MOVABLE TYPE : TEMPLATE

October 02, 2008
Thursday Afternoon At The Space Power Tech Workshop

OK, it's after lunch, and we're about to watch a video about what the Army hopes it will be doing in space in the year 2035. We're being told it's not classified in any way. Nor does it discuss cost or difficulty of what we're about to see...

It seems to be a CGI movie depicting rapid redeployments of advanced satellites (using something that looks a lot like QuickReach). It shows convoy routes planning a "virtual corrider." Mobile user ground stations are deflecting attempts at GPS jamming. A "near-space platform" geolocates a terrorist unit. Noncombatants are identified, the house is surrounded, and the perps captured. The space vehicles depicted are dirty and gritty like the tanks. Like Serenity, in fact. Showing overhead imaging for battle damage assessment. "Understand First." "Act First." In other words, get inside their OODA loop.

Pretty cool.

Anyway, Jay Penn is up now, describing five different powersat concepts that Aerospace has been working on. This was work done for Joe Howell at Marshall and John Mankins at NASA. It consisted of a lot of system/subsystem level trades for comparisons and as inputs to technology roadmaps.

Showing several different concepts, the most different of which is called a "Halo", which has a central transmitter surrounded by what seem to be mirrors for light concentration. But he's going too fast for me to follow. A flurry of charts showing trade analyses and relative costs.

Some of these concepts imply flight rates of 5000/year. Notes that 40% of the global economy is energy. The best costs they could get to for kW-hrs was about eight cents, which isn't bad. One of their concepts is a laser system that is very scalable (480 satellites for 1.2 GW). It uses a layered approach, with pump-laser diodes, microoptics, and a radiator on the back. Output beam is about a thousand nanometer wavelength. He thinks it the most promising architecture of those considered.

Now Paul Jaffe is reporting on a study on space-based power that was performed by the Navy Research Lab. In the beginning, they encountered a lot of skepticism within the lab. Their approach was to look at it in the context of providing Navy/Marine power needs. Study looked at military applications only. They supported the AFRL requirements workshop in July, and are working with NASA on the ISS demo.

They had three findings. First, the concepts are technically feasible, they seem relevant to military needs, and safe power beaming is restricted to large immobile sites. Wireless power transfer is necessary for SBSP, but it's a research area in its own right. No consensus among experts as to best concept. Economics and political priorities will be important, but this wasn't examined by NRL.

They also found that NRL has some key capabilities in many of the technologies (I'm shocked, shocked...).

The third was that different operational scenarios will require different technologies. Large-area applications can use microwave, but applications requiring higher power density will need lasers. Delivery of energy directly to individual end users, vehicles or small widely-scattered nodes isn't currently practical.

They recommended continued NRL funding, but got the impression when they briefed the director that he still considers other energy areas more promising until more of the risk is retired.

A question from the audience brings up the point that DoE seems to be missing in action, considering that they're supposed to be interesting in, you know...energy. There needs to be more of an outreach from other agencies to them to get them involved, particularly if DoE is supposed to be putting together new positions for an incoming administrations.

Another speaker from NRL, Michael Brown, follows with a talk on space structures issues. We have a long way to go from seventy meters (the current longest structure) to kilometeres in scale. Showing examples of ultralight space deployable beams.

Sorry, my eyes are glazing over (also a little sleepy after lunch). Structural analysis is not my bag. Showing concepts for trusses. Showing concepts for automated orbital assembly.

A break, a break, my kingdom for a break...

[Update after the break]

I'm not paying much attention to the current talk which is about wireless power in a deployed base in environment. The speaker said, perfectly deadpan (and he was probably quite serious), "we can't introduce anything into a war environment that is unsafe."

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the War Room."

Jordin Kare (formerly of Livermore) is giving a talk on various space applications for lasers, some in space, some ground based with space relays. Optics are cheap, don't generate much heat, don't weigh much, none of which are the case for lasers, so keep lasers on the ground and put the optics in space.

Thinks that GEO is still the best place, for relay optics so that no tracking of moving satellites is necessary. Also less gravity gradient. But GEO implies big optics. He prefers diffractive optics, using thin sheets of materials with vacuum vapor deposition of metals to make a fresnel lens. It is insensitive to out-of-plane displacements, while mirrors are orders of magnitude more so. They can be lightweight, rolled up, folded. Shows a five-meter example made of panes of glass built at Livermore a few years ago. he thinks that a twenty-meter lens can fit on a Delta IV. Thinks that he could get by with six tons in GEO with relay system as opposed to thirty tons if the laser is place in orbit. Notes that NASA has looked at a similar system with a relay in L1 for powering a lunar surface base from the earth. Talking about using such systems to power electric propulsion vehicles, so they don't have to carry the mass of their power supply, both for earth orbit and earth escape missions. Agrees with Jay Penn on approach of using laser modules, if you really want the lasers themselves in orbit.

[Friday morning update]

I've continue here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:28 AM

Back On The Air

Live, from the space solar power conference in sunny Lake Buena Vista, FL, under the ever-watchful eye of Mickey.

I have power, I have wireless, I've had my proteinless continental breakfast, which seems to be riguer at these aerospace conferences, and I'm ready to blog. Session overview will start in a few minutes.

[A few minutes later]

Omar Mendoza of the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is keynoting. He is head of a new energy and environment office. One of the things that they're working is biofuel from algae, but they see space-based power as a potential breakthrough technology for meeting military power requirements in an environmentally friendly way. Purpose of this conference is to identify technology gaps that must be filled to make it a reality.

Anticipate that early next year the incumbent president will be asking what the military is doing in the way of energy, and they want to have a roadmap ready to present to the new CinC, whoever it is.

Lt. Colonel Ed Tovar of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab now giving a history of the recent activities, including the space power studies performed last year by the National Space Security Office, and the interest that it seems to have aroused. Has gotten interest from environmental groups, energy companies, utilities, Congress, etc. Idea of tying energy to aerospace technology seems appealing. He tells people that this is something that justifies the exercise of due diligence to determine its potential. Talked about introducing John Mankins with a smart guy at NSSO, and had them get into a numbers battle over lift requirements, and that is the kind of activity that he wants to see continue. Two major thrusts: initiation/continuation of studies (much deeper and broader than NSSO report) and develop a roadmap for a demonstration strategy (space-space, LEO to ground, eventually from GEO). Terrestrial power beaming already happening as shown by the Hawaii test. Idea is to generate power in a permissive environment, and provide it in a "less permissive" environment. Wants to use structure and power available at ISS to do in-space demos, and has talked to people at NASA Ames and JSC about coming up with plans for a wireless power transmission demo at ISS.

Notes that Hawaii experiment didn't just demonstrate technology, but they flew aircraft through the beam to characterize it, determine environmental effects, density, efficiency, etc. See it as a form of "soft power" that can help avert conflicts in the twenty-first century. He wants to make this technology a "comma" in the national debate, when energy companies and presidential candidates talk about energy options. "wind, solar, biofuels,...energy from space."

Joe Howell of Marshall coming up next to talk about NASA's technology roadmap.

Oops. Nope. Neil Huber of Concurrent Technology Corporation (CTC) is giving a summary presentation of military requirements, based on a workshop in July. They gathed power requirements for military units at various levels (person, squad, deployed unit, base, etc.), and determining that 3-5 MW is a prevailing military need. Purpose of this workshop is to come up with a rough roadmap.

They also have intangible requirements (strengthen intel, protect critical bases of ops, etc.) Of eight of these, six of them could be satisfied by power from space.

SSP could support the joint force attributes required by strategy if energy can be provided to the force at relevant levels. Could be a game-changing capability. It would be nice not to have to carry batteries, or deploy diesel generators and their fuel.

Space-centric beamed power could provide stability of operations (no concern about having a fuel convoy intercepted and disrupt ops). Nice to be able to quickly redeploy power from one area to another. Could have been very useful after Katrina or Ike, or after the tsunami.

Services had an official requirement to reduce fossil fuel use, and this could play into that. Many DoD bases dependent on fragile and vulnerable commercial power infrastructure--this could make them more independent and robust. 2005 Energy Policy Act mandates that DoD installations transition to green technologies. needs vary from 3kW for a person to 9 MW for a brigade (varies among services). Giving a few examples. Watts for a soldier with his equipment, with heavy batteries, ranging up to 80 MW dedicated to propulsion for a destroyer. ONR testing 35 MW superconducting electric motor.

Air Force has more a better understanding of their requirements, but can't really keep up with the slides (this will be available later, probably on line). Notes that Marines have a very high AA battery requirement. Bottom line: could reduce deployment footprint and logistic footprint (reduced fuel convoying, which is also a dangerous activity). Could provide more stable, enhanced operations at all levels. 3-5 MW seems to be near-term critical number.

In Q&A, Colonel Paul Damphousse is relating experience from Iraq, where it was more dangerous to be on the road than in the air, and pointed out how nice it would have been to put down spot beams in remote areas rather than convoy fuel. In response to a question, Huber notes that fuel in the field can cost anywhere from $50 to $200 per gallon, after shipping it to the front (particularly by air). Makes this a much more attractive market for a high-cost (at least technology) like this.

OK, now Joe Howell is speaking about the NASA technology roadmap. His talk is based on work done in the last ten years (mostly from 1998-2002). Showing slide of classic reference SPS/Rectenna system from the 1970s DoE/NASA studies. Required huge launch capacity. Showing very complicated chart of complexity of all the factors that go into whether or not SPS makes sense. Topic seems to come up every fifteen years or so. Now showing potential requirement to get CO2 reduced--need 40 TW of carbon-neutral power generation to reduce and stabilize at twice pre-industrial levels. When "peak fossil fuels" will occur remains without consensus--how much energy R&D needed for insurance policy?

Now getting back to more recent studies. Still have rectenna farms and large structures in orbit, but much more thin-film concentrators, lighter structures. Showing X33/VentureStar as transportation paradigm of the era. Also showing hypersonic vehicles, two-stage reusables, smaller systems with high launch rates. Studies were based on $200/kg launch costs. Still couldn't close business model at that cost. Showing modular solar-electric concept to transport large space systems to GEO.

He has an eye chart of the technology areas that have to be advanced. Next chart focuses on state of near-term PV technologies--stretched-lens array, thin films, etc. Also showing solar concentrators that have actually flown in space (Deep Space 1). Need a much higher pointing accuracy for these types of systems, which makes the rest of the system more of a technical challenge.

Getting into microwave beam safety issues now (earlier had related the honeybee studies performed back in the seventies and eighties). Has the classic power density chart that shows it's not a problem, but people still don't believe it (just like the people who won't live near power lines). Showing roadmap of demos laid out to 2021, but funding dried up about 2003. Has a chart showing growth of spacecraft power requirements over last quarter century--steady increase up to tens of kilowatts. Needs doubling every five and a half years. Describing solar panel architecture trades.

Overall, this strikes me primarily as not a coherent story, or one put together for this meeting--just a lot of pre-existing charts with historical results from various periods. Probably useful for people unfamiliar with the field, though.

Future needs--sandwiched options, collect on the front, beam out the back, 50%+ conversion efficiency. 5 km transmitter 80%+ efficiency, ten GW system, installed cost $2/watt. Need self-assembly, higher strength/weight materials, higher-temp solid-state devices, need to look at lasers as well as microwaves, but as always, need much lower transportation costs.

In other words, nothing new.

Question: how do we map the NASA quick-look study to the military requirements we just heard? 3 MW isn't really practical for microwave systems because they don't work for the wavelength. SPS size wasn't drive by power requirements so much as aperture size. Wouldn't lasers be better, given recent advances in solid-state devices? Howell notes that a LEO demo could be scaled down considerably for microwaves, and that lasers have issues with clouds, etc. Trades still need to be done. He notes that all of the work presented was to address the need for baseload power, and hadn't considered these new military requirements. Bruce Pittman of Ames asking about potential applications for lunar bases. Could they beam from L1 to the lunar surface? Howell notes that Seth Potter (Boeing) will be talking about this later in the meeting. Competition for going into shadowed craters is nuclear. Jay Penn of Aerospace notes that he'll be going into the economics this afternoon, in response to Bruce's question about how close to closure they came.

Taking a ten-minute break now.

[A few minutes later]

Ron Clark of Lockheed Martin giving a talk now titled "Space-based Solar Power Gap Analysis--Solar Dynamic and Hybrid Launch Approach."

Key to SBPS: increase revenues and lower costs (duh...)

Has an alternate solution motivated by premium-priced power applications such as shale extraction, remote locations and forward basing. Whenever senior people are briefed, we can show progress, but they still say "it's still too tough," based on the technology gaps. Have to come up with compelling plan that closes gaps and changes perceptions. Have to raise revenue above the grid (need $0.20/kW-hr). Need launch costs of $500/kg, and need to reduce spacecraft manufacturing costs to $1000/kg.

Identified apps where current technology may be good enough: peak power, industrial power and forward deployment/nationbuilding.

Notes that emphasis to date has been on photovoltaic (I would note that Brayton cycles were considered in the seventies, but they weren't the reference baseline). He thinks it's time to take another look at solar dynamic. Thinks that cost of space hardware is coming down not only due to technology advance (mass/function drops by factor of two every eight years, which translates to reduced costs), but also from economies of scale, which would apply to a system like this. Iridium experience shows that cost can come down a lot, particularly when one works closely with suppliers and reduces supply chain friction. Cost/kg can drop from $100,000/kg for one-off, and a hundredth of that for thousands. Sees launch costs as coming down as well with growing use of reusability.

He's positing a "hybrid" launch system with reusable suborbital first and second stage, that meets with a medium earth orbit (MEO) electrodynamic tether as a skyhook. Reduces ETO delta V to 5.5 km/s. Identifying specific technology gaps associated with these systems. Looking at on-orbit assembly gaps. Not competitive with coal-fired power plants at current technology maturity level. Need system-level demos of specific technologies that would support SSPS assembly.

A lot of work has been done with a Closed Brayton Cycle (for topping, with Rankine for bottoming) that can have 50% net power conversion efficiency. Gaps here consist of long life, weightless operation, radiators, large inflatable collectors, and space-rated alternators. Thermal radiators are a particularly immature technology for this high-temperature application.

Also need efficient DC-RF conversion. Some new solid-state devices may offer very high (~90%?) efficiency. Need to consider orbits other than GEO. Trade and location will be driven by mission need. MEO might be the right answer for some applications. he sees highest technical risk in MEO tether and payload transfer, and on-orbit assembly cost reduction. Thinks that all risks are tractable, w

In questions, Keith Henson notes that shipping assembled satellites to GEO would be pretty hard on them, due to radiation and debris.

Now Mack Henderson from JSC (who I sat across from at dinner last night) is presenting a concept for a space-based solar power demo at ISS. Goal is to use existing hardware to do a demo in 2010. Have been coordinating with a number of organizations, at DoD (NSSO, AF Security Forces, AFRL, Army Research, NRL), DoE, academia, industry (Raytheon, L'Garde, Boeing,LMSSC/MDR/PWR and SAIC) and help from Futron. Still looking for a DoE liaison--they seem to be focused on terrestrial.

Goal is to provide measurable power from space to ground, have it safe, and show that it is scalable, within the budget and schedule. They want to validate efficiencies over several types of paths. Raytheon is working on a system with 6 K-Band traveling wave tube amps. They're expecting to receive power on the ground on the order of 20 milliwatts from 600 watts transmitted, using Goldstone for the receiver, though other options are being considered. Each beaming experiment will last about ten minutes with about a hundred seconds of maximum power. They're foreseeing a 27-month program for about $55M, hoping for a May 2010 demo.

Already a letter of intent from Gary Payton and Bill Gerstenmaier--NASA will do space segment, DoD will do ground, and help with money. Also provide TWTs, use of AFRL facilities and Tyndall, and help with roadmap. NASA fives a Shuttle ride, berth on ISS, money, use of DSN dish at Goldstone, and project engineering, with support from Raytheon and Texas A&M.

Benefits of concept are near-term launch capability, services available at ISS including humans present. Compared to doing a separate satellite on an EELV--would save hundeds of millions. Biggest risk is schedule. Asking for authority to proceed from NASA HQ next week.

Jay Penn is concerned about the low transmission efficiency of the proposed experiment, and suggests a laser for much better power transfer. It really is amazing that you can only get 20 milliwatts from 600 watts using that monster dish at Goldstone. It just shows how important aperture size is at that microwave frequency (2.45 MHz). It is being pointed out that there are already demos of low-power microwave power beaming from space--it's called comsats. It's determined to take this discussion off line.

Question: what will we learn from this demo and how will it help future designs and concepts? The answer wasn't clear.

Colonel Damphousse points out that there is DoD support for this, and he appreciates the comments. We shouldn't be focused on how many milliwatts or microwatts are being transmitted--beam characterization is important to allow us to scale up later demos. It has to be looked at as a first step, because we aren't going to get billions for a 10 MW demo right now.

Bruce Thieman of AFRL is talking now about spacelift costs, and the implications for space solar power. Currently at $4000/lb to LEO, are only going to get to $400/lb with what's currently funded. Current costs are high, vehicles are unreliable, with long call up. Goal is much faster turn around, much higher reliability and lower costs. Everything is currently horrendously expensive (a lot of dispute about his chart that has Shuttle costs at $450M--it's got to be closer to a billion per flight these days). Showing commercial launch systems--SpaceX, ULA, AirLaunch, Microcosm and others, including Kistler--old chart). Even COTS vehicles can't get costs below $1500/lb or so (Taurus 2 calculated to be $2000). EELV is in the $3400-4300 range.

Showing chart that says that reusable lower stage expendable upper stage hits a near-term sweet spot in cutting costs by about half. Still $300-$400/lb. Can't do better until fully reusable, and that needs launch rates of forty or more a year. The reusable first stage is designed for a 48-hour turnaround. Long-term goal for fully reuable systems is four hours. Want to eventually see a thousand flights per airframe.

Talking about suborbital now. Most important thing that they will do is drive up launch rate and learn about operations, and high turnaround rate. They are a very important community. Showing classic chart of that shows energy costs to orbit--translates into a ticket price to orbit of $76 (about 38 cents a pound). Question is how to bring launch rate up. If we can bring satellites down to $300/pound to build, we could build more and launch them more often, and refresh technology more often as opposed to GPS, which is a fifteen-year satellite, mostly driven by launch costs. Have to change the culture of the satellite community, which will require initial drops in launch costs.

Now Richard Fork (UA, Huntsville) is giving a paper called "Adaptive Network for Power and Information in Near-Earth Space."

His challenge was to come up with a way to use lasers for power, but not a weapon. Proposes a "quantum secure" laser-based network to support both power and information transfer from space. Looking into laser-based power and "intelligent cyber-secure adaptive networks." Have to figure out a way to keep people from "hacking" the lasers. Sees it as an enabler for space solar power.

OK, so he's talking about direct solar-laser conversion, and using lasers for launch (ablative). I don't see how it relates to his summary of the talk, though. Has a chart of bullet points, not particularly related to each other, including one on asteroid deflection with lasers, the last one of which is "Main need is for a well managed program.

All is lost.

Time for lunch.

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, not quite. Now he's talking about quantum secure links again. Conclusions: need for both microwaves and lasers. Lasers alone offer highly directionsl efficent long-range power delivery. They alone offer a "quantum-secure" info network. And intelligent quantum secure power network can be designed an implemented within time frames of interest.

OK. Whatever.

[Update after lunch]

I've started a new post for the afternoon session.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:10 AM

October 01, 2008
Top Eleven Things

...that geeks would do with $700B.

I can tell you that if I had that much money to play with, I can guarantee that, within two decades, asteroids wouldn't be a worry any more. And there would be a tourist resort on the moon.

[Via (where else?) Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:50 AM

September 28, 2008
Probably Just Scurvy

So, what is the cargo of this Iranian ship headed for Somalia?

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill "within days" of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died...

...This was also confirmed by Hassan Allore Osman, minister of minerals and oil in Puntland, an autonomous region of Somalia.

He headed a delegation sent to Eyl when news of the toxic cargo and illnesses surfaced.

He told one news publication, The Long War Journal, that during the six days he had negotiated with the pirates, a number of them had become sick and died.

"That ship is unusual," he was quoted as saying. "It is not carrying a normal shipment."

The pirates did reveal that they had tried to inspect the ship's cargo containers when some of them fell sick -- but the containers were locked.

Osman's delegation spoke to the ship's captain and its engineer by cellphone, demanding to know more about the cargo.

Initially it was claimed the cargo contained "crude oil"; later it was said to be "minerals".

And Mwangura has added: "Our sources say it contains chemicals, dangerous chemicals."

The symptoms described could be possibly caused by chemical weapons, but the pirates claimed that they didn't open the locked holds (though the holds could have leaked as well). But the symptoms also match radiation poisoning.

But why would the Iranians be shipping WMD of any kind to Somalia? For transhipment elsewhere overland? And if it is radioactive, is it the material for a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb?

It will be ironic if it turns out that pirates caught what the CIA didn't (assuming, of course, that they haven't been tracking it).

[Late afternoon update]

Marlon McAvoy emails:

'm a Radiation Protection tech at ORNL. Was formerly a member of the DOE's RAP (Radiological Assistance Program) team, originally tasked and trained mostly for transport incidences, but which was reprioritized after 9-11. Just wanted to offer an observation, which might be old news to you two science geeks.
Skin burns were also reported in this incident. These are normally more associated with beta than the far more penetrating gamma radiation, but there's no way these guys could have gotten beta burns without close exposure to actual, unshielded radioactive material. Gamma can certainly burn the skin, but in which case the victim has sustained an enormous dose and will absolutely die from it, unless the exposure was tightly collimated over a small area.

So, my guess, this seems much more likely to be of chemical rather than radiological origin. But if multiple guys did receive 500+ rem (Roentgen equivalent man) of gamma radiation, our spooks will have no difficulty determining it. We have civilian instrument packages that can map minute fluctuations in background radiation levels; a poorly shielded gamma WMD would look like a magnesium flare to whatever is used by the intelligence community.

Whether they can or should let us civvies know is, of course, another question.

It is indeed.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:18 AM

September 21, 2008
I Did Not Know That

I just discovered, via the latest Carnival of Space, that Bruce Cordell and some other folks have started a web-site/blog devoted to space and space colonization, called Twenty-First Century Waves.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:56 PM

A Blast From The Past

Ben Bova has a piece in the Naples News that could have been written thirty years ago. In fact, it's exactly like stuff that he (and I) wrote thirty years ago. The only difference is that I have experienced the past thirty years, whereas he seems to be stuck in a seventies time warp, and I've gotten a lot more sober about the prospects for a lot of the orbital activities that were always just around the corner, and probably always will be:

An orbital habitat needn't be a retirement center, though. Space offers some interesting advantages for manufacturing metal alloys, pharmaceuticals, electronics components and other products. For example, in zero-gravity it's much easier to mix liquids.

Think of mixing a salad dressing. On Earth, no matter how hard you stir, the heavier elements sink to the bottom of the bowl. In zero G there are no heavier elements: they're all weightless. And you don't even need a bowl! Liquids form spherical shapes, whether they're droplets of water or industrial-sized balls of molten metals.

Metallurgists have predicted that it should be possible in orbit to produce steel alloys that are much stronger, yet much lighter, than any alloys produced on Earth. This is because the molten elements can mix much more thoroughly, and gaseous impurities in the mix can percolate out and into space.

Imagine automobiles built of orbital steel. They'd be much stronger than ordinary cars, yet lighter and more fuel-efficient. There's a market to aim for.

Moreover, in space you get energy practically for free. Sunlight can be focused with mirrors to produce furnace-hot temperatures. Or electricity, from solarvoltaic cells. Without spending a penny for fuel.

The clean, "containerless" environment of orbital space could allow production of ultrapure pharmaceuticals and electronics components, among other things.

Orbital facilities, then, would probably consist of zero-G sections where manufacturing work is done, and low-G areas where people live.

There would also be a good deal of scientific research done in orbital facilities. For one thing, an orbiting habitat would be an ideal place to conduct long-term studies of how the human body reacts to prolonged living in low gravity. Industrial researchers will seek new ways to utilize the low gravity, clean environment and free energy to produce new products, preferably products that cannot be manufactured on Earth, with its heavy gravity, germ-laden environment and high energy costs.

Cars made of "orbital steel"?

Please.

But I guess there's always a fresh market for this kind of overhyped boosterism. I think that it actively hurts the cause of space activism, because people in the know know how unrealistic a lot of it is, and it just hurts the credibility of proponents like Ben Bova.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:29 AM

Good Old Reliable

As is often the case, I agree with Glenn. They can have my land line when they pull the phone from my cold dead fingers.

Cells are simply not reliable enough for me to use them for everything, though I put up with it on a trip (when we were with T-Mobile, my cell phone didn't even work in the house). I wonder how many kids who have grown up with cell phones for voice and texting take their idiosyncrasies and unreliability for granted, because they don't have that much experience with a reliable and clean line? Plus, during the hurricanes, when all else failed, including power, cell service was out, but I always had phone service plus DSL on my land line. It allowed me to stay on line, by using a laptop and a voltage inverter plugged into the car.

The technology may continue to improve to the point at which I no longer feel the need for a land line, but we're nowhere near it yet, in my opinion.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:36 AM

September 19, 2008
Getting Better

The latest installment of "Better All The Time" is up at The Speculist. It's all pretty good (I found sensation in a bionic arm without sensors fascinating), but I liked this:

Hey, did you notice? The world didn't end! We get so used to the world not ending that sometimes we take it for granted. But in honor of our not being sucked into a giant black hole or blasted back in time to when our entire universe was nothing but diffuse particles, the Times Online has compiled a list of 30 other time the world didn't end.

If you like that sort of list, keep this in mind: those thirty days are just a tiny, tiny subset of the total number of days in which the world has not ended. In fact, we are (and I hope I don't jinx it or anything by pointing this out) batting a perfect 1000 on that score.

Yeah, every day, they tell us the world won't end, and it doesn't until one day it does. Which sucks. And there's no one around to say "I told you so."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:42 AM

September 17, 2008
The Latest In Medical Transplants

Eeeeuuuuwwww...:

... Patients who come into the hospital with suspected pneumonia now get an antibiotic within six hours, instead of four hours previously, to allow more time to assess the need for drugs.
One controversial strategy: fecal transplants. For one patient with recurrent C. diff, Kettering suggested a stool transplant from a relative, to help restore good bacteria in the gut. But Jeffrey Weinstein, an infectious-disease specialist at the hospital, says the patient "refused to consider it because it was so aesthetically displeasing."

To say the least. Though some kinky folks might get off on it. It's certainly a simple procedure compared to a heart or a kidney.

Some might argue that a lot of folks in Congress have already had the procedure done, except it was transplanted to the wrong location, considerably north of where it was supposed to go.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:42 AM

September 10, 2008
The Top Six Heroes

...of Neal Stephenson.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:43 PM

September 09, 2008
The New Season

An interview with the creator of the Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:27 PM

Of Course It Does

Restricting the top speed on automobiles "seems reasonably sensible" to Matthew Yglesias:

...of course the reason you're not allowed to go super-fast is that it isn't safe. A large proportion of car accidents are related to people driving too quickly. Thus, via Ezra Klein comes Kent Sepkowitz's suggestion that we design cars so as to make it impossible for them to drive over, say, 75 miles per hour.

Clearly spoken as someone woefully ignorant of the cause of accidents, and who probably doesn't drive much, at least outside a city, or in the west, or in mountains, or on curvy roads where rapid passing is occasionally necessary. Or someone to whom time (at least other peoples' time) has no value. I suspect that he agrees with Al Gore that cars are intrinsically evil, and wishes that everyone would ride a train, like those enlightened Europeans. It's similar to the idiocy (and yes, there's no other word for it) of a double nickel speed limit (something to which even Charles Krauthammer, who doesn't drive at all) has fallen prey.

Fortunately, most of his commenters take him to school.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:20 AM

September 04, 2008
Worth Its Weight In Gold

A list of items that have a higher value density than gold. This is a characteristic of any viable product of space manufacturing, at least one that will have a market on earth, because transportation costs are so high.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:34 AM

September 02, 2008
Impact Of New Space

There's an interesting discussion in comments between Clark Lindsey and Dwayne Day (and others, though those are less interesting) on how much progress we have made in achieving the goals of the new private space industry over at Space Transport News.

Clark tends to be a glass-half-full kind of guy. Dr. Day thinks there are a few drops in the bottom, and they're poisoned.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:57 PM

Breaking Windows

How much should Microsoft fear Google Chrome?

Who knows? We'll see.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:49 PM

Sea Versus Space

Dwayne Day has an interesting history comparing undersea exploration technology with space exploration technology.

One other point of coming convergence--the increasing use of underwater suit concepts for space suits (particularly for high-pressure suits that can eliminate the need to prebreathe). Historically, NASA has generally ignored the undersea folks, though there has been a lot of private interaction (Phil Nuytten of Can-Dive has been developing hard suit concepts for decades). It looked like that might be changing with the selection of Oceaneering for the new EMU program, until NASA cancelled the contract and reopened the competition. We'll see what the future holds, and if Hamilton Sunstrand retains their grip on the agency space-suit budget.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:48 AM

September 01, 2008
For Our Own Good

The government doesn't want you to have access to your own genome data.

Sorry, I outgrew my nanny many decades ago.

[Via Geekpress]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:15 PM

August 27, 2008
I Can Live Without The Flying Cars

...as long as we get disease cures, including anti-aging, from pills. This was certainly a part of the twenty-first century that I'd been hoping for.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:49 AM

August 26, 2008
More On The "CAD Problem"

Jeff Finckenor responds to some of his critics in the comments section:

"He's a whiner who didn't get his way and went to the IG"

Not a terribly polite way to put things, but I suppose it is somewhat accurate. Of course "my way" which I was always advocating was a call to do a technical evaluation to determine what we really needed to do. You know, things like writing requirements, then making selections based on those requirements. Some people would call that good engineering. Some would call it federal law. It never happened. Had it happened then I wouldn't have had any arguments to make and would have been shut down a long time ago. Had it happened and there were real reasons for MSFC and Constellation making the decisions they did, then I could have supported them even if I was less then thrilled. You go to the IG to report waste, fraud and abuse. I was duty bound to report what I saw as both a taxpayer and a government employee. If there wasn't any meat to what I was saying, then the IG would have sent me away. They didn't. Those who want to do the search may also want to look up a letter from Senator Grassley to NASA. It was a very powerful letter and appears to have been soundly ignored. It takes a lot of chutzpah to blow off the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but NASA got away with it.

Those who argue with me will trot out an "evaluation" that was done in 2002, except that that evaluation was based on a CM tool ONLY (not CAD management), and it was fatally flawed in how it was performed. And yes, all you're getting here is an opinion, and again my information has been documented and given to the appropriate authorities.

Was I asked to "stop working against management"? I guess that's one way to put it, if I was willing to ignore reality, give up on the vision of what NASA needs to succeed, and toe the party line.

It was wrenching deciding 3 years ago that my job wasn't worth the mess that I was seeing. I had basically decided that a NASA that could make a decision so badly (which is not quite the same thing as a bad decision, though in this case I believe it is the same), and not be able to correct itself was not a good place to work. So I committed to supporting good engineering practice and federal law, knowing that I might be forced out. 3 years later, I have given up, which was again wrenching for me. The politics are too overwhelming, and it is indeed not a good place for me to work.

Go read the whole thing.

All of the comments have to be very disquieting to fans of business as usual at NASA. It's not about CAD. It's about whether this is an institution that, despite the many talented people working for it, is capable of getting us into space in any serious way.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:22 PM

The Problem With ITAR

There's little new in this piece at the Economist to people who have been following the issue. Well, there is one thing: some signs that the people who have been destroying the industry with this foolish policy may be starting to pay attention.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:59 AM

A Brief History

...and a depressing one, of the Vision for Space Exploration. There's a piece missing in the chronology, though. "Safe, Simple, Soon" was not part of the original vision. That was a sales slogan that ATK came up with to promote their particular means of implementing it. As noted, though, it seems to be failing on all three counts.

Note the comment that PDR has slipped into next year.

[Update mid morning PDT]

More on the PDR slip. It's all the way out to next spring.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:31 AM

August 25, 2008
How Big Is The Problem?

"...and what is the nature of it? An interesting post over at NASA Watch, but the comments are even more interesting. I have some thoughts, and they're related to my earlier thoughts on systems engineering, but I'm curious to see what commenters here think.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:23 PM

August 20, 2008
Bring It On

Converging non-food biomass directly into high-octane gasoline. Let's hope they're right.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:48 AM

August 17, 2008
Change!

...and hope!

Well, not really. The Obama campaign has released its new space policy, and there's not much breaking with the status quo in it. It's basically sticking with the current plan, at least in civil space, but promising (as in all areas) to spend more money. While one suspects that Lori Garver must have played a major role in it, it also reads as though it was written by a committee, or different people wrote different sections, and then it was stitched together, like Frankenstein's monster.

For instance, in one section, it says:

Obama will stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate spaceflight capabilities. NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services is a good model of government/industry collaboration.

But later on, in a different section, it says:

Obama will evaluate whether the private sector can safely and effectively fulfill some of NASA's need for lower earth orbit cargo transport.

If COTS is a "good model," why is such an "evaluation" necessary? Isn't it already a given? I also like the notion that Obama himself would do the "evaluation." As if.

It's got the usual kumbaya about international cooperation, of course, which I think has been disastrous on the ISS. There are also implied digs at the Bush administration, about not "politicizing" science (as though Jim Hansen hasn't done that himself) and opposing "weapons" in space. It also discusses more cooperation between NASA and NRO, ignoring the recent rumblings about getting rid of the latter, and the problems with security that would arise in such "cooperation."

Also, interestingly, after Senator Obama called McCain's proposed automotive prize a "gimmick," the new policy now explicitly supports them. So are they no longer "gimmicks"? Or is it just that McCain's idea was (for some unexplained reasons) but Obama's are not?

Overall, my biggest concerns with it are more on the defense side than on the civil space side. This is utopian:

Barack Obama opposes the stationing of weapons in space and the development of anti-satellite weapons. He believes the United States must show leadership by engaging other nations in discussions of how best to stop the slow slide towards a new battlefield.

Sorry, but that horse is out of the barn, and there's no way to get it back in. No anti-satellite weapons treaty would be verifiable. It is good to note, though, that the policy recognizes ORS as a means to mitigate the problem. That's the real solution, not agreements and paper.

In any event, it's a big improvement over his previous space policy, which was not a policy at all, but rather an adjunct to his education policy. Now it's time for the McCain campaign to come up with one. I hope that he gets Newt to help him with it, and not Walt Cunningham.

[Mid-morning update]

One of the commenters over at NASA Watch picks up on something that I had missed:

Sen. Obama names COTS and several other programs by name, but not Ares or Constellation. He mentions "the Shuttle's successor systems" without specifying what they might be.

That does give him some options for real change. I also agree that a revival of the space council would be a good idea. I hope that the McCain campaign doesn't oppose this purely because the Obama campaign has picked it up.

[Afternoon update]

One other problem. While it talks about COTS, it has no mention of CATS (or CRATS, or CARATS, or whatever acronym they're using this week for cheap and reliable access to space). It hints at it with COTS and ORS, but it's not set out as an explicit goal. I hope that McCain's policy does.

[Update a few minutes later]

Bobby Block has a report at the Orlando Sentinel space blog.

This part struck me (and didn't surprise me):

Lori Garver, an Obama policy adviser, said last week during a space debate in Colorado that Obama and his staff first thought that the push to go to the moon was "a Bush program and didn't make a lot of sense." But after hearing from people in both the space and education communities, "they recognized the importance of space." Now, she said, Obama truly supports space exploration as an issue and not just as a tool to win votes in Florida.

I'm not sure that Lori helped the campaign here. What does that tell us about the quality and cynicism of policy making in the Obama camp? They opposed it before they were for it because it was George Bush's idea? And does that mean that space policy was just about votes in Florida before this new policy? I know that there are a lot of BDS sufferers who oppose VSE for this reason, and this reason alone, but it's a little disturbing that such (non)thinking was actually driving policy in a major presidential campaign.

George Bush greatly expanded federal involvement in education and expanded Medicare. Are they going to shrink them accordingly? I'd like to think so, but I suspect not.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:36 AM

August 15, 2008
"Give We Shall Meet"

That's the subject of a spam email I got this morning. It's from "kenon nader" Here are the entire contents: "Greetings, how are you doing? Give we shall meet"

No link to a web site, just a return email address of someone at "allforchildren.org." And right after typing this, I got another one, same subject and contents, from "duff shiahn-w <assessoriaadm@lo.unisal.br>"

What is the point of this stupidity?

[Update in the late afternoon]

Apparently it's a buffer overflow attack trojan. I don't think it works very well with Thunderbird, given that I have Javascript disabled (which is why I didn't see the script). And my blog is now numero uno on Google for "give we shall meet."

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here's more info.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AM

August 14, 2008
Time To Dig Out The Shutters?

I've been keeping an eye on that disturbance in the Atlantic for a few days, but it's starting to look like there's a chance of a hurricane here early next week. The models are all showing it curving to the north off the coast, and missing Florida, but the models aren't to be trusted this far out. I may have to shutter up on Sunday.

[Update early afternoon]

This morning's model runs have it heading across the top of the greater Antilles, and then tearing up through the Bahamas. Except for GFDL, which has it heading right up the Florida east coast, starting in northern Palm Beach County, and then right up to the Cape, four and a half days from now (i.e., late Monday). Despite my earlier musings on the palliative effects on space policy from a Kennedy Center hurricane, I hope it's wrong.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:22 AM

Firefox Problem

I tend to have a couple dozen tabs (in multiple instances) of Firefox running at any given time. But I've noticed (at least in Windows) that sometimes the program will start to saturate the CPU, and take forever to reload a site, or even to switch from one tab to another. When I shut down the program, the CPU usage goes from a hundred percent to a few percent. But when I reload it, with all previous tabs restored, it shoots back up to a hundred. I suspect that it's just one of the tabs that's causing the problem, but the Windows task manager can't provide any insight, because it's happening inside the application.

It would be really nice if the Firefox folks would put in a diagnostic tool that would tell which open tab, or tabs, was causing the problem, so that one could just close that one without having to kill the whole program. It's really made it almost unusable until I can figure out which one it is. Or just start over, but keeping them open is my way of bookmarking items for later blogging.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:06 AM

August 11, 2008
Fedora Diagnostics

Pete Zaitcev asked for a screen shot. Here are two.

This is the screen where it hangs up for several minutes before going into install mode.

And this one is the cryptic message that I get. I have no idea what it's looking for here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:38 AM

One Less Thing To Worry About?

Is the Yellowstone caldera fizzling out?

This adds to suggestions that the plume has disconnected from its heat source in the Earth's core. If this is true, it means the plume could be dying - and that the sequence of mega-eruptions could come to an end. "If it doesn't have clear source, as it rises eventually the plume will die out," says Schutt.

Let's hope so. A Yellowstone explosion could be a civilization-ending event, and there's not much we can do to prevent it, at least with current technology.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:05 AM

August 10, 2008
Curing Diabetes

...with lettuce? If this is true, it seems like a pretty big breakthrough.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:20 PM

August 09, 2008
New Fedora Laptop Issue

OK, when we last left our intrepid laptop, it couldn't install Fedora. Following advice in comments there, I tried a live version of Ubuntu, and it had no problem, other than telling me that it didn't have an open-source driver for the WLAN. Then I tried Fedora again. It hung up as it did before, but I went away and ignored it, and when I came back after a while, it had finally booted into the installer. Apparently I just hadn't been patient enough the last time.

Now, after selecting languages, it gives me a message saying "No driver found" It tells me that there is no driver for this installation for the device, and asks me if I want to install manually, or if I have a disk. When I try installing manually, it gives me a drop-down list of every driver for every device known to Linus. The only problem is that it doesn't tell me what device is causing the heartburn.

Any suggestions? I'm guessing that it might be the wireless, because of the message on Ubuntu, but who knows?

[Update a few minutes later]

The exact (cryptic) message is "Unable to find device type needed for this installation type."

Huh?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:46 PM

August 05, 2008
It's Healed!

Miraculously (and mysteriously), my internal wireless adaptor started working yesterday. Unfortunately, that gives me one less excuse to return the laptop.

I still have to figure out what to do about Linux. Also, I'm unimpressed with Vista so far. Last night, the machine crawled almost to a halt. It's a 2 GHz Turion with three gigs of RAM. It took forever for task manager to load, and it provided no information as to which process was causing the problem, but the CPU was saturated. I couldn't even shut down applications, or the computer itself. I eventually had to just power it down. It's been OK since I rebooted into safe mode, and then rebooted again, but I have no idea what was going on.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:03 AM

August 02, 2008
Flash Boot?

There was a comment in my previous post about my laptop problems that Vista doesn't play well with others when it comes to dual boot. Could this be gotten around by booting Linux from a flash drive, or a CD?

[Update on Sunday morning]

How about a separate USB hard drive for the other OS?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:50 PM

It's Always Something

Well, I got what I thought was a good deal on a laptop.

Two problems (well, three, one of which is caused by the other). First, the integrated WLAN adaptor doesn't seem to work. That's an annoyance, but I have a USB adaptor. More seriously, it doesn't seem to accept Linux. When I tried to do a Fedora 9 install, it hung on one of the devices. It didn't occur to me to check to see if it was compatible with Linux--I had just assumed that it had evolved to the point where that wasn't an issue any more. So I'm considering returning, but not sure how to avoid the problem in the future.

Oh, the third problem? It comes with Vista installed. I hadn't cared when I thought that it would running Linux most of the time, but now it's an issue.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:25 AM

Unresolved

Clark Lindsey has the press release from Scaled about last summer's fatal accident. Short version, by my reading: we still don't know what happened and probably never will, so we're just going to be a lot more careful in the future.

I still think that they continue to overestimate the safety of hybrids, and that it wasn't a great choice for propulsion. I suspect that if Burt were starting from scratch now, he'd go with a liquid, but shifting to one at this stage would involve too large of a redesign of the airframe.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:11 AM

July 29, 2008
The Era Of Carbon Craziness

Is it almost over? Let's hope so.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:30 AM

Watch Where You're Going

Randall Parker, on the newest dangerous addiction:

The texters would be less dangerous to themselves and others if they didn't have to look down to see the screen. What is needed: Head Up Display Glasses tied to a cell phone. Then one could look ahead and see the text mixed in with sidewalk or whatever else is in front of you.

It's all part of a larger problem as we become a multi-tasking society.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:53 AM

July 28, 2008
Smart Robotic Space Explorers

This is the future of space exploration. Which is why we have to stop talking about "exploration" as a justification for humans in space.

[Update in the evening]

Commenter Paul Dietz recommends >Saturn's Children as a relevant book on the subject. If it's like most of Stross' work, it's hard to go wrong.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:08 AM

July 23, 2008
We're Still Alive, Somehow

So far. Ron Bailey wraps up the end-of-the-world conference. I hadn't previously heard the Yeltsin nuclear football story. It makes one wonder how many other close calls we've had.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:42 PM

An Interesting New Technology

Paper transistors.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:21 AM

July 22, 2008
Just A Rant

And probably a futile one, and one that I've even probably kvetched about before. But when did top posting become the norm for email? Was it Microsoft and AOL's fault?

And is there anything that can be done at this point? In many extended discussions, I feel like I'm driving on the wrong side of the road in my own country.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:14 PM

Good News On The Life Extension Front

From Instapundit.

I think that this stuff is going to sneak up on us, and the political establishment is going to not have any idea how to respond to it. But it will be a disaster for social security in its current form, as well as pension plans, though a boon for those of us who have never counted on it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:10 AM

July 21, 2008
Nuclear Phobia

Time to end it. It's a technology we need in space, too.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:48 AM

Man Versus Nature

A few horrifyingly hilarious tales. Don't miss the exploding whales.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:51 AM

July 20, 2008
"Snarkyboy" Persists

In a follow-up to the original Orion worship post:

The Saturn V, the biggest thing we've ever launched (just go with me here) weighed in at 6,699,000 lbs, or 3,350 tons, and managed to put a measly 100,000 lbs (50 tons) into lunar orbit.
So lets pretend we want to build a classic L5 space colony. How big does it have to be?

Sorry, but we're not going to "go with you there."

This is an inappropriate methodology, and the assumptions here are completely nonsensical. The problem has nothing to do with scaling Saturn Vs, and no one in their right mind ever thought that a "classic L5 space colony" would be built completely out of materials launched from the planet.

There is no good reason that we can't have launch costs of less than a hundred dollars a pound with chemical rockets, and give rides to millions of pounds of passengers and cargo. All that is needed is to make the investment into space transports, and set multiple teams of engineers loose on the problem, something that we have not done to date.

The cargo would be used to bootstrap production facilities for extraterrestrial resources, with high-value/pound payloads (i.e., electronics) coming up from earth. We do not need Orion to build space colonies. We need a lot of other things, but not that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:48 PM

An Effective Alzheimers Treatment?

Let's hope so. Alzheimers is, to me, one of the worst diseases, because it steals not just your body, but your mind, to the point that you're essentially dead while the empty husk metabolizes on. If it's actually possible to reverse the progress of the disease, that's huge news. But I wonder if in doing so, you've still lost some irretrievable memories? And if so, who are you?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:15 AM

Space Elevators

Alan Boyle has a report from this weekend's conference on them. It's unfortunate that it conflicted with NewSpace 2008, in the other Washington. But there are only so many weekends in a year.

[Update a few minutes later]

Alan's report is great, but there sure is an appalling level of ignorance in the comments.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:30 AM

If We Can Put A Man On The Moon...

...why can't we kick the fossil fuel habit? Well, we can, but not the way we put a man on the moon, and certainly not within a decade. On the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first landing, I explain.

[Afternoon update]

It's interesting to note that the original landing was on a Sunday as well. I don't know how many of the anniversaries have fallen on a Sunday, but I would guess five or so. It's not too late to plan to commemorate the event with a ceremony at dinner tonight, with friends and family. Also, a collection of remembrances here. If you're old enough to remember it yourself, you might want to add one.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 AM

It Came From Outer Space

Ron Bailey has more from the end-of-the-world conference, on the risks of asteroids, comets, and gamma-ray bursters. As he notes, comets are the biggest problem, because we might not see them until it's too late. That's why we have to have an infrastructure in space that can rapidly respond.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:14 AM

July 19, 2008
Constructing Sovereignty

...on the high seas. Though he doesn't discuss it explicitly, Chris Borgen makes another case for why we need to get off the planet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:35 AM

July 18, 2008
The End Of The World

Ron Bailey reports.

Well, OK, it's just a conference on the subject. Which isn't as interesting, but a lot less scary.

[Saturday morning update]

We have met the enemy, and he is us:

"All of the biggest risks, the existential risks are seen to be anthropogenic, that is, they originate from human beings."

All the more reason to get some eggs into baskets other than this one. Also, the rise (again) of the neo-Malthusians. It's hard to keep them down for long, even though so far, they've predicted about five out of the last zero world overpopulation crises.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:49 PM

July 17, 2008
A New Toy For Rich People

A submersible speedboat that can dive to twelve hundred feet. If there's a market for this, at a few million a pop, I'll bet that XCOR will be able so sell a few Lynx's to private owners.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:24 AM

The Science Of Batman

How plausible is he? Alan Boyle has done some research.

I agree that the getting-knocked-out-all-the-time thing is a problem. But no more so for Bruce Wayne than almost every teevee detective I watched when I was young. It seems like Mannix or Jim Rockford should have been sitting around drooling with all of the concussions they took almost every episode.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:24 AM

July 14, 2008
Empirical Evidence At The Nanoscale

This is pretty damned cool:

Chan said the experiment shows that it is not possible to simply add the force on the constituent solid parts of the plate -- in this case, the tines -- to arrive at the total force. Rather, he said, "the force actually depends on the geometry of the object."

"Until now, no significant or nontrivial corrections to the Casimir force due to boundary conditions have been observed experimentally," wrote Lamoreaux, now at Yale University, in a commentary accompanying publication of the paper.

I don't know what it means for the singularity, but molecular manufacturing seems to be moving along nicely. Tony Snow's death was sobering for me, because we were very close to the same age. Fortunately, I don't have the genetic time bomb that he did, though my family's heart history is worrisome. All I can do is do what I can do, and hope that things will come along.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:13 PM

Energy Versus Space?

Jeff Foust wonders if new government energy initiatives will crowd out space budgets.

Maybe. His piece reminds me of an idea I've had for an essay on why energy independence isn't like landing a man on the moon.

In fact, I had a related comment over at Space Politics this morning, in response to a comment from someone named...Someone...that cost-plus contracts are a proven means of success in space:

I know alt.spacers see cost-plus as some sort of ultimate evil. But recognize its been successful in the past, from the Saturn V to the Pegasus. And the X-33 would likely have been finished and test flown if NASA had used its traditional cost-plus approach instead of the fixed price model they used. If NASA had funded the X-33/VentureStar under the same procurement model as the Shuttle it would be flying today.

To which I responded:

But recognize its been successful in the past, from the Saturn V to the Pegasus.

Only if by "successful," you mean it eventually results in very expensive working hardware. Not to mention that Pegasus was not developed on a cost-plus contract.

And the X-33 would likely have been finished and test flown if NASA had used its traditional cost-plus approach instead of the fixed price model they used.

Perhaps. At a cost to the taxpayer of billions. And probably a radically different vehicle than the one originally proposed.

If NASA had funded the X-33/VentureStar under the same procurement model as the Shuttle it would be flying today.

Perhaps. And likely just as big an economic disaster (and perhaps safety one as well) as the Shuttle.

We don't like that form of procurement because historically, in terms of affordable access to space, it has repeatedly been proven not to work.

Anyway, I do need to write that essay. We're not going to get energy independence from government crash programs (though prizes may be useful).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:09 AM

July 13, 2008
Roomba Hacking

We haven't been using the Roomba for a while, because Patricia loves the new Dyson. But it excels at vacuuming under the bed, so we tried it for that today. It ran for about five minutes, and died.

I put it back on the charger, and it charged quickly. Too quickly, I fear. I think that the batteries have seen their last.

I was looking on line to see how much replacements are, and found a site that describes how to replace the Roomba batteries with standard sub-C NiMH batteries, with much more capacity than the factory original (four hours on a charge). I may give it a try.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:53 PM

July 10, 2008
Now This Has Potential

We can capture a powerful greenhouse gas and store energy at the same time. Just imagine pastures full of this.

It has squirrel undies beat hands down. Errr...so to speak.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:10 PM

July 09, 2008
Space Power Relay

Clark Lindsey has some space-related thoughts in response to T. Boone Pickens' solar energy proposal:

...one major hurdle, among several, with the plan would be the need to build more long distance electric power transmission lines to reach the more populated and more industrialized areas. This will be difficult since people all along the routes will fight having the lines and towers in their backyards.

Occasionally in discussions of Space Based Solar Power, the topic of microwave relay satellites comes up as a way to move power around. For example, in this paper, Reinventing the Solar Power Satellite (2004) Geoffrey Landis talks about using relay sats for distributing power to different parts of the globe from a single Solarsat. So it should be similarly possible for relay satellites to move power from the Midwest to where it's needed.

Yes, this is one of the "tiers" that Peter Glaser proposed in the development of powersats when he first came up with the idea forty (geez, has it really been that long?) years ago. He envisioned that before energy was produced in space, it might be relayed from energy-rich areas that didn't have local demand (such as a large dam in Venezuela or Brazil). He envisioned such relays as passive microwave reflectors, which are currently a major structural challenge in terms of keeping the surface the right shape within a fraction of a wavelength. But at least at GEO, they wouldn't have to move much.

Rather than giant relay sats in GEO, it might be preferable to place a constellation of relatively small ones in LEO since this would allow the beams to be much more narrow. Perhaps the switching techniques developed for Iridium/Globalstar could be built upon. Smaller beams might also lessen NIMBY resistance to transmitter/receiving sites.

Perhaps, but now you have high slew rates on the reflectors, which makes for even more of a challenge. An active phased array system can be steered electronically as it switches from rectenna to rectenna as it orbits. A reflector has to rapidly move the entire structure while maintaining its shape. The higher the orbit the better in this regard, because it won't have to slew as fast. Also, it would make LEO pretty crowded. A medium orbit (a couple kilocklicks) would probably be better, both because it would require slower motion, and would allow more ground rectennas to be seen at a time, while not cluttering up LEO. The slewing problem could be ameliorated by going to an active system, but that means that the satellite must now not only receive and convert the power, but reconvert and rebeam it to the ground, with all the attendant efficiency issues.

