Lessons in Innovation from the Rocket Scientist who believed in Magic

He was bullied as a child, worshiped the devil, and died a mysterious death at the young age of 37.

Jack Parsons, a leading rocket scientist who helped launch America's entry into space exploration led a bizarre double life: respected innovator by day, strange cult follower by night.

Despite his oddities, Parsons was a classic innovator. Here, 65 years after his untimely death, we examine how Parsons' approach to innovation can help us today in growing our career, business and life.

"We are all born cowards"

Parsons believed that bravery was a big part of innovation. The power to innovate is in us all. But many of us are afraid to make a mistake, look foolish or rock the boat.

Innovation is all about new ideas and different ways of thinking, not conforming to the status quo. Yes, that takes guts. But exercising the freedom to "think" will generate rewards far in excess of risk.

"No man is worthy to fight in the cause of freedom unless he has conquered his internal masters."

The real battle is not "out there" but inside of us. Self-doubt is more potent than outside influence. Parsons knew that, so he made a point of taming his internal demons to free his mind. Only then was he able to develop rocket technology that would one day send humanity to the moon. Priority one is healing ourselves first so we can imagine, create and do.

"A tyrant does not make his tyranny possible. It is made by the people and not otherwise."

Millions blame outside circumstances for their plight, and while it's true the world can be a burden, it's also true that we often "allow" certain people, things and events to affect us, more than we should. The tyrant for many of us is time. Yet, we can control what we do and when we do it. In the final analysis, there are no excuses. We can, and we must, create the time and environment to make things better.

According to friends, Jack Parsons could accomplish more in a year than most people do in a lifetime.

What is especially amazing is that Parsons had no formal education. He would become a leading scientist entirely through his wild imagination and relentless determination.

Parsons is credited with inventing rocket fuel in the 1930s, space technology that was later used in the Space Shuttle, and helping to start the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, known for its robotic space research, later taken over by NASA. (Years afterwards, NASA would distance itself from Parsons, removing him from their history books).

Jack Parsons experienced brief periods of extreme creativity that were interspersed with long bouts of despondency and dejection. It's believed he was clinically depressed, a condition likely passed down from his father who died in a psychiatric hospital.

He was eccentric to say the least, giving his first wife a gun for her birthday. His idea of having fun was to ignite firecrackers in front of his colleagues.

A lover of science fiction, Parsons took a step into the wild side, joining numerous cults that worshipped the devil and practiced black magic. He once called himself the Anti-Christ.

There was no limit to Parsons' imagination, going so far as to practice a mystical ritual to summon a magical being called a "Moon Child" that would rid the world of oppression. (The Moon Child never appeared).

Rocket engineers were not taken seriously in the 1930's. But that changed in August of 1941 with the take-off of the first "rocket-assisted" fixed wing aircraft, thanks to Jack Parsons' solid propellant fuel formulation.

Parsons' fascination with the occult and magic attracted none other than L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame. The two became friends and business partners until Hubbard reportedly ran off with Parsons' girlfriend and much of his money.

That would be the beginning of the end for Parsons.

His luck continued to run out as he came close to being tried for treason, accused of giving classified documents to the Israeli government, where he had hoped to work. The case, along with talk of his black magic dabbling, led to the loss of his security clearance.

Without clearance to work on top government projects, almost flat broke, and increasingly viewed by the scientific community as an unwanted "crazy", Parsons was forced to take odd jobs as a car mechanic, manual laborer and hospital orderly.

At over six feet tall with dark, wavy hair and a fashionable mustache, the dashing Jack Parsons attracted many women into his life. There would be countless affairs, including those with the female staff of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In his final days, Jack Parsons was hired as an explosives expert in major court cases, and on Hollywood movie sets. 

It all came to a shocking end when Parsons was blown up in his garage laboratory - not from suicide, but a horrific accident, likely from one of his experiments with rocket fuel (although some have speculated he was murdered). The blast could be felt from a mile away. Upon learning of her son's death, Parson's mother was so distressed, she took sleeping pills and killed herself.
There are those in the scientific community who say Parsons' strange life was simply part of his genius. Others say he was brilliant but disturbed. Medical observers contend Parsons had a mental disability.

