Ever notice that Campus Sustainability Day and Halloween are eerily close to each other? Well, call it a quirky coincidence, but there is such a thing as "scary sustainability". It is the notion of large-scale environmental demise that, justifiably, keeps us aware and motivates us to reduce our environmental impact and carbon footprints - much like the stick that drives the horse. Sadly, the same prophesying of environmental (and social) gloom and doom has been a prime reason for negative perception of sustainability – due to falsely developed notion that sustainability is very harmful to the economy.

Nevertheless, it is time to face those demons if we are to get rid of them ever. The good news is that the higher education community is already taking action and developing new perspectives at campuses across the world. Colleges and universities are working with local communities to encourage healthy “locavore” populations with farmers markets, community gardens, and campus farms that nurture friendships, culture, and of course, soul-fillingly delicious food! University initiatives are helping weatherize homes, and supporting renewable energy purchases and energy efficiency in the surrounding community. The general public is beginning to realize that sustainability is not so so 'scary'; interest and investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency have increased in the last two years, and several colleges have begun to offer degrees and training programs to prepare students for the growing green jobs sector.

However, all these exciting new initiatives do not necessarily change the dire facts that serve as grim-but-useful reminders of the challenges our society faces. The ill effects of unsustainable behaviors continue to rear their ugly heads. In recent times, our species has successfully set outrageous records for pollution of land [Hungary, Oct. 2010], and water [Gulf of Mexico, cleanup still under progress], and the atmosphere [From Big Brown to Big Bend]. Even as uncomfortably erratic weather patterns seem to be the new norm, members of the sustainability camp are weathering the changes, and aiming to give more than hope to our current generations.

On 10 October 2010, thousands of people [most of them students and young professionals] participated in the Global Work Party hosted internationally by Bill McKibben’s www.350.org. As their collective voice made clear, it will take a lot of work to set things right. As active professionals, engaged students, and members of organizations pursuing sustainability we should recognize our involvement in the larger movement. If we choose to listen to these voices, and keep faith in our commitments, it might be easy to dispel the darkness, and say good morning to a sustainable tomorrow.

The energy and cohesion of thousands of individuals put together makes a case for confidence, a strong reason to believe that the tasks ahead are conquerable. This years’ Campus Sustainability Webcast sheds light on the road towards a sustainable tomorrow. David Gershon spoke of the possibilities for a greener future, sharing his experiences with engaging and empowering communities to help reduce their carbon footprint. The key lesson from his talk is that making sustainability a participatory process that is valuable and effective as a social tool paves the way to removing the veils of mystery and scariness around it. “Scary Sustainability” ends up being just a paper tiger when we realize that the perspectives that created it were faulty, and that it is ignorance, which causes this irrational fear. The act falls apart when we work together towards replacing ignorance with knowledge - like pulling off the scary Halloween costume to reveal the innocent prankster inside!

China’s Tianhe-1A is being recognized as the world’s fastest supercomputer. It has 7168 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and achieved a Linpack score of 2.507 petaflops, a 40% speedup over Oak Ridge National Lab’s Jaguar, the previous top machine. Today’s WSJ has an article,

“Supercomputers are massive machines that help tackle the toughest scientific problems, including simulating commercial products like new drugs as well as defense-related applications such as weapons design and breaking codes. The field has long been led by U.S. technology companies and national laboratories, which operate systems that have consistently topped lists of the fastest machines in the world.

But Nvidia says the new system in Tianjin—which is being formally announced Thursday at an event in China—was able to reach 2.5 petaflops. That is a measure of calculating speed ordinarily translated into a thousand trillion operations per second. It is more than 40% higher than the mark set last June by a system called Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that previously stood at No. 1 on a twice-yearly ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputers.”

The NYT and HPCwire also have good overview articles. The HPC article points out that the Tianhe-1A has a relatively low Linpack efficiency compaed to the Jaguar.

