Friday, August 29, 2003
Get the hell off'a my lawn, you whelps!
Every year Beloit College publishes The Mindset List" to demonstrate the set of referents available to that year's entering students. It is useful to keep in mind the significantly different intellectual framework of someone when you're tying to make a point. That's why kids wander off -- half of what we say goes so far over their heads it don't even make a breeze. In this ageist culture, I was kinda surprised at my first reaction: These poor little kids don't know nuttin'! How rich I feel today. How far up the list do *you* go?They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era and probably did not know he had ever been shot. [they don't know why scandals are called "whatever-Gate"] [they think Deep Throat is porn] They were prepubescent when the Persian Gulf War was waged. There has been only one pope in their lifetime. They were 10 when the Soviet Union broke apart and do not remember the Cold War. [much less "Duck and Cover"] [or have the mind's eye picture of a mushroom cloud]
They are too young to remember the space shuttle blowing up on takeoff. [or a time before anyone had walked on the Moon. or before anyone had left Earth.] Tiananmen Square means nothing to them. [nor the "Little Red Book"] Bottle caps have always been screw off and plastic. [church-key?] Atari predates them, as do vinyl albums. The statement "You sound like a broken record" means nothing to them. They have never owned [seen?] a record player.
They have likely never played Pac Man and have never heard of Pong. [or Ms Pac-Man] They may have never heard of an 8-track tape. The compact disc was introduced when they were 1 year old. They have always had an answering machine. Most have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels, nor have they seen a black and white TV. [or, in the country, 3 channels] They have always had cable.
There have always been VCRs, but they have no idea what Beta was. [or why that's a dam shame] They cannot fathom not having a remote control. They don't know what a cloth baby diaper is or know about the "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up!" commercial. [nor can they sing J - E - L - L - O ! !] They were born the year that Walkman was introduced by Sony. [reel to reel?!] Roller skating has always meant inline for them. [a key?]
Michael Jackson has always been white. Jay Leno has always been on "The Tonight Show." [so that line in The Shining makes no sense] They have no idea when or why Jordache jeans were cool. [ok. neither do I] Popcorn has always been cooked in the microwave. They have never seen Larry Bird play.
They never took a swim and thought about "Jaws." [or tried to take a shower with the curtain open] The Vietnam War is as ancient history to them as World War I, World War II, and the Civil War. [as are love beads] [and a VW bug with flowers looks as old as a Packard with running boards] They have no idea that Americans were ever held hostage in Iran. [and lack those visual images] They can't imagine what hard contact lenses are. They don't know who Mork was or where he was from.
They never heard: "Where's the beef?", "I'd walk a mile for a Camel," or "De plane, de plane!" [or "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!"] [they don't know "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah"] They do not care who shot J.R. and have no idea who J.R. was. Kansas, Chicago, Boston, America, and Alabama are places, not bands. There has always been MTV. They don't have a clue how to use a typewriter. [why is that button marked "return?" Return to where?]
What else did the list miss?
Bettah be careful . . .
ThanQ! Michele and your jeweled meat hammerThe Watchers Council Speaks
The Watchers Council sure covers a lot of ground around the ol' blogosphere and this week's choices are indicative of that. The Council chose from among its members Endgame / Reality Check by Exultate Justi, and from the rest of the blogosphere, a heartfelt piece by Lt Smash, The Long Road Home. We're glad you're "Home from the Sandbox, *ahem* LCDR (select) Smash. Here is the whole list of Watchers Council Links. Multiple great reads. Go See . . .Thursday, August 28, 2003
Please stop telling me I'm dim.
The Secretary of State Shelley and friends seem to believe that I am so dim that I will be fooled into thinking that Aaron Aaronson is much better to vote for than Zeke Ziller simply because his name comes first in the alphabet. Maybe they think I haven't the attention span to make it all the way to the Rs or the Ys. Why else would they believe they had to not only invent a new "random" alphabet, but rotate that alphabet assembly district by assembly district? Fair? Since when is the alphabet a case for crying "discrimination?" Who in hell decides who to vote for based on that person's position in the list on the ballot?!? And who in Hell doesn't know who they're going to vote for before they go into the little booth?!? Please. I'm asking. Kindly step forward and be recognized so that you can be prevented from voting ever again.Will you please stop yelling and do something *useful*?
