Waving Goodbye To The Space Program

Today saw the final launch of the Space Shuttle program.  It is a good time to look back and see what we learned about ourselves since, say, 1960. But this is not the overwhelmingly important date that many are making it out to be.

The date that should be remembered as the turning point is 1972. It is not since then — forty years ago — that humans have flown in real space, outside the earth’s atmosphere.  Most people on earth today were not even alive the last time our race physically reached beyond the earth.

And I am definitely not saying that is a bad thing.

That extraordinary period between Kennedy’s “we are going to the Moon” speech in May 1961 and the return of Apollo 17 in December 1972 was enormous fun.  For those of us who were alive and aware, it was the ultimate trip, and we all reveled in it.  Sitting in a hotel room in Yugoslavia with a dozen others watching the first Moon landing on an ancient black-and-white TV was one of my lifetime memories.

But it ended, and we deliberately pulled away from sending humans into space. Now, we are pulling back from sending humans into low-earth orbit; the latest step in a forty-year retreat.

I believe that we have come to understand that we had over-stepped our abilities; that we simply could not put so many resources into a program that did not directly assist us with the overwhelming problems (poverty, environmental degradation, disease) that face us here on the earth itself.  If that’s true, then the cessation of Shuttle flights should be welcomed as a hopeful sign. And the abandonment of the ISS should be the next objective.

50 Years Of A Hero

The first hero that I remember having was Duncan Edwards, the Manchester United footballer who was killed along with many others in the team in the Munich air crash of 1958.  The second was Yuri Gagarin.

Fifty years ago today, Yuri Gagarin entered history as the first human being in space. A few years earlier, just before my 8th birthday, my father had taken the time to get me interested in the Soviet Union’s feat in putting Sputnik into space. I was entranced and remained an avid follower of the space race for decades. I followed the Russian dogs going up, and Gagarin’s flight was the obvious next step.

It wasn’t revealed for forty years that the cosmonaut ejected from the capsule before it crash-landed, parachuting to earth. And it was definitely sad for Gagarin that he was thereafter too valuable to put at threat and so he was never allowed to return to orbit. No matter.  That first flight was a glorious triumph for mankind!

The Next Glass Ceiling

More than five million people have seen this video already. I wonder what they thought of it?  This is Corning Glass’s view of the very near future:

The thought that materials science melded with computer science can create so many conveniences for us is certainly attractive; who wouldn’t want some of those things? Well, me for one. And the problem is the hoary old chestnut of cost versus convenience.

I’m not talking about the financial cost here (though the technology gap between rich and poor is always to be kept in mind.) No, the cost I am talking about is in personal freedom. Look at the apps displayed. How are they controlled? How do they know it is you making the app request — even for such a mundane task as raising the virtual blinds on the window (do you want just anybody being able to do that to your windows? I’m guessing not, so the system has to know it is you somehow.)

All that access control means the system will always know where you are, for example, and it can always figure out what you are doing. And it means that whoever controls the system also knows those things, always knows where you are and what you are doing. I don’t care for that one bit. I’ll happily give up all of the video’s “advances” in exchange for not giving up any more personal control and privacy than we already have done.

We’ve come this far without talking walls and glass-block phones. I’m happy with that.

Broadband Billing and Dumb Liberals

I am getting sick and tired of liberals claiming that we somehow have a right to broadband connection and therefore the plans by Shaw to charge for access to the internet by usage are somehow immoral. Do these people forget that certain services FAR MORE important than broadband connection — electricity, water, food, gas, for example — are ALL sold on a user-pay basis: the more food you want to eat, the more money you pay for your food; the more electricity you use, the more you pay, etc etc.

To try to place access to broadband as somehow more important than food and water and power simply makes the proponents look stupid.

When these liberals actually try to discuss what is wrong with Shaw’s plan it turns out they object to the profit margin that Shaw is capturing — it costs, say, one penny to deliver one Gb and Shaw wants to charge two bucks.  That’s a fair enough argument — one that the market would quickly resolve but which, in this liberally regulated age, the CRTC can be pressured to solve by putting in place ROI caps, for example.

Stick to the pricing problem, guys, and stop making yourselves look stupid over the “rights” issue.

