Transmission Towers: A Powerful Metaphor for Socio-digital Connectivity

Since I was a kid I’ve loved power line towers. They are anthropomorphic steel giants that carry the lifeblood of our technocracy. There they stand, unwavering, across the American landscape just to get us our fix of energy. Where we are increasingly separated by gadgetry, this infrastructure is never without a friend on either side. I think much poetry and latent symbolism can be squeezed out of these humble icons, and I got the idea to use them to deliver a political message at the climate rallies on October 14th. 

The national power grid is aging faster than we can replace it, and this poses a serious risk to the stability of our country. Moreover, demand-and-supply power management is the antithesis of an efficient and sustainable energy future. Though this problem is seemingly more superficial to Americans than, say, the humanitarian crises we face, it is nonetheless part of a larger picture of shifting the global paradigm to justice, equality and peace, and thus demands appropriate action. 

Participatory pageantry and playful creation serve to spark curiosity and engage the imagination by blurring the lines between reality and possibility – between what we take for granted and a heretofore unrealized perspective. Art is supposed to blow our minds. Only by disrupting hard-wired logic can we form new pathways to a better world. 

This design will be finalized and shared as an Instructable so that anyone can make their own costume. Band together with friends to become a series of wandering transmission towers. Create beauty and story simultaneously. Hopefully we can have fun while we change our worlds. 

Seeing Past the Glamour of the Automobile

Recently I've spent a lot of time fixing my car, and the other day I experienced a paradigm shift in how I think about automobiles. Whereas previously being under the hood of a car was someone else’s territory, the curtain of prestige had fallen. I could now just as easily think of myself fiddling inside a car as the next person. I am a mechanical engineering student at the University of New Orleans. When one thinks 'mechanical engineering’ and immediately jump to 'cars and engines and stuff,’ that person wouldn’t be far from the truth. So it’s not saying much that I now regard myself as mechanically inclined, and maybe disingenuous to say that I’m now just as likely as the next Joe to work under the belly of a monstrous machine. And yet I had this image of cars being a black box of mystery. Or rather a sleek, two-toned, glossy and personified chariot of mystery. Driving away from the auto parts store and worrying about gas, I had an image:

It was an image of cars everywhere, naked. By naked I mean stripped of their aerodynamic shells and oh-so-clean paint jobs to their raw musculature. Naked as in de-sexualized and dethroned from their american-dream pedestal. Naked and defiant, guilting us for ever covering up their functional beauty and dirty secrets -- for it is the filth in a car that brands it as ours, that makes it special. Everywhere these naked cars were zooming, spewing fumes and radiating heat, free to be seen. But everyone looks right past them. 

I think the shells that cover an automobile obscure the immense energy and environmental resources cars consume. Moreover, they give us permission to take for granted the true beauty of cars. If everyone saw their cars as the complex, resource-intensive and inertial beasts that they are, maybe they would think twice about shaving two minutes off of their daily commute, or succumbing to rage and self-righteous indignation at complete strangers. 

Thanks to Kevin Hulsey for the great rendering. 

Improving the Action of Piano Keys

Isn’t that cool looking? That’s the keyboard and action mechanism of a grand piano. As a piano player, I really love the feel of an acoustic piano’s keys. Synthesizers and midi keyboards are very different. The keys are usually made of plastic; the fulcrum of the key is usually at the end (cantilevered) instead of in the middle; and whereas the heaviness of the keys on an acoustic piano (both pressing them down and how they lift back up) makes them feel dynamic and substantial, synthesizers’ ‘action’ is lackluster. 

But I love the way synthesizers sound. I am influenced by electronic music of all varieties. Many digital pianos try to replicate the “weighted” feel of real keys, but it’s just not the same. So here’s the idea:

Wouldn’t it be cool to have the best of both worlds? Imagine isolating the whole action mechanism like pictured above and attaching sensors to each hammer and release, making it a digitized acoustic piano keyboard. Now control those inputs and feed them to a midi synthesizer of your choice. Put it in a pretty housing that combines classical and contemporary aesthetics and you have the coolest digital piano in the world!

How much would it weigh? The action mechanism of a grand weighs approximately 35-40 pounds. The sensors and wires and controller would weigh anywhere from three to ten pounds. The midi synthesizer would be another five or ten pounds. And the intricate dense wood casing would weigh anywhere between ten and twenty pounds. So that puts the whole thing (not including stand or pedals) at 53-80 pounds! 

How much would this thing cost to make? Well…the action mechanism probably could be found in poor condition, but it is so complex that refurbishing it would be a beast of a job (not like this whole project isn’t). If a grand piano is in disrepair, the action almost certainly is to blame. The rest of the piano is the case, the frame and the strings, none of which we care about and not much can go wrong with these parts except the strings breaking or coming out of tune. I’m sure you’d be lucky to get a grand for parts for around $200-400. 

The sensors I would use would be something like an FSR (https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/269) and those are ~$7 each * 88 keys = $616

Woah so this is already getting waay expensive. I’m sure you can just hack some other cheapo electronic for a sensor you could use, but wouldn’t it be nice to have all the ADSR sound attributes of other midi keyboards? I’m going to sit on this idea for a while.

The Limitless Possibilities for Musical Instruments: How Physical Instruments Could Be More Like Synthesizers

I went to a concert last night. It was an orchestra and three singers performing mash-up arrangements of Aaron Copland and Bon Iver music. It had been a while since I had been to the symphony, and I was struck by just how discernible every instrument was. If I closed my eyes, I could point to where each player was on stage just using my ears. I was amazed at what sounds could be coaxed out of such basic resonators like strings, pipes, blocks and membranes. And it made me wonder: What exactly makes an instrument have the timbre that it has? Do we know enough about the physics of sound and music to reverse engineer an instrument based on what we want its tone to sound like?

For example, a xylophone’s tone is determined by the length and mass of the wooden keys; its loudness is related to how hard it is hit, how the reverberations travel through the block and how the arch under they key is shaped; how long the key sounds is determined by how springy the wood is, and if the key rests on its nodes or slightly off; the spectrum of frequencies that accompany the formant that makes up the color of the tone is related to the density of the wood and internal reverberations. We know a lot about how to make a xylophone, probably enough to design the perfect tone without much trial and error.

This got me thinking. Could you design a completely new timbre using what we know about established ones? Like how an electronic musician crafts synthesized tones using a few basic parameters… only with physical objects as the generators and modifiers? Could I imagine what I want my new instrument to sound like and, using a dictionary of physical properties and their effects on the sound, could I create an instrument that actually sounds like what I imagined? Could an electronically synthesized voice and a physically generated voice sound identical?

I don’t think this is such a crazy idea. Basically every material around us makes sound, just not necessarily a aesthetically ‘musical’ sound. But artists have made music out of large boulders by carving very thin columns that resonate when struck or are agitated. Cymbals are basically sheet metal that is masterfully crafted to sustain a wave. Tree limbs and power lines rubbing together sound like a child crying. I saw a man who made an instrument that sounds very much like the human voice – he used a feedback loop to generate the tone and two cardboard tubes that slide together like a trombone change the pitch. In the Sigur Ros concert film Heima, one of the band members makes mallet instruments out of thin shale rock and out of hundred-year-old rhubarb stalks. And look at all the sounds the human body can make! Just about anything can be made into an instrument, and I postulate that there is an entirely new world of sounds that can be made using physical instruments if the imagination is creative enough. 

Applying the Tesla Valve Concept to HVAC

I was looking at housing in New Orleans and saw that the Shotgun House was a historically dominant style in the city.

It’s named the Shotgun Shack because you could fire a gun into the front door and the bullet would pass through each consecutive room, and through the back door. I stumbled on this airflow diagram.

It reminded me of the Tesla Valve, a purely mechanical means of restricting fluid flow to one direction. When fluid flows from right to left, it has a relatively unimpeded path.

But if you reverse the flow direction, these deviations from the main path help redirect the flow back on itself. Each deviation exponentially decreases the amount of fluid that passes.

What if we slightly modified the shotgun house: instead of open doorways, we use kitchen-hinged doors that swing in AND out to direct the dominant flow of air to our liking.

If you open the doors into the rooms, air is deflected and flows straight out the back. If you open the doors into the halls, air flow is siphoned off of the main flow and into the rooms.

In order to keep air flowing, a window would have to be open in every room, so that new air can flow into the rooms and not build up on itself (i.e. get in a ‘traffic jam’) in the hallway.

Another consideration: As in the scientific diagrams, the majority of air flow is redirected by the first one or two deviations (open doors), and so the front of the house (left side) would receive most of the cooling air flow, while the back two rooms would stagnate. This may be desirable if the occupants spent the majority of their time in the rooms that receive airflow, during hours of peak wind (say at night during nighttime cooling). Conversely, it may be desirable to deflect air from entering the rooms during the day if it is muggy and hot (as in New Orleans’ summers). Instead, the house may take advantage of other passive thermal methods such as ground well cooling (digging into the ground to take advantage of it’s constant and relatively cool temperature of ~56 degrees F). 

Just a thought.

Correcting for Imperfect Ocular Geometry

Sjörgren's syndrome is an autoimmune disease where one's saliva and tear glands are destroyed. Dry eyes are not only uncomfortable but dangerous, because the eyelid can do severe damage to the cornea when blinked. Corneal damage can lead to visual impairment and blindness. This is because the refractive geometry of the lens is compromised. A novel new method of restoring vision is through the use of scleral lenses. These are large-diaphragm contacts that rest on your sclera (the white of your eye). They buldge more than your cornea, creating a small space between your eyeball and the lens. This space is filled with artificial tears that have the same refractive index as the cornea, filling in the gaps and completing the refractive geometry.

My windshield, you could say, has had Sjörgren's disease, because there were extended periods where I was out of wiper fluid but would turn on my wipers anyway to clear debris from my windshield. The wipers dragged micro-abrasives across the glass and now there are radial scratches in my windshield. Driving west and at night are a real pain, even with sunglasses on. 

I hear there are solvents that may eat away a bit of the glass and buff out most of the scratches. But I think I'll just make a giant scleral lens instead. 

The Most Adorable Webcam Hacker Blocker

You know how people can hack into your webcam and watch you? You know how everyone in a coffee shop invariably has some tape or band-aid covering their webcams? Why not make your peeper-blocker cute as well as functional? 

Interview with Dr. Ramana Pidaparti, Engineering Professor and STEM Education Innovator

Dr. Ramana M. Pidaparti is a professor and the Associate Dean of Academic Programs at the University of Georgia College of Engineering. I sat down with him on September 25th to discuss admissions into the masters programs at the college, as well as to ask him what excited him about his work with students. Our conversation was wonderful and I felt a real connection with Dr. Pidaparti's philosophy on learning and sharing knowledge. Here is what he had to say:

DB: So I graduated last winter with a degree in Atmospheric Science from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and did a couple stints with a start-up and then with a field campaign by NASA and Duke, but my involvement was limited in those. So I’m traveling around the country talking to people about their jobs, what they actually do everyday, how they got there, etcetera. And I plan to start graduate school next fall. And I’m interested in moving sideways into engineering. I was wondering, do you have any insights about people coming from a meteorology background who want to transition to engineering?

RP: I don’t have any direct experience coming from Atmospheric Science, but in the past we have admitted students from physics, chemistry and biology. So when they come in from a non-engineering background, we ask them to do some prerequisites. Then they can get on to the graduate program.

DB: Yeah, I would probably feel more comfortable taking some preparatory classes.

RP: Right, so you can go and look at our curriculum for environmental and mechanical (those are probably the two [that you will have the best luck with]) and map out to see what you have and don’t have.

