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- Gran Turismo concept car built and run with help from 3D printer
- Neil Gaiman explains why he doesn't sweat "piracy"
- Billion Year labor contract for Scientologists
- Nokia employees stage mass walkout over new Microsoft-centric business strategy
- UK govt's "evidence based" health policies aren't based on evidence
- 1942 adding machines: a marvel of non-essential zero elimination!
- Goodbye, Mubarak: Hope, Fear and Mahir Çağrı
- Egypt: Dance Dance Revolution (big photo gallery)
- Goodbye, and hello
- Sony's upcoming DSLR camera has a see-through plastic case
- David O'Reilly's latest: The External World
- WikiLeaks to sue defector who wrote tell-all book
- How to make a male squid go totally bonkers
- Bespoke tweed slings for hipsters with injured arms
- YouTube showcasing "citizen videos" of Egypt on day of Mubarak's ouster
- Artists and designers share their desks
- New album from Occult Detective Club: free song
- IBM's "Watson" Jeopardy! computer: it's all about the digits
- My essential Mac applications, part 3
- Voynich manuscript dated to early renaissance
- The people of Fort Wayne, Indiana love Harry Baals
- Egypt: TGIF
- Open Source Hardware Definition turns 1.0
- Burning Man: Dr. Dre considered how to "make some loot off these fools"?
- Penicillium up close
- Atlas Obscura travels to the hidden wonders of South America
- Paintings by Brian Despain and Mia Araujo
- Incredible journey: Can we reach the stars without breaking the bank?
- Anti-crime DNA sprays in a reader's neighborhood
- Mubarak resigns
| Gran Turismo concept car built and run with help from 3D printer Posted: 12 Feb 2011 12:19 AM PST The i.materialize 3D printing folks were tapped by Citroën to help build a working, full-size Citroën G, this being an imaginary car that had previously only existed in the virtual confines of the Gran Turismo 5 racing game. They did so, and actually drove the car around the streets of London. The concept car itself is an impressive racing monster, a virtual design transposed to reality with quite irrational proportions. The car remains fully functional with butterfly opening doors and passed top speed tests at about 200km/h on a racetrack.3D printing a supercar, the Citroën GT |
| Neil Gaiman explains why he doesn't sweat "piracy" Posted: 12 Feb 2011 12:56 AM PST In this video from the UK Open Rights Group's excellent ORGzine, Neil Gaiman explains how he came to understand that "Internet piracy" of his books is good for sales and good for readers and writers. Gaiman on Copyright Piracy and the Web |
| Billion Year labor contract for Scientologists Posted: 12 Feb 2011 02:18 AM PST  This "Billion Year Contract" is purportedly the document that Scientologists committing themselves to the Sea Org (a part of the organization alleged to practice indentured labor enforced by corporal punishment) are asked to sign. It came unsourced, but there are plenty of other copies on the web, including this Operation Clambake version. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) |
| Nokia employees stage mass walkout over new Microsoft-centric business strategy Posted: 12 Feb 2011 12:45 AM PST Up to 1,000 Nokia employees in Finland walked out on the job yesterday, following the news that Nokia's future would be based on integrating its products with Microsoft services and abandoning most of its own technology. The walkouts either simply downed tools and walked away or took a day's worth of "flex time." Nokia workers walk out in protest after Microsoft news (via /.) (Image: HS.fi) |
| UK govt's "evidence based" health policies aren't based on evidence Posted: 12 Feb 2011 12:34 AM PST  Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre looks at the UK government's claims that its health cuts and changes are "evidence-based" and finds that the "evidence" consists of bad studies and cherry-picked results. The government initially claimed that UK heart attack death rates were twice as bad as France. This was an overstatement: they are, but following recent interventions the gap is closing so rapidly that on current trends it will have disappeared entirely by 2012. In response, Burstow cites a 2008 paper by McKee and Nolte which he says "concluded that the UK had one of the worst rates of mortality amenable to healthcare among rich nations".Why is evidence so hard for politicians? (Image: David Cameron's so-called policy on the NHS!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from raver_mikey's photostream)
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| 1942 adding machines: a marvel of non-essential zero elimination! Posted: 12 Feb 2011 12:14 AM PST  This 1942 ad for a Comptometer mechanical adding machine celebrates the joy of spending hours every day doing what spreadsheets today accomplish in an eyeblink. I love the feature-list: no glare dials, the elimination of non-essential zeroes, and a marvellous "Keystroke Censor." |