So why is that guy yelling on the sound bites so upset about the removal of the 10 Commandments Monument from the Alabama courthouse? Is he afraid he'll forget what's on it? [ Is he there *that* often?] Or are he and his friends afraid that the rest of us are too amoral to utilize the rule of law as codified without a 52 ton chunk of granite watching over our every move? And why is it that the religious always assume that it is only fear of the wrath of their god that will motivate anyone to act morally? Do they actually believe that no one is capable of doing the right thing simply because it is the right thing? For everyone who is so upset at the removal of that monument: why dontcha buy a small vacant lot in town, Ground Force it up, and install the monument there as your gift to the city and state?Wednesday, August 27, 2003
NASA Responds
This article was emailed to my by someone who actually subscribes to the WSJ. Thank you. The article is here, if you are also a subscriber. I believe I have reprinted it in whole below. [Updated August 27, 2003, Copyright 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved]COMMENTARY Back on Earth By SEAN O'KEEFE [Administrator of NASA] In the seven months since the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia and its heroic crew, much has been revealed about our nation's space flight program. In spite of NASA's impressive record of historic accomplishments and scientific breakthroughs, we now face the painful realities of our shortcomings in safety, communications, flight operations and management. * * * The work of Admiral Hal Gehman and the members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board have recorded these breakdowns as fact. As an agency, we accept them and are prepared to comply with each of their recommendations and move forward. All of us at NASA are indebted to Adm. Gehman and the board's members for their selfless public service in constructing its comprehensive final report. Their dedication to answering the painful questions that have arisen since the morning of Feb. 1 is a great service to the Columbia families and to all who want America's journey in space to continue. The men and women of NASA are prepared for the challenges that come with restoring American confidence in our exploration efforts on behalf of all Americans. As a result of the Columbia tragedy that confidence, and those abilities, have been challenged. In renewing our aspirations and abilities to explore, we must first re-establish those capacities while rebuilding the confidence of those who make our journeys possible. In this assignment, failure is not an option. To continue as the explorers of the challenging frontiers before us, every NASA team member, from astronaut to accountant, program manager to engineer, is dedicated to the principles that have heralded every NASA success: safety of flight from beginning to end; clear and open communications throughout our mission teams; and a management culture that empowers both dialogue and achievement. We have already begun to take the steps within the Space Shuttle Program and others to ensure these tenets will be the fundamental baseline for every NASA mission from this day forward. To date, we have begun reorganizing the agency's management operations and mission procedures to improve internal communications and safety practices. We have also initiated hardware redesigns to enhance safety without compromising on flight performance. We have reached out to the U.S. Navy submarine service and naval reactors community to benchmark best practices and help us improve our fundamental operating procedures and processes. We have also formed a distinguished panel led by veteran astronauts, General Thomas Stafford and Richard Covey to monitor and assess all our Return to Flight activities. And we have established an engineering and safety center to ensure that an objective, fresh set of eyes are on every NASA mission and program. Each of these are steps toward returning America's space shuttles to orbit. Only achieved milestones will drive and dictate our return to flight. While we undertake these efforts, we will continue to analyze the work of Adm. Gehman and the board and seek ways where we can go beyond their recommendations to make space flight even safer. As a new chapter in our nation's history of human space flight begins, we pledge to fly only when we are fit to do so. It is a promise we offer to those with the courage and zeal to explore and a solemn one that we owe to seven friends and their survivors. We are on the path to returning to safe space flight. We have a long way to go but we will get there and we will make America proud.
