april 2006 / greg goebel
* Entries include: mining infrastructure, welcome to 2006, 747 homestead, recycling PCs, Fibonancci poems, getting scammed by ISPs, COSMIC satellites, green tags, lawn GM, urban gaming, mandarin, panda diplomacy, TV-GPS, cosmic rays versus astronauts, methane hydrates, microdrives.
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- MINING (2): While mining is stereotypically associated with shafts and tunnels, everyone also knows about open pit and strip mines, and their bad reputation for massive violation of the very earth. Such "surface mines" are actually far more than norm than underground mines: about 85% of the minerals extracted in the US come from surface mines.
The open pit mine involves digging a huge hole in the ground, and it is best suited for exploiting veins of valuable minerals that plunge deep into the ground through hard rock. Most iron and copper is obtained from open pit mines. Strip mines, also known as "open cast" mines, involve digging up a long strip of ground, pulling out the minerals, then digging the next strip and using the "spoils" to fill up the first. A strip mine is best suited to exploiting "bedded" sedimentary deposits that lie flat over a wide area at a shallow depth underground. Coal and some soft minerals like phosphates are extracted via strip mines.
* The scale of open-pit mines can be mind-boggling. They have a concentric appearance, with a set of levels separated by steps. Each step consists of a flat terrace or "bench" between steep walls or faces about 15 meters (50 feet) high. The benches help stabilize the mine, and provide a working surface for the mine crews. Haulage roads run down diagonally from bench to bench. A single road may spiral around the pit; in some cases, where the pit faces hard rock that's not going to be excavated further, the road will switch back and forth on a single side. If there's room, twin roads may be built to allow empty dump trucks to drive down while full ones drive back up.
Digging the down into the open-pit mine begins by widening the benches, starting from the top, a procedure called a "pushback". The process is similar to that used in underground mines, involving drilling, blasting, and mucking the debris, but the scale is much greater -- with big drill holes, big charges, and big machinery, including power shovels, front-end loaders, and dump trucks. The dump trucks are far too large to drive on a normal public road, and they carry ten times the load of a conventional dump truck. They are generally hauled to the site in pieces and assembled there. Ore is hauled off by train or, in some cases, conveyer belts of once again astounding scale, while the spoils are piled up in artificial mountains.
Given the size of an open-pit mine, a single pushback is not a trivial operation: it can take years, even a decade or more. The operation is capital intensive and so work generally goes on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
* While traditional explosives may still be used in underground mining, the explosive of choice for surface mining is a slurry of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil (ANFO). It's cheap, powerful, safe to handle, and can be pumped down boreholes. As terrorists know, ordinary ammonium nitrate fertilizer can be used to make ANFO, though fertilizer is generally not pure enough to work properly as an explosive unless additives are introduced.
Like any sensible bulk explosive, ANFO requires a blasting cap to set it off. Blasting caps are usually activated electrically, using wires connected to a detonator system. As a safety measure, the wire is never reused, and it tends to litter up mining sites. The stereotype of a plunger-type detonator is way out of date: nowdays, an electronic detonator is used, with the blast set off by punching the appropriate buttons. The detonator contains a capacitor that stores an electric charge to be dumped to the blasting caps.
* While strip mines would seem to be neater than open-pit mines, they tend to be ten to a hundred times larger in terms of the ground area torn up, and environmentalists claim that restoration of the land after reclamation is slow and inadequate. In the 1970s, strip mine operators decided that their problem was partly semantic -- the term "strip" seemed to upset people -- and so they came up with the name "open-cast" instead. It has only partly caught on.
Strip mining usually does not require blasting, since the earth is often soft enough to be removed directly by machinery. The first stage is known as "grubbing", which involves removing the topsoil and vegetation. Then the "overburden" -- the remaining earth blocking access to the coal or mineral layer -- has to be dug out, with the material dumped into the adjacent, exhausted strip. Finally the paydirt is removed.
Different tools may be used on different layers. Soft layers can be removed with a "bucket wheel excavator", which is just what it sounds like: a machine with a spinning wheel on a moveable boom, the wheel being fitted with set of buckets that tear up the earth. The dirt is hauled away on a set of conveyors. Harder layers may require a big shovel, or a "dragline" -- something like a "dry-land dredge", and the biggest machine on land.
A dragline features a control cab the size of a modest hotel and a boom the length of several athletic fields, carrying a "bucket" that could accommodate two buses easily. The bucket is teflon-coated to make it easier to dump its load; its big teeth take a lot of abuse and have to be replaced on a regular basis. The bucket is hauled out to the end of the boom, dropped skillfully to plunge into the earth, then dragged back to the cab, where it is lifted up and emptied into a dump truck.
The dragline moves backwards as it digs up the strips, but it doesn't use tracks. Instead it has long feet or "shoes" on each side that lift up the cab, which then slides backwards a bit, lubricated by a flow of water. The dragline is powered by a heavy-duty electrical cable, with the power running to 10,000 to 25,000 volts AC. This power doesn't actually drive the dragline directly, instead being converted to DC inside the machine for use by its systems. A dragline is so enormous that even pictures of workers walking around one like ants around a crate still fails to give a real sense of its scale.
In the US, by law the land in the spent strip has to be restored to its original contour, which means moving a lot of dirt around. Topsoil has to be laid down, since plants don't grow well in dirt dug up from underground, though the topsoil can be usually obtained from the grubbing of another strip. Mulching, fertilizer, and seeding follows. It can take months to years to deal with one strip; as with open-pit mines, the work is usually continuous. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* HOME SWEET BOEING: According to a BBC WORLD Online article, a California woman named Francie Rehwald, whose family owns one of the state's biggest Mercedes-Benz dealerships, is now directing the construction of a new family home on a 22 hectare (55 acre) plot in the Malibu Hills that will be unarguably unique in completion: its structure is leveraged off major assemblies of a scrapped Boeing 747 jumbo jet.
