My Next Phone Will Certainly Not Have An i In Front of It.

Wow.

You know. I really like my iMac, it is an awesome machine, especially for people who are not particularly computer savvy like myself.  

However, my late, lamented laptop was a Compaq and my current phone is a Blackberry This makes me a heretic to all sides, but I don't like putting all my eggs in one basket.

I r glad.

Vampirism I can deal with, but this?

Now, truth be told, I wasn't seriously contemplating an iPhone, even before the helpful "Stassi in ur pocket" feature was revealed. If I'm going to put out 300 bucks for a phone it had better be somewhat durable and preferably dishwasher safe.

With its portable electronics at least, Apple seems to be gunning for the Faberge' egg niche.

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Hayabusa Returns

Japans Hayabusa space probe has landed in Australia carrying with it the debris it collected off of comet Ikotawa.

I've seen this movie.

Pixy stay safe!
And keep us appraised.
(Especially about the nurses)

UPDATE: Steven Points out that this happened last year. True, but that only means that there has been more time for the effects of any cometary contamination to take effect.

Pixy, let us know if the island continent is, in fact, being overrun with hot nurses wearing sixties hairstyles.

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Space News

Via Rand Simberg comes news of a particularly intriguing study for a spacecraft .

The Nautilus-X MMSEV is on one level a flight of fancy given current budget constraints and launch cycle times, but it is really interesting in that it leverages a lot of existing and very near term technologies and builds on a rational development of the current commercial systems. The full powerpoint is here.

The design is a habitation module with a variety of well thought out facilities for scientific research and a variable gravity deck. The whole design uses largely off the shelf or soon to be off the shelf components being developed by space industry. Bigelow's inflatable modules are the most obvious of the available parts but the big gravity deck is claimed to be a straightforward development of spin stabilized comsat technology and of course the sensor pallets manipulator arms and EVA packs are all the orphans of the soon to be ended Space Shuttle program. Even light craft for landing on an asteroid or the moon are a mature technology given that the LEM worked.

The whole thing is to be attached to a propulsion module. In the illustrations that module is NASAs perpetually around the corner VASIMR system. However, if, as is proposed, the vehicle were set up at a Lagrange point, it would already be beyond the Van Allen belts, so the big problem with conventional ion engines ( that their slow acceleration would keep them in the radiation belts a dangerously long time) is rendered moot. The design can travel to the moon as well as near earth asteroids like Cruithne. There are long term expansions of the design for exploration as far afield as Mars, the main belt and beyond, but those are even farther beyond our budget horizon.  I suspect it could form the design basis for a cycler.

Clark Lindsey points out in the article that as ambitious as it is it dovetails nicely with a lot of technologies needed for and planned by comercial space companies, such as a Lagrange point fuel depot. If that infrastructure is developed privately, or in response to prizes, then this sort of design becomes tenable without too much effort. It is already designed with commercial lifters and spacecraft in mind, eliminating the need for NASA to spend taxpayer dollars on money holes like Orion/Ares.

Clark Lindsay has more:

/-- It illustrates how the use of Bigelow style expandable modules provides for great flexibility in design and in the means of delivery.

/-- It takes direct advantage of the tremendous experience in assembling structures in space that NASA has gained in the past decade. NASA knows how to do this.

/-- It would work very well with fuel depots.

/-- The contrast is striking - Constellation would have had small, single-use, expensive systems in operation perhaps by 2030. MMSEV would be a honest-to-goodness space cruiser in operation by 2020.

/-- The first pass at the design cost and schedule finds it cheaper than the Orion capsule alone.

Emphasis mine. That last inspires much skepticism, but in fairness, Orion was not only a cost plus contract but it was designed with maximum pork in mind.

The cost is estimated at 3.7 billion and the time at 64 months. 3.7 billion additional spent is of course taking the current budget 3.7 billion in the wrong direction, but if we take the take it from the 19 billion in the current NASA budget (just, you know, can the Muslim outreach ) We might still cut the NASA budget by a considerable amount if we focus on astronomy and this while leaving the development of new boosters to Space-X and others.

This could potentially be part a net savings, albeit in NASA which doesn't actually show up visually on a pie graph of the US budget.

Additionally, opening up the vast mineral reserves of the asteroids is an investment in the future in exactly the same way that high speed AmTrack isn't. Visiting near earth asteroids to learn how to deflect them in the event of an incoming Tunguska is in keeping with the defence function of the government, (analogous to flood control in this case), so it is not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that something like this might see the light of day in the current environment...just bloody unlikely.

