Things I've 'discovered' so far this summer:
* I'm glad I'm not an electrical engineering major
* I'm glad I don't attend UMD
* I'm SUPER glad I go to VT
* Its fun to be a city girl for a while... but I do miss southern virginia... (what am I going to do when I graduate college and have to find a job??? there's just not much market for aerospace engineers in Southern VA)
* I have some really great guys in my life
* Not all female engineers are like those in SWE at VT that made me hate SWE...
* Sometimes, the best times can be had just sitting around somewhere talking... even when the DC bums criticize your friends for stuttering... ;)

A New Read
I just started reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel Sunday evening. I've not gotten very far, but it seems to be a good book. According to the back cover, "Pi Patel, a God-loving boy and the son of a zookeeper, has a fervent love of stories and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family and their zoo animals emigrate from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship. Alas, the ship sinks--and Pi finds himself in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi. Can Pi and the tiger find their way to land? Can Pi's fear, knowledge, and cunning keep him alive until they do?"

I've gotten through 50 pages... I just read something that amused me... "He treated me like a grown-up; and he told me a story. Or rather, since Christians are so fond of capital letters, a Story."

I also found a rather provacative statement: "The presence of God is the finest of rewards"

And I'm FINISHED! :)
I finished The Dream of Spaceflight just now after 2 solid days of reading. The last chapter was very short in comparison to the rest of the book so I only have one quotation to post from it... the closing to the entire book.

"Generations will come and go, civilizations will rise and fall, and long after Earth is vaporized by the sun and humanity is either extinct or evolved into other beings, Voyager will drift silently onward, carrying the message through countless eons: that there was, at our time and place in the cosmos, an awareness that knew something of its world and something of itself, an imperfect people of irrepressible spirit, of an imperfect people of irrepressible spirit, of mathematics and music, of love and wonder, who dared to dream of reaching the stars.

This was a decent book... not as good as I had expected, but it was kind of a 'motivational book' of sorts... that sought to place reasoning behind the space program... you know... why its good to have a space program!

So now that I've finished this book I should go to the bookstore again... It's been a long time since I've just read for pleasure! Its something I've kinda subconsciously missed... but I'm sure when I get back to Tech in late August, that I'm not going to be doing much reading again.

Hey Chapter 4... I'm almost done!
First quote of the chapter: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." ~ Proverbs 29:18. This means that without a source of meaning larger that of your own ego or beyond survival itself, you're left in a world full of void. How boring that must be!

Next, I found some interesting statistics that I could've used back in high school in junior english when we had to write our persuasive papers. I wrote mine, unsurprisingly, on why the space program was a good investment. Here's what The Dream of Spaceflight had to say about the topic:

"Even in the days of Apollo the public lost interest after the first lunar landing. Having beaten the Russians in the Super Bowl of space, we went back to business and Monday Night Football. After six walks on the moon, the last three were scrapped, saving seven-tenths of 1 percent of Apollo's total cost. Yet the $24 billion Apollo program cost each American only a dollar a month for nine years, and this ignores exponential returns to the economy. The $38 billion spent on space between 1961 and 1972 was barely 1 percent of the national budget, 3 percent of the amount allotted to social programs, and half the figure for detected welfare fraud. Had even this moderate commitment to space persisted, we would have walked on Mars a decade ago."

More quotations: "Wonder, in its larger sense, denotes the mysterium tremendum, the aura of unfathomable majesty, utterly humbling and wholly Other, surrounding the sublime and terrifying unknowns that border our models of reality.... Thus we gaze into the night sky and feel not diminishment but dilation. We sense the vastness and passion of creation and glimpse an equally vast interior - the 'enormous geography of the soul,'..."

"the less one explores, the less comfortable or compelling exploring becomes."

"The sense of wonder - the need to find our place in the whole - is not the only genesis of personal growth but the very mechanism of evolution, driving us to become more than we are. Exploration, evolution, and self-transcendence are but different perspectives on the same process."

"To believe less - or believe more - is to live in the shallows of what it means to be human."

"A young space enthusiast once asked von Braun what it takes to send a man to the moon. His answer is his epitaph: 'The will to do it.'"

The Dream of Spaceflight, vol. 3
Now for the highlights of Chapter 3: 'Seeking the Center at the Edge' By the way, this book is mostly a book who's purpose is to inspire you to say 'yay spaceflight' not really to provoke critical thought on controversial issues; therefore, most of my posts on this book have been and probably will continue to be quotations I think are spiffy.

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
~T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"'Some Part of our being,' said Carl Sagan, 'knows this is from where we came. We long to return.'"

"Perhaps the disenchantment is that of a nation entering middle age. 'The youth,' wrote Thoreau in his journal, 'gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.'"

