This is an extraordinary announcement from Forbes Magazine. San Jose Calif, Boulder Colo., Framingham Mass., Huntsville Ala., and Durham N.C. are the five regions listed as more Geeky than Lowell (figures based on percentage of workers in science, technology, engineering, and math-based jobs). See the list here. Both the City Manager and leftinlowell.com blogged about this announcement, and UMass Lowell Facebooked it early today, thanks to Mike P. on the campus web squad. Forbes online used a picture of the UML Inn & Conference Center with National Park Service canal boat in the Pawtucket Canal in front as the iconic Lowell image (I believe that’s a Jim Higgins photo—nice work, James.)
July 23rd, 2011
Henry David Thoreau – Jailed For Withholding Poll Taxes – July 23, 1846
MassMoments reminds us that on this day – July 23, 1846 – Henry David Thoreau after walking from his Walden Pond cabin to do an errand – found himself in the Concord town jail for refusing to pay his back taxes. His was just an over-night stay – as someone unasked paid those taxes for him. This greatly annoyed Thoreau who withheld the poll taxes as a conscience protest against the institution of slavery. As he later wrote in his essay “”Civil Disobedience” -
“…it is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and . . . not to give it practically his support.”
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist admired as an original thinker and a gifted writer. He produced an extraordinary body of work — journals, essays, poetry, and books – that included his first book “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” published in 1849 and “Walden, or, Life in the Woods” published in 1854.
Read more about Thoreau here at MassMoments.com.
Culture, Greater Lowell, History, Poetry, Politics, Science | 
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July 7th, 2011
The Final Shuttle Mission
On Friday July 8th, at 11:26AM NASA will launch the space shuttle Atlantis on STS-135, the final shuttle mission. It marks the end of an era that began on April 12, 1981 with the first flight of Columbia. 135 missions later, the United States’ fourth great space program, the successor to Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, has come to its end.
I was born between STS-31 and STS-41, the 35th and 36th shuttle missions, both flights of the shuttle Discovery. STS-31 was the mission to deploy the Hubble Telescope. I have never known anything but the shuttle program. Quite frankly, I have taken it for granted; I cannot imagine it being over. But after tomorrow the United States will no longer have the ability to put astronauts into orbit; we will be reliant on Russian Soyuz rockets for the foreseeable future. Not only is there no plan to replace the shuttle, but now Congress is preparing to cancel the Webb Telescope, which was to be the successor to the Hubble, taking us back even closer to the Big Bang than Hubble is capable of.
The shuttle is the most complicated machine ever built, consisting of over a million moving parts. The time and work involved in preparing a shuttle for launch is unimaginable. The shuttles have given us the Hubble and the International Space Station. And they have given us more technological and scientific breakthroughs than most of us will ever know. read more »
June 30th, 2011
‘Cassini-Huygens’
I wrote this sketch several years ago just after the Fourth of July. The Cassini-Huygens space probe, according to Wikipedia, “entered into orbit around Saturn in July 2004,” and it is expected to transmit data about Saturn and its moons until 2017. In January 2005, the vehicle landed on the Saturn moon Titan in “the first landing ever accomplished in the outer solar system.” The probe is named for a 17th-century Dutch astronomer who “discovered” Titan. We live in big wide world.—PM
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Cassini-Huygens
Jim Casselton is one of the morning walkers. One summer morning we visited for a few laps on the South Common oval. The bluish three-quarter moon’s dents and ridges made a mottled surface that was papery in its translucence. The moon held its place like a shape cut out of a blank sheet. Way beyond, after seven years in transit and two billion miles, the latest celebrity spacecraft, the Cassini-Huygens probe, had reached Saturn. The SUV-sized craft “deked” its way past swirling chunks of ice and universal gravel to find a gap in the rings on Independence Day. In no time, Cassini started beaming back pictures of the distinctive rings and several of the planet’s 31 moons. The trip will climax with the landing of a pod on the vast moon, Titan, the farthest surface on which humans have ever tried to land a machine.
“That moon is fat this morning, and there’s something odd about the light,” said Jim. We’d been talking about pushing the Parks Department to spruce up the Common. He’s a barrel-chested man of medium height. He wore a New England Patriots sweatshirt, the one from the second Super Bowl win, black running pants with a silver stripe up the leg, and white sneakers. When he saw me coming down the hill, he pointed at his white cap with a swoosh and then to my Oakland A’s cap, and said, “Tonight,” meaning the A’s would be playing the Sox at Fenway. Jim lives in “the housing” near the Common, a complex named for a local priest. He’s usually finished his workout before I arrive.