| Goodbye, Mubarak: Hope, Fear and Mahir Çağrı Posted: 11 Feb 2011 07:53 PM PST Ethan Zuckerman parses the day's events in Egypt. "When people take to the streets and the army is called out to stop them, at least two things can happen: Tunis, or Tiananmen. When the world is watching, a peaceful outcome is more likely. A threatened regime, when they think they're immune to scrutiny, is a very dangerous thing." |
| Egypt: Dance Dance Revolution (big photo gallery) Posted: 11 Feb 2011 07:43 PM PST  This is what hope looks like: massive celebrations at the end of an historic day in Egypt, as captured in photographs. Demonstrators celebrate inside Tahrir Square after the announcement of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's resignation in Cairo on February 11, 2011. Egypt's Vice President Omar Suleiman said on Friday that Mubarak had bowed to pressure from the street and had resigned, handing power to the army, he said in a televised statement. More images below. (Images: REUTERS. Photographers: Dylan Martinez, Goran Tomasevic, Asmaa Waguih, Yannis Behrakis, Suhaib Salem, Amr Dalsh, Luke MacGregor )
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| Posted: 11 Feb 2011 04:37 PM PST  Earth (the little dot in the upper right), as seen in scattered yellow sunlight from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometers, by the Voyager 1 probe as it departed our solar system. // NASA/JPL All good things must come to an end. It's been an honor and a pleasure to guest-blog on BoingBoing for the past two weeks, and to engage with so many of you on topics near and dear to my heart. We talked about why the existence of extraterrestrial life is the most thrilling question humans can now answer. We noticed thousands of missing terrestrial planets, and found out how to find them. We discussed science communication, and astrobiology's asymptotic frontier. We weighed the worth of our world, and then crunched the numbers on some new exoplanets. We visited the Earth-like future of Saturn's moon, Titan, and learned the real science behind the forest moon of Endor. We explored a Keplerian orrery, and found new ways to visualize exoplanet data. We saw the birthing pangs of planets. We debated the most promising nearby stars, and wondered how we might one day reach them. Special thanks goes out to those who directly or indirectly helped with these entries: Maggie Koerth-Baker, Rob Beschizza, Jer Thorp, Debra Fischer, Greg Laughlin, David Kipping, Dan Fabrycky, Sara Seager, and Lucianne Walkowicz and the rest of the Kepler science team. Thank you. And thanks to all of you reading this, particularly those of you who joined the discussion and passed story links around. I appreciate your attention and your interest. There was much more I wished to write about and say, and indeed there will be one more multi-part post coming soon, but for now it's time to step aside. I hope all of you will keep reading, keep looking up, and start following and talking with me on Twitter. For media-related inquiries on commissions, reprints, and the like, I can be reached via FirstInitialFollowedByLastName at Google's e-mail service. A final thought: In these past two weeks, our world has significantly changed—not only in Egypt, with the crowdsourced revolution that led to the fall of an autocrat, Hosni Mubarak, but also with the news from NASA's Kepler mission, which hinted that our universe is likely brimming with other living planets. The writing isn't on the wall so much as it's in the stars: We are not alone. The juxtaposition of these two events inescapably brings to mind Voyager 1's famed "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth from the depths of space, and Carl Sagan's timeless meditation on its meaning. It has been oft-quoted, but bears repeating:
Sagan's words are a summation of the value of a cosmic perspective, and I doubt they will ever be surpassed in their eloquence. I'll leave you with them. |
| Sony's upcoming DSLR camera has a see-through plastic case Posted: 11 Feb 2011 04:16 PM PST  This reminds me of the cool see-through cases of prison-approved TV sets. Please tell me the production model will look like this. All consumer electronics should have clear cases! |
| David O'Reilly's latest: The External World Posted: 11 Feb 2011 07:05 PM PST [Video Link, NSFW] (WARNING: this video contains adult content) David O'Reilly, the fearless boy genius animator whose work we've featured in Boing Boing Video with admiration for years (and on our in-flight channel on board Virgin America Airlines), has a beautiful new piece out. In "The External World," a boy learns to play the piano. "Show support by buying a HD copy of this film!" He is absolutely the tits. You should follow him on Twitter. Here's the project website: theexternalworld.com. (via the Boing Boing Submitterator, thanks, Nick Johnson) |