"Seeing our own essence in the floating Earth, we are finally more sacred than our works. 'No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality,' wrote MacLeish, 'man may at last become himself.'"

"A fragmented, depersonalized, demythologized society spawns cancerlike individuals who lack a sense of anything larger than themselves and who thus destroy the social organism that sustains them. Simultaneously alienated and inflated, the ego becomes obsessed with order and control, barricading itself into a tiny clearing in the dark forest of the soul. Cling to a false self, one loses receptivity to the symbolic unconscious, and with it the ability to experience wonder. "

The Dream of Spaceflight, cont.
So in between running tests here at work, I tend to have some time on my hands... at least today. So I've been reading that book some more. I'm on chapter two now, entitled: The Romance of Spaceflight: Nostalgia for a Bygone Future

It mentions an artist, Chesley Bonestell, who was famous for his works of a space nature. I checked out some of his stuff online... its quite impressive. http://www.bonestell.org/Page_30x.html

Also in this chapter it suggests that there are seven zones of human experience. The first five are the 'natural zones':
1) the area of sensation immediately touching the sking
2) the area within two or three meters in which most social interaction takes place
3) the maximum area of social interaction, reaching out a few hundred feet
4) the area that extends as far as one can see or otherwise gather information from any one location
5) an irregular and varying area made up of all the zone-four areas that a person experiences during a lifetime

Beyond the five natural zones are two conceptual constructs:
6) the surface or biosphere of the Earth
7) the universe as far out as one can conceive - the realm of transcendence, the literal locus of ultimate answers to all our "why" questions.

The book alludes to the fact that any 'god' that humans might refer to would be a part of the 7th zone of human experience. To quote the book (disclaimer... this is a quote, NOT my ideas): "To conceive of the transcendent requires a symbol. One cannot worship "God" - a word, a vague feeling, an intellectual abstraction; one needs an image: Jesus, Buddha, a bearded man in the sky, a painting, a statue. Yet the natural tendency is for the image to literally become God, and the larger, elusive feeling that empowered the symbol fades, eclipsed by a host of this-worldly connections. Finally demystified, the statue reverts to its status as mere artifact. Thus every symbol contains the seeds of its own desacralization. The millennial nature of Christian theology generated the idea of spiritual progress, which spawned the notion of salvation through success in this world, which led to the secular idea of material progress, which in turn began to desacralize Christian theology. The last stage of this process is fundamentalist dogma, in which symbols have lost their numinosity and have degenereated to mere signs"

I know that's a rather long quotation... It actually took up most of the page it was on in the book. I understand how the author intended for this long, drawn out description to emphasize a point he was making, however, what he said clearly demonstrates that he is most likely agnostic. Saying that Jesus is not one and the same with God. He says that Christianity is a desacralization. {sidenote: I'm not doing as good of a job today defending my views as normal... but I just wanted to state some of these... quite honestly all i've done really is list several points that I generally would be able to extend upon in at least a paragraph each. bear with me!}

More knowledge from another book
I was at the Air & Space Smithsonian shortly after having finished the book I had to read for my internship. I was roaming the book section of the gift shop and ran across a book that was on sale for just $5, called The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the near edge of infinity by Wyn Wachhorst. I haven't read much of it yet, but I've had a chance to get through the forward and preface, and begin on the 1st chapter (titled 'Kepler's Children'). SO i have a few quotations from this book that I thought I'd post.

"To gaze into the night sky and feel the vastness and passion of creation is to glimpse an equally vast interior. We are aware of the stars only because we have evolved a corresponding inner space."

"Beyond all the political and economic rationales, spaceflight is a spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great opening out of mind and spirit at the dawn of the modern age."

"'Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether,' Kepler wrote to Galileo, 'and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare for the brave sky-travelers maps of the celestial bodies.'"

"What motivates those who venture over the edge, who trek over barren plains, through tangled jungle, or across the Arctic waste?... [it] is a sometimes selfless obsession with reaching the pristine edges of reality...the attempt to complete the grand internal model of reality, to broaden the context of meaning, to find the center by completing the edge."

"'It is part of the nature of man,' he adds, 'to start with romance and build to reality. We need this thing which makes us sit bolt upright when we are nine or ten and say, 'I want to go out and devour the world.''" (Ray Bradbury)

"'There can be no thought of finishing, for 'aiming at the stars' is a problem to occupy generations.... No matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.'" (Robert Goddard)

[It was] "Ed White, floating over the milky blue vastness of teh Pacific with that flash of sunlight on his viosr, that best captured the exhilaration, the euphoric liberation of a species come of age....'I don't want to come back, but I'm comin,' he said. 'It's the saddest moment of my life.'"

