Wikipedia Article of the Day

Theremin:

The theremin was originally the product of Russian government-sponsored research into proximity sensors. The instrument was invented by a young Russian physicist named Lev Sergeivich Termen (known in the West as Léon Theremin) in October 1920^[3] after the outbreak of the Russian civil war. After positive reviews at Moscow electronics conferences, Theremin demonstrated the device to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin was so impressed with the device that he began taking lessons in playing it,^[4] commissioned six hundred of the instruments for distribution throughout the Soviet Union, and sent Theremin on a trip around the world to demonstrate the latest Soviet technology and the invention of electronic music.

Fantastic video of its use here.
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Friday Poetry Burst

In the wake of yesterdays lamentation over the environment I thought this one appropriate.
The Storm Cone, by Rudyard Kipling, 1932


This is the midnight-let no star
Delude us-dawn is very far.
This is the tempest long foretold-
Slow to make head but sure to hold

Stand by! The lull 'twixt blast and blast
Signals the storm is near, not past;
And worse than present jeopardy
May our forlorn to-morrow be.

If we have cleared the expectant reef,
Let no man look for his relief.
Only the darkness hides the shape
Of further peril to escape.

It is decreed that we abide
The weight of gale against the tide
And those huge waves the outer main
Sends in to set us back again.

They fall and whelm. We strain to hear
The pulses of her labouring gear,
Till the deep throb beneath us proves,
After each shudder and check, she moves!

She moves, with all save purpose lost,
To make her offing from the coast;
But, till she fetches open sea,
Let no man deem that he is free!


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Iron Man's New Power Supply

From New Scientist:

Tony's big problem is to cure the ache in his heart. Palladium, we can surmise, drives a cold-fusion nuclear reactor that Tony has miniaturized into the arc reactor, but the radioactive palladium is killing him. The only solution is to make a hypothetical element from a structure suggested by his late father.

Making a new element is not as fantastical as it might sound. New Scientist readers will know that the periodic table is a work in progress, with a new element - Copernicum, atomic number 112 - officially finding its place there last year. A string of other new elements are currently being considered.

Like real-life element forgers, Tony needs some hard-core tech. He assembles what appears to be a particle accelerator and fires a beam of high speed atoms (blue in this case), at a target: presumably two existing elements.

OK, it is not the LHC snaking around his spacious lab, nor is it a "table-top particle accelerator", in which laser beams accelerate electrons with a plasma. But whatever it is, it's impressive.

The result is almost immediate: a triangular-shaped sample of the element, which seems completely stable, and glows white. "Congratulations, you have created a new element," announces a robotic voice. "That was easy," says Tony.

Readers of this blog will remember that I speculated that the movie would feature Tony dealing with his immune system rejecting the arc reactor, just like in the comics. Apparently I was right.
This article implies that he develops a new element that is less poisonous than Palladium.

Fortunately for you, dear readers, I took chemistry. Unfortunately for viewers of Iron Man 2, Jon Favreau and Justin Theroux did not. The clear solution to the palladium poisoning issue would be to use titanium...which not only is lighter and stronger than palladium, but also has its hydrogen storage capabilities...AND IS COMPLETELY BIOCOMPATIBLE!

(Aside: Radioactive palladium fueling a cold fusion reactor? Please. Obviously he's used the palladium as a tritium storage bed and figured out a way to reach 900X concentration of tritium, and uses the "arc" to excite and increase radioactive decay of the tritium, yielding beta particles. Obviously.)


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Are We Dammed?

Brazil, apparently, has chosen intermittent hydroelectric power over environment and native culture. They have cleared the way for the third largest dam in the world to be built along the Amazon river.
The reason I say "intermittent" power is because the dam will only operate at 100% capacity during the monsoon season, which lasts three months. During the dry season, it is expected the dam will only produce about 10% of monsoon season power.
Blah blah blah wipe out fish populations, increase malaria in standing water areas, wipe out rain forest, displace native peoples, blah blah blah.

You know, at some point, the human race will have effectively destroyed this planet. Scientists, politicians, and annoying bloggers like me argue when that point will happen, but virtually all human beings acknowledge that eventually we will succeed in our efforts to irrevocably damage the global ecosystem beyond simple, autonomous repair. Some, like Rush Limbaugh, see the global climate apocalypse as asymptotically distant, though not impossible. Most conservatives see it as unlikely in their lifetimes. Liberals tend to implore us to change our ways, because the climate needs our help, sooner rather than later, but even they cannot irrefutably nail down the PoNR for Earth's climate.

And then you have that lunatic fringe. That small group of people who don't claim, but rather simply accept, that our race has passed the point where the climate is fixable. I try not to fall into this group. I really do.

And then this happens. And I really, really wonder if we've blown it.


