On Flat Tops

I wish I could write that Nick and I spent 4 lazy days trout fishing and hiking in Flat Tops Wilderness Area. I wish I could say that I had some beautiful moment, surrounded by nature, where God, in all His glory, revealed Himself to me through a beautiful night sky filled with stars, or through an astonishing glade complete with waterfall and epic scenery.
I wish I could say that we skipped up the trail like two plucky heroes, and effortlessly conquered that vast, unkempt wilderness; modern day Lewis and Clark.

Instead we hiked, plowed, and gasped our way up 7 miles of steep trail only to find snow increasingly deep, until eventually in a deep forest along a canyon wall the trail disappeared completely into four foot high drifts of snow. At one point we had waded, barefoot, across a rushing snow-fed creek, a move that would not have gained the approval of my mother or my wife. We had dried our throbbing feet on the far bank and pressed on. At another point, we began having to set down our packs and press forward through the snow to try to find the trail, only to find it and circle back for our packs. We'd move forward a hundred yards, then put our packs down again and began the trail-searching anew. Nick's hiking boots, combined with the creek-wading incident, had given him a bleeding heel. I felt a weird tweak in my hip, which was to become much worse later. We were 90% of the way to the plateau, and we simply could not reach it. I remember dropping my pack and sitting down on a log, feet frozen and soaked, despondence on Nick's face as we discussed our options. Unfortunately, continuing forward was simply not one of them.
In the end, we turned around and headed back. Our eight mile journey up became a mad dash back down to a suitable camping site before dusk, out of the snow. About three miles back down we found one. On the way, as I was posting through a snowbank, I lost my footing and slipped. I caught myself on my right hand, impaling it on a piece of deadfall, and felt a "pop" in my already tweaked right hip. I regained my footing and we continued the hike.
We set up camp and pitifully tried to console each other, as our second Man Trip in 3 years had once again been waylayed by snow.

But as we sat there, eating our food and watching the fire, it slowly dawned on me that this was karma at it's best. Instead of me smugly striding like a warrior king on the plateau for a few days, catching trout and stroking my ego like I'd planned, instead I had been crushed before I ever got there. Is there a lesson to be learned here? I certainly asked myself that question many times that evening. The next morning was a baking sauna, and by the time Nick and I got down to the truck we'd drank 2 gallons of water a piece. My foot was bleeding, and Nick (an M.D. for those of you not acquainted with him) determined that my right hip was severely out of place...he showed me that when lying down my right leg was nearly an inch shorter than my left due to the dislocation. Nick's foot looked like hell, and he quickly moaned out of his boots into some flip-flops.

What is this life, we live? It occurs to me that my trip to Flat Tops was awfully metaphorical for my life back home. I stride around (smugly at times), stroke my own ego, and expect that a good plan means life will be a cakewalk followed by 3 days of easy trout fishing. And instead life is an uphill, heaving battle, where you suddenly feel that your youthful vitality has left you. Life is a big, well-planned, ambitious undertaking that often prematurely halts with the road in front of you completely impassible. Life is a well-worn pair of boots suddenly deciding that a blister is a good idea. Life is not, ever, what I expect. And it certainly isn't easy.

But then again, when in your life have you stood and watched a pair of wild elk watch you back? When have you seen fresh lynx tracks in the mud in front of you? How often, really, have you seen a beaver building his dam in the morning mist? When in your life have you stood on a hilltop, completely surrounded by mountains and canyons, and heaved breaths of fresh mountain air? When have you ever come across a gushing stream, 33 degrees at most, and waded into it barefoot? Can you think of a time you have gone to sleep knowing that bears were in your vicinity? Can you think of a time you have woken to the sound of several dozen hummingbirds dancing in the air above you?

