Science Ain't So Bad

A NASA THING!

THE DEMISE OF THE ROCKET SHIP

You and I have been using rocket ships as our basic transportation into orbit for as long as we can remember. Could say they’re the cruise liners of the IPad era. But they’re a bit rich at 1.3 billion dollars per cruise, aren’t they? They’re also inefficient and they’re not exactly “Environment Green”. Also, since each launch is a boo boo  away from a “big bang”, you would be right to conclude they’re dangerous as crap!

INEFICIENT BLUNDERBUSSES

Wasn’t it  Werner Von Braun who said that rocket ships give the Law Of Diminishing Returns a bad name, requiring, as they do, that the passenger list include the fuel tank, itself, which has to be dragged into orbit even as the stuff in it is being consumed? The tank (filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen) weighs about 1.7 million POUNDS and you gotta bring it along each trip if you hope to escape the pull of SOL (Stupid Ol’ Earth).

Well it’s not as inefficient as democracy but it’s close.

So, where was I? I had a point here..

(MISTERScienceAintSoBad shuffles his papers).

Ah.. I think I was telling you that NASA’s having a change of heart about this idiocy of flying 10 story buildings into orbit. If a rocket scientist’s THAT smart, he.she oughta be able to think him.herself right outta business. Least, that’s the theory.

So Stan Starr, Chief of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the Kennedy Space Flight Center has been scratching together a proposal to combine some existing technologies and then throw lots of money at them to see if the bills’ll stick. The idea seems to be a three phase system where the first phase is some kind of track or sled (could be electromagnetic propulsion or something else) which would accelerate the craft faster and faster, horizontally.  Then, after reaching some horrifying number of machs, scramjet engines (phase two) would cut in to fly the beast up to the point where, in phase three, a relatively dainty “second stage” type rocket would boost it on its way to its mission. And, instead of jettisoning the usual singed and dented crap to be hauled back for retrofitting, the launch vehicle would simply return to base and land.

Elegant.

Really, really, elegant.

And fictitious.

None of this exists. But all the basics are there. Rail guns exist. Rocket sleds? check. Neither is anywhere near “up to spec” as a space launch platform but, in astronautics, hope springs eternal. Ramjet supersonic spaceplanes? Che… well, coming along, anyway. Point is, that each phase has advanced technology to build on and could, with appropriate guidance and a humongous “stimulus check”, become part of an entirely new vision of space transport.

ScienceAintSoBad greets this proposal with lots of enthusiasm.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10 big ones. Go for it, guys!

CLASH OF EGOS. STEPHEN HAWKING VS GOD

How do I introduce Stephen Hawking?

Monumental.  The best of the best in Physics. Creatively brilliant. Reaching up, out of an ALS destroyed body that barely keeps him alive, to the highest order of accomplishment in one of the most difficult fields of endeavor.

Impossible.

How could anyone ignore the most profound handicaps to accomplish what he has?

As for God, what can I say?

Really he needs no introduction.

Like Hawking, he stands alone and his very existence seems filled with miracles. He is beloved  and admired by billions who look to him for comfort and guidance.

G_d (Image suffers from the usual deficiencies of trying to capture an ubiquitous being)

So what is one to make of the current clash between the two?

Hawking says God’s role in the creation of the universe  has been overimagined. In his new book, The Grand Design, Hawking asserts that the laws of physics provide a perfectly adequate explanation  for the beginnings of the universe and that, therefore, God’s role is redundant,  unnecessary, and suspiciously convenient for the religious establishment which benefits from the widespread belief that nature needed a hand from the Big Guy (the Big Guy, being God, by the way,  not Hawking).

He confronts, directly, the argument that only God could create something from nothing, discussing the quantum mechanical implications of doing that very trick.

God, on the other hand, has chosen to ignore Dr. Hawking.

So far, at least.

A guy as smart as Hawking will surely appreciate the advantages of leaving things that way.

10.5 WATTS'LL DO YA

SHIFTING TO LED

In 1980, we met the compact fluorescent light.

Ugh!

Small and twisty with nasty contents. You KNOW something THAT bad must have an environmental justification. Compact fluorescents (CFLs) are just just – I dunno – wrong! The color is off, the shapes are off, they’re just not RIGHT!

They say we’re sposed  to use more and more compact fluorescents because  incandescent light bulbs are on the way out. They (incandescent bulbs)  chew up watts faster’en my dog chews through a morselburger (a morsel of hamburger dropped, accidentally, on the floor).

‘course, if you don’t like compact fluorescent bulbs and you wanna do the the right thing and avoid incandescent bulbs, there are those nice hot orange-ish  halogen lights. MisterScienceAintSoBad likes ‘em better than CFLs.

But where are the  sturdy,cool,  long lasting light emitting diode (LED) bulbs which produce a lovely quality of light and  were promised in Genesis, Chapter 1, Verse 1 (Let there be.. “)? Aren’t they the ultimate solution to lighting?

They’re a comin’.

If you’ve bought yerself a nice flashlight, lately, you’ve probably noticed that there are dozens of models that sport LED bulbs. Unlike the flashlights we grew up with  that  throw out a wavering  yellow dot, surrounded by greasy ringlets of yellow and get dimmer and dimmer with use, the new flashlights with LED bulbs are incredible. They’re bright and clear and last a spooky long time. There are tiny versions that surprise with great light and larger versions that ‘re almost like an automotive headlight. Aim one across a big field and you can actually SEE the coyote who’s checking you out. MisterScienceAintSoBad has one for dog walks.

The coyotes in my town are buying them too.

According to Cree, sales of LED lighting components have doubled in the past 12 months.