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Simply Amazing

E.J. Becker was talking to Liz Cheney on the radio this morning on my way to work:

E.J.: What do you make of all these polls that show America having a high approval rating for President Obama and actually saying that Americans trust Democrats on big issues more than Republicans?

Liz: All those polls are outliers, obviously.

Oh, obviously.
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Creationists

Using carbon dating to prove the Earth is billions of years old is not okay.
Using carbon dating to prove dinosaurs and humans did no coexist is not okay.

But using carbon dating to prove some wood was part of Noah's Ark is A-O-K!

Selectively applying science to prove science wrong is the epitome of hypocrisy.


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O. M. G.

Greatest Web Tool Ever?

Here's a sample result.


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Our Own Worst Enemy

Continuing my Iron Man themed posts as I count down the days to the movie premiere of Iron Man 2 this next friday, May 7th, I want to touch on a major issue that affects technology in general, and science-fiction movies in specific: villain's rise because of the hero.

In the first Iron Man movie, Tony Stark's life is a playboy joyride until he has his "come to Jesus" moment and decides to build the Iron Man armor. Lo and behold, because he starts using the armor to thwart Obadiah Stane, Stane builds his own armor and they have an Iron Man/Iron Monger duel at the climax of the movie. What if Tony hadn't built his first armor?
Or similarly, Stark starts his "Mk. I" armor by building the "arc reactor" that protects his heart as well as powers his suits. What if, upon escaping from Afghanistan, he had returned home and had surgery to remove the metal shards in his heart? He could then have removed the arc reactor and destroyed it. Or at least hidden it where Obie couldn't have used it to power the Iron Monger suit.
I am concerned a major flaw in the upcoming Iron Man 2 movie will be that all of Tony's nemeses will derive from things he did/does, rather than simply existing. I'm afraid that Mickey Rourke's Whiplash will be motivated by some anger he holds towards Stark, and be seeking revenge. I am concerned that Justin Hammer will build the Iron Bots because he uses industrial espionage of some sort to obtain basic plans for the old Mk. I-III suits Tony proudly displays in his lab.

Back in the real world, isn't this a pretty common theme as well? The government invents and develops the internet, then upon releasing it to the public becomes enmeshed in an eternal battle against hackers who use that very internet to try to obtain government information or harm government agencies/individuals? Or consider the modern automobile, that has single-handedly changed the way we commute, travel, and live...while also introducing a concepts like vehicular homocide, drunk-driving, and greenhouse gas emissions. Or consider the gun. Without the gun, would JFK still be alive? Martin? Bobby? And how many soldiers, friend or foe, have died because of guns? But then again, how many people have protected themselves with guns? How many frontiersman fed their families during harsh winters via guns?

The cynical truth is that technological utopia is an illusion. As long as character flaws continue to exist in humans (hint: they have existed since our species emerged), technology that becomes available - no matter how altruistic its original purpose - will be inescapably maligned by someone and give that technology a bad name.

So we must look to the future, and try to anticipate exactly how emerging technologies could be corrupted. I harp on and on about autonomous cars being the safest future imaginable...but could a malicious individual hack my car, and turn it into a high-speed steel projectile? Could a malicious person hack their own car, giving themselves emergency vehicle priority so they could zoom through traffic...thereby snarling traffic all around them? I often suggest fusion power is the future for Earth-based humanity's energy needs. But could fusion be bent to a dictator's will? Could a terrorist state circumvent safety protocols, overloading a fusion reactor and holding the world hostage?
Certainly these events are unlikely. But if 20 years ago I'd told you that "a hacker will break into the former Alaska governor's yahoo email account and obtain evidence that the former governor had used that account for official government business, and the former governor will be subpoenaed and testify about it" I'd have been laughed at. Yet here we stand, with elected officials and hackers alike illegally abusing the very technology we once thought would set us free.


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Feasibility of Iron Man's Suit

There are bound to be millions of high school juniors and seniors going next weekend to see Iron Man 2. Of those, several thousand surely have not decided what their academic major will be when they enter college. Of these, a small number will see the movie and go "I'd like to build the Iron Man suit."
To you, tiny minority, I write this post. Now, I will be the first to tell you that it is very unlikely you, alone in your basement machine shop where you rebuild cars, will be able to build the single most technologically advanced piece of hardware in human history. But you certainly can make an impact in the development of that hardware. And if you place yourself correctly, you can be on the team that builds it.

There are four key things missing from the world of science and technology that are really required before Iron Man's suit can be reality.

1. Power Supply It is no coincidence that the development of Iron Man's suit begins with a power supply. Tony Stark (or rather Jon Favreau's engineering advisory team) made it patently clear that super strength requires a lot of energy. The engineering calculations for how much power needed aren't impossible to create, but currently that much power is! At least in a donut shaped, chest mounted device. Go into electrical engineering, physics, mechanical engineering, plasma research, or battery engineering and build Iron Man's arc reactor. Or something better.

