Who is my audience?

The easiest audience to write for, and the one I most often find myself writing for, is myself. I know what I like, and it’s easy to judge (not always, but most of the time) whether I meet that criteria. Of course, writing for an audience that thinks and acts like has, the way I see it, two main flaws:
1. It’s boring. Sure I know what I like, but there are so many things I’ve never read that I could potentially enjoy reading. They may be uncomfortable to read, which means they would be even more uncomfortable to write. Writing using myself as a model audience biases me towards my comfort zone.
2. The world isn’t actually filled up with multiple mes (thank goodness). Some things I like are absolutely repulsive to other people. If I manage the (surprisingly difficult) task of writing something I like, there will still be more people than not that hate it (most likely).

With a little effort and tweaking, though, writing for an ideal audience comprised of people like me isn’t actually such a bad proposition. (If the world was made up of mes, I wouldn’t have to write anything at all, actually, because I would already know what I was going to say, right?)

But expanding the issue of audience to the kind of writing I’m doing for 21W.775, one of the main problems I see with environmental journalism is that, for the most part, the only people that will actually read it, not to mention buy what you are saying, are probably self-selecting environmentalists. That is, the only people who you will reach are the ones who already think the way you do. This isn’t, I’m sure, always the case, and it also doesn’t have to be a bad thing (as long as you use it to meet your goals). For example, you could write something that at first looks like the typical environmental essay and then completely frustrate the environmental-sympathizer audience after you’ve pulled them in (a la Evans). So, there are various things you can do with an essay that naturally attracts a certain type of audience. However, the aim of my essay is to make people who aren’t already environmentally conscious think about where their technology goes once they’ve disposed of it. I want people who don’t recycle to think about their electronic junk (although I’d like to speak to people who already recycle, as well). I want the people that are actually consuming and disposing off electronics and automobiles at a rapidly increasing pace to hear what I have to say. Ok, so maybe that’s a stiff demand, but to even attempt to do that I need to at least get people other than the pre-disposed-to-be-environmentally-sympathetic crowd to read it.

I may have this wrong, but I feel like a lot of the time when an article about environmentally-theme article comes out, say an article on global warming, a lot of people look at it and think “Oh, yet another environmental problem that no one can really do anything about, I don’t need to read that.” I want to find some way to circumvent this phenomenon. I want to make people think about what they are doing, what they are buying, and most importantly, what happens to things after they disappear from our lives. (Because they don’t, as it’s so easy to imagine, vanish completely).

But wait, that’s just what I feel like people would think…now I’ve just fallen back into using myself as a model. This is going to be harder than I thought.

Space Junk: Part II

Ok, so let’s assume space junk is indeed a problem worth devoting time and energy to solve. (Although at this point I wouldn’t label it as a “crisis”, even if it does meet some of the criteria we discussed in class, namely the fact that it represents a trend that radically deviates from historical trends.) What can be done about it, what should be done about it, and what is being done about it?

The NASA Orbital Debris Program Office has this to say about debris mitigation:
“Controlling the growth of the orbital debris population is a high priority for NASA, the United States, and the major space-faring nations of the world to preserve near-Earth space for future generations. Mitigation measures can take the form of curtailing or preventing the creation of new debris, designing satellites to withstand impacts by small debris, and implementing operational procedures ranging from utilizing orbital regimes with less debris, adopting specific spacecraft attitudes, and even maneuvering to avoid collisions with debris.”

That doesn’t quite sound like mitigation to me. The statement introducing the paragraph references the importance of controlling the growth of orbital debris, but except for the first measure listed, all the solutions listed are merely ways of dealing with a large (and growing) amount of junk. That sounds like mitigation of the effects of space junk, not mitigation of the problem of space junk itself.

Is this a problem that is best solved by adaptation or by reduction and elimination? Let’s assume, for a few moments, that we need to get rid of much of the abandoned, burnt out, used up, forgotten, useless, and lost hunks of metal and plastic as we can. There are really only two options for doing this: bring them down to Earth or send them further out into space.

