On horses and history

The Offshore Balancer discusses horses and history:

Actually the horse was never ‘replaced’ so straightfowardly. In the mythologised ‘Blitzkrieg’ conquests in 1939–40, only a small part of the Wehrmacht was mechanised. In the invasion of Poland, many vehicles actually broke down on the plains, while most of the Wehrmacht moved on foot, and supplies were often transported in horsedrawn wagons. In fact, the Wehrmacht, probably the most lethal land force of the century, was heavily reliant upon horses.

Horses remain vital. Who could forget our own special forces in Afghanistan in 2001–2, on horseback with laptops? That photo above was taken at that time, and is a warning against glib historical assumptions. The horse is not a premodern relic, but in some contexts, a remarkably effective vehicle.

The historical view of the horse as an obsolete tool of direct battlefield offensive is simplistic. Competent medieval commanders knew that a direct cavalry charge on a well-prepared and dense enemy line could be disastrous. The value of cavalry never fully rested on their ability to make direct assaults on enemy lines. They did many other valuable things. In combat, they were a tool of exploitation, thrust into a disorganised or fleeing enemy to hammer home success. Outside it, they were used for reconnaisance and supply. The Wehrmacht relied upon them extensively on the Eastern Front of World War Two, where mechanised units ran into many enviromental problems of their own, like extreme weather, primitive roads and stretched supply lines.

Liddell Hart’s own intellectual record on the issue is murkier than Richards allows. He was a prophet of tanks, but his ambitious vision of armour as a single, self-sufficient instrument was very wrong. As more cautious interwar experts argued, tanks were only effective when used as part of a combined arms system.

Ironically, one of the reasons that the interwar British did not fully embrace armour to Liddell Hart and Richards’ satisfaction was not because of intellectual backwardness or a fetish for cavalry, but because there were simply too many competing demands on scarce resources, including the job of policing its empire. This meant that heavy tanks lost out to other things, such as light armoured vehicles and colonial constabularies. The task of fighting ‘wars amongst the people’ that Richards believes the UK must prioritise now came at the expense of preparing for armoured and mechanised warfare. Britain was under-prepared to fight a continental war partly because of its investment in small wars. I hope we never have to re-live that shortfall…

For every battleship admiral or cavalry general, there is a wild-eyed visionary who sees a revolution in military affairs:

Alfred Nobel thought dynamite was such a radical change from the past that it would render armed conflict impossibly costly and lead to the end of war. Ivan Bloch thought the same for the machine gun…navalists in France thought the development of torpedo-wielding light surface vehicles would sweep the capital ship from the waves in the 1880’s and lead to a whole new era of naval warfare. Prior to World War I, airpower visionaries looked at the new technology of the airplane and reasoned that this changed everything: land warfare would become impossible in the face of bomber fleets attacking attacking cities directly from the air…After the war, US Army and Air Force concluded that the atom bomb would revolutionize warfare and make traditional continental operations impossible; both organisations abandoned their conventional methods and restructured to fight the atomic wars of the future. For the Air Force, this cost lives in subsequent nonnuclear land wars in Korea and Vietnam; for the Army, it resulted in the ignominous abandonment of the atomic-optimised Pentomic Division structure by 1961.

The calibration of destruction

The Economist reports on how smart bombs are changing warfare:

During the first Gulf war, in 1991, American warplanes had to drop an average of six 450kg satellite-guided bombs to destroy a tank or a small building. During the second war, 12 years later, a similar attack required bombs half that size, and fewer of them. Today 100kg bombs would suffice, because guidance systems are so good that individual rooms, as opposed to entire buildings, can be aimed at.
[...]
One defence contractor, Israel Military Industries, makes a 225kg bomb, the MPR-500, that can hammer through several storeys of a building and explode on a chosen floor. This feat means triggering the detonation about two milliseconds after the bomb hits the ceiling above the doomed storey. The bomb can be programmed to do this just seconds before it is dropped. Such precision means it is sold as a replacement for ordnance two or more times its size.

The CBU-105 is the kind of hardware war nerds love:

On April 2nd 2003, during the second Gulf war, a hundred or so Iraqi armoured vehicles approached a far smaller American reconnaissance unit south of Baghdad. Responding to a call for help, a B-52 bomber attacked the first 30 or so vehicles in the column with a single, historic pass. It dropped two new CBU-105 bombs, and the result shocked the soldiers of both sides — and, soon enough, military observers everywhere.

While falling, the CBU-105 bombs popped open, each releasing ten submunitions which were slowed by parachutes. Each of these used mini rockets to spin and eject outward four discs the size of ice-hockey pucks.

The 80 free-falling discs from the pair of bombs then scanned the ground with lasers and heat-detecting infra-red sensors to locate armoured vehicles. Those discs that identified a target exploded dozens of metres up. The blast propelled a tangerine-sized slug of copper down into the target, destroying it with the impact and the accompanying shrapnel. The soldiers in the 70 vehicles farther back in the column surrendered immediately.

The CBU-105, however frightening, may actually point the way toward less violent warfare. Cluster munitions — which release bomblets to cover a wide area — are banned or tightly restricted by an international convention. But the CBU-105 and its cousins, known as sensor-fused weapons, are considered legal because very few discs remain unexploded on the battlefield. Those that fail to detect a target are supposed to self-destruct in the air. The trigger batteries of those that do not will quickly die, so duds are unlikely to kill civilians later.

Crucially, the manufacturer of the CBU-105, Textron Defense Systems, of Wilmington, Massachusetts, is improving sensors to allow the weapon to distinguish the heat signatures of cars, buses and homes from those of military hardware. If there is such a thing as a humanitarian bomb, this might be it.

I'm not sure what role that plays in counter-insurgencency, but it sure is a whiz-bang gizmo. Emphasis on the bang, I suppose.

SHOT Show Technology

The Shooting Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show featured a number of new technologies.

Armatix, for instance, is offering a pistol that only shoots if it's near its matching wristwatch. I can't imagine too many people will pay €7,000 for a .22 pistol that lights up green (or red) though.

More practically, Glock has updated its pistols:

Each one has a fiercely textured grip, a larger magazine release and interchangeable backstraps. There’s something new under the hood too. Each gun has a set of three springs to dampen recoil. When we shot the .40-caliber Glock 22, its kick was surprisingly soft.

This Burns scope sounds like technology I expected to see much earlier:

It has a laser rangefinder that can automatically adjust your sights to compensate for the fall of each bullet over long distances. Just point the crosshairs at the target, push a button on the side of the scope, and a bright red dot will show you exactly where the bullet will fall. We were able to easily hit targets at 400 and 700 meters without any experience at long-range rifle shooting.

The semi-auto civilian version of H&K's 416, the MR556, should be out soon — but by then everyone will already have an assault rifle, right?

Threatening home invaders with apparently deadly force and then shooting them with tiny koosh balls does not strike me as "the most intelligent way to defend your family" — but that's what Lightfield is selling:

Later this year, you will be able to buy rubber bullets for home defense. Lightfield has been selling these projectiles to law enforcement agencies and wildlife officials for years. Each round is filled with a soft projectile that resembles a koosh ball. They look like toys, because they’re made by a Chinese toy factory. The best thing about them is that they aren’t likely to kill someone even if they are fired at point blank range. They’re so soft that they’re almost incapable of penetrating the body.

‘Forced Features’ Drive Up Hybrid Prices

The Union of Concerned Scientists — with all the credibility of the Super Friends — has released a Hybrid Scorecard that faults automakers for selling their fuel-efficient cars with forced features that drive up prices:

These features [DVD players, keyless entry systems, heated power mirrors and other pricey gadgets] are standard equipment, not options, and add an average of $3,000 to the bottom line. That’s on top of the “hybrid premium” that typically adds three to four grand to cover the cost of the electric motor and battery pack.

“Consumers shouldn’t be forced to take features on the hybrids and pay thousands of dollars more because manufacturers don’t want to offer them a choice,” said Don Anair, a senior analyst in the vehicles program at the union. “People are looking for fuel-efficient vehicles, and they shouldn’t be forced to pay thousands more for them.”

The automakers can only make so many hybrids, which use new technologies and exotic raw materials, so they can't make up low margins with volume. If they took out all those "unnecessary" high-margin add-ons, they couldn't, and wouldn't, sell the cars for thousands less.

Leonardo da Vinci's Resume

Leonardo da Vinci's resume, written to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, in 1482, describes what the 30-year-old weapons-engineer could do:

Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.

1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy.
   


2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.
   


3. If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.
   


4. Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.
   


5. And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.
   


6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.
   


7. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.
   


8. In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type.
   


9. Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense.
   


10. In times of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.
    


11. I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.

Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency — to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.

Creating Cities From Scratch

American real-estate developer Stan Gale is building a South Korean city from scratch:

The Korean government had found his firm on the Internet and made an offer everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale would borrow $35 billion from Korea's banks and its biggest steel company, and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of downtown Boston, only taller and denser, on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea. When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.

New Songdo City won't be finished until 2015 at least, but in August, Gale cut the ribbon on the 100-acre "Central Park" modeled, like so much of the city, on Manhattan's. Climbing on all sides will be a mix of low-rises and sleek spires — condos, offices, even South Korea's tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Strolling along the park's canal, we hear cicadas buzzing, saws whining, and pile drivers pounding down to bedrock. I ask whether he's stocked the canal with fish yet. "It's four days old!" he splutters, forgetting he isn't supposed to rest until the seventh.

As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better because there's a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow.

Experimental prototype community of tomorrow? I feel like I've heard that somewhere before.

A green city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It's an "international business district" and an "aerotropolis" — a Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it's supposed to be a "smart city," studded with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its "Smarter Planet" religion.

It's not quite clear what a "smart city" offers, but Cisco seems to think it should mean "telepresence":

No longer content to sell just plumbing, the company is teaming up with Gale, 3M, United Technologies (UTC), and the architects of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) to enter the instant-city business. At a Cisco event near New Songdo last summer, Gale stunned the room by announcing plans to eventually roll out 20 new cities across China and India, using New Songdo as a template. In the spirit of Moore's Law, he says, each will be done faster, better, cheaper, year after year.

Cisco calls this Smart+Connected Communities initiative a potential $30 billion opportunity, a number based not only on the revenues from installation of the basic infrastructure but also on selling the consumer-facing hardware as well as the services layered on top of that hardware. Picture a Cisco-built digital infrastructure wired to Cisco's TelePresence videoconferencing screens mounted in every home and office, with engineers listening, learning, and releasing new Cisco-branded bandwidth-hungry services in exchange for modest monthly fees. You've heard of software as a service? Well, Cisco intends to offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities — water, power, traffic, telephony — into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident's bill.

In case you missed it, Gale announced plans to roll out 20 new cities across China and India, using New Songdo as a template. We'll see how that works out.

DIY Streamliner Motorcycle

Dutch “efficiency enthusiast,” Allert Jacobs has modified a Honda Innova to get 199 miles per gallon:

The Honda Innova is no slouch out of the box, returning 133 mpg from a 125cc engine producing a whopping 9 horsepower. But the Dutch “efficiency enthusiast,” as EcoModder calls him in its write-up, couldn’t leave well enough alone.

He’s put in a lot of miles on recumbent bicycles and knows a thing or two about aerodynamics, so the first thing he did was convert the Inova to a recumbent by moving the seat waaaay down on the bike’s step-through frame and moving the footpegs. That and a simple fairing boosted the bike’s top speed from 56 mph to 69 mph. Together with taller gearing, Jacobs raised his fuel economy to 156 mpg.

But why stop there? Jacobs spent several months designing and building the full fairing, which splits in two vertically just behind the windshield so he can get in. While it looks like you’d blow right over with a sneeze, Jacobs claims the bike is stable even in a 40-mph crosswind.

The bike’s record is 214 mpg, and Jacobs says it averages 199. But he’s not done yet. He’s shooting for 235 mpg — which for those using the metric system is 1 liter per 100 kilometers.

If you travel 10,000 miles per year, going from 133 mpg to 235 mpg saves you 33 gallons of gas, or about $83, per year.

Balloon Wars

In the 1950s, early in the Cold War, the US enlisted balloons — because they had attributes that airplanes couldn’t match:

They could stay aloft for a long time (days or even weeks), they could reach altitudes where airplanes couldn’t fly (100,000 feet), and they could go places that were too dangerous for manned aircraft (flying over the Soviet Union).

America used to think big:

Project MOGUL was an Air Force balloon program to detect Soviet nuclear tests by listening to sound waves traveling through the upper atmosphere. During World War II, scientists had discovered the existence of an ocean layer that conducted underwater sound for thousands of miles. They thought that a similar sound channel might exist in the upper atmosphere. If they could put microphones in the upper atmosphere, the U.S. thought they might be able to hear Soviet nuclear tests and even detect ballistic missiles launches heading toward their targets. Designed to test this theory, Project Mogul balloons carried microphones up to the sound channel to “listen” and radio transmitters to send the sound to the ground. At first, project MOGUL flights involved trains of small weather balloons up to 600 feet in length. Later MOGUL flights used the large polyethylene balloons developed for the Navy’s SKYHOOK.

SKYHOOK balloons, funded by the Office of Naval Research, were designed to stay at a fixed altitude (~100,000 feet) and carry a payload of thousands of pounds. They were huge, 400 feet high, made possible because the then new material called polyethylene. These “flying sandwich bags” were built by a company that had experience using this material in packaging – General Mills (the same company that makes Cheerios.)

In 1957 the Air Force started Project ASHCAN (using SKYHOOK class balloons at 100,0000 feet) to take high altitude air samples and search for nuclear particles and trace gases in fallout from tests in the Soviet Union. For the first time, U.S. intelligence could estimate the amount of plutonium being produced by Soviet weapons production reactors. These balloons were secretly launched from Brazil and the Panama Canal Zone, and from air force bases in the U.S. Over time, U.S. intelligence also used reconnaissance planes like the U-2, RB-57’s, and C-130 aircraft to collect air samples.

In 1950 the Air Force thought that high-altitude balloons might be used to perform photo and ELINT spyflights over the Soviet Union. They placed aerial reconnaissance cameras on the balloons and ran a series of test programs (code names of GOPHER, MOBY DICK, GRANDSON and GRAYBACK) launching 640 balloons from New Mexico, Montana, the West Coast, Missouri and Georgia. With the tests completed, the program name changed to GENETRIX and was given the designation of Weapons System 119L.

In late 1955 President Eisenhower gave the ok to launch the GENETRIX balloons over the Soviet Union. Hundreds of these balloons took off from secret sites in Norway, Scotland, West Germany, and Turkey carrying a gondola with two reconnaissance cameras.

The United States launched 516 of the GENETRIX balloons but only 44 or so made it out of the Soviet Union. The rest landed on Soviet farms dumping 600-pound cameras in hayfields. We did get coverage of about 8 percent of the Soviet Union, but politically it created a lot of tension as cameras were popping up on Khrushchev’s desk. “Oh, another balloon Mr. Premier.” The Soviets put on a public exhibition of the equipment.

These high-tech balloons didn't just spook the Soviets:

Before sunrise and after sunset, while the Earth below was dark, high altitude balloons were still lit by sunlight, and their plastic skin glowed and appeared to change color with the change in sun angle. Some of the Project Mogul balloon flights were launched from Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico in 1947, and a few crashed nearby – one near a town called Roswell. The start of the Mogul balloon flights coincided with the first reports of UFO’s. To someone on the ground, these balloons may have looked like UFOs.

Spirit

The latest xkcd strip, on the Mars rover Spirit, is bittersweet. I find it far too easy to identify with a little, well-intentioned robot.

Complexity transforms the simple into the impossible

Complexity transforms the simple into the impossible, Scott Adams (Dilbert) explains:

I keep getting unexplained bankcard services fees on my business checking account, somehow related to selling some of my original art a few years ago. I contacted my bank to clear it up. My bank could find no record that I ever had a merchant account with them. Nor could they find any record that I have a current checking account with them. They did acknowledge billing me for the services they say I don't have.

Allow me to say that again: My bank can't find any record that I have a checking account with them, searching either by my name or my account number. As I write this, it still isn't cleared up.

In the end, it will turn out to be something simple. I probably called the Bankcard Merchant Services department instead of the Merchant Services Bankcard department, and they can only see certain types of accounts, or some such thing. I don't think my money actually disappeared. The real problem is that the world has become so complex that simple tasks are nearly impossible.

I recently got a video switching device, professionally installed, that lets multiple televisions in the house display what is playing on, for example, a DVD player in another room. We just built our home, so we had the luxury of wiring it for that sort of function. It's a great idea, except that when I turn on the TV in one room it sometimes randomly turns on a TV in another. A team of very smart and experienced technicians have been trying to solve that bug for a week. In the end, I'll just live with it, or stop watching television, whichever is easier. Complexity transforms the simple into the impossible.

I went to upgrade a family member's cell phone the other day. I knew exactly what I wanted. The store even had it in stock. Still, the transaction took 90 minutes. It had something to do with using the upgrade of one family member for the phone of another, which ended up killing the wrong phone, hosing e-mail on my BlackBerry, and a host of other issue before we got it all working. Complexity made the simple nearly impossible.

Lately I've been trying to get all of my insurance issues sorted out. I need about seven different types of policies for various car risks, house risks, business risks, and personal risks. So I ask my insurance guy a question, and he passes the question to the carrier, and by the time I get the answer, I forgot what I asked. Worse yet, I have three more questions. Insurance documents keep piling up on my desk. Some want payment, some want inventories, some want data, some need review, and maybe signatures. I don't even know where to start. The complexity has overwhelmed me. So I just stare at the pile and hope a meteor doesn't strike the house.

Giant, Sophisticated, Disposable

Growing up, I had always assumed that spy satellites were chock-full of sophisticated electronics — including, of course, television cameras. This probably was true by the time I was aware of spy satellites, but the first spy satellites carried Kodak film, which they had to return to earth from orbit. They were giant, sophisticated, disposable cameras, produced by something called the Corona project:

When the Corona satellites were launched the CIA used a “cover” story. They called the Corona satellites the “Discoverer” program and claimed it was an experimental program to develop and test satellite subsystems and explore environmental conditions in space. The film recovery capsule was described as a “biomedical capsule” for the recovery of biological specimens sent into space as an early test of how humans would react to manned spaceflight.

The Corona project was run like a startup — a small team, minimum bureaucracy, focussed on a goal and tightly integrated with customer needs. Starting in February 1959, only 12 months after the program began the Air Force launched the first Corona reconnaissance satellite from the military’s secret spaceport on the California coast at Vandenberg Air Force Base. But the first 13 missions were failures. Yet the program was deemed so important to national security the CIA and the Air Force persevered. And when the first images were received they transformed technical intelligence forever. Objects as small as 6 feet (some claim 3 feet) could be seen from space over millions of miles of a formally closed country.
[...]
While Corona had a number of technological breakthroughs, including the first photoreconnaissance satellite, the first recovery of an object from space, etc. it was Corona imagery in 1961 that told the intelligence community and the new Kennedy administration that the “missile gap” (the supposed Soviet lead in ICBMs) was illusory. By fall of 1961 Soviet Union had a total of six deployed ICBMs — we had ten times as many. In truth, it was the U.S. that had the lead in missiles.

Corona was just the beginning. Overhead reconnaissance would become an integral part of the U.S. intelligence community. Hidden in plain sight, Lockheed and the U.S. intelligence community were just getting started in Silicon Valley.

Science project prompts school evacuation

A tech magnet school, holding a science fair, was evacuated, because an 11-year-old student showed up with his project, an empty bottle with wires and other electrical components attached:

Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.

The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8 and emphasizes technology skills, was initially put on lockdown while authorities responded.

Luque said the project was made of an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle with some wires and other electrical components attached. There was no substance inside.

When police and the Metro Arson Strike Team responded, they also found electrical components in the student's backpack, Luque said. After talking to the student, it was decided about 1 p.m. to evacuate the school as a precaution while the item was examined. Students were escorted to a nearby playing field, and parents were called and told they could come pick up their children.

A MAST robot took pictures of the device and X-rays were evaluated. About 3 p.m., the device was determined to be harmless, Luque said.

Luque said the project was intended to be a type of motion-detector device.

Both the student and his parents were "very cooperative" with authorities, Luque said. He said fire officials also went to the student's home and checked the garage to make sure items there were neither harmful nor explosive.

"There was nothing hazardous at the house," Luque said.

The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said.

The student violated school policies by bringing a home-made motion-detector to school as part of the science fair?

