All posts by josephshoer

Science Fiction, Uncategorized

How to Watch Some Sci-Fi Shows: A Quick Guide

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Babylon 5

Don’t watch the first or last seasons. Also don’t watch the season 4 finale.

Battlestar Galactica

When they escape from the planet at the beginning of the third season, HUMANS WIN. End of show.

Doctor Who

It’s supposed to be cheesy, but whenever you see something so stupidly cheesy that it totally rips apart suspension of disbelief (e.g. main characters getting abducted onto 2000s reality TV shows, ’60s robots chanting “DELETE DELETE DELETE,” etc), hold “fast forward” until it looks like something serious is happening.

Farscape

Put up with the first season until it gets under your skin. John Crichton is just as confused as you are. 4th season is optional.

Firefly

Fortunately, it got cancelled before it had a chance to go bad! Movie very optional.

Futurama

Watch it all a zillion times.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Pay attention after Riker grows a beard. (This is a well-known effect.)

NASA, Science, Space

Sailing into Light

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This week, the NanoSail-D mission successfully deployed from FASTSAT. This is, apparently, the first time a nanosatellite has ejected from a microsatellite.

(In spacecraft lingo, engineers grabbed the term “microsatellite” to just mean “a small satellite,” where “small” was in comparison to the spacecraft with masses of thousands of kilograms. But they kept the relationship between the metric prefixes. So a “microsatellite” is about 100 kg or less, and a “nanosatellite” is about 10 kg or less. This is unfortunate for, say, my research group, because our proposed millimeter- or micron- scale spacecraft would have to be named something inconvenient to say, like “yoctosatellites.” Anyway.)

I think NanoSail-D is exciting for two reasons. First, it’s only the second solar sail mission to not explode on launch, after JAXA’s ICAROS mission. (The Planetary Society tried to launch a solar sail five years ago, but the converted ICBM launch vehicle malfunctioned.) Solar sails are a propulsion system that could allow spacecraft to move around the Solar System without expending propellant, so they would be a great technology for getting from planet to planet efficiently. The downside is that solar sailing takes a long time, but fortunately, robots can have long lives and a lot of patience. More solar sails may mean more robotic missions to planets, asteroids, and moons all over the place, which is a good thing for science!

The other reason why NanoSail-D is cool is this microsatellite-deploying-a-nanosatellite idea. Microsatellites are small and low-cost enough to have a pretty rapid development cycle, and spacecraft engineers are less averse to trying out riskier, newer technologies on microsatellites. FASTSAT is a great example: it’s a technology demonstrator mission, a spacecraft devoted entirely to trying out new things. Nanosatellites can be even faster and cheaper to build, so much so that it’s pretty common for universities to build CubeSat projects and you can buy components to build a fully-functional CubeSat off the internet for $100,000 or less.

So with FASTSAT and NanoSail-D, we have a relatively cheap spacecraft with a rapid development cycle that includes cool new technologies – and it launches an even cheaper spacecraft with even riskier technologies, including one that could allow interplanetary trajectories.

These are the ingredients we need to get probes all over the Solar System, and these are the design philosophies that push the envelope of spacecraft engineering.

NASA, Space

Space Access Gap: Closed!

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SpaceX’s second successful Falcon 9 launch has just inserted the Dragon capsule into Earth orbit!

First Falcon 9 launch (SpaceX)

The Dragon vehicle will perform a series of check-outs over the next few orbits before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. If all goes well, then this is a major success for SpaceX and NASA’s COTS program – which seeks to contract International Space Station supply missions to private companies after the Space Shuttle retires, so that ISS has more resupply mechanisms than the Russian Progress vehicle and European ATV. SpaceX wants to human-rate the capsule, as well, to provide astronaut transportation to orbit and even space tourism!

Today's launch (NASA)

Again, if all goes well, this mission ought to be vindication for President Obama’s vision for NASA: use commercial providers to get into Earth orbit, and then let NASA focus on the real envelope-pushing exploration. If the Falcon 9 gets to orbit, and the Dragon could take cargo or people up, then why don’t we just buy those for a fraction of the cost of the Ares 1/Orion system? Especially since that system would take many more years of development to become available to NASA. The Falcon 9 and Dragon will be ready much, much sooner!

Best of luck to the SpaceX team. And may the Congresspeople holding NASA’s purse-strings get their heads out of their pork barrels.