But what about destroying them? Without sci-fi super-villain scheming, the conventional methods of blowing things up merely breaks up the guilty debris into smaller fragments, and micro-meteorites can be just as problematic as their toaster or refrigerator sized predecessors.

“Re-entry” is the polite name for bringing space junk back down to Earth. It has two forms: uncontrolled re-entry and controlled re-entry. Uncontrolled re-entry involves the inevitable orbit decay that accompanies the loss of the satellite’s energy followed by an eventual crashing down to Earth. That sounds fun, right? As the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office website puts it, “the surviving debris impact footprint cannot be guaranteed to avoid inhabited landmasses.”

Well, at least there’s comfort in the fact that 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, and with the imminent threat of global-warming induced sea-level rise it’ll be easier to miss land if we start bringing dead satellites down in 50 or 100 years.

Of course, there are less hazardous ways of bringing large objects down to Earth from space. For example, the MIR space station successfully plummeted into the ocean without any complications. (You can read about the entire saga here on space.com.) Needless to say, despite the fact that no one got hurt people living in the South Pacific weren’t very happy about the fact that it was happening.

Sending satellites further out into space typically involves sending useless satellites to a “graveyard orbit.” This only postpones the plummeting to Earth problem. True, it will take hundreds of years for satellites in a graveyard orbit to lose enough energy to de-orbit and crash into the Earth, but it will eventually happen.

So, the two solutions to space debris (which, of course, only apply to satellites and spacecraft that have control and propulsion systems and not to the innumerable pieces of inanimate trash—here’s a breakdown of the space debris by type: operational spacecraft — 7%, old spacecraft — 22%, rocket bodies — 17%, mission-related objects — 13%, miscellaneous fragments — 41%) boil down to: not really that safe and reliable versus putting off the inevitable until another day.

I haven’t stumbled across any radical solutions, like making a spacecraft with a giant bulldozer-type shovel attached to it that scoops up all the trash and sends it into the sun or anything, but I’m sure people have tossed those around too.

And we've traversed another giant circle. Coming back to the real problem with this problem: not the difficultly posed by its geographic remoteness, but by its conceptual remoteness. Who really has time (or money, or effort) to worry about all the junk floating around in orbit when Tuvalu will be submerged within a century? I think that’s a challenge that mars the entire space program, especially with all of the looming “environmental crises” we’ve been discussing nipping at our heels.

Space Junk

As someone who is going to be an aerospace engineer at least until June (though hopefully not after that), I think I can claim that the problem of space debris is one that touches my life.

This is an interesting issue both because of the direct problems it poses (What are we going to do with all this junk orbiting the Earth? What is going to happen when there’s too much of it to launch any more satellites? What happens to dead satellites? Could any of them ever lose momentum and come crashing down on someone’s head or house?), but also because it raises questions about what an environmental issue is.

What are the boundaries of that vague space that we define as “our environment”? Do they extend past the Earth’s atmosphere? Is there a line we can draw around ourselves, and are we allowed to do whatever we want outside that line? Also, if such a line does exist, is it constantly moving outward in the ongoing narrative of “human exploration” (which comes dangerously close to the narrative of conquest and colonization).

But I’m going a bit too far into outer space now (sorry about the bad pun). Time to get back to the issue of space debris (or space junk, the less polite term).

Here are a few links that offer some background information. NASA monitors closely the amount of space debris orbiting the Earth, and you can follow along yourself here. I find the maps of space debris particularly interesting.



Also, the Wikipedia article on space debris has some fun facts and outlines some of the proposed solutions.

Another item of note: the space shuttle flies “upside down and backwards” from the point of view of the Earth. The “upside down” part is because its dark underside protects the crew from radiation, the “backwards” part is so the thrusters can scoop up and deflect any space junk that could potentially damage the space shuttle. When hurtling at tens of thousands of kilometers an hour, even something a centimeter in diameter can be destructive.

