Alex Wellerstien's Updated Online Nightmare Facilitator has a use other than depriving people of sleep.

It helps one to visualize the extent of distortion in a Mercator Projection.

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 Elon Musk's much hyped and speculated about design for a transportation system which was unveiled today. The 57 page PDF is here. One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes is on the case trying to digest all that info...(or at least digest a sweet potato).

It turns out that this concept is not the vac-train many people predicted so it doesn't have the same technical issues that people have been bringing up for the last few months. It has completely different technical issues.

 I think the notion that right of way issues are no greater than power-lines is wildly optimistic as well as discounting what a legal pain running powerlines can be. The idea of using Inrerstate Medians is a good one that we here at Brickmuppet Blog have long thought to be the only viable right of way option for new rail lines...assuming they could be made economically viable (a BIG assumption). However, keep in mind that attempts to expand a commuter rail system ON EXISTING RAIL LINES here in Hampton Roads faces environmental impact statements and studies that will take up to a decade for some proposed lines. An attempt to install high speed rail tracks next to the existing AMTRAK rail lines is facing a similar issue and delay. The extension of the northeast highspeed rail corridor south is actually an idea which makes good economic sense (unlike most US HSR proposals) but even using existing infrastructures for a well understood technology is taking decades and costing millions before any tracks are even laid. This new tech will give the regulators all sorts of ammunition to mandate all manner of studies. So there is at least one huge political/legal hurdle not addressed.

As to the technical issues, this is a bit out of my comfort zone, but I'm a tad skeptical of the 100% solar power idea (particularly north of the Mason Dixon Line)  and maintaining pressure differentials in well traveled tubes measured in megameters looks to be challenging to say the least.

Brian Wang (who tends to be very sanguine regards mass transit in any form) is running the numbers here, here and here. He looks at the costs here.

That little potential asphyxiation issue notwithstanding this is a very interesting proposal and I'd really like to see something like this made viable.

However, the biggest red flag is not technical or legal...it's Elon Musk. This is something that Ace touched on the other day and I think it's valid. With the exception of Pay-Pal, all of Musk's business ventures have involved government (via taxpayer) subsidies. Tesla and SolarCity are totally dependent on this sweetheart deals and strong-arming rivals via his patrons in congress and CalGov. Even Space-X which is an inspiring and innovative endeavor, exists because it was awarded the space station contract while other less politically connected companies were passed over (perhaps justifiably, perhaps not).

We here at Brickmuppet Blog would dearly like for this to work... But given Musk's past business models the thing this most reminds us of is.....

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Recently we discussed the potential KickStarter has for shaking things up and bypassing normal gatekeepers and FTC issues.

Well, they have issues of their own.

According to PopSci (link via Rand Simberg) Kickstarter recently made a small, quite specific, change to their terms of service. one that RETROACTIVELY removed the stretch prizes from an already funded project.

The project, to create bio-luminescent plants, received $484,013 of a $65,000  goal by the time funding closed and was going swimmingly until it attracted the ire of some...I dunno...luddites or something who, on May 31, started an online petition to get Kickstarter to block the project. Kickstarter knuckled under on July 1.

This is bigger than depriving the projects $40.00 backers of their glowing leeks...this is an ex post facto decision breaching a contracts in response to an internet petition.

Which brings us to Indiegogo which is another outfit with a similar buisness model that few people had heard of before Kickstarter decided to spurn the faint green light of and embrace the darkness of anti GM hysteria....and break contracts.

So lets hear it for Indiegogo...at least at the moment they don't seem to be opposed in principal to biotech startups.

^{...and all that that implies.}

Kickstarter does good within what appear to be self imposed limits. Beyond those limits it's good to know that there is competition.

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I...I don't know what to say about this. ^_via

The US experience with wind farms has left over 14,000 wind turbines abandoned and slowly decaying,

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I don't know WHERE I got this. It was in my unsorted .gif folder.
It's interesting though as it does show how music media evolved over 27 years and how fast the changes became in the 2000s.

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One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes ponders the science behind this story over at Phys-Ord.

It seems that an Israeli company called Phenergy has developed a metal/oxygen battery that runs off water.

Sort of...

Actually the aluminum is the anode, the air is the cathode and water acts as the electrolyte needed for the reaction to work. These batteries have huge energy density but the life of the plates is measured in a few thousand miles (about one thousand currently with water fill-ups every 200 miles in the prototype). 

