News From the Final Frontier

by Claude Tate

This is not something I normally put out for public consumption, but maybe the time has come.  I’m a space nerd, and have been since I first became aware of rockets.

Neil Armstrong on the Moon

I can’t remember when I was first introduced to rockets, but I do remember seeing the launches of the first manned flights in the auditorium of my elementary school.  I remember our teacher taking us to the auditorium where a single TV was placed on a stand. It was a small country school with few resources, so while I don’t remember whether it was the only TV in the school or not, it may well have been. At least it was the only one I was aware of. Our class and a number of others would sit there staring at the rocket sitting there on the pad on that small, grainy, black and white television way down there on the stage. The early Mercury flights always had delays, so often it would take some time before the big moment happened. But it always happened.  The rocket would come alive and lift majestically for the heavens. It only lasted for ten seconds or so, but what a magnificent ten seconds. I was hooked. A fire was lit that still burns today.

Last year, politics dominated our news. John King is probably doing something to torture that touch screen election map he stood in front of every day, day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out. I hope he got extra pay for that.  I was listening to NPR one day and they had a story about a 5 year old being shown a picture of President Obama. When they asked him if they knew who that person was, he said “I’m Barack Obama and I sponsored this message”.

But while everyone seemed to be focused on every word that was uttered in the political arena, there were some significant things happening on the final frontier; some of which received attention, some did not. While the following does not comprise a comprehensive list of everything that happened, these four events stood out for me.  One was a milestone, two signified the passing of an era, and the other was a WOW! event for NASA.

The Voyager Interstellar Mission

First, a milestone was reached as the two Voyager spacecraft began leaving the solar system.

Voyager Spacecraft (Both Voyagers were identical)

Their mission can be broken down into two parts. The first part was to increase our knowledge of the solar system. Voyager 1, launched in September of 1977, did flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 was launched in August of 1977, and in addition to flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, also flew by Uranus and Neptune. The second part, the Voyager Interstellar Mission or VIM began after Voyager 2 passed by Neptune.  The VIM consists of three phases, the termination shock phase, the heliosheath exploration, and the interstellar exploration phases.  Both are now in the heliosheath exploration phase. We do not know how thick this environment is, so we cannot determine exactly how long they will be in this phase, but it will probably be several years.  After that, it will be interstellar space.  They are still operating like champs and have enough power to last until around 2020. After that they will drift.  And providing neither are hit by anything, Voyager 1 will come within 1.6 light years of a star called AC+79 3888, and Voyager 2 will pass within 4.3 light years from Sirius. And then, who knows.

The Retirement of the Space Shuttle Fleet

A Typical Space Shuttle Launch

The next two events signaled the passing of an era.  First was the retirement of the Space Shuttles and their final trips to their respective exhibition sites.

The Space Shuttle flew 135 missions and was the face of the American space program for 30 years, from 1981 to 2011. The accomplishments of Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavor are far too numerous to list here. But two things that really stand out to me were the contributions it made to the construction of the International Space Station, which would probably have been impossible without the Shuttle, and the placing into orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Enterprise Being Flown Over New York To Her New Home

Enterprise was the first orbiter built, and while it never flew in space, was essential to refining the technology and design for the other Shuttles. It has been moved from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum to the Intrepid Sea, Air &Space Museum in New York City.

Endeavor at home in Los Angeles (shuttles are big)

In October Endeavour was moved to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.  Shuttle Atlantis has been moved to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex in Florida and will be placed on display in 2013. Discovery replaces Enterprise at the Smithsonian. It was heart-warming to see so many people turn out to see the shuttles make their final voyages to their respective retirement destinations.

The Death of Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong

The other event that signified the passing of an era was the passing at of the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, at the age of 82 from complications following bypass surgery.

Armstrong, a Navy pilot during the Korean War, served as a civilian test pilot until being selected as part of the second ‘class’ of astronauts in September of 1962. He was one of two civilian astronauts (the preference was for military test pilots) and the first American civilian to go into space when he commanded Gemini 8 in March of 1966. He was selected as commander of the Apollo 11 crew in December of 1968. The other members of the crew were Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin.

Apollo 11 left on its voyage on July 16, 1969.  His coolness under pressure was legendary; a trait that would serve him well in those last few seconds over the moon.  In the final seconds, as the lunar module, Eagle, descended to the surface of the moon, the landing computers became overloaded.  When Armstrong saw they were headed for an unsafe landing site, he took over and manually flew the Eagle to a safe touchdown some distance away. The folks at NASA were worried, but they should not have been. As it turned out, while estimates of the amount of fuel left has varied over the years, the number most often cited is that they had under 20 seconds of fuel left when they landed.

The Apollo 11 crew:
Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin.