Ms. Rehwald suggested to the architect that she wanted a house that was eco-friendly, and have an appearance curvy and feminine. Few structures are more curvy and feminine in appearance than a jetliner, and so the architect, David Hertz, replied: "Let's use a 747!"
The house will not be simply a parked 747 fuselage, a concept that might work well enough for a diner in a tacky resort area but not for a high-class house. The wings of the jumbo jet will be used as roofs for a more conventional house structure, The nose will become a meditation temple, while the 747's distinctive upper deck will become a loft. The aircraft was obtained from a "boneyard" in California for $100,000 USD, though in completion the cost of the house is likely to run to several million.
Hertz originally thought of just building the roofs of the home with the jetliner wings, since they have plenty of area and are more than structurally strong enough for the task. He then figured it would make even more sense -- from the point of view of cost, liveability, and environment -- to simply buy an entire jetliner for the job: "The recycling of the 4.5 million parts of this 'big aluminium can' is seen as an extreme example of sustainable reuse and appropriation. American consumers and industry throw away enough aluminium in a year to rebuild our entire aeroplane commercial fleet every three months."
Of course, the authorities had to sign off on permits for the idea, and did so with few objections -- though they did insist that the aircraft elements be marked to make it clear to aerial searchers that they had not spotted an airliner that had crashed.
* RECYCLE YOUR PC: This March, according to an article in BUSINESS WEEK ("HP Wants Your Old PCs Back" by Lorraine Woellert, 10 April 2006), Washington State governor Christine Gregoire signed a "take-back" law that requires electronics companies to foot the bill for recycling their equipment. The law was heavily promoted by an unlikely advocate: electronics giant Hewlett-Packard.
In fact, HP has been proving downright aggressive in its campaign to deal with "e-waste", as the clutter of old PCs, TVs, and other discarded electronic gear is known. The company backed a pioneering e-waste law in Maine that was passed in 2004, and is involved in similar legislation efforts in dozens of states. Company officials say that the take-back laws are far more effective than point-of-sale taxes that attempt to recover recycling costs, and avoid the prospect that the gear will be shipped overseas to be rendered down in environmentally unsound ways.
Not too surprisingly, HP does have a vested interest in the matter. The company has created an extensive recycling infrastructure to reduce disposal costs, improve production costs, and obtain resalable products for secondary markets. The HP recycling organization even performs "asset management", for example making sure that data on old computing machinery is preserved or disposed of as needed. The new take-back regime suits HP just fine, and other big electronics firms are beginning to fall in line.
One exception is the TV manufacturing industry. With the introduction of flat panel and digital TVs, they are faced with an avalanche as consumers discard their old analog TVs. Panasonic, Sony, and Philips have been pushing instead for point-of-sale taxes to handle recycling. In a "take-back" scheme, the TV manufacturers would be liable for all TVs, no matter how old they were.
IBM and particularly Apple Corp have been backing the TV manufacturers, and environmentalists have been harshly critical of Apple. Company officials insist that their green credentials are good, but Apple still has a lot of ground to cover before it catches up with HP's lead.
* ED: I feel a certain relief that after the better part of a decade wandering around lost, HP is starting to look like it's going places again. How much this revival has to do with the exit of Carly Fiorna from the top job is something I will not speculate on. She insists, incidentally, that she laid the groundwork for the recovery.
It is inspiring to see HP take the lead on this issue. The fact that Apple is bringing up the rear makes me bite my tongue, and I have to do it hard because of the notorious grandstanding of Mac advocates. A WIRED ONLINE columnist got into a flame war with the MacHeads some months back when he pointed out that the much-despised Bill Gates is pushing a global health initiative whose funding rivals that of major governments, while the much-praised Steve Jobs seems solely focused on making business deals. However, I have to stand back and remind myself that I don't have a dog in that fight.
I have become very impressed with BUSINESS WEEK since I started putting out this blog. Although business magazines can sometimes end up playing to the self-importance of senior business executives, BUSINESS WEEK actually takes in technology and social angles, adding a certain capitalism-oriented "thinking out of the box". It's a hassle finding interesting short articles to write up four days a week, and along with THE ECONOMIST, BUSINESS WEEK has become an important source -- surprisingly, more than NEWSWEEK, TIME, and US NEWS & WORLD REPORT combined.
* FIB FAD: The Japanese-based form of blank verse known as "haiku", consisting of three lines of prose with five syllables in the first line. seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables in the third line, is fairly widely known.
Now, according to a NEW YORK TIMES article cited on CNET News ("Fibonacci
Poems Multiply On The Web by Motoko Rich), Gregory K. Pincus, a 41-year-old
Los Angeles scriptwriter and aspiring writer of children's books, has come up
with a new concept for poetry somewhat along the same lines -- or, as the
author of the TIMES article put it:
Blogs
spread
gossip
and rumor.
But how about a
rare, geeky form of poetry?
Pincus suggested, partly as a joke, to write poems with the number of
syllables given by the Fibonacci sequence, which goes as follows:
1
1
2
3
5
8
13
21
34
...
-- and so on. The principle is that each line is the sum of the two lines
before it; the scheme demonstrates exponential growth. Pincus's Fibonacci
poems, or just "Fibs" for short, have six lines and the syllable pattern:
1
1
2
3
5
8
-- or, as he wrote:
One
small,
precise,
poetic,
spiraling mixture:
math plus poetry yields the Fib.
They can go on through following numbers in the sequence, but such long
sentences are cumbersome. Pincus suggested the concept in his blog on
children's literature a few weeks ago, leading to a few dozen submissions.
