Great Shuttle Launch

Thanks to NASA TV, I watched Atlantis launch on its final mission this afternoon at 2:20 pm EDT (STS-132). Great launch. It's hard to believe there are only two more planned shuttle launches this year - and forever. It's a bit sad to see the end of an era like this.

Molecular Manufacturing?

I can't remember when I first read Eric Drexler's 1986 book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. Probably in the early 90's. I remember being really impressed with the book, which outlines the possibilities (and risks) of precision manufacturing at the scale of individual molecules. It never seemed that far-fetched to me, since every living thing on this planet is a proof of concept of molecular machines building other molecular machines such as marigolds, whales, and human beings. With massive parallelism, you can start with a single cell and grow a small human in about nine months. I didn't think it would be easy, but whether it would take 20 years or 100 years, it seemed pretty clear that if DNA and RNA and other molecular level machines in cells could build precise and complex machines (e.g., us), humans could eventually figure out how to do this too. Physics doesn't rule it out, and there's plenty of room at the bottom, as Richard Feynman pointed out in 1959.

Of course we have lots of "nanotechnology" these days - but sunscreen and microfiber cleaning cloths are not what Drexler had in mind in Engines. He was talking about molecular manufacturing, and he specifically talked about nanorobotic "assemblers" that could replicate themselves. He later backed away from that idea as necessary for efficient molecular manufacturing, but not before the idea of self-replicating nanobots running amok and turning everything into "gray goo" had taken hold in the popular imagination. Although progress was made, the misconceptions really limited nanotechnology development for a few years (for more on this, see Drexler's "Letter from the Author" at the start of the 2006 "2.0" edition of Engines, which you can read online for free, or purchase a PDF for 99 cents here).

In the last few years, the panic has subsided, and super tiny things have really started to move. Case in point: this Technology Review article, based on a new paper in Nature. The title and subtitle give the general idea: "DNA Robots on the Move: Machines made of DNA could one day assemble complex--and tiny--electrical and mechanical devices." Whoa.

Chromoscope: Too Cool

There are many astronomy web sites and planetarium apps, but this one is really different. Chromoscope shows you the sky in a wide range of wavelengths, from gamma rays to visible to microwaves. It superimposes and registers imagery from various sky surveys and provides a handy slider to change between spectral ranges (the picture here shows an area around Gemini in transition from visible to hydrogen-alpha). You can zoom and pan with the mouse, and there are also keyboard shortcuts (press H for help). It runs directly in your browser, nothing to install (it doesn't seem to use Flash - I tried it on Safari on the iPod Touch, and it loads so it's probably not Flash, but the controls don't really work). Thanks to Idle Diffractions for the tip.

But there's also a free iPhone/iPod Touch app (Planets) that uses the data from this site to show the sky in different wavelength bands. It's called "Planets" but it actually shows the whole night sky, not just planet data.

New Single: Message from Tomorrow

My new "2009" album is really almost done. Fourteen songs recorded mostly in 2009 (a couple started in 2003, and a couple done this year). I've got the cover graphics done (painting by Monique Bonneau) and uploaded to CD Baby and I'm just waiting on slight corrections for two songs on the master disk. Then I can upload the master tracks and place the CD order. So with luck I will have a bunch of CD's in a few weeks, with MP3's for download on CD Baby even sooner (digital downloads on iTunes and Amazon will take a few weeks more to process).

In the meantime, I've uploaded the final version of the title track as a download-only single, and it's available now on CD Baby and on iTunes. Plans for the world tour have not been started yet, but here are the lyrics for the song.

Message from Tomorrow

New York is under water
Just cloned a brand new daughter
With genes from Ashton Kutcher
Great cheekbones in the future
Voice mail and the world wide web
Implanted in my head

Chorus
Everything is gonna be alright
I saw it clearly in a dream last night
No more pain, and no more sorrow
I got a message from tomorrow

Immortal afterthought
Upload my mind to a robot
New realms of virtual pleasure
And titanium joints forever!
Seinfeld in syndication
In my hotel room on my Mars vacation

Bridge
I may be just a pulsing circuit
But you can bet I’m gonna work it
Make the future what the present never was

Words & music by Bruce Irving and Rob Simbeck © 2006

You can also hear the song on MySpace Music.

Carnival of Space #152

The Martian Chronicles is hosting this week's Carnival of Space.

The Musical Brain (Documentary)

I saw part of this Canadian documentary on an airline flight last November, and I have wanted to find some way to see the whole thing since then, but it's pretty hard to find. The Musical Brain was supposedly available at this CTV site, but early this year it was blacked out due to some issue with broadcast rights to the Winter Olympics (not sure why they had to black out all news content for that). That was supposed to end on March 1 but it's still blacked out. I finally found it on YouTube in six parts (part 2 is missing), but it may not be there for long.

It's worth seeking out. It's a really interesting documentary based in large part on the excellent book This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Leviton. Leviton is a former professional musician and producer who pursued a neuroscience degree and who now studies how music works in the brain (among other things). He had always wanted to do brain imaging studies on a master musician, and he managed to sign up Sting for this. Much of the program involves discussions with and about Sting and his approach to music, with some discussion about his (fMRI) brain scan results. The actual scan results don't reveal any great insights to the viewer or to Sting himself - things like the fact that his brain "lights up" equally in response to jazz, rock, or classical music but very little for "muzak" - these are things that Sting already knew about himself. It was noted that when listening to or composing music, Sting's brain showed a lot of activity on both the right and left sides, which had not been seen in similar exercises with non-musicians or amateur musicians. 

