tyler's take

Some stories have a lot of staying power, others not so much. One of the deciding factors seems to be chronology, with earlier accounts faring better than later ones. So while it may seem questionable that any modern artist, or sports hero, or military/political figure will still be well-known several hundred years hence, some of the ancient ones, from a few thousand years prior, are practically commonplace.

Thus it could happen that one evening while stretching your Achilles tendon, following a run of herculean effort, you might end up on your back staring up into the night sky with your gaze wandering through the constellations of Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Andromeda and Perseus. And this lovely sight (assuming the modern light pollution permits you to see it at all) might invoke the memory of storytime from the days of your youth.

The story of Perseus is an old one, having been told, retold, and revamped many times. By legend, the son of Danaë and Zeus (not Poseidon), the young Perseus is cast into the sea, along with his mother, and is later found and raised by the fisherman Dictys. To protect his mother from the unwanted advances of his “adoptive uncle” Polydectes, Perseus undertakes a quest to retrieve the head of Medusa (aka Uma Thurman). To aid him on his journey he is bequeathed with certain other-worldly gifts: a shield from Athena, a sword from Zeus, and winged sandals from Hermes (these, no doubt, at least as comfortable as winged, Converse low tops). With the aid of his gifts he achieves his goal, as heroes are wont to do, and heads home.

Along his return, which is typically when most adventures finally get interesting, he encounters the beautiful daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia, princess Andromeda, who has been chained by her father to a dashing ocean-front property as something of a sacrificial offering to ward off the sea creature Cetus from destroying the Kingdom (still dream of being a princess girls?). Perseus, hero that he is, slays Cetus, saves the lovely Andromeda and takes her for his bride. That’s the abridged version at any rate. Any questions? It’s all up there written in the stars:

One of the great things about having a constellation named after you is that any interesting things that happen in the direction of your constellation might be named after you as well (special note to all the ambitious politicians out there: try to have a constellation named after you!). Perseus lucked out in this regard by having the comet known as Swift-Tuttle leave a trail of debris intersecting the orbit of our fair planet earth in just the right spot. Every year on its journey around our local star, the earth smashes through this dusty debris field, with sometimes dazzling results: as small bits of shed comet collide with the earth’s atmosphere they burn up, often to spectacular effect. To the casual observer on the ground, these incandescent, incinerating objects appear, for all the world, to be shooting stars. And because this particular cometary debris field always encounters the earth around the same time in its orbit, the shooting stars, or meteors as they are more properly known, always appear to have a common origin.

Thus, if you followed the path of every meteor in a particular shower and traced a line back to its origin, all of the lines would converge near a single point in the sky. This point is the radiant of the meteor shower. A time-lapse photo of the radiant would look something like this.

For the Perseids, the radiant lies very close to the constellation of Perseus, hence the eponymous name.

The simplest way to find the constellation of Perseus, and hence the radiant, is to find someone who knows where to look and have that person show you! Alas, simple is not always easy or convenient. In the alternative, a sky chart, like the one above, helps a lot. A larger scale map can be found here.

The great thing about the Perseids this year is that as long as you can find a cloud-free sky away from artificial light you really shouldn’t need a chart. Just find a comfortable place to lay back, open your eyes and look up. Often, the bright moon can wreak havoc on potential sky viewing, but this year the thin crescent moon sets in the west before Perseus rises in the north east. Perfect!

The peak viewing times this year will be Wednesday/Thursday (Aug 11/12) and Thursday/Friday (Aug 12/13) between midnight and the first light of dawn. With clear skies there may be 50 – 100 meteors an hour, though some meteor showers have produced over 400 an hour! A few years ago I was camping near Yosemite during the Perseids and slept out on the hard granite with my sleeping bag and pad but without a tent. Tired as I was from a long day of hiking, before my eyes closed I had counted over 50 shooting stars. So, have I “seen it raining fire in the sky?” That might be pushing it. But it was a very memorable experience, even if not exactly heroic.