Another Perspective on NASA
If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate). Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers. ...In spite of... variations from case to case, officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the "success" of previous flights. ...Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources. For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
ThanQ! Amr E. Malik of Rantissimo Want to know the author? Check below: Richard Feynman Report on the Challenger, 1986 Feynman's Personal Observations The Commission Report as a whole
He's got a point, there
David takes on the illiterate and makes some excellent points about the misuse of language being an invalidator of one's point. I strongly suggest that you Go See . . . [btw, this is pretty useful, too]More NASA data
More response to the Columbia report: this time from someone currently engaged in the private side of the effort and who has studied NASA methodology extensively. Thank you for writing, and for allowing me to share it. [Responses may be be left in the comments section and will be passed on to the author.]1) Principally this is a management failure/cultural failure at NASA. NASA has had an organizational culture adrift from peer organizations in government and industry for 20 years and like many closed societies has drifted into dysfunction and mysticism. (Gehman stated most of this report could have been written prior to the loss of Columbia). 2) Technical cause of the accident was a piece of foam shed from the Shuttle Tank striking the wing and damaging the Carbon heat protective tiles. While factual, this particular failure is almost irrelevant. Dozens of near-misses in other failed systems in recent years have had equal potential to cause loss of crew and vehicles. The management system that has allowed this to occur is the principle problem. (Other near misses include flawed wiring, hydrogen gas buildup, failure of bolt catchers in flight, fires in APU's) 3) A far more grave issue is the inability to design and build space craft that are capable of fault tolerance, grave degradation and incremental growth in understanding and technology. Aircraft have been designed with 100 years of slow gradual steady improvements from Wilbur and Orville wright to the F-22, 777 and SR-71. Orbital space launchers have only increased in size while using design philosophies based upon the V-2 missile and not upon sensible transportation systems. 4) NASA has developed a cultural problem where proper scientific and engineering analysis are not performed. Argument is preferred over analysis. PowerPoint analysis is preferred over scientific method. Ground tests are preferred over flight tests. Prior to the loss of Columbia, inadequate testing or analysis was performed over numerous flight systems leading to over 300 waivers of critical issues. Wishing away trouble has replaced proper operational discipline. -- This problem can be seen in that the External tank has never been flown in a fully instrumented manner. Test data must validate models, a concept lost on NASA. -- No basic lab tests were conducted of Foam behaviour until Osheroff conducted his experiments in his kitchen. Prior to that senior NASA managers had scoffed at Foamology and disputed that foam was of any consideration in the loss of Columbia. 5) NASA built hundreds of billions of dollars of systems (ISS, Hubble, Compton, Spacelab, SpaceHab) on a highly experimental and provably unreliable launch system (STS). While it is a reasonable federal activity to engage in both scientific research and aircraft design and test, these experiments should not be tied together. Science platforms should be divorced from experimental launch vehicles. The X-15 flew the occasional science experiment but these were always tertiary to the primary mission of research flight test. There is something fundamentally wrong when the X-15 flew 199 times as a research rocket plane, while the Shuttle flew 4 times and was declared operational. 6) A gross disconnect exists between NASA's ground side view of spacecraft and the operational roles and needs on orbit. At KSC it is almost religious that no loose items strike the shuttle. Jewelry is removed, loose items on clothing are taped down, visitors are confined to limited spaces, but when foam flakes off of the ET in flight, this is treated as a minor maintenance issue. ISS flight hardware is processed by ground crews in sterile gowns, booties and masks, but when on orbit, astronauts float around inside in their underwear, eating and playing inside the modules. 7) Aversion to data collection and monitoring: Modern large aircraft are built with Black box recorders to collect condition information to support crash investigation. By luck, Columbia had a data collection system which was vital to this investigation. None of this data is analyzed in flight. Little of this data is analyzed between flights. 1/3 of the Columbia flight sensors had failed at the time of the loss. Proper scientific organizations collect data and utilize it for trend information. NASA dumps most of this information. 8) Inability to institute accountability for improper actions: No NASA managers have ever lost their jobs over gross failures. Challenger, Hubble and Columbia have only resulted in a reshuffling of name-plates. Military officers who lose seven men during a training operation can be sure their careers will be terminated, and they may even face court-martial. Two USAF pilots bombed five Canadian Special forces soldiers during the Afghan War. They were pulled before a Board of Inquiry: their careers were ruined. A USAF captain failed to identify a helicopter containing UN/US Army officials in Iraq during the air patrol in the late 1990's. This failure lead to the shootdown of the helicopter, and a subsequent court-martial of the officer. It is unfortunate we hold Juniour officers to a higher standard of responsibility than a NASA administrator. 9) Obsolescence/failure to grow and adapt: NASA has maintained aging systems and approaches from the 1970's instead of adapting to modern 21st century approaches. -Analog test equipment instead of digital testers. -Paper drawings instead of CAD based systems. -Complex information management instead of digital documentation control systems. -Failure to update drawings to reflect current conditions. These are all symptoms of an organization out of control. 10) Failure to conform to FAA flight safety practice and military range safety practice on re-entry or launch: NASA has always felt immune from practices of lesser bodies. 11) Failure to conform to industrial practices: ASTM, AIAA, ASME. NASA has never had professional engineers in key positions, or used industry guidelines in design practices. SRB design violates ASME design rules. Orbiter bolts have been placed in violation of recommended guidelines. While one can continue on about technical issues, the single biggest problem is that NASA has serious cultural and organizational problems. Policy changes to move NASA away from operating systems and buying flights are needed.
