Danyel Fisher has a good post on fingerprints and false positives. He doubts the guilt of the Oregon man being held in the Madrid bombings case based on fingerprint evidence – only time will tell for sure, but he does make an excellent point that “…if you are “one in a million,” there are 293 of you in the USA…” False positives will become more and more problematic as more people are fingerprinted. One thing Danyel doesn’t discuss, but which is extremely important, is that the resulting false positives will be believed accurate with a high degree of confidence, making it much harder to convince authorities that they are indeed false positives.
Geoff Landis has a paper out on novel approaches to space solar power systems.
One of the reasons I’m skeptical of lunar He3 for fusion as a viable space based business is the competition from SPS. If you can put enough infrastructure on the moon to process the enormous quantities of regolith needed to extract He3, you can just as easily churn out huge numbers of SPS satellites. Unless there is some unforseen showstopper with SPS (and the only one I can think of is possible long term environmental effects due to the microwave beam, but that seems unlikely), then SPS construction will win over He3 fusion. We can do SPS with current technology. We’re not even close to being able to do fusion with He3, and we won’t be for probably two decades. That’s just fusing the He3, not doing it cheaply enough to compete with other power sources.
I’m slowly churning through a detailed piece on fusion which will hopefully clarify a lot of these issues, but I’m a having trouble making the piece not suck, so don’t hold your breath. Hopefully I’ll get unstuck soon.
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.
These guys spammed me this morning. Looks like an interesting site, though I haven’t looked around much. They have launch footage and a movie about Goddard (the man, not the NASA center), along with all the NASA SP-8000 documents, among other things. Anyone know who’s behind the site? I dug around a little, but didn’t find anything.
Incidentally, this illustrates the basic rule of unsolicited commercial email – it’s only spam if you don’t want what they’re selling.
A grab bag of thoughts and observations on the news of the past week or so:
(1) The administration still doesn’t seem to fully grasp the seriousness of the damage done by the revelations of abuse in Iraq. For one thing, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have been on the case since last year, while administration spokesmen have been denying that anything bad was happening. These revelations give credibility to news sources we are trying to undermine, quite apart from the direct damage of pushing literally hundreds of millions of muslims further into the arms of the islamists. Bush has finally said the word “sorry” but it’s not clear he’s taking any other effective action to undo the damage.
The April issue of Physics Today has a bunch of articles on planetary science, though only two are available without subscription. The Mars water article looks particularly good, and it’s one of the free ones.
Incidentally, in the letters section there’s a response to a naive letter about the roots of terrorism in a previous issue which hits the nail on the head.
I had a chance to talk to Rand at SA’04 and he said I should just post whatever was on my mind and not worry about consistency with the previous course of TTM, which had been a concern for me since I’m 99% aligned with Rand on space policy and much less so on terrestrial politics. Since my Dad’s death I’ve found myself less willing to keep my mouth shut about these things (for reasons which I’m not going to go into right now), so I wanted to check things out with Rand before diving back in. Now that I’ve cleared down some of my to do list I’ll resume posting, and we can see how things work out. I suspect that the upcoming election fight will have us all longing for the solemn dignity of monkeys throwing poo, but hopefully TTM will stay far enough above the fray to avoid the splatter.
After too brief a tenure, I’ve decided to set aside blogging for the foreseeable future. In part this is due to additional pressures from work, and in part it’s due to reevaluating my priorities, which had skewed rather too far away from family and friends. I’ve enjoyed my stay here, though I wish I’d had more time to post. Fortunately it looks like Rand is back to full speed and in fine form.