LITE
Dear Family and Friends,
Welcome to this week's "Thoughtlet."
These words are my personal diary and a weekly review of ideas,
beliefs, thoughts, or words that will hopefully be of some
benefit to you: my children, my family, and my friends.
"This was a techie week, one of those weeks us nerds love.
Monday was a regular day at the office. Mike was back from Algeria. He tried to kill the projects there, and they kept meeting his requirements. Looks like there will be quite a bit of work to do there. Dave is very busy with the Grant acquisition, and so he has not been by to visit near as often as before this happened. I drove to work on Monday. George Schultz was in Utah playing golf and visiting Andy and Laurie. I left from work for Vidor. On the way over I listened to some of my AudioTech Books on Tape, which I am way behind on. There was one tape which defined 'Character' as 'knowing what you are willing to stand up for.' There was another tape with an acronym for the word SMART, which I liked:
<![CDATA['Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timely']]>
Got to Vidor in time for a nice bean and rice dinner with Jared, and a wonderful Family Home Evening (http://www.walden3d.com/photos/Family/05_JaredMelanie/060926_Wrights/). It was a nice evening. Wish I could do this with each of you more often. Oh well.
Tuesday I slept in until about 8:00. Breakfast was Honey Nut Chereoos. I remember because I drank the milk from my bowl, only to watch Colby finish all of his cereal, and then drink the milk just like Grandpa did. Maybe this is my legacy. Oh well! Luis Viertel arrived from Houston at about 9:00 and I met him at Wright's Bar-B-Que. The Wright's let me park the Prius under their car park, and Luis drove to Lafayette. It is a nice 2 hour drive.
We went to Lafayette to represent GDC at the GCAGS (Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies), and specifically to meet with Carolina Cruz-Niera, the new director of LITE (The Louisiana Immersive Technology Enterprise). We paid our $200 each and went to the exhibition hall. There were a lot of prospects, in addition to the regular boots. Quite a few people, and everyone seemed very busy. Met several friends, including Alan Peterson, and it is always fun to catch up. We spent quite a bit of time at the Open-dTect & dGB, booth with Fred Amanzadah, president-elect of the SEG.
About 1:00 we went over to the LITE facility, which is almost across the street from the Cajun Dome. They have a 350 seat auditorium with a large curved stereo screen. We went in and set on the front row in the theater seating. Dr. Gary Kingsland came over and said "I'll be amazed if you recognize me." I responded, "Be amazed. What happened, cancer?" He responded, "Yes, thyroid cancer, and they got it all." He went on to tell me he is going to be able to start regrowing his hair, and that he feels fine. It was good to catch up, and to introduce him to Luis. He told me he recommended me to be the director of LITE, and then they were able to recruit Carolina from Iowa State. Then Carolina came in, and Gary made sure she came over and visited with us. It was definitely old friends meeting, because she seemed to forget she had to give the opening talk for a few minutes.
Carolina's talk was an introduction to LITE. She has brought a dozen researchers and staff with her since she started early in July. This includes German, Korean, English, and other researchers. Also, marketing and systems staff from San Francisco, who have been very successful with significant academic to industry technology transfer in the past. It is very impressive what she has accomplished in a couple of months. Then Gary Kingsland gave the first talk. He showed LIDAR data for southern Louisiana, and described the history of the interaction of the river through Lafayette and the Mississippi River, based on the small surface elevation differences mapped with LIDAR. It was obvious from his talk that LIDAR should be a basic exploration tool for the Gulf Coast and also for setting up seismic acquisition plans.
There was a break after Gary's talk, which gave us a chance to talk with Carolina some more. Then we went outside the theater, and let her get on with her business. She introduced the next talk, put on her timer, came out and gave us a personalized tour of LITE. The facility is very much like at Iowa State. In addition to the large theater, there is a small curved front projection theater, a small rear projection executive conference room, and the six wall cave. I look forward to talking Colby (and any other grandkids who are able to visit Lafayette) with me to go for a walk in the "Fire Cave" (a 3-D totally immersive computer game type environment. It was great to catch up. There is obviously a good relationship that has been built up over the years with Carolina, and I predict there will be a lot of joint project done between me (either GDC or Dynamic Resources) and LITE over the next decade.