He takes the train to Boston some days and walks along the Charles River. “That’s a beautiful stretch,” he said, “and they keep it so clean. There were 450,000 people at the Boston Pops on the Fourth of July, and the police didn’t report one incident. That’s people having a good time in a good way.” Underfoot were dozens of spent red-and-blue paper casings of fireworks from the local celebration. “I had my windows open and heard them until all hours. It’s not as rough as it used to be. They stopped the carnivals after a guy got stabbed, but that was years ago. You still have to keep your eyes open.”
“When I was with county corrections, a bunch of us would run in South Lowell on weekends. We’d run through the Back Central area, which some people used to call the South End, where the Portuguese have done a marvelous job keeping up appearances. When I came to Lowell from Florida in 1959, that area was run down. The Portuguese took it over street by street. They’ve got a fine neighborhood. It still has problems, but look at what they do with a patch of land—the car-ports crawling with grape vines and the roses and fruit trees in the miniature back yards. Talk about the Portuguese—Did you know Mr. Homer, the fisherman? He’d come around the section where a lot of the black people lived with his truck and put out these big tubs of fish on ice, all kinds. He’d say, ‘Go ahead, Mrs. Casselton, take a couple more. There’s plenty in the ocean.’ He had piles of fish.”
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—Paul Marion (c) 2004
June 26th, 2011
I Want My Green TV
Who knew? There’s a sustainability trap in the cable TV box. Front page report in NYTimes today about the energy-sucking cable TV boxes and allied home entertainment gadgets that are not designed with “green” in mind at all “because nobody asked us to use less [energy],” according to one “box manufacturer.” For all our local efforts at greener behavior, a third-party decision on TV operation turns out to be a built-in power drain. Read Elizabeth Rosenthal’s enlightening report here, and get the NYT if you want more.
Web graphic courtesy of tv.azzopardi
June 24th, 2011
Rain List Poem
Rain List Poem
.
rain
rainbow
rainbow cactus
rainbow trout
rain check
raincoat
raindrop
rainfall
rain gauge
Rainier III
Rainier, Mount
rainmaker
rainmaking
rainspout
rainsquall
rainstorm
rain-wash
rainwater
rainwear
rainy
rainy day
Rainy Lake, Ont.
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—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1970 edition)
June 11th, 2011
Keeping Things in Perspective
“The findings are significant as we will have to change our view on how the Sun interacts with particles, fields and gases from other stars, and this has consequences that reach down to Earth,” commented Arik Posner, Nasa’s Voyager programme scientist.
Bbc.com reports that NASA’s Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977 are now 14 billion kilometers from Earth and still transmitting data to scientists back home. Who says the “government” can’t do anything right? What a triumph of imagination and technology, accomplished on behalf of our collective nation.
Humans ought to be busy with this kind of work and making sure everyone has enough food, medicine, and schooling rather than wasting so much blood, time, and money on wars and conflicts over religion, territory, and resources. We are alone but together out here in space. Really, as far as we can prove. Earth. Earthlings. The blue dot. We need more voyaging in space to try to understand the cosmic neighborhood. Read the article by Jonathan Amos here.
“The domain of the Sun’s influence is called the heliosphere: The Voyagers are approaching the edge of this enormous balloon of charged particles thrown out into space by our star.” (Web image courtesy of NASA via bbc.com)
May 21st, 2011
For Perspective: From the Space Station
Web photo courtesy of NASA via npr.com
Picked this up on npr.com from a report on “the view from the Space Station.”
May 15th, 2011
Congresswoman Giffords Gets Fly-By View of Endeavour
From Florida Today this story:
Today at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida: U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the wife of Endeavour commander Mark Kelly, has arrived at Kennedy Space Center to watch Monday morning’s launch, her staff has reported.
“Gabrielle landed safely in Florida. Smooth flight with STS 134 astronaut Greg Johnson’s family,” read the post on the Arizona congresswoman’s Facebook page, which includes a dramatic aerial photo of Endeavour on its pad (left). “Thanks to NASA for great fly by of launch pad.”
“Glad to have you here,” KSC staff said via Twitter.
May 10th, 2011
This Is Encouraging: Renewable Energy Forecast
Renewable technologies could supply 80% of the world’s energy needs by mid-century, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Read what BBC reporter Richard Black says about the prospect of renewable energy by mid-century.
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