DB: That’s good, because those are the ones I am particularly interested in!

RP: In the grad school we have an M.S. in engineering, and that’s kind of a broad degree, I personally feel that that’s good. Especially people like you coming from another background, for instance I started in civil engineering and went on to aerospace. Then after I finished my PhD. I started teaching in mechanical. Which I knew a little bit about… but afterwards I started doing, like, biomedical projects. So I think it all comes together, and that holistically they are pretty much the same. I’m teaching a course in the sophopmore mechanical engineering program called Engineering Systems in Society.

DB: Ooh that sounds fun!

RP: The idea there is that you look at societal problems including climate, Enron, all that stuff, and address them using systems thinking. That’s my goal, that’s what I was trying to do in that class. Most of the examples [of engineering] that you see from history are related to civil engineering, nuclear bombs and stuff. They’re all quite related. I think the M.S. program in engineering is probably better in a way, and the requirements are probably one-third common core, and two-thirds open (so you can go to any college and take any courses).

DB: So how many hours, or how many semesters is the M.S. program typically?

RP: Twenty-four hours of coursework, and then another six hours of thesis work. So I think it’s pretty standard, y’know, a masters is pretty easy to get. Ph.D. is another thing.

DB: My undergraduate experience was very much like that graduate experience. I took about thirty, thirty-five hours of classes in a little over a year, it was very fast. So I’ll probably do that again.

RP: Yeah, exactly. It all depends on if the student can manage and is smart enough to handle it, then I think, ‘Why not?’ Our program is thirty hours so you should be able to easily knock it out in a year and a half, if you plan it. The only hard part is getting into the program. We have one student, I think she was from Oklahoma, and she is taking some courses in engineering to wrap up a two-semester, eight-course thing. So you have to spend one more year. But I think that can be reduced to one semester if you look at what you have in common with our curriculum.

DB: Yeah. Is there a lot of room for making your case [to the department]?

RP: Oh yeah. Like I said, masters level [they] should give [students] a chance to explore. It’s not my decision, there’s a graduate education advisory committee which is a panel of faculty and we’ll need to look at it case-by-case. There’s GPA, good experience, all those things matter.

DB: So it’s a more holistic approach.

RP: Yeah, and I always felt that (and I can only speak for students from Physics) we usually get students with three courses, but I’m also new here, I joined in January and different faculty have different takes. So we just try to do the best for you.

DB: Where were you before [UGA]?

RP: I was at VCU in Richmond Virginia, and before that I was in the Midwest for a long time. I went to grad school at Purdue.

DB: That’s a great survey of the eastern U.S.! I saw online that one of your research interests was design mechanics and the arts? Would you talk a little more about that?

RP: Yeah, so basically right now there is a trend on campuses to teach nothing but problem solving. 

One of the ideas is basically the people who go to arts fields and are really creative and passionate about that stuff, it’s good to bring those kinds of people together: the left brain and the right brain and bring them together and see innovation it can bring.

And then after I moved to VCU they started a program called the Da Vinci Center for Product Innovation. They were admitting students from arts, business and engineering together to do that. It was about seven years ago that Stanford started the design school. Most of the time design is part of some engineering programs but they were the first in the country to start that. And people have business schools and talk about design schools and have different design thinking.

DB: I see a lot of that cross-disciplinary-type stuff too.

RP: I think most other schools are trying to mimic that kind of structure. So they are starting with a center, and then some program, and stuff like that. Now they are also opening humanities and social sciences. So they are providing that interdisciplinary approach. The reason I came here is to do something similar, because there are other business, arts and stuff [in the engineering program], but they are opening it up to humanities and social sciences. So they are bringing a diverse group of students and providing that interdisciplinary experience. I mean, before, it was all problem solving.

DB: So you are kind of an evangelist for interdisciplinary STEM education.

RP: Oh yeah, oh yeah! I mean I got in trouble with my promotion one time when I told them, ‘hey that’s all I can do, teach some classes and publish once in a while.’ That should be the fun way. So I’ve done a lot of projects and I really like it. Right now I’m looking at a similar concept, design thinking to the STEM education. Like I said it’s fun, because we are all intellectually curious and want to do something different. And this is their chance. If your student comes and says, ‘give me a project,’ then I have to brain storm and come up with something for them [laughing], so that they’ll have fun and I’ll have fun.

DB: So you’re also being pushed to your limits. That sounds fun!

RP: Yeah it is. I’ve done it, and then I get some grey hair and loose some. [both laugh]. That is my interest. I personally benefit, in a sense, when I work with other people, learn languages, that kind of thing.

DB: Interchange.

RP: Yeah there’s a lot of common things, and then setting up people for certain fields based on their passion. This person, he’s coming next month to speak [points to The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra]. He is the father of this systems view and he is also learning from Leonardo Da Vinci because Leonardo did everything, artist, painter, engineer, architect. I am really excited to go to this talk. That’s my perspective. One time I got some money to do a project in Egypt, that was modeling weather-related disasters.

DB: So you do a lot of projects pushing this STEM philosophy. What other research have you done?

RP: Actually I have done this one project… we are looking at the inflammation of the lung. So people with asthma or RCOPD, they put in a mechanical ventilator. Usually they’ll see how the patient is responding and based on that they’ll dial in their settings. But they don’t have any internal sensors to see what’s going on. It’s just based on patient response, and they lack higher-level data. So we are combining modeling and biomedical engineering in our experiments. Have you heard of Game of Life? It’s like sitting here and looking at your neighbors and then trying to make a decision based on that.

DB: Is it a type of game theory?

RP: Yeah, it’s one form… and then another project we are doing, we are making a drug delivery device. People with ocular distention, when they are sixty or seventy and their blood vessels leak so the have to take an injection. Injection is like surgery. So we are making an implantable device to put behind the eye and fill in the drug, and that drug will release at a constant rate. So that’s another project. Like I said, I don’t know a whole lot about micro- and nanotechnology, but just working with people and talking to people, I say, ‘oh, this sounds good.’

DB: How do you keep your research interests varied, because a lot of people get cornered into one little niche, that’s the way academia works.

RP: Basically talking, when I meet people and they say something, I’ll be like, ‘Go, go!’ and then see whether I can contribute. My goal is to see whether we can work together and then [contribute] to a publication or paper or project. I get tired of doing the same thing again and again, because it’s not me. I’ve learned that. I want to do something new every five years or so. Especially once we write the proposal and get some money, then it becomes real. We say, ‘hey here are some ideas,’ we put them on paper and then ask for some money. Once you get money, then it becomes real. We have to get students, train them, produce papers…

DB: It’s a lot of logistics.

RP: Exactly.

DB: But it sounds very exciting.

RP: Yeah, I mean if someone offers you a million dollars, I wouldn’t go to anywhere else. This is the fun part. Most of the time we have the [research] ideas but sometimes the students bring in their ideas as well, because they are digging more into the details. We brainstorm together.

DB: I’m sure they’ve had the most up-to-date schooling on the topic.

RP: Exactly, like I said, I just know systems and big picture. Like you said, the interaction and then the creativity and innovation has to be there, otherwise it’s no fun, I won’t participate. You’ve got to push me, and I’ll push you.

DB: I like that. It’s really exciting to hear your excitement. I haven’t heard that very much in academia. This conversation feels more like it belongs in the private sector. How did you bridge the ‘boring gap’ in academia [to bring creativity into it].

RP: Yeah, like if I teach a course I might bring in new material, because it should be fun for me too. And once you get money, it’s pretty much like creating your own thing. The knowledge part just drives me. Once my brain starts to work, they start bringing me problems. And I have to think up the solutions [both laugh]. I’m also marketable, and I wasn’t looking to move from VCU but someone submitted my name. They asked, ‘Why do you want to come?’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to come, but’… And here they don’t have departments, and usually there’re departments, like silos, so there’s no intermixing. That’s what excited me [about UGA].

DB: I have to ask you this question: What’s the next big thing for engineers? What process, what area?

RP: It’s kind of hard to predict I think. 

There’s a lot to learn from biology and natural systems. They can show us how to adapt to change, and reinvent our approach to engineering. In biology it’s already been done.

So now we’re trying to come up with new strategies, processes, new materials, but nature has already done it.

DB: Do y’all have a biomimicry specialty, here?

RP: Yeah, actually I’m working on a proposal with someone from James Madison University [related to biomimicry].

DB: What do you like about your job? How does it help you achieve your goals?

RP: I like this job, interacting with students, and working with other colleagues from other disciplines, keeping up with the cutting-edge, and also just getting some money for the college by doing projects. And I get personal satisfaction from working with students and seeing them succeed, because their success is your success. Helping others to focus and be rewarded, that’s the fun part. Y’know if I spend an hour with you I hope it makes a small impact.

DB: It sounds like you’re very next-thing-driven.

RP: Definitely. Actually my son, when he was in middle school, they had to do a science project, and then suddenly it becomes mine, y’know?

DB: “Dad, here can you do this please?”

RP: Yeah, and now he’s in model U.N. and I think he likes it.

DB: Are there hard parts about balancing family and tough work?

RP: It is challenging at times, but once you get comfortable with the things you have to do, y’know, once you get tenure, I think you can still balance trying to have fun and take vacations and still get out [with work]. Mix-and-match a little bit. Sometimes I’ll go to conferences and bring my family along.

DB: Yeah, I grew up with my Dad dragging me to conferences all over the country and it was a blast.

RP: Sometimes it can be cool, y’know in different countries. Sometimes it’s up and down, but it’s fun and once you’ve traveled abroad you learn a lot. I’ve been to a few places and I don’t want to live anywhere else.

DB: Woah, Athens is the best place?

RP: Yeah because I came from a different part of the world.

DB: Oh yeah, you were from the Midwest before this.

RP: Yeah the Midwest, but not only this country. Before that India for grad school. I was brought up there and I don’t want to go back. I’m used to it here and whatever ups and downs, you try to understand the system…

DB: … which hoops to jump through.

RP: Right! So that kind of thing. I told my boss, ‘I’ll stay’. So, what goals do you have for yourself? What do you want to achieve?

DB: My number one goal is to be a father, that’s what I look forward to most in life. But secondarily, I want some sort of creative outlet that is interdisciplinary, that is varied and utilizes engineering and science and interpersonal skills and involves travel. Isn’t that the dream?

RP: Right, right. So you want to go to academia or get a taste of industry?

DB: Of course being my age I am very attracted to the start-up culture, private industry, having ideas and seeing them through to fruition. I’m sure that will change over time, but…

RP: Yes. 

Nowadays I tell my students you don’t want to be a job seeker, you want to be a job creator.

I feel that that’s an opportunity, and it’s not easy, but at least if you’re thinking along those lines, then eventually, hopefully you’ll hit it one day. Hopefully later you don’t regret not trying. You’ve got to take a risk. Like I left my comfortable job, went to a different institution and had to prove myself all over again. This is my third institution [laughs]. But I think you do whatever you do and make it fun for you. It’ll happen. If you’re a little uptight then maybe it’s not going to happen. This is your skill set, your knowledge so just go with it and do them.

DB: Just… loosen up, be open to new stuff.

RP: Right, right, loosen up. That’s what I tell the new faculty when they are made to produce a lot in their first five years to get tenure. If you take pleasure, you’ll be stressed out, but if you say, ‘it’s my job’ you’ll be okay.

 -- To learn more about Dr. Pidaparti and his publications, click here.

