Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 17

DETROIT FREE PRESS TUESDAY, JANUARY 13, 1987 3B da Vinci models exhibited III Colin vfM Covert data base through Feb. 18 as part of a national tour. The pieces are working models, and some may be operated by visitors. The library is open and 1-5 Sun. in the South-field Civic Center, 26000 Evergreen at Civic Center Drive (10 Mile Road).

The exhibit is free. Call 354-9100 during hours listed. The exhibit will be in Lansing Feb. 26-March 29, at the Impression 5 Science Museum, 10-5 noon-5 Sun. Museum admission is $3 adults, $2.50 children 4-12, and $2 senior citizens.

Call 517-485-8115 Leonardo da Vinci had more on his mind than painting the Mona Lisa. He was a confirmed putterer who thought a lot about energy and motion and machines to solve practical problems. His sketches and drawings suggested what lay three or four centuries ahead planes and helicopters, cars and heavy machinery. International Business Machines Corp. in 1951 commissioned the construction of scale models of many of da Vinci's research projects, and the models have traveled to museums, colleges and public libraries throughout the world.

Fifteen are at Southf ield Public Library The theoretical gear system da Vinci developed operates on the principle used in automobile transmissions. Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter Astronomer Loudon at home in the universe "People are impressed I get audiences of 400, 500 people. But good grief! That's about astronomy, and besides It's free! They get 100,000 people at these stupid football games, and they have to pay! So I'm not really doing very well, when you think about It." Jim Loudon Kaleidoscope not for all, -but it's fun Are your eyes burning from too many hours of staring at arid spread sheets and dull reports on your computer screen? A new computer program from trendy northern California offers relief. It's a screen pattern generator called Hallucinations ($25, Polymath Systems, P.O. Box 795, Berkeley, Calif.

94701) and it turns IBM-compatible computers into endlessly changing kaleidoscopes. It's a nice respite from the demanding, deadline-oriented applications most PC users have to deal with. THE PROGRAM creates a variety of distinct patterns. Some suggest organic growth. Others are reminiscent of patchwork quilts, Chinese screens or star clusters.

Various functions allow the user to select colors from an electronic palette table, alter some shapes and determine the speed at which the patterns evolve. Favorite patterns can be saved on the disk or printed out. I took to it immediately. After all the recalcitrant programs I've tried to struggle through, it was wonderful to find one that gave a relaxing reward for virtually no effort. Not everyone enjoys the program as much, though.

I demonstrated it for a friend who is a professional art critic and she turned up her nose. She wanted something more interactive, a program that would allow users to create their own images. "This is like doodling, except you're having a machine do it for you," she said. IN A SENSE, that criticism missed the point. Of course, there are programs that let computer users create their own pictures.

Paint-by-numbers programs offer artists completely new methods and materials. They can "paint" as if with brushes and colors. They can call up images already inside the machine to change and improve what they've entered. Once a picture is established, the machine can alter the colors and shading in an infinite number of ways. But Hallucinations wasn't designed to do that, and faulting it on those grounds is a bit like criticizing a music box because it isn't a piano.

I wish the program had made more adventurous use of the computer's graphics capabilities. The images, for all their interlaced colors, are rather one-dimensional, and there's more to a picture than just shape and color. Real objects show texture, light and shade, perspective and reflections of other objects. All those things can be calculated and the appropriate effects painted on the image, given sufficient time and computing power. Of course, that would slow down the metamorphosis of the images; creating complicated images such as realistic landscapes can take hours of processing even on mainframe computers.

Anyway, when you're paying coach prices, it's unrealistic to demand first-class service. For visually undernourished office workers, kids and anyone who'd like the optical entertainment of an ant farm or an aquarium but can't hack the responsibility, Hallucinations is a bargain. coveries more closely than most, says there are "two big differences between the universe as humans imagine it, back before they know, and what it turns out to be." First, he says, it is far more diverse than anyone could have guessed. "We have been to so many moons and so many planets and there are just no two of them that are alike. Nature has much more imagination than we do," he says, pointing to the differences between the Mars portrayed in 1930s movies our intrepid hero could even mate with the native and the real Mars, far more fantastic than anything screenwriters could imagine.