Additionally, Phenergy seems to have licked a CO2 issue that was plaguing this type of battery.

In this scheme the aluminum is an energy carrier for whatever power plant making the plates so it's no different from any other battery in that regard. OTOH this looks to be VASTLY cleaner than most batteries.

This seems to be a big improvement in range and convenience  over normal electric cars. The fact that changing the plates in the battery is going to need to happen about as often as changing ones oil might seem to be a deal breaker except that aluminum is cheap and recyclable and if the plate costs can be kept down it might be doable. ( In this sense the system is a BIG improvement on previous metal/air batteries that used zinc. ) It might well be something a motorist can do themselves if so inclined.

There are a lot of questions here, but this may well have potential. Of course its affordability and practicality depend on how cheaply the aluminum can be recycled and how easily the plates can be replaced. Therefore, a whole  lot depends on how cheap the grid power is.

In any event, it's interesting....

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One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes celebrates the fact that The third and fourth installments of the Colliers space symposium are online and have been for two months and two weeks respectively.

As mentioned here and here the Horizons newsletter of AIAA Houston is republishing high resolution annotated reproductions of the entire "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" series published by Colliers in the 1950s. This series is a fascinating bit of history as it was extremely important in convincing people that Spaceflight was practical. They are also interesting in that they show step by step how major technical issues were dealt with in an age when most calculations were done with slide rules.

It's also rather sobering. Today, with technology nearly 60 years more advanced, and so much more power at our disposal,  our society rarely speaks of doing great things.
more...

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  Of course, with the beneffit of 20/20 hindsight and subsequent advances in the understanding of the human genome it would appear that radiation and Tesla coils have limited utility in the area of controlled chromosomal manipulation to achieve the desired (and heritable) genetic traits.  Additionally, working alone in a swamp with limited capital and dubious physical plant seems in retrospect to have been non-conducive to the gentleman's stated goals.

One might find it necessary to secure the backing of a large, comparatively rich, yet totalitarian, one party state, preferably one with no qualms about culling any subjects that do not conform to stated party goals.

Meanwhile....In China.

At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.

 On the one hand boosting human intellect seems like a worthy goal, on the other hand there are all sorts of practical issues with this. As I was working on this post I noted that sci-fi author Sarah Hoyt has already looked at a few...

So… anyway, they’re picking these highly credentialed people from Europe and Asia (where of course, connections family, privilege have nothing to do with credentials.  Excuse me, I have some sarcasm stuck in my throat.) 

That is a biggie.

This in part is a product of the Chinese Confucian tradition which views credentials themselves as a virtue rather than a characteristic. This view is certainly not something the Chinese have a monopoly on, it has permeated the US in the last decades to our detriment. This is NOT to say that credentials should be ignored completely or that they might not have some utility for this endeavor, however given the issues Hoyt brings up (connections, privilege ect.) there need to be other issues to take greater weight.

Hoyt also points out that there are some undesireable traits that seem to be tied to high IQ's. She specifically mentions Autistic related characteristics. That is not the only potential downfall however. There actually is  one example of (somewhat unintentional) successful selecting of a human population for intellect; the Ashkanazi. Note though, that this site, which is dedicated to genetic diseases that are especially common among that population, shows that there are more physical issues that might well be tied to the same alleles. I must emphasize "MIGHT" because there is considerable debate on this point. Assuming this is the case, then given time these problems might be cleaved from the alleles.

However straight IQ test performance is not the be-all and end all of what a society needs and the weirdoes who make up a lot of geniuses are not likely to do well in the learning environment that stresses conformity, and test taking ability above all else.

Nonlinear thinking, motivation, ambition and moxie are at least as important. These are not things China has traditionally valued and are certainly not things that a leftist education system encourages. IQ is of limited utility without discipline ( of course the Chinese have THAT in spades so...Advantage Middle Kingdom).

None of this is to say the ChiComs CAN'T pull it off which Hoyt's post seems to be strongly implying. They have hurdles, but they are very, very smart and they are very, very motivated so, while I'm skeptical,  I would not completely write them off.

That's where the ethical issues come in. In the US, without any genetic tweaking beyond marrying up, we have developed a class of people who feel perfectly entitled to rule, by virtue of their credentials. They have a sense of entitlement comperable or greater than a European Aristocrat, because they ae where they are not because of devine providence, (which might lead to some sort of noblise oblige') but because they feel that by virtue of the credentials they have obtained they are intrinsically better than the rest of us.