 

Laundry Then and Now

Today is laundry day in our household.  My wife — a self-described laundry Nazi — loves to split the pile of cloths and linens into a much larger variety of “types” than the simple whites, coloureds, reds that my mother taught me.  Thinking of this got me musing about how drastically this particular household function has changed in the last 70-odd years.

Time was that the laundry represented a full day of  hard physical labour, one that most housewives faced each week with dread.  Today, that has all changed, at least in the westernized world.  With automatic machines and efficient driers, each load takes perhaps just four or five minutes of effort to load, unload and fold.  Five or six wash and dry loads can be completed with less physical effort than a single wash load (not including wringing and drying) meant to my grandmother.

In my research on the retail and social changes on Commercial Drive in the middle of the last century, one of the key factors of modernization that emerges in the 1930s and 1940s is the evolution of many hardware stores into appliance retailers; and, prior to the introduction of TV in the 1950s, it was the steady improvement in laundry technology that drove this process.

As an aside, it is worth mentioning that virtually all domestic technology engineers in the 1920s to 1950s were men, men who would have had little or no first-hand knowledge of the drudgery of household laundry.  I assume that the power of persuasion by their female partners played a significant role in these improvements.

 

Happy Birthday Neon!

Vancouver was for a long time known for the quality and quantity of the neon signs that decorated buildings throughout the city (see this Vancouver Sun story, for example.)  When I first arrived in 1979, there were still considerable amounts of neon downtown and eastside.  But they are few and far between now, and those that survive are treasured.

It seems suitable therefore that we should celebrate the 100th birthday of the neon sign today.

The birth is generally agreed to be the display of two 12 metres (39 ft) long bright red neon tubes at the Paris Motor Show on 3rd December 1910 by George Claude’s Air Liquide company.  This was an air liquefaction company that produced the first industrial quantities of neon gas as a by-product of their process.  Two of Claude’s patents are still integral to the production of neon signs.  Neon arrived in the United States only in 1923 when an auto dealer in Los Angeles spent $2,500 for two “Packard” signs.  But it quickly took off, becoming a mainstay of street decoration on Main Streets across the continent.

By the 1980s, perhaps even the 1970s, the plethora of neon signs in some cities began to be seen as trashy, and their popularity quickly faded.  Some businesses — beer sellers, for example — continue to use a lot of neon, and neon in moderation is coming back into fashion — or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

Happy 100th birthday neon!

Stewart Brand and The Way Forward

Last night I attended a speech by Stewart Brand which effectively opened the Gaining Ground Conference on urban sustainability in Vancouver.   For those who don’t know, Brand founded and edited the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1960s.  He founded a number of organizations including The WELL (precursor to all the internet communities of today), the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation.  He is a multi-volumed author and his latest book, which formed the theme of his speech last night, is called “Whole Earth Discipline: An EcoPragmatist Manifesto.”

In the book and in the speech, Brand takes what might be considered a contrarian position on issues such as cities, nuclear power and genetically-modified food — all of which he declares to be green — and on geo-engineering, which he believes will be necessary.  Brand believes that we have to work in these directions because no other set of policies can save the earth before we reach the tipping point to destruction.

With regard to cities, Brand remarked that the Renaissance was in fact the re-urbanization of Europe after the rural retreat caused by the collapse of Rome 800 years before.  It was the cities that drove progress, and he notes that city slums around the world are the breeding ground of the most interesting and progressive entrepreneurs.  These folks are poor and do not want to be poor any more; they do what is required to improve their lives and by doing, improve the cities at the same time by developing infrastructure.   He noted the development of Sausalito (where he has lived since the early 1960s) from a ramshackle locale to a gentrified space as an example of this process.

This development was described here earlier at: “What Slums Can Teach Us.”

Brand, like me, is a big pusher for nuclear energy.  I have no way of confirming his figures but he noted that one GW of power produced by nuclear energy results in 20 tons of waste. By comparison, one GW of power from coal-fired stations creates 800,000 tons of CO2. Further, he claims, there have never been any proven child defects as a result of nuclear disasters at Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Chernobyl.  Moreover, the area around Chernobyl is now one of the most successful wildlife areas — as a result of the removal of humans and human activity in the region.  He is in favour of very-deep bore holes for storage of the nuclear waste.