It's not all about Sting. There's also good information on how babies respond to music, on the role that music has in the brain's development, and on the various roles that music plays in culture and in social situations.

Orbiter On My Mind

I haven't been doing too much with Orbiter the last year or so, but I've recently been in touch with a couple of Orbiter friends and have started thinking about it again. One thing that's cool is the possible translation of my Orbiter tutorial book Go Play In Space into Russian. I heard about this from Andy McSorley, my co-author on the second edition, and I got in touch with "Kulch" through the Orbiter Forum (Kulch is the creator of many great Orbiter add-ons including the cool TX Winged Space Launcher shown above). He confirmed that he and some other Russian Orbiter users had started the translation project, and I offered to help out by sending my original Word and graphics files. I studied Russian for two years in college, but that was a long time ago and I've forgotten almost everything but the alphabet and a few words and phrases. But it would still be great to have a Russian version of my book, and more importantly, for prospective Russian "Orbinauts" to be able to use my tutorial more easily. Oчень хорошо!

Speaking of using my tutorial, I haven't been on the Orbiter-Forum much recently, so I spent some time looking around and catching up. While there hasn't been a new Orbiter release since 2006 (there are rumors of a 2010 version coming soon), there is still plenty of activity with add-ons, challenges, videos, technology discussions, etc., and with new people joining the forum and asking questions about how to dock with the ISS, get to the moon, navigate to Mars, etc. It's cool to see that people are recommending Go Play In Space as the basic tutorial for Orbiter, and that new users are still finding it useful. I originally wrote it to help myself learn Orbiter, but I'm glad that it's helping other people to climb that fairly steep learning curve (into orbit!) and enjoy this challenging, fun, and still free space flight simulator.

A Word from the WISE (Mission)

I've been meaning to write something about NASA's WISE mission (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), but I noticed today that two of my colleagues have beaten me to the punch, so I will steer you their way. On Kevin Thompson's Idle Diffractions blog, Mark Kahan recently wrote a guest post about WISE. In his post, Mark discusses the WISE first light image (the false color rendering shown above of the area around the star V482 Car, with blue, green, and red representing 3.4, 4.6, and 12 micron bands, respectively). He compares it to results for that patch of sky from earlier IR sky surveys with much lower resolution. WISE will be surveying the entire infrared sky at such resolution over the next few months (until its cryogenic hydrogen supply runs out, probably around October 2010). It will spot asteroids, brown dwarfs, distant galaxies, and much more.

If you're not that familiar with infrared radiation and how it works, the WISE web site has a great interactive feature explaining the basics of infrared and of the WISE mission itself. The narrator is Dr. Amy Mainzer (not Mila Kunis), the deputy project scientist for the WISE program. In the picture above I grabbed two frames from the segment in which she explains how IR is used to tell the temperature of things like stars, or in this case, tea cups. It's easy to tell what's hot and what's not.

Goddard and Google Patents Online

I happened to be on Clark University's web site last night and decided to check on what they had online related to their favorite son, "father of rocketry" Robert H. Goddard. Turns out it's quite a lot - many of Goddard's diaries, notebooks, and papers have been digitized and are available for search and even as PDF's for download and printing. Pretty cool.

Goddard grew up in Worcester, MA and attended WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) for his undergraduate work in physics, graduating in 1908 (he was 26 - his education had been delayed by several periods of illness). He entered Clark (also in Worcester) in 1909 where he received his Ph.D. in 1911. He designed, built, and launched the first liquid fueled rocket in 1926, but he was thinking about ways to get off the planet long before that. In 1907, when he was still at WPI, he wrote an essay called "On the Possibility of Navigating Interplanetary Space" (search the online document database for "interplanetary" and look in the document "1898-1914 - Speculation and Preparation"). He submitted this article to "Scientific American" but it was rejected, "chiefly on account of length," according to the letter they sent him. It was certainly an interesting article, though his concerns were a bit odd in retrospect. For example, he was especially worried about meteor swarms. He was also worried about propulsion, but he didn't really have the ideas of rocketry in mind at this point. He considered that raising a mass to a great height would require a lot of energy, and first discussed solar energy which he dismissed as too diffuse (he may have been thinking about the photoelectric effect which had been explained by Einstein in 1905, but he doesn't mention this). He spends most of the rest of the paper talking about the energy released by radioactive decay in radium, which had also been explained by Einstein in 1905 (E = m c squared), but he doesn't mention that equation or Einstein's name. He concludes that the rate of energy release is too small to be useful for propulsion but speculates that someday a way could be found to release this energy more quickly (he was right, of course, but that involved nuclear reactions that were unknown at the time, not electron transitions as he speculated following J.J. Thomson).

His speculations may have been off the mark here, but he was certainly a curious and clever fellow and not much later he started to think about rocketry. His first rocketry patent from 1914 is shown above, courtesy of Google Patents (beta), which by the way, is amazing. Similar to Google Books, Google has digitized and placed on line in easily searchable and downloadable form millions of US patents from 1790 up to a few months ago. While we are used to the idea that "everything is on the web," this was new to me, even though there have been other ways to get patent information online for years (usually requiring a paid subscription). The internet (and Google!) never ceases to amaze.

You'd Think It Would Be Easy...

Easy to let go of books and magazines, that is, now that I typically have immediate access to the internet as well as extensive local information (and many e-books) on my iPod Touch, Blackberry Storm 2, and a notebook PC. I can look up pretty much anything in a minute or so. But books have sentimental value (collectively and individually for some books). Even reference books are hard. We've been packing most of our books and other things into boxes for a house project that requires shifting most of the furniture around. I've tried to get rid of dead wood (so to speak) whenever possible, and today I did manage to dump a 1997 "Video Hound" movie reference book and a New York Public Library Desk Reference book (also 90's era). This sort of thing is now much easier and better on the web.