Imagine the attitude of those who will know they have been scientifically selected to be geniuses...even if the selection produces little or no gains they will be groomed to lead with that knowledge...insuferable, entitled geniuses. How's that strike you?

Yeah...Me too...

Our first experience with the friendliness problem might well be with spoiled wetware rather than AIs.

Of course there is whole question of a totalitarian one party state setting out to create Ubermenchen.

Great potential, great peril.

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As one of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes points out, "Boom!" does not do justice to what may be coming to the planet Mars.

"2x10¹⁰ Megatons is hard to visualize so think of it as being about this much 'splody."

It seems that recently discovered fast parabolic comet C/2013 A3 is going to pass pretty close to Mars. Exceedingly close. Best guess now has it passing within 63,000 miles of Mars. However the margin of error in plotting its course due to uncertainties about it's mass, its extreme speed and the limited time this object has been observed mean that the cone pf probability extends from 74,000 miles out from Mars to 0.000 miles.  This is much closer to Mars than the moon is to Earth.

The comet is moving exceedingly fast and is a retrograde orbit to boot so its relative velocity is around 35 miles per second, or 5 TIMES Earth escape velocity!

Since C/2013 A1 is a hyperbolic comet and moves in a retrograde orbit, its velocity with respect to the planet will be very high, approximately 56 km/s. With the current estimate of the absolute magnitude of the nucleus M2 = 10.3, which might indicate the diameter up to 50 km, the energy of impact might reach the equivalent of staggering 2×10¹º megatonnes! This kind of event can leave a crater 500 km across and 2 km deep. Such an event would overshadow even the famous bombardment of Jupiter by the disintegrated comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in July 1994, which by some estimates was originally 15 km in diameter. - See more at: http://spaceobs.org/en/2013/02/25/comet-c2013-a1-siding-spring-a-possible-collision-with-mars/#sthash.SS7W2n7v.dpuf

The comet is 50 clicks across (by comparison the "Dinosaur Killer" was only 10 clicks in diameter). This would be a planet changing event.

Scott Lowther has thoughts on what the (admittedly unlikely) impact might mean for ambient Martian atmospheric pressure. Assuming it didn't blow the atmosphere clean off, it could be interesting indeed.

In any event, with a magnitude of 8.0 as seen from Earth, the comet should be visible with the naked eye in rural areas, which means we get a neat show regardless of whether it hits.

_{"Science Babe" is Shizune Hachimaki, from Katawa Shoujo.}

Since C/2013 A1 is a hyperbolic comet and moves in a retrograde orbit, its velocity with respect to the planet will be very high, approximately 56 km/s. With the current estimate of the absolute magnitude of the nucleus M2 = 10.3, which might indicate the diameter up to 50 km, the energy of impact might reach the equivalent of staggering 2×10¹º megatonnes! This kind of event can leave a crater 500 km across and 2 km deep. Such an event would overshadow even the famous bombardment of Jupiter by the disintegrated comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in July 1994, which by some estimates was originally 15 km in diameter. - See more at: http://spaceobs.org/en/2013/02/25/comet-c2013-a1-siding-spring-a-possible-collision-with-mars/#sthash.SS7W2n7v.dpu

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Just got this via twitter.

CNN.com is reporting this afternoon that NASA has lost contact with the International Space Station.

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The Google Bubble is is explained here. Note that it's basically an ad for Duck-Duck Go, but it does explain the problem succinctly.

How bad can it get?

I noticed hadn't cleared my search history or cookies all year when a recent search on my computer for BAD APPLE CHINESE resulted in Newt Gingrich vs. Piers Morgan  and a search for AMVs in general included Bill Whittle videos.

No doubt someone to the left of me would be getting Obama hymns and  such.

It can be somewhat mitigated by clearing ones search history and all cookies periodically.

 On the political level this means that getting people to change their minds about things political is going to be even more of a herculean task than is discussed here, here, here and here.

On a rather more profound level it cannot be good for the nations polarization or getting people to change their minds about important things like immunizations and GM foods.

This is a huge structural problem, but I'm at a loss as to what to do about it.

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Well, that was exciting.