Then somebody on the popular Slashdot.org website -- "News For Nerds / Stuff
That Matters" -- linked to it and the idea took off. Pincus notes with
amusement that more than a thousand Fibs have been written since the
beginning of April:
The
art
of speech
discovers
possibilities
at the heart of our ignorance
Lots
of
presents
just for me.
Mistletoe and wine
wrapped underneath the Christmas tree.
Not all hard core poetry buffs are impressed, one writing that she found the
concept "uninteresting". But then she added:
So
you
no doubt
will not find
it interesting
to talk to me about this stuff.
* On that note, I have to add, if just for a place to keep them, a set of
joke haikus or "jokus" that I put together that will almost certainly go
right past anybody who's not familiar with Looney Toons:
Is it duck season?
Or wabbit season? Daffy
gets nailed either way!
Coyote sets traps.
Will he catch a Roadrunner?
Falls off cliff again!
When the label says:
"ACME: The Name You Can Trust!"
-- read: BUYER BEWARE.
"Abraca-pocus!"
Count Dracula is no match
for smartass bunnies.
Marvin the Martian
is sure he will conquer Earth.
In your dreams, space runt!
BACK_TO_TOP
* I'm a student of scams and am knowledgeable about them, but I've always known that nobody is immune to a scam: for every person out there, there's a game that will take them in.
This was proven to me by the fact that I just got scammed. I was poking around on web hosting review sites and ran into some glowing comments about LunarPages web hosting, which offered what amounted to a really good deal -- far more goodies than my current hosting provider gave me.
So I signed up; to get the best rate, I took the two-year pay-in-advance plan, a fair bit up front but it would seem to pay off. There were some communications difficulties on my end at the outset, so I decided to contact LunarPages to make sure things were on track. Although I did manage to get my website itself moved, when I tried to get the domain name transferred, I suffered through three days of sheer doubletalk, runaround games, stonewalling, and so on, leading me to wonder if the people were staggeringly inept or deliberately baiting me. I called their hotline phone number, but everyone was busy working on an emergency.
Then the truth dawned on me: they had just scammed me. They were neither being inept nor baiting me, as such: they were deliberately blowing me off and were laughing their heads off all along. I did some poking around on the Net and found a site with people who had also been scammed by LunarPages. The web hosting review site appears to have been a front of some sort to pull in suckers. That was stupid of me. I know perfectly well that interested parties often load up online reviews -- and if they're all 100% glowing, something's wrong. Sigh, I read up on scams but I hadn't heard about hosting scams.
Then I realized that calling them might have been another scam, meaning I might be racking up huge phone bills to Madagascar or someplace ... since they didn't try to keep my hanging on the line, that seemed unlikely, but I didn't want to try it again. That led to another revelation: they have my login on my website! They really couldn't do much more with it than play pranks on me, but I changed the password immediately and then asked the support people at my legit hosting service to see if anything suspicious had been placed on the site. Then I had a much worse revelation: THEY HAVE MY CREDIT CARD NUMBER!
I promptly blocked it. From what I saw of the other complaints, LunarPages is just a sleazy business, not an outright criminal operation, and, since it operates on a traceable basis, was not going to commit a blatant crime themselves -- they would get nailed. However, there was nothing to prevent them from quietly selling off my credit card number to somebody else. I couldn't take the chance. So I am getting a new card, recovering my losses from VISA, and making sure everyone who bills me monthly via VISA gets an updated card number ASAP.
They tried to jerk me around again, and I replied: "Ah, you've had your fun, but the game's over now." They had a "never say die" attitude and then got in one little last shot in by claiming they were going to refund my money. Considering they were complete frauds -- "whether the truth or a lie, still certain to deceive" -- and that they knew I had blocked my VISA card, I was not confused for long. The chances of getting any money from them were nil and they were just hoping to rope me into another runaround.
I contacted VISA and got the paperwork rolling to get it back anyway. I did get my money back, by exactly what process I am not sure. They may have actually performed the refund on their own, which would suggest that they weren't trying to pull off scams as such, they were just grossly inept and indifferent -- not that it made any difference on the receiving end.
I suppose if me and others make sure that LunarPages gets plenty of (bad) publicity on the Web, that will merely make them change their badge and play the same game under a new identity. Indeed, the other complaints I found about LunarPages were from people who had actually run sites on the service, sometimes for several years, and then got seriously jerked around. Considering LunarPages did everything they could to evade even getting my site set up -- which was at least something of a favor, since I didn't end up shutting down my current host, which would have really tanked me -- either they are going farther into the dark side or, more likely, they're snatching as much as they can get before they have to cut and run.
But at least I can make more people wise to the game. I've learned to run
the "scam test" on Google: just type in:
<company_name> SCAM RIPOFF FRAUD
-- and see what comes back. If I'd done that to begin with, I'd be a happier
person today.
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- MINING (1): I have to strongly recommend Brian Hayes' 2005 book INFRASTRUCTURE, which provides a slick, user-friendly survey of the industrial infrastructure that surrounds us. I wish I'd read this book 25 years ago and spared myself decades of ignorance. Just to make sure I have absorbed this book properly, I'll be outlining it in weekly installments over the next year or two, taking it a chapter at a time.
* Chapter one of INFRASTRUCTURE focuses on mining. It might seem superficially that mining is a straightforward matter, but it turns out that mining is a surprisingly diverse technology. The same deposit may be exploited in different ways until it is finally exhausted. Exploiting a gold deposit might begin with "placer mining", using water to extract metal fragments from a sand or gravel bank; then moving on to a shaft mine; escalating to a full open-pit mine; and finally, when the deposit seems played out, extracting what's still available from the mine debris or "tailings".
