The Green Revolution will not be televised, because it was already a movie. As usual, screenwriters were well ahead of reality. Soylent Green (1973) had two guys living in a squalid apartment with (as I recall) a light bulb and radio powered by a stationary bike generator.
80x24 white and pale green screens... stacks of them. Dixon Ticonderoga #2 keyboard/mouse combination, electric sharpener, Staedtler Mars backspace, desk brush for backspace and bagel crumbs.
Next stop: do it yourself keypunch room, or submit to keypunch pool, wait overnight.
This included embedded systems work on an 8080.
My 4K TV has too much glare to be a good monitor, and it blocks my view out the window. My Happy Hacking keyboards each cost as much as the TV. Decent HD monitors are under $140. 4TB USB disk is $100, and even 28GB build trees do not use it up that quickly.
It is interesting because sudden death at age 22 ought to be rare. Recall the recent death of a young woman at University of Maryland from an adenovirus infection, followed by the discovery there of around 30 more cases of adenovirus, some requiring hospitalization. Over the years, clusters of adenovirus and of meningitis have arisen in situations where young people are making a transition into living in close quarters with others: dorms, military training, and how about someone starting work in an expensive urban area?
(Silicon Valley Airbnb listings have several dorm-like situations specifically marketed to young technical workers.)
Aneurysms, cardiac electrical defects, septicemia and valve damage following dental work (prime age for wisdom tooth extraction)... My worst episodes of flu (or perhaps something with flu-like symptoms, like adenovirus) were between ages 18 and 27. At age 18 I was failing to recover from what seemed like flu, then developed high fever that affected my judgment; someone finally noticed and dragged me to the doctor: bacterial pneumonia.
A colleague of mine some years ago, age mid 30's, was out of work with what began as typical flu. It evolved badly, attacked his heart, and left him with 20% loss of heart function.
The case is of public interest: a person at an age where serious consequences of undiscovered congenital defects can appear, increased exposure through new living situations, immune system not yet hardened by previous exposures, "it's just the flu", and the idea that one ought to just power through any situation.
There is an immediate lesson that does not require a medical examiner's findings from one tragic case. If you have someone age 17-28 in your family situation or in your general circumstances, yes this is the physically most capable age where people do amazing things, but it also has special vulnerabilities, including suddenly dropping dead on a basketball court. Keep watch and be aware that, though occurrence is rare, things can go bad quickly for those with undiscovered defects, or who become infected by something especially bad.
It is standard practice in large scale real estate development to assemble parcels of land into a larger development, with incremental purchases under various shell corporations that conceal the eventual owner. A seller is likely to want a higher price from National Megacorp headquarters project than from Rabbit Hole Limited Partnership XVII.
Acquaintances in Munich noted that some people decades ago made a great deal of money buying parcels that "happened" to be situated near what eventually became S-Bahn (suburban train) stations.
One could construct instruction set curiosities on the 1401. On a 16K machine, the maximum length divide instruction required around 57 seconds to complete.
Old school American Southern cooking comes close with red-eye gravy. Pan fry some ham, then deglaze the pan with black coffee. Serve on grits or biscuits, with a side order of sociopathy.
Morse code proficiency was until 2003 an international treaty requirement for issue of amateur radio licenses to operate below 30 MHz. I passed 5 WPM at age 15, but family moves first made the written exam difficult to access, then located us to an area where property covenants prohibited outdoor antennas, and topography defeated reception anyway. I never obtained a license.
Circa 1994 I was the systems guy and embedded development guy at a startup. We registered a domain using the initials of the company name. Non-tech companies were slower to set up general Internet mail and domains. Within a few months, whenever I scanned our postmaster mailbox, I found increasing numbers of emails directed to a movie production company which had the same initials, but who registered their domain with their full company name. People were lazy or were guessing, and used the initials.
I should have registered my own initials as a domain early on. That domain eventually was registered by a large bank with my same initials. If I had taken the domain first, they probably would have sued me to abandon both the domain and public use of my own initials.
Circa 1963 my Southern California next door neighbor was a toll call. I had been given a couple of old wooden box crank ringer phones by a friend of my grandfather, who was at an East Texas rural phone company. My friend and I (I was around age 9) ran some speaker wire between our bedroom windows and connected these phones and an ordinary dry cell battery. It worked fairly well.