Anyway, I suspect that, regardless of size, NIMBY resistance to rectennas will dwarf that of resistance to transmission lines and towers, given that it's a devil they don't know.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AM

July 04, 2008
Brush Up

There will be a test tonight. A guide to fireworks effects.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:15 AM

July 03, 2008
Killing The Planet

...with wind mills:

...the only feasible backup for the planned 25-gig wind base will be good old gas turbines. These would have to be built even if pumped storage existed, to deal with long-duration calms; and the expense of a triplefold wind, gas and pumped storage solution would be ridiculous. At present, gas turbine installations provide much of the grid's ability to deal with demand changes through the day.

The trouble is, according to Oswald, that human demand variance is predictable and smooth compared to wind output variance. Coping with the sudden ups and downs of wind is going to mean a lot more gas turbines - ones which will be thrashed especially hard as wind output surges up and down, and which will be fired up for less of the time.

The fiends.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:57 AM

July 01, 2008
The Economics Of Longevity

Some thoughts, over at Fight Aging.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:16 AM

Better Living

...through hookworms:

"Many of the people who were given a placebo have requested worms, and many of the people with worms have elected to keep them," Dr. Pritchard said.

I hope they can figure out how it works, and (literally) eliminate the middle man...errrrr...worm.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:39 AM

June 30, 2008
We're Not Ready

It's been a hundred years since Tonguska, but we're still not taking the threat seriously.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:00 PM

Better Diagnostics

...through metabolites:

Douglas Kell, a researcher at the University of Manchester in Britain, has already created a computer model based on metabolite profiles in blood plasma that can single out pregnant women who are developing pre-eclampsia, or dangerously high blood pressure. Research published last year by Rima Kaddurah-Daouk, a psychiatrist at the Duke University Medical Centre in America, may not only provide a test for schizophrenia, but also help with its treatment. She found a pattern of metabolites present only in the blood of people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The patterns change according to the antipsychotic drugs patients take and this may throw light on why some respond well to certain drugs, but others suffer severe side-effects.

This seems very promising, and near term. This part is a little misleading, though:

Studying genes alone does not provide such detail. Genes are similar to the plans for a house; they show what it looks like, but not what people are getting up to inside.

This implies that the genome is a blueprint--that the body is built by following a plan. But that's a bad analogy. A much better one is a recipe. First do this, then do that. If it were a blueprint, identical twins would be truly identical, and indistinguishable. But because it's a recipe, there are subtle differences (e.g., fingerprints) because the genome doesn't specify the body design to that high a level of detail, and much can depend on womb environment (one reason to think that this could be a strong factor in the creation of homosexuals, in addition to genetic predisposition).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:43 AM

June 29, 2008
Boostback

Jon Goff has another installment in his excellent series of tutorials on future space transport concepts. The interesting thing, as he points out, is that one can see a clear development and technological maturation path to these types of affordable systems via operational suborbital vehicles, both horizontal and vertical.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:26 AM

Hooking Them Early

Behold, Space Camp Barbie. Maybe math isn't as hard as she thought.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:17 AM

June 28, 2008
A Solution To The Ares 1 Problem

A tuned mass vibration damper:

Due to both the immense size of Taipei 101 and the fact that it sits just over 600ft from a major fault line, engineers had no choice but to install one of this size at a cost of $4m. Too heavy to be lifted by crane, the damper was assembled on site and hangs through four floors of the skyscraper. It can reduce the building's movement by up to 40%.

And only 728 tons. Hey, the vehicle's already overweight. What's a little more?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:52 PM

June 27, 2008
Caulking Up The Leaks

I've noticed since upgrading to Firefox 3 that my browser (and general system) performance has been much better. An independent consultant claims that it's now the most efficient browser on the market in regard to memory leaks, at least for Windows, and Safari has problems (though it's not clear whether that's just on Windows, or on Macs as well).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:37 PM

Is Philanthropy In Our Future?

Some thoughts at The Speculist.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:29 AM

June 26, 2008
Is Big Government A Mac?

Or a PC?

[Update in the afternoon]

Why we should want big government to be a PC:

You know I love the products, but Apple is a fascist company. I should know -- I worked there. Even got personally cussed out by Steve Jobs (may his name be praised forever).

Apple products are based on centralized command-and-control. Apple makes the hardware, software, and -- increasingly -- many key applications ("everything inside the state, nothing outside the state"). The Apple faithful believe that the computing world dominated by Microsoft is bad (if not outright evil) and must be redeemed. If only everyone changed to their way of computing, we would reach computing nirvana. And society would be changed for the better, too. If only.

The analogy may be getting a little strained.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:47 AM

An Engineering Manpower Crisis

There's an interesting article over at the NYT about the Pentagon's difficulty in getting good engineers, particularly systems engineers.

In short, the pay is too low, it's not seen as exciting as a lot of the other opportunities for new grads (e.g., Google, or other fields such as finance), programs take too long and are technologically obsolescent, and there's too much bureaucracy. Sounds kind of like the reasons I left fifteen years ago.

This was amazing to me, but I guess that after almost three decades in the business, it shouldn't be:

Their report scolded the Air Force as haphazardly handling, or simply ignoring, several basic systems-engineering steps: considering alternative concepts before plunging ahead with a program, setting clear performance goals for a new system and analyzing interactions between technologies. The task force identified several programs that, hobbled by poor engineering management, had run up billions of dollars in overruns while falling behind schedule.

I've seen this happen at NASA many times over the years, but that doesn't surprise me because space isn't important. National defense is, or at least should be. One wonders how to change the incentives in the system to get better performance. Part of the problem is that the services themselves, particularly the Air Force (with which I have the most experience) don't value procurement highly enough as a career path. It's a lot easier to become a general via the cockpit than it is through logistics or development. The other problem is that you often having young lieutenants and captains given responsibility for programs of a size far beyond what they'd be managing at a similar experience level in private industry. This is good from the standpoint of encouraging recruitment, but it often means that they lack the experience to handle the job, and even (or especially) when they're good, they may be promoted up and out of the program. That's one of the Aerospace Corporation's primary functions--to provide program support to the blue suits, and maintain an institutional memory to make up for the fluidity of personnel changes of the AF staff.

In theory, it's a big opportunity for people like me (I actually have a masters degree in aerospace program management), but it's hard to get consulting work as an individual due to arcane procurement rules. Also (though the article didn't mention it) it's a hassle to deal with a clearance, and I'm not in any rush to renew mine, though I'm starting to consider it, because I really do need the income. Blogging just isn't paying the bills.

Oh, one other thing. The description of the problems above bears a strong resemblance to a certain controversial large NASA project, where maintenance of the job base and pinching pennies seems to take precedence over actually accomplishing the goal. Or "closing the gap."

[Via Chicago Boyz]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:24 AM

June 25, 2008
Rewiring Our Brains?

Is the Internet changing the way we think?

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

It's anecdotal, but I've noticed the same thing. I used to read many more books (and magazines, such as The Economist) than I do now. Almost all of my reading occurs on line, and I am much less able to focus than I used to be. But it's not clear whether this is an effect of aging, or new habits. More the latter, I suspect.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:38 AM

June 21, 2008
A Mundane Singularity

Here's a nice compendium of what we could achieve, and not that far off, without molecular manufacturing, AI and fusion.

The haters of humanity will hate it, of course.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:35 PM

June 20, 2008
Pushing Back

...against the pessimism. I think that Stephen Gordon is right in comments. People are optimistic in their own lives, and think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, because they watch and read too much news.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:33 AM

Bombing John McCain

...with Google:

Bowers chose the news articles by matching the topics to existing polling data that shows what issues likely will turn voters off to McCain. He also makes sure that the articles come from news organizations like CNN.com, which already are highly ranked in Google search results, he added.

"We're just using McCain's own words -- everything we are targeting are things McCain has done or said himself. There's no bias at all. There are no opinion pieces. They are all news pieces that quote McCain himself. Obviously it is manipulating, but search engines are not public forums and unless you act to use them for your own benefit your opponent's information is going to get out there. This is the sort of 'Do It Yourself' activism that is very much in line with the tone of this campaign," Bowers said.

Somehow, based on some of Google's actions in the past, I suspect they don't mind.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 AM

June 19, 2008
Let's Hope It's No Fluke

A cure for cancer from immunotherapy?

Ed Yong, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "It's very exciting to see a cancer patient being successfully treated using immune cells cloned from his own body. While it's always good news when anyone with cancer gets the all clear, this treatment will need to be tested in large clinical trials to work out how widely it could be used."

However, the treatment could prove extremely expensive and scientists say that more research is needed to prove its effectiveness.

On the other hand, it may prove to be not that expensive at all. It seems to me something quite amenable to economies of scale, and reduction of cost through technology advances.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:17 AM

Cyd And The Cape

Both are discussed today over at Lileks' place. Also, judicial overreach in the Great White North.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:39 AM

June 17, 2008
Superbrowser

Firefox 3 has been released. Here's a review. I've been using the beta for a while, and I've had some issues, but they seem to have worked them out. It now supports all the plugins I used in Firefox 2, and it's a lot better in terms of memory management, and it doesn't crash or even slow from too many open tabs (a big problem with 2.0). The best thing, to me, is that it seems to be able to handle a lot of Explorer-centric sites, so it may finally allow me to abandon Microsoft and go full Linux (particularly with continuing improvements in Wine).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:43 PM

Guilt-Free Petroleum

Some thoughts from Thomas James:

...the amusing part is that it is theoretically a carbon-negative fuel source -- the microbes take more carbon out of the atmosphere than what they excrete as a useable oil (if that doesn't seem to make sense, recall that the microbes themselves require carbon for their own structure).

On the other hand, since this approach requires genetic engineering, the watermelons and luddites will no doubt put the kibosh on it regardless of its benefits -- the only thing more intolerable than the idea of environmental-guilt-free petroleum sustaining the Western lifestyle of individuality, independence, and material happiness is the knowledge that that guilt-free petroleum comes from "frankenbacteria."

They'll hate it even without the bioengineering. As noted, it doesn't require us to tighten our hair shirts, or depopulate the planet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:11 AM

Thoughts On The Number Six

Over at Rockets and Such.

So, it goes from Ares 5 to Ares 6, and it still doesn't satisfy the mission requirement. And now it has outgrown the MLP.

There's a concept in the development of a space vehicle known as "chasing your tail," in which the need to add something to the vehicle (like adequate structural strength, with margin) results in more weight, which results in the need for bigger or more engines to push it, which results in the need for more propellant capacity to accelerate the added mass, which results in...

And the design won't close.

Now in fact, it is probably possible to get this design to close--bigger vehicles are easier in that regard than small ones. But regardless of the size of the vehicle, mission needs are always going to grow (and they still don't really have solid numbers on the EDS/Altair/cargo requirements). So it won't be able to get the mission concept (one and a half launch) to close, particularly as we move beyond the moon, even if it can be done for the moon.

The rationale for the heavy lifter has always been to avoid the complication of orbital assembly (apparently, the false lesson learned from our success with assembling ISS is that we should throw away all that experience, and take an entirely different approach for VSE). But it's already a "launch and half" mission, needing both Ares 1 and Ares 56, so they're not even avoiding it--they're only minimizing it. And even if the lunar mission doesn't outgrow the Ares 6, it won't be able to do a Mars mission in a single launch. So if we need to learn to do orbital assembly (and long-term propellant storage) anyway, why postpone it? Why not take the savings from not developing an unneeded heavy lifter (and new crew launch vehicle), and invest it in orbital infrastructure, tools and technology to provide a flexible system that can be serviced by a range of launch vehicles, without the single-point failure of Ares? These are the kinds of issues that a new administrator will have to consider next year.

And don't get me started on the Ares 1 problems:

The currently favored mitigation approaches - still undergoing a trade study - for thrust oscillation will add around 500 lbs to Orion for shock mounting on the crew seats and vital components.

So, because the geniuses behind this concept decided to put the crew on top of the world's biggest organ pipe, they'll add a quarter of a ton to an already-overweight vehicle with no margin, so that the astronauts will (might?) be able to survive watching the rest of the capsule being vibrated even more intensely around them.

There is a word for this. It starts with a "k" and ends with "ludge." And then there's this.

Thrust oscillation is now categorized as a 5x4 risk for the upper stage.

I'm not sure which axis is which in that formulation, but it either means that there is a very high likelihood of a catastrophic outcome, or that that it is probable that there will be a near-catastrophic outcome. And no mitigation has yet been found.

They really need to consider going from one and a half launches to (at least) two launches of a single medium-sized vehicle type. Two launches is two launches, it would save them a huge amount of development costs, provide much better economies of scale in operation and production, and get completely around the "stick" idea, which is proving to be a programmatic disaster waiting to happen, if it hasn't already. Let us finally end the cargo cult of Apollo, and develop real infrastructure.

[Late morning update]

Here's more discussion over at NASA Space Flight.

[Update a few minutes later]

In a post from a week ago, Chair Force Engineer has some related thoughts as well, on the wisdom of choosing solids at all:

The solid-liquid trade study is one that couldn't have been adequately analyzed during the 60 days of the ESAS study, and will likely end up as an interesting footnote in the Ares story. The question is whether the Ares story will fall into the genre of historical nonfiction, or fantasy and tragedy. If the latter is true, perhaps liquids were the answer after all. But the decision to not cap the weight of Ares V (even at the expense of payload) is one that taxpayers shouldn't forget if the massive rocket, and its shiny new infrastructure, ever get off the drawing board.

It seems pretty clear (as it did at the time) that the decision to build "the Stick" was pre-ordained, and that the sixty-day study was a rationalization, not a rationale, and that none of the CE&R recommendations were seriously considered. An Administrator Steidle would no doubt want to revisit it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:01 AM

June 16, 2008
Seek, And Ye Shall Find

Another huge oil discovery in Brazil.

What's amazing is not so much that Congress won't allow us to pump oil, which we badly need to do. They won't even allow us to look for it, especially if it's in a "pristine" (aka barren coastal plain, frozen in the winter and a mosquito-infested bog in the summer) region, at least according to Senator McCain.

What are they afraid we might find?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:13 PM

Only Cat 5?

For that kind of money, I'd expect Cat 8, at least.

An audiophile and his money are soon parted.

[Update a few minutes later]

As noted, the Amazon customer reviews are hilarious.

[Update in the evening]

Stephen Dawson (from Down Under) has a defense (albeit pretty flimsy. as he admits) of Denon.

I have to admit my disappointment as well. I'd always respected Denon up until this. As someone in comments said, one hopes that the marketing person responsible will have a few of these cables run through them from one end to the other. Or be keelhauled with them.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:29 PM

June 12, 2008
A Hopeful Long Shot

Some interesting progress in polywell fusion.

"We're fully operational and we're getting data," Nebel said. "The machine runs like a top. You can just sit there and take data all afternoon."

So was Bussard correct? Will it be worth putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a larger-scale demonstration project, to show that Bussard's Polywell concept could be a viable route to fusion power?

Nebel said it's way too early to talk about the answers to those questions. For one thing, it's up to the project's funders to assess the data. Toward that end, an independent panel of experts will be coming to Santa Fe this summer to review the WB-7 experiment, Nebel said.

"We're going to show them the whole thing, warts and all," he said.

Because of the complexity, it will take some interpretation to determine exactly how the experiment is turning out. "The answers are going to be kind of nuanced," Nebel said.

The experts' assessment will feed into the decision on whether to move forward with larger-scale tests. Nebel said he won't discuss the data publicly until his funders have made that decision.

Let's hope it pans out. If so, Bob Bussard will be smiling from the grave, or wherever he is.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:04 PM

Fighting Global Warming

With geoengineering. But the hair shirters don't like it:

Stabilization can only be achieved by cutting current carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent. This means implementing highly unpopular policies of carbon rationing and higher energy prices. So some climate change researchers and environmental activists worry that the public and policymakers will see geoengineering as way to avoid making hard decisions. "If humans perceive an easy technological fix to global warming that allows for 'business as usual,' gathering the national (particularly in the United States and China) and international will to change consumption patterns and energy infrastructure will be even more difficult," writes Rutgers University environmental scientist Alan Robock.

Well, boo frickin' hoo.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Commenter Chris Potter has a pithy translation: "If there's no good reason for people to do what I want them to do, they won't do it."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:42 AM

June 10, 2008
What To Take With You?

I agree with the commenters who say that almost anyone from the modern era transported to medieval Europe would be unlikely to live more than a few days. I'd certainly have pretty bad odds.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:33 AM

A New Project In The Works?

Alan Boyle has an interview with Paul Allen. This isn't right, though:

Adrian Hunt, the collection's executive director, told me that putting a pilot in the V-1 turned out to be a terrible idea.

"The theory is that you open the cockpit and you jump out just when you're getting close to the target," he said. "There's a slight design fault there. Once you open the cockpit, that's the intake for the rocket - and it tends to suck in things, including people.

"...intake for the rocket"?

It was a pulse jet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:04 AM

June 08, 2008
Fast-Forward Radio

Sorry for the short notice, but I forgot to mention that I'll be on Fast-Forward Radio tonight, in less than an hour. Fortunately (assuming you care) it will be available for download later.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 PM

June 06, 2008
Geoengineering

A brief survey of potential global warming solutions. What is more interesting to me than the engineering is the politics and ethics of all this. Asteroid diversion falls in the same category. But at least some of these things could drive a need for low-cost space access in an unprecedented manner.

But this is one that doesn't really seem to be in this category, unless it were mandated. It's more of a "think globally, act locally" approach:

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the ultra-low-tech approach of painting rooftops white to reflect sunlight.

We've been thinking about doing that anyway, just to reduce our air conditioning bill. With a gray cement tile roof, that soaks up a lot of sun, it's hotter than Hades's kitchen in the attic this time of year, and that could really cool things down.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:30 AM

Mormons And Infrastructure

Jon Goff has a truly excellent post on what will be required for space settlements, with useful historical analogies. I've always considered the LDS analogy quite apt, both in terms of types of technologies and infrastructure needed for the emigration, and the motivations. As he notes, unfortunately, the space community often uses unuseful historical analogies and/or fails to recognize where they break down.

But what he describes would be a true "Interstate Highway System" for space, as opposed to what Mike Griffin considers one (Ares/Orion).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:25 AM

June 05, 2008
The Singularity

Several essays, over at IEEE Spectrum. I haven't read them yet, but they look interesting.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:58 AM

A Self Replicating Machine

It's not as impressive as it sounds, though. It's a long way from a true self replicator.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:04 AM

June 04, 2008
Energy Wedgists Versus Breakthroughists

Put me in the latter camp.

Although the Climate Security Act does direct some spending towards low-carbon energy research, it is basically a wedgist scheme. If something like it is adopted by the next presidential administration, we will find out which side is right. If the wedgists are correct, cutting carbon dioxide emissions will produce a modest increase in energy prices resulting in the deployment of a wide variety of readily available low-carbon energy sources over the coming decades. If the breakthroughists are right, energy prices will soar provoking a political backlash. In which case, perhaps one need only peer across the Atlantic to the spreading protests against higher fuel prices in Europe to see the future.

Yup.

One of the most disturbing things about McCain is that he has bought completely into the hysterical climate-change claptrap, and is unamenable (so far at least) to reason.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AM

May 30, 2008
Maybe They Could Use Crayons

There's been quite a bit of commentary about the technological backwardness of the enemy. That is certainly a key distinction between this war and World War II and the Cold war, in which we were at war with technologically advanced industrial states (Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union), whereas the hirabis have virtually no industrial or weapons-making capability, short of nail bombs. I think that it was Rich Lowry who compared the two cultures by writing something like "...we build skyscrapers and jet airliners--that's our idea. They hijack our airliners and fly them into the skyscrapers--that's their idea."

Anyway, there was some buzz recently that they had developed a computer graphic of a nuked Washington DC for one of their propaganda videos.

Nope. They had to lift it from a western video game. They're not only incapable of carrying out our destruction, they're not even capable of simulating it. But it does speak strongly to their intent if they ever get their hands on advanced weaponry, something that, with advancing technology, will become more and more of a problem in the future.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:45 AM

May 29, 2008
Which Three Body Parts?

...would you rejuvenate? Randall's choices would make a lot of sense for me, too. Though I'm not sure how useful this is as a thought experiment. How likely is it that we'll actually be presented with such menu?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:53 AM

May 27, 2008
I Hate When That Happens

It's a pretty common occurrence for a little kid to be disappointed when he loses his grip on his balloon, but this is in a different class entirely:

The former paratrooper had hoped his "Big Jump" -- starting 40 kilometers (25 miles) above the Earth's surface -- would set new records for the highest jump, fastest and longest free fall and the highest altitude reached by a man in a balloon.

But those hopes drifted away over the plains of Saskatchewan in Canada when the balloon escaped.

I think he should give up on the balloon thing, and just wait for a rocket ride.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:46 AM

May 26, 2008
Revenge Of The Jedi

The browser wars return.

This particularly caught my eye:

Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.

The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user's browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word "football" into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with "football" in the name or description.

Firefox has named this new tool the "awesome bar" and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser for an individual user.

"Sitting at somebody else's computer and using their browser is going to become a very awkward experience," said Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation.

Sounds like a market opportunity to me. I have a few ideas about how to solve it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:08 PM

May 24, 2008
Saganites?

I find it amusing that these folks were clueless as to the purpose of the Google Lunar Prize when they signed up:

In my first blog, I wrote why Harold Rosen formed the Southern California Selene Group. In short, he and I registered our team to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE to demonstrate that a low-cost space mission to the moon could be accomplished and could lead to lowering the cost of some future robotic missions to planetary moons. Plus, we intended to have fun! Harold and I both are strong supporters of space science and robotic space exploration. (For one, I'm an astronomy and cosmology enthusiast.) We love the kind of work that JPL is doing, for example. But we most definitely are not in favor of human space missions. That is not our goal, nor do we support such a goal.

The Team Summit turned out to be a real wakeup call. In the Guidelines workshop that I attended just last Tuesday, the cumulative effect of hearing all day from Peter Diamandis, Bob Weiss and Gregg Maryniak that the "real purpose" of the Google Lunar X PRIZE was to promote the so-called commercialization of space (which I took to mean highly impractical stuff like mining the moon and beaming power to the earth, as shown in one of GLXP kickoff videos), humanity's future in space, etc. etc., took its toll. I couldn't help but think "what am I doing here?" When I spoke to Harold about it on the phone later, he agreed - no way did he want to be involved in promoting a goal he does not believe in.

So, what does this mean? It sounds to me like it's not just a goal they "don't believe in" (which is fine--they could not believe in it and still want to win the prize for their own purposes), but rather, a goal to which they are actively opposed, and don't think that anyone should be pursuing. I'm very curious to hear them elaborate their views, but it sounds like they're extreme Saganites. For those unfamiliar with the schools of thought, you have the von Braun model, in which vast government resources are expended to send a few government employees into space (this is Mike Griffin's approach), the Sagan model ("such a beautiful universe...don't touch it!), and the O'Neillian vision of humanity filling up the cosmos.

So when they say they don't support such a goal, does that mean they oppose it, and would take action to prevent it from happening if they could? Sure sounds like it. And they take it as a given that lunar mining is "impractical," but is that their only reason for opposing it, or do they think that it somehow violates the sanctity of the place, and disturbs what should be accessible only for pure and noble science? I'll bet that they'd prefer a lot fewer humans on earth, too.

[Via Clark Lindsey]

[Update late morning]

Commenter "Robert" says that I'm being unfair to Carl Sagan. Perhaps he's right--I was just using the formulation originally (I think) developed by Rick Tumlinson, though Sagan was definitely much more into the science and wonder of space than were von Braun or O'Neill... If anyone has a suggestion for a better representative of the "how pretty, don't touch" attitude, I'm open to suggestions.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:27 AM

Self Assembly Progress

This seems like a big deal:

The CHN (Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing at Northeastern University) has been able to develop a novel way to assemble nanoelements (nanotubes, nanoparticles, etc.) into nanostructures and devices that enable the mass production of atomic-scale structures and will lead to the production of devices such as biosensors, batteries, memory devices and flexible electronics very quickly and efficiently and with minimal errors.

Bring it on.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:24 AM

May 22, 2008
That Trick Never Works

But maybe this time. Peter Thiel has provided seed funding for a libertarian ocean colony.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:42 AM

May 21, 2008
Soylent Something

Here's an article about the current status of the lab-grown meat industry (such as it is):

...don't hold your breath while waiting for your first lab-grown roast. Despite considerable hubbub over the technology in recent months, we're still years--or, more likely, decades--away from affordable lab-grown meat. The current experiments are taking place in bioreactors that measure only a few hundred milliliters in volume, and the longest complete muscle tissues are just 2 centimeters long. Researchers are nowhere close to scaling up their production to market-ready levels, to say nothing of market-ready prices. A Dutch team's lab-grown pork, for example, would cost around $45,000 per pound--assuming they could make an entire pound of the stuff. Bioreactors may be energy-efficient when compared with cattle, but they're also expensive to design, build, and maintain. They also require highly skilled personnel to manage, in order to preserve aseptic conditions.
Furthermore, manufactured meat promises to replicate only the taste and texture of processed meat; as far as we are from enjoying lab-grown hamburger, we're even further from perfecting man-made rib-eyes. So even if meat labs did become viable commercial enterprises, the naturally raised meat industry would hardly vanish.

I think that this is a little too pessimistic. Considering where we've gone with realistic computer graphics based on fractals, I wouldn't count out the possibility of a nicely marbled filet being produced in the lab. But this is what I found interesting, in a linked article at the New York Times, bewailing how much meat we eat:

Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government's recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It's likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources.

What's the point of the first sentence? Were the 1950s the epitome of American health? Yes, people were eating less meat, and a lot more processed high-glycemic carbs (noodle casseroles, mashed potatoes, lots of sugary dishes--Lileks can tell you all about it). It's my parents diet (and it was mine as a child). They were both overweight, and both died of heart attacks fairly young (my father was eight years younger than me when he had his first, and if I live two more years I'll outlive him). I'm in relatively good coronary health, with no known problems. It's the diet of our grandparents that we should be emulating, not our parents (speaking to the boomers here).

And since when did the federal government become a nutrition expert? They food pyramid is a bad joke, in terms of health, with far too little protein, and too many carbs. The author of the article blithely states protein requirements as though they are established, objective fact.

It could be that some people are eating too much meat, but I'll bet that a lot more are eating too much sugar, white rice and refined flour. The interesting thing is that it's not meat and fat per se that seems to increase cholesterol levels (assuming that high cholesterol is really a problem, and not just a symptom), but the combination of it with an overabundance of carbs. That's what Atkins is all about (though I think he took it too far).

Anyway, I find it annoying to see this stuff promulgated as though it's indisputable, when in fact it is in constant dispute, and I think that those disputing it have the better of the argument. But if we do need more meat, I hope that we can in fact get the factories going, for both cost and ethical reasons.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:23 AM

May 19, 2008
Doomsday Has Been Postponed, Part Whatever

More thoughts on "peak oil," and what I'll call the "peak oil constant," which seems to be twenty or thirty years (i.e., it's always predicted to be that far in the future).

[Update mid afternoon]

Manzi has a follow up, in response to a Georgetown professor. Bottom line:

What if we had reacted to the predictions throughout the 1970s and 80s that we would reach peak oil in about 2000? Do you think that some of these proposed changes would have slowed economic growth and prevented the world from being in the current position of paying an ever-dwindling share of total output for oil? What other difficult-to-anticipate changes might some these interventions have had? Could the idea of purposely restructuring the transportation, housing, and agricultural sectors of the U.S. economy based on a prediction for an event that we have proven to be very bad at predicting - and for which the world's leading experts refuse to provide anything other than very broad guidance - induce a sense of humility? It does in me.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:34 AM

May 14, 2008
Don't Know Much About Space Policy

Gregg Easterbrook thinks that NASA should be saving the planet from errant asteroids, instead of building a moon base. He can't avoid the usual straw man, of course, which makes much of the rest of his whining about moon bases suspect:

As anyone with an aerospace engineering background well knows, stopping at the moon, as Bush was suggesting, actually would be an impediment to Mars travel, because huge amounts of fuel would be wasted landing on the moon and then blasting off again.

Bush only "suggested" that to people who miss the point of the program. No one is proposing that every, or even any, mission to Mars touch base on the moon before going on to the Red Planet. The point was that the moon might be a useful resource for making Mars missions more cost effective, particularly if we can find water there, and deliver it as propellant to some staging point, such as L-1, which isn't particularly out of the way en route to Mars. In addition, learning how to build a base on the moon, only three days away, is valuable experience to wring the bugs out of a Martian base, which is months away, despite the different environments.

But ignoring that, the real problem is that he doesn't seem to understand NASA's role:

After the presentation, NASA's administrator, Michael Griffin, came into the room. I asked him why there had been no discussion of space rocks. He said, "We don't make up our goals. Congress has not instructed us to provide Earth defense. I administer the policy set by Congress and the White House, and that policy calls for a focus on return to the moon. Congress and the White House do not ask me what I think." I asked what NASA's priorities would be if he did set the goals. "The same. Our priorities are correct now," he answered. "We are on the right path. We need to go back to the moon. We don't need a near-Earth-objects program." In a public address about a month later, Griffin said that the moon-base plan was "the finest policy framework for United States civil space activities that I have seen in 40 years."

Actually, Congress has asked NASA to pay more attention to space rocks. In 2005, Congress instructed the agency to mount a sophisticated search of the proximate heavens for asteroids and comets, specifically requesting that NASA locate all near-Earth objects 140 meters or larger that are less than 1.3 astronomical units from the sun--roughly out to the orbit of Mars. Last year, NASA gave Congress its reply: an advanced search of the sort Congress was requesting would cost about $1 billion, and the agency had no intention of diverting funds from existing projects, especially the moon-base initiative.

Now, I disagree with Mike that we don't need an NEO program--I think we do. But unlike Gregg, I wouldn't put NASA in charge of it. And if Congress wants to fund NASA to look for space rocks, it's going to have to tell NASA not to do the other things that it wants to do, or fund it. Also, this was a little verbal gymnastics on Gregg's part. Mike said that Congress had not instructed NASA to defend the earth, which is true, and the fact that they asked NASA to look for hazardous objects doesn't change that fact in any way, despite his sleight-of-hand at the keyboard. Looking for objects is one thing--actually physically manipulating them is a different thing entirely. It's like the difference between the CIA and the military. The former provides intelligence, the latter acts on it.

The Space Act (almost fifty years old now) does not grant NASA the responsibility to protect the planet, even with subsequent amendments. It is simply not its job. Moreover, no federal agency has that job, and as Gregg points out, if the US military were to take it on, there would be widespread suspicion on the part of the rest of the planet, and it would open us up to tremendous liability if something went wrong (not that there would necessarily be any lawyers around to care).

And is it really the job of the military? Again, as Gregg points out, this is a natural problem, not an enemy. If ET, or Marvin the Martian presented a threat, it would make sense to get the Air Force (or if we had one, Space Force) involved, because that is a willful enemy to be engaged, which is what we have a military for.

But as I've written before (six years ago--geez, where does the time go?), the only historical analogue (at least in the US) we have for planetary defense is the management of flooding by the Army Corps of Engineers. This is a predictable (though not as predictable as an asteroid or comet strike) natural disaster, at least statistically, and one that can be managed by building dams, which is largely what they do.

Now, I'm not proposing that the ACE be put in charge of defending the planet, but that thought isn't much more frightening than putting NASA in charge of it. Yes, Gregg, we could lobby to get Congress to amend the Space Act to put it in the agency's portfolio, but do you really think that would be a good idea? NASA is fifty years old this year, and bureaucratically, it acts much older than that. You don't want to take an existing agency, with too much on its plate, and too little resources with which to do it (and yes, much of what it's doing it shouldn't be doing, but that's a different discussion) and give it such an important, even existential task. It worked fine in the sixties, because it was a young, new agency with a focus on a single goal (though it managed to accomplish a lot of other things along the way in terms of planetary exploration--Tom Paine once told me that there was so much going on during Apollo that NASA did a lot of great things that it didn't even know it was doing).

No.

I've often said that if the president really thought that the VSE was important, he would have taken a policy lead from the Strategic Missile Defense program in the eighties, in which an entirely new entity was established to carry it out (SDIO, now BMDO), because it would otherwise get bogged down in blue-suit politics in the Air Force.

I agree that we should be doing much more about this threat than we are, but just because NASA is ostensibly a space agency doesn't mean that they should be in charge of it. I would establish a planetary defense agency, which had that as its sole charter. It might ask for (and occasionally get) cooperation from NASA, but it would do the same with the Air Force, and it would put out contracts to the private sector, and it would coordinate with COPUOS and encourage other nations to establish such entities to enter into cooperative agreements. If you ask NASA to do it, it will just become one more boondoggle, or it will get buried in the agency's other priorities. Either way, if it's important, you don't want a sclerotic agency, long past its sell-by date, to be in charge.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:17 PM

May 09, 2008
Solar Singularity

Is it approaching? A nickel a kW-hr would be pretty hard to beat.

Like Phil Bowermaster, this kind of thing is why I don't lose much sleep over peak oil.

[Update a few minutes later]

A lot of comments on the subject over at Randall Parker's place.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AM

May 02, 2008
A New Strap-On Design

No, not that kind of strap on. Get your minds out of the sewer.

A strap-on helicopter:

Tiny rockets at the tips of the helicopter's rotor blades take the place of a tail rotor, a component which couldn't be safely attached to a human body. According to the company, the Libelula would be the lightest helicopter in the world, so light that it could be strapped to a person's body with a carbon fiber corset.

"The best [part] of this technology is that [these] kinds of helicopters don't need a tail rotor because they don't have any torque, so with a simple vane they can turn - being the simplest form of an helicopter and the easiest and safer to fly," the company says on its Web site.

So, first question is: how do they prevent the pilot/passenger from rotating with the blades (there's bound to be non-zero friction in the bearing)? Seems like you'd get kinda dizzy, and it would be hard to steer.

There would also seem to be safety issues for bystanders--that thing could easily decapitate someone.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:28 PM

May 01, 2008
The Man Who Grew A Finger

I suspect that this is just the beginning of getting to the point at which we'll be able to regenerate whole limbs.

Interestingly, Patricia had a very similar injury a few years ago when we were diving in the Dominican Republic. She had it stitched up in Santo Domingo, and the nail is there now, but the finger is just a little shorter, and still a little numb at the end. This would have been a much better solution.

Anyway, bring it on.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:15 PM

Green Fascism

There's an interesting post over at New Scientist on the new eugenicists. What's even more interesting, though, are the numerous comments, which repeat many of the myths about population growth and control, and feasibility of mitigating it through space technology, including space (to use the politically incorrect word) colonization.

I don't really have time to critique in any detail, other than to note that anyone who makes feasibility arguments on the latter subject by referring to Shuttle costs is completely clueless. Sadly though, years ago, Carl Sagan did exactly that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:35 AM

April 30, 2008
Libertarian Transhumanism

Rob Bailey has an interview with Peter Thiel. I agree with him that "transhumanist" is a misleading word, and it's not useful to use it until there's agreement on what is human. Unlike people like Asimov (and Kass) I don't believe that we lose our humanity when we live indefinitely long.

I would have been interested to hear his thoughts on space.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:35 AM

April 28, 2008
Sounds Pretty Good To Me

Better (and longer) living through molecular assembly:

"I think the most profound - I use this word repeatedly - transformative potential that this technology has is to basically democratize modern medicine."
In other words, nanotech has the potential to instantly diagnose and treat disease.

As Chris Peterson says, "bring it on."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:36 PM

April 25, 2008
One Of The Many Reasons...

...I don't use Microsoft Server software.

Why would anyone use Microsoft on their server? I can understand the desktop, for naive users, who also use the crap at home, but on a server?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:47 PM

Fascists Of The Corn

David Freddoso is still angry about our insane and, in my opinion, criminal ethanol and sugar policies:

The problem is that our sugar industry has even better lobbyists than big ethanol. They enjoy price supports, which we pay for both through the Treasury and in the supermarket. The price of our sugar is usually twice that of the world market. The sugar growers love it -- even if they cannot sell all of their sugar, they have a guaranteed government buyer at an inflated price. The corn growers love it too, because high U.S. sugar prices push our food industries to use high-fructose corn syrup (ever seen that on a product label?) as an alternative sweetener -- yet another artificial support for the world price of corn.

Not to mention wreaking havoc on the Everglades. Price-supported sugar cane is using up a lot of the water that both south Floridian humans and animals need, and they do this with the same political clout that they use to get the subsidies and tariffs, for an industry that is not all that big in terms of the economy.

Even if we want ethanol, we can't solve the problem by importing sugar, because there are tariffs in place. We can't import the ethanol itself because there's a high tariff against that, too. Wherever you turn, there's no way out -- Americans don't enjoy economic freedom, we live in a managed economy.

It makes me especially proud of my country when I see Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) call foreign delegates' concerns over a potential doubling of world hunger "a joke..."

Let's call these people out for what they are--Republicans and Democrats alike--fascists. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[Update a few minutes later]

Biofool.

[Update early evening]

Oh, wonderful:

Key House and Senate farm bill negotiators reached agreement today on the main elements of the farm bill...[T]he five-year bill would raise the target prices and loan rates for northern crops beginning in 2010, raise the sugar loan rate three-quarters of a cent and include a sugar-to-ethanol program.

Oh, that's just great. We have a program that makes us overpay for sugar, and now we're going to start a new program to subsidize the ethanol we create from it -- because without the subsidy, the inflated sugar price we've created will make the ethanol unprofitable.

Just when you think it can't get any worse, they always find a way.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:19 AM

Five Social Fallacies

...of geeks.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:28 AM

April 24, 2008
A Policy Disaster

Deroy Murdock writes on the ethanol scam, and its global effects on food and fuel prices.

[Update a few minutes later]

If this pans out, ethanol will make a lot more sense, won't be competing with food, and won't require any subsidies:

Along with cellulose, the cyanobacteria developed by Professor R. Malcolm Brown Jr. and Dr. David Nobles Jr. secrete glucose and sucrose. These simple sugars are the major sources used to produce ethanol.

"The cyanobacterium is potentially a very inexpensive source for sugars to use for ethanol and designer fuels," says Nobles, a research associate in the Section of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.

Brown and Nobles say their cyanobacteria can be grown in production facilities on non-agricultural lands using salty water unsuitable for human consumption or crops.

Bring it on.

[Evening update]

David Freddoso has an appropriately outraged follow-up to the Murdock piece:

Our government's negligence and perhaps even malicious misdirection of societal resources toward a worthless, unwanted product -- ethanol -- will cause millions of people to go hungry tonight.

The way things are going, this could become the worst chapter yet in the sad, ruinous history of our bipartisan agricultural welfare programs. For those who write in and protest that free-market capitalism is an uncompassionate, un-Christian economic system, I submit that you are currently witnessing the alternative.

Indeed. End the tariffs, end the subsidies. Let the market work.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:15 PM

Throw In The Towel?

Is it time to give up on finding a vaccine for AIDS?

If the animal model is useless, that's going to make it very hard to test new ones. The only ethical way to do it would be to work with people who engage in risky behavior, and that's going to be very problematic in terms of getting credible results.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:50 AM

April 23, 2008
Under Attack

Some @n@l orifice is sending out spam using my long-time email address as the return address. So I get all the bounces. Typically, it's about a thousand emails, in addition to the usual spam, and this is the third time this week (which makes me wonder how many of them don't bounce, and actually get through). And I can't filter it, because I have to know if email bounces, in case someone I was actually trying to send email to bounced.

But when these attacks happen, I have to just delete it all, because life is too short to go through them on the off chance that one in a thousand will actually be a legitimate bounced email.

I know Clark's law (no, not Clarke's Laws). The one that says that any sufficiently advanced amount of cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice, but it's hard for me to believe that this is not intentional. I don't know if my having to deal with all of this extraneous unfilterable email is the intent, or it's just a side effect of the desire to make me look like a purveyor of p3nis enlargement devices and drugs.

Anyway, if I seem unusually testy, you know why.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:37 PM

A Potential Breakthrough?

A new class of high-temperature superconductors:

According to Steven Kivelson, a theoretical physicist at Stanford, "[there exist] enough similarities that it's a good working hypothesis that they're parts of the same thing." However, not everyone hopes the mechanism is the same. Philip Anderson, a Nobel Laureate and theoretical physicist at Princeton, says that an entirely new mechanism of superconductivity would be far more important than if they mimicked the current understanding of superconductivity. "If it's really a new mechanism, God knows where it will go," says Anderson.

Let's hope.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:04 AM

April 21, 2008
101 Great Computer Quotes

Here ya go.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:15 AM

April 15, 2008
Bring On The Meat Factories

Hey, I'm all in favor of factory-manufactured meat, if it can be made to taste as good as the naturally grown variety, but I'm not going to stop eating meat until it happens. My criteria are basically intelligence based, and the first animal I'd give up eating, if I were going to give up any,s would be pigs, but I still occasionally have pork. I don't feel that badly about eating cattle--they just don't seem that bright to me. And the question of whether or not they're better off living a short life, and then being slaughtered, than never having existed at all is one that, as noted, is purely subjective and unresolvable in any ultimate sense. I know that I've seen some pretty happy looking cows on the hillsides overlooking the Pacific in northern California. I can think of worse lives.

By the way, Phil should be aware that marsupials are mammals. The distinction is placental versus non-placental mammals. And there are people (probably some of those "bitter," out-of-work folks) in this country who eat possum, and armadillo.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AM

April 14, 2008
I Know What He Means

Lileks:

The Piccadilly was knocked down for the Marriott Marquis, which is really one hell of a hotel. I stayed there for a week; loved the rooms and the hotel and the location, but I absolutely hated the glass elevators. Practically had to huff a bag of laughing gas to get on the things.

It's a problem with Marriotts in general. The large atrium with the glass 'vators seems to be a trademark. I hate them. They don't seem to take into account the acrophobes among us.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:27 AM

April 13, 2008
The Wisdom Of Google

If you type in "HALP US BRAK WE R STUK IN SMALL TOWN," it will respond: "Did you mean: HALP US BREAK WE R STUCK IN SMALL TOWN?"

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:34 PM

Why Bother?

Thomas James, on the difficulty of writing post-apocalyptic survival stories about people with no interest in survival.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:34 AM

April 11, 2008
Fedora Upgrade Woes

OK, so I followed Pete's advice, and tried an upgrade from Core 7 to Core 8 via yum (yes, I know that Core 9 will be out shortly, but I figure it would probably be a mistake to go directly from 7 to 9, based on previous experience). Everything went fine until the end, when it failed with this message:

--> Processing Conflict: glibc-common conflicts glibc < 2.7
Error: No Package Matching glibc.i686

So, now what?

[Evening update]

OK, I ended up having to completely blow away glibc. Unsurprisingly, it broke my installation, with no obvious way to fix it. But it allowed me (finally) to do an ftp upgrade via a rescue CD. I'm now running FC8.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:05 AM

Reinventing The Wheel

Thomas James has a question that I've often wondered about as well:

I have to wonder, has every project I have ever worked on with LM (X-33, VentureStar, ET, CEV/Orion, among others) started from scratch with everything from numbering schemes to release processes to configuration management to data vaulting to drawing formats and standards to basic skill mix and team structures? You'd think that after so many decades that a lot of this stuff would have become routine by now -- revised periodically as new technology becomes available, of course, but not built anew every time.

A counter argument to this -- and one I used frequently when confronted with the All-Encompassing Michoud Excuse for Not Improving Processes: "That's the way ET does it" -- is that one ought to take advantage of the start of a new program to incorporate the lessons learned from other programs, thereby continuously improving the way business is done. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground between status quo and Year Zero when it comes to these things.

Every time we used to do a proposal at Rockwell/Boeing, and have to describe the systems engineering process, it seemed like we had to come with a new process flow description and graphic, as though we'd never done this before, instead of taking an existing one and tweaking it, and this applied all across the board--in risk mitigation and management, trade analyses, etc.

If I were running one of these multi-billion dollar corporations, I'd put someone in charge of boilerplate and legacy, so that there was a one-stop shop of best practices and material for use in both proposing and managing programs. Maybe they have one, and I was always unaware of it, but if that's the case, that's a big problem as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:55 AM

April 08, 2008
You Won't Be Seeing Me In This Building

A skyscraper over half a mile high. Man, what a target for terrorists. And conveniently located, too.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:55 AM

April 05, 2008
More Fedora Fun

Because my life was too care free, and being a glutton for punishment, I decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 7 to 8.

Unfortunately, the latest distribution doesn't fit on CDs any more, and I don't have a DVD reader in the machine to be upgraded. So I decided to build a boot disk on a cd, and do it from the network. So I build the CD, for x86_64 (the machine is running on an Athlon 64), boot with it, and everything is going fine until it's about ready to start checking for dependencies. It gives me a message (from memory): "You are about to upgrade to x86_64, but your previous installation is i386. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?"

I scratch my head. I'm pretty sure that the last install was a 64 bit one. Maybe they mean that it will fail if I don't have a 64-bit processor, but I do, so I tell it to go ahead. It starts checking dependencies, and the bar starts to move slowly to the right. Until it's a quarter of the way, at which point it quits moving. I go away and come back in an hour. Still no motion. I go away and come back after a couple hours. Still stuck. I go to bed. I get up in the morning. No more progress. It finally exits with an error.

I try it from a different FTP site. No joy.

OK, if it thinks that it's an i386 installation, I'll just update that, and worry about making it 64 bit later. Burn the disk. Boot.

This time, when I get to the same place, I get the following message: "You are about to upgrade to i386, but your previous installation is x86_64. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?"

Note the subtle difference from the previous error message.

OK, the installer is schizo. When I try to install i386, it thinks it's replacing x86_64, and when I try to install x86_64, it thinks it's replacing i386. I tell it to go ahead. I get the same result--it hangs during the dependency check, at exactly the same place.

Any Fedora gurus out there with any suggestions? (Pete Zaitcev, I'm looking at you...)

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:32 PM

April 04, 2008
Getting Better All The Time

Men no longer have go through the drudgery of determining whether or not chix are hawt. We can now have the computers do it for us:

"The computer produced impressive results -- its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave." This is considered a remarkable achievement, believes Kagian, because it's as though the computer "learned" implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.

I wonder what units it used to judge? Millihelens (that amount of female beauty required to launch a single ship)?

Of course, that was the easy part:

Kagian, who studied under the Adi Lautman multidisciplinary program for outstanding students at Tel Aviv University, says that a possible next step is to teach computers how to recognize "beauty" in men. This may be more difficult. Psychological research has shown that there is less agreement as to what defines "male beauty" among human subjects.

No kidding. I've sure never been able to figure it out. Maybe it can just check his bank balance.

Which brings up an interesting (and potentially politically incorrect) point. I think that women are clearly much better at determining whether other women are attractive to men than men are at figuring out whether or not other men are attractive to women (at least physically). I suspect that this is because physical attributes are (for evolutionary reasons, unfortunately) where women primarily compete, so they have to be more attuned to it. I also think that this is why women tend to be more receptive to same-sex relations than men, even nominally heterosexual women (hence the concept of the LUG--lesbian until graduation). In order to be a judge of feminine pulchritude, it helps a lot to appreciate it, and it's a shorter step from there to wanting to experience it up closer and personal than it is for a guy. Particularly a guy like me, who finds men disgusting, and is eternally grateful that not all women do.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:02 PM

April 01, 2008
Off-Planet Gas Stations

Jon Goff has the Powerpoints of Friday night's propellant depot panel, including mine.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:44 AM

March 28, 2008
No Peak Oil?

If this is true, it's a huge story. It certainly seems plausible. I've always claimed that oil reserves are driven much more by technology advances than by consumption rate:

n the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.

It was not until 2007, when EOG Resources of Texas started a frenzy when they drilled a single well in Parshal N.D. that is expected to yield 700,000 barrels of oil that real excitement and money started to flow in North Dakota. Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion and drilling 300 new wells in what is expected to be one of the greatest booms in Oil discovery since Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

It's also a story that will enrage those who want us to tighten up our hair shirts.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:32 PM

March 24, 2008
Get Ready

For the end of Windows XP.

I'm still using Windows 2000 myself. And I'm transitioning over to Linux.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:27 AM

March 21, 2008
Redefining Dead

It's a couple weeks old, but here's a very interesting article on the current debate among medical ethicists of when someone should be considered dead for the purpose of organ donation:

Truog is one of a handful of vocal critics who believe the medical community is misleading the public -- and deluding itself -- with an arbitrary definition of death. The debate, which is being fought largely in academic journals, has important implications for the modern enterprise of transplantation, which prolonged the life of more than 28,000 Americans last year. Truog and other critics believe that changing the rules -- and the bright-line concept of death that underlies them -- could mean saving more of the 6,500 Americans who die every year waiting for an organ.

...This debate exposes a jarring collision: On the one hand, there is the view that life and death are clear categories; on the other, there is the view that death, like life, is a process. Common sense -- and the transplant community -- suggest that death is a clear category. Truog and other critics suggest that this is to ignore reality.

"They think, 'We can't remove these organs unless we decide that you're dead,"' says Truog, "so the project becomes gerrymandering the criteria we use to call people dead."

Many people assume that we have good criteria for determining when someone is dead, but we don't and never have. I wrote about this several years ago, during the Ted Williams cryonics controversy:

There's no point at which we can objectively and scientifically say, "now the patient is dead -- there is no return from this state," because as we understand more about human physiology, and experience more instances of extreme conditions of human experiences, we discover that a condition we once thought was beyond hope can routinely be recovered to a full and vibrant existence.

Death is thus not an absolute, but a relative state, and appropriate medical treatment is a function of current medical knowledge and available resources. What constituted more-than-sufficient grounds for declaration of death in the past might today mean the use of heroic, or even routine, medical procedures for resuscitation. Even today, someone who suffers a massive cardiac infarction in the remote jungles of Bolivia might be declared dead, because no means is readily available to treat him, whereas the same patient a couple blocks from Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills might be transported to the cardiac intensive-care unit, and live many years more.

I find it heartening that this debate is finally occurring, rather than the medical community dogmatically keeping its head planted firmly in the sand. Because it lends further credence to the concept of suspension (cryonic or otherwise), and clarifies whether or not cryonics patients are alive or dead. The only useful definition of death is information death (e.g., cremation, or complete deterioration of the remains). As long as the structure remains in place, the patient hasn't died--he's just extremely ill, to the point at which he's non-functional and unable to be revived with current technology.

In fact, given that this debate is about organ donation, it's quite applicable to cryonics. In a very real sense, cryonics is the ultimate organ donation (and in fact it's treated that way under some state's laws). You are effectively donating your whole body (or just your head, in the case of a neurosuspension) to your future self.

But it will continue to tie the legal system up in knots, and declaring cryonics patients to be alive would be a problem under the current cryonics protocols, because unless one is wealthy, the procedure is paid for with a life insurance policy. If you're not declared dead, then you don't get the money to preserve yourself. But if you don't preserve yourself, you'll eventually be clearly dead by any criteria, as your body decomposes. At which point the policy would pay off, far too late to preserve your life.

And of course, if a cryonics patient isn't considered dead, then the heirs won't get any inheritance at all. Cryonics patients already have enough fights with relatives over the amount that they'll inherit due to the cost of the suspension. Keeping them legally alive will only make this situation worse. We really need to come up with some creative new laws to deal with this, but I suspect it's not a very high priority among legislatures who, when they deal with cryonics at all, generally instead of facilitating it, attempt to outlaw it or regulate it out of existence. And that's not likely to change any time soon, regardless of the state of the debate in the medical ethics community.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:29 PM

March 19, 2008
Space Visionary

I don't remember the first book I read by Arthur Clarke, or my age when I read it, but I would imagine that it was less than ten. But I do remember that, whatever book it was, it spurred me to go find more.

In the 1960s, Flint's auto industry was booming, and one of the founders of General Motors, Charles Stewart Mott, still lived there. He was worth a couple hundred million at the time (equivalent to a couple billion today), and he had established a foundation for education that had rendered the Flint public school system one of the premiere ones in the country at the time. Part and parcel of this was the public library system. I lived within walking distance (and a trivial bike ride) of the main branch. I would haunt its science fiction section daily, in hope of finding a new Clarke (or Heinlein, or Asimov) book that I hadn't read, and I recall the anticipation when I would discover an unread one that had just been returned by the previous borrower. I often wouldn't even wait to get home, instead sitting down in a chair to devour it in the library.