Stewart Brand is also a supporter of genetically-modified food primarily, it seems, because he sees it as the best way to deliver additional food and nutritional value.  Along the same lines, he believes that “garage biotech” will be the growing hobby — as programming was in the 70s and 80s.

He now believes — with reluctance, he admits — that some level of geo-engineering will be necessary as we are now not able to mitigate the effects of emissions in time.  He remarked that we would need three Mount Pinatubo-value eruptions each year to counter the rise in heat on the earth.  He has looked at atomizing seawater into the atmosphere to brighten the albedo affect from clouds which would help cool the earth.

Basically his point is that our problems are now so great that we will need to engineer ourselves out of them — ecological sentiment is simply not enough.  He hopes that the “legacy resistance” against older “new” technologies (nuclear, GM food, etc) will not stop us finding pragmatic solutions to the earth’s crisis.

The speech was the first in the new Fay & Milton Wong Theatre at the brand new SFU campus in the re-developed Woodward’s building.  It was a sold-out event at the 400-seat locale and attendees included BC Premier Gordon Campbell.

The Lingering Death of Video Stores

The video rental store — one or more of which has probably been a fixture in your main street — is coming to the end of its relatively short life; after their emergence in the early 1970s, it is hard to see them surviving much into the next decade.  They have been overwhelmed by Netflix and video-on-demand-on-TV and all those movies now available through the internet.

There are three independent video stores still operating on Commercial Drive here in Vancouver, but I expect them all to become coffee bars or schwarma cafes within the next year or so.

While Blockbuster only went bankrupt last month, Wayne Huizenga who built the company in its “blockbuster” days saw the writing on the wall and sold out for billions in the late 1990s.   Now, the Wall Street Journal formally issues the burial notice.

I disagree with some of the comments on the WSJ piece:  I do not expect bookstores to go the same way anytime soon.  A VCR or CD case, no matter how attractive the images, does not have the appeal of a book; they are very different items in how they feel, how they work and how people feel about them.  I’m sure that books will go on for a long while yet, regardless of the growing popularity of the Kindle and its clones.  But video rentals, their time has already come and gone.

French Towns Move Away From Trucks And Back To Horse Carts

More than 60 French towns have struck on a cheaper and greener way to collect household waste –

60 French towns that have struck upon a cheaper and greener way to collect household waste – ditching the dustbin lorry in favour of a horse and cart.Long before recycling became a household word, a Paris prefect called Eugene Poubelle, introduced three separate containers for household waste – glass and pottery, oyster and mussel shells, and the rest – and had horse-drawn carts empty them. Six years later, his surname entered the Academy dictionary as the word for “dustbin”. Now, over a century later, a growing number of French towns are returning to horse-drawn kerbside waste collection, as a better way to recycle …

“By using the horse for garden waste collection, we have raised awareness. People are composting more. Incineration used to cost us E107 a tonne, ridiculous for burning wet matter, now we only pay E37 to collect and compost the waste,” says Mayor Jean-Pierre Enjalbert of Saint Prix, in Greater Paris …

In Sicily, another place bringing back four-hoofed transport, Mario Cicero, mayor of 14th-century town Castelbuono … pioneered glass and cardboard collection using two packsaddle donkeys in 2007. Three years on, Cicero has done his sums and calculated a cost saving of 34%, as well as winning over a sceptical population and putting more donkeys to work.

“Compared with E5,000-7,000 annual running costs for a diesel truck, an ass costs E1,000-1,500 and can live 25-30 years. A truck costs around E25,000, lasts around five years and can’t reproduce,” says Cicero, whose four asinelli have now produced 25 offspring, so he won’t even be buying any more.

De-evolution at its finest!

Going Round The Bend

I love escalators; they are a fine form of transportation. And here, at last, is the first escalator that can go around any curves required by the architect.

What a neat development!

It Walks The Walk and Talks The Talk

So-called wearable computing has generally been contained within university labs, but now it is stepping smartly to the front of the cat walk.  London-based fashion company CuteCircuit has launched a little black dress that is also a mobile phone.