Interview with Sam Fahmy, Director of Public Relations at The University of Georgia

 My second parents, the Landrums, worked for decades in the administration of the University of Georgia. I grew up visiting them every year in the cool, hip town of Athens. They would show us around the campus, and swap stories about their days as students in the seventies. After explaining my mission to Mr. Landrum, he immediately thought I should talk to Sam Fahmy. 

       Mr. Fahmy is the Director of Public Relations in the Office of Academic Affairs at UGA, and he had some fantastic things to say about being in your mid-twenties. 

DB: So where were you when you were 24?

SF: That’s a great question. I finished my undergraduate degree in five years, and then I actually took a gap year myself and I’m really glad that I did that. At the end of college I thought I wanted to do journalism but wasn’t sure. So I took a distance learning class in journalism and realized, ‘Yes I love this!’ I also got away from Athens and moved to Charleston, SC, lived on the coast and it was wonderful. On paper the plan was to save money for grad school. I think I actually ended up with less money at the end of that year. But I really enjoyed the lack of structure and the opportunity to think about what I wanted to do. And then when I got into graduate school I was very focused on it. I spent a year waiting tables and living a very unstructured life. I thought, ‘this was fun for a year, but now I’m ready for something more career-like.’ And I’ve worked with people who went immediately from undergrad to grad school. And to them graduate school felt like just an extension of undergraduate. And so I’m glad I did [take some time off] and I encourage other people [to do so], if they can. I think you just need a re-entry plan.

DB: Just a little bit of time to pick yourself up.

SF: Yeah, think about what you want to do when that gap year is over. So when I was 24 I probably had just wrapped up my masters degree. I was very fortunate in that I graduated into a really strong job market. I earned my masters degree in the year 2000.

DB: So no worries yet [about the economy].

SF: This was some time ago. The economy was really strong. I had multiple job offers to choose from. I was really fortunate to be able to pick the one that was best for me. It’s much more challenging for students today just because of the way the economy has changed. That said, most of the students that I work with out of the health and medical journalism program tend to find success. But you really have to be focused from day one of grad school, ‘What do I want to do when I’m done?’ So you want to acquire the skills that you need. And it’s okay to have multiple options and things you want to do. At the same time you should have some sort of endgame.

DB: I see a lot of kids with no endgame that got out of school and are just kind of wandering, like me.

SF: I think a lot of people go to grad school because they don’t know what they want to do.

DB: Right.

SF: The attraction of that is, it’s respectable to say, ‘I’m in graduate school.’ [both laugh] But I don’t think that’s an ideal situation to be in. Ideally you have a sense of what you want to do. Interestingly there are a lot of new graduate programs that give students some flexibility. For instance here we have this Integrated Life Sciences program. In the past people in doctoral programs pick the field of study and the professor you want to work with at the very beginning. The ILS program gives you the opportunity to pick as many as three labs from a slate of two hundred.

DB: That’s awesome.

SF: It gives people the opportunity to explore their options before committing to a decision. It’s a good way to explore options and have a specific end in sight. So there are options out there. There are professional masters programs out there with very professional career goals in mind. For example, we have a masters in Biomanufacturing and Bioprocessing. It’s basically a two-year program that is a cross between an MBA and a science degree. And it could involve biofuels, pharmaceuticals, all these things. The take-home is that there are more options for people who are unsure, but are more professionally oriented. The program has a good focus on career outcomes, so the student feels that the investment in time and money is worthwhile. Most students have to do an internship and they help set you up. People who graduate from it have jobs lined up, and they are rewarding, knowledge-based careers. So there are some neat things out there.

DB: It sounds like this school and others are starting to adapt to the future economy [where jobs leap-frog others in relevance], and they are giving lasting tools.

SF: Yeah, there’s a lot of movement towards interdisciplinarity. A lot of the big problems that we face are going to require solutions from multiple perspectives. There’s not going to be a magic bullet, but rather we’ll use multi-faceted approaches from different fields.

DB: Have you written about anything or heard about something exciting out there, something that lights your fire?

SF: A lot of the interesting things we’re doing in graduate education are exciting. There are more options. A lot of people saw graduate school as a way to prepare for academic careers (and that’s still out there), but there are also these alternatives in industry and non-profits that maybe there weren’t in the past.

DB: I guess you can’t turn back the undergraduate experience to focus more on professional options.

SF: It’s interesting. At the University we have a career center and a large percentage of our students avail themselves to it. More schools are requiring internships; our provost announced these academic enhancements. One of the big things is to hire internship coordinators. Increasingly resources are being redirected to help students find a career that suits their interests and skills. I really resist the idea that the University experience in and of itself should be about career preparation, because we also want people to be stewards of their community, of their environment, to be able to make informed decisions, to vote, to appreciate the arts and other things that aren’t specifically career-related. We want them to have careers, but we also want them to have lives.

DB: That’s so liberal arts.

SF: Yeah, exactly! Looking back on my undergraduate experience I think some of my favorite courses had nothing to do with my area of study, like music appreciation, art history, even public speaking. There were things that made me a better person and that made me a more thoughtful person. I really do think that if we’re going to be – even fast-forward to decades from now, globalization and things like that – if someone has a small set of job skills but lacks cultural competency to work with people from different cultures and understand different perspectives—

DB: Bridge the gaps!

SF: Yeah, so I think a liberal arts education becomes more important. If you were to train someone for a specific job, then ten years from now new technological changes mean that that job doesn’t exist. I believe that the education that we provide gives students a degree of flexibility, to be successful no matter what the economy does.

DB: I’m reading a book on resiliency in cities especially in light of climate change, and you just reminded me so much of the need for resiliency in education! I’d never thought of that.

SF: Yeah, to bounce back and be someone who’s constantly learning.

DB: That’s the question, how do you keep learning?

SF: Hopefully it’s something that people enjoy and seek out, and there are so many opportunities out there. There are conferences, materials online, webinars. In any field there are these resources, and many of them are free. So it’s really up to you to avail yourself of them.

DB: What do you do for fun?

SF: Time with family is always one. I have a wife and two daughters that I love. Rock climbing is kind of my passion when I have time. I feel like it’s good for both the body and the mind in the sense that it’s great exercise, but it’s also problem solving. You don’t just use force to get up there, you really do have to think about the best course of action to take, so it’s a lot of fun.

DB: A lot of people I talk to say rock climbing. I don’t know if there is a common thread or what.

SF: I have heard that people who are in the sciences gravitate towards rock climbing because there’s that problem solving aspect.

DB: Are you working on anything in particular right now?

SF: Primarily right now, for example, editing profiles of faculty on the home page with these, like, Q&As. I am working on a couple of news releases about some new initiatives that are coming up: the provost’s office and what we are going to publish and when. So halfway into the fall semester I’m thinking about spring semester. Things sneak up on you, and there are things that urgently need your attention and the challenge is separating the short-term things from the long-term things.

DB: Prioritization.

SF: Yeah, switching between the two.

DB: That’s what intimidates me about professional life is needing those executive skills to prioritize things.

SF: Yeah, I deal with that with my graduate assistants. I’ll just throw a bunch of things at them and they’ll ask, ‘well, what do you want me to do first?’ Early on I’ll explicitly say, ‘this, then this, then this.’ And that helps them. There’s the prioritization by deadline, but also the prioritization by importance. So urgent things aren’t necessarily important, and you have to understand the difference between the two.

DB: Yeah, that gives me a heart attack.

SF: So there are certain times that I work on things that are much farther out because they are more important than a near-term item because…

DB: … if you didn’t do them, it would be that much worse.

SF: Yeah. And frankly I think as you grow professionally there are things you understand better about yourself. You understand how you work better. For instance in the morning, I tend not to do very productive thinking. So I try to have short-term things [set up for myself]. And then I try to save the afternoons for more long-term things like writing, planning, things like that. That’s what works best for me, but there are some people who are the opposite.

DB: Like grade school warm-ups.

SF: Your really have to figure out what works for you. Another thing: if I skip lunch and don’t exercise, then that really throws me off. I may have saved a little time by spending more of it at the desk, but it was probably less productive.

DB: That’s hard to see, because kids around me only value time.

SF: Yep. It’s challenging. The quality of your work is also valuable. I know I can work at night, but I know I don’t do very quality work at night, so I just save things like updating websites, things like that where it’s not particularly creative or challenging, but it needs to be done. So that’s a really good time to do it. I suppose as time progresses you really get to know yourself better.

DB: You mentioned updating websites and stuff, do you have skills like HTML or PHP, coding and scripting?

SF: No that’s more of the back-end stuff, we have staff that do that. I update the content of the websites using content management systems (we use Expression Engine), so it’s about as easy as filling out an order form online.

DB: It’s nice to know that not everyone needs to know scripting. Over the last couple of decades have you found the [technological] transitions difficult?

SF: No. Because I basically have set a personal goal never to be that person who doesn’t know how to program the VCR. It’s one of those things where, unless you are constantly keeping up, you are going to fall way behind. And you’re going to fall behind in a way that, it’s almost exponential, [that you can’t get back up to speed]. Things change so rapidly that it could almost become foreign to you.

DB: A lot of my friends run into that because they reject current technology on principle and then they get to a job and they’re unfamiliar with the technological infrastructure.

SF: Yeah, it’s one of those things where, if you’re one of the people who doesn't do a little bit every day, it can catch up to you quickly and then you don’t have the skills that others do.

-- Read Mr. Fahmy's articles about academic affairs here!

Interview with Chantelle Rytter, Community Parade Artist

Chantelle Rytter is an artist, a collaborator, an organizer and a visionary. Above all she cares about community and play as the social cure-all. I met with her on the second of October on the rooftop a Grant Park bar and later a bike ride around inner Atlanta. This is what we discussed:

DB: When people ask you what you do, what do you tell them?

CR: I’m a community parade artist, at least primarily. I do three lantern parades and two bicycle parades here in Atlanta every year.

DB: So I can kind of imagine the bicycle parades: you’re on bicycles, wearable art, floats, puppets…?

CR: They’re pretty simple. I built three giant phoenixes—I want a flock of phoenixes—and they live in the ceiling of the bike shop, BeltLine Bikes. So they’re leading the parade and they represent the rise in ridership across Atlanta neighborhoods. I come up with some sort of easy theme, and sometimes a giveaway. Like this time it was funny mustaches. Or pinwheels on Peachtree St. There’s bicycle decorating an hour before the parade and I give them stuff that they can stick on their bikes in thirty minutes. Some people bring crazy things on their own, and they are wonderful!

DB: When I ride with my friends, they mount toy trumpets to their helmets. Mostly for ease of finding each other.

CR: Neat.

DB: So lantern parades… can you tell me a little more about those?

CR: I started being interested in things based on participation – just wide-open participation where everyone’s invited to come do this.  Creative play. There is a universal desire for creative play. And I have a background in New Orleans, and those folks have a dedicated civic play practice.

DB: They get it.

CR: Yeah. Civic Play… that’s the title of my upcoming[TEDxPeachtree] talk, Civic Play – The ultimate social tonic. And we need that stuff, it’s a love bomb where we do crazy things together in our public space, and we get to be individually expressive but collaborate with our city. It’s good stuff. And lantern parades, I got clued into lantern parades around the world based on participation. So they come from Asia. They are hundreds of years old. We can’t touch Asian lantern parades. They are huge, they’ve been going on for three hundred years, they’re incredibly beautiful. They are also very organized and precise. And, in my understanding, it was in the late 80s that a group of UK community artists happened to see one in Japan and they brought the idea home. So the UK has been doing lantern parades since the early 90s. And then Australia. Australia has a really righteous one that has been happening for twenty-five years. In Lismore, Australia so it’s not like a big place. They’ve won national tourism awards. The good ones can have a nice economic impact. Like, for the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade, the economic impact on the city was $147 million.

