Paul Tries to Understand Science is a collection of articles I have written about general science, as an aid to education. Not your education, so much as my own. If I get to the point where I can write a coherent explanation of a bit of science, I feel that I have managed to learn something about it. I’d be thrilled if someone else manages to learn something too.
The newest ones are Rocket Efficiency and Consider the Roundworm. I have other topics in progress.
On a less serious note for which I don’t have another category: as the kind of nerd who gets interested in questions about obscure fields of knowledge, one question that I became interested in was the origin and history of that word... this resulted in me laying out A Historical Timeline of the word “Nerd”.
Writings about The Future! Yep, the place where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives. As a wise man once said, future events such as these will affect you in the future. These writings were originally part of a blog, but I kept tweaking and revising them, and also that blog was not getting the readership that this site is, so I gave them a permanent home here. The Science! section was an outgrowth of this.
The most recent article is Will There Ever Be a Material to Replace Steel?
I once met a man who unexpectedly turned out to be a rocket company founder. That planted a seed, and now, years later, inspired by the rapid advances in the late 2010s in the field of commercial spaceflight, I have added a major new section to this website. It takes in-depth looks at a number of new modern rockets and spacecraft, and while I was at it, also the existing rockets which remain in service. I’ve been gradually adding material to this since 2017.
The original emphasis was on New Space private commercial ventures, but it turned out that as of 2017 most of these had yet to actually fly anything, so most of the rockets that actually worked were the older government-sponsored models. Since then an increasing number of the private ventures have made successful flights, and it’s now starting to become what I’d originally envisioned. But there are still a lot of companies which are hoping and struggling with little chance of ever making any profit, as the industry tends to attract people who, like that guy I met, have big dreams of being disruptive innovators but lack sufficient appreciation of how difficult flying to space really is. Read it all here: Rockets of Today.
Each rocket’s page now has a comments section where you can add your thoughts.
I play the dilettante in a lot of areas here, but there is one field where I have true professional expertise, and that is software development. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t goof around with programming sometimes as if I were still an amateur.
I have coded in a lot of different languages and operating systems over the years... assembly language on an ancient IBM mainframe, FORTRAN on a bizarre 36-bit Honeywell, SNOBOL on a DEC-20, REXX on an Amiga... I even learned TECO once. (Ah, the memories. Will anyone wax nostalgic someday about good old .Net?) Maybe I should learn Rust next.
But the very first “large” coding project I cut my teeth on was a text adventure game co-written with a friend... and as of 2023, that game is back, and runs in your browser through the magic of WASM! Here it is — the game of Lugi! It was a silly game, but I put a lot of myself into it.
Another game playable online is this creative-writing thing which we used to play online on the B-Movie Message Board. I converted the format from forum threads to a database app. If you like thinking of fun ideas for nonexistent movies, here’s an outlet for some fun creativity: The Movie Pitch Game!
Back in those Good Old Days of the 20th Century, I also wrote a bunch of freeware and shareware for the Amiga. The good bits are on this page: Amiga Software by Paul Kienitz, where anyone who still uses one of those can download any or all of it, including source code. It includes Amiga versions of the Info-Zip Group’s Zip and Unzip tools, since I was a contributor to that group, and maintained the Amiga port, along with contributing to the common code. My most popular Amiga program was Q-Blue, which was shareware but is now free. A few of these Amiga projects have recently been revived to fix old issues, and migrated to Github for preservation.
Lately I’ve stuck a small toe back into the open source world. My first little project on Github was not legacy code, but a Javascript library called SPARE, which is a very easy way to add AJAX to your website content without requiring any serverside support. It’s used on my other site, Cape Jeer. This is still evolving as I broaden capabilities and respond to the changing browser ecosystem.
I’ve been drawn to nature photography since I got my first camera at somewhere around age eight, and by now, I think I might be starting to get kind of good at it. My original online gallery has pictures spanning the years I shot with film — basically, the last quarter of the twentieth century. This gallery has not been updated since 2002.
