Bits & pieces

[unixronin]

High frontier:  The FAA has granted Scaled Composites a license for a sub-orbital launch, which gives Burt Rutan a clear shot at the X-Prize later this year.  Rutan being Rutan, it won't surprise me if he gets it on the first try.  Under the X-Prize rules, an entrant must launch a crew of three to beyond the 100km "edge of space" and return them safely to Earth, then repeat the flight within 14 days, using the same specific vehicle for both flights.

(Update:  As radarrider reports, SpaceShipOne flew again today, achieving Mach 2 at 105,000 feet after a 40-second burn of its main engine.  This was SpaceShipOne's second powered flight.)

Windjammer:  The Genesis solar wind probe has sealed its sampling scoops and is ready to begin its return to Earth.

Wet feet:  A climatologist at the University of Reading says that irreversible melting of the Greenland ice cap could begin within fifty years.  The Greenland ice cap is the world's second largest, containing 2.85 million cubic kilometers of ice.  The bad news: if it melts completely, it will raise global sea levels by 7 meters.  The good news: it'll probably take a thousand years to melt.

Speaking of waves, Japan's LISM gravity-wave detector has gone operational in the same facility as the SuperKamiokande neutrino detector.  Its detection sensitivity is on a par with Japan's TAMA detector and Germany's GEO600, and two orders of magnitude better than LIGO.  A planned cryogenic-instrumentation version should be sensitive enough to compete with LIGO-II.

Pulling a switch:  When the Earth's magnetic field switches, it doesn't switch all at once, according to new research.  The magnetic field flips in as little as 2,000 years at the equator, but it takes as much 11,000 years for the switch to complete at the poles.  Magnetic compasses must get as confused as hell in the middle latitudes during the switch.  (Then again, by the time the next switch comes, there probably won't be a magnetic compass left on Earth outside of a museum.)

Traffic beater:  A banking three-wheeled car a meter wide that can carry two people hopes to reduce traffic congestion.  It runs on compressed natural gas, can manage 50mph, and is claimed to have about a fifth of the running cost of a conventional car.

We're Not Diebold:  Washington State e-voting company VoteHere has open-sourced its source code for peer review.  The source release includes a "voting machine simulator" that can be programmed to cheat in order to show how VoteHere's software detects the altered ballots.

Get yer luverly FUD here:  UK intelligence agencies claim to have foiled a plot to stage a "dirty bomb" attack using osmium tetroxide.  However, cursory examination of the merits and drawbacks of using osmium tetroxide in a bomb (for instance, osmium's cost of up to $180 per gram) throws serious doubts on the claim.

And oh yeah, remember that FlashMob supercomputer planned at UCSF?  Well, probably to no-one's great surprise, it was pretty much of a bust.  Peak performance for the cluster turned out to be only 180 GFlops, using 256 laptops out of the 700 participants; the planners were hoping to exceed 403 Gflops and get onto the top 500 supercomputers list.  What's worse, only 150 laptops were stable enough to actually complete the Linpack benchmark, scoring an unimpressive 77 Gflops.

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Yay 25 feet of water!

Ew, that means that LA will be underwater and the ocean will get all dirty.

Maybe it is a bad thing.

But on the other hand, I could figure out where the new oceanfront property will be, and make a killing in long term real estate deals.

-Ogre

[juuro.livejournal.com]

I think we are, statistically speaking, already overdue for the next magnetic field flip.

And I think no matter how magically advanced technology we are creating, we should not dismiss and pooh-pooh as ridiculously cavemannish the simple and reliable solutions. There is a reason why the main compass of ships and planes is still required to be a magnetic one.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think we are, statistically speaking, already overdue for the next magnetic field flip.

Actually, there is a significant school of geomagnetic thought that says it has already begun.

And I think no matter how magically advanced technology we are creating, we should not dismiss and pooh-pooh as ridiculously cavemannish the simple and reliable solutions. There is a reason why the main compass of ships and planes is still required to be a magnetic one.

Oh, I wasn't dismissing magnetic compasses as cavemannish. But remember, reliability is a relative thing. The fact remains that the magnetic poles wander around enough even now that magnetic compasses can only be used accurately across large distances (say, by ships or on international flights) if you have an up-to-date set of magnetic corrections for the area you're in right now. (And that's only going to get worse, and the correction tables more complex and more quickly outdated, as we get further into a field reversal.)

