Mars One program and Graduate School program

Today I got an email which started with these sentences: 

"Did you know US astronaut Clayton Anderson was rejected by NASA for its astronaut training program 15 times, yet in 2007 he boarded the Space Shuttle Atlantis for a trip to the International Space Station. He proved anything can happen and no door is ever completely closed..."

Yes, my one way ticket to Mars did not get approved. So I guess I will not be one the astronauts who suppose to go to Mars in 2023. Over 200,000 people from all around the world applied to the Mars One program. In the initial round (four round totally) they chose 1058 applicants which means the chance of being in the first round is around %0.5! In the first round, of the chosen few, 586 are male and 472 are female with the majority age range between 26-35, although %10 of the pool are over 46. 
Still there is a slight chance to be part of Mars One program. They will reopen the application process again in late 2014. By 2015, sixteen teams of four individuals will be selected for seven years of full time training and eventually 4 of them (2 men and 2 women) will be selected to be the first humans who will settle on Mars. I was thinking why I wasn't one of them and thought they just needed to check my amazon account, apparently amazon doesn't offer prime membership in Mars! 

I made this graph which shows the percentage of total applicants by country (for higher quality please click on it). 

The complete criteria for choosing astronauts are here (and the main part in the table below), which I found interesting. I think in some ways this table pretty much represents the characteristics of a graduate student! These days I'm working on my resolution for the new year and I diffidently like to apply these attributes in my life on Earth. 

Five Key Characteristics of an Astronaut

Characteristic	Practical Applications
Resiliency	Your thought processes are persistent. You persevere and remain productive. You see the connection between your internal and external self. You are at your best when things are at their worst. You have indomitable spirit. You understand the purpose of actions may not be clear in the moment, but there is good reason—you trust those who guide you. You have a “Can do!” attitude.
Adaptability	You adapt to situations and individuals, while taking into account the context of the situation. You know your boundaries, and how/when to extend them. You are open and tolerant of ideas and approaches different from your own. You draw from the unique nature of individual cultural backgrounds.
Curiosity	You ask questions to understand, not to simply get answers. You are transferring knowledge to others, not simply showcasing what you know or what others do not.
Ability to Trust	You trust in yourself and maintain trust in others. Your trust is built upon good judgment. You have self-informed trust. Your reflection on previous experiences helps to inform the exchange of trust.
Creativity / Resourcefulness	You are flexible in how an issue / problem / situation is approached. You are not constrained by the way you were initially taught when seeking solutions. Your humor is a creative resource, used appropriately as an emerging contextual response. You have a good sense of play and spirit of playfulness. You are aware of different forms of creativity.

Term projects

Personally I am very pro for term projects. For me, at least, helps to practice what I'v learned in the course of the semester. During the semester you are learning (or may be just encountering) lots of ideas and it would be ideal if you learn how to execute them. Even for some people ideas are worthless unless executed. In one of our courses in this semester we learned about limnology. Actually the objective of the course was much broader and limnology was just part of that. I just wanted to give you a sense of this class (Yes, I'm deeply thankful for our professor). Part of this class was accomplishing an analysis on a well studied reservoir and writing a paper in a standard format. Class was grouped up in several teams (not to mention that this helps teamwork as well - believe me, working as a team is much harder than you think. Sometimes you need to redo all things you've done already, but its fun! :)). Each team should prepare a write up and also a presentation for their work. Its very nice when you can see and use actual data and come up with new ideas beside developing skills you learned. At this moment we are in the middle of our write up section and I think we will have a wonderful term project. 

I made a video for some of the data we already processed:

I also made an interactive plot for visualizing rainfall data for the period that project was defined. For best experience please open it with Firefox browser. Select a time span or date you would like to see by holding the left button of your mouse (unless you are left handed and switched the button configuration) and double click to come back to the full graph. Ill have an update for this post. Let me know if you have any questions or ideas. 

Trends in Indirect and Direct Potable Reuse

Water Density

Can you imagine a world without water! Water is strange! We need it for almost everything we do to be alive. Personally I was so happy after reading the news that about 2 percent of the soil of the surface of Mars is made up of water. 

We  know that density of water is changing with temperature, pressure and also salinity. Commonly in our calculation we consider having fresh water (with very low salinity) and 1 bar pressure. In this situation the maximum density of water is around 4 degree Celsius. 

I made a small software to calculate the density of water based on its temperature. You can download it here (32, 64). Please let me know if you have any questions or want me to add more features to this software. 

Environmental Awareness

1- 

Choosing career path is an important decision in everyone's life. Personally I went down some roads and have some experiences as an engineer in three different sections. I worked in consultant and contractor firms. Also in a testing lab. 