But I was also looking at some of my many Japanese dictionaries. I'm not actively studying Japanese now (and I have Kotoba! on my iPod Touch), so that would seem to be an easy category to toss. But those books are so amazingly intricate (this one is great, sample page at left), and they have so many memories of trips to Japan and to Little Tokyo in Los Angeles... I can't part with them.

The same for Billboard's Book of Top 40 Hits. Of course all that song information is on on the web somewhere - but the compilation, the cross-comparisons, and especially the "ooh, I remember that song" serendipity... the web doesn't quite replace that. So I'm keeping that book (it's pretty old, around 1990 - I may update to the 9th edition when it comes out this fall).

Belated Birthday Greetings to Hubble

Yesterday was 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope on board the Discovery (STS-31). Pretty amazing - makes me proud to be an optical engineer. And of course after last year's final service mission, HST is better than ever. It continues to produce great science and beautiful imagery like this portrait of a stellar nursery in the Carina Nebula which has been dubbed "Mystic Mountain." For a quick review of Hubble's history and "greatest hits," check out this cool NASA Flash feature.

Beautiful New Album by Aqualung

Amazon's free MP3 earlier today was a song called "Magnetic North" by Aqualung, which is the recording name of singer-songwriter Matt Hale (it's still free on this page). I downloaded it this morning and immediately loved this song. I listened to it maybe three times before sampling the other tracks on the new album it comes from (it's the title track). They sounded great too, so I bought the album. I've been listening in the car and at home today, and it is just such a beautiful collection of music. Amazing melodies, excellent singing, lovely arrangements. One of those albums I wish I'd written and recorded myself. It's making me want to write some songs on piano - I haven't done that for a while.

I realize now that I have a couple of Aqualung songs in my MP3 collection (from Paste and other samplers I think). I liked those songs but never looked further - there's just so much music, it's hard to keep track of even the good stuff! Now I'll have to check out his earlier albums sometime. Serendipity strikes again (actually marketing - I'm a sucker for free samples).

My South Park Space Avatar

I rediscovered a cool Flash-based web site for creating avatars based on the drawing style of "South Park," sp-studio.de. So I made myself into an astronaut character (can't you tell that's me in there?). I also created a more realistic self-portrait in my natural environment.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I am easily amused.

SDO: Amazing Sun Images

These will be all over the web but I simply have to point out the amazing first-light images and videos from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). You can probably find some video clips on YouTube, but it's worthwhile to download the 29 MB QuickTime to see all the detail in the March 30 prominence that is shown in still frame here. You can find more first light images in this gallery.

Moon and Back. Twice.

Of course I didn't actually go to the moon and back twice (except in Orbiter - I've done it virtually a few times, with the benefit of time acceleration). But I've now flown the equivalent miles on United Airlines. I just got back from a week in Taiwan, and on my return flight from Tokyo to San Francisco, I passed the million mile mark. Unfortunately SFO was not the final destination - Boston was, and door-to-door, this was the usual 29 hour Taiwan trip (Taipei, Tokyo, San Francisco, Boston). So I now have 1,006,462 miles on United, which is supposed to give me Premier Executive status for life. This is the level I usually get from travel anyway, but it's nice that I'll keep it even if have a light travel year.

Taiwan was nice. I was mostly in Taipei but also spent some time in Hsinchu and Taichung. Busy schedule visiting customers with our Taiwan distributor. A lot of driving and a few trains. Nice people, good food, including some excellent Italian and Thai food (not to mention various Chinese). That's the Taipei 101 building - a quick snapshot with my phone while driving by in the rain. It's no longer the world's tallest building (it lost the title just this year), but it's still pretty freaking tall (509 meters, 1,671 feet, 101 floors). I've been to the top a couple of times, but not on this trip. One time I saw the gigantic 730 ton tuned mass damper that was lifted to the top floor by floor during construction. There's a cool video here of the ball in motion during a 2008 earthquake in China (it helps to damp out the swaying of the building due to wind as well as earthquakes - physics in action, explained here).

Asteroids & Mars on the Agenda

After President Obama's speech at Kennedy Space Center, I think I'm pretty much with him and Buzz Aldrin on the new direction for NASA. I can understand the view of Neil Armstrong and others who feel that by not defining a specific near-term goal for NASA to accomplish (namely to return to the moon in a government spacecraft by some target date), Obama seems to be pulling the plug on human spaceflight for the USA. But the operative word there is seems - because a specific goal without the funding to achieve it is really not a goal at all, and certainly not a near-term one. It's more like a wish, accompanied in the case of the Constellation program by the hope of keeping many of the employees and contractors who now work on the shuttle employed for the many years it would take to get Ares I and Orion off the ground, at least until some cash-strapped future president finally cancels these programs. There was no serious plan or funding for the moon lander. But maybe if enough people believed in Constellation (like Tinkerbell the fairy), it wouldn't die.

I don't know. I love the Apollo program and all it accomplished, but it really doesn't seem like a sustainable approach absent a Cold War imperative and the willingness to pump a lot more money into NASA than anyone has done since probably 1967. And as Elon Musk of SpaceX said in this statement, "The President quite reasonably concluded that spending $50 billion to develop a vehicle that would cost 50% more to operate, but carry 50% less payload was perhaps not the best possible use of funds."

