So, what happens when the bio-tech equivalent of Moore's Law kicks in?

This is very interesting tech, but my guess is that it is even more interesting that portrayed, because the technology sounds like stuff that can get cheaper and cheaper, and simpler and simpler. Like, you know, computers do. Or digital cameras, or flat-screen TV's, or smart phones. And could head in the direction of home machines that can take a drop of your blood and report on your blood sugar or cholesterol levels. And send the results to your physician, who will see graphs of her patient's conditions, wit warning flags if something needs attention, or prescription dosages need tweaking.

What's missing? You and me buying our medical diagnoses like we buy other consumer goods.

Technology Review: Personalized Medicine on the Spot:

A new device can rapidly test biological samples for genetic variations that could cause dangerous reactions to some drugs. By Erica Naone

Different people can react to drugs in different ways, and in some cases the response can be predicted from their genes. For example, the drug warfarin, often used to prevent blood clots, can cause dangerous bleeding in some patients. Researchers have identified two genetic variations that can increase this risk.

Tests for this type of individual genetic variation have been available for a long time, but in many cases they cost too much and take too long. Nanosphere, a startup out of Northwestern University that's based in Northbrook, IL, hopes to change that. Its Verigene system, which takes just a few hours to analyze DNA from blood or other material, allows doctors to test for genetic variations without having to send samples out to a lab.

A. DISPOSABLE CARTRIDGE
A single-use cartridge uses a combination of chemical reactions to isolate fragments of DNA from a patient sample and test them for specific genetic characteristics. The top half of the cartridge is discarded after this process is complete, leaving a prepared glass slide behind.

B. BAR CODE
To help keep track of samples, a bar code is printed on the test cartridge and the underlying slide.

C. REAGENT WELLS
The necessary ingredients for the chemical reactions used to process the DNA are stored in wells located around the edges of the test cartridge. After the DNA is extracted from a sample, the machine uses air pressure and mechanical valves to release the ingredients from the wells as needed. Strands of DNA that are complementary to the target sequences are used to bind those sequences to the glass slide below the cartridge, as well as to gold nanoparticles that will allow the DNA to be detected when exposed to light. The cartridge washes away any excess DNA or nanoparticles and then sets off a reaction that coats the remaining nanoparticles with silver, which makes it easier to scan for them.

D. DNA LOADING CHAMBER
A DNA sample is loaded into the port shown here. Sonic energy, applied when the cartridge is inserted into the machine that processes the samples, breaks the DNA into small fragments and separates it into its two complementary strands so that it can be captured on the surface of the glass slide.

E. GLASS SLIDE (MICROARRAY)
After the chemical reactions have finished, the target DNA remains on the surface of the prepared glass slide, tagged by silver-coated gold nanoparticles. The Verigene's reader can read the slide by shining light into it and measuring how that light is scattered by the tagged DNA. The system can be used to look for single or multiple genetic targets....

Even your old grandma can do it...

Fraser Speirs on the iPad.

... I fear this January-26th thinking misses the point.

What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that's because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won't work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/car analogy. My bad.)

I'm often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they're thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental....

Is the radical simplicity and ease-of-use of the iPad the real point? As a Mac user I've seen this aspect growing for a while now. Especially in the way all those apps that begin with an "i" work together. I don't actually like it very much; it always makes me feel cranky and rebellious. I never download pictures from my camera into iPhoto, I'd rather arrange my own folders.

But as soon as I get into some aspect of computing that I'm not familiar with, the same ease-of-use is liberating. I recently helped start a group in our parish that wanted to put podcasts of sermons on the web site. It seemed like an impossible mountain of technical juju to climb, and we assumed we would have to recruit "experts". I wanted to be my own expert, but I didn't have the time. I kind of jump-started things by making a sample podcast in Garageband. Then clicked one button to put that into a "blog" in iWeb. Then clicked another button and uploaded it to my iDisk.

I hated working in an Apple environment that assumed I was a "lifestyle" person (iWeb I mean, not Garageband, which I recommend.) But I loved being able to whip something up myself in a hour, and send a link to the group to see, and make them think, "Yes, we can do this.". (Here's a link to our website. The most recent podcast is on the right, and the podcast page is linked on the left. Not fancy, but a start.)

Formidable graphics work...

My daughter sent me this link,

Here & There — a horizonless projection in Manhattan. Take a look!

It really gives a feel for the shape of the town, both close-up and distant. It was apparently a difficult thing to put together, but considering how Google Maps and Google Earth are now integrating 3-D models of buildings, one can imagine that in the not-to-distant future you will be able to see such projections from any point like you see "street views" now.

Here's a video, in much less detail...

Here & There in Manhattan from schulze on Vimeo.

Anybody remember card catalogs?

My daughter sent me this...

It's pretty funny, but also interesting to me because, well, that's the way it was...

Back in the misty past, like the 1980's or 90's. Back before the earth began to cool, there used to be a service for searching for rare and out-of-print books. You would go to a used-book store and ask for something. They would offer to search for a book they didn't have, for a small fee. Then they would mail in the query which would be printed on a weekly list that was mailed to all subscribing stores. Booksellers all around the country—or maybe the world—would peruse the list and try to spot something they had in stock. Then they could send a card to the store that searched for it, and they in turn would contact you with an offer.

It seemed impressively efficient at the time. Similarly, at the public library I used to fill out a one-page form and pay a couple of bucks to do an inter-library loan request. Now I can, via the SFPL's web page, search a wide variety of libraries in the region, and click to request a book. (Don't use the service if you are absent-minded. They charge a dollar a day for late books.)

It's unlikely you have one of these gadgets sitting in your garage.....

...But probably somebody does somewhere. Anthony Watts (His blog Watts Up With That? is an indispensable source on the subject of global warming) writes....

Readers: Your help needed to recover old satellite imagery:

...As WUWT readers know, I covered a fascinating project on 3/31 here showing how a team of dedicated technical archaeologists are trying to get old AMPEX 2" reel to reel data recorders functional again so that they can recover thousands of moon and earth images from the 1960's that would otherwise be lost to history. There is a current scientific interest in the images, as some may help determine the extent of polar ice during those years.

I've offered WUWT as a vehicle to help find parts and manuals. You may have access to these things and not know it. Ask around, especially with the old-timers in your department, and check your dusty basements and storage areas. - Anthony...

...The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), is a NASA ESMD funded project to recover the original Lunar Orbiter analog data which was recorded on an Ampex FR-900 2" video instrumentation recorder. As far as we know, we have the last surviving drives of this type in the world. We have retired Ampex engineers working with us on this project but the FR-900 was a limited use machine (exclusively the U.S. government at the FAA, USAF, NASA).

What we need is to find any possible source of documentation (we know about the Stanford Archive and have been there many times) for the FR-900 or the possibility of actual machines.

There are similar machines with the numbers FR-901, FR-902, FR-950 that are close enough that we can use any information on them....

I suspect this is a bit silly...

Crew in Moscow to Simulate Part of a Flight to Mars - NYTimes.com:

...In a small step in the direction of Mars, the international crew is embarking on a simulated flight to the planet to test the limits of human tolerance for the isolation and monotony of interplanetary travel.

"It is really like a real space flight without the weightlessness and the danger to our lives," said Sergei N. Ryazansky, a cosmonaut-in-training who will lead the mission. "On the inside, we will have a lack of incoming information, so it’s the science of sensory deprivation."...

... On a mission to Mars, astronauts will have to contend with communication gaps of as long as 20 minutes.

"Working in such conditions requires that a person be able to check himself, evaluate his condition in relation to the crew and in relation to mission control and be able to correct himself," said Boris V. Marukov, the experiment’s director and a former crew member on the International Space Station. "He will be a psychotherapist for himself."...

I'm pretty sure there are no technical reasons why a Mars crew could not have high-bandwidth communications with Earth. Un-manned flights don't have them now because there is no need to add the extra weight and power-requirement.

So a Mars mission could communicate with all the Internet tools we have today, except for the delays. Those would be frustrating, but I don't think we are talking "sensory deprivation" here. And anyone who has children nowadays learns that Internet communications can provide a lot of our human needs for closeness and conversation. If my daughter is bored and discontented I'll suggest she invite some of her friends over. "Whatever happened to Susie?" I'll say. "You two used to be such good friends." And the answer is likely to be, "We still are; I see her on Facebook.." And they do--they even post little videos (probably mostly giggles and words-not-in-complete-sentences).

You could run a small business while flying to Mars. Or "meet" people of the opposite sex. Or be active in political debates. You could upload the latest movies and music. Read the NYT.

Even being physically present with people can be different these days. Charlene and I will sometimes sit on the sofa, each of us active on our laptops. Even sending each other e-mails, because that's a fast way to send a link to an interesting web page! Last year we were sitting together, and I read an interesting product review, clicked to Amazon.com, and ordered her birthday present with "One-Click." And she didn't even know.

I have Internet friends I've never met in person. Some of them are commenters on this very blog. And aren't blogging and commenting themselves just a sort of time-delay conversation?

Milled....

If you are interested in tools, machining or manufacturing, you will want to watch this video about how the new Macbooks are made. The bodies of the laptops are individually milled, with exquisite detail and precision, out of solid blocks of aluminum!

Unbelievable. Future ages will NOT look back on us as barbarians devoid of art. They will just disregard the nihilist sludge that is seen in "modern art" museums, and focus on our technological poetry...

To understand the Left, read Lewis Carroll...

So who's blocking "alternative power?" "Renewable energy?" Greens. Leftists. Democrats. No surprise there; once you abandon the use of logic, anything is possible...

WSJ, August 18, 2008: Wind Jammers

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live. In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%.

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."....

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Thoughts to think by the gas pump...

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management today published proposed regulations to establish a commercial oil shale program that could result in the addition of up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from lands in the western United States....

...The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is only publishing proposed regulations at this time because the Consolidated Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2008 prohibits the agency from using FY2008 funds to prepare or publish final regulations. The President has called on Congress to remove the ban on finalizing oil shale program regulations...

...The largest known deposits of oil shale are located in a 16,000-square mile area in the Green River formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Shale formations in that area hold the equivalent of up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Federal lands comprise 72 percent of the total surface of oil shale acreage in the Green River formation....