He begins a litany of Martian wonders, speaking very fast, his voice rising with excitement: "The air freezes solid and falls on the ground around the poles every winter, then evaporates in the spring and you get winds of 300 miles an hourl It has a single volcano bigger across than the state of Michigan and five times the height of Mt. Everest from base to peak, or three times the height of Mt. Everest above sea level! And it has a canyon that stretches a quarter of the way around the equator of the planet, and that averages as wide, from rim to rim, as the Grand Canyon in Arizona is long!" More profoundly, he says, the universe has turned out to be "much more alien than we had thought. It isn't a cut-rate Earth. You can't breathe the air.

You can't mate with the native princesses. "To the extent that there is opposition to space exploration, a root psychological cause of it is fear inspired by the fact that so much of the universe is not only not friendly to us, it isn't even hostile to us. It is utterly indifferent to us." He pauses, perhaps for effect, as the earth turns and the sun vanishes and the light grows dim in his humble little living room. "There are entire galaxies out there that are exploding, and they are going to go right on exploding whether or not I get a raise, or you meet your deadline, or the whole earth blows up. And I think a lot of people find that terrifying." But isn't it? "Not necessarily," he says.

"You can learn to appreciate the alienness, but it is something that you have to learn." Then he smiles. "To the connoisseurs, it is the best part." For a free copy of Astro-schedule, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to U-M Exhibit Museum, New Astroschedule, 1109 Geddes Ann Arbor 48 109-1 079. To reach Jim Loudon, call Chives, 426-5396, anytime. LOUDON, from Page 1B who regularly speaks in exclamation points, who shouts whenever he gets excited, who laughs like a bowl full of jelly, his belly rippling beneath his space mission T-shirt, compliments of NASA. "He is terrifically smart, with a memory that will retain things probably forever," says Fred Hindley, an announcer for WUOM radio, which regularly airs Loudon's commentaries on space and space exploration.

"It's just incredible, his ability to take terribly hard things and make them easy." "You almost felt like you were each astronaut eat each ul; it's that detailed," Ann Arbor attorney Jean King says of Loudon's on space flights, 'i "MylastAstroFestwillbeasadday me," says astronomy senior Dan Durda, who has attended all but one of the AstroFests held during his four years at U-M, even in the summer when it meant a 300-mile round-trip drive from his home in northern Michigan. 'V "I started coming to AstroFests when I was 14," says Shari Williams, 20, "and even then I could understand and find it exciting." She is majoring in astronomy, in large part because Lou- don enlarged the universe for her. "He represents the fun in it." WILLIAMS AND DURDA, although undergraduates, have one big Advantage over Loudon: They have -University of Michigan library cards. Loudon has no library card. Neither "does he have an office on campus.

He has a title staff astronomer at the Exhibit Museum but there's no money attached to it. Although he's known as Mr. Astronomy in Ann Arbor and throughout the state, Loudon is not on the faculty I at U-M. Neither does he have a PhD. In fact, the astronomy department kicked him out 17 years ago when he was 26, shortly after he earned his master's degree, telling him he was a marginal student.

(He agrees with their assessment.) Now, he is thankful it happened that way. Research, which PhD astronomers do for a living, "involves sitting out there with a telescope for cold "night after cold night doing boring Jhings." Let others bounce radio waves off distant galaxies. He'd much rather talk about those galaxies, those radio waves, those researchers. He has only One condition, which he mentions early in each AstroFest: I "There's only one ground rule, and that is there is no such thing as a dumb question. If I don't know the answer, I I'll fake it." Nobody laughs when he says that; they know it's not true.

If he occasionally makes a mistake, the audi-J ence corrects him, or next month he i comes back and corrects himself. At the next AstroFest, 7:30 p.m. I Friday at the Modern Languages Build-j ing, Auditorium 3, he will speak about "A Year After Challenger: Where Do We Go From Here?" Last year, immedi- ately after the disaster, he spent one and a half AstroFests (or aoout nve hours) explaining exactly what went wrong. His February topic is "Voyager 2 Uranus Discoveries, Part IV." Part IV? It sounds as exciting as 12 hours of talk about foam insulation, but fans predict it will be astounding, as usual. "I remember him once dissecting a (NASA) package on the Viking Mars lander, line by line, explaining what the data meant," said Joel Lauder, an engineer and manager at Allnet, a long ly.) "I could be frank.