And so, it was not the trip we planned. It never is. But by God, what an adventure. What a great place, what beautiful terrain, what a great friend I had with me. Isn't that what life is? Some airhead philosopher, surely thinking he was offering empathy, said once that "life is about the journey, not the destination." In this case, though I find the words cliche, he is right. Life is the suffering, the bleeding, the freezing, the pain, the wonder, the adventure, the camaraderie, the gasping for breaths of air, the 12 hour drives for 2 days of camping...life is slinging a 40 pound backpack on your shoulders again and again after you search for a hidden trail. Life is starting a fire while your whole body convulses from cold. Life is a long drink of coffee at 5 in the morning.

What life isn't is a stroll through the park with the keys to the city handed to you. Sometimes it is good to be reminded of that.


_

Read More

Vacation

Forgive me, dear readers, for the hiatus. I am backpacking here until next Wednesday.

You stay classy, Planet Earth.


_

Read More

Republicans Kill Science Funding...

Science funding is good...reelection is better.
I love the part where science funding is okay if you include an anti-pornography amendment.

Dear Republicans,
Don't count on my vote. ESPECIALLY YOU, JERRY MORAN.


_

Read More

Friday Poetry Burst

My Life Has Been The Poem,
By Henry David Thoreau

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.


_

Read More

Neil Armstrong Quotables

"orbital sentinels were helping man understand the vagaries of nature..."

What does that even mean?

"America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz (at a price of over 50 million dollars per seat with significant increases expected in the near future)"

It currently costs America $160 million per astronaut to launch people in the shuttles.

"For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature."

The decision to retire the shuttles this year was actually in place during Bush's administration. We have not had human exploration capability beyond Earth orbit since Apollo, some 40 years ago. And the Constellation Program wasn't expected to get us anywhere until 2020 or so.

What I don't get is why these guys think we can't do anything in space without people up there to do it.


_

Read More

TAE's Official Iron Man 2 Review

I’m not going to spoil the plot and tell you what happens. The movie was really good. Very entertaining, though understandably predictable. You know from the start that Stark will defeat Vanko. You know that the War Machine armor will kick ass. You know that Scarlett Johannson is in the movie because of her looks (in Scarlett’s defense, her crazy blitzkrieg at Hammer Industries was probably the second best female vs. multiple males fight scene I’ve watched, second only to Uma Thurman dispatching the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill Vol. 1).

The scenes are lush and epic, the technology is unsurprisingly bleeding edge. RDJ plays Stark well; he’s believably smug, and his mortality clearly weighs on him and only exacerbates narcissistic character flaws, which disconnects the audience from him emotionally and while it helps build his character, it also makes us care less about his impending death. Of course, this could be because we all know somehow he won’t die of palladium poisoning.

I thought Justin Hammer, as portrayed by Sam Rockwell, was very well done. He seems a clear Stark wannabe, his attempts to grandstand like Stark seemed awkward and forced, and near the end of the movie when he yells angry threats at Ivan Vanko, you don’t feel like he is any good at being angry; the passive aggressive character shines through.

But the movie in general had a theme I felt needs addressing: Tony Stark has Bill Gates Syndrome. By Bill Gates Syndrome, I mean that upon successful completion of a mega-wealthy empire, and having reached the point where he could literally never run out of money, Bill Gates suddenly became a born-again charitable guy. After years of cutting and hacking at competition, and aggressively marketing his products and raking in every dollar possible, he appears to have realized his legacy isn’t going to be so wonderful, and has gone on this world-improvement bonanza. More power to you, Mr. Gates.

Stark appears to have developed the same sudden sense of morality, possibly continuing from that revelatory moment in the cave in Afghanistan in the first movie. He wants to be remembered for something other than Stark Weapons, wants his legacy to be more than just the “Merchant of Death.”