We had a near miss from an asteroid big enough to cause a 5 megaton blast if it hit. Over a thousand people were injured in Russia  this morning when a small meteor detonated above (and impacted just outside of) the town of Chelyabinsk. This afternoon, bolide exploded above Rodas Cuba causing minor damage and another bolide lit up San Fransisco this evening but did no damage.

The near miss asteroid has pretty much been established to be unrelated to the Russian meteorite, though its unclear if the two bolides were related to the Russian event.

2012DA14 which passed inside Geostationary Orbit got some buzz in the press over the last few days and Drudge, of course, hyped it like it was the Sweet Meteor Of Death. It was discovered by an amateur astronomer in Spain, not NASA or any other credentialed body, so if not for him we never would have seen it coming until it was upon us (if then). If it had been the tiniest bit off its actual course it would have hit. At this point we could have done nothing about it.

The objects that caused so much excitement in Chelyabinsk, Rodas and  San Fransisco, well, we never saw them coming.

This pic is making the rounds today....because it's true.

Next time the S.M.O.D. Squad comes visiting they may not be so congenial.

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Doom. It is upon us.

UPDATE 2:

But I did laugh...

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1 Where's the ka-boom?  I was expecting an Earth-shattering ka-boom....

Posted by: Siergen at Fri Feb 15 17:38:01 2013 (Ao4Kw)

2 The ka-boom is here.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Feb 16 03:24:25 2013 (vp6an)

3 What, no animated siren?

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Feb 16 04:51:15 2013 (cZPoz)

4
Here is an animated Siren for you.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Feb 16 15:05:44 2013 (vp6an)

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Tearful, fearful, Sayaka is giving me the creeps, so I've gotta post something just to get the creepiness off the top front post. 

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Deep sea cameras have caught the first pictures of a giant squid in it's natural habitat doing normal squid things.

Here is a short video.

Oops...she's neither giant nor in her natural habitat nor doing normal squid things. Lets try again...

..and a couple of pictures...

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The Tsar Bomb, a weapon tested by the U.S.S.R. in 1961 was the penultimate in things designed and built to go "BOOM!"

It's fairly well, known and its effects are described here and here.

The ground surface of the island has been levelled, swept and licked so that it looks like a skating rink. The same goes for rocks. The snow has melted and their sides and edges are shiny. There is not a trace of unevenness in the ground... Everything in this area has been swept clean, scoured, melted and blown away.

The nightmare facilitator helpfully color-codes the blast. Going outward from the hypocenter: the yellow  in the center is a deep crater of fuzed glass. This is the extent of the fireball itself and EVERYTHING here is utterly gone.  The green area has an instant death rate of 50-100 percent due to radiation. This is included in the simulator because it's important for smaller bombs but its really redundant here because the much larger red area overlaps it and experiences instant overpressures of 20PSI and above. Red is going to see the utter destruction of even many steel reinforced concrete buildings. The grey area, which will have overpressure down to 4,6 PSI will  see most structures destroyed except for the very strongest steel and concrete structures, which will be damaged. The death rate in the red and grey zones is going to be close to 100% even if NO radiation was present. Overlapping all of these zones,  and extending well beyond them the is orange area . Outside the grey area it will still experience some blast damage but the orange zone mainly experiences thermal effects. Any exposed skin gets 3rd degree burns and most everything flammable or combustible burst into flames. This will likely result in a firestorm stretching from Trenton NJ to Brentwood, to Fairfield CT and north almost to West Point. Note that this is a very simplistic map and takes into account dissipation of the blast and the curvature of the earth, but it does not take into account terrain or atmospheric conditions. For instance the facing slopes of hills might get higher level effects than their distance would indicate and info from the actual Tsar Bomba test indicates that scattered fires might be started in the Adirondacks

This blast does not have the vast range of the 1961 test because it is assumed to be a ground burst. Of course a ground burst is a VERY dirty explosion. The harbor is unusable for decades and very likely isn't a harbor any more.

Lets pull back a bit...

The major US harbors would have been destroyed and since the seismic effects would have been greater than 8.0,  there would have been earthquake-like damage up and down the eastern seaboard, which transmits seismic waves very efficiently. Remember each 100 MT bomb is roughly half a Krakatoa. Worse, radioactive tsunamis might have done additional damage. The bomb itself, wouldn't cause a real tsunami, but the vertical shaking the concussion would have caused could have precipitated avalanches in the undersea canyons outside many east coast ports. This could conceivably trigger tsunamis.

Note that those 'splody circles are the actual blast fields...to scale.