The landing took place on July 20, 1969.  I was among those millions around the world who were glued to the television and listened to the NASA audio and animations as the Eagle approached the moon; heard Armstrong describe the descent to Mission Control in Houston; and felt that feeling of pride as he said, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”  I was still there when after several hours of rest and preparation, Armstrong opened the hatch of the Eagle, attached a TV camera to its leg and descended the latter to the moon’s surface.  And I watched and listened on live TV as his first boot touched the moon and he uttered those famous words, “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.” In 1960 our rockets were blowing up on the pad and just nine years later, we were walking on the moon. Words simply cannot fully capture what America accomplished in July of 1969.  The closest I can come is to say it was beyond extraordinary.

After the moon landing, Armstrong could have cashed in and made untold millions of dollars.  Instead, he chose to return to Ohio and lead a quite life. He taught aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati from 1971 to 1979, worked on his farm, served on several commissions including the investigation of the Challenger explosion, accepted membership on several boards, and took a few jobs as a spokesman for companies he believed in. But until the end, he insisted he was no hero.  He was only doing his job and was one of many who were responsible for the moon landing. NBC had an excellent story of his death and also those first steps on another world.

His family released a statement after his death responding to the many who had asked what they could do to honor Neil.  It stated that in addition to honoring his service, accomplishment and modesty, when you look at the moon, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.

The Curiosity Mission

The other event may not equal the moon landing, but I would still classify it as a WOW! event, the landing of Curiosity on Mars.

Curiosity, which was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, made a powered soft landing on Mars August 6, 2012.  The landing used a technique never before attempted and was nothing short of amazing. The following description is taken from the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Fact Sheet.

Engineers designed the spacecraft to steer itself during descent through Mars’ atmosphere with a series of S-curve maneuvers similar to those used by astronauts piloting NASA space shuttles. During the three minutes before touchdown, the spacecraft slowed its descent with a parachute, then used retrorockets mounted around the rim of an upper stage. In the final seconds, the upper stage acted as a sky crane, lowering the upright rover on a tether to the surface.

And it all worked perfectly.  We have sent a number of unmanned missions to Mars; missions that have yielded a great deal of information about Mars.  But Curiosity is by far the most sophisticated unmanned probe we have ever launched, and has the potential for advancing our knowledge of Mars exponentially. For more information on this amazing mission, go to NASA’s homepage for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission.  A good place to start when you reach the page is the Fact Sheet I referenced above.  It is under Mission Resources located on the right side, and it provides an excellent overview of the mission.  The scope of Curiosity’s abilities is nothing short of amazing.

Self Portrait by Curiosity on Mars

We will not be sending men back to the moon anytime soon. And I was disappointed when our new moon program was cancelled.  And presently we have no vehicle to send astronauts to the International Space Station. But we are moving forward into that final frontier. Private U.S. companies are developing the vehicles that will soon be sending Americans back into in a few years.  SpaceX has already developed a rocket and capsule that has begun making supply runs to the space station, and will soon have the capability to send men into space. NASA, in addition to continuing to send men to the space station and someday to an asteroid and Mars, will be undertaking missions that will increase our knowledge of the earth and unlock the secrets of the solar system.  And hopefully in the near future, the James Webb Space Telescope will be ready for launch. The James Webb Space Telescope may not sound as exciting as some of the other missions, but it should extend our vision to the edge of the universe.  And of course, Hubble continues to make discoveries that prove the universe is far more magical and wonderful than we ever imagined.

Our future in the final frontier is bright. And for this old space nerd, it’s going to be exciting.

Environmentalism and the Future

by Matt McKinnon

Let me begin by stating that I consider myself an environmentalist.  I recycle almost religiously.  I compost obsessively.  I keep the thermostat low in winter and high in summer.  I try to limit how much I drive, but as the chauffeur for my three school-age sons, this is quite difficult.  I support environmental causes and organizations when I can, having been a member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society.

I find the arguments of the Climate Change deniers uninformed at best and disingenuous at worst.  Likewise, the idea of certain religious conservatives that it is hubris to believe that humans can have such a large effect on God’s creation strikes me as theologically silly and even dishonest.  And while I understand and even sympathize with the concerns of those folks whose businesses and livelihoods are tied to our current fossil-fuel addiction, I find their arguments that economic interests should override environmental concerns to be lacking in both ethics and basic forethought.

That being said, I have lately begun to ponder not just the ultimate intentions and goals of the environmental movement, but the very future of our planet.

Earth and atmospheric scientists tell us that the earth’s temperature is increasing, most probably as a result of human activity.  And that even if we severely limited that activity (which we are almost certainly not going to do anytime soon), the consequences are going to be dire: rising temperatures will lead to more severe storms, melting polar ice caps, melting permafrost (which in turn will lead to the release of even more carbon dioxide, increasing the warming), rising ocean levels, lowering of the oceans’ ph levels (resulting in the extinction of the coral reefs), devastating floods in some places along with crippling droughts in others.

And according to a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by 2100 (less than 100 years) 25% of all species of plants and land animals may be extinct.

Basically, our not-too-distant future may be an earth that cannot support human life.

