Grandma's House

I wish I had said this to you, my cousins. But I couldn't get all four of you together at once. I couldn't, or I wouldn't. For while I felt welcome, I didn't always feel comfortable. It's a powder keg here, and as in all wars, the children will suffer most, and most blamelessly.

What would I say?

I would say that she was your grandma most of all. I was given, unexpectedly, a place of honor at the service, as the surviving descendant of her eldest child, her eldest son. Because of this I was charged with starting the procession for incense and prayer. I also sat in the front row. My mother -- bless her heart! -- sent flowers via the Kahului florist, flowers that read "From Ryan". I know that some read this as arrogance and presumption and not kindness, sounding a dissonant note. (The other two wreaths simply said "Beloved Grandmother" and "Beloved Mother", with no names.) Perhaps worst of all, my aunt proposed, last-minute, to add a brief statement and prayer dedicated to my late father, extending the service another ten minutes.

All of these serve, in some way, to separate me from you. It is the last thing I want, for your kindness has been the one thing that has kept this trip tolerable.

I can't claim her. She gave birth to my father, and my father gave birth to me. But our relationship was a tenuous one, one of a half dozen visits and cards during the holidays. You, on the other hand, were there every week -- even now. You grill, you eat, you laugh, you talk story.

I want to tell you that I don't know that with Grandma Yamada. I'll never know that. But I know what it is to have that, and to lose it.

Every Sunday, with few exceptions, my mother's family would gather at Grandma Yasuda's house. Not everyone had gone to church. But everyone ate. Everyone talked. As the youngest cousin, I enjoyed the attention and patience of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and older cousins.

As an only child of a single mother, this experience was absolutely vital. Without it, I have no doubt I would be dead, in spirit if not in body.

I even lived there for a time. In retrospect, I am grateful my mother had both the privilege and willingness to go to half-time employment and live a couple days a week with her parents when they contracted cancer. I spent even more time with some of my cousins. I learned how to change a colostomy bag. I learned to grieve as I saw both my grandmother and my grandfather alive one day and dead the next.

And I grieved, especially for my grandmother. I lost her in 8th grade, on the cusp of graduation, before I could give the valediction. I talked about teaching then, because I didn't have the heart to talk about how much I missed her, what she had meant to me.

If I am honest, then, I do not share your pain. But I know it. I know that pain better than I know my own face.

You aunts and uncles -- I also know what it is to lose a parent, a parent with whom, maybe, you feel you had unfinished business. But damn you and your foolish machinations and grudges. Choke on your bitterness. I will speak to your children.

You may wonder if you'll lose that center, now that she's gone. You may. Maybe not. You are four, and your spouses, and your own children, bound by a father who yet lives there. Will he be your center? Perhaps, though fathers and sons, and fathers and daughters, do not always have the same luxury, the same patience, the same opportunity for love to feel unconditional, though in these cases, at least, it certainly is.

We lost our emotional center, and eventually, we lost our place of congregation. The diaspora is spread less through space and more through neglected ties. It can be rekindled, and I have the good fortune of picking up where I left off with many of these cousins and aunts. But it is different, and in many ways, inferior.

If your bonds live -- and they have a better chance, for you are brothers and sisters -- it will be because you work to reforge the broken links through frequent and strenuous effort. You will be fine, I hope, I think. But the rest of us? If we let three months, six months, a year pass, what will become of us?

No matter. I will instead focus on my gratitude. You have, without knowing, let me feel the slight touch of a rope tied to a ship long disappeared over the horizon, a ship bearing my happiest memories, my most important influences. I weep for your loss, but I celebrate the realization that I had this best of gifts. I hope you know what you had, and what you must fight to keep.

Sigh - wine has substituted feeling. Food has substituted grief. Let me walk on these sands and clear my thoughts, for they ramble irregularly like the waves in this breakered lagoon.

Why I wanted to become an astronomer

I can't believe I haven't told this story yet.

This is the story of how I got interested in astronomy and managed to will myself somewhat far down the professional path.