2. Linear Actuator/Artificial Muscle Where exactly, does Iron Man's suit get its strength? The comics waste no time explaining it, probably because comic book writers/artists are not scientists. But the truth is a powered exoskeleton will need some kind of actuators to give it strength. Raytheon's suit uses hydraulics. Other suits use similar technologies including pneumatics or mechanical linear actuators. Electro-active Polymer Muscle (EPAM) and other artificial muscle technologies are still in fledgeling phases, and their suitability is questionable considering they need hundreds to thousands of volts to operate.
No, what we really need is for you to go into materials science or chemical engineering and develop a true artificial muscle. Normal human muscle has a strength of approximately 0.35 megapascals, so you need to invent artificial muscle with the same (or preferably greater) energy density. Want to really impress me? Go to school and learn how to make artificial muscle that has an energy density linearly correlated to current passing through it. And it generates little or no heat.

3. Control System Somehow, Tony Stark controls his armor. In the comics he uses direct neural linking, or the armor becomes part of him. In the first movie, they are rather ambiguous about how that is accomplished. My own research is on tracking eye gaze, and using that in combination with custom blink algorithms. Also, I humbly submit that voice recognition would be convenient. You could always just raise the faceplate if you wanted to talk to anyone other than the suit.
In any case, software engineers, neurobiologists, and electrical engineers need to get busy developing a breakthrough way for a human to interact with a machine. Or as I like to say, "we just need the drivers to make human software talk in 1's and 0's."

4. Weapons In the comics, Iron Man has a blistering array of sweet, powerful weapons. In the movie they mostly focus on his repulsors in his hands as weapons. So the long and short of it is: invent repulsors for your exoskeleton to fight with.

That's it, really. A blending of all four of those, toss in flight capability, and you have your own Iron Man armor. That is, if I don't beat you there.


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Powered Exoskeleton Control Systems

With Iron Man 2 only days away, at work we engineers are buzzing with our own belief-sets about the feasibility of technical aspects of the Iron Man movies. For example, most of us agree that Whiplash's ability to cut through cars with electrified whips is "impossible" whereas Iron Man's palm-mounted repulser weaponry is merely "implausible."

One topic about which we cannot build a consensus is the control mechanism by which Iron Man controls his suit. Most of us agree that it is implied in the movies that direct neural interfacing with Tony Stark's brain is the only plausible way that he is controlling the suit, as verbal commands are nearly absent, and since his hands and feet are busy fighting/flying, he must be just "thinking" commands that are somehow picked up by the suit.

Direct thought reading, through EEG or various other technologies remains technology about which I am highly dubious. I have proposed that eye-gaze tracking systems could basically control the suit, given a HUD and various pre-trained protocols.
Reading thoughts though, to me, is unlikely for the following reason: you can't accurately determine what the fish population in a pond if you simply stand at the edge of it and see what swims by.


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Stephen Hawking Fears A Romulan Invasion Fleet

Hawking assumes that visiting intelligent life would be malicious, bent on stealing our resources or simply killing us. I don't necessarily agree with that. My belief is that any alien race sufficiently advanced to develop interstellar propulsion must have overcome genetic and cultural propensities for violence.

He makes a good point though, and I find it refreshing to hear from a thinker:

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said.

What Hawking is suggesting here is that any violent confrontation between us and visiting aliens will be fairly lopsided. But what isn't clearly stated here is the old saying "Columbus brought smallpox, and took home syphilis."
Face-to-face interaction with an alien race would almost certainly kill us, and them. This was alluded to over 100 years ago when H.G. Wells wrote in War of the Worlds that all-powerful aliens reach Earth bent on take-over, only to be completely annihilated by the bacteria and virii we native species have found innocuous for millenia.

So Hawking is right. Shaking hands with aliens would probably mean our doom.


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Musing on the External Darkness

Saturday morning I rose at a breathtaking 3:15 AM to go catfishing. It turns out catfish are as nocturnal as a newborn baby, and are best caught when you'd rather be sleeping. I headed out to a new spot, a put-in on the Kansas River just west of Lenexa. When I arrived, I was alone in the parking lot. The boat ramp was silent. Below me and to the east, I could detect the faint gurgling of Cedar Creek. I grabbed my fishing gear, my new, 90 lumen LED flashlight (which basically turns night into a surreal, narrow spectrum of day), and off I went. I walked down to the point, and set up shop. I got both rods out pretty quickly, using HyVee's Bacon Cheddar Bratwurst as bait. I figured the combination of bacon oil and cheese oil would bring the cats in heavy and fast. Once I had my lines in the water, I clicked off my flashlight.