DB: Holy crap!

CR: Right? Direct! They think that indirect it was more like $334 million. In a study commissioned by the 25 big krewes who throw the big parades in Orleans parish, they figured that they spent $25 million to throw those parades. They were self-funded.

DB: That’s a huge boon!

CR: Yeah, for a really fun thing. It does all kinds of good stuff: social infrastructure, cultural infrastructure, and cash. Anyways, lantern parades are just beautiful, and they’re my thing since they’re based in participation, and we did not have them here. There’s one in Baltimore that I’m going to go see. I saw the one in Vancouver. It was the longest running one in North America and it ended. I had no idea it was the last one. It was heartbreaking. Their participation tanked, and their spectatorship rose and it became difficult to maintain it anymore. I try to keep the language clear, it is based in participation. It’s not, ‘Come see the parade,’ it’s, ‘Come be the parade. There’s no parade without you.’ We can’t lose the language, lest people think it’s just a normal parade that you go see. So making it like the second line in New Orleans - you show up, make a lantern and walk that way. It’s really easy, spontaneous. Now that it’s gotten to the size that it has, we are thinking of ways to deal with the shear volume of people. 23,000 people. The growth of it has been crazy. It started in 2010 with the Atlanta BeltLine. We’re six years into a 25-year project: a 22-mile loop connecting the abandoned railroad tracks. Now it is, ‘Do you live inside the perimeter?’ Soon it will be, ‘Do you live inside or outside the BeltLine?’ A closer circle. It used to be the creepy place behind all the dumpsters, all the backs of the buildings. Like you would have no idea that under all the weeds and trash was a railroad track. So the route is level – it was a railroad line – which is convenient. But it’s a monster of a project. So in 2010, the BeltLine was still the creepy place behind the dumpsters, and the city needed to believe that it would be this country’s greatest urban renewal project. So it’s really perfect, to me, for a lantern parade, because holding up a light is a universal symbol for faith and support in communities around the world. And we need to hold up the light for the BeltLine for another twenty years. I’m interested in things that have the potential to become a tradition, that can become part of the cultural fabric, that can appeal across every demographic and could last for a really long time. Y’know? 

The stuff I admire about New Orleans, I think other cities really need civic play, those civic traditions that you put on your calendar. 

So the first year [of the lantern parade] I would have called it a wild success if one hundred people came. I did four workshops leading up to it - and five hundred people showed up! And walked in the mud and the dirt and the weeds on the interim trail. And then it got paved, but it still wasn’t quite [there], I mean: rickety, crazy bridges that sit next to the new bridges, and every time we pass by, we’re like, “Do you remember when we walked on that thing?!” So five hundred people showed up that day and it was the largest number of people to ever stand together on the Betline. This little section is only two miles of the planned twenty-two. This teeny section connects the Old Fourth Ward, which is Martin Luther King Jr.’s district, the birthplace of Civil Rights, to Piedmont Park. Which is like Midtown, fancy, our blue-blood founding fathers, the Piedmont Driving Club, [connected] to a historically black community. It’s a nice walk between those two places for the first time in the history of the city. And the BeltLine will connects 45 other neighborhoods. People get across town completely differently. We’ve held races between joggers, cyclists and cars and the cars are losing by a long shot to get from this neighborhood to that neighborhood. It used to be all hilly when you rode your bike, but the BeltLine is a 1% grade.

DB: That’s awesome!

CR: So, it went from five hundred people to 1,250 to 10,000. [In three years.] And every year I wrote a grant… won a grant… wrote a grant… won a grant. Until finally [the year we got 10,000 people] I said, ‘you guys, why don’t we take this out of the grant system and make it permanent.’ So if people ask me whether we’re doing it next year I can say yes. I think the jump to ten thousand had to do with the BeltLine really getting its heart around the Lantern Parade. The Lantern Parade kicks off Art on the BeltLine, that’s happening now. If you have time to go poking around there’s a ton of public art on the East and West side. There an app for it. There’s a series of performances for eight weeks, there’s eight curated miles of art. Art on the BeltLine. It’s five years old now, and all growed up.

DB: So did you grow up here, and how has the BeltLine grown compared to the influx of new residents and the changing consciousness of Atlanta?

CR: No I am a transplant. I thought I was just visiting. The city has become so exciting and it’s changed so much. I moved here from New Orleans in 2001. It didn’t feel bike-able then. Our ridership has gone up 400%. There is a vote up for a bond referendum for 15% funds to go to bike lanes. But more people are simply riding their bikes, without infrastructure. Same with the art scene, it’s blown up. Was it social media, was all that going on and we didn’t know about it? Or is there just a ground level explosion of stuff? LivingWalls is amazing, a murals project that’s been going on for five years now. They bring in eighty murals a year from artists from all over. Now it’s five years in. It’s really changed the way the city looks. The BeltLine is funded by a tax allocation district, the East side of the trail where my parade is, has generated $775 million. Just right around that two miles. So all the housing around the trail was not there five years ago.

DB: So after the completion of the BeltLine, this is potentially a tens of billions of dollars development plan.

CR: Uhuh, and people want to live on the BeltLine. It’s going to take forever to finish but it’s so cool. I need to go poking around to see if there’s anything affordable to live in left. The Old Fourth Ward park was a horrible drainage problem, and the feds came down on the city to fix it, so they turned it over to the BeltLine design team and now it’s the prettiest storm drain you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s gorgeous and it cost $30 million less than they thought. We got this. Instead of another tunnel under the ground it’s this beautiful park. People love the BeltLine. They’re complaining now that it’s too crowded. Which is funny.

DB: What a terrible problem to have, ha-ha.

CR: Over on the Westside, I have heard it called the whiteline. You go over there and no one is on it. But it isn’t making a neighborhood connection yet, like, you can’t go anywhere on it, it’s sort of a dead end. They are developing it equitably, thought. The Eastside was just first, largely due to a sizeable private donation. The Westside Trail

is being built out right now. The difference between the eastside and the southwest side of town in terms of economic development is huge. It’s not been equal at all.

DB: Black and white, quite literally.

CR: Yeah almost exactly black and white, and poor. So in three years there will be a Westside Trail BeltLine lantern parade. And I will figure out how to do that. We need the Westside to hold up a light for the BeltLine. I want the eastside to go into the westside, but we certainly need the west side to light it up!

DB: So do you envision several smaller communities within the BeltLine or do you see a unified Atlanta in the future? What will it look like after the completion [of the BeltLine]?

CR: Atlanta is a city of neighborhoods. It’s very easy to come here and take the train out of the airport, stay in a hotel downtown, and miss the art museum and midtown. You would be pressed to find Grant Park or Cabbagetown or all the little neighborhoods. I think the BeltLine will be a way for visitors to get to the neighborhoods, and a way for the neighborhoods to visit each other. Because I feel like you could write postcards from the West End to the Eastside. It’s a completely different [world] even though you’re only three miles away.

DB: Growing up in D.C. I had that same feeling. 16th street separated white and black D.C. I almost never crossed 14th street, not out of any cultural fear, but I simply didn’t have any ties. And it was a weird alien feeling going three miles east and not recognizing the neighborhood at all.

DB: So I’ve got to ask about your early life. Were you always a community parade artist?

CR: No, I’m sure I could have stayed in New Orleans and joined a krewe and been happy doing that.

DB: A crew? An arts crew?

CR: No, a krewewith a ‘k’. So Mardi Gras isn’t thrown by the city of New Orleans, it’s thrown by the Krewes. I’m the captain of the Krewe of the Grateful Gluttons here. I founded my Krewe in New Orleans and used it as a ruse to get my Atlanta friends to come to Mardi Gras. And then a divorce ran me out of town and I came to Atlanta, because my favorite people are here. But being displaced from this thing that I love… What I didn’t like about Atlanta became opportunities for me. I wandered off into civics. Previously I owned rental property, worked in restaurants, catering. Nothing that I really loved.

DB: It sounds like you found your passion and something you’re very good at. What is your day-to-day operation like as an organizer and an artist?

CR: Certainly no day is the same. Today I need to practice my TedxPeachtree talk a hundred times and turn in the slideshow. I have a lantern parade in the works for Grant Park. The workshop attendance is terrible and I need to figure out how to improve that. I’m going to hang out with the sponsors, the Grant Park Conservancy. Tonight we’re going to put together lantern kits. The workshops are sweet. People meet each other, and then at the parade it’s like seeing a long-lost relative. “You! I love you! Look what you did to your lantern, that’s gorgeous!”

DB: I guess you have picked up quite a few things about getting people together.

CR: Really, connecting people to place. People needed to fall in love with the BeltLine space. If people were in love with [Grant Park], they would care about it more. So the parade – when we lay down joyful blessings on a space and we love that space much more.

DB: I love this vocabulary. It’s so very foreign to me. It’s new and exciting to me to talk about people, place, identity and development.

CR: 

How to get people to fall in love with where they live. Because it changes everything when they love it. 

Half the time the difference between the good and bad neighborhoods is the damn trash on the ground. Why do some people have pride and clean that up? [It’s about] people’s ability to care, outside of their yard, outside of their neighborhood. And can you care about the city? The state? Can you care about the country? It gets vague as it drifts out. What does our capacity for caring look like? It definitely changes when people love a thing.

DB: Were there people of particular influence for you when you were around 25?

CR: I would say the people in my Krewe. I found my Atlanta friends in my 20s and I’ve pretty much been operating as this large group since. We want to hang out together all the time. In my recipe for happiness I would say great friends, time to play with them and gratitude. I talk about this in my TED talk: that our private parade play, what we do as friends, is an embarrassment of riches. It is such good stuff. How do you extend that out into the world? I can’t imagine not having that in my life. You know that social isolation is one of the number one things that’s killing people. And, I don’t know how to fix the transportation issue. I do know how to fix some social isolation. Like what can you do to make the world better? There’s plenty that you can’t do, but… you should probably just go start a krewe. Do you have a bunch of friends? Great, do stuff together a lot, be grateful for it and appreciate it. If you don’t, then find them. Find your people. I think that community is really important and it enriches our lives. I can’t imagine not having a lot of great friends.

DB: When you first said ‘krewe’ I thought, ‘Is that a gang?’

CR: Sometimes we are. I should have worn my Krewe shirt to show you. Yeah we have shirts.

DB: Do you go around Atlanta spray painting walls and skateboarding?

CR: Nah, it’s modeled after the New Orleans thing. Except in absence of other Krewes [in Atlanta] I changed it. Some of them actually recruit, they pay dues, they’ve got to raise money to do those crazy parades. So the Krewe’s membership isn’t open, but come do the thing, you don’t need to belong to do that.

DB: Yeah, it sounds like a club, structured and organized, a little bit of high school [clique], but it also sounds like the opposite. Open and comfortable.

CR: Yeah everyone’s welcome. One of the greatest things we do is the Gnome March. Seven years we’ve been doing this. We made it a world record attempt to make it clear that everyone is invited to dress up like a garden gnome and help bring global attention to important gnome issues…

DB: [snorts and laughs]. Yeah

CR: Gnomes have a lot of issues… fighting gnomophobia and legalizing weeds. About 200 people do it every year. We have never won the [world] record but there is no place like gnome. 

It’s just a really fun day. And that baffles people: “Why do you do this thing?!” ... For fun. 

People tend to think that anything fun can’t be important. Is fun not the most important thing?! As kids, we live for fun. The rest is just waiting… waiting for the next time you get to play.

DB: [sarcastically] What about accountability, responsibility, duty, honor, place in society? What about these things? Love? Family?