Now, in my more misanthropic moments, I have allowed myself to indulge in the idea that this is exactly what the earth needs.  That this in fact should be the goal of any true environmental concern: the extinction of humanity.  For only then does the earth as a planet capable of supporting other life stand a chance.  (After all, the “environment” will survive without life, though it won’t be an especially nice place to visit, much less inhabit, especially for a human.)

And a good case can be made that humans have been destroying the environment in asymmetrical and irrevocable ways since at least the Neolithic Age when we moved from hunter and gatherer culture to the domestication of plants and animals along with sustained agriculture.  Humans have been damaging the environment ever since.  (Unlike the beaver, as only one example of a “keystone species,” whose effect on the environment in dam building has an overwhelming positive and beneficial impact on countless other species as well as the environment itself.)

So unless we’re seriously considering a conservation movement that takes us back to the Paleolithic Era instead of simply reducing our current use and misuse of the earth, then we’re really just putting off the inevitable.

But all that being said, whatever the state of our not-too-distant future, the inevitability of the “distant future” is undeniable—for humans, as well as beavers and all plants and animals, and ultimately the earth itself.  For the earth, like all of its living inhabitants, has a finite future.

Around 7.5 billion years or so is a reasonable estimate.  And then it will most probably be absorbed in the sun, which will have swollen into a red giant.

(Unless, as some scientists predict, the Milky Way collides with the Andromeda galaxy, resulting in cataclysmic effects that cannot be predicted.)

At best, however, this future only includes the possibility of earth supporting life for another billion years or so.  For by then, the increase in the sun’s brightening will have evaporated all of the oceans.

Of course, long before that, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (ironically enough) will have diminished well below the quantity needed to support plant life, destroying the food chain and causing the extinction of all animal species as well.

And while that’s not good news, the worse news is that humans will have been removed from the equation long before the last holdouts of carbon-based life-forms eventually capitulate.

(Ok, so some microbes may be able to withstand the dry inhospitable conditions of desert earth, but seriously, who cares about the survival of microbes?)

Now if we’re optimistic about all of this (irony intended), the best-case scenario is for an earth that is able to support life as we know it for at most another half billion more years.  (Though this may be a stretch.)  And while that seems like a really long time, we should consider that the earth has already been inhabited for just over 3 and a half billion years.

So having only a half billion years left is sort of like trying to enjoy the last afternoon of a four-day vacation.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Deleting the “Human” Factor

by Wade Maki

History is often divided into ages based upon a particular trend. The age of reason, age of invention, enlightenment, information and industrialization are but a few examples. Some ages are known for conflicts, others for prosperity. As we are 12 years into the 21^st century, I’m noticing a trend that may make this the century we delete the human factor from decisions.

“I’m still here! Turn the lights back on!”

This summer my department was moved into new offices. Of course they are not new so much as new to us with some recent updates and fresh paint. One of the first things we noticed was how the traditional light switches were replaced with motion light sensors to automatically turn the lights on when we enter and off when we are not around. One might be tempted to see this as motivated by convenience, but one would be wrong. The idea here is to save energy (ergo money) by removing the human factor from the equation. Humans tend to leave lights on and so the automatic sensor is there to handle things without having to rely on flawed human judgment. Even though the motion sensor must use some additional power, it has been determined that the sensor will be more efficient than people. As with anything new the bugs haven’t been worked out such as the daily tendency for the sensor to turn off my light when I read, work on my computer, or just sit mostly still for awhile. Thus, I must pause in the dark and wave my arms in the air to get the sensor to turn my light back on. True to the trend of deleting the human factor there is no way for me to override the sensor.

We’ve all been here.

This summer I made several airline flights to conferences and events. At every airport where I used the restroom I found a similar trend of removing the human factor from the equation. Want soap? Put your hand here and the sensor will decide how much to give you. Want water? Hold your hands here and a pre-determined amount of water will flow. Want a paper towel? Wave your hands and a predetermined (always too small amount) of paper will be dispensed. The goal, as with my light sensor, is to remove my decision from the equation in the name of efficient use of energy, water, paper and soap. Why this became of interest was that in one of the airports most of the sensors had apparently stopped working leaving only a couple of sinks operational. If you’ve ever seen a busy airport restroom this was quite a sight to watch as dozens of people were dumbfounded (they waved their hands in vain but no soap or water came). You see, as with my light switch, the ability for an actual human being to turn on the water or pump the soap had been removed rendering the sinks non-functional.

The trend then is for small groups of humans (committees I’m guessing) to decide that in the name of efficiency, safety, or some other good purpose, systems should be designed to remove human decision-making entirely. Lest you think that it stops at switches and faucets please know that Google is close to perfecting the self-driving car. As anyone who drives around others knows, the machines can’t possibly do it worse… can they? I suspect this is only the beginning of a century long trend of deleting the human factor.