That is to say, in plain English, that Democrats are blocking the extraction of petroleum in the US. How much petroleum? 800 billion barrels...what does number that mean? Hmmm? Well children, the human race has used, to date, about 1 trillion barrels of oil. So the Green River Formation, by itself, is equal to about 80% of all the oil we've ever used on earth. Arabia ain't in it!

Show-stoppers....

Like many people who started reading blogs "back in the beginning," I miss Steven den Beste. He used to throw splendid doses of cold water on various areas where fuzzy-thinking is common. One of them is alternative energy sources. He's posted a summary that is worth reading, if you think wind power or some such is in the near future going to take away our need for power generated by coal, oil and nuclear. (den Beste has serious health problems, by the way, that's why he now limits himself to lightweight blogging.)

....I don't blog about that kind of thing anymore. I never enjoyed blogging about energy, anyway, because for too many people "alternate energy" is more about religion than about physics. They believe that if we are just creative enough, we can overcome fundamental physical limitations -- and it's not that easy.

In order for "alternate energy" to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can't scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2, but there are ways to work around that.)

The only sources of energy available to us now that satisfy all five are petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

My rule of thumb is that I'm not interested in any "alternate energy" until someone shows me how to scale it to produce at least 1% of our current energy usage. America right now uses about 3.6 terawatts average, so 1% of that is about 36 gigawatts average.

Show me a plan to produce 36 gigawatts (average, not peak) using solar power, at a price no more than 30% greater than coal generation of comparable capacity, which can be implemented at that scale in 10-15 years. Then I'll pay attention.

Since solar power installations can only produce power for about 10 hours per day on average, that means that peak power production would need to be in the range of about 85 gigawatts to reach that 1%.

Without that, it's just religion, like all the people fascinated with wind and with biomass. And even if it did reach 1%, that still leaves the other 99% of our energy production to petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

The problems facing "alternate energy" are fundamental, deep, and are show-stoppers. They are not things that will be surmounted by one lone incremental improvement in one small area, announced breathlessly by a startup which is trying to drum up funding...

It's impossible to argue with most of the people who talk about "alternate energy;" They want to believe, and just don't hear anything like this. Plus, most people can't think. The average person, even with a university degree, can't think clearly about these things, and doesn't want to. For instance, the concept of scaling is basic to all technical discussions. But how many people will even understand, not to mention respond intelligently, if you tell them their favorite scheme "won't scale?" (It doesn't have to be a technical subject; there are things that work in small groups but not in large groups. Or small countries, but not large or diverse countries.)

Neat things happening...

I use Google SketchUp Pro, a marvelous 3-D drawing/drafting program, in my work, and back in March of 2006 when Google bought SketchUp I speculated on what was cooking:

...So maybe the plan is to model every building on earth, and incorporate them all into Google Earth! Then you could take a virtual stroll down any street, enter any (public) building....Links and databases could be associated with places..."walk into" a restaurant, and see the menu, the hours, maybe even make a reservation for a specific table that has a nice view...

Well, that seems to be just what's going on. I just noticed this post on the Official Google SketchUp Blog:

....With our new Google Cities in 3D Program, we've made it easier for communities to "get themselves on the map". The program provides a way for local governments to share whatever 3D data they have, allowing them to appear in the 3D Buildings layer of Google Earth. Sound interesting? This post on the Google LatLong blog has all the juicy details....

Just routine air-transport....

This is interesting to me. The V-22 was mired in controversy and problems for so long, that I kind of assumed it would never be operational. And yet here it is, working away, hardly even being mentioned. Cool.

I wonder how well it is actually working out? The concept is awesome, and I've always tended to think that even if cost a mint, and failed to meet expectations, we should be pushing ahead with it in order to learn enough to build better models later. And of course it fits well with "small wars," which is all we have now.

Iraqi army soldiers from the 27th Iraqi Infantry Brigade, 7th Iraqi Infantry Division, prepare to go on a patrol March 18 in the Hawron Wadi, which is just east of Baghdad, after exiting a MV-22 Osprey. The Iraqi army has been training with Marines and Navy SEALS to conduct helo-borne operations such as patrols and cache sweeps. While on patrol, the soldiers looked for any signs of insurgent activity and talked to locals to see if they had seen anything unusual. GUNNERY SGT. JASON J. BORTZ / MARINE CORPS. From Frontline Photos, 3-19-08

For world peace, poke a thumb in their eye...

From the Daily Mail: Bush branded 'cowboy of space' after decision to shoot down malfunctioning satellite...

President Bush was branded a cowboy last night amid claims that his decision to shoot down a failed satellite could spark a confrontation with Russia and China...

...They warned the president could provoke a new arms race in space by brandishing America's military power.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, called the move "regrettable".

And in a jibe aimed at the President he said: "Clearly someone in the administration who has the instincts of a cowboy has decided this is the perfect excuse to rattle our sabres and show the Chinese that we have the same capabilities."....

Rattling our sabres is good. It will promote peace. Looking weak and indecisive will tend to lead to war. I suggest we should try to make the debris fall so as to make shooting stars over Peking...

(Image purloined from Neptunus Lex. Thanks. )

Competitive in the $50-a-barrel range...

Charlene recommends this piece on flex-fuels, by Bob Zubrin (thanks to Glenn)...

...In light of this, a top priority of U.S. national security policy should be to break the oil cartel. This imperative has been apparent since the 1973 oil embargo, but nothing effective has been done. However there is now a way to break OPEC.

What is needed is for the Congress to pass a law requiring that all new cars sold in the United States be flex-fueled - able to run on any combination of alcohol or gasoline fuel. Such cars are existing technology - in fact about 24 different models of flex-fuel cars were produced by the Detroit Big Three in 2007, and they only cost about $100 more than the same car in a gasoline-only version. But, since alcohol fuel pumps (such as E85, a fuel mix that is 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline) are nearly as rare as unicorns, flex-fuel cars only command about 3 percent of the new-car market.


The reason E85 pumps are so rare is that gas station owners don't want to dedicate one of their pumps to a kind of fuel that only a few percent of the cars can use. If we had a flex-fuel requirement, however, then within three years of enactment there would be 50 million cars on the road capable of running on high-alcohol fuels. Under those conditions, E85 and M50 (a 50 percent methanol, 50 percent gasoline fuel mix; flex-fuel cars can use any alcohol, including methanol) pumps would start appearing everywhere.

But most important, this would not just be happening here. By requiring that all new cars sold in the United States be flex-fueled, we would be forcing all the foreign car manufacturers to switch their lines to flex-fuel as well, effectively making flex-fuel the international standard. So there would be hundreds of millions of cars worldwide capable of running on alcohol, forcing gasoline to compete everywhere against alcohol fuels that can be produced from numerous sources. This would effectively break the vertical monopoly that the oil cartel currently holds on the world's fuel supply and keep prices in the $50-a-barrel range, because that is where alcohol fuels become competitive.....

I'm a bit doubtful, myself. There's no mention of how much energy, perhaps from petroleum, it will take to make the alcohol. And what this might do to food prices. What's the per-barrel price of alcohol now?

Internet battle areas....

This is from an e-mail that Jonah Goldberg posted at The Corner:

...I know this is terrible, and I feel kind of like a kid separating flies from wings, but believe it or not, there's a sort of conservative underground that's banging on the Amazon 1-star ratings of your book to the point where Amazon is taking them down. And I love it! I mean, they're just disapppearing them. Amazon. Deleting. Liberal comments. About a Conservative (transcends Conservative, I got that) book. Un. F***ing. Believeable. And I speak as someone who's been commenting on Amazon, lo these many years.

In the last day, enough people have rated uninformed 1-star reviews badly enough that Amazon is taking them down. Simply disappearing them. Again, I have to say it, I can't believe it.....

"Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in the Industrial Age anymore." People write SF books about a near future when Cyberspace is the main arena where people interact and things happen. But the reality creeps up on us, and nobody quite notices how curious it all is.

       

Biter bit...

Reading this, I have to smile, thinking about how Leftists and Democrats worked SO HARD to help their Communist allies, and to turn the people of South Vietnam over to slavery and torture and death, and what happens? NOW, when they are working hard to turn the people of Iraq and Afghanistan over to a similar cruel fate, here is a Vietnamese person (not the only one, by the way) who is filled with gratitude towards the Great Satan, and is helping others in their hour of need...

On the nights when no mortar shells fell, Anh Duong listened to the Saigon crickets. More often, though, the girl lay by her open window, her hair damp against her cheeks, and wondered, as the lights from flares flickered on the leaves of a plum tree, if the next Viet Cong rocket would smash into her house.

"Why would you want to randomly blow up civilians?" Duong remembers thinking.

Now, at age 47 and living in Maryland, Duong is still grappling with the question, trying to apply bedtime lessons from Vietnam to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Duong is known as "the bomb lady" around the Pentagon and as the engineer behind America's first thermobaric, bunker-busting explosive. A 5-foot-1-inch suburban mother of four, Duong has become, according to Thomas A. Betro, director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, "one of the most important weapons-developers of the modern era."

For Duong, who was honored recently as one of the federal government's top civil servants, producing tools for U.S. troops is a way of life. After years of pioneering explosives for the Navy, she now creates systems to help identify terrorists.
"I don't want My Lai in Iraq," Duong said at the Pentagon, where she works on anti-terrorism issues as a science adviser. "The biggest difficulty in the global war on terror -- just like in Vietnam -- is to know who the bad guys are. How do we make sure we don't kill innocents?"

Duong's most recent innovation, the Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities (JEFF) project or "lab in a box," analyzes biometrics. It will be delivered to Iraq at the beginning of 2008, the Navy said, to help distinguish insurgents from civilians.
"The best missile is worthless if you don't know who to shoot," Duong said.....

Kindles at Fahrenheit 451

Here's a different view of the Kindle...

Kindle can light up your life November 29, 2007 BY ANDY IHNATKO

So here's what Amazon went and did. Metaphorically, the company invented a humanoid robot capable of autonomous action. Every day at 4 a.m., it gets in your car and drives all over the state, buying fruit, milk, butter, eggs and other staples straight from the farm. By the time you wake up and trudge into the kitchen, there's a steaming plate of waffles waiting for you, made from scratch, and topped with fresh-picked strawberries and whipped cream.