More than Heinlein, more than Asimov, both of whom were strong influences on me, Clarke taught me about the precision and beauty of science and engineering, and of the importance of making science fiction plausible. I liked all of his work (including the non-science fiction, such as Glide Path, a story of the development of radar during WW II), but I liked the solar fiction the best. It realistically presented me with an exciting future in space into which I could imagine growing up. When 2001 came out (sadly, he died only a month before the fortieth anniversary of its initial screening), it redefined science fiction movies in a way that no other did, before or since (and no, sorry kids, Star Wars doesn't count--despite the space ships and flying vehicles, it's fantasy, not SF). Barely a teenager, I watched, enraptured, as Clark and Kubrick took me first into earth orbit, on that spinning space station, then on to the moon, then on to Jupiter in that amazing nuclear-powered spaceship that had no fins, no streamlining--just ungainly, but realistic-looking and functional hardware that would work in the vacuum and darkness of deep space. (Sadly, as an aside, we seem much closer to Hal the talking computer today, seven years after the movie was supposed to take place, than to even the Pan Am space transport or space station, let alone moon bases and manned Jupiter missions.) It was a future that I could envision, and one toward which I could work, by studying math and science.

But it wasn't just one side of Snow's two cultures--Clarke had his spiritual and artistic side as well, and he inspired one to think deeply about the meaning of existence. One of his best books is much less hard science than most: Childhood's End, a book about how humans evolved, and where we are evolving to, a subject that becomes ever more relevant and prescient as (or if) we are truly approaching a Vingian singularity. I've always thought that it would make a great movie, if Clarke were involved, but there's no chance of that now.

He didn't just have interesting stories and themes--he was a beautiful, eloquent, emotive writer. As I mentioned in the previous Clarke post, we stole some of his words for the foreword of our space ceremony, of which he was one of the major influences that caused us to create it:

Five hundred million years ago, the moon summoned life out of its first home, the sea, and led it onto the empty land. For as it drew the tides across the barren continents of primeval earth, their daily rhythm exposed to sun and air the creatures of the shallows. Most perished -- but some adapted to the new and hostile environment. The conquest of the land had begun.

We shall never know when this happened, on the shores of what vanished sea. There were no eyes or cameras present to record so obscure, so inconspicuous an event. Now, the moon calls again -- and this time life responds with a roar that shakes earth and sky.

When the Saturn V soars spaceward on nearly four thousand tons of thrust, it signifies more than a triumph of technology. It opens the next chapter of evolution.

No wonder that the drama of a launch engages our emotions so deeply. The rising rocket appeals to instincts older than reason; the gulf it bridges is not only that between world and world -- but the deeper chasm between heart and brain.

Rarely do I get tears in my eyes from reading, but one of the most moving short stories of his that I ever read won a Nebula Award¹. And justly so. It has an ending poignant and tragic, not just for an alien civilization, but for a man's faith in his God.

I only met him once, though I suppose that still makes me fortunate, in that most never got to meet him at all. It was not long after I graduated from Michigan with two engineering degrees--the product of his influence (and that of others as well, most notably Gerard O'Neill). I was working at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California (near Los Angeles), and I had just written a paper on a concept that I'd come up with, called a "tidal web," that I presented to the Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing in 1981. It was a geostationary structure consisting of a series of tethers in gravity gradient, connected together in a ring, to create a huge platform on which sensors and transponders could be placed. This would in theory eliminate the need for station-keeping satellites, and allow a much higher density of GEO usage, with it being limited only by spectrum and EMI interference issues, rather than physical concerns about collision. (Unfortunately for me, it later turned out, based on calculations performed by Dan Alderson for Larry Niven while researching Ringworld, that it would be orbitally unstable, and eventually fall to the earth.)

Not long afterward, Clarke gave an evening lecture at TRW in Redondo Beach, not far from where I worked and lived. I attended it, and afterward, met him briefly and, knowing of his interest in geostationary structures, gave him a copy of the paper. I later got a brief, but gracious note from him, postmarked from Colombo, Sri Lanka, indicating his interest and gratitude, and that he had added it to his collection of such things. I still have, and treasure, that letter.

I'm sure that he was disappointed, as were many of his readers, that his 2001 vision didn't come true, even without the monolith. After all, in the 1940s and 1950s, he probably would have been astonished (or incredulous) if someone had told him that we'd have landed a man on the moon in 1969. When we appeared to be doing so (which was the case while the movie was being written and produced), it was seductively easy to extrapolate it to lunar bases in the 1970s and Mars missions in the 1980s, as the space station was being constructed in earth orbit. But he'd have been even more astonished, and appalled, to think that we would never go back after 1972, and spend the proceeding decades in low earth orbit, very expensively.

While he lived a long life, it's sad that he died just as interesting and different things are happening that may finally have the prospect of turning at least some of his space stories into reality. Clarke had three well-known laws about technology (though J. Porter Clark has a good related one of his own). But one of his lesser-known ones (at least I think it's his--I can't find a link with a quick search) is that we tend to be optimistic about technological progress in the short term, and pessimistic in the long term, due to the exponential nature of technological advance. I try to use this law to temper my expectations in both directions, and (at least) be optimistic about the long term, as long as it's not long-term enough that (in the famous words of Keynes) we're all dead. The long term was too long for Sir Arthur, but if and when we do have the lunar bases, and the nuclear cruisers to Jupiter, it will be in no small part due to the role that he played in challenging minds, young and not so young, and painting vivid and credible pictures of the future in their heads that motivated them to go out and attempt to create it.

So remember him, and go reread some of the classics. And if you've never read them for the first time, I'll cast my mind back to my childhood and youth, remember the thrill I felt when I opened up a new, unread one, and envy you.

[Early evening update]

One other point about his prescience in the sixties (or at least, I hope so--it seems likely to me as a general point, if not the specific company). The clipper ship that went up to the space station in 2001 didn't have a NASA logo on it. It was Pan Am.

1. I just noticed in rereading it, a failure of imagination that wouldn't strike one reading it in the 1960s. It's interesting that, in the late fifties, he thought that a starship would be bringing data back to earth on magnetic tape and photographs. It just shows how hard it is to get the future right.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:49 AM

Breaking Moore's Law

An interesting new data storage technology:

Lai said that in principle, Nanochip could develop the ability to move the probe a single atom at a time. The company said its current generation of probes has a radius smaller than 25nm, but it projects that eventually the probes could be shrunk to two or three nanometers apiece. That scale, said Knight will enable development in 10 to 12 years of a memory chip greater than 1TB. For a first generation, anticipated in 2010, Knight says he expects a small number of chips to be in excess of 100GB, but a more realistic number is "tens of gigabytes" per integrated circuit, a capacity comparable to the current generation of flash devices.

I don't know how long it will take, but I do think that mechanical drives will eventually become obsolete.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:22 AM

More Clarke Thoughts

From John Derbyshire:

It is plain from his life and his work that Clarke was deeply in love with the idea of space. In 1956 he went to live in Sri Lanka so that he could spend his spare time scuba diving, the nearest he could get to the silence, weightlessness, and mystery of space. That profound imaginative connection with the great void is one of the things that separates science fiction writers and fans from the unimaginative plodding mass of humanity -- the Muggles. Clarke had it in spades. The other thing he dreamt of, and wrote about, constantly was alien civilizations: how incomprehensibly magical they will appear to us when we encounter them, and how they will deal with us.

He mentions Bradbury in his remembrance. Some thought of them as four: Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury. I never did. I like Ray Bradbury, both as an author, and personally (I met him occasionally when I lived in LA), but I never considered his work science fiction, at least not hard science fiction. It was more in the realm of fantasy and poetry to me (and of course, Fahrenheit 451, which was a political dystopia).

[Late morning update]

Bruce Webster agrees:

I'm not sure I've ever met, talked to, or read of an engineer or scientist who was inspired to become such because of something Bradbury wrote. I'm not saying they're not out there -- I just think it's a very small number, especially when compared to Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Yes. I enjoyed some (though not all) of Bradbury's work, but I was never inspired by it. It just seemed too far from an attainable reality to me.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Even Bradbury himself agrees:

First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time--because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:09 AM

March 18, 2008
The Last Of The Giants

I'm hearing that Arthur C. Clarke has passed. I assume that it's true, but I'll have more thoughts later. In several ways, he was my favorite author--not just science fiction author, but author, period, growing up. Currently at a loss for words.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here's a link to the story.

Among many other things, he wrote the foreword to our July 20th ceremony (though not for that purpose--it was fair use).

[Update a couple minutes later]

Instapundit has some instathoughts.

[Update a few minutes later]

Bruce ~~Henderson~~Webster already has a requiem up. He must have had it preprepared, like the MSM.

I have to dispute this, though:

The irony is that Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein would all have loved to go into space personally, but obviously were never able to.

He's joking, right? When it comes to Asimov, the man wouldn't even get on an airplane, let alone a rocket. If he had to travel long distances, it was always by train. The notion of the actual man going into space, regardless of his fantastic imagination, is ludicrous.

Meanwhile, Clark Lindsey has a link roundup.

Also, I should note that Bruce explains my post title in a way that I didn't, for those who didn't get it. And the fact that I have to explain it makes me feel old. More when I write a serious post about it.

[Update on Wednesday morning]

Sorry, wrong Bruce. It was Bruce Webster, not Bruce Henderson, who emails that Asimov would have loved to go into space, if he could do it via train. It must be a mite confusin' to have a Bruce blog. Do they sing the Australian philosopher's drinking song over there?

[Another update]

Bruce also notes that he didn't have the eulogy in the can:

I made my living as a writer for several years (see http://brucefwebster.com/publications/), mostly in computer journalism, and have published over 150 articles, columns, and reviews, plus a few books. Because of my tendency to, ah, wait until the last minute, I often wrote those articles, etc., the night before (or the night after) they were due. For example, during the two years I wrote a column for BYTE, I typically wrote that column -- usually 3000 to 4000 words and sometimes as much as 7000 words -- in one sitting, late at night, the day before deadline. So a 540-word post about something near and dear to my heart is hardly breaking a sweat.

Actually, being a major procrastinator myself, I can (strongly) identify with that. Apologies for the mistaken assumption.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:59 PM

March 12, 2008
Tilting At The Windmill

Or maybe not. Let's hope not. Anyway, Bigelow deserves our support in his valiant effort to make ITAR sane. Not sure off hand what we can do to help, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:59 PM

Battle Of The Featherweights

Here's a comparison of the ASUS Eee and the Everex Cloudbook.

I'm not really in the market for either of them--I can live with my full-service laptop for now. I don't tend to be an early adopter, and will wait until they get more function and lighter still. But it looks to me like the Eee would definitely have the edge for me if I was going to get one.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 AM

Molecular Computing

Alan Boyle reports on what appears to be a breakthrough in molecular machinery. Bring it on, at least as far as the medical applications go.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 AM

March 10, 2008
The Solar Singularity?

Arnold Kling has some thoughts on our near-term (in the next couple decades) energy future.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:02 AM

Guitar Heros

Michael Yon has a long but interesting post about helicopter combat in Iraq:

Sometimes I sit up on a hill and watch them in the air. The other day two Kiowas were screaming low right over the rooftops and doing hard turns. I couldn't see the combat because they were too far away, but I knew they were toe to toe and there was plenty of shooting going on or they wouldn't have been flying so violently. It's scary watching them because I've met them and know they are mortals doing the work of immortals. At any second there could be a fireball. A "fallen angel." I remember the call over the radio last year of a "fallen angel" down by Baghdad. All aboard had been lost.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:00 AM

March 09, 2008
Blackbird Memories

From a former pilot.

...the plane was dripping, much like the misshapen model had assembled in my youth. Fuel was seeping through the joints, raining down on the hangar floor. At Mach 3, the plane would expand several inches because of the severe temperature, which could heat the leading edge of the wing to 1,100 degrees. To prevent cracking, expansion joints had been built into the plane. Sealant resembling rubber glue covered the seams, but when the plane was subsonic, fuel would leak through the joints.

One of the sayings of the program was that if the plane wasn't dripping, don't bother to get in--someone forgot to fuel it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AM

March 08, 2008
Busy

The next house project (not counting landscaping, which we may be hiring someone to do) is molding, both replacing base and installing crown. It was a nice excuse to go out and buy a nice Craftsman 10" compound dual-bevel laser miter saw, because Sears was having a sale. I thought about getting a 12 inch, because it wasn't that much more, but it took up more room, and the blades were a lot more (though with carbide, it might have been a one-time purchase, given my low usage level). And I couldn't really justify it--the ten-inch will do just fine for almost anything I need to do in terms of beveling or mitering. If I need to bevel bigger things, a table saw will do the job. I guess I'm not Tim the Tool Man, even though I am from southeast Michigan.

I continue to be amazed at how low cost good tools have become--particularly tools (and power tools) that didn't even exist when I was a kid. I suspect that this isn't factored into inflation much, but it really does add to the national wealth when people can improve their productivity at little cost. In California in the nineties, I did some base molding with nothing but a circular saw, but it was a pain in the ass, and I'm sure that this will do a much better job. Anyway, if blogging seems light, that will be one of the reasons.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:50 PM

March 06, 2008
I Always Suspected It

I've always thought that Monster cables were a scam, and that the supposed quality improvement couldn't justify the ridiculously high prices, and that it was quite annoying that they've monopolized so much shelf space in the electronics stores. It's hard to get reasonably priced audio cables (though things are better at Home Depot). But really, I've always figured that most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Monster and lamp cord.

Well, it turns out that supposed audiophiles couldn't distinguish between Monster and coat hangers. But I suspect that the scam will continue, with salespeople continuing to push them. There are probably great margins for both the manufacturer and the retailers.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AM

March 05, 2008
Space Arms Control Speech

Would a ban on space weaponry be verifiable? It seems intuitively obvious to me that the answer is "no."

I think that this is a key point:

The President's Space Policy highlights our national and, indeed the global, dependence on space. The Chinese interception only underscored the vulnerability of these critical assets. Calling for arms control measures can often appear to be a desirable approach to such problems. Unfortunately, "feel good" arms control that constrains our ability to seek real remedies to the vulnerabilities that we face has the net result of harming rather than enhancing U.S. and international security and well-being.

I always trust hardware over paper and good intentions.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:56 AM

More On Cholesterophobia

A few weeks ago I said that we don't do enough science when it comes to heart disease, and may confuse correlation with causation. Here's another interesting bit of data that reinforces the notion that cholesterol levels don't necessarily cause heart disease.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:32 AM

Two Top Tens

First, amazing chemistry videos, and then check out the worst captchas.

Both via Geekpress.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 AM

March 04, 2008
Scottish Innovation

This isn't new, but I'd never seen it before, and figured that many of my readers hadn't either. The world's only rotating canal lock. There's more info at the usual source, of course. It's a pretty clever design.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:32 AM

What's The Point?

Sarah Pullman is very unhappy with Facebook's privacy policy.

OK, I got a Facebook account last fall, at the urging of several people, who told me that I simply had to have one (though they could never actually explain why). I've yet to figure it out myself. I've gotten no discernible benefit from it (of course, I haven't invested much time in it, either). Can anyone explain to me what the big deal is, and what I'm missing out on if I don't have an account, or don't use the one I have?

[Update late morning]

While we're on the subject, here's an article on which is better for business: Facebook or LinkedIn?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AM

March 03, 2008
A Glimpse Of The Singularity

Charlie Stross sees it.

What I found interesting, though, is how quickly the discussion in comments transitioned to how slow the progress has been in space access, with NASA taking a beating.

There is no question that space technology, with high-powered (megawatts/gigawatts) devices is fundamentally different than things that switch bits and electrons around, and it's not reasonable to expect it to come close to Moore's Law. But there's also no question that, given different policies for the past half century, things could be much further along than they are. We may not (as Monte Davis noted in comments over there) have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey by 2001, or even now, but we'd be on a lot clearer path to it, I think.

But that has never been a societal goal, even when we were pouring four percent of the federal budget (and doesn't that make the NASA fanboys drool) into the problem during Apollo. We were just trying to beat the Russkies to the moon, and after we did that, we got preoccupied, and public-choice economics took over, as it always does when things aren't important any more. And that's the way it's been ever since. But because of false myths promulgated during that era, it's been tough to raise the money privately as well.

It won't happen as fast as we'd like it to, nor will it happen as slowly as those who continue to cheer for government spaceflight expect, either. And most importantly, it will have trouble keeping up with the electronics singularity (though a lot of those advances will eventually accelerate space technology as well, and it will happen much sooner than most expect).

But I think that we are seeing real, measurable progress now, and I expect it to continue, and to continue to confound those who continue to cheer NASA five- and ten-year plans.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:56 PM

Needlessly Annoying

I just entered my account number at Chevron/Texaco's site, in order to recover a lost user name. The form to do so simply has a text box saying "Account Number." When I look at my account number on my bill, as printed by them, it is a sequence of numbers separated by hyphens, so I type it in as they give it to me on my bill. So of course, it kicks out an error message, telling me not to include any dashes or spaces.

I find it easier to separate the subnumbers, because it makes the number easier to read and verify. Back when I was doing web site ecommerce (over a decade ago), I found it a trivial task to write a line of perl that would strip out extraneous characters, and convert the string to a pure string of digits. Has the technology degraded since then to the point that they have to annoy their customers by making them enter a perfectly valid number twice?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:40 AM

A Cure For Diabetes?

It seems to work in mice:

Last year, Dr Terry Strom and his team demonstrated that they could stop the on-going destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in mice using a combination of three drugs, although they were unable to regenerate the cells.

However, when they added an extra ingredient - an enzyme called alpha 1 anti-trypsin - a significant rise in the number of beta cells was seen.

I'm not sure what the point is here:

It is exciting that these drugs could stop the immune system from attacking insulin-producing cells, but it is too early to tell whether these cells recovered in the mice or if new cells were produced.

Does it matter, from a practical standpoint? I can understand why the researchers would be curious, but a cure is a cure.

Anyway, here's hoping that it can work in higher mammals.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:03 AM

February 29, 2008
A Nanotech Dustup

A week-long debate over at the LA Times (similar to the one that Homer Hickam and I had on space last fall).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:31 PM

The End Of The Steam Age

The Navy is shifting from steam catapults to electric launchers for its aircraft carriers.

Cool.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:46 AM

Got A Second?

On Leap Day, some thoughts on timekeeping problems from Alan Boyle.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:32 AM

February 28, 2008
"Neither Gods Nor Goo"

An interesting survey on the current state of nanotech.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:13 AM

"Slow The Development Of Future Combat Systems"

In what fantasyland does Obama think that this is a winning campaign plank during a war?

I see another 1972 coming up for the Dems.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:19 AM

February 27, 2008
Terminators, Coming Up

Alan Boyle has an interesting post on the ethics of killer robots.

"Asimov contributed greatly in the sense that he put up a straw man to get the debate going on robotics," Arkin said. "But it's not a basis for morality. He created [the Three Laws] deliberately with gaps so you could have some interesting stories."

Even without the Three Laws, there's plenty in today's debate over battlefield robotics to keep novelists and philosophers busy: Is it immoral to wage robotic war on humans? How many civilian casualties are acceptable when a robot is doing the fighting? If a killer robot goes haywire, who (or what) goes before the war-crimes tribunal?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:52 AM

February 26, 2008
Strange Internet Problems

As some of you have heard (it seems to be the main news now on cable), Florida had a massive power outage today. It didn't affect me, except indirectly.

About quarter after one, I heard a little click from my UPS, which usually indicates a power drop, but we didn't lose power, and even a computer that wasn't on a UPS didn't seem to have a problem. But I noticed shortly afterward that I had no internet connection. The DSL modem lights were all working fine, but I couldn't connect, even after repeated resets. I ended up being on the phone with AT&T for over an hour, and they finally got things working again. They told me that somehow (somehow?) my authentication had gotten screwed up, and that they had rejiggered (or some other technical term) the lines to get it working again. They didn't believe that it had anything to do with the power outage--that it was just coincidence. I'm skeptical.

Anyway, as you can see, I'm back on line.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:38 PM

Are Americans Stupid?

Phil Bowermaster has some thoughts:

See how deftly it's done? Stupid religious Americans, clever "heathen" Europeans. Unfortunately, in the context, this doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. Americans are opposed to stem cell research because we're ignorant religious bigots. Okay, sure. But we're opposed to nanotechnology for the same reasons? And GM foods?
GM foods? Now wait a second...a lot of Europeans are opposed to GM foods. I bet they would even say it's on moral grounds! Yet somehow, they manage to pull that off without being either 1) religious or -- more importantly -- 2) stupid. Personally, I think being morally opposed to GM foods is kind of stupid, and being "morally" opposed to nanotechnology is idiotic. However, I don't see how American stupidity is dumber than European stupidity; one may be informed by religious belief, the other by a paranoid superstitious dread of scientific progress. Advantage: Europe? If you say so.

I just hope that Americans aren't stupid enough to fall for Obama, as the Democrats currently seem to be.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:04 AM

It's That Time Of Year Again

Hope I'll see some of you at the Space Access conference in Phoenix next month.

[Update at 9:30 AM]

Attendees will get to hear John Carmack talk about cool vehicles like this one.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:33 AM

The Economics Of "Free"

A fascinating and very useful article on the value of waste. It's must reading for anyone who wants to entrepreneur on the web, in my opinion. I found the byline amusing:

Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail. His next book, FREE, will be published in 2009 by Hyperion.

Will he be giving the book away?

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:12 AM

February 25, 2008
Not So Identical

Apparently "identical" twins don't even have identical genetics:

Identical twins emerge when a zygote -- the fertilized egg that develops into an embryo -- splits into two embryos. As such, they should have the same genomes. The researchers speculate that as the cells making up each embryo divide over and over again during development in the womb, mistakes occur as dividing cells shuffle copies of their DNA into daughter cells.

But genetic differences between identical twins might also accumulate after development over a twin's life as well. "I think all our genomes are under constant change," Bruder told LiveScience.

I think that this has implications for cloning as well. It may not be possible to exactly clone an individual, and the differences could turn out to be quite noticeable.

[Update in the evening]

Per some comments, the key point in this story is that it has long been known that there are differences in twins (personality, eyesight, fingerprints, etc.). But those are things that can arise even from an identical genome. The genes are not a blueprint, but rather a recipe, and even if a recipe is followed carefully, the results are not always guaranteed to be the same. The point of the article is that, contrary to previous theories that obvious differences in twins could be attributed solely to different environments, that the genome itself wasn't necessarily the same. That is new.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:22 PM

Which Is Greener?

Driving, or walking? John Tierney stirs up a hornet's nest of vegans and other morally overrighteous high-horse riders (see comments). I mean, to question Ed Begley, Jr. Isn't that just the height of apostacy?

This reminds me of a piece that I've been thinking of writing about overall energy and fuel costs, including human fuel. With the ethanol boondoggle, we've gone back to the point at which we're using crops for transportation (something we largely left behind at the end of the nineteenth century) and we now have increasing prices in both food and fuel as they compete with each other for the same farmland. This isn't a good trend for the Third World (consider that one of the effects of the ethanol subsidies has been a dramatic increase in corn and tortilla costs in Mexico, making a poor country even more so).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:18 PM

February 23, 2008
How The Mighty Have Fallen

AOL is pulling the plug on Netscape. I think that the beginning of the end was when they acquired it. But it lives on, really, in the Mozilla products.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:55 PM

February 21, 2008
How It Went Down

Gizmodo has a video and the story on the satellite hit.

Oh, and so much for the naysayers who said it wouldn't work. Wishful thinking, one suspects.

They've been poo-pooing this since the eighties, going back to Tsipis and Garwin in SciAm. A good example of Clarke's First Law, about elderly and distinguished scientists.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:23 AM

February 20, 2008
Bingo

Apparently the shooting gallery was a success.

A defense official says a missile launched from a Navy ship in the Pacific hit the U.S. spy satellite it was targeting 130 miles above Earth's surface. Full details are not yet available.

Presumably, we'll find out just how successful it was in the coming days.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:38 PM

Where Will I Get My Shower Radio?

Sharper Image has filed for Chapter 11. I wonder if they'll be able to reorganize?

I always thought their stuff was overpriced, and apparently a lot of people agreed with me. They also spent a lot on sending out all the catalogs. I wonder if their business model even works any more, what with Amazon and all.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:51 AM

Does Solar Photovoltaic Make Sense Yet?

An interesting discussion of the current economics.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:44 AM

February 19, 2008
How It Will Go Down

The folks at AGI have attempted to model the satellite break up. Unfortunately, they need more data to have much confidence in it. But even still, I doubt if my free version of Satellite Took Kit would be up to the job that they've done.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:35 PM

NOTAM

This seems like a pretty big exclusion area for the satellite shot on Thursday. Is it going to disrupt airlanes? I'd be pretty annoyed if my trans-Pacific flight was delayed for it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:05 AM

Get A Rooster

Lileks sets an alarm clock:

First you push the ALARM SET button, and you should get our old friend, Mr. Blinking Twelve. But no. You press SOURCE to select iPod or FM tuner. Repeatedly pressing this button just makes the iPod option flash on the display, though, and you figure you've done something wrong. So you turn the device OFF.

And the display face lights up. This is the first indication that the device was designed by the American Union of Nonintuitive Interfaces. These guys get a lot of work nowadays. You start again. SOURCE. You get the flashing iPod option. Ah hah: here's another on/off button; let's try that. It turns everything off and powers down the unit. That's an option you've never had on an alarm clock before; if we had world enough and time, we could consider the possible scenarios in which one would want to power down the alarm clock. None come to mind.

Speaking of roosters, having spent some time in tropical climes where they run around wild, I can attest that the notion that they crow at dawn is a myth that has been foisted on city slickers like me. Or rather, that they only crow at dawn. I hear them crowing at dawn, at sunset, at lunchtime, at 2 AM. They may be good at waking you up, but not at any particularly useful time.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:55 AM

Is Nanotechnology Immoral?

Well, I don't think so, at least not intrinsically. But apparently a lot of people do. I wonder how the results would come out if you said "molecular manufacturing" instead?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:48 AM

Gone The Way Of Eight Track And Betamax

Toshiba is throwing in the towel on HD-DVD. Looks like Sony won, this time.

That explains all the cut-rate players at Christmas time. I'm sure that the entertainment industry is happy to only have to deal with one new medium. Wonder how long they'll continue to produce standard DVDs?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:35 AM

February 16, 2008
Frying A Turkey Without Oil?

Not exactly, despite the claim of this post:

Deep frying is a form of convection heating. Instead of hot air, you are using hot oil to transfer the heat. Depending on the oil used in the fryer, the temperature is usually about 375 degrees to keep the food from absorbing a lot of oil.

The Big Easy uses infrared energy to "bathe" food. It excites the proteins, not the water. Thus, you are literally frying it. It's just like sitting in the sun all day. The infrared energy will "fry" your meat's skin. The Big Easy doesn't need a lid because it's better to let the hot air escape. That way your food doesn't dry out and there's no basting necessary. Unlike conventional turkey fryers there is also no warm-up period. Just drop your thawed turkey (stuffed or unstuffed, injected or not, sugar-less rubbed or not) into the chamber and turn the Big Easy on. Infrared energy starts cooking it immediately and the cooking time for 12-14-pound turkey will be cut almost in half.

Without expressing an opinion on the relative merits of cooking a turkey this way, it's not equivalent to deep-fat frying. As it says, it only radiates the skin, whereas a deep fryer gets hot oil inside the bird as well, which has to speed up the cooking time considerably. And if the oil is sufficiently hot, there's no reason that it has to make the bird greasy, or any more so than it would be naturally from its own fat.

The Big Easy™ is $165 at Amazon, whereas serviceable friers are available for less than half the price. Of course, with the former, you don't need any oil, which might save you ten bucks or so per turkey preparation, so it might pay for itself over time if you do a lot of turkeys. But considering the time value of money, I think that you'd have to be a real turkey fan to make up the difference. Of course, it might be good for other meats as well.

[Update late evening]

Contrary to Glenn's comment, I don't call "foul." The proper spelling is "fowl."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:46 PM

A Kludge

Is this the future of air travel?

Engineers created the A2 with the failures of its doomed supersonic predecessor, the Concorde, very much in mind. Reaction Engines's technical director, Richard Varvill, and his colleagues believe that the Concorde was phased out because of a couple major limitations. First, it couldn't fly far enough. "The range was inadequate to do trans-Pacific routes, which is where a lot of the potential market is thought to be for a supersonic transport," Varvill explains. Second, the Concorde's engines were efficient only at its Mach-2 cruising speed, which meant that when it was poking along overland at Mach 0.9 to avoid producing sonic booms, it got horrible gas mileage. "The [A2] engine has two modes because we're very conscious of the Concorde experience," he says.

Those two modes--a combination of turbojet and ramjet propulsion systems--would both make the A2 efficient at slower speeds and give it incredible speed capabilities. (Engineers didn't include windows in the design because only space-shuttle windows, which are too heavy for use in an airliner, can withstand the heat the A2 would encounter.) In the A2's first mode, its four Scimitar engines send incoming air through bypass ducts to turbines. These turbines produce thrust much like today's conventional jet engines--by using the turbine to compress incoming air and then mixing it with fuel to achieve combustion--and that's enough to get the jet in the air and up to Mach 2.5. Once it reaches Mach 2.5, the A2 switches into its second mode and does the job it was built for. Incoming air is rerouted directly to the engine's core. Now that the plane is traveling at supersonic speed, the air gets rammed through the engine with enough pressure to sustain combustion at speeds of up to Mach 5.

A combination turbofan/ramjet. Hokay.

If I understand this properly, the idea is to fly fast subsonic over land to avoid breaking windows, and then to go like a bat out of hell over the water. When I look at that design, I have to wonder how they can really get the range, with all of the drag that is implied from those huge delta wings, not to mention the wave drag at Mach 5. I also wonder where they put the hydrogen--that stuff is very fluffy, and needs large tanks. It's probably not wet wing (it would be very structurally inefficient), which is why the fuselage must be so huge, to provide enough volume in there for it.

Sorry, but I don't think that this will be economically viable. As is discussed in comments and the article, hydrogen is not an energy source--it's an energy storage method, and it's unclear how they'll generate it without a greenhouse footprint. Moreover, it's not as "green" as claimed, because dihydrogen monoxide itself is a greenhouse gas. I'll bet that this thing has to fly at sixty thousand feet or more to get itself sufficiently out of the atmosphere to mitigate the drag problem, and that's not a place where you want to be injecting a lot of water.

This concept doesn't learn the true lessons of Concorde: like Shuttle, a lot of people have learned lessons from Concorde, but the wrong ones. The correct lesson is that we need to get rid of shock waves and drag. Once we do that, we'll be able to cruise at reasonable speeds (say, Mach 2.5) everywhere, over both land and water, so we won't have to build the vehicle out of exotic materials and eliminate windows. We'll also be able to have fast transcontinental trips (two hours coast to coast) which is another huge market that this concept doesn't address at all. Finally, it has to do it with a reasonable lift/drag ratio, so that ticket prices will be affordable. And I think that the fuel issue is superfluous--Jet A will be just fine for the planet, as long as fuel consumption is reasonable, which makes the vehicle design much easier, with much more dense fuel.

Fortunately, I've been working for over a decade with a company that thinks it knows how to do this, and I'm hoping that we'll be able to start to move forward on it very soon.

[Via Clark Lindsey]

[Update in the late afternoon]

In response to the question in comments, there's not much publicly available on the web about shock-free supersonics, but here's a piece I wrote a few years ago on the subject.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:13 AM

February 15, 2008
Caulking The Ship

It's about time. Firefox is finally fixing all of its memory leaks:

No matter the reason or the timing, Mozilla claims progress on the memory front. In its release notes, the company trumpeted the fact that the just-released Beta 3 plugged more than 350 leaks, with over 50 stopped in the last eight weeks alone.
"We've made a lot of progress," said Schroepfer. "Our memory usage is significantly improved, and dramatically better than [Microsoft's] Internet Explorer 7."

But the work's not finished. "Most of the big memory issues are resolved, and we're seeing some pretty good numbers [on memory consumption], but some additional [work] is one reason why we felt we needed Beta 4."

That's been one of my biggest complaints about Firefox. At any given time, I may have forty or more tabs open, and the memory usage would get to the point where the machine was paging so much to disk that it would just be brought to its knees, and I'd have to kill Firefox to recover the memory.

But I also have to say that since I upgraded my RAM from one to two gigs (on a Windows 2000 machine) the problem has largely gone away. For anyone who's unaware (and particularly now that memory prices are plummeting), the cheapest thing you can do to improve your computer's performance (dramatically, in my case) is to give it lots of memory.

But I may go get the beta version of Firefox 3 anyway.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:31 PM

Never Mind

There was a little bit of a buzz in the blogosphere a few days ago about Gizmodo's report that the Japanese plan to bombard the planet with frickin' laser beams from outer space. No word on whether or not they would be attached to the heads of sharks.

I thought it was a little strange, myself. While lasers have been proposed for space solar power, most of the concepts over the past four decades (ed-- wow, it's really been four decades since Peter Glaser came up with the idea? Yup) have been to transmit the power with microwave beams. Lasers (probably free-electron lasers with tuned frequencies) have the advantage of higher power density (and thus less need for large ground receivers). But they don't penetrate the atmosphere and clouds as well, and they are less efficient for power conversion. Also, they raise exactly the fear described in the Gizmodo piece--that higher power density is a double-edged sword. Microwaves are preferred because the energy conversion efficiency is very high, and the beam density is less than that of sunlight (it's better than sunlight despite this, because the beam is available 24/7 and the conversion efficiency is much better, at least with current solar cell technology). It's much more difficult to weaponize, by the nature of the technology.

Anyhoo, I'm assuming that what was actually being referred to was this:

On February 20, JAXA will take a step closer to the goal when they begin testing a microwave power transmission system designed to beam the power from the satellites to Earth. In a series of experiments to be conducted at the Taiki Multi-Purpose Aerospace Park in Hokkaido, the researchers will use a 2.4-meter-diameter transmission antenna to send a microwave beam over 50 meters to a rectenna (rectifying antenna) that converts the microwave energy into electricity and powers a household heater. The researchers expect these initial tests to provide valuable engineering data that will pave the way for JAXA to build larger, more powerful systems.

Microwaves, not lasers, as Gizmodo mistakenly claimed. The article does mention lasers as a potential means of getting the power down, but that's not what next Wednesday's test is about.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:31 AM

February 13, 2008
IE Tips

For those who don't want to use a good browser, or are forced by draconian IT policies at work to use Internet Exploder, here is a description of some plug-ins for it that may make it almost as useful as Firefox.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:55 AM

February 12, 2008
More Stem Cell Advances

This stuff really is moving along at a good clip:

"Our reprogrammed human skin cells were virtually indistinguishable from human embryonic stem cells," said Plath, an assistant professor of biological chemistry, a researcher with the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research and lead author of the study. "Our findings are an important step towards manipulating differentiated human cells to generate an unlimited supply of patient specific pluripotent stem cells. We are very excited about the potential implications."
The UCLA work was completed at about the same time the Yamanaka and Thomson reports were published. Taken together, the studies demonstrate that human iPS cells can be easily created by different laboratories and are likely to mark a milestone in stem cell-based regenerative medicine, Plath said.

Repeatability--one of the hallmarks of solid science. Of course, they always have the standard caveat:

"It is important to remember that our research does not eliminate the need for embryo-based human embryonic stem cell research, but rather provides another avenue of worthwhile investigation."

I think that, at some point, the embryo work will be abandoned, because even for many researchers, it's ethically problematic. But they will have to do a lot of correlation and validation before they can get to that point.

In any event, stuff like this brings us much closer to escape velocity.

[Via Fight Aging]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:08 AM

February 09, 2008
Obsolete

It's the end of an era. Polaroid is ceasing production of instant film. I hadn't noticed, but they stopped manufacturing the cameras a couple years ago.

I remember back in the sixties when we got one. It seemed pretty cool at the time, but it's not a technology that could survive the digital era. I'm actually a little surprised that it lasted as long as it did.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:50 AM

February 08, 2008
Progress In Longevity

I don't know if there's much point to living ten times as long if you're a nematode, but if it works for us, too, Methuselah, here we come.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:33 PM

Size Does Matter

Half of UK men would give up sex for six months for a fifty-inch television.

You know, if that's the deal, considering the first twenty years of my life, someone owes me a screen the size of a drive-in theater.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:05 PM

Amazing Photo

A dew-covered dragon fly.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:04 AM

Blogging The Chicago Auto Show

...as only Iowahawk can.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:23 AM

Disappearing Art

We're losing our movies:

The report's authors state the data explosion could turn into digital movie extinction, unless the studios push the development of storage standards and data management practices that will guarantee long-term access of their content.
As the report points out, even if a 100-year black box were invented that "read data reliably without introducing any errors, required no maintenance and offered sufficient bit density at an affordable price," there would be nobody alive capable of repairing it if that box were to fail at 99 years. In the real world of data management, digital assets are stored on media with longevities much less than 100 years, vulnerable to temperature changes, humidity and static electricity. It can be misidentified, inadequately indexed and difficult to track.

Also, whereas a well-preserved 35mm negative has traditionally contained enough information to fulfill any requirement for ancillary markets, there's a question in the minds of some industry observers about whether the quality of masters archived in digital formats will be sufficient for quality duplication. In an age when home movie systems can often provide a better experience than some commercial theaters, that's not an unimportant concern.

This is a problem that cryonicists face as well. How do you preserve the data that defines your life and identity over an indefinite period of time? No static media can be relied on--they all deteriorate eventually. I know that I have lots of floppies from the eighties that are probably unreadable now.

Data is going to have to be stored dynamically, and continually moved to new systems as the technology evolves. It will also have to be stored holographically, and distributed. Fortunately, the costs of digital data storage are plunging, with terabyte drives now available for the cost of multi-megabytes twenty years ago, and that trend is likely to continue as we get into molecular storage.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:45 AM

Quad Cores For Everyone!

But no ponies. A look at the near future of microprocessors.

I find it amusing that so many people will be using quad-core machines for word processing and email. On the other hand, we'll probably need that kind of processing power to filter all the spam.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:41 AM

February 07, 2008
No Ten-Year Plans

Ron Bailey has some thoughts on top-down government-driven technology programs:

The motivation behind the Apollo moon shot program was largely geopolitical. The Soviets had launched the first artificial satellite in 1957 and orbited the first man around the planet in 1961. As a NASA history explains, "First, and probably most important, the Apollo program was successful in accomplishing the political goals for which it had been created. Kennedy had been dealing with a Cold War crisis in 1961 brought on by several separate factors--the Soviet orbiting of Yuri Gagarin and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion only two of them--that Apollo was designed to combat." The Apollo program cost $25.4 billion (about $150 billion in current dollars) to land just 12 astronauts on the moon. It is curious that Shellenberger and Nordhaus cite the Apollo program as an example of transformative technologies since it was basically a technological dead end.

Yes, and one that NASA seems determined to repeat.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:04 PM

February 06, 2008
Creating Value On The Net

This is a very valuable article to potential IT creative entrepreneurs.

[Via Geekpress]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 AM

February 02, 2008
Space Anniverseries And Anti-Aging

A podcast with me, Glenn Reynolds, and others, over at Popular Mechanics.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:58 PM

What A Great Job To Have

Some people get all the fun. You could charge admission to watch a test like this:

The secret payload traveled a distance of 3.61 miles in about six seconds on three sleds. Each sled ignited in stages to propel the cargo down the track. A helium tent enclosed nearly three miles of the 10-mile track in order to reduce the aerodynamic heating and drag on the payload.
Despite our earlier speculation, no one is saying what it was that traveled so fast. Navy sources did admit that, on top of the multiple sonic booms heard in the desert, the payload itself detonated at the end of the track.

I'll bet it did.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:12 AM

February 01, 2008
A Brave Man

Eating the canned cheeseburger. With pictures.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:49 AM

January 31, 2008
Happy Birthday

The Local Area Network is thirty years old. An interesting history, and prospects for its future. I personally still find wireless too unreliable, even in the house. I'm going to be running CAT6 now that things have cooled off in the attic.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:17 AM

January 30, 2008
We Need Science In Medicine

One of the prevailing myths of modern life (I use the word here in the sense of something that everyone believes, not necessarily something that is false) is that cholesterol causes heart disease and stroke, and that reducing it will reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke. But the recent Vytorin issue should give us cause to question this conventional wisdom.

Whenever I've looked at the research, I've never been able to see any clear indication that taking cholesterol-reducing medication actually reduces risk, per se--all that the clinical studies that I've seen seem to indicate is that cholesterol reduction is taking place. But correlation is not causation. It could be that both high cholesterol and vascular disease are caused by some third factor that hasn't been identified, and that in reducing cholesterol, whether by diet or medication, or both, we are treating a symptom rather than a cause.

My point is, that I don't know the answer. But I don't have a lot of confidence that the medical community does, either. And I remain wary of taking medications with unknown side effects and potential for interaction with other things I ingest, when the benefit is unclear. And I write this as someone who lost both parents to heart disease (my father's first heart attack occurred when he was about forty five, and he died from a second one about a decade later). But they also had much different lifestyles than I did--they grew up with poor diets during the depression, they both smoked like chimneys, and they were both overweight. So I don't necessarily believe that genetics is destiny, at least in this case.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:40 AM

January 29, 2008
The Ground Shifts In Redmond

Photoshop is running in Linux. If they can work out the last incompatibility bugs in Open Office, we'll start to reach a tipping point, given the unhappiness with Vista.

[Tuesday evening update]

More bad news for Microsoft. Firefox has reached 30% market penetration in Europe.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:15 PM

This Is Just...Wrong

A cheeseburger in a can.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:13 PM

Radar Breakthrough

This looks like a pretty slick technology:

Lockheed for the first time has been testing a digital beam array to locate and track live targets--in this case, commercial and military aircraft coming in and out of the Philadelphia area. "The hard part was how we combined all the data ... to form the individual beams," Scott Smith, program manager for the radar system at Lockheed, tells PM. Commercially available high-speed digital electronics and advanced signal processors have become advanced enough to allow this data processing to occur, and that in turn has enabled digital beamforming to become practical for use outside a lab.

It will be helpful for ATC, but it has obvious military applications:

Digital beamforming radars will likely find their first homes on ships that track missile threats to U.S. fleets. Those threats will come from ballistic launches hundreds of miles away or from high-speed missiles launched from submarines or warplanes. The Russian government has been busy selling sea-skimming, antiship missiles to China that are designed to overwhelm the U.S. fleet's radars, so the ability to track multiple, fast-moving threats could become vital in the Taiwan Straits. But a digitized phased array radar can handle many incoming signals at once, and should be able to discern real threats from bits of metal or shaped decoy balloons.So somewhere a Chinese admiral is frowning at Lockheed's news, and a Taiwanese general is smirking.

Expect the usual suspects, any minute, to claim that it is "destabilizing" (a phrase they use any time the US comes up with a better way to defend itself).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:02 PM

Space And Nanotechnology

Thoughts on space tourism, "shooting down" errant satellites, and gray goo, in a podcast with Instapundit.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:39 AM

Technology On The March

Sonia Arrison writes about progress in genetic engineering and other life-enhancing/extending techniques.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:31 AM

January 28, 2008
The Radiation Problem

A solution?

They started with two common food preservatives--the same stuff, BHA and BHT, that keeps Wonder Bread fresh for weeks--as a means to carry away free radicals before they can cause harm.
But for the food preservatives to become effective, the scientists needed a way to get them inside cells.

That's where carbon nanotubes, single layers of carbon atoms curved into tiny cylinders, came in handy. The research team attached the food preservatives to the nanotubes, which, because of their size, provided a perfect vehicle for traversing the body's arteries and entering cells.

Tour said he began his research with the goal of finding a drug to protect astronauts on long-duration space missions from the radiation to which they are exposed outside Earth's atmosphere.

But the test results in mice, which were given the drug 30 minutes before a blast of radiation, were so impressive that Tour thought the drug might have much broader potential.

I hope that the real promise is for deep space travel, not for a nuclear war. We need to do everything we can to avoid the latter, but if not, this will help as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:53 AM

January 24, 2008
Commercial Space Roundup

Dale Amon has some thoughts, though as I note in comments, Mercury is an unlikely prospect for prospecting.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:27 AM

January 22, 2008
Electronic Contact Lenses

A long and fascinating article on a revolutionary technology.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:38 AM

January 21, 2008
Please, Microsoft

A campaign to save XP. Though I'm still using Windows 2000, myself.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:28 AM

January 14, 2008
So, What's The Catch?

This seems like a pretty big breakthrough.

Using patented microorganisms and transformative bioreactor designs, Coskata ethanol is produced via a unique three-step conversion process that turns virtually any carbon-based feedstock—including biomass, municipal solid waste, and a variety of agricultural waste—into ethanol, making production a possibility in almost any geography. The technology is ethanol-specific and enzyme independent, requiring no additional chemicals or pre-treatments.
Simply put, the Coskata process can produce ethanol almost anywhere in the world, using practically any renewable source, including feedstock, garbage, old tires and plant waste. And it can do so for less than a dollar per gallon.

I wonder what the equivalent cost per barrel of oil that represents? It seems like it would make sense to convert jet engines at that price, if you can.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:15 AM

January 09, 2008
DIY Triodes

As the comments indicate, this video really is amazing. I don't have the patience for this sort of thing, but I'm always in awe at craftsmen like this. And making vacuum tubes is becoming a lost art. I know that starting in the nineties, some of the more obscure types were available only from Russia. Fortunately, Sylvania and GE continued to make the most common ones.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:06 PM

January 08, 2008
This Looks Like The Future Of Displays

OLEDs.

Unless there's a big change in my finances for the better though, I suspect its a few years off for me. More here.

[Via Instapundit, who has me very envious this week, as he gets to go to the CES for Pop Mechanics]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:42 AM

January 06, 2008
Word is Back

I just lost four hours of work when Word 2007 12.0.6015.5000 died. Last time that happened that badly was when I was working on my dissertation in 1996. It not only killed the open file, but all of the open word files. No autorecover. Custom bullets then bam. Save early save often. My wife's compact flash card is off to data recovery, too. Must have been that horseshoe that was pointed down. You might think Microsoft would tell me if my autorecovers are failing to save? Open the pod bay door HAL. Anyway, I didn't have this problem with 2003. Ugh.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 07:37 PM

January 05, 2008
Bird Flu Redux?

Four cases in Egypt.

Fortunately, it appears that they caught it from birds. But we can't let our guard down.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:03 PM

January 04, 2008
The Current State Of Anti-Aging

A nice overview at The Economist.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:50 AM

December 29, 2007
Our Alcoholic Future

I haven't had much to say about Bob Zubrin's new book, other than to point to reviews of it. This is mostly because I haven't read it, or even the excerpt in the current issue of The New Atlantis. Well, here are a couple more. Neither Shubber Ali, or Ken Silber are that impressed.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:41 PM

December 20, 2007
Can Fasting Clear Your Arteries?

An interesting result I hadn't seen before. I'll sometimes go all day without eating, just because I don't have the time, or get around to it. But I never do a whole twenty-four hours. I wonder if the effect works at all for a two-thirds day fast? Of course, for people with blood-sugar problems, it would be kind of tough to do. Lots of other interesting stuff over at Future Pundit as well (as usual) including robot sex, eco-disaster tourism, huge battery breakthroughs, and other things.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:18 AM

December 18, 2007
Voice Of God Ray

There's apparently a military application for what I thought was an advertising technology:

It appears that some of the troops in Iraq are using "spoken" (as opposed to "screeching") LRAD to mess with enemy fighters. Islamic terrorists tend to be superstitious and, of course, very religious. LRAD can put the "word of God" into their heads. If God, in the form of a voice that only you can hear, tells you to surrender, or run away, what are you gonna do?

What's cool about this weapon is that it's one that will be particularly effective with this enemy. If it happened to me, the voice of God isn't the first theory that I would come up with, since I'm an unbeliever, but with these guys, it probably would be.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:24 AM

December 17, 2007
Reclaiming the First Amendment

Ron Paul's supporters and a former Federal Election Commissioner are turning the operation of political speech inside out by turning individual donors into political organizations and the delivery vehicle (pun intended) into a for-profit universal-access media company. Bravo! Or as On the Media puts it:

...a campaign reform loophole as big as the Ron Paul blimp.

Expect ever tighter epicycles from the FEC to try to hold back the Internet and the innovative business processes that low transactions costs make available via personal computers and the Internet. They will nullify all limitations on free speech.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 04:48 AM

December 15, 2007
Happy Birthday

To the transistor, which will be sixty years old tomorrow.

It has to be in the top five all-time inventions.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:11 AM

December 14, 2007
Fill'r Up

Toshiba has come up with a lithium battery that can get to a 90% charge in five minutes. This is huge for electric cars, if it pans out. Anyone want to work out how much power/voltage/current that would be for the equivalent of a tank of gas?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:15 PM

Voices In Your Head

This is kind of disturbing:

The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before. For random passersby and residents who have to walk unwittingly through the area where the voice will penetrate their inner peace, it's another story.

I predict a lawsuit at some point.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:13 AM

December 13, 2007
Holiday Hints

For that special geek in your life, here's a list of ~~Christmas~~holiday gift suggestions. And here's a list of things to be sure not to get him or her--the ten worst gadgets of 2007.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:38 AM

How Precise Are Clocks Getting?

This precise:

To tap the F1's full accuracy, scientists have to know their precise relative position to the clock, and account for weather, altitude and other externalities. An optical cable that links the F1 to a lab at the University of Colorado, for example, can vary in length as much as 10 mm on a hot day -- something that researchers need to continually track and take into account. At F1's level of precision, even general relativity introduces problems; when technicians recently moved F1 from the third floor to the second, they had to re-tune the system to compensate for the 11-and-a-half foot drop in altitude.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:34 AM

December 06, 2007
In Defense Of Audiophilia

Fred Kaplan makes the case. I hadn't been aware of how much the quality of the sound was degraded to compress it into an MP3. Of course, I've never gotten into the MP3 thing, other than to listen to interviews and the like on my Treo. When I want to listen to music, I still go with CDs and vinyl.

And I don't think that Teachout is going to persuade very many people to give up their high-end equipment. One would think that he, of all people, would remember the old dictum that there's no accounting for taste.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:12 AM

December 05, 2007
Some Advice On Home Theater Sound

From Amazon, who have been running a series.

The main reason I'm linking is to explain this, because it struck me that some might wonder why:

Unless you have a high-end receiver and speakers capable of generating a lot of bass, I recommend setting them to "small." This will send their bass to your subwoofer.

Some might ask, "...but what about the stereo for the bass? I thought that stereo required separation. How can you get that if it's all coming from a single speaker?"

Here's the deal. The ability to discriminate the direction of sound is a function of its wavelength. The wavelength of notes in the bass frequency is substantially longer than the distance between your ears, so there's no way for you to tell what direction the sound is coming from at those frequencies. Can you tell where thunder is from the sound? Yes, you can tell how far away it is, if you see the lightning and count the time until you hear it (about five seconds per mile), but absent visual clues, there's no way to tell the direction purely from the sound.

That's why you can not only get away with sending all bass to the subwoofer, but it doesn't even matter where the subwoofer is. So you can place it where it's convenient, or aesthetic (as long as it's at least in the same room). It's the high frequencies where speaker placement matters.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:27 PM

December 04, 2007
Smart Cars

John Tierney has an interesting piece on the current state of the art.

I don't really look forward to this particular future--I like driving (though I have to confess that having a computer replace most of the other lousy drivers out there appeals to me greatly).

But my biggest concern, that I never see addressed, is reliability. Not just of the smarts in the car, but in the car itself. What happens if cars are barreling along at ninety miles an hour ten feet apart, and a tire blows? Or the brakes fail? Or the engine dies?

There simply won't be the margin to avoid a collision, as we (generally, but not always) have at current spacing. You can make the cars as smart as you want, but physics will remain physics.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:21 AM

December 03, 2007
Anti-Anti-Aging

A long but very worthwhile essay by Aubrey De Grey on the societal resistance to ending aging--"old people are people, too":

Geronto-apologists simultaneously hold, and alternately express, the following two positions:
* They refuse to consider seriously whether defeating aging is feasible, because they are sure it would not be desirable;
* They refuse to consider seriously whether defeating aging is desirable, because they are sure it is not feasible.

Like a child hiding in a double-doored wardrobe, they cower behind one door when the other is opened, then dash to the other when it is closed and before the first is opened. Only when both doors are flung open in unison is their hiding-place revealed. They are both well and truly open now, and the time when this sleight of hand was effective has passed.

There is no question that indefinite lifespan will cause a host of new problems to be solved. But that doesn't mean that they're insoluble, or that they'd be so bad as to want to continue the current holocaust that has been going on since the dawn of humanity, in which everyone is sentenced to death after only a century or so. In any event, it's probably inevitable, barring some societal catastrophe in the next few decades, so we'd better start thinking about how to solve them.