Response to the Plight of Human Space Exploration
Today I have been given the opportunity to pass on some commentary on the Columbia report by Dr. Charles Lurio, consultant in the field of space enterprise, policy and engineering. Dr. Lurio included two stories from the NYT which describe some of the current private enterprise undertakings in the field.
Dr. Lurio: Below are the lead articles of today's New York Times Science Times section - on the prospect for going beyond the inevitable constraints of the NASA system in achieving practical space access. I'm quoted in there and very much appreciate the reporter's interest. But a quick anecdote: I listened a bit to the press conference on the Columbia report today. There was a comment to the effect of how many good engineers there are at NASA - and I wish to emphasize that I couldn't agree more with that. But there were superb engineers in IBM circa 1970. That didn't mean that the 'behavioral genetics' of that organization was any better suited to bringing about the personal computer revolution than NASA is suited to bring about practical space access. No doubt the Board's findings hold the potential for NASA to get _its_ human space transportation programs into better shape - but only within narrow limits of the system by which you bring about such access. It would be folly to expect the NASA system to be able to generate practical, low cost and safe access to orbit. That road requires significant new markets, and the creativity of many different groups. Yours very truly, Charles A. Lurio, Ph.D. Consulting in Space Enterprise, Policy and Engineering . From the NYT: ____________________________________________________________ August 26, 2003 Eyes on a Prize, Entrepreneurs Seek to Launch a New Industry By JOHN SCHWARTZ MESQUITE, Tex. -- Russell Blink is squeezing into a spacesuit. It is the real thing, made for Russian astronauts. John Carmack, his fellow dreamer, bought it for $5,000. Like the technologies for making rocket engines that showed up in industrial catalogs, it was, simply, out there. "Isn't it amazing what you can get on eBay these days?" Mr. Carmack says with a wicked smile. If the past of spaceflight lies with NASA, which is bracing for the Aug. 26 report into the Columbia shuttle disaster, the future of spaceflight may be starting here, in a cluster of office parks east of Dallas near body shops, heavy-equipment rental yards and flooring stores. In a high-ceilinged warehouse, a small group of dedicated hobbyists led by Mr. Carmack, a software millionaire, is trying to build a rocket from largely off-the-shelf components that the members fully expect will take Mr. Blink into space on the cheap. Then again, the future may lie in a very different place: a high-tech shop in the Mojave Desert, Scaled Composites, where Burt Rutan, an innovative aviation designer, is putting together his own craft. Or it could be in any of the other two dozen teams from five countries that are hoping to win the X Prize, a contest whose founders hope will jump-start a private space race and create a space tourism industry. The competition has garnered the interest of space freaks, tech zillionaires like the founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, and more. (Mr. Bezos declined to talk about his space research company, Blue Origin L.L.C., or to say whether he planned to participate in the X Prize competition.) None of the teams seem to be doing things the way that NASA does them, but that's the point -- to get to space in an entirely new way. For now, only the governments of the United States and Russia launch humans into space; China plans to try later this year. The two space tourists so far have paid millions of dollars to fly on Russian craft. A private space industry would face many roadblocks. "The environmental impact study is a big, big hassle," Mr. Carmack says, and the Federal Aviation Administration is still trying to determine what kind of process should be used to regulate the flights. But advocates of space exploration say there has to be an alternative to what they see as the expensive, bureaucratic over-engineering of NASA. The American space agency would create "the plutonium-powered toaster," says Dr. Charles Lurio, a space consultant and advocate. "There's no question that there are difficulties to be overcome and dangers, but that's why you want to have a bunch of different people try a lot of different things," he said. The contest is modeled on the Orteig Prize, the competition that led to Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight in 1927 with his Spirit of St. Louis. What with inflation and the high cost of shooting things into space, the scale of the new prize is somewhat larger: $10 million to the winner, instead of the Orteig's $25,000. The connection to the Orteig Prize is important to the creator of the X Prize, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis. "Since the age of 9, I wanted to be an astronaut," he said. "It's all I dream about." He worked toward his goal, getting degrees in medicine and engineering, as well as certification in fields like aviation and scuba diving. Along the way he realized that only a tiny number of astronaut applicants get the job, and only about half of those chosen get to fly. And even those who fly rarely get many missions. So Dr. Diamandis decided to create a new industry in the private sector to send people -- or, as he calls them, "self-launching carbon