It's one of the most awesome consumer products ever. It might even be a landmark moment in technology. ... and Amazon is promoting it as a $399 waffle maker....

Sounds like it might be cooler than I imagined. Apparently the Kindle includes unlimited free web browsing over Verizon's EVDO network! (Odd. So what do the people who are paying Verizon for data access think about this?)

If, by the way you are thinking of buying one (Or anything else from amazon.com) do click one of my links, such as the link below...So Random Jottings will get a little baksheesh!

 

"both bug-crusher and discretionary hat"

Steven Poole on that new e-book reader, called the "Kindle," from Amazon....

....I here propose a minimal list of features that any really successful ebook device must eventually have. Feature parity with physical books, after all, is surely a reasonable baseline demand. So here is what the electronic book of the future will be like.

1 It will have an inexhaustible source of energy and never need recharging.

2 It will have resolution as good as print. (No, Amazon, really as good as print.)

3 It will be able to survive coffee and wine spills, days of intense sunlight, dropping in the ocean, light charring, and falling completely into two or more pieces, while still remaining perfectly readable afterwards....

He's got more. Including:

...13 The ebook will function, morever, as both bug-crusher and discretionary hat. Placed on my face, it will make a soft roof against the sun on the beach.....

Death of a thousand cuts...

Thanks to Michelle:

GAO Forest-Thinning Study Sparks New Controversy
Written By: James M. Taylor
Published In: Environment News
Publication Date: July 1, 2003
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

Supporters of President George W. Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative have a new study to cite as proof reforms are needed in the federal government’s forest management effort. Opponents of the President’s plan disagree, saying the study proves current procedures are working.

The study, released by the General Accounting Office (GAO) on May 15, found most federal forest-thinning proposals subject to third-party comment were appealed by environmental activists.

The GAO examined 762 U.S. Forest Service (USFS) proposals to thin forests and prevent fires during the past two years. According to the study, slightly more than half the proposals were not subject to third-party appeal. Of those proposals subject to appeal, third parties challenged 59 percent.

Appeals were filed most often by anti-logging groups, including the Sierra Club, Alliance for Wild Rockies, and Forest Conservation Council. According to the GAO, 84 interest groups filed more than 400 appeals of Forest Service proposals. The appeals delayed efforts to treat 900,000 acres of forests and cost the federal government millions of dollars to address.

Forest Service officials estimate they spend nearly half their time, and $250 million each year, preparing for the appeals and procedural challenges launched by activists......

Everyone else is out of step...

Brian Tiemann speaks up for English measurements, against metric. I tend to agree. Now that the English are pretty much extinct, and we Americans have assumed the job of being what England was, I think we should hold firmly to our traditional measurements.

.....What people love to point out about the metric system is that its measures are based on fundamental units taken from the natural world; but really, that's hardly an argument at all. What good is it that the meter is supposed to be the circular length from the pole of the Earth to the equator with the decimal point moved over a bunch of times? Some French guy thought that the dimensions of the Earth should for some reason be the basis for all length measures, and by doing a bunch of number-juggling he found that he could get it down to an almost usable length, something we'd been calling a "yard" forever, but which was formerly made up of three of a much handier unit: the foot, which describes something you can hold in your hands and divide up with your fingers, not something you have to measure with a stick that you have to keep in your closet or behind your desk. What, in the real world, does that have to do with how far it is from the North Pole to the equator on this lumpy, imperfect sphere of rock we live on, anyway? Why do we have to work with wonky units like "decimeters" if we want something that kindasorta resembles a hand-holdable length unit?

And for that matter, who cares if a cubic decimeter of water is a kilogram? Is that really any easier to remember than any other arbitrary conversion, or any easier to calculate? I remember having to refer to the table of decimal conversions in the back of my science books to figure out just how many places to move the point left, and then right, in order to arrive at the answer—and trying oh-so-hard to convince myself that the very act of trundling up and down that chain of powers of ten somehow proved how much easier the metric system was to grasp in the human brain. I wish I'd realized at the time just how far from that "ideal" the reality really was: that I could have saved plenty of time and space in my brain by jettisoning those useless "shortcut" decimal conversion factors and simply doing the appropriate multiplication or division operation. Or, better yet, using one of those newfangled calculator dealies we were all taking to carrying around. Funny how we never made decimal-place errors when we were multiplying things by 5280 instead of trying to remember whether we were supposed to move the dot up 8 or 9 places....

I dare-say in my own work I'd make fewer mistakes using the metric system. But it would not be worth it. Compromises with ugliness—especially if it's French—can be bad for the soul...

..."Then on her quarter, with the patched inner jib, that's the Hope: or maybe she's the Ocean -- they're much of a muchness, out of the same yard and off of the same draught. But any gait, all of 'em you see in this weather line, is what we call twelve-hundred-tonners; though to be sure some gauges thirteen and even fifteen hundred ton, Thames measurement. Wexford, there, with her brass fo'c'sle eight-pounder winking in the sun, she does: but we call her a twelve hundred ton ship."

"Sir, might it not be simpler to call her a fifteen hundred ton ship?"

"Simpler, maybe: but it would never do. You don't want to be upsetting the old ways. Oh dear me, no. God's my life, if the Captain was to hear you carrying on in that reckless Jacobin, democratical line, why, I dare say he would turn you adrift on a three-inch plank, with both your ears nailed down to it, to learn you bashfulness. The way he served three young gentlemen in the Med. No, no: you don't want to go arsing around with the old ways: the French did so, and look at the scrape it got them into....
-- Patrick O'Brian, HMS Surprise

Death can strike at any moment....

The explosion at Scaled Composites is a big deal for our family, because my brother-in-law works there. Fortunately, he was not there at the time it happened, but if he'd been at work, he would likely have been close to the blast. Pray for the dead and injured!

Here's my post on the time we were there to watch SpaceShipOne win the X-Prize...

Save a billion lives, get no respect...

"Norman Borlaug has saved more lives than any person currently living. Indeed, he may have saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived."

Naturally, Leftists and "Helpists" and Greens hate him, and hinder his work.

Do read this piece on Borlaug, The Most Important Person You’ve Never Heard Of, by Pejman Yousefzadeh. My dad, who was a horticulturist and farmer, knew about this stuff, and I remember him telling me when I was young that the starvation we heard about in various Third World countries could be avoided. I didn't quite get it then; the idea that the world's population was doomed to expand faster than the food supply was just too pervasive. I thought he was foolishly optimistic, but it was the simple truth.

Pejman includes a quote from an InstaPundit reader:

...It's not because he spent his life serving the poor, per se. Press accounts are filled with stories about those who serve the poor. It's that Mr. Borlaug didn't serve the poor by giving away other people's money, or by demanding that other people give away their money. He served the poor by DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGY, which in the view of the press is just as evil as making money, if for no other reason than someone makes money from the developed technology.

Think about it: You seldom see accolades afforded all the brilliant researchers at GE Medical Systems, Pfizer, Merck, Glaxo, Medtronic, or you name it, for precisely the same reason...

I think that's part of it. But I think it's more than that. Borlaug gets no credit, because he solved the problem. Journalists will laud you for helping the poor, as long as they stay poor! They love Mother Theresa, but she didn't upset the "natural order" of things. If she had found some way of lifting poor people into middle-class affluence, and they stated buying cars and computers and eating KFC, and imagining they were equals of the elitists in the helping bureaucracies, she would have been an object of scorn.

Charming new idea...

John McBride, at Ars Technica:

...Microsoft has filed another patent, this one for an "advertising framework" that uses "context data" from your hard drive to show you advertisements and "apportion and credit advertising revenue" to ad suppliers in real time....

....The application, filed in 2006, describes a multi-faceted, robust ad-delivering system that lives on a "user computer, whether it's part of the OS, an application or integrated within applications."

"Applications, tools, or utilities may use an application program interface to report context data tags such as key words or other information that may be used to target advertisements," says the filing. "The advertising framework may host several components for receiving and processing the context data, refining the data, requesting advertisements from an advertising supplier, for receiving and forwarding advertisements to a display client for presentation, and for providing data back to the advertising supplier."

....It would inspect "user document files, user e-mail files, user music files, downloaded podcasts, computer settings, computer status messages (e.g., a low memory status or low printer ink)....

....The patent makes no mention of any method by which an actual user might exert control, nor does it mention very real privacy or security concerns....

Such an exciting future we have ahead of us. Any day now our computers will just buy stuff for us (printer ink! drugs that enhance!) and then every day will be a wonderland of surprises. But alas, not for me. I'm just too parochial and stick-in-the-mud. A cyber-Mennonite. Maybe I should purchase one of those "Windows" machines, and get a life!

Dreamliner...Go Capitalist oppressors!

Boeing recently rolled out the 787 Dreamliner, which they hope to start flight-testing in August or September, with first deliveries next May.

One thing that's really neat is the the carbon fiber composite fuselage is stronger than an Aluminum one, so the windows can be significantly bigger (27 cm by 47 cm, with a higher eye level) and the cabin pressure can be higher (6,000 feet instead of 8,000). Also the cabin humidity can be higher, because composites are not subject to corrosion!

So look forward to future air travel that's, well, not fun, but less of a misery!

Richard Branson, left, and Jim McNerney, chairman and chief executive of Boeing Co.,
pose inside a display of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner after a news conference in Chicago.
Photo: AP

I don't pay much attention to automobiles...

...so I wasn't sure what to think yesterday when we saw a Prius with a spoiler. Is that not somewhat odd?

Maybe we're all gonna die, but life sure is funny....

Peter Burnet , on reports the US may deal with global warming by deploying giant mirrors in space or by reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere....

....This is just tooo...delicious. Imagine you are a greying environmentalist who has spent decades musing about biological Armageddon with the sandals and fruit juice crowd. From youthful rebel you have matured into learned sage and now are perhaps a mightily-respected academic or consultant. You have read hundreds of turgid tomes on the looming destruction unrestrained growth will wreck, and written a few yourself. You have spent thousands of hours in seminars and conferences with the like-minded, debating how you, the intellectually anointed, can save Mother Earth by convincing everybody to “fundamentally change their way of thinking”.