“Although the Linpack performance is a stunning 2.5 petaflops, the system left a lot of potential FLOPS in the machine. Its peak performance is 4.7 petaflops, yielding a Linpack efficiency of just over 50 percent. To date, this is a rather typical Linpack yield for GPGPU-accelerated supers. Because the GPUs are stuck on the relatively slow PCIe bus, the overhead of sending calculations to the graphics processors chews up quite a few cycles on both the CPUs and GPUs. By contrast, the CPU-only Jaguar has a Linpack/peak efficiency of 75 percent. Even so, Tianhe-1A draws just 4 megawatts of power, while Jaguar uses nearly 7 megawatts and yields 30 percent less Linpack.

The (unofficial) “official” list of the fastest supercomputers is TOP500 which seems to be inaccessible at the moment, due no doubt to the heavy load caused by the news stories above. The TOP500 list is due for a refresh next month.

Our final essay for the "In the Archives" series comes to us from English professor Christopher Corbett. Corbett writes a monthly column for Style magazine in Baltimore and has been published by the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer. His publications include Vacationland, The Poker Bride: A Story of the Chinese in the American Goldfields, and Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express, which serves as the basis for his archival recollections.

How I Got That Story

When I was still doing journalism I decided to ride a bus from Osoyoos, British Columbia to Tijuana, Mexico largely to prove that it was still possible to ride a bus from one border of these United States to the other without actually traveling on an interstate highway. The bus company was called the Boise-Winnemucca Stage Lines – it descended from an honest to God stagecoach. My plan proved more complicated than I had hoped it would. But that’s another story.

But that’s how I found myself in Reno, Nevada on a savagely hot summer weekend. The bus had dumped me there.

Americans are not meant to be on foot. I immediately rented a car. And from my base at Fitzgerald’s Hotel, a venerable shrine to what would become Nevada’s reason for existence - gambling - I studied a map of the Silver State.

Virginia City, home of the fabled Comstock Lode, was only 20 miles away. Eureka! I drove down. And from here, in the old boomtown that knew Mark Twain when he was still Sam Clemens, I again studied the map - and saw that I was near Fort Churchill – site of a Pony Express station.

In the John Wayne film that plays in my head, Fort Churchill looked exactly like a Pony Express station should. A cluster of adobe buildings on a wind-blown sward of sand in the Nevada desert with the distant snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada, like a kind of Shangri-la, on the horizon.

I knew nothing about the Pony Express – which was actually called the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company during its brief and financially disastrous life – April 3, 1860 to October 26, 1861.

Back East, I began to think about “the Pony” as old people in the West still called it. I began to read. One book led to another. I poked around. The books were wildly contradictory and many appeared to be the work of fantasists. It took no time and little scholarship to realize that the story of the Pony Express was really a story of how something got to be a story – or in its case, an American whopper. There had not been a book in half a century. Eureka! I got to work.

My research into the story of this story would take me to the fabled Huntington Library in southern California and to the Newberry Library in Chicago and on to the Library of Congress and to the historical archives of the eight states that the Pony crossed from Missouri to Kansas, to Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. I went to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and I went to the cellar of the library at Willliam Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri where packed away in some dusty boxes were the extensive papers of one of the few real historians to ever have a look at this tale, which one early chronicler called “a tale of truth, half-truth and no truth at all.”

I am a big fan of libraries because of this pilgrimage. It’s like fishing. You don’t always get a bite but you can’t fish at home. You have to get out there and do some legwork as the old denizens of Grub Street called it. Shoe leather! I found things that had never appeared in print before. I tracked down stuff that went a long way toward explaining America’s appetite for what Bernard DeVoto called “the borderland of fable” that place where fact and fancy collide. There’s a lot of that territory across the wide Missouri.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Pony Express and I am often asked to speak from Phoenix, Arizona to Nebraska City, Nebraska and points in between. People ask is anything true? Have you learned anything? What can you tell us?