The stimulus bill has poisoned that well for some time but this sort of thing does warrant some attention in the near future, assuming we get our fiscal house in order.

Regards that mention of asteroid defense mentioned earlier, Pejman Yousefzadeh deconstructs a rather disingenuous leftie meme about tea partiers, strict constitutionalists and space defence. Namely the rather idiotic notion that because there was no means to deflect asteroids or comets in 1789 it must be considered unconstitutional by conservatives and libertarians.
While we are on the subject of guarding against things from space it seems timely to visit this proposal to replace NASA and much  of the USAF's involvement in space with a non-DOD affiliated organization under military discipline modeled on the US Coast Guard. PDF here I think this has a lot of merit. Certainly the civil service model is sub optimal and in any event some branch of government would eventually be necessary for safety inspections and rescues in  space. It makes sense that it be a limited gendarmerie along the lines of the USCG (probably operated out of the DOT) that can handle the job while being non-unionizeable and able to deal with things like debris mitigation both directly and through enforcement. The USCG gets along well with the public and does scientific work as well so this might be a good fit that would avoid wasteful duplication down the road.


All this talk of asteroids and comets....where are the comets coming from? Tyche possibly. We've covered this before but Tyche (which seems more likely to exist than Nemesis ) is in the news again.

More here. There is growing evidence that a big gas giant or brown dwarf is in our solar systems Oort cloud. 


Finally this scientiffical type post would not be complete (or worthwhile) without paying all due respect and homage to one of those who made it possible: a member of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes.

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Dragon into Space and Back Again!

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Do it Yourself SCIENCE!!1! From the Bottom Up

  One of The Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes coyly hints at her approval of a series of stories involving do-it yourself SCIENCE!!1!

In 1997, one Karl Stanley invented and built himself a submarine. This is cool and uncommon, but not unheard of by itself. However, his submarine is not only an innovative gliding sub,  but naval architects estimated it had a crush depth of 1500 feet.

Will Forman, who designed and tested submersibles for the Navy, thinks Stanley is the first ever to build a gliding sub. "I think it's a great thing, especially if he survives," said Forman

Amongst its other features:

• 30-inch diameter viewport for her passengers
• 11 powerful lights, including one positional
• Nine viewports for the pilot so he can see in every direction
• Comfortable bench seating for extended dives
• Built-in CD sound system

(Submarine adventures require appropriate BGM)

Stanely, chafing at the lack of opportunity to put his sub to use in Oklahoma moved first to Florida and then to Honduras where he has for the past several years run a small tour business. Oh, and there is a movie...


Sadly, he ran afoul of local politics and was for a time, unable to offer tours. Sometime in the last two years however, that issue seems to have been resolved.
SCIENCE!!1! wins!

Via The Firearm Blog, comes this video of a homemade coilgun (an electomagnetic gun, operating on the same principle as a mass driver).


Steve takes a stab at guessing its performance:

My guess would be a 800 grain slug traveling at 100 ft/second and generating just under 18 ft/lbs (24 joules) of muzzle energy. This is guesstimate fits in with the inventor's estimate of 1-3% efficiency (1250kj * 0.03 = 37.5 joules).

There is also a lengthy discussion in his comments.

Additionally, there is a similar but less elaborate device demonstrated here.

Moving up, thanks to Scott Lowther,  we learn about this weeks amazing demonstration of a human powered ornithopter. This wasn't made in a garage, but  was a college project with a fair amount of resources and degrees involved. Of course we are going to let this one slide because...
Well, because  HUMAN...POWERED...ORNITHOPTER!!

The Tycho Brahe capsule is a single passenger capsule with a full view through a polymer plexiglas-dome so that the person can see and experience the entire ballistic ride.

An older article is here and was linked to at the Secret Projects Forum where this excerpt inspired some discussion....

An aerospike on top of the plexiglass should hopefully blunt the full shock and thermal effects acting on the dome, the designers said.

(It was that word "hopefully" that really stood out.)

Finally, via Instapundit, we learn about a gentleman who has built his own satellite! The satellite will flash morse code messages to Earth (and no doubt give George Noory lots of calls). This fellow intends to fork over 100 grand to have it launched..perhaps he should just talk to the Danes.

