Plasma Wind

Wheels within Wheels

Spiral Lights over Norway?  Indeed.  Check out the scattering's take on the deal of the wheel.

(update 12/11/09):  Ok, it was a Russian Missile.  So what, its still cool. 

Unit Conversion Tool, Update No. 3

YAUCTU (Yet Another Unit Conversion Tool Update).  This is update number three.

You can download this latest version at the bottom of this post. 

As I need unit conversions myself, I add them to the tool.  Recent additions to this version are for some volume, power, and energy conversions.  I also found an error in one of the area conversions, which I have fixed. 

The idea is that you could use the tool directly for unit conversions, or append the spreadsheet to an existing of yours, or hyperlink it.  It is not recommended to cut and paste individual cells unless considerable care is taken to check the equations and cell notation. 

A few Rules/Suggestions/Tips:

My convention is that the numbers you need to input are blue, and calculated values are black.  One can go english-to-metric or metric-to-english via the appropriate worksheet.

If you want to convert within the same unit family (i.e. english to english or SI to SI), you can simply do a "goal seek", using values from one of the corresponding converted units as the "To Value" . If you've never used "goal seek" in Excel, here's a tutorial on how it works, or try this. 

As I stated before, no claims are made as to accuracy of these conversions, so the user assumes all risk when downloading this spreadsheet.  I strive to be as accurate as possible since this is the conversion tool that I actually use.  However, each user is responsible for his or her own work, so always check your own work carefully!

Any feedback as to additional conversions to add, or other ways to improve the conversion tool is greatly appreciated.

Download Unit converter 12-09-09

Space Ship Two in the Land of the Lost

Recently, I saw "Land of the Lost" on DVD.  I liked the Saturday morning show  as a kid.  It was one of the last shows I watched before becoming a teenager and transitioning out of getting up on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons and such.  (Spoiler Alert!) I remember being especially intrigued by how they "ended" the last show of the TV series by having the the "original" family leave the land of the Lost to be followed by "another" identical, alternate-universe family, and the whole process starts over again, recursively justifying eternal reruns.  I remember feeling a certain poignancy for the eternal recycling of those people and the creatures trapped in the Land of the Lost.  Perhaps that was one of the first times that I recognized a good story line, and how it was the quality of the writing that made the difference.  I also recall that Larry Niven was credited with at least one of the scripts.  I've since discovered a number of excellent Sci-fi writers did as well: Ben Bova, Norman Spinrad, et al. 

Anyhoo, the Land of the Lost Movie, starring Will Farrell, was ok.  I happen to like Will Farrell, so I found it pretty funny, although rather crude in a few places. 

However, the whole reason for this post is that I am quite sure that I saw the crashed remains of a Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo in the background of one of the scenes.  It passed very quickly, and I had to back it up and check it out multiple times, but I'm quite sure that's what it was.  It was painted red, and broken up quite a bit. 

I don't have a time count when it occurs, but it is immediately following the scene where the ice cream truck and man crashes onto the land of the lost, and near the scene in which the large allosaurus is exploded by a tank of pressurant gas.  Will Ferrell is walking along, and the red SS2 is crashed on the ridgeline above him.  The words "Virgin" appear to be on the enpennage.  

See!  New Space continues to make inroads into the collective mainstream culture!

If anyone sees this and can confirm it, I would be most obliged.

Still Cranking

My work load has increased dramatically, which is good.  However my response time on posts and responding to comments has increased as well.  Thanks for your patience, and I hope I'm providing good value for the time you take to read what's here.

Still got lots of good stuff coming: more ATR history, some more downloadable spreadsheet analysis tools, another ATR application post (that's a big one), as well as the usual onslaught of regular postings, offering keen and insightful observations, or so I keep telling myself.

Where's Your Flying Car? You Traded It In

When I was a kid, I remember seeing pictures of the cars of the future, and some of them could fly, or at least the coolest ones did.  So, how come we don’t have flying cars now?

We’ve got all this research going on, the government spends billions annually on new materials, high-performance jet and rocket engines, intelligent control systems, advanced modeling tools.  All sorts of incredible technological advancements that were purchased with taxpayer dollars.  We went to the moon, for crying out loud!  If we’re really so advanced technologically, then a flying car should be a snap.

The reason we don’t have flying cars is that we, as a country, as a people, have chosen to be a socialistic society, instead of a technological/entrepreneurial society.  We have chosen entitlements, equality of outcome, and government programs instead of free markets, equality of opportunity, and individualism.  And when you make that choice, there are consequences, for good or bad, that inevitably emerge. 

Knowingly or unknowingly, collectively rather than individually, we traded away growth, prosperity, and innovation for the dream that together, we could ensure the well-being of all of us.  We wanted to make sure that the less fortunate were taken care of, that the environment was taken care of.  We wanted to make sure that everything was safe, non-toxic, and nurturing of everyone’s self-esteem.  Our march towards socialism was fueled by our best intentions, our noblest aspirations for what mankind could be.