[Update a few minutes later]

A comment I just made in the comments section made me think about this flawed argument that De Grey pointed out:

The litany of obfuscation begins by exploiting the terminological ambiguity of the word “ageless” with observations such as “An ageless body is almost a contradiction in terms, since all physical things necessarily decay over time.”

Assuming that this is not just a straw man on De Grey's part (and I don't think it is--I've seen opponents make the argument myself), this is the argument from entropy. It's a good argument, except for one flaw--a fatal one. It's simply not true that all physical things necessarily decay over time.

Negative entropy can, and does exist. That is, in fact, exactly what life is--a negentropic process (at least locally). If all physical things necessarily decay over time, how to explain the transition from fertilized egg, to embryo, to baby, to youth, to full healthy adult? Surely they don't believe that this is a "deterioration," or "decay"?

The only things that decay over time are things left to nature, and are not properly maintained, and repaired as needed. But as long as one is willing to invest energy in repair and improvement, there is no necessity for physical objects to "decay over time." The human body grows over the first couple decades of life, and continually improves (and repairs as necessary), so clearly, there is no law of physics that requires that it decay over time. It's simply a bad design, and there is no reason that we can't fix it so that it continues to repair itself indefinitely. Figuring out how to do so, not circumventing physics, is the challenge.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:10 AM

Hybrid Computers

The distinction between hardware and wetware is going to really start to blur in the coming years:

Charles Higgins, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, has built a robot that is guided by the brain and eyes of a moth. Higgins told Computerworld that he basically straps a hawk moth to the robot and then puts electrodes in neurons that deal with sight in the moth's brain. Then the robot responds to what the moth is seeing -- when something approaches the moth, the robot moves out of the way.
Higgins explained that he had been trying to build a computer chip that would do what brains do when processing visual images. He found that a chip that can function nearly like the human brain would cost about $60,000.

"At that price, I thought I was getting lower quality than if I was just accessing the brain of an insect which costs, well, considerably less," he said. "If you have a living system, it has sensory systems that are far beyond what we can build. It's doable, but we're having to push the limits of current technology to do it."

There are going to be some humdinger ethics issues to deal with along this road.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 AM

Tech Flops

Here are this guy's opinion of the top ten for 2007. And by "technology" he means IT.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:55 AM

December 02, 2007
Rejuvenation?

An anti-aging drug is about to go into human trials, even if its makers won't admit that it has this effect.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:51 AM

November 30, 2007
Bring It On

Early detection of cancer and Alzheimers with blood tests:

The company is also validating protein-based tests for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, the latter an affliction for which the only conclusive test is currently an autopsy. Among the possible benefits of a proteomic Alzheimer's test, due out late next year, would be the ability to definitively separate sufferers from those with other neurodegenerative problems, now a major obstacle to running effective clinical trials of drugs for Alzheimer's.
"Power3 won't do it all," says Essam Sheta, the company's director of biochemistry. "But my expectation is that in the next five years, we as a scientific community will be able to develop diagnostic tests for many, many types of diseases."

Let's hope so.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:40 AM

November 29, 2007
Progress Toward Biowarfare

Tim Oren has some worrisome thoughts.

And, unrelated, but from the same site, Joe Katzman says to short Google. They're not tending to their knitting.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:17 AM

November 28, 2007
Beating OPEC

Here's a review of Bob Zubrin's new book, which is about energy rather than space.

If you're in the DC area, there's an opportunity to hear him speak about it tomorrow night.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:21 PM

November 27, 2007
Organic Transistors

FETs made with fullerene.

Cool.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:42 AM

November 25, 2007
Better Living

...through termite guts:

The bellies of these tiny beasts actually harbor a gold mine of microbes that have now been tapped as a rich source of enzymes for improving the conversion of wood or waste biomass to valuable biofuels.

Sounds better than converting food to fuel.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:12 PM

November 24, 2007
An Interesting New Airplane

Does anyone know if this is for real, or vaporware?

There is no doubt a significant market for a supersonic business jet. The problem is, they still haven't found a solution to the sonic boom problem. They're finessing it with this airplane by (as the Concorde did) flying supersonic over water only, but enhancing performance by flying it just slightly below sonic velocity (almost transonic) over land, which gives them a faster trip than a conventional subsonic jet. But the advantage isn't all that great, since they're restricting it to Mach 1.5 (presumably because their fuel costs would go through the roof, and their range to almost nothing, if they went faster).

If you look at the comparisons of trip times, in some cases, it doesn't make that much difference, and because they haven't solved the wave drag problem, they still don't have trans-Pacific range--they have to make a stop to refuel, so it only drops the trip time from fourteen to nine hours or so. Also, they only show a route from the east coast to Japan. If they wanted to fly from, say, LA to Down Under or Taipei, it's not obvious to me where they'd stop for a refuel. Hawaii's too far from Asia for their range, and Society Islands are too far from the US. It's interesting, though, that they claim to have the same range at Mach 1.5 as as Mach 0.85. They really get killed in that transonic region, as expected.

A true supersonic bizjet (say, Mach 2.4, which is about as fast as you could go with aluminum), with adequate range to get across the Pacific, could do it in about five hours, which would be a huge revolution.

Still, there will be a market for this thing, I think, if their cost numbers are valid. They seem to be claiming that they're comparable to a G550 on a per-mile basis (which also means on a passenger-mile basis for the eight-passenger configuration). I'd like to understand more about them, though. What are they calling "fixed" and "direct" costs?

While they drink a lot more Jet A than the Gulfstream, they claim to have lower fixed costs for supersonic flight. Is this because they spend less time to travel a mile, and get more miles per maintenance? That would explain why they have higher "fixed" costs and lower "direct" (mostly fuel, I assume) costs for the high subsonic mode.

I think they can make some money with this, but it's not the real breakthrough we need.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:45 AM

November 23, 2007
Glad To Hear That

Apparently the iPhone isn't that great for blogging (if I'm allowed an understatement).

Well, neither is the Treo, with the Palm OS. I did a blog post once, just to see if I could do it, but I can't imagine doing it routinely. It would help if they would come up with a better browser than Blazer. Or maybe they have, and I'm just not aware.

On the other hand, as Stephen Green points out, perhaps it's just as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:45 PM

Are Zeppelins Green Aviation?

I don't know (or frankly, much care), but I think that it would be a neat way to travel, if you have the time. Like an aerial cruise ship. I've been thinking since the eighties that the technology has evolved to the point at which dirigibles make sense for specialized applications.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:34 AM

Finding The Cure

This is a pretty cool distributed computing project

Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.
Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

I thought that SETI@home was an interesting application, but this seems a lot more useful to me. I may set it up to run on my file server, which has a 64-bit AMD CPU that's idle much of the time. It will help justify the electricity costs to run it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:29 AM

November 21, 2007
Save The Weeds!

Megan McArdle, who is now in Cambodia, muses on how anyone managed to figure out how to make silk. One could ask this of all kinds of technologies.

What's interesting though, is that the thread gets hijacked by a loon who is worried about cruelty to caterpillars.

Given how unevolved we remain, how can we ever be allowed to colonize space?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:17 PM

Changing The Subject

Leon Kass uses the latest breakthrough to ride his anti-cloning hobby horse:

The alleged need for so-called therapeutic cloning — cloning embryos for research — is now passé. We can therefore disentangle the “life issue” of embryo-destruction from the “dignity issue” of baby manufacture, and enact a legislative ban on cloning and other degrading forms of baby-making, as recommended unanimously by the President’s Council on Bioethics: Prohibit all attempts to conceive a child by any means other the union of egg and sperm, both obtained from adults. Erecting such a barrier against the brave new world would be a great achievement, one that pro-lifers can now happily embrace without reservation.

Without reservation, except for the fact that Dr. Kass can never explain why they should, other than that he personally finds the concept of cloning humans disgusting (though whether it's more or less disgusting than eating ice cream in public, I'm not sure he's ever quantified).

Creating and raising cloned humans is a completely separate topic from therapeutic cloning (which is why I still think that they should come up with a different phrase for it). The latter has no intent to create a human being--just to create spare parts for one. There may be a good argument to be made that there is something intrinsically immoral or problematic with cloning humans, but I've never heard Dr. Kass make one. He's just trying to hijack the discussion, here.

Putting him in charge of the Bioethics Commission was one of the many reasons that I'm disappointed (well, that's not quite the right word--I never had high hopes for him in that regard) with President Bush.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:08 PM

More Stem Cell Stuff

Alan Boyle has an interview with one of the key researchers. As he notes, this isn't yet the end of the line for embryonic stem cell research--they need to continue, at least for a while, in order to provide a comparison baseline with the new techniques.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:07 AM

November 20, 2007
Breakthrough?

This is a huge story if it pans out, and the headline is exactly right. Researchers create stem cells without destroying embryos. I've never been as upset about embryo destruction as many want me to be, but if this can take that issue off the table, it will make it much easier to forge ahead. In fact, what's great about it is that it seems to be a much more promising technique than nuclear transfer:

...it's not such a surprise that Ian Wilmut, the man who cloned Dolly the sheep a decade ago, recently said he has been persuaded to give up his own cloning experiments, thanks to news of Dr. Yamanaka's successes.
"Any scientist with basic technology in molecular and cell biology can do reprogramming," says Dr. Yamanaka. "If we can overcome the issue [of having to use dangerous viruses to ferry the genes into cells], many more people will move from nuclear transfer to this method."

As the article notes, it's surprising how quickly they got to this ability. We could conceivably see it in action within a decade, and perhaps within a very few years. Good news for those of us still in relatively good health. It may significantly accelerate our progress toward actuarial escape velocity.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:55 AM

Autoimmune Disorder

...of the Internet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:13 AM

November 19, 2007
Where No Fish Has Gone Before

This is pretty neat. Fish with wheels. I'm not sure if it's useful, but it's interesting.

[Via Marsblog]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:45 AM

November 18, 2007
Science Fiction from a Paper Magazine

William Sapphire anticipates the telepathigram. Of course it will be called something much simpler like message necessitating the new retronym mindless message. It's much more unlikely for the retronym mindless message to be needed because of a new co-dominance of thoughtful messages.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 09:05 PM

More Old Fogie Discussion

There's a long discussion over at Slashdot about the whether not email is for old f@rts.

A lot of good points over there, the most salient of which is that it's not so much a generational thing as a "having a life" thing. Young people have a lot more free time to jabber at each other on IM, but for serious work-related discussions, email will remain essential for a long time (though I'm pushing clients to establish internal corporate blogs for a lot of this kind of discussion, to avoid spam issues, and provide better archiving and organization of topics). Also, with Facebook or other social networking sites, you're limiting yourself to other Facebook members.

[Update in the afternoon]

Speaking of Facebook, as someone who has signed up, but not figured out why, what is a "friend" in Spacebook terms? What are the implications of it?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:09 AM

November 16, 2007
NIST/NSA "Have Some Explaining To Do"

Bruce Schneier wonders if there is a back door in a NIST/NSA-approved random number generator. This seems like a good market opportunity for Jeff Manber.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 AM

November 15, 2007
Cheaper Solar Cells

Maybe fifty percent cheaper.

I'd seriously consider a rooftop system here in south Florida if that happened. Those kinds of prices would seriously reduce payback time.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:52 AM

Feeling Like A Fogie

Is the email age ending? I got an account on Facebook recently, but I still haven't figured out why. Of course, I'm kind of anti-social by nature.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AM

November 14, 2007
Good News On Phishing?

I've seen a spate of phishing attempts in my email lately, for institutions such as "Pacific Capital BanCorp," with a fake URL to gather in my data (assuming that I have an account there). I'll get half a dozen in a row, each with a different domain, such as "2dfe.com." Does this mean that they're having to create new domains and sites quickly before groups like Anti-phishing.org shut them down? I know that I report them the minute I see them. Of course, it's harder to deal with the ones in China, which apparently just took over first place in this kind of thing from the US, according to Anti-phishing.org

By the way, it sure would be nice if Thunderbird had a feature for forwarding a group of emails to a single address, rather than having to do them individually.

[Update a minute or so later]

Hmmm...actually there is. If you highlight a block of messages, and hit "Forward," it attaches them all to the forwarded message. Cool.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:58 AM

Beam Weapons

That wasn't the headline that I would have used. I thought when I was about to read this story that they were using the lasers to simply find the IEDs. No, they're using lasers to destroy IEDs remotely. I think they're approaching the capability to put them on the frickin' heads of the sharks.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of twenty-first-century warfare, Alan Boyle has an interesting piece on the new age of battlebots.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:14 AM

November 13, 2007
Further Thoughts On The Mythology Of Clones

From Phil Bowermaster.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:49 PM

November 12, 2007
Send In The Clones?

Looks like they've figured out how to clone primates.

There's long been some sort of quasi-religious belief for some that there is something more fundamentally difficult about cloning humans that means it will never happen, or not for decades. ("OK, you can clone a mouse, but you can't clone a larger animal. OK, you can clone a sheep, but not a monkey.") Well, it seems to me that the cloning of humans is inevitable, and now not very far off.

Of course, unlike conservatives (and one of the many ways in which I'm not one, "neo" or otherwise, despite confusion on the part of some apparent simpletons who comment here), I don't have any intrinsic problems with cloning. It's just a technology, and one (like all technologies) that can be used for good or ill. I in particular have no problem with cloning that provides directed organ generation, such as a liver, and think that the notion that such a growth would be a human being in its own right, and entitled to personhood status, nonsensical.

I also don't have any intrinsic problem with cloning people and raising them to adulthood (despite the "yuck factor" issue that many seem to have with it). It just seems to me that it's taking gene selection (something that we've been doing with offspring, consciously or otherwise, since the beginning of the race) to a new level. I don't think that so many are going to do it that we become a monoculture, and that there will remain plenty of genetic mixing, as long as we consider it necessary as humans.

In any event, I welcome the development, and if it causes problems, then we'll deal with them as they arise, but I certainly don't want opposition to it to prevent the beneficial effects. If I have to go to Thailand or South Korea to grow myself a new liver, I'll certainly have no moral compunction restraining me from doing so.

[Update in the afternoon]

Here's a Reuters story that's kind of a mess.

I wish that we could come up with some other word for growing stem cells and organs from your own cells than "cloning" because it creates the kind of confusion expressed in both the UN resolution and in the article. It strikes me that this is mainly a "feel good" resolution, since it's non-binding, and everyone realizes that there's no enforcement mechanism even if there were. This technology is going to happen, regardless of debates in Turtle Bay.

And this sentence makes no sense to me at all:

The authors said laws should grant clones full human rights to protect from discrimination.
Otherwise, opponents of clones in an inheritance dispute, for instance, might say that a clone and the person from whom their cells were grown should only get a half share each.

Huh? What is the legal scenario here? Who was cloned here, and what is their purported relationship with the person from whose cells they were cloned? If a couple, after reading my blog, and despite my physical appearance (or vice versa) decided that they wanted to create and raise a clone of me, there would be no legal relationship between me and him (or her). I'd like to think that they would need my permission, but as far as I know, there's no clear law against stealing a lock of my hair and doing so. That person would be a legal child of that couple, with nothing to do with me, unless some prior arrangement were made for it. We are completely separate legal persons. If I were to inherit something from someone, that clone would have no claim on the inheritance simply because (s)he shared my genome.

On the other hand, if I were to create and raise such a clone, it would be my legal child, and no more or less entitled to my inheritance from (say) my father than any other child of mine would be.

But granting (assuming that this is the line of thinking here) that a clone is somehow a second instantiation of the same person, with the same legal rights, it makes no sense to complain about both being entitled to only a "half share each" of an inheritance. How much more could it, or should they get? If there is a whole inheritance that must be split evenly (and thus "fairly") between two inheritors, how could each get any more than half? Do these people want to defy the laws of mathematics, or did they go to the Leo Blum school of accounting, in which he sold several thousand percent of a Broadway musical? Did the Reuters reporter give this statement any thought at all when writing it?

Expect a lot more confused argumentation, and reporting, as these technologies get closer to fruition. I think that it also points up the fact that people who were raised reading a lot of science fiction are both more familiar, and more comfortable with these concepts.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:48 AM

November 07, 2007
Richard Garriott: Space's Next Generation

Here's Richard Garriott on a recent Austin ZEROG flight

Fellow Austinite Richard Garriott talks more in the December issue of PC Gamer about his upcoming trip to space:

I grew up with an astronaut father, and space has been my pinnacle interest since I was young.... the probability of me going [to space] the same way my dad did was zero....
Since earning my earliest profits in the games industry, I have been investing in privatizing space....

Here's how he enabled Dennis Tito to get into space with his investment in Space Adventures.

I am also involved in Zero G, which has given me a taste of what I might experience in space. Zero G uses a modified Boeing 727 to take people on parabolic flights into microgravity. Anyone can book these flights and I tell you, it will change your life. People get giddy on these flights; they experience true happiness and living in the moment. I enjoy these flights so much that I recently chartered four of them to help promote the release of my space epic MMPORG Tabula Rasa. And my experience on them solidified my desire to get private citizens into space as well--even those without bazillions of dollars.
... I am lucky enough to be able to go into space myself through our work with the Russian Government! Earlier this month, we announced that I will be going into space as the seventh private space explorer, and the first second-generation astronaut, next year. I can't tell you how excited I am about this. But I'm still my father's son[;] I will be part of a team conducting experiments and bringing back new knowledge and data concentrating in four areas: commercial, educational, environmental, and artistic. This isn't just a joy ride for me; it's something I need to do.

Amen on the ZEROG flights.

There's a little more in his trip-to-space blog.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 12:25 PM

November 05, 2007
Ultra Capacitors

This technology seems to be moving along pretty well, and it's one of the revolutions that will constitute a major solution to our energy problems.

This approach allowed the engineers at Standard Oil to build a multifarad device. At the time, even large capacitors had nowhere near a farad of capacitance. Today, ultracapacitors can store 5 percent as much energy as a modern lithium-ion battery. Ultracapacitors with a capacitance of up to 5000 farads measure about 5 centimeters by 5 cm by 15 cm, which is an amazingly high capacitance relative to its volume. The D-cell battery is also significantly heavier than the equivalently sized capacitor, which weighs about 60 grams.

I've probably told this story before about innumeracy, even of physics students, and the inability of some to think through a problem. When I was teaching an E&M lab in college, we were doing experiments with capacitors, and someone came up and said, "The lab instructions say to use a microfarad capacitor, but this one says MFARAD instead of (greek letter mu--the symbol for micro)FARAD. I assume it means megafarad. Don't we have smaller ones?

I explained to him that the largest capacitor I'd ever seen (this was in the late seventies) was a quarter farad, and it took a truck to deliver it. Did he really think that he was holding something in his hand with four million times that capacity?

The article is also a good tutorial on capacitors in general, for those unfamiliar with how they work. The way that I like to think about this is that the positive charge accumulates on one plate, and the negative on the opposite one. They are held in place by their mutual attraction (being opposite charges), but cannot combine because of the insulation gap represented by the dielectric. The more accumulated charge, the higher the attraction (and field force) and accompanying voltage and potential energy. When the plates are allowed to connect to each other through an external circuit, the charges flow toward each other and create current (and power). The breakdown voltage is the voltage at which the gap can no longer restrain the attraction between the two groups of charge, and they jump across it to meet their destiny. This is to be avoided.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorry, link was slightly mangled (though usable) before. Fixed now.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:15 AM

Call-out Shelter

Buy a cell phone jammer if you want to project 30-foot cones of silenced phones. Or if you don't want to be arrested for using a jammer, build yourself a Faraday cage: no signal and no interference.

blocked call out

And here's a discussion of another kind of blocked call out.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 11:08 AM

November 02, 2007
Buzz in Las Vegas

I'll also be doing light posting. I'm having dinner and a ZEROG flight with Buzz Aldrin. There still appears to be some availability. If you can get to Vegas by 6:30 tonight, you can make the dinner and the ride prep starts tomorrow at one. The price is $8,900; it's more than the regular price of $3,500, but less than $144k for a flight with Stephen Hawking. At $3500 for 25 seconds * 12 parabolas at 0g is $700/minute. That's about a quarter the price per minute of a week in 0g on the International Space Station.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 03:29 PM

November 01, 2007
Top Thirty Failed Technology Predictions

Here they are. I'd read most of them before, but it's nice to have them all in one place. They're missing Vannevar Bush's quote about ICBMs.

Intercontinental guided missiles, Bush contends, need not be feared at all—at least for the present. "It can be done . . . [but] its cost would be astronomical. As a means of carrying high explosive or any toxic substitute, therefore, it is a fantastic proposal. It would never stand the test of cost analysis."

Here's another one we hear all the time: "Who would want to pay many thousands of dollars to go into space? Perhaps a few will, just to be the first, but it will just be a passing fad."

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:04 AM

October 31, 2007
Living Long And Prospering

Joel Garreau has an interesting WaPo piece on Aubrey de Grey.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:53 PM

October 22, 2007
Peak Oil?

Well, according to this article, we're past it. I don't buy it, though. It says nothing about shale or tar sands, which are going to come on line in quantities that will make current prices unsustainable. Another encouraging thing is that solar may become competitive within a decade. As the Guardian article points out, we are in an energy transition period, but it's nowhere near as apocalyptic as it makes it out to be.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:06 AM

October 21, 2007
Two For The Price Of One

Glenn is kvetching about having to buy both types of HD players:

The prices have dropped enough that I might be able to buy this high-rated HD-DVD player and this Sony Blu-Ray player and not spend much, if any, more. On the other hand, the notion of having to buy two just bugs me somehow.

My preference, actually, is to buy two things if I have the room, and I can afford them. Bundling functions in a single unit might seem convenient and cost saving, but the problem with it is that if one component fails, you still have to either replace the entire thing, or at least replace the functionality of the part that failed. The old example would be a combination microwave/range. The microwave dies, and you not only have to go replace it, but you can't find a stock replacement for it that will fit the range, so you have a permanently dead microwave in your kitchen, and have to take up space with the new one on or under the counter. Unless you go out and replace the entire stove, even though the range and conventional oven are just fine.

A more recent, and mundane example is these television/DVD combos. If the TV dies, it's become a boat anchor, unless there's a way to get the DVD output from it to bypass the TV. Plus, some of them (amazingly) are HDTVs, with standard DVDs (hopefully, they at least do up conversion). So you get instant obsolescence, built in! My (two-channel, thank you) stereo system still uses a separate pre-amp and power amp.

A risk analyst (like yours truly in his day job) would say that by increasing the complexity you're increasing the probability of failure (can anyone say Space Shuttle? Apparently it really bugged NASA to have to buy both a launch vehicle and an orbital laboratory...)

But I suspect that bundling is the wave of the future, particularly as electronics continues to become less and less expensive (as living space becomes more so).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:57 PM

October 14, 2007
A Disruptive Technology

Three-dimensional home printers:

More importantly, prices for 3-D printing machines have been falling rapidly, reaching $20,000, and the day is foreseeable when they will fall below $1,000 and become home appliances, says Phil Anderson of the School of Theoretical and Applied Science at Ramapo College in New Jersey.
The results, he warned, could be economically "disruptive."

"If you can make what you need in your own home quickly, then manufacturers become designers, with no need for factories, warehouses or shipping," Anderson told LiveScience.

Given the drawbacks discussed in the article, I think that this is likely to be a gradual transition, that will allow time us to adapt.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:04 PM

October 11, 2007
Regulated To Death

Randall Parker writes about the biggest barrier to medical advances:

If you read the full article above you'll learn that the first experimental subjects for a Novato California company were in Argentina - not exactly close by. I suspect this says something about medical regulation in America today. The Argentines were on hemodialysis for kidney failure and had what the report below characterized as "typical risk factors for end-stage renal disease". You might expect regulatory agencies to grant greater freedom of action to try out new treatments on people who are looking death in face. But this company used subjects from another country. I fear excessive regulatory obstacles in the way of new treatment development are costing lots of lives.

I suspect that the FDA probably kills more people by delaying the introduction of new drugs and procedures than it saves. But it's like protectionist policies and other interferences with the market--the jobs and businesses that aren't created are an invisible consequence compared to existing jobs that are lost, and a bureaucrat is much more concerned about being blamed for a death that results from a new drug than one that results from its delay, because the latter is just a maintenance of the status quo.

Randall also has bad news about avian flu. It may be easier for it to mutate to affect humans than we thought.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:08 AM

October 08, 2007
Who Will Carry The Fusion Torch?

I can't find any web confirmation of this on a quick search, but I am reliably informed that Bob Bussard died yesterday. I didn't know that he was ill. I may have more thoughts later.

[Update a couple minutes later]

This isn't my (direct) source, but this is the news from Jerry Pournelle.

[Tuesday morning update]

Well, there are certainly a lot of encomia in comments. I didn't really know the man, myself. I met him once, a quarter of a century ago, at a monthly OASIS meeting in LA, where he gave a talk on his "fusion lightbulb" concept, and several of us had dinner with him afterward. Prior to that, I had only known him as the man after whom the interstellar ramjet was (appropriately, since he invented the concept) named. My brief experience matches that of commenters, though. He was an interesting, friendly man, who seemed to be attempting to accomplish great things for humanity.

And it's sad that people don't realize what humanitarians technologists can be. Most people think that humanitarians are only social-worker types. But whatever you think of him personally, Henry Ford revolutionized America, and gave mobility to the masses. Edison brought them light. Sam Walton (who was not a technologist, but a businessman), for all of the unfair demonization of his store chain, has helped the poor more than any social program, by making relatively high-quality (by the standards of a century ago) goods much more affordable to them.

More humanitarian technologists should be recognized as Norman Borlaug was. Perhaps, if polywell fusion pans out (and I have no opinion on the probability of that), Dr. Bussard will be as well, but it will be a shame that if so, it will be posthumously.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:35 PM

October 04, 2007
Uh Oh

As they become more plentiful, Linux boxes are becoming more attractive targets for rootkits.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AM

October 02, 2007
An Elderly Scientist

Alan Boyle has an interview with James Watson. This exchange reminded me of Arthur Clarke's First Law of Prediction:

Q: There’s a lot of talk about extreme longevity being perhaps within reach in the next few years. …
A: Oh, I doubt it. Men will continue to die in their 80s. How many people make it past their 80s? Some do, large numbers, but most people don’t.

He provides no basis for his belief that we will not be able to live longer, other than that we never have. Given all the other things that we do in the twenty-first century that previous generations never have, I have to say that I find his argument less than scientifically compelling.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:57 AM

September 30, 2007
Talking Turkey About Human Spaceflight

On Friday, Russell Prechtl and George Whitesides respond to Steven Weinberg's dissing of spaceflight in pursuit of science.

To sum up: Space settlement for species preservation, spinoffs, human spirit and human nature.

What are these worth? Depending on how long before the extinction event it could be anywhere from all of Earth's discounted GDP to nearly nothing for species preservation assurance. If an extinction event is 1 in 26 million per year we can take our chances and still have an expectation of 99.99999% of our GDP next year. Spinoffs is weak. Human spirit is hard to quantify. How is ISS doing more for human spirit than Skylab or Mir? Human nature is more of a restatement of the human spirit argument that it is human nature to seek to raise the human spirit. But how? It's not enough when someone says "ISS is worthless" to say "but if we don't learn to live in space we'll die!" We can learn to live in space with or without the ISS; what's the difference?

I'm planning to take Steven Weinberg to lunch and see what he says to these arguments later this week. Let me know if there's anything else I should ask him.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 11:34 AM

September 15, 2007
A Magic Bullet?

Let's hope this works in humans: cancer-curing mouse blood.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:21 AM

September 14, 2007
Singular

Ron Bailey has a report on last weekend's Singularity Summit.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:02 AM

September 13, 2007
The End Of Ethernet?

Not quite, but perhaps in a few years. It's had a pretty good run. I still think I'm going to CAT6 the house.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:00 AM

September 11, 2007
Is Geoengineering The Future?

I suspect so, and I think that this will also create some interesting markets for affordable space transportation. It's a lot more economically plausible scenario than restricting carbon emissions.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:26 AM

September 10, 2007
An Open Singularity

Some interesting thoughts from the Singularity Summit this past weekend.

Speaking of which, Phil Bowermaster was in attendance, and blogging about it. Just keep scrolling.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:41 AM

September 09, 2007
Moving From Windows To Linux?

A useful guide.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:09 PM

September 07, 2007
Living Indefinitely Long

I see that Aubrey de Grey has his new book out. Looks interesting.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 AM

September 05, 2007
Not Just For Robots Any More

Now, this is what I've been waiting for (well, at least until they come up with superior technology to replace it):

As reported in the London Daily Mail, Yacoub's team harvested the stem cells and used a chemical cocktail to coax them into becoming heart cells. Placed on a "scaffold" made of biodegradable plastic, they grew and fused together to form discs of heart valve tissue just an inch wide. As the valves developed, the scaffold decayed, leaving behind solid tissue.
Yacoub, a professor of cardiac surgery at Imperial College London, noted: "Although there has been huge progress in developing mechanical replacements, they still work mechanically and not physiologically — they cannot match the elegant sophisticated functions of living tissues."

Unlike rigid artificial valves that just open and shut, these valves are living tissue that responds to events and changes shape as required. The heart can pump freely and unobstructed by a foreign object. There's no need to replace valves as children grow older — indeed, no need to replace them ever.

And they're planning to grow whole hearts as well. Hey if it's good enough for robots, it's good enough for me.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:34 AM

September 04, 2007
A Free Man

Keith Henson survived his stint in jail in Riverside. I'm reliably informed that he's been released. Hopefully, other than a restrictive probation period, the long nightmare is over for him.

More background here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:13 PM

Dr. Strangelove Redux?

Did the Soviets build a doomsday machine that's still operational?

Blair is not a wild-eyed Cassandra raising unsupported suspicions. Colleagues in his field regard him as a serious and cautious scholar raising real questions. Stephen M. Meyer, an expert ohttp://www.slate.com/id/2173108n the Russian military at MIT, told the Times that Blair "requires of himself a much higher standard of evidence than many people in the intelligence community."
Blair's troubling papers, along with his book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, serve as a reminder that the illogic, irrationalities, and vulnerability to catastrophic error of our Cold War nuclear war command and control mechanisms were never resolved or fixed, just forgotten when the Cold War ended. His analysis suggests that during the Cold War, we may have escaped an accidental nuclear war by luck rather than policy.

Sleep tight...

[Update on Thursday morning]

Alan K. Henderson is having a flashback. Errrr...make that flashforward.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:39 PM

The End Of The Silicon Age

Is drawing near:

Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center in California developed a technique for measuring magnetic anisotropy, a property of the magnetic field that gives it the ability to maintain a particular direction. Being able to measure magnetic anisotropy at the atomic level is a crucial step toward the magnet representing the ones or the zeroes used to store data in binary computer language.
In a second report, researchers at IBM's lab in Zurich, Switzerland, said they had used an individual molecule as an electric switch that could potentially replace the transistors used in modern chips. The company published both research reports in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Wonder what the implications of this technology are for Moore's Law?

[Update a few minutes later]

Howard Lovy (who is back to blogging on nanotech again) has some thoughts on the paucity of imagination in reporting these things.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:00 AM

Life In The Twenty-First Century

A body-repair robot powered by heart muscle tissue. Pretty cool, and a hint of things to come.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AM

August 31, 2007
Infinite Loop

I hate automated phone payment systems that insist on voice input. I particularly hate them when they're stupidly worded.

After providing information, the voice says "Can I repeat that for you?"

Well, the two options are yes, or no. Obviously, the system is capable of repeating it for me. So the correct answer is "yes." But an answer of "yes" will result in it repeating it for me. To which my response should again be "yes." The only to get it to stop is to lie, and say, "no." That is, the system cannot repeat it for me, even though we both know it can. And of course, being the sensitive kind of guy I am, I feel guilty about lying to it, even though it's just a mindless machine.

I'd like to think that there's some counter built into the system to keep scrupulously literal and honest people from dying of starvation or sleep deprivation while continuing their futile attempts to placate it, but it seems like it would just be simpler to word it, "Should I repeat that for you?" Or "Would you like me to repeat that for you?"

It's even more irritating than asking me whether or not I had a perfect stay.

[Update a while later]

For those curious, I see no reason to protect the guilty. Maybe they'll hear about this and do something about it. It's US Bank.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:34 PM

August 27, 2007
Mutating Computer Worms

This is interesting, and a little disturbing. We're going to have to come up with better ways to fight these things.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:09 PM

Go To The Back Of The Bus

Well, actually, the back of the airplane. It's safer there.

I wonder if the statistics would show that you're better off in an exit row? Particularly in the window seat?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:24 AM

August 24, 2007
Powering Houses

...from car batteries? As someone currently living in hurricane country, it looks pretty attractive to me. It would help a lot to get off-peak pricing, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:07 AM

The Latest Fashion

A chain mail tee shirt. Made from aluminum.

I don't know, while it would be fairly light, aluminum is pretty soft. I wouldn't think it would stand up that well to a blade. When you're making one from mithril, get back to me.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 AM

August 23, 2007
Whole-Airframe Parachutes

This development has intriguing potential for space vehicle safety systems, if sufficiently light weight.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:40 PM

A Generic Cancer Breakthrough?

Maybe:

Curley is brimming with cautious optimism.
"If we can come up with ways of delivering these particles to the cancer cells, but not to normal cells," Curley said, "this treatment will work. There's not a doubt in my mind. Any kind of cancer, anywhere in the body!"

Doctor Curley's team is ready to publish their first results using laboratory animals. So far, the targeted nanoparticles and the Kanzius RF machine have passed every test.

Hope it's not being overhyped. There's a little too much boosterism, and not enough information, in the news story to tell.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:55 AM

Better Space Programs

...through molecular manufacturing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:04 AM

August 21, 2007
Linked In Idiots

OK, I haven't quite figured out why I want to be in all these social networking sites, but I actually have accumulated quite a few contacts in Linked In. But twice now, when I tried to add someone as a "Friend," I get a message, in big red letters, that "We're sorry, but you must provide an email address to send an invitation to a friend."

Fine. I know their email address.

The problem is, the geniuses (<VOICE="Homer Simpson">I'm being sarcastic</VOICE>) who designed the web site don't provide any text box in which to put it. Am I missing something?

[Update a few minutes later]

I did figure out, that if I check "Other" instead of "Friend," I do get a text box for the email address. This seems like a bug to me.

In addition, there is a problem. Apparently, someone I invited disinclined the invitation, or said they didn't know me, which is why I'm required to enter email addresses for friends, even if they won't provide a means to actually do that. It seems like this is too harsh a punishment for a one-time occurrence of this. I've no idea how it happened, but inviting people you don't know, or who don't (for whatever reason) want to admit that they know you, doesn't seem like such a horrible thing that it's one strike and you're out. Another bug, in my opinion.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:58 PM

Transhumanist Technologies

The Lifeboat Foundation has a list of the top ten.

[11:30 AM update]

Artificial life in three to ten years?

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could "run amok," but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.
"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."

I hope that's not attributable to a mere lack of imagination...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:33 AM

August 10, 2007
Outta Here

See you later.

[Saturday morning update]

That was my first experience flying Spirit airlines. Also likely my last, other than my planned return on Tuesday. Got to the airport, had a hell of a time finding parking, and it took a lot longer to get to the terminal than planned. We had a very crowded line both for check-in and security, got to the gate just in time to board. It turned out that it didn't matter since, when we got there, the board said "Delayed." No estimated time of departure, no explanation. There was a plane sitting a few hundred feet off the gate in an obvious state of being repaired. About an hour or so later, they announced a new gate. We go over to the new gate, which is on the opposite side of the concourse.

This is an international concourse (Concourse H in Terminal 4 at Fort Lauderdale), and it was designed by a madman. On the west side runs a glassed-in hallway, through which deplaning passengers pass on their way to immigration and customs. In order to board the aircraft, one must cross this hallway. Obviously, since one cannot mix domestic passenger still in the US, and newly-arrived passengers somewhere in international limbo, no one can board until the hallway is clear. But there is apparently little reservoir for people at I&C, so they back up into the hallway. All the way to the end of the concourse. And then all the way back to the beginning of the hallway, doubling around. We are told that we can't board until these hundreds of passengers have cleared the hallway.

Now, each gate has dual doors in the hallway, so that the hallway can be cut off to let passengers board. But this would, of course, cut off the people in the hallway trying to advance up the line. The obvious solution is traffic control, in which the hallway is temporarily closed, board some passengers, reopen the hallway to clear the backup, board some more passengers, etc. but it takes them a maddeningly long time to actually do this.

But finally, we get on the plane. We taxi out, at which point the pilot announces that they just have to do one final balance check, and then they can take off. I have never heard of a balance check on an aircraft the size of a Boeing 737 before. They must be running very tight margins on packing passengers and cargo into this aircraft if they have to worry about this. But apparently, things turned out to be all right, as I didn't notice them shifting passengers around. And only two and three quarters hours after the original scheduled departure, we are in the air.

I wasn't aware of this but everything on Spirit, other than the seat and bottled water, is a la carte, and overpriced (two bucks for a box of pretzels, a dollar for a soft drink, no protein of any kind on offer). But at least they take (in fact insist on) credit cards. Also, checking luggage is ten bucks per bag (unless you purchase in advance on line, in which case it's only five). I actually like this, as I've long advocated the end of subsidizing checked luggage by those traveling light. The seats don't recline, though they tantalize you with a button, anyway.

The flight was also quite noisy, with numerous crying babies and loud (semi)adults. I've never understood why some people feel the need to spout their inanities to each other at a volume that can be heard halfway down the length of the aircraft. I don't know whether they imagine that the rest of us will be fascinated by their lives, and are rapt at every word, or that simply have no sense whatsoever of self consciousness.

In any event, we finally got into Detroit about three hours later than planned (about ten thirty, once I got the rental). We had originally expected to be in around seven thirty, with time for dinner, and then a three-hour drive up to the lake. Instead, we grabbed some deli sandwiches at a twenty-four hour supermarket in Fenton, and drove straight up from there, arriving around two AM.

Hopefully, the rest of the weekend will go more smoothly. But I'm not looking forward to a 6:45 AM return on Tuesday morning via Spirit.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:01 PM

Not Rocket Science

This comment from a lawyer about the new practice of injecting potassium chloride into fetuses in the womb to ensure that they don't survive the abortion brings up a question that perennially perplexes me.

Regardless of one's position on the death penalty, why is it so damned hard for the state to come up with a way to execute someone painlessly? Apparently, this "three-drug cocktail" they've come up with can be quite painful if not done properly, or with the proper doses.

I just don't get it. There are a number of ways that people die accidentally, with no apparent knowledge that they are going. Carbon monoxide kills many people every year with no warning to the victim. Maybe it's only painless because it happens in their sleep, but how about this example?

Before the first Shuttle launch, some ground crew died in the engine compartment of the orbiter, because they were in there during a nitrogen purge. They apparently never knew they had a problem, but simply passed out. If there's a CO2 buildup, the body knows it's asphyxiating, and tries to do something about it, but no such warning mechanism has ever developed for a pure nitrogen atmosphere, because no animal would have ever encountered such an environment in nature.

So why not simply bring back the gas chamber, but instead of a toxin, simply remove the air and replace it with nitrogen? I'm sure there are other examples, but I fail to understand why this is such a difficult problem.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:19 AM

August 06, 2007
Better Living Through Chemistry

This is a nice incremental breakthrough from a "save the planet" standpoint, but they miss out on another benefit, I think:

In laboratory tests, these new boric acid suspensions have reduced by as much as two-thirds the energy lost through friction as heat. This could result in a four or five percent reduction in fuel consumption, according to Ali Erdemir, senior scientist in Argonne’s Energy Systems Division.

Four to five percent reduction in fuel use is nothing to sneeze at, given current gas prices, but I would think that it would also (much more) dramatically reduce engine wear, if it really reduces friction losses that much.

When I was a kid, it was standard procedure to rebuild an automobile engine after (if you were lucky) a hundred thousand miles or so, replacing piston rings and rod bearings, to prevent the blue smoke of oil that found its way past the rings into the combustion chamber, and the risk of throwing a rod from a worn bearing. Most cars were, in fact, designed to allow this to be done without removing the engine (not MGs, though...).

I had a 1986 Honda Accord that I bought in 1987 with about twelve thousand miles on it, and sold it about three years ago, a quarter of a million miles later, with no major engine work, other than having to replace a distributor shaft that had seized up and sheared off. It had lots of problems associated with a deteriorating car, but not a worn engine.

I don't know whether or not this is due to better materials, better lubricants, or a combination of the two (I suspect the latter). I did in fact use Castrol Syntech synthetic oil in it, which supposedly had the same effect as "Slick 50," a nostrum that you poured into your oil to provide a teflon coating to the engine parts. I was inspired to do this in the mid-eighties by a colleague at Rockwell who used it in his Cessna 180, and told me that when he tore down the engine for its required FAA maintenance after the standard number of hours, he could discern no wear.

I think that we're in an era now in which cars become obsolete or unfashionable long before their engines (and probably transmissions) wear out. This breakthrough, if it works as advertised, will simply advance that trend.

[Tuesday update]

There's a lot of discussion in comments about oil-change intervals. I wouldn't necessarily take the advice of an oil manufacturer on this--they're not exactly disinterested parties. Traditionally, the car's owner's manual will specify what the manufacturer recommends (who still has a dog in the fight, but a much smaller one unless you do your work at the dealer).

Interestingly, our 2000 BMW 323i doesn't have a fixed specified service frequency. It actually computes it based on how much fuel is used, speed, etc. It actually has an indicator saying how many miles until the next scheduled service, which can vary up or down depending on what you did on your last trip. But in the factory shop manual (I generally buy one for every car I own--they tend to pay for themselves, despite the high price), it indicates that an oil service should be done in between each major service. And a major service is estimated to occur every thirty thousand miles, or twenty four months, whichever comes soonest. That implies that the fanatical Teutonic engineers in Munich think that the oil shouldn't generally need changing more often than every fifteen thousand miles. Of course, they also recommend BMW-brand synthetic...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:58 PM

August 03, 2007
Interview with Land Speeder Manufacturer

The Star Wars land speeder is scheduled to head into commercial production in 2008 or 2009. It looks more like a flying saucer than a roadster. It uses ground effect. Safer and simpler than a helicopter? Stay tuned.

Here's a brochure, a spec sheet, and a FAQ.
I asked Bruce Calkins, press contact at Moller about it.

Transterrestrial Musings: Is it street legal?

Bruce Caulkins, Moller International: It falls into a new category. While no one has claimed it, it remains to be seen who will want to regulate its use.

TM: Estimated first delivery date?

Caulkins: Late 2008 or 2009.

TM: Range?

Caulkins: Dependent upon payload, but approximately 100 miles.

TM: Gas mileage?

Caulkins: Not very good. Our engines burn .55 lbs per hp-hr. With 600 hp installed, that gives you 45 minutes to an hour on 40 gallons.

[TM: That calculates out to 2.5 miles per hour.]

TM: Snow present any difficulty?

Caulkins: No.

TM: What would happen if you drove it over a cliff?

Caulkins: The terrain-following software would let the vehicle settle at its maximum safe descent rate until it came to the bottom of the cliff.

TM: Can you drive over other cars on the freeway?

Caulkins: I wouldn't recommend it. Someone will probably be really pissed when they see you get ahead of them. We suggest that it be used off-road exclusively.

TM: What do you expect retail price to be if production hits 500,000 units?

Caulkins: At that volume, price could be in the range of $10,000 per unit, although I don't know ...

(Thanks for the lead, Instapundit.)

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 02:23 PM

Old Dog, New Trick

I don't text much, but it sounds like a handy skill to have in an emergency:

The three company representatives were unanimous in their No. 1 piece of advice for cell-phone users:
"The biggest tip is to understand the importance of text messaging," Smith said. "Text messaging uses far fewer of our network resources."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AM

Losing The War

...against spam. It's an interesting history, but a little depressing.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 AM

August 02, 2007
In-Air WiFi

Looks like it's finally coming. I'm not sure that this is the ultimate technical solution, though. 1.5 Mbs won't go very far with a plane full of browsing passengers, and it won't work for international flights over the oceans. Ultimately, they'll have to find a satellite solution, with more bandwidth.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:36 PM

July 31, 2007
Electric Roadster

Tesla Motors, the electric high-end sports car maker brought to you by SpaceX rocket man, Elon Musk, is sold out for one year. They are calling their August 2008 deliveries still the 2008 model year Roadster, but they have customers who have put $30,000 down instead of the usual $50,000 for the $100,000 car for deliveries through 4Q08. That's somewhere between 25% and 50% of their academic year 08-09 production.

I wanted to buy one except for
1) "No, we don't take trade-ins at this time"
2) No financing on the down payment until delivery (although it is refundable until about 3 months before delivery)
3) The Lotus Elise frame won't really accommodate someone who's 6'1" without taking off the roof to get through the door. Maybe if I lose a second 20 pounds, I'll try again.

I look forward to their next offering and I hope it has a slightly bigger cockpit. Other than to support Elon Musk, I want one because they are novel. That I'll be burning cheap coal as opposed to expensive oil is a nice way to subsidize my taste for novelty.

The reduced dependence on foreign oil stuff is pretty weak. For the $80,000 more that it costs to buy a Tesla, one can put 60 years worth of gasoline ($2.88*464 gallons per year) into the strategic petroleum reserve. But whatever they use to sell these babies so I can buy one is fair game.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 01:02 PM

July 30, 2007
Freezing Or Uploading?

Ron Bailey has a dispatch from last week's transhumanist think-in in Chicago.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:49 AM

July 29, 2007
A New Oxymoron

Kind of like jumbo shrimp. An odorless durian? It seems to me that it sort of defeats the purpose. You can't really separate odor from taste, because odor is a vital part of taste (people who can't smell have taste suppression as well). It might be some interesting new fruit with an interesting taste, but it wouldn't be durian.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:01 PM

Sociable Robots

A long but interesting article on the history, and current state of the art:

Cog was designed to learn like a child, and that’s how people tended to treat it, like a child. Videos of graduate students show them presenting Cog with a red ball to track, a waggling hand to look at, a bright pink Slinky to manipulate — the toys children are given to explore the world, to learn some basic truths about anatomy and physics and social interactions. As the robot moved in response to the students’ instructions, it exhibited qualities that signaled “creature.” The human brain has evolved to interpret certain traits as indicators of autonomous life: when something moves on its own and with apparent purpose, directs its gaze toward the person with whom it interacts, follows people with its eyes and backs away if someone gets too close. Cog did all these things, which made people who came in contact with it think of it as something alive. Even without a face, even without skin, even without arms that looked like arms or any legs at all, there was something creaturelike about Cog. It took very little, just the barest suggestion of a human form and a pair of eyes, for people to react to the robot as a social being.
...The robot expressed a few basic emotions through changes in its facial expression — that is, through the positioning of its eyes, lips, eyebrows and pink paper ears. The emotions were easy for an observer to recognize: anger, fear, disgust, joy, surprise, sorrow. According to psychologists, these expressions are automatic, unconscious and universally understood. So when the drivers on Kismet’s motors were set to make surprise look like raised eyebrows, wide-open eyes and a rounded mouth, the human observer knew exactly what was going on.

There are videos to demonstrate.

At craft shows, I've always been impressed at the artistry of the people who can take a bunch of hardware, like nuts and bolts and other things, and weld or solder it together into something that looks like a dog, or cow, or even person, and not just those entities, but ones with expressions on their faces, and even in their bodies. It is amazing how quickly and how much one can infer, falsely or not, from very little.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:13 PM

Sad Day

From a statement from members of the Personal Spaceflight Federation:

We will persevere — we believe that we can best honor those pioneers who were involved by carrying on their work.

Hudson, Witt, Anderson, Carmack, French, Gump, Benson, Rutan, Tai, Bigelow, Sirangelo, Greason, Dula, O'Donnell, Diamandis, and Musk

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 10:26 AM

July 28, 2007
Continue forward

Some of us think of space heroes as only those who strap themselves into a rocketship. But people like these, who give their sweat and lives to build those ships, who take their families out to live in the desert and work incredible hours on tedious tasks to make those rockets fly, and who do so because they share the dream of an open frontier in space, they too are true heroes.

Rick Tumlinson in Space Frontier Foundation press release

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 09:28 AM

July 26, 2007
Save The Environment

Stop recycling. Or at least, stop mindless recycling.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:23 AM

Dinerman Lauds Heinlein in Wall Street Journal

Taylor Dinerman wrote a nice tribute to Robert Heinlein in today's Wall Street Journal. He concludes:

In another hundred years, it will be interesting to see if the nuclear-powered spaceships and other technological marvels he predicted are with us. But nothing in his legacy will be more important than the spirit of liberty he championed and his belief that "this hairless embryo with the aching oversized brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure and spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency."

Mr. Dinerman writes a weekly column for the Space Review.

Nice to see Taylor and Jeff Foust's publication getting broader exposure.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 10:26 AM

July 17, 2007
The Coming Ethanol Biodisaster

Victor Davis Hanson makes an interesting point:

An ironic note: The agricultural revolution that changed America was not entirely a result of efficient machines, chemicals, and new crop species. Much of it was due to the end of devoting millions of acres to pasturage and feed stuffs for millions of horses. My grandfather told me that when he was small half our farm was used to feed the horses that pulled the cultivators for the vineyard and orchard. But apparently here we go again-planting land for transportation. And we should expect everything from ice cream to beef to rise in price as a result.

And Iain Murray adds detail:

Efforts to force-feed the U.S. corn ethanol industry are likely to trigger lots of forest clearing, but U.S forestland is of substantially poorer quality than its corn land. Our corn is grown on our best land, while our forests grow on our worst. Forest land is steeper, dryer, poorly drained, or somehow lacking—and therefore low-yielding. If the land quality of the cleared forests is only half as high as the quality of the current corn land, the additional land required to displace 10 percent of our gasoline with corn ethanol could total 110 million acres.

As he says, an environmental disaster by any measure.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:53 AM

I Got Eight Out Of Ten

Are you technologically useful?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:08 AM

July 16, 2007
Fire and Ice Conundrum

In Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode "Midnight Sun" posed the conundrum (a riddle with a pun as the answer) whether the world would end in global warming or cooling. Robert Frost also pondered this riddle in his 1920 poem.

I think I have the answer: "Fire!"

The pun is that this is what you say to clear a crowded movie theater. Now that you have the punchline, you can get the setup in my column in The Space Review which is up.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 07:43 AM

July 06, 2007
A Perpetual Motion Machine

It sounds great. There's only one problem. It doesn't work:

Despite apparently violating fundamental laws of physics, Steorn planned to demonstrate its machine to the public Wednesday at the Kinetica Museum gallery in London.
Steorn, however, ran into a minor problem -- Orbo isn't working.

Steorn posted a note on its Web site:

"We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting. We have commenced a technical assessment and will provide an update later today."

Yes, of course. Camera lighting. I'm sure that's it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AM

July 05, 2007
Artificial Brains

...rat brains:

The robot's biologically-inspired control software uses a functional model of "place cells". These are neurons in an area of the brain called the hippocampus that help real rats to map their environment. They fire when an animal is in a familiar location.
Alfredo Weitzenfeld, a roboticist at the ITAM technical institute in Mexico City, carried out the work by reprogramming an AIBO robot dog, made by Japanese firm Sony, with the rat-inspired control software.

When placed inside a maze, the robot learnt to navigate towards a "reward" in a remarkably similar way to real rodents, using landmarks to explore.

Very interesting, with a lot of implications.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:10 AM

June 26, 2007
Now That's Data Flow

It looks like Alan Boyle has been having a good time in France. Today he writes about the grid, at CERN.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:37 AM

June 18, 2007
More Options

Randall Parker has a list of consequences when the cost of individual gene sequencing comes down (as it inevitably will). I found this one interesting:

Discovery of genetic variations that contribute to appearances such as genes for eye and hair color, complexion, hair texture, facial shape, and other attributes that contribute to visual desirability.

Physical desirability is a two-way street. We are bred to appear desirable, but we're also bred to view desirable people as desirable. I wonder if some people might not figure out how to rearrange their genes to change what is desirable to them? That's probably a much tougher problem, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:17 AM

Save The Planet

...by not recycling:

...recycling is no way to reduce global warming. In fact, by increasing energy use, it worsens it.

[Update mid morning]

Someone asked in comments in this post if I made up the phrase "Green Man's Burden," and if it was the first usage. Well, it turns out that I wasn't first (though I did come up with it independently). Here's an instance of it at the Competitive Enterprise Institute back in 2000. And here's an instance on Usenet from 1991. Great minds think alike, I guess.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:17 AM

June 16, 2007
Less "Invasive"

Now here's a breakthrough that I hope they can get to market quickly:

A simple blood test may eventually replace the dreaded and highly invasive colonoscopy for detecting colon cancer, say U.S. researchers.

