The measure of success

What is the measure of success?

To some, it is material. The Porsche Cayenne. McMansion. Oversized yacht. To those of us looking on, we must wonder – how much do you own, how much the bank? Perhaps the measure of success is the ability to hornswaggle one’s banker?

There are many other measures of success. Popularity. Athletic skill. Acting chops, Oscars. Youtube views. Nobel Prizes.

But perhaps the more meaningful measure is deeply personal. At the end, what did you accomplish? Did you do good? Are others better off because of you? These are important questions.

Dad was second generation Italian. Sicilian, more specifically. That means that his parents migrated here through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, nearly 100 years ago. Sicily, the land of intense sun, shimmering seas, incredible beauty, heartrending cruelty, and mind numbing poverty. A good place to be from.

Grandpa came first, his wife following a year later. This is because it was necessary to start a life, find work, build some reserves. Something the government does for folks nowadays.

Dad was the youngest of four, born in the late 1920s, with his formative years firmly spanning the Great Depression. Life was hard. Speaking only Italian, he learned English on the side as he attended school. He worked at twelve to help support the family, without complaint. Hard work, farming and landscaping, calluses, sunburn, exhaustion. The 1930s were not kind.

And then it got worse. His father, stressed, or drunk, was abusive. Other, darker things, not to be spoken of. He moved out of the house as a young teenager, just to survive.

Then, the war. Rationing, rag picking. Gleaning. Times were tough, but the American spirit was strong and we built ships and planes and trained our troops and won the war. Dad did his part, a proud Navy veteran at the ripe old age of 16, lying about his age, serving in the South Pacific. The war was soon over, and he, with millions of others, returned to civilian life.

He took up with his high school girlfriend, a ravishing redhead, the love of his life, and by 1948 was married. Soon after, the children began to come – third generation Italian English Scottish German mutts. The wonderful generosity of America chipped in with the GI bill, and Dad became the very first in his large, multigenerational family, spanning two continents, to gain a college degree. Physics, science, and mathematics, thank you. Not bad for a scruffy Italian brat, knees protruding from torn trousers just a few years prior.

We moved to the country, the family growing in size - ultimately nine kids, too expensive in the city. With room to breathe, we learned to prepare the soil, plant the garden, weed and cultivate, harvest and store. In spite of tough times, we never went hungry. Instead, we learned to prune the apple trees, milk the cows, tend the chickens, and care for the garden. We ate well, but it was the fruit of our labor. We learned the value of work.

Dad became a high school teacher. Science and math. Planning laboratory experiments for his students, he often tried them first on us at home. We learned to make gunpowder from scratch. To burn magnesium, brighter than the sun. That the age of paper could be determined by the degree of yellowing, and modeled by “aging” in a hot oven. We learned to think.

And much, much more. How to change the oil in the car. To replace a flat tire. To add an electrical outlet. Repair a leaky faucet. Plumb a brand new hot-water heating system. Dig a septic system and pour concrete footings. Always teaching, a lifetime vocation and avocation.

What was the outcome? At the end, he lived in a small cottage, drove a tiny, rusted car, and tended a postage stamp garden. He worried and fretted that he had not been a good father, could have done better, should have done more. The kids deserved far better.
 
Now that you’re at peace, Dad, you may rest well knowing what you’ve achieved. Your students, hundreds of them, benefited from your tutelage. Your children are successful, each in their own way. We are happy, secure. We are kind and charitable. Self-reliant and capable. We learned well.

Thanks Dad. You were a fabulous success, the model of a life well lived. You made us who we are. You made a difference. No Nobel Prize here, but perhaps there should be.

A brief history of energy

The energy news in New England isn’t great. Electricity prices are expected to rise 9.6% this summer relative to last. The average cost of a gallon of gasoline in Massachusetts last week was $3.68, up 4% from the same period in 2013. In this recent brutal winter of polar vortexes, extreme, extended cold pushed our heating bills through the roof. And while natural gas at the central Pennsylvania hub was $3.37 per million BTUs, it was $24.09 in Boston. (This is due to a lack of pipeline capacity, a situation that towns along the northern tier of Massachusetts are striving to perpetuate).