However history will ultimately judge him - the bizarre imagination of Jack Parsons took us into space. Today, our own commitment to creativity and innovation, can take us just as far.
John Marvel Whiteside "Jack" Parsons, born in Pasadena, California, became part of a group of rocket scientists who formed their own company called Aerojet in the early 1940s. The company sold rocket fuel to the U.S. military and was eventually taken over by General Tire. Even though Parsons was the energy and brains behind the company, he was kicked out for "unsafe working methods." Parsons is generally credited with igniting America's advancement into space and has a moon crater named after him.

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from the fabric we are made of

from the fabric

we are made of

New Bloc Québécois leader Martine Ouellet wants to break up Canada

Newly acclaimed Bloc Quebecois leader Martine Ouellet salutes supporters. (Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press)

The mid-1990s were an exciting time to be a pro-sovereignty Quebec politician.
The Parti Québécois had a majority government. An agonizingly close referendum took Quebec to the brink of independence. The Official Opposition in Ottawa was Lucien Bouchard's Bloc Québécois — a federal party committed to the sovereignty of Quebec and the breakup of Canada.

In 1993, Lucien Bouchard was sworn in as leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, after his fledgling Bloc Québécois won 54 seats in Quebec on a promise to fight for sovereignty. (CBC)

Two decades later, it's a different story. The Parti Québécois is back in the opposition benches. And the BQ vote collapsed in the 2011 election, crushed by the NDP's Orange Wave in Quebec. The BQ was reduced to four seats and lost official party status. The Bloc did win 10 seats in the 2015 federal election, but its share of the popular vote in Quebec dipped below 20 percent for the first time.

For a party that was once synonymous with popular, charismatic leaders like Bouchard and Duceppe, the Bloc has seemed adrift for the past six years. It has had six full-time and interim leaders since the 2011 election.

We'll be really good neighbours, but sharing the same fridge is not a great thing for us and the rest of Canada. We'd rather have our own place. - Martine Ouellet 

Forty-seven-year-old Martine Ouellet stepped into the void last month, becoming acclaimed as the new BQ leader … a job that had no other willing and eligible takers.

But while the BQ appears to many to be a spent force in Canadian politics — and even in Quebec politics — Ouellet insists the BQ "is not a dinosaur, it's a phoenix."

Martine Ouellet is a mother of two and a mechanical engineer by training, earning her degree at McGill University. She was first elected to Quebec's National Assembly in 2010 as a member of the Parti Quebecois and would become the PQ's Minister of Natural Resources in 2012. She currently sits as an independent in the National Assembly.

She spoke to guest host David Gutnick from Montreal.

Click 'listen' above to hear David Gutnick's interview with Martine Ouellet. 

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Sperm to The Egg

Trying to get away from ourselves as we are...

We are always trying to get away from ourselves as we are, not so much the world, the reality we have come to recognize, that we exist in because it isn't the reality that we find satisfying, most comfortable and often seek to get away; via vacation, drugs, weekends, etc...we try and recognize that we are the center of the existence we are in...we are solely responsible for the reality we have come to accept...our reality is guided and influenced by our perceptions of the realities that exist around us... we are each God and Satan to ourselves, the good and the bad and each our perception thereof...

We do not exist in the true reality, we are always trying to find to enter the reality where we are all one. We seek to be born together...our individual reality is on the outside of the egg...our true reality, the universal reality is the egg to which we journey to be born into as opposed to be born from...

Gravity is the force of love...

The O'Reilly Factor with Donald Trump - SNL

Billy Cobham Tribute 5 solos 1968-1976 & more

Drum solos and hot stuff performed by Billy Cobham excerpted from the following performances:
**Horace Silver Quintet**
Jazz Omkring Midnat
Denmark TV 1968

**Mahavishnu Orchestra**
Munchen, Germny,
Olympia Jazz
August 17, 1972

Chateauvallon, France
August 23, 1972

BBC
August 25, 1972

**Billy Cobham Band**
London
Rainbow Theater
July 13, 1974

**Billy Cobham / George Duke Band**
Montreux, Switzerland
July 6, 1976

Digital Dream Machine

Turn off your lights and position your face a few inches from your computer screen. Begin playing the video and then shut your eyes. Interesting effects, patterns and colors should start appearing.

How Apple's Night Shift Compares to F.lux

Apple recently added Night Shift to macOS, which changes the color temperature of your screen based on the time of day in the hopes that it'll help you sleep better. Before the launch of Night Shift, f.lux was the go-to tool for doing this. Let's see how they compare.