| WikiLeaks to sue defector who wrote tell-all book Posted: 11 Feb 2011 03:48 PM PST From The Independent: "WikiLeaks says it will take legal action against a former key member of the website who left after a bitter fallout with founder Julian Assange and went on to set up a rival whistle-blowing platform." They're referring to Daniel Domscheit-Berg, formerly aka Daniel Schmidt, whose tell-all book "Inside WikiLeaks" went on sale today in Germany. |
| How to make a male squid go totally bonkers Posted: 11 Feb 2011 03:44 PM PST "A single protein found on the surface of squid egg capsules will instantly transform a placid cephalopod into a eight-armed undersea terror, scientists discover." (thanks, 24601) |
| Bespoke tweed slings for hipsters with injured arms Posted: 11 Feb 2011 03:38 PM PST  Boing Boing reader Garth says, Hi BoingBoing friends! When I saw the leg bone cane post, I thought you might enjoy this bespoke tweed sling that my amazing wife Claire made for me out of an old sport coat. She used the original pockets and detailing from the coat to make me look disability-fabulous. Slings in particular are fairly easy to retroengineer--some fabric and about $5 worth of Velcro, straps and rings from the fabric store will make you the envy of your uninjured friends. More on their blog here. It's very spiffy, Garth, thanks for sharing! And get well soon. |
| YouTube showcasing "citizen videos" of Egypt on day of Mubarak's ouster Posted: 11 Feb 2011 03:24 PM PST With Mubarak out and the internet back on, there's an absolute flood of images, sound, and video out of Egypt on this historic—and so far, joyous—day. YouTube's Citizentube channel is curating an amazing collection of uploads by people in Egypt. |
| Artists and designers share their desks Posted: 11 Feb 2011 07:04 AM PST  Noah "Skull-a-Day" Scalin sez, "Writer Kate Donnelly asks artists & designers to share images of their desks and work spaces as a way to peek inside their minds and practice. So much more fascinating that a typical profile and fun to see how the work contrasts or reflects with their spaces. Folks featured so far run the gamut from the famous (Milton Glaser) to, well... me." From Your Desks (Thanks, Noah!) |
| New album from Occult Detective Club: free song Posted: 11 Feb 2011 02:52 PM PST  It's nice to know that there are some youngsters who know good music. Occult Detective Club is formed by Alx Anguiano on vocals/guitars, Andrew Messer on guitars, Chris Reeves on drums and Tyler Shults on bass.Free song by Occult Detective Club: C'mon Levi |
| IBM's "Watson" Jeopardy! computer: it's all about the digits Posted: 11 Feb 2011 03:38 PM PST  Thanks to my own 13 games of Jeopardy! and the book about it and all, lots of people (including the New York Times) have asked my opinion about the whole IBM computer vs. Ken Jennings vs. Brad Rutter cage match, airing next Mon-Wed (check local listings). Let's be clear: I have no inside knowledge, and while Ken and Brad are both friends of mine, we haven't discussed the games. I'm just a former player doing color commentary before the big game.Here's what you might not see at home: at the top tournament level, every player can figure out nearly all of the correct responses, no matter how arcane. When I was in fighting shape for the Masters tournament at Radio City in 2002, I could usually suss out at least 50 of the 61 clues in a game, and sometimes up to 55 -- and I was hardly the strongest player. (The trick isn't actually knowledge -- obviously! if you know me -- but getting in the fast-lateral-thinking groove.) I got my butt handed to me, in fact, by a guy who eventually got his butt handed to him by Brad. IBM wouldn't unveil their spiffy new buzzerbox unless they were sure it could solve a similar number of clues. And they definitely have a good idea of Watson's ability, after many months of honing its skills in mock games against progressively more successful real-life Jeopardy! champs. (Full disclosure: I was invited to play in the final round of mock games, but I had to drop out due to illness. Damn, that would have been fun.) At Brad's and Ken's gods-throwing-lightning level, the difference between winning and losing usually isn't mental agility, but the ability to time the milliseconds between the moment Alex finishes the clue and one of the producers activates the buzzers, slamming your thumb down with either (a) near-perfect reflexes at the off-camera lights telling you the buzzers are go, or (b) a near-perfect guess at the off-stage producer's timing. Since a computer can obviously react to the "go" lights more rapidly and consistently than any human, it will probably win. My two cents, anyway. The only alternative I can imagine is if Watson is given a human-like randomness in buzzing of a few milliseconds, but there's no report I can find of any such delay. Apparently, if its algorithms generate a feeling of suave cockiness, dudebox can buzz in instantly. Combined with Watson's inhuman inability to forget anything or stress out, I don't