Update 1600 8 Dec 10: At the post-flight press conference, Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX gave an overview of the mission and a rosy assessment of its success. Apparently, the Falcon 9 second stage reached a very health apogee – well above the ISS orbit – the Dragon performed well enough in space to maintain a good lock on the TDRSS relay satellite, and it successfully splashed down within 10 km of its target and within a minute of its projected landing time. Musk stated a couple times that his “mind was blown” and pointed out that, had there been people on the Dragon spacecraft, they would have had “a very nice ride.” He thinks that all (“all”) Dragon needs to be human-rated are seats and an escape system, though he did admit that launch-escape system testing is both crucial and very hard. Apparently NASA officials told SpaceX that, if this flight went well, they would consider allowing an ISS rendezvous and docking on the next Dragon flight, so that may be a possibility for next year. Another Musk gem, on the politics of SpaceX’s activities: “any politician who wants to increase the deficit and reduce American access to space, go ahead and cut [the NASA Commercial Crew program].”

People, Skepticism, Social commentary

Atheist Vuvuzelas Making Noise in Texas

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I sometimes find myself a visitor to College Station, TX and have, over the course of those visits, made a few acquaintances. Today, I checked out an item from the Bryan/College Station local news that involved one such acquaintance: Keri Bean, who has organized the Brazos Valley Atheist Vuvuzela Marching Band and done something…rather adventurous, shall we say? Video below.

What really struck me about this story was the first quote that was critical of Keri and her compatriots. From the web article:

“Wasn’t exactly happy about the Christmas Parade this year, I spent many years teaching my children to love and respect other people and to love the fact that they were children of God and I don’t feel that they should be influenced in any other way especially not at a Christmas parade,” said Tina Corgey, who is a lifelong Bryan resident.

I’m not surprised that there were people in Texas who were disturbed by an atheist group marching through town. However, I couldn’t help but get hung up on the statement, “I spent many years teaching my children to love and respect other people…I don’t feel they should be influenced in any other way,” because this unhappy Bryan resident then went on to criticize the beliefs of other people and criticize that they had expressed those beliefs.  The Atheist Vuvuzela Band wasn’t antagonistic or offensive in exercising their First Amendment rights; they went about this with a healthy dose of humor and respect. So is Corgey saying one thing and doing another?

The thing is, I agree with Corgey’s sentiment – at least, her spoken one. I am happy that she’s taught her children to love and respect other people. I also think it would be wonderful if nobody ever influences her children to dislike or disrespect others. If she believes that these ideals derive from all people being children of God, that’s okay, too.

A marching band advertising themselves as atheists (or one playing vuvuzelas, for that matter) does not encourage her children to be disrespectful, or even encourage them to turn away from God. It merely announces that atheists exist. Corgey went on to say:

“If you have younger children they weren’t going to understand but I have older children, a teenager, 8-year-old and they were curious and they asked questions and it was hard for them to believe and understand that there are actually people out there that don’t believe in God,” Corgey said.

It is hard to acknowledge and understand ideas, theories, and beliefs that aren’t compatible with those that we accept. And it is also hard to explain to young or inexperienced minds that it’s okay for other people to believe something other than what you believe, as long as they treat others with respect and their beliefs don’t lead them to harm others. (That’s an ideal I celebrate about America!)

It’s hard, but not impossible. It’s hard, but not unnecessary. In our modern, free, and open society, it is essential that we accept differences of opinion without reducing them to tit-for-tat soundbytes. We must grapple with difficult issues in a considerate, respectful, and open-minded way.

That’s the reason why I’m glad that Keri and the Brazos Valley Atheist Vuvuzela Marching Band did what they did: because it caused Corgey’s children to be curious. They asked some questions to find out about other viewpoints than their own. Corgey may have struggled to answer their questions, and that’s okay – they are hard questions to answer. But the most important thing is that we keep asking them! Sometimes, questioning our ideas is the best way to strengthen or understand them. Sometimes, questioning our ideas leads us to something better. And sometimes, questioning our ideas leads us to something that is simply…different. But if we do not question, then we go nowhere. Curiosity should be celebrated! If the Athiest Vuvuzela Marching Band caused Corgey’s children to be curious enough to wrestle with questions that adults find difficult to engage, then they did a very good thing.