Placer mining is just old-fashing panning for gold. A "placer" (pronounced "plah-ser") is just a deposit of sand or gravel with some exploitable concentration of a useful mineral, with the deposits originally established by the action of rivers or glaciers. In panning, the miner sluices the sand or gravel around in a pan using water, washing away the light materilas and leaving flakes of valuable metals behind. It's not very efficient, in essence only skimming off the cream of the metals in the deposit, but it doesn't require much investment in infrastructure.
The concept can be scaled up by using a "sluice box" or "riffle box", which is a chute with a riffled bottom through which water and sand or gravel is directed. A process known as "hydraulicking" further automates the process, using a high-pressure hose to tear apart the placer, with the material flowing downstream to a sluice box. It is basically a form of automated erosion, producing a mass of silt that clogs streams, and it is illegal in the US except for Alaska. It is still used in the gold and diamond fields of Brazil, South Africa, and Southeast Asia, but spreading environmental regulations are hemming it in.
* As far as underground mines go, the stereotype notion is of a mine dug into a hillside. Such "tunnel mines" were great sites for old melodramas, but most mines are shaft mines, dug straight into the ground. The most important single piece of gear for a shaft mine is the "hoist" that lifts the elevator for the mine, using it to send miners and mining gear down and bring ore back up. The whole concept is essentially like that of a building elevator, but building elevators only carry a few tonnes of load and travel a few hundred meters at most. A mine hoist, in contrast, may carry tens of tonnes of load and will travel several kilometers, and it is correspondingly much more heavy-duty.
The visible part of the hoist is the "headframe", which is traditionally in the form of a "split A-frame", angled on one side and vertical on the other, where the hoist cable drops down the mineshaft. More modern headframes are in enclosed buildings sheathed with corrugated metal sheeting. At the top of the headframe is a big pulley known for some odd reason as a "sheaf", over which the cable runs down to a power winch on the ground on one side and down into the mineshaft on the other. Some more recent headframes have the winch on the top of the headframe with the sheaf.
The ore-carrying buckets lifted by a mine hoist are called "skips" while the miner-carrying lifts are called "cages" -- no doubt because they have a folding cage gate across the front. Skips are much heftier than cages since they have to carry a bigger load. It is not unusual to have a dual hoist with twin skips, the empty one going down as a partial counterweight to the loaded one going up. By law, in the US, there must be at least two shafts into the mine, which usually translates as a "main shaft" for the skips and a "man shaft" for the miners.
The skips dump their loads into a hopper. The ore may be hauled away by truck or rail cars at a small mine, or by an aerial tramway in some cases, but it's usually moved by sets of conveyor belts that can stretch on for kilometers. Some kinds of ore can be mixed with water and pumped as a slurry through pipelines. However it's transported, the ore ends up being dumped onto an outdoor storage heap.
Mines require hefty ventilation systems, not merely to keep the miners from suffocating but to carry away dust, fumes from blasting, and in the case of coal mining, methane gas that could be an explosion hazard. Some hard-rock mines will have the fans at the bottom of the shaft, but coal mines will have them at the top so they won't be knocked out by an explosion. Just like household fans, the mine fans can be of axial configuration -- like a propeller -- or centrifugal configuration -- like a pump impeller. However, they are much more powerful than any household fan.
Mines also require powerful pumping systems to keep them from filling up with water. The first application of steam engines was as mine pumps. Now the pumps are usually electric, and sited at the bottom of the mine, next to the sump where the water flows. As with mine fans, mine pumps tend towards the high-powered. Once mines are abandoned, they tend to fill up quickly. The water is often contaminated with metals, in some cases so much so that metals can be commercially extracted out of the water itself.
Really deep mines, four kilometers or more down, have been dug, and they are bigtime engineering challenges. Getting ventilation air down that deep is one problem, compounded by the fact that temperature rises about a degree Celsius for every 165 meters of depth. That means chiller plants to keep the miners from roasting. There is also no practical way to make a single hoist that can drop that far -- the weight of such a long cable becomes impossible to pull -- so there are several levels of hoists, with men and ore transferred from level to level. The rock in the mines is under so much pressure that when a mine tunnel collapses, it is with earthquaking abruptness.
* Underground mining is still a dirty business, but it is not anywhere near as agonizingly laborious as it once was. In the days of man power, miners bored holes in a tunnel face the hard way, with one miner holding a drill rod and the other pounding on the rod with a sledgehammer. Charges were set, then -- after crying out "fire in the hole!" -- ignited. The debris was shoveled out and loaded into mule carts, a process known as "mucking"; shovels were called "muck sticks". Hand drilling moved up to pneumatic drilling, with multiple pneumatic drills now mounted on a crawling machine known as a "drilling jumbo" that drills out several holes at once. Machinery now also handles mucking out the ore.
After mucking out, the tunnel has to be reinforced to keep its roof from collapsing on the miners -- a misfortune referred to as "getting slabbed". Timbers were traditionally used for this job, but now tunnels are reinforced by "roof bolts" several meters long that are screwed into the tunnel ceiling.
The mine also includes useful underground facilities. Fan and pump rooms have been mentioned, but there are also powder magazines, tool rooms, electric-power stations, maintenance shops for equipment, latrines, sometimes even lunchrooms. In the old days, there were underground stables for the mules used to pull the ore carts.
* The introduction of automation means that mining, always an occupation loaded with lethal dangers, claims far fewer lives than it did a century ago. This is partly due to the fact that the automated methods have been designed to higher mandated safety standards, but mostly it is due to the fact that there are nowhere near as many miners. Mining has been farmed out to machines.