And as a side note... Books that Kepler Wrote
* Somnium - Kepler's vision of life on the moon
* Harmony of the World - Even through all the hardships Kepler faced during his life, he was convinced that it was still beautiful.

From the Earth to the Moon - Jules Verne

and thus ends the first chapter.

Long Time, No Post

Well, its been well over a month since I posted up here. I suppose I just haven't been 'inspired' by anything recently to write about here. I've been in College Park, MD since May 31 at the University of Maryland for a program called RISE doing research in the electrical engineering department (I know its not my major). I've met some pretty cool people and had time to hang out with a few of my friends from VT. Two of the people in my group at RISE were born and lived a good portion of their lives in another country.

Maria grew up in Romania. When she was really young, her dad was on a business trip in the US and decided to never go back to Romania (Romania was having a rough time... corrupt gov't and the works..). Anyway, once word got around that he had never returned home the government began harassing her family. While they attmepted to get out of Romania to join her dad in the US, the government wasn't giving them permission to leave and kept trying to get them to fess up about the father's wherabouts. Anyway, by the time the family finally got permission to leave, the government had collapsed and was beginning to rebound, but they were sick of the way they had been treated so came on to the US anyway.

Aimi spent most of her life in Nigeria. Her mother had moved to the US when she was very very young. But Aimi stayed in her town in Nigeria. Her father had many wives and so she really didn't get a chance to get to know him. Other members of her family took care of her until she was about 17. Then she moved to join her mother and sister in NYC. She spent about a year there before her mother kicked her out. So at 18, Aimi had spent only a year in the states and was supporting herself.

I'm so impressed by these stories of their lives. Its very brave of them and I have so much respect for how far they've gotten.

Goals, Dreams, and Priorities... As well as a bit of Wisdom from Good Ol' C.S. Lewis

Well, I was going to have some literary commentary here to go along with this post, but nothing on the internet seems to be working right now (other than this). Anyway, this post is kinda inspired from two different sources: my Sunday School lesson today and the book I'm in the process of reading right now -- The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

Let me start off with the Sunday School lesson. Chris, our teacher, came in and wrote 4 words on the chalkboard: goals, dreams, desires, priorities. Then he asked us to define these 4 terms. So here's what we, as a class, came up with...

• Goals = something realistic you plan to do


• Dreams = lofty, something you'd like to do... you don't put any (or much) effort into obtaining this, and thus expect little success from these actions.


• Desires = wants, feelings


• Priorities = hierarchy of dreams and goals

And Chris posed to us that Goals are dreams with deadlines. Also, all 4 of these are inter-related. We decided that the Flowchart would go something like this...
Desires --> Dreams --> Goals --> Priorities.
(Except sometimes the priorities have an overall effect on the desires and dreams and goals)

This lesson is something that hits home with someone like me... I'm generally a very organized, goal-oriented person and having a Sunday School lesson on these very things was something I could get into. The scripture that went along with this lesson came from several different places in the Bible... one of which was "Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart." (Psalm 37:4) Another was "Ask and it will be given unto you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened unto you." (Matthew 7:7) 

This doesn't just mean that if you say that you delight in the Lord, then you can get that brand new car you've been wanting. Rather, if you TRULY are walking with the Lord and are striving to be like Christ, your 'priorities' will shift to be more like what Christ wants and less of those 'worldly', selfish ones. God isn't going to push himself on you to make a change; you have to make the decision for yourself. He's not going to give you the power to stop a bad habit even if you ask in prayer if you don't truly want to get rid of that habit. You have to want to accept God's will for your life. You have to want to make the change. And to grow in your walk, God's will must be the first priority in your life. You can't keep on doing the same ol' thing and expect to get closer to God.  

I think for me in my life, where I've always had this big plan in my life, that's the hardest thing for me. I work so hard on accomplishing my goals and preparing myself for those things I have planned out in my future that I often make that the first priority in my life, shrugging my relationship with God off to the side. And its hard for me to keep him in first place in my life because sometimes its hard to make that connection between my aerospace engineering and my religious convictions. Its easy to get in the routine of relying on yourself to accomplish your goals... and if you work hard enough at it (at least in my experience) you can reach those goals too... at least I have been able to, so far. That's when you slip out of things. 

A few weeks ago, in my religion class we were watching some video on the religious responses people had to the 9-11 attacks... they kept showing scenes of beaches with sunsets, and for some reason seeing the waves come in and out on that TV screen made me think of something. You know, when you were little and were at the beach. When the under toe comes, you can feel its impact. At first, its effect subtle, you can maintain your stance and keep your feet on the ground. But gradually the force of the current increases and eventually knocks you off your feet, pulling you under. This is like in your walk with God. At first impact, you can keep on going in your life the way things had always been and keep the guise that everything’s just fine, just the way it always had been... even fooling yourself. But eventually, it builds up and overcomes you... You loose control of your life because you've gone away from God's will for your life. 