What greeted me can only be described as oppression. Darkness, like a blanket, surrounded me. From every direction, I could see nothing, but hear everything. The chirping of little insects, the buzz of a mosquito in my ear, a fish splashing nearby...all suddenly seemed implausibly loud, and impossibly close. My uber-flashlight had served its purpose well, but my eyes were now maladjusted to the darkness. Far off in the distance, I saw a flash...a nearby thunderstorm was moving off into the distance.

I suddenly felt very small. Very alone. It occurred to me that what I was feeling was a sense of being distinctly mortal. And it dawned on me that I don't normally feel that.

I don't think it was fear that gripped me, that cool morning. In Kansas there are literally zero native animals that can easily kill you. There aren't even tropic diseases or insect-borne pathogens to fear. No fish could come up out of the water and eat me. No flash flood could wash me away. No, in the darkness I did not feel fear. Or at least, I did not feel afraid for my life. Instead I felt weight.

I felt like the sky, the cool breeze, and the sounds of nature all around me were pressing against me, from every direction. Perhaps the ability to see not only allows to a person to see how far away something is, but also how close it is to you...if you catch my double meaning. A sound that would normally send my eyes looking a fair distance away suddenly seemed basically in my ear. The smells in the breeze, including one that smelled of something rotten, seemed to force themselves upon me.

At some point, my eyes began to adjust. I began to see faint outlines of things, like the point where Cedar Creek and the Kaw joined, the two waters swirled and mixed in a terrific impression of the cloud cover of Jupiter. At one point I caught a large fish, a blue catfish in the neighborhood of 5 lbs. He fought on in and I took a look at him, then released him. He disappeared back into the dark. After he was gone, I realized I had enjoyed the few minutes of his company, even at one point talking out loud to him, describing his features to him. Then, with my customary pat on his tail, I'd set him on his way. Once again I was alone in the darkness. Once again the weight was upon me.

I wondered to myself if this was some sort of sensation only I felt, or if this sense of the world pushing on me was something all humans felt? I imagined my ancestors, thousands upon thousands of years ago, crowding up to the fire, and actually evolving a pathway in their brains that released pleasure hormones when they sat and stared into the flames. I imagined them turning to face the darkness, and only feeling cold on their faces, only hearing noises from sources they couldn't see.
Then my mind ventured forward in time, to a city, perhaps the first human city, where people willingly paid tax money to have a man walk down the street each night and light gas lamps, so that the darkness would be eternally banished from their lives. They lit candles in their houses, they kept a merry blaze going in the hearth. All to drive out the dark and fill their lives with sweet, pleasurable light.
Then I imagined a creature in the dark, perhaps a raccoon or skunk, watching me exit my truck earlier that morning. I had interrupted its natural feeding so it watched, amused, as I fumbled in the dark like a blind infant. Watched me, as I fumbled desperately for my flashlight, then visibly relaxed upon its ignition. I can imagine the raccoon watching the erratic way I flashed my light back and forth, not knowing "what's out there", moving with a quick, purposeful stride through the blanketing dark.

As this all stewed on in my mind, and as I continued to catch and release fish I realized that the dim light of the night, the tiny amount I could utilize to see, was actually not natural. It was light pollution from the nearby city. That was a bleak moment. To know that this nearly utter darkness that pressed in on me was not actually as bad as it got.

At some point, along Nature's course for our species, we gave up the tapetum lucidum that most animal species use to see at night. The tapetum ludicum is a reflective surface that lies behind the retina in the back of an animal's eye. Essentially light comes through the eye, and whatever passes through the retina without being absorbed by rods is bounced off the tapetum lucidum back into the retina, essentially giving the eye a double shot at seeing the photons coming at it. The upside of this little piece of anatomy is good vision at night. The downside is that vision at night is blurry - the eye has two dim versions of an image and your brain must rectify those into a single, brighter image, but the time delay between the images leads to them being out of focus with one another.

I would have paid good money for a pair of tapetum lucidum, just then. Something, anything, really, to break the darkness' hold on me. Eventually I broke; I switched on my flashlight and pointed it at the end of my fishing rods, where it traveled on into the night. And with that piercing, blessed light, I began to cheer up. I began to once again forget my mortality.


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Muhammad and Censorship

I'm not going to rehash a bunch of arguments other people are making about censorship and whether Comedy Central did the right thing. Instead let me just say this:

Nuke the Whales.


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The Genius Brain

Carl Zimmer suggests that athletes are geniuses because the super-efficiency their brains exhibit during athletic activity:

Del Percio’s team has also measured brain waves of athletes and nonathletes in action. In one experiment the researchers observed pistol shooters as they fired 120 times. In another experiment Del Percio had fencers balance on one foot. In both cases the scientists arrived at the same surprising results: The athletes’ brains were quieter, which means they devoted less brain activity to these motor tasks than nonathletes did. The reason, Del Percio argues, is that the brains of athletes are more efficient, so they produce the desired result with the help of fewer neurons. Del Percio’s research suggests that the more efficient a brain, the better job it does in sports. The scientists also found that when the pistol shooters hit their target, their brains tended to be quieter than when they missed.

