Andy Borowitz: “I’m not sure if a gigantic oil rig sinking was the best way to celebrate Earth Day.”
But they’d been planning it for months!
[Update a few minutes later]
On this Earth Day, thank Big Oil.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
And Now For Something Completely Different
A weightless dog.
He (or she) doesn’t seem that upset about it. Probably not the first time.
[Via Stephen Gordon]
The Downfall Of The Thousand-Video Reich
First they came for Hitler. And of course, Hitler is understandably upset.
Greased Lightning
I’ve been suffering with a crummy DSL connection for months, since the move back to CA (I’ve had to reboot the modem often, because it seems to slow down and start dropping packets periodically, with multi-second delays on pings). But yesterday, Verizon fiber finally came to the house.
This is real broadband, for the first time at home. It’s like night and day, in terms of page loads and video.
[Update a few minutes later]
No, I don’t know why the date is wrong. I did the test today. Maybe I should try a different site.
[A couple minutes later]
Bandwidthplace says that it’s about 4 Mbps up and 15 down.
The Beginning Of The End?
Those tiny black dots are nanobots delivering a lethal blow to a cancerous cell, effectively killing it. The first trial on humans has been a success, with no side-effect.
Faster, please. I wonder if innovations like this will continue under ObamaCare?
What Happened To Technorati?
When I search for posts related to this blog, it comes up empty. But I know that Glenn Reynolds has linked me in the last week. Does it no longer track incoming links? If not, what service (if any) does?
Too Trusting
Spammers are starting to move into the social network sites:
Most social networks have internal messaging systems for communication between members. Petre’s group examined that of Facebook, which boasts 5 percent of the world’s population as its users. While Facebook has an antispam engine, the group found that it was better at filtering out phishing e-mails than preventing spam messages from getting through.
The group started by creating fake profiles to trick users into friending them. They created three profiles, one containing almost no information about the user, one with some information, and one with detailed information. They used those profiles to join popular groups and began sending out friend requests.
Within 24 hours, 85 users had accepted a request from the first profile, 108 from the second, and 111 from the third. Petre says that acceptances began to accelerate, since more than 50 percent of the time, users would accept the request if they shared a “mutual friend” with the fake profile. In some cases, he says, users would send a message asking for more information about how they knew this supposed new friend. The researchers didn’t respond to these requests, but in many cases, Petre says, users accepted the request anyway.
The researchers then posted a link without any explanation to the fake profiles’ walls, using a URL shortener to obscure where the link went. Almost 25 percent of the profiles’ “friends” visited the link, Petre says.
I am pretty picky about who I friend on Facebook. I will generally only accept people that I’ve met in meatspace, or at least had previous interactions with on line. Simply having mutual friends is not sufficient. I might friend someone who I don’t know if they provide a message explaining why they want to be my friend, but never if it’s simply a generic friend request. This just seems like basic common sense to me.
Not Quite That Simple
The Navy has developed a submarine escape trainer. Presumably, it assumes that your sub isn’t too deep.
But while I assume that it’s part of the training, I see no mention of the need to allow the air to flow out of your lungs as you ascend. The pressure in them at depth is going to be several times that at sea level, and if you hold it in, you’re guaranteed a pulmonary embolism, likely fatal. Also, surface rescuers would have to have a hyperbaric chamber handy, otherwise those rescued are almost certainly gong to get badly bent (again, possible fatal, certainly injurious), unless the accident from which they are escaping occurred shortly after submerging. But if you’re going to float around for awhile before being rescue, bends seem almost certain. On the other hand, I guess it still beats drowning or asphyxiation at depth. Sounds sort of like an ejection seat for an aircraft — attempted suicide to avoid certain death.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I don’t know what current training requirements are, but I think it would be worthwhile to give scuba training to all submariners, to reduce the chances that they’ll hold their breath while ascending. Rule number one of diving training is to never hold your breath underwater. Of course, it’s an easier rule to obey when you have an air supply…
[Update a few minutes later]
Yes, as corrected in comments, bends isn’t (aren’t?) an issue. I’d forgotten that subs are maintained at one atmosphere.