Bring it on.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:02 AM

June 15, 2007
I Could Have Used One Of These When I Was In Management

Today's special at Woot is a USB-controlled missile launcher. Which means that it will work with a laptop for mobile applications.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:26 AM

June 14, 2007
But Other Than That, It's Perfect

Iain Murray doesn't think much of the energy bill:

It will raise energy prices, raise food prices, increase hunger, worsen appliance performance, make the roads more dangerous and bring back Carter-era gas lines and shortages just when we need them the least - after disasters. It's a horrendous concoction of every bad energy idea imaginable and will impact every family trying to make ends meet around the country. It's unbelievably stupid in its rehashing of failed ideas and do-it-yourself economics. It needs to go down in flames, and soon.

[Update about 2:30 eastern]

There's a request in comments for a link to the bill itself. I'm guessing that it's this one (thank Newt Gingrich for Thomas).

Also, the editors of National Review are pretty unimpressed as well.

[Late afternoon update]

Thomas links seem to have a finite (and short) lifetime. Just go to Thomas, and search for S.1115.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:56 AM

June 12, 2007
A Quiet Solution

Now that it's officially hurricane season, we've been thinking about investing in a generator. But this backup battery looks like it might be an interesting solution. It's also got a fifteen hundred watt voltage inverter built in, so it looks like you could use your car as a quiet gasoline generator.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:36 AM

June 09, 2007
"Eco-Manslaughter"

Roy Innes, on the Green Man's Burden. Contrary to Kermit, it's not that hard being green. It's only hard on the benighted objects of the greens' affection.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:28 AM

June 08, 2007
Wireless Power Transfer

Not for power satellites, but for powering or charging local devices, like cell phones. It doesn't say what the efficiency is, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:39 AM

June 07, 2007
Undying Comment Thread

The previous post on Freeman Dyson's global warming comments have kicked off a long (and apparently informed and happily troll-free) discussion on Bob Bussard's latest fusion concept.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:46 AM

June 05, 2007
Return To The Blogosphere

I hadn't noticed it before, but apparently Howard Lovy is back, blogging about nanotech.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:24 AM

May 24, 2007
And So It Begins

Dell is shipping Linux machines. Redmond can't be happy. It will be interesting to see how they sell.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:04 AM

Fighting Climate Change

With planetary engineering schemes.

Sure beats Kyoto. And the solar shade idea would be a great market to drive down launch costs.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AM

May 23, 2007
DNS Problems?

If anyone is still having DNS problems with Bellsouth (now AT&T), or any other ISP, this looks like an interesting solution. It's a value-added free DNS service, that makes money from ads when you type in a bad URL. It also claims to block phishing sites, so it provides additional security.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:46 AM

May 22, 2007
The World Made Smaller

I hadn't noticed, but Sunday was the eightieth anniversary of Lindbergh's historic flight, and yesterday the anniversary of his landing in Paris, over twenty-four hours later. But Louise Riofrio remembered, and has a post on the past and future of airliners.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:11 AM

May 21, 2007
Asimov 2.0

Phil Bowermaster has some thoughts on updating the Three Laws of Robotics.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:32 AM

May 16, 2007
Now There's An Improvement

<tone="sarcastic">Well, I'm sure glad that AT&T bought Bell South.</tone>

Their POP server has been down much of the day. When I go to the Bell South technical support web page, the link to "Network Status" no longer exists, even though when one does a search on "Network Status" one receives instructions to go to the Bell South technical support web page, and clink on the "Network Status" link...

The only other option is to chat with a representative. So I follow the link (it only works in Explorer, of course, not Firefox), and fill out the form with my name, rank, and phone number. And problem description. Which has a limited text field so it won't allow me to print out the last letter of the problem. Or a complaint about their text box that does that. I click on the button to "Chat without diagnostics." I get a new page that says the following:

The BellSouth FastAccess DSL eAgent option is currently unavailable.
The hours of operation to chat are as follows:

DSL Technical Questions 7:00AM - 12:00AM 7 days a week
Billing Questions 8:00AM - 7:00PM Monday through Friday
8:30AM - 5:30PM Saturday
Order Status Questions 8:00AM - 8:00PM Monday through Friday

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for choosing BellSouth FastAccess DSL!

They're only available during working hours and some hours on weekends. I receive this message at a little after three Eastern time. But note that there's no time zone. Maybe the scheduled times for chat are in whatever time zone Bangalore is in.

So, no email, no network status, no way to chat, no way to email (because I don't have email, remember?). All I can do is call 611 and see if I can find a non-moron who knows what a POP server is, and doesn't ask me to reboot my PC.

I don't hold out high hopes. And here I was, thinking that Bell South Interweb service sucked before they were reabsorbed into the AT&T borg...

I mean, I am still the number two Google hit for "Bell South DNS problem," two and a half years later.

[Update a couple minutes after posting this]

The power of the blogosphere! As soon as I put this post up, the server started working again. TM gets results!

[Update a couple minutes after the last update]

Now it's timing out again. Oh, well.

[Update a few minutes later]

And now it's working again. But even if it is, that doesn't excuse their pathetic on-line help setup.

[An update an hour or so later]

OK, I'm only number two for "Bell South DNS problem", but I'm numero uno for "tech support idiocy."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:55 PM

May 11, 2007
An Interesting Question

Is aging natural? Or normal? And even if it is, does that mean we shouldn't try to beat it?

I think that part of this is people falling prey to the naturalistic fallacy, and mistakenly assigning a good/bad value to "normal."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:47 AM

May 10, 2007
Sweet

A homebuilt 3-D printer that creates objects out of sugar.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:32 AM

May 08, 2007
A New Renewable Energy Source

Tapping the jet stream?

And have we overemotionalized the climate debate? The most interesting thing about this article is the source.

[Update in the afternoon]

From comments:

What kind of an axe does Rand then have to grind here? It seems to be just hypocricy. We see a string of climate articles with his blurbs suggesting "Warmmongers are in trouble" or some such. Why oh why?
Because the policy outcomes, if global warming is admitted to be real, are something he is against in principle? And yet he advocates against denying evolution in a few posts to the side. Oh, the irony.

My "axe to grind," if I have one, is that I am a skeptic (not a "denier") on the need to up-end our economy for climate change, as I am on all religions. If global warming is "real," we'll deal with it as the effects become evident, and we'll have a much better chance of having the resources in the future with which to deal with it if we don't panic about it right now.

My "axe to grind" is against the overrighteous and hypocritical moralists who want to preach to the rest of us how to live while refusing to live by their own sermons, and purchasing indulgences for themselves. It is against the watermelon socialists who are using this new religion as a means to implement the collectivist (and ultimately totalitarian) social goals that they couldn't achieve in the Cold War.

This long ago ceased to be about science. And, FWIW, evolution remains on much more solid footing than climate models.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:30 AM

May 01, 2007
The Top Fifteen

...geek blog sites.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:02 AM

April 30, 2007
Aging Is A Disease

...that we should view as curable.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:25 PM

Or A Vasectomy, Either

Note to self: should the need unfortunately arise, tell the surgeon that I don't want him to do my colostomy this way.

Either way, I suspect that you'll still pay through the nose.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:53 AM

April 28, 2007
A View Of The Future

From the past. Lileks would have a great time with this.

Well, we did get the undersea tourist boats.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:18 AM

April 25, 2007
The Way We Age

An interesting, but somewhat depressing look at the upcoming crisis in geriatrics, over at the New Yorker.

What struck me about it was the assumption that the decline is inevitable, and that we have to focus on managing it, when in fact we need to put a lot more effort into technologies that can stop aging, and even reverse it. The assumption is that living too long is a problem, and it is, if we don't figure out how to maintain and restore the ability of the body to repair itself.

[Via Alan Boyle]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:47 AM

April 23, 2007
Blue-Ray Versus HD-DVD

Who will win out?

Following a market lead wrestled free in February, Blu-ray’s performance is now said to have evolved to the point where nearly three of every four HD discs sold belong to Sony’s format. Moreover, Home Media Magazine’s research, which is built on estimations from movie studios and Nielsen VideoScan point-of-sale records, further supports the notion that consumer choice resides firmly in Blu-ray’s corner.

OK, my questions are a) do those numbers include pr0n and b) if not, where is the pr0n industry going? My theory is that whither the pr0n industry, so goeth the rest of the new media world.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:12 PM

Can I Plug Mine In?

Now here's a solar panel installation business I could really get into:

It's a two-piece bikini with photovoltaic film strips attached strategically to various parts of the clothing, so that you can charge your gadgets while you're catching some rays. Better yet, the charging takes place via those rays.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:43 AM

April 11, 2007
World, Flesh, Devil

I was surprised to learn that Virginia hadn't read Bernal's classic. As she notes, the price would indicate that it could support a new printing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AM

April 09, 2007
Hard Or Soft Nanotech?

The answer seems to be (unsurprisingly, at least to me) both. And that's good news, since many have claimed "neither."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:33 AM

April 02, 2007
Space Marathon

An astronaut is going to run the Boston Marathon remotely. I think the astronauts should demand conjugal visits.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 12:21 PM

March 24, 2007
Dawn of Modular Spaceflight Revolution

John Carmack's announcement of a modular rocket that can reach suborbital space for $25,000 per module is revolutionary. Each module can independently reach suborbital space. Group the modules together and any size or shaped payload can reach suborbital space. The cost to get to space is $250 per module in fuel costs.

In a video that John said will be posted to his web site, he showed the modules being hooked together in a square arrays. These arrays can then be stacked for staging.

He predicts that he will produce the Armadillo orbital "Sputnik" which John also referred to as Mitchell Burnside-Clapp's DYANN--Do You All Notice Now?

There are two revolutions here. The first is an open source garage revolution. With a small warehouse and a budget closer to Charlie Farmer's in Farmer Astronaut than COTS winners RpK and SpaceX, Armadillo in a humble, matter-of-fact tone is brashly announcing an orbital program.

The second is the price of the revolution. At $25,000 per module, the capital cost per delta V is unprecedented and substantially lower than RpK or SpaceX.

This revolution was incrementally developed in plain sight and demonstrated in plain sight. No one thought Carmack's Pixel and Texel were minimum concept proofs for a 64-module version. No one thought that by looking at the specifications they were seeing the ultimate cheap first stage and second stage and third stage.

Carmack thinks he can get the mass ratio down from 27 to 15 with some low cost evolutionary modifications. At 15-1, he can loft "Pixel 2" onto a suborbital trajectory with a 64-module first-stage lifter made up of 16 Pixels arrayed in a 4-4 grid or 8x8 single modules. Pixel 2 will be full of fuel and be the second stage. On top of Pixel will be a single module with a 25 lb. payload that will make it all the way to orbit. The cost for this delivery? The capital costs would be about $1.7 million if he can stay under $25,000 per module. If only the first stage is reusable, the cost per flight would be $150,000. If the first and second stage are reusable, the cost per flight would be $60,000. For a three stage system, that is a not very revolutionary price of $2400 per pound to orbit (albeit revolutionary vs. old space of $10,000+ per pound though.)

If they achieve a two-stage to orbit system where the second stage is also reusable, that would deliver a 100 lb payload to orbit for $35,000. That is roughly half fuel and oxidizer and half capital assuming a 100 flight lifetime. $350/lb is revolutionary. If this could be scaled up to Spacex Falcon IX payload size of 22,770 lbs., that's $8 million or $22 million for a Falcon IX heavy sized payload of 62,500 lbs. An array of 100x100 modules supporting a second stage array of 25x25 modules boggles the mind and would cost $265 million in capital costs at $25,000 each. The flight rate assumptions would not be invalidated, however, because the vehicle could be broken up to support the suborbital tourism industry and smaller orbital payloads.

On the optimistic side, this price is before mass production. This mass ratio is before switching to methane (a 10% improvement in ISP over alcohol and a 50+% fuel price drop too). Google revolutionized servers by using modular white box CPUs. Now Carmack is making a bid to do the same thing. Nevertheless, Henry Vanderbilt cautions me that there is a long way to go from a view graph to orbit.

---------Update 3/24/07 7:00 MST---------

A wide plane requires a bunch of successively stronger connectors moving inward and results in very little additional payload delivered by the outside modules. This is especially true with a square grid which require more connections moving in from the corners than a hexagonal one. Other possibilities are more stages so connections are shorter and more vertical and larger, taller modules for lower stages.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 06:09 AM

March 21, 2007
Getting Closer

Sharon Machlis, online editor for Computer World, says that Linux is almost ready for the workplace. She did a test drive.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:58 AM

March 15, 2007
Don't Have Your Heart Attack

...on a weekend. And this seems like good advice:

...people worried about a heart attack should find out which hospitals in their area offer 24/7 angioplasty — and get there fast if they suffer chest pain, shortness of breath or cold sweats...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:54 AM

March 14, 2007
Is There A Bluetooth Expert In The House?

If one has Vonage, and a bluetooth dongle on the computer, is it possible to use a the same bluetooth headset that one uses with one's cell phone with it? If so, what's involved?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:41 AM

March 10, 2007
Thoughts On The Time Change

I think it will be pretty hilarious if, after all the hoopla about Y2K that turned out to be nothing (admittedly, we had a lot of warning), the world comes to an end because Congress decided to extend daylight savings time a month.

I've updated both the desktops (at least on the Windows side) and my Treo/cellphone, but who know what the morrow brings?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:29 PM

March 09, 2007
An Arms Race

A technical solution from Adobe (and Canon) may be appearing to solve the fauxtography problem, as I hoped and predicted. I assume that other camera companies will want to cooperate as well, if they want professional journalists to use their equipment. Interestingly, Adobe is sort of in an arms race with itself, simultaneously coming up with better image manipulation software while at the same time developing means of defeating it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:08 AM

March 03, 2007
Extreme Plumbing

These guys have a great job:

We're very careful with these tanks — high and low pressure. We saw firsthand what they can do when testing that classic scene from the movie Jaws in which police chief Brody, played by Roy Scheider, shoots the scuba tank wedged in the mouth of Bruce the Shark with a rifle. The tank blows up, shredding the great white's head.
We tried it — minus the shark. We placed an M-1 Garand rigged for remote-control firing in the MythBusters testing facility — i.e., one of our scorched and battered shipping containers — and aimed the rifle at a 3000-psi scuba tank. The .30-caliber bullet drilled a neat hole, and the tank rocketed around impressively — but didn't blow up.

We like things to blow up. So we tried it again, this time with a cigarette-pack-size block of C4 explosive strapped to a fresh tank. When we detonated the C4, the blast from the ruptured tank was so powerful that it bulged the sides of the shipping container.

Another myth we tested was whether a high-pressure air tank would take off like a rocket if its valve was knocked off. So we dropped a large weight from a height of 10 ft. onto the valve of a tank at 2500 psi. The tank punched through two cinder block walls before it came to a dusty, battered rest. Scary stuff.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:53 AM

March 01, 2007
What The World Needs

A toy for seven and up that nurtures a child's inner sadist.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:35 AM

Try, Try Again

Is Windows Vista Microsoft's New Coke?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:26 AM

The Top Five

Computing technologies that are hot for '07.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:38 AM

February 28, 2007
Hope For Space Elevators?

Carbon nanotubes seem to be self repairing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:15 AM

February 26, 2007
He Survived

Alan Boyle has encountered a cyborg. She's not as scary as popular media would depict. In fact, any one who doesn't like her has to be a little inhuman themselves...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:14 PM

Dude!

You're getting Linux on Dell:

"The second-order implications are even more interesting, because I think there's no way that Michael Dell didn't see this coming," Raymond wrote. "His company has been quietly selling Linux machines to business customers for several years -- which means he's got more than enough real-world market data to see where the trends are going. Mr. Dell had to have a pretty strong suspicion that Linux preinstalls were going to show up as a top user demand before the fact -- and yet, he let IdeaStorm happen anyway. This tells me he isn't nearly as nervous about angering Microsoft as he used to be. Something in the balance of power between the world's largest PC vendor and the crew in Redmond has shifted, and not in Redmond's favor. You can bet money on that."
Running Linux on Dell laptops could have another lure, Raymond wrote. "I think one significant problem Dell and Microsoft are facing is just that Vista is too resource-hungry and bloated to run well on sub-$500 machines, which are the highest-volume market segment now. Dell may be arranging itself some maneuvering room to preinstall an [operating system] that won't make its low-end hardware look like crap."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:12 AM

I Did Not Know That

Minneapolis had a weatherball (perhaps still does? Not clear). I remember the one in Flint, growing up, but I didn't realize that it had been syndicated (perhaps from somewhere else?). It was built the year after I was born, so it's almost as old as me (sigh...).

[google, google...]

Ah, here we go:

There are or were other weather balls, constructed by banks such as the ones built by Michigan National Bank in Grand Rapids MI, Texas National Bank in Houston TX and Northwestern Bank in Minneapolis MN. Grand Rapids TV station WZZM channel 13 bought the dismantled Michigan National Bank weather ball, restored it and moved it to its studio location at the I-96 and US-131 interchange. KCAU-TV in Sioux City IA also has a weather ball.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AM

February 24, 2007
Mile-High Skyscrapers

They're on the way. But not in the US, or at least, not in New York.

And you won't get me into one of them.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:25 AM

February 23, 2007
We're Number 18!

C'mon, Wolverines. Don't let those Vols show you up.

Get down to pirating! Arrrrrr...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:09 PM

February 22, 2007
Just A Matter Of Time

Computers are already better than humans at chess (and I can recall a time, back in the eighties, when there were predictions that this would never happen, or at least not for many decades), but they still don't do that well at Go.

Well, that may be changing:

Two Hungarian scientists have now come up with an algorithm that helps computers pick the right move in Go, played by millions around the world, in which players must capture spaces by placing black and white marbles on a board in turn.
"On a nine by nine board we are not far from reaching the level of a professional Go player," said Levente Kocsis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' computing lab SZTAKI.

The 19 by 19 board which top players use is still hard for a machine, but the new method is promising because it makes better use of the growing power of computers than earlier Go software.

I, for one, welcome our go-playing overlords.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:14 PM

February 21, 2007
That's Moving

I mentioned how impressed I was with the speed of the Eurostar train from London to Brussells. I was guessing that we were going a hundred fifty mph or so. Apparently, that wasn't too far off, but it's going to go even faster later this year:

Beforehand, it took nearly three hours to make the crossing, and now it will take two hours, 35 minutes. Further upgrades scheduled to be completed in 2007 will knock another 15 minutes off. The trains will finally travel at their top speed of 186 miles per hour, according to Eurostar.

Sure wouldn't want to hit a cow at those speeds. At the least, it would be instant hamburger. A system like that would be a huge hit for LA-Vegas, if they could resolve the political and financial issues.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:49 PM

Retro

Here's an interesting sociological experiment:

Wall, 32, an Eastern Michigan University graduate student, hasn't left her west-side Ann Arbor home for another plane in the space-time continuum. She's simply going a month — through March 2 — without using any technology created since 1950. It's part of her master's degree project on the impact of technology in modern life.
When she has a headache? Uncoated aspirin instead of ibuprofen. When she needs to contact a friend? Snail mail or an antique rotary phone. When it snows? Sledding instead of reality TV. Her project is a completely original conception, said Professor Denise Pilato, who teaches in EMU's College of Technology.

"In some ways it's an experiment,'' she said. "And being that it's an experiment, there are a lot of surprises for her.''

Seems like she overdid it, though. There were televisions in the fifties.

Anyway, let's just hope that she doesn't go as far as these academics did:

A passionate critic of Euro-American "linear thought," Grok is one of a growing number of college professors around the nation who have relocated to caves, mud huts and makeshift sweat lodges to demonstrate their disdain for western culture and technology. For Grok, 44, the move to a cave was a natural step in his intellectual progression.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:58 AM

February 20, 2007
Fighting Fakes

Alan Boyle has a post on the current state of the art in detecting fauxtography. As the researcher notes, this will always be an arms race. With molecular manufacturing, it's going to become possible to create copies of art that is indistinguishable from the original. I also think that it will mean an end to cash, because it won't be possible to create uncounterfeitable currency.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:01 AM

February 17, 2007
Life In The Twenty-First Century

Building a silicon cortex.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:35 AM

February 07, 2007
Storage Breakthrough

Hitachi has announced their terabyte drive.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:52 AM

February 06, 2007
Ummmmmm.....

Mystery Meat.

One technical challenge: Muscle tissue that has never been flexed is a gooey mass, unlike the grained texture of meat from an animal that once lived. The solution is to stretch the tissue mechanically, growing cells on a scaffold that expands and contracts. This would allow factories to tone the flaccid flesh with a controlled workout.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:42 PM

Tell Us How You Really Feel

I'm not sure--it's kind of subtle, but I think that this is a guy who really hates Macs:

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.
PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:10 AM

February 01, 2007
Embracing Their Inner Geek

In a follow-up to the chicks and the singularity article, it turns out that girls are geeks, too.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:10 AM

January 25, 2007
Life Despiced

One can look at the radar for south Florida, and see that we've had our rain for the next few days.

As time goes on, uncertainty (at least about things amenable to modeling and based on solid laws of physics) is reduced yearly.

Economically, it's a good thing to know that there's no rain in the next few days. It makes it easier to plan irrigation, boat outings, etc. And that's a good thing, and one not to want to end.

But still, there's a nostalgia (at least for those, like many of my generation, who remember the uncertainty) of not knowing what was to come next. To anticipate the unanticipatible. While the gain is better than the loss, the loss remains.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:49 PM

January 22, 2007
Not A Dog

There's an old saying that, on the Internet, no one can tell you're a dog. It turns out that that's probably not true. In fact, anonymity is going to be getting hard with this kind of analysis.

...differences remain in the way that people tap out their electronic secrets. Internet users have characteristic patterns of how they time their keystrokes, browse Web sites, and write messages for posting on online bulletin boards. Scientists are learning to use these typeprints, clickprints, and writeprints, respectively, as digital forms of fingerprints.
While the aims of this research are to strengthen password security, reduce online fraud, identify online pornographers, and catch terrorists, the technology is raising some troubling possibilities. "It's a bit scary," says Jaideep Srivastava, a Web researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. "The privacy implications are huge."

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:28 AM

Let Email Be Email

I've also noticed the huge increase in image spam for stock scams. The solution to this seems pretty simple to me. Just block any email with an image in it.

Sure, a lot of people who like to flood their friends' mailboxes with pictures of cute puppies will whine, but is this really a critical need for email? Much of the evil of spam is enabled by the bloat that emails have become in recent years, with HTML and embedded graphics (just one more bit of proof that Microsoft is evil).

Just say no, mail servers, and go back to ascii. And for users, if you want to show someone a picture, send them a link, or attach it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:30 AM

January 19, 2007
Molecular Machinery

Behold: molecules that can walk and deliver payloads in a straight line. This could lead to some interesting breakthroughs.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here are some interesting pictures of semi-conductor junctions and charge carriers, at the nano-scale:

"There's no major surprises here," says Andreas Heinrich of IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. "But the fact that they are actually imaging the electric properties is a big step forward." Surprises may show up when de-vices shrink below around 50 nanometers, Heinrich says, because dopant atoms will be so scarce that their individual positions may affect the de-vice's function. Tomihiro Hashizume of Hitachi's Advanced Research Laboratory in Hatoyama, Japan, says the ability to see precisely how charge carriers move "will be indispensable for the further progress of de-vice miniaturization."

[Update a little after 11 Eastern]

A surgical microbot.

The scientists are designing the 250-micron de-vice to transmit images and deliver microscopic payloads to parts of the body outside the reach of existing catheter technology.
It will also perform minimally invasive microsurgeries, said James Friend of the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory at Australia's Monash University, who leads the team. The researchers hope the de-vice will reduce the risks normally associated with delicate surgical procedures.

The piezoelectric approach seems promising.

How much further behind will be nanobots?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:55 AM

January 18, 2007
A Magic Bullet?

Conventional wisdom has long been that there are many types of cancers, and that we won't come up with a single "cure for cancer"--that there will be many different treatments for different problems. But some researchers think that they may have in fact found a low-cost drug that cures many types of cancer, with few side effects.

This seems like pretty big news.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 AM

January 17, 2007
A Beating Heart

Manufactured from stem cells. Some of the commenters are skeptical, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 AM

January 16, 2007
Extending Moore's Law

Through a new kind of chip architecture.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:14 AM

January 10, 2007
Terabits

Developments in photonic ICs.

I'd think that Cisco must be considering an acquisition.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:58 AM

January 06, 2007
It's All Good

Moonbats (and non-moonbats) often accuse me of being a "right-winger" and a "conservative." I guess that's because I don't think that George Bush is Hitler reincarnated, and that removing dictators who support terrorism is a good thing. But if anyone really wants to know why I'm not a conservative, Will Saletan has an interesting example. So-called liberals are afraid of cloned animals and cloned food. Conservatives seem to look askance at cloned humans. I've got no problem with either.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:03 AM

January 05, 2007
Quite A Breakthrough

...if it really works:

Associate Professor Michael King of the University of Rochester Biomedical Engineering Department has invented a de-vice that filters the blood for cancer and stem cells. When he captures cancer cells, he kills them. When he captures stem cells, he harvests them for later use in tissue engineering, bone marrow transplants, and other applications that treat human disease and improve health.

It's not clear from the article how close it is to actual use on humans.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:18 PM

A 300 TB Drive

Less than four years away?

According to Joystick, Seagate boffins are apparently working on a hard-drive which uses heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) techniques.
The boffins think that this will mean that they can shove 50TB of data into a single square inch of drive space, or around 300TB of information on a standard 3.5-inch drive.

This means that you can stuff the entire Library of Congress onto your hard-drive without any compression.

Man, that will hold a lot of 3D holographic pr0n...

Of course, by then Vista 2010 will require 250 TB for a standard install...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:08 AM

December 29, 2006
Walking Through The Minefield

David Brin has a long, but useful essay on the future of technology and humanity. I may have some thoughts later.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:46 AM

December 26, 2006
Accelerating Toward Actuarial Escape

Lawrence Altman describes the tremendous advances in medicine that we've made in the last half century:

Few people appreciate that medicine has advanced more since World War II than in all of earlier history. Newer drugs and de-vices and better understanding of disease mechanisms have vastly improved the care of patients. For male babies born in this country in 1960, the life expectancy was 66.6 years; for female babies, it was 73.1 years. In 2004, the figures, respectively, were 75.2 and 80.4. Medical advances account for much, though not all, of the gain.

My father had his first coronary in 1968, at the age of 45. He had a second one a little over ten years later, and died at age 55. I'm now several years past the age at which he had his first, and approaching the point at which I'll live longer than he did, partly due to massive changes in lifestyle (he smoked and was overweight, and grew up on a typical Jewish diet of that era), but also because we can now monitor such things, and keep control of blood pressure and cholesterol, and if I do have a coronary event, I'll have a much better chance of rapid and useful care than he did in either case. I continue to hope that I'll live to see actuarial escape velocity.

Even more interestingly (at least to me), he also writes about the hubris and unjustified arrogance of the medical profession:

During my training, most professors said that all diseases were known. That hubris left doctors unprepared when AIDS came along in 1981 to cause one of history’s worst pandemics. H.I.V. has infected an estimated 60 million people and killed 25 million of them.
...We may snicker over Eisenhower’s treatment. But imagine the laughter in 2056 as people look back at the brand of medicine and public health that we consider so sophisticated today. For all that doctors have learned in the last half-century, we are ignorant about far more.

I've written about this subject in the past, in the context of MDs who refuse to believe or even imagine that future technologies may hold powers of cure (including curing the damage caused by cryonic or other suspension) that don't exist today. As he points out, while the medical progress within our lifetimes to date has been astounding, the future, and perhaps even the near future, holds much more.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:07 AM

December 22, 2006
Picking A CPU

This is timely. I've been planning to do some system upgrades, but haven't been paying that much attention to the last couple generations of processors. Here's a nice overview of the situation and a buyers' guide.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:57 AM

December 19, 2006
Thirty-Two Years Of Microcomputing

I remember when this issue of Popular Electronics came in the mail. I wanted one, but couldn't afford it at the time (or at least, I couldn't justify spending the money on what was essentially a toy). As this article notes, it first became publicly available thirty-two years ago today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:19 AM

December 18, 2006
Death Of A Species

I'm sure that Bush and Rove will get the blame for this any minute now.

For some 20 million years, the baiji, also called the white-flag dolphin, frequented the Yangtze’s sandy shallows, using sonar to catch fish in the silty flow.
In the last few decades, the dolphin’s numbers plunged as rapidly as the Chinese economy surged. The Yangtze’s sandy shallows, which the baiji frequented, have largely been dredged for shipping.

The baiji sought fish that have been netted or driven from the river by pollution. And its sonar may have been disrupted by the propeller noise from boats above. A 1997 survey counted 13 baiji in the river. None of the dolphins survive in captivity.

I wonder if they saved a lot of DNA samples? If so, we may be able to get them back as technology continues to advance.

In fact, if there isn't already such a thing, someone should establish a DNA bank for endangered species, as a backstop. As with cryonics, we at least should be preventing information death.

[Noon update]

Well, there's at least one.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:45 AM

December 16, 2006
I, Nanobot

I haven't had the time to read through this whole thing (we're moving foliage into the house and decorating it, to the annual consternation of the cat), but I think it's worth a read. The Singularity continues to approach, and by definition, we are not prepared.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:55 PM

December 11, 2006
Faster Non-Volatility

Phase-change memory:

Scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda said they developed a material that made "phase-change" memory 500 to 1,000 times faster than the commonly-used "flash" memory, while using half as much power.
"You can do a lot of things with this phase-change memory that you can't do with flash," IBM senior manager of nanoscale science Spike Narayan told AFP.

"You can replace disks, do instant-on computers, or carry your own fancy computer application in your hand. It would complement smaller technology if manufacturers wanted to conjure things up."

The day's not far off that you'll be able to carry an unimaginable amount of knowledge around in your pocket.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:33 AM

An Interview With Elon

Here's a piece from yesterday's Mercury News. He's not a pure investor. It's part philanthropy:

I think the probability of humanity living longer is greater if we're a multi-planet species. I think that's fairly obvious. But I'm also quite optimistic about Earth. I don't think Earth is in any danger of imminent demise. I think we will solve the problems that we have before us, and that humanity will probably live for a very long time.
But there's always a chance that it could end. That's why people buy life insurance. They don't expect to drop dead tomorrow. Or car insurance. You don't expect to T-bone your car into a semi. But you might. That's why I'm a big believer in space exploration.

For me, space exploration is actually more interesting for positive reasons. I think humanity will be far more interesting and richer and diverse and just the future will be much more exciting and interesting if we are a space-faring civilization that is expanding among the stars than if we're forever on Earth.

That's the attitude I'd have if I had his kind of money.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:27 AM

Next Stop, Telepathy?

The Economist has an interesting survey on the future of the phone.

I'm not an early adaptor, and unlike the younger generation, I don't live with my cell phone--it's not an intimate and essential part of my life. I often forget to take it when I leave the house. Of course, this may be less a generational thing than the fact that I work mostly from home. When I'm traveling, I'm much more careful to keep it handy. But I wonder how many of these new developments won't be picked up by older generations unused to them?

It's also going to be a strange world, when most people are walking around seemingly talking to themselves like schizophrenics. We can still tell today because of the earpieces, but once they get smaller, or embedded in the body, it's going to be a lot harder for shrinks to tell the difference between people with imaginary voices in their head, and real ones.

[Update late morning]

I'm guessing from comments that my humor was a little too subtle today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 AM

December 07, 2006
Uninstalling Malware

I haven't bothered to download IE7, because I use Firefox 2.0 for the vast majority of my web browsing, and find IE6 acceptable for the rare occasions when a web site insists that I use Internet Explorer. Based on this article, it sounds like that was a good (non)move.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AM

December 04, 2006
Growing Acceptance

The scientific community is starting to believe in life extension. There's still a lot of resistance, though, as the discussion about grant titling indicates. There's an old saying (generated, I believe, in the wake of Kuhn's Structure Of Scientific Revolutions) that "science advances, funeral by funeral." Ironically, it may ultimately require the deaths of a generation of researchers to achieve indefinite lifespan.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:10 AM

December 01, 2006
Energy Breakthrough?

Solar-powered electrolysis, using a bioengineered protein.

Cool. Brings a whole new meaning to the (stupid) phrase "no blood for oil." In this case, it's blood to replace oil.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:21 AM

She Just Noticed?

This isn't particularly profound, but it's interesting to see a growing awareness of transhumanism and its implications among the non-technical commentariat. Mona Charen on life extension:

Let's stipulate that for those wealthy enough to take advantage of it (i.e., most Americans), science will make it possible for people — say, your children and mine — to live 200 years.
What would that mean? Let's see, Social Security benefits for 135 years? Medicare for the same period? Prescription nanobots for a century? Assuming that people will remain healthy and working for decades and decades (which is what the futurists predict), would the economy expand due to the continued productivity of well-trained people, or sink under the weight of the extra elderly? (Not all of those doddering around at the age of 140 are going to be on the tennis courts.)

The entire concept of family life would have to change. What would happen to the already high divorce rate if people had to spend the better part of two centuries together? How about military service? Would young men and women who could otherwise expect to live to such astounding ages be willing to risk dying at 20 or 25?

Of course, there's nothing magical about two hundred years. Once we figure out how to do body repair, there's no upper limit on lifespan, barring accidents. And the sociological implications are both staggering and unpredictable.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:06 AM

November 27, 2006
Forget About Mousetraps

Building a better nail.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:18 PM

November 16, 2006
Clogged Arteries

Glenn writes about a new book on traffic congestion, and how it's a bigger problem than people realize.

I've often thought that it is a massive economic waste. I also think that there are things that could be done about it that would be relatively low cost, and don't involved construction of new highways or relaning the roads. As I've noted before, if I were king, I'd launch a massive public education campaign on lane discipline, and enforce it with tickets. I'd be harder on left lane hogs than on speeders.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:38 AM

Ancient Nanotech

Were nanotubes the secret of Damascus blades?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:39 AM

November 15, 2006
Sublimating The Instinct

Phil Bowermaster (who's not the man he once was) has a some musings on virtual children. His co-blogger responds.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:41 AM

November 06, 2006
Running Out Of Room

Though he doesn't say it explicitly, Randall Parker explains why we'll have to eventually settle space.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:11 AM

November 04, 2006
Carbon Neutral?

SciAm reports a potentially interesting breakthrough in biofuels:

Dreyer and his colleagues built a reactor capable of producing hydrogen from soybean oil, biodiesel or sugar water without any of the buildup that would have resulted from a conventional process. To get the reactor warmed up, the researchers ignited a mixture of methane and oxygen in order to bring the catalyst to a searing 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Addressing concerns about keeping the process carbon-neutral, Paul Dauenhauer, another graduate student working on the project, notes that while methane is a fossil fuel, there are other ways to heat the catalyst that don't involve burning petrochemicals. What's more, once the reaction is running, it's self-sustaining, and methane and oxygen are no longer required.

A fuel injector like those used in a car atomized the biofuels into tiny droplets that landed on a hot rhodium-cerium catalyst, which converted the fuel to syngas. This reaction released energy and heated the catalyst. The heat and ratio of carbon and oxygen in the reaction kept the buildup from sticking to the catalyst. For each type of biofuel, nearly all the fuel was converted and about 70 percent of the hydrogen bound up in the fuel molecules was given off as gas, the researchers report in this week's Science. "We find we reach the theoretical maximum," says Dauenhauer.

Cool.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:42 AM

November 02, 2006
Breakthrough

A liver grown from umbilical cord blood. Leon Kass can't be happy about this.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:17 AM

October 27, 2006
The Next Big Thing On The Web?

Virtual worlds?

One of the arguments against space tourism as a long-term market is that as the VW technology advances, the real thing may actually be viewed as boring compared to the possibilities offered by programmable realities. I suspect that this will be true to some limited degree (particularly given the cost differential of doing things in cyberspace as opposed to meat space), but I'm sure that there will always be "Luddites" who refuse to hide in virtual worlds, protected from real consequences, but will prefer to go out and test their bodies and senses against the real thing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:21 AM

October 26, 2006
Cool

Firefox 2.0 has a spell checker built into its text boxes. Handy for blogging. It doesn't like the word "spellchecker."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:24 AM

October 13, 2006
A Lifesaver

Literally, from this medical breakthrough:

Composed of peptides, the liquid self-assembles into a protective nanofiber gel when applied to a wound. Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, research scientist in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and Kwok-Fai So, chair of the department of anatomy at the University of Hong Kong, discovered the liquid's ability to stop bleeding while experimenting with it as a matrix for regrowing brain cells in hamsters.
The researchers then conducted a series of experiments on various mammals, including rodents and pigs, applying the clear liquid agent to the brain, skin, liver, spinal cord, and femoral artery to test its ability to halt bleeding and seal wounds.

"It worked every single time," said Ellis-Behnke. They found that it stopped the bleeding in less than 15 seconds, and even worked on animals given blood-thinning medications.

The wound must still be stitched up after the procedure; but unlike other agents designed to stop bleeding, it does not have to be removed from the wound site.

The liquid's only byproduct is amino acids: tissue building blocks that can be used to actually repair the site of the injury, according to the researchers. It is also nontoxic, causes no immune response in the patient, and can be used in a wet environment, according to Ellis-Behnke.

Is this a drug, or a de-vice? I hope that the FDA won't get in the way of immediate field use. We need it on the battlefields, both in Iraq and in the emergency rooms of the inner cities. It seems to me that if what's stated is true, unnecessary (e.g., for further animal or even human testing) delay in deploying it should be considered criminal negligence.

[Note: misspelling of de-vice necessary for some arcane reason known only to the creators of Moveable Type (if they know)]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:00 PM

September 28, 2006
Poetry, Not Argument

For those morons who continue to think that I am a reflexive defender and fan of the Bush administration, there's no better argument against it in my opinion than its apparent worship of the likes of Leon Kass.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:26 PM

September 25, 2006
How Do You Check Their Pulse?

A continuous-flow artificial heart:

Frazier and his team have implanted pairs of commercially available ventricular-assist de-vices* into calves that had their hearts removed. The researchers say the de-vices* were able to pump blood and respond to the animals' needs based on their activities. "You put this in cattle and they stand up and moo and eat and wonder why everyone is looking at them so weird," says William Cohn, a collaborator on the research and director of minimally invasive surgical technology at the Texas Heart Institute.
...Cohn hopes that in the future, artificial heart technology will become much safer and easier to use, broadening the potential pool of patients. "It wouldn't surprise me if at the 2050 Olympics, there were standard and modified [competitor] divisions," he says.

Ahhh, life in the twenty-first century.

* Note: misspelling deliberate. For some weird reason, MT won't allow me to create a post with the word "dev i ces" in it. The script actually breaks.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:21 AM

September 18, 2006
Good News On The Life Extension Front

The Methusaleh Foundation just got a major donation.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:52 AM

September 12, 2006
Stability

The conservative case for life extension.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:17 AM

September 06, 2006
Splog Overload

Here's an interesting article at Wired about spam blogs, a problem that could take down the blogosphere if the search engines can't get it under control. I've had to ban blogspot.com from comments and pings a few months ago because there were so many comments and pings coming from blogspot splogs. One other warning for people like Jeff Foust:

Another giveaway: Both Some Title and the grave-robbing page it links to had Web addresses in the .info domain. Spammers flock to .info, which was created as an alternative to the crowded .com, because its domain names are cheaper – registrars often let people use them gratis for the first year – which is helpful for those, like sploggers, who buy Internet addresses in bulk. Splogs so commonly have .info addresses that many experts simply assume all blogs from that domain are fake.

Maybe he should see if personalspaceflightblog.com is available.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:06 AM

August 31, 2006
Nukes, Nano And Neutrality

Popular Mechanics has a new podcast up on prospects for nuclear power, who's right about "net neutrality" (hint--everyone's being disingenuous), and nanotech. Along with a Ted Stevens "tubes for rubes" remix...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:50 AM

August 26, 2006
Shopping For A New Phone

Does anyone know if a Palm Treo 650 can be used as a voice recorder?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:47 PM

August 24, 2006
You'll Be As Shocked As I Was

...to hear that the latest beta of Microsoft Vista is unstable and rife with bugs.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:03 AM

August 23, 2006
They Don't Know To Downshift

Every year, with the start of college, out comes the list to help us codgers understand the mindset of college freshman:

1. The Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is about as scary as the student union. 2. They have known only two presidents. 3. For most of their lives, major U.S. airlines have been bankrupt. 4. Manuel Noriega has always been in jail in the U.S. 5. They have grown up getting lost in “big boxes”. 6. There has always been only one Germany. 7. They have never heard anyone actually “ring it up” on a cash register. 8. They are wireless, yet always connected.

What I found most interesting, though was this comment (partially, I think, in response to this one):

38. Being techno-savvy has always been inversely proportional to age.

...My daughter and oldest son (20 and 22), both learned to drive a standard shift and are very good at it. My daughter, who needed a car for where she went to school (had to drive to several remote sites for classes) acquired a 1993 5-speed Honda. Upon returning from school, she complained that it would lose power going up long hills. They are bright and alert to the world, and would have few problems with the 75 items in the list, including having played the “state licence plate game.” My most recent failing as a father, though? Not having taught them to downshift.

Young people are certainly early adaptors when it comes to using new technology, and faster to pick up the user interface. But I'm not sure that the current generation actually understands the technology that it uses as much as previous ones did. They don't have to understand how things work, because we rarely fix things any more, and when we do, we take them to professionals to do so. Electronics are lost, or become obsolete, before they stop working, and even when they do break, they're rarely fixable, and are cheap enough to simply replace. Cars break down, but few people work on them (partly because things are so densely packed in them that it's quite difficult these days), other than those who do it professionally.

I just wonder if not understanding why and when to shift a manual transmission is a symptom of this. It just struck me as an interesting metaphor. For something.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 AM

August 20, 2006
More On Fauxtography

From The Economist:

In an effort to reel in photography, camera-makers are making it more obvious when images have been altered.
One way of doing this is to use image-authentication systems to reveal if someone has tampered with a picture. These use computer programs to generate a code from the very data that comprise the image. As the picture is captured, the code is attached to it. When the image is viewed, software determines the code for the image and compares it with the attached code. If the image has been altered, the codes will not match, revealing the doctoring.

Another way favoured by manufacturers is to take a piece of data from the image and assign it a secret code. Once the image file is transferred to a computer, it is given the same code, which will change if it is edited. The codes will match if the image is authentic but will be inconsistent if tampering occurred.

Digital signatures, just as I suggested. But even that won't be guaranteed:

...forgers have become adept at printing and rescanning images, thus creating a new original. In such cases, analysing how three-dimensional elements interact is key.

Yup. So we'll also need the army of photographers, for independent views of the event in question, and an army of ever-more-sophisticated bloggers to keep the forgers honest (or at least catch them when they're not).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:05 AM

August 18, 2006
Death To Caps Lock

This seems like a good idea to me. It would make it hard on spammers and netkooks, though. Then again, that's not a bug, it's another feature.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:21 AM

August 16, 2006
Splashing Cold Water

...on Ray Kurzweil. Derek Lowe is optimistic, but not that optimistic:

I agree that we can overcome the major diseases. I really do expect to put cancer, heart disease, the major infections, and the degenerative disorders in their place. But do I expect to do it by 20-flipping-19? No. I do not. I should not like to be forced to put a date on when I think we'll have taken care of the diseases that are responsible for 95% of the mortality in the industrialized world. But I am willing to bet against it happening by 2019, and I will seriously entertain offers from anyone willing to take the other side of that bet.

I hope (as I suspect he does as well) that he's wrong, but fear he's right. Still have to exercise and watch the diet. On the other hand, I do think we've already made pretty good strides on this front, and they may be sufficient to keep me going until whatever date needed.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:55 AM

August 14, 2006
Fauxtography

My thoughts on the latest Reuters scandal (at least "Routers" has never used fake pics...) over at TCS Daily, and what it may mean for the future of press photography.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:04 AM

August 10, 2006
Pet Peeve

Two, actually. Voicemail systems for credit cards that insist you use voice, and don't offer a keypad option.

But this one also bugged me. After giving me the confirmation number, it asks "Can I repeat that for you?"

The answer is obviously "yes," and never going to be "no," but that obvious grammatical logic would put me in an infinite loop. It irks me as a pedant. I wish it would ask instead "should I repeat that for you?" If it were a human, I would joke with it, saying, of course you can, but you don't need to. But with a machine, it's simply irritating.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:32 PM

August 01, 2006
Nanotech?

Researchers have been able to tailor semi-conductors one atom at a time.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:19 PM

July 21, 2006
A Solution?

A quick non-conference post here: oil from plankton?

Pretty cool, if it works. It would be nice to put the mullahs out of business.

[VIa email from Billy Beck]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:04 AM

July 19, 2006
Good News On The Automotive Front

Rear-wheel drive is once again in ascendance.

[Via Kaus]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:51 PM

July 12, 2006
Get The Beta

Firefox 2.0 is ready for testing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:16 PM

July 11, 2006
The SENS Challenge

...offered by Technology Review against Aubrey de Grey's theses doesn't seem to be going so well. At least for the skeptics:

The judges’ unanimous opinion is summed up by Dr. Myhrvold, who observed: “Some scientists react very negatively toward those who seek to claim the mantle of scientific authority for ideas that have not yet been proved. Estep et al. seem to have this philosophy. They raise many reasons to doubt SENS. Their submission does the best job in that regard. But at the same time, they are too quick to engage in name-calling, labeling ideas as 'pseudo-scientific' or 'unscientific' that they cannot really demonstrate are so. We need to remember that all hypotheses go through a stage where one or a small number of investigators believe something and others raise doubts.”
Robotics pioneer Dr. Brooks stated: “I have no confidence that they (SENS detractors) understand engineering, and some of their criticisms are poor criticisms of a legitimate engineering process.”

I just noticed that the link to the original Technology Review announcement is broken at the MPrize site. Here it is.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:57 PM

The Greatest Invention Since Bottled Beer

Self-cooling beer bottles.

When I was a kid, I wondered why you couldn't have some kind of CO2 cartridge built in to the bottom of a can that when released and expanded would suck the heat out of the bottle. But I never bothered to run the numbers on it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:55 PM

July 06, 2006
From My Cold Dead Hands

That's the way you'll take away my fast forward on my DVR. This guy seems to be in denial over the loss of his business model:

"I'm not so sure that the whole issue really is one of commercial avoidance," Shaw said. "It really is a matter of convenience--so you don't miss your favorite show. And quite frankly, we're just training a new generation of viewers to skip commercials because they can. I'm not sure that the driving reason to get a DVR in the first place is just to skip commercials. I don't fundamentally believe that. People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand (options), that you can't skip commercials."

No, of course not. No one wants a DVR to be able to skip commercials.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:19 AM

July 01, 2006
The End Of The Battery?

This looks promising:

The researchers are working on a new device that uses carbon nanotubes to store and release electrical energy in a system that could carry as much power as today's lead or lithium batteries.
But unlike the rechargeable batteries used on today's cellphones and laptop computers, these devices could be recharged hundreds of thousands of times before wearing out.

There are the skeptics, of course:

Andrew Burke, research engineer at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California at Davis, said that the new capacitors would have to be many times more powerful than any previously created. "I have a lot of respect for those guys, but I have not seen any data," Burke said. "Until I see the data, I'm inclined to be skeptical."
Even if Schindall's capacitors work, he doubts they'll transform the electronics industry overnight. Companies have too much invested in today's battery systems, and it would take years before carbon nanotube capacitors could be mass-produced.

A classic innovator's dilemma.

I've never been a big battery fan. Chemical energy storage always seemed very crude to me.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:11 AM

June 30, 2006
Can't Miss This

A rocket belt convention. Be there, or be...on the ground.

And yes, this was a tough one to categorize.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:31 PM

June 28, 2006
Your Next OS?

Here's an extensive tour of Microsoft Vista.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:50 AM

June 26, 2006
Supply Chain Mismanagement

We bought a new telly back in February at Brandsmart USA (I never know whether the name is Brand Smart, or Brands Mart, or if the name is meant to be deliberately ambiguous that way)--our first leap into the HDTV water. It was a Samsung thirty-inch CRT.

When I first turned it on, a loud buzz emitted from it, lasting about a second. It was annoying, but once the picture came up, everything was fine. I should have taken this to be a warning.

A month or so ago, we lost stabilization on the horizontal sweep, resulting in wavy sides. Fortunately, this was one of those rare occasions on which we actually bought an extended warranty (it was past the ninety days from the manufacturer). After several days, we got a service call (about a week and a half ago, before I went to California). The serviceman took one look, and said that it was a bad power supply. He also told me that the noise at startup wasn't normal, and was also a bad supply, or perhaps a flyback transformer. If we'd reported it initially, we would have just gotten a new teevee.

But since it was past the ninety days, he was going to have to repair it. He told me that he'd have to order a new power supply from Samsung.

I called this morning (Monday), and they still didn't have it in, and wouldn't be able to even tell me when they would, unless I call them again on Wednesday (with the usual waits on hold through two different departments), and which time they could tell me.

How is it, in this day and age, that a major Korean electronics manufacturer can not only not have a part delivered to a major metropolitan area within a couple days, but not even know, after a week and a half, when they will?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AM

June 20, 2006
Knock It Out Of The Sky

Who would know if we fired at the Nork missile and missed?

If we could knock it out of the sky, it would take a lot of wind out of Kim Jong (mentally) Il's sails. But the down side would be the black eye and seeming impotence if the world knew that we tried to and couldn't.

So does Russia have radar that would see an interceptor launch over, say Alaska? If not, does anyone else? And if not, what would we have to lose in taking a shot? If we take it down, it's a huge coup, and if we miss, we just don't mention that we even attempted it.

I should note that I would think the chances of failure small, since we'd presumably be sending multiple interceptors, rather than the single ones we've used in previous failed tests. The fact that we have had successful single-shot tests would indicate to me that chances of success for a multi-shot attempt should be pretty high.

By the way, here's a good overview of the current missile defense situation.

I recall back in the eighties, when people were poo pooing the concept and saying that even if we could knock down some missiles, we couldn't get them all in a massive Soviet strike. One rejoinder to that (in addition to the fact that even getting half of them would put enough doubt into a Soviet commander's mind to perhaps preclude the attack at all) was that we needed it against rogue states. Like North Korea. This would result in scoffs by the anti-BMD folks.

"Why would they build a missile that we could shoot down when they could just smuggle the bomb into a container ship?"

I guess that Kim didn't listen to them. Fortunately, neither did we. At least ultimately, though it's taken much longer than it should have to deploy, as a result of years of obstruction from the port side of the political spectrum.

[Update on Wednesday at noon]

There's a long discussion in comments to a post by Jonathan Adler over at Volokh's.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:25 PM

June 16, 2006
Virus Alert

I've been getting a little flurry of emails, all of which say that they're publishing something about me somewhere (no mention of my name in the body of the email, of course), with a copy of the article and a photo supposedly attached for my approval. I also got one with a similar attachment indicating that it was a crime scene photo and they were looking for potential witnesses. No two alike yet, except for these features. I unzipped the attachment on a Linux machine, and it contains a *.exe file (presumably Windows executable). I've no idea what it does, but if you get one, too, my free advice is to not execute it.

Oh, wait. Now I see that Symantec has scrubbed one of them.

Here's the culprit. Backdoor.Naninf.E

It's a Trojan horse.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:48 AM

June 12, 2006
I Just Don't Get It

Was the world clamoring for an on-line spread sheet? What need does this serve that one can't get from an office suite? It's free? OK, so is this, and you don't have to worry about net lag, and storing your data on Google's server. Not to mention that it's as powerful as Excel, with (at least somewhat) file compatibility. Why do they think this was a good idea?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:05 AM

June 11, 2006
Can It Be Done?

Technology Review has some of the initial attempts to knock off Aubrey de Grey's thesis on the feasibility of immortality (actually, indefinite lifespace is a better phrase). I haven't read them yet, but my readers may be interested. They also contain a response to each by de Grey, and a counterresponse.

[Via the newly redesigned Cosmic Log website, which now looks a lot more bloggy, though I suspect that Alan still goes through an editor, or at least an uploader...]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:23 PM

June 10, 2006
A Glimpse Of The Future?

Al Zarqawi may have been done in by smart dust. While it's hard to disapprove of this particular application, this is only the beginning of this kind of technology. It will be interesting to see what kind of technological countermeasures appear in the future to allow the retention of privacy. It may be a losing battle.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:18 PM

June 08, 2006
Mixed Feelings

This is a useful, if somewhat disgusting advance in medical technology. Another step on the road to disease-fixing nanobots. But it's not ready for prime time, yet, I suspect. I was thinking this as I read, as well:

Gardner says the system would need careful testing. "If something this complicated goes wrong, it could be very hard to get out."

