Rocket Scientist

Looking at the beginnings of aviation, the rate of loss to attrition was unbelievable.  Aviators died in plane crashes or were lost forever.  Those few that lived to die of old age, still had to walk away from some pretty scary crashes.  And that reminded me of someone I read about on one of the astronaut’s biographies that I thought was well worth mentioning for Black History Month: Bessie Coleman . 

Although she dreamed of starting her own aviation school for African Americans, she died after being thrown from a tailspinning plane at the age of 34.  But what an inspiration she was to other African American pilots and, indeed to us all.
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Ravyn of Exchange of Realities  has posed five interview questions to me as a meme.  Well, I’m game.

1. Your about page says that you’re “an engineer by accident”. What was the accident? Well, I always wanted to be a writer, see.  If you’d told me “Hey, you’re going to be an engineer!” my senior year of high school, I would have rolled on the ground laughing.  Then, somehow (because I applied for everything) I got a scholarship from the engineering department and a scholarship from the physics department AND, if I took engineering physics, I could have them both.  Then, I was just too stubborn to let “the toughest major on campus” beat me.

2. What are the three most important things that people should come out of high school knowing? Is there any lack of knowledge you see often in today’s high school grads that just makes you want to chew out the system? (a) How to express themselves in writing, not necessarily poetically or with great talent, but to write in such a way that people understand their intent. (b) How to solve word problems.  Math is used all the time, every day, by all of us.  Word problems are how we relate real life to math and vice versa.  If you can solve word problems, the rest of math is a piece of cake and you’ll always know why you learned math.  Science is effectively blocked off to those who can’t relate reality to math.  (c) Learn to speak in public.  Debate, speeches, acting, something in front of people.  If you can express your thoughts and interact intelligently in a public forum, you are much more likely to be able to make those ideas a reality or sell ideas others have.  People like that are very valuable.  If you master these three things, I can’t think of anything that stands in one’s way (although artistic talent is nice too).

3. Which area of “didn’t do the homework” in a speculative fiction piece annoys you more: biology/ecology, the impact of the differences between that world and ours on society, or improbable physics? Why?  Anything glaringly impossible or senseless can throw me; if the story doesn’t have a character I’m in love with, I can turn my back in disgust.  My background is physics so I’m most likely to pick up on that first, but my father was a biologist so I get some of those, too.  I get immersed in a good story, so I’m irked when something needlessly wrong wrenches me out of my little fantasy.  I’m actually forgiving on different world scenarios but not to screwed up characters.  Give me good characters and I can forgive a great deal.  Bad characters, and you better have your ducks in a row.  I also hate historical novels that have completely and utterly trashed history.

4. How about in writing? Bad dialogue or bad word choice? Why? Since I’m a tried and true character reader, probably bad dialogue.  For me, nothing kills a character like lifeless dialogue or actions that make no sense to the character as it’s been developed.  Bad word choice can be irksome, but it rarely gets my ire up unless its endemic.  People who clearly use a thesaurus without understanding the subtleties of the language are unlikely to hold my interest.  But an occasional wrong word can be forgiven.

5. If you could give extra funding to five areas of research, what would they be and why? Just FIVE? (A) Green technologies - I truly think that, if we don’t change our ways drastically and soon, some of the poorest people in the world (who have contributed the least) will suffer for our wastefulness.  Green technologies, in my opinion, include water purification, batteries, solar and wind energy, energy efficiency and smart building design.  (B) Agriculture.  We have a great many resources and land areas that aren’t being used effectively that could be.  We could be changing some of our least hospitable areas into areas that are much more self-sufficient and self-reliant with smart ways of helping them grown or cultivate their own land.  (C) Medicine, of course, including not only advances against such horrors as cancer and AIDS, but also better ways to promote hygiene and protect against disease for those parts of the world where things like malaria, parasites and the plague are still part of life. (D) Material sciences, largely because they feed all the other sciences, and provide advances and capabilities for everything from new types of batteries to solar cells that you can paint on your house to materials that can provide appreciable protection from thermal extremes (like aerogel).  (E)  Space exploration, obviously, and space related technologies, including rocketry, energy production, batteries, recycling, and making useful stuff out of dirt. A lot of practical applications can fall out of that and space is to everyone’s benefit. But it’s not just what we fund but how we fund it.