Self-driving Google car

If this trend continues what will life in 2099 look like? My life will be managed by devices that wake me up, remind me where to go and what to do, perhaps even when to shower (and for how long). My car will drive me where I need to go. Manual driving will be too risky to allow, but drinking and riding while on your phone is perfectly okay. My refrigerator will know what’s inside and order anything I need from the store, which may deliver it (or have my car add a grocery stop to my commute). In addition to managing my life, my devices will track and report my activities to ensure public safety (this is already occurring and will continue to expand). I could go on, but it is enough to note how some of these things we can see coming by 2099 and others are almost here already.

Of this trend most will ask the wrong questions. Most will ask “how does this make life more efficient and convenient?” Some will ask “what are the costs to us by this loss of control?” In both cases there will be important points on each side to be weighed. However, perhaps the most important question we should ask is “how does removing humans from decisions change us?” Who will we become when we make fewer decisions and cede more control to machines (and to those who program them)? By comparison we know how using cell phones has resulted in a generation that no longer remembers numbers and has forgotten many social amenities. What will life be like 2099? I can give you a rough sketch of this future. Who will people be in 2099? That, may be a much more disconcerting question.

Choose Your Own Adventure

By Carrie Levesque

Recently in the Russian Novel of Conscience course we have been discussing Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 dystopian novel We, about a highly mechanized and regimented totalitarian society (the One State) hundreds of years in the future where citizens have achieved the ultimate happiness: unfreedom.  Taking as our starting point Marx’s claim that machines, invented to help man, have become the symbols of his servitude, we debate the extent to which machines and technology have enslaved or liberated men in today’s world.

As a class, we’ve compiled a pretty good list of technology’s benefits (efficiency, convenience, online degree programs!) and costs (myriad media addictions, a privileging of online relationships at the expense of face-to-face ones).  At midterm, several students have written excellent papers on how we have created a sort of One State within the United States through certain government policies and technologies which reduce rather than foster our individuality and humanity.

Many of these discussions have stirred up nostalgia for simpler times, when it seems people had different values and a different relationship to one another.  They’ve made me think about a book I read recently on a more extreme response to this question, the Back to the land movement (which is a great deal more complex than just ‘living simply,’ but I’m limited to 800 words…).

I grew up in a remote area of northern Maine that has always attracted Back-to-the-landers.  What possesses these diehards who apparently find the southern Maine homesteads of the followers of Scott and Helen Nearing not austere or isolated enough, that they would haul their few remaining possessions to the place where the logging roads end and call it home, I can’t say for sure.

But I’ll admit to having a touch of that idealism myself- to unplug, to live off the land, to disconnect from our nonstop media and rampant consumerism of all the latest technology (though you’d have to be insane to choose the wilds of northern Maine, a place with two seasons: Brutal Winter and Rainy Black Fly Infestation).  Though I now prefer a more comfortable climate, I understand the appeal of living in a beautiful, natural setting, devoting most of one’s time to work in the outdoors without a care for whatever new technology or entertainment the rest of the world is enthralled with.

Coleman Family

And yet, through a closer examination of life ‘off the grid,’ I’ve also come to a greater appreciation of many benefits of our modern life. I recently read Melissa Coleman’s memoir This Life Is In Your Hands about growing up the daughter of famous homesteader and Nearing mentee Eliot Coleman. She chronicles the great strain that the demands of homesteading put on her family, resulting in her father’s ill health, her baby sister’s tragic death and her parents’ divorce.  (On a lighter note, she also reveals some of the purist Nearings’ well-kept secrets: Helen’s love of ice cream, mail order fruit and other delicacies.  Even the folks who wrote the (sometimes a tad righteous) book on living local and off the grid indulged a little on occasion).  Though there were certainly aspects of their lives on the homestead that were richly satisfying, some readers may come away wondering if their chosen cure for the ills of modern life wasn’t in some ways as harmful as the disease, physically as well as spiritually.

Another interesting look at the real-life struggles of those who lived in those idealized ‘simpler times’ is the PBS reality series Frontier House.   In 2001, three families (selected from among some 5,000 applicants!) lived off the land for six months on the simulated frontier of 1880s Montana.  The success of their venture was assessed by historians based on whether each family had put by enough food and fuel over the summer and fall to survive a Montana winter.  Though they labored admirably, through all sorts of drama, if memory serves it was decided all would have perished.  The simpler times were never as simple as they seem.   (Frontier House is available in UNCG’s Instructional Film Collection, but sadly, not on Netflix).

There are no easy answers to the question of man’s relationship to technology.  Most people I know lament their dependency on smart phones, social media and a food supply so highly engineered that many of us have no idea what we’re really eating half the time (pink slime, anyone?).   Yet we have so much to be grateful for.  We live in a time of amazing medical advances.  Whatever may plague or disappoint us in our lives, we have the freedom and resources at our fingertips to research alternatives and connect with like-minded people to find a solution.  For all our similarities, thankfully these United States are not the One State.  Our ultimate happiness is not to be found in our unfreedom, but in our freedom to negotiate these complex choices and relationships, to choose our own adventure.