see how any mere primate has a prayer. (And that's a measure of the amazing accomplishment of IBM's engineers. Big applause to them. Still, the human ego has a fallback: as Ken has noted, Watson still couldn't write a clever Jeopardy! clue to save its backside bus.) Over a three-game match, our fellow fleshbags should be seen as huge underdogs. All of which is why I truly hope one of the guys goes John Henry, using his buzzer like the fabled hammer, and pulls off a stunning upset. Let the games begin! PS -- Brad and Ken will both be still a heck of a lot more fun to hang out with afterward, either way. Brad does improv comedy now, and Ken's blog is one of my favorite daily reads -- a daily fascination with cool arcana that I can only imagine BB readers will love. |
| My essential Mac applications, part 3 Posted: 11 Feb 2011 02:47 PM PST I recently bought a new iMac computer, and I installed about 30 different applications on the first day. They are applications I consider essential (or at least mighty desirable for my purposes). On Wednesday I talked about programs 1-5, and on Thursday I covered programs 6-10. Today I'm describing programs 11-16. Next week I'll describe the other 15 applications.
Unfortunately, iTiVo is not as useful today as it was a couple of years ago, because more and more networks are putting a copyright protection flag on their television programs, making it impossible for iTiVo to download the programs from my TiVo. Does anyone know of an application that can work around the stupid copyright flag on TiVo?
In 2004, a Boing Boing reader named Mason told me about Listen&Type. It's a great way to play back recorded interviews for transcription. Here's why: (1) I don't have to switch back and forth between iTunes and a text editor to stop and start the recording. Listen&Type lets me set up keyboard commands so I can stop and start the audio without leaving my text editor. (2) I can skip back 5 seconds by entering a keyboard command, a feature I use a lot. There are some other functions, too, such as marking, but features 1 and 2 made me an instant and lifelong fan of Listen&Type.
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| Voynich manuscript dated to early renaissance Posted: 11 Feb 2011 01:50 PM PST  Scientists have carbon-dated the Voynich manuscript, a puzzling and beautiful document covered in botanical and scientific drawings. Named for the Polish-American bookseller who acquired it in 1912, its undeciphered text and purported 15th-16th century origins have long been a matter of controversy. So just how old is it? According to the University of Arizona, the sample was dated to between 1404 and 1438, making it older than previously thought; it predates the Gutenberg bible, printed in 1453. The dating team, led by Greg Hodgins in the university's physics department, did not decipher the language, itself hand-written in elegant "alien characters" on many of the manuscript's pages. They used an accelerator mass spectrometer to detect traces of carbon-14, a rare radioisotope found in plants and animals. As the rate of decay is predicable after the plant or animal dies, the concentration of carbon-14 in a sample of organic material is an accurate indicator of age. Four samples, each measuring about 1 by 6mm, were taken from four different pages of the manuscript, according to the university, then cleaned and burned to leave only its carbon content for analysis. Inks on the document were also found to be consistent with colors available during the Renaissance, but it is not easy to date them. "It would be great if we could directly radiocarbon date the inks, but it is actually really difficult to do. First, they are on a surface only in trace amounts" Hodgins said in a press release. "The carbon content is usually extremely low. Moreover, sampling ink free of carbon from the parchment on which it sits is currently beyond our abilities. Finally, some inks are not carbon based, but are derived from ground minerals. They're inorganic, so they don't contain any carbon." The book is currently owned by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. In 2004, one academic concluded that the text was meaningless gibberish. His prime suspect, Elizabethan fraudster Edward Kelley, would appear to no longer be in the frame. Photo: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University Press Release [UoA] |
| The people of Fort Wayne, Indiana love Harry Baals Posted: 11 Feb 2011 01:54 PM PST The citizens of Fort Wayne, Indiana really do love their former Mayor Harry Baals, and they're about to have the most awesomely named public facility in the history of all time. (Thanks Luke) (UPDATE: They've closed the poll, but you can still view the totals - RB) |
| Posted: 11 Feb 2011 11:41 AM PST [Video Link] From Al Jazeera English: Scenes from Cairo, hours after president Hosni Mubarak ceded power to Egypt's military following 18 straight days of popular protest.
Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, has resigned from his post, handing over power to the armed forces. Omar Suleiman, the vice-president, announced in a televised address on Friday that the president was "waiving" his office, and had handed over authority to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. [Video Link] |
| Open Source Hardware Definition turns 1.0 Posted: 10 Feb 2011 11:13 PM PST Phil Torrone from Make Magazine writes in with cool news about the Open Source Hardware Definition: "The Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Statement of Principles 1.0 and Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Definition 1.0 has hit 1.0 - Open Source Hardware (OSHW) is a term for tangible artifacts -- machines, devices, or other physical things -- whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things. This definition is intended to help provide guidelines for the development and evaluation of licenses for Open Source Hardware. The top open hardware electronics pioneers and companies have endorsed the 1.0 definition, and next up will be logo selection!" Open Source Hardware (OSHW) is a term for tangible artifacts -- machines, devices, or other physical things -- whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things. This definition is intended to help provide guidelines for the development and evaluation of licenses for Open Source Hardware.OSHW |
| Burning Man: Dr. Dre considered how to "make some loot off these fools"? Posted: 11 Feb 2011 10:17 AM PST   I can't guarantee the authenticity of the above letter purportedly written by Dr. Dre in 1995, but it's funny nonetheless. Click to see it larger. I'm in nevada with Hype lookin at spots for this new video we are shooting for that single I told you pac is going to be on once he is out, called California love. We met a bunch of crazy, naked motherfuckers in the desert today, they were putting up some type of giant wood man. I guess they have a big party out here for a bunch of days. I asked them how much they pay, they said "nothing", I was like no money? Someone should get behind this shit and make some loot off these fools cause they said that there will at least be 5,000 people. I think I will have my office look into it, just to see if there is easy money to be had here."Dr. Dre Definitely Started Burning Man" (via The Fader, thanks Gil Kaufman!) |
| Posted: 11 Feb 2011 06:56 AM PST  From synthetic biology blogger Christina Agapakis, a close-up look at microbial landscapes, including this amazing shot of Penicillium. Christina says:
Christina and I will be on Bloggingheads.tv tomorrow for their Science Saturday show. On the menu: My upcoming book about the future of energy, Christina's interest in designing biology, and our mutual love of cheese. |
| Atlas Obscura travels to the hidden wonders of South America Posted: 11 Feb 2011 09:47 AM PST   Our friends Dylan Thuras and Josh Foer of Atlas Obscura recently trekked through South American in search of hidden wonders, from an "everlasting" lightning storm to Caño Cristales, considered by some to be the "most beautiful river in the world" thanks to the surreal hues generated by its algae population. Dylan and Josh are sharing their travel diaries, photos, and videos in an ongoing series at Slate. "World of Wonders 2011: Curious and exotic places" |
| Paintings by Brian Despain and Mia Araujo Posted: 11 Feb 2011 09:36 AM PST   A lovely show of new paintings Brian Despain and Mia Araujo opens tonight at Seattle's Roq la Rue Gallery. Despain's series, titled "Tin Machines and Mercuric Dreams" and Mia Araujo's "The Secret Keepers" paintings hang until March 5. The entire show is viewable online as well. Roq la Rue: Mia Araujo and Brian Despain |
| Incredible journey: Can we reach the stars without breaking the bank? Posted: 11 Feb 2011 09:33 AM PST  Voyager 1, our civilization's furthest and fastest emissary into space. Traveling at 17 kilometers per second, Voyager 1 still would take some 73,000 years to reach the nearest star. Yesterday, we talked about which stars might be the most important ones for the near future of the search for habitable and inhabited planets. All the stars I mentioned are relatively close by and pretty bright, and some of them are already known to have planets. If and when potentially Earth-like worlds are found around these or other nearby stars, astronomers will begin lavishing them with attention in a process of discovery that will span generations. In all likelihood, entire careers and even subdisciplines of astronomy and planetary science will emerge from studying all the data we can remotely gather from a handful of promising worlds scattered among the nearest stars. If we are extremely lucky, and find signs of not only extraterrestrial life but also extraterrestrial intelligence, the consequences will spread beyond our sciences to shape and change our religion, philosophy, literature, and art. And, if we did locate another pale blue dot circling a nearby star, for many people the next logical step would be to attempt to send people or machines there for direct investigation. It sounds simple enough, to send a spacecraft from point A through mostly empty space to point B. The Moon hangs shining in the sky along with the stars, and we've already sent explorers there, as well as robotic emissaries to all the solar