Your initial pragmatic concern over specific ecological threats has long ago morphed into a comprehensive secular version of The Fall that leads you to lash out indiscriminately against cows, cars, perfumes, plastics, airplanes, prepared food, smokestacks and just about everything else people want in order to squeeze a little enjoyment and comfort out of life. But you know comfort and enjoyment must go, along with freedom, because otherwise we’ll all soon fry/freeze. You have mastered using a veneer of brow-furrowed concern to hide your delight in each item of worrisome news and your growing excitement about the day the dark forces of American capitalism will be overthrown and you will be called by the powers that be to help them outlaw, plan, regulate, restrict and undo us all back to the 18th century.

You’re almost there. The battle against the Bush-led forces of reaction and selfish madness has been tough in recent years, but the tide has turned and the smell of victory is in the air. The IPCC and the UN (the only sane voices on climate, as on everything else) are about to release the definitive work on climate change. (How could so many volumes be wrong?) It will take all doubt and all questions off the table. Even big business is wavering. The enemy is squirming and circling his wagons, while you sharpen your arrows for the final kill that will vindicate your entire life’s work and earn you a well-deserved prominent place in the progressive Pantheon.

And then the U.S. Government throws some brilliant nerdy crew-cut from Texas into the spotlight to tell everybody there is no problem--all we have to do is put lots of his special balloons and droplets into space and the problem is solved. “Can do!”

Aaarrgghhh!

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh thinking of their agony if we did that simultaneously with winning the Iraq Campaign...Let's see if we can get the timing just right...

Update: And even richer, suppose the US actually started to launch space-mirrors, or to seed the seas with nutrients. Think of all those AlGores instantly flipping and declaring that the science behind Climate Change isn't what it's cracked up to be!

More than awesome...

NewScientistSpace: It is a feat millions of times more impressive than finding a needle in a haystack. The new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted about a dozen spacecraft on the Martian surface and, incredibly, taken pictures of such sharpness that scientists have been able to identify individual rocks that were first photographed by the Viking landers in 1976.

The new series of pictures released late on Monday show both of the Viking landers, never spotted from orbit before, as well as their nearby heat shields and backshells. These are the top and bottom covers of the capsules in which the rovers decended through the Martian atmosphere to land...

You can see a Viking parachute still lying where it fell 30 years ago!

Thanks to Alan Sullivan...

Interesting tid-bit

This was an aside in a post by Orrin Judd,

...Richard Rhodes was on NPR's Studio 360 just yesterday explaining how half of all the nuclear plants in the US are burning nuclear material from decommissioned Soviet warheads, making it one of the only government programs in history that pays for itself, not to mention that it disposes of an environmental threat and replaces burning coal and gasoline and whatever...

I had never heard that. But Rhodes ought to know about this stuff, having written this (excellent) book...

Awesome pics...

...of a Space Shuttle launch seen from from 60,000 feet.

(Thanks to Brian Tiemann)

"Freedom of action in space"

One of the reasons I get very impatient with those conservatives who say that Bush and the Republicans have "let us down" is that there are lots of cool things happening that they never acknowledge, or put into the balance-pan to weigh against those things they don't like. Such as this:

WASHINGTON—U.S. President George W. Bush has quietly signed a new National Space Policy that asserts his country's right to deny access to space to anyone "hostile to U.S. interests."

The policy also rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space.
The document characterizes the role of U.S. space diplomacy largely in terms of persuading other nations to support U.S. policy, encourages private enterprise in space and emphasizes security issues.

"Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power," the document, a revision of the U.S.'s previous space policy, asserts in its introduction.

The Bush administration bluntly denied the revisions were a prelude to introducing weapons systems into orbit.

"This policy is not about developing or deploying weapons in space. Period," said a senior administration official, who asked to remain unnamed....(Thanks to Orrin Judd)

OF COURSE we will have weapons in space. It's impolitic to mention it, but somebody's gotta be the cop. And it will have to be us. Just as, right now, we are the cops on the global sea lanes. China or Japan can be confident that slow vulnerable oil tankers will creep across the sea towards them unhindered because the United States Navy won't tolerate anything else. And it won't be something we have any choice about; these tasks devolve on the strongest power like-it-or-not. In the 19th Century Great Britain guarded the freedom of the seas. They declined, we rose, and the job fell to us.

...There was a note of caution, however, from Michael Simpson, president of the International Space University in France.

"On the one hand, it worries people like me who would really love to believe that space will be a place where we don't take our combat and our history of conflict with one another," Simpson told the Star's Scott Simmie.

"The concern, and where the rest of the world has got to get involved, is how do you decide what is a threat, and what is really the legitimate use of space by someone else?"...

Geez, how hard is this stuff to understand? You are legitimate if you are in the Axis of Good. That's International Law now. Just watch what America and Australia do, and do the same.

"International Space University in France." And what the heck is that? I probably don't want to know. I bet they are planning a new Airbus consortium, to overtake us in space...

On and on and on....

Apparently people are still claiming that the moon landings were faked. Rand Simberg links to this page, debunking their arguments with easily understandable physics and logic...

Bad: When the movies of the astronauts walking and driving the lunar rover are doubled in speed, they look just like they were filmed on Earth and slowed down. This is clearly how the movies were faked.

Good: This was the first new bit I have seen from the HBs, and it's funny. To me even when sped up, the images didn't look like they were filmed in Earth's gravity. The astronauts were sidling down a slope, and they looked weird to me, not at all like they would on Earth. I will admit that if wires were used, the astronauts' gait could be simulated.

However, not the rover! If you watch the clip, you will see dust thrown up by the wheels of the rover. The dust goes up in a perfect parabolic arc and falls back down to the surface. Again, the Moon isn't the Earth! If this were filmed on the Earth, which has air, the dust would have billowed up around the wheel and floated over the surface. This clearly does not happen in the video clips; the dust goes up and right back down. It's actually a beautiful demonstration of ballistic flight in a vacuum. Had NASA faked this shot, they would have had to have a whole set (which would have been very large) with all the air removed. We don't have this technology today!...

It's well worth reading just to review or learn some interesting physics. What's discouraging is that this stuff will not have the slightest effect on the other side...they will just go on making the same claims until the die off. It's like arguing with leftists. There's no argument, because they won't answer your points, or defend (or even clearly define) their own.

well, we are not the smallest...

Here's a nifty page, The Size Of Our World showing the relative sizes of the planets and stars...

thanks to Jimmy Akin...

Awesome, awesome...

Finally we find out something about the mysterious Blue Origins..

The public space travel business is picking up suborbital speed thanks to a variety of private rocket groups and their dream machines.

Joining the mix is Blue Origin's New Shepard Reusable Launch System. It is financially fueled by an outflow of dollars from the deep pockets of billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com...

Having these proud-as-Lucifer dot-commers competing with each other to get into orbit is just too utterly cool. "Last guy into space is a girl!" But what really interested me about Blue Origin is this:

...Blue Origin's spaceship is patterned after Department of Defense/NASA work on the single-stage vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X) and Delta Clipper Experimental Advanced (DC-XA). It was repeatedly flown in 1993-1996 at the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Among a list of distinctions, a 26-hour turnaround was achieved between the DC-XA's second and third flights - a first for any rocket. The flight program ended in July 1996 with the DC-XA suffering severe damage due to a landing strut – one of four—that failed to extend. The unbalanced vehicle tipped over on its landing pad and caught fire. Due to lack of follow-up money, the program was ended....

Delta Clipper was one of those might-have-beens that just breaks your heart. The wretched Shuttle sucks up millions of dollars a day even when, as usual, it's not flying at all. DC cost nothing in comparison, but died for lack of funds. And lack of interest on the part of the commissars.

And now Delta clipper rises again! Yay!

Delta Clipper. Image from space.com

Wow...

My son sent me this link:

Record meteorite hit Norway
As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit with an impact comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima...

....Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera because his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time.

"I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the object and then continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous crash.....

I must assume that our government is aware that a large meteoritic impact would have an appearance very similar to the explosion of a nuclear bomb...blinding flash, mushroom cloud ascending into the Stratosphere, deadly X-Rays, etc. Don't push the Button right away, George...

Maybe we'll get our flying cars after all--minus the car...

Pretty neat stuff...

Daily Mail:....Now German company ESG has developed the strap-on rigid wing specifically for special forces use.

Resembling a 6ft-wide pair of aircraft wings, the devices should allow a parachutist to glide up to 120miles, carrying 200lb of equipment, the manufacturers claim.

Fitted with oxygen supply, stabilisation and navigation aides, troops wearing the wings will jump from a high-altitude transport aircraft which can stay far away from enemy territory - or on secret peacetime missions could avoid detection or suspicion by staying close to commercial airliner flight paths.

The manufacturers claim the ESG wing is '100 per cent silent' and 'extremely difficult' to track using radar.

Once close to their target landing zone, the troops pull their parachute rip cord to open their canopy and then land normally.

Weapons, ammunition, food and water can all be stowed inside the wing, although concealing the 6ft wings after landing could prove harder than burying a traditional parachute.

ESG claims the next stage of development will be fitting 'small turbo-jet drives' to the wings to extend range even further....

Apparently some parachutist used home-made wings to "fly" across the English Channel! Of course these gadgets will probably soon pass into general use and be used by terrorists. C'est le Guerre....

The article has a picture. (Thanks to Jimmy Akin)

I'm a bit dazed...

The most important software I use is the stupendous program SketchUp, by @last Software. And @Last has just BEEN BOUGHT BY GOOGLE!!

What does it mean? I hope it means good things, although we all of us have had the experience of seeing a cool program bought by a big rich company, and then they do nothing with it and it ends up on the bone pile. But Google's a pretty cool savvy crowd, so hopefully things will work out. @Last has always been run on a shoestring, and hasn't been able to afford certain "frills and extras," like advertising. so this could be great for SketchUp.

SketchUp can be used for many things--I use it to design cabinetry--but mostly it's used by architects. It's awesome for modeling buildings. So maybe the plan is to model every building on earth, and incorporate them all into Google Earth! Then you could take a virtual stroll down any street, enter any (public) building....Links and databases could be associated with places..."walk into" a restaurant, and see the menu, the hours, maybe even make a reservation for a specific table that has a nice view...