But there has been a price to pay. And the price you pay for socialism is an unrelenting curtailment of individual initiative, of the freedom to dream, hope, create, build, and grow. We can’t innovate because of liability issues.  We can’t generate research funds because they’ve been taken from us as taxes.  When you become a socialistic society, your business becomes everybody’s business.  Nobody wants it in their backyard, or in your backyard either.

So if you’re asking where’s your flying car, the answer is that you traded it in on the sincere intention that the less fortunate could be taken care of, that our rivers might be made cleaner, our skies might be blue again, so that a person with no job could get some food stamps, or a person with no insurance could get medical treatment.  In our rush to create more equality and reduce poverty in our society, we’ve acceded to activist government policies that are designed to “spread the wealth around”.  And we’re learning the hard lesson that when you spread the wealth around, you don’t eliminate the poverty, you eliminate the wealth.

The great and terrible irony is, that if we’d have let people create, innovate, and prosper, we’d have all of the above and way more.  And we would be creating wealth, not expending it.  Even more fundamentally, we would have created this prosperity through voluntary cooperation, not government coercion.  We’d have flying cars, and life-saving drugs, and all sorts of things that we can’t even imagine now.  

Was it worth the price?  I don’t know.  But I do know one thing: if I had a flying car,everyone would be better off. And I mean that as metaphorically deep as you wanna’ go.

(a repost from 6/1/09)

There's Water on the Moon!

NASA's LCROSS mission has officially confirmed the detection of macroscopic amounts of water on the moon.  This is huge, a real game changer.   The implications for scientific missions, and the development of exoeconomic development are staggering. 

My post from back in June regarding the upcoming LCROSS/LRO mission (Hitting a Harsh Mistress), can be found here, and includes the downloadable charts that Todd May, NASA Manager for the Lunar Precursor Robotic Program, was kind enough to provide.  Its quite interesting to look back on the charts and see how folks were anticipating what might be the results from the mission. 

NASA as an organization often takes a lot of grief when things don't work out as well as they might be expected to.  But in this case, NASA has hit a home run, with bases loaded.  Congratulations to Todd May, Anthony Colaprete, and all of the LCROSS/LRO mission team.  You guys rock.

The Technology of Politics

Fredrick Hayek was an important political/economic thinker and writer of the twentieth century.  His classic books The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty, among others, were extremely influential in shaping political thought, and particularly libertarian and conservative thinking. A short, 5-minute movie summarizing the main ideas in The Road to Serfdom can be found here.  It is quite chilling.
Despite his beliefs in the power of free-market economies, he was not a Laissez-faire economist, nor was he a conservative, and states his reasons for not being one in his classic essay Why I am not a Conservative.  

One of the important ideas that Hayek promoted was the notion that reason alone is insufficient to solve all problems, especially complicated ones like how prices are set in economic systems.  Instead, he argued that natural systems, like the free-market economy, must be given sufficient freedom from regulation from well-meaning bureaucrats, so they can operate as a gigantic system of interacting elements.  These elements are essentially individual people, pursuing their own individual market interests. 

In many of the most important ways, the free-market economy operates very much like an information network.  And if we've learned anything about networks, it's that you've got to leave them more or less alone so that they can work out, or compute if you will, the best organization of the system based merely on their own simple interactions.  Kevin Kelly does a remarkable job of describing the interactions within networks that make them so powerful and effective. 

One would do well to read the above references, and give some consideration to our current political climate and our gradual decent into socialism, the very socialism America's founding fathers warned against.  Whatever your political persuasion, you should be concerned about our gradual loss of liberty, and the elimination of freedoms that we once took for granted.  It's one thing to disagree with others regarding political questions.  It's quite another when those disagreements cannot be discussed for fear of reprisal.

Fredrick Hayek was an important political/economic thinker and writer of the twentieth century.  His classic books The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty, among others, were extremely influential in shaping political thought, and particularly libertarian and conservative thinking. A short, 5-minute movie summarizing the main ideas in The Road to Serfdom can be found here.  It is quite chilling.
Despite his beliefs in the power of free-market economies, he was not a Laissez-faire economist, nor was he a conservative, and states his reasons for not being one in his classic essay Why I am not a Conservative.  

One of the important ideas that Hayek promoted was the notion that reason alone is insufficient to solve all problems, especially complicated ones like how prices are set in economic systems.  Instead, he argued that natural systems, like the free-market economy, must be given sufficient freedom from regulation from well-meaning bureaucrats, so they can operate as a gigantic system of interacting elements.  These elements are essentially individual people, pursuing their own individual market interests. 