There were three primary influences: a man, books, and television.

The man:

I think I was about six when I met Uncle Kimo, a cousin-in-law-in-law. (My aunt married a man who had a sister who married Uncle Kimo.)  At the time, Uncle Kimo worked at JPL as an instrumentation engineer. I really liked "Uncle Kimo". He seemed to know a lot of things! We spent time drawing maps of continents and he would tell me about space. Over the years, he sent me some of those nice high-gloss photos from Voyager and other space missions. Some of my personal favorites were a radio reconstruction of Venus' surface, Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, black and white images of Uranus' satellites, and that stunning deep blue shot of Neptune and the Great Dark Spot, accented by some bright white storms (the largest called "Scooter", if memory serves).





I think I loved Uncle Kimo not just because of the cool space stuff. He was maybe the first male family member I really felt comfortable around. My dad was crazy and unstable; my uncles either scared me because of their anger or were just not that interesting/good with kids. I loved my grandpa, but he was intimidating (especially to everyone older than me), and the language barrier made us not quite as close as we might have been.

Also worth emphasizing: Uncle Kimo was the first adult who really tried to teach me about the world around me, and do it in a way that didn't assume I was just a dumb kid.

I only saw Uncle Kimo a few times growing up, but I'd still place him as a tremendous influence on my life in general, and my interest in astronomy in particular.

Books:

I spent a lot of time alone growing up. My parents divorced when I was three. My mother worked, and so my grandparents played a large role in raising me. They were kind and loving, but didn't speak much English, so I ended up turning to books. My mom says I initially hated to read, and would slam my little hand down on any book she tried to open and read to me. Maybe I was creeped out by Shel Silverstein's artwork in Where the Sidewalk Ends. But, eventually, I did start reading on my own.


As a society, are we still ok with this?


One of the first books I got was The Golden Book of Stars and Planets.

I read it probably a couple hundred times. I loved the artist's depictions (all images of the planets were hand-drawn).

I still remember it mentioning NGC 5128 (depicted on the cover, right side), thinking "That's a weird name for a galaxy. Why wasn't it called something like the Milky Way? Or Snickers?" (It's a radio source, and got special mention, though I thought it made weird sounds because the artist's depiction made it look like it was surrounded by hair.)

I also went through a weird phase as a kid in which questions in a book would freak me out. They scared me! Because of that, I'd have to skip over the last part of the Mars section? "Was there ever water on Mars? Could there have been life?" It was that and an earthquake preparedness pamphlet that creeped me out with those "?", which I must have mentally read in some sort of spooky voice. (Did anyone else have this, or was this a leading indicator for profound mental unsoundness? -- again, with scary questions!)

I loved that book so much.

More books. Remember Scholastic catalogs? Or Arrow? Or the other one? Classroom teachers would give us these catalogs filled with books that we could buy at (what I thought were) reasonable prices. Now, I didn't know how money worked, even though I loved Scrooge McDuck in Ducktales and tried to swim in a pile of dimes in my grandparent's living room. (Maybe another flag that this boy ain't right.) I remember that in first grade everyone wrote a letter to President George H. W. Bush. I wrote that the process of making change (money, not policy) seemed unfair -- why does someone get to keep more of the money? My teacher helped me write it, but I'm a bit annoyed she didn't try to sit down and explain it to me at the time. I got a photo back, but I don't think the letter had an answer.

Also, in retrospect, this was one place where economic differences started to show. A lot of my classmates probably couldn't afford any books. I always got to pick a few, as well as get a subscription to Highlights! magazine.



Goofus generally gets what he wants, even if he is an asshole. Gallant is a spineless appeaser and a fake, pretentious prick. Guess who I grew up to be?

One of the books I got this way was Planets: A Golden Guide to the Solar System.

This was not my favorite book. I don't know why -- I carried it around everywhere. It just seemed not as exciting, or less accessible because of more data. There were tables of numbers, I think, and maybe fewer dramatic, page-filling images.

