Published on 15 Mar 2012
From the upcoming Special Edition Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle DVD/BluRay by NASA/Glenn a movie from the point of view of the Solid Rocket Booster with sound mixing and enhancement done by the folks at Skywalker Sound. The sound is all from the camera microphones and not fake or replaced with foley artist sound. The Skywalker sound folks just helped bring it out and make it more audible.
H/T to Anthony Watts for the link.
In the Observer, John Naughton makes a few corrections to the way the media is reporting the saga of Edward Snowden and his revelations about the NSA’s global surveillance operations:
Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.
In a way, it doesn’t matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.
Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users’ data.
Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn’t have it. Nor would there be — finally — a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.
These are pretty significant outcomes and they’re just the first-order consequences of Snowden’s activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap — speculation about Snowden’s travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The “human interest” angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.
I use a few tools to come up with items to post on the blog. The two most useful are Twitter and RSS. I’d been using Google Reader for my RSS needs until it was shut down at the beginning of July, so I switched to The Old Reader and it has been working quite well as a direct Google Reader replacement. Earlier this week, TOR had a server meltdown and multiple failures of drives while attempting to recover. As of this morning, they’re still trying to get back online and (hopefully) recover all the data. Fortunately, I’ve also been testing Newsvibe for RSS, and it’s still working well … but has a different set of feeds than TOR.
My other main tool, Twitter, seems to be having some issues today … or it might just be that my old Twitter client is finally giving up the ghost. I’ve been using the desktop TweetDeck client for years, but I really disliked the “new” version of the tool introduced when TweetDeck was taken over by Twitter itself. Over the last several months, the old client (version 0.38.2) has been slowly losing bits of functionality — for example, sometime in the last week, I lost the ability to send a direct message from Tweetdeck, and earlier this year it became impossible to use the “old” retweet method and more recently to retweet at all.
Today, when I started up the client, it was unable to retrieve any data from earlier this morning. This might be a general issue with the Twitter API or it might be yet another bit of creeping feature-fail. It’s picking up new Twitter posts, but one of the more useful features was that it would also collect tweets from my several lists that had been posted overnight. This morning, only the main feed column in Tweetdeck is being populated, the rest (Mentions, Direct Messages, various list and search columns) are empty.
I may need to shop around for a new Twitter client. Either way, it puts a crimp in my usual blogging habits.
Canada’s mobile telephone market is a rigged oligopoly of three major companies and a few minor players. One of the big three, Telus, has opened a new campaign against the federal government’s tentative gestures towards allowing a more competitive mobile phone market for Canadians. Michael Geist has the details:
Yesterday, Telus CEO Darren Entwistle was campaigning at the Globe and Mail and National Post, warning of a “bloodbath” if the government sticks with its commitment to allow for a set-aside of spectrum for new entrants such as Verizon. Telus is concerned that a set-aside would allow Verizon to purchase two of the four available blocks, leaving the big three to fight it out over the remaining two blocks. Telus emphasized its prior investments in arguing for a “level playing field” in the auction.
Yet to borrow Telus’ phrase — “scratch the surface of their arguments and get to the facts” — and it becomes clear the fight is not about level playing fields since new entrants have been at a huge disadvantage for years in Canada. Indeed, even with a spectrum set-aside, there would not be a level playing field as companies such as Telus would have big advantages that include restrictions on foreign ownership for broadcast distribution (thereby blocking Verizon from offering similar bundled services), millions of subscribers locked into long term contracts, far more spectrum than Verizon would own, and its shared network with Bell that has saved both companies millions of dollars.
While the companies frame their arguments around level playing fields, the real goal is simply to keep competition out of the country. For Verizon (or any major new entrants), a spectrum set-aside will be crucial since it is the only way to obtain sufficient spectrum (when combined with the existing spectrum from Wind Mobile and Mobilicity) to establish a viable fourth wireless network that could compete directly with the big three incumbents. If Telus gets their way, the removal of the set-aside would kill the government’s stated goal of a viable fourth carrier since there would be little reason for Verizon to enter the country only to face many of the same disadvantages that has hamstrung the smaller new entrants.
[…]
Make no mistake: the Telus lobbying campaign will be joined by Bell and Rogers as the three companies spend millions of dollars in advertising and lobbying to keep the Canadian market free from much needed competition (the Wire Report reports that ten board members each from Telus and BCE have registered to lobby the government on spectrum). The government has insisted that it will do whatever is necessary to ensure greater competition and consumer choice in the wireless sector. The potential Verizon entry into Canada — undoubtedly conditioned on a spectrum set-aside — is precisely what is needed. In this case, sticking with its policy by siding with consumers and greater competition has the dual advantage of being both good policy and good politics.