But TAE asks: could Stark have done anything good with his life without his piles of money? It seems these rich men who turn good have one thing in common: they are really, really rich. It’s easy to exact your will on others, no problem to get press for your beneficent activities, simple to sway the hearts of others, when you are exorbitantly wealthy. Gates, Stark, and many other wealthy benefactors suffer from a singular issue: trust. They do not trust the poor (or anyone else) to manage money well, and so they believe they, in all their wisdom, can best help the poor by managing it for them. If Bill Gates wants to really do good for Africans, why doesn’t he just give all $33 billion of his Foundation’s assets to Africans and be done with it? Because he thinks he should micromanage his charity, both because he mistrusts others and because he fears losing control of his work will mean that the good that comes from it might not be associated to him. It’s called the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a reason! Why didn’t he name it the “Anonymous Donor Who Wants to Help Others Foundation”? Mostly because he doesn’t want to be anonymous. He wants the credit. Stark, in a fictional sense, is doing the same with his appropriately named “Stark Expo.”

And so I found myself sympathetic to Ivan Vanko, a little bit. Partnered with Tony’s father Howard Stark, Ivan Vanko’s father Anton Vanko had developed the first arc reactor, now famously strapped into Iron Man’s chest. Realizing the awesome, world-changing potential of the technology, Vanko had wanted to sell it, and make a fortune. Stark, on the other hand, wanted to give it away to make the world a better place. Howard Stark has Vanko deported to Russia, where he suffers an embittered fate. Then Stark goes on to build a weapons empire inherited by Tony, and the arc reactor technology, for some reason, never goes public beyond the one powering the Stark Industries factory.

TAE scratches his head. Why wasn’t the arc reactor technology taken public, like Howard Stark wanted? If Howard Stark wanted to make the world a better place, why did he build a weapons conglomerate? And what kind of funding did Stark use to build his empire? Probably Defense funding.

And if Anton Vanko had gotten his wish, and he and Stark had sold the arc reactor technology for millions, would he have then used that money to build a charitable empire? Would his son have spent his life as a weapons manufacturer, who then about-faced and tried to build a legacy of good deeds? “That should be you,” Anton Vanko says to his son at the beginning of the movie as Stark emcee’s his Expo on the television. Does Vanko mean his son should be the wealthy playboy…or the weapons conglomerate turned benefactor?

And so a conundrum appears here that gives TAE pause: can you not effect real change for the better in the world without wealth to back you? Certainly, Christianity teaches us that your wealth and the amount of good you do in the world is irrelevant as long as you spend your life in the selfless service of others. In fact, Jesus directly states that wealth is a hindrance to good acts. But pound for pound, someone who wanted to do good…for as many people as possible…needs a lot of money under them.

Readers of this blog know that my life goal is to develop technologies that will change the world for the better, much like Dean Kamen is attempting. But Kamen, like Gates, like Elon Musk, and like Stark…all have started down their beneficence roads armed with a fortune acquired from private capital. Start improving the world with an empire of money to back you, it seems, and you end up with a legacy like Edison. Try to improve the world without capital, and you end up like Tesla.

And so the question I begin to ask myself is this: do I build the weapons empire and let my children have the luxury of being the world-improvers? Though I dream of being like Tony Stark…am I in reality actually more like Howard Stark?

Anyway…Iron Man 2 was good.


_

Read More

The Iron Man Costume

Built using an Objet Eden printer.

Did I mention I have one of these at work, not 15 feet from my cube? Yes. I do.


_

Read More

Space Exploration

If we assumed humanity was a viral infection of the planet Earth, and assumed that Earth's increasing ecological toxicity was in fact an immune response to our presence (global warming is Earth's fever), could we rethink space exploration and colonization thusly?

TAE thinks this is a pretty fair way to plan extraterrestrial colonization. Viruses spread from person to person by causing themselves to be expelled, either in fluids or in the air (basically still in fluids), which is then put into contact with other living creatures. If those living creatures are the right species, the virus can take hold in the new host.

The solution, of course, is to spew small seed groups of humans at random into space. Those humans, of course, are simply fertilized embryoes, who will be raised by robots once a fertile planet is reached. Although a massive 99.9997% of those humans will never see the light of an extraterrestrial day, a tiny handful will, and our species will have found a new host planet.