Nikola Tesla Is Back in Tech Fashion

Nikola Tesla is back in tech fashion, the Wall Street Journal reports:

When California engineers wanted to brand their new $100,000 electric sports car, one name stood out: Tesla. When circuit designers at microchip producer Nvidia Corp. in 2007 launched a new line of advanced processors, they called them Tesla. And when videogame writers at Capcom Entertainment in Silicon Valley needed a character who could understand alien spaceships for their new Dark Void saga, they found him in Nikola Tesla.

Kudos to Daniel Michaels for not mentioning the hair band as an early example of Teslamania:

An early hint was "Tesla Girls," a 1984 single from the British technopop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Performance artist Laurie Anderson has said she was fascinated by Tesla. David Bowie played a fictionalized version of him in the 2006 film "The Prestige," alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described Tesla in a recent documentary film as "more of an artist than a scientist in some strange way."

By the way, that image of Tesla is of David Bowie playing Tesla.

The beauty of Tesla is that he wrote little down, and most of what he did write down was destroyed, so you can start from some of his boasts and assume he understood just about everything well before its time:

His papers suggest he stumbled upon — but didn't pursue — lasers and X-rays, years before their recognized discoveries. He proposed transmitting electricity through the upper atmosphere. He sketched out robots and a death ray he hoped would end all wars.
[...]
Tesla's more outlandish pronouncements stoked that mythology. He said he could use electricity to cause earthquakes and control weather. He claimed to have detected signals from Mars while he was in Colorado.

Unlike Edison, who died in 1931 with 1,093 patents to his name, Tesla left few completed blueprints. The shortcoming undercut his legacy but added to the air of mystery surrounding him.

Toyota Executive Sees Limits to Electric Cars

Koei Saga, Toyota's managing officer of advanced technology and battery development, sees — and admits — limits to electric cars:

He said (through a translator) that limited range means that E.V.’s work best as “very small commuter-type vehicles” for use in major metropolitan areas (he used Europe and Japan as examples). Asked if longer-range E.V.’s were possible with current technology, he said that could happen only “if we forget about battery life and if we forget about the cost incurred for replacement of those batteries.”

Cost remains an issue, Mr. Saga said. In 10 years, he said, Toyota would like to reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries by more than 50 percent. But he pointed out that the price of batteries for cellphones and computers has fallen much faster.

Battery cars capable of extended highway travel are relatively far in the future, Mr. Saga said. He envisioned such electric cars working best if they could obtain electricity not from batteries, but from an interaction with the highway itself. Just such a system has been tested by the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology of Korea, which uses induction strips and inverters embedded in the road to recharge batteries when cars drive over them.

Such induction strips and inverters alleviate the need for expensive and heavy batteries:

In May, scientists at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology demonstrated how induction strips and inverters embedded in a road can carry a current that recharges specially designed electric vehicles on the fly. The cars in such a system — aimed primarily at urban areas — would be equipped with compact batteries that have a 50-mile range.

The government of South Korea is investing heavily in the project, which was displayed at last month’s C-40 summit in Seoul, a city of 10 million with serious traffic problems.

The Israeli project — a venture of the research and development firm Innowattech, which is linked to the Israel Institute of Technology, takes a slightly different tack. Piezoelectric ceramic tiles are embedded into the asphalt of a road, or the tracks of a rail line, and linked to modules that draw the electricity generated from the pressure exerted by passing vehicles.

Piezoelectric materials are commonly found in micro-electronics, like watches and CD-ROMs, which rely on very small quantities of power.

Looking to adopt a nanotechnology to a macro scale, Innowattech installed its systems under a 50-yard stretch of the outside lanes on a commercial highway that handles about 600 trucks each hour.

The firm’s director of business development, Yael Greenberg, said the system, which has no moving parts, generated the equivalent of 250 kWh per kilometer lane. The capacity, she added, “really depends on the traffic.”

Another option is to go with ultracapacitors, which can't hold much energy but can recharge almost instantly — at bus stops, for instance.

Dam the Bering Strait

You can control the climate of the entire Arctic if you just build a dam across the Bering Strait:

Back in the cold, icy 1950s and 1960s, Soviet climatologists were told to devise a plan for melting the Arctic ice cap. They came up with several ideas, including damming the Bering Strait and pumping cold Arctic water out into the Pacific, drawing warm Atlantic water into the Arctic.

But now in the 21st century, climatologists are oriented toward preserving the Arctic ice cap and the Greenland ice sheets. Here is a proposal involving the damming of the Bering Strait, in order to save the Arctic ice cap (see PDF report at bottom). (via Global Warming)

A recent modeling study at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) supports the idea that the Bering Strait has been at the center of significant climate changes — most recently at the end of the last glaciation.

The computer simulations showed that North America and Eurasia warmed significantly during the times when the Bering Strait was open, with the tropical and subtropical Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as Antarctica, warming slightly.

Remember that at least twice during the most recent glaciation, sea levels were low enough to create a land bridge across the Bering Strait. This allowed the migration of Siberian tribesmen (and perhaps other groups) across the strait from Asia into North America. Here is a scientific examination of the effect of the Bering Strait — open vs. closed — on the Arctic climate.

This reminds me of Philip K. Dick's alternative history classic, The Man in the High Castle, in which the victorious Nazis dam and drain the Mediterranean, using atomic power. It's the kind of thing that seemed perfectly within our grasp during the Atoms for Peace era — certainly easier than landing a man on the moon and returning him safely.

Battery Costs Aren't Dropping Fast Enough

BCG has released a study concluding that the long-term cost target for electric-car batteries — $250 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) — is unlikely to be achieved in the next decade without a breakthrough:

Most electric cars in the new decade will use lithium-ion batteries, which are lighter and more powerful than the nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries used today in hybrids like the Toyota Prius. Citing the current cost of similar lithium-ion batteries used in consumer electronics (about $250 to $400 per kWh), many original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs) hope that the cost of an automotive lithium-ion battery pack will fall from its current price of between $1,000 and $1,200 per kWh to between $250 and $500 per kWh at scaled production. BCG, however, points out that consumer batteries are simpler than car batteries and must meet significantly less demanding requirements, especially regarding safety and life span. So actual battery costs will likely be higher than what carmakers predict.

Weight is also an issue. Randall Parker notes that the 400+ lb battery in the Chevy Volt provides 40 miles of range on electric power. That doesn't scale well:

To go 200 miles in electric power would require 2000 lb just for the battery. Forget about the typical car's 400+ mile range until battery energy density goes up by some multiple.

If current prices are $1,000 to $1,200 per kWh, what does that mean?

To put that in perspective a compact or midsize car might use a quarter of a kWh per mile. So at current prices a 100 mile range will require 25 kWh or at least $25,000. The cost is worse than that since batteries are not typically allowed to run all the way down.

And, again, that 100-mile ranges doesn't simply cost $25,000; it also mean lugging 1,000 pounds of batteries along for the ride. That doesn't help mileage.

Batteries are extremely expensive, not just in dollars per kWh, but also in pounds per kWh, even if the electricity they store is fairly inexpensive per kWh. Gasoline stores tremendous energy for its weight.

Thus, if you're going to include both a gasoline generator and batteries, as in a Chevy Volt, you should only carry enough electricity in battery form to get you to work (and maybe back, if you can't charge there). Any storage you don't need on a more-or-less daily basis is a waste of money and a waste of energy, because those extra batteries don't carry themselves.

Uranium Is So Last Century

Uranium is so last century, Richard Martin quips. Thorium is the fuel of the future — if we go by some research published in 1958:

Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.
[...]
After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.

Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.

By the way, Thorium is in fact named after the Norse god of thunder.

Builders Zero In on New Goal of Energy-Neutral Housing

Builders are zero-ing in on net-zero housing — whether or not it makes economic sense:

In Greenfield, Mass., where Rural Development is putting up duplexes, the premium for a net-zero home is as much as 15%. For example, it has one three-bedroom home on the market for $240,000, compared with about $203,000 for a comparable home without net-zero features, says Anne Perkins, a Rural Development director. Most of that extra cost is for solar systems, she says.

Eight of Rural Development's net-zero homes built so far have been purchased. One selling point: energy bills that can run more than $2,700 a year are cut to about $700, and total energy savings allow buyers to recoup the purchase premium in roughly 12 years after tax incentives and rebates are included.

A 12-year pay-back period after tax incentives and rebates are included is not impressive at all. The problem is that solar systems generally aren't cost-competitive, but they're necessary to declare a home net-zero, rather than simply energy-efficient.

Programmer Conned CIA, Pentagon Into Buying Bogus Anti-Terror Code

Double-crossing the CIA sounds like risky business, but a programmer did just that. Dennis Montgomery conned both the CIA and the Pentagon into buying bogus anti-terror code:

In December 2003, DHS secretary Tom Ridge announced a terror alert based on intelligence from “credible sources” about imminent attacks that “could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11.” Dozens of French, British and Mexican commercial “flights of interest” were canceled, and news agencies were reporting that the threats extended to “power plants, dams and even oil facilities in Alaska.”

Playboy says the source of the intelligence was never revealed publicly. But the evidence points to Dennis Montgomery, who had convinced the government that Al Jazeera — the Qatari-owned TV network — was unwittingly transmitting attack orders to Al Qaeda sleeper cells concealed in video it broadcast.

Montgomery claimed he decoded the orders using a program developed by his four-year-old Las Vegas firm, eTreppid Technologies. The software found hidden bar codes in Al Jazeera videos that contained latitudes, longitudes, flight numbers and dates for planes being targeted for attacks, he reportedly claimed. He fed the information to a CIA employee at the agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology, who passed it up to CIA Director George Tenet, who in turn passed it to the White House.

“[Tom] Ridge’s announcement, the canceled flights and the holiday disruptions were all the results of Montgomery’s mysterious doings,” the Playboy article asserts.

Over the next few years Montgomery’s intelligence wound its way through the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, the Senate Intelligence Committee and even Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.

But aside from Tenet and a few others, Playboy reports, no one actually knew the information was supposedly gleaned from messages hidden in video broadcasts.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the government was searching feverishly for any information or tools that would help deter additional attacks, and was willing to throw millions of dollars at any prospector who asserted he had a solution. It was this environment that helped Montgomery convince officials at DHS and elsewhere that he was able to detect hidden messages in video that no one else was able to see.

When one CIA officer finally learned the source of the information his agency was being fed, he says he was livid.

“I was told to shut up,” he told Playboy. “I was saying, ‘This is crazy. This is embarrassing.’. . . I said, ‘Give us the algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.’ They wouldn’t even do that. And I was screaming, ‘You gave these people fucking money?’”

The Sky’s the Limit for China’s DIY Aviators

The sky’s the limit for China’s DIY aviators, Michele Travierso says:

These garage builders and innovators are, like their products, often called shanzhai. Literally translated, it means “mountain strongholds,” but it has come to mean nonprofessional or clandestine manufacturers turning out products from the basic to the highly sophisticated. These shanzhai often take familiar products, concepts and marketing memes and remake them with peculiar but innovative twists.

Xu Bin, a 31-year-old farmer from Zhejiang province, became an internet sensation and the face of the shanzhai zeitgeist when a video of him flying his autogyro went viral:

Bin managed to design and build the contraption, which uses a rotor for lift and a propeller for thrust, then teach himself how to fly it after checking the internet for guidance. He’s built four flying machines, including a two-seater. It’s strictly a low-budget affair, as Bin finds using new engines beneath his dignity. Using old motorcycle engines, he says, “keeps me on my toes. It prompts me to be a better designer.”

Bin says the craft is inherently safe because it can safely glide to the ground in the event of an engine malfunction. Many wannabe pilots have paid Bin a visit in the three years since his first flight, and he is only too happy to offer advice and guidance gleaned from hundreds of flights.

The authorities, he says, “leave me mostly alone, as I fly low and locally.”

Modern China is more like the America of 100 years ago than modern America is.

How Success Killed Duke Nukem

Clive Thompson explains how success killed Duke Nukem:

To videogame fans, that logo is instantly recognizable. It’s the insignia of Duke Nukem 3D, a computer game that revolutionized shoot-’em-up virtual violence in 1996. Featuring a swaggering, steroidal, wisecracking hero, Duke Nukem 3D became one of the top-selling videogames ever, making its creators very wealthy and leaving fans absolutely delirious for a sequel. The team quickly began work on that sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, and it became one of the most hotly anticipated games of all time.

It was never completed. Screenshots and video snippets would leak out every few years, each time whipping fans into a lather — and each time, the game would recede from view. Normally, videogames take two to four years to build; five years is considered worryingly long. But the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie — Toy Story — and Xbox did not yet exist.

On May 6, 2009, everything ended. Drained of funds after so many years of work, the game’s developer, 3D Realms, told its employees to collect their stuff and put it in boxes. The next week, the company was sued for millions by its publisher for failing to finish the sequel.

Sometimes you need to learn to let go — which is hard to do when you've learned to set ludicrously high expectations, and you have the money to burn:

When Duke Nukem 3D came out, Broussard’s Duke Nukem engine — called Build — produced the best-looking game around. Barely a year later, though, it looked antiquated. Broussard’s key rival in the Dallas gaming scene, id Software, had announced its Quake II engine, which produced graphics that made Build seem blocky and crude. Broussard decided to license the Quake II engine, figuring it would save him precious time; programming an engine from scratch can take years. Though 3D Realms never confirmed how much it paid for the license — Miller referred to it as “a truckload of money” on a gaming news site — the price was said to be as high as $500,000. When the engine was released in December 1997, Broussard’s team quickly began creating game levels, monsters, and weapons around it.

By May 1998, the team had created enough material to show off at E3, the annual videogame industry convention. Duke Nukem Forever was set in Vegas; in the game’s plot, Duke operates a strip club and then has to fight off invading aliens. Broussard showed a trailer featuring a dozen different scenes, including Duke fighting on the back of a moving truck, jet airplanes crashing, and furious firefights with aliens. Critics were awed: “It sets a new benchmark for making a 3-D game more like a Hollywood movie,” Newsday proclaimed. Broussard was clearly obsessed with making his product as aesthetically appealing as possible. When he brought a few journalists over to a computer to show off bits of the game, he pointed out the way you could see individual wrinkles on characters’ faces and mused over how to make his campfire more realistic. (”As soon as we mix in some white smoke and some black smoke, I think we’ll be there,” he said.)

Behind the scenes, though, Broussard was already unhappy with the results and was craving better technology. A few months after the Quake II engine was released, another competitor, Epic MegaGames, unveiled a rival engine called Unreal. Its graphics were more realistic still, and Unreal was better suited to crafting wide-open spaces. 3D Realms was struggling mightily to get Quake II to render the open desert around Las Vegas. One evening just after E3, while the team sat together, a programmer threw out a bombshell: Maybe they should switch to Unreal? “The room got quiet for a moment,” Broussard recalled. Switching engines again seemed insane — it would cost another massive wad of money and require them to scrap much of the work they’d done.

But Broussard decided to make the change. Only weeks after he showed off Duke Nukem Forever, he stunned the gaming industry by announcing the shift to the Unreal engine. “It was effectively a reboot of the project in many respects,” Chris Hargrove, then one of the game’s programmers, told me (though he agreed with the decision). Broussard soon began pushing for even more and cooler game-building tools: He ripped out the ceiling of a room at the 3D Realms office to assemble a motion-capture lab, which would help his team in rendering “complex motions like strippers,” he noted on the 3D Realms Web site.

Broussard simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of Duke Nukem Forever coming out with anything other than the latest and greatest technology and awe-inspiring gameplay. He didn’t just want it to be good. It had to surpass every other game that had ever existed, the same way the original Duke Nukem 3D had.

But because the technology kept getting better, Broussard was on a treadmill. He’d see a new game with a flashy graphics technique and demand the effect be incorporated into Duke Nukem Forever. “One day George started pushing for snow levels,” recalls a developer who worked on Duke Nukem Forever for several years starting in 2000. Why? “He had seen The Thing” — a new game based on the horror movie of the same name, set in the snowbound Antarctic — “and he wanted it.” The staff developed a running joke: If a new title comes out, don’t let George see it. When the influential shoot-’em-up Half-Life debuted in 1998, it opened with a famously interactive narrative sequence in which the player begins his workday in a laboratory, overhearing a coworker’s conversation that slowly sets a mood of dread. The day after Broussard played it, an employee told me, the cofounder walked into the office saying, “Oh my God, we have to have that in Duke Nukem Forever.”

Broussard and Miller had spent $20 million of their own money on Duke Nukem Forever before they went hat in hand to Take-Two, their game publisher, to ask for $6 million to help finish the game. They didn't get it.

Insurgents Have Not Hacked U.S. Drones

Insurgents have not hacked U.S. drones, despite the Wall Street Journal headline, but they have intercepted unprotected video feeds using cheap off-the-shelf software called SkyGrabber:

U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds.

In the summer 2009 incident, the military found "days and days and hours and hours of proof" that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups, the person said. "It is part of their kit now."

So, why are the drones transmitting unencrypted video?

The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead, many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the U.S., Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes. Additional concerns remain about the vulnerability of the communications signals to electronic jamming, though there's no evidence that has occurred, said people familiar with reports on the matter.

Bacteria engineered to turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel

Researchers from UCLA have engineered bacteria to turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel:

Using the cyanobacterium Synechoccus elongatus, researchers first genetically increased the quantity of the carbon dioxide-fixing enzyme RuBisCO. Then they spliced genes from other microorganisms to engineer a strain that intakes carbon dioxide and sunlight and produces isobutyraldehyde gas. The low boiling point and high vapor pressure of the gas allows it to easily be stripped from the system.

The engineered bacteria can produce isobutanol directly, but researchers say it is currently easier to use an existing and relatively inexpensive chemical catalysis process to convert isobutyraldehyde gas to isobutanol, as well as other useful petroleum-based products.

Great Demos of All Time

David Foster shares some of the Great Demos of All Time:

1. In the early 1850s, elevators had been invented and were in limited use, but were generally–with good reason–considered unsafe. At the Crystal Palace exposition of 1854, Elisha Otis demonstrated his elevator safety device. He had himself hauled up to a considerable height in an open cage, and then directed his assistant to cut the hoisting rope. The safety mechanism, as designed, clamped its jaws to the elevator’s guide tracks and kept it from falling.


2. In the 1890s, most ships were powered by reciprocating steam engines (with commercial sail still holding a pretty respectable share). Charles Parsons, who had invented the steam turbine in 1884, set up the Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company in 1893, with the objective of applying the invention to the propulsion of ships. He built a nifty little ship called the Turbinia, and, after initial trials, brought it unannounced to the Naval Review for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (1893). Turbinia, which had an impressive top speed of 34 knots, raced between the lines of large ships, easily evading a Navy picket boat that had been sent to stop it, and indeed almost swamping the Navy vessel with its wake.


3. In June 1914, Lawrence Sperry demonstrated his new airplane autopilot to the crowd assembled at the Airplane Safety Competition on the banks of the Seine. Flying with Sperry was his French mechanic, Emil Cachin. The Curtiss C-2 flew down the river, and directly in front of the judge’s stand. Sperry engaged his stabilizer device and passed in review with both his arms held high. The aircraft continued on a straight and steady course, with the pilot obviously not handling the controls. During the second pass, Cachin climbed out on the starboard wing and moved about 7 feet away from the fuselage, with Sperry’s hands still off the controls. As Cachin moved out on the wing, the aircraft momentarily banked due to the shift of weight, but the gyrostabilizer quickly corrected the attitudinal change, after which the Curtiss continued smoothly down the river. On the third pass, Cachin stood on one wing and Sperry on the other, with the pilot’s seat empty.
   
   The crowd and the competition judge were blown away by Sperry’s accomplishment, and the inventor was awarded the 50,000 franc prize. (The New York Times was less impressed, commenting snidely that “Of stability commonly understood, no heavier than air flight vehicles will ever have even as much as that dreadfully fragile monster, the dirigible.”)


4. In 1952, the Remington Rand corporation proposed to CBS News that its Univac computer be used to predict the results on election night. CBS execs were skeptical about the idea, but went along with it.
   
   Most commentators were offering predictions ranging from a Democratic landslide to a tight race with Stevenson slightly ahead of Eisenhower. But at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time, Univac predicted that Eisenhower would pile up 438 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 93, with the odds of an Eisenhower win at 100-1.
   
   The CBS executive in charge did not believe these numbers, and adjustments to the assumptions were made. At 9:00 PM, the network announced that the machine was predicting 8-7 odds for an Eisenhower win.
   
