On the Making of Bricks
Unveiling the night's mysteries one little blue panel at a time.
My parents were in town recently, and we went with them on one of the Chicago Architecture Tours, where you ride down the river in a big boat, and the guide points out features and tell stories about the many downtown buildings. It’s actually pretty cool: in my experience, it’s pretty much universally agreed by locals as is one of the “tourist” attractions most worth doing.
Anyway, as impressive as the Sears Tower’s spikes and the St. Regis’s curves, I remember being struck when the guide pointed out an older building with over 300,000 beautiful bricks used in its construction. That’s a lot of bricks. I read afterwards that a skilled brick layer might lay 500 bricks in a day, assuming they had a strong support team constantly supplying the bricks and mortar. Yet that’s still two years of long 6 day work weeks to construct those walls, brick by brick. I wonder, sometimes, how they had the courage each day to start.
The Arecibo Legacy Fast Arecibo L-band Feed Array Survey (ALFALFA) was, for over a decade, the largest survey of 21-cm radio waves coming from distant galaxies in outer space. It began observing in 2005 after years of preparatory work and completed observing in 2012, with a final data release in 2018. After two decades of work over 30,000 extragalactic sources where harvested from the darkness of the radio night.
I joined ALFALFA in 2011, when observing had an established rhythm, a nightly routine of logging in and monitoring the instruments for irregularities, WAPPS failures, or unexpected radio frequency interference (RFI). Yet the observing – the collection of the data – was just the start of it. Each scan needed to be examined for additional terrestrial interference – Navy radars, GPS satellites, cell phones and the like. Scan by scan we’d flag and remove the interference with a software named flagbb; I don’t recall why the bb, just that our team lead Martha, fondly or otherwise, called the process “more fun than human beings should be allowed to have.”
After flagging, the data would be run through a process that gridded the scans into hundreds of “data cubes” – 2.4 degree square chunks of the sky, each with 1048x4 separate channels, that is, 4192 separate 2.4° by 2.4° square images at different radio frequencies corresponding to different galaxy distances. We’d look through these images, one by one, looking for white blips among the blue noise that would indicate a detected galaxy. Each blip would need to be isolated, boxed, measured, and carefully cataloged, one by one: years of effort to finally obtain a catalog over over 31,000 bonafide extragalactic sources.
I’ll note that while computers that were trained to detect these sources and save on labor were helpful, but only so accurate. No matter what machinery we developed, in the end a complete catalog required a steady slow harvest: a starting and an ending, grid by grid, channel by channel, a search for whatever was hiding out there in the night.
I occasionally dream of those blue windows still, though my part was comparatively quite small, and though I got on a bus already in full swing. I don’t know how they ever started, to be honest. Each grid was daunting enough. But somehow it happened, one little blue panel at a time.
I know all this, yet I still can’t seem to fully understand how skyscrapers get built. I’ve been struggling with my writing recently, in part because I can’t get past the work’s intimidating height; I’ve successfully, I thought, come up with a full blueprint of a book: drawn out it seems academically interesting, with appropriate spacing for doors and plumbing. But construction is another matter. Whenever I attempt to actually create even the smallest of chapters, it seems I’ve hit a wall.
Annie Dillard, in her penetrating way, compares writing to remodeling a house. “You tap the walls lightly,” she writes, “you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay or everything will fall down…. Unfortunately it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck.”
Yes, I duck. But with my head down, I’m pinned in a rubble of my own making. How to move? The weight is crushing.
At my writing group yesterday, one of my friends, Josh, told me about an exercise from college where they were assigned to write little stories throughout the semester, unaware that at the end, their final assignment would be to construct a book from these stories: a “simple” organization of building blocks, already made, around an unintended but emergent theme. “Just make bricks,” he said to me. “Anything else is too big.”
He’s right of course. Like most mortals on our planet earth, I, weighing just 0.000000000000000000000001 Earth masses, find myself unequal to the tasks set by my starry eyed college graduate self, who, despite some knowledge of physics, somehow failed to compute the force required to change the world. Yet, while the skyscrapers loom impossible, perhaps, I can still make a brick.