On the other hand, a ring laser gyrocompass always indicates true, not magnetic, north, and is unaffected by magnetic anomalies. Likewise, a GPS unit can tell you not only your heading anywhere on the planet, with greater accuracy and more easily than a magnetic compass (thus making a great reference or backup for your ring laser gyrocompass), but can give you your exact position to an accuracy of meters in the same measurement. (Granted, a magnetic compass in your backpack doesn't ever run out of batteries.)

I'd be prepared to bet on that requirement for magnetic compasses not lasting more than another few decades at most.

[juuro.livejournal.com]

A GPS depends on a complex infrastructure. Not a good thing in my book.

A gyro, whether mechanical or ring laser, works stand-alone, and only requires infrastructure in the manufacture stage. Acceptable in my book. But in an airborne vehicle, it is only a relative indicator. It needs to be on the surface to be able to be a north-pointer.

(And a good clocksmith will be able to make a mechanical gyro from raw materials. The mechanical one is a bit sensitive to jarring, though.)

I'm afraid the requirement for magnetic compassess is going to go away. We are going to make ourselves dependent on complex technology. It is so nifty to be able to tell your location to the fraction of the metre, even though much poorer precision is usually sufficient.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

A gyro, whether mechanical or ring laser, works stand-alone, and only requires infrastructure in the manufacture stage.

Right, as long as you can keep it powered up.

I'm afraid the requirement for magnetic compasses is going to go away. We are going to make ourselves dependent on complex technology.

I think one could convincingly argue that we already have. I don't think our current civilization could survive without our technological base. We, as a species, could survive its loss, sure, most of us; but a lot of us, mostly in industrialized Western nations, would die, and our civilization would have to change drastically.

[juuro.livejournal.com]

What I am afraid of that even as a species we are going to degenerate to hydroponically maintained clusters of nervous tissue.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't have any real fear of that ever happening. Cyborgs, bioelectronic enhancements, maybe even one day bioelectronic brain augmentation, sure. But brains in a jar? It's never gonna happen (except possibly in special cases -- becoming one of Anne McCaffrey's shellpeople might be an attractive option if you just suddenly became an untreatable quadriplegic). For 99.999% of sane people, it'd be too limiting to ever want to do voluntarily.

[juuro.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you're an optimist. Shellperson I would approve. But consider. We are telecommuting, we are approaching telepresence, we are using virtual reality environments... what's limiting about that? All the experientia one could wish, without ever having to leave home! There will be the fad of "authenticity", but those will be the fringe. It's not the division to Eloi and Morloc we are headed for, it is the brainjars and the meatbrawns.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

All the experientia one could wish ... except for a beer, or a smoke, or sex, or a nice hot shower, or a charbroiled steak, or a Thai curry, or two fingers of Bruichladdich straight up. You can stand on a virtual mountaintop, but you can't feel the wind blow through your hair or the sun on your face. You can go virtual skiing on virtual snow, but when you throw virtual snowballs when you get to the bottom, the snow isn't cold and you can't feel them hit. You can ride a virtual motorcycle on the track, but you can't feel the tires bite on the track, can't feel the drag when you put your knee down, can't feel the vibration from the engine or the surge of acceleration as you get on the throttle out of the corner, can't feel the wind buffet as someone who braked deeper than you and carried more speed through the corner blasts past you.

It's going to be a long, long time before we can convincingly simulate those ... and even when we can, I think you're going to find that the vast majority of people are going to have an enormous level of resistance to the idea of being snipped out of their bodies, poured into a jar, hooked up to a bundle of optical fibers, and stored on a shelf for the next hundred years.

[juuro.livejournal.com]

It will be a long time, but not a long long time. Then all the sensoria you are desiring will be available. The resistance will be coming only from a group of people. Another group, the couch potatos, will be all too happy to accept. And the lazy majority will be writing letters to the editors and ultimately giving in. There is a desire for personal, physical immortality in the human mind. A few hundred years is an acceptable interim solution.

There will be the minority, though, who will continue in the traditional body plan.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Frenkly, I have to say most of the couch potatos will be no loss. I consider that an evolutionary gain for the human race, especially if they haven't reproduced yet.