Night Shift and f.lux (free) sound identical at a glance. They both attempt to reduce your exposure to blue light at night by applying a warmer color filter to your screen after the sun goes down. The similarities between the two end there though, and in typical Apple fashion, which one you use depends primarily on how much you like to tinker with settings.

F.lux Offers Way More Options to Tweak How It Works

Night Shift's (left) minimal settings are part of the appeal, but f.lux (right) offers way more ways to customize it.

The biggest and most important difference between f.lux and Night Shift comes in the form of your options for customization. With Night Shift, you can set when Night Shift activates, and then choose a color temperature on a scale of Less Warm to More Warm.

F.lux offers a somewhat insane variety of options. You can choose the temperature of your screen during the day, at sunset/sunrise, and at bedtime. You can choose from various color presets or create your own. There's even a Night Owl setting for those who actually prefer to work late into the evening.

Beyond that, f.lux also allows you to set how long the transitions between colors last, what time you get up on the weekend, and you can set reminders when it's getting close to your bed time. F.lux even includes several specific types of color effects, like a dark room mode that inverts colors, a movie mode that preserves colors while reducing certain lights, and a mode that automatically triggers the macOS dark theme at sunset.

Night Shift's Effect Is Less Noticeable

Since it's shipping with a commercial product, Night Shift is also a little less extreme than f.lux. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, Night Shift is targeting a broad set of people, whereas f.lux is filling a niche. F.lux breaks down the differences in a forum post, the main difference being in how f.lux also reduces blue-green light:

F.lux claims that Night Shift just doesn't reduce enough light to help with sleep. We know that the supposed effect here is about much more than just reducing the blues, but it's hard to say whether one or the other is actually better for sleep.

Regardless, Night Shift is much less intrusive because all it does is add a warmer filter to your display, and you can use it without disrupting your general computer usage that much, unless you're working on color correction in photos or videos. Even with all of the different settings tweaks you can do, f.lux has a much more noticeable impact because it does more than just apply a warmer filter; it changes the overall amount of light alongside the color.

F.lux Works On Older Macs (and Everything Else)

One little surprise that came with the launch of Night Shift on the Mac is its limited compatibility. For some reason, Night Shift is limited to the following Macs:

• MacBook (Early 2015 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer)
• Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer)
• iMac (Late 2012 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Late 2013 or newer)

Good news though, f.lux works on pretty much every Mac in existence (as well as Windows and Linux). So, if Night Shift isn't an option, you can get the same effect out of f.lux's default settings, so don't feel like you're missing out on anything special.

There's also the fact that f.lux is continually a work in progress, with small iterations being released pretty often and new landmark features added in at a steady pace. The developers behind f.lux are constantly talking about the research behind their work and making adjustments to the software as they go. I doubt Apple will show this same sense of dedication to a small little feature they tossed into their operating systems.

Regardless, Night Shift is still useful for a lot of people and the simplicity of its set it and forget it attitude means it'll be in use by a lot more people. If you want more options though, grab yourself a copy of f.lux.

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Climate change could make severe turbulence even worse

Fasten your seatbelt

April 6, 2017

Sofia Sforza via Unsplash

Climate change makes severe turbulence more likely.

Airplane passengers are in for an increasingly bumpy ride according to a study released today in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. Climate change is altering the jet stream, making severe turbulence more likely. The study builds on earlier work which found that climate change would lead to bumpier airplane rides. What makes the new research unique is that it quantifies how much different kinds of turbulence will increase—59 percent in the case of light turbulence, a 94 percent increase in moderate turbulence, and 149 percent increase in severe turbulence.

For the one in four Americans who are afraid of flying, any jostling could be considered severe. But like an earthquake, turbulence is rated on a scale. One is light—gentle enough so passengers may not notice it—three is moderate, or enough to jostle a drink, five is severe, and seven is extreme.

"Anything above five is by definition stronger than gravity," says study autho Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. "What that means is that anything that's not strapped in will potentially be projected around inside the plane. That would include passengers."

Shake, Rattle, But No Rolls

Turbulence happens when an air mass moving at one speed meets another air mass moving at a different speed. The meeting causes a sudden shift in airflow, leading air to move chaotically. It's a bit like trying to walk down the street on a particularly windy day, and being buffeted about in multiple directions. So, a plane moving into turbulent air may have its left wing hit by an upward gust causing the plane to bank right. Similarly, if both wings are suddenly hit by a downward gust, the whole plane might drop a bit, which isn't great for anyone inside.