All right, so why should your average person care about space junk? It’s so far away, right? The bits of dead satellites and trash dumped from Mir are potentially the most damaging to other satellites, the International Space Station, and space telescopes, not a normal person walking around on Earth. So maybe this points to another broader question, which is how does the space program fit into environmentalism (if it fits at all)? Should we completely abandon exploring other worlds in favor of fixing the myriad problems on our own planet? I don’t think the two have to be mutually exclusive, but I’m sure there are some that make that argument. There are even people who claim that it doesn’t matter what we do to the Earth because we’ll be able to colonize Mars or live in a space station or something. People that say that don’t realize how far we are from actually being able to do it.

In any case, although I’ll be giving up my connection with the space industry when I graduate (at least for the near future), and I think that more money should be spent on environmental issues, I’m not advocating choosing Earth over space or vice versa.

Ok...maybe I am just a little…

Blog number two: the natural in the unnatural

Our steed: A green, lumbering, Ford truck, wired to run on diesel and vegetable oil. It fits six comfortable in the two front bench seats, but countless bodies could be piled into the truck bed if we wanted.
Our destination: The local Odwalla Juice shipping center.
Our goal: Infiltrate and pilfer dumpsters, returning home with sweet blended juices for the reasonable price of the soiled soles of our shoes.

I’m no expert at dumpster diving. I’ve only been twice, accompanying a friend of mine who recently made what most would call an eccentricity at best (at worst a perversion) a hobby over the past six months or so. He and his friends go dumpster diving nearly every weekend, even two or three times a week, keeping charts and maps of the best locations and tracking the quality of the refuse around the Boston metropolitan area.

Pulling behind the Odwalla Juice shipping center at around 1 am, my friend tells me “You can look at the expiration dates, but as long as they aren’t bloated they should be ok.” We putter through a large parking lot—more accurately, a series of parking lots connected with asphalt canals and dikes—houses row upon row of slumbering beasts, large semis waiting for the sun to rise.

We park about 400 meters from the target so as not to arouse suspicion. Nonetheless, when we get there, linked chains snake around the width and length of the rusted green box. The dumpster has been padlocked.

Using our headlamps, we search along each edge for a way inside. “I can see a ton of juice in there!” someone says futilely. But we can’t access it without doing any damage, so we lope back to our green monster and ride on to the next site.

After turning the car to vegetable oil (which permeated the cab with the distinct smell of potato chips) and stalling out in the middle of a U-turn, we finally made it to the Trader Joe’s dumpster in Needham. This dumpster was far more hospitable. My friends jumped inside while I hesitated next to the dumpster, turning over all the items they handed to me in various states of disrepair. Pears, open packages of pasta, dented boxes of cereal, crates of muffins, soggy heads of lettuce, tubs of cheese (mozzarella, brie, muenster) and even a whole egg were lifted over the metal precipice and into my waiting hands as I carefully piled them into a plastic crate.



Last Friday, for the first time in my life, I spent nearly my entire day around whirring, slicing, boring machines and hot, flying shards and shavings of metal. Constructing parts for my senior thesis (a model of an tidal-current-driven turbine) has been a chore I’d been putting off for a few weeks, not so much because of laziness of apathy, but because the machine shop scares me half to death. But, after spending a few hours coaching myself and mustering up my courage, I finally tackled the task.

The work I had to do would have gone a lot faster if Todd, the machinist in the Aero/Astro machine shop, had just taken over and done everything for me, instead of standing behind me as I flinched every time I touched a tool to the spinning cylinder of aluminum on the lathe. I jumped the first time the metal shavings flew off in long spirals, fluidly accumulating in large piles of metallic curls.

Inanimate machines, once again, have taken on a life-like form in my eyes. The machines in the shop scare me because to me they seem uncontrollable; they have their own agenda and their own guiding laws that I don’t have authority over or understand. Todd, however, (to use a cliché) speaks the language of the machines; he has command over them.

So when Todd stepped in to take over for a particularly difficult maneuver, and told me that what he was doing made him very nervous, I just about ran for my life.