I could be earnest. But I'd rather be Jim." Then Chives will tell the caller about Jim's upcoming lectures, including directions. He periodically publishes the U-M Astroschedule, printed on yellow paper and packed with information about Earth-bound space-related events. He also writes the Michigan Spacelog, an eight- to 10-page monthly compendium of heavenly events past, present and future for every day of the month, distributed to about 100 news media. (He always includes the Miss Universe Pageant.) In his one-room house (besides a bathroom and basement) are two chairs, a desk, a bed, a sink on stilts, a small refrigerator, a floor lamp, many cardboard boxes that serve as filing cabinets, and shelves holding hundreds of boxes of slides, cassette tapes of lectures and classical music, and records, mainly 20th Century classical music, another of his specialties.

Above his bed is an air-conditioner and a framed black-and-white photograph of Mt. St. Helens erupting. Across the small room, over his desk, is his "most valuable a four-by-six Inch University of Michigan flag that went to the moon with the Apollo 15 crew, all of whom were U-M grads. Posted throughout the house are checklists like those astronauts use in flight.

One taped to his refrigerator begins: "Finish all food in freezer." Taped to the inside of his front door is a sign: "Warning! Real World beyond this door. Enter at your own risk." ON LOUDON'S PLANET, folks have grown so accustomed to space flight that the networks stopped televising space shuttle launches. Movies that make millions feature space creatures and space flights, and youth grow up thinking space is a friendly place, apart from a few nasty guys such as Darth Vader. But Loudon, who tracks space dis- Expand Your distance phone service based in Birmingham, who drove with a friend to Ann Arbor this cold December night to hear Loudon. They bought candy bars, bagels and Cokes for dinner.

During this AstroFest, Loudon answers questions about the origin of the moon (theories suggest, he says, that the moon is either the Earth's sister, daughter or wife, then explains for 20 minutes why he finds the daughter theory so fascinating); the use of ion-drive to propel rockets in space; the impending explosion of the giant star Betelgeuse; what would happen if the sun suddenly disappeared; how a shower of carbonaceous-chondritic asteroids may have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. He also answers in detail what some In the audience think is a stupid question: Why can't NASA use parachutes to return spacecraft to the Earth? THE ASTRONOMY department that kicked Jim Loudon out 17 years ago is happy about his success, such as it is. "People are impressed I get audiences of 400, 500 people," Loudon says. "But good grief! That's about astronomy, and besides it's free! They get 100,000 people at these stupid football games, and they have to pay! So I'm not really doing very well, when you think about it." Says astronomy professor Richard Teske: "There was a time when we wondered why Jim was being identified as the premier astronomer at the University of Michigan. We were a little uncomfortable about that.

If Jim blew it, or screwed up, the identification fell right upon us. As time's gone by, and it's become clear Jim's not going to be a professional liability but rather an asset, we've become more comfortable." I Adds Teske, "He's able to educate the public better than we do." Associate professor Dick Sears gives the evidence: "The real competition comes on Visitors' Night (a monthly event sponsored by the astronomy department) in which we dull faculty get up and spout our bit of knowledge (to an audience that rarely tops 125), while Jim packs them in over there." Says Teske: "We scientists are trained to talk to one another. Jim has made the effort to convey ideas in common, human terms. He has become a cult figure." Loudon has been asked by many public speaking 'instructors to reveal his secrets. Loudon says he has none.

"It's as if a paraplegic came to you and said, 'You can move your arm; teach me how you do You don't know how you do it." t. LOUDON GOT his training on the banks of a small lake in New Jersey where his family owned a cabin. Night after night, summer after summer, he and his best friend, whom he hasn't seen in decades, would sit beneath the stars while Loudon explained to Skipper what they saw, and what they didn't see but could imagine. "I'd pass on to him all this stuff I read, or saw on TV, or saw at the planetarium. Little did I realize he was teaching me how to lecture.