By not putting him as the first priority in your life, you're putting yourself at high risk for going astray... errr, actually you are going astray. If you're not careful, you'll lose it... like when the force of the under toe gets too strong. 

Anyway, I just started reading The Screwtape Letters yesterday afternoon, and I've been surprised to find several passages within it so far that are somewhat related (or at least intriguing and applicable to life as I see it as a college student) to this same topic. Just as a little background, for those of you who are not familiar, Screwtape is a devil. The book is comprised of letters written by Screwtape to his nephew, Wormwood - a devil in training (to give it a form of quatification). Screwtape advises Wormwood in the ways of converting wavering humans away from Christianity (or 'the Enemy' = God). Any quotes I make are things that Screwtape is saying as he advises Wormwood as to how best get the person on the side of 'Our Father Below' (the Devil).  

"Finally, if all else fails, you can persuade him, in defiance of conscience, to continue the new acquaintance on the ground that he is, in some unspecified way, doing these people 'good' by the mere fact of drinking their cocktails and laughing at their jokes, and that to cease to do so would be 'priggish', 'intolerant', and (of course) 'Puritanical'." - Letter 10  

"The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction, and it is specially promising among the English who take their 'sense of humour' so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame. Humor is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame... A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke." - Letter 11 

"The Christians describe the Enemy as one 'without whom Nothing is strong'. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off... It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing... Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." - Letter 12  

"active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel." - Letter 13

A Brief Update
I haven't updated here in a while, so I thought I'd take a 'study break' from exams to just mention a few things...

Its exam time now... All I have left of my freshman year is 4 exams, one of which is at 3:30 pm today! :)

Anyway, this year has been incredible. I can't think of a dull moment... and its gone by SOOOO fast. I've learned a lot and have had a lot of new experiences since I got here to VT.

I've been consumed with coursework here at the end of the semester and that's been keeping me from doing a lot of the blogging stuff... well, as a matter of fact, I haven't been very regular on it this entire semester.

And before I close out this post, I want to say that I am lucky to have friends like HokiePundit. Thanks. :)

Happy Easter

Well, its the day to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
So go out and be glad for Christ is risen.

Today, I believe was the first Easter I spent away from my family and didn't go to church.

A verse of recognition
I know I've been gone from the blogging world for a while, but I just got back from Bible Study with the Nav's and this verse was mentioned and stood out to me... Philippians 2:14-16

Philippians 2
2:14
Do all things without complaining and disputing,
2:15
that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world,
2:16
holding fast the word of life, so that I may rejoice in the day of Christ that I have not run in vain or labored in vain.

America Triumphant
A nifty little montage

Just something I ran across
I found this quote on a friend from high school's AIM Away Message today...
Best explanation of the world's problems that I have ever heard:
"Liberals are stupid.. Their parents smoked too much pot or something. Think about it. There was the 70's and then there was this surplus of liberals"

Controversy in Hokie-land
If ever there was an issue of the CT (Collegiate Times - the VT student produced newspaper), today would be the day! Just take a look at some of the headlines....

* BOV drops gays from policy

* Affirmative action dealt blow at Tech

* Federal bill would put cap on tuition

* Lesbian hire gets boards approval

* Changes to admission policy detrimental to Tech diversity

And yesterday wasn't much better...

* Tech may censor extremist speakers

* Diversity commission OK'd

* Smoking ban passed for campus residents

And that's not mentioning the SLEW of war-related articles (not that I find those to be controversial at this point...).

IMPORTANT:

Store Closing Notice:

ALL K-MART AND WALMART STORES WILL BE CLOSED IN IRAQ!!!

THEY WILL BE REPLACED WITH TARGETS.

Silly French
Found this link on a friend's AIM Profile:
Your French belters (from the Sun Feb. 15th)

Random Notice
Hey, I just realized that Robbie (HokiePundit) has placed me on his links list under Fightin' Gobblers! So I did the same..

Happy Valentines Day... err Singles Awareness Day
I found a link off of a friend's profile this morning as I checked everyone's away messages after I woke up (yeah.... i do that every morning as I wait for the water in my shower to warm up).

Singles Awareness Day

While I'm not so adamant about how horrible Valentine's Day is (I do love those conversation hearts), the author does have a point. People do get overly worried over this one day... and what does it teach us? not really much.... people rush out and buy their significant other stuff, but just because its some day.... The point the author makes is that love shouldn't just be something that is put on the front burner for this one celebrated day, but rather love should be celebrated all year round...

Anyway, Happy Valentine's Day just the same.

Valentine's Day.... err... Singles Awareness Day