The machines humans have created, designed to assist them in the process of engineering, manufacturing, and production, are not even completely under our control. This may be a stretch (and entering the realm of the sci-fi), but the machine shop makes me feel like the control we think we have over the machines we construct is only as illusory as the control we think we have over nature. Lathes and drills and saws can just as easily wrench themselves out of our grip, just as the dams we build can burst and the volcanoes on whose flanks we build cities erupt.

In one of our first classes I defined “nature” as that which is beyond our control. So are the machines that scare me so much (and rightly so…Todd likes to tell stories during his safety training sessions of gruesome accidents that have occurred in the machine shop) part of nature?

For some less reflective blogging, here are a few quotes that are relevant to my essay (and that I might use in my revision):

From Bruce and Young, In the Eye of the Beholder
p.4
“There is an almost universal face blueprint across different species of animal.
One fundamental similarity across all animals which is reflected in their faces is symmetry. …there is nothing in the environment to force a distinction between right and left, and that is why…features such as eyes and legs developed equally on either side of the animal. Intriguingly…these same considerations would mean that any animals evolving on other plants would share this same basic feature of bilateral symmetry.”

p.244-247
“Dadd had been an artist of great promise, but he spent most of his life in Bethlem and Broadmoor hospitals after he killed his father in 1843. When he killed him, Dadd thought his father was someone else (the devil). This is a form of delusional misidentification—a psychiatric symptom which involves thinking that other people are not who they appear to be.

“One of the most extensively investigated forms of delusional mis-identification has been the Capgras delusion; the claim that one or more close relatives has been replaced by near-identical impostors.

“Capgras delusion patients can be otherwise rational and lucid, able to appreciate that they are making an extraordinary claim. If you ask ‘what would you think if I told you my family had been replaced by impostors?’, you will often get answers to the effect that it would be unbelievable, absurd, an indication that you had gone mad. Yet the same patients will claim that, none the less, this is exactly what has happened to their own relatives. If you ask for evidence that it is an impostor, the patients often tell you they can see the difference, yet they find it hard to express this difference in words. Further probing will sometimes reveal more pervasive feelings that many things seem strange, unfamiliar, almost unreal.

“All of us find things we like and things we dislike in our loved ones, but acknowledging the existence of the things we dislike about them can make us feel uneasy. A much discussed possibility has therefore been that the Capgras delusion is a pathological way of resolving chronic uneasiness: by splitting the relative into a good original and a bad double, the double can be hated without guilt.

“Like many psychodynamic hypotheses, this is ingenious but not grounded in evidence.
When we look at faces of people we know, we recognize who they are and parts of our brains set up preparatory reactions for the type of interaction that is likely to follow. Russian psychologists named these preparatory reactions the orienting response…Capgras delusion can happen when the pathway responsible for the orienting response is affected. The consequence will be that faces can be recognized, but seem somehow odd because they do not provoke the usual reactions. The impostor claim is a rationalization of this highly disquieting sense of strangeness.”

From Mary Roach, Stiff
p.65 (during her trip to the Body Farm in Tennessee)
“Something else is going on. Squirming grains of rice are crowded into the man’s belly button. It’s a rice grain mosh pit. But rice grains do not move. These cannot be grains of rice. They are not. They are young flies. Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let’s not use the word ‘maggot.’ Let’s use a pretty word. Let’s use ‘hacienda.’

“I see them. They are spaced out, moving slowly. It’s kind of beautiful, this man’s skin with these tiny white slivers embedded just beneath its surface. It looks like expensive Japanese rice paper. You tell yourself these things.”

p. 67
“Bacteria-generated gas bloats the lips and tongue, the latter often to the point of making it protrude from the mouth: In real life as it is in cartoons. The eyes do not bloat because the liquid has long ago leached out. They are gone. Xs. In read life as it is in cartoons.”

Oddly enough, I find all of this morbidity, well, morbidly fascinating. I also realized that I won’t be able to describe decay to this level of detail (or interest) because I’ve never seen it. So I am going to try some amateur empiricism that will come no where near to the type of decay Roach observed:

I will buy a piece of fruit (maybe two) and put it in an open Ziploc bag in my room. I will observe it for the next week, and perhaps write about what I see in my final draft.