The Clock is Ticking

By Claude Tate

I’ve been thinking lately about the problem of overpopulation.

WARNING:  I cannot verify the following story from my sociology professor is true. However, I can verify it got my attention.

My first encounter with the population problem came early in my college career. I had a sociology professor who told us of an effort in a rural village in India to help women use the rhythm method of contraception. The health workers gave each woman of childbearing age an abacus.  Each day they were to move another bead to one side. They were told how it was safe to have sex once all the beads of a certain color were on one side. The abacus experiment did work exactly as planned. The women did not move one bead a day as intended. They simply moved all the beads that indicated danger over at once, and went on their merry way.  Of course in America we believe in using more reliable methods of birth control…or do we?

Recently, the Obama Administration got into some political hot water in issuing a requirement that birth control pills be covered in the new health reform legislation.  Schools, hospitals, and other institutions supported by the Catholic Church felt the government had overstepped its authority in requiring them to offer birth control through the health insurance policies they offered.  For many Catholics, this was a matter of faith.  But unfortunately for many politicians, it was just an opportunity. President Obama thus sought an accommodation. The accommodation, that the insurance companies that cover the costs of birth control must assume the full cost, took some of the air out of the opposition, but it still may have a political impact.  Only time will tell.

And at the time of this writing, a bill is moving through the Arizona legislature that would require employers to ask women who take birth control pills if they are using it for birth control or a medical condition. It will allow an employer to refuse to cover a prescription used for contraception. And according to the American Civil Liberties Union, the law would make it easier to fire a woman if the employer found out she took birth control medication for the purpose of preventing pregnancy. In other words, the beliefs of the employer would take priority over the beliefs and needs of female employees. It has already been approved by the House, and as of this writing, is in the Senate Rules Committee. If approved there, it will be considered by the full Senate.  Whether it will pass or not or what the specifics of the final bill will be is still up in the air, but the fact that it is actually being considered by a state legislature is disturbing. I wonder if those opposed to medicine to prevent unwanted pregnancies would allow insurance companies to buy abacuses. Who knows, maybe they will work this time.

They call the time leading up to elections the silly season. But for this election cycle, we may need some new descriptors. I can see the arguments of the opponents of abortion.  But I find it difficult to believe that insurance coverage for medication to prevent pregnancy be denied, especially in a world whose human population has just passed 7 billion people and counting.

Our world is facing many problems.  In fact, their number is so daunting it’s simply hard to wrap one’s mind around them.  I may deal with some of the others in future contributions, but for this blog I thought I would focus on one problem, that of overpopulation. But as I thought about it, I realized it was simply too broad to deal with in such a limited format as overpopulation is a factor in one way or another in so many of the problems we face today. So, I decided to limit my discussion to only one aspect of the problem, the impact of our increasing population on the future of the biosphere. We are going forth and multiplying at an alarming rate.  And for the earth, that means we are running through its resources at exponential rates.  Mineral resources are growing more and more scarce, the problem of what to do with waste products is growing worse on land and on sea (there’s a major floating trash dump in the Pacific that we do not know how to deal with), fresh water is being depleted and is already running low in many areas, the demand for food is leading to deforestation on a massive scale, and plant and animal species are disappearing daily as natural habitats are destroyed or altered. And of course, regardless of what some still say, we are changing our climate.  If something is not done to rein that growth in, and rein it in soon, we will reach the point where the planet’s biosphere simply will not be able to support any more humans.  We will reach its “carrying capacity”.  And the entire biosphere will be impacted.  Life is tenacious. It will continue. Human life will even probably continue. But it will be different.

As you can see, even introducing the impact of overpopulation of the biosphere is simply too complex to adequately deal with within this space. So I searched for some websites that would introduce this issue to anyone who may be interested in the impact of overpopulation and the environment.  So I typed in ‘population growth and the environment’ and received 5,480,000 results. After closely reading 5,479, 999 websites, I settled on an essay from the website, 123helpme, called “The Population Explosion” .  It provides a nice, brief overview of some of the major environmental problems associated with the growing human population.

Note:  I was just kidding about reading ALL of those sites. I really read only a few hundred thousand or so before deciding on including “The Population Explosion”.

Obviously, we need to bring our population growth under control, but how to do that is still very much open to question. Any solution will involve among other things, something we deal with in the last unit of my BLS class, “Visions of Creation”; how we understand what it means to be human.  However, as with any problem, the ‘devil is in the details’.  And the details here will have implications for every human on the planet.  So any discussions of solutions must wait for another time and another place.

But I do know this… the clock is ticking.

Transcendence on a June Night

By Claude Tate

The topic area for this blog is designated as “Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Leisure, Family”, So naturally I thought about a little lightnin’ bug, whose scientific name is Phausis reticulate, but is commonly known as the blue ghost.