CR: When it’s good, it’s fun. I think our country suffers from time impoverishment. 

That people are living with a poverty of time. I think a lot of that is self-inflicted. A lot of people think play time isn’t legitimate. But leisure is the basis of culture! 

We need some time to kick around with friends. If you’re not being productive... blah blah blah. It’s okay.

DB: In college my friends were constantly riddled by anxiety because if they weren’t being incredibly productive with their time, they saw it as a waste and that they would reap the negative consequences of that. I’ve seen people get serious issues from not allowing themselves any leisure time. For not forgiving themselves for their unachievable objectives. I guess I see what you mean.

CR: I didn’t make up ‘leisure is the basis of culture.’ It’s this book that’s in my bathroom. It’s making a case for it, based in Greek philosophy. They believed that you need time to come up with stuff, take a walk, talk to others, play with your dog.

DB: I was in D.C. last summer looking for those places. When I was in South America there were those places where people just sit and look at other people, looking at them! Y’know? It’s very odd but it’s so good. I was looking for those places and I could only find them in the black or Latino neighborhoods [in D.C.]. And even those were being gentrified. I used to see the plaza, the park as the stoop where people loiter and mill about. But I realized, ‘that’s the most valuable public space, not the restaurants or shops.’ It’s hard to catch myself with those judgments.

CR: We are the richest country with the least amount of leisure time.

DB: Have you ever been to burning man?

CR: Yup.

DB: How’d you like it?

CR: Oh, I loved it. It’s a lot of work, fun work, but it’s not easy.

DB: It sounds a little dangerous too. There are real risks in going!

CR: Oh yeah, and it’s exciting. I was interested in learning metalworking. I did a workshop with this metal artist in town, Charlie Smith, and I got to help them build a burning man project. The workshop ended, and they were like, ‘well we’re doing it again tomorrow, you wanna hang out?’ I was definitely the least skilled person on this krewe but I loved it. It was hard, you have to wear head-to-toe clothing to weld… in July. You’re in the ceiling of this hot-as-shit warehouse. Sore from yesterday reaching to weld something you can’t reach. I’m like, ‘What are you doing Chantelle? What are you doing with your summer?!’ At some point they asked me if I wanted to come [to burning man]. Finally I was like, ‘Yes, I’d be crazy not to.’ We built these giant fire birds. I couldn’t not see them in their final form. And these people had been doing it for years, so it was like traveling with royalty. Their camp was this beautiful circus-grade tent with a living room and a bar in it. Everyone in the camp brings a handle of something. We were right on the front of the circle, and they could gate off our camp, they built a giant observation platform in front of it, so you could look out at all the stuff going on. They had friends at crane camp, I got to go ride up in a little loveseat that’s on a crane platform that they raise into the air.

DB: Oh! I was thinking you meant the bird!

CR: No, cranes! And they play with them! Like, if something good’s happening, you can tell because all the cranes go out there and circle it.

DB: [laughs], anthropomorphic machines. I don’t think I could handle myself out there. Other people seem to be so well adapted to that environment. One of the things I’m into is sculpture, kinetic or otherwise. Whenever I go to a new city I look for cool pieces that are notable. When I was a kid I loved marble rolls. There was this iron kinetic sculpture in my dad’s office building that I loved as a kid. I would sit there for hours and watch it go. Part of me is closing off that interest in creativity and expression, just because it’s not on my platter in these pre-designed career tracks. It’s hard to envision myself embracing it in my future life. But [expletive]!

CR: Big sculpture is really cool. Requiring engineering.

DB: Yeah! That’s kind of what’s sexy about it to me. It’s problem solving and expression all in one.

CR: 

I love to build big shit. It’s really fun.

DB: Recently I’ve been disillusioned with national involvement and activism. A lot of my friends are doing really good work in a more local capacity. It’s turned me on to working locally, either in local politics or in community non-profits and activism.

CR: I think it’s more rewarding because you can see it. On a national level you hope that it trickles out.

DB: Is that cheating? That you want to see the fruits of your labor?

CR: No. I try to keep politics out of my art projects, just because they’re so divisive. Ugg. I had an article published in the Atlanta Business Journal last week as a guest columnist. So I write the thing, send it to the PR firm, they send it back with a bunch of edits, I take most of the edits out and send it back to them. They promise they won’t change anything in it. I say thanks and they publish it. It comes out, “Chantelle Rytter, community parade activist” and I go, “No, no no!” People call me wanting me to lead marches. Maybe I’ll feel differently some other time in my life, but that’s not what I am into right now. I did bring my skeleton puppet to the Capital when Georgia arts funding was cut. I gave her a sign that said “Died of embarrassment from living in Georgia”. The funding was restored. I go to Georgia Rides to the Capital, supporting cycling in Georgia. If local politics impact my fun – that’s different!

--Check out Chantelle's recent work on her website, or videos of events on YouTube!

Interview with Jed Niffenegger, Traffic Engineer

Who doesn't find themselves in traffic wondering why signals are timed the way they are. But there is a greater logic to the traffic network than to streamline our personal commutes, and I wanted to talk to someone who is in the nitty-gritty of transportation operations. I googled Raleigh + Traffic Engineer and before I knew it I had an hour with Jed Niffenegger in downtown Raleigh the next day. Here is a snippet of our conversation on September 25th. 

DB: What is your official job title?

JN: I believe it’s Senior Transportation Engineer; I manage Raleigh’s transportation program.  

DB: And what does that entail?

JN: The traffic engineering program has about 44 people in it. And it’s broken up into a couple of things. The streets are divided into three entities: private streets, public -- which are either local jurisdiction (county, township, city) -- and state highway system. The feds are rolled into the state highway system because the states maintain them. In Raleigh we have about 1500 miles of road. We maintain the signs, the markings and the traffic signals for the entire area. Even the DOT roads: they reimburse us through a municipal agreement. (The rational is that they don’t have the staffing to do it… if you live in the city you pay a higher tax rate.  With this higher tax rate you expect a higher level of service so the city provides maintenance (can do so at a higher level).)

We also have a signal system, which is downstairs in the basement. What that is—we have twenty CCTV monitors, with pan, tilt and zoom so we can monitor traffic. We maintain six hundred traffic signals. They are all connected via fiber-optic cables. So we can run timing programs. A good example [he pulls out a map of the city with some thoroughfares highlighted in green]: We come up with corridors that we know have a predominant movement… this [pointing to one green line] will be inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening. [He points to a gap in an otherwise continuous green corridor] We get better ‘green band’, which is better movement of a platoon of vehicles, if we break it up. So, we have all these different corridor plans and we are constantly making changes because people’s driving behavior changes over time. We run multiple plans—for some of the big corridors we may run a plan from midnight to five a.m., then another for the a.m. peak, then there’s a break, and you might have a lunch plan, and then a break… so they do that in the signal system.

In addition to that, we’ve got the streetlight program. We lease about 32,000 streetlights from Duke Energy. All cities pretty much have streetlights; most of them all lease them. We are in the process of upgrading them to LEDs – they provide a bit better light dispersion (so when you’re driving down the road, they’re a little more consistent).

We also have the red light camera program which is actually very contentious, which dumbfounds me a little bit. We run our [program] completely differently from others. We pick locations that have a high frequency of angle crashes, or ‘t-bones’, which tend to be more severe. We’ve had whitepapers done, documentation, that show that these devices, when located appropriately, decrease red light run and therefore angle crashes and increase safety. The way the program works is we pay a third-party vendor to do it, and the fee that we collect pays for that. I have one staff that does all the approvals… you got your degree in meteorology?

DB: I did…

JN: He did too, hah hah. He got his masters in civil engineering. So he’s running that program now. Then I have something called a traffic-calming program, which is also very contentious.

DB: What is that?

JN: Most cities have them… 

A lot of the older infrastructure was built around a vehicle-centric mode of transportation. It’s not as friendly for walking or cycling, and there’s a big push for bike lanes and more sidewalks and greenways.

Also they often laid [the old roads] out in a straight line. Well if you have a straight line vehicles tend to go fast. So streets with demonstrated speed compliance issues, we can go in and install speed humps, or horizontal deflection devices (like put a median here, then a bump out there and a bump out here) and create a weaving effect, which slows traffic. That’s pretty much the gamut of the programs I have.

DB: Yeah, I’ve seen the weaving effect on streets in my hometown… it’s effective. Annoying, but effective.

JN: Yeah the humps are what [we hear] are really annoying.

DB: How long have you been working with the City of Raleigh?

JN: I started in the summer of ’06.

DB: And what kind of budget do you work with now?

JN: My operating budget is probably around… [opens large binder] ten or twelve million dollars. And that’s just operating costs. I also have capital improvement program funds. The fiber optic signal system upgrade was a $28M project, so we had to manage that. Every year for the employee salary, contracts, equipment, all the materials and supplies, it’s about ten to twelve million.

DB: And where were you before the City of Raleigh.

JN: Well, I kind of did what you are doing. When I was in college I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Math was always easy for me. And a friend of mine, his father ran a construction company. I always liked building stuff, tinkering with stuff, y’know. Some people’s minds are just wired like that, they’re mechanically inclined. So I went to [North Carolina] State for engineering straight out of high school. I didn’t really have a compass forward. I just kind of kept going. I thought maybe I wanted to do Architecture, I took some classes and decided I didn’t like that at all. So I finished up in Civil Engineering with an option in Construction Management. And when I graduated the economy was just booming and I kind of got caught up in that. Companies were flying recruiters down to try to get kids straight out of college because the work was so plentiful. I got caught up in that and took a job. I only worked for a couple of days before I said, ‘What am I doing?’ Because originally I wanted to do like you, I wanted to travel. I couldn’t find anyone to travel far with, so I was doing trips in North Carolina. I still didn’t have any direction. I asked around and people said, ‘Why don’t you go to NCDOT, they have a great training program. You’re not going to work long hours, but you’ll get a good foot in the door. And if you’re going to work in transportation, everyone has to use DOT standards.’ So I applied and got a job. I worked there, and the first three years I was just out having fun and wasn’t really thinking about professional careers. If you’re an engineer there’s something called being a Professional Engineer – a P.E. There’s two parts to it: You take what’s called Fundamentals of Engineering (an exam, usually straight out of school) And it’s pretty much an SAT for engineering. It’s an eight-hour test. [I mime shooting myself] Yeah. And if you pass it you’ve got to work four years under an engineer. And then you have to apply to take the P.E. [exam]. Well about that time I was tired of working at the DOT. At the time, their benefits package was set up where (kind of a flaw)if you work five years you were fully vested (meaning, whenever you were ready to retire you got their health insurance).

DB: Oh my god, yeah. Flaw for them, great for you.

JN: Now it’s twenty-five years, but back then it was five. So I got my P.E. and right at five years I didn’t have any job. So I took a cross-country trip like you’re doing trying to figure out what to do with myself. And I love rock climbing, surfing, skiing, I like being outside. I thought, ‘Maybe I want to do something I’m a little more passionate about.’ Well, I talked to a lot of people, met a lot of people. I came to the realization that, when your passion becomes your job, a lot of the times your passion…

DB: Dies out?

JN: …yeah. The other thing: in a lot of these jobs you’re guiding someone climbing. It’s not a very high-paying job. So the grass is greener. “You can go climbing on the weekends and still make a decent living” 

And the consensus I got from talking to people was: live your life to the fullest on the weekends, and find a job that you’re reasonably happy with. 