We went back to the exhibition hall for a little while, then decided it was time to head back. Luis was hungry, and I convinced him to wait and eat at the best Bar-B-Que place in South Texas. He liked Wrights, and especially all of the old car photos. Melanie and Jared had other commitments, and so we didn't get to see them. One of the lady's serving mentioned the Prius, and said "I thought you were a Saturn man?" She explained she has a Saturn, which she really likes. Grandma Wright came in and made a comment about the Prius. It was good to see Jackie. I got home about 8:30, in time to watch the second half of The Unit. Gritty, like too much today. And I like it, which probably shows the real lack of depth of my spirituality. Oh well!
Wednesday morning George was still in Utah, and I drove the Prius for my turn at the car pool. Mike Schoemann had meetings, so he drove, and I ended up leaving the Prius at the Fry Road Park and Ride. Oh well! Called Andrea and she swapped out the Saturn, leaving the keys on top of the driver side front tire. When I got to work, the following article was on-line:
<![CDATA['Even on the ground, space elevators may have uses
21:50 26 September 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Kelly Young
The hope is that one day a space elevator, comprised of a robot that
will climb a strong tether about 100,000 kilometres (60,000 miles)
long, will be able to send humans or other cargo cheaply into space.
Developing the technology necessary to accomplish this goal will take
years, but some progress has been made so far. LiftPort Group, based in
Bremerton, Washington, US, stretched a cable one mile (1.6 kilometres)
into the air in Arizona, US, in January 2006 using a cluster of three
balloons (see Space-elevator tether climbs a mile high).
But that test lasted for only six hours. Now, LiftPort has finished a
60-day test with a 100-metre-long tether held aloft by four helium
balloons. The test was designed to see what kinds of problems would
crop up if such a platform were used to transmit Wi-Fi signals. The
lofty platforms would be especially useful for providing Wi-Fi
coverage to rural areas, says company president Michael Laine.
Overall, he says, the test went well, but there were several
unexpected encounters with wildlife. More than a dozen insect egg
colonies had been laid on the tether, and in the first few days of
the test, curious bats flew around the balloons, apparently attracted
by the sound made by the tether's vibrations. Late in the test,
swallows were also seen swooping down on the balloons, possibly to
sip the morning dew on their surfaces.
"That's the difference between a 6-hour and a 60-day test," Laine told
New Scientist.
The company also tested their climbing robot on this tether, even
though it was not crucial to finding out whether the balloons would
work as a Wi-Fi station. The robot will be necessary in the future
for delivering new helium tanks to balloons at higher altitudes.
The team learned that if the tether is pulled hard by wind, it starts
to buckle and deform slightly, creating crinkles. The robot climber
hit these crinkles and could not proceed because they made the tether
too thick for it to handle.
"We broke our robot by doing this," Laine says. "It's the kind of
failure we never would have learned had we only been doing 6-hour
tests." Future designs will have to incorporate sensors to tell the
robot when it is about to encounter varying thicknesses.
LiftPort is now working with North Carolina State University and
Rutgers University, both in the US, to develop a 5-km- (3-mile-) high
tether system. Several weeks ago, the company also made its own carbon
nanotubes for the first time. Because carbon nanotubes are extremely
thin but incredibly strong, they have been studied for use in a
lightweight tether that could reach all the way to space.
Other groups are also working towards building a space elevator. On 20
and 21 October, more than 20 teams will compete in the second round of
NASA's Beam Power and Tether Centennial Challenges, competitions to
spur the development of technology required for a space elevator.
In the Beam Power challenge, teams will try to use light to power a
robot that needs to climb 50 metres at a rate of 1 metre per second or
faster. The Tether challenge will test the strength of the competitors'
tethers. LiftPort will not compete in the contests, as Laine sits on
the board of the California-based Spaceward Foundation, which partnered
with NASA to put on the two challenges.
No one won the first competitions, which were held in October 2005.']]>
Wednesday was spent with Scott Smith, Fred's son-in-law, who brought the new version of dTIPS from Detroit. It is impressive what he has built. He is having a lot of success with his pipeline planning software. This is largely used for designing how to build water pipelines. There is an obvious connection to the Lake Powell Pipeline to Cedar City project I have become so interested in.