Image from the Encyclopedia Britannica

 

     “As humans we are born of the Earth, nourished by the Earth, healed by the Earth.  The natural world tells us:  I will feed you, I will clothe you, I will shelter you, I will heal you.  Only do not so devour me or use me that you destroy my capacity to mediate the divine and the human.  For I offer you a communion with the divine, I offer you gifts that you can exchange with each other, I offer you flowers whereby you may express your reverence for the divine and your love for each other.
In the vastness of the sea, in the snow-covered mountains, in the rivers flowing through the valleys, in the serenity of the landscape, and in the foreboding of the great storms that sweep over the land, and in all these experiences I offer you inspiration for your music, for your art, your dance.”

~From  the essay, “Evening Thoughts”, included in Thomas Berry’s 2006 book of the same name.

I was first introduced to Thomas Berry (a native and resident of Greensboro) in classes I took with Dr. Charlie Headington in the MALS program here at UNCG.  Sadly, Dr. Berry passed a few years ago, but fortunately, he left us with a considerable body of writings, some of which I’ve included in my BLS class, “Visions of the Creation”.  Thomas Berry’s legacy cannot be summed up easily.  As one of the world’s leading eco-theologians, he drew on numerous cultural, scientific, philosophical, and religious traditions to weave a narrative of a universe filled with mystery, wonder, and the sacred.  But to me, perhaps the most important message Dr. Berry imparted to us is that this knowledge and these insights are accessible to everyone. The earth stands ready to reveal its sacred knowledge, and show us our place and role, and what it means to be human. All we have to do is to pay attention.

Far too often, we only give the earth a passing glance as we go about our daily lives, but we do not really pay attention to it.  But from time to time, the earth will show us something so special that we must stop and pay attention. One such instance occurred to my wife and me last June.  It wasn’t one of Martin Buber’s “I/Thou” moments, but it was magical nonetheless.  Since I’m somewhat lazy, or maybe a should say extremely busy, I’ve pasted a portion of the letter my wife and I wrote to Our State in August of 2011 concerning our ‘stop and check this out’ moment.

“We read with great interest “Southern Lights “about the “blue ghost” fireflies in Henderson and Transylvania counties. About 10 pm on June 5 of this year, we hurriedly left our place outside of Etowah (10 miles NW of DuPont State Forest) to be with our son and his family as they awaited the birth of their second child in Hendersonville. At the foot of our mountain, near the French Broad River, there’s a large open valley.  That night the entire valley was positively aglow in fireflies, from the ground to the tops of the trees. While we wished we could have stayed longer, we could only stop briefly to appreciate this remarkable display as our granddaughter was on her way.

We had no idea why so many fireflies had gathered in that particular place until the arrival of our August edition of “Our State”.  We are now convinced that blue ghosts were responsible for this magical moment that heralded the arrival of a new life.

We have returned same time, same place but have never seen them in such abundance. But with a healthy granddaughter, a memorable sighting and another keepsake edition of Our State, we are blessed threefold! ”

The article “Southern Lights” was written by Diane Summerville.  There are several things that make them remarkable.  First, they are rare.  According to the article, blue ghosts only exist in a few places, and “Henderson and Transylvania counties are two of those places.” They can also be found in areas of Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. One reason for this is that they are very fragile.  We referenced DuPont State Forest (the legislature recently changed its designation to DuPont State Recreational Forest) because due to the cool, moist climate, there are a number of colonies there. But even there, they only come out during late May and June when the temperature and humidity are just right.  Everything was ‘just right’ on that night in June when we saw them. Another reason they are rare is that there are very few females. So when the population of a colony drops, it may take years for them to re-establish themselves. So sighting them is special.  Also, their lights are special.  First, they are slightly bluish, thus the name, blue ghosts.  And rather than staying lit only a second or two like other fireflies, their lights stay lit for several seconds, and sometimes up to a minute. They don’t twinkle. So a few thousand blue ghosts will be far more visible than ordinary fireflies. That was why our valley looked so magical that night.

But understanding what lit up our valley on that June night has taken nothing away from the wonder we experienced. In fact, it has only enriched the memory. I’m sure Thomas Berry would agree.

If you are ever traveling to the Hendersonville area in late May or June, and have some free time, you may want to contact The Friends of DuPont Forest. They normally take two or three blue ghost tours each spring.  But sightings aren’t guaranteed. Conditions must be just right. Wonder cannot be ordered at a take-out window, and it doesn’t come with fries.

Image from the Blue Ghost Post blog of a blue ghost sighting.

It Takes Audacity

By  Matt McKinnon

Ok, so not just Audacity; any recording and editing software will do.  But Audacity is free, works with all of the major operating systems, and, at least in its basic form, is not hard to use.  (Though in order to export the files, they have to be converted to mp3 format using the LAME encoder.)

A few of my students have had trouble doing this, but most are able to create their own audio files to attach in Blackboard for me and their colleagues to listen to.

And that simple addition to my American Dreams course has added a dimension to online education that, after five years of teaching in the BLS program, I did not expect.