DC, Philadelphia and Baltimore as torpedo targets are a bit far fetched. One would have to assume torpedoes powered by RTGs or something so the Sub doesn't have to enter the Chesapeake or Delaware Bays. Chicago and Sacramento are rather unlikely targets for a torpedo.

However, the above simulation was done with a slightly different scenario in mind.

The weapon, as big as it was, was not as big as one might think. If you removed the fins, it could fit in an ISO shipping container. It was also not all that advanced in reality. The Soviet engineers designed it very quickly and it was reportedly a straightforward and very conservative scale-up from the U.S.S.R.s early hydrogen weapons. The Soviet engineers did not seem to find it terribly challenging. This means that once anyone gets the ability to produce hydrogen bombs, something like this weapon is a straightforward development, probably only a decade or so down the road.  (the Russians did it rather quicker in what by today's standards are primitive conditions, but they are very good at engineering)

Barring a catastrophic screw-up resulting in a nuclear exchange, the current nuclear threat is, at the very most, something along the scale of "Little Boy" (a firecracker by comparison). However, there is no more potent terror weapon than the 'King of Bombs' and the ability to do damage on that scale is demonstrably attainable. That such large weapons are wasteful and poisonous enough to cause massive contamination is of little deterrent to those who covet nukes for terror purposes. Fortunately, no one likely to try and sneak one of these things into the country will be able to develop or obtain them...for at least 10 or 12 years. 

UPDATE: Edited for clarity.

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One of the Brickmuppets Crack Team of Science Babes has asked that we respond to mysterious commenter "JT" who seems to need information about Three Mile Island. 

Three Mile Island is a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania that suffered a partial meltdown in one of its reactors in 1979 due to a confluence of failures, both human and mechanical.. Though widely touted as an unmitigated catastrophe, the areas radiation detectors detected very low levels of radiation released, about 1/1000th that needed to cause immediate heath effects. A subsequent Columbia university study was done in 1991 to measure long term effects. It measured the cancer frequency of the local population to the US as a whole over the 10 years since the accident and found a very small increase in some cancers (and a lower rate than the norm for Leukemia). Because the measured increases were so low (between 0.4 and 1.17%) and the distribution did not correlate to the actual contaminated area (as described by wind patterns and dosimeter reports) the Columbia study actually suggested that stress was as a possible cause of the increase...and with all the hype the people of the area had certainly been subjected to stress. A more recent study points out that the area along the Susquehanna river near Three Mile Island happens to have one of the highest radon levels in the USA. This might invalidate all attempts to tie cancers to the reactor accident. Not mentioned in either study is the likelihood that residents around Three Mile Island were screened for cancers at a higher rate than the average US population which likely further skewed the number of cancer discoveries and thus the overall numbers.

Thus it is pretty darned clear that, while initial concern regards the incident was good and proper the subsequent hype and hysteria was both irresponsible and grossly misleading. Furthermore, the effects of the breathless and sensational coverage included the virtual death of the nuclear plant construction in the USA, which was a far greater catastrophe for the nation than the accident itself.

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One of the Brickmuppet's crack team of science babes has just rolled in with some space related news, both historical and current. She looks quite...um...we're just going to go with 'pleased'.

First comes some follow up on a previous post here, namely that the Horizons newsletter of AIAA Houston has completed the second and third installments of their fully restored (and annotated), high res reprints of the iconic Colliers series on space travel from the 1950's. The series, Man Will Conquer Space Soon was an extremely important work in that it brought to the public the realization that space travel was possible in the near term. The two most recent installments focus on lunar exploration and while they diverge greatly in both architecture and scale from the Apollo program, the expedition envisioned in the articles are still largely sound from an engineering standpoint (though the procedure for setting up the shelter is not entirely practical).  Von Braun and Ley worked out their endeavor in minute detail and provided sufficient weight margins for incorporating additional equipment should they be deemed necessary by subsequent discoveries. The Horizons team has provided high resolution versions which is especially important given that the articles were illustrated by Fred Freeman and Chelsey Bonnestell.

To wit...

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While the world watched the first person to break the sound barrier without a vehicle, today also marks the 65th anniversary of  the first time someone broke the sound barrier at all. Well, earlier today, that man, General Chuck Yeager commemorated the event by taking an F-15 through the sound barrier.. Yeager is 89 years old.

That is seriously cool.

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