_

Read More

Surprise of the Century

Halliburton was involved in the safety casing of the exploded oil pumping station now sitting at the bottom of the Gulf.


_

Read More

Fringe Benefits of My Job

Most of my readers know that I am not a full-time blogger. To the rest of you, it should be obvious from the mediocre quality of my posts!
What I do full time is engineer. I work for a non-profit research institute and we build some pretty kick-ass stuff.

Being a non-profit, we don't exactly get yearly bonuses. That's fine though, because we have a huge, sometimes-bottomless-seeming coffer of overhead money we can politely ask our bosses to spend on our behalf. I might not get a $300 check in the mail for my hard work...but when I suggested to my boss that our research efforts might be better served if we spent $300 and bought this book, this book, and this book...he had cleared me to buy them on overhead before I had finished the sentence.


_

Read More

Iron Man vs. Zombies

Nothing tweaks my ire more than people who expect The Godfather Part II every time they go to a sequel. And then they come home and write some incredibly snobbish drivel about how they were so disappointed that they, unlike the majority of the rest of America, did not find the movie entertaining.
So today we have this absurd argument from Ross Douthat that all these actors in the 70's were amazing (and never did a bad film), all these directors in the 70's did brilliant work (and never did a bad film), and all these movies in the 70's were epic blockbusters that the world can barely fathom even to this day (and never once was there a bad film)...and current blockbusters don't come up to that par.

Nothing like revisionist history.

What Ross is forgetting, up on his "I demand the greatest show on Earth every time I grace a theater" horse is that the movie industry's entire point is to entertain us while making lots and lots of money. Not to be an artist venue.
If Americans are entertained by two large men in Speedos pounding each other around in a fenced cage, and the UFC makes tons of money because of it...well, I keep waiting for someone who has grown up watching Muhammad Ali make an argument that ultimate fighting is not what boxing was in the 70's, and be damned if it ever will be.
Look, Ross, if you wanted to see amazing directors doing amazing work, go to the Sundance Film Festival. Don't go to a summer blockbuster. The purpose point is different.

Then you get guys like Matt Seitz at Salon arguing that superhero movies suck because they aren't groundbreaking enough.

But wait, Seitz beats me to the punchline:

Critics who don't like a particular superhero film -- any superhero film -- are apt to be simultaneously blasted in online comments threads as aesthetic turistas ill-equipped to judge the work's true depth and snooty killjoys who expect too much and need to lighten the hell up.

Matt, you need to lighten the hell up. Just because you think you can waylay others from countering you just by mentioning what their likely arguments will be does not thereby render those argements invalid!

His basic argument, further on, is that a parallel genre, zombie movies, has so much more depth and so many more really good movies than the superhero genre. Perhaps that is true. But what he leaves out of his discussion of movie quality is how effectively either genre succeeds at its purpose. What is the purpose of a zombie movie? True hardcore aficionados would suggest that zombies are an argument against the nameless hordes of a welfare state, and vampires are an argument against the elites. But in the modern era (and by modern era I mean the era in which 28 Days Later was filmed) the primary purpose of a zombie movie is to scare the hell out of the audience. Or gross them out. Or probably both. Certainly, the zombie genre's purpose is not to make people walk out of the theater and go "that movie really made me rethink some things" or "as Elizabeth Banks was running from those zombies she really put on a great acting performance". In fact, the lack of big actors should tell us something about zombie movies; namely that no one goes into the project expecting an Oscar. And almost every zombie movie ends the same way: open-ended, tragic ending. The all build to the point where you think the infection has been contained...and then either right before the credits or right after, you see a zombie/virus/monster escape containment.