system's planets. Reaching the stars shouldn't be that much harder—but it is. Consider the problem from the simple viewpoint of velocity. It's easy to forget that until very recently, the fastest anyone had ever traveled on planet Earth was almost certainly about 200 kilometers per hour (kph), the terminal velocity of a plummeting human form past which air resistance impedes further acceleration. But then our species learned to build machines that use the fossilized sunlight in coal, gas, and oil to go even faster. In 1906, a Bostonian named Fred Marriott finally surpassed the millennia-old record—and lived to tell about it—traveling over 200 kph in a steam-powered car across the sands of Daytona Beach, Florida. Scarcely forty years later, a West Virginian test pilot named Chuck Yeager flew a rocket-propelled plane at more than 1,000 kph, faster than the speed of sound. A decade after that, gargantuan rockets were accelerating men and machines to nearly 28,000 kph, fast enough to orbit the Earth and gain a god's-eye view of the planet. That's how we sent astronauts to the Moon, and robotic probes to other planets. Surely we can go even faster, and undertake interstellar voyages. But space is vast, and even the distance to the nearest star is mind-boggling. Let's say the Sun is the size of a large orange, 10 centimeters in diameter. Place the orange on the ground, walk a bit more than 10 meters away, and you're in Earth's orbit. Finding our planet might prove challenging—it would be the size of a millimeter grain of sand. The walk out to Pluto, a speck of dust ten times smaller than our sand-grain Earth, would be nearly a half-kilometer, and along the way you'd be lucky to encounter any of the planets: Even the largest, Jupiter, would be no bigger than a small marble. From Pluto in this scale model, to reach the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, you'd have to travel some 2900 kilometers: roughly the distance between Memphis and San Francisco, or about how far you'd have to dig straight down into the Earth before reaching its outer core. At this scale, light, the fastest thing in the universe, would travel through space at just over 2 centimeters per second. In actuality, light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second, and requires nearly four and a half years to reach Alpha Centauri from our solar system. Today, the fastest humans on Earth and in history are three elderly Americans, all of whom Usain Bolt could demolish in a footrace. They're the astronauts of Apollo 10, who in 1969 re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at a velocity of 39,897 kph upon their return from the Moon. At that speed you could get from New York to Los Angeles in less than six minutes. Seven years after Apollo 10, we hurled a probe called Helios II into an orbit that sends it swinging blisteringly deep into the Sun's gravity well. At its point of closest approach, the probe travels at almost 253,000 kph—the fastest speed yet attained by a manmade object. The fastest outgoing object, Voyager I, launched the year after Helios II. It's now almost 17 billion kilometers away, and travels another 17 kilometers further away each and every second. If it were headed toward Alpha Centauri (it's not), it wouldn't arrive for more than 70,000 years. Even then, it wouldn't be able to slow down. Of the nearest 500 stars scattered like sand around our own, most would require hundreds of thousands of years (or more) to reach with current technology. Space and Ships Part of the problem is rocketry—an inescapable fact of accelerating by venting material out of a nozzle is that it's not terribly efficient. Not even accounting for food, water, and other consumables, you must carry all your fuel along with you, and the faster you wish to go, the more fuel you'll need—fuel that itself requires additional amounts of fuel to accelerate the additional mass. We've already almost maxed-out the velocities attainable through Apollo-style chemical rockets. But even so, there are no insurmountable physical barriers preventing people and machinery from going much, much faster than the pioneers of forty and fifty years ago. A small, scattered vanguard of idealistic scientists and engineers around the world still obsessively concoct new ways of harnessing more energy, of achieving more velocity, of going faster and farther than anyone has ever gone before. Maybe the stars are within reach. We already know how to build speedier and more efficient rockets powered by electricity instead of chemicals, but they won't do much to get us to nearby stars. For that, only a handful of schemes could suffice. Some researchers suggest building rockets fueled by antimatter, an energy source so potent that the amount required to send you on a month-long crossing to Mars would be measured in grams. Others call for constructing gossamer-thin thousand-kilometer-wide "sails" in space, which would ride on powerful laser or particle beams out of solar system. These options and their more exotic variations theoretically offer velocities that are a significant fraction of the speed of light. Sadly, while the physics may be on our side, the economics aren't: Based on present production rates and costs, producing and storing enough antimatter to fuel an interstellar mission would quite possibly bankrupt the planet. As for an