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Treasure Hunt

One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes takes time out from her S.C.U.B.A. prep to pass along this interesting tale of archeology, marine salvage and atomic science.
^{_{(Link via Jerry Pournelle)}}

Archeologists had been fruitlessly trying to get funds to examine an old Roman shipwreck. Then someone found out that the wrecks ancient cargo was lead ingots. Lead that was smelted before 1945 and kept in a neutron inhibitor (like water) is devoid of certain radionucleides released by the A-bomb tests. This makes such lead exceedingly important for certain physics experiments and more precious than gold for those applications.

Funding problem SOLVED! ( By SCIENCE!)

^{Science-babe art is by Ao Ume}

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One Can Miss the Darndest Things

One of the Brickmuppet's crack team of science babes dances with joy at the news that astronomers have discovered a new star.

While new stars are uncovered all the time this is exiting as it is less than 10 light years from Earth.

The new find, UGPS 0722-05, is less than 10 light years from here. But sky-watchers missed it for so long because it’s a brown dwarf, a member of the murky class of celestial objects that linger between gas giant planets and low-mass stars. Brown dwarfs have so little mass that they never get hot enough to sustain the nuclear fusion reactions that power stars like the sun. Still, they do shine, because they glow from the heat of their formation, then cool and fade.

This dwarf’s temperature is somewhere between 266 and 446 degrees Fahrenheit, making it the coldest scientists have even seen. With its minimal activity, the brown dwarf gives off just 0.000026 percent the amount of light that our sun does.

Unassuming Generally Puny Star #0722-05 is particularly interesting because of its implications for the total number of stars in the universe as well as its proximity. If we missed it we may have missed others fairly close as well.

While even the much closer Proxima Centauri is well beyond our reach the possibility of nearby stars is of more than passing interest.

Nemesis, is a star hypothesized to be a companion to our own sun. There has, over the last few years been some indirect evidence in support of its existence.  One theory astronomers had to explain its not being discovered yet was that it was a very dim red dwarf  that had not had an accurate  parallax measurement taken and whose brightness was overestimated contributing to its position being assumed to be much farther out.

This discovery makes it quite plausible that there is another star in our solar system that we simply haven't seen at all yet.

_{Science Babe is Maya from Sunshine Sketch...and an example of poor casting in this role.}

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KAIJU NEWS ALERT

The marine Kaiju threat level has been raised to eleventy off of Chiba.

A Japanese fishing trawler has been sunk by giant jellyfish.
Now although I have wanted to be able to truthfully report something like this since I was six, I was initially skeptical.So, I read the article to find out if:
A) the source was the Weekly World News or Pravda
B) what REALLY happened

To my surprise the source is the London Telegraph and what seems to have happened is that giant jellyfish have sunk a Japanese trawler. Fortunately no one was hurt.
See also here and here.

The culprit seems to be the infamous nomura jellyfish, which has been in the news before.
There was a huge infestation of the things in 1958 and 2005. Unlike the 1958 infestation, their numbers have remained rather high for the last several years and they have caused considerable difficulties for the Japanese fishing industry.
This year, another very large infestation has hit Japan.

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The Miracle of SCIENCE!!!

One of the Brickmuppets crack team of science babes brings us a collection of cool, potentially game changing developments in the field of SUPER SCIENCE!

Magnetic Monopoles?
 Tony Stark call your office. This has been one of the holy grails of physics for some time, now 4 different teams have produced considerable evidence that they exist. More on the discovery can be found here and Brian Wang has an overview of the implications, if this can eventually be replicated commercially  here.

Metallic Hydrogen?
Researchers at the University of Buffalo have found that adding lithium to hydrogen they can vastly reduce the pressures at which it becomes metallic. IF this can be made stable at reasonable pressures, the implications for this are potentially game changers for both rocketry and electronics. As a rocket fuel it would theoretically have performance heretofore never attained by man. As explained here it's applications for electronics are something that has been long sought.

Metallic hydrogen is predicted to be a high-temperature superconductor. A superconductor is a state of matter where electrons, and thus electricity, can flow indefinitely and without resistance.

Wow! There are certainly hurdles to be overcome....

The calculations also predict that LiH6 could be a metal at normal pressures. However, under these conditions it is not stable and would decompose to form LiH and H2.

...still, this takes metallic hydrogen from the purely theoretical to something that might well be made practical with refinements in stabilizing it. As a fuel it is, like regular H2, not an energy source, but an energy carrier albiet one with high density, it would require a lot of power to produce...power that might best come from....