No kidding.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:49 AM

June 02, 2006
God And The Singularity

Some thoughts, over at The Speculist. Not sure how to categorize this post, but I went with "Technology and Society." The notion of "celebrities as proto-transhumans" is interesting.

And as a complete aside (based on a comment over there mentioning her), am I the only heterosexual American male who doesn't find Jessica Simpson particularly attractive?

[Update a few minutes later]

Just to take the post further off topic, I also have no idea what it is that anyone sees in Drew Barrymore (though I know from experience that Michael Mealing will find this heresy).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:44 PM

June 01, 2006
Busted

Radley Balko has Greenpeace dead to rights on their anti-nuke demogoguery.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:44 AM

May 30, 2006
The Morality Of Human Enhancement

Ron Bailey has a report on a conference this past weekend.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:08 PM

May 17, 2006
Greater Love Can No Person Have

The admirable Virginia Postrel writes about how she became a kidney donor:

Usually when someone is seriously ill, all you can do is lend moral support and maybe cook some meals or run a few errands. Nothing you do will make that person well. But if you donate a kidney, you can (with the help of a team of medical specialists) cure her. Who wouldn’t want to do it? I had no idea what a strange thought that was.
Nor did I sort through my motivations. I’ve spent a good bit of my life trying to save the world, mostly by working to beat back bad government policies, including some that would have stifled medical research. But even when your side wins, the victory is incremental and rarely permanent. And people of goodwill dedicated to the same good cause can be awfully contentious about how to achieve their goals.

In this case, there was something reassuring about the idea that the benefit wouldn’t depend at all on my talents, persuasiveness, or intellect. It would be simple. All I had to do was show up. In middle age, I’ve realized that I can’t save the world. But maybe I could save Sally. Someone had to.

The phrase gets overused, but read the whole thing. I just hope that we aren't far from the day that friends won't have to make such sacrifices in order for friends to live.

And here's the story from the recipient's side:

In polls, only 30 percent to 40 percent of Americans say they have designated themselves as donors on their driver's licenses or on state-run donor registries. As for the remainder, the decision to donate will fall to their families who are as likely as not to deny the hospital's request. In any event, only a small number of bodies of the recently deceased, perhaps 13,000 a year, possess organs healthy enough for transplanting.
The verdict is in: relying solely on altruism is not enough. Charities rely on volunteers to help carry out their good works but they also need paid staff. If we really want to increase the supply of organs, we need to try incentives — financial and otherwise.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:44 PM

May 09, 2006
More Hypersonic Hype

Via Clark Lindsey, here's one of those periodic stories that someone is working on a Concorde successor. As usual, it makes little technical or economic sense (at least the story, if not the reality).

It is full of contradictory statements, to anyone who understands basic aeronautics. Example:

Japan is trying to leapfrog ahead in the aerospace field with a plan to build a next-generation airliner that can fly between Tokyo and Los Angeles in about three hours. But a string of glitches, including a nose cone problem during the latest test flight in March, has led the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to look for an international partner.
“In the future, we think we need some kind of cooperation with NASA,” JAXA spokesman Kiyotaka Yashiro said. “Every developed country is doing some kind of research, the U.S., Europe and Russia. International cooperation is essential.”

This is just a tossed word salad. Three hours? Three hours isn't a Concorde successor--that's hypersonic. LA-Tokyo is about fifty-five hundred miles. Three hours means about 2000 mph (taking into account takeoff, landing, etc.). That's over Mach 3. That would be quite a leap, given that we haven't even figured out how to do Mach 2 affordably.

There is a "sweet spot" in aircraft speed that balances the costs of rising fuel consumption with speed, against the diminishing returns on higher speed, considering the time one spends getting to and from the airport. If one wants to have cost-effective supersonics, it doesn't make sense to choose a tougher goal of Mach 3 when an easier Mach 2.5 will still get one to Tokyo in four hours, a huge improvement over the current eleven.

And what do "nose cones" have to do with anything? It doesn't explain, but I'm not aware of nose cones (whatever they are) being a barrier to supersonic flight. And how does one leap to the conclusion that a "nose cone" problem is sufficiently insurmountable that it requires international cooperation in general, and help from NASA (which wasted over a billion dollars of taxpayer dollars on supersonic transport research in the nineties) in particular? Why would they think that NASA understands the problem, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary?

Yashiro’s comments came in response to a Japanese newspaper report that said JAXA would ally with NASA and the U.S.-based aerospace manufacturer Boeing Co. on the next stage of development. Japan is expected to develop the engine, which would generate 1 percent of the noise of the Concorde, while Boeing builds the airframe, the Nihon Keizai newspaper said.
Yashiro said the report was premature and that no decisions have been made on partners.

In other words, there's nothing to the story, which makes no sense. How does one have an engine that generates "1 percent of the noise of the Concorde"? And what evidence is there that Boeing knows how to build a cost-effective airframe for a supersonic transport?

Among the hurdles are two difficulties that plagued the Concorde, jet-engine noise and high fuel consumption. Japan has already successfully tested an engine that can theoretically reach speeds of up to mach 5.5, or more than five times the speed of sound.
But test flights of an arrow-shaped test model over the Australian desert have had mixed results.

In one incident, the aircraft prematurely separated from its booster rocket and crashed. Then, in a much-vaunted March 30 trial, the airplane failed to reach its target altitude and the nose cone cover failed to jettison as planned.

Well, now we understand the "nose cone" problem. They're referring to the scramjet experiments performed in Australia recently. But these have nothing to do with supersonic transports. As noted above, the goal doesn't require Mach 5, and scramjets are not necessary for supersonic transports. If the Japanese agency imagines that they do, it will indeed be a long time before they solve the problem.

And the problems with Concorde weren't just "engine noise" and fuel consumption (though the latter was a significant problem). Certainly side-line engine noise needs to be reduced, but this is a problem that results from conventional solutions, which require afterburners to get the low-lift airplane off the ground during takeoff. If they had better takeoff L/D, they wouldn't have an engine noise problem. And this analysis completely ignores the sonic boom issue (though it's not a problem for flight over the oceans). Until they figure this out, supersonic transports won't reach their full potential, which includes transcontinental markets.

As I've pointed out in the past, we won't have economic supersonic flight until we solve the shock-wave problem. Once we do that, we will simultaneously solve the sonic boom and the fuel consumption problems.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:29 PM

Attack Of The Flying Robots

It's actually a potentially serious problem:

The technology for remote-controlled light aircraft is now highly advanced, widely available -- and, experts say, virtually unstoppable.
Models with a wingspan of five metres (16 feet), capable of carrying up to 50 kilograms (110 pounds), remain undetectable by radar.

And thanks to satellite positioning systems, they can now be programmed to hit targets some distance away with just a few metres (yards) short of pinpoint accuracy.

Security services the world over have been considering the problem for several years, but no one has yet come up with a solution.

Sounds like a job for the hive mind of the blogosphere.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:43 AM

May 04, 2006
Splog Update

Joe Katzman has some thoughts (and a useful comments section) about the comment and trackack spam problem that (among other things) keeps people from posting Blogspot URLs here. It's not your father's Internet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:44 AM

April 28, 2006
Word To The Wise

Hosting Matters probably thought that it was a coup to host Instapundit, and it was, in the sense that they've gotten a lot of other high-profile bloggers as well. But there's a down side. It's not clear whether or not this DOS attack is an attack on so-called "right-wing" bloggers, but right now, I'm glad that I don't share a pipe with him, and the others. It should be noted that, even if the attacks appear to be originating from Saudi Arabia, this doesn't meant that the Saudis are doing it. There's a reasonable chance that it's being done by zombie machines directed from elsewhere (perhaps as an attempt to frame the Saudis for it, or just because they may have more unprotected machines).

When one sees the long list of quality blogs that were brought down due to this, it makes one think that there should be some diversification in hosting services, to eliminate this potential single-point failure for a significant part of the blogosphere.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:21 AM

April 24, 2006
Death Is Dying

This seems like good news:

This decline in death rates was so big it offset the increase in population, so the number of total deaths actually dropped by about 50,000 to 2,398,343 in 2004 from 2,448,288 recorded for 2003. Declines are rare -- the last one was in 1997 -- and this one was huge -- the biggest decline in 6 decades.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:26 PM

April 17, 2006
Potential Satire Bleg

Were any movies made by Hollywood about Pearl Harbor during the war? What movies were made during the war about events that precipitated the war?

As will probably be obvious, I want to know how soon is "too soon."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 PM

Creeping Technology

You thought the Mini was a small car? Behold, the nanocar. Sounds a little too small for me, but it should get great mileage:

The nano-car's molecular motor contains a pair of bonded carbon molecules that rotate in one direction if illuminated by a specific wavelength of light. After fixing the molecular engine to the car's chassis and shining a light on it, Tour's team confirmed that the engine was running by using nuclear magnetic resonance to monitor the position of the hydrogen atoms within it...
...Tour estimates that the car could travel two nanometres per minute but says his team has yet to find a way to watch their molecular automobile in action. "We think the car would drive along, but we wouldn't be able to see it and I don't think people would believe us," he says.

You don't say...

Even if they can get them working, I'll bet they still can't find a parking space in Manhattan.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:43 AM

April 14, 2006
Worst Technology Products Of The Year

Here are the top ten, according to Tech Republic. And the year is still young.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:15 AM

Tissue Engineering

I remember reading about this technique, using inkjet technology for constructing artificial organs, a few years ago. It's starting to pay off:

Cells seem to survive the printing process well. When layers of chicken heart cells were printed they quickly begin behaving as they would in a real organ. "After 19 hours or so, the whole structure starts to beat in a synchronous manner," says Forgacs.

The future may be here sooner than we think. And it makes things like Larry Niven's concern about people harvesting corpsickles for body parts seem pretty silly.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:09 AM

April 10, 2006
Anti-Viral Breakthrough?

This could have huge implications for almost any viral-borne disease (including avian flu):

Aethlon Medical, a small San Diego biotech company, is developing a portable de-vice that removes viruses from blood. Known as the Hemopurifier, it filters not only smallpox but numerous other viruses, including Marburg and Ebola.
The Hemopurifier resembles a shrunken dialysis cartridge, the rolling-pin-size de-vice that purifies the blood of patients whose kidneys have failed. Both use a filter to remove toxins from blood. But unlike traditional dialysis, the Hemo-purifier also includes plant-derived antibodies, such as cyanovirin, that bind to a variety of viruses and eliminates them from the bloodstream. The plant solution can be modified to weed out even genetically engineered germs.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:13 PM

April 05, 2006
Growing New Organs

...in the lab:

They took a bladder biopsy from each patient and isolated muscle cells and special bladder cells called urothelial cells, which they grew in the lab.
The cells were then placed onto a specially designed bladder-shaped scaffold and left to grow for seven to eight weeks.

The researchers surgically attached the engineered bladder to the patient's own bladder and followed progress for up to five years.

They're working on hearts as well. This sort of thing seems inevitable to me, and it's exciting that it seems to be coming along very quickly, because I (curiously, like everyone I know) am not getting any younger.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:28 AM

April 04, 2006
Live, Or Memorex?

Check out the latest generation in computer graphics. It's getting very, very (almost frighteningly) close to photorealistic.

[Via The Speculist]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:18 AM

April 01, 2006
The Latest Technology Gadget

I don't have much time to post today, because we have relatives visiting and went down to the Everglades, but I thought that this new electronic innovation was interesting. I'm going to order a bunch.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:06 PM

March 31, 2006
Oh, Am I Annoying You?

As Paul Hsieh says, you don't necessarily have to be autistic to find this device useful:

A device that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed.

Or maybe cluelessness on this front is one of the defining characteristics of autism.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:38 AM

March 30, 2006
The Customer Speaks

More trouble for Airbus.

As a Boeing stockholder, I'm happy, but I'm not thrilled with so little competition in the world air transport industry. It would be nice to see some non-subsidized companies in this business, but the barriers to entry are acrophobically high.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:22 AM

March 29, 2006
Ummmmm...Soylent

OK, my question is, will vegetarians be willing to eat this?

"I don't find it hard to believe that in vitro meat can be produced that tastes like hamburger or chicken nuggets," said Jason Matheny, one of the founders of Vive Research, a U.S. form working on growing meat for the global market. Most of the flavour in burgers and nuggets now sold in grocery stores or restaurants comes from seasoning or filler, he said.
Researchers have succeeded in growing bits of meat, the type that could be used in burgers or spaghetti sauce.

I mean vegetarians who are for ethical reasons, not because they don't like the taste of meat.

And speaking of ethics, here's a conundrum:

One group, which he would not name, did offer him money, but they wanted him to grow meat from human cells, so they could grow pieces of themselves to eat.
"I don't want to participate in high-tech human cannibalism," he said he told them.

Theoretically, he said, it would be possible. Researchers have harvested human myoblasts, cells that can grow into muscle fibre.

OK, so what would be wrong with that (ignoring the "yuck" factor)?

It kind of depends on why you think that cannibalism is wrong. In fact, it's akin to the dilemma of child p0rn that is produced without harming (or even utilizing) children. Is it wrong because someone else is hurt in the production of it, or is there something intrinsically wrong with it? In the case of the latter, the Supreme Court has ruled (at least it's my understanding) that the purpose of child-p0rn laws is to protect children from being molested in the production of the product, not (just) because the existence of child p0rn is perceived to be opposed to the best interests of society.

This seems similar to me. People will argue (as they do with synthetic p0rn) that having ready access to long pork may cause some people to want to experience the more gourmet version--the real thing, perhaps with a side of fava beans and a nice chianti, and should thus be made illegal, even though no persons are harmed in the manufacture of it.

I don't necessarily agree with that, but it's an interesting debate.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:41 AM

Huge Medical Advance

Getting rid of needles.

Cool.

[via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:21 AM

March 24, 2006
Nanobreakthrough

IBM has made an integrated circuit from carbon nanotubes:

With an 18-micron long carbon nanotube, the scientists built a 10-transistor ring oscillator, a device typically constructed to test new manufacturing technologies or materials. Using one instead of many carbon nanotubes to build an IC reduces the manufacturing steps and therefore cost...
...Electrical current moves more freely and faster through carbon nanotube than silicon, making carbon nanotube a more energy-efficient material for a speedier chip. It also is super small. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and a carbon nanotube is 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.

All these properties make carbon nanotube an appealing candidate for improving performance by piling on more and smaller transistors on a chip without causing overheating.

Moore's Law marches on.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:34 AM

Getting From Here To There

Stephen Gordon has some interesting thoughts about the transition generation (of which I'm probably part) for life extension:

Here's the point. This woman's years in serious decline are lengthened by life extension treatment. Instead of being disabled five years followed by death, she is disabled about 12 years followed by indefinite youth. Which is best?
In the history of the world, this is not a decision that many will face. Obviously those who are already dead never had a choice. And hopefully people who are young today will get stage three care when they need it. This is one generation's dilemma.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:38 AM

March 23, 2006
Still On The March

Here's a pretty disturbing interview with a University of Minnesota researcher on the potential for an avian flu pandemic:

If this were to go human-to-human—we talk about a worst-case scenario in terms of what happened in 1918, when roughly 2.5 percent of the world's population died. Of those who contracted it, roughly 5 to 6 percent of populations died, varying by age.
The mortality rate so far for this virus is around 55 percent, so this virus would have to attenuate a lot to get down to that level. And we do have good data. There are not a lot of mild, asymptomatic infections out there [with H5N1]. We're now aware of six studies involving over 5,000 close contacts of H5N1-infected people, in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Hong Kong, in which less than one person per thousand contacts had evidence of an H5N1 infection that was missed—that is, a mild infection.

This [virus] is not causing a lot of asymptomatic infections right now. Some people are saying there's a lot of mild [H5N1-related] illness all over out there, but it's just not true. That means we're not artificially inflating the mortality rate by missing a lot of infections. I'm actually pretty confident that the real mortality is almost that high.

So for that number to drop all the way down to a couple percent is a pretty big drop. Which says to me that when people talk about 1918 as a worst-case scenario, well, maybe that isn't the worst-case scenario. That's hard for people to hear, because then they think you're really trying to scare the hell out of people. But you know what? It's just the data.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:22 AM

How About Monkeys?

Microsoft says that Vista isn't "People Ready" yet:

Microsoft execs also talked about "Impacting People," then they dragged out fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, who seemed very "impacted" as he sang praise for Microsoft programs. Actually, he was reading meaningless statements from a TelePrompTer. Here is one of his quotes, verbatim: "When you combine people and technology, you have a very powerful combination." Think about that. Just let it sink in for a minute...
...No one mentioned the fact that in 1997, Microsoft held a similar event in New York City to declare that IBM's "big iron" was dead, because Windows NT--remember Windows NT?--was going to "scale up" and replace the mainframe. I wonder if Ballmer ever feels like the guy in Groundhog Day, reliving the same press conference, over and over. I know I do.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:33 AM

March 20, 2006
As I Become More Mature

(That title is a euphemism for having one foot in geezerhood), I don't need an alarm unless I need to get up very early after getting to bed late. I generally wake up pretty early anyway. And when I do need some external assistance, the plaintive little "beep, beep" of my watch is generally sufficient.

But when I was younger, I definitely could have used one of these: Behold, the world's ten most annoying alarm clocks.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:08 AM

Not Getting It

Via Glenn, I find a new group blog about the future. But I found this post pretty disappointing, and I'm hoping that it's not indicative of a more general cluelessness:

According to Cambridge University biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, the first person to live to 1,000 years of age has already been born. True or not, this idea is frightening to me mainly because the average person today starts to get pretty frail right around sixty, so unless we manage to improve the quality of life for the elderly along with their lifespan, we youngsters are doomed to some 900 years of infeebled misery. While I'm sure that at some point the necessity for some kind of physical rejuvenation process would breed the requisite ingenuity to devise one, I'm still not convinced that several decades, if not centuries, of torture would be worth it.

He can't have actually read much of what De Grey wrote, if he believes that the intent, or likely outcome, is to "provide nine centuries of torture." The whole point is to defeat senescence, not merely to keep frail bodies alive. Note also the commenter who is already bored with life at age fifty seven.

As I wrote in a letter to the editor of The Economist back in the late eighties, if your idea of life is to come home from work with a six pack in front of the television, then three score and ten is plenty (and perhaps even too long). But if you're a Leonardo or Leonarda da Vinci, several centuries could be all too short. We will have to come to terms with the reality that many won't want to live forever, and become more societally accepting, at some point, of the right to end it, lest we do in fact be sentencing people to centuries of "torture" (mental, perhaps, if not physical).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:42 AM

March 17, 2006
Au Revoir

A French couple, husband and wife cryonicists, died when their freezer lost power.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:14 PM

March 16, 2006
Art Buchwald

...is apparently dying. There are a lot of people we could do without, but who thinks that this would be a better universe without Art Buchwald?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:33 PM

More Decline In The "Giggle Factor"

Not about space tourism. About anti-aging therapies. From Reuters:

Olshansky and his colleagues have called on the U.S. government to inject $3 billion a year into the field, arguing the benefits of achieving an average seven-year delay in the process of biological aging would far exceed the gains from eliminating cancer.
Ethically, the extension of life is controversial, with some philosophers arguing it goes against fundamental human nature.

But John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, said any society that applauded the saving of life had a duty to embrace regenerative medicine.

"Life saving is just death postponing with a positive spin," he said. "If it is right and good to postpone death for a short time, it is hard to see now it would be less right and less good to postpone it for a long while."

Yes, this is the logical dilemma that the Kassians and other deathists find themselves in. Who are they to decide how long other people should live?

I was talking about this with someone last summer in DC, and he asked an interesting question. There's a respectable argument to be made that, while not every individual requires religion to be good, society itself does, because not everyone will be moral without a belief in a divine lawgiver and retribution in the afterlife. Similarly, he asked me, though no one wants to die, isn't it good for society that we do?

My trite response, a la Groucho, is "what has posterity ever done for me?"

Unquestionably, death has some beneficial consequences for society. For one thing, it's currently the most effective means of defeating dictators and tenure (which are often the same thing). I think the answer to that, though, is to come up with more effective means of dealing with dictators than the UN, and once it's recognized that people are effectively living forever, or at least as long as they want to, tenure will have to face reform as well (in addition to an end to life-long appointments in general). Death also promotes innovation (as the old saying goes, science progresses, funeral by funeral).

But I'm not aware of any benefits that are worth sacrificing my life for. Risking, yes, but not sacrificing it. If death taking a holiday causes problems, I'd rather spend my life coming up with better solutions to those problems, rather than arbitrarily deciding that three-score and ten, or any other number, is the right one. After all, if one is going to argue that we should only live for a finite period of time, how would one come up with the right length? And how does this differ from mass executions, for the mere crime of living too long? It seems to me that the slope on which folks like Leon Kass and Eric Cohen tread is very slippery, with extremely ugly terrain at the bottom.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:28 AM

Quick Thinking

A teenage girl shot a picture of a flasher with her cellphone camera. Too bad she didn't have one of these, instead.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:04 AM

Ode To A Dying Tomcat

From the Chairforce Engineer

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:58 AM

March 15, 2006
Juxtaposition

John Scalzi (whose book I have yet to finish reviewing but, briefly, enjoyed greatly) has a dual book review of Glenn's book, and Joel Garreau's.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:50 PM

Electronic Noses

...and smellovision.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:13 AM

March 13, 2006
A Couple Centuries Early

NASA has invented the tricorder.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:36 AM

March 11, 2006
Mass Exodus of Davids

Rand Simberg has already covered an Army of Davids here. Consider that some of the last vestiges of the old media that author Glenn Reynolds eulogizes. Simberg got a pre-print, I didn't. There will soon be scant difference between the press and the public making the question of who to receive a pre-print something to be settled in shades of gray by Slash Dot ratings and auctions. That will make it easier for a media outsider like me to compete on a level playing field with more traditional media that gets their books early.

Reynolds's book stands at the precipice of the future and treating different subjects seeks to penetrate the "fog of war" obscuring what will happen shortly. In places, Reynolds is foresighted and confident, especially in areas far along the path to individual control. In others, he seems flummoxed to explain what lies right around the corner despite having a well developed theory in another context.

In this extended review, I will take many of Reynolds's claims and incomplete predictions and fill them out and complete them.

Reynolds starts by explaining that beer was once the province of the individual brewer, became mass produced, became vulnerable to innovation by individual brewers, became mass customized and is now a heck of a lot better for the journey.

Each technology that Reynolds addresses is in some stage of that journey. Journalism was once the province of the town crier and wandering minstrel, became mass produced with the advent of the newspaper, is now vulnerable to innovation by bloggers, podcasters, independent filmmakers (e.g., Fahrenheit 911 and Control Room) and video bloggers. As we all have the resources to produce Max Headroom's Edison Carter's investigative video blog with GPS and the Internet for our controller and Amazon tip jars and Google ads for our pay, expect broadcast and print news to get better.

Will countries like China survive the transition? I am perhaps hoping as much as the American News Anchors did when they witnessed the Tiananmen Square people power that democracy and individuality will break out. Had there been satellite video bloggers present in 1989, my opinion is that the ensuing carnage would have brought down the Government. But a fleet Party can try to stay one step ahead of the searing light of Glasnost by turning that light on itself a little bit and cracking down hard well before things get too big to spin. If the US can be pilloried for torturing at Abu Ghraib via a couple of uncomfortable pictures, can Chinese prisons stand up to such scrutiny when it arrives as it must?

On p. 19, Reynolds notes that Davids can't pursue specialization the same way the gray flannel oldsters can. This is temporary. Bloggers may be temporarily limited to good spellers. It's only a matter of time before editors and writers team up to do vanity blogs and some of them hit the big time. I grabbed the "EditMyBlog.com" domain a year ago. I just let it lapse so have at it. Teams of like minded part timers have done garage startups for years in Silicon Valley. It is only a matter of time before the virtual corporations of Davids start springing up and putting specialization to work against the Goliaths.

My own company SpaceShot, Inc. has one employee, ten consultants who earned more than $600 last year and another ten who earned less. Our office is in my basement. All of the consultants are part time (and the employee). We have calls on Freeconference.com, we use opensource software, we get cheap leased equipment, have cheap credit pushed at us and generally face a friendly business climate. Why spend hundreds of dollars per employee on an office, a computer, a network and so on when all of that infrastructure is now a standard home and coffeeshop entertainment item? It is high time to construct the virtual corporation where all the mobile workers get paid an extra few hundred bucks a month, but have to find their own office space, network and computer.

Specialization and foreign trade are coming to the lowliest of activities. If you are too busy to play a video game to garner status from fancy virtual body, mind and materiel, you can hire third world clickers to slay the virtual ogres for you and buy their virtual booty on ebay or even do a complete virtual brain transplant to a new virtual body. Who would have thought the main problem with identity crime in video games would be the poor third world would-be hacker giving their buff identity to a rich first worlder for a price?

No, there will be no specialization deficit among the Davids.

Will the Davids yearn for health plans as Reynolds worries on p. 21? No again. As wages rise at a faster and faster rate to keep the poor sods who still are doing work they hate in their corporate jobs, there will become less and less of a need for insurance of any kind. It's the first $9000 in health care coverage that are expensive. The next couple of million is astonishingly cheap for the typical healthy person. The average household income is already $50,000. As they become richer, they will become more risk accepting of small risks. They will be more easily deterred by the Goliath practices of making filing health claims annoying. They will start opting for health savings accounts. Some will decide the $3000 or less in taxes they save by insuring is not worth the trouble of all the expense accounting, pre-authorizations, and denials. Does anyone opt for the $25 towing coverage any more? That used to be a day's work 30 or 40 years ago. Now it's only a couple of hours. If you add in the time to file the silly claim, it's a very bad bet. Insurance will still get takers, but it will be more like coupon clipping and collecting frequent flier miles than the life or death political struggle of the Clinton years.

The service economy is an opaque riddle to Reynolds. He is not alone. This issue of Foreign Affairs has Alan Blinder going down similar blind alleys (I'll cover that later). In the 18th century, the rich had cooks, but everyone else had to scrape by and do a rotten, barely specialized job of cooking for themselves. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we went through a series of food innovations leading to faster preparation, better ingredients per unit labor, more specialized capital, Goliath doing mass production and now what? Now even a cook can have a cook. Someone who works at McDonalds can provide meals for thousands of people and pay a very small portion of their pay for food for themselves prepared by someone else. Mass customization is nearly here as big freezers and a massive wealthy class emerges that can afford outsourced home cooked meals. Fast gourmet food is competing with home chef service. As the technology gets better for food preparation, storage, reheating, presentation and so on, fewer and fewer people will need to spend less and less time to feed us better and better. The answer to Reynolds's riddle on p.27 about where we get the money to pay for all these services is plain once revealed: we serve each other. We cook for each other, give each other massages, paint for each other, write stories (punditry blogs?) for each other, and more.

As colleges go virtual--is UC Berkeley already virtual because of the satellite classrooms--many services become obsolete (newspaper boy springs to mind) and many others move overseas where capital markets, government policy and human capital will make it better to do old things, what will the rest of us do? One thing is for sure. It will pay better (in $ and life quality) than manufacturing or whatever is going virtual or overseas. If it didn't people would still do it. I once thought society would restratify into superrich demanding traditional services from hordes of servants. Now, I think it will be more like now. Rich, finicky servants will only serve the way they want. When the innovation of the day was artisanship, Bruegel was able to make a mint painting portraits. Did he keep zillions of servants? No, he adorned his house with craftsmanship. Sculpture. Leather walls. Wonderful furniture. Fabulous stone masonry. Nine servants was enough.

We will have to make due with one servant. That's because we will be hired out to be someone else's servant on average so we will be served on average no more or less than we serve others. But that service will take many wonderful time shares. A few minutes of someone's time for medical care. A few minutes for food. A few minutes for someone to keep my house from falling down. Leaving a fabulous surplus for new activities. Read on to find out what they will be.

On p. 69, Reynolds reviews why modern technology is making it hard to surprise us for long. He does not make a key generalization. If cell phones and CNN prevented an attack on the Whitehouse minutes after three similar attacks were perpetrated, then perhaps the most critical failure of US Iraq policy was to postpone putting up cell phone towers in occupied Iraq. Cell phones empower the good guys to call the cops. It is therefore ludicrously self-destructive to turn off the cell phone system in the event of a terrorist attack. Better would be to broadcast emergency pricing on the cell phone system as Vickrey who won the Nobel called for 35 years ago. That way, people who had a juicy story, or a lead on the bad guys could use the system to stop the bad guys cold. There are many more good guys than bad guys. Wikipedia manages to keep the spammers out.

It will be very hard to poison us all at the same time. The ones who drink the water, eat the pills or whatever first will alert the rest of us to the danger (albeit indirectly). There is enough skepticism of technology that there are several competing architectures waiting in the wings to emerge if one falters. Microsoft was reported to be licking its chops over RIM's doom even as RIM's shares were trading high enough to reassure everyone that it's patent woes were exaggerated. It's a lot harder to roll tanks with satellites.

I'd bet on the good guys developing a cure faster than a disease can spread. The good guys tend to be smarter and have more resources. Once we get the government out of the way of providing vaccines and cures and take our own responsibility (like say buying our own course of Tamiflu), then we will be even more resilient to disasters both natural and manmade. Same with the frankinfears of biotech and nanotech. Expect citizen watch groups to pay more attention to levees.

Computer viruses are just one more service. Anti-virus software is currently mass produced. Less vulnerable operating systems, digital immune systems and such rate to be able to keep up with the viruses, but even if they don't we rate to be Ok. Computing power is becoming tradable. High computation time jobs can be done by teams of individual computers working together to form supercomputers. These computers can work together voluntarily to search for extraterrestrial life or any of a number of grand challenges or work together involuntarily to conduct denial of service attacks if they have been taken over. Adam Smith's invisible hand should eventually guide selfish hackers to eventually win out over the malicious hackers. Just as syphilis eventually became less virulent, computer viruses should eventually evolve to parasites that routinely send out new credit card info, harvest spare processing time, and even start to protect against other competing viruses, worms, trojan horses and so on. The virus producers that don't frag their customer's hard drive, don't annoy them enough to reformat the hard drive and don't take too much out of their wallet are likely to be better capitalized and better able to defend their turf against rivals who are less well capitalized. Put in these terms, the theives who steal computer time, credit card numbers and so on may evolve to provide the same service at a competitive rate with the antivirus companies. The drain from the credit card has to be too small to notice. The computational degradation has to be too small to notice. Evolution and greed should drive bad guys to create a global computing resource and efficient global crime syndicate that will result in the same thing. Awesome immune systems for our computers with a minimal drain on our wallets and attention. I think the bad guys will be outspent by the good guys and the bad guys who are effective will evolve into good guys just as the raiding theives of antiquity were eventually deputized as armies and police.

Military and political power are just two more sets of goods and services that can be easily fit into Reynolds's framework once stated in that fashion. Governments, armies, R&D, policing and so on used to be a local tribal thing. Then it became mass produced. Now, it is becoming more of the domain of the individual again. Stateless actors such as bin Laden can afford his own private army and weapons R&D. We don't need a town guard and a big wall any more. People can buy enough fire power to hold off the Federal Government long enough to become martyrs vastly nullifying the police powers and army. The power of the pen can find out what the last of the Soviet troops were going to do against Yeltsin's people power. Knowing the rules of engagement, the players boldly continued. Power will continue to devolve to the people.

Information warfare will be joined by bloggers and the vast array of non-state organizations.
Vigilante hackers will take it on themselves to start their own private wars against the bad guys.
Jay-Walker-style omnipresent surveillence will make it much harder to sneak around, even if it is only random people viewing random webcasts.
Private firepower and training will eventually come into their own if government fails them, empowers them or just ignores them.

I must admit it's a little opaque for me too. But DoD will need to continue to innovate to provide service in the face of private armies and private security forces competing with them. Maybe castling or building private arsenals like in Vinge's short stories.

On p. 159, what would happen if the laws of economics are repealed and we have plenty of everything? Won't happen. You broke the speed limit, Mr. Reynolds. I can certainly say that if manufacturing capacity is nearly free, I will buy all of it and produce a generation ship to go to Alpha Centauri. It will always remain expensive enough that we can only afford our fair share on average. But seriously, if people have serious manufacturing capability to rival the Pharoahs, the Carnegies, and governments, what would they make? My guess is Pyramids, libraries and universities, and grand challenges like national health services and space programs.

Microsoft is a good case study. As a group, they have bought hundreds of billions of dollars of palaces. Every Microsoft Millionaire has a house nicer than King Arthur. The locks, the central air and heat and TV alone would be enough. Once everyone has their mcmansion, their Fahrenheit 451 wall screen, their supercomputer, their fancy sports car, vacation house, etc. etc., what are they to do? Gates has founded his own world health organization and is making great strides toward vaccination and malaria research. Allen has founded his own space program. He's dabbled in direct democracy.

Follow the billionaires' money to figure out what we will all be doing when we are all billionaires. Dabble in politics like Ross Perot. Topple governments like Rhodes and bin Laden. Space programs like Allen, Bezos and Branson. Vast philanthropy like Carnegie, Soros and others. We will sponsor art, education, research and more. Some of us will be able to control the resources that Queen Isabella did and conquer the Moon, the planets and the asteroids.

Personally, I am trying to start a little of all that well before I get to be a billionaire. I commissioned some art for a few percent of my income. I invested some money in startups. I sponsored a prize. I filed a patent. I hired a band to play my daughter's school. I commissioned some custom furniture. I hired an errand person. I donated some money to a political campaign. I even started my own micro space program. Inflation and rising wages will raise the average family income to $300,000 in 30 years. The $50,000 a year average household income used to be the prize offered by million dollar sweepstakes. Now we need $10 million or $100 million prizes to attract interest. Millionaire nation.

Reynolds misses that NASA as Goliath is vulnerable to Davids like Musk, Bezos, Bigelow, French and others taking to the Moon and the planets by themselves. Just as Richard Branson could start Virgin records with a song and a prayer and rise to become a major label with little more than the chutzpah that Reynolds is just shy of himself with his home recording, and personal personality cult, Branson has started his own space program and may yet unseat NASA as the biggest space organization on the planet. $50 billion a year in government space research could quickly be eclipsed by a space tourism industry dominated by 2-4 players bigger than NASA if it exceeds 10% of the terrestrial tourism industry.

In the talk of clinical immortality, Reynolds makes two errors. The first is that he assumes we will be impoverished by global crowding. This is false. He should read Julian Simon's Ultimate Resource 2. The second is that he accept's deGray's analysis that kids will become more scarce. Why won't the trend of starting a new family every thirty years or so keep going? Especially if artificial reproductive techniques such as cloning (or someday artificial sexual reproduction from non-sexual cells) extend reproductive years, then why wouldn't kids just keep coming? If a frontier opens up on the Moon, the planets, the asteroids and beyond, there will certainly be room for them.

So if it's possible, I envision an even more empowered set of Davids accomplishing even more even more effectively than Reynolds foresees. Many many services will become cheap enough to produce at home part time, outsource cheaply or obtain local or telepresent help. We will be the service providers. Every service is vulnerable. I think humanity will win the race to survive its homeworld, its sun and even its battle to fly apart fast enough to escape the connectedness that is enabling this (near?) future mass exodus.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 10:47 PM

March 10, 2006
The Energy Source Of The Future

That's what fusion has always been called. The old joke is that it's the energy source of the future, and it always will be. Back in the seventies, we used to talk about the fusion constant--forty years--as the time it would take until fusion became commercially viable. That glorious day continues to recede off into the future. Now we learn that a leading researcher in the field threw in the towel shortly before he died.

I'm not as pessimistic, but I can see how someone could get discouraged after devoting one's life to the goal and seeing so little progress. I think that we probably will still need better materials, but I wouldn't give up hope yet. On the other hand, I wouldn't bet on it, either--we need to be working on a number of fronts (including space power).

[Update a few minutes later]

I'd still like to hold out hope for fusion propulsion, even if it won't be practical for electric power generation. How much harder/easier is that problem? It's one that hasn't gotten as much effort, but it's not clear whether or not if you get one, you get the other.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:06 AM

March 02, 2006
Lost Secrets

This is cool.

Some of the Enigma messages were never broken. Now, you can contribute some CPU cycles to attempting to crack the last ones.

Actually, I think I know one of them. I'll bet it's "DON'T FORGET TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:48 AM

February 23, 2006
The End Of Books?

It may be in sight.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:31 AM

February 22, 2006
No Worries

During National Engineers Week, Robert Samuelson writes that the so-called science and engineering gap is phony.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:13 AM

February 21, 2006
One More Reason Not To Use IE

I don't mind most of this information being publicly available, but I sure don't want anyone to see the contents of my clipboard. I'm sticking with Firefox.

[Via Geekpress]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:25 AM

February 20, 2006
Hug An Engineer

It's that week (that few pay attention to) to celebrate the people who do much more to improve our lives than most people realize.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:05 AM

February 13, 2006
Life In The Twenty-First Century

Nanotube capacitors.

Using nanotube structures, the LEES invention promises a significant increase on the storage capacity of existing commercial ultracapacitors by storing electrical fields at an atomic level. The new LEES ultracapacitors could replace the conventional battery in everything from the smallest MP3 players through to electric automobiles and beyond, yielding batteries with a lifetime equivalent to the product they power and recharging times inside a minute. Most significantly, they promise a much smaller and lighter “battery”, and will be an enabling technology for many new concepts such as electric bicycles with the “burst” peak power of a motorcycle, or electrical trams with the capacity of a train but without the infrastructure. In automotive terms, they raise the possibility of an integrated starter/generator and the capability of ultra-efficient regenerative braking systems.

So, what's the catch? Well, no obvious violations of physics, but unfortunately, the article doesn't describe a time frame for getting them from the lab into your iPod. It seems almost inevitable, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:11 PM

February 09, 2006
Cool Toy

I'd sure feel bad if I crashed it, though. I wonder if they have a scale T-38 to train with?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:26 AM

February 06, 2006
Goliaths Beware

I read Glenn's new book on the plane back from California on Friday night (it was a red eye, but I have trouble sleeping on planes unless I'm very, very tired).

There won't be a lot new here to anyone (like, for instance, me) who has been reading the TCS columns on which much of this is based, over the past few years. The basic theme flows throughout--how new technologies are empowering individuals, disempowering the large companies and bureaucracies that have been viewed as the future for the past couple centuries, disintermediating goods and services, and making cottage industries more economically viable.

Examples presented (among many others) are blogs taking down big media (Ra^thergate is cited), musicians marketing and selling music without big record-company contracts, passengers fighting back on September 11th and the "American Dunkirk"--the spontaneous evacuation of lower Manhattan using private vessels to ferry people across the rivers. He also talks about upcoming revolutions in technology, such as life (and in fact, youth) extension.

Even if you are familiar with much of this through reading Instapundit, it remains worthwhile to pull it all together in one place. Interestingly, the one part of the book in which the theme seems to be subsumed, at least to me, was the section on space (already reviewed by Jesse Londin). It starts off very promising, with the chapter titled "Space: It's Not Just For Governments Any More." And he does discuss the need for tourism and private activities, and prizes. But his obvious interest in the general topic of the future of space pulls him astray from the general message of the book, as he wanders off into terraforming, space elevators, etc. While these are interesting topics (at least to me, and many readers of this web site), it's not clear how they relate to empowerment of individuals through advancing technology. They're certainly unlikely to be achieved through a grass-roots, disintermediation approach--it will take a Goliath of some kind to construct them, one suspects. Perhaps the point is that they're technologies which, once developed, whether by Davids or Goliath, in themselves might ultimately empower individuals to become space colonists.

If that was the point, I suppose that it's a useful one, but we're a long way from either of those kinds of capabilities (though space elevators are probably more feasible in the next few decades than terraforming Mars). I would have liked to see more discussion of the near term, and how we can do more with existing technologies, as space-enthusiast Davids, to slay (or at least get the attention of) the Goliath that is the federal space policy establishment (and yes, the problem is much bigger than NASA).

There's also one technical error (in my opinion). In the section on Orion, he claims that chemical rockets don't scale up well, whereas Orion does. I suspect that this guy would be surprised to learn that large chemical rockets are harder to build (though they're certainly harder to raise the money to build). In fact, I'll shock many long-time readers by saying that heavy-lift vehicles do make sense, with this caveat--they must have a large market (the failure of ability to imagine one on the part of investors, whether government or private, was Sea Dragon's downfall). Larger vehicles have less proportion of their weight as "overhead" (e.g., avionics, controllers, valves and plumbing, etc).

That quibble noted, though, I do highly recommend the book. It is indeed thought provoking (and I'm sure that my thoughts would have been far more provoked had I not already been thinking about these things for the entire young millennium). Those who are unfamiliar with these topics will find some interesting linkages between seemingly disparate trends, and much to ponder about the future directions of those trends. For only seventeen bucks plus shipping, as a valuable glimpse of the future, it's a bargain. But it could be an even better deal--Amazon should bundle it with a slingshot.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:20 PM

February 03, 2006
Joining The Buggy Whips

Western Union sent its last telegram last week.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:03 PM

Blimps

Joe Katzman say they're part of the Air Force's future. With civilian applications. I'd love to see dirigibles come back, with modern materials, as aerial cruiseships. I think there'd be a big market for them.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:24 AM

January 12, 2006
Earth Strikes Back?

Lileks isn't impressed with the latest doomsaying trope from the scientifically illiterate.

This is the same kind of blinkered and dyspeptic mentality that says we shouldn't expand life into the universe. And here and here are some related golden oldies.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:17 AM

January 11, 2006
O Tempora, O Mores

Speaking of evolution, our modern car technology seems to be breeding lousy drivers:

Fewer than 30 of those questioned in a recent survey knew what anti-lock brakes were, and less than 5 percent understood traction control. To test some skills of the average driver, the U.K.’s Times newspaper brought along a 15-year-old BMW 3-series devoid of every modern safety feature and asked some regular drivers to take it through the test track at the Graham Griffiths of Ultimate Car Control training school. While all the drivers were able to drive their modern Volvos, Hondas, and Subarus successfully in all conditions, they failed when forced to drive the classic car.

I grew up in Michigan, and drove sixties British sports cars through my formative driving years. They didn't even have redundant brake master cylinders, let alone automatic braking systems (in fact, my 1960 MGA had to share the hydraulic reservoir for both brakes and clutch actuator, so if you got a brake leak, you eventually lost your clutch as well--made for fun times occasionally). On snowy winter nights, I used to go over to the parking lot at the neighborhood golf course to practice driving my '67 MGB-GT in an area where there was no danger of hitting anything if you spun out.

I remember a few years ago when I was in St. Louis at Christmas, and they got a sudden blizzard the night before we were to fly out. Our flight ended up being canceled, and we rented a car to get back to the relatives' home where we were staying. I noticed that when I hit the brakes in the snow, they would chatter, and that was the first time I'd experienced ABS. I didn't like it, because I felt like I didn't have control of the car (the same problem I have with automatic transmissions). But apparently, modern drivers just learning are going to know nothing else, and not understand the physics or techniques of driving in low-traction conditions.

I'm afraid that as we get further and further from the era in which certain skills were required to survive, we'll have a larger and larger population that won't manage even the slightest breakdown in our technology. I want to see the future, but this is, I think, one of the real downsides of it--a population that becomes Eloi.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:06 PM

December 27, 2005
Tomorrow, Today

The latest, year-end Carnival of Tomorrow is up, and has a number of very interesting links (of which mine is undoubtedly the least interesting). Hard to believe that we're already almost four years into the new century, and millennium, and while we don't yet have flying cars, in many other ways, we're living in the science-fiction future of our childhoods, at least for those baby boomers among us.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:46 PM

Living A Thousand Years

Here's a good Internet equivalent of a "man-(and woman)-in-the-street interview"--a compendium of Freeper responses to the article in the Toledo Blade about Ray Kurzweil and life extension.

The interesting thing to me will be the responses when (as one commenter put it) "a mouse lives ten years."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:36 PM

December 23, 2005
Pleistocene Park?

They've sequenced the genome of a woolly mammoth. I think we're going to see one walking around in a few years.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:03 AM

Advances In Nanotech

Things are progressing nicely:

"We have demonstrated the controlled synthesis of nanostructures at levels of complexity significantly beyond any work yet reported. What we have done is the most challenging synthetic problem in these structures, and one with huge potential payoffs from both the standpoint of fundamental scientific impact and producing novel de-vices and applications."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:27 AM

December 22, 2005
Uh Oh...

A robot that is self aware. Is it too early to form PETR (People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots)?

I'll personally be interested to see if it starts touching itself improperly.

Seriously, I've done this experiment myself with both of my cats. They clearly recognize themselves in the mirror, because they don't get upset (as they generally would) at the sight of another cat.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:45 AM

December 19, 2005
It's A King-Kongarama!

At this week's Carnival of Tomorrow.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:11 AM

December 17, 2005
Century Plus Two

A hundred and two years ago, the Wright brothers kicked off a new era of heavier-than-air flight. I wrote several pieces on the subject on the centennial.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:05 AM

December 15, 2005
Video Conferencing Soon Ready for Prime Time

Economist reports that video conferencing kinks are being worked out of both the experience and the business model. Corporations are getting on board. $1.75/minute on peak, $0.25 off peak? If it is being used "around the clock" as they say, average price would be only $0.50/minute or if only during business hours 40 hours/wk at $2/minute. Paying $3000 hard costs for four hours ($12.5/minute) of on site business meetings the past two days myself, I sure would like it if I could cut travel by 75%. The calculation is more extreme if you assign labor cost to travel. If you throw in my 16 hours of travel at $2/minute you get up to over $20/minute for these face-to-face meetings.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 08:31 AM

December 13, 2005
Positive Feedback Loop

Control engineers would call this a runaway controller.

When the response to a change is to increase the change, rather than decrease it (which is what, for example, thermostats normally do), change happens very quickly, and uncontrollably. One of the issues with global warming is whether or not the feedback is positive, or negative. That is, does the warming result in even more warming, resulting in...or do things happen at higher temperatures that result in cooling?

One potential positive feedback might be that if glaciers and ice caps melt, the albedo of the planet decreases, which means that less energy is reflected back into space, which could result in further warming. In the other direction, if we are headed into a new glacial period despite the greenhouse effects (perhaps because solar activity dominates all else), then increasing snow cover makes things colder because more solar energy is rereflected, thus causing more cooling, and an accelerating glacial advance.

On the negative feedback side, though, it could be that more warming results in more clouds, which might in turn have the effect of cooling things off.

I suspect that the reality will be a combination of positive and negative feedback mechanisms, and it's hard to know what the overall effect will be, though ultimately, it will be negative, but perhaps at a significantly higher (or lower) temperature. I'd be very surprised if the seas end up either boiling, or freezing solid.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:07 AM

Questions For Neal Stephenson

From Slashdot readers. He has answers.

[Via Fred Kiesche]

[Update a couple minutes later]

I just realize in reading it that this is an old piece (from over a year ago), that I'd previously linked. Oh, well. It's still a good read for any who haven't read it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:53 AM

To Engineer Is Human

Professor Henry Petroski has written many interesting books and essays on the art and limitations of engineering. Nick Schulz has a fascinating interview with him.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:32 AM

December 08, 2005
Moore's Law Marches On

A new semi-conductor compound from Intel:

Intel says that replacing silicon with indium antimonide cuts power consumption by ten times while boosting performance by 50 per cent.

New chips employing it are still a decade off, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:49 AM

December 07, 2005
Ah, Tradition

Iain Murray:

...Inuit representatives complained about the effect climate change was having on their ancient way of life in that their snowmobiles kept dropping through the ice.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:56 AM

They Needed Some Cats

Last spring, in a piece at TechCentralStation, I disputed the notion that the world was "using up its resources," and I cited the prevailing belief about the fate of the Easter Islanders:

There was a recent story in The Guardian about a new United Nations study, with the misleading headline, Two-Thirds of World's Resources "Used Up". It's not the first time we've seen such hysteria, and it certainly won't be the last. But relax -- the sky isn't falling. The headline is nonsensical, because it falsely implies that "resources" are a static quantity, and non-renewable. As an example, they often cite Easter Island, whose civilization supposedly failed due to running out of them.

At least one commenter at the time questioned the use of the word "supposedly," asking (if I recall correctly) if anyone disputed that.

Well, apparently some people do now.

[Via Iain Murray]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:56 AM

December 05, 2005
Molecular Manufacturing Breakthrough

Researchers have been able to achieve electrowetting of nanotubes with mercury. If they can do it with other metals at higher temperatures, it could lead to reliable nanowires.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:08 AM

December 04, 2005
Someone Want To Hire A Cropduster?

Somehow, I suspect that there will be a lot of demand for this product, at least among men.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:23 AM

December 02, 2005
What I Would Want For Christmas

...if I still lived in the Great White North. Behold, the Chevy 454 big-block snowblower. I'll bet that sucker will toss your driveway's contents into your neighbor's yard. You know, the one three blocks away?

Somewhere, Tim the Toolman is grunting. And drooling.

Get down on your knees and beg, Mother Nature! Who's your daddy now?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AM

A Major Step

...toward utility fog? And get your bumper sticker.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:05 AM

December 01, 2005
Getting Better All The Time

Here, at long last, is what the world has been waiting for. First came sliced bread, and now, finally, we have the temperature-controlled butter keeper.

Ah, life in the twenty-first century.

[Update at noon]

We do indeed live in an age of technological wonders. How did we ever roast marshmallows without it?

And what marsh do marshmallows grow in, anyway?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:10 AM

November 30, 2005
Time To Upgrade

The new version of Firefox is out.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:31 AM

November 20, 2005
What Is Human?

Stephen Gordon has some thoughts on Asimov's Three Laws, post-humanism, and personhood.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:20 PM

November 14, 2005
"An Awesome Piece Of Ordnance"

I have no doubt that this will be militarily very effective, but I wonder what kind of safeguards they have in place to keep the bad guys from getting their hands on one, in such a way as to use it?

I'd like to think that at some point these weapons will have security measures, such as temporary codes (good for, say, an hour), to prevent them from being used by the terrorists. I don't know whether it's practical or not, but as our weaponry continues to advance, so will theirs if they can get access to it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:33 PM

Don't Panic

Michael Fumento says that there's a lot of unjustified hysteria over the "inevitable" avian flu pandememic.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:09 PM

November 09, 2005
Ahead Of Themselves

I know that it's only today, but the Carnival of Tomorrow is up anyway.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:01 AM

October 28, 2005
Three Futures

National Geographic interviews Joel Garreau on his new book, Radical Evolution:

That's one of the critical aspects of Radical Evolution: We're talking about the next 10 or 20 years. We're not talking about some far side of the moon. This is going to happen on our watch.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:40 PM

October 26, 2005
Living "Forever"

A recent interview with Aubrey De Grey:

Why do you personally want to live forever?
It’s not really a matter of living forever, it’s just a matter of not wanting to die. One doesn’t live forever all in one go, one lives forever one year at a time. It’s just a case of "Well, life seems to be fun, and I don’t see any prospect of it ceasing to be fun unless I get frail and miserable and start declining." So if I can avoid declining, I’ll stay with it really.

Right. It's not a matter of living forever. It's a matter of living as long as one wants to live.

[Update a couple minutes later]

D'oh!

It's not that recent--it's from last spring.

Oh, well, in the context of living forever, it's not very long ago. And maybe there are some readers here who haven't seen it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:56 PM

Carnival Of Tomorrow

The latest one is up, with the emphasis this week on future economics.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:05 AM

October 25, 2005
I Did Not Know That

Isaac Newton invented the cat door, certainly a boon to my (and my cats') existence. It's almost as good as the gravity and calculus things.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:27 PM

October 21, 2005
Going To The Birds

Sam has been the avian flu blogger here, but I'd like to point out that TechCentralStation has a series on the subject.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AM

October 05, 2005
Isn't She Lovely?

Stevie Wonder may get his sight back.

These medical advances are just going to keep on coming. Will they say he's no longer human if he has a microchip implant?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:55 AM

Short Wave

DoE researchers have developed a bright terahertz laser:

T-rays still constitute a gap in the science of light and energy. They inhabit a region of the electromagnetic spectrum remaining to be better understood—and much better exploited. Now that a way to generate them at high power has been demonstrated, T-rays can potentially extend and add widely to the wave-based technologies that have defined the last century and a half, from the telegraph, radio and X-rays to computers, cell phones and medical MRIs.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:55 AM

September 30, 2005
Bad Avian Flu News

It's resistant to Tamiflu.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:52 AM

Calming Katrina

It just occurred to me that an iceberg placed in front of a hurricane could take the energy out of it. I just did a quick google, and came up with this guy, who thought it up ten years ago, but it's not quantified in any way.