interstellar sail, such an endeavor would dwarf the largest single piece of space-based infrastructure yet built, the International Space Station, a construction project that has so far cost an estimated $150 billion. Constructing an interstellar sail would probably cost far more—and that's not including the truly astronomical electric bill associated with powering the multimillion-gigawatt laser that would need to shine on the outbound sail for years on end. At present, the most economically viable fast boat out of the solar system would probably be a spacecraft propelled by regular pulses of detonating atomic explosives. We do, after all, already have plenty of nuclear bombs lying around for no other real purpose than destroying civilization. Perhaps it's not unreasonable to co-opt them for a more productive endeavor. The US government actually funded a study of the concept in 1958, an ambitious program called Project Orion that seriously proposed, among other things, building a nuclear-pulse spacecraft that could send humans to the moons of Saturn as early as the 1970s. But legitimate concerns over radioactive fallout and the dual-use possibilities of miniaturized thermonuclear explosives forced Project Orion's eventual cancellation. Flying High A more recent effort to design a nuclear-pulse spacecraft began in September 2009, and is called Project Icarus. Though, to be fair, Icarus itself is based on another highly regarded study, the 1970s-era Project Daedalus, named after the mythological craftsman who flew free from imprisonment on wings he constructed from feathers and wax. Both projects plan spacecraft that would voyage to the stars propelled by thermonuclear fusion. Fusion occurs when nuclei of light elements like hydrogen or helium are slammed together with such force that they merge, releasing a flood of energy. It's a process that creates and destroys: It's what gives hydrogen bombs their fearsome power, but it also is how stars shine, glomming together light nuclei in their cores to form heavier elements. Stellar fusion is what made the calcium in your bones, the carbon in your DNA, and the oxygen that you breathe. If fusion reactions could somehow be used in a propulsion system, they could accelerate a spacecraft to perhaps 10 percent the speed of light. Daedalus envisioned replicating that pressure and heat via arrays of high-powered lasers that would focus on small fuel pellets, compressing them past the fusion threshold and channeling the resulting plasma through a magnetic nozzle to produce thrust. The Icarus team is considering that approach, but has yet to decide on its thermonuclear propulsion method of choice. Like Daedalus before it, Icarus is a project run entirely by volunteers, scientists and engineers who spend their idle time dreaming of starflight and performing laborious calculations to learn how it might be practically achieved. But unlike the Daedalus volunteers, who relied on the liberal use of slide-rules, brand-new HP-35 calculators, and an occasional sketch on the back of a bar napkin, the Icarus team is leveraging the power of more than 30 additional years of technological progress. Our advances in velocity may have petered out over the past few decades, but our prowess in information processing and communication has steadily accelerated. Each individual volunteer on the Icarus team today could marshal more computing power than was available to most nation-states in the 1970s, and can electronically access the bulk of the world's accrued scientific and technical knowledge within seconds. Rather than gathering in pubs, they are formulating their starship design via internet telephony, private messaging forums, and the occasional post on the official Icarus blog. Still, while anyone can crunch numbers, actually building a starship would consume a large chunk of the Earth's entire economy, and likely would require creating massive economies off-world. In the Daedalus plan, for instance, constructing a nearly 200-meter-long, 4,000-metric-ton spacecraft in Earth orbit was actually the easy part, nevermind that such a ship would be roughly the same size as one of the UK's Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. The harder task was acquiring 50,000 metric tons of the necessary thermonuclear fuel, an isotope of helium that is vanishingly rare on Earth. The Daedalus solution was to harvest the fuel from gas-giant planets like Jupiter, by building and operating a fleet of balloon-borne robotic extraction factories in their atmospheres. In other words, the easiest way the Daedalus volunteers found to fuel their starship was, in effect, the industrialization of the outer solar system. Additional obstacles abound. Traveling at a significant fraction of light-speed can be compared to staring down the barrel of a gun: Running into a small piece of dust, or, heavens forbid, a sand grain, could cause catastrophic damage. The preferred Daedalus countermeasure was a 50-ton beryllium shield placed at the ship's prow. Even if no damaging impacts occur, a starship on a mission of decades or centuries would still require maintenance as parts and components wore out or broke down. For Daedalus, the solution was to pack a number of autonomous robotic wardens onboard the spacecraft to repair damage as it occurred. Creating such artificially intelligent robots capable of tending a