Wednesday evening a group called The Progressive Forum hosted an evening with Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard Professor, for a multi-media presentation of his new book "The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion." It was at the Wortham, I wanted to go, and Andrea indulged me and went with me, even though the two tickets and parking cost about $80. The multi-media portion was an opera singer, and some slides from figures in his book. Andrea said she was surprised how much people were willing to pay to listen to common sense. It was much as I expected, and confirmed the picture I have been building in my mind as to how I will be involved in marketing ""An Open Mind." Time will tell if I'm right. The nerd in me took and shares the following notes:
<![CDATA['There is a truce between scientific materialists and religious
believers in the effort to save biodiversity. Working together
science and religion can save life in the natural word because of
shared precepts of moral behavior. The meeting is on the near-side
of metaphysics, and resulted in a truce. Because over the next 25
years one quarter of existing species will be gone and by the end
of the century half will be gone. Religion and science are two of
the most powerful forces in the U.S. We owe to ourselves and to
future generations a beautiful environment.
The biosphere is much more diverse than we ever realized. It took 3.5
billion years to evolve the biosphere. The twenty-first century is
the century of the environment. The next few years is a bottleneck.
Fertility has dropped from 6 children per woman to 3. We are running
2.1 children per couple in the industrialized world. The population
of the world will peak at 9 billion.
Biodiversity is the total inherited life on earth, including:
1. Ecosystems;
2. Species in the ecosystem; and
3. gene distorting traits of 1,390,000 species.
Most species are insects, complimented by plants and flowers.
There are 900,000 insect species, and only 5,000 species of mammals.
Scientists only know 10% of the species. One of every five forms of
life are nematode worms. There are currently 16,000 known species of
nematode worms, and there could be millions. The 16,000 know fungi
species could be 3 million. There are 10 billion bacteria in a
handful of dirt. The world depends on bacteria. There are 700
species of bacteria that live in our mouth. You can derive an
accurate genome of bacteria in a couple of hours. There are 1,000
parts to complete the genetic code of a virus. There are 1,820 miles
of DNA code for a single human cell. Fungi live off of abiotic
sources. The slimosphere has more mass than all of life at the
surface.
There is water upwelling on Mars. Expect to find water several
kilometers deep. Might find life on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons.
Most life on the surface of Earth is in the tropical rain forests.
Half of the tropical rain forests have been destroyed by man. With
all of the ants and wasps, Tarzan would not have lasted 15 minutes
in the top of a tropical rain forest. Today they use building
cranes to drop in on the top of the trees. They identified 42
species of ants on one tree in Peru. There are 1,200 species of
butterflies in a few square kilometers of tropical rain forest.
A new centipede was recently discovered in Central Park.
You can spend a lifetime studying the life in one stump, and make
major contributions to science. At age 13 he identified the first
fire ants in Alabama, next to Mobile Bay. They came from Brazil,
and now they are all across the southern U.S. To be a naturalist
is a calling.
If you reduce the area available for life, it reduces the number of
species proportionally. For instance in the Philippines they went
from 70% forest coverage to 22% forest coverage in the last century.
Think of the word HIPPO:
H = Habitat destruction
I = Invasion, like fire ants
P = Pollution, 80% of the rivers in China are poisoned
P = Population, there are limits to the growth of any population
O = Over harvesting, like fish in different areas
There are many extinctions, including the golden frog of Costa Rica,
the Ivory Billed Woodpecker of North America, and 125 species of
birds in Hawaii. The first Hawaiians arrived in 400 AD.
When a problem in the environment is identified, and you want to know
how to fix it, go to conservation ecologists, who know how. There
are 25 environmental hot spots, which cover 1.4% of the surface of
the earth. These hot spots include 50% of known plant species and
40% of known land mammals. It would cost $30 billion to improve the
life for people in these areas and thus to save the these species.
One/one-thousandth of the annual world-wide gross income would
provide $30 trillion in return. The central problem of the next
century is how to raise the poor of the world to save the environment.
Over one billion destitute people live in these hot spot areas. At
the end of the day, the direction taken will be be an ethical
decision. It is the right thing to do. Society is defined not just
by what it creates, but also by what it refuses to destroy.
Questions and Answers:
- Theologians have shown great interest in this message.
- There has been no unfavorable response yet.
- An intensely religions nation like America, with an intensity of
genuine moral belief, should be willing to take action for good.
- On the science side there are studies showing the problem with
increasing accuracy.
- The key is to put science and religion together to solve the problem.