Here's a screen shot (at screen resolution, rather fuzzy) of some current work. This one is past the "design" stage, but anything you see is totally plastic, and can be easily manipulated...I can select a face of a rectangle and "pull" it out, or grab one edge and "pull" that, turning it into a trapeziod-thingie. That crown-molding was made by drawing a profile, and then selecting a line for it to "follow."

And it's a totally 3-dimensional environment. There is no 2-D view. I can rotate the plan with a push of my mouse so I'm looking from underneath, or behind or above...Zoom in or out like flying. Instead of being a "fly on the wall," I'm a fly that flies all the time...

Awesome technology

Take a look at this book scanning machine. I knew that Google and Amazon and others were scanning books, but I never had any notion how they did it. Coolies? Magic? This is better.

Found on this interesting post at Long Tail, about the long tail of books...

Totally awesome...

Totally Wow! Take a look at this scale representation of our Solar System, with each pixel equalling ~1,000 km! A fubsy little planet like Earth is just lost in the vastness. You can hardly find it unless you use the cheats...

(Thanks to wohba, via Dean)

Then have a flyoff.....

Great rant by Jerry Pournelle:

NASA spends a billion and can't fix the problem of foam dropoff. Give me a billion and 3 years (and exemption from the Disabilities Act and some other imbecilic restrictions) and I'll have a 700,000 pound GLOW reusable that will put at least 5,000 pounds in orbit per trip, and be able to make 10 trips a year for marginal costs linearly related to the cost of fuel. Give me $3 billion and I'll have a fleet of the damn things. Once they're flying we can work on getting the payload weights up. Give me $5 billion and I'll have the fleet plus one that's set up to go Earth orbit to Lunar Surface and return to Earth orbit as often as we like (each trip costing about 10 flights Earth to Earth orbit to refuel it). Costing: 700,000 pounds of fuel at $2 per pound times 4 as a guess. Throw in other stuff and the marginal costs are maybe $10 million a flight Earth to Earth orbit, so about $100 million to go back to the Moon.

Now, as a backup in case single stage is the wrong way to go -- and I can be convinced that it is -- hand another $1 billion to Burt Rutan and let him try his air lift first stage approach. Then have a flyoff. Hell, go mad: give me a billion, give Burt a billion, hand a billion to each of the remaining big aerospace companies, and give a billion to NASA. That's $5 billion, less than the annual cost of the Shuttle program -- have you noticed that the program cost is independent of the number of Shuttle launches? NASA will waste its billion, the two aerospace companies will futz around with studies that end up requesting $20 billion each and produce nothing but paper, but you may be sure that Rutan and I will both have some flying hardware...(Thanks to NixGuy)

Read it entire.

Come to think, I could do more with a billion than NASA does! And my commission would only be a few tenths of one percent....

Ka-boom. Repeat 200 times.

My son Rob showed me an intriguing video. It's a re-imagining of Project Orion, on a contemporary mission to Mars.

Of course no one savvy enough to read Random Jottings needs to be reminded what Project Orion was...

Too late to market with the Better Mousetrap...

I just had a really good idea. A really really good idea...But then my first Google hit revealed that hundreds of people had already had that same neat idea:

BBC: Visually impaired people are now increasingly able to join in the video gaming fun thanks to an ever-expanding range of audio games. More games are being made which do not rely on sight They even have the potential to turn into new gaming genres in their own right which could start to appeal to sighted gamers.

But, compared with the millions of copies of PC and console games sold every year, the market for audio games is still relatively tiny.

"My guess is that about 3,000 audio or blind-accessible games are sold a year," said Richard van Tol who jointly runs Audio Games.Net, an information site for fans and developers.

"Loads of blind people have computers but not many of them know about audio games."

There are currently about 50 commercially available titles on the market, with perhaps three times as many freeware and shareware options. Like their graphics-based cousins, the games come in many varieties - adventure, arcade and so on...

EV-DO...A name that breathes mystery...romance...adventure

I found this article by David Pogue, on EV-DO, very interesting. It probably won't affect me much, though my new phone is EV-DO, 'cause I never go anywhere. But when we get it here in the Bay Area, Charlene's Treo is going to really hum...assuming she wants to pay for the service. (Rumors here have it already emerging in downtown SF, and other spots, like outbreaks of a new disease.)

...It's a relatively new cellular data network called C.D.M.A. 1xEV-DO, which, as you surely knew, stands for Code Division Multiple Access Evolution-Data Only. No wonder Verizon Wireless, the earliest and largest adopter of this technology, just calls it the BroadbandAccess plan.

To get your laptop onto this very fast wonder-net, you need a special cellular card that slides into its PC-card slot. Novatel and Kyocera have recently given the blossoming EV-DO future a big thumbs-up by releasing new cellular cards for laptops running Windows (and, with a little tweaking, Mac OS X).

EV-DO offers two addictive benefits. First, it's cellular. You don't have to hunt down public hot spots; an entire metropolitan area is a hot spot.

Second, EV-DO means sheer, giddy speed. EV-DO is a so-called 3G (third-generation) network, the fruits of $1 billion in Verizon development. And when your laptop or palmtop locks onto a good signal, you can practically feel the wind in your hair.

How fast is that, exactly? Verizon claims you'll be able to download data at an average of 400 to 700 kilobits per second (kbps), which turns out to be true. That makes EV-DO at least five times as fast as the rival technology offered by Cingular and T-Mobile, called EDGE (70 to 135 kbps), and about seven times as fast as Verizon's original data network (still available), which it calls NationalAccess (60 to 80 kbps)...

Verizon is leading in EV-DO, with Sprint just getting started. You can buy cards for your laptop, and newer phones may have it. However it's only fast downloading; uploading is not improved.

But what always flabbergasts me is how such fabulous, sexy, scintillating new technology can be sold with such banal names. Verizon is, I hear, hosing out about FOUR BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR to roll this service out, and yet the best name they can come up with is BroadbandAccess!

Apple would have come up with something enticing, like they did with Firewire (elsewhere known charmingly as IEEE-1394). Maybe QuickSilver, or Zap-Lightning, or June Bug, or something. And I'm not just thinking in terms of taste; it's worth money. Verizon will doubtless be spending millions on advertising to try to get people interested, and to get them to remember a totally forgettable name. Makes me want to scream. Spitball would be a better name...how 'bout Phaeton, LightSpeed, FastBall, Seabiscuit...Jeeze, they should hire me. My rates are very reasonable...

I bet the bozos spent 50 Grand on focus groups, so that lack-wits could agree that "BroadbandAccess" was a winner. Phooey.

New Gadgets...

We just moved our cell-phone service to Verizon, from T-Mobile, and got new phones for the whole family. Charlene has the awesome Treo 650, and I have an LG VX8000. (Now there's a brand name to capture hearts and minds! LG, whatever the hell that is, must be a company run by engineers. Good phone, but idiotic marketing.) It's a picture phone, and here's a picture of Charlene's Treo, displaying, tah dah...Random Jottings! She actually woke me up this morning to show me my blog on the Treo.

So far we are very pleased with Verizon.

Watch the watchers...

This article by Max Borders in TechCentral argues that street cameras are not really a violation of civil liberties...

...Indeed, what is the difference between a cop sitting in his patrol car monitoring the streets (and you) whilst eating a Bavarian crème and that same cop sitting in a control room doing the same? You may respond that, in one instance, the cop is not visible to you. But there is nothing to say that cops can't monitor people while obscured by alleyway shadows. In fact, they do it all the time. Would anyone argue that this is a civil rights violation?...

TMLutas counters:

...It's not a bad piece but misses the real problem of the cameras, they make the state too strong. A society where everything done by an individual in public is captured, stored, collated, and attached to a personal file makes it too easy to keep tabs on dissidents, on the loyal opposition, even on personal enemies of those in power....

I think they are both missing the real issue. I think David Brin got it right, in The Transparent Society, when he argued that street cameras are going to happen. They are just too effective, and people's desire for safe streets is so strong, that they are inevitable. Therefore, what civil libertarians should be pushing for is the right to watch the watchers! There's no reason why the same camera technology should not allow us to watch the cops in the control room. (And, civil liberties aside, they would do a much better job of the watching, if they knew we were looking over their shoulders, and could tell the world that Officer Muldoon was busy dunking his donut and didn't even notice the mugging on the screen in front of him.) And maybe citizens should be able to watch the streets also.

Another issue that could be pursued with profit is where, and how long, the recordings are to be stored. Hizzoner the mayor should not be able to collect juicy clips of his political opponents visiting low dives. Perhaps those concerned with civil liberties should be pushing for the feeds to be stored where they are not available, except by court order if they hold evidence of a crime or accident. And they should be erased after a set time.

We are inevitably going to have less "privacy" in public spaces just because of the ever increasing amounts of information that is being captured. The Internet is a sort of public area, but this blog post, though it will probably be read by only a few hundred people, is available to the world, and is possibly being stored in ways I've never heard of, and could be used against me in the future. But the privacy of "big city anonymity" is actually not the norm in history. Most people have lived in small communities, where almost everything is known about everybody. A certain amount of that is coming back, whether we like it or not.

kids straight off the plane...

Nice story from Jay Manifold:

Early evening, St Patrick's Day. Science Night at Della Lamb Elementary in downtown KC: seven spoken languages amongst the student body; at least a third of the kids are straight off the plane from some of the deepest hellholes on Earth (refugee camps in Somalia, Sudan, etc), still learning to use plumbing and electricity....

....I found the Moon. It took a while. Magnification was maybe 30x; the disk subtended about half the field of view. A fat crescent with some Earthshine and high-relief features in the Southern Highlands and along the coastlines of Mare Serenitatis and Mare Tranquillitatis.

An African girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old, steps up. Swathed from head to foot in some kind of robe, which is just as well, because it's not warm and there's a strong breeze. I think how strange this environment must seem to her, and wonder how many family members she has lost, and how many people have died before her eyes. She is utterly silent. I point to the eyepiece, and she leans in for a look.

Three seconds later she has leaned back, eyes wide, looking directly into mine -- and grinning from ear to ear, brilliant white teeth gleaming in the darkness. She gazes at me, and then, instead of stepping away, she leans over for another, longer look. Only then does she leap away to find a friend and share the wonder. It occurs to me that some members of the next generation of scientists may have unlikely origins....

x

What an age we live in!