I tell them that one day I drove to Topeka, Kansas – the state capital. I had been there before. I was rooting about in the vertical files and archives in the Kansas State Historical Society looking for bits of the story of the Pony Express. I had reached the point where I thought I knew a lot - or at least more than I had known. There I came across a yellowed index card in an old-fashioned card file that you see less and less nowadays. It was a citation pertaining to an interview? An old lady in Marysville, Kansas, the Marshall County seat, gave this interview in the 1930s to a local historian. On the reverse side of the index card someone had scrawled, “she saw the Pony Express.”

I asked to see the manuscript, which some poor soul had painstakingly transcribed – typed on onionskin paper. Here were the memories of an old lady who had come to Kansas when there were still wolves and Indians and immense herds of buffalo. She was a German immigrant. There were whole towns of Germans out there. Towns with names like Bremen and Hanover. She taught school for years and years. And when she was a young woman, not much older than her students, she rode her pony overland 20 miles to a schoolhouse each week to teach the farmer’s children. She carried a long barrel pistol in her waistband and remembered that although she never shot an Indian she shot at a few. It was a hard world on the prairie.

Her maiden name was Elizabeth Mohrbacher. She was living in Marysville when the British explorer Sir Richard Burton – headed to have a look at the Mormons – hit town. And she was there when they raised the flag when Kansas became a state. And there too, when Sam Clemens, a recent Confederate army deserter passed through town headed for the territory ahead. And she was there when the Pony Express arrived after a 100-mile dash from St. Joseph, Missouri. She remembered it in wonderful detail. This was no bar story. This was no dime novel. These were not the recollections of an established fraud like William Frederick Cody. Here was an old lady on the Kansas plains who had seen America and lived a life out of a Willa Cather novel. Here was perhaps the last living American to have actually seen “the swift phantom of the desert,” as Twain called the Pony Express rider.

On mornings like that - even in Topeka, Kansas - every bit of research is worth it and all the disappointments and the trips that seemed pointless and the leads that did not pan out don’t matter much anymore. I could not believe that I had found her. She had been waiting for me for a long, long time.

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Learn more about all of our Archives Month activities!

How many of you all have been affected deeply by this past 9/11 anniversary?
How many of you all thought to yourself that "why is this idiot trying to burn the Quran"?
How many of you asked yourself that "why is there a huge issue about the ground zero community center...if it were a church, no one would care"?
With that regard....
Please come out and join is for our event on November 2, 2010 in the University Center, room number 312. This is an opportunity to bring your non-muslim friends to give them a chance to learn about what Islam is really all about. Please spread the word! Inshallah, hope to see all.

Monday, October 25, 2010

5:30 pm - 8 pm

            The meeting began with the senators discussing ideas for how to better improve the UMBC undergraduate experience. The senators created a list of 17 ideas. Each senate member then chose a flaw of UMBC they wanted to improve, pursue, and take initiative on. 8 flaws were chosen to be pursued, which include: lack of school spirit and social events, lack of liveliness of the Commons on weekends (a.k.a. “Death of the Commons”), the purell dispensers in the RAC are empty, there are not enough parking lots and the price of parking tickets is too high, meal plans should be improved, perhaps there should be rollover meal plans from week to week, inadequate security, more shuttle transportation to Baltimore/BWI, and there should be free printing in the library. Over the next few weeks, the senators will further investigate these flaws and will ponder about solutions to these flaws.

            After that, Samy Rabb, FYA of Student Organization Support Staff (SOS) told the senators about this year’s SOS. To find out more information about SOS and/or to find out EXACTLY what Sammy discussed, check out the followings sheets he handed out, attached below.

            After Samy left, one of the Senate members presented a proposal to revise the Undergraduate Academic Conduct Policy, representing Academic Conduct Committee (ACC). The Senate then discussed their views of the proposal and the proposed academic conduct policies, and came up with questions to ask the faculty advisor of the ACC when she visits the Senate next Monday.

Stay tuned for next week’s blog to find out about the conversation with the ACC advisor, what the Senate members discovered about their initial research regarding the flaws of UMBC they wish to improve, and more!

Or even better, come to a senate meeting! They are on Mondays at 5:30 pm in Commons 318.  

                Take Care,

              Anisha Khandelwal

 p.s.

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