In many of the most important ways, the free-market economy operates very much like an information network.  And if we've learned anything about networks, it's that you've got to leave them more or less alone so that they can work out, or compute if you will, the best organization of the system based merely on their own simple interactions.  Kevin Kelly does a remarkable job of describing the interactions within networks that make them so powerful and effective. 

One would do well to read the above references, and give some consideration to our current political climate and our gradual decent into socialism, the very socialism America's founding fathers warned against.  Whatever your political persuasion, you should be concerned about our gradual loss of liberty, and the elimination of freedoms that we once took for granted.  It's one thing to disagree with others regarding political questions.  It's quite another when those disagreements cannot be discussed for fear of reprisal.

For the Love of Technology

We love technology (from the Greek, literally “know-how”). It’s so…so… American.  We’re a culture evolved from all the do-it-yourselfers, early adopters, pioneers, independent thinkers that left Europe a few centuries back, so its only natural that we want to know how to do something better, easier, or maybe so that we can make a buck, or maybe just because we like knowing how to do something that other people can’t.  This is something we seek out and embrace.

 But the implementation of new technology is a different story.  New technology faces the challenge of displacing the incumbent technology.  When people are faced with this decision, they make a reasonable assessment: does the new technology and its claimed benefits outweigh the difficulty and risk of replacing the old technology, especially when the incumbent way is working, making money, and can be counted on?  (Way) More often than not, the incumbent wins, and the new technology is not implemented. The difficulty of implementing new technology and innovations is well-documented and analyzed in Clayton M. Christensen’s books, The Innovator’s Dilemma, and The Innovator’s Solution.  Christensen basically shows that new technology has to enter “from the bottom up”, by providing innovation for the needs of customers that aren’t being served by the incumbent. 

 A while back, considerable discussion arose from John McGowan’s article in the Space Review regarding technological innovations that might make cheap access to space possible.  I think the significant contribution of McGowan’s article is the reiteration of the fact that technological development requires many trial-and-error attempts in order to work out all the kinks. 

 I provided some comments to the article, in an attempt to shed some light on specific approaches to technical innovations for low cost space access.  In my opinion, there is almost no better reference to this issue than John London’s seminal book, LEO on the Cheap, which can be downloaded here.  London points out that simplicity and design choices can radically alter development and operational costs, and that there are cultural issues involved as well. He provides excellent examples as well as recommendations.  Col. London (ret) is a rather amazing person, and is one of the few people I know to have served in the Air Force (as an officer), and in NASA and the DoD (as a civilian), and has remained a tireless supported of the "New Space" Industry.  Not too long ago this was considered fringe territory, and it was John who coined the term the "radical rocket underground".  So he's not just talking out of his hat, he's been there, done that.

 LEO on the Cheap essentially provides a roadmap on how to develop low cost space launch systems.  And in fact, many of his recommendations and observations have found their implementation in some of the current space launch systems, such as SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR, and others.

 Finally, I think its worth noting, as I did in my comments to McGowan, that we may eventually rediscover the advantages provided by spaceplane-type launch vehicles which take off from a runway, fly an envelope-expansion type flight, and then return to land. Despite their larger dry mass fractions, aircraft-type flight operations allow incremental flight testing, and hence, many more trials for a given development budget.

 But the question remains as to why this has taken so long.  This is not a simple question to answer, because there have been, in my opinion, quite a number of contributing factors.  But, my best attempt at putting it in a sentence or two goes something like this:  the Space launch industry emerged largely as the product of post-World War II industrial practices and the success of large, government-led projects.  Subsequently, the aviation and aerospace industries were largely usurped by cold war imperatives.

 Further discussion and explanation of what I mean above will require additional posts, which I’ll provide later.  But the upshot of this, at least for Americans, is that launch vehicle design, development, and the selling of launch services got wrapped up with only one customer, the U.S. Government.  The U.S. Government became the incumbent, and it’s taken a long time to create and find markets for these alternative launch services.

 I have to remind myself that new markets have to be created.  They are created when there is an exchange of things between someone who wants and/or needs something, and someone who has something to offer.  Usually, when someone wants something that doesn’t currently exist, creative people scramble around to provide that something.  However, if a creative person has something that they are offering, and no one wants it at the moment, then it sometimes takes a while to find someone who does want it, and sees its value.  Oftentimes, people don’t even know what they want except more/better/faster/cheaper of what they currently have. 

 How does this apply to our current launch markets?  We have people who need launch services, and we have people who provide those launch services.  The people who need launch services want more/better/faster/cheaper launch services than they have now.  Incumbents, like Boeing, LockMart, Orbital, have the advantage.  This is the innovator’s dilemma.  New launch providers, SpaceX, Blue Origin, TGV Rockets, et al, are seeking ways to “enter from the bottom up” by providing lower cost services to customers who aren’t being served by the incumbents.  This is the Innovator’s Solution.  And I think it’s going to be successful beyond our wildest reckonings.