So what do we have now? A couple of specific human spaceflight goals for "the next decade" (visit an asteroid as shown above, and orbit Mars) that are quite far off (2025+) and not too detailed. A reinstated and scaled-back Orion capsule which will serve as a development platform for future human spacecraft and provide a government-built option for emergency escape from the ISS, which will be extended by five years to 2020. And a plan to develop the Ares V, a heavy lift vehicle that could support a variety of programs in future years. Plus more funding to encourage privately developed spacecraft and launch vehicles - call it the "private option" (you would think Republicans would be all over this - except that it conflicts with their Prime Directive, to oppose Obama on everything). And more funding for NASA to develop advanced propulsion systems and other technologies that will be needed for future missions but are too risky for companies to handle as "product development." Note that they are actually increasing NASA's budget by $6 billion over the next five years to help support these plans.

So all things considered, I think it's a pretty good plan, and President Obama summed it up pretty well in his speech:

Fifty years after the creation of NASA, our goal is no longer just a destination to reach. Our goal is the capacity for people to work and learn and operate and live safely beyond the Earth for extended periods of time, ultimately in ways that are more sustainable and even indefinite. And in fulfilling this task, we will not only extend humanity's reach in space -- we will strengthen America's leadership here on Earth.

TLAM’s, Torpedoes, and All That

I’m a peace loving old guy who enjoys a good war simulation once in a while. There, I said it. In the mid- to late nineties I was obsessed with military flight sims like Falcon 3.0, Jane's F-15, Jane's F/A-18, Total Air War, and Falcon 4.0 (with the occasional WWII air combat sim thrown in for good measure – European Air War and Microsoft’s Combat Flight Simulator 2 were my faves). I also dabbled in civilian flight sims (Microsoft Flight Simulator and a few others), but I never really got into those weaponless sims until I started taking real flying lessons and could use MFS to practice navigation and other skills I needed in the real airplane. I always preferred the more realistic "study sims," and while I enjoyed the technical and procedural complexity, I have to admit I also enjoyed blowing stuff up. What can I say?  I wasn’t exactly a skilled virtual fighter pilot, but I didn't mind a long learning curve and I could handle the acronym-rich environment (BVR, HOTAS, AMRAAM, BFM, SAM, HUD, TFR, SA, MFD, etc.). Once I got my private pilot license in 2001, I pretty much lost interest in flight sims until 2005 when I discovered the Orbiter space flight simulator (we’ll call this a flight sim too).

The only other “video game” category I ever spent time with was naval warfare simulations – first Harpoon (a naval war game) and later a few different submarine sims, especially Jane's 688(i) Hunter/Killer. Unlike air combat, submarine warfare is a game of stealth, evasion, and patience where in real life an engagement can extend over days or even longer. Sub sims shorten this with time acceleration and other compromises while retaining a certain degree of realism in sensors, ocean acoustics, weapons, etc., but sub sim sessions can still last for hours. Save your game!

Now for a limited time (until I lose interest and/or patience), sub sims are back with an impulse buy of Sonalyst’s “Dangerous Waters.” This 2005 game comes from the team that developed Jane’s 688(i) but it’s more advanced in various ways, and allows you to control additional “platforms” for ASW (antisubmarine warfare), a surface ship and two aircraft (a helicopter and a fixed-wing patrol plane). You can also control some Russian subs. It’s an awful lot to learn and relearn, so I’m concentrating on the somewhat familiar 688(i) Los Angeles class of submarine

I’ve gotten my feet wet (so to speak) with a couple of training missions from the web. There’s a lot to worry about so I’m relying on a number of automated assistants to help me with sonar and weapons. I’ve been working with the different sonar modes, learning again to hide under “the layer” to avoid detection, launching a few TLAM’s (Tomahawk Land Attack Missile), and waiting for the inevitable “torpedo in the water” messages from my “crew.” So far I haven’t done too well even with all this help, but it’s fun. I’m not really sure why studying a complex piece of software that simulates underwater warfare is “fun,” but somehow it is.

How to Travel to Space

I was looking through some of my Flickr pictures the other day when I noticed a comment from six months ago. I have a lot of screen captures from Orbiter, and one of them was used in an article in an online travel magazine called Matador. It's the one shown here, with the shuttle docked at the ISS with Cape Cod below.

The article is "How to Travel to Outer Space," and it discusses most of the ways civilians have and might be able to get to space, orbital and suborbital - although the Russian Soyuz option to the ISS is probably not going to be available for a while even if you have the $30 million (or whatever the actual fare is). So it's talking about real travel, not virtual stuff like Orbiter. But they liked my picture, which is cool, and they even gave me credit. The Matador site is cool too - most of the trips are down to Earth, but they go to a lot of exotic places.

Update: Speaking of Flickr, NASA has a great Flickr site, NASA: 2Explore. It's not the only place to get NASA images, but it's got a nice selection in multiple sizes and includes current shuttle and ISS missions.

Ah, Paris

Paris is great - I know this will come as a great surprise, but it really is. I'm lucky to have spent quite a bit of time there over the years. Recently I've mostly visited for just a day or so at a time as part of a whirlwind tour of European customer sites (a country a day is pretty much the norm). But it's still great, even if I only stay one night, have a meal or two, and just catch a glimpse of Notre Dame or Sacré Coeur.

You can catch a zoomable, pannable glimpse of most of Paris captured in great detail from a single high vantage point at this web site: Paris 26 Gigapixels. Be sure to maximize it.

STS-131 Launch

Unfortunately I missed the launch of STS-131 early this morning, but I really love the view in this NASA photo. It's hard to believe there are only a few more launches left in the shuttle program.