The first program that I ever wrote for a stored program control computer (Barrowman equations for model rocket center of pressure), was for Wang's programmable calculator circa 1969. The program was punched into IBM Port-a-Punch cards (much later identified with the Florida "hanging chad" election ruckus), which were placed by hand one at a time, into a sort of waffle iron reader device.
The Wang calculator used both Wang's core memory, and a second patent on circuitry to calculate a logarithm and to use the logarithm in other calculations.
Flash erase wear-out, especially at low temperatures during the erase cycle, has been well-known for many years. I first encountered this circa 1991, during qualification of Intel 28F010 NOR flash for an extended temperature application. And again during qualification of AMD flash to replace this, because Intel had many months of production gap due to a botched fab move to a partner fab (Nippon Steel, I believe), that turned out to be incapable of producing the device.
Disturb during write is also well-known. I suspect that the behavior and mechanisms here are different for modern NAND than they were for NOR.
The best relevance of the work would be in situations least likely to use it: small volume products without good traceability in sourcing.
45.45, 50, 75, and 100 baud were all used by electromechanical teleprinters.
In the New York City area in the 1970s, we used numerous 75 baud current loop circuits in a bank transaction network, serving terminals at bank branch and merchant locations. It was said (unconfirmed) that these circuits were relatively inexpensive, and often were constructed of split pairs that would not be usable for voice. A single loop could serve a number of terminal units connected in series.
Cruise ships have much greater mobility of passengers on board, plenty of hand contact surfaces like stair railings and elevator buttons, common buffet tables and eating areas, gambling equipment, theater seats, hours spent standing in line, milling crowds, confined passageways, and a typical exposure window of 6-10 days.
I spent most of my one and only cruise (Alaska / Inside Passage from Seattle) on deck.
There was a memorable 1996 article in the New England Journal of Medicine examining transmission of drug resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis by a passenger on a commercial airline flight.
I left Motorola in 2006 (along with around 200 others) as a business unit was dismantled.
In its last years as a shrinking husk of an grand old-school company with a real research operation, I was able to get maybe 5 PhD signal processing / RF specialists from Motorola Research in the Chicago area, assigned for a few weeks to work on an interesting little project. I got a proof of concept, and they got a proof of capability for specific direct digital synthesis and up/down conversion techniques that were in development and looking for applications.
I had to lobby hard to travel to Bangalore in my last few weeks there, to transfer engineering knowledge to an outsource group, many of whose members were unable to obtain US visas in good time. Apart from a couple of weeks of intestinal distress afterward, that was a very informative life experience.
By the time I had my exit interview, the building was locked, and I was probably still at home within sprinting distance of the toilet. I did the exit interview from mailed paperwork, talking to an HR person at another site. She was so depressed and exhausted from doing this for the other 199 or so, that I had to walk her through the process.
I did a search the other day and found, amusingly, that my patents are now owned by Google (from whom I have never worked).
We need to go beyond Groundhog Day, and draw from Office Space, Falling Down, and from the old Twilight Zone TV series.
Very definitely not gone. A few years ago I developed sudden and alarming symptoms in my R eye vision. I drove myself to the nearest ER. The ER physician did a careful exam with an ophthalmoscope, then with a specialized small ultrasound unit.
The ultrasound quickly eliminated the possibility of a detached retina, and allowed confident diagnosis that no condition required emergency treatment. The cost was maybe $300.
A subsequent office visit to an ophthalmologist confirmed that this was a posterior vitreous detachment. Myopes have a greater tendency to develop these in later life, due to more acute curvature at the retinal surface.
Of what functional relevance is a 20 year anniversary celebration of a piece of marketing nomenclature? If you want an excuse to have a cocktail party to celebrate a two-word branding phrase that is lamented as failing to meet someone's ambition, go ahead.
My realm is embedded systems: high reliability systems with 10-20 year designed service life, using a variety of CPU architectures, and evolving into very high complexity System On Chip designs. These systems would not be feasible across this timescale without a stabilized and evolving GPL'd tools base: gcc, binutils, and glibc, and Linux as a long-lived build platform.
20 years might be accurate for "open source" as nomenclature. It is not accurate for the underlying phenomena. My choice of monument is a GNU Emacs 16.56 source tape dated 1985, at the point where RMS had replaced the disputed display code from Gosling Emacs.
By around 1992, gcc had evolved to be usable (with a lot of configuration work for gcc and the runtime library) as a cross compiler. At the time I was working on a 68000 based embedded system, using a commercial cross compiler. The commercial product was expensive, slow, had some arcane proprietary extensions, and was abandoned by its supplier (their principal business was defense contracting) from further development, and even if I recall correctly, re-hosting beyond Sun 3.
