CERN has re run the ‘faster than light’ neutrino experiment and replicated the results even after refining their methods. Still lots of controversy but exciting.
Hot footed Neutrinos seen again
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Category Archives: Technology
War in the 21st Century, 2nd of 2 parts
Over at Baen Books the second Beating Decline monograph, dealing with the new high tech realms. Ground war, Space and Cyberwar/Borderless War. Has some interesting insights on systems tested in Iraq and ‘Stan that I had not heard but make sense. Here is the 1st post.
Space Based Power!
Power Sat Concept
IAA says Space Based Grid Pwer Generation is a realistic prospect in 30 years, which actually says today because it would take that long to build the infrastructure to make it real.
Space Junk to Resource
I saw this picture elsewhere and lost it, its cool and a bit worrying, thought of course the scale is so out of kilter it’s almost sublime, but if you figure this only the big stuff and that it’s all in motion all the time and new stuff is going up there, then the worry is not so out-of-place.
- Junk, very expensive Junk, maybe reusable Junk
All sorts of solutions for removing this stuff has been proposed, from robo tugs to catchers mitts, and evaporating them with lasers. That last has been under study since the 1990’s and you don’t have to blow them to ‘microns’ you just have to slow them down enough so they did into the outer atmosphere and come crashing to the ground.
A very high tech broom (click through to Wired article)
And in the end I think the laser broom will be used, to deorbit bolts, dropped tools, smashed up debris etc, not worth recovering.
But a lot, even most of the material up there probably can be reused. If we could cheaply catch the small stuff, maybe my using the Laser Broom to guide it into a catch basket, there is plenty of solar power and vacuüm to smelt the metals and create new things.
Using spare material, sunlight, natural vacuüm and microgravity environment it seems reasonable that we could design and build a large-scale Additive Fabrication Machine in orbit that could build space craft parts from scrap. In the long run we then start getting the materials from asteroids or the moon and off we go into the solar system.
NaNoWriMo Day 12 Update
So I spent most of the day on this and only got 2,628 words written. Yesterday I spent less time overall and put out a lot more words. As per typical there is more than one reason, and writers block per se was not one of them. Mainly it was because I spent a lot of today doodling on my iPad creating a ‘professional quality’ (per Smash Words Style Guide) cover for Elgin. I love doodling on graphical projects, and especially on the iPad. I started out trying to do a typical (atypical) swords and sorcery type cover with Elgin the Iffrit and Elgin the Cowboy etc, and this was stupid, I’m not an artist. Then I started playing around with scenery and graphics do-dads and came up the the pretty cool cover you’ll all be seeing soon.
While I was doing that I was pondering shifting the ‘publishing’ of the ongoing work the Smashwords, who have kindly made Meatgrinder and their site available to NaNoWriMo works. Trying to do it on the web page is a bit of a pain since there is something hinky with the import of large blocks of word text into WP, almost undoubtedly me not the site but not something I’m going to bother fighting right now.
Then of course was the fact that I was mucking around in my mind with the usual….you’re getting too long, too wordy, too discursive. But then I went back and as of this time I really don’t know that I am. Oh I can see sections an editor would say cut out, and they’d be right technically, but I have to wonder if the shibboleths of the day of physical type setting, or even physical paper and binding, should come across full force into eBooks, I like books that flesh out the character, that spend some time explaining things, describing things. As long as they’re not boring.
Status from NaNoWriMo
Words Written Today 2,628
Total Words Written 34,332 Current Day 12
Average Per Day 2,861
Words Remaining 15,668 Days Remaining 19
At This Rate You Will Finish On November 17, 2011
Words Per Day To Finish On Time 82
Target Word Count 50,000 Target Average Words Per Day 1,667
(oops forgot a title) Nov 4th Progress
So I put up the first chapter of Elgin, the Novel I’m writing for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), you can click-through Elgin in the writing menu to the left, read to the bottom and click on the Chapter 1 link. OR:
- Elgin Introduction
- Elgin Chapter 1
So I spent the day shuttling between various medical labs and had some time to write, so I did some on the iPad. My method for this is clumsy but workable. I use Dropbox to store my current writing which gives me access on the ThinkPad T42 laptop where I do most of my writing and the iPad which is my constant travel companion. I use Pages for writing, which started out pretty easy to use and is getting easier to use. On the iPad Dropbox knows I can open a word document in Pages, so it gives me that option, but of course Apple does not link to Dropbox so I have to e-mail the file to myself and drop it back into Dropbox, which is annoying but workable.
Without my Verbatim bluetooth keyboard using the iPad on-screen keyboard is a two hand two finger exercise instead of ten finger touch typing but it’s still pretty fast. Pages was the only real choice for a real word processor that I could see when I bought the iPad. And as times goes along I am getting to like the slimmed down features of pages, though I dislike the modern smart phone based assumption that it knows better than I what I meant to spell (it’s a pain when inventing words/’terms for scifi or fantasy.)
Anyway read the intro and first chapter, let me know what you think.
SpaceX costs , and some remote observations…
Elon Musk in this update post is very publicly making the point that while his wealth enabled him to ‘launch’ SpaceX the prices they are charging are ‘real’ and sustainable over the long run not subsidized. Seems that he is proving that when you are talking about certain classes of product America is still the leader, you just can’t carry old infrastructure, including old thinking, along for the ride.
Had a look at Blue Origin’s website and their factory, the thing that strikes me about all of the eSpace companies is that they are quite modest in size, set up for clean, smooth, flexible manufacturing and have a modest work force. I assume that they have developed a significant network of supporting suppliers, small and large and do only key operations in house.
