About Layoffs

Not surprisingly, I've been thinking about the fact that my father was the age I am now, when he was separated from the Air Force. In part, my memories are triggered by conversations on Twitter, about South Bend's argument over a casino, and this article by the Boston Globe, about being poor at an Ivy League school.

This may surprise some people, but Purdue University is not actually in the Ivy League. It is a state school in Indiana, part of the Big Ten. It is still a big-name school for engineering.

The rest of this post draws on a post I wrote 4 years ago, on my old blog. I guess I haven't gone into my story much in the past year or two. On one hand, moving on is a good thing, it means I don't need to re-tell it. On the other hand, it also means that new readers may not be aware of where I came from.

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I was 15 that summer, when my dad came up for promotion again. As a military officer, he had two chances to promote up before he was discharged. This was the second time, and he was not promoted.  That was also the summer when Mom was expecting my Dear Brother #3 (DB3).

Settling the Solar System

This week I've been touching on last week's Twitter conversation about the Narrative of Mars Colonization, based on this episode of Star Talk Radio: The Future of Humanity with Elon Musk.

It is interesting that Dr. D.N. Lee picked up on the problems of framing the discussion with phrases like "stuck on Earth", "save humanity", and "Manifest Destiny." The Storify of her discussion is here.

When I listened to the podcast, what I picked up on was the discussion about education of women as a means to reduce population growth. As I table that topic for a later discussion, let me just drop this link describing the concept of Reproductive Justice.

Yesterday I posted links to books and other resources discussing NASA culture. This morning I updated it with a few more items.

The first 7 astronauts were selected from U.S. military test pilots. This automatically excluded women, because even though women had been serving in combat since before 1776,  been pilots since 1908 (not just white women, Bessie Coleman earned her pilots license in 1922), and flown military aircraft since 1942, including as test pilots (if not earlier, since many of the barnstorming aircraft were WWI surplus), the first woman selected for military Test Pilot School happened in 1982.

The questions I see are:

Some History of Exploration and Globalization

Today I'll be discussing the historical globalization, settlement, and colonial history that influences the marginalization of under-represented minorities in STEM. These influences carry over into our narrative of Mars Colonization.

If you missed yesterday's post, here are the two key background articles:

• OtherSociologist's blog, "Rethinking the Narrative of Mars Colonisation"
• Dr. Lee's, "When discussing Humanity’s next move to space, the language we use matters."

One of the narratives that we have about globalization is described by Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat : A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Friedman describes 3 phases of globalization. Friedman's three phases begin with Columbus in 1492:

• Globalization 1.0: Rediscovery of the New World, the Americas
• Globalization 2.0: Multinational companies creating global markets
• Globalization 3.0: Individuals developing global networks and businesses.

However, in the History of Exploration course that I took, Dr. Keith Parsons discussed how globalization has no beginning. In that course, we used phases more like this:

St. Louis Movie Nights

Two of the major inflection points in my life, both happened in the greater St. Louis area.

I have written several times about the Space Shuttle flying through Scott AFB while we were stationed there in the early 1980s.

As a college student in the late 1990s, I was hired as a cooperative education student for a company in St. Louis.  I lived in an apartment in Hazelwood, perhaps 5 miles away from Ferguson, MO.  My roommate was a Mechanical Engineering student from Florida, studying at Tuskegee.  Yes, she is black.

We moved in, in January, and she didn't have a winter coat.  I taught her what I knew about getting through snow, ice, and winter.  She taught me more.

Owning My Privilege

If you are reading this, please go check out @gildedspine's tweets about the #yesallwomen hashtag today.  She is the one who started it all.  I knew, that evening, however given the hate and bullying she was receiving I withheld her name on my previous post.

As I read through her tweets, as I think about what has happened in Ferguson, MO this weekend, and I listen to the Twitter response... what all of my blog posts are coming to, both the "becoming an engineer" series in progress AND the "social justice background" posts, are about owning my privilege.

Because engineers do make a decent amount of money.  I do not own a yacht, nor any kind of boat.  I do, however, live in a comfortable house, I pay my bills, I have medical care, we keep food on the table, and we have a little bit for investing & discretionary spending.  All of that, is privilege.

Big City - Small Town

In a previous post, I began the story of my own understanding of diversity and social justice.  I said then that I was not sure when or if I would be ready to tell part 2.  However, I have had time in the past seven weeks to think about it, and to begin to tell the story.  This is turning into a longer series than I thought.

As a child, I wished I grew up in a small town, the kind of place where I might have a teacher who had taught one or both of my parents, where aunts and uncles were around, and where people knew who I / my family was.  Not that we needed to be famous, popular, or rich.  Just, I wanted to be in a place where my family belonged.

My sophomore year of high school, my father was discharged from the Air Force.  Dad finished his degree (a second Bachelor's), and over the summer they began job hunting in earnest.  When he was hired for a job in rural Indiana, we moved.

Culture Shock