Asilomar Two
Here’ is the first report I’ve seen on the conference this past week on geoengineering. I would have like to attend, but didn’t have either time or money right now. I was a little disturbed by what seemed to be an absence:
Participants…split into groups representing the two broad kinds of geoengineering: methods which block solar radiation from the sun, like spreading aerosols in the stratosphere, and techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere, like growing algae blooms at sea.
…A vexing question for participants was the role of commercial companies in this controversial field. A breakout group devoted to the idea of blocking sunlight—by whitening clouds or the ocean surface, for example—couldn’t agree on whether it should propose barring for-profit companies from the enterprise.
Ignoring the issue of the role of private enterprise, what I’m reading seems very terracentric (which isn’t uncommon among the scientific community — I think it was one of the reasons that it there was so much skepticism about Alverez’ dinosaur-extinction theory). After all, if the goal is to block sunlight, the closer to the source you are, the easier the job might be. Maybe there were some space-based solutions discussed, but you can’t figure it out from this report. One of the reasons that I wanted to attend was to provide a perspective that might not otherwise be there, and it looks like my fears were born out.
I’d bet that if you proposed (say) Ehricke-type solettas, or sunshades, you’d be laughed out of the room, largely out of ignorance of space transportation economics. I would have provided a tutorial to explain why it’s foolish to extrapolate costs of current launch systems to future large-scale space access, because I’ll bet that’s exactly what most of them would do (because it’s what most people do now). I’ll look forward to a more detailed report on the conference, though, including a full list of presentations.
[Monday afternoon update]
It should be noted that I’m not advocating geoengineering. I’m just pointing out that for those who do, they shouldn’t exclude space-based solutions because of false preconceptions. It’s sort of like my attitude toward NASA. I wouldn’t weep much if the agency was defunded (other than the personal impacts on my friends who are employees and contractors). But seeing as how that’s unlikely to happen, I’ll continue to lobby to at least have the funds spent sensibly, in terms of actually advancing us in space.
Good News On ITAR
I’ve long said (to paraphrase Mark Twain) that ITAR is like the weather — everybody talks about it, but no one ever does anything about it. Well, that may be about to change:
The legislation gives the president the authority to remove satellites and related components from the US Munitions List (USML), hence removing them from the jurisdiction of ITAR. (It would not, though, allow the export of such items to China.) Other provisions of the legislation would direct an ongoing review of the USML “to determine those technologies and goods that warrant different or additional controls”, which could benefit the space industry even if the White House didn’t exercise the provision to remove satellites and related components from the list wholesale.
The legislation passed the House last year, but for several months has been sitting in the Senate, raising fears they may never consider it. But speaking on an ITAR panel at the Satellite 2010 conference last week, David Fite, a staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee but speaking only for himself, said things were going “somewhat on schedule” compared to authorization bills in previous Congresses. That schedule would have the Senate passing its version of the authorization bill by the summer and a conference report reconciling the differences between the two in September or October.
It’s unclear from the reporting whether or not this will fix the problem for launch providers, or just satellite manufacturers. For instance, will it make life easier for the suborbital folks? Of course, the biggest problem is this:
“We are in an election year,” cautioned Fite. In his 11 years on Capitol Hill, he said, “I have never seen an environment that has been this partisan.” Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, concurred. “The danger is that this will become a political issue in an election year, which means it’s not going to be addressed on its merits, it will be addressed by slogans.” That will make it harder for reform to make its way through Congress and could also hurt the administration’s other reform efforts.
I’ve also long said that, as it took Nixon to go to China, only the Republicans can fix ITAR (though Duncan Hunter made sure it would never happen all through the Bush administration) because the Dems can’t afford to look weaker on national defense than they already do. I do fear very much that this will become a casualty of the very ugly campaign we’re heading into.