Conversely, the superhero movie tries to excite the audience, and rather than feeding on their childhood fears, instead it attempts to mine every childish fantasy possible. In that way, Iron Man 2 succeeds admirably. What is more fantastic (and entertaining) than being a billionaire genius with a suit that gives you (a normally ordinary little boy) super powers? The only thing better would be if it happened before you had to bother with growing up, right?
When we were kids, we were scared of the dark, of strangers, of the unknown, of lots of things. So during the daytime we pretended to be superheroes. Zombie movies that succeed are ones that find those vague insecurities we still have and exploit them. This entertains us. Superhero movies are no different, except for the imagined scenarios plumbed from the thickness of our brains are much more pleasant.

If you look at superhero movies, and simply say "what was the purpose of this movie?" The answer almost exclusively would be "to entertain me." In this way, superhero movies continue to be wildly successful, and despite Ross' protests, the 70's could never have hosted good superhero movies; there were no good special effects that could sufficiently capture our childhood imaginations on film!

Seitz leaves one thing out, in his quest to prove zombies beat superheroes: for every bad superhero movie there are at least ten bad zombie movies. Compare this list of every superhero movie ever made to this list of every zombie movie ever made. Do we really want to compare these genres?
And how can someone judge the superhero genre without mentioning V for Vendetta, one of the smartest movies made in the last 15 years? And why does Seitz ignore Hellboy, a brilliant, dark movie that pushed for character development over special effects? Why doesn't Seitz mention M. Night Shyamalan's wonderful masterpiece, Unbreakable? And if he loves when movies pay homage to their roots, he certainly should have mentioned Disney's 1991 serial piece The Rocketeer, which featured a deliciously evil Timothy Dalton and a young woman named Jennifer Connelly who gave a performance so hot that some movie theaters actually found burn marks on their screens.
Sure, its easy to go after the larger, more advertised pictures in the superhero genre as campy and formulaic. But just like the zombie genre, the superhero genre has a lot of meat below the surface that deserves its due credit.


_

Read More

So bad its...good really, really bad.

How could a tagline like this produce a bad movie...

Ali (Christina Aguilera) is a small-town girl with a big voice who escapes hardship and an uncertain future to follow her dreams to Los Angeles. After stumbling upon The Burlesque Lounge, a majestic but ailing theater that is home to an inspired musical revue, Ali lands a job as a cocktail waitress from Tess (Cher), the club’s proprietor and headliner. Burlesque’s outrageous costumes and bold choreography enrapture the young ingenue, who vows to perform there one day.

Soon enough, Ali builds a friendship with a featured dancer (Julianne Hough), finds an enemy in a troubled, jealous performer (Kristen Bell), and garners the affection of a bartender and fellow musician (Cam Gigandet). With the help of a sharp-witted stage manager (Stanley Tucci) and gender-bending host (Alan Cumming), Ali makes her way from the bar to the stage. Her spectacular voice restores The Burlesque Lounge to its former glory, though not before a charismatic entrepreneur (Eric Dane) arrives with an enticing proposal.

Such an original script definitely deserves my movie patronage!


_

Read More

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go drool at a movie screen for a few days.


_

Read More

Antibiotics, Pesticides, and the War on Terror?

It seems to me that a weird paradox has emerged in science, where people are now advocating that less is more when it comes to antibiotics and pesticides. Carl Zimmer issues this worrying blog post in Discover magazine about rapid methods weeds are developing to circumvent death-by-Roundup.

For a while, it seemed as if glyphosate would avoid Melander’s iron rule. Monsanto scientists ran tests that showed no evidence of resistance. Glyphosate seemed to strike at such an essential part of plant biology that plants could not evolve a defense. But after glyphosate-resistant crops had a few years to grow, farmers began to notice horseweed and morning glory and other weeds encroaching once more into their fields. Farmers in Georgia had to cut down fields of cotton rather than harvest them because of infestations of Palmer amaranth.

