…and radical politics. As he notes, let’s hope that SCOTUS slaps down this evil once and for all.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Remembering Bernard Beard
Over at the original post, John Bossard comments:
Dr. Beard was a colleague of mine as we worked together at the ARES Huntsville office, and I considered him a friend, and I hope he considered me the same.
Bernard had a wide-ranging intellect, and made numerous contributions in a variety of fields, including computational particle physics, before moving into the aerospace field, where he worked for PW in turbojet engines and flight trajectory analysis. He then went into academics, teaching in the ME dept at Christian Brothers in Memphis, and eventually becoming department chair.
It was my opinion that the progressive politics and trans-logical arguments of the academic world eventually lead him to seek work back in the aerospace world, and it was my pleasure to get to work with him when he joined ARES Corporation in 2007. There, Bernard made significant contributions in a variety of different areas, most notably in working on slosh mechanics of the Ares I upper stage, where he developed some amazing analytic modeling capabilities. His website, “Slosh Central”, provided a great deal of references regarding this topic.
Bernard was a reserved, dignified person, of even temperament; calm, and thoughtful. He was a master of the BBQ, and participated in numerous team competitions out of Memphis, where he kept his home with his wife and two sons. He was also scouter, participating as an adult leader in cub and boy scouts with his sons, and this was an area where we found a great deal of common ground.
I’m sure there were many other things that Bernard did, that I’m not aware of, as would be the case of a man with a powerful intellect and imagination.
His passing was sudden and unexpected, and is a tragedy. He will indeed be missed.
Thanks, John.
“Clunky, Anachronistic”
Judy Miller on the death of The Death of a Salesman. I had to read it in a literature course in college (Arthur Miller was a Michigan grad). I agree, it hasn’t held up well.
In Praise Of Chaos
Thoughts on creative destruction, from George Will, with a generous nod to Virginia Postrel.
Straight People
Are they born that way?
I know I was. And if someone “self identifies” as straight, but shows signs of arousal by the same sex, they’re not straight, they’re bi. I don’t understand why the concept of a spectrum, a distribution from pure homosexual through bisexual to pure heterosexual, skewed toward the latter, is such a hard concept for people to get their heads around.
The Colliers Series
Started sixty years ago, introducing the American public to the coming age of space. It later led to a series of Disney short animations, shown on Sunday nights.
An Important Anglospheric Question
Is there an American equivalent for “snogging”? Is it different than smooching? If not, then should we adopt this side of the pond?
I Think I’ll Move There
An Italian town has outlawed death.
When death is outlawed, only outlaws will die.
The SAT
I never took it, but here’s a guy who retook it at age 35. The analytic geometry question was easy for me, but I didn’t take the time to try to figure out the covered polygon. I assume I’d probably do pretty well on it, even now.
How did I get two degrees from Ann Arbor without taking the SAT? By spending the first two years at community college.
And boy, can I identify with this:
Because I work on a computer like normal human beings, I’d forgotten how painful it can be to write in longhand for long stretches of time. I know it’s not as bad as digging trenches in the Amazon, but still—it’s AGONY. Your neck gets sore from staring down. You get that weird dent in your middle finger and thumb from pressing the pencil too hard. Everything around you starts to smell like old pencil shavings. This is why I fucking hated blue-book exams in high school and college. It wasn’t that I had to study, or that I had to think on the fly. It was the hard LABOR of it all. Every time I finished a blue-book exam in school, I felt as if I had just moved a cord of firewood. Many times, I would hurry up and try and finish the essay early, just so that I could stop writing and rest. It’s amazing, when you think about it. You spend a whole semester studying for some test, and then you rush it because you just want five extra minutes to relax. That’s how my brain works. It’s not a perfect organ.
I am so fortunate that computers came along when they did. My writing volume would be a tiny fraction of what it is if I had to write long hand.
Derbyshire Update
Apparently, for those concerned, the prognosis is good.