Portrait of Claudia

This is a portrait of Claudia who ran track and attended Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, USA, as a Marketing and Spanish undergraduate. Her ambition for her future was talent management, particularly in the music field. She believed that Los Angeles, California, USA was the perfect place to get a foot in the door in that industry.

Claudia’s favorite music group was Earth Wind & Fire, which Blue Breeze Band (see previous portrait) was playing as we spoke. Earth Wind & Fire was the group that actually got her interested in talent management. Claudia noted that Charlie Wilson and other artists who influenced Rhythm and Blues (R&B) and Hip Hop today, helped her make this decision. Of course, she also appreciated contemporary R&B and Hip Hop.

Claudia defined Earth Wind & Fire‘s style as definitely R&B, but she also considered them funky. “They dabbled in disco a little, even though that wasn’t their preference. They are a feel good music. Everyone can get down to it no matter who they are,” she said.

Claudia was not from Los Angeles, but from Nashville, Tenn, USA, where she excelled at Hume-Fogg AcademiMagnet High School  Claudia came to the Martin Luther King Day Event because the team didn’t have practice and her coach asserted that each student/athlete had to volunteer somewhere. Claudia googled events for Martin Luther King Day, and the Big Sunday 5th Annual MLK Day Clothing Collection & Community Breakfast was one of the first things that came up. The event was accessible to her and a fellow teammate because Claudia had a car.

Claudia believed in the importance of helping out every single day and was hoping she could do more throughout the year as a volunteer. The two teammates were having a blast helping out on Martin Luther King Day.

It was such a pleasure to meet Claudia. At the time of the posting, I knew so many people her age who were cry babies, didn’t get things done, were chronically late, made excuses for everything, etc. Claudia knew what she wanted, was intelligent about it and expressed her views perfectly. Talking to her made me look forward to the future and to what young people could achieve.

Image Credits: Bat-Ami Gordin © 2017 all rights reserved. Credit if you use it, please.

Sonnet VI

>  Logo of the Center for NanoScience was “written” by pushing around
atoms of Gold [PTCDA = Au(11) using a nanomanipulator.”]

Atomic beach balls tossed beyond the bumps
of solid golden strips will now design
a strange imaginary landscape. Clumps
of particles appear to now entwine.
Electrons guided with some magic wands
create a message to my covered eyes.
These nanonistic, small molec’lar bonds
reveal to me all earthly matter ties.
I track and hover through the quarks of chance
enthralled by how our measurements can rule
the future of all technical advance;
A strange discovery: a student’s tool.
By thought and reason great ones had their turn.
now, with my hands, some new things I shall learn.

************************

I wrote this one in 1993 after attending an IEEE convention in Seattle and learning about the Nanomanipulator. Warren Robinet was speaking and he said, “Imagine atoms the size of beach balls…” He was referring to a futuristic version of the nanomanipulator, where a virtual image of atoms (like a hologram) would be in the air, right in front of your face. You would have the capability of moving atoms around, like moving beach balls in the air. But that would not be a dream. That would not be a game. It would be a virtual interface to a nanomanipulator, and you would really be moving around atoms within the scanning tunneling microscope. He discussed how in the future, this could be a pedagogical method of teaching chemistry. That is, the students would learn molecular structure by actually moving around the virtual atoms and creating molecules.

His presentation was very stimulating, so I wrote this sonnet. I sent to him, and he sent it to the lab. They posted the sonnet on the bulletin board in their lab, and then Russell M. Taylor  published the sonnet in the appendix of “The nanomanipulator: a virtual-reality interface for a scanning tunneling microscope.”  http://www.warrenrobinett.com/nano/index.html

A great link to get an idea of how a nanomanipulator moves atoms around would be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W7lcYoBA98

Sonnet XXXIII

Illustration of the frame-dragging effect in which space and time are dragged around a massive body

Newton thought space and time were absolute
then Einstein discussed relativity.
It was easy to prove an attribute
of an attractive force: captivity
of bodies, was not new. Now imagine
a planet immersed in honey: as it
rotates, it swirls and pulls with an action
much like spinning space time. In an orbit
around the earth, four precise gyroscopes
measure this effect. Quantized current flows
until it detects magnetic stream slopes
differential. A spin-axis opposes
new directions. The strength of gravity
can’t match the speed of light’s velocity.

************************

This sonnet is about gravity Probe B (GP-B), a mission sponsored by NASA aimed to prove the effects of Albert Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity.

Rather than quoting them verbatim, you can read more about this project on:

http://einstein.stanford.edu/MISSION/mission1.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/gpb/gpb_results.html?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4dc2487ce8ed9dc6,0

Posted on:

Open Link Night, Week 27

Sonnet XXXII

The Space Station's Massive Solar Arrays

The Space Station’s golden solar arrays
squeeze out the last morsel of energy
from each orbit. An instrument surveys
all dosages of power at every
diurnal spin as they revolve around
the planet. Large measures of power will
be sucked into the batteries. Compound
silicon solar cells dominate. Still,
it is the rotary joint that lets
the panels track the sun and seize
the rays. ISS spins until it sets
into shadow. It performs this with ease
just like a geometry, zipping all through
limited plasma fields of cobalt blue.

************************

This comes from @Astro_Ron ‘s (Ron Garan)  http://twitpic.com/4s3pix

This was a difficult sonnet to write in that it contained many engineering concepts. In general, it’s easier to incorporate science into poetry than it is to incorporate engineering.

Posted on:

Open Link Night, Week 26