Gcc became the clear choice to carry the project forward. I put it into place, and it supported the product for the remaining 12 years or so of active development (some new capabilities, mostly keeping up with replacements for obsolete components).
For the past 9 years much of my work has been centered around a body of proprietary software that supports certain high function System On Chip products from a vendor. This software has a history of at least 10 years, three major chip family architectures, and several steps of evolution within each architecture. It has grown to around 30M lines of C code. This is not bloatware with elaborate frameworks and libraries: these devices are sufficiently complex to require that much software to even construct a usable API (around 2800 pages for a sketchy API document, 5800 pages for a very incomplete chip hardware reference).
None of this would be feasible without a long term stable cross-compiler (gcc) and a place to run it (Linux) on large bodies of code.
Meanwhile in the un-free software world, a defense contractor friend pointed me to a recent U.S. Navy RFP for translation or other porting technology, seeking to make 1970s software written in a proprietary 1969 language (CMS-2), runnable on ordinary modern commercial machines. Today it runs on fossilized power-hungry refrigerator-sized Univac AN/UYK-somethings, built from components that went out of production years ago. Yes, our national defense depends upon stuff like this that has outlived essentially all of the original authors. The situation is similar for other long life cycle embedded products, in realms apart from weaponry.
Note that IBM mainframe OS and compiler software were freely available until the early 1970s, when compilers and some other larger products went from a $25 tape copy charge for source, to expensive licenses and restricted source code access. Some of us learned quite a lot by reading e.g. the $25 Fortran H compiler source code.
The history from my perspective, looks more like open (1970), closed (1972), opening back up (1985), usably open (1992), then "open source" as nomenclature (1997), then whatever you want to call today's maelstrom of bloated frameworks. GPL's origin in MIT / Symbolics / LMI controversies is a crucial component of the 1972-1985 evolution; that story must be mentioned, and is told elsewhere from disparate perspectives.
My high school got a Wang 360 programmable calculator. Programs were punched into IBM Port-a-punch (hanging chad fame) cards. My project was Barrowman's equations to compute the center of pressure of a model rocket.
My first conventional language was FORTRAN on an IBM 1620, then machine language for that machine. 4900796
Then 1401 Autocoder, playtoy Lisp, 360 assembler, Pl
That graph looks far too much like MY graph from MY failed attempt to reproduce a published experiment in thermal conductivity of an organic system. You are going to be hearing from your Institutional Review Board. Also, I am jealous that you got a much better curve fit than I did.
On a murkier note, a few years ago I did an online search for work in Single Event Upsets ("cosmic ray" interactions with electronics). I was a bit surprised to see a paper from a small institution in India, with a photo showing a test setup in front of a porthole in a thick shielding wall. The photo looked familiar, and the text in the paper was utter gobbledygook. I located the other paper, and sent an email to its principal investigator at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The reply arrived quickly, thanking me and noting that this was one of the most egregious examples of plagiarism that they had encountered.
Development of TCP as evolution from NCP, was under ARPA funding. I was at a lecture at UCLA where Cerf presented related research results. This was during the Vietnam war controversies, and many were uncomfortable with DoD involvement. That does not change where the money and part of the impetus came from.
Communism is an interesting theory, whose attempted application to the real world resulted in unprecedented mass murder, famine, and a residuum of lying apologists who are unwilling to acknowledge the mountain of skulls in their living room.
Opinion: the population within that district, especially towns like Tyler, tend to be low income, not highly educated, and adhere to religious sects that emphasize personal propensity to sin, unquestioning acceptance of authority, and willingness to punish very harshly an act that has been framed as a moral wrong.
The people want to be and often are personally decent, but scientific rigor and skepticism take a distant second to authority and persuasion. Those are the jurors.
Spin is a simple method of stabilizing a rocket by gyroscopic forces (conservation of angular momentum), if the craft and payload are able to withstand and perform as intended while spinning. It works for rifle bullets, where the projectile is spun up by spiral grooves in the gun barrel. It is very simple and robust; in a model rocket you just mount the fins at a slight angle tilted off the axis of the rocket body.
Slashdot Mirror
The Green Revolution will not be televised, because it was already a movie. As usual, screenwriters were well ahead of reality. Soylent Green (1973) had two guys living in a squalid apartment with (as I recall) a light bulb and radio powered by a stationary bike generator.