While we tend to think of automation in terms of factories with robot assembly lines, in reality 21st-century industry is automated to a high and surprising degree almost all along the board, using a far smaller labor force than required in the era of our great-grandparents. This is a theme that will be repeated over and over in the course of this series. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* COSMIC IN ORBIT: On 14 April 2006, an Orbital Sciences Minotaur booster -- featuring the two lower stages of a surplus Minuteman ICBM and the two upper stages of a Orbital Taurus air-launched booster -- put the six-satellite "Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, & Climate (COSMIC)" into orbit.
COSMIC is a collaboration between the US and Taiwan, with the mission conceived by researchers at the University Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, and the satellite payloads built in Taiwan using mostly Taiwanese government funding. The Taiwanese also proudly call the system "FORMOSAT 3".
The six satellites were designed to perform atmospheric studies known as "radio occultation", sensing the refraction (bending) of the precision signals produced by Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation satellites as they pass over the Earth's horizon to the COSMIC satellites. The refraction measurements can provide data on atmospheric temperature, pressure, and moisture. The GPS receiver on each satellite was developed by the US National Aviation & Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) in Pasadena, California. GPS radio occultation experiments have been flown as experiments before, but this is the first time the procedure has been put into operational use.
The six satellites were based on the Orbital "MicroStar" standard satellite bus, originally developed for the Orbital "Orbcomm" low-orbit messaging comsats. Each satellite is in the shape of a disc a meter (1.1 yards) in diameter, with solar panel "covers" on each side that hinge open in space. The spacecraft are "gravity gradient stabilized", with a long extensible antenna mast hanging down in the Earth's gravity to maintain a stable orientation, but also have four small maneuvering thrusters. Launch weight of each satellite was less than 70 kilograms (157 pounds), with the six satellites launched in a stack. They were placed in an orbit with an inclination of 72 degrees to the Earth's equator and an altitude of 800 kilometers (500 miles). Over the next 13 months, the six satellites will space themselves evenly along the orbit, and then the formal observation phase of the mission will begin.
* GREEN TAG GAME: There's been talk at the governmental level of "emissions trading", in which companies whose factories have problems meeting emissions regulations can effectively "purchase" the emissions shortfall of other companies whose plants are well within the limits. The idea is interesting, if controversial. BUSINESS WEEK reports ("It's A Little Easier Being Green" by Heather Green, 10 April 2006) that some businesses have come up with a similar idea of "environmental trading" on their own, in the form of "green tags".
Coffee giant Starbucks is a leader in the effort. In 2005, the company pledged to buy 20% of its power from renewable sources. The immediate technical problem with this idea is that not all or even most of Starbucks' 8,400 US coffee shops have enough access to renewable energy to meet that standard. Starbucks came up with an interesting scheme to make good on their pledge, paying a half-penny per kilowatt-hour to a company named 3 Phases Energy in San Francisco. 3 Phase acts as a front for a number of wind energy companies, which use the Starbucks subsidy to sell more wind power, increasing the overall use of renewables. 3 Phase then hands certificates to Starbucks to validate the transaction.
A number of other companies, including some major corporations, have turned to such "green tag" arrangements to act as environmentally responsible citizens, and get some publicity along with it. It costs a premium -- from half a percent to 8% on top of their normal energy bill -- but it's generally cheaper than trying to buy renewable energy directly from a patchy network of suppliers.
Power utilities are getting into the green tag game as well. Some states, like California and New York, are requiring their utilities to deliver specified proportions of renewable energy, and green tags can be an easy way to achieve such goals. Even private citizens can now buy green tags and slap them on their cars for all to see. How far the approach can go remains to be seen -- government and private groups are working to introduce oversight and develop standards so the scheme won't be exploited or used for scams -- but right now green tags are a growth market.
* GM ON THE HOME TURF: The development of plant genetic modification has led to a strong backlash from activists, but as reported in a WIRED Online article ("Turf Warrior" by David Wolman), not everyone is intimidated. The article takes a closeup of Jim Hagedorn, the aggressive CEO of lawn giant ScottsMiracle-Gro, who has a simple wish: "I'd like to see biotech in every backyard."
Hagedorn is a 50-year-old ex-USAF F-16 pilot who has a stable of muscle cars, and he's not soft-pedaling his ideas. The lawn industry is a big business, with worldwide revenues of about $7 billion USD a year, and ScottsMiracle-Gro raking in about a third of that -- $2.4 billion a year. The company didn't get that big without being energetic. Hagedorn states that homeowners trying to take care of their lawns face three problems: watering, maintenance, and weeds: "Solve those three issues and you're a friggin' hero!" The problem is that environmentalists, government regulators, and a public jumpy over GM may not all see him as so heroic.
Hagedorn has a good case to make, however. There are 130,000 square kilometers (50,000 square miles) of lawns in the US, which is about three times the area occupied by corn, making grass the biggest single user of irrigation water. The grass is not merely decorative: it soaks up carbon dioxide emissions and prevents soil erosion. However, it also soaks up pesticides and fertilizers that can become pollutants, and lawn mowers contribute their bit to atmospheric emissions.
And then there's water needs. A typical lawn will soak up about 38,000 liters (10,000 US gallons) of water in a year; in a desert locale like Las Vegas, the total may be ten times that. Usable water is a limited resource and the activities needed to obtain it have an environmental impact.
Enter biotech. Although environmentalists are uneasy at best over biotech crops, about 13% of US farmland was planted with biotech crops in 2005, and its advocates are very enthusiastic. Not only are the crops more profitable, the advocates point out that the GM plants are environmentally more benign, requiring less plowing (and so reducing soil runoff), reducing the application of pesticides, and last but not least, reducing irrigation needs. Who could object to the same benefits in lawn care?
Certainly not Jim Hagedorn: "If we want to keep gardening attractive and relevant in the Internet age, we have to meet this need." GM grass is coming and ScottsMiracle-Gro intends to bring it on.