Doubled.

Home lighting? Just watch. Home Depot’s gearing up to sell a “65 watt LED bulb” that  only uses 10 watts of juice. The light quality will be terrific, it will last a ridiculously long time,  and, if it breaks, no hazmat suits. A vacuum cleaner’ll do nicely.

PocketPad

GOOGLE ANSWERS THE IPAD. RAISES IT ONE.

Mister ScienceAintSoBad tried out the Droid X, Verizon’s very latest Android phone.

Which isn’t easy. They’re gone.

Sold out.

Why?

Cause customers got the idea right away.

Terrific app phone.

ALMOST too large.

Almost.

Makes yer pocket look funny.

It’s so large (and fast and easy to see) that you can pretty much do all that stuff you wanna do WITHOUT having to cart around a “computer”.

Which, keyboard or no, the IPad is.

You want funny looking pockets, put an IPAD into your pocket.

Funny.

At 4.3 inches, the “X” pushes the size of an app phone right up to the envelope. But it’s still pocketable. It’s still a phone.

LITTLE awkward.

So is love. So is parasailing. So is paying yer phone bill.

It’s a compromise. A MUCH better one than a tablet computer. The soft  keyboard’s big enough to make for near touch typing (in landscape mode). Videos engulf you.  Enough room to stuff in plenty of battery.  Plenty of speaker. This isn’t resonant, wall pounding base but, for a phone? Wow!

There’s even room for a functional (and hand insensitive) antenna. (Insensitive to hands as far as I could tell.  Look for testing lab results on reception, not reviewer impressions, OK?)

I’m keeping a point on ice. I may need it for Samsung’s Galaxy S .

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 9.

EGGHEAD

MRSASB: You’re breaking my heart, man! Don’t Do this! You’re straying into political stuff where a real science guy has no business. Why is it YOUR concern which out-of-work losers get paid what? I wanna hear about which robots are smarter. Which robots are better dancers. Not INTERESTED in crying for society’s cast outs. That another blog. OK? FlintHeart00001

Yer TOUGH, FlintHeart. Even Einstein strayed into the dirty, dirty world of politics from time-to-time. Carl Sagan too.

It won’t happen again.

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No Humans?

Technology CREATES jobs, right?

Unemployment’s kinda high.

Slow economy.

To get through the rough spot, employers have been p-r-e-t-t-y creative. Every possible trick. Technology aplenty.

Not that I’m worried. In Business Week, I read that robots create more jobs than they destroy. Robots, kiosks, voice recognition system. All fruits of the labor of human designers, manufacturers, implementers of all kinds.

If anything, technology means more jobs and more interesting work.

Well.

Jeff Burnstein, the author of the Biz Week article I quote above,  is head of the Robotic Industries Association.

Tongue.

Cheek.

Here’s the thing. Some things’re true till they aren’t anymore.

Then, they’re not so true.

Robots have been around. We’re used to them. Nobody died. (I could research this. Maybe a robot ate somebody.)  And, at times, employment’s been just fine while “machine heads” were welding away at car companies.

In bad times, we target our rage at giant job sucking winds wafting Mexican spices our way. But technology is our friend. More jobs than it eliminates.

This is CERTAINLY what MISTERScienceAintSoBad likes to think. He is a HUGE proponent of techology and science (‘case you haven’t noticed). Huge.

But I got this day job, too. Where I’m sposed to be objective. Look at evidence. Scientific approach. (Science is an elaborate way of being honest with ourselves. You can quote me.)

So.

What’s WITH this sticky, sticky unemployment number that’s spooking investors? Maybe something new is happening. Maybe we’re slipping into the “robotic age” – the one where all our work’s done by machines? Where we live lives of leisure, living on I don’t know what?

Matthew Bleicher’s (Robots FTW) unsure. His “bet” is that us human’ll still get to flip a burger or two. But he admits he could be wrong.  Rosemary Black (NY Daily News)  describes the way that robots are now being deployed in the work place “side by side with humans”. She describes a hospital in Silicon Valley where “..Tug robots deliver meds, take out the trash and even speak politely to human workers and patients. Leasing the robots costs the hospital about $350,000 annually, while hiring that many people would have cost more than $1 million a year.”

Katharine Gammon (Wired Magazine) is less nuanced. She says robots are “stealing” American jobs in warehousing.

Larceny.

Where’s  this leading?

PUNCH LINE

The punch line? Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works, talks about ordering food at a MacDonald’s kiosk.

Too good. Too easy. The kiosk was fun. Got him thinking. He sees a “seismic shift” in the American work force for which we aren’t prepared. He points to  five million jobs lost from the retail sector already. Just the beginning, he says. You wait.

MisterScienceAintSoBad has to let you down. Can’t give you the definitive answer here. Can’t boil down the evidence. There ISN’T “evidence” for future events. We don’t yet KNOW if technology’s starting to truly destroy the base of employment).  We DO know that vigilance is the price of living in this century. Can’t live yer life by cliches . Real estate CAN go down.  So can skyscrapers. So can economies.

Things change. Expect the unexpected.

In the past, technology HAS created more jobs than it has taken away. A truism.

We hope.

Note to investors. If, by some chance, we ARE in the middle of “the big one” where  technology crowds humans out of the workplace, this has implications. High unemployment may NOT mean recession anymore.  The “salaries” of the unhired workers wind up in balance sheets as “retained earnings”. Which isn’t very fair, is it?

So.

In the interest of fairness, social justice, and, most important of all, social order, gotta figure out a proper way to get those resources back to the new leisure classes before they get too bony.

Should be a mere exercise in Democracy, right?

What do YOU think?