The garment, branded the M-Dress, lets wearers make and receive calls by slipping their sim card under the label, allowing them to keep their usual numbers.  Gesture recognition software allows users to pick up a call by raising their hand to their ear and end a conversation by letting it fall to their side.  The M-Dress, designed by the London-based fashion company CuteCircuit, will ring when an incoming call is received and different ringtones can be assigned to different numbers …

The dress is described as being made of “a dark, richly textured, form-fitting silk jersey” and will be released in 2011. Its price remains undisclosed. The antenna, described as “super-tiny”, is stitched into the bottom hem of the dress, which rests at about knee-height, to reduce the amount of radiation that the wearer is exposed to.

A message on the CuteCircuit website said: “Very often phone calls are missed because mobile phones are quite awkward to carry, especially for women, that have garments with small or no pockets. “To allow women to stay connected while remaining stylish, CuteCircuit designed the M- Dress. A mobile phone in its own right but built out of soft circuitry.”

In the old days it was only spies and FBI agents who talked into their wrists.  Now, anyone can do it — at least if you have the fashion sense to wear a little black dress, that is.

From The Independent in London.

The Discovery of Asteroids

This is an extraordinary video.  It illustrates the discovery of asteroids in our solar system between 1980 and 2010.  The first time an asteroid is discovered it shown in bright white.  It then becomes green or, if it is an earth orbit-crossing asteroid it becomes red. Those asteroids that closely approach the earth are shown in yellow.  The years and the total number of asteroids are shown at the bottom left of the screen.  As the years pass, the number of asteroids discovered increases rapidly.  This is best seen at full screen.

More than 500,000 asteroids have now been found within the solar system, and thousands of them cross our orbit.  The scientists say that the rate of discovery is not slowing down.

In the video you can see the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit and most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun.  The orbital elements were created by Ted Bowell and associates at Arecibo. See this webpage for more info.

I got this video from http://www.universetoday.com

Do We Need Lead-Lined Knickers?

In many cities it has become standard practice to monitor street movements by CCTV cameras; and going to an airport these days, I guess we have all become used to having every part of us patted and prodded and photographed and x-rayed.  Some people going to courthouses have become accustomed to the same close inspection.  But do you expect this while you are peaceably driving down the street doing your shopping or visiting friends?  I suspect not.  But you would be wrong.

According to this report at Forbes, full body-scan technology is not employed on the streets of North America:

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview … “This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss … Reiss says AS&E has customers on “all continents except Antarctica.”

What’s the fuss?  Take a look at this image and you tell me…

Though Reiss admits that the systems “to a large degree will penetrate clothing,” he points to the lack of features in images of humans shown in images like the one shown at right, far less detail than is obtained from the airport scans.

So far, perhaps.  But these machines have a habit of becoming more adept, and I doubt they will tell us when that happens. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) says:

the scans, like those in the airport, potentially violate the fourth amendment. “Without a warrant, the government doesn’t have a right to peer beneath your clothes without probable cause,” he says. Even airport scans are typically used only as a secondary security measure, he points out. “If the scans can only be used in exceptional cases in airports, the idea that they can be used routinely on city streets is a very hard argument to make.”

The TSA’s official policy dictates that full-body scanners won’t save any images. However,

Reiss [says] that the vans do have the capability of storing images. “Sometimes customers need to save images for evidentiary reasons,” he says. “We do what our customers need.”

Our mothers used to warn us to wear clean underwear; should we now update that advice to lead-lined undies?

Weather In The Cold War

I am a devotee of linear history: I like to know the order in which things happened, what came first, what came next. Give me the timeline before giving me your explanation or analysis. In an earlier iteration of my blog, I tried to catalog some of these “cultural beginnings” and I have continued this here.

It will come as no surprise therefore that I just love the History of Science Timeline site.

Having been born in 1949, I decided to look at what happened in 1950 and the first thing I noticed was that in 1950 we have the first weather forecast by an electronic computer. The 24-hour forecast took 24 hours to compute. Of more interest to me was the purpose behind the work:

“As a committed opponent of Communism and a key member of the WWII-era national security establishment, [John] von Neumann hoped that weather modeling might lead to weather control, which might be used as a weapon of war. Soviet harvests, for example, might be ruined by a US-induced drought.”

Science for the greater good, eh?

12,000 Days

12,000 days ago, Elvis Presley had been dead four days and Groucho Marx for one; Jimmy Carter was into the eighth month of his presidency and serial killer Son of Sam had just been captured. On that day, August 20 1977, Voyager 2 was launched into space. This morning, 12,000 days later, she is almost 13 light-minutes away from earth, still heading out beyond the Solar System, and still sending us valuable data every day.