The Elements for iPad

Is there an iPad in my future? Possibly, but not just yet. As a user of the iPod Touch and a heavy e-book reader, I'm certainly well within Apple's target demographic, but I'm taking a wait-and-see approach for now. I have pretty much constant access to a Windows notebook and a BlackBerry Storm 2 in addition to the iPod Touch, and I do most of my e-book reading with the Kindle and Barnes & Noble apps on the Touch and the Storm 2 (though I also have their reader applications installed on my notebook). So I have plenty of back lit screens on which to read books - do I really need a bigger screen than the iPod Touch? The key advantage of the Touch and Blackberry is the fact that I always have these devices handy - they are easy to get out, use, and put away. Do I need another device to carry around and keep charged? Not just yet. Right now it really does seem to be just a jumbo version of the Touch. But if the right killer app comes along, who knows?

I don't think it's a killer app, but the iPad version of the book The Elements looks pretty cool based on this review (with video) on Boing Boing. The comments are interesting - some people are saying, "big deal, it's a flashy web site" while others compare it to early CD-ROM "multimedia" books (I had a few of those back in the 90's, like Microsoft's Multimedia Mozart). But a few are saying "it's the first iPad-specific multimedia book, and it's fairly impressive, but give developers a few months to see what they can do with this thing." I think that's about right. The iPad reminds me a little of the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" in Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age. Of course that singing, talking, listening, 3D-displaying, fully adaptive "book" was created with futuristic nanotechnology and could do a lot more than the iPad will do any time soon. But I could imagine the iPad becoming a device more like that in future versions.

As a bonus in The Elements is a dynamically illustrated version of Tom Lehrer's song "The Elements." The Boing Boing review includes a video of it which is embedded here. Music by Arthur Sullivan (from "The Pirates of Penzance"), lyrics from the periodic table.

Evo Devo on Nova

I watched a wonderful 2-hour Nova special on my iPod this weekend, one of several recent Nova episodes available as "Vol. 4" at the iTunes store (only $1.99 per episode - bargain!). "What Darwin Never Knew" explores the mechanisms of evolution at the level of embryonic development, a field now called evolutionary developmental biology (or evo devo). It is based largely on two books by biologist Sean Carroll, including The Making of the Fittest which I read and discussed here in 2008 (I called that post "Evolution: Under the Hood"). Carroll himself is one of a number of researchers who are interviewed about their research in this episode of Nova.

Charles Darwin was an amazing scientist - his explanations of the power of natural selection to produce "endless forms most beautiful" has truly stood the test of time. But there was a lot that Darwin couldn't know that scientists can and do know know now, thanks to their ability to read and interpret the genetic code. Of course "interpret" is the tough part, since just knowing the sequence of DNA (e.g. the remarkably similar genomes of humans, chimps, fruit flies, etc.) is just the first step. It's a great detective story involving genes that activate other genes that in turn control still other genes. Scientists have not only found intermediate fossil forms such as a fish with leg-like front fins, they have figured out how the genetic control methods work to make huge changes in function (fins, hands, wings, etc.) from relatively small changes in the DNA.Great stuff!

Update: Embryos of fish, dogs, and other creatures are amazingly similar. See if you can tell what's what in this interactive quiz.

Einstein in Full

I've read a few books about Albert Einstein and his scientific achievements, but it's been a few years, and I've had Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe on my must-read list since 2007. I finally got the Kindle edition and have been reading it in those odd Kindle iPod/Blackberry moments the last week or so. It really seems to be a balanced portrait of a man who was a rather complicated human being in addition to being an iconic scientific genius. There were some real paradoxes with this guy. He was open minded yet stubborn. Peaceful and caring toward all of humanity, but sometimes not so nice to his family. I still like him.

New Blog Design

How's this for breaking news? I've got a new blog layout! Blogger has a new feature where you can customize each of several basic formats. I didn't do much customizing but I picked out the basic template and chose the Earth background.

Otherwise things are just staying busy and my blogging brain is too boggled to blog much.

Conservation of Books

I read a lot of books, and recently I've been trying to get as many as possible in electronic form, using my iPod Touch, Blackberry Storm2, and occasionally my PC (I have Kindle and Barnes & Noble reader apps on all three devices). Not only does this take up no physical space, but I can have a variety of books with me all the time, allowing me to read a bit while waiting for the dog to do what dogs do (bark at the neighbor's dog) or whatever.

But I still have shelves and boxes of physical books, loved and unloved, read and unread, old and not so old. What to do with them? Many of them I will keep in case I want to read them again (it sometimes happens) or for sentimental reasons. Too many actually. I've donated several boxes to the town library for book sales. I've even thrown away a few (things like ancient programming reference books). But recently I found another solution.

OK, it's actually not a solution, but it's a pleasant problem: a web site called PaperBack Swap. Basically it's a book trading site. First you sign up as a member (it's free). Then you list books you want to give away, and when someone requests one, you mail it to the other member (this costs about $2 to $3 for most books and requires a trip to the post office, though there are ways around this). When the other member receives your book, you get a credit with which you can request a book from the many listed by other members (there are over 4 million books listed). The site has many features that make this all pretty painless (book search, wish lists, labels, reminders, etc.).

But since you get 2 credits just for signing up and listing 10 books, it's not really a way to reduce the number of books I have in the house. But it finds good homes for books I don't need and serves my need for serendipity at very low cost.

Carnival of Space #146

Simostronomy is hosting the carnival of space this week. Check it out.