   One of the Remington Rand staff members then discovered that he’d mistakenly added a zero to the Stevenson totals from New York State. With this error corrected (and I believe with the revised assumptions required by CBS still in place, though this isn’t clear from the sources), Univac gave the same prediction as before: 438 to 93 with odds of an Eisenhower win at 100:1.
   
   The final vote was 442 to 89. Late at night, CBS announcer Charles Collingwood made an embarrassing confession to his audience: Univac had made an accurate prediction hours before, but CBS hadn’t aired it.

Project Cybersyn

In the early 1970s, Chile's Socialist government went to English eccentric Stafford Beer, looking for an alternative to Russian-style central planning, and he promised them a cybernetic synthesis, Project Cybersyn, made from old telex machines, an IBM 360 mainframe, and some Star Trek-inspired sets. Alex Tabarrok explains:

The military regime that overthrew Allende dropped the project and probably for this reason when the project is periodically rediscovered it is often written about in a romantic tone as a revolutionary "socialist internet," decades ahead of its time that was "destroyed" by the military because it was "too egalitarian" or because they didn't understand it.

Although some sources at the time said the Chilean economy was "run by computer," the project was in reality a bit of a joke, albeit a rather expensive one, and about the only thing about it that worked were the ordinary Western Union telex machines spread around the country. The two computers supposedly used to run the Chilean economy were IBM 360s (or machines on that order). These machines were no doubt very impressive to politicians and visionaries eager to use their technological might to control an economy. Today, our perspective will perhaps be somewhat different when we realize that these behemoths were far less powerful than an iPhone. Run an economy with an iPhone? Sorry, there is no app for that.

Indeed, you don't have to read far between the lines of Andy "socialist internet" Beckett's account to get a flavor of what was really going on:

Beer's original band of disciples had been diluted by other, less idealistic scientists. There was constant friction between the two groups. Meanwhile, Beer himself started to focus on other schemes: using painters and folk singers to publicise the principles of high-tech socialism; testing his son's electrical public-opinion meters, which never actually saw service; and even organising anchovy-fishing expeditions to earn the government some desperately needed foreign currency.

(Note the classic, 'the visionary failed because others lacked idealism' story. Meanwhile the visionary is off on an anchovy-fishing expedition.)

Jeremiah Axelrod and Greg Borenstein put together a 25-minute presentation emphasizing the sci-fi theatricality of the whole endeavor:

The control room is like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in another respect — both are stage sets. Nothing about the room is real, even the computer displays on the wall are simply hand drawn slides projected from the other side with Kodak carousels.

Ironically, when rumors of the project began to circulate, the illusion of omniscience and omnipotence that Beer had created, the same illusion that so appealed to Allende and that had funded Beer's visions and experiments, this illusion caused fear that an all-knowing big brother was on the way — and such fear may even have encouraged the coup.

After the coup, rather than destroying the project because of its "egalitarian" nature, the military regime was more likely to have been disillusioned and disappointed to discover project Cybersyn's impotence.

Chevrolet Volt Sure Drives Sweet

Chuck Squatriglia of Wired says that the Chevrolet Volt sure drives sweet — it's attractive, practical and fun to drive:

A “sport mode” button on the dash boosts output from 90 kilowatts (120 horsepower) to 111 kilowatts (148). Push it and you’ll lose some efficiency, but the car accelerates with more authority. Our feel behind the wheel is the car’s claimed zero-to-60 time of around 8 second is in the ballpark.

The Volt is about the same size as the Toyota Prius and weighs a little more than the Chevrolet Cruze. The car’s final weight hasn’t been determined because GM hasn’t decided how big a gas tank to give it and there are other details to be worked out, but figure it’ll come in around 3,500 pounds.

It handles like any other small sedan. GM describes it as sporty. We’d describe it as nearly nimble. The ride is comfortable but not too soft, the steering is responsive, and the chassis is tight. The Volt isn’t a sports car, but it is reasonably fun to drive.

The Volt runs exclusively on electricity:

There’s also a 1.4-liter engine under the hood, but it isn’t connected to the wheels. Its only job is driving a 53-kilowatt generator that keeps the juice flowing when the battery runs down.

Battery performance is the obvious concern, both short-term and long-term:

Plug the cord into a conventional 110-volt, 12-amp socket and you’ll charge the Volt’s battery in 6 or 8 hours. Stick it into a 220-volt, 15-amp outlet like your dryer uses and Posawatz said you can do it in less than 3.

Although the Volt has a 16-kilowatt-hour battery, it only uses half that. GM overbuilt the pack to ensure it’s good for at least 10 years or 150,000 miles. The General is backing it with a warranty that long.

“We’re very confident that we have a battery pack that delivers the range, durability and performance consumers have a right to expect,” said Bob Lutz, GM vice chairman and the guy cracking the whip to get the Volt built. If the battery shoots craps before the car does, Lutz said replacing it shouldn’t cost more than an engine overhaul.

“I don’t see why it would cost any more than that,” he said.

That’s optimistic at this point. Automakers, least of all GM, don’t discuss how much lithium-ion batteries cost. That’s one reason Nissan says it will lease the pack in the Leaf EV. Most experts say they run $500 to $1,000 per kilowatt-hour. GM — which is building its own batteries at a factory in Detroit — is confident costs will come down as hybrids, plug-in hybrids and EVs become more common.

So the Volt is carrying an extra 8 kW-hours of battery storage, at $500 to $1,000 per kW-hour? That can't help the price tag — or the weight of the car:

There’s only room for four people, because the car’s 400-pound T-shaped battery runs down the middle and under the back seats. That keeps the mass centralized, the center of gravity low and the pack safe.

“We protect the battery as well as the second-row passengers,” Posawatz said.

No word yet on the price, but GM is widely believed to be trying to keep the cost below $40,000. Add in the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs and figure on a sticker price around $32,500.

Electric cars don't need a "real" transmission with a gearbox:

The gearshift on the center console is essentially a big switch. There’s no gearbox, just a reduction gear. “Shifting” from drive to low almost triples the amount of regenerative braking when easing up on the accelerator. Take your foot off the pedal, and the car slows more quickly and returns more energy to the battery.

Embezzle a bit more of your building’s heat

New Yorker Marco Arment explains how to embezzle a bit more of your building’s heat:

Use a box fan to convert your passive radiator — in effect, a giant heatsink — into an active heatsink-with-fan combo.

Are Those My Initials?

Someone stole Steve Blank's ideas on two occasions:

Once it almost mattered. This is about the time it didn’t.
[...]
The first time was at Rocket Science Games. I was positioning the company as the second coming of the video games businesses at the intersection of “Hollywood Meets Silicon Valley.” This was a great positioning, it helped us raise lots of money and get tons of press. I had a wonderful set of slides that illustrated (to me) this inevitable trend. At the end of the presentation was one “uber” chart I had labored over for months which laid out all the converging trends in the industry. I used it in all presentations and gave it at industry conferences.

Are those my initials on the slide?

Fast forward nine months. My co-founder, head of business development and I were in Japan raising money. We were sitting in the conference room of a large well-respected media firm when their CEO breezed in to give us an overview of who they were and how forward thinking their firm was. I thought highly of this firm and was in awe of their content and films so I was a bit blown away when the CEO got to the finale of their presentation. It was, as he explained, the sum of their strategy and strategic thinking for online media. And the slide was…

My slide.

Not a summary of my slide, or a Japanese copy of my slide, but my actual slide. I stood up from my seat, and walked around the boardroom table to get closer to the screen just to be sure. The CEO was beaming at my interest in the details of the slide. Examining the slide, I pointed to the bottom right and said to our translator, “Tell him my initials are still on the bottom.” The interpreter’s face went white, and after a lot of “I can’t tell him that,” he did.

We weren’t sure if we should feel insulted or complimented, but after a few deep breaths (and a lot of kicking under the table by my head of business development) my smart VP of business development used it as an opportunity to point out how honored we were that there was an obvious strategic alignment between the two companies. (I sat there smiling tightly.) Given the potential for a cross-cultural meltdown all parties behaved politely. The CEO turned out to be a very nice guy and rented a big bus to take his staff and all of us sightseeing, dinner and drinking around Tokyo. (I’m sure when he got back to the office he was handing out a personalized knife to the executive on his staff who had borrowed my slide.)

In the end, the CEO couldn’t get his board to give us the cash in exchange for the Japanese distribution rights and some equity. We ended up raising money from Sega.

I heard later that the slide disappeared from his presentation.

Wingsuits for Airbone Assault

SPELCO, the Special Parachute and Logistics Consortium, produces a variety of parachute systems, helmets, oxygen supplies and other gear and services, but their most eye-catching project is the Gryphon Next Generation Parachute System, a wingsuit for airborne assault:

This is described as a modular upgrade for parachute systems for use in “high-altitude, high-opening” jump missions, typically carried out by Special Forces. This 6-foot wing gives a glide ratio of 5:1, which means that a drop from 30,000 feet will allow you to glide about 30 miles. The makers estimate that this would take around 15 minutes, giving an average speed of about 60 miles an hour.

“All equipment is hidden in a lifting body optimized for stealth, the radar-signature is extremely low,” says the Gryphon data sheet (PDF). “Detection of incoming Gryphon soldiers by airborne or ground radar will be extremely difficult.”

Gryphon has a guidance system and heads-up display navigation. Best of all, the company are looking at an option for bolting on small engines similar to those used in Yves Rossy’s setup. These will increase the range to more than 60 miles, but will also make it possible to cover long distances from low altitude so that the entire mission can be more stealthy.

Software Turns Webcam Into 3D Scanner

ProFORMA, or Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition, software turns an ordinary webcam into a 3D Scanner:

Normally, scanning in 3D requires purpose-made gear and time. ProFORMA lets you rotate any object in front of the camera and it scans it in real time, building a fully 3D texture mapped model as fast as you can turn an object. Even more impressive is what happens after the scan: The camera continues to track the objsct in space and matches it’s movement instantly with the on-screen model.

It works by generating a 3D point cloud from the image coming through the camera and then uses some clever math to both ignore the occasional occlusion of the model by a hand and to work out where the surfaces are.

Device spells doom for superbugs

Researchers have demonstrated a prototype device that can kill bacteria on the skin or in the mouth, including the hospital superbug MRSA — using plasma, which does not normally recommend itself for topical use:

But the new research focuses on so-called cold atmospheric plasmas.

Rather than turning a whole group of atoms into plasma, a more delicate approach strips the electrons off just a few, sending them flying.

Collisions with nearby, unchanged atoms slows down the electrons and charged atoms or ions they leave behind.

It has been known for some time that the resulting plasma is harmful to bacteria, viruses, and fungi — the approach is already used to disinfect surgical tools.
[...]
The team says that an exposure to the plasma of only about 12 seconds reduces the incidence of bacteria, viruses, and fungi on hands by a factor of a million - a number that stands in sharp contrast to the several minutes hospital staff can take to wash using traditional soap and water.

Professor Morfill said that the approach can be used to kill the bacteria that lead to everything from gum disease to body odour.

A History of the Death Ray

Benjamin Wakefield provides a history of the death ray:

The concept of the modern death ray was forged in the 1920s and 1930s, when various individuals theorized the application of a particle beam or electromagnetic weapon. The American inventor Edwin R. Scott claimed to have developed a "lightning device" that could "bring down planes at a distance" (NYT, 1924). Prior to this, Harry Grindell-Matthews had tried to sell an energy weapon to the British Air Ministry. In 1923 he claimed to have invented a device that could "put magnetos out of action," which with enough power could operate to a distance of up to four miles (Ibid.). However, despite demonstrating the weapon to journalists he was unable, or unwilling, to produce a working model for the military. Over a decade later, Antonio Longoria produced one of the more bizarre claims. Apparently he had constructed a device that could kill a mouse that had been encased in a "thick walled metal chamber" by dissolving its red blood corpuscles (Popular Science, 1940). The then president of the Inventor's Congress, Albert Burns, said that he had witnessed dogs, cats, pigeons and rabbits being killed at a distance by this weapon (Time, 1936).

Longoria's wanton abuse of pigeons would have angered the noted eccentric Nikola Tesla, who harbored a deep fondness for the bird. No discussion on the history of the death ray would be complete without mentioning the pioneering work of Tesla. He worked on his "teleforce" weapon from the early 1900s until his death in 1943, but because he was unable to secure any governmental funding, the project was left undeveloped. His ideas concerning the creation of the energy weapon seem to be the most viable when compared with those of Longoria, Scott, and Grindell-Matthews. His theory was that a narrow stream of particles, perhaps mercury or tungsten, could be accelerated by a high-voltage current to produce a concentrated beam of minute projectiles. Tesla believed (some would say wildly exaggerated) that this would produce enough energy to destroy "a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles" (NYT, 1934). He boasted that his weapon would have the effect of surrounding every country that used it with an impenetrable barrier, capable of destroying invading armies before they could even cross the border (Ibid.). In fact, all four of these pioneers made similar claims.

Indeed, the one thing that these men all had in common was their singular belief that their death rays could put a stop to armed conflict. Tesla optimistically referred to his weapon as a "peace-ray"—"a machine to end war" (Tesla, 1937). Similarly, Grindell-Matthews believed that "the death-ray will sweep whole armies into oblivion, whole cities into bleak, smoldering ruins, explode bombs in midair, blow up ammunition dumps from great distances [and so] end war" (Time, 1924). Fundamentally, they desired to create a weapon that was so powerful that it would act as the ultimate deterrent against war. It is no surprise, then, that when such a weapon was finally developed, public interest in the death ray dwindled. The atomic bomb took its place as the superweapon of unimaginable annihilation, surpassing the destructive capability of any of the proposed energy weapons. Although the United States National Inventors Council would continue to list the death ray as a much needed military invention until 1957 (NYT, 1957), the golden age of the concept was over by the late 1940s.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world

Fred Pearce provides a shockingly disingenuous explanation of how 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world:

We've all noticed it. The filthy black smoke kicked out by funnels on cross-Channel ferries, cruise liners, container ships, oil tankers and even tugboats.

It looks foul, and leaves a brown haze across ports and shipping lanes. But what hasn’t been clear until now is that it is also a major killer, probably causing thousands of deaths in Britain alone.

As ships get bigger, the pollution is getting worse. The most staggering statistic of all is that just 16 of the world’s largest ships can produce as much lung-clogging sulphur pollution as all the world’s cars.

Ships have grown larger over the years, in order to transport good more efficiently. It hardly makes sense to complain about pollution on a per ship basis, when the largest ships presumably pollute less per tonne-nautical mile.

This point seems equally misguided:

But, unlike power stations or cars, they can burn the cheapest, filthiest, high-sulphur fuel: the thick residues left behind in refineries after the lighter liquids have been taken. The stuff nobody on land is allowed to use.

Thanks to decisions taken in London by the body that polices world shipping, this pollution could kill as many as a million more people in the coming decade – even though a simple change in the rules could stop it.

This "bunker fuel" is being burned far out at sea, where it is hardly likely to cause "breathing problems, inflammation, cancer and heart disease" in millions of Britons. That's why it's legal there and not on land.

And that's also how 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world — because the "pollution" he's discussing is just sulphur, which cars don't emit in meaningful quantities (100 grams per year).

Our First Electric Cars May Be Trucks

Our first electric cars may be trucks, John Voelcker reminds us:

It turns out that urban delivery trucks offer very good ”duty cycles” for electrification. They cover a fairly predictable area — usually about 160 kilometers (100 miles) or less each day — and they return to the same base every night, meaning that the costs of high-voltage charging stations can be concentrated into a central location.

Britons of a certain age still remember the three-wheeled electric milk floats that delivered their morning pints throughout London. The company that made them, Smith Electric Vehicles, still survives today, and it's preparing to launch mid- and large-size electric delivery trucks into the U.S. market. Smith will be closely followed by a new company, Modec Ltd. While Smith now modifies Ford trucks, Modec has designed its own from the ground up. Each company plans to set up a U.S. assembly plant to avoid the notorious ”chicken tax,” an import duty of 25 percent that has been levied for 45 years on light- and medium-duty commercial vehicles imported into the United States. (The notorious tax stems from a trade dispute over U.S. exports of frozen chickens, then a brand-new concept, to Europe.)

Modec's William Doelle shares some hard lessons learned from pilot programs:

• Plan for much longer and much costlier infrastructure installations than you could possibly imagine;
• Do not let fleet mechanics work on any of the high-voltage components;
• Do not expect fleet mechanics to have any understanding of safe electrical practices;
• Similarly, do not trust the fleet's in-house electricians! Modec was forced to replace a $6000 high-voltage charger, which had to be air-freighted from the UK, when a man he called ”Sparky” hung it on an outdoor chain-link fence, exposed to the elements, without considering that tropical rainstorms might pose a problem to a 300-volt indoor device;
• It is crucial to create very clear, explicit, well-illustrated manuals that cover every possible contingency.

Apple's Mistake

Paul Graham examines Apple's mistake:

Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.

They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words "software" and "publisher" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style.

If software publishing didn't work in 1980, it works even less now that software development has evolved from a small number of big releases to a constant stream of small ones. But Apple doesn't understand that either. Their model of product development derives from hardware. They work on something till they think it's finished, then they release it. You have to do that with hardware, but because software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution. The standard way to develop applications now is to launch fast and iterate. Which means it's a disaster to have long, random delays each time you release a new version.

Apparently Apple's attitude is that developers should be more careful when they submit a new version to the App Store. They would say that. But powerful as they are, they're not powerful enough to turn back the evolution of technology. Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.

How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design apply beyond their stated domain. For example:

• Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker. (Mar's Law)
• At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.
• When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.
• A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Settlers is the new Golf

In Silicon Valley, Settlers of Catan is the new golf:

I recently attended a high-level technology conference that was held right next to a beautiful golf course. In my unscientific poll of about 30 attendees, only one actually went golfing, and over half had never golfed in their life.

In contrast, Settlers of Catan (or “Settlers,” as it’s often called) is booming and is quickly becoming the activity of choice for entrepreneurs here in the Valley. I got into Settlers because Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, had been telling me about what a great game it is for over a year. Then one day, some of the engineers at Rapleaf (most of whom had been playing Settlers since college) challenged me to play with them, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

It wasn’t long after my Settlers initiation before I began to discover Silicon Valley technologists meeting and huddling over the board game. In fact, there might even be a high correlation between technology innovation and Settlers play – some of Silicon Valley’s most talented players include Mark Pincus, Zynga CEO; Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search; Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook executive; Barney Pell, Powerset founder; Tod Sacerdoti, BrightRoll CEO; Saar Gur, Charles River Ventures partner; Scott Faber, Ingenio founder; Erin Turner, Level Up founder; Ellen Levy, LinkedIn VP; super-angel Aydin Senkut; Ken Sawyer, Saints Ventures CEO; John Lilly, Mozilla CEO; Matt Sanchez, Videoegg CEO; Dave Wehner, Allen & Company managing director; Kavin Stewart, LOLapps CEO; and many others.

But it is not just Silicon Valley stars who are contributing to Settler’s growing adoption — many engineers and young founders play too. In the Valley, where geeky is “in,” Settlers is going mainstream.

Reasons for Settlers’ success include its variety for winning tactics, easy-to-understand rules, and its relatively quick and balanced game play.

How an Engineer Turned a Cellphone Into a Microscope

Using software he developed and about $10 worth of off-the-shelf hardware, UCLA professor Aydogan Ozcan has adapted cellphones to substitute for microscopes:

In one prototype, a slide holding a finger prick of blood can be inserted over the phone’s camera sensor. The sensor detects the slide’s contents and sends the information wirelessly to a hospital or regional health center. For instance, the phones can detect the asymmetric shape of diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, or note an increase of white blood cells, a sign of infection, he said.
[...]

For this electronic system of magnification, inexpensive light-emitting diodes added to the basic cellphone shine their light on a sample slide placed over the phone’s camera chip. Some of the light waves hit the cells suspended in the sample, scattering off the cells and interfering with the other light waves.

“When the waves interfere,” Dr. Brady said, “they create a pattern called a hologram.” The detector in the camera records that hologram or interference pattern as a series of pixels.

The holograms are rich in information, Dr. Ozcan said. “We can learn a lot in seconds,” he said. “We can process the information mathematically and reconstruct images like those you would see with a microscope.”
Dr. Ozcan’s system may someday lead to a rapid way to process blood and other samples, said Bahram Jalali, an applied physicist and professor of electrical engineering at U.C.L.A. “It is potentially much faster than a microscope,” he said. “You don’t have to scan mechanically” as people must with a microscope with its small field of view.

“Instead you capture holograms of all the cells on the slide digitally at the same time,” he said, so that it’s possible, for example, to see immediately the pathogens among a vast population of healthy cells. “It’s a way of looking quickly for a needle in a haystack,” he said.