payloads that come with their own money" -- into space. "I was convinced that the marketplace was real, that the technology was readily available," he said. "The only thing missing was the vehicles to jump-start the market." In 1994, a friend and fellow space advocate, Gregg E. Maryniak, gave him a copy of Lindbergh's memoir, "The Spirit of St. Louis." Dr. Diamandis realized that competitions had been an important spur to commercial aviation. The two friends enlisted several other enthusiasts and established the X Prize Foundation in St. Louis, with plans to build a monitoring center in the St. Louis Science Center. The Lindbergh connection does not stop there. Erik R. Lindbergh, Charles and Anne Lindbergh's grandson, is a trustee and vice president of the foundation. "I kind of got in under the grandfather clause," he said. Mr. Lindbergh said at first he asked, "Isn't there a better way to spend $10 million on earth?" But Dr. Diamandis reeled him in. Mr. Lindbergh talked with Dr. Byron Lichtenberg, a former astronaut and a co-founder of the prize, about the "overview effect" astronauts describe in seeing the world all at once, that "it changes them." It could be a powerful experience for a larger group of people. "I said: `Oh -- there's something more here. It's not just about money and excitement and sex appeal,' " Mr. Lindbergh said. "There's something much, much bigger here. And that is what got me involved." Still, fund-raising was slow and the prize money was only secured late last year. Old NASA hands say it's not quite as easy as it looks to the newcomers. "We're coming up on 50 years of human spaceflight and we're still learning every day," said Jay Honeycutt, the president of Lockheed Martin Space Operations and a former director of the Kennedy Space Center. "I just hope they all do understand how hard it is." Still, he said he loved the idea of the prize. "I think it's dynamite," he said. Each team is approaching the prize in its own way. Mr. Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, is the most closely watched. It is Mr. Rutan who designed Voyager, the first airplane to fly around the world without refueling. His X Prize entry has two stages: a sleek, twin-turbojet carrier aircraft, the White Knight, and a second-stage rocket, SpaceShipOne. Some competitors speculate that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is backing the project, though neither Mr. Allen's people nor Mr. Rutan's crew is talking. In any case, from his site in the Mojave Desert, Mr. Rutan has already flown the plane that will launch the space vehicle, and this month he did a drop test of the space-going component to show that it could be piloted and landed safely. Another well-regarded team, Canadian Arrow, fulfills a lifelong dream of its founder, Geoff Sheerin. An industrial designer, Mr. Sheerin is creating a rocket that would make Buck Rogers comfortable. He will launch it on an offshore barge in the Great Lakes system for a straight-up, straight-down flight, and he plans to recover the capsule from the lake. Mr. Sheerin said the prize was part of his own business plan to foster space tourism. "We intend to collect the X Prize on the way to becoming the industry," he said. Since he was a teenager in Niagara Falls, Ontario, he realized it was possible to create rockets that could launch people into space for a reasonable fee. But he found no one willing to finance such a venture. The X Prize, he said, brought out backers more comfortable with sponsoring a competitor than a business -- adventure capital, as opposed to venture capital, began to flow. "Without the prize there would be no Canadian Arrow," he said. Backers still take some convincing, however. "There's an initial skepticism," Mr. Sheerin said, "until we show up and they find we're not wearing tinfoil on our heads." Other groups have decided to make a run at space without participating in the X Prize. Jeff Greason, the president of Xcor, a California company close by Mr. Rutan's, said the conditions of the X Prize contest weren't compatible with building the vehicle that would lead to commercial spaceflight. "We are very focused on getting the cost required to enter the market down as small as possible," he said. "That leads us to a smaller vehicle that will not carry three people." He added, "We're not in a rush to be the first to do it; we want to be the first to make real money doing it." That focus on cost is what could start the next space industry, said Mr. Maryniak, now executive director of the X Prize. Historically, he said: "Space engineers sort of worship at the altar of high performance. In the real world what people have to optimize to is low cost." Setting the bar intentionally low should also make a difference, he said. X Prize calls for launching people just over 60 miles high into suborbital space, the middle frontier surpassed early in the American space program. Any passengers would still feel weightless, and the physics of launching to that level is far simpler than those needed to achieve orbital flight, Mr. Maryniak said. "It's possible for modern-day Orvilles and Wilburs to do this task," he said. Selecting the teams has been a challenge, Dr. Diamandis said. "I can't tell you the number of e-mails I've gotten that say, `Forward me a million dollars and I would be pleased to build my antigravity ship and win your X Prize.' " At the same time, he said, "You don't want to turn away those pesky bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio." What thrills him, Dr. Diamandis said, is that so many people are excited by the competition. "We're allowing people to dream again," he said. He does not deny that the endeavor has risks. "These are pioneers," he said. "Much of the stagnation in our space program is because of our inability to take risks -- we're not allowed to fail any more. There can't be new frontiers opened without embracing some level of risk." _______________________________________________ August 26, 2003 Inside the Clubhouse, a Rocket Is Being Built By JOHN SCHWARTZ MESQUITE, Tex. -- Every day is Christmas at Armadillo Aerospace as the new toys and tools arrive in the mail. "I probably spent tens of thousands of dollars on next-day shipping," says John Carmack, the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, outside Dallas. It is a tiny fraction of the wealth he accumulated as the co-founder of Id Software, the pioneering company that brought compelling, graphically rich computer games like Doom and Quake into the world. And now he's trying to come up with something out of this world. It stands nearby: a homely rocket that, in its current incarnation, looks more like rough sculpture than spacecraft, a surprising blend of high tech and handmade. The fuel tank, coated with glimmering fiberglass, is actually a tank designed for industrial water purification. The passenger capsule is made of rolled and welded aluminum, with handholds welded on here and there and scribbled notes on the metal pointing to iffy welds. Unlike some of the other teams in the X Prize competition, there is no Buck Rogers industrial design at work here. It looks for all the world like a big science fair project. "Isn't it cool?" asks Katherine Anna Kang, who is married to Mr. Carmack and is one of the seven members of the team. Climbing into Mr. Carmack's space capsule is an intensely claustrophobic experience. The pilot squeezes into a tiny space above a bulkhead made of fiberglass-aluminum honeycomb and then straps himself against a slab of foam rubber -- the kind sold in cheap mattress stores. The position is a fetal crouch, with the pilot's back facing the nose cone. The two passengers would lie in the slightly larger space below, their backs curved against the inner wall of the capsule like human parentheses. One big difference between the early days of the space program and today, Mr. Carmack says, is the number of rocketry engineering problems that have been solved. "We need to debunk the rocket science mythology," he said. For example, liquid fuel engines turn out to be built from well-understood technologies, he said. "It's just plumbing with the volume turned up a little bit," he said. Mr. Carmack speaks in a rush, with a slightly nasal tone and the punctuating grunt -- a kind of hmmph? -- that seems to give his mind a moment to catch up with the flow of words, or to close off an unfinished thought. Unlike many participants in the X Prize competition, he did not grow up dreaming of space travel. "I had a standard geek childhood," he said, but "I wasn't a true believer" in the space effort. Bit by bit, he got drawn in. He found himself reading science fiction, and inspired by the enthusiastic attention paid to the X Prize by Slashdot, an online news service. His team of volunteers has already created and tested rockets and control systems. And the volunteers know that the work is risky. They have, for example, chosen a fuel, based largely on hydrogen peroxide, that is commercially available and less toxic and volatile than, say, the hydrazine used in the space shuttle. But it still has problems. Splash a drop or two on a pair of leather shoes, and they will burst into flames. Phil Eaton, a member of the Armadillo crew, had that happen not long ago. "All of a sudden, this shoe just goes `Whoosh!' " he said. With such hazards involved, some potential suppliers have refused to do business with Armadillo. The companies' lawyers painted worst-case scenarios in which "it's going to land on a school bus full of nuns and orphans," Mr. Carmack said. A maker of propellant told him that the $1 million fuel contract wasn't worth the $25 million the company estimated it might spend defending itself in a product liability suit. "It's disappointing, but, hmmph," he said. When asked whether she minded seeing her husband spend so much on the space race, she said: "What they are trying to do is an admirable thing. It's a really great, geeky clubhouse."
Worm Wrights and Virus Virtuosos
One way they hide their identity is to release a virus onto the Net from a public terminal at a university computer center or copy shop. ...Many virus writers go to great lengths--including destroying their hard drives--to get rid of evidence that might aid prosecution.
Melissa contained a unique identifier from Micro$oft Word, the author of the Anna virus was located by his ISP, and the ILOVEYOU author submitted an early version of the code as his senior thesis. [doh!] The four Israeli teens who wrote Goner bragged in IRC discussions. [duh]
Given early, circumstantial evidence that MSBlast may have indirectly contributed to the recent New York blackout, the author of MSBlast (if found) could face life imprisonment under U.S. law. But I still think the likelihood of finding the MSBlast author is low, because he appears to have guarded his anonymity well, and because the worm is so poorly designed, no one is likely to take credit for it.
heh.