What’s striking is how many different ways weeds have found to overcome the chemical. Scientists had thought that Roundup was invincible in part because the enzyme it attacks is pretty much the same in all plants. That uniformity suggests that plants can’t tolerate mutations to it; mutations must change its shape so that it doesn’t work and the plant dies. But it turns out that many populations of ryegrass and goosegrass have independently stumbled across one mutation that can change a single amino acid in the enzyme. The plant can still survive with this altered enzyme. And Roundup has a hard time attacking it thanks to its different shape.

What I find interesting is how this seems just like worrying documentation of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. It seems every time I turn on the TV I see news of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, or staph, and how more and more diseases need stronger and stronger antibiotics...the old guard has failed.

Many are calling for organic farming, suggesting that diligence and hard work can produce farms as productive as farms gassed with massive doses of Roundup (these are mostly people who have not worked on a farm). Many (who have never had to take care of a child with severe fever) also call for reduction in antibiotic use, suggesting that people should just "tough it out" when they get a non-lethal infection (see here and here). The argument, as Melander put it over 100 years ago, is that by letting the some of pesticide-susceptible bugs live, some of the time, then they spread their genes out and pesticides work better.

It's funny, really. In the War on Weeds, and the War on Bacteria, more and more people think that we should just let the weeds win. Let the bacteria win. Unless, you know, things get really bad. Then we should step in with our antibiotics and herbicides and show 'em who's boss.
But somehow this doesn't really play out when it comes to terrorism. You just don't see people on TV saying "the smarter we get in the War on Terror, the smarter the terrorists get. We should give up the fight and let as many terrorists come to our country as want to. We'll deal with the really dangerous terrorists...but let most of the low-key, Times Square bombing-level terrorists do their thing. They really aren't a threat to the majority of America."
For some reason, the "surrender to win" thing doesn't really work in this case.

But then again, it doesn't work with antibiotics either. Did you know that in Africa, places without clean water have an appalling literacy rate below 25%? Give those areas clean water, and studies show the literacy rate jumps above 90%. Why? Because kids aren't missing school with water-borne illnesses.
The same is true for antibiotics. How many kids would miss school, even here in America, if they were down with a 100+ fever that lasted weeks? How far behind would kids be if they missed a month of school with whooping cough? Maybe only a few people would die if they didn't get their antibiotics...but our society would inevitably fall behind.
And could you afford to miss two weeks of work due to your upper respiratory infection? Do you have that luxury? Most don't, and so they need antibiotics so they can bounce back in just a few days.
No, we just can't put down the War on Germs. Surrender here does not mean victory, it means setbacks, suffering, and slowdown. Instead of lamenting bacterial resistance, we should be ever more aggressively searching for new and stronger medicines.

Essentially the same is true for herbicides. Can you really look a farmer in the face and tell him that he should only produce 2/3 of his potential crop because he shouldn't use herbicides? If I told you that I wanted you to work at your job just as hard (or harder, given you'd have to go back to walking beanfields), but from now on you only got paid a fraction of your former wage...would you be upset? Would you tell me to screw off?
How can anyone honestly tell farmers to intentionally be less productive? America's very foundation was built on the concept that innovation allowed more and more productivity from farms...which allowed more and more people to move to the cities and innovate.
No, less herbicide (and subsequently less crop) is no answer to the War on Weeds. Smarter herbicides, smarter crop plants is the better answer. The same is true for pesticides. Do you think that if farmers stop using Bt corn...the corn borer will agree to stop eating corn?

It just seems to me that although humans and evolution seem locked in an eternal arms race, laying down our weapons would not solve the problem. Nature does not negotiate, Nature does not sign treaties. And so we cannot blink first.


_

Read More

Dear Kansas Senate

Dear Kansas Senate,

It is hard enough out there right now. Really. I got laid off last year, for Christ's sake. My family scrapes by now, choked to the hilt with debt and student loan payments. My retirement funds are just now starting to recover from the recession, my wife is still trying to get through college, and my daughter, poor thing, has to wear used clothes we buy at garage sales.

And now you want to make it harder for me to be fat.