Cheaper desalination

Saltworks Technologies has set up a test plant in Vancouver to demonstrate cheaper desalination:

Existing desalination plants work in one of two ways. Some distil seawater by heating it up to evaporate part of it. They then condense the vapour — a process that requires electricity. The other plants use reverse osmosis. This employs high-pressure pumps to force the water from brine through a membrane that is impermeable to salt. That, too, needs electricity. Even the best reverse-osmosis plants require 3.7 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy to produce 1,000 litres of drinking water.

Mr Sparrow and Mr Zoshi, by contrast, reckon they can produce that much fresh water with less than 1 kWh of electricity, and no other paid-for source of power is needed. Their process is fuelled by concentration gradients of salinity between different vessels of brine. These different salinities are brought about by evaporation.

The process begins by spraying seawater into a shallow, black-bottomed pond, where it absorbs heat from the atmosphere. The resulting evaporation increases the concentration of salt in the water from its natural level of 3.5% to as much as 20%. Low-pressure pumps are then used to pipe this concentrated seawater, along with three other streams of untreated seawater, into the desalting unit. As the diagram explains, what Mr Sparrow and Mr Zoshi create by doing this is a type of electrical circuit. Instead of electrons carrying the current, though, it is carried by electrically charged atoms called ions.

Salt is made of two ions: positively charged sodium and negatively charged chloride. These flow in opposite directions around the circuit. Each of the four streams of water is connected to two neighbours by what are known as ion bridges. These are pathways made of polystyrene that has been treated so it will allow the passage of only one sort of ion — either sodium or chloride. Sodium and chloride ions pass out of the concentrated solution to the neighbouring weak ones by diffusion though these bridges (any chemical will diffuse from a high to a low concentration in this way). The trick is that as they do so, they make the low-concentration streams of water electrically charged. The one that is positive, because it has too much sodium, thus draws chloride ions from the stream that is to be purified. Meanwhile, the negative, chloride-rich stream draws in sodium ions. The result is that the fourth stream is stripped of its ions and emerges pure and fresh.

It is a simple idea that could be built equally well on a grand scale or as rooftop units the size of refrigerators. Of course, a lot of clever engineering is involved to make it work, but the low pressure of the pumps needed (in contradistinction to those employed in reverse osmosis) means the brine can be transported through plastic pipes rather than steel ones. Since brine is corrosive to steel, that is another advantage of Mr Sparrow’s and Mr Zoshi’s technology. Moreover, the only electricity needed is the small amount required to pump the streams of water through the apparatus. All the rest of the energy has come free, via the air, from the sun.

3-D Photovoltaics

Using zinc oxide nanostructures grown on optical fibers and coated with dye-sensitized solar cell materials, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new type of three-dimensional photovoltaic system, which could replace the familiar large panels atop roofs:

Dye-sensitized solar cells use a photochemical system to generate electricity. They are inexpensive to manufacture, flexible and mechanically robust, but their tradeoff for lower cost is conversion efficiency lower than that of silicon-based cells. But using nanostructure arrays to increase the surface area available to convert light could help reduce the efficiency disadvantage, while giving architects and designers new options for incorporating PV into buildings, vehicles and even military equipment.

Fabrication of the new Georgia Tech PV system begins with optical fiber of the type used by the telecommunications industry to transport data. First, the researchers remove the cladding layer, then apply a conductive coating to the surface of the fiber before seeding the surface with zinc oxide. Next, they use established solution-based techniques to grow aligned zinc oxide nanowires around the fiber much like the bristles of a bottle brush. The nanowires are then coated with the dye-sensitized materials that convert light to electricity.

Sunlight entering the optical fiber passes into the nanowires, where it interacts with the dye molecules to produce electrical current. A liquid electrolyte between the nanowires collects the electrical charges. The result is a hybrid nanowire/optical fiber system that can be up to six times as efficient as planar zinc oxide cells with the same surface area.

"In each reflection within the fiber, the light has the opportunity to interact with the nanostructures that are coated with the dye molecules," Wang explained. "You have multiple light reflections within the fiber, and multiple reflections within the nanostructures. These interactions increase the likelihood that the light will interact with the dye molecules, and that increases the efficiency."

Wang and his research team have reached an efficiency of 3.3 percent and hope to reach 7 to 8 percent after surface modification. While lower than silicon solar cells, this efficiency would be useful for practical energy harvesting. If they can do that, the potentially lower cost of their approach could make it attractive for many applications.

(Hat tip to Mark Frazier.)

End of an Extravaganza

John Derbyshire describes the end of an extravaganza:

In the first third of the 15th century, while the Hundred Years War between England and France stormed dramatically to its denouement (Agincourt, Joan of Arc), and Muslims held on by their fingernails to their last fragment of Spain, and the Ottomans regrouped following the ravages of Tamurlane, and Ladislas II was breaking the power of the Teutonic Knights — while all that was happening at the other end of the Eurasian land-mass, China was enjoying a spell of national confidence and bold self-assertion under the third Ming emperor.

The famous great tourist sights of Peking stand as testimony to that period of vigor. Among its other glories, though they left us with no monuments to admire other than a few scattered steles, were the seagoing expeditions of the "Eunuch Admiral" Zheng He. In seven voyages from 1405 to 1433, Zheng and his "treasure fleets" carried the imperial banner to Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and the east coast of Africa.

The striking thing is how utterly little historical consequence these voyages had. It can fairly be argued, in fact, that they had none at all. A school of revisionist historians has come up arguing that Zheng was instrumental in the consolidation of Islam in Indonesia; and one scholar even tells us that "Zheng He reshaped Asia." Even on the most extravagant claims, though, nobody thinks that Zheng's voyages had any result as dramatic as what followed the great European explorers of a few decades later.

There were no colonies established as a result of the treasure fleets, no trade routes opened up, no alliances formed, no enlargement of understanding among China's educated classes. The Ming court decided at last that the whole business was too costly. The records of Zheng's last two expeditions were destroyed in a court intrigue, and China commenced the retreat into incurious bureaucratic despotism from which she was awoken only four hundred years later, when European traders came banging on the nation's doors.

Derbyshire wrote this in June, which explains the punchline:

Now, approaching the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing (July 20), you have to wonder if history is repeating itself. America's manned space program was a grandiose public-works project, government-initiated and government-funded, like Zheng's expeditions. Its achievements, like theirs, were sensational but content-free. Men floated in orbit above the earth's atmosphere; men walked on the moon, but nothing changed among the earthbound.
[...]
Manned space travel always was, and still is, a pointless extravaganza project of no practical or scientific value — a Zheng He expedition for our time. In the bumptiousness of early-imperial triumphalism — a new dynasty established in China, a great war won by America — government can get away with stuff like that. Then, as domestic lobbies clamor for more of the national fisc ("If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we …?"), as the people are tamed by long peace, turning away from great events to their small daily affairs, as a mandarinate of unimaginative scholar-bureaucrats consolidates its grip on the society, priorities shift.

Faster Maintenance with Augmented Reality

When you use virtual reality technology not to portray imaginary worlds but to "annotate" the real world, you get augmented reality &mdash which may soon help Marine mechanics carry out repairs:

A user wears a head-worn display, and the AR system provides assistance by showing 3-D arrows that point to a relevant component, text instructions, floating labels and warnings, and animated, 3-D models of the appropriate tools. An Android-powered G1 smart phone attached to the mechanic's wrist provides touchscreen controls for cueing up the next sequence of instructions.
[...]
Henderson and Feiner first gathered laser scans and photography of the inside of the vehicle. They built a 3-D model of the vehicle's cockpit and developed software for directing and instructing users in performing individual maintenance tasks. Ten cameras inside the cockpit were used to track the position of three infrared LEDs attached to the user's head-worn display. In the future, the team suggests that it may be more practical for cameras or sensors to be worn by the users themselves.

Six participants carried out 18 tasks using the AR system. For comparison, the same participants also used an untracked headset (showing static text instructions and views without arrows or direction to components) and a stationary computer screen with the same graphics and models used in the headset. The mechanics using the AR system located and started repair tasks 56 percent faster, on average, than when wearing the untracked headset, and 47 percent faster than when using just a stationary computer screen.

(Incidentally, if you read between the lines a bit, the untracked headset was slightly worse than a stationary computer screen.)

Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map

The US has far more natural gas at its disposal than anyone thought three or four years ago:

The U.S. consumes about 23 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas a year, according to the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency (EIA). The Potential Gas Committee (PGC), an organization headquartered at the Colorado School of Mines, put the country's potential natural-gas resources at 1,836 TCF in a biennial assessment released in June. That's 39 percent higher than its estimate of two years earlier. Add to that the 238 TCF that the EIA has calculated in "proved reserves" (the gas that can be produced given existing economic conditions) and the PGC pegs the future supply at 2,074 TCF. In other words, there is enough natural gas to supply the country for 90 years at current consumption rates. Even if we used natural gas to totally replace coal in generating electricity, domestic supplies would last for 50 years.

Almost all the newfound resources are in shale deposits, which are now estimated to contain 616 TCF of recoverable gas, says John Curtis, a professor of geology and geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and director of the Potential Gas Agency, which provides technical assistance to the PGC. Supplies in the Appalachian basin alone are calculated at 227 TCF, with the Marcellus accounting for the bulk of that. And Curtis says he expects that even more shale gas will "be in the mix" in the committee's next assessment.

Indeed, some geologists believe that gas supplies in the Marcellus and other shale deposits might be even more abundant than the PGC estimates. In January 2008, Lash and Terry Engelder, a colleague at Pennsylvania State University, calculated the amount of recoverable gas in the Marcellus deposit at 50 TCF. But initial drilling efforts in the region have gone so well that Engelder now puts the recoverable supply of gas at 489 TCF. If that's correct, it makes the Marcellus the second-largest natural-gas field in the world; only a massive offshore reserve shared by Iran and Qatar is larger.

Zinc-Air Batteries

A Swiss company called ReVolt has developed rechargeable zinc-air batteries that can store three times the energy of lithium ion batteries, by volume, while costing only half as much:

James McDougal, the company's CEO, says that the technology overcomes the main problem with zinc-air rechargeable batteries — that they typically stop working after relatively few charges.

So, how does a zinc-air battery work?

Unlike conventional batteries, which contain all the reactants needed to generate electricity, zinc-air batteries rely on oxygen from the atmosphere to generate current. In the late 1980s they were considered one of the most promising battery technologies because of their high theoretical energy-storage capacity, says Gary Henriksen, manager of the electrochemical energy storage department at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The battery chemistry is also relatively safe because it doesn't require volatile materials, so zinc-air batteries are not prone to catching fire like lithium-ion batteries.

Making them rechargeable has been a challenge:

Inside the battery, a porous "air" electrode draws in oxygen and, with the help of catalysts at the interface between the air and a water-based electrolyte, reduces it to form hydroxyl ions. These travel through an electrolyte to the zinc electrode, where the zinc is oxidized — a reaction that releases electrons to generate a current. For recharging, the process is reversed: zinc oxide is converted back to zinc and oxygen is released at the air electrode. But after repeated charge and discharge cycles, the air electrode can become deactivated, slowing or stopping the oxygen reactions. This can be due, for example, to the liquid electrolyte being gradually pulled too far into the pores, Henriksen says. The battery can also fail if it dries out or if zinc builds up unevenly, forming branch-like structures that create a short circuit between the electrodes.

ReVolt says it has developed methods for controlling the shape of the zinc electrode (by using certain gelling and binding agents) and for managing the humidity within the cell. It has also tested a new air electrode that has a combination of carefully dispersed catalysts for improving the reduction of oxygen from the air during discharge and for boosting the production of oxygen during charging. Prototypes have operated well for over one hundred cycles, and the company's first products are expected to be useful for a couple of hundred cycles. McDougal hopes to increase this to between 300 and 500 cycles, which will make them useful for mobile phones and electric bicycles.

ReVolt is also developing a novel battery structure in which one electrode is a liquid — a zinc slurry:

To generate electricity, the zinc slurry, which is stored in one compartment in the battery, is pumped through the tubes where it's oxidized, forming zinc oxide and releasing electrons. The zinc oxide then accumulates in another compartment in the battery. During recharging, the zinc oxide flows back through the air electrode, where it releases the oxygen, forming zinc again.

In the company's planned vehicle battery, the amount of zinc slurry can be much greater than the amount of material in the air electrode, increasing energy density. Indeed, the system would be like a fuel-cell system or a conventional engine, in that the zinc slurry would essentially act as a fuel — pumping through the air electrode like the hydrogen in a fuel cell or the gasoline in a combustion engine. McDougal says the batteries could also last longer — from 2,000 to 10,000 cycles. And, if one part fails — such as the air electrode — it could be replaced, eliminating the need to buy a whole new battery.

Super Concrete

The technology of cement-making has been repeatedly lost and rediscovered — and now "new" super concretes may lead to super bunkers:

The Romans knew how to mix crushed rock (”caementitium”), with burnt lime and water to make a versatile building material. The Pantheon in Rome boasts the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, still just as strong after 2,000 years. But cement was unknown in medieval times, with lime mortar serving as a poor substitute.

However, by the 1950s, it was obvious that much modern cement is not as durable as the ancient variety, and many buildings succumbed to concrete cancer caused by water penetration and chemical action. Ukrainian scientist Victor Glukhovsky looked into why the ancient cement recipes were so much more durable than modern ones and found that adding alkaline activators gave a greatly superior product. His work inspired Joseph Davidovits, a French chemical engineer, to discover the chemistry behind geopolymers and how it can be manipulated.

Professor Davidovits was awarded the French Ordre National du Mérite, and is President of the Geopolymer Institute. His most remarkable claim is that the pyramids were built using re-agglomerated stone, a sort of geopolymer limestone concrete, rather than blocks of natural stone. This would explain many of the mysteries of pyramid construction. Handling barrels of liquid concrete and casting in place would be much easier than moving giant blocks of stone. Remarkably, recent X-ray and microscopic study of samples has supported the theory that the pyramids are made of artificial stone.

The progress of geopolymers as building materials has been slow. Builders have an understandable tendency to stick to materials which have been around for decades and whose properties are well understood. However, the U.S. Air Force has been among the more enthusiastic early adopters — I look at military applications in the current issue of Defense Technology International (page 42).

For example Pyrament, a geopolymer-based cement is handy for the rapid repair and construction of runways. After just a few hours a Pyrament runway is ready for the heaviest aircraft, reaching a strength that conventional concrete can only match after several days.

The Air Force Research laboratory has funded geopolymer research for runways, insulation material, rocket nozzles, and other applications. It’s even been developed as special glue for holding satellite components together in the harsh conditions of space.

But the U.S. does not have a monopoly on this sort of technology. A couple of years ago Danger Room reported suggestions that Iranian scientists were working on ultra-high-strength concrete compositions. (Incidentally, high-hardness concrete is used in the construction of nuclear plants.)

The University of Tehran’s Faculty of Civil Engineering has its own Construction Materials Institute, which conveniently lists research papers in English. And it turns out that there is a lot of research into concrete technology, including fiber-reinforced concrete and concrete with ultra-high electrical resistivity. The Iran University of Science and Technology also displays some of its research in English — including a number of patents for new geopolymer cement formulations. The expertise is there; the only question is over whether there are other, unseen Iranian projects in this field.

The giant new Massive Ordnance Penetrator is reckoned to be able to break through 200 feet of 5,000 pounds-per-square-inch concrete, but just 25 feet through 10,000 psi concrete. Much harder concretes might be a real challenge.

Bootstrapping Complexity

Andreas Lloyd liked the ideas Kevin Kelly wrote about in Out of Control, but he found Kelly's presentation frustrating — so he remixed the book into a new, shorter volume, Bootstrapping Complexity:

Remixing is perhaps too strong a word because he mostly simply dropped entire chapters, with a little re-arranging here and there. It is a very sharp but intelligent edit. But the effect is striking. Instead of a rambling book about one dozen things, Lloyd's remix of my book focuses it on the cybernetic and feedback aspects of the systems I was reporting on in the early 1990s. I suggested this focus needed a better title than Out of Control, which I never was happy with anyhow, so Lloyd came up with a new one for this version of the book. He calls it Bootstrapping Complexity.

Pandora

A few years ago, Steve Sailer tried out Pandora, the "Music Genome Project" for Internet radio — which does not recommend songs based on shared tastes but rather relies on experts' assessments of songs across 250 factors — and found that it worked pretty well:

But one response was off: I put in Revolution Rock by the Clash, which isn't a rock song at all, but a lazy, joyous reggae ramble. Pandora came back with the punk Career Opportunities by the Clash, which suggests that one of their employees had cut corners and categorized Revolution Rock by title rather than by music.

Anyway, a recent New York Times Magazine piece shares this anecdote:

[Pandora CEO Paul Westergren] likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’ ”

This anecdote almost always gets a laugh. “Pandora,” he pointed out, “doesn’t understand why that’s funny.”

A basic problem that you can't get around in Pandora:

If you like a song not so much because of the style but because it's an expert execution of a style, then Pandora isn't as good as a recommendation site.

Pandora performs a sort of factor analysis on your musical tastes, Sailer notes — although he layers quite a bit of his own "insight" on top of it:

Listening to these songs that I picked out a few years ago plus other ones similar to them, I would say I have post-British Empire upper middle class public schoolboy tastes in music. This may seem odd, but my tastes in songs would seem most natural for a Scottish or northern English lad at a southern English boarding school for toffs, or maybe at Sandhurst, the military academy.
[...]
Very strange, but it also fits a lot of my taste in authors as well (Waugh, Orwell, Wodehouse, etc.). I now remember how much I liked David Niven's autobiography, who was a Sandhurst grad. And the autobiography of Churchill, another public schoolboy/Sandhurst man.

So, it's no surprise that The Clash were always my favorites. After all, Joe Strummer, despite his appalling teeth, was an upper middle class public schoolboy whose dad, a friend of Kim Philby's, was a diplomat (i.e., spy) for the fading British Empire.

You could use Pandora's database for scholarly purposes, he suggests:

For example, T.S. Eliot pointed out that an artist creates his own "school" of predecessors that nobody noticed had anything in common before. For example, I've always felt that the ancestors of the punk rock of 1976 included from the 1968 to 1973 era: Communication Breakdown by Led Zeppelin, Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting by Elton John, three songs that sounded like they have more in common after you'd heard the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Clash than before. This giant proprietary database would presumably allow those kind of academic hypotheses to be tested objectively.

Next Stop: Ultracapacitor Buses

Ultracapacitors are like superbatteries: super-efficient, quick to charge and discharge, long-lasting — and holding very, very little energy. Now a Chinese company and its U.S. partner have found a clever way to deploy ultracapacitor buses:

There's just one catch: the best ultracapacitors can only store about 5 percent of the energy that lithium-ion batteries hold, limiting them to a couple of miles per charge. This makes them ineffective as an energy storage medium for passenger vehicles. But what ultracapacitors lack in range they make up in their ability to rapidly charge and discharge. So in vehicles that have to stop frequently and predictably as part of normal operation, energy storage based exclusively on ultracapacitors begins to make sense.
[...]
The trick is to turn some bus stops along the route into charge stations, says Dan Ye, executive director of Sinautec. Unlike a conventional trolley bus that has to continually touch an overhead power line, Sinautec's ultracapacitor buses take big sips of electricity every two or three miles at designated charging stations, which double as bus stops. When at these stations, a collector on the top of the bus rises a few feet and touches an overhead charging line. Within a couple of minutes, the ultracapacitor banks stored under the bus seats are fully charged.
[...]
The buses can also capture energy from braking, and the company says that recharging stations can be equipped with solar panels (although this is mainly to further the perception that the vehicles have a lower carbon footprint). Ye says the buses use 40 percent less electricity compared to an electric trolley bus, mainly because they're lighter and have the regenerative braking benefits. They're also competitive with conventional buses based on fuel savings over the vehicle's 12-year life, based on current oil and electricity prices. Sinautec estimates that one of its buses has one-tenth the energy cost of a diesel bus and can achieve lifetime fuel savings of $200,000.

"The ultracapacitor bus is also cheaper than lithium-ion battery buses," says Ye. "We used the Olympics (lithium-ion) bus as a model and found ours about 40 percent less expensive with a far superior reliability rating."
[...]
The ultracapacitors are made of activated carbon and have an energy density of six watt-hours per kilogram. (For comparison, a high-performance lithium-ion battery can achieve 200 watt-hours per kilogram.)
[...]
There are some other important limitations. The 41-passenger buses, based on current technology, lose 35 percent of their range when air conditioning is turned on, and have weak acceleration. But even under these conditions, they could still prove practical for municipal, campus, airport, and tourist buses.