Horace Hagedorn founded Miracle-Gro in 1951. His son Jim retired from the Air Force and joined the family business in 1987, coordinating a merger with Scotts in 1995 and taking the top job in 2001. By that time, the company was heavily into biotech. In 1998, ScottsMiracle-Gro established a partnership with Monsanto, the giant of plant GM, with the objective of using GM technology that had been developed for food crops to make better grass and flowers. The initiative was labelled "Smart Plants".
The first effort was to create a GM variety of creeping bentgrass, a popular grass variety often used on golf courses. The modified bentgrass featured a new gene known as CP4 EPSPS that made it resistant to the herbicide glyphosphate -- much better known by the Monsanto brand name of Roundup. The "Roundup-ready" bentgrass would survive applications of herbicide that killed weeds and crabgrass. In 1999, to help acquire tools for the effort, ScottsMiracle-Gro acquired a majority stake in Sanford Scientific, a small instruments maker that sold a "gene gun" used to blast foreign genes into target organisms. The "biolistic" -- biology + ballistics -- gun fires tiny particles of tungsten or gold salted with genes into cells, with some fraction of the plants acquiring the genes.
The Roundup-ready bentgrass was ready for use in 2001. An application for approval was submitted to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2002; it hasn't been granted yet, but permission was given for growing seed plots in anticipation of the day when the USDA gives the green light.
The pilot plantings have been carefully monitored, with samples of grass taken well outside the bounds of the fields to see if the genetically modified grass has spread. Of course it has: grass is a wind-pollinated plant. Environmentalists fret about such Frankenstein hybrids running amok, but proponents point out that the hybrid grasses are little different from their wild ancestors, other than being resistant to Roundup. The hybrids can be killed by other types of herbicides. However, the NEW YORK TIMES ran a front-page article citing a report about the spread of the GM grass, and the matter suddenly went hot. Even moderates were upset. The reason was that most plant crops can't survive without human help, but grass can keep on growing indefinitely whether people are taking care of it or not -- meaning that if the GM grass became a nuisance, we'd be stuck with it. The USDA approval process suddenly became more difficult.
Confronted with public outcry and government bureaucracy, Hagedorn and his people backtracked. Hagedorn was simply making a tactical retreat; he had no intention of giving up. Company greenhouses are now growing new strains of grass that grow slowly, meaning they require less mowing. These grasses also have high concentrations of chlorophyll, making them greener.
Hagedorn is optimistic that the GM grass will get USDA approval. Once that happens, ScottsMiracle-Gro will tailor grasses to consumer needs, with drought resistance, disease resistance, slow growth, or whatever the buyer wants. He sees no major obstacles in his path: "I decide what I'm going after, and I go after it. I don't stop."
* URBAN GAMES: Jon Fine, who runs a column in BUSINESS WEEK on media and advertising titled "MediaCentric", ran an interesting item in the 10 April 2006 issue on a New York City company named "area/code", the brainchild of hardcore game freak Kevin Slavin and veteran game designer Frank Lantz.
The 36-year-old Slavin is so single-minded in his pursuit of games of all types that he claims he unhooked his DirecTV account because it was cutting into his Xbox playtime. Now he has put this focus into creating what is to him the perfect occupation: creating elaborate multiplayer games that actually use the city streets as the playing board, with funding provided by advertisers. There is nothing entirely new about such "urban games" or "big games", but the idea of making them into a serious business is operating at a new level.
Technology makes such urban games much more practical, with the players networked using Wi-Fi and cellphones to coordinate the play. This was the basis for Lantz's 2004 "Pac Manhattan", in which the classic video game was played out on a grid of city blocks in Manhattan. It wasn't really done as a commercial exercise but Slavin, then working in an ad agency, saw the potential, observing that the game was "a form of media" for advertising that would provide "actual experiences for people instead of telling them about something" and pass the message on to onlookers.
Slavin got in touch with Lantz, and later in 2004 and into 2005 they ran the game "ConQwest", sponsored by Qwest Communications. ConQwest operated in ten cities and was based on imagery posted in the cities to provide clues, with the imagery recorded and passed on by the camera phones of the players. Pieces of the game also popped up in weekly newspapers and clever fake ads in public places -- one proclaiming deadpan: "It smells so good you'll fall in love with yourself!" ConQwest cost $3.2 million USD, but it paid off, with praise in the ad industry press and a number of awards.
The whole concept sounds a bit too loopy to fly for long, but it has an ace in the hole: Slavin and Lantz love games and see advertising as a way to run a game, instead of using a game as a form of advertising. They want to have fun first of all, and if they make money at it, so much the better. If anybody can make a go of it, they can.
* In other media news, BBC WORLD Online reports that fans of the BBC sci-fi series DOCTOR WHO will be able to download little freebie one-minute episodes or "Tardisodes", featuring the current Doctor, David Tennant, and his femme companion Billie Piper, a pop singer turned TV actress. The Tardisodes are mini-stories based on current TV episodes, with footage not seen on TV. They will be available in the UK a week before each new episode.
The Tardisodes are a component of a bigger project being run by the BBC named "TV Plus". It will include preview clips on mobile phones, program premieres on broadband, and other on-demand video services. The interesting thing about the Tardisodes is that they suggest that video over mobile handhelds is not necessarily just a way of performing old-fashioned TV programming using a new technology. The imaginative may find that video on handhelds provides some opportunities to do things that haven't been done before.
* Of course, any DrWHO fan knows that the Tardis is the old-fashioned British police box that the Doctor uses to bounce around in time and space, and that Tardis really means "Time And Relative Displacement In Space". It is actually so enormous inside that even the Doctor can get lost in it -- in a phrase, it's "dimensionally transcendental".