Fire-hose Rocket Pack

Jet-Lev Flyer is a water-driven "rocket pack." It's not that hard to explain, but watch the video. I don't think this is quite my style of personal flying machine (though probably much cheaper than a Cirrus or a Cessna), but it's pretty cool as long as you don't mind flying over a body of water to a maximum altitude equal to the length of the intake hose. I like this statement on the company's safety page: "For a jetpack, the Jetlev has excellent inherent stability" (they go on to explain why in terms of center of gravity and such).

Launching the Space Age in 1926

On this day in 1926, Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid fueled rocket in a field in Auburn, Massachusetts. It reached an altitude of 41 feet and traveled 184 feet downrange. At the time, Goddard was a professor of physics at Clark University in nearby Worcester, MA. He had published papers on rocketry and had discussed the possibility of a rocket reaching the moon. He was ridiculed for these ideas, most famously in a 1920 New York Times editorial which questioned Prof. Goddard's understanding of basic physics, "since there is no air in space for the rocket engine to push against." It wasn't until 1959 that Goddard would be recognized as the father of modern rocketry and the space age, and it wasn't until July 1969 (after Apollo 11 had landed on the moon) that the Times would correct its 1920 editorial and say "the Times regrets the error."

There's more on this historic event at Mass Moments. Thanks to my main Clark University contact for reminding me of this historic day!

If you'd like to try your (virtual) hand at re-creating Goddard's first launch, you can install Mark Paton's "Early Rockets" add-on for the Orbiter space flight simulator. One of my test flights is shown below.

Voyager's Grand Tour

I've been reading a book I found on a sale table at the Toadstool Bookshop in Keene, NH last weekend (great bookstore, BTW). Voyager's Grand Tour: To the Outer Planets and Beyond by Henry Dethloff and Ronald Schorn (2009). Among other things, the authors do a great job of setting the scene in terms of how little anyone knew about the outer solar system before Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 flew by Jupiter and Saturn between 1979 and 1981 (and in the case of Voyager 2, Uranus and Neptune from 1986 to 1989). Pioneers 10 and 11 had gathered some information (we were really clueless before 1973), but the quality and quantity of imagery and scientific data was so much greater for the Voyagers.

The moons of the outer planets were hardly known at all, but were somehow considered unlikely to be very interesting. Voyager 1 dramatically altered that view when it sent back imagery and data showing that there are active volcanoes on Io. The Voyager program was an amazing success. Of course we now know much more about Jupiter (Galileo orbiter) and Saturn (Cassini orbiter), but Voyager 2 is still the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune.

Stellarium Revisited (now with satellites)

I haven't looked at Stellarium for quite while so I decided to see what might be new. If you're not familiar with it, Stellarium is a great freeware (open source) planetarium program. I installed the latest version (0.10.3, January 2010) and was pleased to find that it now supports plug-ins, including one called Satellites that uses NORAD TLE (three-line elements) data to add many artificial satellites to the sky objects the program can display. I fast-forwarded the time to see what might be around near sunset tonight and found that the ISS will be making a visible pass from west to northwest between about 18:34 an 18:40 EST - it won't get very high for me on this pass but it's a clear night so I should be able to spot it through and above the trees. Of course there are other resources on the web like Heavens Above for finding ISS and other visible satellite pass data for your location, but this is an especially nice visualization method.

Stellarium is a great program, and the developers keep adding features and improving the interface. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Carnival of Space #143

Carnival of Space #143 is at Next Big Future. The amazing Mars avalanche picture above was created from HiRISE imagery by Bernhard Braun and is discussed in the carnival post from Universe Today.

David Shrigley. Simple. Sick. Funny.

I was going through some papers and found some postcards by David Shrigley. I bought them a few years ago at a bookshop in Oxford, England. His artwork is simple (when he draws people, they remind me of Beavis & Butthead, remember them?). His ideas are often quite bizarre. But he cracks me up. Here are two I have that I was able to also find online by searching for "David Shrigley postcards." He has a few books. I should buy one of them in case I lose the postcards again.

Musical Collaboration with Software?

The weekly Kurzweil AI Newsletter steered me to this great article on composer and musical creativity researcher David Cope (here's a 2009 NPR interview with him). Cope is a composer who has spent many years developing software to help him explore and understand musical creativity. The software he developed (EMI or Emmy, and his newest creation, Emily Howell) actually composes music. Cope's basic hypothesis on musical creativity is that it is fundamentally imitation and redeployment of music the composer has heard before. His first program (EMI, mp3 samples here) was based on the analysis of many pieces of music to extract what you might call the style of the original composer, though it really goes deeper than style to include sources and influences. EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) could then create new pieces of music in that style (or combination of styles), music that was often considered by experts to be of high quality and practically indistinguishable from music by the original composer - until they were told that the composer was a computer, after which they judged the music to be derivative and mechanical, as well as relatively uninteresting since they are new works written in old styles (e.g., Bach).

Emily Howell in some ways seems like a new interactive "front end" for EMI. Using it, Cope communicates musical ideas and goals. The software responds to these goals with modifications to the music "under construction" (it uses the output from EMI as its musical source material). In this way, composition becomes much more of a collaborative process between Cope and Emily Howell, and the results are rather impressive, based on the samples I have heard, with a sound more like modern music than re-fried classics. Emily Howell's first album is supposed to be released soon on Centaur Records.