Ferrari 312 PB replica scale model

This Ferrari 312 PB replica scale model is amazing, but I cringe when I think about someone spending 15 years building what amounts to a one-off toy car:

Dust and Rocks

When men landed on the moon 40 years ago, John Derbyshire thought the world had changed for ever:

How naïve! Nothing changed at all. The Arabs and Israelis had gone at each other hammer and tongs two years before: Four years later they did so again. The mainland Chinese, in the throes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, were told nothing of the event. (So our newspapers reported. However, several urban Chinese have told me they knew about the Moon landing within a few hours.) Americans themselves were at least as interested in Chappaquiddick as in Tranquility Base.

Forty years on, what does it look like, really, but another TV special? Nothing followed from the Moon landing, other than, of course, five more Moon landings and the wretched, pointless, homicidal Space Shuttle program. It made nothing happen. It did not stir new thoughts in the minds of civilized men, as the great 15th- and 16th-century sea voyages did. It has brought us no potatoes, no tobacco, no Noble Savagery speculations on human nature, no Tempest. It made no dramatic new fortunes (though I suppose some shareholders in the aerospace companies did well). It did not make poor, inconsequential nations into world powers. Nothing unexpected turned up. The voyages, Apollo 13's malfunction aside, went rigidly as planned. We found what we expected to find: dust and rocks.

Barnes & Noble's E-Reader

Barnes & Noble is set to reveal its new Kindle competitor next week, Gizmodo says, with a black-and-white e-ink screen and a color multitouch screen, like an iPhone — all in a Reardon-metal frame, if the photos are to be believed. And it should run the Randroid OS.

(The sample page is from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.)

A Pretty Useless Prophet

Cringely describes himself as a pretty useless prophet:

Back in 1994, I proposed to my employer at the time that we start a strictly online publication to cover just Microsoft. We called the proposed e-magazine MicroSquish and took it so far as to make a pilot issue and do some very interesting market research.

The World Wide Web was only a couple years old at the time, and I was unconvinced that it presented a suitable delivery platform in an era of dial-up Compuserve accounts and 2400 bps modems. So MicroSquish was conceived as a downloadable publication to be distributed by e-mail in the new PDF format then called Acrobat. It looked just like a print magazine, right down to the 75 percent ad-edit ratio.

And just to be cool, we built into the technology the ability to report back data from readers. We could not only track who read each issue, but how many times it was read and which stories or ads. We figured this data of who read what and in what order would be very useful to advertisers and ad agencies. But we were wrong.

Ad agencies 15 years ago didn’t want to know whether or not their ads had actually been read, they told us. This was simply because if an advertiser discovered that few, if any, people were actually reading their ad on page 113, the company might just pull that ad and save their money, taking revenue away from the ad agency in the process.

The entire ability to sell an ad-edit ratio of 75 percent (which was needed to qualify for printed distribution by second class mail — yet another buggy whip in a digital era) was based on this deliberate ignorance. Ad agencies and publications alike knew that many — even most — advertising dollars were simply wasted, but it wasn’t in their interest to admit that, so they didn’t.

Get Out of My Building

Steve Blank was an experienced marketer when he learned how little he knew:

Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. I was pleased with myself that not only did I understand the issues, but I also had an opinion about what we should build. All of a sudden I decided that I hadn’t heard the sound of my own voice in a while so I piped up: “I think our customers will want 24-bits of double-buffered graphics.”

Silence descended across the conference table. The CEO turned to me and asked “What did you say?” Thinking he was impressed with my mastery of the subject as well as my brilliant observation, I repeated myself and embellished my initial observation with all the additional reasons why I thought our customers would want this feature. I was about to get an education that would last a lifetime.

Picture the scene: the entire company (all 15 of us) are present. For this startup we had assembled some of the best and brightest hardware and software engineers in the computer industry. My boss, the CEO, had just come from a string of successes at Convergent Technologies, Intel and Digital Equipment, names that at that time carried a lot of weight. Some of us had worked together in previous companies; some of us had just started working together for the first time.

I thought I was bright, aggressive and could do no wrong as a marketer. I loved my job and I was convinced I was god’s gift to marketing. Now in a voice so quiet it could be barely heard across the conference table our CEO turns to me and says, “That’s what I thought you said. I just wanted to make sure I heard it correctly.” It was the last sentence I heard before my career trajectory as a marketer was permanently changed.

At the top of his lungs he screamed, “You don’t know a damn thing about what these customers need! You’ve never talked to anyone in this market, you don’t know who they are, you don’t know what they need, and you have no right to speak in any of these planning meetings.” I was mortified with the dressing down in front of my friends as well as new employees I barely knew. Later my friends told me my face went pale.

He continued yelling, “We have a technical team assembled in this room that has more knowledge of scientific customers and scientific computers than any other startup has ever had. They’ve been talking to these customers since before you were born, and they have a right to have an opinion. You are a disgrace to the marketing profession and have made a fool of yourself and will continue to do so every time you open your mouth. Get out of this conference room, get out of this building and get out of my company; you are wasting all of our time.”
[...]
As I got up to leave the room, the CEO said, “I want you out of the building talking to customers; find out who they are, how they work, and what we need to do to sell them lots of these new computers.” Motioning to our VP of Sales, he ordered: “Go with him and get him in front of customers, and both of you don’t come back until you can tell us something we don’t know.”

And he was smiling.

My career as marketer had just begun.

How Useful Are You?

According to this technology quiz, I am "certainly a technologically useful human":

Starting from the year 0, you might be able to advance civilization to the 20th century.

That's why you should let me into your post-apocalyptic commune; I can bootstrap society.

A Library to Last Forever

Sergey Brins argues for a library to last forever:

Because books published before 1923 are in the public domain, I am able to view them easily.

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.

Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.

Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.
[...]
In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will “impress the necessity of something being done” to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection.

I hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it’s an important step. Let’s not miss this opportunity.

Of course, his real goal is to present Google's legal dealings in the best possible light:

This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.

Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights holders have not yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access policies are assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose owners have not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights holders, giving them an incentive to step forward.

Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

Blasted into space from a giant air gun

As an astronaut you would not want to be blasted into space from a giant air gun — but it makes sense for certain sturdy payloads:

The gun is based on a smaller device Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 metres long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometres per second.

Now Hunter and two other ex-LLNL scientists have set up a company called Quicklaunch, based in San Diego, California, to create a more powerful version of the gun.

At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described a design for a 1.1-kilometre-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometres per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit.

While humans would clearly be killed and conventional satellites crushed by the gun's huge g-forces, it could lift robust payloads such as rocket fuel. Finding cheap ways to transport fuel into space will lower the cost of keeping the International Space Station in orbit, and in future it may be needed to supply a crewed mission to Mars.

The gun would cost $500 million to build, says Hunter, but individual launch costs would be lower than current methods. "We think it's at least a factor of 10 cheaper than anything else," he says.

Franklin Chang-Diaz, a former astronaut and physicist at the Ad Astra Rocket Company based in Webster, Texas, says a launch gun might make more sense on the moon, where there is no atmosphere. "You don't have to worry about drag or heating or anything like that," he says.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

Security and Freedom

John Derbyshire discusses the trade-off between security and freedom:

The invention of the personal computer brought in one of those brief periods of explosive creativity when twenty-year-olds with no paper qualifications could make fortunes by inventing useful goods. Being a software developer in 1980 was like being a steam locomotive engineer in 1820, or an aircraft designer ninety years later. Nowadays, of course, you need four graduate degrees and a king's ransom of liability insurance before anyone will let you design a plane. This has good and bad results. Good: planes are much safer than they were in 1910. Bad: nobody with the least flicker of imagination or creativity makes a career designing planes — which is why planes look just the same now as they did thirty years ago. Soon, no doubt, you will need a Commerce Department license to write computer programs.

There you have the trade-off between security and freedom, which every parent of small children wrestles with daily on a more intimate scale.

Private Space Technology Powers Up

Private space technology powers up as Ad Astra's VX-200 lives up to its name:

We are getting ready to fly the VASIMR engine on the International Space Station (ISS). It is a 200-kilowatt plasma rocket, the most powerful rocket ever built to fly in space, and the prototype is being tested on the ground in our facilities in Houston. We have been gradually ramping up the power over many months, and our goal is to reach 200 kilowatts, which is the power level the rocket will run at on the ISS, and we achieved that today. We actually reached 201 kilowatts.

Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz explains his plasma rocket engine:

VASIMR stands for “Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket.” It’s a plasma-based electric rocket engine, so it’s different from conventional chemical rockets, which are propelled by the combustion of rocket fuel. VASIMR isn’t based on chemical reactions. Instead, it uses plasma, which is a gas that’s been heated to extremely high temperatures, temperatures approaching that of the Sun. Because it’s so hot, the plasma can’t be handled with any conventional materials. We have to use superconductors to generate electromagnetic fields to contain the plasma, form it into a jet, and guide it out the back of the rocket engine. VASIMR is meant for use in outer space — it won’t replace chemical rockets for launching payloads into orbit.

There is a term in rocketry, “specific impulse,” which measures how efficiently a rocket obtains thrust from its propellant. The higher the specific impulse, the more efficient the rocket, and the less fuel it requires. In general, specific impulse increases as a rocket’s exhaust gets hotter. A good chemical rocket’s specific impulse is on the order of about 500. And the specific impulse of the VASIMR and most other plasma-based rockets is in the thousands, even the tens of thousands. So we’re talking about an orders-of-magnitude performance improvement of the rocket. That’s why we go to all the trouble of working with plasma, because there’s a huge payoff in terms of how much fuel you use to get any given payload from point A to point B in outer space.

In all plasma rockets, you have to produce thrust by accelerating the plasma. Other plasma rockets do this with electric current from metallic grids that are immersed in the plasma. Too much plasma flowing past these grids will make them essentially melt, so you can’t go to extremely high power. You can somewhat get around this by making the grids very large, or making arrays of them, but you’re still limited by grid erosion and damage. This means most plasma rockets are inherently low-power devices.

In VASIMR, however, there are no grids. Its plasma is contained by magnetic fields and heated and accelerated by electromagnetic waves. Since no parts of the rocket are immersed in the plasma flow, you can make the plasma very dense and hot and get much better performance.

To reach its full potential, the VASIMR needs nuclear power:

In fact, with the power close to what a nuclear submarine generates, you could use VASIMR to fly humans to Mars in 39 days. A chemical rocket makes the trip in eight months. That’s eight months of exposing your astronauts to debilitating cosmic radiation and weightlessness. By the time they get to where they’re supposed to work, they’re gonna be in bad shape—almost invalids! They’ll have to spend a big chunk of their time just recovering from the trip. That’s simply not a smart way to conduct an exploration program. By not addressing the key problems of limited power and propulsion, NASA is forced to work with extremely complicated and expensive mission architectures that are very limited in capability.

Without nuclear power, how will the VASIMR get deployed?

We signed an agreement with NASA last December to actually mount the VF-200 on the International Space Station in 2012 or 2013. Unfortunately, the space station doesn’t have 200 kilowatts to give us. So what we’ll do is use the solar arrays of the station to charge a battery pack that we’ll carry on board, which will allow us to fire the rocket at 200 kilowatts for up to 15 minutes. We’ll do this again and again for months to qualify the engine in space. In 2013 or 2014, we’ll make clusters of 200-kilowatt engines to give us something close to a megawatt of electricity, and deploy them with a very high-powered solar array. This will be a robotic reusable “space tug” that can refuel or reposition satellites, or even send packages to the Moon at a much lower price. By charging for those services, we hope to bootstrap our way into developing a megawatt-class rocket.

Here's how the VX-200 might pay for itself:

The ISS has to be reboosted every few months; otherwise it gradually falls and burns up in the atmosphere. These reboosts require about 7 metric tons of rocket fuel per year. How much does it cost to get 7 metric tons of rocket fuel into orbit? $140 million. That’s the bill someone has to pay, each year, just for hauling up the fuel. The 200-kilowatt solar-powered VASIMR can do the same thing with about 320 kilograms of argon gas per year, which still costs about $7 million, but it decreases the price by a factor of 20.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

A Cheaper Brick

Calstar has devised a cheaper brick:

Ordinary bricks are fired for 24 hours at 2,000°F (1,093°C) as part of a process that can last a week, while Calstar bricks are baked at temperatures below 212°F (100°C) and take only 10 hours from start to finish, Kane said.

The recipe incorporates large amounts of fly ash — a fluffy, powdery residue of burned coal at electric plants, that can otherwise wind up as a troublesome pollutant.

"Ours is a precise product" that relies on getting the chemistry right, said Amitabha Kumar, Calstar's director of research and development.

The process of making the bricks, which look and feel like any other brick, requires 80 to 90 percent less energy and emits 85 percent less greenhouse gas than ordinary bricks, according to Calstar.

Lower energy costs mean higher profit, allowing the company to pay for its research and compete against large companies that have economies of scale.

Naturally the Brick Industry Association says that they are not actually bricks, and that there is no proof that products using fly ash will last as well as traditional brick.

Of course, there's no proof that they won't last longer than traditional brick either.

The Duct Tape Programmer

After reading an interview with Jamie Zawinski in Coders at Work, Joel Spolsky dubbed him the duct tape programmer, because he's the kind of guy who can make anything work with a little duct tape and WD-40 — while everyone else is discussing which space-age polymer to order:

Here is why I like duct tape programmers. Sometimes, you’re on a team, and you’re busy banging out the code, and somebody comes up to your desk, coffee mug in hand, and starts rattling on about how if you use multi-threaded COM apartments, your app will be 34% sparklier, and it’s not even that hard, because he’s written a bunch of templates, and all you have to do is multiply-inherit from 17 of his templates, each taking an average of 4 arguments, and you barely even have to write the body of the function. It’s just a gigantic list of multiple-inheritence from different classes and hey, presto, multi-apartment threaded COM. And your eyes are swimming, and you have no friggin’ idea what this frigtard is talking about, but he just won’t go away, and even if he does go away, he’s just going to back into his office and write more of his clever classes constructed entirely from multiple inheritence from templates, without a single implementation body at all, and it’s going to crash like crazy and you’re going to get paged at night to come in and try to figure it out because he’ll be at some goddamn “Design Patterns” meetup.

And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, “multiple inheritence sucks. Stop it. Just stop.”

You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid because they just can’t keep enough facts in their head at once to make multiple inheritence, or templates, or COM, or multithreading, or any of that stuff work. So they sheepishly go along with whatever faddish programming craziness has come down from the architecture astronauts who speak at conferences and write books and articles and are so much smarter than us that they don’t realize that the stuff that they’re promoting is too hard for us.

Here’s what Zawinski says about Netscape: “It was decisions like not using C++ and not using threads that made us ship the product on time.”

Duct tape programmers are pragmatic:

Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

50 things we never need to hear at another game development conference

Joe Ludwig shares 50 things we never need to hear at another game development conference:

1. Korea is the future. They are five years ahead of us and where Korea goes, the rest of the world will follow. (I have been hearing this for at least five years. )
2. Free to play with micro transactions is the one true business model.
3. Client downloads are death.
4. We must look beyond the core gamer audience and embrace more casual players.
5. Women are 50% of the audience.
6. Don’t trust the client, it is in the hands of the enemy.
7. You game is a service.
8. MMOs are hard. No, they’re really really hard. Seriously. You can’t possibly imagine how hard they are.
9. [...]

Will Amazon Become the Wal-Mart of the Web?

Will Amazon become the Wal-Mart of the Web? Hasn't it already?

Sometime later this year, if current trends continue, worldwide sales of media products — the books, movies and music that Amazon started with — will be surpassed for the first time by sales of other merchandise on the site. (That transition already occurred this year in its North American business.)
[...]
Over the last year, shoppers have bought fewer books, CDs and DVDs, in many cases opting for cheaper digital downloads. In the quarter ending in June, for example, Amazon’s worldwide media sales grew only 1 percent, to $2.4 billion, highlighted by a slowdown in video games.

But during the same quarter, sales of other products, which the company lumps together on its balance sheet in a grouping dubbed “electronics and general merchandise,” grew by 35 percent, to $2.07 billion.

One of Amazon's key strengths is its supply chain management:

Instead of storing similar items next to each other — televisions with other electronics, shampoo with other personal care items — randomness abounds. In the warehouse where Terry Jones loudly roams the aisles, which the company somewhat randomly dubs Phoenix 3, “Star Wars” action figures are stocked next to sleeping bags; bagel chips sit next to the “Beatles: Rock Band” video game.

In one high-risk valuables area, monitored by overhead video cameras, a single Impulse Jack Rabbit sex toy is wedged between a Rosetta Stone Spanish CD and an iPod Nano.

In nearby Goodyear, Ariz., at an even larger distribution center known as Phoenix 5, Amazon stores and ships more unwieldy items. Samsung 54-inch plasma HDTVs are stacked three high on the floor, next to crates of Pampers. Across the aisle, a kayak ($879) sits alone on the floor, wrapped tightly in cardboard and plastic.

Amazon says it stores dissimilar products next to each other on purpose, to minimize the possibility that employees select the wrong item. That seems unlikely: every product, shelving unit, forklift, roller cart and employee badge in these shipping centers has a bar code. Each physical move is orchestrated by software that calculates the most efficient path from shelf to the shipping area, telling employees on their wireless bar code readers which aisle and palette to go to next.

“Imagine how many customers we serve and if they were all here now,” said Bert Wegner, Amazon’s director of North American fulfillment, gesturing over the open space in Phoenix 5. “We are doing the heavy lifting for all of them in a hyper-efficient manner.”

Amazon also benefits greatly from its advanced inventory management methods and ability to negotiate beneficial payment terms with vendors. The company sells such a large volume of merchandise, and can predict customer demand so accurately, that it generally sells products within 65 days, before it has to pay suppliers for them.

That arrangement, which analysts call “negative working capital,” is unusual outside of grocery stores and allows Amazon to avoid the huge capital charges associated with buying and storing such a broad line of inventory. It also boosts the company’s cash flow, which it has used to pay down its debt to $109 million at the end of June from a hefty $2 billion in 2000, and to add more product lines to its Web site.

Amazon’s profit and margins have always been slender; it earned only $645 million in 2008, up 36 percent from the year before, compared to Wal-Mart’s $13.4 billion, up 5 percent. But Wall Street is more enamored by the promise of the online retailer, valuing Amazon at around 60 times earnings and Wal-Mart at 15 times earnings.

“They don’t have to incur huge inventory carrying costs and can add product categories almost ad infinitum,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “Amazon has an almost magical business model in terms of inventory management.”

Lean Software Development

Mary Poppendieck (Leading Lean Software Development) never heard the term waterfall while working at 3M:

We always had developers understand their customers and test every bit of code as they wrote it. The first time I heard about this thing called “waterfall,” it was prescribed by a contract for the State of Minnesota, and I couldn’t figure out how it could possibly work. Actually, it didn’t work very well at all, and I decided it was a rather strange way to develop software. So I decided to write a book, taking ideas from Lean Manufacturing and applying them to software development.

Lean is from manufacturing, but many of the ideas carry over to other fields with little modification:

Well, Lean works for banking, which is a service business. Svenska Handelsbanken is a bank in Sweden that has been using Lean principles for 25 years. It puts the bank in a position to deal with discontinuous change in the financial markets by expecting local teams to make independent decisions. By having many individual teams seeing what opportunities are out there and responding, the bank stays ahead of changes in the markets.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, also believes in small, independent teams; he calls them two-pizza teams. A two-pizza team is the number of people that can be fed with two pizzas. Amazon’s cloud is a service-oriented architecture in which each service is owned by a two-pizza team. The team is responsible for the service from cradle to grave: determining what is needed, development, operations, support — everything.

Toyota is the same; teams of six to eight people, with good mentoring from their manager, get work done better and faster.

An underlying concept of Lean is that if you can't create small independent-thinking teams, you can't respond rapidly in the face of continuous change. So you need to create a governance structure that allows the teams to make the right decisions and makes it possible for them to focus on the outcomes of the ultimate customer.

(Hat tip to Kevin Meyer at Evolving Excellence.)

Google Lets You Custom-Print Millions of Public Domain Books

Google now lets you custom-print millions of public domain books through their partner On Demand Books and the Espresso Book Machine:

And now Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.

Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000 Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore of about $3 for materials. The machine prints the pages, binds them together perfectly, and then cuts the book to size and then dumps a book out, literally hot off the press, with a satisfying clunk. (The company says a machine can print about 60,000 books a year.)