I use several web browsers every day, including Firefox, Chrome, and even Internet Explorer. I also use Opera for some tasks, and I was less than happy to find out that the most recent release of the browser is a major step back in functionality. I’m clearly not the only disappointed Opera fan:
After 9 years of using Opera almost exclusively, I finally saw the developers betray their own user base. Curse you, Opera 15… ~Frozen
— Dragon Season (@DragonSeasonCom) July 19, 2013
Seriously, who removes useful, popular and working features with no bugs and almost no maintenance needs from their major releases? ~Fozen
— Dragon Season (@DragonSeasonCom) July 19, 2013
Tab pinning, tab thumbnails and tab resizing, some mouse gestures, Opera Mail, bookmarks (not kidding), search box… @Paeroka ~Frozen
— Dragon Season (@DragonSeasonCom) July 19, 2013
@Paeroka When you have a small market share, the obvious best move is to alienate them! ~Frozen
— Dragon Season (@DragonSeasonCom) July 19, 2013
As we wait for dessert, I ask him about his recent speeches at technology conferences discussing the “war on general purpose computing”. He runs through the argument with practised fluency. Computers are by nature general-purpose machines. It’s impossible to make a computer that does all the kinds of things we want computers to do yet is somehow disabled from making copies of copyrighted material, or viewing child pornography, or sending instructions to a 3D printer to produce a gun.
“Oh my God, that’s good,” says Doctorow after his first mouthful of crumble. My peanut butter shortbread is fantastic too, if absurdly calorific. We are interrupted only by another waiter dropping a tray of glasses.
He continues with the argument. The impossibility of making limited-purpose computers won’t stop governments or corporations trying to put on the locks, or changing laws to try to make those locks effective. But the only way these limits can possibly work is subterfuge: computers therefore tend to contain concealed software that spies on what their users are trying to do. Such software is inevitably open to abuse and has often been abused in the past.
Digital rights management systems intended to prevent copying have been hijacked by virus-writers. In one notorious case, the Federal Trade Commission acted against seven computer rental companies and the software company that supplied them, alleging that the rental companies could activate hidden software to grab passwords, bank account details and even switch on the webcam to take photos of what the FTC coyly calls “intimate activities at home”. As computers surround us — in our cars, our homes, our pacemakers — Doctorow is determined to make people realise what’s at stake.
Tim Harford, “Cory Doctorow has Lunch with the FT“, TimHarford.com (originally published at the Financial Times), 2013-07-15
sp!ked editor Rob Lyons explains that “peak water” just isn’t something to worry too much about:
Disappointed by the failure of the peak-oil disaster to come to fruition, our doom-mongering, Malthusian friends have alighted on other scary narratives to confirm their suspicions of humanity as a rapacious blight on the planet. Their latest is ‘peak water’.
On the face of it, peak water is a boneheaded concept on a planet where two thirds of the surface is covered in, er, water. According to the US Geological Survey, there are 332 million cubic miles of water on Earth. What we tend to need, however, is not sea water but fresh water, of which there is much less: nearer 2.5 million cubic miles. And much of that is too deep underground to be accessed. Surface water in rivers and lakes is a small fraction of overall fresh water: 22,339 cubic miles. Handily, though, natural processes cause sea water to evaporate and form clouds, which then dump their contents on to land — so in most populated parts of the world there is currently sufficient water to supply our needs in an endlessly renewable way. As for the future, it is clear there is no shortage of H2O on the planet. What we really have is a shortage of cheap energy and the necessary technology to take advantage of the salinated stuff.
The ‘peak water’ theorists focus on groundwater supplies that are either being used faster than they are replenished, or supplies that are not replenished at all: so-called ‘fossil water’. According to leading environmentalist Lester Brown, writing in the Guardian last weekend, the rapid exhaustion of these supplies in some parts of the world is leading to the decline of food production. And at a time of fast-growing populations, this apparently promises disaster for these countries.
But often, the problem is a political rather than a practical one. [. . .]