As a songwriter (but definitely not a "composer"), I find this cool and exciting. It's really just taking musical tools to a new level. In their early days, synthesizers and sequencers were considered to be threats to studio musicians and orchestral players, but they have truly expanded the palette of tools that musicians have available (though I'm sure some musical jobs have been lost or displaced in the process, while others have been created). I write most of my songs with a guitar or keyboard and record most of them with the help of a talented (human) producer and musician who can arrange things I can't arrange and play things I can't play. In addition to recording software (SONAR), I sometimes make use of a program called Band-in-a-Box which generates fairly sophisticated automatic accompaniment through MIDI-based synthesizer voices. These are great for demos and they have inspired some of my best songs by allowing me to easily play around with different styles,arrangements, and instruments. I'd be happy to work with a smarter version of BIAB (like Emily Howell) if it becomes available at an affordable price.

xkcd: "Height"

I occasionally read the funny/nerdy comic xkcd. I saw this drawing of "the observable universe from top to bottom" ("Height") a long time ago and have always wanted to blog something about it. So here it is. Be sure to click the small image and scroll to examine all the funny bits visible at full scale. Heights above the Earth's surface are accurate on a log scale. You can also buy a poster of this from the artist.

P.S. Looks like I wrote about this in 2008 too. Oops.   It's cool enough to blog twice.

Make Mars "The Destination?"

I really go back and forth on this. I've been a member of the Mars Society since 2005, I've read several of Robert Zubrin's books, and I even attended and presented a paper at the 2006 Mars Society Conference. I've spent a lot of time reading and simulating and thinking about Mars, and there's no doubt that as a non-Earth destination, Mars is as good as it gets in this particular star system.

So when I read Bob Zubrin's latest essay on why NASA needs a human spaceflight destination, and why that destination needs to be Mars, I want to believe. On some level, I do believe. I was a child of Apollo (and the Beatles) and I probably became an engineer because of it. I was inspired. Developing technologies that will someday be great building blocks for some TBD exploration program (as in the current Obama proposal for NASA) - that's maybe practical, but it's sure not inspirational. Developing a commercial space industry is an essential step in becoming a space-faring civilization, and it will probably create some pretty good high-tech jobs in the USA, but it's probably not inspirational at anywhere near the Apollo level.

On the other hand, Apollo was exceptionally non-sustainable, a proxy-for-war crash program to beat the Soviets to the Moon, and given the political climate and the cost of the Vietnam War, we were damn lucky that we got up to Apollo 17 - I'm sure there were plenty of people in Washington ready to pull the plug as soon as Neil and Buzz splashed down. It surely inspired a lot of people and left a legacy of technology that fueled the US economy for many years. But there's no single threat at the level of the Cold War around which you could build a political consensus for an intense Mars-focused program right now (unless you could somehow show that this would reduce short-term unemployment).

I guess I'm really hoping that the analogies between the early aviation industry and the early commercial space industry will come true. That someone will develop the DC-3 and later the 707 and 747 of commercial space, and that from these developments, the path to Mars (and to the Moon and the asteroids) will become clearer and easier than it is now. But is that a realistic hope? I don't know. Probably not in my lifetime (guess I better work on extending that).

Then there's the whole Lifeboat thing. What if we "sink" this planet? Yeah, I don't know. It's definitely easier to just have a glass of wine and watch American Idol. But I'm trying to avoid that (the Idol part anyway).

NASA Changes: Yes, that's it exactly

A lot has been written about the recent changes in NASA's mission and funding, including the cancellation of the under-funded Constellation "back to the Moon" program and the proposal to rely more on commercial space companies to support Earth orbital operations for both cargo and astronauts. I basically agree with this decision, and I hope that Mars will eventually be emphasized (and funded) as the next big destination for human space flight. I was busy with other things when much of this discussion was going on, but I just found an essay by Michael Belfiore that really sums up my feelings. He wrote a guest analysis for Popular Mechanics on February 1 entitled Human Space Flight Needn't Rely on NASA. This is a very clear-headed and succinct essay on this issue, and its final line on the new direction for NASA rings true:

JFK's let's-go-to-the-moon-in-this-decade battle cry it isn't. But in some ways it's even more exciting, because it points the way to truly sustainable development in space.

The picture above shows Elon Musk of SpaceX standing by his company's Falcon 9 launch vehicle which will launch for the first time this spring.

Beatles Revisited

The Beatles have been one of my favorite bands since I first started listening to them in 1967 (yes, I was a few years late to the party - the first Beatles record I bought was the single "Hello Goodbye" b/w "I Am The Walrus" in December 1967). Recently I've been on a Beatles nostalgia kick, triggered by two books I've been reading, Can't Buy Me Love by Jonathan Gould and Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald.

Of course I've read a lot of things about the Beatles over the years, but these books are especially enjoyable because they focus on the cultural context and on the songs. Gould's book is something of a cultural history of the 50's and 60's with fairly detailed descriptions of the Beatles' songs and albums as well as their musical influences. MacDonald's book (which I actually just got) is more of a detailed, critical song-by-song analysis, and while much of their music was amazing, this author's not afraid to point out that some of what the Beatles put out was actually pretty crappy (good example: Harrison's "Blue Jay Way," though I have to admit I listened to it a zillion times back in the day and still know it by heart - "Magical Mystery Tour" was the first Beatles album I bought - what did I know?).

I've been reading Can't Buy Me Love on my iPod Touch (Kindle e-book), and it's really cool to be able to quickly pull up and listen to any song he's discussing since I have all the Beatles' songs on there. Ain't technology great sometimes? It was also cool that in the early part of the book, when Gould was writing about the boys' time in Liverpool, that I could think back to the "Magical Mystery (Bus) Tour" that I took there back in 2008. We even stopped in front of the church where John and Paul met in 1957.

That's me in front of the Strawberry Field gate.