Of these older photographs, the ones that have generated the most public interest are those of the Oakland hills fire of 1991. I have sometimes granted reproduction rights for some of the images from this series at no cost. Higher resolution scans are available. If interested, write.
I haven’t yet made a gallery of newer DSLR pictures. But here’s something: lately I’ve concentrated mostly on birds, often not even bringing any wide angle lens when I go out, and I have started to turn more and more into something like a birder. And what I’ve made of that is a page that lists all the species I’ve seen and all the local species I expect to see by taxonomy, with links to pictures on those kinds of birds that I have managed to photograph so far. So some of the shots are blurry messes, because that was the best I could do with a less commonly seen bird.
Gear: my earlier film shooting was done with a classic K1000, then I got a beater Oly OM-2 which I used throughout the nineties. I finally got a DSLR in 2007 — a Pentax K10D. I now have a Pentax K-3 with five lenses, including a 300mm f/4 and 1.4x teleconverter for birds. I also got a discounted Pentax Q. Mounting that to the 300mm on a tripod gives really serious reach, but with a picture quality which is pretty much only suitable for video. If the Pentax gear wears out, I’m now very unsure of what system to put any further money into. Kind of wish I’d gone with my second choice, Nikon.
During the previous decade I put together, but did not publicize, a compendium of what I knew about all the modern lenses made for the Pentax K-mount. I wouldn’t put a ton of stock in it as a resource, but here it is for anyone who might find some value in it.
— Oh, that aurora shot you can’t get back to? Here. And here are three others.
When among fellow fans of cheesy crap cinema at places like the B-Movie Message Board, one thing many of us would do is write reviews to share with each other. Here are some of mine, covering some unforgettable film treasures such as Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales or the Mexican classic Santo vs the Martians. And I occasionally slip in a classy indie film or even an A picture, but those are the exception.
Many people in this space create their own movie review websites. (My personal favorite of the bunch is And You Call Yourself A Scientist!?, in which real life scientist Lyz Kingsley looks at movies containing mad science.) I eventually made my own... and to make it practical I decided to specialize. So I focused it on a topic which at that time had a lot of marginal and dubious specimens in it: superhero movies. I had no idea that in the decade to come, they would overwhelm the summer blockbuster scene, and even less that by doing so they would actually raise the average quality of such blockbusters by a significant amount. By 2016, as the MCU became the most talked-about subject in the movie industry, I was losing interest in the whole topic, and gradually stopped writing new reviews, even for movies I had seen. But I did review a hundred movies, good and bad, and they can all be found at my other website: Cape Jeer. Which now supports comments for readers who have something to say about a reviewed film.
I’m glad to say I did find some real stinkers in there... but you may wonder why someone put that much time into such a silly-ass project. Honestly, I wonder myself.
At some point, a couple of film promoters started sending me screener discs for review. But these weren’t for superhero adventures, or for enjoyable cheese... it was mostly for documentaries. A lot of them had to do with topical issues current at the time, so I collected the reviews on a page for Current Events Movies.
Sorry, that’s not me — the well known fiddle player is a different Paul Kienitz who lives in Wisconsin. I have been known to pick a mandolin from time to time, and write a tune or two, but I wouldn’t pass myself off as a legit musician in any genre.
I was thinking about making a page to organize all the outdated detritus that used to occupy this home page, but then I stumbled on a better option: a preserved copy of this page as it was twenty years ago, back when the domain was gning.org, before it was redesigned to be less garish and facetious. After fixing some internal URLS, most of it is working just as it did then, except that there are many external links which are no longer valid. Here it is, in all its Web-1.0 glory: The Twentieth Anniversary Edition!
The most popular and widely read page there, for some reason, is 48 Reasons Not To Get A Boob Job. The most entertaining are probably these quizzes:
- Which Science Fiction Writer Are You?
- Which Classical Composer Are You?
- Which House Paint Are You?
- Which Office Supply Are You?
- Are You A Republican?
That first quiz ended up being passed around among actual science fiction writers.
You may notice that the distinctive font I use for the banner and topics is already present in that old page, though only within a single image. This page explains where it came from and how I finally made a proper .otf version of it.