Simple as a grade-school science experiment, but something that I think is worth doing.

Muscles, mud, and mummies

As a runner, my most frequent and immediate contact with nature—nature in this case referring to anything on the other side of the front door—occurs during my daily training runs. These encounters with the world outside are distinct because, unlike most of my other attempts to experience nature, the thing I am most acutely aware of is my own body. Usually when I go hiking or camping or backpacking (or even driving) in the so-called “middle of nowhere” I do so with the goal of shedding my day-to-day worries and all the self-consciousness (self-centered-ness?) that comes with them. One of the reasons I enjoy backpacking so much is that after living for a week or more off of only what I can carry on my back I realize how silly most of the things I worry about really are. Running, however, yields the opposite effect.

Complete attention to the body is an affect that running not only produces but necessitates. That is the essence of running, whether the distance is 400 meters or a marathon: perceiving and interpreting all of the physical and psychological signals, good and bad, your body is sending you in order to maintain a level of effort that is just on the cusp of your sustainable limit. Of course, the state of mind I just described applies more to racing than it does to training, but even this morning, on an easy training run, I noticed my breathing and the soreness in my right knee more than the cracked ice sheets floating on the river next to me. I was attuned to changes in the wind, but only because it stung my face.

My broader point is (I think) that when we experience Nature, “nature”, or nature, we have to experience on some level through our bodies. Perhaps if I spent some time studying meditation techniques I could learn to disconnect my mind from my bodily senses, but I’m definitely not at that point right now. As a consequence, the experiences in nature I remember most vividly are the ones where I was in the most physical pain. It’s not that I remember the pain itself, but that I am more likely to remember the event if it was accompanied by pain. I remember hiking up a mountain in Yellowstone when I had tendonitis; I remember the time I fell down a near-vertical ravine (and I lost my fearlessness); I remember the trail-run where I was lauded as “bloodiest runner” as I crossed the finish coated in mud. Why, in the presence of breath-taking mountains and awesome forests do my own body and its physical reality leave a greater impression on me? And why do I find this troublesome?

I’m going to leave those questions unanswered for now and completely change topics. I have a few ideas (more like images) that have been tumbling around in my head for the first essay. They all kind of (vaguely) center around the question of what life is, what is it in us that recognizes life, and how we can produce the illusion of life.

- When Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov, the leader of the Russian Buddhists from 1911 to 1927, was exhumed 75 years after his death, he was reportedly in the condition of someone who had “been dead for 36 hours”: still sitting in a lotus position, still with soft pliable skin, and still enveloped in a sweet fragrance. He (reportedly) underwent no embalming procedure of any kind.

- I went to the MIT Museum on for the first time on Friday when my parents were visiting. I was entranced by the kinetic sculpture of Arthur Ganson. Many of his sculptures seemed to so perfectly simulate motion that we instantly recognize as lifelike, even though it is driven by gears and pulleys instead of chemical reactions. For example, there was a cart you push around the room that has a rotating treadmill of shag carpet creates the illusion of crawling worms with fibrous tubes. There is also a bed of rice grains that squirms like maggots (entitled “Brownian Rice”), and a wishbone that “walks” along a track. It was amazing. The funny thing is, I saw this room right after I saw the robotics gallery, where machines were meticulously engineered to move or behave like humans or other animals, but I found Ganson’s kinetic sculpture much more successful at stimulating the (someone creepy) feeling of recognizing lifelike motion in something inanimate.

- As most of you are no doubt aware, the MIT campus is practically overrun with rats. (Or, they rule the campus by night, at least. The squirrels have a pretty good run of it during the day.) While I often see a rat (or two or three in succession) scurrying across open concrete, I am most acutely aware of the rats when I walk close to bushes and shrubs. Instead of seeing discrete rodents, I hear an entire hedge shaking. I can’t tell if there are two rats or twenty rats in there, and it seems like it’s the bush itself that is alive and moving.

Ok, so maybe once I let those out of my head they don’t seem so connected (or relevant to nature).