The voices are full of character. Rich in diversity.  Different in their tone and cadence.  Some are smooth and polished, others hesitant.  Some are quite moving, even poetic.  Some are transcendent in their plainness.

But all of them are honest.  Real.

They are like voices out of a Ken Burns documentary: serious, focused, reading (not speaking off the cuff) a personal account of the American Dream.

They add a profundity to the most banal of writing assignments.  They add depth.  They add life.

The assignment is simple: write a five minute reflection on what you think about the American Dream.  And then record it and post it on Blackboard.  Students do this twice—once in the beginning of the course and then again at the end, almost like a personal assessment of how their views have changed.  For the final assignment, they submit the written version as well.  And it is here that I have learned to appreciate the depth, the character that is conveyed with hearing someone speak their own words—as opposed to simply reading their words myself.

Of course there are limits:  I wouldn’t want to hear someone read aloud their five-page paper on politics and religion in America, or worse yet, their twelve-page book review in the Senior Seminar.  But for something short, something as personal and as powerful as a dream, as the American Dream, as their American Dream, it has an amazing effect.

I realized it when I listened to the audio files the first time I taught the course last year.  In a way that the written word cannot achieve, these voices of my students grabbed me—grab me still—and, for lack of a better way of saying it: made it personal.

After all, if we’re honest, we must admit that with all the benefits of distance education (and there are many), one of the things that’s missing is personal contact.  And what’s more personal than a voice?

Ok, a face.

Here’s me and my wife (I’m on the right).

Here's Vicente Fernandez.

And those rare times I have seen a picture of a student in one of the assignments they submit in their Senior Portfolio—usually as part of a photography assignment or a blog—it has had a similar effect: giving an added dimension to someone whose existence to me is represented entirely by the written word.

But there’s something about the human voice.  The old adage is that a picture is worth a thousand words, but if you’ve ever lost someone dear, you’ve probably had the thought: “What I would give just hear their voice again.”

Now here’s Fernández’s voice (and his hat):

But let’s not get carried away.

I have to admit that I hate Facebook, only reluctantly joined LinkedIn (but never use it), don’t care what folks are doing this weekend (or did last weekend), don’t want to see pictures of people from high school whom I didn’t really like in high school (or my second-cousin’s newest baby), and generally believe that our culture has gone overboard with social-networking, the effect being that communication (and society?) has been thinned out and dumbed down.

But when we take what’s useful from these platforms and make judicious use of them in our BLS courses, well, the effect can be startling, enriching, enlightening.

And in the case of Audacity, it can literally be the opposite of dumbing down:

It gives students their voice.

Online Learning: Accidentally Green

By Jay Parr

This is where I admit I’m a little bit of a green freak. I use an electric lawn mower, an electric weed eater, and an electric leaf blower at my house, partly because they’re less expensive to fuel and maintain, but mostly because it allows me to avoid the wasted fossil fuels and absurd emissions of small gasoline engines. I can’t afford an electric car on an academic’s salary, but I did manage to find an electric scooter that I could afford, and I ride it to work any time the weather’s not too horrible…and as an old motorcycle lover and bicycle nut, I have a ridiculously liberal definition of “not too horrible” for riding. So yeah. Green freak. That’s me. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.When I first started working with the BLS Program in 2004, our primary goal was not to provide a green method of delivering our classes. In fact, it was the least of our considerations. We were mostly concerned with meeting the needs of the nontraditional students who wanted to complete a bachelor’s degree, but didn’t have the leisure to make it to regularly-scheduled classes on campus. The people we thought about were working 8-to-5 and weren’t served by the evening offerings on campus. Or they were working parents and couldn’t afford childcare to go to class. Or maybe they worked in some field with unpredictable hours, such as emergency services, or the medical field, or the airline industry, or even the good old restaurant business (and we have since had students in all of those fields). Whatever they were doing to pay the mortgage and support their children, we wanted to make classes that they could complete from home, in the hours they could manage to carve out of their schedules. From what I hear from our students, I think we’ve been pretty successful at that goal.

What we didn’t plan was the myriad ways in which our online classes are so much more resource-conserving than their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Here are a few that come to mind.

No Driving — Instead of having each of our students burn a few gallons of gasoline getting to class (a lot of them are pretty far from campus), we use a few watts of electricity to deliver their classes electronically. They can participate in their classes anywhere they can get online, whether that’s at home, at work on a quiet night shift, at their favorite coffee shop, or from their hotel room while they’re traveling on business. It goes even further than that, because many of our faculty also teach their classes from home. Given that we have faculty who live in the Triangle, in Charlotte, and even out of state, that adds up to a lot of driving avoided by teaching and taking classes online.