Voyager 2 was built in 1976-1977 with tools that we would consider archaic today, and yet these days we have trouble keeping a toaster alive for more than six months!

Simply The Best

I’ve been an office wallah most of my life and, without doubt or hesitation, I will declare the humble paper-clip to be one of the greatest inventions.  I’ve never been a stapler-kind of guy; the act of stapling always seems so prescriptive, so final.  With a paper-clip, you can always reshuffle the papers as and when you want.

The GEM paper-clip seems so perfect, so inexpensive, that it should have been with us since our cave-living days.  But no.  As this article in Fast Company describes, the GEM paper-clip isn’t that old (the image shown is the earliest known, from 1894) and there were dozens of competitors for its ubiquitous success.

I agree with the article that the success of the GEM design is a perfect example of the marketplace working as it should.

What’s The Big Deal With 3-D?

There is an interesting piece in the New York Times today about the campaigns being prepared by television manufacturers to sell us on the expensive idea of 3-D on TV.  Samsung alone will spend $100 million this year on marketing it to us.

TV manufacturers are betting on 3-D. There are forecasts that consumers will buy 3.5 million to 4 million such sets, or about 10 percent of all United States television sales, this year. But that may be optimistic. Different and incompatible technologies mean that one maker’s glasses, for example, cannot be used on another’s television model. “The glasses go for a premium — around $150 — which means it’s costly, for example, to have a few people over for a Super Bowl party, unless it’s ‘bring your own compatible spectacles,’ ” said Ross Rubin, an analyst for NPD Group, a market research firm.

This is all such nonsense! I see in 3-D all the time, it is the natural way of seeing for human beings — and we do it without having to resort to fancy glasses.  Why would I want to pay extra for what is normal?    For me, one of the aesthetics of watching television or film or even fine art is that 2-D is NOT normal, and the skill is in translating a regular 3-D world into the artistic constraints of 2-D.

I’ll stick with the unreality of movies and TV and paintings, thanks very much.

Watching The Culture Change

As a further sign that going to the movies is no longer the world’s favourite entertainment activity, the latest video game craze “Call of Duty 2” was released just five days ago. In the brief time since then, sales have totaled $550 million. The highest ever 5-day total for a movie was for last year’s “Dark Knight“, which took $204 million in that period.

Estimates are that “Call of Duty 2” will make $780 million by the end of this year alone at $60 a copy.

Game building costs continue to climb, but they are nothing like the costs associated with major motion pictures (James Cameron’s new “Avatar” is said to have cost $500 million to produce). So, higher returns and lower costs: which business would you rather be in?

Recycling Buses

In Atlanta, they have recycled three old city buses to create a cool bus shelter:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even the seat is from one of the de-commissioned buses.   Great idea!

This is from SpaceInvading via coolboom.

507 Mechanical Movements

Here is a glorious find, with thanks to No Tech Magazine.  With a publishing date of 1868 (republished 1908) and bearing the title “507 Mechanical Movements:  embracing all those which are most important in Dynamics, Hydraulics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics, Steam Engines, Mill and Other Gearing, Presses, Horology, and Miscellaneous Machinery“, this doesn’t have all the hallmarks of a winner.  But to me it is a joy to behold, for a few reasons.

First and foremost, it shows that virtually any mechanical problem can be solved by careful thought and precision engineering.  The vast arrays of industrial might and computational power we throw at issues today perhaps hide a lack of genuinely personal creative thought.   Not so in earlier days.  The thought processes required for this kind of solution making had to be transparent in the drawings and descriptions.  It is a reminder of what we achieved without all the trappings and destruction concomitant with modern consumer-capitalism.

Second, the book is laid out exactly as required for this kind of information.   Images on one side, relevant text on the other; no jumping about.  And that good design is carried forward in this virtual representation.  The images are crisp and clear and navigation is a breeze (just click on a page to move forward or back).

Thirdly, having been manager of a technical writing group for many years, I appreciate the clarity of the text.  Everything that needs to be said is said well, and nothing that is irrelevant is allowed to intrude.

To me, this book is as well planned and well constructed as the movements it describes. I am glad to have found it.  Thanks again to No Tech magazine.