the sum of the squares of the first three primes

Today my morning began in a manner most bizarre. For starters, I was in Las Vegas, which by itself is almost patently absurd since my intentional desire to be in that city is nearly negative (I’ve seen CSI after all (not to mention “The Hangover”)), and all of my previous ventures there have been strictly confined to the airport and its immediately surrounding airspace. Yet there I was, seemingly, crawling through the scaffolding of an unfinished mega-casino complex, where debt-strapped construction had inelegantly ground to an ugly halt, leaving the slowly decaying remnants of some still-born monstrosity in concrete and steel as an iconic (and ironic) monument to the avarice of humankind (yes, it was one of *those* mornings). I had made my way to this most unappealing place in an attempt to escape from the gathering horde that was moving in a manner most unsympathetic to my technological troubles. You see this morning, despite my absolute best attempts, I simply *could not* get my phone to stop ringing, and it was ringing very loudly. *Very* loudly. No one was happy with me. Some people were, in fact, unhappy to the point of violence and my perception of this propensity had inspired me to seek refuge in this peculiar place. The particularly frustrating part was that, as far as I could tell, no one was actually calling me, and if they were I was completely unable to answer the call. Or silence the phone. Or reboot it. Or shut it down at all. Did I mention how loud the ringing was? It was fairly frustrating. It had been going like that for what seemed like ages. Despite my deep affection for the phone I had reached the point of determination to fling it into the pool of the nearest fountain I could find, drowning the deviant device (and its deafening sound). As such, I began to make my way down and out of the structure towards the place where I thought that such a fountain might be found. As I approached what seemed to be the entrance hall of the aborted complex, I saw from behind what appeared to be the gilt glimmer of a statued woman standing gracefully in the center of a large basin. Rounding her to the front I nearly marveled at the prospective spectacle, for she held out seven bottles, as if pouring out wine, with one bottle in each of her seven curiously connected hands, and each of the seven bottles was one color of the rainbow. But nothing flowed out of the side-turned bottles, and the basin was dry. This unnatural construct, the centerpiece of its hollow edifice, was still-born too. Alas, it was a desert after all. Momentarily enthralled, I wondered if the intended flow from each of the bottles might have somehow matched the color of its source, and how they might have mixed and mingled in the basin. But I wondered only briefly; my rebellious phone was still ringing. And as I turned away from the extraordinary scene, my face encountered something quite unexpectedly hard. It was a fist. Boom. And seven-colored stars mingled in the basin of my mind.

I sat up fumbling towards consciousness and sequentially made several rather revealing realizations: first, my phone was no longer ringing; second my alarm (which emanates from a device greatly resembling my phone) was trilling at me most incessantly; third, I appeared to be back home with all of my (quite groggy) parts conveniently unbroken. I picked up the alarm and, glancing at the time, realized that it must have been bleating like that for nearly 20 minutes straight. Wow, where’s snooze when you need it? As these realizations coalesced, I pondered the pros and cons of my position. The upside was that my phone (not to mention my face) was perfectly fine. The downside was that the ringing meant I ought to get up, or that I ought to have had some time ago. Alas again, I was going to be late for workout. Again. Alas.

Yesterday morning I saw Wendy at the gym and we chatted a bit. She texted me later to tell me about about a public star-gazing party going on that evening that she’d heard about on the radio; she said she and Jon were planning to go.

Jon called me later and invited me over for the meal he was making prior to nightfall (those guys are great). Just for fun I grabbed my photo maker as I was heading out the door. On my way over to Jon and Wendy’s there were still a few clouds in the clearing sky and one of them presented a nice opportunity for a tricky shot (texting while driving may be illegal, not so sure about photography …).

Dinner was great. Jon did some expert grilling with an improvised marinade made from a hot sauce that Eddie Reese had introduced to us last month. Jon and Wendy can really cook!

When night fell we made our way over to St. Stephens high school. The star party was happening on the football field, and what a crew we found when we finally arrived. The biggest collection of astro-geeks that I’ve seen since my college days when I took a paleo-astronomy class for my social science credit (or was it fine arts?). Most were quite friendly and very willing to share the views from their fancy scopes. I grabbed a few long shutter shots of my own:

While I had my camera out I took a picture of the nearly half moon. Previously some doofus had seemingly tried to blind Wendy by telling her to look into his telescope while it was pointed at the moon without a light filter (the moon is actually quite bright). My photo
is definitely lower resolution, but also less blinding.