So I came back. I started applying, I got a few offers, one to do roadway design and construction management-type stuff. That job was: hire an engineering firm, oversee them, go to all the public meetings, do all the public interaction, go to city council, do all that. And then, once everything got approved, then go to construction. I managed the construction projects, worked with  the inspectors,  do the pay invoices, make sure NCDOT is happy, make sure all the regulatory red tape is done. Or sometimes we do the design in-house. I worked there about a year and a half and then got promoted over to here, which is traffic engineering. I knew about traffic engineering, but didn’t have any formal training. Then when I got here I got more and more programs put under me. So that’s where I’m at today.

DB: How did they come to trust you with these programs? Did you just get on-the-job experience.

JN: Maybe I’m a quick learner. I knew some of it when I came in. I wasn’t that clueless. Because when you go to school you learn a little about a lot. I already had a little knowledge, and there’s a little bit of a learning curve, but it came pretty quickly. Learning never stops. It’s a little different than college where it’s so intense where you’re cramming for a final, versus maybe going to Spain for a year and by the end you’re speaking fluent Spanish. It’s a little like that. A little bit of osmosis.

DB: I’m very thirsty for a work environment where I feel like I could absorb anything through osmosis.

JN: I think if you have an open mind and you listen to people, that can come pretty quickly. But you need an environment where people are willing to talk to you about what they do. When I was at DOT it was like cube city. Do you remember that movie Office Space? It was like that, it just wasn’t—I couldn’t do it. Like a rat in a cage.

DB: That’s the opposite of the dream. Did you ever have any other career paths that you considered other than traffic engineering?

JN: 

To be honest, when I went to school I didn’t know what I wanted to do. When I graduated I still didn’t know. This just kind of fell on me. I like what I’m doing now. Will I be doing it ten years from now? I don’t know.

DB: Is that what you mean by, ‘I’m probably not the typical guy to talk to’?

JN: Some people are very career motivated. I will say I work very hard and I take my work very seriously. I think that’s probably resulted in where I’m at today. Not anything due to applying to all positions – like I didn’t even want to apply for this position. I got asked a couple of times by a few people saying, ‘you should apply.’ I really like what I’m doing, I like my staff, and I think we are making changes. I like the idea of civil servitude. In engineering you can either go public or private. If you go public, what you’re doing is projects for DOT or municipalities. And then there’s the other side, the private engineers who are working for developers, and that might not be in the best interest for the general public. They always have to bo attentive of billable hours like an attourny. My role is to look out for all 400,000 residents, not one specific one. Civil Engineering, in my humble opinion, is a profession that is more suited to civil servitude. We are building infrastructure. Infrastructure is something that everyone needs. That’s my take anyway.

DB: So, what’s your day-to-day like?

JN: Uhh [pulls up his calendar, which has three to six appointments every single day.] Sometimes it’s lighter, sometimes I get double- or triple-booked. Meetings and meetings and meetings. I have a shop downtown. The shop has 31 individuals and the admin, 32. One part is signs, one part is signals. So the signal part has all these cabinets, electrical things, and parts. The sign shop is full fabrication. We can make any sign (except interstate signs). We get the blanks from department of corrections, we sheet them with a high-intensity prismatic sheeting, and FHWA mandates all this stuff. So they go out there and install all of the signs. They also do pavement markings using something called thermoplastic, which is a plastic that uses heat to apply – the yellow and white lines. It has glass beads embedded in it to be reflective. It is unbelievably durable. We also do something called the visual obstruction program where they check the sight triangles, which make sure you have adequate unimpeded lines of sight for oncoming traffic. The other component of the job is just emails – I probably get one hundred plus per day. A lot of them from citizens, a lot from elected officials or my boss, a lot from staff. 

You’ve just got to prioritize fires: which one’s the worst, and put it out. 

I’ll be doing emails at night. I also have public meetings quite a bit.

We are a growing city. We are exponentially growing. There are some four hundred thousand residents and we’re supposed to be eight hundred thousand in ten or twenty years. The problem is that we have to work very closely with all the other departments. Next to me, David Eaton, he runs the transportation program, all the CAT busses. He manages all of that. They keep talking about a half-cent sales tax for a light rail between Durham and Chapel Hill, but Wake County hasn’t voted on it yet. The other thing is, because the city is a lot smaller than the state, we interact with elected officials a lot more. Which… [long pause] they’re elected officials. They have constituents that have complaints, which sometimes are legitimate and sometimes are not. We have to deal with all four hundred thousand people. One doesn’t get priority over the next. If there is an emergency issue or a safety issue we deal with those first.

DB: And I feel like traffic is one of those things citizens single out first when looking to complain.

JN: Yep, we get calls from attorneys once or twice a week. We have six hundred signals we maintain and you’ve heard the term ‘ambulance chasers’ right? They come after us. The reason is, the state has a liability cap at $500,000, municipalities don’t. So they come after us. And attorneys actually know this MUTCD [motions at boat anchor on his desk] almost as well as we do. And it doesn’t matter if a signal has a component that malfunctioned over here [left hand] and the crash occurred over here [right hand. If it goes to a juried trial, some of this stuff is complex anda jury may not comprehends it Usually we have a law suit pending, one that we know is coming, and one that’s ongoing. We work with the police quite a bit regarding that. A lot of times they’ll ask us for our expertise regarding what the signal function was doing, trying to get a better understanding of the situation at large so they can charge or not charge the person(s) appropriately.

DB: Wow you have a lot on your plate!

JN: Oh! That’s another thing, the safety program. I have one staffer in the safety program and what he does is… There are around 20,000 reported crashes, and there are a lot that go unreported (on public right-of-way, this isn’t including parking lots). We file those, every year. The police reports range from really good to the other end of the spectrum. [On his computer Jed shows me a crash diagram for a particular intersection, derived from two years of police reports. A dozen rear-end crashes are listed at each of the entrances to the intersection. A half-dozen angle and side-swipe crashes are diagrammed in the middle, some with circles to indicate injuries.] Any time you have a signal there are going to be rear-end crashes. Not to say we don’t care about those, but those usually aren’t the ones that warrant our attention. The angle crashes are the ones [we focus on]. [Jed deftly navigates file folders by cross streets]

DB: I bet you know this city like the back of your hand.

JN: [Nods in assent]. Most of the conflict points occur right at the intersection. So we go out and try installing counter measures, change the signalization to mitigate the crashes. It can be a minor thing, like right around the capital there were a bunch of crashes from people running the red light. So we put the T-heads, the dual reds at the top, and crashes have been cut in half. 

So little things like that and five people didn’t get in an angle crash. So that’s a kind of warm-and-fuzzy feeling.

DB: That’s great! That’s awesome. Is there a lag between countermeasures and measuring the improvements?

JN: Of course. [Measuring improvements] is something that, the more time you give it, the better. But you don’t want to give it too much time because traffic increases. The sweet spot that we typically look at is three years. But if we make a countermeasure, we will typically see a substantial drop in crashes after the first year.

DB: Do you ever have problems with staff turnover?

JN: Well, any job has turnover, but DOT and the private sector seems like a revolving door. I’ll deal with a consultant and, ‘Oh I’m no longer here, here’s my new card.’ The staff I have is really good and I have very little turnover. The majority has been people retiring. We have a pension system, which is nice. You work 30 years for the city, and they take your four highest-paying years, average them, and you get about sixty percent of that [every year] until you die. And that’s why no one does pensions anymore.

DB: Yep, because they were just too sweet. My generation’s screwed.

JN: Yeah. 

Interview with Destin Sandlin: Rocket Scientist and YouTube Science Educator

The man behind the popular science YouTube channel Smarter Every Day is animated, curious and well-spoken. Something about each of his videos brings me back to childhood. Back then every day was full of exploration, experimentation and wonder (a nascent practice of the scientific method). Destin Sandlin may be infinitely childlike in his curiosity, but I can't think of many higher virtues than that. I got to talk with Destin in Huntsville, Alabama while he was on lunch break from his day job as a test flight engineer at the Redstone Test Center. Here are some highlights from our talk:

Duncan Belew: Where were you when you were 24?

Destin Sandlin: I was married and about to have my first child. I didn’t actually have the child, my wife did. I felt like I was part of it. I was three and a half years into my career already and I had just finished putting [my wife] through physician’s assistant school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and we were about to have our first baby. And I was about to start YouTube, I just didn’t know that yet.

DB: Had you gotten your masters at that point?

DS: No. I got a career first, and I got back and got my masters degree at night. It’s a hard way of doing it. Especially if you already have a child. But that’s what it is.

DB: I bet your time was divided very stressfully between being a dad and doing Smarter Every Day (SED).

DS: My wife enables me to do a lot. She helps me by giving me time to work on stuff and giving me focus. The running joke amongst friends is that I’m like a monkey, and if there’s anything shiny to distract me. Like for example if we’re in restaurants I can’t face the TV. I can’t do it. So she’s like a lens that focuses my efforts into more like a laser beam or something.

DB: Can I ask how y’all met?

DS: We met in Physics. I went to physics class and she was sitting in the front row and I was sitting three or four rows back and I was like, ‘Man, that is a beautiful specimen of a human being right there.’ And if I could ever approach a girl of that caliber then man, that would be amazing. Sure enough, we got married. 

DB: What was your earlier education like, before college?

DS: Well there are two types of education: there’s the formal education in school and then there’s the education outside of it. And my dad was the main thrust of my education outside of school. He always made sure I was learning things, like ways to work with my hands. As a junior in high school that could barely drive I was changing the break pads on the truck, right? Which I think is a pretty big deal. So dad would have me work on the cars and stuff. Not anything big, but that kind of stuff I value just as much as the formal education.

DB: Absolutely, that sounds way more valuable—well, complementary.

DS: Well yeah as far as surviving, it is probably more valuable than learning how to, like, factor polynomials.

DB: On that note, what skills did you learn in school that you still use today, if any?

DS: My favorite skill is probably trigonometry. You can use the mess out of some trigonometry. … I had an English teacher who’s name was Ms. Rushen (that makes sense right?), and she taught me how to write coherent thoughts in long essay form. Basically how to tell a story and [have] it make sense. And the running joke was ‘Destin’s a science dude, what on earth is he doing in this class?’ It was AP English and she was really hard on me but we loved each other. She would always make fun of how I wrote, but she did it in a way that I knew that she was correcting me.

Being able to write and communicate a thought clearly is a huge deal. So when I make Smarter Every Day episodes I’m just communicating one big thought.

And so it comes back to how Ms. Rushen taught me how to write. You really need to be a well-rounded individual.

DB: In Asheville there’s a huge community of science communicators whose job it is to make sure that the science that people produce is understood by the public and decision makers. I feel like that’s a huge deal.

DS: That’s what I’ve found, is that scientists are great at gathering data and making sense of it, but we’re not very good at communicating it. I did a video a couple of days ago on a shrimp. It is an incredible thing that these research scientists have done at Harvard and University of California at Riverside and over in Singapore. They’ve done incredible work, it just hadn’t been communicated. I feel that once you communicate it, people get really excited about it. It has to be in a story form.

DB: Speaking of people across international communities, do you see anything on the internet or in [scientific] papers or just talking to people that really gets you fired up?

DS: I think we should have astronauts on the moon right now.

DB: Right now?

DS: Like yesterday.

DB: Why is that?

DS: Think about it. We did it back in the sixties, clearly we understand the technology to do it. People are like, ‘Oh we already went to the moon.’ Well the moon is a staging area. It’s only a few days from home if something goes wrong. Why do we not have a dude giving me a daily video blog from the moon? Granted the blog would be like, ‘Yep. Still dark. Still very desolate and barren.’ (Both laugh) Y’know? But still he would be living up there and learning how to survive in a space environment for an extended period of time. And he has one-sixth the gravity that we have on Earth, which is something you’re not going to have flying around on a space ship. We need to be doing it just so we learn how to do it. Just like when the European explorers came over to the New World, they had to learn how to live off the land. Why are we not learning that on the moon?