Release of the first new DrWHO series on DVD in the US has been delayed to July. The US Public Broadcasting Service, which had carried the old DrWHO series, didn't bite, and the Sci-Fi Channel was uncertain. It took some time to sell Sci-Fi on running it, and of course it can't be released on DVD here until the channel's done their full season release. I can be patient.
* WELCOME TO 2006 (6): To finish up this mini-series, suppose I take my visitor from 1950 around the house and town. She might find much that still looks familiar, though there would be surprises: the CD players, the DVD players -- serious home movies on the cheap, an impossibility in 1950 -- my digital cameras -- hundreds of shots and no film. She might be startled to notice that the batteries generally look much the same as they always did.
The style of the cars would seem alien, but the technology hasn't changed that much -- electronic ignition systems and various bells and whistles being the biggest changes, hybrids not having much of an impact just yet. Traffic lights are nothing new, except for using LED arrays instead of incandescent bulbs. If she came back in a few years, she might wonder where all the light bulbs went, having disappeared in favor of LEDs in general.
They didn't have megasized supermarkets in 1950, but most of the goods would seem familiar: produce, bakery items, meats, tins of beans, corn flakes, candy bars. What would be surprising is the diverse packaging, and also the sometimes ingenious pop-open tops that have greatly reduced the need for can openers. Barcodes would be another big surprise, as well as the RFID systems that keep people from lifting DVDs from the rental shop.
Overall, however, things would seem recognizable in many ways -- fire stations, parks, hospitals, baseball games, newspapers, high schools, county fairgrounds, kids flying kites, all the homely things of a town. It is harder to know what a visitor from the past would think of the social changes: no more Red Scare, the enemy is Islamic extremism; more diversity, not inherently a bad thing but sometimes taken to extremes; and more regulation, again not inherently a bad thing but sometimes taken to extremes.
It would be even harder to say what we look like now to somebody from the past. Would we seem to have improved or gotten worse? Probably nothing more than a bit different. I suspect that the biggest revelation to somebody from 1950 is that everything would seem so familiar, just with some improvements. It's not the gleaming 21st century of 1950s sci-fi, with towers into the sky, flying cars, rocket belts, and sentient robots. The reality is that, in many if not all ways, the more things change -- the more they stay the same. [END OF SERIES]
* CANCER VACCINES: The mechanisms that cause cancers are elaborate and present an immense challenge to researchers searching for a cure, but advances are being made. According to an article in US NEWS & WORLD REPORT ("Sticking It To Cancer" by Josh Fishmann, 3 April 2006), two strains of human papilloma virus (HPV) cause 70% of all cervical cancers, and now a vaccine is available that can provide solid protection against both strains. There has also been progress in "therapeutic" vaccines that can direct the body's immune system to fight cancers.
The HPV vaccine is named "Gardasil" and was developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck. The US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is evaluating the vaccine and the consensus is that it will be approved. A similar vaccine, developed by Glaxo Smith Kline in Europe and named Cervarix, has already been approved across the Atlantic and is being evaluated by the FDA here.
Cervical cancers can be caused by 15 different viruses, with the two HPV strains dealt with by Gardasil and Cervarix at the top of the list. HPV is a very common virus, transmitted by even very casual sexual contact. Most of the time the body can deal with it, but it can infect basal skin cells -- the cells making up the bottom layer of the skin -- and hang on, gradually causing lesions that can result in a cancer 13 years or more after infection. Most women who contract HPV do so in their teens and early 20s, but only develop cervical cancer in their 30s or later.
Gardasil provides protection against the particularly hazardous strains of HPV 16 and HPV 18. It also protects against two other strains that can cause genital warts in males and basically harmless lesions in females that lead to false alarms. The vaccine is made up of HPV coat proteins, allowing it to provoke the immune system but not cause an infection. The level of antibodies against HPV climbs to a height six months after vaccination, with that level maintained for at least three years. Trials show the vaccine to be highly effective, with no HPV lesions in the 6,000 women who were administered the vaccine, but 21 cases of HPV lesions in the women in the control group. Cervarix is similar to Gardasil, but it only protects against HPV 16 and HPV 18; however, it includes a booster chemical that provokes a very strong immune response.
Optimism for the new HPV vaccines is running very high. To be sure, biomedicine is a tricky business; use of the vaccine will have to be monitored for decades to ensure that it really does work and has no bad side effects.
* Using vaccines to fight existing cancers is not as far advanced. Trials have been performed with a "therapeutic vaccine" againsts prostate cancer named Provenge from Dendreon, a Seattle-based biomedical firm. Provenge is manufactured by taking immune system "targeting" cells from the victim, provoking them with prostate cancer proteins, and then administering the vaccine to the patient. It is not a miracle cure: trials show that the average increase in survival is only 4.5 months. However, it doesn't have the nasty side effects of chemotherapy, and no other method gives more than an additional 2.5 months.
A company named Therion in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is working on a vaccine named "Panvac VF" that targets pancreatic cancer. The vaccine consists of a benign virus that has been seeded with pancreatic cancer genes; once administered, it provokes the immune system to attack the cancer cells.
Critics have suggested that the optimistic results obtained with such anti-cancer vaccines are due to skewed results from small scale trials and that the treatment has no particular merit. Both sides agree that further tests need to be done, with the proponents believing that it will vindicate their approach. Says one researcher: "Clearly, we're not there yet, but I hope and I think that we're getting closer."
* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: A POPULAR SCIENCE note from December 2005 talked about a new highway bridge in Wisconsin that looks perfectly ordinary from the outside, but uses a reinforcement grid of plastic composite instead of ordinary steel "rebar". The bridge was designed by engineers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is intended to address a problem faced by bridges in such northern climates: the use of salt to deice roadways in winter, resulting in seepage of salt water into the bridge structure and corrosion of steel rebar. The composite bridge cost over a third more than a conventional bridge, but is expected to last twice as long.