Zimmer goes on to describe numerous examples of athletes' brains being energetically efficient.

But it is barely touched on that this same efficiency can extend to almost any human process. I humbly submit that we engineers are absolutely sick-fast at math, and do complicated calculations in our heads with relative ease and efficiency, but art students don't. The mental processes that can be optimized do not have to be the ones that lead to physical motion. A good example would be people who do a lot of public speaking get better and better at both their oratory style as well as their ability to improv on the fly. Another example is people who become extraordinarily good at card games, or board games. The plasticity of the brain allows a person to become more efficient at whatever they focus on, given that focus is frequent and regular.

Zimmer drops a little gem at the end of his piece:

The scientists also trained another group of people on the same game, but with a twist. They put a battery on top of the head of each subject, sending a small current through the surface of the brain toward a group of neurons in the primary motor cortex. The electric stimulation allowed people to learn the game better.

Subjecting people's brains to electrical excitation during an event to make their memory stronger is not new; scientists have known for a long time that during traumatic events, like a car crash, people's observation that "time seemed to slow down" was in fact due to a huge surge of electrical activity in the brain during the event, essentially giving them photographic memory.
But what is striking here is the implications for all types of learning. By providing the brain with mild excitation, people were not only better at remembering, they were better at learning. Zimmer worries that tennis players of the future may cheat by wearing a portable electrode while she practices her serve.
But I wonder instead if the future isn't a much brighter one: people can actually learn faster, and remember what they learn better, making them more productive humans. Kids can spend less time in school, or perhaps spend the same time in school but double their total knowledge. And they remember what they learned better than they can now. Imagine people getting college degrees in less time, or getting more degrees in the same time as now. Imagine new hires learning their job skills faster, and doing them more efficiently.

Simply put, if cortical electrical stimulation makes people better learners, and gives them better memories, then I say plug me in.


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It's not my fault!

Yeah...its grandpa's penchant for bonbons that gave me cancer, not my penchant for smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day...science has proved it!


(disclosure to my mom: TAE does not smoke 2 packs a day, promise)


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NASA Weather Hijinx

Look, perhaps the best reason not to build big rockets that blast huge spacecraft into space that go on amazing, daring missions, and then return and safely land back on Earth to a heroes welcome, and instead launch small rockets with cargo to the ISS where the big spacecraft are built and launched from there

IS THE FACT THAT NASA CAN'T LAND THE SHUTTLE IF A SINGLE CLOUD IS IN THE SKY


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Deep Thought on Supervolcanoes

The volcano in Iceland has disrupted tens of thousands of flights. The volcanic ash is a health threat to hundreds of millions.

And it is a mere pimple compared to the Yellowstone Caldera. Imagine no airplane flights for a century. Imagine an ice age.


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Neural Prosthetics - Featured in Comics!

XKCD tackles the absurdity of reveling in present-day technology when tomorrow's technology sounds so much cooler:






(click image for larger version)
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NASA V2.0

President Obama's speech yesterday at NASA could be described as "a little everything for everyone." He promised manned trips to Mars. He promised a bigger budget. He promised research into advanced propulsion. He promised robotic exploration of other planets. He promised new jobs. He promised old ones could be spared.

Overall though, I liked the tone of his speech. Assuming manned space missions are required, due to political wrangling and the fact that I'm simply not in charge, then developing the technologies to go to Mars while skipping return missions to the Moon makes a lot of sense. The President had this to say:

Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there. There’s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe it’s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach -- and operate at -- a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward.

The President is imply here and elsewhere that recreating the 60's isn't really giving NASA a goal worthy of its potential. Mars, on the other hand, he finds worthy.

By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it.

This, along with many other Obama Administration strategies implies the following: he is committed to goals that may not come to fruition during his Presidency. This suggests a deep, understated patience, and a hard-to-ignore altruism that idealists are drawn to.

Now, while I am no fan of manned spaceflight, my basic argument against it is that current propulsion schemes are too inefficient, and that without a an advanced method of getting around the cosmos very fast, it is a waste of time and money to send astronauts up to do what robots could do much more cheaply. Obama dropped this little trinket in my lap though, and I was simply floored:

But I want to repeat -- I want to repeat this: Critical to deep space exploration will be the development of breakthrough propulsion systems and other advanced technologies. So I’m challenging NASA to break through these barriers. And we’ll give you the resources to break through these barriers. And I know you will, with ingenuity and intensity, because that’s what you’ve always done.