DB: I’ve talked to people in the last 24 hours that say we should retract all that money and worry about problems here on Earth, and I understand their point, because if you’re not lit by the curiosity to explore space, and if you don’t see the advantages – medical, technological, just understanding our experience here on Earth – then I guess you would think that it was a waste of taxpayer dollars.

DS: No, it’s not a waste. My grandfather worked on the space program. And that blew my mind, and it made me want to do things like that. So if nothing else, it inspires a generation to be explorers, right? 

Exploration doesn’t have to happen in an unknown area. But it does have to happen in an area that we don’t completely understand.

I just did a video on the Mantis Shrimp – Mantis Shrimp are all over the oceans, all over the world right? There’s a lot to explore there. Exploration has to happen, but the first step to that is making people want to explore. The space program undeniably has made millions and millions want to explore.

DB: Only so many people can go up in space, so people have to find another way to [explore]. That’s awesome. I found that a lot of kids my age and younger aren’t touched by that inspiration, the age of exploration in the sixties and seventies, and so it’s really cool to see a new channel (no pun intended) of curiosity driving exploration on the internet.

DS: We really need to be on the moon, dag-gummit.

DB: You’ve got how many kids, four?

DS: Four and one on the way… Excuse me, three and one on the way. Yeah. I can’t math, I’m sorry.

DB: Ha ha, how old is the oldest?

DS: She is seven.

DB: So imagine you’re oldest daughter is twenty-one or whatever, my age, and she is about to embark on a big chapter of her life. If you had this golden, uninterrupted moment to impart the most important wisdoms to her, what would you tell her?

DS: I would hope that my daughter will carefully consider all her decisions and not necessarily make the decision that makes her feel good, or makes her happy, but that she knows in the long run will bring her the most joy. 

I think if you focus on yourself and try to make yourself happy, then you’re doomed to fail. But if you focus on making others happy and serving others, then you will find true joy. 

I mean, I’m a Christian and that’s how I feel. People think that you’re supposed to focus on happiness. And you’re really not. From the faith perspective, nowhere does Jesus talk about, ‘Go ye therefore and be happy,’ no. He says all the opposite things like, ‘do the hard stuff,’ ‘serve other people’ and ‘care about other people more than you care about yourself.’ If you focus on trying to make yourself happy you’re going to fail.

DB: Yeah, and that’s not the perspective I normally hear in the ‘noise.’

DS: I mean it’s the same way with marriage. If you focus on what you’re getting out of your marriage, you will fail. But if you focus on giving in your marriage, then even if you’re not getting things then you’re still successful because you’re giving. You just need to be other-centric, instead of self-centric. So that would be my advice. Not to the point of being exploited and used. Be cunning and know when people are trying to take advantage of you. But at the same time focus on serving other people. Does that make sense? Is that the kind of answer you were after?

DB: No, but that was a great answer! I wasn’t really after anything.

DS: Yeah, see I wanted to be an engineer just because that’s how my mind works, and I like helping people see the world differently. That’s why I do Smarter Every Day. It would be a lot easier to not do SED. But we do it a) because it’s fun, and b) because we really feel like [my wife and I] help people get to see the world differently. I have a friend and he’s becoming a doctor so that he can help kids in South America. Which is awesome. That’s very other-centric. And so I think that you’ll find that the people who focus on themselves the least end up being more joyful.

DB: I’ve noticed that some of your videos you end with a quote from [the bible].

DS: Yeah one of the ones I use a lot is from Psalms. It says, “Great are the works of the Lord studied by all who delight in them.” And that verse came from the doors to Cavendish Laboratory where Faraday discovered the electron.

DB: Woah!

DS: Yeah it’s pretty hardcore stuff.  And I [end videos with that verse] because I get my inspiration from trying to figure out how the world was created, and however you feel that came about, you’ve got to ask yourself questions. For me I ask questions about how the world is set up. That verse is about curiosity. That’s the word that I draw my inspiration from because I think of the world as the work of a creator. I don’t care how you think it came about. For example the bird that’s looking at us right there (there is a pigeon on our table). Everything about that bird is amazing: the bones in the legs are hollow in a round form in the cross section, and they have the most material on the outside. When I first learned about the buckling equation in mechanics and materials, I said, ‘Holy cow! That’s how bones are built!’ Because you have the most strength with the least amount of material. When I started learning things like that it was clear to me that everything around me had an incredible amount of order, even though it’s so complicated and it appears to be disorder. I just realized once I took one or two steps closer then you could see the order in it. … 

People think that you’re supposed to be close-minded if you have faith and that’s not it at all. It’s about using your mind and being intellectually honest, and being willing to admit when you’re wrong.

DB: Speaking of curiosity, has it ever been a burden to be so lit by a compulsion to understand everything?

DS: Not at all. I enjoy it. It makes life more interesting. It makes life more abundant I would say. It makes my life really fun I think.

DB: And thank you for sharing that with other people. We delight from it too.

DS: I think everybody is interested in the same stuff, once they understand how much we don’t know.

DB: Traveling! You’ve done a lot. Some of the places I can think of are Peru and the Amazon. Where else?

DS: I’ve been to two cities where they leave to go to Antarctica, but I’ve never actually been to Antarctica. I’ve been to Hobart, Tasmania and that was a few weeks ago. I actually saw an ice crusher, a big orange one. It had a neat name like the Aurora Australis or something like that. But I got to see that boat from afar. And then I’ve also been to Christchurch… ah, I can’t remember whether it’s Christchurch or Wellington where they go down to Antarctica from.

DB: Is that in Patagonia?

DS: New Zealand. I can’t remember which one they actually leave for Antarctica from. Yeah but it would be neat.

DB: Yeah I really hope you get to do that some day. What keeps you going back to these places?

DS: I mean, in Peru (I’m going there in October) we’re working on an orphanage. Some friends of mine started an organization called Not Forgotten and they are trying to break the cycle of abandonment in this little town called Iquitos. Well, I say ‘little town,’ but it’s like four hundred thousand. This big town, but you can’t access it from roads, there are no roads. There’s this one road out and it goes to a city called Nalta, and that’s it. So everything’s flown in or brought in on boats called Peki-pekis. I keep going back there because I want to help with the progress of the orphanage that these guys are working on. It’s awesome. The way it works is: kids get abandoned because their mothers have too many children, and because they keep trying to satisfy the man. Like we were talking about earlier, the man is self-centered so he abandons his family. So then the boys grow up and that’s the only example of fatherhood they’ve seen and so they repeat it. So if we can break that cycle and show them, ‘hey this is what authentic fatherhood looks like,’ then at least with the next generation we can break this cycle and help them understand what it means to be a father. That’s why I keep going back to Peru. I keep going back to Australia because they invite me and it’s awesome. I don’t know when I’m going to get back to Africa.

DB: Where have you been in Africa?

DS: Just on the west side. My sister was a Peace Corps volunteer so I went and visited her there, my friend was as well. He was in the Gambia and my sister was in Sierra Leone. And I go back to Europe also for various reasons.

DB: Of all the stuff you’ve done in the five or six years you’ve been doing Smarter Every Day, what is the coolest one fact you’ve learned?

DS: Fact? I mean the knowledge itself is not the end goal. It’s the path of discovery. It’s the journey between those two points that’s so interesting. So you go from knowledge to understanding and then I take other people along that path with me. That’s what’s so fun. We could be learning about anything and I think I would enjoy it about the same. … I really enjoyed the Prince Rupert’s drop, which was obviously fun. I’ve got a couple of things that I haven’t released yet that were really stinking fun. Every time I interact with the thing I still remember how I learned about it.

DB:  Hah that’s cool, and I look forward to seeing this thing.

DS: When people ask me that question I always think about this one video that I created that hardly anyone has watched. It’s called Why You Didn’t Die at Birth. It’s how you go from a liquid environment in your mother’s womb, to being able to breathe.

DB: I feel like I have no idea how that works.

DS: Yeah I didn’t either, so I created a video about it with my son. As he was being born. And it was a very emotional, stressful experience for me. Like, a blood vessel popped in my eye, that’s how stressed I was. But it was really really cool. So when I watch that video, it’s like I’m looking back at somebody else. I can see Destin, this young man who’s all stressed out, and I can see all the fears and hopes and dreams I have for my family at that specific moment in time. I can see that play out throughout the video. And I’m about to go through all that again. I’m probably going to go watch that [video again] in the next few weeks to prepare me.

DB: Is it going to be a source of comfort or will it get you stressed all over again?

DS: Heh, it enhances my faith, that’s for sure. Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see.

DB: What I’ve always wanted to ask people is how do you know you still love to do what you do, y’know?

DS: Well ask yourself what you would do if you didn’t get paid. What is that thing you love that you have to do, that’s like a fire in your bones and if you don’t do it you’ll catch on fire and turn into a pile of ash? Do that thing. Even if it means you live in a trailer and you’re not able to afford fancy things for your wife. Because if you’re smart about the wife you chose, she’s not going to care either because she’s going to do what she loves. Don’t rush to failure. You only get one shot at life and you might as well enjoy it. 

Doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy, but you can be joyful. There’s a difference between the two. I’m not always happy. But I do feel joy.

DB: In the times that you feel disappointed or frustrated, how do you deal with it?

DS: I have an eternal perspective. Meaning: I know that this too shall pass. Whatever the heck it is, this is going to pass. It is something that I can’t really explain to people that don’t have the same perspective that I do. I’m not saying—please don’t misunderstand me – that I have some secret knowledge. I’m just saying that I have a very long-term view on life. And that I understand I have a limited amount of time, and I only control what we’re doing right now. Like right this moment, it’s the only point I can control. 

I can’t control five minutes from now, and I can’t control five minutes ago. I can only control right now.

So if your life is a mathematical function, your life is going to have ups and downs. You are either on the up-slope or the down-slope. You’re never neutral. I’m not talking about success in terms of how other people think. I’m just talking about how you are affecting your own life. You just need to make advances towards the top by helping others, try to affect other people’s lives for good, be other-centric and realize that this is going to pass. Focus on the long-term goals not the short ones. What are your long-term goals?

DB: Being a successful father. That’s really what my ten-year plan is.

DS: Really. What is success? You have to have a metric right?  You have to quantify to see where you are on the function. You’re not always going to be successful; you’re going to mess up, just a heads up. You’re going to say something (I’m not talking about screaming at your child) but you’re going to say something that scares your child emotionally.

DB: Like, ‘Hey, you’re going to die someday.’ ‘What?!’

DS: Yeah, exactly. You’re going to say things that your child doesn’t understand. And when you do those things just apologize and move on. Forgiveness and grace are really good things. And they have made a huge impact on my life. 

You can learn more about Destin by watching my new favorite video (or any of his videos) on Smarter Every Day

Interview with Sheila Cummings, Aerospace Engineer and CEO

     Sheila Cummings is an inspiring entrepreneur and engineer. I met with her on September 2nd to talk about her career, her passions and goals, and how she has acclimated to the real world without sacrificing who she is. Her office is situated in the largest university research park in the country in Huntsville, AL. We had this conversation over lunch: 

DB: You got your degree from UMD College Park. They have a great engineering program right?

SC: They do, they have a great engineering program. When I went there on a college tour I was amazed at the campus. There was this huge tank for training astronauts –

DB: The neutral buoyancy tank, yeah!

SC: And I was like, “Ok, where do I sign up!”