Why the concern over energy prices? Because energy is at the very root of the economy. High energy costs destroy job growth, increase the cost of everything we consume, and act as a terribly regressive tax on the poor and middle class. Since you will be asked to make many decisions, both politically as a voter and commercially as a consumer, it is worthwhile to understand and consider energy carefully.

We are often presented with a menu of energy types with a dizzying array of sources. Wind, solar, hydroelectric, oil, natural gas, coal, biomass, nuclear, geothermal, tidal – and each with multiple variations, it’s enough to make your eyes cross. Let’s go back to basics.  

According to current thinking, the universe sprang into existence nearly 14 billion years ago in a blinding flash of pure energy. Within a fraction of a fraction of a second, this energy expanded in all directions, slowly coalesced and began to form matter. As we can tell from Hubble Space telescope images, great spiral galaxies formed, organizing and spinning and creating vast numbers of stars, each a microcosm of spinning planets and moons. The universe is a vast playground of energy, mainly star fusion and angular momentum (spin).

Let’s take a brief tour of our plethora of energy sources here on Earth.  

Solar. Our star, like all stars, creates heat and light from a process of nuclear fusion, where hydrogen atoms, under great pressure, fuse to create helium, thereby releasing energy. Deep within the star, heavier elements are produced in this enormous furnace, such as iron and uranium. Here on earth, we can collect radiated solar energy and convert it directly to electricity or use it for heating water. Solar energy is available, of course, only when the sun shines. Clouds and dark of night necessitate the use of storage or alternative energy sources.

Wind. Believe it or not, this is also fusion (solar) energy. The sun heats the land, the sea, and our atmosphere creating great currents of air. The wind blows because of the sun. If our planet hung in a dark, cold, void of space, there would be no wind.

Hydroelectric. Surprise, also fusion (solar). While some would say that this is gravitational energy, gravity is not an energy source. The water that falls must have been raised in the first place. As the sun evaporates water into the atmosphere, it eventually falls as snow or rain. Lifted by the sun, the water now flows through lakes and rivers and dams and generates electricity.

Fossil. Now you’re beginning to get it - also solar fusion. Over a billion years, the sun’s rays bathed the earth. Trillions of tons of bacteria and plankton and grasses and trees and animal life thrived, died, decayed, and became buried under hundreds and thousands of feet of rock and sand. Compressed and cooked, this biological mass stored the solar energy that originally created it in the form of natural gas, oil, and coal. Fossil fuels, because of their concentration, have an extremely high energy density which is why they are among our cheapest fuels.

Biomass. As the sun shines on corn or sugarcane or a number of other fuel crops, fusion energy is converted to organic compounds by photosynthesis. This stored solar energy can then be processed into fuel. This technology can also be adapted to bacteria and plankton. Biofuels have the potential to create cheap, plentiful fuel, but if we’re not careful, can compete with foodstocks thereby driving up food prices.

Nuclear. Yes, solar fusion energy, though not from our star. Other, older stars created radioactive elements which were incorporated into the crust of our earth when it was formed. We can mine uranium, for instance, to create power by nuclear fission. As we know from Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl, this presents risks. Properly managed, nuclear energy can provide vast amounts of power with no effluents other than radioactive waste (not to be minimized, this waste can be very dangerous). The holy grail of nuclear researchers is to create fusion reactors, the same as in the stars. This would be much safer and cleaner than nuclear fission.

Geothermal. Another byproduct of solar fusion. According to the Department of Energy, 80% of geothermal energy comes from the decomposition of radioactive elements in the earth’s crust (which originated in a solar furnace). The remaining 20% is residual heat from the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago. Geothermal energy can produce gases and pollutants from fluids withdrawn from the earth, but most geothermal plants contain emission control systems.

