Keith Henson survived his stint in jail in Riverside. I’m reliably informed that he’s been released. Hopefully, other than a restrictive probation period, the long nightmare is over for him.
More background here.
Dr. Strangelove Redux?
Did the Soviets build a doomsday machine that’s still operational?
Blair is not a wild-eyed Cassandra raising unsupported suspicions. Colleagues in his field regard him as a serious and cautious scholar raising real questions. Stephen M. Meyer, an expert ohttp://www.slate.com/id/2173108n the Russian military at MIT, told the Times that Blair “requires of himself a much higher standard of evidence than many people in the intelligence community.”
Blair’s troubling papers, along with his book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, serve as a reminder that the illogic, irrationalities, and vulnerability to catastrophic error of our Cold War nuclear war command and control mechanisms were never resolved or fixed, just forgotten when the Cold War ended. His analysis suggests that during the Cold War, we may have escaped an accidental nuclear war by luck rather than policy.
Sleep tight…
[Update on Thursday morning]
Alan K. Henderson is having a flashback. Errrr…make that flashforward.
The Next Fifty Years In Space
You’re going to see a lot of these kinds of pieces as we come up on the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik, now only one month away. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ll probably come up with a version of my own in the next few weeks.
Sharper Pictures Than Hubble Can Take
One of the problems with proposals for space applications is that it turns out that many of them can be done without leaving the planet. But I suspect that the far side of the moon will still always be better for radio astronomy than earth-based telescopes.
Darwin Nominee
Here’s what happens when you make a spud gun with black powder as a propellant. Don’t try this at home, or anywhere else, kids.
The End Of The Silicon Age
Is drawing near:
Researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California developed a technique for measuring magnetic anisotropy, a property of the magnetic field that gives it the ability to maintain a particular direction. Being able to measure magnetic anisotropy at the atomic level is a crucial step toward the magnet representing the ones or the zeroes used to store data in binary computer language.
In a second report, researchers at IBM’s lab in Zurich, Switzerland, said they had used an individual molecule as an electric switch that could potentially replace the transistors used in modern chips. The company published both research reports in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.
Wonder what the implications of this technology are for Moore’s Law?
[Update a few minutes later]
Howard Lovy (who is back to blogging on nanotech again) has some thoughts on the paucity of imagination in reporting these things.
Debris
This article on testing satellite shielding against space debris is a good reminder that even if NASA solves the foam problem, or someone comes up with a new reusable vehicle concept that isn’t subject to debris during ascent, that space vehicles will always be vulnerable to orbital debris:
An object less than 0.05 inch across blew a hole through a section near the payload door of the shuttle Atlantis during its mission last September, according to the July edition of NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly News journal.
The damaged section was replaced.
Had the object, which investigators think was a piece of a circuit board, hit the thinnest part of the wing edge, “There is a question whether the vehicle would have survived re-entry,” said Eric Christiansen, a NASA engineer specializing in debris shielding.
A spacefaring nation will have the capability to do repairs on orbit to mitigate the hazard of such events, but to do that requires the development of a orbital infrastructure, something that NASA’s current plans strenuously avoid.
A New Space Policy Agenda
Space logistics consultant Mike Snead has an interesting article at The Space Review on how to become a space-faring nation. I’ve glanced over it, but haven’t had time to absorb the whole thing. I don’t know how politically realistic it is, but what is most interesting to me is that the word “NASA” does not appear in it, anywhere.
I think that this was fundamental policy failure of the Vision for Space Exploration. While the vision was seen as important for the administration, just as was the case with Shuttle after Apollo, and space station after Shuttle, it was primarily treated as something for NASA to do after Shuttle and station, not an intrinsically important goal in itself. If it had truly been important, an entirely new entity would have been created to carry it out, without the baggage of the past, in much the same way that missile defense was viewed as too important to leave to the Air Force in the eighties, resulting in the formation of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO).
Life In The Twenty-First Century
A body-repair robot powered by heart muscle tissue. Pretty cool, and a hint of things to come.
Watch Out For The Polar Bears
If the global warming evangelists had the slightest sense of irony, they’d never even attempt things like this. They have no concept of what laughing stocks they make of themselves.