Teh Golden Age of Space Exploration



Asteroid discovery from 1980 to 2010. Science fiction promised us a future in which a few brave men in small tin cans would have to go out and discover each one of them separately at great risk; instead it turns out high powered and not so high powered telescopes, lots of computers and the occasional unmanned probe are enough to discovered hundred of thousands of new asteroids in a few years…. A great age for scientific discovery, but not so heroic as we thought it should be…

Why Buildings Fall Down – Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori

Why Buildings Fall Down


Why Buildings Fall Down
Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori
334 pages including index
published in 1992

It’s been a real pleasure to read this book. I read a lot of non-fiction, as you may have seen here over the years, but it’s rare that I come across a book that explains a difficult subject as lucidly and understandable as this one. Why Buildings Fall Down, as is obvious from the title, attempts to explain the science behind catastrophical structural collapses by examining various famous and not so famous disasters and tries to find common causes for them. The principle author, Mario Salvadori was a structural engineer with decades of experience in building things that don’t fall down and he and Matthys Levy are very good in translating this experience for the interested layperson like myself.

A great deal of the credit for the clarity of this book however lies also with the illustrator, Kevin Woest. Wherever the technical descriptions in the text get a bit too complicated for me, there was a drawing illustrating it perfectly. Such drawings have an advantage over using photographs, as with photos there’s always too much unimportant detail and often a muddiness in black and white. Woest’s drawings strip away everything that’s not necessary to illustrate a given concept, his art functioning as a plate of clear glass between the reader and the concept. It takes real skill to do this and do this properly.

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Zeitgeist

Drive your rightwing friends even more batty: Nixon was worried about climate change:

Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, notable as a Democrat in the administration, urged the administration to initiate a worldwide system of monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, decades before the issue of global warming came to the public’s attention.

And again: Reagan was kind of a wuss compared to the wingnut fantasy version of him:

In fact, Reagan was terrified of war. He took office eager to vanquish Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and its rebel allies in El Salvador, both of which were backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union. But at an early meeting, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggested that achieving this goal might require bombing Cuba, the suggestion “scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan,” according to White House aide Michael Deaver. Haig was marginalized, then resigned, and Reagan never seriously considered sending U.S. troops south of the border, despite demands from conservative intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and William F. Buckley. “Those sons of bitches won’t be happy until we have 25,000 troops in Managua,” Reagan told chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein near the end of his presidency, “and I’m not going to do it.”

Continuing our theme, the epic tale of when Terry Savage met a free lemonade stand shows that when it comes to political correctness even the most uptight liberal leftwinger has nothing on the wingnut right:

“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That’s the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs — how much the lemonade costs, and the cups — and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money.”

Imagine having to live this way, of having to determine of anything you do whether or not it’s properly capitalist or backsliding deviantism and worse, having to do this not just for yourself, but for anybody you meet?

Some quick links to end the day:

Sensawunda

Centauri Dreams on the increasingly many brown dwarf stars that are being found in our stellar neighbourhood and how cool they are:

In fact, it gives me pause to reflect that the focaccia I baked the night before last needed higher temperatures (500 degrees Fahrenheit) than the coolest of these brown dwarfs can supply. Most of the new objects in the Spitzer study are T dwarfs, the coolest class of brown dwarfs known, defined as being less than 1500 Kelvin (1226 degrees Celsius). One of the dwarfs in this study is cold enough that it may represent the hypothetical class called Y dwarfs, part of a classification created by a co-author of the paper, Davy Kirkpatrick (Caltech).

Brown dwarfs may be the most common stellar objects around as this representation shows. You wonder if brown dwarfs could have planets and if so, whether those planets could have life on them and if so, how it’s adapted to the extremely cold temperatures such planets must suffer from. Of course, from a hypothetical intelligent species arising on a planet around a brown dwarf, we ourselves would be exotic extremophilic lifeforms: imagine being able to exist at temperatures where water is a liquid!

Cyberpastoralism

In what’s only an aside to his main post, Alex reveals his second thoughts about the slow burn revolution of decentralising technology:

I can’t help thinking, looking at a lot of the growing technology of instant urbanism (suitcase GSM base stations, palletised VSATs, Aggreko gensets, Sun Microsystems containerised data centres…) that a lot of this stuff might actually be a sort of negative toolkit of local optimisations.

RepRap isn’t on that list, but it should be part of this as well. All these technologies take something that you’d normally need a huge industrial complex for, scale them down to were they fit on the back of a lorry and make them independent of the infrastructure that their full scale counterparts depend on, therefore enabling sophisticated technology to be plunked down anywhere in the world without requiring anything but electricity. And even that can be provided independently, by using wind or solar power or diesel generators.

Alex calls it “instant urbanism”, but you could also call it cyberpastoralism: get all the tech benefits of living in the city without having to live in the city. There’s always been a strain of that in science fiction, a longing for the death of the city, for technology to advance to the point where a single household (or at best, a village) could provide everything we now need a global infrastructure for through magic replicator tech. In the fifties it was the flying car and fear of the a-bomb that would bring this about (cf. Simak’s City), in the eighties it was cyberspace and telecommuting and now we’re actually seeing a host of technologies maturing or almost maturing that look a lot like real versions of Star Trek replicators.

Of course even thinking about this for a moment makes you realise this independence is phony. You still need factories to manufacture these “suitcase GSM base stations, palletised VSATs, Aggreko gensets, Sun Microsystems containerised data centres” before they can be used and you still need the raw materials before those magickal RepRap machines can do anything, with everything that implies. All that changes is that people who can afford these toys can pretend to be rugged individualists independent from the rest of society, just like they now can pretend to rough it in the countryside in their expensive 4x4s and brand name survival kits.

In the real world the technologies Alex mentions are meant to be used as quick and dirty stop gaps, to work around the lack of a functioning infrastructure until a more permanent solution can be achieved. But when we see the US Army in all seriousness arguing for diesel generators to power Kandahar indefinately, something has gone wrong. Granted, the alternative of building a proper electricity network and getting power from the Kajaki Dam project and protecting both from the “Taliban” is problematic as well. But the choice for diesel is at heart a political one: it means “Afghanistan” has to buy foreign generators, foreign diesel and keeps the country tied to its donors, much more so than if a proper electricification programme is launched. Going the diesel route means Kandahar electricity production is outsourced to whoever wins the army contract — and the first thing you lose when outsourcing is control.