- Sustainable life in 40 years includes:
- global awareness of the environment
- awareness of what the world is really like
- serious efforts to stabilize problems
- approaching peak of population
- put in place greatly enlarged and better monitored parks with
built in north to south and east to west corridors
- Yukon to Yellowstone type of corridors
- People do not like change, especially when it alters lifestyle
- Climate change and the decline of biodiversity is becoming
widely accepted.
- After all things fail, men turn to reason.
- Secular humanists do not have a 3,000 year history to build
ceremonies to acknowledge life changes.
- Human nature is hardwired for tribalism, i.e. There is a close
connection to human nature and to fidelity.
- Brains are not hardwired. We have involuntary reactions.
- Universities need to become problem oriented. Formulate problems
and work with teams of faculty and students to solve the problems.']]>
A few weeks ago I read a WorldWatch paper about the importance religion can play in developing a sustainable environment. Then I a few days after going to the Edward Wilson presentation I received a copy of "Inspiring Progress - religions' contributions to sustainable development," which will be one of the next books I read. The more I read and think about these concepts, the more I think there is an worthwhile contribution tied to my efforts with "An Open Mind." Again, time will tell, just like time will tell if LITE contributes to the economy of southern Louisiana.
The big news for Thursday and Friday was that the the Walden 3-D web site was still down. Frustrating. Marc installed the new Netopia router the Thursday before, and thought he had told EarthLink what they needed to know to reset the DNS IP address so the world would know the new way to get to www.walden3d.com. However, they required an e-mail be sent from a new e-mail account, walden3d@EarthLink.net, which Marc did on Tuesday. Then they didn't change it, because they were confused about the fact there were two domain names tied to the same IP address: www.walden3d.com for the web access and oak.walden3d.com for the mail server. It turned out the /home/user server at GDC went out on Friday, and neither George nor Mike could work on the projects they were in the middle of, so we left the office after lunch, and I spent much of the afternoon on phone calls between Earthlink and Marc and myself, with my head or placing the cell phone on speaker and the house phone on speaker in order to communicate between Marc and Earthlink. Frustrating to say the least. One of Andrea's walking ladies brought some chairs she was going to give to Katy Christian Ministries, and gave to us to put upstairs, while I was on the phone. I don't even think they realized I was in the house, and I thought it was Andrea until she came home. Friday night we watched a couple of more episodes of the third season of "24." This one is all about drugs, and is darker and uglier than the others.
Saturday morning I cut back the ginger plants in the greenhouse and by the big rock in the back yard and mowed the lawns before it was time for General Conference. Between sessions Paul called to tell us Kate is expecting their third child on the 17th of May. Exciting news. I enjoyed all three sessions of General Conference on Saturday. I wish I knew all ten of you kids were watching all of the sessions of Conference, and yet I know you are not all doing this very worthwhile activity. Oh well! Hopefully someday you will each come to realize these words are the true light of the world, and there is more to gain from Conference talks than anything else we can be spending our time doing. Even pursuit of exciting technologies like the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise are, in an eternal perspective and compared to the words of eternal life from Conference talks, a temporary LITE."
Since the 38th week of 1996 I have written a weekly "Thoughtlet"
(little statements of big thoughts which mean a lot to me).
Until the 43rd week of 2004 I sent these out as an e-mail. They
were intended to be big thoughts which mean a lot to me.
Over time the process evolved into a personal diary. These notes
were shared with my family because I know how important the
written word can be. Concerned about how easy it is to drift and
forget our roots and our potential among all of distractions of
daily life, I thought this was a good way to reach those I love.
It no longer feels right to send out an e-mail and "force" my kids
and my family to be aware of my life and struggles.
Everyone has their own life to lead, and their own struggles to
work through. I will continue this effort, and will continue to
make my notes publicly accessible (unless I learn of
misuse by someone who finds out about them, and then will
aggressively
pursue a legal remedy to copyright infringement and I will put the Thoughtlets
behind a password).
The index to download any of these Thoughtlets is at
http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets,
or you can e-mail me with
questions or requests at
rnelson@walden3d.com
(note if you are not on my e-mail "whitelist" you must send 2 e-mails
within 24 hours of each other in order for your e-mail to not be trashed).
With all my love,
Dad
(H. Roice Nelson, Jr.)