That means you can stop into the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, and for less than $10, custom-order your own copy of Dame Curtsey’s Book of Candy Making, the third edition of which was published in 1920 and which can only be found online for $47.00 used.

Dane Neller, On Demand Books CEO, says the announcement flips book distribution on its head.

“We believe this is a revolution,” Neller said. “Content retrieval is now centralized and production is decentralized.”

On Demand Books suggests that book stores price the books at about $8, leaving retailers with a $3 profit after both Google and On Demand Books collect a buck-a-book fee. Google plans to donate its share to a yet-unspecified charity, which might be a reaction to its messy legal and public policy fight over a copyright settlement that covers books that are still in copyright. (All the books that are being added to On Demand Books repertoire in this agreement are out of copyright in the country where it will be printed.)

Google spokeswoman Jennie Johnson notes that “Most people can’t get into the Harvard Library, but you can print their books next door,” at the Harvard Bookstore.

Nurtured by Super-Angel VCs

Intuit recently acquired Mint.com for $170 million, but Mint never would have made it that far without being nurtured by super-angel VCs:

Mint.com owes much of its success to one such investor, First Round Capital, which opted to back the fledgling company at a time when other VCs demurred. Indeed, the Mint.com acquisition is First Round Capital's largest exit, beating out the $100 million sale of portfolio company Powerset to Microsoft. And although First Round Capital would not quantify the return on its investment, co-founder Josh Kopelman says the Mint.com deal generated the highest return of any deal the firm has done. Previously its best return came when eBay acquired StumbleUpon for $75 million, which generated more than 14 times First Round Capital's original investment. "I don't think this changes our strategy," Kopelman says. "It is continued validation for our approach."

When First Round Capital made its initial investment in 2006, Patzer was a 25-year-old software engineer working for an electronic design automation company. But the Duke- and Princeton-educated entrepreneur envisioned building a Web site that would help consumers manage their money—one much easier to use than Quicken, the market-leading product from Intuit. "Quicken is not quick," Patzer recalls saying to himself at the time. "There's got to be a better way to do this."

After spending 14 hours a day for six months building an early version of Mint out of his own savings, Patzer began looking for money to take the company to the next level. He was turned down by a dozen angel investors and many top established venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Clearstone Ventures. "Every single VC told me I would fail because no one would trust a startup with their financial info," Patzer says.

First Round Capital saw something other investors missed. At a networking event for entrepreneurs in the summer of 2006, Patzer pitched Kopelman, piquing his interest. "I had a server running on a laptop in the trunk of my car," Patzer says. "He waited a couple of minutes. I ran out and got the laptop and fired up a demo."

Kopelman liked what he saw. He asked Patzer to send him a business plan. "We saw a really big market and someone who had really thought it out," Kopelman says. "He saw an opportunity to solve a really big pain point for customers." Within 10 days, First Round Capital offered to invest in the startup. "They moved incredibly fast," Patzer says. "First Round Capital put down a term sheet without caring what anyone else would do."

First Round Capital didn't stop helping the company there:

Guidance from First Round Capital also helped Mint.com avoid several potential disasters. After Mint.com won the top award at the TechCrunch 40 conference in 2007, its Web site was besieged by users. The company's servers went down, hampering its ability to capitalize on the coveted distinction. The Mint.com team traced the crash to a problem in its database technology. Later that night, Kopelman personally contacted an executive of MySQL, Mint.com's database provider, asking him to help solve the problem. "We were able to resolve the issue within 24 hours—if not faster—because of the connections Josh had," Patzer says. "It was a crucial moment." Thanks to that save, Mint.com met its initial three-month goal for user acquisition in 36 hours.

A One-Way Ticket to Mars

Existing plans to travel to Mars are absurdly expensive and will remain unrealistic for decades, Paul Davies says, but there is a way to put humans on Mars at a fraction of the cost using foreseeable technology:

Five years ago I made the radical proposal that a handful of astronauts be sent on a one-way journey to Mars. I am not talking about a suicide mission. With its protective atmosphere, accessible water and carbon dioxide, and significant amounts of methane, Mars is one of the few places in the solar system that could support a human colony.

By eliminating the need to transport heavy fuel and equipment for the return journey, costs could be slashed by 80% or more. Supplies and a power source would be sent on ahead, and only when everything is functional would astronauts be dispatched. The base would be re-supplied from Earth every two years. Of course the mission would still be highly risky, but so is round-the-world ballooning and mountaineering. The ideal astronauts would be scientists and engineers who could continue to do world-class science while serving as trailblazers for the colonisation of a new planet. Eventually, more people would join them. After a century or two, the colony could become self-sustaining.

The first Martians would have to accept reduced life expectancy due to radiation, lack of advanced medical resources and lower gravity, but a return journey entails similar hazards. Moreover, the most dangerous parts of space exploration are take-off and landing: cutting out the return halves the risk.

I have presented my idea at Nasa conferences, and discussed it with scientists in other countries. The response has nearly always been positive. There is a persistent myth that nobody would volunteer to go. In fact, I have found no shortage of eager scientists, young and old, who say they would accept a one-way ticket.

The People’s Republic of Google

Unlike Cringely, I would not call it The People’s Republic of Google, based on this description — but it's definitely not a normal business either:

Google isn’t organized like any tech company I’ve ever worked in, that’s for sure. Peer review seems to be at the heart of nearly everything. Yes, there are executives doing whatever it is that executives do up in the Eric/Larry/Sergeysphere, but down where the bits meet the bus most decisions seem to be reached through a combination of peer review-driven concensus and literal popularity polls.

The heart of Google is code and all code there is peer reviewed TO DEATH. The result is absolutely the cleanest code in the digital world, forced into that condition by what can be a torturous process of line-by-comment-by punctuation mark analysis sometimes over-driven by people who take their work WAY too seriously. You know the type. Peer review wars have apparently been known to break out at Google, though rarely. Usually the pedants are accommodated and, in fact, they for the most part win. The code is clean as a result, but the process is s-l-o-w, or so I’ve been told.

And the code had better be clean, because at Google developers outnumber testers by 50-to-1.

But peer review at Google goes way beyond looking at the code. Hiring requires peer review. Promotion requires peer review. Presumably even firing requires peer review, though I didn’t have anyone actually tell me that. All the technical workers at Google are involved in peer review activities a LOT of the time — up to 20 percent, in fact.

Which brings us to the vaunted 20 percent time Google engineers are supposed to get to work on anything they like. Most of them apparently use that time for corporate housekeeping — for doing all that peer reviewing. It makes sense: if you want to appear productive in your main job yet are still required to do all this work that would normally be handled by managers, when else can you do it but during time you don’t have to account for?

This may be part of the reason that the Google 20 percent time hasn’t spawned as many new products as I expected it would.

This is where it gets odd:

At Google I am told developers bid for what they want to do with their time. If there’s a big job to be done people commit to parts of it. And the parts nobody commits to do? They don’t get done. Really. So when we wonder exactly how a JotSpot, which I really liked, turns into a Google Sites, which I really don’t like, that morphology apparently comes from people changing what they want to change.

There is no marketing input.

Effectively, there is no marketing.

I am not making this up.

How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade

It helps to have an old law-school buddy like Peter Thiel, Alex Karp found out, when you decide to disrupt the spy trade with your new high-tech venture:

"We were very naive. We just thought this was a cool idea," says Palantir's 41-year-old chief executive Alexander Karp, whose usual dress is a track-suit jacket, blue jeans, and red leather sneakers. "I underestimated how difficult it would be."
[...]
Palantir's roots date back to 2000, when Mr. Karp returned to the U.S. after living for years in Frankfurt, where he earned his doctorate in German social philosophy and discovered a talent for investing. He reconnected with a buddy from Stanford Law School, Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of online payment company PayPal.

In 2003, Mr. Thiel pitched an idea to Mr. Karp: Could they build software that would uncover terror networks using the approach PayPal had devised to fight Russian cybercriminals?

PayPal's software could make connections between fraudulent payments that on the surface seemed unrelated. By following such leads, PayPal was able to identify suspect customers and uncover cybercrime networks. The company saw a tenfold decrease in fraud losses after it launched the software, while many competitors struggled to beat back cheaters.

Mr. Thiel wanted to design software to tackle terrorism because at the time, he says, the government's response to issues like airport security was increasingly "nightmarish." The two launched Palantir in 2004 with three other investors, but they attracted little interest from venture-capital firms. The company's $30 million start-up costs were largely bankrolled by Mr. Thiel and his own venture-capital fund.

Credit Laundering

Insight — which is more than mere knowledge — generally comes through personal connections, Cringely argues, rather than books — and so far we’ve had to create campuses and pay $50,000 per year to enjoy such personal connections:

That no longer makes sense.

Education, which — along with health care — seems to exist in an alternate economic universe, ought to be subject to the same economic realities as anything else. We should have a marketplace for insight. Take a variety of experts (both professors and lay specialists) and make them available over the Internet by video conference. Each expert charges by the minute with those charges adjusting over time until a real market value is reached. The whole setup would run like iTunes and sessions would be recorded for later review.

Remember, all lectures are also available online for free. What costs is the personal touch.

Say a particularly good professor wants to make $200,000 per year by working no more than 20 hours per week or about 1000 hours per year. That gives them a billing rate of $200 per hour.

Now look back at your university career. How much one-on-one time did you actually get with the professors who really influenced your life? I did the calculation and came up with about two hours per week, max. Imagine a four-year undergraduate career running 30 weeks per year — 120 total weeks of school — times two hours of insight per week for a total of 240 hours. At $200 per hour the cost comes to $48,000 or $12,000 per year.

That’s a huge savings compared to the $200,000+ an MIT-level education would cost today (remember the MIT online degree — there is one — costs the same as if you were attending in Cambridge). And ideally the pool of insightful experts would be far greater than any one university could ever employ. And that’s the point of this exercise; it can’t be an emulation of a traditional university, because that would inevitably disappoint — it has to be in at least one way clearly, obviously, stupendously better than what’s available now.

This brings up the subject of Straighterline, a new online quasi-university charging $99 per month for "all you can eat":

Straighterline has a problem with accreditation — they can’t get it. So they cut deals with no-name schools to effectively launder their credits, passing them on to third-party schools. I see nothing wrong with this but in time Straighterline or schools like it will have to take a more direct approach to the problem of gaining acceptance. The University of Phoenix did that through the simple expedient of offering real classes all over the place and charging a lot more than $99 per month for all-you-can-learn. Exciting as that price is, it is precisely what scares the crap out of many established colleges.

If I were running Straighterline, then, I’d get ready to file a big restraint of trade lawsuit against some big vulnerable school caught up in, say, an NCAA athletic recruiting scandal. ”Pick your targets carefully,” Pa Cringely always said.

The other thing I would strongly recommend is that Straighterline put some big bucks into recruiting its own stellar faculty. Spend whatever it takes to get the top people in some discipline to start. Hire academics if you can and lay practitioners if you can’t. Most academic contracts don’t prohibit teaching part-time elsewhere and if they do try to stop the practice, well that’s just a further example of restraint of trade.

Thin-Film Solar Startup Debuts With $4 Billion in Contracts

A startup with a secret recipe for printing cheap solar cells on aluminum foil debuted today — with $4 billion in contracts:

Nanosolar’s technology consists of sandwiches of copper, indium, gallium and selenide (CIGS) that are 100 times thinner than the silicon solar cells that dominate the solar photovoltaics market. Its potential convinced Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to back the company as angel investors in its early days.

Two big announcements marked its coming out party: The company has $4 billion in contracts and can make money selling its products for $1 per watt of a panel’s capacity. That’s cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels in markets across the world.

Small solar farms should face fewer NIMBY hurdles than big coal or nuclear plants.

Traditional solar cells can reach higher efficiencies — 40 percent versus 16 percent — but they require a lot of silicon, and they're not cheap.

Sleepy snow leopard cub Yukichi

Is it wrong that I see adorable sleepy snow leopard cub Yukichi, and I immediately think, "He doesn't use Windows!"

(Max OS X Snow Leopard is now available.)

What happened to Second Life?

What happened to Second Life?, Cringely asks:

Facebook is hot right now and Second Life is not, and some of that comes down to the difference between fantasy and reality. Second Life is a fantasy environment — an EverQuest without the quest — and that’s the problem. It has the heavy processing requirements of a game without the rich textural depth of a Tolkein or even of real life.

Facebook, being tied to the real lives of the people involved in it, never runs out of anything, whether it is server power (minimal requirements there. at least in comparison to Second Life) or stuff to talk about. Second Life is barren in comparison. By attempting to imitate life, it pales beside the real thing.

150th Anniversary Of Solar Carrington Event

A couple days ago it was the 150th anniversary of the solar Carrington event, named after English astronomer Richard Carrington, which caused such an intense geomagnetic event that telegraph lines operated from currents induced by geomagnetism:

On Sept. 2, 1859, at the telegraph office at No. 31 State Street in Boston at 9:30 a.m., the operators’ lines were overflowing with current, so they unplugged the batteries connected to their machines, and kept working using just the electricity coursing through the air.

In the wee hours of that night, the most brilliant auroras ever recorded had broken out across the skies of the Earth. People in Havana and Florida reported seeing them. The New York Times ran a 3,000 word feature recording the colorful event in purple prose.

Today, such a solar eruption, or coronal mass ejection, would melt power stations and throw us into an unelectrified society for months or years, because our power grids are more vulnerable than ever:

The problem is interconnectedness. In recent years, utilities have joined grids together to allow long-distance transmission of low-cost power to areas of sudden demand. On a hot summer day in California, for instance, people in Los Angeles might be running their air conditioners on power routed from Oregon. It makes economic sense — but not necessarily geomagnetic sense. Interconnectedness makes the system susceptible to wide-ranging "cascade failures."

To estimate the scale of such a failure, report co-author John Kappenmann of the Metatech Corporation looked at the great geomagnetic storm of May 1921, which produced ground currents as much as ten times stronger than the 1989 Quebec storm, and modeled its effect on the modern power grid. He found more than 350 transformers at risk of permanent damage and 130 million people without power. The loss of electricity would ripple across the social infrastructure with "water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on."

"The concept of interdependency," the report notes, "is evident in the unavailability of water due to long-term outage of electric power — and the inability to restart an electric generator without water on site."

Pimp My Rifle

James Dunnigan describes some popular add-ons for infantry weapons, starting with the red dot sight:

This sight, similar to the point-and-shoot viewfinder found in cameras for many years, was first used by the military (U.S. Army Special Forces) in 1970, and also became popular with hunters and paint ball gun users. The red dot sight was more accurate than iron sights, could be used with both eyes open and was generally more effective at typical combat ranges (under a hundred meters). The sight was particularly effective at night, and in the 1970s, that was its big advantage.

Current devices, like the U.S. Marine Corps ACOG (Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight), does not use batteries and provides a red chevron-shaped reticle and bullet drop compensator. For daytime use, a fiber optic system collects available light for brightness and controlled contrast in the scope. At night, the system relies on tritium for illumination. The 4x32 sight allows you to get first round hits at 300 meter, or longer ranges. The sight still allows for better accuracy at closer ranges, with both eyes open. The manufacturer, Trijicon, made the original sights of this type back in the 1970s. SOCOM has long used them, and many marines and soldiers have bought the civilian version of the ACOG with their own money. At a thousand bucks each, ACOG costs more than the rifle it’s mounted on, and the users consider it well worth the price.

For a while, troops were happy with a Surefire White Light 6P flashlight taped to the end of their rifle, but now they have MFALs — Multi-Functional Aiming Lights:

This looks like a small flashlight, and attaches to the rifle. But this device can put out visible, or invisible (infrared, or IR) light. When using IR, you go into a cave providing light only you can see, with your night vision equipment. If you are real quiet (or sort of quiet), you have a big advantage over the bad guys trying to hide in the dark. This rig also allows you to see any booby traps the enemy may have laid for you. MFAL also emits a laser pointer (like the older "red dot"), but one that cannot be seen by the enemy (unless they also have night vision gear, which they usually don't.) The MFAL was developed with the help of feedback from combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beaming Solar Energy from Space to Japan

Space-based solar power isn't a crazy idea — as long as you ignore the economics, which a Japanese consortium apparently has:

Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and IHI Corp. will join a 2 trillion yen ($21 billion) Japanese project intending to build a giant solar-power generator in space within three decades and beam electricity to earth.
[...]
Japan is developing the technology for the 1-gigawatt solar station, fitted with four square kilometers of solar panels, and hopes to have it running in three decades, according to a 15- page background document prepared by the trade ministry in August. Being in space it will generate power from the sun regardless of weather conditions, unlike earth-based solar generators, according to the document. One gigawatt is enough to supply about 294,000 average Tokyo homes.
[...]
Transporting panels to the solar station 36,000 kilometers above the earth’s surface will be prohibitively costly, so Japan has to figure out a way to slash expenses to make the solar station commercially viable, said Hiroshi Yoshida, Chief Executive Officer of Excalibur KK, a Tokyo-based space and defense-policy consulting company.

“These expenses need to be lowered to a hundredth of current estimates,” Yoshida said by phone from Tokyo.

The project to generate electricity in space and transmit it to earth may cost at least 2 trillion yen, said Koji Umehara, deputy director of space development and utilization at the science ministry. Launching a single rocket costs about 10 billion yen, he said.

“Humankind will some day need this technology, but it will take a long time before we use it,” Yoshida said.

The trade ministry and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which are leading the project, plan to launch a small satellite fitted with solar panels in 2015, and test beaming the electricity from space through the ionosphere, the outermost layer of the earth’s atmosphere, according to the trade ministry document. The government hopes to have the solar station fully operational in the 2030s, it said.

Evernote Financials

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, shares some of the financials behind the company's universal memory drawer:

Evernote, of course, is free. That’s important because the company, which does no advertising, needs to acquire customers as cheaply as possible. “Our product is our marketing,” Mr. Libin says.

In 18 months, 1.4 million people have tried the service. An additional 4,500 try it each day.

“Free is not a loss leader,” he says. “If we can get a small percentage of users to pay we start to make money.”

How many times has a venture capitalist heard that? But Mr. Libin showed that the magic is not only that it takes just a small percentage of customers to turn red ink into black, but also that the longer they remain customers, the more profitable they become.

About 75 percent of the customers walk away within the first four months. That’s not worrisome, because the revenue from Evernote’s 500,000 active users is growing faster than the growth in the customer base. How? Customers discover that they need more than the basic storage space or want some extra features, like the ability to scan PDF documents for a particular word. Evernote charges them $5 a month or $45 a year for these and other benefits.

Mr. Libin studied the behavior of the earliest adopters and found that the longer customers used the service, the more likely they were to start paying for it. About 0.5 percent convert to paying customers in the first month. But after about a year, 4 percent have converted. (He says he thinks the figure will top out at about 22 percent.)

It makes sense. The shoebox of data is more valuable to the customer as it becomes larger. In addition, compelling uses — like photographing those business cards — quickly eat up the monthly allotment of memory, inducing a person to start paying. The longer the customer stays, the more valuable he becomes.

The company gets about 3 cents of revenue for each active user in the first month of use, but after a year that same cohort of customers is providing 35 cents each.

Evernote made $79,000 from paying customers in July, Mr. Libin says.

That’s not enough to cover the cost of the engineers who design new features and the additional servers to store all the added data. But the cost of staffing doesn’t rise exponentially as more customers join, and the cost of adding storage declines because computing power keeps getting cheaper. (Electricity costs go up, but that is not a budget killer.)

The variable cost for each active user was about 50 cents a month when the company started, but has been dropping along a curve to 9 cents a month. By January 2011, Mr. Libin projects, the company will break even.

Go, Steam Racer, Go!

World's fastest kettle breaks oldest land speed record:

This morning, at California's Edwards Air Force Base, a British steam car put the kettle to the metal and broke the oldest-standing land speed record. Driver Charles Burnett III piloted the car to speeds of 136 mph and 151 mph during two separate runs.

British engineers celebrated a triumph that comes after days of setbacks and 10 years of development. Attempts to break the record last week had faltered when the steam car's turbine became stuck, although the car had unofficially broken the record during test runs.

The official recorded speed averaged from the two latest runs breaks the previous steam car record of 127 mph set by Fred Marriott in 1906 — as long as it holds up to official FIA scrutiny.

Still, the three-ton, 25-ft "Inspiration" steam car represents a marvel of engineering that wraps new materials around an old concept. Lightweight carbon-fiber composite and aluminum cover a steel space frame chassis, and the car holds 12 boilers containing almost two miles of tubing. Steam gets superheated to 400 degrees C (752 degrees F) before being injected into the turbine at more than twice the speed of sound.