Atomic Power Plants: We here at Brickmuppet Blog really like atomic power and we are overjoyed to report that mass production of some of the small reactors we've blogged about before is indeed iminent. Hyperion's nuclear reactors are finally going to enter production, albeit in the UK. In Japan, Drudge reports that small reactors are taking off,  Toshiba (with Westinghouse) is planning to mass market their 4s Reactor. While the reactor itself  is old news it appears that Toshiba no longer considers it experimental and is looking beyond Alaska to the third world. Mitsubishi is also developing small mass produced reactors for third world consumption. Such reactors dispersed around the US could provide a robust, redundant, reliable, decentralized and nearly carbon free source of power if it were pursued aggressively, particularly if domestic reprocessing facilities were developed. This would be a vital and necessary investment if one genuinely considered global warming to be a transcendental threat and a damned good one if one was more concerned about the well being of the U.S.A. with regards to infrastructure, strategic, and economic (cheap power=jobs) well being. Those in power seem to have little concern about any of that.
Alas...

Well...back to the miracle of SCIENCE!

Touchy Feely Bionics!
The BBC reports on the first prostetic arm with a sense of touch!

Caves on the Moon!
Japans Kayuga lunar probe seems to have spied a cave....no word on the presence of amazons, diamonds and giant spiders...but we'll keep you posted.

Finally, via Jerry Pournelle, comes this astonishing powerpoint presentation of the earth from space....look.

_{Science Babe is the scientist Yayoi from Mouse by Satoru Akahori}

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Technology Marces Ever On

Scott Lowther reports that you can now buy canned chicken...no...not canned chicken...A canned chicken.




I cannot do justice to Lowther's sublime commentary.....go see for yourself.

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Mirror Eyes

For the first time ever, a  vertebrate has been discovered that uses mirrors in addition to lenses to focus light in its eyes.

                                                          ^{image via BBC}

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Science with a Capital "!"

One of the Brickmuppets Crack Team of Science Babes points out that Brian Wang has a huge roundup of really interesting technology advancements here.
Some have been touched on here before, but Wangs' got a lot more and links within links. Get a cup of hot chocolate, sit down and start clicking.

A few highlights...

Cardboard harder than cast iron.

Nuclear fuel from seaweed.

3-D printers...for buildings, that Caterpillar expects to be field testing by the end of the year.

As has been mentioned here numerous times, we are on the cusp of, or witnessing several breakthroughs that have the potential to greatly increase our quality of life.
 
The only thing standing in the way of most of them most of them are Luddites, and those who would unwittingly regulate them out of existence. That fact bears considerable pondering over the next 8 days at least.

The idea that great advances could just be shelved for silly, political reasons is not at all far fetched as the continued existence of Leon Kass outside of a pillory demonstrates.

Historically such decisions have had very bad results.Rome had very rudimentary steam engines. However the development of them for more practical applications was officially discouraged for fear that they would displace slave labor...and thereby create an employment crisis and subsequent social upheaval....the implications of the industrial age and the elimination of slavery...2000 years ago.....are fascinating, but rife with assumptions more the purview of Harry Turteldove.

China is the most commonly cited example, and unlike the Roman example above requires little assumption that necessary advances would have been made. In possession of the largest merchant fleet in history, the oldest and most advanced civilization  on earth decided in the early 1400's to stop exploring and engaging the world. The nation rapidly lost the applicable technologies and did not become a world power again until the 1960's...and was not a serious economic power until the early 90s.

The lead in economics and power the US currently enjoys is infinitesimal in comparison to the lead in technology, knowledge, and both hard and soft power that China enjoyed in the 1400s. Other nations were literally centuries behind, and yet a group of visonless bureaucrats, for reasons of both well intentioned but short sighted idiocy, and the most venal self interest, stymied through legislation (or simply outlawed) not only emerging technologies, but existing ones as well. China was leapfrogged and became the plaything of the nations who had put her inventions to good use. In a last fit of bureaucratic group think, the descendants of those who had brought this about, ended the modernization efforts of the Tang Dynasty solely because they feared that the new ministries and corporations focused on technological development  would threaten their power and relevance. The result was 70 years of blood, culminating in the worst mass murder humanity has ever seen.

The people who oppose nuclear power and other technologies occasionally do so out of good faith. Even so, following their tragically flawed path is a journey through despair and blood.

We cling desperately to the face of a precipice, but we are about to grow wings. There are those  who presume to know whats best for us, and think we should not posses wings. It is imperative that we not hand them shears.

_{(Science babe is actually Klan Klan from Macross Frontier)}

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Bad Week for the Bahamas

In addition to the annoying fact that current models have Hanna coming right up the Cape Fear river, It looks like our friends the Bahamians are going to get a double barreled hit.