                                              (Career vs. Job)

2- 

If you cant explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough (Albert Einstein). 

3-

If I didn't know the name of one of my courses, even though at this moment which is two weeks till the end of the semester, I had no idea what this course is about. No structure, poor delivery, no coherence between lectures, poor designed tests and exams, bad timing for the class, bad TA. On the other hand in my other course. OMG, everything is well structured. You know whats going on in each lecture. The class is so engaging which keeps you on board all the time during the semester. 

4- 

"Who saves one life, saves the world entire" (Thomas Keneally, Schindler List - originally from Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:9).

5-

I was thinking to join UN or World Bank after getting my degree. I was born in a so called third world country (see the definition here and here). I know and experienced lots of their problems (besides I love traveling). 

6-

We need Environmental Awareness.

7- 

I have decided to join academia. 

Emissions Gap Report 2013

I was thinking about the age of earth after watching this and having a look at  this. If you google the age of earth, it will tell you: 4.54 billion years. And the age of universe is: 13.8 billion years.
So it took the universe 9.26 billion years to give birth to the earth and four and half billion years for earth to come up with the diverse living species on it (and also this level of intellectuality). On the other hand our Sun got more than 6 billion years to finish its fuel. You got where Im going with this. In less than four billion years we will evolve to super humans, Sumans! The rate of evolution would be much faster and I don't think we really need that much time. On the contrary, think about what just we did to our beautiful planet during the last 100 years (with all of the pollution, increasing in temperature, accumulated CO2, nukes, and lots of irreversible damages). Do you remember the Flash Crash(watch it here)? Almost the same thing will happen to the earth if we don't do anything about it. Do you think we can make it to the end of this century?!
This is a serious question. Last week it was a meeting called "The Global Emissions Gap Report 2013" in Germany (you can find Gap Report for year 2012 here - I will have another post on this report later). Basically countries (actually 13) who are producing more than 70 percent of global emissions are trying to fill the gap between what is expected as a pledge made by them to reduce emissions and the amount of emissions that is needed to keep the temperature change less than 2 degree Celsius till 2020. 

2020 is not that far, fingers crossed! 

One thing is for sure: Any delay will be very expensive for Sumans! 

bathrooms

I don't know your heard about this or you experienced it yourself. The best ideas come when we are in the bathroom and while we are taking shower. Yes, Aha effect! This  guy talks about that here. He is mentioning why we are experiencing so called “creative pause”. You can reach to this state in different situation, jogging is a good example. Sorry if I messed up with your imagination talking all about bathrooms, you can find beautiful pictures for them all around the world here. Anyways, today I was thinking again how we can reduce wasting treated water in the bathrooms! Bill Gates is spending good amount of money for redesigning toilets. And if you are more interested, you can participate in their Reinvent Toilet Challenge. 

When you want to establish a new lifestyle, you may need to think about may things. Paradigm shift is one of the important things in this procedure. Slow by slow people know and understand the effect of their behaviors. I appreciate Bill Gate for his perspective in this matter.

Here are some ideas for reducing teated water consumption in toilets:

1) Using used water from sink or shower

This guy made a project out of it. 

2) Saving water in shower before it warms up. Have a bucket in your bathroom and fill it while you are waiting to the water gets hot. 

3) Installing multi flush toilet.

4) Install the tank in higher elevation. 

5) Installing Urine Diverting (UD) toilet.

What about showers? How can we save water there? Milk bath?!   :) 

Closed loop showers seems promising! 


Please let me know if you have other ideas that you want to be added to this list.

New Project

I got involved in an amazing project. I will tell you more about it in future posts. But I will give you some ideas to think about ...
Did you hear about green gas emissions? Did you hear about global warming? How about global dimming? Did you know oceans contain more than 93% of the global heat content? How you heard about effects of jet contrails? Did you hear about destabilized methane hydrates? Do you know many of models we are using today are not well calibrated? Do you know the projected temperature at the end of the 21st century using current models? Do you have any idea how accurate they are? 
I have some stories for you ...

I'm back!

Hello folks!

It has been a while from my last post and I know you missed me! Im back finally after some moving. 

I will try to update more frequently and post interesting things. Actually, I already have lots of things in my mind and Im planning to post them in the near future. I just needed a little bit time to adjust and organize some settings. I hope to see you soon.

Free webinar

There is a free webinar next week about Economic and Environmental assessment of industrial water use in the Great Lakes watershed.

This might be of interest to you.

Assessing the Economic and Environmental Benefits of Industrial Water Use Efficiency within the Great Lakes Region

And if you live in Texas or planning to go there in the near future, there are two good symposium you may attend. Here is the link.