The beauty of pigeons

Reading a recent post on a friend’s blog earlier, I was reminded of something I’ve been thinking about recently: pigeons.  Pigeons take a lot of shit, and I think it’s all a bit unfair.  I mean, I can obviously understand an aversion to them as vectors for disease (though one hopes this is less of a concern now in the first world than in, say, fourteenth century Europe), or because they’re pests who flap around you and try to steal your food, or even just because they do a lot of pooping on stuff.

But a lot of people I’ve known seem to have an even more deeply fundamental aversion to them, a powerful disgust in the most righteous sense of the word.  And speaking to such people, I hear one complaint come up more than any others: they eat garbage. This assertion is, I guess, supposed to demonstrate just HOW disgusting these critters are, but I’ve always thought of it in an entirely different light: pigeons eat garbage, so pigeons are made out of garbage.  Looking at it a certain way, our garbage essentially turns into birds and flies away.  I don’t know about you, but if I’m to be honest (and I can afford to, because no one’s reading anyhow), I find that a wholly beautiful thought. All the waste and refuse of human civilization, the things we deem too spent or too unclean, are set out in the streets and in time become life, and people have the audacity to call this disgusting.

I don’t want to take this too far, because I already categorized this post under “kinda gay” and I don’t want to have to change my mind and create a category for “really gay”, but if I were to take a sort of social psychoanalysis tack on this for a moment, I’d have to say the fact that people express such vehement aversion to life that thrives on those very things which we as a species produce and discard is, well, one of humanity’s more bizarre neuroses.

Stuff space does to you that you didn’t know space did to you

One of the things I like to do is to design models of things in AutoCAD.  Houses, hovercrafts, deep-Earth gravitational linear induction generators, &c.  Some time ago, while reading about ongoing developments in Project Constellation, I got it in my head to design a modern, realistic spacecraft akin to the Space Shuttle or the Orion.  I never actually got around to it, but in my research I discovered a rather interesting document published by NASA: the Man-Systems Integration Standards (NASA-STD-3000).

This is a highly detailed document which essentially lays out at great length every conceivable consideration concerning humans in space and in particular how spacecraft design ought to reflect these considerations; in its own words:

The NASA-STD-3000 was created to provide a single, comprehensive document defining all generic requirements for space facilities and related equipment which directly interface with crewmembers.

Seriously, this shit is absurdly in-depth: from tables on the thermal conductivity of binary gas mixtures, to standards for the radius of rolled edges on sheet metal, to diagrams on optimum sitting angles for people sitting together for social interaction; this document has everything.  There’s also a large section at the beginning just on the capabilities of the human body in general (‘Anthropometry and Biomechanics’).

But what I found particularly interesting were the bits scattered throughout that dealt with the response of the human body to being in space.  Everyone knows about bone loss and muscle atrophy and shit like that that happens in microgravity, but as it turns out, there are a lot more effects that you never hear about.  Things like:

You can’t taste food very well.

In space, without the benefit of gravity kindly telling them to mind their step and keep in place, your bodily fluids have a tendency to diffuse and shift upwards.  This results in a sort of lowkey but constant nasal congestion, which in turn makes tasting food difficult.  The MSIS cautions us: ‘Given the important role that food is likely to play in maintaining morale on extended space missions, attention should be paid to this problem.’

You see shit.

Apparently, astronauts frequently report seeing bright flashes of light when at ‘specific orbital locations’.  I keep puzzling over the inclusion of that qualifying prepositional phrase, but I’m no spaceologist, so I’m coming up short on speculation as to what those particular orbital locations would be.  The real spaceologists, however, inform us that these flashes are thought to be caused by ‘cosmic rays and/or heavy-particle radiation traversing the head or eyes and triggering a neural response’, which is actually pretty awesome if you think about it.  I also find myself thinking back to stories of astronauts claiming to have witnessed UFOs while in space, such as famously Gordon Cooper during his Mercury flight, and wondering if it can’t be attributed to this.  It wouldn’t be surprising, considering the MSIS elsewhere informs us that space does a myriad of wacky things to your vision, including ‘a shift in perceived colors’, ‘a reduction in contrast sensitivity’, and ‘ reduction in near acuity with no apparent change in far acuity’.  Not to mention the lack of a fixed horizon and other landmarks, along with the fact that humans are terrible at recognizing anything when oriented more than about 45 degrees off of vertical (if you’ve ever tried to turn your head sideways and read, you’ll know it’s doable, but more difficult).

You can’t tell how much stuff weighs.

Okay, so this is sort of a no-brainer, but I still found myself interested by the actual findings of research done into it (and for that matter, by the realization that they even DO research into shit like this).  For instance, did you know that ‘in a weightless environment, increments in mass must be at least twice as large as weight increments in a 1-G environment before they can be discriminated’?  Or that for two similar masses to be distinguished in 0-G, there must be at least a 10% difference between them?  Neither did I!  Reasonably, the MSIS recommends increasing acceleration on objects in order to better estimate their mass (by, I don’t know, swinging them around your head or something; if you happen to be in space, that is).

Smelly stuff is more smelly.

On Earth, when something is smelly, the smelliness tends to go away over time.  This is because the particulates causing the odor have a great expanse of air to diffuse in, and either simply waft away into the atmosphere, or in a more closed environment will eventually tend to settle down to the floor, out of the air.  In the cramped, closed system that is a spacecraft orbiting around the Earth, however, these particulates have nowhere to diffuse to but the few meager cubic meters occupied by the inhabitants of the craft.  Also, without gravity gently nudging them downwards, they have nowhere to settle to either.  So they tend to just float around in the air, the air that you’re breathing, indefinitely.  In other words, if something is making a smell (like, say, a bunch of humans living in cramped quarters), that smell is just going to stick around forever.  Now, the MSIS suggests that this can be partially mitigated by proper circulation and filtration systems, but it occurs to me that you might start seeing that nasal congestion as a blessing after a while (especially if you’re on a Russian craft, hey-oh!).

There’s a lot more cool stuff, but this is all I feel like writing about at the moment.  However, if you’re like me (and I know I am), you’re probably wondering what mention the MSIS makes of that most titillating of spaceology topics: SPACE SEX (and other SPACESEXUAL ACTIVITIES).  Well, it’s a big document, but all I’ve managed to find are a few vagueries like oblique references to ‘private time’ for married couples.  Decidedly the most interesting bit, however, is the results from a study on the popularity of various ‘Leisure Activities Among Antarctic Research Station Members’, meant presumably as a guide for similar preferences among spacecraft crew.  Most of the items on the list are fairly normal: bull sessions, physical exercise, reading fiction; but there, about 2/3 of the way down the list, is the phrase ‘”Happy Hour”‘ (quotes theirs).  Hmm.  Now maybe this refers to booze, or even something else entirely, but I prefer to think that NASA cares deeply about its astronauts having time to “”"ignite the boosters”"”.

Aww yeah.