Ike's currently projected track is just plain mean.

Of course, as anyone who has followed these storms the last few weeks knows, they are anything but predictable...except to the extent that they are an annual annoyance.

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Whew!....Urp!

Well, it looks like the Weather Nerd was right...as usual, and Gustav did not become Katrina 2. There is still the possibility that some levees will fail after the storm (as happened in 2005) but it now appears that this is not a calamity. Thus far only a few Hurricane related deaths are reported in the Continental US, all traffic related.
Now attention turns to Hanna and Ike.

In addition to the possibility of a very rough landfall, Hanna looks like it could go up the spine of the Appalachians, storm systems drop moisture when they hit mountains which could cause it to dump a lot of rain between North Carolina and Pennsylvania. I have no idea what sort of rain potential this storm has but Appalachia by its nature is vulnerable to flash floods. Historically several Hurricanes have killed more people in the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina via flooding than they did in coastal regions.

Ike appears poised to wreak havoc in the Caribbean, though it looks like most nations and all the US Territories will thankfully be in the happy quadrant of this one if it doesn't stray too far from the NOAA model (though the Bahamians are going to have a rough time with this one). The big question here again is rain, which has historically caused lots of damage in the area, particularly on Hispaniola due to deforestation.

Still, it looks like we dodged a big one.

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Science....the Music Video

Science at CERN explained



Via Colleen Doran who has  further thoughts and reminiscences here.

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Chinese MacGyver Proves the A-Team was Realistic

(except for firearms accuracy)

Wow.

This fellow made a gyrocopterhelicopter out of scrap metal and a lawnmower engine!





These are puportedly the same guy and same machine but the two vids show vehicles that appear to be operating on different principles. It may be that the autogyro was modified at some point to be a full helicopter which would make sense if the guy was learning as he went. Autigyros are rather more simple and helicopters are such an abomination against physics that the inventor may have wanted to get one half of the whirlly bits right before trying for the full Sikorskey.

Of course, they may  also be unrelated machines.

More here.

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Peak Metals

Robert Silverberg holds forth on the rapidly declining reserves of Gallium and other rare but useful metals.

Over at Ars Technica, Ethan Gutman has an analysis of this and concludes that the situation is, unsurprisingly, neither as dire as the  worst predictions, nor as rosy as the more pollyanish takes on this have been.

Ultimately this planet has limited resources. However, even putting aside the obvious merits of recycling, Mercury is likely to be exceedingly rich in heavy metals and most other things we need for an industrial civilization can  be found in some abundance from the moon to the outer planets.  There is no reason to panic, but there is one more reason to work towards cheap access to space.

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And I Just Ate Too....

A pig with a monkeys face has been born in China.
Now a deformed farm animal is not normally news but the picture was disturbing enough to make me shiver...thus it warrants discussion about this stories implications.

The way I see it there are 5 possibilities here...
1: It is a bizzare but random mutation, the snout and jaw, shortened enough to give the piglets face an almost human face and the Brickmuppet nightmares.
2: As above, but not quite as random, having been triggered by the appalling pollution levels in parts of China.
3: This was an in vitro fertilized pig and due to incompetence at a government facility this farmers sow was accidentally impregnated with one of those human animal hybrids that Leon Kass gets the vapors over. This is possibly part of a program to grow transplantable organs or to make Chinese pigs taste even more like pork.
4: Its a pod pig.... the  Body Snatchers are in China. Head for the hills. Trust no one.
5: It's a pig thing...you wouldn't understand...but you should react as in #4.

Scenarios 1&2 can be safely dismissed in the interest of fearmongering and hysteria. #3 is disturbing in a Soylent Green / Clonus Horror sort of way but points (tangentially) to the distant possibility of catgirls being developmentally just around the corner. Scenarios 4&5 pretty much just suck and have no silver lining that I can see....
Anyway, discuss....

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Dateline: Maelstrom/Perditions Fire

(OK actually its Australia)

An albino humpback whale is making waves near Byron Bay Australia*.
While whales making waves are not news (they tend to splash a lot) albino whales that have made it to adulthood certainly are.

In  related news, the Japanese Whaling Industry managed to compound the PR debacle that is their very existence, by issuing a "no comment " when asked if their ships would spare the ultra-rare and easily identifiable cetacean.


_{(* For Mee.Nuvians, that's on the east coast about 220 miles north of Pixyville )}

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Dolly

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