I was 1 1 or 12 when we met, and it went on till I was 19 or 20. It was the only training I ever had." He collected bachelor's and master's degrees at U-M. He was not a stellar student, although he has an IQ of 136. After he was kicked out of graduate school about complex numbers turned him off," said one of his professors), he subsisted on part-time jobs, including a teaching job at Frank Rauscher, senior vice-president for research at the American Cancer Society. Nearly all the 50 drugs in common use attack tumor cells while they are actively reproducing.

The problem, he said, is that most kinds of tumors grow very slowly and are hence not susceptible to the available drugs. THE SHIFT in strategy is of great importance to the medical community because the institute plays such a central role in chemical screening. Some private drug companies use mouse screens, but companies often send substances to the federal agency for preliminary analysis. Two developments made the new approach feasible, according to Robert Shoemaker, an institute official who managed the design of the test-tube method. The ability to maintain the necessary Juman tumor cell lines has the experimental Residential College.

It was there that he started showing films about space to his students, open ing the events to the public. "I showed films, and at first my comments were very brief, then they began to get longer, then I began to notice people were enjoying the comments more than the films." When he lost that job in 1977, because he hadn't published anything and had no PhD to boot, he continued the free monthly lectures with funding from the university's Exhibit Museum and the Department of Aerospace Engineering. He earns about $300 for each AstroFest. He has subsisted since on soft money, and not much of that. His annual income in 1985 was $13,000, from lectures, freelance interviews with radio stations and networks, and magazine articles.

He lectures wherever they'll have him, including Michigan State University, the University of Windsor, Wayne State University, the University of Toledo and the University of Illinois. "I have a product people don't realize they want unless they've seen It. I tell somebody I will give four 3-hour lectures on the planet Uranus and people will come, and they tell me I'm nuts until they've seen it." He also does radio commentaries on space. A decade ago, he traveled to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory In California to cover the Viking mission to Mars, filing more than 100 reports to National Public Radio during the second half of 1976. The assignment required more than smarts: He had to teach himself to drive to get there.

At age 33, he took driving lessons for three or four weeks, then drove alone across the country, sleeping along the way in the back of his Volkswagen Rabbit. A BACHELOR, he lives in what he describes as "a shack" on the shores of a small lake near Ann Arbor, at a location revealed to a reporter but generally kept secret even from his best friends. He does that because of what he calls his "sleeping problem." He spends 14 to 16 hours each day in bed, struggling to fall sleep or, occasionally, sleeping. "It would be disaster for me if someone knocked on my door when I was trying to sleep." One acquaintance says he's coy about the location of his home because "people call him all the time, all sorts of strange people with new theories of the universe and who want to try them out on Jim Loudon." Loudon's "roommate" is his answering machine. He calls it Chives, after a servant-being in a science fiction series by Poul Anderson.

"Hello, this is Chives, Jim Loudon's lovable answering machine," the machine might say (messages change frequent improved, and an automated method has been perfected for reading and analyzing the results of the screening system. Without automation, large-scale use of the method would create a logistical nightmare because 10 million or more individual tests will be involved each year. Officials expect to screen 1 0,000 to 20,000 compounds a year, according to Shoemaker. Some chemicals previously passed through the mouse screen will be retested as well. Besides providing more specific, disease-targeted information, the test-tube screen will be cheaper and easier to manage than the mouse screen.

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26-3124 ANTI-CANCER DRUGS, from Page 1B Physicians and patients are desperate for better drugs to treat cancers of the lung, colon and breast the three leading causes of cancer death as well as melanoma and other cancers. In the new strategy, chemicals that show initial promise against particular cancers in the test tube will then be tried In mice specially bred mice whose immune systems have been suppressed into which the same tumor strains have been grafted. Studies in live animals are necessary to learn about the test chemical's toxicity and whether it is metabolized in a way that changes its effectiveness. The ultimate result, officials hope, will be drugs that work against specif- ic cancers in humans. The existing mouse screen has been best at selecting drugs that work afalnst fast-growing cancers, said Dr.

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