80x24 white and pale green screens... stacks of them. Dixon Ticonderoga #2 keyboard/mouse combination, electric sharpener, Staedtler Mars backspace, desk brush for backspace and bagel crumbs.
Next stop: do it yourself keypunch room, or submit to keypunch pool, wait overnight.
This included embedded systems work on an 8080.
My 4K TV has too much glare to be a good monitor, and it blocks my view out the window. My Happy Hacking keyboards each cost as much as the TV. Decent HD monitors are under $140. 4TB USB disk is $100, and even 28GB build trees do not use it up that quickly.
It is interesting because sudden death at age 22 ought to be rare. Recall the recent death of a young woman at University of Maryland from an adenovirus infection, followed by the discovery there of around 30 more cases of adenovirus, some requiring hospitalization. Over the years, clusters of adenovirus and of meningitis have arisen in situations where young people are making a transition into living in close quarters with others: dorms, military training, and how about someone starting work in an expensive urban area? (Silicon Valley Airbnb listings have several dorm-like situations specifically marketed to young technical workers.)
Aneurysms, cardiac electrical defects, septicemia and valve damage following dental work (prime age for wisdom tooth extraction)... My worst episodes of flu (or perhaps something with flu-like symptoms, like adenovirus) were between ages 18 and 27. At age 18 I was failing to recover from what seemed like flu, then developed high fever that affected my judgment; someone finally noticed and dragged me to the doctor: bacterial pneumonia.
A colleague of mine some years ago, age mid 30's, was out of work with what began as typical flu. It evolved badly, attacked his heart, and left him with 20% loss of heart function.
The case is of public interest: a person at an age where serious consequences of undiscovered congenital defects can appear, increased exposure through new living situations, immune system not yet hardened by previous exposures, "it's just the flu", and the idea that one ought to just power through any situation.
There is an immediate lesson that does not require a medical examiner's findings from one tragic case. If you have someone age 17-28 in your family situation or in your general circumstances, yes this is the physically most capable age where people do amazing things, but it also has special vulnerabilities, including suddenly dropping dead on a basketball court. Keep watch and be aware that, though occurrence is rare, things can go bad quickly for those with undiscovered defects, or who become infected by something especially bad.
It is standard practice in large scale real estate development to assemble parcels of land into a larger development, with incremental purchases under various shell corporations that conceal the eventual owner. A seller is likely to want a higher price from National Megacorp headquarters project than from Rabbit Hole Limited Partnership XVII.
Acquaintances in Munich noted that some people decades ago made a great deal of money buying parcels that "happened" to be situated near what eventually became S-Bahn (suburban train) stations.
One could construct instruction set curiosities on the 1401. On a 16K machine, the maximum length divide instruction required around 57 seconds to complete.
The above character sequence (minus the ellipsis) begins the first card of nearly all 1401 binary decks. Explain why.
2000 vs 2980: explain the significance of these numbers in later 1401 configurations.
Old school American Southern cooking comes close with red-eye gravy. Pan fry some ham, then deglaze the pan with black coffee. Serve on grits or biscuits, with a side order of sociopathy.
Morse code proficiency was until 2003 an international treaty requirement for issue of amateur radio licenses to operate below 30 MHz. I passed 5 WPM at age 15, but family moves first made the written exam difficult to access, then located us to an area where property covenants prohibited outdoor antennas, and topography defeated reception anyway. I never obtained a license.
Circa 1994 I was the systems guy and embedded development guy at a startup. We registered a domain using the initials of the company name. Non-tech companies were slower to set up general Internet mail and domains. Within a few months, whenever I scanned our postmaster mailbox, I found increasing numbers of emails directed to a movie production company which had the same initials, but who registered their domain with their full company name. People were lazy or were guessing, and used the initials.
I should have registered my own initials as a domain early on. That domain eventually was registered by a large bank with my same initials. If I had taken the domain first, they probably would have sued me to abandon both the domain and public use of my own initials.
Circa 1963 my Southern California next door neighbor was a toll call. I had been given a couple of old wooden box crank ringer phones by a friend of my grandfather, who was at an East Texas rural phone company. My friend and I (I was around age 9) ran some speaker wire between our bedroom windows and connected these phones and an ordinary dry cell battery. It worked fairly well.
The first program that I ever wrote for a stored program control computer (Barrowman equations for model rocket center of pressure), was for Wang's programmable calculator circa 1969. The program was punched into IBM Port-a-Punch cards (much later identified with the Florida "hanging chad" election ruckus), which were placed by hand one at a time, into a sort of waffle iron reader device.