Darius Peterson III, right, gives the thumbs-up to his dad, Maj. Darius Peterson, after receiving his diploma from Liberty County High School in Hinesville, Ga., on Saturday. Maj. Peterson and fellow 3rd Infantry Division soldiers watched the ceremony via video teleconference from Iraq.
From Army Times Frontline Photos, May 23, 2005

Lewis Levine / The (Hinesville, Ga.) Coastal Courier / AP
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

shared space

Here's more on the new Dutch approach to traffic management (Blogged here previously), which is about to be tried in London's Museumland area...

...The idea of "shared space" is to denude a street of most of its conventional markings and features and create a different urban landscape in which motorists and pedestrians are put on an equal footing, so to speak. Drivers start to behave in a very different way amid the new uncertainty, moving slowly, making eye contact with pedestrians, and becoming aware of much more than whether the lights have gone red. Or so the theory goes.

Evidence from Dutch towns is impressive. Safety records have improved, local officials report, and accidents, when they do happen are far less serious, because of the slow speeds.

Yet overall cross-town speeds are no slower than before, because intersections are far more fluid and snarl-ups are rare...

Actually this is something we've all experienced. Imagine you're in the parking lot at the end of the ball game, and you slowly drive forward while people stream all around you. No one gets hurt. And the bit about overall speed being no slower rings true to me. City traffic often seems to me to move faster than traffic in the suburbs, where you may have three lanes in both directions, but you have to wait at each traffic light for the North-South traffic, then the North South left-turn lanes, then the East-West left-turn lanes...torture.

Mobile phones...

Any recommendations for cell-phone service? Our family plus Charlene's firm share a T-Mobile account, and we are not thrilled with it. We will likely switch when the contract ends.

We are not power-users, we tend to prefer things that are simple and just work without fuss. Though I might want to get a camera-phone. Since starting blogging I seem to see a lot of the oddest things, but never while carrying a camera...(This is one of them. I had to go home and come back with camera)

I like these notions...

Wired has a fascinating article on a new theory of traffic engineering...

...We drive on to another project Monderman designed, this one in the nearby village of Oosterwolde. What was once a conventional road junction with traffic lights has been turned into something resembling a public square that mixes cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. About 5,000 cars pass through the square each day, with no serious accidents since the redesign in 1999. "To my mind, there is one crucial test of a design such as this," Monderman says. "Here, I will show you."

With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions...

It's about getting rid of traffic signals, crosswalks, road-markers...all the stuff that tries to make traffic flow faster and keep it away from pedestrians. It turns out this can be safer—situations that seem dangerously ambiguous force drivers to think, to slow down, and to move with care.

...The old ways of traffic engineering - build it bigger, wider, faster - aren't going to disappear overnight. But one look at West Palm Beach suggests an evolution is under way. When the city of 82,000 went ahead with its plan to convert several wide thoroughfares into narrow two-way streets, traffic slowed so much that people felt it was safe to walk there. The increase in pedestrian traffic attracted new shops and apartment buildings. Property values along Clematis Street, one of the town's main drags, have more than doubled since it was reconfigured..(thanks to Orrin Judd).

I'm a very urban person, and intensely aware of how some streets are pleasant to walk along and have flourishing businesses and restaurants. And others aren't. And the difference has a lot to do with cars. Ocean Avenue, the commercial street in my neighborhood, has heavy traffic and has never flourished. Nearby West Portal Ave, which has slow-moving traffic, and isn't a thoroughfare you would take to get somewhere else, is the most pleasant shopping-street on this end of town. Reading the article makes me think about how people often cross West Portal in the middle of the block, and how it feels rather acceptable to so so, because it's a pedestrian-friendly street.

Update: Here are some pictures of Oosterwald.

You should always carry one of these...

On the subject of convergence (of our various digital gadgets) I've tended to favor the theory that our mobile phones will eat everything else. Some of them already include cameras and PDA's, and they are starting to be web-browsers and collect e-mail. And it seems like I've heard rumors of MP3 players.

But there's another multi-purpose tool that we tend to carry around...one that already covers many needs...one that's psychologically ripe for the golden convergence...will this surprise entrant win the race for the digital future?

Yes, folks, it's a Swiss Army Knife with a USB flash drive! Here's a story about it...

Fixed, I hope...

If you like repairing things, you should be aware of a great site, repairclinic.com.

Our Maytag dryer started making an ugly grinding noise. On my own I couldn't even figure out how to get it open. But the repairclinic.com site had a nice picture, which with a mouse-over shows larger views of the various parts, and explanations of what they do.

I took off the front bulkhead, and spent some time rotating the drum, trying to locate the sound. (A little patience is very important...take your time, things will seem bewildering at first.) Eventually I noticed that one of the pads the drum glides on was worn away, and the metal underneath was shiny with scraping. A few more clicks, and the part is ordered, and will be shipped tomorrow. 'Till it comes, we will be living like hardy pioneers, hanging our clothes on an improvised clothesline...

Update: The new parts worked just fine. They had to be installed with pop-rivets, which is OK with me. Our dryer is running smooth and quiet...

Gadgets...

Some cool new technology hits the battlefield...

Prairie-dogging

Until recently, that meant popping their heads out of [Stryker] vehicle hatches to check out the terrain, then ducking back in to view a dashboard computer showing friendly and enemy forces on a digital map compiled by the Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below battle management system.

Commanders made these checks a grueling 70 to 80 times each hour, said Bruce Westcoat, market segment manager for aerospace and defense with MicroVision Inc. of Bothell, Wash.

“Physically, it was very taxing,” Westcoat said. “Mentally, it was distracting to have to go down in the vehicle and lose the terrain view.”

But now Stryker commanders use wearable technology that lets them keep their eyes on the battlefield most of the time while patrolling dangerous terrain. The technology—a Nomad helmet-mounted device developed by Microvision—provides a see-through computer display that officials say is improving safety, accuracy and efficiency...

Beep beep beep...

Here's a nice article on the high-tech biggies who are getting involved in space travel. There are more of them than I realized...

Since Anousheh Ansari was a little girl, she dreamed of exploring space. Then she became one of the most successful female IT entrepreneurs in history and decided to do something about it.

The Iranian-born electrical engineer made a fortune at the height of the Internet bubble, selling start-up Telecom Technologies to Sonus Networks for an estimated $440 million. In May, she joined the growing ranks of IT luminaries jumping into the space race, lending her name and undisclosed financial backing to the $10 million contest now known as the Ansari X Prize challenge...

Hopefully it will become so much the fad, that any silicon gazillionaire who lacks a credible rocket venture will feel like a failure and a laughingstock, and will be afraid to leave his house lest the other kids laugh at him. Or her.

We're back!

We were at Mojave Airport this morning, and watched SpaceShipOne win the X-PRIZE! It was Awesome! Much more thrilling than I had expected...

Here's the spacecraft after the flight, being put on its cart...it's so light a couple of guys push down the tail, and the cart is rolled under it. The chap with the beard and the khaki pants, by the nose, is my brother-in-law, Bud McClure. He was photographing some tape (which has different colors that burn off at different temperatures) on the pink thermal protection system, which he designed (along with the environment control system, plus many other odd jobs like engine simulators and trajectory code.)

His mind is already on SpaceShipTwo, being built for Bransen's "Virgin Galactic"...

Here's me, and my mom, Evelyn Weidner. On the right is the pilot, Brian Binnie, and I've forgotten who the other guy is. But next to his chin you can see the colored tape, partly etched away by heat. Bud said the heat was just as he had calculated.

These are the three chase-planes, which worked at different altitudes...

The most exciting moment at Mojave we didn't get on film, (unless it's on our video, which I haven't had time to mess with). The mother ship, White Knight, carried the spacecraft to 49,000 feet. This took about an hour, and we would catch glimpses of it and a chase plane as they circled ever higher. At the end all we could see were two contrails, very high. Finally the moment came to detach SpaceShipOne. Two contrails split off to either side, and a new one appeared going straight up! Fast! In about a minute it went to what looked like 5-times the height gained in the previous hour. Shortly after that it was announced that the required altitude to win the prize had been exceeded, also breaking the height record set by the X-15 in 1963 (107.9 kilometers).

Here's White Knight, the mother-ship, with SpaceShipOne attached beneath, taxiing past us. They look like the most improbable of contraptions, and one wonders why it doesn't all collapse, and if this is just a hoax. Then they just take off, like it's no big deal. And suddenly they look rather graceful. The cool clear high-desert morning was a pure delight for me, though my family seems to find the desert a sort of Purgatory to be escaped from...

Alas, my son the pilot is busy at college, and he had to miss this. One of the most delightful things was the informality of it all. SpaceShipOne was towed back to the hanger behind that white truck you see above. Nothing was gold-plated, nothing was bureaucratic or pompous. Nothing was NASA...(Or as Rutan says it, "Nay-say.")

One more....here's the cockpit...

Wild blue yonder...

By the way, the Weidners will be heading down to Mojave this weekend to watch, if all goes well, the second launch of SpaceShipOne. We have a ticket courtesy of my brother-in-law, who is an engineer at Scaled Composites, (and already, I gather, doodling plans for SpaceShipTwo!)

I hope to blog some good pix...

"These were the first, tentative space vehicles"

If you are interested in space, a new article by Rand Simberg is a must-read...

As Tom Wolfe chronicled in The Right Stuff, while Lyndon Johnson was declaring that our nation wouldn’t go to bed by the light of a communist Moon, and while the German refugees from Hitler’s rocket program were in Alabama developing the vehicles that would eventually take us to the Moon, there were rocket planes flying in the Mojave Desert, released from B-52 bombers. They sundered the skies, probing the upper reaches of the atmosphere and even temporarily leaving it. These were the first, tentative space vehicles, and had they not been interrupted by the urgency of beating the Soviets to the Moon, their successors might have continued. They might have flown higher, and faster, and faster yet, until at last they flew fast enough to defy the gravity of the Earth and reach orbit.

That might have been another road to space, a path not taken—one that might have provided a more incremental, affordable, and reliable approach, instead of one in which we put small capsules on unreliable and expensive munitions, and hoped for the best....

Here's a little more from the essay:

....Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, as an employee of a major government aerospace contractor, I participated in and managed several studies relating to future launch systems. These so-called “space transportation architecture” studies evaluated and compared alternative conceptual launch systems.....