Last October, an Air New Zealand flight from Ho Chi Minh to Auckland encountered turbulence so severe it was forced to turn around after two crew members suffered critical injuries. That same year, a JetBlue flight from Boston to Sacramento was forced to make an unplanned landing after it hit a patch of turbulence that sent 22 passengers and 2 crew members to the hospital. In 2015, an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Shanghai experienced turbulence that led to the injuries of 21 people. The plane made an emergency landing in Calgary, Alberta. And in 2014, a United Airlines flight from Denver to Billings, Montana hit turbulence so severe that five people went into the hospital.

Satellite observations dating back to the 1970s show that because of climate change, different parts of the atmosphere are warming up at different rates. At 30-40,000 feet, the low latitude tropical regions are warming much faster than the high latitude arctic regions (which is the opposite of what's happening on the ground). This temperature difference has always driven the jet stream, but as tropical regions warm up faster than the arctic, that difference grows—and the jet stream becomes both stronger, and less stable. Turbulence is coming along for the ride.

"Turbulence can actually damage planes," said Williams. "There was a plane flying over the Colorado Rocky's on the 9th of December 1992 through some extreme clear air turbulence—it would have been a seven [on the scale]. Six meters of the left wing broke off and one of the engines got torn off as well."

Plane engines,
Williams told PopSci, are affixed with aptly named, 'shear nuts and bolts.' The engines are designed to shear off planes if they become unstable. "The fact that the engine broke off probably saved the life of the people on the plane, because the last thing you want is an unstable engine kind of hanging off a plane causing instabilities."

This kind of damage is rare—in most cases turbulence is still more about comfort than safety, and there hasn't been a single plane crash due to turbulence since the 1960s. But even light and moderate turbulence will cause wear and tear on a plane. That means the need for inspections—for planes to be taken out of service and maintained—will also go up. It's a significant economic burden for an industry already operating on razor thin margins.

While the seasoned traveler may wonder why pilots don't just fly around the turbulence, the answer is simple: the pilots can't see it. Though we tend to think of turbulence as being associated with storms, the kind of turbulence Williams focuses on is related not to weather but to the jet stream, or the bands of strong wind in the upper levels of the atmosphere.

"We call it clear air turbulence to distinguish it from the other kinds of turbulence which is in clouds," said Williams. "The pilot can see the clouds, so he or she knows that the turbulence will be there and will avoid trying to fly through. But clear air turbulence is particularly hazardous precisely because it's invisible. It tends to strike when the seatbelt light is switched off and passengers are moving around inside the cabin." On average, patches of clear air turbulence tend to be more than half a mile tall (3,280 feet) and 37 miles wide.

Pexels

Clear air turbulence is particularly dangerous since pilot's can't see it coming.

Predicting Turbulence

Williams was able to predict increases in turbulence by running a climate model. He ran it first under control conditions, using preindustrial levels of carbon dioxide for the equivalent of twenty years. He then ran a second simulation where the CO₂ is double that of the pre-industrial levels—roughly where we'll be by the middle of the century if we don't change our behaviors.

But climate models don't actually have this kind of turbulence built into them. "Williams took 21 vetted, commonly used indicators for turbulence and looked for those in the climate model," said Kristopher Karnauskas, a researcher in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the study. "It's not just limited to one predictor of turbulence, because no one predictor of turbulence is perfect or always right, so he used a broad ensemble approach."

Williams then compared the control run with the elevated CO₂ condition and calculated the amount of turbulence in both of them. That's how he found the increases.

Kendra Pierre-Louis

Climate change will increase turbulence by a lot.

Why Models Matter

Climate models have come under fire recently, in part because to lay people they can seem disconnected from reality. That's why Karnauskas likes to use TV screens to explain how they work.
"With a climate model, you take the planet and you cut it up into grid cells like the pixels on a TV," Karnauskas. "Each of those grid cells knows all the laws of physics. It looks at its neighbors around it and says 'is it warm over there, is the wind coming from this direction, and then it marches forward in time." By being fed those base conditions, the model can make extrapolations about the future.
In fact, the only limitation of the study that Karnauskas notes is that it only uses one climate model, which he says limits our ability to categorize the full certainty of the results. But this isn't the first study to suggest that the jet stream is changing along with the warming climate.

Both Williams and Karnauskas have published studies that found that because the jet stream is getting stronger, eastbound flights from the U.S. to Europe will get faster, while westbound flights from Europe will be slower. This is backed up by real world incidents.