starship for decades on end might be a bit more difficult than designing a Roomba to autonomously vacuum your living room. And all that effort would only send a 500-ton payload, sans humans, strictly on a one-way flyby of a star. There would be no slowing down, stopping, or returning home. The Daedalus probe would fly through the alien star system in only a matter of hours, gradually trickling data homeward via a parabolic radio antenna. After absorbing untold treasure, time, and talent to reach another star, the Daedalus starship would have sent back scarcely more than the cosmic equivalent of a postcard. Icarus has upped the ante: The team intends to design a starship that can enter orbit around its target star, perhaps to monitor any potentially habitable planets there, and then, somehow, send large amounts of data back to Earth. Suffice to say, engineering at these scales makes "rocket science" look like child's play. Even further, consider the disruptive, unanticipated effects of the technologies a project like Icarus currently uses—not even including the ones it hopes to eventually employ for its starship: The ubiquitous computing and information networking that now allows Icarus to break out of local pubs and stretch across the world also seems to be turning many people's focuses inward, simultaneously connecting and unweaving the world. The velocity of our technology may ultimately be too fast, rather than too slow, and like the Daedalus probe of yore, could accelerate past its target in a flash, never to return. In other words, we could all too easily become lost in the virtual worlds we make for ourselves, and lose interest in the stars. Or, more probably, we could squander our resources and experience profound and irreversible technological regression. Sometimes, I pessimistically hold with some combination of these two extremes.
Given the magnitude and number of extreme technological and economic challenges that must be overcome to achieve starflight, it's difficult to imagine what, in fact, a civilization capable of interstellar travel would look like. Probably not much like us--more than anything else, projects like Icarus and Daedalus seem to tell us that we are presently as distant from interstellar travel as the stars are from Earth. And, at least until our culture's prioritization of short-term profit once again aligns with pushing the limits of the ultimately possible, that's likely to remain the case. Perhaps someday one of these starship designs will take us out of the solar system on voyages to other living planets, other cosmic oases, strewn among the stars. Or maybe all the methods conceived today will in the fullness of time bear no more resemblance to actual starships than airplanes have to birds. Either way, it's worth remembering that the 100,000-year duration of interstellar voyages we can undertake right now is but the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. It may actually be more effective to adapt our expectations to those timescales, and to attempt to master such long-term planning rather than trying to brute-force our way to Alpha Centauri. In expanding outward into space, patience, not velocity, may be the greatest virtue. After all, we're already on an interstellar spacecraft called the Earth, sailing with the Sun and its retinue of other planets around the Milky Way in circuits lasting 250 million years. Only by carefully preserving and cultivating the relatively bountiful and accessible resources of our planet and the solar system will we ever escape their confines. For now, it's wise to reflect that in our headlong rush to go ever faster and farther, we may only be fooling ourselves. |
| Anti-crime DNA sprays in a reader's neighborhood Posted: 11 Feb 2011 09:18 AM PST Jantine sez, "January 10th I received this letter from my district officials saying they;ve installed DNA spray in the area I live in. I've posted the letter, pic of the sign and some translated excerpts on my blog for the time being." DNA spray installed in my neigborhood (Amsterdam West) (Thanks, Jantine!) |
| Posted: 11 Feb 2011 09:26 AM PST  Hosni Mubarak has stepped down as president of Egypt, according to Vice President Omar Suleiman, who announced on state TV that the military was now in control of the country. Earlier today, Mubarak and his family flew to Sharm el-Sheik, a resort town in the Sinai peninsula. [BBC. Photo: Reuters] |
Many of the protestors work on the Symbian software so their jobs will be in jeopardy as Nokia begins to implement Windows Phone 7 on its handsets. Their future is not at all clear after today's news-broad strokes have been painted but much of the logistics have yet to be revealed. Nokia will not work exclusively with the Windows Phone 7 operating system (and they will be customizing it) so jobs will be preserved but Symbian will no longer play the prominent role it once did at the company so job loss is inevitable. 
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Dear resident, to reduce the number of hold ups, the shopping streeds in West will be equipped with DNA-sprays from january 2011 onwards. The DNA-spray is an extra means beside the camera surveillance which district West in our effort to improve the safety in the shopping area... | You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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