I don't know how sensitive storms are to ocean surface temps, so you'd have to figure out how much you needed to lower the temperature, and over how wide an area, to see if it was in any way feasible. But I'd have to think that an iceberg in the tropics could do some pretty good cooling over a pretty broad area. Of course, getting it into position quickly could be a challenge. And around here, and in the Bahamas, the water is so shallow it would probably run aground.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:26 AM

Conflict

It's a little frustrating that this conference and this one are both occurring on the same weekend, four hundred miles apart.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:08 AM

Speaking Of John Roberts' Age

Is he the last Chief Justice the nation will ever have? He seems to be in good health, so I think that it's possible that he'll live for many decades, perhaps centuries.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:15 AM

September 27, 2005
William Gibson, Call Your Office

Dale Amon describes the shady nature of life on the front lines in the cyberwar. There is some good advice on computer security in comments.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:59 AM

Tomorrow's News, Today

The tenth Carnival of Tomorrow (which is now a road show, and no longer tethered to the Speculist, which originated it), is up, with lots of stuff on space, nanotech and singularity, and other futuristic topics.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:22 AM

September 26, 2005
Is The Desktop Computer Dying?

Maybe. Laptops are definitely making inroads into the market, and will continue to do so, but as the article points out, there will always be a place for good, comfortable, cheap machines for people who aren't road warriors.

I use my laptop a lot when I'm traveling, but it remains a PITA to carry around and continually reboot and renetwork, and I'm always glad to get home to my nineteen-inch screen and ergonomic keyboard. Not to mention my three CPUs and KVM switch. They'll take away my desktop when they pry my cold, dead fingers off my Logitech.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:24 AM

September 23, 2005
Headset Etiquette

This is a problem that's just going to get worse as the technology evolves:

While many users find them convenient and fun, the new headsets can create peculiar social situations. As was the case with Ms. Vilson and her friend, bystanders are often unaware that a user is wearing one. Indeed, users of Bluetooth headsets often appear to be talking to themselves.
Another pitfall: "Half the time people think you're talking to them when you're really not," says William Robbins, a doctor in Orlando, Fla. He was in a supermarket recently enjoying a bit of risqué banter with an ex-girlfriend over his headset when the woman next to him thought he was talking to her.

Eventually there are going to be implants that allow voiceless communication, bringing one more science-fiction concept (akin to mind-reading) to reality.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AM

Boy Scout's Motto

Stephen Gordon has some good advice to prepare for the Avian flu, which could be disastrous if we let it get out of control. I wish I had more confidence in the competence of the government to deal with this.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:38 AM

September 16, 2005
The Taming Of The Screw

Here's an interesting (if you're into mechanical engineering) story about a man who has reinvented the screw. This could have some interesting aerospace fastener applications.

[via Geekpress]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:16 AM

September 15, 2005
The Six Dumbest Ideas

...in computer security.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:07 PM

September 02, 2005
Contrast

As we watch a former major city of the United States receding into the anarchic and medieval past, Glenn Reynolds has an interesting interview with Ray Kurzweil about the future.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AM

August 31, 2005
Let Them Eat Cake

Ron Bailey writes that Europe is starving the third world. Apparently, to the left, ideology is more important than the actual welfare of those for whom they purport to prescribe their misguided nostrums.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:35 AM

August 28, 2005
Good News For Injured Vets

And other people missing limbs, or organs. They may be on the verge of being able to regenerate them.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:44 PM

August 27, 2005
Bioethics In DC

As I mentioned previously, I attended a debate on bioethics at the Marriott in downtown Washington on Thursday night. The panel consisted of Ron Bailey, Reason science reporter and author of the interesting and recent Liberation Biology, (former?) Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau, who wrote the recent (excellent, in my opinion) book Radical Evolution, Eric Cohen, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and editor of The New Atlantis, and it was moderated by Nick Gillespie, managing editor of Reason. I took no notes--so I hope that those others present will forgive me any lapse of memory, and hopefully correct me in comments.

The focus of the debate was trans- or post-humanism, and whether or not it's a good thing. It's not an issue that will be resolved in a single, or many debates, but as was pointed out numerous times, the best resolution will be one that allows individuals free choice, regardless of various individuals' views of the ethics of various options.

The specific topics discussed were designer children, longevity in good health, enanced human mental and physical performance, and the ethics of using "human" "embryos" (I use quotes because there is a legitimate definitional dispute about both of these words in describing many of the research and therapeutic proposals).

There were no surprise positions from anyone. Bailey was the strongest cheerleader, for reasons obvious to anyone who's read his book. Garreau (again, as would be expected from his book) was both entertaining and resigned to the future. Cohen came across as the reasonable conservative, standing athwart history and shouting not "STOP!," but rather "look both ways, and listen, before crossing some of these particular streets." But it's clear that, were it up to him, he wishes it would in fact stop, and would prefer that we have not only a permanent red light, but a barricade to keep us from transporting ourselves to the other side. But he is also clearly aware that this won't be a tenable position to many, and so he reasonably (and I think usefully) couches his debating points more as questions than as answers, in the Socratic hope that many of us will agree with his implicit answers. Gillespie did a good job of moderating, but it was also clear, ultimately, that he was in the Bailey camp (at one point, he jokingly noted that if there was a drug that could get Bailey to meet a deadline, he'd like to put him on a drip of it). So it really was sort of a two on one against Cohen (with Garreau and Gillespie each making up half).

Bailey began by repeating the arguments from his book--that people opposed to these things were, at bottom, opposed to health, to longevity, to improved human performance. He also pointed out the strange bedfellows that these issues have created, though he was mistaken to a certain degree here, I think. While it's true, as he pointed out, that both many leftists (such as Rifkin and McKibben and the watermelon crowd) and conservatives are opposed to genetic tampering, he missed a key point, mistakenly lumping the conservative position in with the enviro one on the subject of GMO. But I'm not aware of any significant conservative opposition to GMO, at least as far as foods go.

There's a fundamental distinction between the conservative and leftist bases of objections to genetic modification. Conservatives oppose it because they revere the human, as they define it. Modifying non-human organisms has no intrinsic horrors to them. The Rifkinites, on the other hand, think that all lifeforms have a "right to genetic integrity" (whatever the heck that means). Moreover, they refuse to accept such "speciesist" notions as elevating human DNA above that of any other. This distinction is of more importance than Bailey granted it (none at all, in this particular venue, though that may have been in the interest of time). While the two groups may have a temporary alliance on some of these issues, the coalition will quickly fall apart when it comes to things like golden rice, and this is important to understand for both the potential allies against this technology, and those who want more aggressive progress in opposition to them, if they wish to have effective strategies in the upcoming and ongoing political battles.

Eric Cohen started off (slightly disarmingly, though he had a serious point to make) by complimenting Bailey on the title of his book, but then turned it back on him, comparing it to many of the problematic aspects of the socialistic (even Marxistic) liberation theology of the 70s and 80s. He made the (always useful) distinction between arguing the ethics of means, and the ethics of ends. While he's clearly disturbed about some of the societal implications and goals of the research, he's even more so about the use of embryos, which he sees (rightly, in my opinion), as a completely separate issue. His view seems to be that, even if he agreed with the proffered benefits from the research, creating what are to him human beings and then destroying them is a morally unacceptable way to achieve them. This is, of course, an easier position for him to take, because he also objects to many of the ends, but it's certainly a legitimate one.

There was a brief back and forth between him and Bailey about the number of embryos spontaneously aborted in nature, but I think that Cohen got the better of this exchange. As he pointed out, Bailey's argument that it's all right to use frozen embryos for experimentation because they will never become humans anyway, just as many naturally aborted embryos will not, is a form of the naturalistic fallacy. He rightly pointed out other things that nature does, that we (including, presumably, Bailey) wouldn't consider doing, because we find them morally reprehensible. "Natural" doesn't equal "good."

On his objections to ends, he was on much weaker ground, I think. His arguments seemed in fact to be straw men, to me. Specifically, he raised the spectre of "decades of drooling on your shoes" when in fact the research goals are long and vital lives. But the ultimate false argument was what seemed to be his bottom line--that these technological advances "may not" (and he clearly thinks would not) make us happier. But the argument is not that we are developing solutions to the age-old problem of human happiness. The goal, at least in the case of the health research, is more modest--to alleviate misery.

His argument stands on a little firmer ground when it comes to the issues of designer children and human enhancement, but here, again, it's not so much happiness that's being sought per se, so much as material benefit and pleasure. Admittedly, many shallowly associate these with happiness, but realists familiar with history and human nature know that people will continue to pursue these things whether they make them happy or not. So Cohen's position is really just a new form of puritanism, and while it sounds laudable and idealistic ("this is not the road to happiness, people"), it's destined to be as losing a battle as all previous attempts at that project.

Garreau is less worried about the loss of humanity that seems to concern Cohen and his cohorts. He proposed an interesting idea (which I infer, rightly or wrongly, based on a subsequent discussion with him, was partially influenced by Pinker's The Blank Slate, in which he describes the essentiallness of human nature to understanding the power of our art and literature). He postulated what he called the "Shakespeare test" to determine whether or not someone (or something) was human. Would the Bard recognize it as such? Quote from memory: Put him on the bridge of the Enterprise. I think he'd see everyone as human, though he might have a little problem with that guy called "Data." The folks with the crabs on their foreheads? Human for sure.

On the subject of athletics, Cohen was fond of calling juiced athletes "breeding animals," implying that there was nothing noble or romantic about the notion of someone running faster because they took a pill, or diddled with their genes. He thought that this would take away from the public interest in athletics, from which ensued a discussion about what it was that people enjoyed about such events. Cohen was rightly labeled (and he proudly accepted it) a "romantic."

A good argument against this notion, that I pointed out to Bailey afterwards, is that we've had technologically enhanced humans racing for years, and the more technological enhancement, apparently the more popular the sport. I'm referring, of course, to auto (and other vehicle) racing. How many more people turn out to see thousand-horsepower engines driven by humans (such as NASCAR) than to watch a one-human-power human run around a track shank's mare? In these new track events, as is the case with auto and yacht and (starting next year in New Mexico) rocket racing, it's a race not just of human ability, but one between engineers as well. Danica Patrick wouldn't be able to go a single round with any professional male (or probably even female) boxer, but put her in a cockpit in a high-powered machine, and the combination of the two is extremely competitive. This is the future of sports.

Overall, it was a fascinating discussion, with equally interesting after-panel talk (during which I met Mike Godwin for the first time, and talked more to Garreau). These aren't issues that will be easily resolved, but these kinds of discussions are necessary and valuable as we continue to (inevitably--sorry, Eric Cohen) feel our way into the future, step by step, and I congratulate the sponsors for putting it on.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:19 AM

August 25, 2005
Clone Wars

One of the perks of being in DC (besides avoiding hurricanes) is that I can attend events like this one. I think I will. Maybe a report on it tomorrow, if I get time.

I probably won't live blog it, because I don't know if they'll have wireless, and even if they do, I don't have a working battery for my laptop, so it requires a power outlet as well. The latter is a problem that I hope to solve shortly, either with a new battery, or (more likely) a new laptop, since this one is a dinosaur from the last millenium (though just barely--it's five years old this month).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:58 PM

August 24, 2005
The Future Of Bizjets?

The Chair Force Engineer has a photo tour of the Eclipse manufacturing plant. Let's hope that in a few years, these will be pictures of suborbital vehicles under construction.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:28 PM

Reboot A Couple Times

...to commemorate the anniversary. Windows 95 debuted ten years ago today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:28 AM

Droning On

WSJ (subcription required) has an opinion piece about replacing onsite pilots with remote pilots. My contribution on the subject is here. Check out patent disclosure 20020128746 for more uses of teleoperation. Go here and search for inventor dinkin and air in any field.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 08:48 AM

August 22, 2005
Death Of A Music Pioneer

Bob Moog has died. It's hard to overestimate how much he changed the face of modern music.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:28 AM

August 19, 2005
Nanotech Breakthrough

I wish I could figure out which small, public companies are going to benefit from this.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:23 AM

August 18, 2005
Spear Phishing

Here's an interesting new phishing scam:

Rather than posing as a bank or other online business, spear phishers send e-mails to employees at a company or government agency that appear to come from a powerful person within the organization, several security experts said...
...Unlike basic phishing attacks, which are sent out indiscriminately, spear phishers target only one organization at a time. Once they trick employees into giving up passwords, they can install Trojan horse programs or other malicious software to ferret out corporate or government secrets.

And this was interesting as well, which raises the issue of what constitutes an order from a commanding officer:

At the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., several internal tests found that cadets were all too willing to give sensitive information to an attacker posing as a high-ranking officer, said Aaron Ferguson, a visiting faculty member there.
"It's the 'colonel effect.' Anyone with the rank of colonel or higher, you execute the order first and ask questions later," he said.

But if on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog, how can you tell that someone is a colonel, let alone your colonel? There's a long tradition of written orders having to be obeyed, but have emails acquired that attribute by default? If so, it may need to be rethought, given the nature of the technology.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:45 AM

August 17, 2005
Two Cults In One

Speaking of Thomas James, he has an amusing tale from the Mars Society Conference.

[Update a few minutes later]

I was about to do a radio interview with a German radio station about evolution and intelligent design when I posted this, so I didn't get a chance to finish the thought with a similar supporting anecdote of my own.

I have a dear old friend (who will remain nameless) who is also a victim of the Mac cult. He swears by his Mac, and professes hatred of PCs and a mystification about why anyone would buy them when they could have a Mac. But when he shows me things on it, there are invariably problems with it that, if it were my machine, would cause me to toss it into the sea in frustration. Yet he seems almost blind to it, even as he asks for help in doing things that it won't let him do.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:51 AM

August 15, 2005
Don't Eat The Yellow Battery

This is an interesting breakthrough in energy generation, but I doubt it will be practical for transportation. Though it does bring a whole new meaning to the old urban myth about running a car on water. In this case, beer might be more effective, as long as someone else was behind the wheel.

[Update at 5:15 PM EDT]

Eeeeuuuuwwww...

Here's another application for this amazing liquid.

Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it.

Dig in...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:45 PM

August 12, 2005
A Breakthrough?

A potential cure for Alzheimers. Using a nasal spray. Here's hoping.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:50 AM

August 10, 2005
Ten Years Of The Web

Patrick Ruffini has some thoughts on the decade since Netscape's IPO.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:18 AM

August 01, 2005
Back In California

...and still busy with all the stuff I didn't do on Friday and this weekend, but the Carnival of Tomorrow is up. There's also lots of good stuff over at The Space Review today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:54 PM

July 29, 2005
Complex Failure Bleg

One of the things that I'm working on is a series of case studies for failure of complex technological systems, particularly where a failure cascades (perhaps inevitably) into others. Columbia is a good example, in which the fragile leading-edge TPS was damaged during launch, which resulted in initial burnthrough during entry, which caused more internal damage, which resulted in a bigger hole in the wing, which resulted in increasing asymmetric forces on the vehicle, which resulted in eventual inability to keep the nose pointed forward, which resulted in the destructive breakup of the vehicle from aerodynamic forces.

Is anyone aware of similar cases (preferably non-space, e.g., the Bonefish fire)?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:53 AM

July 20, 2005
"He's Dead, Jim"

RIP, Scotty.

Of course, given that he had Alzheimers, he may have been dead by any useful definition for some time, just as Ronald Reagan was, even if the empty shell of the body continued to metabolize. In many ways, I fear this disease more than cancer, because it robs you and your loved ones of what is essentially you, while leaving them with an ongoing burden that can only be relieved by the final, physical death, which cannot come too soon once the mind is gone.

This, to me, is a powerful case for euthanasia. We may (and I suspect, will) come up with a cure for Alzheimers in the sense of preventing the damage, but once the damage is done, there's no repairing it--it's information death, which is actually much more final than metabolic death.

[Update on Wednesday evening]

How appropriate. They're beaming him up. So to speak.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:45 AM

July 18, 2005
Speaking Of Anniversaries

I didn't note it, but Saturday was the sixtieth anniversary of the first atomic explosion, at Trinity Site in New Mexico. It was also the thirty-sixth anniversary of the launch of Apollo XI.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:08 AM

July 15, 2005
More Tech Support Idiocy

So I'm paying my Chase bill on line, and I log in with Firefox, as usual. It takes me to my account page, but any attempted link from that page (e.g., to actually pay the bill) yields a timeout error indicating that the page has gone too long without activity. Which is nonsense, because I only just logged in. After wasting a long time getting through to someone in tech support on the phone, she asks me who my ISP is.

Me: What difference does it make who my ISP is?

Her: We need to know to diagnose this.

Me: [scratching head] Ummm...OK. It's Bell South.

Her: So what browser do they use?

Me: ?? What browser do they use? They don't use a browser. They're an ISP. I use a browser.

Her: When you log in to Bell South, what browser do they make you use?

Me: Log in to Bell South? With a browser? Why would I do that?

Her: How do you log in?

Me: I don't log in. I have a permanent connection. It's called DSL. It's called broadband. You should try it, I hear it's all the rage.

Her: Well, do you use a browser?

Me: [long silence, as steam slowly starts to waft out of my ears] Why yes, yes, I do use a browser, funny you should ask. Someone told me once it's how one accesses stuff on the World Wide Web. I find it handy, occasionally.

Her: What browser do you use?

Me: I usually use Mozilla. Why didn't you ask me that in the first place, instead of giving me the third degree about my ISP and how I log into it, which is a subject as far removed from the problem, as far as I can see, as the price of beef jerky in Tibet?

Her: I've never heard of that browser. Do you have Internet Explorer?

Me: Yes, I do. I tend to avoid using it, unless someone is sufficiently user hostile as to create a web site that doesn't use standard HTML. Should I try that?

Her: Yes, go ahead, I'll wait.

Of course, it works fine with IE. I issue a complaint.

Me: I've been paying bills for years with a Mozilla browser. You seem to have broken your site, since I can no longer do so.

Her: Oh, we don't support any browsers other than IE and Netscape.

At this point, I've wasted enough time on this, thank her, and hang up.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:28 PM

July 11, 2005
A New Broadband Delivery System

Via your electrical outlet. If this happens, it will put a lot of pressure on the cable and DSL providers to drop their prices.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:42 AM

Dodoburger

Thomas James has some thoughts about artificial meat.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:54 AM

June 24, 2005
Two Carnivals Of The Future

One at the usual place and the other at...The Onion.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:46 AM

June 23, 2005
An Anti-Hurricane Device?

It's getting to be the time of year in south Florida to hope that this will work.

Just one of several items in the latest Technology Quarterly from The Economist.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:04 PM

June 22, 2005
How Long Should A Life Sentence Be?

I have some thoughts today, over at TechCentralStation.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:38 AM

June 21, 2005
He Changed The World

Jack Kilby has died. Without him (or at least without the work that he did--someone else surely would have if not him) there would be no desktop computers on which to type brief obituaries like this, or an Internet to communicate them.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:29 AM

June 18, 2005
A New Problem

I hadn't previously given this much thought, but it makes sense. More people buying increasingly affordable big-screen televisions is going to skyrocket the nation's electrical consumption. People don't realize how much electrical demand is driven by computers and server farms, but this is a new application for the home that will start to exceed the electricity used by multiple computers and home networking.

Of course, I only have the television on when I'm watching, whereas I rarely turn the computers off.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:47 AM

June 16, 2005
Concorde, The Sequel

The Japanese are foolishly teaming up with the French to build what they call "Son of Concorde":

The new plane will have 300 seats and cut the flight time between New York and Tokyo to six hours, reports said.

While there's unquestionably a market for such a plane, assuming the right ticket price, they provide no clues as to how they can build a supersonic plane this large, with that much range, let alone one that won't be unaffordable to fly, given its fuel consumption. They do pretend to, though:

The ministry added that Japan had successfully tested an engine that could theoretically reach speeds of up to five times the speed of sound.

Whoop de doo.

That's nice, but it has zero to do with building an affordable, boom-free supersonic airliner, about which they seem clueless. One can only imagine that government money is involved.

At least it's no longer US government money.

This effort will share Concorde's ultimate fate, if it's lucky. More likely it will simply be a black hole of tax dollars, ending in nothing but paper, just like NASA's equally poorly-conceived, and disastrous High-Speed Research program in the 1990s.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:03 PM

June 14, 2005
Better Than Nanopants

Nanobrushes:

The brushes can be used for sweeping up nano-dust, painting microstructures and even cleaning up pollutants in water.
The bristles' secret is carbon nanotubes, tiny straw-like molecules just 30 billionths of a metre across.

This is pretty cool, but it remain irritating that the prefix "nano" has come to mean the scale of the objects themselves, rather than the scale at which they are built. That's why Eric Drexler had to abandon "nanotechnology" and come up with the phrase "molecular manufacturing" to represent his concepts for precise placement of atoms in building objects both small and large.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:32 AM

June 13, 2005
Liberation Biology

I just got an advance copy of the book in the mail. I don't know when I'll get around to reading it, though--it's a big one. But it looks pretty good. Note that the only "review" at Amazon so far is an ad hominem attack by someone who obviously hasn't even read the book yet. Appropriately, few found his "review" useful.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:23 PM

We're Living In The Future

And it has androids.

...given Q1's reported glitch-related "spasms" at the expo, it may be a while before androids are escorting tour groups or looking after children—which may be just as well. "When a robot looks too much like the real thing, it's creepy," Hiroshi told the Associated Press.

Oh, and for all the robosexuals out there, there was no mention of just how lifelike it is underneath the clothes.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:43 AM

June 12, 2005
Personal Vidcams

Glenn points to this article about battlefield use of high-storage-capacity videocameras.

I suspect that it won't be long before people start having these installed in their cars to quickly resolve disputes in accidents. It would be particularly helpful against people who deliberately cause fender benders for insurance fraud. I'd think that the insurance industry would start offering discounts for people who have them, and that eventually they'd become factory equipment.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:06 AM

June 10, 2005
The Future Is Coming

This week's Carnival is up, over at The Speculist.

Also, Stephen Gordon has an interesting article on some breakthroughs in solar power, that could be revolutionary for the Third World. Solar thermal power, that is.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:35 AM

June 01, 2005
Should Bill Gates Have Been Born?

How about Isaac Newton? Arthur Kaplan asks some interesting questions:

As genetic testing moves into the world of mental health, we are going to face some very tough questions. Will medicine suggest that any and every variation from absolute normalcy is pathological? How can we draw lines between disabling diseases such as severe autism and more mild differences such as Asperger’s, which may give society some of its greatest achievers? Will parents have complete say over the kind of children they want to bear? And what sorts of messages will doctors and genetic counselors convey when talking about risks, probabilities and choices that involve not life and death but personality and sociability, genius and geekiness?

Some, like Jonah Goldberg, have already pointed out the irony and conflict in some so-called "liberal" positions in the light of changing technology. He uses the example of how upset the gay community will become if a "gay gene" (or more likely, complex of genes) is discovered and can be tested for prior to birth. An absolute right to abortion, after all, implies a right to abort because the fetus is (or at least will become) homosexual.

Does the abortion debate take on a new flavor when it's no longer simply about the convenience of the mother, but the viability (both physical and social) of the fetus? Perhaps Bill Gates' spinal cord could have been used to develop stem cells to save many others. Would that have been a good tradeoff? When we decide to end the lives of the unborn (or, for that matter, the born), we can never know what potential we're losing. The ultimate question of course, is whether or not it will be a decision of the government, or of individuals.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:35 AM

May 31, 2005
Predictions Of The Future

From the past.

Some of them held up pretty well, and some of them didn't really happen until the twenty-first century, and some haven't panned out at all (like using electric currents to encourage plant growth, and the quiet cities). Slightly subsonic electric ships don't seem likely to happen any time soon, and pneumatics came and went, being used only for niche applications. Still an interesting set of prognostications for the time.

[Update a few minutes later]

D'oh!

As Paul Dietz points out in comments, they're only calling for ships that go a mile a minute. I was somehow thinking ten miles a minute (close to sonic velocity). Don't ask why I was thinking that--I don't know. Yes, sixty miles an hour is theoretically possible, but it's high power consumption.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:28 PM

May 27, 2005
Ahead Of Their Time

It's the Carnival of Tomorrow. Today!

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:33 AM

May 25, 2005
Beats Me

John Podhoretz asks (iconoclastically, given the venue) what's wrong with reproductive cloning? I don't know, either.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:00 AM

May 18, 2005
An End To Privacy?

It's not here yet, but it's definitely on the way:

Police found a so-called "skirt cam" under a subway grate at 88th Street and Lexington Avenue Tuesday afternoon after a woman called police saying she had noticed suspicious wires protruding from the grate as she passed by.

Emphasis yours truly.

Once Wifi is ubiquitous, there will be no "suspicious wires" to betray the location of a camera, and cameras will continue to get smaller and more power efficient (though there is a physical limit on how small the lense can get). Consider this a glimpse not just of womens' undergarments (assuming they're wearing same), but of the future.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:05 PM

May 09, 2005
Greening of GE

GE started a big ecomagination advertising campaign. I think that proactively spending to be a net cleaner of the environment by buying up carbon emission permits (where they are for sale) would be more effective than their research spending at abating pollution. But of course, the image is more important to them than the results.

If GE wanted to reduce internal pollutants at lowest cost, it would have an internal tax on GE polluters and provide cash to corporate abaters. The pollution permit trading scheme would decentralize the decisions about what abatement projects to fund out to the individual profit and loss units. That is good public policy for the world if it decides to cut carbon emissions. It is also good public policy for countries, states or cities that want to cut the maximum emissions for the least social dislocation.

China and India have probably reached the tipping point in many of their cities where their inhabitants are rich enough to want a cleaner environment even if it has some associated increases in the cost of doing business. US reached that point in about the 1940s and has been getting cleaner ever since.

I think the campaign may be a flop. It sounds to me like Echo Machination and is a little too reminiscent of HP's Invent! campaign. But they are the masters of their sound and image and they are probably right on the winning emotion if not on the details.

For two takes on "echo think" (fka group think), read this novel-length fictional account, Rigged by Ross Miller, my former boss and czar of risk management at GE R&D. There is another article in today's FT (trial/subscription required after first two paragraphs).

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 08:17 PM

May 06, 2005
Ductile Concrete

From my alma mater. This could have a lot of applications, reducing future costs of highway infrastructure maintenance, among other things.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:16 AM

May 04, 2005
Cat Man Do

Expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing as the technology for body morphing (particularly genetic) continues to develop:

He charges $1,000 a day for his appearances, but the offers are sporadic. Avner said his agent is pitching a show for him on the Fox television network, but the details are still murky.
"If I could make a living at it, it would be nice," he said.

He said his need to transform himself into a form of human cat stems from his Indian background as a member of the Huron and Lakota tribes. He grew up in Michigan and was given the Indian name of Stalking Cat. Following an ancient Huron tradition, Avner said he is changing himself into his totem of a tiger.

Not surprisingly, he has a web site.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:35 AM

April 21, 2005
The New Buggy-Whip Manufacturers

Glenn writes about GM's problems.

This is an issue of personal resonance with me, and one that I write about with heart heavy, because I almost certainly wouldn't be here blogging, or blogging about the topics that I do, if it weren't for GM. I grew up in Flint, Michigan (unlike Michael Moore, despite his claims), the home town of GM. It was part of the proud history of my town, and much of my third grade education was devoted to learning about it. I remember the tales my grandparents told of the proud stand of the union in the 1937 strike, how through the long weeks wives and mothers brought their husbands and sons sandwiches to pass through the factory windows during the lockdown on south Saginaw Street at the Fisher One plant, now closed, around the corner from which my brother owned a house in the 1980s, when it was still operating.

My father was a GM executive. GM put food on our table, paid our mortgage, paid for the public schools that I attended (however abysmal, but at the time, they were probably as good as any in the nation as a result of GM-provided property-tax payments, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation--C.S. Mott was one of GM's founders), and helped fund Mott Community College, which I attended prior to going to engineering school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And of course, it put many cars in our garage and driveway over the years (most of them GM products).

But the movie October Sky resonated strongly with me, because I saw in some ways GM as the coal mine that kept me from the stars (despite the fact that GM actually played a key role in Apollo--AC Spark Plug Division, for whom my dad worked at the time, built the inertial platform for the Command Module and Saturn), and my father as someone who couldn't understand how anyone wouldn't want to work for the company that had treated him, a kid from Brooklyn who moved out of the big city to marry his midwest sweetheart after the war, so well. I remember his shock as I spurned his company cars (almost invariably Caddies, or Caddie wannabes, like Buick Electra 225s, which handled like ocean liners with flooded bilges) for my own MGB-GT when I went out on dates.

Of course, it wasn't nearly as bad as the movie--my father even tolerated, if he didn't understand, the fact that I preferred MGs to GM as a youth (and truth be told, to the degree that MGs or their like are still being produced, still do).

Part of the parallel was that I worked summers for the company to help with college bills (getting the jobs through the influence of my dad, of course), and it helped motivate me to study harder so that I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life there. One of the things that these summer job experiences taught me was that in addition to the fact that they made lousy cars (even then, in my humble sports-car-loving opinion), they were dramatically mismanaged, and that ultimately (though I didn't imagine that it would take so long) they had no future.

Now this has all caught up with them.

General Motors is a powerhouse company of the early twentieth century, in a slow-motion collision with the twenty-first. By some estimates, several thousand dollars of the cost of each car they sell goes to pay health care and retirement benefits of their employees. As more people retire, this can only get worse as the burden grows.

Much worse, like the Catholic Church, which I wrote about earlier today, they're not prepared for the health-care breakthroughs about to come about. One would think that improvements in health care would be a boon to a corporation with many billions of dollars in annual health care costs, and from that narrow standpoint it may. But what happens to that same company when it also has a liability in the form of a guaranteed annuity to its retired employees (and future retirees) as long as they live, when as a result of that improved health care, they stubbornly refuse to die? Virginia Postrel points to a recent article by Holman Jenkins (subscription only, sorry) in the WSJ about GM's troubles which alludes to this:

Mr. Wagoner has decided that GM will go the final laps in its race with the mortality tables without the possibility of any hits that Zeta might have spawned. This may be entirely rational, but the grim reaper had better hold up his end of the bargain.

Given current advances in medicine, it's looking like a sucker's bet that he will.

I'm grateful to GM for what it gave me and my family growing up, but it's looking (as in fact it has for a long time) like a sinking ship to me, and the current pathetic efforts (scroll down--I've never been able to break the code on Mickey's permalinks) in terms of new models are just rearranging the deck chairs. The only hope I see, ultimately, is a bankruptcy that will require a renegotiation of the insane contract with the UAW.

Does anyone else see any parallels between GM's current situation and that of another outdated child of the early twentieth century--Social Security?

[Update on Friday night]

For any of those who found their way here due to an intrinsic interest in and knowledge of GM and Flint history (particularly recent Flint history), I have a request for information here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:10 PM

Better Living Through Stink Bombs

Well, at least slower living. Researchers have put mice into suspended animation using hydrogen sulfide. And, the key part of course, brought them back.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:42 PM

Will This Pope Be The Last Pope?

My thoughts on that subject, at TCS.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:35 AM

April 18, 2005
In The Mail

As Glenn would say. I just got a review copy of Radical Evolution, by Joel Garreau. It looks quite interesting. I'll try to get to it in the next few days (though I'm in the middle of the Baroque Cycle, so it will be a challenge).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:15 AM

The Past Brought By The Future

Long-time readers know that I'm not real big on the "spin-off" argument for funding space exploration and technology. Still, when something like this happens, it's certainly a nice side effect.

Since it was unearthed more than a century ago, the hoard of documents known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri has fascinated classical scholars. There are 400,000 fragments, many containing text from the great writers of antiquity. But only a small proportion have been read so far. Many were illegible.
Now scientists are using multi-spectral imaging techniques developed from satellite technology to read the papyri at Oxford University's Sackler Library. The fragments, preserved between sheets of glass, respond to the infra-red spectrum - ink invisible to the naked eye can be seen and photographed.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:45 AM

April 15, 2005
Behold

The world's smallest motor.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:32 AM

April 14, 2005
The End Of The Incandescent Light Bulb?

It may be in sight. LEDs have come a long way, baby.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:00 PM

Robots And Supervolcanoes

On Tuesday, I noted that someone needs to categorize and prioritize all the things that might kill us. Well, someone must have read my post, because the Guardian has done just that. The Daily Ablution has the story.

I'll chime in with Glenn and others, and note that I also welcome our robot overlords.

I disagree, though, that there's nothing we can do about supervolcanoes (at least in terms of preserving humanity). Having an economically independent and genetically diverse population off planet will at least preserve the species against such an event. That won't help with gamma ray bursts though. This list is a little terracentric, in that it doesn't distinguish between those events that would be a problem just for the earth (e.g., a supervolcano eruption) and those that would be more comprehensive (e.g., gamma rays, or obstreperous robots). By the way, does the robot scenario encompass gray goo?

Anyway, they need to rectify this.

[Tax day morning update]

Phil Bowermaster has all the solutions.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:48 AM

Dive

Anyone who thinks that private spaceships are a pipedream should check out this private submarine, which is for sale for a cool eighty million bucks. This is the next big thing in yachts. I think that we'll have the space equivalent within twenty years.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:56 AM

Here Comes The Future

Ten cool emerging technologies.

I like the silicon lasers and the universal memory, but a $0.25 malaria treatment is going to have huge effects on the developing world. The next step after that will be to get rid of the sickle-cell gene (though if malaria is artificially conquered, it should disappear naturally in a few generations).

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:53 AM

April 13, 2005
Brilliant Morons

Who are the geniuses who think that a web site has to use the latest and greatest technology in order to accomplish a basic function? There's nothing I love better than going to some site (like, for example, Bell South's) to test my internet speed, and then to wait a long time for a page to appear to be doing something, and then be informed that the test can't be run because I don't have plug-in "X" installed.

Now plugin X is obviously not required to test an internet connection speed, or to display it, because I can find numerous other sites that will do this for me without requiring a plugin. The poor benighted neanderthals who designed those web sites apparently figured out how to do it with standard HTML, because it seems to work in all my browsers.

Self-indulgent whiz kids who think they're doing us some kind of favor by insisting on bells and whistles on their web sites should ask themselves: how many people visiting their site will be pissed off if they don't encounter a need for zippywhammo plugin "X" on their site? I mean, this isn't http://internetspeedconnectionthemovie.com we're talking about here.

Now, ask how many people who are trying to get their technical question answered, but can't because the poindexters who designed the web sites make them go off and download and install software (on a slow network connection, which is what they're trying to diagnose and fix) before they'll get the answer, will get pissed off?

Think about it, brainiacs.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:52 AM

April 07, 2005
Renewing Dinosaurs

In response to my Chicken Little post the other day, the proprieter of Swerdloff.com asks:

There are plenty of nonrenewable resources, aren't there? I don't see many dinosaurs around, for example. Isn't the point of the report that there will be serious repercussions if bees, for example, go the way of the dinosaurs? The function of living organisms as “resources” should be part of your assessment, I would think.

Well, if dinosaurs were still around, they'd certainly be a renewable resource, assuming that we decided to do dinosaur husbandry of some type, whether domesticating or ranching them (and in fact, by some theories, dinosaurs, or at least their descendants, are still around, and quite renewable, as we get millions of pounds of meat and eggs from them annually, with their numbers increasing).

But I assume what he means is that the resource in question is decomposed dinosaurs (the prevailing theory for the origin of petroleum), which is not renewable. Well, in fact, though it's not being renewed, it is renewable. From the standpoint of fungible commodities (as opposed to art, or unique species) there is no such thing as a non-renewable resource.

In fact, this question inspired my latest column at TechCentralStation, up today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:24 AM

April 05, 2005
New From Google

High-resolution satellite images of almost anywhere, including your own home. Just go to the site, zoom in and center, then click the "Satellite" link in the upper-right corner.

[Via email from Howard Gluckman]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:05 AM

Precision

Stephen Gordon reports on what looks like a major breakthrough in genetic engineering.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 AM

April 04, 2005
Terabyte Drives

Hitachi says they're on the way, soon. Finally, room for my cheesy SF movie collection in one place.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AM

March 30, 2005
The Sky Is Falling

Now where have we read things like this before? Oh, yeah.

The very headline is absurd. For it to make any sense, one must believe that "resources" are some fixed quantity, rather than a product of technology and human ingenuity. Which was of course exactly the same mistake that Dennis Meadows made in "Limits to Growth." Not to mention Paul Ehrlich.

[Update at 2 PM]

Phil Bowermaster has further thoughts. He also has some great SF movie titles. I'll bet these are being optioned as I type.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:15 AM

But It Checqued Out Fine

This probably isn't news to people who are both good writers and use MS Word, but its grammar checker sucks.

I personally find it a frustrating mix of useful and extremely annoying. It does occasionally catch a word I misspell (something that I do rarely), but it almost never gives me good grammar advice. Ninety percent of the time (probably more) its recommended changes are either of no value, or would actually be wrong (I notice in particular that it has problems recognizing subjects and objects when recommending singular or plural forms of irregular verbs). I'll probably keep using it, but given my writing style, I wish that I could disable the "long sentence, no suggestions" feature, because that's the one that I most often get false alarms with.

Anyway, as the article says, if you're a student (or worker) and think that your product is spelled correctly and grammatical just because Microsoft says so, think again. There's still no substitute for a human editor, whether yourself or, if you're unsure, another.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:31 AM

March 25, 2005
The Rest Of The Story

In the wake of the Oscar hype, Sallie Baliunas has a tribute to Howard Hughes, relating some of his lesser-known, but very important accomplishments.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AM

March 24, 2005
Hope They Don't Blow It

Whatever one's position on the use of embryonic stem cells, it has to be admitted that restrictions on their use, and ethical concerns, have certainly spurred creativity in developing alternatives. Apparently, funded in part by the Catholic Church, Australian researchers have come up with a way to harvest useful adult stem cells from the nose.

As someone well endowed in the schnoz department, I think this is great. I don't have a big problem with cloning, or using embryos, but I don't have a huge letch to destroy them either. If we can come up with medical advances that everyone's ethically comfortable with, all the better. Of course, some people are apparently morally opposed to long life and good health, regardless of the means.

I should mention perhaps the ultimate irony of this particular breakthrough. The one person in the world who seems most interested in remaining youthful forever will never be able to take advantage of it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:29 PM

March 22, 2005
Thrown Off The Ambulance

I've had nothing to say about the Terri Schiavo case, because I don't know that much about it. But all of the major media, including The Corner, seem determined to rectify that situation. Or rather, they seek to inundate me with information about it, if not enlightenment.

I guess it's understandable why it's become such a compelling story--it's a heady mix of themes both political and philosophical. We have the nature of marriage, the fidelity of a spouse to both his marriage and to what he claims are his wife's desires, the importance of documenting those desires prior to such an event (though one can never truly know what one's feelings will be when it actually happens), the appropriate role of the states, the federal government, and the judiciary in deciding such personal and heart-wrenching situations, the definition of "persistent vegetative state" and the uncertainties of how to determine whether it truly persists in a particular individual, the absurd hypocrisy of allowing execution without trial by passive (but not active, even though they actually are) acts, the right to live, the right to die, the value of a life bereft of cognition, even (though this is one that few talk about) whether or not such a life can even be considered fully human, and the ultimate prospects for recovery from such a condition.

I'll ignore the politics and legal issues, which will clear out quite a bit of the underbrush. I'll also ignore all of the speculation as to the husband's motives and character, about which I know little, and actually care less, at least for the purpose of this discussion.

I'd like instead to delve more deeply into what I think has been ignored--the philosophical and ethical issues involved.

Is this euthanasia? It depends on how one defines it. Obviously, the courts want to rule that it isn't because it's against the law, but what is the ethical difference between withdrawing food and water from a forty-one year old unable to feed herself, and a one-month-old unable to feed herself? (I'll ignore for now the ethical absurdity of it being acceptable to starve and dehydrate someone to death, when that is a certain outcome of one's actions, but not to painlessly euthanize them.)

It's clearly not the age, because someone who was invalid and requesting food and water would be provided it in our society, or those who failed to do so would be charged with criminal neglect, and this would be true for a person of nine months or ninety years. It can only be the potential for humanity and a life that others would consider to be of "value." A baby has a full, cognizant, sapient life ahead of it, whereas the presumption in this case is that Mrs. Schiavo apparently does not.

We are told by numerous experts (with a few dissenters) that she has no cognitive function, or awareness of either her surroundings or her own existence. I have to wonder how they can know this.

Awareness of surroundings is easy enough to identify. Assuming that their sensory apparatus--eyes, ears, skin--are functional, one can move objects to see if they follow them with their eyes, or make noises to see if they turn at the sudden sensory input. Of course, any household pet (other than a pet rock) would pass this test. So surely that can't be a test, in and of itself, either. We have granted a special privilege to creatures that share our DNA structure, though in the future, as such things become ever more manipulable, the use of DNA as a definer of humanity will come to be seen as inadequate in the face of those things that truly make us human--our cognitive abilities, our emotions, our loves and fears, our laughter and tears. I don't know to what degree Terri Schiavo still retains those features, which are what I consider essential to being a human.

But more fundamentally, is she conscious? In an ultimate philosophical sense, how can one judge that for anyone, let alone for someone with whom we are unable to communicate on even the most basic level (again, assuming that to be the case, a matter which seems also to be in some dispute).

Years ago, the famous (well, among mathematicians and computer types, anyway) pioneer of computing theory, Alan Turing, came up with something called the Turing Test. It recognizes that there's no way to know with ultimate certainty that someone is conscious or self aware--we can only know that about ourselves--but that we make the assumption with what appear to be our fellow humans that if someone acts like they are, then they are. So the question arises, if we were to develop a machine that behaves like, indeed is indistinguishable from, a human in terms of its responses to questions, and in conversation, in what sense can we say it's not conscious as well? Other, that is, than to arbitrarily (and, though I hesitate to use the term, considering that its source is Peter Singer, in a "speciesist" way) define things that are inorganic and lacking human DNA as being intrinsically incapable of consciousness?

So, is Terri Schiavo conscious? Well, she certainly seems to fail a Turing Test. But suppose (and this, of course, is the most horrifying possibility), to turn the old insult on its head, the lights aren't on--the shades are for the most part drawn--but somebody is home. Suppose that she's fully aware of her existence, in all its pain and frustration, and is physically unable to communicate that fact to us.

It seems to me that there are two possibilities (recognizing gradations between them).

The first possibility is that there is, in fact, someone home. If so, then the state of her mind is important. If she wants to live, despite her husband's testimony, then it would seem important to let her do so, and hopefully, few would disagree--even her husband. This is in fact her family's (with the exception of her husband) belief.

If she wants to die, perhaps because she's in indescribable pain, or simply from the frustration of being trapped helplessly in her body with no prospect for escape, then of course it's more complicated.

After all, the people who are trying to keep her alive now (and I'm not referring only to her family) would, for the most part, still be doing so even if she were expressing her desire to end her life, since for the most part they find euthanasia morally repugnant (perhaps even if it meant to consign her indefinitely to a living hell). I don't think that they would do so because they are cruel people, but because they do seem (often irrationally) to value anything that resembles human life above all else, and they can't personally know what hell they're putting her through, any more than they can know with certainty as to whether or not she's conscious.

On the other hand, many (like, for instance, me) believe that the desires of the individual in this, perhaps the most personal decision possible, should prevail, if she's an adult. So unlike them, if I knew with certainty that Terri Schiavo wanted to end her existence, I would not only allow her to do so, but I'd help her do so as quickly and painlessly as possible, particularly given how long she's been in this frustrating state.

The second possibility is the one that the courts have ruled to date is in fact the case--that she is completely uncognizant of herself or anything else--a "vegetable," albeit one composed almost entirely of protein, with few carbs. There are in turn two possibilities attached to this one. First, that this is a permanent state, irreversible. Again, this is the current position of the courts. The second, though, is that given either time, or technology (a possibility that I've heard no discussion of to date), she will at least improve, if not be talking and running and laughing again.

If we can know, with absolute certainty, that she is vegetative, and that it's persistent, then I have no problem with pulling the feeding tube, other than in fact that's a needlessly long way to go about the process of ending this (what I would consider) non-human life. In fact, it seems to me that, if there really is no one home, it doesn't matter in what manner we do so, from an ethical standpoint, other than the standpoint of human decency. We could chop off her head, bury her alive, put her through a wood chipper, leave her in the woods to let the animals feed upon her, etc. All of these would be outrages to her family and loved ones, of course (hopefully including even her maligned husband), which is why we would do none of them, but it certainly wouldn't matter to her. The point is, that we could euthanize her, and not play this bizarre philosophical game of pretending that we're not really killing her by denying her food and water--that her "dying process is continuing," as though it's something passive, with which those who (actively) removed her feeding tube have nothing to do.

But the second possibility is the one that I find most interesting, for the purposes of this (by now) long discussion.

Suppose that she is in a vegetative state, but that it can be repaired in the future, with technology not yet in existence, or perhaps currently imagined, even if she won't heal from it naturally, on her own. Those long familiar with my weblog will know where I'm going with this.

What Terri Schiavo's family is doing is asking to give her an ambulance to the future, whatever that future may hold. They want to keep her alive for the simple aphorism that where there is life, there is hope. They considered her to be in that ambulance, no matter how clunky with current medical knowledge (and perhaps given her husband's orders, for good or ill), while on the feeding tube. To remove it now is to open the back doors, and kick the patient out in the street to die, bereft of any more hope for the future.

Terri Schiavo may in fact be already dead, by the definition of cryonicists, because if her brain is as damaged as some claim, anything resembling her, in terms of personality and memories, is long gone, with no hope for return. She has suffered the ultimate, irretrievable death--information death. Even if medical technology improves in the future to repair her mind, they might restore someone to full health, who physically resembles Terri Schiavo, or Terri Schindler, but it will be a different person, with different memories, and perhaps a completely different nature. It's someone who Terri's friends and family may get to know, and come to like and even love, but it won't be Terri, and never will be Terri, no matter how strong the resemblance.

Cryonics patients, on the other hand, are trying to preserve what (if the pessimists about Terri are right) she has already lost beyond recovery. They want to preserve their memories and personality currently residing in their intact minds. Their bodies (and the number of chromosomes in their DNA) are of secondary importance (though to many, still important). A human brain frozen today cannot be repaired today, but we cannot say what the morrow brings.

So from that standpoint, if Terri is as non compos mentis as the courts have ruled (again, a premise granted only for the sake of this discussion), then patients in cryonic suspension, particularly those put there more recently, under better, cell-preserving protocols, are more alive than Terri Schiavo is, even though she breathes, and needs a feeding tube, and they have no metabolism at all.

This, of course, has been a long-winded way of saying that I don't ultimately know what to do about Terri, because I don't know if (by my lights) she's alive or dead. If she's alive, and wants to remain so, she should. If she's alive and wants to die, she should be able to do that. If she's dead, then it doesn't matter. It's a hard case, and as the old saying goes, hard cases make bad law, which is why what's going on in Washington is also troubling.

What truly concerns me about this case, though, and ultimately puts me on the side of the family, is that I've seen how the courts have dealt with the rights of innocent people (cryonicists) desperate to save themselves, but who have callously been granted the equivalent of a death sentence. Sadly, courts cannot always be trusted in such matters, because judges cannot always be trusted to be scientifically literate or even amenable to simple logic. I'm concerned that Terri Schiavo hasn't gotten her day in court, or that if she did, it was a bad one, and I think that she should get one more bite at the apple, if there's any possibility at all that she has the teeth for it. Let's make sure she's really dead before we throw her off the ambulance.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:06 AM

Stupic Mac Tricks

Well, clever ones, actually. Using the internal motion sensor.

Finally, they have the technology to do what I think would be a really cool piece of software, for those of us with nostalgia for sixties childhoods--a virtual Etch-a-Sketch. If you decide you don't like the picture you drew, just turn the thing over and shake it to clear the screen.

There actually is one on line, if you want to play with it. Kiss your productivity goodbye today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 AM

March 18, 2005
Could Be Any Millenium Now

Here's another good reason to get out into space, as quickly as possible, and as robustly as possible--we may be past our "extinct by" date.

[Via Alan Boyle]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:07 AM

March 11, 2005
The Chinese Won't Be Happy

Stephen Gordon has some interesting predictions about the future of manufacturing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:15 AM

Social Machines

In an interesting brief survey of the state of the robotic art, Alan Boyle asks if there are robosexuals in our future.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:08 AM

March 10, 2005
A Modern Wonder

Michael Jennings has a nice photo essay about the new viaduct in France:

The materials from which this bridge has been built are vastly stronger than anything that existed even 20 years ago. I have said this before, but this is in my mind the defining characteristic of modern post materials revolution structural engineering. Structures are then, flimsy. They almost look like spider webs. The defining characteristic of industrial age engineering was bulk. But now we are in this virtuous circle of stronger and lighter materials allowing a much thinner deck, allowing the other parts of the bridge to be lighter and less substantial too, allowing still more economies elsewhere, and a rapidly dropping cost of projects like this.

That will be a characteristic of a space elevator as well, if it's built.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:42 AM

March 09, 2005
Definitely Not Pro-Life

Virginia Postrel usefully points out (once again) the bifurcation of the anti-cloning activists' agenda.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:30 AM

Mighty Mouse

Phil Bowermaster has some interesting thoughts about making mice smart.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:05 AM

March 07, 2005
More Than Human

That's the title of a book I read recently. No, it's not the classic science fiction tome by Ted Sturgeon. This one is (I think) non-fiction, and new, just having been released this week.

A first book by Ramez Naam (a software developer who claims to be one of those responsible for Internet Explorer, though I won't hold that against him), it's a highly readable survey of the current and projected state of the art in various life-extending and life-enhancing technologies, including life extension, cloning, prosthetics and neural implants, most of which are already here, but in their infancy. These are subjects about which he's both enthusiastic and optimistic.

Many critics of these technologies, particularly Kassians and other worshipers of ultimate death, will find them quite disquieting. Regardless, whichever camp one is in, as Naam points out (and as I pointed out last week), these technologies are going to happen, because that's the history of such technologies. They are being developed to solve real human problems that are causing real human suffering, and once they become available, there's no sufficiently bright, unambiguous line between their uses for therapy and their uses for what some, like Dr. Kass or Frank Fukuyama, will consider unnecessary enhancement, to a state beyond that which they currently (and subjectively, and arbitrarily) define as human.

It's not a new problem. To take a mundane example, a plastic surgeon can do reconstructive surgery on a mastectomy patient, to restore her shattered sense of womanhood at the loss of one of the features that biology and society have defined as a key component of that state. Few argue that there is anything wrong with this. But the same surgery can also change a 32B to a 36D. And some women are naturally unendowed, and would like an artificial solution to what they view as nature's mistake. Who is going to be the arbiter of which are allowed such surgeries?

Naam leads off each chapter with similar examples, of radical new therapies currently in work, that have natural potential for non-therapeutic use. Beyond that, the military is developing some of these deliberately for the purpose of enhancing troop performance. Imagine the possibilities of a pilot able to fly an aircraft, and sense hostile activity, directly with her mind, with no need for intermediary appendages. Imagine in particular the utility of such a system in which this can be done remotely.

One particular insight from the book that hadn't struck me before is the disingenuousness of the Godwinized argument that many use against proponents of cloning, or life extension, or body enhancement, by accusing them of attempting to revive the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, offshoots of which were indeed adopted by the Nazis.

But such comparisons are ludicrous. It wasn't the goal of the eugenics movement that was necessarily odious (they were, after all, only seeking an improvement of humanity)--it was the means by which they wanted (indeed would have had to employ and, in Germany, in fact did) to achieve it. They could only achieve their goals through government coercion and ultimately totalitarianism. The irony is that proponents of these technologies are seeking them for use by the free choice of individuals, while this time it's the opponents, those who (by their spurious association of them with the eugenicists) wish to implement government policies to prevent the use of such technologies. In Virginia Postrel's formulation, the dynamists are those who want to allow individuals to decide, and the stasists are the King Canutes who want to hold back the tide through the force of government (though, unlike Canute, they don't seem to recognize that the tide won't be held back).

Naam's ultimate message is that these technologies are coming, ready or not. If we can't accommodate our definition of humanity to them, then the future will indeed be post human, but I suspect that it will be a future much more free of suffering and pain than the present, with much more opportunity for growth of those things--art, science, love and laughter--that make being human so precious.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AM

February 10, 2005
Well, At Least It Didn't Cost Too Much To Find Out

The Air Force has decided, after a $25,000 study, that Star-Trek-like transporters aren't currently feasible.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:12 AM

February 07, 2005
We Start Them Out Young In The Great Lake State

A four-year-old Michigan boy drove his mother's car to the video store and back. It was closed, unfortunately:

Osga then discovered the boy, whose mother told police her son tried to drive the car earlier after she let him steer the vehicle from her lap.
"He's 4 years old, his mom didn't even know he was up," Heugel told The Grand Rapids Press for a Sunday story. "I don't think he even realizes what he did."