DB: Ok, so put yourself in my shoes: you just graduated with a B.S. in some STEM discipline… How do you go from there to owning your own company?

SC: Well, ironically I never dreamed of owning my own company but it was working for others that I was never quite satisfied. It was just like, ‘gosh I have so many ideas for how to do things better.’ My first few years in my career, I thought, ‘It’s just because I’m the lowest man on the totem pole’, and then after a while it was like, ‘I’m never going to have a voice in this organization’. So then I started looking for another opportunity where I could bring my ideas to the table and where I could contribute. So I joined a small business that allowed me to do that. And the first couple of years, it was just fabulous. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. I just happened to build a rapport with the management team and I did a lot of hard work to prove myself. Next thing you know, I’m VP running this major business unit. And I found along the way that there were certain things that I was really good at: the business side of engineering, the customer relations.

DB: Sounds like a lot of leadership skills.

SC: Yeah, and I was good at that. So it just all worked. And then of course, as organizations do change, new leadership came in and the dynamics were different and I was like, ‘OK, it’s time for me to do something different.’ Several friends of mine were like, “Aren’t you going to start your own [company]?’ I thought about that for a few months and I was like, ‘Hey I think I can do it.’

DB: That’s great! And that was 2009?

SC: Yep. And y’know I started with a plan and an approach and then the sequestration hit and I had to come up with a different plan. Learning to be dynamic and recognize you don’t have all the answers – I can quit and go home or I can change plans and find something different. Let’s look at this business a different way and see what we can make of it. So here we are five years later and things are going pretty well.

DB: A lot of people say that my generation will have three to five very different careers in our lives. Did you always know you wanted to be an Aerospace Engineer, and if not, how did you come to that decision.

SC: Well, actually... 

I always wanted to be a fighter pilot. And even in high school I did ROTC and was prepared to go into the Air Force. I took the exam, I scored really well, and I went down to sign up with the recruiter, and he said to me, “…You’re going to make a great nurse.”

DB: Are you kidding me?

SC: No. And I just said, “Huh? You don’t understand. I have this plan, I want to be a pilot.”

“Well, y’know the Air Force needs nurses.” And I just said I can’t do that. I cannot be a nurse. I’ve done all this preliminary work. I don’t know if it was the recruiter I talked to that day or what. I thought, ‘There’s no way, I cannot be a nurse.’

DB: That must have been devastating.

SC: It was devastating, and my family said, ‘look you go to college, you get a degree and you’ll have your pick [of careers] when you come out, as long as you do well academically. ‘Ok, well I’m going to do engineering for aerospace.’

DB: It’s funny that you met that hurdle with the military because of, I’m assuming, your gender, and then you decide to go into the STEM fields with probably just as many barriers [for women]. Did you encounter any more things like that?

SC: Oh yeah. My junior year in college I met my now-ex-husband and was pregnant with my first child. And my propulsion professor told me that I should just go home and wait until after I had had my child and come back and try college later. 

And I was like, ‘Oh my god! You just lit the biggest fire in me, are you kidding me?’

DB: Kind of did the exact opposite of what he intended.

SC: Yeah. In the early parts of my career, it was clear that I was in the man’s world and there were lots of men in leadership, there were no women in leadership at the organization I worked for anywhere except the secretaries. It became very apparent that structures were in place that were working against me. All of that contributed to me working for this small business where women were in leadership roles, where it was clear that I was respected for my contributions and I was evaluated fairly. That obviously shaped me as a leader of an organization and how I look at people and the opportunities that I give to others, and how I evaluate them. Ultimately it’s made me who I am today, and at some level it lights a fire in me.

DB: In all of your years of experience with gender-related injustice, what is something I can do as a man to open doors, or to not impede the way for women in my field?

SC: I think one of the things you can do is to make sure you’re treating everyone the same. Regardless of what role you have, the people you have the opportunity to interact with, whether they be employees or students or mentors or whatever, look at them the same. Treat them the same. Have an open mind and recognize that everybody is different and everybody brings value in different ways. If you can find a way to tap into people’s strengths, you’ll see that that is incredible. It is truly rewarding to see the individual strengths of the people on my team and to play those strengths together. It’s awesome when it all comes together. It’s what it ultimately is all about, is whether you can make that synergy work for what it is you’re working on. Making sure you’re treating everybody fairly. It’s easy to follow the stereotypes. Not that you intend to discriminate…

DB: …But you don’t check those predispositions that are put in your head.

SC: And they’re everywhere, yeah.

DB: I didn’t know that Space Camp was in Huntsville. I always thought that it was in Florida or something!

SC: Yep. It’s a great camp. Two of my kids have gone through the camp there.

DB: Lucky, lucky! How old are your kids?

SC: My oldest is going to be 20 in October, she’s a junior at UA Tuscaloosa; my middle son is seventeen, he’s a senior at Sparkman; and my youngest is a sixth grader, he’s twelve.

DB: So they’re all at different points in their development. That’s cool.

SC: My daughter had a very clear plan for what she wanted to do. She had known for a long time that she wanted to study journalism. In high school she laid out her courses to get to Alabama to go to the Journalism and Communications college. Over the years she’s developed an interest in politics so she’s looking at political science and law school. My son, he’s the total opposite. He’s like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’

DB: So if I were one of your children sitting across from you right now and you had this golden, uninterrupted moment to impart wisdom to them that they would take with them for the rest of their lives, what would you tell them?

SC: I would say find your passion and pursue it. Whatever it is. Pursue it with everything you have. If it’s art or sculpture, fine. Figure out a way to employ yourself, but pursue your passion. I wanted to be a fighter pilot, and I pursued that with vigor. When somebody put an obstacle in my way I found ways to maneuver around that obstacle and that ultimately created a path for me that I never would have envisioned I would have ever been on, but it’s been this journey and it’s been very rewarding for me. Find what you love and do it. And sometimes that’s the hardest part, [finding your passions]. But look at what you enjoy doing, look at what your interests are, and pursue them. My daughter has worked in underprivileged communities in mission work, internationally. She’s been to China; she’s been to Venezuela. What if you want to make a difference in those countries... you have to be involved in the policy, so I’m trying to show her how being in international policy and how a law degree will allow her to be in a position helping to implement those policies. Yeah, she could go and be a missionary… but an alternative would be to have a degree that allows you to work internationally. But if you don’t have any money, you can’t help people who don’t have any money.

DB: “Put your oxygen mask on before you put on your child’s.”

SC: Right.

DB: That’s something that’s very important to me. I have this, I wouldn’t call it guilt, but this acute awareness of disadvantage and inequality in the world and a compulsion to do something about it, as a lot of young people have in the world. It sounds like you’re advocating for, ‘Yes, you can do it the hard way, yes you can get your hands dirty, or you can affect policy, y’know, look at the big picture.”

SC: Right. Being active in our community is very, very important for me as a business owner, as well as for our employees. But it takes money to do that. Ultimately putting yourself in the position to where you have those resources or you can raise the resources to get involved and make a difference. Sometimes you have to look at … how do you make the biggest difference with people who don’t have clean water? Is it, ‘do you build dams?’, ‘do you bring them the technology that allows them clean water?’, or ‘do you just ship in water?’. 

You have to look back at the fundamental problem, how do you help these people to be sustaining in the long term?

DB: This sounds like an engineer’s point of view.

(Both laugh)

DB: That’s funny, I’ve been more and more aware of the black-and-white thinking of kids like me. These eco-anarchists and anti-corporate liberals, partisan zealots (and I am one of them admittedly) but I’m increasingly aware that we’re not seeing the whole picture, we’re not seeing the grayscale, we’re not seeing the in-between-the-lines.

SC: And that’s natural because it takes a certain amount of experience to see the whole picture, and it takes exposure to see the [whole] problem. But the good thing about your generation is that you force others to reexamine their position, re-think their decision, what it is that they think is right or wrong. So we all help each other see the picture at a different angle or different perspective and ultimately come up with a better solution, then I think we are all better off.

DB: Are you saying that our naïveté has a place in life? (Both laugh) That’s reassuring. It’s not completely useless. Good.

Sheila Cummings is CEO of Cummings Aerospace in Huntsville, AL. 

Huntsville, AL

     I arrived in Huntsville, Alabama at around nine o'clock (ten o'clock EST). I bought some groceries and rolled into Ditto Landing camper park about half an hour outside the city. I have a pop-up tent from approximately nineteen seventy-four that has quite a few patched holes in it and the fabric has long since lost its waterproof quality. I threw that thing up, then put together a sandwich, and slept. 

     This morning I cleaned up and headed to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, which is home to Space Camp. Yes, the Space Camp. I always thought it was in Florida or something. It turns out after the depression and the fall of the cotton mill industry here, the U.S. military came in during the second World War and set up munitions factories. Ever since then this city has been a hub for the aerospace, defense and engineering industries. I visited the University of Alabama at Huntsville campus this morning and saw slew of tech companies lining the main drive, their sleek logos beckoning to graduates like sirens. The campus directory resembled that of a NASA research park (excepting the lone arts college building). Overall I get a big physics, engineering and space vibe from this part of town. 

     The Space and Rocket center was really neat. I spent half an hour watching one little exhibit video about the Chandra x-ray observatory. I learned a lot about what it takes to lobby for your project over thousands of other equally viable, valuable and reasonably priced space exploration projects. (It helps to have friends on the Hill). There were displays of rockets in the courtyard and a life-sized model of a shuttle with ESBs. There was also a huge military presence, both in the form of helicopters and ground-to-air launchers outside, to displays and sponsored exhibits inside. This is a military town for sure. 

     I entered the Saturn-V hangar where the eponymous rocket lay in exploded display. This was the rocket that carried the first humans to the moon. The exhibit focused on the development of the first stage propulsion units, the H-1 and F-1 jet engines. As you may know, Kennedy's call to put a 'man on the moon' within the decade of 1960 and the rally of the scientific community was a huge achievement. During those ten years, millions of ideas were thrown out, rigorous testing was done, design flaws were found and corrected nearly overnight, and people went without much sleep. So said my new friend Roy. 

The F-1 jet engine that enabled space flight for humans. 

     Roy Logston's primary job on the Saturn-V rocket was systems testing of the S-IVB, which included the J-2 engine. I sat down with him while he espoused the near flawlessness of the J-2, its specific impulse of 435 seconds (which can't physically be improved upon very much), and his work with the Skylab (predecessor to the International Space Station). We walked forty feet over to the actual decommissioned Skylab. Roy pointed up at the solar panel arm and told me about the mission where a micrometeoroid shield that protected the craft from space debris malfunctioned and came off, stripping one of the solar arms with it. Astronaut Pete Conrad had to spacewalk and fix a part by brute force so the remaining solar arm would deploy. The arm finally opened, but it flung Conrad off of the structure and into space and he became the first man to dangle loose in space while attached only by a tether. 

     Roy also let me know a bit about himself. He was born in 1930 and grew up in eastern Ohio during the great depression. In high school and college he drove a taxi cab, sometimes 80 hours a week on top of classes, leaving little time to sleep. In '53 he was drafted during the Korean War but somehow landed a desk job stateside pushing papers for radio engineers. In college he earned degrees in English, Physics and Mathematics. I can't imagine pulling that off, but he did it! After the Army, he found himself in the Aerospace industry where he remained for 35 years. When I spoke with him, he had long since retired. Roy volunteers as a very knowledgeable docent at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a pastime that surely is better than watching MSNBC and FOX all day at the retirement center. I am glad I bumped into Roy. 

     Tomorrow I tour UAH and interview Dr. Sheila Cummings!