Tidal. There is great potential for capturing the energy of tidal currents for power generation. While opponents decry the potential impact on navigation and sea life, supporters proclaim the virtue of clean, sustainable power. Unlike solar energy, the tides run day and night. This energy source is not from solar fusion – it is much older. Look at the Hubble spiral galaxy image again. The amount of rotational energy stored in the universe is immense. Part of that energy is represented by the moon’s orbit around the earth, dragging the tides with it as it goes. Tidal energy is as old as the universe itself.

This is just a brief overview of energy and its sources. You owe it to yourself to become informed. Understand that all energy enterprises have risks and benefits. Become familiar with such concepts as reliability, renewability, and sustainability. Appreciate the impact of energy costs on jobs and the cost of living.

Energy is too important, too fundamental to our survival, to deserve less.

We have so little time to thank them

There is so much of import that deserves mention. The VA secret waiting list scandal. The stock market ascending to record heights. Kim and Kanye’s wedding.

But this week is the seventieth anniversary of D Day, when 156,000 allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy on one single day, June 6, 1944. The fresh faced boys who slugged their way into Europe are now in their late eighties and nineties. The ones who are still with us remember.

It was an enormous undertaking, hard to fathom. The front stretched from the Cherbourg Peninsula to the Orne River, some sixty miles. That is approximately the length of Cape Cod, from Falmouth to Provincetown. It involved thousands of naval vessels, tens of thousands of aircraft sorties, and ingenious artificial ports to protect offloading cargo ships from the fury of the storm tossed English Channel. Over 13,000 paratroopers and nearly 4,000 glider troops added muscle behind the lines.

The order of battle was simple: “You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other Allied nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.” This was the pivotal moment of the war in Europe. Till now, Germany had been stubbornly victorious.

The atmosphere of the time was grim. The Germans were known to be developing secret weapons in Norway and at Pennemunde in the Baltics and other locations. It was feared that bacteriological agents, nuclear bombs, and new unmanned rockets were all being created and refined for Hitler’s portfolio. The cost of failure would “carry consequences that would be almost fatal,” according to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, causing “a setback to Allied morale and determination… so profound that it would be beyond calculation.”

Russia, a fickle ally then as much as an enigma now, was closely watching. The overall strategy of the European conflict was to press Germany from both the east and the west. Russia had held up her end of the bargain, losing millions of casualties as the cost of pushing German forces from Ukraine and Belorussia. But the agreement made between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the Teheran Conference in 1943 was that America and Great Britain would open the western front with a cross-channel invasion. If we failed, it was feared that Russia would consider a separate peace with Hitler and withdraw from hostilities. In that event, an Allied victory would become sharply improbable.

It was with this background that southern England became a huge staging area in the spring of 1944. Hundreds of thousands of troops camped, trained, and prepared. Millions of pounds of materials and supplies were moved near ports. (Each division would require 700 tons of supplies per day while in combat and 47 divisions were to land.) The impact on the British populace was massive. Coastal shipping and ferries were diverted to the logistical effort, as were many railways. Their meager rations were further cut, travel was nearly impossible, and their fields and gardens were trampled underfoot as soldiers and supplies were staged. But in view of the consequences, these privations were cheerfully accepted.

The precise day of the landing was a bit slippery. First agreed in Teheran to be in May, the plan was changed to target early June. This was due largely to the challenge of amassing the necessary landing craft, but also to allow time for preparatory air attacks. These were intended to cripple critical transportation facilities in France to impede the  flow of German troops and to soften German defenses. Accordingly, “D Day” was moved to early June, with moonrise, sunrise, and tides dictating the 5th through the 7th. A fierce storm was forecast for that entire period, and it was feared that the invasion might need be delayed until the next favorable astronomical period in late June. The 5th of June dawned dark and stormy with wave-tossed seas, low clouds, and wind-blown, horizontal rain.

But later that night, a pause in the winds, a glimmer of starlight, a respite. June 6th it was to be.

The rest we know. Steven Speilberg and Tom Hanks documented the terror, mortality, and grim determination of that day in “Saving Private Ryan,” as did John Wayne in “The Longest Day.”

There can be no end to the thanks we owe. These veterans, few and fewer each day, deserve to be thanked and recognized and praised. Find them, and do it.