[Robert Vamosi] believe[s], however, that the authorities have a reasonably good chance of finding Sobig's author, largely because there appears to be some financial motivation behind this worm.
How do you know if your system's been hijacked for spam? One clue is, in your e-mail client, the sudden presence of "delivery failure" alerts for e-mails sent to people you do not know. Another is the presence of increased activity on your PC's UDP Ports 995 to 999, which any good firewall should notice and inform you of.
Notes on 'Smart Clothing'
Some of the new directions in Human--Computer Interaction (HCI) suggest bringing advanced computing into all aspects of life. Computers everywhere, constantly monitoring our activities, and responding ``intelligently'' have the potential to make matters worse... because of the possibility of excluding the individual user from knowledge not only of certain aspects of the computer upon his or her desk, but also of the principle of operation and the function of everyday things. ...A varied supply of ideas, like biodiversity, leads to advancement in thought, and new paradigms in computing. Thus a single entity controlling all the world's supply of software, and in some sense, thought (e.g. a single entity providing all of the world's WWW browsers, and therefore, in some sense influencing the world's Internet content, or a single entity providing all of the world's dictionaries or automatic spell checking programs, in some sense influencing the use of language), could reduce the world's diversity of thought. Seamlessness of thought may reduce intellectual diversity, in the same way that monocropping reduces biodiversity. ...There are a number of researchers who have been proposing new computer user--interfaces based on environmental sensors. Increasingly we are witnessing the emergence of ``intelligent highways'', ``smart rooms'', ``smart floors'', ``smart ceilings'', ``smart toilets'', ``smart elevators'', ``smart lightswitches'', etc.. However, a typical attribute of these ``smart spaces'' is that they were architected by someone other than the occupant. Thus the end--user of the space often does not have a full disclosure of the operational characteristics of the sensory apparatus and the flow of intelligence data from the sensory apparatus. ...What is proposed is a computational framework for individual personal empowerment. This framework involves the architecting of a new kind of personal space, through an apparatus that is owned, operated, and controlled by the occupant of that space. In some sense, it is like a building, built for one occupant, and collapsed down around that one occupant. This computational framework for HI is called ``WearComp''... [eyetap.org]
...`Smart Clothing' offers an alternative to centralized surveillance. It suggests a future in which people, through prosthesis, might have both improved visual memory and improved ability to share it. But it also suggests a hope that the visual memory be distributed among people, and be less likely to be abused than if it exist in a centralized form, as is more common with a network of surveillance cameras...
Putting video imagery in the hands of everyday people, every day, restores the symmetry between the observed and the observers.
Where Ware; redux
UPDATE: on WhereWare, Auto Black Boxes, and RFID tags. Discussion forum here.PAL650 utilizes ultra- wide bandwidth pulses to provide sub-foot precision for the two-dimensional and three-dimensional location of tagged objects. ...The UWB tag itself is roughly the same size of a wristwatch and can transmit continuously for nearly four or five years on a single button cell battery.
This is a great idea, helping hospitals keep track of equipment can save "upwards of $75,000 to $100,000 each month directly attributable to lost equipment." I can imagine that this tech will be useful in innumerable other operations, large and small. Another point made in the discussion forum:
I have found, in interviews, an almost unfathomable hostility to location-based services amongst UK m-commerce operators. Which is not to say that it won't get off the ground: any service provider who is *not* dealing with end-users/consumers on a daily basis (eg, RFID proponents) will probably remain bullish about the technology and cause it to be rolled out. However, non-user-controllable locaiton-based technologies amount to a fundamental breach of trust with users, and the m-commerce operators I have spoken to have made it quite clear that they think that the entire m-comerce market -- and not merely the location-based component of that market -- will shrivel and die if non-user-controllable or non-opt-in whereware becomes widespread.
The discussion must continue. These technologies can be extremely useful [just the car-key problem, alone...] or extremely destructive [ya think people/obsessive stalkers know too much about one from one's blog...] It is as Steve Mann points out; the only smart way to approach "smart objects" is not to give the decision-making capability to the object but to require the person to be smarter than the objects by putting the decisions in the hands of the human.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
The Eyes of Texas, et al, Are Upon You, You Can Not Get Away . . .
