Prof. Appleby's Blog

If you’re reading this blog, you and I (there are two of us, right?) probably have some things in common.  A love of astronomy is perhaps one of those things.

I felt rather nostalgic last night as I stepped outside after dark and looked up at the stars on a cold, clear winter night.  It brought back memories of my youth when I would regularly spend hours outside looking at the sky, often with my telescope, but sometimes just reclining in a lawn chair and looking upward.  I  miss those times very much.  They were times of joyful, focused solitude.

I became interested in astronomy at a very early age.  I’m not sure when, exactly, but I think it started just before I began attending school.  I recall my older brother having a telescope and I’m sure I must have looked through it.

Eventually, I had telescopes of my own and I began watching the sky and reading astronomy books with a passion.

My love of science fiction kicked in around 7th grade when a junior high friend suggested I read some books by Robert Heinlein.  That really fueled my imagination; I couldn’t wait for the future to arrive when huge, rotating, doughnut shaped space stations would orbit the earth and rocket ships would routinely blast off from space ports to visit the stations, or the moon, or the planets.

In 8th grade, two milestones occurred.  First, I suddenly discovered that I loved science, especially physics, so much that I wanted to make it my life’s work.  Second, I discovered Star Trek.  That fascination with physics endured for quite some time and I contemplated a career in astronomy or astrophysics.

I think it was my sophomore year in college that things changed.  I still loved astronomy.  A great date night for me was to visit the Fernbank Planetarium.  But somehow the joy was always missing in class.  I’ve never been able to understand why that happened, but I never quite got it back.  Untethered from physics, I bounced through a variety of other career possibilities and ultimately found myself working on computer systems.

I never became Dr. Appleby, renowned astrophysicist.  The space stations of today, with their broken toilets, are a shadow of the things I dreamed about.  The spaceships?  Same thing.  The fascinating world I watched on Star Trek?  It never happened.  I guess it never will.

All of this (perhaps boring) preamble is connected to an article I read today about NASA’s next mission.  It might be to bring back some rocks from the moon, or maybe a piece of asteroid.  A third choice is to land on Venus.

Hmmm.  What would I choose?

Rocks from the moon?  I don’t know. I guess that would be okay.  A piece of asteroid?  Better, but not great.  Land on Venus?  I sort of like it, but I know it will end up generating more discussions about carbon dioxide.  I’m sick of carbon dioxide.  Let’s forget Venus.

How about going out to Saturn and grabbing something from the ring system?  I like that.   Or maybe scoop up something from one of the Jovian moons and check it out?

What I really want is a real space station.

Or a warp engine.

Something.

I’m sitting here in the pre-dawn hours on Christmas Day, having had some trouble getting back to sleep.  So, naturally, I start reading science articles.  If you’ve been in my classes, you know that I really enjoy reading popular science stuff.  There’s just something about the writing style that makes me laugh – especially when the articles deal with “early man.”

Now, this particular article deals with the inhabitants of an 800,000 year-old campsite.  Already I’m impressed.  I had no idea that camping had been discovered at such an early date.  I suspect that many of the inhabitants of my own sub-division (my “neighbors” as I call them) have never even been camping.

Oddly enough, however, camping isn’t the primary focus of the article.  The real focus is on the fact that these inhabitants used different parts of their rectangular living spaces to perform different activities.  I suddenly feel this almost inexplicable sense of bonding with these folks (or hominids, or whatever they were).  You see, we do exactly the same thing in my own home!  So little has changed over the last 800,000 years.

The article says as much, too, noting that hunter-gatherers today also use different parts of their living spaces for different purposes.  No doubt.  Though, I should add that, when my hunting and gathering are done for the day, I sometimes eat and watch TV in the same rectangular living space.  (My wife would actually prefer that I not do that, of course, but that’s another story.)

