which is, essentially, the Italian equivalent of a tapas bar. You order several small plates and everyone shares them. The food we ordered included salad, fried olives (better than it sounds, but still saltier than I'd like), suppli (rice croquettes filled with cheese - one of my favorite foods in the world and something I'd only eaten before in Italy, so a particular pleasure to find on a menu in the U.S.), grilled salmon, butterfish with pine nuts, stuffed portabello mushrooms, red peppers, and steak. Along with a bottle of red wine, it proved to be quite a feast, especially as we added in dessert (tiramisu, in my case). Not cheap, but $120 or so for three people isn't horribly out of line either. And it was well worth every penny.

Back at home, today was an arts and crafts day. I went over to Wildfiber for a class on recycled papermaking. It was a lot of fun and I ended up making five sheets of paper plus a small sculpture of a cat. However, I smell of paper pulp, which is not a very pleasant thing. So it's time to stop writing and take a nice long shower.