I dunno who told Mr. Obama to say that, whether he thought that gem up himself, Holdren directed him to do so, or one of his writers felt that way, but it is the quintessential argument I have been making (doggedly) for the last 2 years, and I felt as though a weight were lifted off my shoulders when the President tasked NASA (with promises of funding) to find faster ways of traveling to and fro in zero-G.

All in all, I liked it. I like this President, I like the way he thinks. I like that he thinks.


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Deep Thought

"Couple Blogging" will ruin blogging.


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Obama's NASA Speech - The Transcript

Can be found here. My full analysis to come.


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Live-Blogging the NASA speech

Obama: "Critical to manned spaceflight will be breakthrough propulsion systems..."

I love it.


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Live-Blogging the NASA speech

Obama just said "ramp up robotic exploration of the solar system."

I am glad I voted for this guy.


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The New NASA

In a bizarre twist, a liberal Democrat President is urging privatization of a government-run entity, and the Republicans are upset.

President Obama releases his new vision for NASA today in a speech at Cape Canaveral, where it is expected he will outline the following changes to NASA's current plans:
- Ferrying astronauts to the ISS shall be privatized ASAP.
- Research will continue on a large rocket to transport cargo to space.
- No moon mission planned.

Obviously, I love this. Obama wants to invest $6 billion into stimulating private spaceflight. Of course, the Old Guard is pissed, probably because this means space might become democratic. Just think of it...orbiting the Earth no longer would require a government entities' prior approval!
The old NASA stalwarts, like Chris Kraft, are understandably mad. Their entire careers were built in a world where space was dominated by the Americans, and namely the American Government.
Now at some point, the internet was declassified and pushed into the private sector. No longer could the government completely control the flow of electronic information around America! NO!!! But look what the internet has done; wikipedia, my blog, news articles about President Obama's speech about NASA all come to your eyeballs instantly, for a nominal monthly fee.
Is it so hard to believe that privatization of spaceflight will be any different? Maybe for a while - even a long while - plebs like me won't be able to afford a ticket up there, but you can bet during my daughter's lifetime, the price of admission to zero-G will fall. And that is a good thing. Because there is no engine of technological evolution ever witnessed like the mighty power of the United States Economy.

Of course, that doesn't mean I support manned exploration of space. I hold to my belief that astronauts exploring the stars is as unrealistic as sending humans to the bottom of the ocean to explore there - only the marine biologists are smart enough to accept that robots can do it better; NASA hasn't. Or more specifically, Tom Jones, Buzz Aldrin, Gene Cernan, and a cadre of old, patriotic men who don't want to see "their era" end cannot accept that manned spaceflight will be great for setting up an orbital economy, but is a pointlessly dangerous and obscenely expensive way to explore the deeper heavens.
President Obama's promise to "extend the space station's life by five years and put billions into research to develop the big new rocket ship capable of reaching a nearby asteroid, the moon or other points in space. Those stops would be stepping stones on an eventual mission to Mars" doesn't seem to me very smart, or cost-effective.
Look, President Obama, you are uber-smart (as evidenced by the fact that you regularly read this blog), and I support most of your policies simply because I know you think about them. So please, hear my suggestions and then think about your space policy.
1. Develop a heavy lifting rocket as planned, but for the sole purpose of lifting mechanical components up to the ISS, where they can be stored and assembled.
2. Privatization of astronaut ferrying is perfect, and I laud you for adopting this as policy. However, the purpose of these astronauts is to be space construction workers, not scientist/explorers.
3. Use the ISS as a workshop for building LEO (low earth orbit) to Mars spacecraft, and launch as many as possible containing any number of robotic explorers. Any astrophysicist will tell you that the energy required to reach Mars is trivial compared to the energy required to go from the ground to LEO, because once you get into space, moving around up there is relatively easy.
4. Sell the Moon. Given that the Moon is technically owned by the United States (there is no legal ownership of the Moon, but given legal precedent, it can be potentially assumed by the U.S.A. that being the first and only ones there, we effectively own it.
5. Pour as much money as possible into advanced propulsion technology.

The MSNBC article I reference implies that the new NASA plan will appeal more to a "younger generation." I suppose this is true. While I do not intend to personally insult Buzz Aldrin &Co., and owe them a debt of gratitude for their risk-taking during my parents' childhood, I must admit - I don't give a rats' ass about what they think. Buzz Aldrin has a hard time checking his email. This is my generation's turn to make the choices.

I love my grandfather. I listen to his advice, which is usually "worship God and save as much money as you can." But although he was a retirement consultant for many years, I would not ask his advice as to which internet companies deserve my investment dollars. The market is just to fast-moving, the technology has just outpaced him, and the economy is just too different now.
The same is true for these Old Guard Astronauts. I value their advice on patience and fortitude, and on America needed to explore the stars. But when they start giving specifics my eyes glaze over. They really aren't qualified, anymore.