In reality, all of the fixes that apply to peak oil also apply to peak water. New technology may make water desalination far cheaper than it is now, a claim being made for new water filtration methods based on nanotechnology. Better use of water in irrigation, through careful management of when and how water is applied to crops, could cut usage dramatically — something that is already happening in dry countries such as Israel and Australia and in parts of the US. Current uses of water, like flush toilets, may be superseded in places where water is in high demand. Through civil engineering projects, water can be shifted from places where it is plentiful to places where it is needed most, something societies have been doing for thousands of years.
In Samizdata, Brian Micklethwait goes back to his Airfix modelling days to rediscover his admiration for Avro’s Lancaster bomber. In the process, he discovers just how strange the evolution of that aircraft actually was:
In the late 1930s, believing that bombers would always get through and that they therefore had to have lots of bombers or lose the war, British Air Officialdom had two ideas about how to build a bomber. They accordingly announced two specifications, which different potential bomber-makers were invited to meet with their designs. They wanted a two engined bomber, like those that the Germans bombed Britain with in 1940 but better, or like the Wellington but better. And they wanted a much bigger four engined bomber, such as the Germans never got around to building, and like … well, like the Avro Lancaster.
So, the Lancaster was Avro’s answer to the second requirement? Actually, no. Or, not at first. Britain ended up with three four-engine heavy bombers, the Short Stirling, the Handley Page Halifax, and the Lancaster. But strangely, by far the worst of these three, the Short Stirling, was the only one of the three that was all along intended to be a four-engine bomber. Both the Halifax and the Lancaster started out as answers to the two-engine specification rather than the four-engine one.
[. . .]
In particular, all the work that Avro had done improving, as they had hoped, the fuselage of the Manchester, which had done nothing to improve the Manchester, suddenly came into its own in the new configuration. Ever since I built my Airfix Lancaster as a child, I have wondered about the oddity of that Lancaster fuselage. Simply, this fuselage seemed too small for the airplane as whole. And the wings seemed too big. Not ugly exactly, in fact not ugly at all, but nevertheless a bit like the arms of one of those misshapen body builders with excessive biceps. My Lancaster photo (above) even shows how the wings between the fuselage and the inner two engines go straight out rather than tapering, as if these wings were only widened late on in the design process. Now, all that makes sense. The Lancaster’s fuselage began life as the fuselage of a smaller airplane. No wonder it looked to me too small. It was too small. The Lancaster’s wings look stretched because they were stretched. It is only now, after half a century and more of gazing at the Lancaster, that one looks at the Manchester, and sees its fuselage as too big and its wings as too small.
The birth of the Lancaster illustrates a general point about making airplanes, which explains why successful airplanes often fly on for so long. Consider the airborne WW2 mega-hit, the DC-3 (aka the Dakota), and then later the big Boeings, the B-52 and the 747. The Lancaster didn’t last as long as those hardy perennials, because propeller driven heavy bombers were soon replaced by jet bombers (like the B-52) and by intercontinental ballistic missiles. But even the Lancaster flew on for many decades, in the only slightly altered form of its close cousin, the Avro Shackleton, which only went out of service in 1991!
The Economist has a glowing overview of new diesel engines for cars:
NOT to belittle the success Tesla Motors has had with its Model S luxury electric car — outselling its petrol-powered equivalents since being launched last year — the prospects for battery-powered vehicles generally may never shine quite as bright again. Babbage believes their day in the sun is about to be eclipsed by, wait for it, the diesel engine.
Surely not that dirty, noisy, smelly, lumbering lump of a motor that was difficult to start in the winter? Certainly not. A whole new generation of sprightly diesels — developed over the past few years — bear no resemblance to your father’s clattering, oil-burner of an Oldsmobile. It is no exaggeration to say that, with its reputation for unreliability and anaemic performance, the Olds 4.3-litre diesel from the late 1970s single-handedly destroyed the reputation of diesel engines in America for decades to come. Quite possibly, it also contributed to Oldsmobile’s own demise.
Later this year, Americans will get their first chance to experience what a really advanced diesel is like — and why Europeans opt for diesels over hybrids, plug-in electrics and even petrol-powered cars. The leader of the new pack is the Mazda 6, completely redesigned for 2014, with the choice of either a 2.5-litre four-cylinder petrol engine or a 2.2-litre turbo-charged diesel. The diesel has 30% better fuel economy and provides oodles more pulling power. Good as the petrol version is, motorists who choose it over the diesel will miss out on a lot.
[. . .]