I got a more important book that had both dramatic pictures and tons of numbers (though not derivations) around first or second grade. My Sunday School teacher gave me his old college astronomy textbook, a paperback that cost $34.75 at the Aschula's student store. (I still remember the sticker on the cover.) The book was Essentials of the Dynamic Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, Second Edition by Theodore P. Snow. Sadly, I can't track down the cover image, but it must have been a saturated image of a star, or an AGN, or something like that, with some rainbow accents suggesting spectra.

I think I read that book cover to cover several times. This was the source of nearly all of my knowledge of  introductory astronomy. Memory being what it is, those early memories were retained much more easily than ones in college, making it sometimes challenging to rewrite my knowledge of certain important constants. (The distance light traveled in a second was, in my mind, 186,282 miles, and not 299,792 kilometers. Mercury orbited the Sun at a distance of 38 million miles -- and unfortunately all my distance scales inside the Solar System remain imperial.)

Same church: our rather conservative junior minister occasionally called on me, possibly for comedic effect, to quote some astronomical fact -- closest star, distance to the Sun, etc. -- that had some tie-in to his sermon.

Years later, after being accepted at CU Boulder's astronomy grad program, I happened to meet with Theodore P. Snow. (I think he went by Ted at the time.) Usually, meetings were about prospective research, but I spent the entire time as a fanboy gushing about how incredibly important his textbook was to my life. I have no idea whether it was flattering or scary for him, but I was thrilled to put a name to a face. (It also helped that he seemed nice -- read: Not A Professor Asshole.)

This book and interactions with that pastor explain why I never, ever thought of a conflict between science and religion until I started paying attention to politics/went to college. I still think it's misguided/overrated.

Books were a good substitute for technology. I was lucky enough to get a small telescope for Christmas, but quite frankly, it was a piece of crap Celestron. I probably should have read the manual more carefully, but none of us really took the time to figure out how to use the RA and DEC wheels, or how to use coordinates to find things in the sky. Oh, and perhaps most importantly, I couldn't see jack shit because I was too close to Los Angeles. Saturn's rings and the Galilean satellites were nice to see, but a bit anticlimactic after spending years staring at NASA images.

Television

As a kid, I watched a ton of TV, unsupervised. I remember being confused as to why "Orchie Bunkur" was so angry all the time. (This is a reference to All in the Family.) I even wrote a letter to that effect, to no one in particular. (I liked writing letters as a kid.) This letter was proudly placed in my grandpa's scrapbook without further comment, a testament to both his love and the complete absence of analytic evaluation of child behavior in my family.

I watched a lot of Star Trek: TNG. Remember that it ran from 1987-1994. From the age of four to eleven, I saw brand-new TNG episodes. I saw the very first airing of "The Best of Both Worlds". Eat your hearts out, young nerds.

I would record a lot of these episodes and re-watch them endlessly (VHS, in case the young people are curious). I didn't have particularly good taste -- I recorded as much as I could, and ended up with a skewed impression of the overall series, with Data being held up by Samuel Clemens with a .45 revolver playing a more important role than, say, "The Inner Light" or "Darmok". More fortunately, I also recorded and watched "Chain of Command", though maybe even scrubbed and tidied torture scenes weren't the best thing for a young child to process.

I also watched Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Again, I had no taste -- I thought Babylon 5 was an incredibly well-acted show and ST: DS9 weak by comparison (I would reverse those judgments years later.)

But in addition to sci-fi, I watched some sci-fact. NOVA specials were great, and what I know of cosmology comes from them.

The most personally important program, however, was a National Geographic documentary titled Asteroids: Deadly Impact. It primarily focused on Gene Shoemaker and his study of asteroid and comet impacts. Of course, no one man or team can claim sole ownership of such a broad field, but it made for great watching.

Only the intro is available for free online: Asteroids Deadly Impact

Again, I recorded this, and watched in at least 50 times. I returned to it a few times in high school, especially when I had an abysmally poor physics teacher, to sort of remind me why I thought astronomy was worth studying.