Free NASA App for iPhone

With the changes underway in its mission and funding, I'm not sure if there will be a Lunar Electric Rover in NASA's future, but you can still learn about it and "drive" it in a free iPhone/iPod Touch app that's now available. It's not the most exciting game you'll find for the iPhone, but the graphics and background info are pretty cool. It's available from the iTunes App Store (search for NASA Lunar Electric Rover Simulator).

New 3D Sun App

I just learned about 3D Sun, a new free app for iPhone and iPod Touch. It uses data from NASA's STEREO solar observation satellites to produce a zoomable, spinnable, false-color image of the sun in several selectable wavelengths, updated on a daily basis. It also provides news and alerts on solar events. I downloaded it and tried it out - it's pretty cool considering you're holding the sun in the palm of your hand.

Carnival of Space #141

I've missed a few space carnivals the last couple of months, and time marches on - we're up to carnival number 141! This week it's hosted by Starry Critters which is a pretty cool blog. It features many images from Hubble, Spitzer, and other telescopes, chosen for their resemblance to plants or animals, and presented in zoomable and pannable Flash viewers in each blog post. The one above is from a February 11 post, titled "Flower of Orion" (taken by ESO's ground-based VISTA survey telescope).

Getting Back to Normal (sort of)

I'm still in the "gravity well" of the international meeting that I organize every February, but I'm slowly climbing out of it. Everything went well last week, including the off-site entertainment day which this year was at the Disney Resort in Anaheim, California, my first trip to Disneyland in quite a few years. It was fun - I did a couple of the nostalgic space-themed rides like Space Mountain (really just a roller coaster in the dark) and Star Tours (a full motion simulator ride). But the best thing I saw was a "live" stage show demonstration featuring Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO. It walks, climbs stairs, stands on one foot, runs, and even dances. Pretty amazing. It apparently understands some voice commands, but it was hard to tell its abilities in this since the show was heavily scripted (if it wasn't heavily scripted, ASIMO is certainly ready to pass the Turing Test).

Lots of things have been happening in the space world while I've been on my blog vacation. Although there are a lot of uncertainties ahead for NASA under its new charter and budget, I agree with the general direction (even though some of it is more of a lack of direction). Nothing about space flight is anywhere near "routine," and the analogies with the early development of the aviation industry (air mail contracts leading to the early airline business) are not very exact. But if we are ever to be a space-faring civilization, government space agencies can't continue to run the whole show. Transferring the LEO business to commercial operators seems like the right thing to do.

I've got a backlog of things to write about once I get my schedule more under control, including several really good books (all read on my iPod Touch - I'm mostly reading e-books these days). One was a SF book called Eifelheim by Michael Flynn, and another was Girls Like Us by Sheila Klein, a musical and cultural biography of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon.

I also have to mention a couple of flying notes. One is the free on-line book See How It Flies by John S. Denker. I discovered this back when I was taking flying lessons in the early 2000's. Denker is a physicist and a flight instructor and this book is an incredible merging of the scientific and technical with the practical aspects of flying airplanes. I rediscovered it this past week when I was moving my files to a new PC. I have some background in physics and flying and I still love both, though I do sadly little of either these days. Denker clearly has a deep knowledge of both, and his explanations and graphics are great.

The final flying note is a video link sent by a friend, a 5 minute HD clip of the US Navy Blue Angels in action. I'm always a sucker for a great flying video. I've seen the Blues quite a few times, but this video gives some amazing perspectives on their art (that's a still frame above).

Carnival of Space #137

Just a quick post to let you know that this blog still has a pulse - faint and irregular, but like that poor chap in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who gets thrown on the plague wagon, "I'm not dead." I'm thinking that right around February 12 or so I'll start to have some time and mental energy to think about blogging again.

In the meantime, there's a lovely Carnival of Space to explore over at One Astronomer's Noise. There are links to a number of interesting looking blog posts as well as a few references to the movie Avatar, which I'm dying to see. Busy as I am right now, I actually tried to see it twice - bought tickets and everything. Once was a user error (we bought tickets for the 2D version by mistake and decided to see a different movie and see the 3D version later). The second time I was in the theater watching previews with the 3D glasses when the digital projector broke. Bummer. We got replacement tickets for that and I hope to see it soon. It sounds like a great escape, but for now it's back to the reality of PowerPoint and meeting planning.

Parrot AR.Drone: Too Cool!

I love getting cool apps for the iPod Touch, even though in many cases I don't end up using some apps very much. This is especially true for games - I've gotten a number of free and 99 cent or so games, but I rarely end up playing them more than a couple of times. I'm really not a big gaming person, though I did go through a 6-year period of intense flight sim usage in the 90's (a slight exception). I love "airplane and space stuff" but even in that category (flight sims, lunar landers), I never really got hooked on any iPod apps.

This one could be different, though it will require a substantial external hardware investment. Assuming the price of the Parrot AR-Drone isn't too ridiculous, I'm looking forward this year to getting a small quad-rotor helicopter that comes equipped with two video camera and a WiFi hub. The flying WiFi hub lets you connect to it from an iPhone or iPod Touch and fly the helicopter by tilting the iPod while you watch the view from its nose-mounted video cam beamed back to the display!  Battery life will probably be an issue since this small remote controlled thing will use its power to transmit a WiFi signal and to power the video cameras and other on-board electronics in addition to the four rotors.But still - it looks amazing. If you are "remotely" interested in this sort of thing, check out the videos. It's being developed by a French company and I guess they introduced it at CES in Las Vegas last week. They apparently already have an application developer kit so there will be various "augmented reality" apps for small-scale aerial combat along with who-knows-what.

A flight sim that really flies! How cool is that?