Being at this star party reminded me of the last star party I had attended, which was hilariously narrated by some Tennessee state park rangers during the Bicycle Ride Across Tennessee over the autumn equinox of 2005. I did that ride with David and his dad, and my mom and dad, and thinking of that reminded me that my parents had just gotten home from successfully completing their 8th (and allegedly last!) Oklahoma Freewheel.

Looking deep into the wonders of the universe from a dark hilltop on a starry night, and stirring up all these memories reminded me of how blessed I really am to have (and have had) such wonderful friends and family. And that made me think that today would be the first day for my own father to be only on the receiving end of these words: Happy Father’s Day, dad!

and yet … sometimes it feels like Autumn Fallin’.

Thinking back, I cannot resolve the first memory of my grandfather; it seems that he was simply always there. Not “there” in the sense that he raised me or that he was around all the time. Just “there”. Part of the firmament. Extant. I recognize that I am fortunate in having known him. My own father and grandfather never met their respective grandfathers.

Last month my grandfather took his final breath. The hour after that moment was remarkable in the sense that it was the first hour in the previous 895,980 hours that grandfather was not breathing the air of this world. The following day was remarkable in that it was the first of the previous 37332 days that my grandfather was not alive. That’s no small number of days and, quite frankly, a plenitude of hours (certainly something to ponder the next time I am compelled to be waiting a hour for something tedious to be completed).

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of all those hours (900,000 if you’re into rounding) is how many of them were happy. 895,000 hours is well over 102 years; while the average life span in this country may be 78.4 years, there are plenty of people who do not reach 51. Thus my grandfather enjoyed somewhere between 1.3 to 2 lifespans during his time in this world, yet the numbers go off the charts if you compare the happy hours he lived with those of the seemingly average american life. I was blessed to converse enough with my grandfather to know that, though he lived though many hard times, almost all of his days (and hours) were happy ones. Indeed, he considered himself to be “the luckiest man on earth.”

My grandfather’s funeral was remarkably well attended for a man who outlived almost all of his cohorts. Anyone who lives over 100 years is something of a legend in their own right, and my grandfather’s life included certain aspects that made him slightly more legendary than most. Indeed, I met more than one person attending the services who had known him only by reference.

I was privileged to be one of two family members to speak at my grandfather’s memorial service. What follows is the essence of what I said:

My name is Tyler Blessing.

I am Olie’s youngest grandson and the only grandson to share his wonderful family name. Barring an unexpected miracle, I am his last genetic hope for continuing that name (and Olie reminded me of this this one at least one occasion).

And I think that I do not need to ask you to join me in missing him.

This evening as I listened attentively to a beautiful person say a beautiful thing about life made better by friends and acquaintances, it struck me just how blessed I was to have my own life similarly improved.

And after returning from my brief evening escape out of the office (and the final “stretch of the rules” for my extended taper) I received a message from my good friend Jon confirming that the last piece of an unlikely puzzle had suddenly fallen into place. Indeed, mountains had moved for me today, and it was all due to my wonderful friends.

And so, because of my friends moving mountains I am required to now correct an error I made last week. It turns out that last weekend in Atlanta was *not* the *last* hurrah for tech suits after all. As unlikely as anyone might have guessed, the actual *last* hurrah will now be this Saturday morning at the Texas Swim Center at 8:00 am. And a few of my (quite speedy) good friends will join me in taking one last run at the one that got away as we challenge the national record in the 200 Freestyle Relay. Everyone in the Austin area (friends and acquaintances alike) is invited to come and cheer us on (or simply come for the sheer entertainment value of watching grown men go around in skin tight body suits once worth $1000s but now asymptotically approaching $0 as the June 1st death date for technical swimming suits rapidly approaches). Either way it should be fun!

But if you come, don’t be late! We aim to dive off the blocks exactly at 8:00:00 am and be done just before 8:01:24.00 if all goes well. And why should it not? If your friends can help you move mountains, can they not also help you break records? After all that’s been done to make this meet happen, the swimming seems like the easy part!

Here it is. The last hurrah for tech-suits in pool competition:

http://www.usms.org/comp/scnats10/

today I’m swimming 200 free and 100 fly.
Tomorrow has me in 500 free, 50 fly, and 100 free.
Sunday I’m done after 200 fly.

And we have a big enough travel team to do a full set of relays.

Real-time results can be found on the page linked above