Epilogue:

These influences were critical. I enjoyed reading books. I had a person who cared about me, and encouraged my interest. Even my religious authority figures fed this interest in astronomy.

I didn't really know what astronomers do until later, and in retrospect, I probably should have looked into it a bit more before embarking on a professional path.

But in some ways I was more successful than I should have been. How many of us dreamed of being a paleontologist as a kid? Or a marine biologist? At some point, most of us revise those dreams -- ideally because we discover other interests, but often because the impracticality of our dreams are beat out of us by parents, teachers, or others.

When I was about four, I said I wanted to be a pediatrician, probably because my pediatrician, Dr. Nakashima, was a hilarious and awesome guy who claimed to be a ninja turtle, and maintained that despite my challenges. But my mom's asshole friend said that that wasn't a good idea, and I never, ever considered being a medical doctor, even though, in retrospect, I probably would have been a good one.

I was lucky, in some sense. I was lucky to have enough resources and opportunities to follow my dreams without reality intruding. Sure, it was unfocused and overly idealistic. Sure, I hit points when the contradiction between what I felt were my skills and interests diverged from what I appeared to be doing. And yes, it ended pretty badly, and I'm still recovering from poor choices I made.

But I got away with it for a hell of a long time, partly because I was good enough at math and science to do it, but partly because I had just wanted it so badly and didn't know "better" not to irrationally pursue what should have been a more deliberate, cautious, and considered course of action.

Maybe I shouldn't think that I failed spectacularly. Maybe I should instead be grateful that I got away with it for so long.

Let's Play Adventure!

I have a cousin. He is in kindergarten. He is confident, athletic, and bright. Whenever I saw him, he used to say, "Let's play adventure!" As he's gotten a bit older, he has become slightly more polite: "Uncle Ryan, can we play adventure?"

Let me explain.

At some point, in the not-too-distant past, I decided to entertain my cousin by going on a make-believe adventure in the backyard. It involved some convoluted story involving a sacred sword, evil wizards, monsters, merchants, comedic sidekicks, and magic items.

I didn't realize that I was unintentionally committing myself to a long-term contract. Since then, every time I've met this cousin, we've played "adventure". We must've played it at least 25 times; I've lost count.

The goal of this was to stimulate his imagination. I don't know if it's worked -- sometimes, I try, with mixed success, to get him to come up with the storyline. I'm hopeful that he'll play adventure with his friends at school.

Also with mixed success: crafting stories with enough moral ambiguity that it doesn't boil down to killing the bad guys. At least he knows that not all monsters or witches or ogres are evil.

Most recently, given a particularly intellectually bankrupt day, I ripped off The Oregon Trail and took a group of cousins on a long and dangerous journey through a cul de sac in Monterey Park on the way to the Willamette Valley.

It was unusual, in that the cousins included some older folks - one about eight or nine. Initially, a ten-year old girl was part of the party, but she decided to quit early. In revenge for her rational decision to drop out of a kid's game, she became the first person to die of dysentery.

When asked what dysentery was, I explained that it involved nonstop diarrhea. The eight year old boy was delighted.

I'm not a particularly great storyteller, especially when forced to improvise. I think, when I finally find a Toastmasters club I like, I'll choose the storytelling module once I complete the basic one.

But I do think storytelling, and imagination, are tremendously important.

It's a lot of work - more work than playing a game with established rules, or watching a TV program. So why do I do it?

Growing up with a busy single mom and non-English speaking grandparents, I found myself alone a lot. (I'm an only child, and the youngest grandchild in my family.) I did watch a lot of TV -- a lot of "crap telly". But I also spent a lot of time wandering around in the backyard, making up things with dirt and bugs.

Whenever my mom went shopping, I would also try picking up random bits of debris and make up an adventure, hiding in the circular racks and assembling equipment.