....As we looked at all the combinations of architectures and models, we discovered something interesting. While some vehicle design concepts were clearly better than others, they were all extremely expensive per-flight for the low-activity scenarios, and they were all much less expensive for the high-activity scenarios. Using the space shuttle as a reference, we developed a notional architecture that had sufficient facilities and vehicles for a hundred shuttle flights per year. (That sounds ridiculous today, since there have never been more than nine shuttle flights in a single year, but in fact the shuttle was originally intended to fly once a week.) Surprisingly, the per-flight costs that we estimated were much lower than the actual shuttle costs at the time. The same was true of other launch concepts we studied. The cost per-flight or cost per-pound varied dramatically—in some cases by a factor of ten....

The subject of space seems to accumulate more myths than any other. I've long suspected that many people are unconsciously frightened by the utterly limitless vastness that confronts us. And so we cling to concepts that assume that space travel will always be rare, expensive, and under the control of cautious bureaucracies...

another small step...

Lance Jonn Romanov writes

Japan Deploys Solar Sail Film in Space

ISAS succeeded in deploying a big thin film for solar sail in space for the first time in the world.

ISAS launched a small rocket S-310-34 from Uchinoura Space Center in Kagoshima, Japan, at 15:15, August 9, 2004 (Japan Standard Time). The launch was the culmination of a historic new technology, the world-first successful full-fledged deployment of big films for solar sail.

A solar sail is a spacecraft without a rocket engine. It is pushed along directly by light particles from the Sun, reflecting off its giant sails. Because it carries no fuel and keeps accelerating over almost unlimited distances, it is the only technology now in existence that can one day take us to the stars...

It was just a brief experiment, but very pleasing to contemplate...

"riding on top of everyone else's platform"

Drunkenbatman has a fascinating essay called Convergence Kills, about where Apple might be heading with its new technologies. He argues that convergence (the gradual merging of all our digital gadgets into one) is going to take the path of mobile phones eating everything else. Why? Because your phone is the one thing you always carry. Phones are already turning into cameras and PDA's, and also Internet browsers. Apple has just partnered with Motorola to include their music technology into the next generation of phones, which will work like iPods, though only holding 15 songs!

Apple has claimed that its iTunes Music Store is mostly a loss-leader to sell their very profitable iPods. Maybe it's the other way around:

There's an old adage about magicians; if you want to learn the trick, close your ears and open your eyes. Well it might not go exactly like that, but that's the lesson I took from it.

When people are talking, you have a natural inclination to look at their eyes, and if they're doing something with one hand chances are you really need to be watching the other if you want to see what they're really up to. In other words, watch the hands. And Apple is particularly adept at misdirection...
. . . . . . . .

...Apple is playing towards that exact same endgame, but with a twist: they're creating a new light-DRM [Digital Rights Management] platform that is riding on top of everyone else's platform. iMacs, Windows, mobile phones, everything. Google is also creating a platform riding on the backs of other platforms... except its based around becoming the access point for all things internet. Apple wants that, but for DRM content.

They weren't kidding around with their vision of the computer as a hub for your digital life, they just forgot to mention that the hub will come with a lock. And guess who owns the keys? (Thanks to Joe Katzman)

Apple has a head start, but a lot of other players will be trying to do the same thing...Good luck.

My next cell-phone will have a camera for sure. I'm always seeing odd things and wishing I had a camera handy. And look at this--one inch hards drives for phones! It's coming.

"Instead of boxes, you get rooms..."

Do take a look at this article on inflatable space habitats, being created by businessman Bob Bigelow, owner of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain...

...To understand just how revolutionary Bigelow's projected cost savings might be, consider the International Space Station. By 2010, this troubled project will have cost a total of $50 billion, will be 10 years behind schedule and will contain about half of the habitable work space that had been planned, around 550 cubic meters. Just two of Bigelow's planned modules will exceed the entire work space of the ISS, but since the modules will cost around $100 million apiece, the savings become obvious. Two hundred million dollars vs. $50 billion is quite a difference, enough of a difference to entice other private companies into the new space race.

"More space at a cheaper price allows companies to do large-scale things," NASA's Miller says. "Instead of boxes, you get rooms, for experiments, for equipment, for manufacturing. The next generation of medicines, the next generation of materials and technology could all come from the zero-gravity environment. This is where people are going to make a lot of money. And that will really accelerate the science and create direct benefits for humans on Earth."...

What's really interesting is how Bigelow's company is now partnering with NASA.

Actually, even more interesting is the cultural change: Guys make their first billion, and nowadays, instead of focusing on the America's Cup or the Kentucky Derby, they head for space! This, if I may use an oft-misused phrase correctly, [see Word-Note here] is a sea-change.

Afterthought: It might become some kind of high-tech macho one-upmanship thing. Paul Allen's a Microsoftie, so imagine Larry Ellison or Scott McNealy deciding they just have to compete?

(Of course I blogged the same inflatable habitat idea here, way back in 2002, but no matter. I won't dispute priority; it's progress that's important!)

(Thanks to Will Collier)

Good news...Halliburton/KFC merger announced...

From The Japan Times Online :

Toshiba Corp. and General Electric Co. have applied for permission with the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct a feasibility study on building a nuclear plant in Alabama, company sources said Sunday.

The two electric giants are hoping to land the contract following a Bush administration decision to once again support the construction of nuclear power plants, according to the sources...(via Judd)

Even if it doesn't get built, it will siphon off energy from the Ultras that otherwise would go to helping the terrorists win. Sort of like the papier maché airplanes widely used in WWII to attract the bombs and bullets of attackers.

President Bush should immediately announce the construction of ten new nuclear plants, and a proposal to merge Halliburton and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then smash the terrorists while nobody's looking...

New technology...

Take a look at this video! A 36 ton truck hits an innovative new barricade at 50mph. The barricade (unlike the truck) appears unharmed.

(Thanks to Dean)

Dragon Ladies

U-2's were in the news when I was a little boy, when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. So I find it amazing and delightful that those odd and beautiful planes are still defending Freedom's Wall. Here are some pictures, taken at an "undisclosed location" in Southwest Asia.

"booster configurations vary"

Jay Manifold speculates with the sort of speculations that go to my head like wine (or it could be the hot-chocolate-with-copious-dollop-of-rum that Charlene just made with the bain marie she recently scored for a mere frizzle on eBay) Speculation: Why not replace the Hubble Space Telescope with multiple small cheap space telescopes???

...I infer that a relatively simple space-based telescope should cost about 150 times as much as a ground-based amateur telescope of the same size. Grazing over to this page, I note -- after wiping the drool off my chin -- a price of $10,749 for a 25" 'scope. Once again applying the cube-of-aperture relationship, then multiplying by 150, I arrive at a figure of only $6.3 million for a 1-meter telescope in space.

Well, er, except for launch costs....

- - - - - - - - - - -
...Notwithstanding that the above are approximate figures -- the asking price is rarely obtained in the current depressed launcher market, booster configurations vary, and performance varies significantly by orbital altitude and the latitude of the launch site -- we may reasonably expect to pay no more than $12 million for the launch. I note that one of the least expensive vehicles, the Dnepr, could launch several such telescopes at once if they could somehow be fit inside its payload fairing.

I conclude that less than $20 million could put us well on the way to launching one or more space telescopes before Hubble ceases operation. Compare perhaps half a billion dollars for the cancelled Hubble-maintenance Shuttle mission....

A small space telescope could still do the job of a much larger earth-based telescope. I have no idea how time on the Hubble is allocated, but I can feel confident that it isn't used for out-of-the mainstream projects. Sort of like the early mainframe computers—there was no way to be playful or inventive with them.

Think of Jay's project as the equivalent of the coming of the mini-computer...

Platinum asteroids...

John Kalb wrote a comment to the "What use is a newborn child" post below, that made me think. (I hope he will be flattered by that and not mind that I think he's wrong.)

The issue is that space will only become a source of resources in the distant future. No one doubts that there are valuable minerals on the moon and Mars, but the cost of bringing them back here now would be prohibitive, and it will stay that way until at the very least we have factories on those planets to refine whatever raw materials we find there and then send the finished products back.

China's rhetoric about mining the moon's riches for the benefit of humanity is just that. For now, the only place in space of any strategic or economic value is low Earth orbit.

First of all, the idea that minerals and resources are what we are short of, and need to go hunting for, is wrong. It's a holdover from the Industrial Age, when coal or oil or iron ore were limiting factors to a nation's success. But the more we enter into the Information Age, the less important they become. Which is why their prices (adjusted for inflation) have been falling for the last hundred years or so. And why, despite dire predictions, we don't run out of any of them—in fact we find our reserves growing. And why the countries that specialize in providing them tend to be among the poorest. All this is a byproduct of the Information Age and its technology. NOTHING we are doing now is hindered by lack of minerals!

[To help understand this, reflect on a similar change that happened when Humankind went from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age. The previous limiting factor had been agricultural production. Countries were often stopped dead in their tracks by famines. And all progress was limited because most people were of necessity poor peasants and farmers. And armies were limited by the number of available peasant recruits. Once industrialization hit, all was changed and agriculture was no longer a bottleneck. Industrial nations don't have famines. And they are able to drastically reduce their farm populations and put those people to more productive work, while producing more food—often to the point of awkward surpluses. And Krupp's cannon trumped any number of infantrymen on the battlefield.]

Even if (getting back to question of space), even if there are platinum boulders ready to be plucked from low orbit which will pay for NASA's budget, that's not the point. That wasn't Pedro's point. John is thinking like those 16th Century chaps who though the New World would "pay off" in gold and silver. There was a lot of gold, but in fact (to name just one of many many items) the humble potato was a far more valuable discovery, allowing Europe's population to increase by tens of millions. And the ideas that have emerged from this hemisphere are incalculably more valuable yet.

Spain took the lion's share of the silver, and it impoverished her. Japan, a country with no resources, adopted a collection of American ideas on business management, and used them to become stupendously wealthy. Ideas, inventions, wisdom, increased human happiness and potential, those are the payoffs from new worlds. And there's no way to predict when and where they will happen.