It's not enough that you take away my right to have my car's suspension be destroyed with your constant and diligent road maintenance, not enough that you provide and maintain gorgeous public lands upon which I successfully caught catfish two weekends ago, not enough you forced me to endure top-notch schools...now you want to incentivize healthiness too? You bastards.

This is America! In America we're supposed to be rotund, fat behemoths! We need those sugary, death-hastening, acidic drinks in order to stay awake and work the long, stressful hours required to make enough money to buy all the fast-food we eat! You can't take that away from us!

Everyone knows that when government increased the tax on cigarettes, the number of smokers went down. Increasing the tax more, decreased the number of smokers more. It's science. Same thing is true for alcohol. But I know deep down that that wouldn't apply here!

Look, we know you are arguing that you are doing this to shore up the state deficit. And I know that the deficit was caused by the recession. And I know the recession was mostly not the fault of Kansans. But you're politicians! Don't we pay you to magically fix the budget every year despite changes in the taxes levied? Doesn't part of that assume you will always be able to lower taxes, no matter what the national fiscal situation is?

And just because the $90 million dollars you would raise from the soda tax would save thousands of government jobs, keep many schools open, and help Kansans statewide, what's more important than any of that crap is saving the jobs of the three to five hundred Coke and Pepsi employees who would be laid off as a result of this tax! You just can't do that to good people. To hell with the hundreds of teachers that would be laid off, the hundreds of road workers that would be laid off, and the multitude of others that would be laid off as a result of a state deficit.

Look, if you want to tax something, tax lipstick. You could make a lot of tax revenue because lots of people use it. But, since I don't personally use it, I don't really care much if you tax it.


_

Read More

Quote for the Day

"It's just like if I fed you a nutritionally incomplete diet of Hershey chocolate bars and then stressed you by loading your hive on a semi-truck and hauling your 3,000 miles and unloading you and putting you in contact with herbicides and pesticides, it would be like my spraying your face with Raid every day. Then if you have a big blood-sucking mite on you, you’re going to get sick!"

-Jerry Hayes, Florida Dept. of Agriculture, in reference to why the Honeybees are disappearing.


_

Read More

Writing About Wine

Impossible to do without sounding like a total snob/douchebag.

My own favorite form of self-experimentation has to do with wine. It's pretty clear that we expect more expensive wines to taste better. (This expectation is visible in an fMRI machine.) But it's also clear that, at least for amateurs, this expectation is mostly false: when you give people bottles of wine without any price information, there is no correlation between the cost of the wine and its subjective ratings. A $8 bottle is just as enjoyable as an $80 one.

Every few months, I conduct a blind taste test. (In general, I think the most useful forms of self-tracking will be the tracking of our innate biases.) I trek to Costco and my local wine store and pick up several bottles at various price points. The wines are poured into cheap decanters. And then I taste the wines over the course of a lazy afternoon, being sure to eat lots of crackers in between. I smell, swirl, sip and swallow. (I like my wine too much to spit it out.) I'm no Robert Parker, but I take a few notes and render my judgement. What have I discovered? Mostly I've learned that my ratings are woefully inconsistent. The same $18 pinot that I loved last year might get low marks at a later date. A Tuscan blend that seemed so generic now seems like it would be a perfect foil for pasta with tomatoes.

Well, it must be horrible to subject oneself to the humiliation of buying wines and not knowing expensive from cheap. Probably similar to the humiliation one feels when misidentifying a Lamborghini Countach as a Lamborghini Diablo. Or mistaking the jet you are flying is as a Gulfstream III when in fact it is a Gulfstream V.
Perhaps Jonah could spare himself from humiliation and just drink Yellow Tail like the rest of us.


_

Read More

Where Does Iron Man Get His Strength?

Last week I outlined the four technologies that a high school student entering college could focus on in terms of their career path if they wanted to be part of a future in which Iron Man was feasible.
Of those four, we've covered power supplies and control systems. Today I want to focus on the 700 lb. gorilla in the room: the artificial muscle.