I'm starting to that the proper allegory for NASA is a tree. The first 30 years was like a full growing season for the tree. At the end of the 80's and into the 90's, the summer got late, and the tree growth slowed. Then the last decade was the winter. Now it's Spring again, time for the tree to move up to higher heights, greater goals, and loftier aims. The old leaves need to be shaken off, and discarded forever, so that better, healthier, more productive leaves can take their place. And think of privatization of space not as the end of the tree, but rather the scattering of its seeds in the wind, ensuring that tree's legacy will blossom on forever.


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If trapped on an island...

If I were trapped on an island with only one food, and I could choose that food, I would definitely choose royal jelly. Possibly the world's single perfect food.


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Not to Alarm You But...

We may be hearing aliens on the radio for the first time.


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Quote of the Day, Atlantic Edition

"So can someone tell me why I'm paying for The Atlantic when all the content I'm paying for will show up online, free, a month before the magazine arrives in my mailbox?"

-"wiredog" in the comments here.

The obvious answer, "wiredog" is that the online content couldn't exist if we didn't pay subscriptions to the magazine for the authors to write it. But he/she makes a good point; why do they release the content online so far in advance of the print edition?


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What If...

When Bastian entered the bookshop, Coreander had been reading Macchiavelli's The Prince instead?

(Following the meme started(?) by Freddie)


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Why Trees are Good and Gas Canisters are Bad

One of the great things about trees, and all plants for that matter, is their unique ability to store carbon dioxide. But plants don't simply store carbon dioxide...they convert it from a gaseous form into a solid form, a la sugar. And that basically boils down to about an 800-fold density increase in the matter.
So occasionally I see articles like this, where scientists have released a new method of capturing carbon. In the article, they call their 'artificial trees' is a building with resin panels that absorb CO2 very well, then release it when wetted. The building can absorb about a ton of CO2 a day, at a cost of $150 per ton.
What to do with that CO2 is an unsolved question. Sell it to oil mining companies to pump into the ground? Store it in caves? All that gas takes up a lot of space.
The firm producing the air scrubbers, Global Research Technologies, LLC, (most cliche business name ever???), seems to believe factories that produce carbon dioxide will buy these air scrubbing "artificial trees" as a way to offset carbon tax, or to capture the carbon for cap and trade.
TAE asks: if this costs $150 a ton, why not just plant some damn trees? If a factory needs to offset their carbon emissions, why not buy tree seedlings at $5 each, and have nearly zero maintenance...
Dave Nowak, a U.S. Forest Service researcher suggests the following trees are ideal for carbon capture: Common Horse-chestnut, Black Walnut, American Sweetgum, Ponderosa Pine, Red Pine, White Pine, Hispaniolan Pine, Douglas Fir, Scarlet Oak, Red Oak, Virginia Live Oak and Bald Cypress.

TAE would like to add his personal favorite choice: the Sycamore. Growing in excess of 100 feet tall and living upwards of 500 years, these massive trees store boatloads of carbon. Their huge, broad leaves are essentially carbon sequestration factories unlike any other in the world. A single sycamore tree at a cost of $5, it is estimated, can sequester 1 million tons of CO2 during its first 200 years.

Comparatively, the air scrubbing artificial tree would capture that same amount of carbon in roughly 2,700 years, at a cost of $20 million dollars.

In short, GRT's 'artificial tree' is neither an artificial tree nor a cost-effective way to sequester carbon. It might be a good way for industrial consumers of CO2 to acquire it cheaper, but I doubt these 'artificial trees' will save the world.

And this just highlights what I have said earlier: the person who discovers (and subsequently patents) cheap, artificial photosynthesis will be the richest person in history.


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Cars that Drive Themselves, Ctd

Hate to say I told you so, but...here's an article describing not only that European and Japanese automakers are hard at work developing cars that drive themselves, but also that people in the auto industry see autonomous cars on the road by 2020.

This article in New Scientist points at many layers of technology, all stemming from the grandfather of autonomous car tech: the anti-lock brake. For example:

-Volvo now has a system where your car will prevent you from running over a pedestrian.
-GM expects to launch vehicles that need no human control on the highway by 2015.
-Japanese researchers have developed a wifi network that communicates hazards between cars and automatically tells the driver this information.
-Researchers are developing the SARTRE system, by which a car can join a "convoy" and let the lead car control the direction and speed. All cars in the convoy save as much as 40% of their gas via this system
-GM and Carnegie Mello.n researchers won DARPA's urban challenge with a fully autonomous vehicle moving in traffic.

TAE takes great relief in the thought that by the time The Abstracted Daughter is old enough to get her driver's license...she might not need one. And "traffic fatality" maybe a buzzword from "dad's era".