I guess I'll be keeping my old buggy for a while longer.An estimated 25 million automobiles in the United States now have event data recorders, a scaled-down version of the devices that monitor cockpit activity in airplanes.
Their purported purpose is to monitor sensors and determine whether or not the airbags should deploy. A simple sensory function, yes?. Apparently not.
Though capabilities vary widely among carmakers, most recorders store only limited information on speed, seat-belt use, physical forces, brakes and other factors. Voices are not recorded. But the devices are finding its [sic] way into courtrooms as evidence in criminal and civil cases...
GM has been using recording/sensor devices since the 1990s, to find out why airbags were blowing up randomly. They claim to collect the data only with the owner's or lessor's permission. Ford, on the other hand, is selling a decoder device for $2,500. To anyone. This decoder device can access data from some GM models manufactured since 1996 and some Fords made since 2001. At the National Emergency Number Association conference last June, an Automatic Crash Notification System was presented. Upon a crash, this "black box" is able to notify Emergency Services of the exact location of the car via a GPS system and cell phone, enable the 911 operator to communicate with those in the car via a speaker phone, determine the speed the car was traveling upon impact, what part of the car was hit, whether the car rolled and how many times and how it landed, whether or not brakes or accelerator were used, how many g-forces the car experienced on impact, the number of passengers in the car and their seat belt status, and the airbag deployment situation.
[In a test crash] Within five minutes, the crash data was translated into a computer model that could be read by doctors. ...[The next step will] include information about the ages of passengers and crumple zones of specific makes of car.
There is a lovely little puff piece about the device in Forbes, crying out about how dangerous driving is and how this device will save lives©. But even their puffery cannot disguise the base intent of the recording device.
Just knowing the box is there changes drivers' behavior. Fear of getting caught may be a more powerful motivator than fear of getting killed. ...teenagers drive much better when their parents are sitting next to them. [The] black box device is always there watching the driver. Some people are worried about privacy. We're not. [NB both authors are professors at Yale] You can bet that there will be a careful-driver discount [on insurance] given to people who agree to install a black box.
Well, there ya go. "It's purely voluntary." [Never mind the fiduciary coercion.] "What have you got to hide?" [It's not "hiding." It's called "none of your business."] and my fave, "It's for your own good." [Byte me.]
The auto black box monitor is another example of utilizing technology to invade privacy and make dependent children and good, ovine little consumers out of what used to be the citizenry.**
As long as we continue to give up our shoes, pausing only to thank gawd that Richard Reid chose not to hide his bomb in his shorts... As long as we pretend to believe that a 90 year old nun should be as closely watched as a 25 year old male fresh off a plane from Syria... As long as we allow our phone calls to be listened to, our blogs to be investigated, and streets to be videoed... [and a nice hello to all the boys and girls at Ft Meade, gladdaseeya] As long as we delegate to "someone else" the responsibilities for keeping ourselves free... As long as we keep volunteering to give up all these things in the sophism of "safety" and "security" -- we're fucked neither.
** Citizen: One who enjoys the freedom and privileges of a city/state and who upholds the responsibilities deriving therefrom; [aka: an adult]
UPDATE:
AB 213 Assemblyman Tim Leslie, R-Tahoe City, [has a concern.] The main concern is that they are estimated to be in 25 million cars, and most drivers don't know they are there... [He has proposed a bill, AB213 ] Under the bill...automakers must tell car buyers that the devices are in their cars, and specifies how the information can be used, ...the data would be the private property of the registered owner of the vehicle and could only be retrieved with the owner's permission, a court order, or by the manufacturer for the purpose of improving auto safety. ...With the law in place, car owners will have a chance to argue in court that others should not have access to the information -- a right they do not have now. ...The bill has moved through the Assembly and one Senate committee with little debate, not a vote against it, no opposition and no proponents -- outside of Leslie.
Like needing a warrant to peer in your windows or search your sock drawer. Go Tim Leslie . . .
Whussup guys?
My friends at the Eco-Terrorist Fan Club seem to be fairly quiet about The West Covina Bar-B-Que thrown by their much-beloved ELF. Could it be that you guys want one of these pretty puppies ?!?
WEST COVINA, Calif. — [Arson] Fires destroyed dozens of SUVs and a warehouse at an auto dealership Friday, and vehicles there and at three other dealerships were spray-painted with slogans such as "Fat, Lazy Americans."
Hell, all the good ol' boys want a Hummer! Let's go get a beer -- you drive!
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