They are using modern tools and techniques, informed by a huge legacy of knowledge and the tools that the legacy has created. This is the sort of thing that America is very good at, it requires motivated people working in trust based teams, with accountability, bull headedness, hard headedness, willingness to fail and a refusal to let the risk of, or even the actuality of failure, to get in the way of progress. Small entrepreneurial companies are infinitely better at this that big ones. Especially big ones with any ties to the gov’t/mil world and its utter aversion to risk or failure.
Minor Planets (all the stuff that isn’t one of the eight (no longer nine since Pluto got dissed)
The Minor Planet Center web site, a Smithsonian Operation, so pretty serious stuff, lots of info, just a scan of the lists could alter your view of the local environs we live in. 1200 plus potential dangerous asteroids….known and in the inner system today, tens of thousands of other bodies out there, ready to play interplanetary billiards if something really hairy this way came. But mainly a very good resource for serious thought, serious business like eSpace objectives for mining, and for not so serious ventures such as SciFi.
A combo shows a sequence of images of the Lutetia asteroid at various distances before the closest approach of the Rosetta spacecraft in 2010. A rare opportunity to observe an asteroid at close quarters has unveiled a remarkable rock that seems to be a precursor of a planet, astronomers reported on Thursday.
So I found the article with the above picture (click through) fascinating, dealing with an asteroid that got a fly by last year by Rosetta (ESA Spacecraft.) “The astronomers calculate Lutetia to be 121 kilometres (75 miles) long, 101 kms (63 miles) tall and 75 kilometres (47 miles) wide.” “Lutetia’s high density, at 3,400 kilos per cubic metre (212 pounds per cubic foot), its large size and its ancient surface make it different from any other asteroid studied so far, the studies said.”
This is Eros the first asteroid to be visited, “34.4×11.2×11.2 km in size 34.4×11.2×11.2 km in size” “Mean density 2.67±0.03 g/cm³ ” or about 2670 kilos per cubic meter.
Eros Montage from Wikipedia...approximatly real color
Below is Temple, a comet visited by two spacecraft. “Mean density 0.62 g/cm³ ” or 620 kilos per meter.
Comparison of From Wikipedia: Deep Impact and Stardust photos of a smooth elevated feature on the surface of the nucleus showing recession of icy cliffs at the margins
With this information it becomes obvious that the make up of the minor worlds is much more diverse than had begun to be thought. Eros is pretty dense but still probably filled with voids, obviously Temple is pretty much a rubble pile, which astronomers think is true of other bodies.
So Lutetia is too dense to be a rock pile or even void filled, it has to be as solid as a planet, they think it’s a left over planetesimal from the early creation of the solar system. The only way it can be as dense as it is, is if it went through a molten phase. Given that a shell even a ‘few’ miles thick of rock provide a good insulator it is apparently possible that Lutetia has a molten core.
Does that mean there could be differentiated materials in that crunchy coating? It seems to be an obvious target for mining, where there is pretty much zero risk of cave ins. What are the odds of a good distribution of useful materials for the space industrial infrastructure? This may or may not be a valid mining target, but it points out some things to think about.
Under Siege is available at Smashwords
M.A. Harris’s Smashwords Author Profile: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/MAHarris.
Book page to sample or purchase Under Siege: http://smashwords.com/b/99853.Far Future Adventure, Intrigue and Battle
Apples iEmpire
I’m sure what I’m going to say has been said before, I intimated it the other day for that matter, but Steven Jobs left Apple with an iMpire (i Empire) that no one has been able to keep up with. One way of seeing his legacy, the way he and others may have seen it was as the tools required to interact with the world of data.
Our world (in the metaphysical sense) started out as a place of brute physicality. As society developed and technology humans began to plan, and then we began to record information remote from our brains, and then ideas and concepts, some of them completely disassociated from the physical world we lived in. Some people began to ‘live in their head’ could do so without getting eaten or starving because society could afford to support them, and even awarded them for some of the things they could bring forth (art, science, technology in the abstract.)
This evolution has continued to the point where a large part of our world has become intellectual, it is now a world of data that can only be accessed with the right tools. But this world is not a static one where you just look in and pull out what you want, there is a vast amount of creation and manipulation required. But this requires a set of tools that provide mirror simple access to the world of data. Mirror simple, because all you need to do with a mirror is hanging it up and look into it and it does its job. If technology requires you to carry out arcane incantations and hand motions to provide access to the data world then its to some extent impeding you.
Look at it another way, there is ongoing work in the DoD that eventually will allow a pilot to look around and see the world outside the cockpit as if the aircraft were not there. We need the inverse, the ability to peer into the data world and do what we need, from any point at any time, for an uncountable multitude of reasons…
- On the Go Data Access + Comms
- iPad (Fire hose of access, lite content creator, iPhone in chief?)
- iPhone
- iPod, Touch (can we see this as the low end iPhone) Nano (does this eventually become the iPhone Nano, the iWatch….which it already is, almost)
- The Links
- Commercial Front End
- ITunes
- AppStore
- The Linking memory
- iCloud
- Content Creation
- Mac
- Mac Mini (beginner)
- MacBooks
- AirBook (on the go content creation, iPad with keyboard)
- Home Data Center, access heavy, creation light
- Apple TV
- Mac Mini
- iPad
So Apple as a complete iCology now; the problem is that we really need the rest of the tech world to catch up.
This World and Others 