Some of the observations surprised me.  In one rectangular living space, they were preparing fish and producing flint-tools.  I didn’t expect that.  Normally, I do my flint-tool type work in a different area – especially if my wife is preparing fish.  Then, in a separate area, they find evidence of eating-type behaviors (fish bones, crab stuff  – though not stuffed crab, as far as we can tell – and nut shells) plus debris associated with tool resharpening.

This I don’t quite get.  I mean, I can see preparing the fish in one rectangular living space (let’s call it the kitchen) and eating it in another rectangular living space (say, the dining room) – but what’s with the tool making and sharpening all over the house?  Did they not have garages?

I read on.  There is the mandatory use of words like implement and fashion.  They have a nice, early-man sort of feel, don’t they?  I was in a Japanese restaurant the other day, trying to fashion a couple of smooth wooden sticks into an eating implement – but I finally just used my fork.

Ah!  The nuts were apparently roasted and there is a somewhat lengthy explanation of why they would roast them.  It quite possibly has something to do with convenience and taste.  Interesting.  It triggers a thought: Remember to buy some more roasted peanuts during the next grocery store visit (where I do most of my hunting and gathering these days).  Oh, and buy a roast.  I love roast as much as the next hunter-gatherer.

Moving on, I read that the use of separate rectangular living spaces suggests advanced cognitive abilities.  Cool.  Because we’re doing that in my house.  Of course, it’s largely my wife’s idea.  I’m okay with just a great room.  Maybe she’s the one with the advanced cognitive abilities.  Yeah. It starts to fit the pattern I’ve seen over the years.

Well, this is quite a discovery (I mean, about the advanced cognitive abilities of these campers – not of my wife).  It looks like researchers thought that such abilities didn’t show up until about 100,000 years ago.  But, 800,000 years ago!  Wow!  I mean, that’s getting pretty close to being off by an order of magnitude.  Maybe somebody’s advanced cognitive abilities might benefit from a little sharpening of their own.  But enough said about that.  Anyone who reads science articles regularly knows that there is a continuous revision of “what we know.”

Not to bore you further, I’ll mention one last thing.  It appears that our ancient friends used hammers and anvils to crack open almonds.  Is it just me, or does that seem like a bit of an overkill?  I mean, that’s like my driving my car over them.  Just use a nutcracker.  No wonder they have to keep repairing their tools.

Oh, and it looks like they had two campfires with some people sitting around one and other people sitting around another.  How we know they were sitting beats me.  That sounds more like speculation than empirical science, but that’s fine.  I won’t tell them how to do science if they won’t tell me how to hunt and gather.  Besides, we do something similar in my home, but it’s not around campfires, it’s around TVs.

I don’t get it.  I don’t get this weird disconnect where talented people can’t get decent jobs.  For example, how is it that a young man with excellent communication skills, Ivy League caliber test scores, an ability to write well, a good work ethic, and a desire to do virtually anything just to get a start in life (asking only that it pay enough to live off of), can’t generate any interest?  Why are so many recent college graduates just wondering around, desperately looking for any decent opportunity?

No, this isn’t due to the recession.

This has been happening for a while now.

Is it possible that a college degree now signifies little or nothing?  Are college graduates viewed as being unprepared to do anything productive?  I’m serious – is that the essence of what’s happening?  Is that the general perception of  business and government?

Maybe we do need to re-think the current educational system and what we are preparing our students to do with their lives.  If the market for your product is shrinking, then it’s time to act.  What can be changed?  How can the value of a college degree be strengthened?  Or is a matter of relevance?  Four years is too much time to waste.

There was a time when graduates could be hired and trained in-house to perform certain jobs.  Your first year might be spent learning specific, job-related knowledge and methods to conform you to the procedures and culture of the business where you worked.  I don’t know if that’s still done.  But I see a lot of talent being wasted and I share in the concerns that have been expressed about a “lost generation” of young Americans – people who will get a late start in their careers and have less total earnings potential than prior generations.

We need to figure out the inhibitors that are keeping talented people out of the workplace and then we need to fix them.