Yesterday's Tech Revolutions: Galleasses

Rick Robinson usually looks to the future and imagines what space combat might look like, but sometimes he looks back at yesterday's tech revolutions — like the galleass, which made medieval navies obsolete:

Medieval naval warfare followed a combined arms doctrine, a mix of slow but sturdy and high-built round ships, similar to large transports and functioning as mobile castles, and faster, low-built rowing ships, galleys and smaller barges, that served roughly as seagoing cavalry. The rowing ships had offensive punch (including putting troops ashore), while the big round ships provided defensive strength and logistic support.
[...]
[The English galleass Hart's] mission was to serve as an anti-galley escort. Though slower than the French galleys she was intended to fight she could at least force them back with her heavy bow guns. And if the galleys swarmed in, even though she lacked the high fighting castles of conventional big ships her powerful secondary armament could give them a very hot reception.
[...]
Though effective against galleys, [galleasses] were pigs under oar-power — but swans under sail. And their broadside secondary armament, intended for defense against swarming galleys, turned out to be highly effective in offense.

So larger versions abandoned the lower-deck oars, replacing them with more broadside guns, until the secondary armament became the main armament. This variant type got a variant name, galleon, and ended up as the ancestor of the classic broadside-armed sailing man-of-war. (Some smaller models retained oars well into the 18th century — in an unusual Hollywood concession to accuracy the Black Pearl in Pirates of the Caribbean is fitted for sweeps, as was Captain Kidd's rather similar ship, Adventure Galley.)

The Programming Antihero

Noel Llopis describes The Programming Antihero on his team:

I was fresh out of college, still wet behind the ears, and about to enter the beta phase of my first professional game project — a late-90s PC title. It had been an exciting rollercoaster ride, as projects often are. All the content was in and the game was looking good. There was one problem though: We were way over our memory budget.

Since most memory was taken up by models and textures, we worked with the artists to reduce the memory footprint of the game as much as possible. We scaled down images, decimated models, and compressed textures. Sometimes we did this with the support of the artists, and sometimes over their dead bodies.

We cut megabyte after megabyte, and after a few days of frantic activity, we reached a point where we felt there was nothing else we could do. Unless we cut some major content, there was no way we could free up any more memory. Exhausted, we evaluated our current memory usage. We were still 1.5 MB over the memory limit!

At this point one of the most experienced programmers in the team, one who had survived many years of development in the "good old days," decided to take matters into his own hands. He called me into his office, and we set out upon what I imagined would be another exhausting session of freeing up memory.

Instead, he brought up a source file and pointed to this line:

static char buffer[1024*1024*2];

"See this?" he said. And then deleted it with a single keystroke. Done!

He probably saw the horror in my eyes, so he explained to me that he had put aside those two megabytes of memory early in the development cycle. He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory to free up when it's really needed.

He walked out of the office and announced he had reduced the memory footprint to within budget constraints — he was toasted as the hero of the project.

As horrified as I was back then about such a "barbaric" practice, I have to admit that I'm warming up to it. I haven't gotten into the frame of mind where I can put it to use yet, but I can see how sometimes, when you're up against the wall, having a bit of memory tucked away for a rainy day can really make a difference. Funny how time and experience changes everything.

You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry

Nick Waanders employed a creative variant of the kanban to get his game-development team to focus on what really mattered — call it, You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry:

It's hard to convince a team of 100 people that the programmers can't simply "fix" the performance of the engine, and that some of the ways people had gotten used to working to needed to be changed. People needed to understand that the performance of the game was everybody's problem, and I figured the best way to do this is with a bit of humor that had a bit of hidden truth behind it.

The solution took maybe an hour. A fellow programmer took four pictures of my face — one really happy, one normal, one a bit angry, and one where I am pulling my hair out. I put this image in the corner of the screen, and it was linked to the frame rate. If the game ran at over 30 fps, I was really happy; if it ran below 20, I was angry.

After this change, the whole FPS issue transformed from, "Ah, the programmers will fix it," to, "Hmm, if I put this model in, Nick is going to be angry! I'd better optimize this a little first." People could instantly see if a change they made had an impact on the frame rate, and we ended up shipping the game at 30 fps.

The Land Ironclads

H.G. Wells' The Land Ironclads famously predicted the modern tank — in 1903, well before the first tank saw combat in 1916 — but it also predicted trench warfare and stormtrooper tactics:

The young lieutenant lay beside the war correspondent and admired the idyllic calm of the enemy's lines through his fieldglass.

'So far as I can see,' he said at last, 'one man.'

'What's he doing?' asked the war correspondent.

'Field-glass at us,' said the young lieutenant.

'And this is war?'

'No,' said the young lieutenant, 'it's Bloch.'

'The game's a draw.'

'No! They've got to win or else they lose. A draw's a win for our side.'
[...]
They had been there a month. Since the first brisk movements after the declaration of war things had gone slower and slower, until it seemed as though the whole machine of events must have run down. To begin with, they had had almost a scampering time; the invader had come across the frontier on the very dawn of the war in half-a-dozen parallel columns behind a cloud of cyclists and cavalry, with a general air of coming straight on the capital, and the defender horsemen had held him up, and peppered him and forced him to open out, to outflank, and had then bolted to the next position in the most approved style, for a couple of days, until in the afternoon, bump! they had the invader against their prepared lines of defence.

He did not suffer so much as had been hoped and expected: he was coming on, it seemed, with his eyes open, his scouts winded the guns, and down he sat at once without the shadow of an attack and began grubbing trenches for himself, as though he meant to sit down there to the very end of time. He was slow, but much more wary than the world had been led to expect, and he kept convoys tucked in and shielded his slow-marching infantry sufficiently well to prevent any heavy adverse scoring.

'But he ought to attack,' the young lieutenant had insisted.

'He'll attack us at dawn, somewhere along the lines. You'll get the bayonets coming into the trenches just about when you can see,' the war correspondent had held until a week ago.

The young lieutenant winked when he said that.

When one early morning the men the defenders sent to lie out five hundred yards before the trenches, with a view to the unexpected emptying of magazines into any night attack, gave way to causeless panic and blazed away at nothing for ten minutes, the war correspondent understood the meaning of that wink.

'What would you do if you were the enemy?' said the war correspondent, suddenly.

'If I had men like I've got now?'

'Yes.'

'Take those trenches.'

'How?'

'Oh — dodges! Crawl out half-way at night before moon-rise, and get into touch with the chaps we send out. Blaze at 'em if they tried to shift, and so bag some of 'em in the daylight. Learn that patch of ground by heart, lie all day in squatty holes, and come on nearer next night. There's a bit over there, lumpy ground, where they could get across to rushing distance — easy.

In a night or so. It would be a mere game for our fellows; it's what they're made for.... Guns? Shrapnel and stuff wouldn't stop good men who meant business.'

Secrets of the Mystery Gun that Shelled Paris

The June, 1930 issue of Modern Mechanix has a well-illustrated piece revealing the secrets of the mystery gun that shelled Paris during the Great War a dozen years earlier:

There was a barrel 120 feet in length, approximately twice as long as the biggest guns built to that time — so long, in fact, that the end had to be supported in the air to keep it from bending down and being shot off by its own shell. In fact, that very thing happened to the first of the guns tested at the German proving ground, for the barrel bent a full inch under its own weight.

Next they fired a shell 75 to 80 miles or more, over a total trajectory ranging from 90 to nearly 100 miles.

To do that the shell was shot 24 miles above the earth, higher than any man-made thing, save possibly a small sounding balloon, had ever penetrated. At that extreme height the shell traveled through what was almost a vacuum, at a temperature of far more than 100 degrees below zero.

The shell, traveling at an average speed of 30 miles a minute — or sixty times as fast as the usual legal rate for automobiles — took three minutes to complete its aerial flight of 90 miles. It remained away from the earth so long, in fact, that the old world revolved on in space while the projectile was away, so the gunners had to aim a half mile east of the target in order that the target might be there when the shell arrived to hit it.

Online Education Beats the Classroom

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, concludes that students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction:

The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

I cringe when I see Fast Company parody itself with headlines like How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education — but I found this bit on Western Governors University intriguing:

If open courseware is about applying technology to sharing knowledge, and Peer2Peer is about social networking for teaching and learning, Bob Mendenhall, president of the online Western Governors University, is proudest of his college's innovation in the third, hardest-to-crack dimension of education: accreditation and assessment.

WGU was formed in the late 1990s, when the governors of 19 western states decided to take advantage of the newfangled Internet and create an online university to expand access to students in rural communities across their region. Today, it's an all-online university with 12,000 students in all 50 states. It's a private not-for-profit, like Harvard; the only state money was an initial $100,000 stake from each founding state. WGU runs entirely on tuition: $2,890 for a six-month term.

"We said, 'Let's create a university that actually measures learning,' " Mendenhall says. "We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree."

WGU began by convening a national advisory board of employers, including Google and Tenet Healthcare. "We asked them, 'What is it the graduates you're hiring can't do that you wish they could?' We've never had a silence after that question." Then assessments were created to measure each competency area. Mendenhall recalls one student who had been self-employed in IT for 15 years but never earned a degree; he passed all the required assessments in six months and took home his bachelor's without taking a course.

Most students, though, do the full coursework, working at their own pace through online course modules, playlists of prerecorded lectures, readings, projects, and quizzes. For every 80 students, a PhD faculty member, certified in the discipline, serves as a full-time mentor. "Our faculty are there to guide, direct, counsel, coach, encourage, motivate, keep on track, and that's their whole job," Mendenhall says.

Multiple-choice tests are scored by computer, while essays and in-person evaluations are judged by a separate cadre of graders. What WGU is doing is using the Internet to disaggregate the various functions of teaching: the "sage on the stage" conveyor of information, the cheerleader and helpmate, and the evaluator. WGU constantly surveys both graduates and their employers to find out if they are lacking in any competencies so they can continue to fine-tune their programs.

Mendenhall is impatient with those who argue that what he's doing with education and technology is unworkable. "Technology has changed the productivity equation of every industry except education," he says. "We're simply trying to demonstrate that it can do it in education — if you change the way you do education as opposed to just adding technology on top."

A Lunar Nuclear Reactor

Researchers at NASA and the Department of Energy recently tested key technologies for a lunar nuclear reactor that might power an outpost on the moon or Mars:

To generate electricity, the researchers used a liquid metal to transfer the heat from the reactor to the Stirling engine, which uses gas pressure to convert heat into the energy needed to generate electricity. For the tests, the researchers used a non-nuclear heat source. The liquid metal was a sodium potassium mixture that has been used in the past to transfer heat from a reactor to a generator, says Palac, but this is the first time this mixture has been used with a Stirling engine.

"They are very efficient and robust, and we believe [it] can last for eight years unattended," says Lee Mason, the principal investigator of the project at Glenn. The system performed better than expected, Palac says, generating 2.3 kilowatts of power at a steady pace.

The researchers also developed a lightweight radiator panel to cool the system and dissipate the heat from the reactor. The prototype panel is approximately six feet by nine feet--one-twentieth the size required for a full-scale system. Heat from a water-cooling system is circulated to the radiator where it dissipates.

The researchers tested the radiator panel in a vacuum chamber at Glenn that replicates the lack of atmosphere and the extreme temperatures on the moon--from over 100 degrees Celsius during the day to below 100 degrees Celsius at night. The panel dissipated six kilowatts of energy, more than expected--a "very successfully test," says Palac. On the moon, the panel must also survive the dusty environment cause by the regolith.

Lastly, the researchers tested the performance of the Stirling alternator in a radiation environment at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. The objective was to test the performance of the motor, ensuring that the materials would not degrade. The alternator was subjected to 20 times the amount of radiation it would expect to see in its lifetime and survived without any significant problems.

Mason says that the tests are very important in showing the feasibility of the system and that the next step is for the researchers to conduct a full system demonstration, by combining a non-nuclear reactor simulator with the Stirling engine and radiator panel. He says that these tests should be completed in 2014.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

40 Million Years of Uranium, at 10X Current Use

Al Fin notes that we have 40 million years' worth of uranium, at 10 times our current use — and we have three times as much thorium as uranium in Earth's crust:

According to Brian Wang, there is an estimated 40 trillion tons of Uranium in Earth's crust, and over 120 trillion tons of Thorium. Only 67,000 tons of Uranium are "consumed" yearly. If rational fuel enrichment and re-cycling is incorporated into the fission cycle, Earth would never run out of fissionable uranium.

The Thorium cycle is safer and less prone to weapons proliferation. Fortunately, we have over 100 million years worth of Thorium.

Electric Chopper

The guys at Orange County Choppers have finally gone and built an electric chopper:

On Wednesday, Siemens, the electronics and electrical engineering global powerhouse, unveiled the Smart Chopper it commissioned from the renowned custom motorcycle outfit. Siemens claims the bike has a 60-mile range and a 100 mph top speed. An onboard charging unit can be plugged into any 110-volt socket to charge the bike in five hours, and Siemens says it’ll charge in as little as one hour when plugged into a higher-voltage station. A single-speed, clutch-less transmission delivers the power from a 27-hp electric motor.

Why do they always cite the least impressive stats for an electric vehicle? They don't have great top speed, or long range, or enormous horsepower figures, but they do accelerate off the line well.

More stats:

The 350-pound bike is long and low, with an massive 300mm (10.5 inches) rear tire. With an outrageous 120-inch wheelbase and overall 45-degree raked front end, you’ll need four lanes to make a U-turn. Sounds like an OCC bike to us.

Of course, the entire bike is outfitted with LED lighting by OSRAM Sylvania, a Siemens subsidiary.

Empire Off The Grid

Dean Kamen calls his private island off the coast of Connecticut North Dumpling Island or the Dumplonian Empire. Now that the Coast Guard has switched the local lighthouse to solar power and has cut the power they were feeding the island via submarine cable, Kamen has decided to take his tiny empire off the grid:

But Kamen is determined to use his North Dumpling empire to show that zero-net energy is not only possible now but that it will be very appealing in the future. He has resolved to live off the renewables on the island: a wind turbine and three monster arrays of solar panels, plus Kamen’s beefed-up version of the Stirling engine. It all adds up to a peak generation capacity of just under 25 kilowatts.

To coordinate the different sources, Kamen designed an intelligent system that knows, down to an individual solar panel or light source, how much energy is being produced and consumed on the island and, based on that information, negotiates the relationship between the two in real time. It is this system that he monitors and controls from his basement command center.

Kamen has many strategies to minimize his energy use, but the big breakthrough is the island’s lighting. With the help of his friend Fritz Morgan, chief technology officer at Philips Color Kinetics, in Burlington, Mass., Kamen has replaced every bulb and fixture on his island with light-emitting diodes. That switch cut the power he needed to light his lair by 50 to 70 percent.

Here's how that peak generation capacity breaks down:

The island’s four arrays of solar panels have a combined peak output of 12.2 kW. A 10-kW wind turbine that looks like a cartoon missile, made by Bergey Windpower Co., perches on a lattice tower 25 meters above the island. The Stirling engine in the basement can contribute another 2 kW if necessary.

The islands high-tech LED lighting would probably cost an ordinary consumer $100,000 — but it doesn't use much electricity:

An average household dedicates approximately 20 percent of its energy budget to lighting. Here’s how that 20 percent can be manipulated by replacing incandescents with LED lighting. A traditional 60-watt incandescent bulb lasts about 1500 hours and has only a 2.5 percent efficiency because it wastes most of its energy as heat. Its brightness rating is about 16 lumens per watt, which is a measure of how much luminosity your bulb produces for every watt it eats up. A compact fluorescent lightbulb, or CFL, does much better: A 13- to 15-W bulb has about an 11 percent efficiency, emitting around 75 lm/W. The less-wasteful CFL lasts about 10 times as long as an incandescent (a little under two years).

On the downside, CFL bulbs contain mercury, which means they must be treated and disposed of as hazardous waste. Now consider LEDs. The best of these can pump out a whopping 150 lm/W (from the ”raw” chips, not the integrated lamp or system) and function at about 22 percent efficiency. With typical use, that’s at least 11 years without changing a bulb.

What happens when the island gets neither sun nor wind?

That’s when Kamen’s Stirling engine kicks in. Kamen’s reimagining of the 193-year old design is about half the size of a refrigerator, and its job is to convert heat energy into work.

A Stirling engine contains a sealed cylinder, one end hot, the other cool, with a sliding piston that moves the gas back and forth. On the hot side, the gas expands and exerts pressure on a piston; on the cool side, it contracts. Unlike a gasoline or diesel engine, Kamen’s Stirling is an external combustion device. The fuel that heats the gas inside the engine never touches the engine itself. Unlike spark-ignition or compression-ignition vehicle engines, a Stirling doesn’t require that the fuel be mixed with air in a particular ratio. It can run on pretty much any liquid or gas fuel, including diesel, methane, gasoline, or olive oil. Got cow manure? That’ll work, too. The design is ideal in theory, converting fuel to heat and heat energy into mechanical energy, but one problem remains: The machine generates electricity at an efficiency of only 20 percent. The rest is wasted as heat.

But Kamen says the concept of ”waste heat” changes with context. In winter that heat can be diverted to the house, the clothes drier, and the island’s domestic water supply. ”Think of it as a furnace that’s also making electricity,” Kamen explains. Harness the heat from the Stirling while it generates electricity and you can get an efficiency darn near 100 percent, he says.

His own machine typically produces 1 kilowatt of electricity, enough to power 128 LED lights, each equivalent to a 60-W incandescent. The engine sits in a far corner of the basement. At the moment, it’s inactive because the solar panels are generating a steady, incoming stream of 2 kW.
The Teletrol system runs an iron-fisted dictatorship over all of these processes. If there’s any excess power, the system uses it to feed the vast bank of custom batteries lining an entire wall of the basement, 24 big red plastic containers that resemble gasoline canisters. These batteries weigh 144 kilograms apiece, cost between $1285 and $2000 a pop, and must have their chemistry checked periodically with a hydrometer.

They’re also truly and deeply rechargeable. They are lead-acid batteries optimized for what’s called a deep discharge cycle, meaning that their charge can be repeatedly and substantially depleted by 80 or 85 percent. For contrast, most battery chemistries typically tolerate at most 5 to 10 percent depletion on a regular basis. The batteries were made by a company called Surrette Battery Co., headquartered in Springhill, N.S., Canada, and Salem, Mass., which specializes in cells optimized for solar and wind-power charging. Each battery comes with a 10-year warranty.

”Every once in a while, we know we’re going to have to depend on these batteries to run the entire island,” Kamen says. They can power the island for three days continuously in the unlikely case that all sources of energy simultaneously go off-line.

Notice how the waste heat from incandescent bulbs is waste, while the waste heat from his Stirling engine makes it a furnace that's also making electricity. Hmm...

Care to Write Army Doctrine?

Care to Write Army Doctrine? If you're in the army, at all, you now can:

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.

The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being “wikified.” The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”

How to breathe on the Moon

Ferrying oxygen to the moon might cost $100 million per ton, so researchers have developed a reactor that can extract oxygen from Moon rock:

NASA has been looking for ways to get oxygen from Moon rock for several years. In 2005, as part of its Centennial Challenges programme, the agency offered a US$250,000 prize to the first team to come up with a piece of kit that could extract five kilograms of oxygen in eight hours from some simulated Moon rock. Despite raising the value of the prize pot to $1 million in 2008 with the help of the California Space Authority, the prize remains unclaimed. In addition, the agency's ongoing In Situ Resource Utilization programme is currently looking at several different technologies for extracting oxygen from Moon rock.

Now, Derek Fray, a materials chemist from the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues have come up with a potential solution by modifying an electrochemical process they invented in 2000 to get metals and alloys from metal oxides. The process uses the oxides — also found in Moon rocks — as a cathode, together with an anode made of carbon. To get the current flowing through the system, the electrodes sit in an electrolyte solution of molten calcium chloride (CaCl₂), a common salt with a melting point of almost 800 °C.

The current strips the metal oxide pellets of oxygen atoms, which are ionized and dissolve in the molten salt. The negatively charged oxygen ions move through the molten salt to the anode where they give up their extra electrons and react with the carbon to produce carbon dioxide — a process that erodes the anode. Meanwhile, pure metal is formed over at the cathode.