The Wang calculator used both Wang's core memory, and a second patent on circuitry to calculate a logarithm and to use the logarithm in other calculations.
Flash erase wear-out, especially at low temperatures during the erase cycle, has been well-known for many years. I first encountered this circa 1991, during qualification of Intel 28F010 NOR flash for an extended temperature application. And again during qualification of AMD flash to replace this, because Intel had many months of production gap due to a botched fab move to a partner fab (Nippon Steel, I believe), that turned out to be incapable of producing the device.
Disturb during write is also well-known. I suspect that the behavior and mechanisms here are different for modern NAND than they were for NOR.
The best relevance of the work would be in situations least likely to use it: small volume products without good traceability in sourcing.
45.45, 50, 75, and 100 baud were all used by electromechanical teleprinters.
In the New York City area in the 1970s, we used numerous 75 baud current loop circuits in a bank transaction network, serving terminals at bank branch and merchant locations. It was said (unconfirmed) that these circuits were relatively inexpensive, and often were constructed of split pairs that would not be usable for voice. A single loop could serve a number of terminal units connected in series.
Cruise ships have much greater mobility of passengers on board, plenty of hand contact surfaces like stair railings and elevator buttons, common buffet tables and eating areas, gambling equipment, theater seats, hours spent standing in line, milling crowds, confined passageways, and a typical exposure window of 6-10 days.
I spent most of my one and only cruise (Alaska / Inside Passage from Seattle) on deck.
There was a memorable 1996 article in the New England Journal of Medicine examining transmission of drug resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis by a passenger on a commercial airline flight.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Especially memorable is a seat map showing the index passenger's seat, and locations of others who showed positive TB skin tests.
I left Motorola in 2006 (along with around 200 others) as a business unit was dismantled.
In its last years as a shrinking husk of an grand old-school company with a real research operation, I was able to get maybe 5 PhD signal processing / RF specialists from Motorola Research in the Chicago area, assigned for a few weeks to work on an interesting little project. I got a proof of concept, and they got a proof of capability for specific direct digital synthesis and up/down conversion techniques that were in development and looking for applications.
I had to lobby hard to travel to Bangalore in my last few weeks there, to transfer engineering knowledge to an outsource group, many of whose members were unable to obtain US visas in good time. Apart from a couple of weeks of intestinal distress afterward, that was a very informative life experience.
By the time I had my exit interview, the building was locked, and I was probably still at home within sprinting distance of the toilet. I did the exit interview from mailed paperwork, talking to an HR person at another site. She was so depressed and exhausted from doing this for the other 199 or so, that I had to walk her through the process.
I did a search the other day and found, amusingly, that my patents are now owned by Google (from whom I have never worked).
We need to go beyond Groundhog Day, and draw from Office Space, Falling Down, and from the old Twilight Zone TV series.
Very definitely not gone. A few years ago I developed sudden and alarming symptoms in my R eye vision. I drove myself to the nearest ER. The ER physician did a careful exam with an ophthalmoscope, then with a specialized small ultrasound unit.
The ultrasound quickly eliminated the possibility of a detached retina, and allowed confident diagnosis that no condition required emergency treatment. The cost was maybe $300.
A subsequent office visit to an ophthalmologist confirmed that this was a posterior vitreous detachment. Myopes have a greater tendency to develop these in later life, due to more acute curvature at the retinal surface.
One online article notes 16nm Finfet fab entry cost at $80M, 66 mask steps. You would need a very wealthy patron.
Of what functional relevance is a 20 year anniversary celebration of a piece of marketing nomenclature? If you want an excuse to have a cocktail party to celebrate a two-word branding phrase that is lamented as failing to meet someone's ambition, go ahead.
My realm is embedded systems: high reliability systems with 10-20 year designed service life, using a variety of CPU architectures, and evolving into very high complexity System On Chip designs. These systems would not be feasible across this timescale without a stabilized and evolving GPL'd tools base: gcc, binutils, and glibc, and Linux as a long-lived build platform.
20 years might be accurate for "open source" as nomenclature. It is not accurate for the underlying phenomena. My choice of monument is a GNU Emacs 16.56 source tape dated 1985, at the point where RMS had replaced the disputed display code from Gosling Emacs.