No charges will be filed against the boy or his mother, Heugel said.

It was the third time in six weeks that a west Michigan child was caught driving a vehicle.

Hey, when you're one of the leading producers of the product, you want to get them started early.

Seriously, growing up in Michigan, and particularly in Flint, Michigan, which was then (and still remains largely today) a one-industry town, there was a lot of emphasis on driver's ed. There used to be a miniature town in Kearsley Park, with little blacktop roads, stop and yield signs, one-way streets and traffic signals. It was called Safetyville, USA, sponsored by the Industrial Mutual Association (IMA) of Flint. There were small electric cars that children could drive around on the streets, but before you could get a "license" to do so, you had to go through driver's training, and learn the road rules.

Apparently, it's still there, but without the cars. It was a great idea, and I'm a little surprised that it didn't survive, or spread to other communities.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:11 AM

February 04, 2005
Let Me Use The Damn Keypad!

Just a little rant.

I guess it's some kind of technological advance when we can talk to robots on the telephone, but I don't want to do it. It's not just that the technology isn't perfect, and you have to enunciate clearly and loudly. Did it ever occur to these morons that if I'm in the middle of a cube farm, I just may not want to speak my credit card number, or social security number, or zip code, or mother's maiden name aloud? Or even speaking precise monosyllables, and sounding like an idiot to your cubemates?

I thought that the concept of using the digital keypad for sending commands to a remote system was great. Going to voice is, for me, a step backwards. There's no reason that they can't give a keypad option for each verbal one, yet many of them, once they transition to the new voice recognition systems, don't. I prefer to pay my bills in silence, and I'll prefer service providers that recognize that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:09 AM

February 03, 2005
The Latest On Things Nano

It's been out for over a month, but I just noticed this survey on nanotechnology at the Economist.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:55 AM

Strange Bedfellows

If this is the next political divide, I know which side I'm on.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:03 AM

January 28, 2005
Applephilia

Lileks has a bad case of it, and rejoices in it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:55 AM

January 26, 2005
Frightening Thought

How many clueless people are going to respond to this email and install the trojan attached?

Dear Sir/Madam,
We kindly ask you to install this update to your PC as soon as possible.

In the libraries of OS Windows® critical errors have been found. This errors lead to destruction of the system files from your computer without an opportunity on restoration. The given service-pack fixes libraries and does not allow various Trojan modules to penetrate into your computer.

Yours Faithfully,
Microsoft INC

MsWindowsUpdate.rar: 00000001,00000001,00000000,00000000

You'd think they could find someone who knew a little better English to at least check their grammar.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:36 PM

January 25, 2005
"Give A Little, Take A Lot"

Businessweek has a nice little history of Linux, and Linus Torvalds.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:10 AM

January 10, 2005
DNS Culprit Found?

Could this explain all the DNS problems that I and others have been having?

One troublesome technique finding favor with spammers involves sending mass mailings in the middle of the night from a domain that has not yet been registered. After the mailings go out, the spammer registers the domain early the next morning.
By doing this, spammers hope to avoid stiff CAN-SPAM fines through minimal exposure and visibility with a given domain. The ruse, they hope, makes them more difficult to find and prosecute.

The scheme, however, has unintended consequences of its own. During the interval between mailing and registration, the SMTP servers on the recipients' networks attempt Domain Name System look-ups on the nonexistent domain, causing delays and timeouts on the DNS servers and backups in SMTP message queues.

If so, it's just one more reason to make spamming a capital offense.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:47 AM

December 21, 2004
It Had To Happen

This is a lot better than using cell phones to set off roadside bombs. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, "reach out and touch someone." (Slightly work unsafe for both links.)

And if you're the do-it-yourself type, here's a site with a lot of tips for just using stuff around the house...

Check out the main site there too--not just the cell-phone pages. It's just the place for pervs on a budget.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:49 AM

"Laughing At People's Fears"

Will Saletan has a disquieting report on a recent biotech meeting.

I am largely in favor of the kinds of advances proposed here, but the community is indeed going to have to learn to respect the views of people who are concerned about it, and lighten up on the condescension, if they don't want to see progress shut down out of ignorance.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:15 AM

December 20, 2004
Nostalgia, Part II

A high-school dropout computer designer who builds retro machines has put a Commodore 64 on a chip. Only in America.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:47 AM

Nostalgia

For sounds going extinct. It's an interesting article, and a little disconcerting that there are many sounds with which a certain generation (mine) is familiar that kids today may have never heard, except in the movies. It brings to mind this post from last summer, when I heard a sound that was familiar to me only from WW II movies, though my father heard much more of it than he ever imagined wanting to.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:30 AM

December 19, 2004
The Fox In Bill's Henhouse

The New York Times has a story about the explosive growth of Firefox, and how Redmond's screwed, at least in the short term. There may be only one way out, as Scott Ott amusingly points out.

But another article says that Thunderbird, its email client companion, won't be able to make as many inroads against Outlook, no matter how insecurity-ridden that program is, because of the energy barrier necessary to change email clients.

Email and Usenet are the biggest things keeping me from switching to Linux for my desktop--I just have too much legacy data in Eudora and Agent, and no obvious way to transition over to things like Thunderbird and Pan. I use Mozilla for browsing, but I'm still using Eudora and Agent, until there's an open-source solution for this problem.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:38 AM

December 17, 2004
A Century And A Year

A hundred and one years ago today, the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight took place. There was a much bigger deal about it last year, centennials being much more newsworthy than hundred and first anniversaries, and it was spiced up by the first supersonic flight of SpaceShipOne on the same day. In fact, looking back now, that's probably the event that started off a very remarkable year in space--2004, even though it was a couple weeks early. I'll put together a year-end review of what happened in space this year. In very many ways, it was the most exciting year, and one more filled with hopeful portent, since the 1960s.

I had pieces on the Wright brothers' accomplishment at National Review, TechCentralStation, and Fox News. Those who didn't read them then might find them of interest today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:46 AM

December 03, 2004
Living To One Thousand

Here's a debate on aging, and the prospects for eliminating it, between Aubrey De Grey and S. Jay Olshansky.

I find the latter unpersuasive. His argument seems to be "people in the past have predicted it, and it didn't happen, therefore it won't now either."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:07 AM

November 30, 2004
Rejuvenation

Philip Chaston reports on a talk in London by Aubrey De Grey, in which he announced that the Methuselah Mouse prize is being extended to another one for best late-onset treatment, for those of us too old to benefit from breakthroughs that must be started early in life.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:33 AM

November 24, 2004
Nanoassembly

In seawater. Using techniques developed by abalones.

I suspect that this is a much bigger story than most people realize right now, if it works out.

[Via Virginia]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AM

November 21, 2004
Breeding An Oxymoron

They've developed a mild habanero pepper.

What next? Flying cars?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:56 AM

November 19, 2004
A Better Google

If you're looking for scientific or scholarly results. This has been necessary for a while, with all of the pr0n swamping some search results on regular Google.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:16 AM

November 17, 2004
Telehunting

I'm not sure just what the Texas officials' problem is with this:

Hunters soon may be able to sit at their computers and blast away at animals on a Texas ranch via the Internet, a prospect that has state wildlife officials up in arms.
A controversial Web site, http://www.live-shot.com, already offers target practice with a .22 caliber rifle and could soon let hunters shoot at deer, antelope and wild pigs, site creator John Underwood said on Tuesday.

Texas officials are not quite sure what to make of Underwood's Web site, but may tweak existing laws to make sure Internet hunting does not get out of hand.

Seems like a great idea to me. It would let you bag venison from the comfort of your own home, from anywhere in the world. It would be a good way to keep the deer from scenting you, and could reduce the overpopulation in many states.

It also sounds like just the ticket for John Kerry. He could crawl on his stomach in one of his own mansions, with his virtual shotgun, instead of having to go out in the cold and mud.

[Update on Thursday morning]

The deer aren't going down quietly. It seems they've adapted the tactics of the Islamakazis, and are taking us with them.

[Update early Thursday afternoon]

For anyone who wants to give it a try (shooting over the internet, not crashing into deer), here's the web site.

[Another update on Thursday night]

We're under siege.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:09 PM

November 11, 2004
Half A Century

Of teevee dinners. Happy anniversary, Swanson.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:57 AM

Can Flying Cars Be Next?

Check it out. 3-D television.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:10 AM

October 27, 2004
Exponential

Phil Bowermaster has an interesting post on what the future may hold in terms of information storage and processing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 AM

October 26, 2004
Shiftless

Tim Blair is hosting a lively discussion on the virtues of clutches.

I've never owned a car with an automatic transmission.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:52 AM

October 18, 2004
How Long Can And Should We Live?

Stephen Gordon has a review of a new book on the prospects for indefinite lifespan.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:30 PM

October 01, 2004
They Never Learn

Another victory for the blogosphere over a professor who tried to resurrect the authenticity of the fake CBS memos.

But, hey, what's a little academic fraud? It's all in the service of the cause, right? The most important thing is to get rid of chimpie.

What frightens me is that the ability to create such fakery without getting caught (given a little intelligence, something in short supply so far on the part of the Bush haters) is improving every day. Authenticating documents (and records of events) is going to become a major societal issue in the future, and it's starting to become one already.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AM

September 10, 2004
A Latter-Day King Canute

We discussed various means of mitigating hurricanes in the comments to this post, but now comes a southern Florida businessman with a different idea.

Color me extremely skeptical. My confidence is less than buoyed by his association with Ed Mitchell, definitely one of the wackier Apollo astronauts, but hey, it's his money, and if by some miracle it works, great. Of course, we won't ever really know if it works, at least for this particular storm, because there's no control on the experiment (i.e., we'll have no idea what would have happened if he hadn't done anything).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:52 PM

August 30, 2004
Liquid Cooling Garments

...for the masses. Astronauts have always had coolant loops in their clothes when performing extravehicular activity, to carry away the heat in the only way possible, but now it's becoming an off-the-shelf item, thanks to Israeli ingenuity. Expect to see the space startups employ it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:57 AM

August 16, 2004
Flying Blind?

Here's an interesting article on the future of science fiction in the face of accelerating change.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:36 AM

August 09, 2004
Steam kills

An accident at a nuclear plant kills four workers. It was a steam leak, but that won't stop the antinuclear hysteriacs from flipping out. Of course, nothing will stop the antinuclear hysteriacs from flipping out. OTOH, it's worth pointing out that the failure of the steam system lead to an appropriate controlled shutdown of the core, just the way it should. In a sane world the headlines would read "Nuclear reactor safety system works as designed," and the whole thing would lead to no more than a call to reemphasize the safety guidelines for working with high pressure steam that have developed over the last couple of centuries. My prediction is that the accident will turn out to have been preventable had those guidelines been followed. Steam is dangerous, but controllable, and it can be safely harnessed. Just like nuclear power.

Posted by Andrew Case at 12:14 PM

Spam and Cyberterrorism

There's a brief bit by Bruce Sterling in Wired online on cyberterrorism and spam and what should be done. Worth a read, though I don't agree with all his conclusions.

Posted by Andrew Case at 08:58 AM

August 08, 2004
The Thirty-Seven Year Itch

People are getting divorced at much later ages, as a result of (probably among other things) increasing longevity.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:35 PM

August 05, 2004
Cable TV Regulation

Via Technology Review, and article on the technical objections to a la carte cable service. Turns out the complaints by Comcast and Time Warner that it's technically difficult are flat out BS. Surprise!

You'd think that the cable companies would stand to benefit by going to an a la carte model - I know I'd be much more likely to get cable if I could pick and choose, and pay for only those channels I'm interested in. Also, by letting customers pick channels for themselves the cable companies would have a much better read on what their viewers are interested in, which would help pitch advertising better.

I dislike government telling businesses how to run their operations, so I oppose forcing cable companies to go to an a la carte model. The fact that the media megacorps feel the need to shade the truth about the costs is interesting, though. Much more worthy of government intervention to my mind is the simple fact that media megaconglomerates exist. Concentrations of power are a threat to liberty regardless of whether they are governmental or private. Concentrations of power within the media are particularly dangerous, because they can shape our perceptions of the world. If there's any area where heavy handed intervention in the marketplace is justified, it's in breaking up media conglomerates.

Incidentally, I realize there's a widespread view within the blogosphere that blogs represent a revolution in information accessability that make old media irrelevant. This is such a dumb notion that I have a hard time figuring out how to address it without insulting the reader's intelligence. Blogs are a new, parallel information source (with a godawful signal/noise ratio), which offers access only to people who actively seek it out. Suffice to say the number of people reading blogs for information which challenges their preconceptions is small. If blogs become people's primary information source about the world, the US will fragment into tiny groups of people whose worldviews are so different that meaningful communication between them is effectively impossible. We're headed that way now, so maybe I should just stop worrying about it.

Posted by Andrew Case at 06:56 AM

July 27, 2004
More Computer voting

Via MIT's Technology Review, an item on computer voting and the upcoming election.

There was a particularly stupid an ill-informed op-ed (warning: audio link) on PRI's show Marketplace yesterday. Basically the commentator felt that since ATMs are so reliable, we should trust voting machines. This completely ignores that fact that ATM errors have multiple redundant means of catching errors, since they generate a paper trail at the time of the transaction, the customer has additional opportunities to catch errors when they receive their bank statement, and the bank has enormous incentives to ensure correct accounting if they want to stay in business. If there is a potential problem with an ATM it can be taken off line for a couple of days until it is fixed.

In the case of electronic voting machines, they are put to the test once every couple of years, set up by people with minimal training, there is no independent audit trail, and there is considerable incentive to falsify votes, knowing that if you are successful you or your allies will control the investigation into what happened. Only an independent voter-verifiable audit trail can make electronic voting credible. Unfortunately my state (MD) is dragging its feet on this issue despite a well organized effort to knock some sense into the heads of the Election Commission.

I blogged this topic earlier, and I'll do it again before the election. This is the single most important technological issue facing the US. We have the potential to completely invalidate elections. Without trust in the electoral process government has no legitimacy, and people will be forced to accept disenfranchisement or resist with force. That may sound like hyperbole, but I suggest you think carefully about the likely reaction if there is a significant split between exit polls and reported (utterly unverifiable) election results in a hotly contested election. I don't think rioting is at all unlikely, and public officials hanged from lamposts is a real possibility. It's all well and good to joke about that being a good thing, but there's no guarantee that the officials hanged are the guilty ones, or that large scale public disorder will in any way actually address the problem. Just ask Reginald Denny.

I spent four hours last night working with commonly used commercial software which crashed three times. It was MicroSoft Word, so there's something of an expectation that it's a P.O.S., but it's at least as heavily tested as the Dielbold software that I'll be using to cast my vote in November. My confidence in the system working as it should is not high.

Posted by Andrew Case at 07:31 AM

July 22, 2004
Bad, Bad, Bad idea

There's a bill working its way through congress that will criminalize sale of technology that intentionally induces a person to infringe copyright. That places all recording media under threat. This is one of those bills which is written at the behest of major corporations looking to compete via legislation rather than the marketplace.

Information simply cannot be force fit into the conventional mold of property rights law that originated in the ownership of land. Patents are workable as a means of protecting intellectual property, though they have been abused somewhat recently. Copyrights on the other hand are being abused and manipulated to an unprecedented degree. We recently saw the extension of copyright by an additional 20 years (thanks to some heavy lobbying by Disney, among others), and there's no doubt that when those 20 years are up efforts will be well under way to extend by another 20. The copyright system is broken, and this latest bill will just break it still further. We need to completely rethink the way we handle copyrights from the ground up. I can't claim to know what the answer is, but it's clear what it isn't: banning technologies just because they can infringe copyright. That is an idiotic route that leads to making pen and paper technically illegal.

Posted by Andrew Case at 06:38 AM

July 15, 2004
The latest Crypto-Gram

Crypto-Gram is a monthly newsletter on security issues put out by Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Internet Security. I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating. the link above is to the latest issue, which includes a well argued piece on handling terrorist suspects without skirting the Constitution. Schneier argues that it's not necessary to work around established due process rules in order to deal effectively with terrorism. There are a couple of other really good items in this issue, notably the item on economic motivations for security theater (insurance companies will give you breaks on premiums if you install X-ray machines, even if you don't use them effectively), and the item on ICS, a company selling an encryption scheme which they claim - get this - uses no math. Brilliant.

Anyway, if you're at all interested in security issues and the tradeoffs between security and liberty, go on over and take a look.

Posted by Andrew Case at 09:10 AM

July 14, 2004
Return Of The Mainframe?

A new offering by Hewlett Packard--a PC that can be shared by four users--makes me wonder if we've finally come full circle.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:54 PM

Are They Watching Me?

I was reading this interesting article about the latest security techniques against worms, when my laptop froze up.

I've rebooted now. Just coincidence, I'm sure...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:52 PM

Myopic

John Derbyshire has been asking questions about why frozen sperm survives freezing, and gets a knowledgable email on the subject. The emailer does understand the issues, except for this:

A good post-thaw viability (survival of cells) is around 60% of the total of cells-- some people advertise >80% or 90-%, but that is a bit of a 'lie via statistics' game-- they don't count all the dead population in computing the percentage. We are working here with different, more efficacious, and non-toxic CPAs, of which the most promising appears to be arabinogalactin extracted from larch trees.
As you can see, this is the reason that we will never get Ted Williams back among the living. His frozen body consisting of billions of cells simply would not work with only ~60% of the cells surviving the thaw process. As one can say, God instills the soul when He wishes, and outsmarts us all.

This, of course, presumes that the only method we will have, now and forever, is crude thawing. It ignores the future possibility of different techniques for restoring the tissue to room temperature and viability (e.g., nanomachinery that repairs as it warms). It's fair to have an opinion that we may never have such capability, but it's quite foolish, I think, to believe categorically that this is so.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:53 AM

July 13, 2004
More Supersonics

Kevin Murphy has some thoughts about supersonics, based on my previous post. He's skeptical.

Given that he's not stooped to calling me a scientific lightweight, and incapable of understanding mathematics, that's fine, but he doesn't really understand the whole picture, which is understandable since I haven't really presented it. This is a matter of some frustration to me, but one that I can do little about until I can persuade the company involved to put up information on the web, so that it can be critiqued and reviewed.

Regardless, I'll try to respond to his comments as best I can under the circumstances (which include limited time on my part).

...even if you have the same drag coefficient at supersonic as you do at subsonic -- your drag, and thus fuel consumption, will increase substantially.

The key clause here is "if you have the same drag coefficient at supersonic." At least for the wing, it's actually possible to do better, at least in terms of induced drag (an effect of the end of the wing, which makes it greater than two-dimensional) which is actually improved at higher speeds. The notion, right or wrong, postulates that supersonic L/D for aircraft designed under this theory will be similar to that of subsonic aircraft, so it offers the potential (if not promise) of airfares comparable to subsonic fares for the same routes.

With regard to his comments on angle of attack, they're not relevant, because any angle of attack that is non-zero will dramatically increase wave drag and induce shock waves. The aircraft's nominal design condition is zero AOA. Takeoff and time to cruise aren't an issue, either (as isn't the engine) because we can get rid of the extreme sweep that has always been associated with supersonic aircraft (a design strategem that was always a kludge to come up with a way of minimizing wave drag without solving the fundamental problem).

Something like the SR-71 engines are a likely solution, in terms of the inlet, but that's not a problem because they'll be optimized for fuel economy at cruise speed (which will constitute most of their operating time), not takeoff/landing. Also, we're not proposing anything as fast as the Blackbird--Mach 2.4 will probably be adequate.

But here is really the crux of the issue.

The claim is that with enough leading edge sharpness and the proper contouring behind, you can fly supersonically without shockwaves, except circulation (flow around the airfoil) which produces lift elimates the shockless effect. Why would this be? Well, without lift on a sharp symmetric airfoil the stagnation point would the the leading edge. If you add circulation, perhaps you move the stagnation point so that it is no longer on the leading edge. Could this be the problem? The flow splits at the stagnation point (that's where it stops), and if it isn't sharp where it splits, you get a shockwave? If that is the case, well, we're screwed. No amount of adding in balancing circulation downstream will matter, and adding it to the flow over the wing to cancel it out will mean an end to the lift from the wing. Now you could make an unsymmetrical airfoil such that at the cruise condition the stagnation point is on the sharp point of the airfoil, but you'd have shockwave drag getting to that point (or if you had to fly off design point.)

The proposal is not to build a symmetric airfoil. Stagnation points really aren't relevant.

Imagine a Busemann biplane, which is really a DeLaval nozzle inside two wings. The top of the upper wing is flat, as is the bottom of the lower wing. That allows the airflow to move past without shock. The ramping occurs within the two wings. Now, Busemann showed that this will have a shock-free flow, but because of the symmetry, it has no lift. Now imagine that the lower wing is dynamic--it's actually a supersonic airflow coming from a non-shocking duct, with a flat lower surface. The lower surface of the "biplane" (after a short ramp) is a stream of higher-energy air (to satisfy Crocco), that mixes the total flow to provide the anti-circulation to balance the wing circulation.

The idea is to provide that balance to eliminate the need for the highly entropic downstream vortices, that require far more energy than that required to simply provide that balance. It spreads the residual shocks over a much larger footprint, reducing almost to insignificance the PSF on the ground, and essentially eliminates the wave drag.

Bottom line: if this works (and I don't claim that it will--only that it's not obvious to me that it won't), this means wide-body supersonic aircraft, at non-ozone-eating altitudes, at ticket prices comparable to subsonic ones. It means obsolescing the current subsonic fleet in the same way that prop-driven airplanes were put out of business by jets, other than niches.

I think that it's worth spending a tiny fraction (how about a percent of one year's budget?) of the billion-plus dollars that NASA wasted on the High-Speed Research program, but NASA didn't agree in the late nineties, even when Congress specifically appropriated it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:46 PM

July 10, 2004
Some patent thoughts

One of the things I did in my dissolute holiday was play Texas Hold'em with Dan Barry, among other people. The first thing in my inbox when I got back was an email from my advisor asking if I'd be willing to help someone with some patent advice. Among the first websites I visited when I got back was The Space Review, on which there is an article advising space entrepreneurs on patents, using Texas Hold'em as an example. Bizarre little chain of coincidences. Not being superstitious I'm not trying to figure out the deeper meaning, but it's a little odd.

Anyway, on the topic of patents, the article by Sam Dinkin is pretty much exactly on target, but I thought I'd mention the advice I always give people thinking about patenting an idea. This is based on all of six month's experience doing IP work, so it's far from definitive, but my job would have been simpler had I known it, so here goes: The most important thing to understand about patents is that they aren't about ideas or inventions, they are about lawsuits. The only utility of a patent is in a lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit. If your idea is unlikely to be picked up by someone else, a patent is unlikely to help. Given that the time when people are thinking about patenting an idea is right at the beginning of their business, the money and time invested will often pay off better elsewhere, such as in building a proof of concept demo. A patent can be useful in scaring away competition, but that cuts both ways - if you think you can build a genuinely better mousetrap but it infringes someone else's IP, all may not be lost. After all, it's about a lawsuit, and the patent holder doesn't always win - there are some really lousy patents out there.

Anyway, I'm repeating a bit of what Sam Dinkin said, but hopefully the repetition isn't wasted. If you have a good idea that might be patentable, go read his article, and then go read what Don Lancaster has to say on the subject. Also, check out the EFF's Patent Busting Project for some examples of some of the egregious stuff that manages to get patented. EFF is trying to bring some sanity to the subject but they could certainly use some help.

Posted by Andrew Case at 04:38 PM

July 05, 2004
Show Me The Numbers!

To paraphrase the Cuba Gooding character from "Jerry Maguire."

I keep seeing these breathless articles in the popular media, and even the trade press, about reducing sonic boom, with its promise of practical commercial supersonic flight. The latest hype comes from Popular Science (via Clark Lindsey).

Why do I call them hype?

Two reasons.

First, I have never, ever seen a single number in these articles indicating to what degree the boom is attenuated. Maybe it's just my suspicious nature, but I suspect that if we could see those numbers, we might be less impressed.

Second, there is never any mention in these articles about the other problem that is holding back practical supersonic flight, which is all of the drag associated with the shock. Even if by some legerdemain with vehicle contours they can reduce the boom sufficiently to allow overflight of land, the operating costs will remain horrific and unaffordable to most, because of the tremendous amount of wave drag from the shock system and skin drag from the huge swept delta wings that all of these concepts continue to employ.

That means that at best, it will remain another Concorde, though perhaps one that can fly coast to coast--an expensive ride only for the rich.

I find this topic particularly frustrating because I've been aware for a number of years of a technology with the potential to effectively eliminate shock, with both the sonic boom and the tremendous drag associated with it, but there has never been any interest in pursuing it, from either NASA or industry.

Anyway, I'll take this stuff seriously when I see some quantification of just how much they're reducing the overpressure, and some indication of understanding of the drag problem, instead of focusing entirely on the boom.

[Update in the afternoon]

Clark points out in comments that they do show some numbers in a slideshow.

Color me unimpressed. There's never been any doubt that one can reduce boom through body shaping--the issue is whether you can get enough reduction to solve the problem. This graph shows a softer peak, from a little over 1.2 PSF to about 9 PSF. So they're reducing it by about thirty percent.

Big whoop. Still gonna break windows.

Is there any reason to think that they can do significantly better than this graph would indicate, particularly for a large transport? There's none provided in the article. In fact, they even admit in the caption here, "Designers of the modified F-5E weren't trying to eliminate the sonic boom, but prove that aircraft shaping can lessen this signature of supersonic flight."

Big deal--we knew that.

And as Clark notes, there remains no mention of the drag issue.

Still looks like hype to me, similar to that over hypersonics. It may be beneficial for some military apps, but there's no reason to think that it will usher in a new era of commercial air transport, or even make supersonic bizjets practical, despite the pretty pictures.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:14 AM

June 27, 2004
Increasing Productivity Rocks

Let's raise a glass to stubborn freelancers.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:46 PM

June 15, 2004
A couple of computer security issues

The latest Crypto-gram is out, and it's got the usual good stuff in it. Two things that stand out are the Witty Worm, and a letter on computer security (the last one).

The Witty worm is particularly scary because it was so well written (700 bytes!) and so destructive (infected 100% of targeted systems in 45 minutes). The only reason it wasn't a major story is that the worm targeted only systems running a particular company's security software, and there were only a limited number of installations.

Posted by Andrew Case at 08:57 AM

June 12, 2004
Who Am I?

Steven den Beste has a long essay on the nature of consciousness and identity (which I hadn't noticed earlier because it starts out about anime, a subject in which my disinterest is astronomical). In it, among other things, he concurs with my comment a week ago about the late president (not to imply that he read it).

President Reagan's heart stopped beating a few days ago, and low-level brain activity inside his skull also ceased. But he actually died long before that, from my point of view.
The problem is that we can't really say when. It is usually a very long and gradual process. How much must you lose before you no longer exist at all? At what point is an Alzheimer's patient really dead, if not when his heart stops beating?

Of course, that's not a good criterion either, since hearts can be resuscitated. I've written before that, like identity, death itself is a legal state, not an objective scientific one.

He asks an ethical question as well:

Organ transplantation is one of the reasons why medical ethics now is forced to confront the question of when someone has actually died, even though their heart continues to beat. If we conclude they are nonetheless dead, it may be possible to save other lives.
In a case like that of Jon-Erik Hexum, or someone else who has suffered severe trauma to the brain in a car accident or via gunshot, that transition is sufficiently abrupt that it's more straightforward. But should we consider the possibility of using Alzheimer's patients as organ donors? And if so, how do we know that the disease has progressed far enough so that they, too, are effectively brain dead? I doubt that anyone will ever seriously consider using Alzheimer's patients as organ donors precisely because it is such a sticky problem.

There's a corollary to this question. Suppose we had a way of preserving brains, in some kind of suspension. We don't know yet how to transplant them, or how to reverse the progress (if that's the right word) of Alzheimers, but we could remove the brain and put it in stasis in the hopes that the future will both find a cure and the technology to replace it.

If the brain is the seat of the identity and the person, why wouldn't it make sense to do such a preservation before the brain deteriorated, and the individual was lost forever to information death? Why would, or should, such a procedure be illegal (as it currently is)?

There was in fact a court case like this a few years ago. It wasn't about Alzheimers--a man with a brain tumor petitioned a court to be allowed to be cryonically suspended if his condition took a turn for the worse, before it destroyed his brain. His assumption was that as poor as the prospects might have been for a cryonic suspension, it beat the odds of having a cancer destroy his mind, a condition that no future technology was likely to be able to repair. And in some sense, he was proposing an organ donation of his brain to his future self.

The court ruled against him, on the basis that he was asking permission to euthanize himself. The irony, of course, was that he was attempting to save himself, while the court was essentially sentencing him to a horrible death. Fortunately, his cancer went into remission, so the issue became moot for him, but the general principle remains. Unless and until we resolve the issues of identity, and where it resides, and what truly constitutes death (as opposed to the current and ever-changing function-based criteria) and differentiate the concept of information death from bodily functions, such issues will continue to be troubling, and in many cases, perverse.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:58 AM

June 11, 2004
A New California Housing Tax

The wackos in Sacramento are at it again. They want to require home builders to put solar panels on a certain percentage of every new home built.

Dan DeLong, who emailed the link to me, comments:

I think every year 10% of the members of [fill in name of environmental group] should be forced by law to install the same system.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:19 PM

June 10, 2004
Good News

Since Glenn's on vacation, I thought that I'd point out this week's installment of good news at The Speculist.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:29 PM

What A Shame

SCO's Unix licensing revenues were down a little in the second quarter.

99%, in fact.

Maybe they should have a going-out-of-business sale.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:00 AM

May 29, 2004
Creative Commons License 2.0

The latest revision of the Creative Commons License has been released. Creative Commons is an attempt to deal with some of the messiness of intellectual property law by making it simple to create a roll-your-own license permitting certain kinds of use and forbidding others. If you create IP, take a look. Creative commons provides a way for you to encourage creative people to build on your work while retaining some measure of control.

Hat tip: Joi Ito

Posted by Andrew Case at 06:52 AM

May 26, 2004
The Benefits Of A Database Nation

Amidst all the angst about loss of privacy in the modern age (a little amusing, considering what a modern invention privacy is), Declan McCullagh has an interesting article on the unsung good things about having your name in databases in this month's Reason (the one with the customized cover that shows an aerial view of the subscriber's neighborhood).

One part of the article puzzled me though:

MBNA grew to more than 51 million customers through its aggressive "affinity" program, which let a number of groups -- NASCAR, universities, the Atlanta Braves, and so on -- market credit cards imprinted with their own logos. Not counting its existing customers, in 2000 MBNA had a database of 800 million names of prospective cardholders provided by affinity groups, but it could afford to send only 400 million solicitations.
Writing in the Duke Law Journal in February 2003, Indiana law professor Fred Cate and Georgetown business professor Michael Staten described how MBNA winnowed its list down to an affordable size through aggressive information sharing. MBNA first looked at public records and then, by exchanging information with its affiliates, tried to evaluate the creditworthiness of the remaining names on the list. The remaining 400 million people received solicitations with the endorsement of the affinity group to which they belonged.

In what country did this take place? Is this worldwide? The population of the US is around three hundred million, last time I checked, and many of them are of insufficient age to be eligible for credit. Where did they come up with eight hundred million names?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:39 AM

May 24, 2004
Temperature In Hell Dropping Rapidly

James Lovelock has endorsed nuclear power.

It will be interesting to see if this creates a major schism in the watermelon community. This was always the rational position for environmentalists to take, if they really believed that carbon release was harmful, but environmentalists have rarely been rational. Either that, or they had some...other...agenda.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:15 PM

May 21, 2004
Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy

The New America Foundation has put together a cartoon guide to Federal Spectrum Policy. Quite apart from being a fan of cartoon guides to whatever, I'm a fan of rational technology policy, which the Federal policy towards spectrum allocation isn't. I don't know much about the New America Foundation other than what's on their website, but the analysis of spectrum policy is basically right, if a little, um... cartoonish.

Hat tip: Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber

Posted by Andrew Case at 06:56 AM

May 20, 2004
General Aviation under attack

These guys are trying to stop a series of idiotic lawsuits which threaten to kill general aviation. Their opponents are the usual NIMBY morons who won't get a link out of me because I refuse to move them up Google's page ranking. Check out their quotes page for some astonishing statements by the NIMBYs. I'm sympathetic to concerns about noise, but there are ways to deal with it without stomping on other people's liberties.

Posted by Andrew Case at 04:51 PM

May 18, 2004
Technology and Psychology

Edward Tufte has a famous essay on the Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, which should be required reading for anyone involved in communicating basically anything. I think Rand has already linked to this essay elsewhere, but I'll link again just for emphasis. There's an excellent, if a little technical, essay here which covers some similar issues in word processing (hat tip to an anonymous commenter on this post).

The author makes three points about WYSIWYG word processing:

The author is distracted from the proper business of composing text,
in favor of making typographical choices in relation to which she may have
no expertise (``fiddling with fonts and margins'' when she should be
concentrating on content).
The typesetting algorithm employed by WYSIWYG word processor
sacrifices quality to the speed required for the setting and resetting of
the user's input in real time. The final product is greatly inferior to
that of a real typesetting program.
The user of a word processor is under a strong temptation to lose
sight of the logical structure of the text and to conflate this with
superficial typographical elements.

The technical communication tools we use direct our thinking about the problems we are working on into certain channels. Bad (or inappropriate) tools encourage bad thinking. Good tools make it easy to understand the semantic content of the communication. This is one of the reasons good tools are less popular than bad ones. Bad tools allow sloppy thinking to fly under the radar. Good ones make it harder to obfuscate, requiring a higher level of discipline and clarity of thought. It's possible to be clear in PowerPoint and Word, just as it's possible to say stupid things in LaTeX or ASCII. The thing that makes a tool good is what it makes easy (clarity) and what it makes hard (obfuscation).

The thing that is lost in many of these discussions of technical communication is that for the majority of users, ease of obfuscation is a feature, not a bug. Most people are average or below. They want to be able to pass off their work without subjecting it to excessive scrutiny. Tools which make this easy will always be more popular than tools which make it hard. The customer for the software is the person writing the BS, not the person reading it. The distractions of futzing with typesetting make it harder to focus on generating good content, but the flashiness of the presentation makes it easier to paper over the weakness of the content. It's telling that the second of these "features" is more important than the first.

Having bitched about the problem, I feel I should offer some attempt at a solution. In this case I think it comes down to little more than requiring technical memoranda be written in ASCII or LaTeX (or some similar method that separates content generation from presentation - even HTML might work). Of course, this implies that the boss wants technical memoranda, which is the root of the problem in the first place. The technical tools are just a low-order symptom. Another approach (of which this post is a sample) is to try to propagate the meme that excessive fondness for PowerPoint and Word is a warning sign for technical mediocrity. The CAIB report has certainly helped with this, as has the Edward Tufte essay.

Posted by Andrew Case at 10:47 AM

May 17, 2004
"Powerpoint Engineering"

Thomas James points out this little article from Government Executive:

The biggest lesson, Roe said, is to curb the practice of "PowerPoint engineering." The Columbia report chided NASA engineers for their reliance on bulleted presentations. In the four studies, the inspectors came to agree that PowerPoint slides are not a good tool for providing substantive documentation of results. "We think it's important to go back to the basics," Roe said. "We're making it a point with the agency that engineering organizations need to go back to writing engineering reports."

Thomas wonders if there will be slides available of the report...

This is not just a problem for NASA--in my recent experience of the past couple years (in which I've fallen off the "recovering engineer" wagon and done some consulting for both large and small companies), it's endemic in industry as well (partly because contractors come to reflect their customer's culture). Back in the olden days, when I was a technical supervisor, I was a stickler for well-written technical memoranda. Now they don't even seem to exist, let alone exist in a useful form, and few engineers seem to know how to write any more.

I absolutely agree that this is a major problem in the industry, but it's not going to change until upper management decides to make it happen, and unfortunately, being upper management, they'll probably remain addicted to briefing charts, and not even understand the problem. We've forgotten how to write, and they've forgotten how to read.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:11 AM

May 16, 2004
Crypto-Gram

Anyone who is interested in technology policy and security ought to subscribe to Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram. It's an excellent monthly newsletter written by one of the foremost experts in computer security, and it's free. RTWT, as they say. One thing that stood out in this latest edition is the Brief Safe (fair warning - it's kind of gross).

I'll probably post more on some of the items in the latest Crypto-Gram later in the week. Right now I have to get my wife safely off to Wood's Hole.

Posted by Andrew Case at 06:58 AM

May 10, 2004
CD Rot

It's not really new, but it's good to see the fragility of CDs getting some press. One of the ironies of the information age is that information is being lost at a rate unprecedented in human history. A lot of that is pointless BS like my undergrad history papers, but a depressing amount of it is potentially useful technical material and historical primary sources. It'd be nice to have a really good high density long term data archive format. Currently the best we can do with any certainty that it will still be accessible in a hundred years or more is high quality acid-free paper.

Posted by Andrew Case at 08:43 AM

March 10, 2004
Cryonics Emergency

For those who have been following the nonsense in Arizona over putting the state funeral board in charge of cryonics regulation, we thought that the situation was under control, with the sponsor of the bill appearing to be reasonable. However, Alcor now says that he's been dealing in bad faith, and is now trying to rush a devastating bill through the state house tomorrow.

If you're an Arizona resident, and want to keep your options open for life extension, it's very important that you go read the link, and contact your representative tomorrow to urge him or her to vote against this bill.

And anyone in Mr. Stump's district might want to investigate the potential for replacing him this year...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:19 PM

March 06, 2004
Sun Outages

From the Risks forum, a submission on sun outages in satellite TV systems. When the receiving antenna, the satellite, and the sun all line up, the satellite signal is swamped by the sun. It's obvious that this would be a problem once you think about it, but this is the first time I've seen consumer level consequences from it. You'd think that cable systems would make a big deal out of this (up to 8 minute outages twice a year), since obviously cable doesn't have the same issues. As Rand has pointed out many times here and elsewhere, the key to reduced launch costs is markets. Right now satellite TV is doing quite well in competition with cable, but this is a definite competitive disadvantage, which is bad news. The good news is that it's also a money making opportunity for whoever can figure out how to fix it.

Other items (also here) in the same digest talk about electronic voting machines. We're entering what is certain to be a nasty campaign, and if things proceed on their current course the results of the election will be tainted by serious problems with electronic voting systems. The last thing America needs in the current global climate is still further internal polarization. Fortunately some smart and dedicated people are working to mitigate the problems, and you can help.

Posted by Andrew Case at 09:02 AM

October 20, 2003
Cancer Breakthrough?

Australian researchers have cured cancer (or at least put it into indefinite remission) in mice, using modified versions of their immune systems to attack the cancer cells throughout their body.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:48 AM

September 26, 2003
Airplane Science

With the centennial approaching in December, Ralph Kinney Bennett has penned (or more likely keyboarded) a tribute to the brothers Wright.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:51 AM

September 16, 2003
Cryonics Breakthrough?

I just saw a segment on Fox News (Shepherd Smith's evening show) that said that Greg Fahy is going to announce the ability to restore animal kidneys to full function after freezing them to deep subzero temperatures. I visted Greg in his lab over a decade ago when he was doing organ preservation research for the Red Cross in Rockville, Maryland, and he was doing some breakthrough work with rabbit kidneys then. According to the report, tests with human organs may commence within two years.

The purpose of the research is to make it possible to preserve organs for transplant for longer periods of time, but the implications for making cryonics ever more viable are obvious. Of course, they had to have the usual "scientist" on as a nay sayer. However, they're having to cling to straws more as time goes on. They used to talk about making cows out of hamburger. Now they're reduced to saying, "Well, OK, they can do it with a mouse, but that's a long way from doing it with a human."

That's how science progresses, professor.

Oh, and kudos to Fox for using the correct term "cryonics," rather than cryogenics.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:37 PM

August 28, 2003
Absurd

The authorities in Lansing just figured out, after only a little over a quarter of a century, that there's a cryonics facility in Clinton Township, Michigan.

Now, of course, they've decided that they have to regulate it, but they don't know how. They think that it's a combination mortuary and cemetery (which, for some unexplained reason, can't both legally be done in the same place). Of course, it's neither, but they can't suspend any new patients until it gets sorted out.

[via Howard Lovy]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:55 AM

August 04, 2003
Breathing Down Bill's Neck

It's not just for servers any more. A German study concludes that Linux is approaching Windows XP in new user usability.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:57 AM

August 02, 2003
Battle Lasers

Getting closer. They're making big breakthroughs with free-electron lasers, and the article also describes some other interesting applications for chemistry.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:53 PM

July 28, 2003
Desktop Manufacturing

...is getting closer.

Flexonics is still in its infancy, but the technology?s potential raises questions about what it will mean to be a consumer in an era of de-vices-on-demand. You?d no longer pay for a product, Canny says, you?d pay for plans. I look forward then to a generation of do-it-yourself industrial designers, tinkerers who tweak commercial product designs to improve and customize them. How will I access the fruits of their labor? Peer-to-peer plan networks, of course, where designs for blenders and mobile phones and TV remote controls are swapped like so many MP3s.

There was a lively couple of threads here on the ethical implications of this a few weeks ago.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:48 PM

May 04, 2002
I'm My Own Grandpaw

In addition to cribbing my schtick about Punxatawney Yasser on Thursday (it was probably a case of great minds thinking alike...), normally-sensible James Taranto went off on a rant yesterday--he seems to be a Kassian queasitarian.

On one issue, however, Fukuyama is right and the libertarians are nuts. That issue is reproductive cloning, the manufacture of babies that are genetically identical to an already living human being. Libertarians pooh-pooh objections to reproductive cloning on the grounds that, as blogger Josh Chafetz suggests, a clone is no different from an identical twin.
But this is fatuous. A pair of identical twins are siblings, equally situated toward each other. By contrast, if a man clones himself, he is the "father" to his clone, responsible for his care and upbringing. Libertarians say there's no need to outlaw reproductive cloning because it's unlikely very many people will want to practice it. That's probably true, but those who would are probably those we would least want to. After all, what kind of egomaniac wants to raise a carbon copy of himself?

Well, that might be true. But the fact that some of us don't think that someone would make a good parent hasn't, heretofore, resulted in state sanctions against it. Mr. Taranto is entitled to his opinion as to whether people who want to clone are definitionally unfit parents, but I can't see any basis in law for it.

To understand what's wrong with reproductive cloning, consider the proscription against incest--a remarkably resilient taboo, having survived the sexual revolution unscathed. Even libertarians, who defend the right of consenting adults to do everything from prostitution to polygamy and snorting coke to freezing dead relatives' heads, have never, so far as we know, championed a man's "right" to sleep with his adult daughter.

Well, actually some have...

And what's his problem with freezing dead relative's heads? Why is it all right to burn them, or let them rot, but not freeze them? Oh, I know. It makes him "queasy."

Incest horrifies us because it violates the boundaries that define the most fundamental human relationships, those on which both social cohesion and individual happiness depend. The relationship between parent and child, or brother and sister, is fraught enough without introducing the elements of sexual possessiveness and jealousy that a love affair entails. If children result from an incestuous union, the family tree becomes a horrific tangle, in which parents are also aunts, uncles or grandparents.

No, James.

Incest horrifies us because we've been bred to have it horrify us. It's called an evolutionary adaptation. For the reasons you state, but more importantly, for reasons of the probability of genetic unhappiness resulting from inbreeding, those earlier humans (and their non-human ancestors) who mated with siblings, parents, and children were less successful than those who didn't. The folks (and pre-folks) with a natural repugnance to incest had a better chance of passing on their genes, so most people (and other animals) alive today have a more-or-less strong version of that genetic trait.

The implication of this is that a natural revulsion developed in more natural times might not necessarily be valid in the modern world, in which we have more control over our genetics, just as religious dietary proscriptions developed by nomadic desert peoples might have little utility in a world of health inspectors and refrigeration.

Feelings are generally just our genes' way of getting us to do what they want us to. We've overcome them in the past (by, for example, teaching that rape is wrong and developing systems of morality in general), and there's nothing holy about the anti-incest feelings, or anti-cloning feelings, either. We have to evaluate the morality of it in the context of our value system--we cannot just "go with our gut."

Cloning raises a similar set of problems. Suppose a couple decide to produce a "son" by cloning the husband. Who are the resulting child's parents? The man and his wife, who are raising the child? Or the man's parents, whose coupling produced the boy's genes? Suppose instead of cloning himself, the man clones his father. Suddenly he's his own grandpa.

Now he's confusing two separate concepts--genetics and legality.

Many people have legal children who share none of their genes (it's called adoption). Many people have people who share some or all of their genes for whom they have no legal responsibility whatsoever (e.g., identical twins, or an anonymous sperm donor). Certainly the law is going to have to catch up here, as it did with things like surrogate motherhood, or in-vitro fertilization, but surely he's joking if he thinks that a man cloning his father, and raising the son, literally makes him a legal grandfather of himself.

Parentage and responsibility to raise children is determined not solely by genetics, but by intent and action. Mr. Taranto needs to untangle these concepts in his mind before he'll be able to discourse on them usefully.

If that's not enough to make you queasy, consider this scenario: A 30-year-old couple produce a "daughter" who is a clone of the wife. Two decades pass, the girl grows up, and her middle-aged "father"--with whom she has no genetic kinship--suddenly finds himself face to face with a young woman who is not just hauntingly similar but identical to the woman with whom he fell in love when he was young.

No, not literally identical. Even identical twins aren't literally identical, in the sense that there are no physical or personality differences between them. Genes aren't a blueprint--they're a recipe. The cook (in this case the environment of the womb, and the environment in which the child is brought to maturity) can have a lot of influence over the final product, even if the recipe is followed. Twins are identical because they are produced identically. But it would be surprising (at least to me) if a child bred in a different womb, and raised by different parents in different times, would be the same person as her genetically-identical mother. I don't know about Mr. Taranto, but I fall in love with people for much more than their physical attributes.

But even it she were literally identical, it is certainly fodder for an entertaining soap opera, but assuming that a woman is foolish enough to engage in such an endeavor with her husband, why should the state prohibit it? I still await an answer other than the state of Mr. Taranto's stomach.

Reproductive cloning is a monstrous proposition, for reasons that have little to do with the debates over genetic engineering and over the cloning of embryos for medical research. Responsible advocates of scientific progress would do well to be relentless about making this distinction.

I agree that the distinction should be made--there are certainly vastly different ethical issues involved in the two cases. But I simply fail to see it as the intrinsic monstrosity that Mr. Taranto does. Now I suppose that I'll make him queasy.

But the fact remains that, when the state chooses to interfere with people's freedom, we need a more compelling reason than "yuck." I haven't yet heard one from either Mr. Taranto, or Professor Kass.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:32 AM

March 05, 2002
Bravenet Problems

For those of you who use bravenet.com as your hit counter, I notice that some of you don't have the image sized in your HTML. If you put in an image in a page, with no size, the page will delay the load until it gets the image, because it doesn't know how much real estate to allocate it in the browser display.

If you add the parameters "height=xxx width=yyy" where xxx is the image height in pixels, and yyy the width, as parameters to the "img src=..." tag, you might be able to get around the bravenet delay, even when bravenet is down. For instance, if you "view source" on my code, you'll see that my tip bucket is explicitly sized, so that the page loads quickly even if Amazon is slow in responding (which it occasionally is).

Unfortunately, I don't know the size for the Bravenet hit counter myself, but if you can find the image somewhere, and load it into a graphics program, it will tell you the size.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:12 AM

January 18, 2002
You Look Sweet Upon The Seat Of A Microchip Built For Two

This is pretty cool. Sandia has come up with a microchain for transmitting mechanical power.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:13 AM

October 13, 2001
Slouching Toward Nanotech

OK, now that I've gotten that out of my system, I want to discuss more important matters that came up in the process of indulging in my primal tribal urges...

While I was watching college football (in particular the FL-Auburn game), I saw an advertisement.

It was an advertisement for a tool ( not surprising, considering the demographic--it was included amidst other ads about lawn fertilizer, razor blades, fermented malt beverages, hair regrowth tonics, etc.--you know the drill).

Now, I have observed, both from advertisements, and from actually shopping and purchasing from places like Home Depot, over the past few years, that tools for manly men (such as moi of course, and Tim the Toolman ), have both improved in quality and reduced in price, to the point of amazing. When I was a kid (more years ago than I like to think about, or even describe........all right, it was in the late '60s and early '70s), tools were precious implements. They were things to request, generally in futility, from financially-strapped parents, for special occasions, such as birthdays or Christmas. And if such tools were Craftsman, with their lifetime warranty (we couldn't aspire to such Olympian implements of the gods from Snap-on)..., well, that was more than a birthday--it was a premature visitation to Paradise, and one of which we were obviously and blatantly undeserving.

But enough of the trip down memory lane. The point is, that now I can in fact go down to Home Depot, and find on sale drop-forged tools of which, as a pimply youth, I could only have dreamed, for a price that is a minor blip on my already-overcharged credit cards.

All right, so they're made in China. Isn't globalization wonderful?

These tools are not just cheap^H^H^H^H^H affordable--they're damned useful. They can do things that we could only fantasize about (assume we had a really rich and lustrous fantasy life). In fact, when we see Bob Villa shilling for them, admit it--we are all kicking ourselves wondering why we didn't come up with this idea so that we too could get ripped off by some venture capitalist who would take our idea and run with it, using his money, and leaving us with an infinitesimal fraction of the company that would exploit it and make millions for someone with more money and smarts than us.

So, why am I boring y'all with this?

I saw an ad for a new kind of tool. A magical, transcendant tool--a tool that I could not have envisioned in my most drug-addled adolescent fantasies. It was a universal wrench, called the Gator Grip (most appropriate, considering I was watching it during the Florida (Gator)-Auburn game at the time). When I saw it, I thought immediately of Hans Morovec's book, published much over a decade ago (depressing how long ago), called "Mind Children."

In that book, he described fractal robots, creatures of human invention, into which we would download our minds/souls, and they would have a semi-infinite number of appendages, with which to explore the world around us, manipulate it, and (most importantly) interact with other fractal robots to induce in them pleasure, in a semi-infinite sort of fingular interaction (sorry, I'm not going to get more explicit--this is a family-oriented stream-of consciousness, or in my case, puddle of consciousness...). I.E., robot sex, except sex much better than we can even imagine, unless we subscribe to some of the really hot sites on the net.

Anyway, I digress again (sorry, college football and sex have that effect...).

My point is, that there are tools for gripping stuff (bolts, nuts, various terrorist appendages, if the damned FAA will allow you to carry them) that we couldn't even conceive of, let alone purchase, when we were acne-challenged kids working on our cars. This particular tool, with which I am now enamored, has a lot of little pins, in circular pattern, on springs, that when pressed against some object, take its shape.

Now, you might say, "What's the big deal?" And if you've never had to work on a mechanical system (car, furnace, pasta maker) for which you either lacked the proper bit, or the head had been stripped beyond recognition, you would be fully justified in such a question.

But if you're a manly man, like me, who will spend several hours on repairing something that is worth a dollar ninety eight (when his time is worth several tens of dollars per hour on a good day, if doing something actually useful, and who can't tolerate the thought of actually paying some drone who is obviously less talented than you at fixing stuff), you will immediately recognize the value of such a de-vice.

It is the universal wrench. It can grab anything--broken wingnuts, stripped screws, stripped nuts, misshapen bolts. How could any man worthy of the name not be willing to take out a fourth mortgage on his house for such a mystical de-vice?

Now, to get to the real point of this demented rant, this tool is really a first step. While it is not a nano de-vice in scale, it most certainly is in concept.

Think about it.

Many conceptualizations of nanorobots imagine them fitting themselves to proteins, folded in a unique protein-like manner, and accommodating themselves to the folds.

Here we have a macro-tool that operates on exactly the same principle. No matter how complex or (OK, let's be honest, we munge them) ..., ummmm...compromised (yeah, that's the word!) fastener interface that it encounters, it contorts itself to grip.

When I saw this, I had two immediate thoughts.

I had to have one of these, for that wood screw I stripped with that screwdriver that I was too cheap to replace, and
This was a significant step toward de-vices that would indeed work on a micrometer or nanometer level, and that in fact we were close to immortality and eternal happiness. And of course, the singularity, in which we would all become (if we are to believe Bill Joy) slaves to the machine overlords, and toil endlessly in their underground sugar caves.

Anyway, I want one... Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:32 PM