I never became a LARPer; again, possibly because my isolation never put me in contact with that culture until college, at which point prejudices and the demands of study discouraged it. And I don't know that an obsession with D&D's modern ruleset would be all that helpful in cultivating genuine creativity and imagination among the young -- to the contrary, it might be borrowing someone else's word of fantasy.

Here's the point of the story: when my cousin asks other adults to "play adventure", they don't really know what it means. And when they do, they often make the excuse that they don't know how.

I worry, deeply, that it's not an excuse, but an accurate statement of fact.

PBS and the battle over America's soul

This election has been about many things. It's been about jobs, tax policy, public debt, a sprinkling of foreign policy, and, occasionally, social issues like gay marriage, vaginal ultrasounds, and contraception.

But it's becoming clear that it is about principles in addition to policy. It's subtle, but it comes down to two different visions about the nature of America, its government, and its future.

We must decide, not once and for all, but as often as is necessary, as often as we are in danger of forgetting, what America really represents.

The battle for America's soul is cast as a false choice between equity and individualism. It really comes down to whether we care, and how much we care, about our fellow citizens, even if they are unknown to us.

I think the PBS debate has highlighted this.

***

First, facts about the funding:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives $445 million from the federal government. The 2012 federal budget is $2.469 trillion. This means the CPB represents 0.018 percent of the overall federal budget.

This is important, because, as we've seen from surveys, people often overestimate the share of the budget that goes to things like NASA. One survey suggests Americans think NASA takes up 24 percent of the budget, when it in fact receives around 1 percent.

Obviously, zeroing the federal funding for public television will not, in itself, do much for the deficit. Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it particularly well:

2. Federal money represents about 15 percent of the overall public television budget. The rest is made up by sponsorship from foundations and, as they famously say, "viewers like you". On the face of it, that doesn't sound like a lot. But it's unclear what restrictions are placed on both the public and private funds. Contributions and local sponsorship of specific stations might vary a lot -- KPCC in the greater Los Angeles area probably does better than a number of rural networks. Some organizations might target specific programmatic development, and not fund operations -- or vice versa. Some organizations insist on matching funds. So there is the potential for a 15 percent reduction to affect far more than 15 percent of the operations of PBS.

But the reason this battle is important is not the specific numbers involved with the funding. It has to do with what PBS represents. I'm going to focus just on the children's programming, though a spirited, solid defense can be made for the rest of it -- including the News Hour, which the debate moderator, Jim Lehrer, helped create so many years ago.

***

Younger people might not know much about Mr. Rogers. He was the host of a long-running children's show on PBS called Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. It has been satirized, sometimes acutely, but always from a place of love and respect for the impact it's had on generations of Americans (and Canadians).

The funding issue reminds me of Mister (Fred) Rogers' testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications, in which he successfully argued against a proposed PBS budget cut by Nixon. He did it by explaining, calmly, clearly, what he did, and why he did it. In short, he created a safe, educational environment for children, explaining calmly and carefully things about the world. He did this because he was worried about commercial programming for children, and what it could do to the emotional development of children.

(For those of you who don't know, Mr. Rogers had a background in child development and music composition, and was an ordained Presbyterian minister.)

Mister Rogers, more than Big Bird, embodied the spirit of PBS, especially its children's programming. It was only later, much later, that I realized he was talking to adults too.

An excerpt from a fantastic article that deserves to be read in full:

He is losing, of course. The revolution he started--a half hour a day, five days a week--it wasn't enough, it didn't spread, and so, forced to fight his battles alone, Mister Rogers is losing, as we all are losing. He is losing to it, to our twenty-four-hour-a-day pie fight, to the dizzying cut and the disorienting edit, to the message of fragmentation, to the flicker and pulse and shudder and strobe, to the constant, hivey drone of the electroculture … and yet still he fights, deathly afraid that the medium he chose is consuming the very things he tried to protect: childhood and silence. Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling television--gently, of course--to just shut up for once, and television listened. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy's Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, "All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are ... Ten seconds of silence." And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, "I'll watch the time," and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn't kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked … and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds … and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, "May God be with you" to all his vanquished children.