By around 1992, gcc had evolved to be usable (with a lot of configuration work for gcc and the runtime library) as a cross compiler. At the time I was working on a 68000 based embedded system, using a commercial cross compiler. The commercial product was expensive, slow, had some arcane proprietary extensions, and was abandoned by its supplier (their principal business was defense contracting) from further development, and even if I recall correctly, re-hosting beyond Sun 3.
Gcc became the clear choice to carry the project forward. I put it into place, and it supported the product for the remaining 12 years or so of active development (some new capabilities, mostly keeping up with replacements for obsolete components).
For the past 9 years much of my work has been centered around a body of proprietary software that supports certain high function System On Chip products from a vendor. This software has a history of at least 10 years, three major chip family architectures, and several steps of evolution within each architecture. It has grown to around 30M lines of C code. This is not bloatware with elaborate frameworks and libraries: these devices are sufficiently complex to require that much software to even construct a usable API (around 2800 pages for a sketchy API document, 5800 pages for a very incomplete chip hardware reference).
None of this would be feasible without a long term stable cross-compiler (gcc) and a place to run it (Linux) on large bodies of code.
Meanwhile in the un-free software world, a defense contractor friend pointed me to a recent U.S. Navy RFP for translation or other porting technology, seeking to make 1970s software written in a proprietary 1969 language (CMS-2), runnable on ordinary modern commercial machines. Today it runs on fossilized power-hungry refrigerator-sized Univac AN/UYK-somethings, built from components that went out of production years ago. Yes, our national defense depends upon stuff like this that has outlived essentially all of the original authors. The situation is similar for other long life cycle embedded products, in realms apart from weaponry.
Note that IBM mainframe OS and compiler software were freely available until the early 1970s, when compilers and some other larger products went from a $25 tape copy charge for source, to expensive licenses and restricted source code access. Some of us learned quite a lot by reading e.g. the $25 Fortran H compiler source code.
The history from my perspective, looks more like open (1970), closed (1972), opening back up (1985), usably open (1992), then "open source" as nomenclature (1997), then whatever you want to call today's maelstrom of bloated frameworks. GPL's origin in MIT / Symbolics / LMI controversies is a crucial component of the 1972-1985 evolution; that story must be mentioned, and is told elsewhere from disparate perspectives.
Stupid tablet ... PL/I, various minicomputer machine languages, microcodes, and tons of 8080 assembler. Since 1982, nearly all C.
My high school got a Wang 360 programmable calculator. Programs were punched into IBM Port-a-punch (hanging chad fame) cards. My project was Barrowman's equations to compute the center of pressure of a model rocket. My first conventional language was FORTRAN on an IBM 1620, then machine language for that machine. 4900796 Then 1401 Autocoder, playtoy Lisp, 360 assembler, Pl
That graph looks far too much like MY graph from MY failed attempt to reproduce a published experiment in thermal conductivity of an organic system. You are going to be hearing from your Institutional Review Board. Also, I am jealous that you got a much better curve fit than I did.
On a murkier note, a few years ago I did an online search for work in Single Event Upsets ("cosmic ray" interactions with electronics). I was a bit surprised to see a paper from a small institution in India, with a photo showing a test setup in front of a porthole in a thick shielding wall. The photo looked familiar, and the text in the paper was utter gobbledygook. I located the other paper, and sent an email to its principal investigator at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The reply arrived quickly, thanking me and noting that this was one of the most egregious examples of plagiarism that they had encountered.
Development of TCP as evolution from NCP, was under ARPA funding. I was at a lecture at UCLA where Cerf presented related research results. This was during the Vietnam war controversies, and many were uncomfortable with DoD involvement. That does not change where the money and part of the impetus came from. Communism is an interesting theory, whose attempted application to the real world resulted in unprecedented mass murder, famine, and a residuum of lying apologists who are unwilling to acknowledge the mountain of skulls in their living room.
Opinion: the population within that district, especially towns like Tyler, tend to be low income, not highly educated, and adhere to religious sects that emphasize personal propensity to sin, unquestioning acceptance of authority, and willingness to punish very harshly an act that has been framed as a moral wrong.
The people want to be and often are personally decent, but scientific rigor and skepticism take a distant second to authority and persuasion. Those are the jurors.
My ancestry is there, and I know the mindset.
Spin is a simple method of stabilizing a rocket by gyroscopic forces (conservation of angular momentum), if the craft and payload are able to withstand and perform as intended while spinning. It works for rifle bullets, where the projectile is spun up by spiral grooves in the gun barrel. It is very simple and robust; in a model rocket you just mount the fins at a slight angle tilted off the axis of the rocket body.