To make the system produce oxygen and not carbon dioxide, Fray had to make an unreactive anode. This was crucial: "without those anodes, it doesn't work", says Fray. He discovered that calcium titanate, which is a poor electrical conductor on its own, became a much better conductor when he added some calcium ruthenate to it. This mixture produced an anode that barely erodes at all — after running the reactor for 150 hours, Fray calculated that the anode would wear away by roughly three centimetres a year.

In their tests, Fray and his colleagues used a simulated lunar rock called JSC-1, developed by NASA. Fray anticipates that three reactors, each a metre high, would be enough to generate a tonne of oxygen per year on the Moon. Three tonnes of rock are needed to produce each tonne of oxygen, and in tests the team saw almost 100% recovery of oxygen, he says. Fray presented the results last week at the Congress of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry in Glasgow, UK.

To heat the reactor on the Moon would need just a small amount of power, Fray notes, and the reactor itself can be thermally insulated to lock heat in. "It won't be a problem," he says. The three reactors would need about 4.5 kilowatts of power — not much more than that used to heat an immersion heater in a domestic boiler — which could be supplied by solar panels or even a small nuclear reactor placed on the Moon.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

Mines Could Provide Geothermal Energy

Engineers from the University of Oviedo believe that mines could provide geothermal energy — low-intensity geothermal energy, that is, providing heating and hot water for people living nearby:

The study looks into geothermal exploitation of a two-kilometre-long mine shaft, in which the temperature of the rocks 500m below the surface is around 30º C. This is typical of many of the mining areas in Asturias, although it could also be applied to other parts of the world. Water could be forced in through tubes at 7º C and return at 12º C, a big enough heat gain to be of benefit to towns located above the mines.

In Fahrenheit, the 86º rock would heat 45º water to 54º.

The Icarus Syndrome

Jim Manzi calls it the Icarus Syndrome:

Successful modern economies create unprecedented wealth and material ease, but they also tend to generate characteristic anxieties. One of them is the recurring belief that the whole thing is a house of cards. Psychologically, this is the fear that there is some hidden danger that will cause modern society to collapse, and that we would have been better off if we had stayed lower to the ground and not tried to build such an overwhelming success. The most compelling of these stories often involve problems that the modern system has supposedly created itself.

An earlier example is the British Coal Panic:

William Ewart Gladstone, in his 1866 budget speech, warned that Britain faced the prospect of exhausting its domestic coal within a century and had poor prospects of finding sufficient alternative energy sources. This was not an idiosyncratic point of view. The year before, the economist William Stanley Jevons's influential book The Coal Question had made the same prediction and proposed a set of policies to conserve coal for the inevitable lean times. John Stuart Mill supported both the thesis and Jevons's proposals. Newspapers took up the "Coal Panic," and a Royal Commission on Coal was created. Eventually the issue fizzled, and Britain moved on to other, more pressing, concerns.

It was true that British coal production could not grow indefinitely, and it did not. The essential points that Jevons missed, however, were the feasibility of displacing coal with petroleum as a source of energy and the decreasing centrality of low-cost coal to the industries that were to lead Britain in the 20th century. But then again, as the great physicist Niels Bohr reportedly said, "Prediction is hard, especially concerning the future."

The obvious modern analog is Peak Oil:

The peak oil theory usually proceeds from the correct prediction in 1956 by Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert that oil production in the United States would hit its high sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Advocates, however, much more rarely note that in 1974 Hubbert also predicted that global oil production would peak in about 1995. Whoops. It turns out that it's more feasible to predict peak production in very well-understood geography, such as the United States, than for the world as a whole.
[...]
Caruso identified 36 academic forecasts for peak oil published between 1972 and 2004. There is an obvious pattern in the data. Roughly speaking, academic forecasts indicate that we are about 20 years from peak oil today, just as such forecasts generally indicated that we were about 20 years from peak oil throughout the 1970s and 1980s. What if we had reacted to these earlier, incorrect predictions of resource exhaustion with, as many advocated at the time, government coercion to force a decrease in petroleum use and to limit growth? We very likely would not have found ourselves on the other side of one of the greatest periods of wealth creation in American history, and therefore would probably not be in the happy position of paying, even at 2008 prices, a smaller share of GDP for oil than we did in 1980.

There is a finite amount of oil in the world, so we will eventually reach a production maximum. We have, however, a very poor track record in predicting when this will happen, and the world's leading experts will provide only the most general guidance that it looks like we probably have several decades of production growth in front of us. Much like the British looking forward from the 1860s, we don't have a very good idea of what the technology landscape, and much else besides, will be when or if this occurs. Almost certainly, the best course of action is the simplest: Let markets integrate this information into prices for oil and alternative energy sources, and then let entrepreneurs use this information to guide the deployment of resources through markets.

Laser Weapons

Science-fiction fan Rick Robinson runs the numbers on laser weapons:

So an ideal diffraction-limited laser zapping in the near IR, with a wavelength of 1000 nanometers firing through a 2-meter telescope, has a spot size of 12.2 cm at a range of 100 km.

If your laser has an average power output of 1 megawatt, each square centimeter is getting hit with about 8.5 kilowatts — about 850,000 times the intensity of sunlight at Earth's surface. The target surface will get very hot, very quickly.

The most refractory material we currently know of, graphite, requires some 50 MJ to vaporize 1 kg — roughly the energy of 12 kg of TNT — and has a density of about 2.2 g/cm3. Cutting to the chase, our beam will burn through it at not quite a millimeter per second. Most metals are much less resistant to heat, so the laser will burn through metal hulls way faster. But if you substitute a 5 meter mirror — or a 400 nanometer beam, at the short end of the visible spectrum — you'll burn a smaller hole at half a centimeter per second. Or it will have the same spot size and burn rate at 250 km.

Lesson: For a given beam power, the bigger the mirror and shorter the wavelength, the greater the effective range. And lasers cannons, at least in the classical IR-visible-UV band, probably won't look much like guns, but perhaps more like a TV satellite dish.

The consequences:

If you can see it, you can zap it, and vice versa. As noted above, laser spot size is closely related to telescope resolution. If you can focus the beam to a couple of dozen centimeters, that is also the resolution your sensors can gain, simply by looking through the telescope between pulses. Which means that lasers of this precision don't just score random hits like World War I battleships; they fire at specific points on the target surface. (If mechanical or thermal limits preclude this precision, you won't get the penetrating burn-throughs described above, just scars burned along the hull surface.)

Thus the objective won't just be to blast an enemy ship but to mission kill it by zeroing in on critical systems — such as armament. In a laser battle, if you can hit the other guy effectively at all you can shoot the gun out his hand. But it gets better. What happens when two lasers are zapping each other? Their targeting optics are pointing straight at each other — so the optics concentrate the incoming beam right onto the laser itself. I have no idea what the effect is, but it could easily be dramatic. Laser engagements lend themselves to a mutual eyeball frying contest. Whoever zaps first, probably wins.

But there is another and even more curious implication of laser combat. So far I've been talking about beams concentrated down to blowtorch intensity, kilowatts or metawatts per square centimeter, able to burn right through refractory materials by heating the surface to thousands of degrees K. But what about mere scorch intensity? Say, the 50 watts/cm2 that causes primary thermal burns to humans and sets paper on fire. This won't burn through armor, but it will likely burn out delicate components such as sensor elements, or at any rate saturate and 'dazzle' them.

Thus laser weapons can blind the enemy, temporarily or permanently, at much greater range than they can do serious physical damage to structures.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

But how much electricity does it use?

GM is loudly touting the fact that their new Chevy Volt should get 230 miles per gallon in city driving. But how much electricity does it use?

Applying EPA's methodology, GM expects the Volt to consume as little as 25 kilowatt hours per 100 miles in city driving. At the U.S. average cost of electricity (approximately 11 cents per kWh), a typical Volt driver would pay about $2.75 for electricity to travel 100 miles, or less than 3 cents per mile.

A typical car might burn five gallons of gas to go 100 miles. At $3 per gallon, that would come to $15.

The Volt looks like it will use 25 kWh in electricity and 0.43 gallons of gas, for roughly $2.75 plus $1.29, or $4.04 — so the cost of electricity is tiny, but it's still more than the cost of gas.

The Volt's Battery

The Volt's battery is big — far bigger than it needs to be:

The anticipated energy capacity of the Volt's 375 lb (170 kg) 220-cell lithium-ion battery pack is estimated at 16 kWh, but is only charged to 85% full when charged up, and is discharged to 30% SoC approximately, before the engine cuts in and maintains the charge at around this level. When the vehicle is plugged into a charger the battery SoC is restored to 85%. Hence the battery has an effective capacity in use of 8.8 kWh.

A recent Carnegie Mellon University study indicates that a PHEV-40 [plug-in hybrid vehicle with 40 miles of battery capacity] will be less cost effective than a HEV [Prius-style hybrid-electric vehicle] or a PHEV-7 [plug-in with just 7 miles' capacity] in all of the scenarios considered, due to the cost and weight of the battery. Jon Lauckner, a Vice President at GM, responded that the study did not consider the inconvenience of a 7-mile electric range and that the study's cost estimate for the Volt's battery pack was "many hundreds of dollars per kWh higher" than what it costs to make today.

The weight of the battery pack in the Volt which finally comes to market will reportedly be approximately 375 lb (170 kg),[71] primarily because the Volt will use lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries while the EV1 used heavier lead-acid and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. Li-ion batteries are expected to become cheaper to manufacture, as economies of scale take effect.

Electric motors are very, very efficient, but electric batteries are not; they're both heavy and expensive for the amount of energy they store. Gasoline engines are not efficient, but gasoline is; it stores a tremendous amount of energy in a light and still remarkably cheap form. Complicating this is the fact that electricity off the grid, especially at night, is extremely cheap, even if carting it around in batteries isn't.

An extended-range electric vehicle, like the Volt, stores some energy in its electric batteries and some energy in its gas tank. (It's on-board gasoline engine is a generator. It's not hooked up to the wheels through a mechanical transmission.) The trick is to balance expensive and heavy batteries, which use cheap electricity from the grid, with fairly cheap and light gasoline from the gas station — and it looks like 40 miles of battery capacity is too much.

230 MPG

GM's new Volt should get 230 MPG in city driving:

The Volt is powered by an electric motor and a battery pack with a 40-mile range. After that, a small internal combustion engine kicks in to generate electricity for a total range of 300 miles. The battery pack can be recharged from a standard home outlet.

GM came up with the 230-mile figure in early tests using draft guidelines from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for calculating the mileage of extended range electric vehicles, said Tony Posawatz, GM's vehicle line director for the Volt.

If the figure is confirmed by the EPA, which does the tests for the mileage posted on new car door stickers, the Volt would be the first car to exceed triple-digit gas mileage, Posawatz said.

The downside? The car will cost close to $40,000. How much will gas have to cost for a Volt to make sense? A lot.

First, realize that the familiar miles-per-gallon metric is upside-down. What you want to know is gallons per mile — or gallons per 100 miles. If you travel 10,000 miles per year in a 10-mpg clunker, you use 1,000 gallons of gas per year. At $4 per gallon, that's $4,000 per year on gas.



If you upgrade to a decent 20-mpg car, you'll use 500 gallons of gas per year — saving yourself $2,000 per year.

If you upgrade a 20-mpg car to a super-efficient 50-mpg car, you'll use just 200 gallons of gas per year — which may be impressive, but it only saves you an additional $1,200 per year.

In fact, upgrading a 20-mpg car to a 230-mpg Volt cuts annual gas consumption from 500 gallons to 43.5 gallons — which, again, seems impressive, but it only saves $1,826 per year.

Even a pure electric vehicle using no gas — getting infinite miles per gallon — could only save you $4,000 per year; you can't spend less than zero on gas.

Miles per Gallon	Gallons per 100 Miles	Gallons per Year (10,000 Miles)	Dollars Saved per Year (@$4 per Gallon)
10	10	1000	$0
20	5	500	2000
50	2	200	3200
230	0.43	43	3826
Infinite	0	0	4000

That said, I love the technology under the Volt's hood. It isn't a Prius-style hybrid; it's an electric vehicle with a gas generator for extended range. That means no transmission.

They'd probably have a more sensible vehicle if they halved the size of the battery pack. That would dramatically reduce the cost of the vehicle, it would significantly reduce the weight of vehicle, and it would only ever-so-slightly increase the gas consumption of the vehicle.

This Is How the Carriers Will Die

Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, has been saying for a long time that aircraft carriers are just history’s most expensive floating targets, and that they were doomed:

But now I can tell you exactly how they’re going to die. I’ve just read one of the most shocking stories in years. It comes from the US Naval Institute, not exactly an alarmist or anti-Navy source. And what it says is that the US carrier group is scrap metal.

The Chinese military has developed a ballistic missile, Dong Feng 21, specifically designed to kill US aircraft carriers: “Because the missile employs a complex guidance system, low radar signature and a maneuverability that makes its flight path unpredictable, the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased. It is estimated that the missile can travel at mach 10 and reach its maximum range of 2000km in less than 12 minutes.” That’s the US Naval Institute talking, remember. They’re understating the case when they say that, with speed, satellite guidance and maneuverability like that, “the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased.”

You know why that’s an understatement? Because of a short little sentence I found farther on in the article—and before you read that sentence, I want all you trusting Pentagon groupies to promise me that you’ll think hard about what it implies. Here’s the sentence: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.”

“Well, they must have thought of that already,” you might think. “They must have some defense in mind.”

When you start talking like that, just slap yourself and remember all the other military traditions that kept going long after anybody with sense knew they were finito.

The most obvious example is European heavy cavalry trotting into longbow fire again and again. Crecy demonstrated that knightly charges were suicide against the longbow in 1346. But the French aristocracy had so much invested in prancing around on their damn steeds that it took another demonstration, at Agincourt in 1415 to even start to get them thinking about it. I’m no math wiz but I think that 1415 minus 1346 — yup, that’s 69 years between catastrophes. Lessons learned? None.

These dodos always have one thing in common: whether it’s knights charging with lances on very expensive horses or top gun brats like McCain zooming onto carrier decks in history’s most expensive aircraft, you’ll always find that the worst, most over-funded services are always the ones where the rich kids go to show their stuff. Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on. Why do they keep getting funded long after they’ve been shown up? The same reason knights were galloping around pretending that the longbow hadn’t turned half their friends into pincushions: because it was a way of life for the richest and dumbest people in the country and they weren’t about to let it go.

The US Navy, Brecher says, will be stuck with its own Harpoon:

Y’all remember the Harpoon, the US Navy’s first dedicated anti-ship guided surface to surface missile, right? Good ol’ AGM-84? A fine weapon by all accounts. You’ll remember it entered service in 1977.
[...]
Well, instead of just paging through Jane’s and drooling over the Harpoon’s range and 221-kg warhead (don’t bother lying, I spent years doing that stuff myself and I know), think about what that weapons means in terms of this key sentence from my last story: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.” Now put that together with the fact that the Harpoon, way back in the Disco Era, had a cool little feature called “pop-up.” And what it meant is that the Harpoon itself worked as a ballistic missile. So even in our own inventory, we’ve had a weapon lying around for decades that could have taken out all our carriers.

What “pop-up” means is — well, it’s actually kind of cool and for once I can talk my old fave, hardware, without feeling like a tool. So anyway, the Harpoon has an interesting trajectory. It’s fired from vertical or diagonal tubes on the deck or the hold of surface ships, but there are other models that can be launched from aircraft or even subs. If you’ve seen video of a harpoon launch, you see it zoom up from the tube, then slide down to fly level, just above the waves, so’s to avoid enemy radar.

But once the Harpoon’s own radar has spotted the target, does it keep flying level to slam into the side of the ship? Nope. I’ll quote from the owner’s manual: “Once a target has been located and the seeker locked…the missile climbs rapidly to about 1800m before diving on the target (”pop-up maneuver”).”

In other words, the Harpoon does a last-minute transformation from wave-skimmer to ballistic missile. If you diagrammed its flight path, seen from the side, You’d get a capital “P” lying on its back, with the loop of the “P” being the pop-up maneuver.

The reason the Harpoon was designed to hit the target from above rather than the side is simple: a ships defenses are configured to stop planes (and missiles, even though they don’t work against missiles and everybody knows it) coming in diagonally or horizontally. To repeat that sentence again — and I’m going to keep repeating it till everybody realizes what it means — ”ships currently [just like in 1977 when the Harpoon entered service] have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.”

So we have the Navy’s own weapons system testifying against it: way back in Carter’s time the Navy bought a weapon that was designed to hit ships like a ballistic missile, yet now, forty years later, USN ships have no defense against ballistic missiles.

It gets worse. The Navy didn’t even want the Harpoon at all. It was only adopted because after seeing Soviet-made anti-ship missiles destroy the Israeli destroyer Eilat in 1967, a few of the more honest R&D guys at the Pentagon forced the Navy to shop for their own model. The Navy — remember, they’re just like the French heavy cavalry brass of the late 14th century, trying real hard not to think about the real world — didn’t like the idea of anti-ship missiles at all. They were the equivalent of the longbow: unmanned, longrange, un-chivalrous weapons, and you couldn’t drink with them at the officer’s club.

A New Approach to Fusion

General Fusion, a startup in Vancouver, Canada, claims that its new approach to fusion could lead to a prototype power plant within a decade for less than a billion dollars:

So far, it has raised $13.5 million from public and private investors to help kick-start its ambitious effort.

Unlike the $14 billion ITER project under way in France, General Fusion's approach doesn't rely on expensive superconducting magnets — called tokamaks — to contain the superheated plasma necessary to achieve and sustain a fusion reaction. Nor does the company require powerful lasers, such as those within the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to confine a plasma target and compress it to extreme temperatures until fusion occurs.

Instead, General Fusion says it can achieve "net gain" — that is, create a fusion reaction that gives off more energy than is needed to trigger it — using relatively low-tech, mechanical brute force and advanced digital control technologies that scientists could only dream of 30 years ago.

It may seem implausible, but some top U.S. fusion experts say General Fusion's approach, which is a variation on what the industry calls magnetized target fusion, is scientifically sound and could actually work. It's a long shot, they say, but well worth a try.

Hackers and Fighters

A part of me feels like I should have written Hackers and Fighters:

This essay was prompted by a post on comp.lang.lisp by Joe Marshall.

Some of the people in this group have, or are pursuing, advanced degrees in computer science. Some have bachelor's degrees. Some have degrees in related fields. Some have degrees in completely unrelated fields. Some have dropped out before getting a degree. Some are autodidacts.

Is there a correlation between studying computer science and knowing about computers? Do people gain anything by pursuing an advanced degree in computer science, or would they be as well served by saving the money, buying a PC, and teaching themselves? There is a romantic ideal of the untutored hacker that program circles around MIT grad students. Is that absurd or commonplace?

This reminds me of another debate which takes place in martial arts — about martial arts students and street fighters. Geoff Thompson touched on this in his excellent and extremely funny book Watch My Back. Geoff is a trained martial artist, a karateka, a grappler and the victor in over 200 street fights as a bouncer. In his book he compares two styles of fighter — the school-trained martial artist and the untutored but hardened street fighter.

The street fighter fights in a ring with no rules and no boundaries. The school-trained martial artist trains for a circumscribed contest with known parameters. What Geoff says is roughly this: the street fighter, if transplanted to the tournament ring, will often fare poorly. Contrariwise the trained martial artist in no-holds fighting will generally be taken out by a good street fighter unless his level of skill is very high and he has trained for combat situations. However, the combination of the two, the street fighter who has also formally trained in the dojo, will surpass either.

This is also true for programmers.

He’s Only in Field Service

Steve Blank has found that the most important early customers for your startup usually turn out to be quite different from who you think they’re going to be:

When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “Serial Communications Controller” (SCC). As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. I’m too busy so why don’t you drive over there and talk to him.” (My guess is that our salesman was busy trying to sell into the “official” projects of Apple, the Lisa and the Apple III.)

Zilog was also in Cupertino near Apple, and I remember driving to a small non-descript Apple building at the intersection of Stevens Creek and Sunnyvale/Saratoga. I had a pleasant meeting and was as convincing as a marketing type could be to a very earnest and quirky field service guy, mostly promising the moon for a versatile but then very buggy piece of silicon. We talked about some simple design rules and I remember him thanking me for coming, saying we were the only chip company who cared enough to call on him (little did he know.)

I thought nothing about the meeting until years later. Long gone from Zilog I saw the picture of the original Macintosh design team. The field service guy I had sold the chip to was Burrell Smith who had designed the Mac hardware.

The SCC had been designed into the Mac and became the hardware which drove all the serial communications as well as the AppleTalk network which allowed Macs to share printers and files.

Some sales guy who was too busy to take the meeting was probably retired in Maui on the commissions.