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I don't know why I didn't think of this before

If I were a smart manufacturer of cars, I would install huge, beautiful, expensive OLED LCD screens in the cars I build. I would then offer the cars to consumers at a high price...

...or I would offer it to them at a much lower price, and in exchange I would require that they open access of their ultra-lavish screen to vendors.
In the meantime, I would sell rights to vendors to broadcast commercials on the screens at a reasonable rate, for a reasonable fee.

Watching "Monsters, Inc"? You must have kids in the car, and the GPS verifies you are nearing a McDonald's! The movie pauses, and your kids watch a commercial showing the awesome toy they could be playing with in mere minutes if only they convince their parents to stop at the aforementioned Mickey D's.
Watching "The Hangover"? You might be interested in knowing that the following nearby bars have the following drink specials.
Is it dinner time? The following restaurants are right in your path, and here are some delicious items on their menus.

Essentially you are doing exactly what Google's Ad programs do. They cater to their viewers best by identifying trends in the user's searches and location. The same could work here. If a user's screen shows macho action movies mostly, or the user fits in the single male 18-49 demographic, or a host of other indicators, the gorgeous LED LCD screen could target that driver/passengers with ads that he/she would find appealing. Location would also be key. McDonald's could key up a quick ad when your car was approaching a nearby location. In the morning Starbucks could point out how fantastic their chai lattes are and then suggest you turn left, a Starbucks is "only a block away..."
The possibilities are virtually endless. And as the smart car manufacturer, I could charge those businesses top dollar for access to my drivers. It would quickly offset the cost of that large screen I installed in the car, and then continue to be a source of revenue as long as the car was on the road.

Of course, we wouldn't want the insanely awesome screen to distract the driver. More on that to come.


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Deep Thought

How long until we have Google Streetview on top of Everest? I give it less than 10 years.


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Quote for the Day

There was a time, not very long, when I had left college and I was doing nothing but sitting in my apartment all day, practicing guitar while I watched television. At the time I was very interested in playing scales and developing lead guitar technique, and playing fast, learning the modes and such.... I have limited natural talent for guitar, but at the time, since I was practicing obsessively, I couldn't help but pick up a few skills. What I liked, though, what I wanted, was to play just at the outside edge of my ability, to play just a little bit faster than I had a right to, to be forever on the bleeding edge of what I could do, to feel like the guitar was something so slightly out of my control, to get to the note, but to just barely, just barely get there.

Anyone who knows will tell you that's the worst way to practice guitar, but it didn't matter much to me. I played for no purpose. What I want is to be able to live that way, for the whole of my life to just exceed my grasp, to feel like the instruments of my existence are barely beyond my ability to operate them.

Amen, Freddie, Amen.

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Easter

Thanks, Jesus!


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Have Moon, Will Sell.

Larry Niven's Ringworld series hinges the human future on "tweaking" by other alien races. The "Puppeteer" species senses that the Kzinti are too aggressive a race to trade with, so they trick another alien race, The Outsiders, into stumbling into Earth, and selling the humans there a faster-than-light propulsion system. This gives the humans a tactical advantage over the Kzinti when the Puppeteers cause a series of "Man-Kzin Wars". The purpose of this whole process is to breed the violent Kzinti out of their own race, by letting them get killed by the superior equipped humans. It works.

If you didn't follow that, its okay. I barely can. The point is, humans obtain FTL equipment via aliens that already possess it. We do so by buying it on credit.

TAE's plan: sell the moon to aliens. The moon possesses higher than usual amounts of deuterium, and low gravity. In exchange for FTL travel technology, we could barter away the moon's resources, as well as allow an alien species to set up a trading/mining outpost there, where they could further sell us more technology at their leisure. And of course, once equipped with FTL technology, humans wouldn't really need our moon. Or Earth, even.

But how to get aliens here? TAE suggests we change our SETI program into a craigslist-style posting: "Wanted: one faster-than-light propulsion system. Will pay cash. Have deuterium laden moon, willing to trade."
What alien could resist?


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TAE Nods Approvingly

As Andrew Sullivan, a homosexual, fills out "married" on his census form.

It's a brave new world, folks. Get used to it.


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Disappointment with President Obama

While offshore drilling certainly is an effective method to pander to Republicans in order to stir support for climate change legislation, if what President Obama wanted, as he claimed in his speech, was to "reduce dependence on foreign oil", then instead of signing an executive order allowing off-shore drilling, instead he should sign an executive order mandating a 5 mpg increase requirement for all vehicles, effective Jan 1. 2011.

That would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil by billions of barrels more than we will ever mine out of the oceans.

In any case, I am not too disappointed. I know how politics works. You pander, then you succeed. Pander more, succeed more. People can call Obama a hypocrite for this, but off-shore drilling doesn't pollute much, and actually passing climate change legislation would more than offset the loss of environment due to drilling in the Gulf.


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