As a mechanical engineer by training and a biomechanist by preference, I've become intimately aware just how incredibly well-designed skeletal muscle is. Frankly, if it didn't work so well, why has the entire animal kingdom adopted it as a locomotive method? Muscle, as it turns out, is elegant in its complexity of construction while being simple in its purpose: to pull as hard as possible. Most people don't realize just how strong muscle is; during your hardest muscle flex, only about a third of your muscle fibers are firing at any given moment...much more than that and your muscles would literally rip themselves off your bones. Muscles come in a wide variety, from quickly-tiring fast-twitch to endurance slow-twitch. They, at some point in history, captured some bacterial precursor to mitochondria and enslaved them into their own built-in energy factories.

A quick math lesson: typing 120 words a minute, with an average of 6 letters per word, takes about 2,500 individual muscle actions a minute. And that's just to sit there and type!

But the real marvel of muscle is how energy dense it is. Muscle can produce about 0.35 MPa of stress, roughly 50 psi for us Americans. So a muscle with a one inch diameter can pull with about 40 lbs of force. Want to be stronger? Add muscle thickness.

Creating an artificial version of muscle, however, has been thwarting scientists and engineers for decades. Mechanical actuators, driven by motor/gear sets are promising, especially as brushless permanent magnet motors get smaller and stronger. But those assemblies trade speed for strength. Pneumatic actuators work really well at the same strength as muscle, but suffer from control issues due to the compressibility of air. Futuristic materials like "electroactive polymers" and "shape memory alloys" require high voltage, high temperature, or suffer from short lifespans.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory seems to have thrown their weight behind "mesofluidics" which is their term for hydraulic pistons the size of human muscles. They report hydraulic systems that can basically mimic human muscle in energy density in this paper. The researchers suggest the artificial hand could be used for telerobotic disassembly of roadside bombs in war areas.

TAE suggests a more likely use for these systems: powered exoskeletons. Here's two reasons why it would be better for exoskeletons: auxiliary systems and danger.
Unlike a standalone mechanical servo actuator, a hydraulic piston requires valving, pumps, and a motor assembly. These are all heavy. The ORNL team waxes over the fact that their prosthetic hand will require these systems, instead focusing on how light the actual hand it. Of course, if any artificial muscle technology could have auxiliary systems of unknown weight elsewhere, those AMT's would look amazing too!
But imagine instead, the mesofluidic actuators used as a powered exoskeleton...giving the user 3-5 times their normal strength, and the system would carry its power generator, pump, reservoir, filter, valving, and control systems on itself somewhere, unloading it from the user. This is essentially what the SARCOS/Raytheon exoskeleton intends to do; the exoskeleton is a hydraulic system that carries the weight of the auxiliary hydraulic components on its back.
The second problem with hydraulic actuation, as opposed to some of the other actuation technologies, is danger. Personally, I don't know that I want to have a mechanical component intimately attached to my body that has 3,000 psi compressed parts in it. The last time I got in the way of a power-washer (at ~200 psi), I found the sensation a little unpleasant. I can't imagine getting blasted at 15X that intensity.
Once again, though, I turn to exoskeletons. It would be a relatively simple process to plate the exoskeleton wearer with light plastic or carbon fiber that would protect that soldier/user from exposure to failed hydraulic components. Those protective plates, however, are unsuitable for an 80-year-old who lost his hand in the war.

What ORNL and SARCOS have hit on here is that really, if we are honest with ourselves, hydraulic pistons are the only things capable of producing the power, pound for pound, that muscle does.

That's not to say Tony Stark uses hydraulics in his Iron Man armor. Given that he invented a new power source for it, invented a new control system technology, and is responsible for inventing all the weapons in his company and on the suit...it wouldn't be a leap to assume he invented a novel artificial muscle too.


_

Read More