Areas of Unrest

30 September 1999 - Taking Measure

QOTD: "Hairy-legged, blood-sucking and sexually prodigious, fleas are natural candidates for art-world celebrity." - Tessa DeCarlo, in a Wall Street Journal review of Maria Fernanda Cardoso's flea circus

Reading: Robert Falcon Scott, Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals

Listening to: Dr. Didg, Out Of the Woods

The most interesting news story of the day was that they've discovered what happened to the Mars Climate Observor. Or, more precisely, they've discovered why it entered the Martian atmosphere too low and burned up. It turns out that the Lockheed Martin team provided the orbital maneuvers in English units, while the NASA software used metric units. This is one of these things that is really easy to have happen, and is also really easy to prevent by testing properly.

It's also an excuse for me to rant about why it's entirely ridiculous that the U.S. persists in using the English system when even the English have largely gone metric. (You do still see some use of the English system for distances in the U.K., though.) Some day we will look back at this sort of nonsense and think it's as absurd as the French insistence on measuring longitude from Paris instead of Greenwich until decades after everybody else had standardized.

And standardization is really what this is about. The actual choice of units is arbitrary. I'll fully admit that I have never managed to think in Celsius temperatures and have to convert to Fahrenheit to have any idea how hot or cold it is. But I have gotten reasonably used to thinking in kilometers, liters and kilograms, especially once I understood that if you are cooking for a group, you figure on 100 grams of meat per person. (Which is a bit under 4 ounces if you have to do the conversion, by the way.)

The lack of standardization goes beyond whether or not we use metric units. I had a professor in my undergrad days who was particularly annoyed that the position of elevator buttons was not standardized. This seems like a minor point, but it's got to be tricky for blind people. There may be braille symbols on the control panel - but first you have to find the control panel.

Cars are one of my favorite examples. While ergonomics have improved, I have spent far too much time trying to find various controls on rental cars to think that we are well-served by some design variations. I had a car this past week in Colorado in which the ignition was not on the steering column and I muttered under my breath each morning for just that second or two that I had to think about it.

Of course, this assumes we all standardize the way I like things.

Before I change the subject, my favorite story about measurement standards has to do with a Navy satellite system. This is alleged to be true, but I can't speak to it first hand. At any rate, if it isn't, it should be. The story claims that the Navy ordered a ground system to go with their new satellites. One of the functions of pretty much any ground system is orbit determination and this system provided the satellite ephemerides in kilometers. (By the way, ephemerides is the plural of ephemeris, which is just a table of astronomical positions. It is very important to know that the word "ephemerides" has 5 syllables, i.e. it is e-phe-me-ri-des, with a short i in the penultimate syllable. I have been at too many meetings where the ignorant pronounce the last two syllables as one syllable, i.e. "rides" with a long "i", and I doubt that I am the only person who is suspicious of the competence of people who can't even pronounce the buzzwords in their own field. But that has nothing to do with my story.)

Anyway, the Navy saw the satellite positions in kilometers and objected. "We're the Navy!" they said. "We use nautical miles."

So the contractor rewrote the software. They put the in-plane orbital parameters (i.e. the axes of the ellipse or the downrange and crossrange) in nautical miles. Then they redid the altitude computation, too. The satellite altitude was reported in negative fathoms.

On an entirely different subject, I will admit that part of my muttering under my breath on Tuesday morning was because it was snowing. It was just wet heavy flurries. But snow in September is unnatural. Even in Colorado. Now I am home and we are having a heat wave. If I ever get to standardize things, can I start with the weather and order up a lot of clear, crisp, cold but not snowy autumn days?

As for other news, the Red Sox made it to the playoffs. This means that I am on edge waiting to see what strange and bizarre way they come up with to blow it. And what is with the Mets? Usually, if they are going to screw up, they do it all season long, instead of this nonsense of choking at the end of the season. And this makes two years in a row.

Finally, I have relatively little food pornography to report on from this trip to Boulder. I flew in late on Monday because I had an all day meeting in Azusa, so I had to deal with airline food for dinner. Tuesday night a group of us went to Zolo, where I had a delicious dinner of seared ahi in a spicy sauce (chipotles among other things) followed by cinnamon profiteroles (filled with coffee ice cream). And Wednesday night was a reception so the point was socializing and adding to my collection of vendor toys, rather than the food, which was okay but unexciting. The toy for this event was a rubber ball with the program logo and a map of the world. The map was hardly accurate, as it was missing the entire Indian subcontinent, so I hope it wasn't intended to be a reflection on the mapping displays the contractor is developing.