Seriously, read the whole thing.

***

PBS in general, and its children's programming in particular, serves the needs of educational and emotional development of children without being bombarded by commercial messages.

It is especially important for kids who don't have a fully developed social support network.

I came from a loving family. But I spent a lot of time with grandparents who didn't speak English while my mother was at work. I watched a lot of TV. In retrospect, watching All in the Family when I was three years old was probably not good for me. (I remember writing, "Why is Orchie [sic] Bunker so mad?" on a letter to my grandpa.) But I did watch Mr. Rogers, and Sesame Street, and it helped me with my language development.

So PBS isn't for the kids privileged with wealth and attention and top-notch early childhood education. It's for the rest of us. It's for those of us whose parents, bless their hearts, needed the TV as a babysitter occasionally, but were concerned about the epileptic-inducing nature of Power Rangers and similar shows. It was for those of us who grew up around non-English speakers. It was for those of us who didn't have anyone to talk to us about divorce, or Desert Storm, or about anger -- all of which Mr. Rogers did.

PBS is for the rest of us, for all of us. It's not enough--no television program could replace parenting, in-person education, and hugs. But it helped, especially when it brought kids and adults into the same room, the same emotional space, and helped adults to actually talk with their children.

***

There's a difference between asking for shared sacrifice and cutting a budget completely. If it were about the deficit, then I think Mitt Romney would have used PBS as an example of something we all value, but also something that will need to be cut somewhat in order to ensure a firm financial footing for the children in question.

He didn't do that. He made a joke, a joke to the face of a man employed by that network for decades, a joke at a member of an iconic show, Sesame Street, with twenty different versions around the world. In particular, a version for Palestinian children, Sharaa Simsim, has already been the victim of politics. In early 2012, it was defunded after the US Congress suspended Palestinian aid after Palestine's appeal to the UN for statehood. (The funding was later reinstated by Congress, with restrictions, but the restrictions were overridden by the President.)

It was a joke because he doesn't get how important it is to families not like his -- flawed families, with flawed parents, where TV is on more than it should be, but where it can be a source of learning and even healing. That's what Mr. Rogers saw, and Mr. Romney does not. It's about families that may or may not be like ours, children who may not be ours, but belong to us -- and we to them -- all the same.

Why should I try to say it in words, when Mr. Rogers did it for me?

We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say 'It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.' Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes."

Sesame Street, you're my hero. Fred Rogers, you're my hero. You have helped me develop into a person who, however imperfectly, believes that liberty and responsibility are partners, not antagonists, in the building of a more perfect union. And it is that partnership, with all its tensions, that is the soul of America.

The Face of the Future

I have a new cousin! Mika Hsu Kotsubo was born on March 19. Here she is, held by brother Caleb.

I've been learning a lot about organizational theory lately, and so it's always helpful to step back from the somewhat depressing conclusions regarding institutionalization and the likelihood of success for military transformation to enjoy the beauty of life.

When I think about it, I think that's the one thing that has me most tempted to jump ship and do policy work. Astronomy is beautiful in it of itself; it has no greater purpose than simply learning about the universe. Yes, there are spin-offs, commercial and military (though it seems the tech transfer direction goes military -> civilian)
but the true product is beauty and greater understanding. That, if nothing else, has been the casualty of an increasing siege mentality in this country. In my home, in my community, and in the halls of power, the emphasis on security trumps all else.

A state needs to ensure the security of its citizens. At the same time, a state must ensure its security by maintaining not only a vast overseas network and force projection capabilities, but also a strong domestic economy, a creative and innovative workforce, and the spirit and essence of what makes us who we are - an identity grounded in freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and justice. We must be the good guys, right? If not, what are we doing?

This point is somewhat vague, and Jake has rightly called me on many of my arguments, which are flaccid and meandering. I have a lot of concrete comments, based on articles written by Donald Rumsfeld and Barry Posen for my miltech class. I'll write more on this when I have had more sleep and less pressing work.