NASA, Science, Skepticism, Space

Did NASA Discover Life in the Saturnian System?

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Um, no.

NASA put out this press release, which inspired a blogger to post some speculation based on the credentials of the participants in the press conference:

if I had to guess at what NASA is going to reveal on Thursday, I’d say that they’ve discovered arsenic on Titan and maybe even detected chemical evidence of bacteria utilizing it for photosynthesis

–and the Internet went wild with the announcement that NASA had found life on one of Saturn’s moons, including an Atlanta newspaper. Of course, nowhere in NASA’s press release did they say anything about Saturn or Saturn’s moons, but feh! Who cares about what the primary sources say. Speculation is fact!

My guess? There has been some kind of study or experiment that shows how life could evolve based on a different chemistry than familiar Earth life, and that that chemical environment may exist (or have existed) elsewhere in the Solar System. The point of such a finding would be that we’d have to make sure any future astrobiology studies don’t just look for life as we know it – that they include the new chemistries. But that’s only my guess.

If NASA had discovered life, don’t you think the press release for the upcoming news conference would be front and center on NASA.gov, and that the list of panelists would include names like Bolden, Garver, Holdren, or Obama?

Graduate school, Science

A Grad Student Milestone

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I have started collecting my materials and papers into a dissertation draft, and today came up with a pleasant surprise. I visited the web site of the AIAA, an organization that publishes some of the journals I’ve submitted to, to take a look at some of the information on one of my papers. When I searched for my name, one of the hits returned was not one of my papers. Nor was it even one of my research group’s papers. It was from another author!

Naturally, I downloaded the paper straightaway. It appeared in the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics this month, and is on the subject of satellite formations held together by actively controlled electromagnets. Right in the second paragraph was a reference to my work with my advisor at Cornell:

And, sure enough, reference [3] is to, as it turns out, my first conference paper on this project!

(As an aside, by now I’ve done much better work than that paper – and as I edit my dissertation material, I keep thinking, ugh, how could I have written some of that stuff! – but I won’t be picky, because I understand how long the publication process can take!)

To my knowledge, this is my first outside-my-group citation. That’s a grad school milestone!

For those of you not familiar with science and engineering papers, let me explain a little. Even if this is only a sentence in the literature review, it’s still pretty important. It shows that the authors included my work within the scope of the field; it’s a sort of measure of acceptance into the community. This citation is especially cool because the MIT group that published this paper has been working on electromagnetically controlled satellite formations for a number of years, and we’ve seen our work as complimentary to theirs in a number of ways. It’s nice to see the recognition, and to see our work mentioned in the same section as other related research projects. (And I did some work out of one of Schaub’s textbooks recently.)

All right! Now I guess it’s time to try and get back to the grad studentry…

Gadgets

I am annoyed at smartphones, because I am about to get one

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Two reasons.

One has to do with the carriers. Modern cellular networks are entirely digital. Make a call, and the phone is digitizing your voice and sending bits through a radio network. Send a text, and the phone is sending bits through a radio network. Load a web page, and the phone is receiving bits through a radio network. It makes absolutely no sense for phone companies to split their plans into “voice,” “text,” “email,” and “data” segments. Really, it’s all data. The network hardware doesn’t care whether the last byte you sent was voice or text or web, it was just a byte. Bit-bit-bit-bit-bit-bit-bit-bit. It took the same amount of bandwidth to send. The only reason phone companies structure things in this way is that they can get people to pay for more things than they otherwise would if, oh, let’s say, Congresspeople realized that it’s all just data and that the phone companies are charging customers several times for the same thing.

The other is that I think the manufacturers, carriers, marketers, and (most annoyingly) customers have forgotten where the second half of the compound word “smartphone” came from.

I have had my eye on the Droid Incredible for a little while now, so I’ve been following many smartphone reviews to see how newer phones match up, and they almost universally agree that call quality on all these devices is okay at best. Today I played around with an Incredible for a bit in a Verizon store and tried calling someone else with it, chatting for a bit, then switching phones with them and chatting some more. On both ends, the voice I heard was clearly intelligible but sounded like it lacked the full richness of tone that I would hear in normal conversation. It was a bit filtered sounding, maybe with a little bit of background. I figured it just sounded like a voice over a phone.