New Stuff, as far as you know

I know its a bad habit, but I've found a good source of seemingly new material to post about:  some of my previous posts.  Let's face it, you're not going to go back and dig through my archives from May to read more of my posts (unless...you....have...some sort of....obsession....yikes...)

So I'll do you a favor, and I'll repost a few of what I consider to be some of my better earlier posts, posts you never read because nobody was reading them (as far as I know). Here's a good example (maybe others will follow):

The Perishability of Technology

One aspect of technology that particularly fascinates me, is the process of technological degeneration, i.e. how technology gained can in fact be lost. We tend to think that the world we inhabit now represents the acme of technological progress, and in most of the ways that matter, this is true.  Our current technological prowess has emerged after thousands of years of more or less continuous progress, one discovery leading to another, several advances combining together to foster one great leap forward, or a new discovery.  James Burke’s famous television documentary Connections provided many fascinating accounts of this technological advancement. 

 Yet this steady, upwards-moving progress is not necessarily a given.  Furthermore, advancements made are quite perishable.  Consider, for example, that of the Roman Empire.  At the peak of this great civilization, numerous important technological advancements had been made in civil engineering, including structures (the barrel arch), materials (concrete), and hydraulics (aqueducts, siphons, valves), as well as the important advancement of how to organize and execute large projects: the technology of project engineering.  However, as the empire fragmented and eventually dissolved, so too went their technological capabilities.  Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, building technologies in Western Europe would not equal what the Romans achieved for nearly 1400 years (say 400 A.D. to the 18^th century).  I recently read where a large Roman bronze valve, used for water flow control, was finally taken out of service, having performed satisfactorily for over 1500 years. 

 Other civilizations have also had highly developed technological advancements that would not be equaled for millennia.  The ancient Egyptians had a technological civilization that was so advanced, that it is still a wonderment to this very day, as it was to Medieval Europeans, the Romans, the Greeks, and the Persians.  The great pyramid at Giza was the tallest man-made structure in the world until it was finally surpassed by the Eiffel Tower ; build for the Exposition Universelle of 1889. 

 Yet these civilizations, and many others (Mohenjo-daro, Tiahuanaco, Ba’albek), grew, reached their zenith, declined, and eventually disintegrated, usually leaving behind remnants of their past greatness.  The reasons for their declines are multifaceted, and not always clearly understood.  But my question is, what happens to the technology as your civilization declines?  Do you know someone that used to know how to do some process, but they’re no longer alive?  Perhaps you remember when things actually worked, but they don’t any more.  Do you just settle for less, and tell your children about the good ‘ol days when we used to have running water and telephones? 

 The idea of the perishability of technology I find very interesting, and somewhat disturbing, because it suggests that our continuous progress is by no means inevitable.  Sure, you’ll have a world war now and again, but the important technological civilizations survived, rebuilt, and in fact, net technological progress was often made.  But what about some other global catastrophe?  Or perhaps there could be some sort of gradual disintegration of civilization, like what happened to the Roman Empire, causing us to sink back into a more primitive and less technologically-capable condition.

 I often see movies and dramas about what happens in the aftermath of some great catastrophe or societal collapse (The Road Warrior, From Here to Eternity, Waterworld, The Postman, etc., there’s quite a list), and you see people trying to cope with what’s left of their civilization.  What you don’t see (because it’s hard to depict and perhaps not particularly dramatic) is people making the choice between slumping back into using less technology, or trying to maintain and improve what ever technology is left.  This process is composed of thousands of smaller choices that you make every day, throughout the day. “I’m going to go to my job today”, “I’m going to read a book on how to do something today”, “what can I create that’s new to me today?”, etc. 

 It seems that most of us would make the choice to keep trying to move forward, to maintain and improve existing technologies because we prefer them.  This approach to living is well articulated in Kevin Kelly's recent column “The World without Technology”:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/03/the_world_witho.php

So even if we had a major breakdown in our civilization, for any number of reasons, there might still be enough people around to recover, and preserve whatever technological gains we had made.

 And yet, we know from the historical record that these massive failures of civilization do occur (as previously discussed above), and that they can take thousands of years to recover from.  Perhaps some technology is lost for good (ref 1, 2).  Why does this happen?  Maybe that’s the question I’m asking. 

 These questions have direct bearing on the issue of humankind's expansion off the planet.  I will be exploring these questions and the general issue of off-planet expansion as part of my regular postings.  By giving consideration to the processes of how technology can be lost, in addition to how it is gained, perhaps that will provide some insight into our motivations for continuing to know more, to understand better, and to move forward and outward.

 References

1.  The Technology of the Gods; D.H. Childress; ISBN 0-932813-73-9

2.  Ancient Man:  A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts; W.R. Corliss; ISBN 0-915554-03-8

How this Blog got its Name

In case you were wondering

yes, that's me, and this is what I do.