In January 2015, a flight from New York's JFK airport to Heathrow took only 5 hours and 16 minutes because the jet stream was so strong. Ordinarily, that flight takes longer than six hours. During that same period, westbound flights from London and Paris to New York battled such strong heads that they burned more fuel than expected, requiring stops in Maine for refueling

It's important to note that Williams' study only looked at the North Atlantic—its conclusions can't be extrapolated for other routes. At the same time, however, it's important to recognize the impacts that climate change will have on the aviation industry so that companies can better plan and prepare for everything from plane maintenance and repair to fueling.

"For decades, all of the focus on climate change and air travel was about how air travel is going to make climate change worse," said Karnauskas. "But this kind of study, and other studies around climate change making flight times longer, are a new wave of looking at that relationship. It's showing that climate change can feed back on the industry itself. It's not just that air travel affects climate—we know that's true. But air travel is being affected by climate change." 

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A Massive Dead Galaxy Existed Just 1.7 Billion Years After the Big Bang, but No One Knows How

We might be very wrong about how galaxies form.

For the first time, astronomers have spotted a massive, inactive galaxy from when the Universe was only around 1.7 billion years old, and no one can explain how it ended up there.

Our current understanding of galaxy formation states that all of the galaxies that existed back then should have been tiny and low-mass, and busy forming stars. Instead, this dead behemoth was already five times more massive than our Milky Way is now, all condensed into an area 12 times smaller, and had long finished its peak star formation.

If the discovery is verified by other teams, it means scientists will need to rethink the way galaxies form, and overhaul our assumptions about what happened in the first few billion years after the Big Bang.

It also suggests that there are plenty of surprises yet to be found at the beginning of our Universe.
"This discovery sets a new record for the earliest massive red galaxy," said lead researcher Karl Glazebrook from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

"It is an incredibly rare find that poses a new challenge to galaxy evolution models to accommodate the existence of such galaxies much earlier in the Universe."

While there are still a lot of unknowns about how and when galaxies start and stop forming stars, our best models assume that it happened a while after the origin of the Universe - meaning it would have been at least 3 billion years after the Big Bang before dead galaxies such as this 'red nugget' would have appeared.

In the time before that, research suggests that most galaxies would have been low-mass and busy making stars. For example, astrophysicists predict that 1.7 billion years after the Big Bang, our own Milky Way galaxy would have been a "messy little dwarf galaxy with just 1/50th of its mass today", But this new galaxy, known as ZF-COSMOS-20115, contradicts that model entirely.

The new study suggests this galaxy had formed all of its stars (three times more stars than in our Milky Way today) during a rapid star-burst event that occurred relatively soon after the Big Bang, and by 1.7 billion years into the Universe's history, it was already done.

That makes it what's known as a quiescent or 'red and dead' galaxy, which is common to see around the Universe today, but no one had expected one to exist back then.

"This huge galaxy formed like a firecracker in less than 100 million years, right at the start of cosmic history," said Glazebrook.

"It quickly made a monstrous object, then just as suddenly it quenched and turned itself off. As to how it did this we can only speculate. This fast life and death so early in the Universe is not predicted by our modern galaxy formation theories."

Researchers had previously found hints of these strange, early maturing galaxies, but this is the first time researchers have properly detected on.

To peer so far back in time, the researchers used the giant W M Keck telescopes in Hawai'i. They were looking for emissions at near-infrared wavelengths, to give them information on the presence of old stars and a lack of active star formation in old galaxies.

When they first spotted ZF-COSMOS-20115, they didn't think it could be real, Glazebrook told Gizmodo.

"We used the most powerful telescope in the world, but we still needed to stare at this galaxy for more than two nights to reveal its remarkable nature," said one of the researchers, Vy Tran from Texas A&M University.

What's needed now is follow-up observations using sub-millimetre wave telescopes - something that the James Webb Space Telescope, which is set to launch in 2018, will be able to assist with from outside the interference of Earth's atmosphere.

"Sub-millimetre waves are emitted by the hot dust which blocks other light and will tell us when these firecrackers exploded and how big a role they played in developing the primordial universe," explains one of the team, Corentin Schreiber from Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Until then, it's anyone's guess how this giant dead galaxy came about so early in the timeline of our Universe, and you can bet that mystery is going to be keeping astrophysicists up at night for the months to come.

The research has been published in Nature.

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