With its old 1.4-litre diesel engine, the Volkswagen Polo still holds the record for being the most frugal non-electric car in Britain and the rest of Europe — with a fuel economy on the combined cycle of just 3.8 litres/100km (equivalent to 61.9 miles per US gallon). The Toyota Prius hybrid? A lowly twentieth on the league table of the most economical fuel-sippers, with 4.2 litres/100km, along with higher emissions of carbon dioxide. The 19 cars having better fuel economy than the Prius hybrid are all clean diesels.
Babbage fully expects the new generation of clean, low-compression diesels to raise the fuel-economy bar by a further 20% or more. That will put diesels on much the same footing — on an equivalent miles-per-gallon basis — as many of the electric vehicles available today. Their big advantage will be that they will come with none of the range anxiety and recharging difficulties to worry about. Roll on the day.
Tim Harford discusses high speed trading and its potential problems:
“High-frequency trading” is a rich environment of algorithms, of predators and prey, all trying to make money by trading financial products at tremendous speed. But the basic proposition is simple to state. When the price of a share rises in New York, the price of related contracts will rise in Chicago just as soon as the news arrives. But if everyone else gets the news on the regular cable, and you’re renting space on the faster cable, you can see into everyone else’s future by (say) 0.7 milliseconds, plenty of time to buy soon-to-rise assets and then, less than a thousandth of a second later, to sell them again.
You don’t have to be a socialist to find this kind of thing discomfiting. There are three concerns. The first is that scarce resources are being spent on high-speed connections that have no social value in what is at best a zero-sum game. The second is that high-frequency traders may be making money at the expense of fundamental investors. The third problem is that such trading appears to introduce systemic risks. The “flash crash” of May 2010 is still poorly understood, which should ring alarm bells — especially since the need for speed means most high-frequency algorithms are simple and therefore stupid.
What, then, should be done? Rather than trying to slow down the algorithms, why not slow down the market? Most financial exchange markets run continuously, effectively assuming that traders can react instantaneously, withdrawing out-of-date offers and replacing them with up-to-the-picosecond prices. It’s this flawed premise — that all trades could be instantaneous — that means that no matter how fast the computers get, there will always be an incentive to go faster still.
A simple way for an exchange to improve matters would be to run an auction once a second, batching together all the offers to buy and sell that have been submitted during that second. Unsuccessful bids and asks would be published and would remain on the books for the next auction, unless withdrawn. One auction a second ought to be enough for anyone; it would deliver a stream of well-behaved data to regulators — currently unable to figure out what is going on — and it is plenty of time for a computer to weigh its options.
A short video of Kirk Sorensen taking us through the benefits of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, a revolutionary liquid reactor that runs not on uranium, but thorium. These work and have been built before. Search for either LFTRs or Molten Salt Reactors (MSR).
FAQ
The main downsides/negatives to this technology, politics, corrosion and being scared of nuclear radiation. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors were created 50 years ago by an American chap named Alvin Weinberg, but the American Government realised you can’t weaponise the by-products and so they weren’t interested.Another point, yes it WAS corrosive, but these tests of this reactor were 50 years ago, our technology has definitely improved since then so a leap to create this reactor shouldn’t be too hard.
And nuclear fear is extremely common in the average person, rather irrational though it may be. More people have died from fossil fuels and even hydroelectric power than nuclear power. I added this video for a project regarding Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, watch and enjoy.
No, it would not collapse the economy… just like the use of uranium reactors didn’t… neither did coal… This is because you wouldn’t have an instant transition from coal… oil… everything else to thorium. We could not do that. Simply due to the engineering. Give it 50 years we might be using thorium instead of coal/oil (too late in terms of global warming, but that’s another debate completely), but we certainly won’t destroy the earths economy. Duh.
And yes he said we’d never run out. Not strictly true… bloody skeptics … LFTRs can harness 3.5 million Kwh per Kg of thorium! 70 times greater than uranium, 10,000 greater than oil… and there is over 2.6 million tonnes of it on earth… Anyone with a calculator, or a brain, will understand that is a lot of energy!!
H/T to Rob Fisher for the link.