No Buildings — We don’t need big spaces to gather faculty and students in the same room, so we don’t have to spend a bunch of money and resources building, heating, cooling, and lighting classroom buildings. That means fewer buildings and more green space for everyone, and it adds up to a substantial savings in terms of resource usage. Even with smart climate-control systems, classroom buildings take a vast amount of energy to heat and cool, and because of their scale, they have to be heated and cooled around the clock, even at night when no one’s around. By delivering our classes online to our students, we help reduce the pressure to build and maintain more resource-hogging classroom space. In fact, an online class full of students using their laptops at home, even if they leave them on all the time, still uses less electricity than it takes just to run the nighttime security lighting in a classroom building.

No Paper — Using online discussion boards, and writing, receiving, critiquing, and grading essays online saves reams of paper (literally) for each online class. My writing-intensive class has ten discussion boards, a prospectus, an essay, and a final revision. With twenty-five students in that class, assuming one full page each for the discussion boards, two pages for the prospectus, and ten pages each for the essay and revision, that’s (*does some math*) eight hundred pages that aren’t getting printed. Add in a syllabus that doesn’t have to get printed and handed out to the class, and that one 25-student online class has saved two whole reams of paper. Multiply that by the twenty-four classes we are offering this semester, and that’s a nice, heavy case of paper that isn’t getting deforested, pulped, packaged, shipped, and most likely ending up in a landfill somewhere at the end of it all.

So, less driving, less construction, less heating and cooling, and less paper. As a green freak, I gotta say that’s not too shabby as an accidental side effect. And here we were just trying to make it easier for you to go to class in your pajamas!

Recalculating

By Marc Williams

Anyone in a car with a GPS knows the phrase “recalculating.” Once you program your destination and begin your journey, the GPS expects you to follow the path with unwavering trust. The slightest turn from the designated route—a pit stop, a scenic detour, a bite to eat—will cause the GPS to recalculate the route. If I miss a turn and get frustrated, the Garmin’s voice is steady and confident, never losing sight of the path. It’s oddly comforting to know that someone in the car can keep their cool. Interestingly, on my Garmin system, and on all of the GPS devices I’ve encountered in other cars, the voice that calmly says, “recalculating” is always female. Is that merely a coincidence?

CNN.com’s Brandon Griggs recently wrote about the new iPhone 4S feature, Siri,

and its distinctly female voice. Griggs notes that female voices are far more common in talking devices than male voices, and provides some interesting theories on the various reasons why talking computers tend to be female. For instance, Griggs cites Clifford Nass of Stanford University:

iPhone's Siri

“It’s much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,” said Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass, author of “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.” “It’s a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.”

HAL 9000 (From Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Another theory suggests that Hollywood uses male computer voices in suspense and thriller movies to create a sound of “menace,” so perhaps we find the idea of female computers to be more less menacing.

Or the historical theory is that WWII aviators relied on females for navigation, since their voices were easily distinguished from the male voices of the other pilots.

In many BLS courses, including my arts courses, gender roles and gender identity are discussed and debated at length. In fact, last week, my “Big Plays, Big Ideas” class was discussing gender attitudes on war in our examination of the Greek comedy Lysistrata.

So what does the trend of female computers say about gender attitudes on technology today?

Siri in action:

Anti-Plagiarism Tools

By Marc Williams

All of my classes in the BLS program involve some kind of essay or research paper.  Additionally, students discuss a variety of course topics using threaded message boards—a kind of virtual classroom discussion.  With both kinds of writing, many students supplement their understanding of the topic by conducting quick online searches.  Sometimes these efforts are deliberate attempts to research but in some cases, students “just want to be sure” their thoughts are on the right track.  In either case, I ask students to document the sources they consult but I suspect that many informal online searches go undocumented.  Unfortunately, students who conduct this kind of informal web research without proper documentation can easily commit an act of plagiarism–even if the student does not intend to deceive.

My rule of thumb for students is to include any source consulted in a bibliography, whether that source is quoted in the paper or not.  Sources that contain unique information or sources that are quoted in the text of the paper require parenthetical citations, a hallmark of Modern Language Association format (MLA).

I’ve found two tools that make online research and documentation just a bit easier.  The Online Writing Lab (OWL), hosted by Purdue University, contains a variety of style and formatting guides, including details on MLA format.  This site is up-to-date with the 2009 MLA format updates, is completely free, and can replace the hard copy version of the MLA Handbook I used to ask my students to purchase.  The OWL contains great information on citing electronic and web sources, which is great for online students who do so much of their research using the web.  Using the OWL can help students present all of their sources in an easy-to-read, easy-to-navigate format.

Second, I’ve found an application called Zotero, which is a plug-in for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.  With Zotero installed on my browser, I can document a web source in one click.  When I’m conducting a web search, I launch Zotero and the software helps me track all of the information I need to generate bibliographic entries: the site’s name, the date the site was published, the date on which I accessed the material, and the URL.  I can sort the various sources into a folder so all of my sources for one project are stored together.  Zotero allows users to take screen shots so that the content of the web page can be stored along with the citation data.  And files can be attached to each entry, so I can download a PDF of a journal article and save it along with the necessary citation data.