But then I called the other person on my old LG VX5400, a basic flip-phone that was inexpensive enough to be fully subsidized by Verizon, and repeated the chat-swap-chat sequence. There was a marked improvement in voice quality; it sounded like I heard a fuller frequency range through the connection in both cases. The other person agreed with my assessments.

This puzzles me: why would the Incredible both record and play lower-quality audio? I can think of a few of reasons that might apply:

  1. The Droid Incredible has both an inferior speaker and inferior microphone to my old phone.
  2. The Droid Incredible has an inferior antenna to my old phone.
  3. The Droid Incredible uses more lossy encoding schemes to digitize and play voice audio.

I think there’s no excuse for any of these scenarios. For the first two, clearly better hardware was available to the manufacturer and clearly that hardware is within Verizon’s subsidy budget, so there’s no particular reason to cut corners and make a less capable product. In the third case, well, that’s just silly; why would the manufacturer put software in place that detracts from the performance and appeal of their product?

Obviously, smartphones are being marketed to consumers on the basis of their web access and mobile computing features, rather than their capabilities as phones. But I’m looking at upgrading my primary (and only!) phone line, so it’s important to me to be able to clearly understand others and clearly express myself in phone calls. The hit on voice quality from the Droid Incredible isn’t quite enough to outweigh the reasons I have to want its other features, and I’ve seen anecdotal evidence on the Internet that goes both ways on its call quality, but a noticeable reduction in voice quality was enough of a disappointment to make me briefly reconsider the other features. This device is supposed to be better than my flip phone; yet while it may be “smart,” it’s not better at being a phone.

Maybe this is why many of the people I know who have obtained smartphones immediately became harder to get in touch with…

Food, Gadgets, People, Science, Skepticism, Social commentary

Disconnects

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Tonight, a friend of a friend came over to my apartment so we could all make chili together. During this process, we came to a point when we needed to defrost a bunch of ground beef. When I moved to the microwave to get that going, Friend-of-a-Friend says to me, “You know, you can also defrost meat in a bowl of warm water. That’s healthier for you.”

Usually the method I choose by which to defrost meat is governed by how long I feel like waiting for dinner, and how much I am thinking ahead. But I was curious about this new rationale, so I asked Friend-of-a-Friend to explain how the warm-water method is healthier than punching the “defrost” button on my microwave. “Well,” this person says, “one is cooking with radiation, and one isn’t.” Then they shrug and make a waffling gesture with their hands. “Ehhhh…” The implication was clear.

Something about this situation bugs me. Here is a person who has enough scientific knowledge to see that there is a connection between microwaves, radiation, and certain health concerns – but not enough knowledge about these things to realize that they have constructed a problem or fear that has no justification.

Microwave ovens work by bouncing radiation with a wavelength of a few centimeters or so around in a cavity. This wavelength lines up nicely with some of the vibration modes of water molecules, and the vibrations thus excited get passed along to food as heat.

Ionizing radiation can cause health risks in a number of ways, including killing things outright at high enough doses. However, the more relevant concern at the low levels of radiation found in a household appliance would be that the radiation could damage the structure of some cells’ DNA, and those cells would run amok – becoming cancer.

However, microwave radiation is non-ionizing: it is not energetic enough to do much more than excite molecular modes or maybe kick a few electrons into a valence band. It can’t cause any more direct damage to you than a walkie-talkie does by blasting you with radio waves, or a household radiator does by bathing you in infrared radiation. Furthermore, it can’t cause any damage to the DNA or cell membranes in the steak or pork chop or broccoli cut or baked potato or whatever else you put in your microwave oven. Even with ionizing radiation, irradiating the steak doesn’t make it radioactive. The result you get is a hot steak, not a carcinogen.

So, here is a person who knows that microwaves work by radiation, and that radiation causes cancer. But this person doesn’t realize that the physical mechanisms in each case are different, that the food cannot transfer the effects of radiation to you by being eaten, and that there is no syllogism here. But I wonder just how pervasive this kind of thing is: would this person be surprised if I shined a flashlight on them, and then announced – accurately and truthfully – that I was irradiating them? And how many other people are out there with similar misconceptions?

It strikes me that this sort of incomplete knowledge is a little dangerous, because it creates fear where none should exist. And there are many forces out there that would love for us to receive only partial knowledge, because then we can be driven by those constructed fears. If only more people could be motivated to pursue a fuller understanding of science…