In The New Yorker, Joel Johnson talks about the Oculus Rift, which may be available in retail stores by the end of the year:
Luckey’s garage creation, which soon was named the “Oculus Rift,” is not far from a smartphone with a headband. An L.C.D. screen spans across a plastic mask, sitting about an inch away from a user’s eyes; a barrier divides the display in two, effectively creating one screen for each eye. Motion sensors track the position of the wearer’s head, then feed this data across an umbilical cord to a computer, typically a gaming P.C. Instead of rendering one 3-D world to a single monitor, as in a typical first-person video game, such as Call of Duty, the computer renders the same 3-D world twice, from slightly different angles. It sends those two perspectives, side by side, to the Rift, creating the illusion of depth. Motion is controlled by the direction in which the wearer is looking; instead of using a mouse or a controller to direct your gaze in the 3-D world, a person simply needs to turn his head.
The Oculus Rift uses optical tricks to create the realistic sensation, like slightly warping the edges of the view in the computer, which is corrected by plastic lenses in the goggles. The pixels are more tightly packed directly in front of the eye, giving the perspective a roundness that feels more like human vision. It works. The Oculus Rift rivals — and will possibly exceed, when it hits the shelves sometime in late 2013 or mid-2014 — the best virtual-reality hardware available, military-grade or otherwise.
[. . .]
I’ve been testing the Oculus Rift for a month, and in it, virtual reality feels a lot like scuba diving. First, there is the mask. Then there is the strange disconnect between where your body actually is and where your mind, confused by the mask, is telling you that your body is located. This sensation of discombobulation is doubled in virtual reality, since the current version of the Oculus Rift doesn’t track your body or hands, only your head.
Still, more than any of its antecedents, the Oculus Rift is convincingly engrossing. Most of the several dozen people who have tried my Rift put the goggles on as skeptics, but removed them as believers that virtual reality, as a practical phenomenon, now exists.
On YouTube, WoodenPotatoes recently posted a video where he tried out his new Oculus Rift unit with the original Guild Wars Prophecies by ArenaNet. As he points out in the video, the game is in no way optimized for use with the Rift, but is still an interesting experiment:
The Economist on a promising new development in battery technology:
LITHIUM-ION batteries are hot stuff. Affordable, relatively lightweight and packing a lot of energy, they are the power source of choice for everything from mobile phones to electric cars. Unfortunately, the heat can be more than figurative. Occasionally, such batteries suffer malfunctions that lead to smoke, flames and even explosions. In gadgets, such meltdowns can be distressing and dangerous. In aircraft, they can be fatal. Earlier this year airlines grounded their entire fleet of Boeing’s next-generation 787 passenger jet after the lithium-ion batteries installed in two planes caught fire. Last month they have been permitted back in the air after being retrofitted with a protection system in the form of a tough steel box that vents directly outside in the event of a fire.
A more comforting solution, of course, would be to build a lithium-ion battery that could not burst into flames in the first place. Katie Zhong at Washington State University might have just such a device. For the last few years, she has been working on battery technology for flexible and bendable electronic gadgets. By blending a polymer called polyethylene oxide (PEO) with natural soy protein, she had made a solid electrolyte for lithium ion batteries that could be bent or stretched to twice its normal size without affecting its performance.
Like all batteries, lithium-ion rechargeables consist of two electrodes separated by an electrolyte. In a typical lithium-ion cell, the electrolyte is a solution of lithium salts and organic solvents. Charging drives lithium ions from the electrolyte into a graphite anode. On discharge, the reverse happens, with a balancing flow of electrons through the device being powered.
As part of the 75th anniversary of Mallard’s record breaking 126mph run in 1938, sister loco 4464 Bittern was temporally permitted to exceed from 75mph to 90mph on the mainline. This was to be a rare look at steam running at higher speeds, following recent high speed test runs. On June 29th Bittern hauled a London-York special “The Ebor Streak” which ran along the A4’s native racing ground the East Coast Mainline.
4464 is first seen at Langford in Bedfordshire running like a greyhound at 90mph! Well…I think it was doing a little more than 90! After a high octane pursuit on the A1 carriageway, the next location is what better place to see an LNER A4 would be Doncaster. Ending on a high note, the A4 whistles and echoes past Doncaster Works where she, Mallard, Flying Scotsman and all other LNER locos were built.
With special thanks to Locomotive Services Limited, DBS and Network Rail for this miracle to happen.
I’m now in high hopes in getting the next two 90mph runs on July 19th and 27th.These shots and much much more will be included in the forthcoming documentary: “BITTERN: The Need for Speed” as part of the “MALLARD 75” celebrations. Which will include at an depth look at the preparations and build up to the main events in June & July, along with interviews with the crews & officals at this historic event in railway preservation history. See http://www.ovpsteam.co.uk/48.html
H/T to Eric Kirkland for the link.
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