Businesses need to consider short-term payoffs. As a nation, we should be pushing ourselves into space because we need to grow—our souls need to grow. There will be payoffs from that, probably bigger than we can imagine.

Of what use is a newborn child? --Franklin

Pedro writes

[Lefty-blogger discussing Bush Space Plan asks:] "WHAT'S THE PAYOFF?" Holy rocket ship to the moom, batman, some of you people need to read a little less narcissitic literature and dig into some rock-'em sock-'em science fiction. 'What's the payoff?' Are you freakin' kidding me? How about the resources of an entire freakin' planet? No wait, one extra planet, one extra large satellite (the moon), a couple of little ones (Mars' moons), plus the asteroid belt thrown in as a bonus. PLUS the spin-off technologies. But how can you ask "What's the payoff?" when we're talking about an entire planet? NASA = bloated gov't, OK, we can fix that, and it's a valid point. But "What's the payoff?"

If you gotta ask, it probably means you don't really want to know. Reminds me of how our Great Plains region was once thought of as the "Great American Desert." And Alaska was "Seward's Icebox."

But some of us are looking at the stars...

Mike writes, (concerning Lileks's Space musings)

...Oscar Wilde said a wonderful thing: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” That one works for me on more than one level today. The right hand holds the sword, the left hand holds the sextant. Beautiful - and inspiring in its own right. James, once again I most humbly tip my hat to you.

I'm not enthused about the Space Initiative, because I think giving NASA the job is really a way a making sure that the big scary space genie stays in the bottle.

BUT, I am pleased with it because it is a great big thumb o' the nose to the Jimmy-Carter-turn-down-the-thermostat types who will whine that we have problems here on earth to solve first. This is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA you're talking about here, and we can fight a war, grow the economy, shoot bricks into space AND stillspend more to exacerbate our social problems than all the little countries put together.

And it's not really very big, budget-wise. Space has been running less that 1% of the Fed budget. The cost is a bit of a bullshit issue. (Anyway, how come no one says "we need to spend money solving social problems before we subsidize professors to deconstruct James Joyce?" Or before we subsidize sugar beets?)

I have a heartfelt desire to see smaller government, but not because I think we can't afford more. Those deficit snivelers have rocks in their heads. Our economy is going to grow far faster than our debts. It's been doing that for several centuries now. Remember what happened the last time we had a tax-cuttin' President? Fellow named Reagan? To this very day we hear whinging about how he increased our national debt by 1.3 Trillion. Sounds ombinous, but not one of those lying-with-statistics crybabies ever mentions that our national wealth grew by 17 Trillion in the same period!

Light'n out for the territories...

Moira writes

...The daughter and I were discussing Bush's space-speech on the way to Tae Kwon Do lessons yesterday. After disposing of the pragmatic issues we moved on to the dreams. She enthused about being an astronaut and walking on Mars, I owned that it was a mournful realization for me that I would never leave the earth. I added that I would die a happy woman if she were ever able to do so, or, really, if I could see the first solid attempts to light out for the territories. But never to leave home at all! The human race living in its parents' basement apartment forever. That's a melancholy notion...

New realm in the air...

Rand Simberg points to an interesting article by Greg Klerkx, The Citizen Astronaut

...These days, unfortunately, the shuttle is not the best advertisement for space travel of any kind. More important, NASA has never really accepted the idea that space travel should be for anyone but professional astronauts. The agency did all it could, for instance, to stop a businessman, Dennis Tito, from visiting the International Space Station in 2001.

Underlying NASA's resistance is a fundamental disdain for sullying the human space flight enterprise with the brassy sheen of commerce. But this is backward thinking. Was Charles Lindbergh any less inspirational because he was, to put it bluntly, an aerial privateer chasing a cash prize?

President Bush's Mars initiative neatly places NASA's goal of exploration in the public spotlight. Now the agency needs to allow the rest of us to participate.... (Klerkx has a new book out also, Lost in Space : The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age. I'm going to take a look at it.)

It's not just commerce they disdain, the bureaucrats don't want to share space with the common man. They are elitists. It's no accident that elitists of all stripes are attracted to government. Only the state can overrule the marketplace.

It's worth keeping in mind how we dealt with a similar situation, with a new realm in the air where private enterprise was slow to grow to a self-sustaining size. In the 1920's the US Government used airmail subsidies to greatly expand our then tiny airlines, and encourage the creation of larger and faster planes. I wrote a post about it here; it's a very interesting bit of our history. The gist of it was that we subsidized capacity. The airlines with airmail contracts got more money if they flew bigger planes, even if there wasn't mail to fill them. In effect this was subsidizing the carrying of passengers, and of course the development of bigger planes.

But, one important thing—the US government didn't try to decide what the "goal" of airlines should be! That was good, because we really didn't know enough to decide. For instance, the transports that were created in the 30's were vital to us in WWII. But the Air Force was totally uninterested in them. If government masterminds had tried to save resources by allocating them according to a master plan for airplane development, the results would have been far worse.

Space thoughts 2

Wretchard writes:

....Whether Europe, Asia or America will first find the key technology necessary to make interplanetary travel an economical reality cannot be foreseen. Yet history suggests that the answers will be found by those who are looking for them....

.... Maybe the challenge is not to put men on Mars by a date certain, but the subtly different one of making investments to ensure that any technological breakthrough can be exploited rapidly and without hesitation. Clearly the day will come when nations will expand beyond the confines of the planet and our task is to be ready to mount the first real breeze for the distant shore....

"to mount the first real breeze for the distant shore". Yes

One of the points of his post was that there is no way that there is going to be reasonably priced space travel anytime soon:

....Rocketman points out that no available engine technology can boost payloads into space in economical quantities. Current launch costs are on the order of $8,000/lb, a number that will have to be reduced by a factor of ten for the habitation of the moon, the establishment of La Grange transfer stations or flights to Mars to be feasible. This will require technology, and perhaps even basic physics that does not even exist. Simply building bigger versions of the Saturn V will not work....

I would respectfully suggest that maybe, just maybe, that isn't true. One thing that is overlooked is that neither launch vehicles nor the launch process itself has ever been subject to the ruthless cost-cutting of mass production! In the manufacturing sector, reducing costs by a factor of 10 is routine. Happens when things go from small scale production to large scale. Launch vehicles have always been produced in small batches, and most of their components are produced in small batches. And they are built by companies that are totally geared to produced small quantities of expensive planes and rockets for government agencies rather than the marketplace.

No only is manufacturing in small lots very expensive, but development costs must be amortized over a small number of units. (It LOOKS like we are spending a lot on developing our spacecraft, but in fact I suspect spacecraft research is on a starvation diet. If we were producing any spacecraft in large quantities, management would instantly decide that more R&D would be a good investment.)

Think of those "factor of ten" objections. Imagine that (yes, I know this is visionary and won't happen—don't bother to chide, it's just a thought experiment), imagine that a certain size of launch vehicle could reasonably be built and launched for $50 million each. Imagine that our government, (or some other entity with deep pockets) offered to buy vehicles+launches for only $5 million each. BUT, with a commitment to buy 400 launches a year for 10 years....I wonder if they would have any takers?

Most people have no idea of the cost-cutting that goes on behind the scenes in, say, the automotive industry. Every nut and bolt is scrutinized for possible cost savings. Every supplier is ruthlessly squeezed to lower prices and then lower them again. And they in turn squeeze their suppliers. Robots replace ever more workers. Software schedules the ordering and movement of every part, so they arrive at the factory just hours before they are due to be used.

I have a "hunch bordering on a certainty" that that "factor of ten" problem one hears of so often could be quickly solved by pure brute force. Won't happen of course.

Space thoughts 1

Alan pours scorn on a suggestion that the Space Initiative could help solve the problem of bone-loss in the elderly...

....Poppycock, a senior citizen might say. The idea that medical research could be facilitated in space would not withstand any honest cost-benefit analysis. This argument is simply a scam to sway an important voting block in favor of more high-flying pork. Make no mistake: at present the manned space program is no more than an engine for expropriating and spending money. If we want to learn about the cosmos, we are simply wasting resources when we send humans into space. If we want to learn about human physiology, earth is the place to do it....

We've been hearing arguments like that for decades. NASA has long pushed the idea that "spin-offs" will justify their budget. It's total balunkey, Any spin-offs are dwarfed by what would have happened if that money had just been given to good research labs.

But the whole argument is wrong on a deeper level. We can't plan what we should do in or with space, because we don't know what space IS.

We are like 16th Century Europeans becoming aware of a New World in the Western Hemisphere. We dream of cities of gold and a Northwest passage. But it's a certainty that what we will find will be the equivalent of tobacco and maize and potatoes and steamboats and geysers and the US Constitution and a "new birth of freedom." We don't know what space is, and we won't find out until a lot of people can go there. Go there with time and resources and freedom to experiment and invent and just be crazy dreamers. Freedom to try crazy things that will get some of them killed.

"Men of iron, ships of aluminum"

at Spacedaily I found this article comparing the problems of space vehicles like the Shuttle with the problems of Zeppelins and other rigid airships.

...the great rigid airships have a lot of lessons to teach us about how technologies rise and fall. In particular, the problems that eventually killed the large airship are almost exactly the same as the ones that currently bedevil our space launch vehicles -- especially the Shuttle...

...High Unit Cost -- The low lift/volume ratio of hydrogen and helium meant that airship designers had to make their craft very large to get useful amounts of lift. Even an X-zeppelin had to be large and expensive. In sharp contrast, the winged aircraft of the same era were so cheap that X-planes were thrown together by bicycle mechanics in barns and garages...

Narrow Design Base -- There were never more than four independent airship design teams active at one time, and most of them were heavily dependent on Zeppelin Corporation design data acquired by purchase, espionage, or reverse-engineering of crash wreckage. (During this Golden Age of Aviation, there were dozens of airplane design teams at work, exploring every possible idea for improved performance.) The USA is now down to two major players in the launch vehicle market, with the Ariane team the only active overseas group not dependent on old US or Soviet technology transferred during the Cold War.

Among the other similarities: Narrow Contractor Base, Mammoth Ground Support Equipment, Safety Trade-Offs, Low Flight Rate, Publicity Spotlight, Fanatical Promoters...

And the one that really made me both smile and wince: Inappropriate Traditions. (read it)