* Another article in the same issue displayed an interesting gimmick developed by biologist Lawrence Rome of the University of Pennsylvania: a self-powered backpack. The backpack's frame is designed so that the pack itself can move up and down on rails, spinning an electric generator that can produce a maximum of more than seven watts to run electric gear or charge a battery. Although the added gear increases weight a bit, the buffered up and down motion of the pack actually makes it more comfortable to carry. The scheme has obvious military applications -- grunts in the field carry a fair amount of electronic gear, and research on the concept was partly funded by the US Naval Research Lab -- but Dr. Rome is also trying to commercialize it.
* In other gadget and gimmick news, according to BBC WORLD Online, a research team under Dr. David Russell at the University of East Anglia in the UK has developed a system for detecting toxins and pathogens, based on gold nanoparticles about 16 nanometers in diameter. The particles are coated with sugars specific to the target or class of targets to be detected, and then placed in a weak solution. When the target material is added to the solution, the solution changes quickly from red to blue. The lab team has also tinkered with solutions of particles that can detect several different targets using sets of nanoparticles; the color change is less vivid but still noticeable.
* LEARN MANDARIN NOW: It is obvious that China is going to be a much bigger world player in the 21st century than it was in the 20th, and one symptom of this increasing influence is the global spread of the Mandarin, the common tongue among the many Chinese dialects.
According to a WIRED ONLINE article ("The Mandarin Offensive" by Michael Erard), China's "National Office For Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language" -- AKA "Hanban" -- is enjoying widespread success. Thailand and South Korea will offer Chinese in elementary and middle schools by 2007. Europe is moving along, with France and Germany leading the pack there. The US is lagging, but Mandarin is becoming more popular here, too: there are "Confucius Institutes" dedicated to spreading Chinese language and culture on six US university campuses, out of 41 over the entire globe. The Hanban is looking forward to establishing 100 such institutes.
The bulging population of China means that Mandarin is actually the first language of more people than English, and Mandarin is also the second most common language on the Internet. Hanban officials believe that there are about 30 million people around the world currently learning Mandarin as a second language, and the office is working to increase that number to 100 million in four years.
China's government backs the effort with funding of $25 million a year. In 2005, the Hanban sent volunteer teachers to two dozen countries, and intends to top that number this year. The office provides money and tools to get the foreign Confucius Institutes working. The tools include learning games, such as "Chengo Chinese", which the Hanban developed in collaboration with the US Department of Education.
Imperial China sent emissaries abroad to sell Chinese culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, but those efforts pale in comparison to the global ambitions of the Hanban, some comparing the effort to a "moon shot". Spreading Mandarin is seen as a way of increasing Chinese business, political, and social influence in a distinctly nonthreatening way, and there are a number of influential Americans who are enthusiastic about the exercise.
* ED: The rising importance of Asian culture in the US is becoming more obvious all the time. I see an increasing number of young guys with Chinese / Japanese characters as tattoos -- one was flattered when I spotted the "death" symbol on his right arm; he had the "life" symbol on the left.
Still, this is superficial. After tinkering with Japanese for years and finding it an endless struggle, I suspect that learning Mandarin would present much the same obstacles: not only is the language completely unrelated syntactically to English, but learning the character set and trying to use it on a computer is a challenge. The WIRED article glossed over such difficulties. One wonders if Hanban has developed a "virtual keyboard" that a user can pop up in a window on a PC to use a mouse to write in Chinese, eliminating the need for localization.
Incidentally, I found out that my PC provided me with a useful Japanese learning tool. I'd built a set of bitmap files describing the kana -- the Japanese auxiliary phonetic character set -- and was having trouble keeping some of them straight. I figured a computerized "flashcard" system might help out a good deal, but I didn't have time to implement it.
Then I finally recalled that there was a screen-saver option on Windows that would display images at random from any directory I selected. I pointed it to the directory of kana bitmaps and it nicely popped them up in an unpredictable order. There was even an option to use the keyboard arrow keys to step through the displayed bitmaps at will. It is nice to get a freebie every now and then.
* The panda bear is a creature so adorable that it suggests the good Lord has a cutesy side to Him. Chinese regard the panda as something of a national mascot, and millennia ago Chinese emperors were use it as a token in diplomacy. The Chinese have strong roots in their customs, and following Richard Nixon's groundbreaking visit to China in 1972, two pandas named Ling Ling and Hsing Hsing found their way to the US National Zoo in Washington DC.
Now, according to a NEWSWEEK article ("China's Panda Politics" by Melinda Liu and George Wehrfritz, 3 April 2006), China has two little panda cubs named "Tuan Tuan" and "Yuan Yuan" and has proposed that they be given to Taiwan. The idea is very popular in Taiwan; 65% of the populace is in favor of it. However, Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, wants to turn the deal down. It is after all no coincidence that in Chinese, "tuanyuan" means "reunion".
This is not a strictly emotional issue, either. Officially, China cannot give pandas to any foreign land; expatriate pandas sent overseas are on loan, and the financial terms of the loan can be stiff indeed. In contrast, Beijing insists that Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan will be an outright gift, with no strings attached. However, that doesn't conceal the big string that once Taiwan accepts the pandas under those terms, the island's government has conceded in principle that it is part of China.
The pandas will be very hard to turn down, with Taiwanese zoos scrambling to prepare for them. The political position of Mr. Chen and his party is poor at the moment and he may not be able to resist the pressure to accept them. The panda offer is part of a charm offensive on the part of Beijing, with other elements including cuts on tariffs against Taiwanese goods and establishing friendly relationships with Taiwanese opposition politicians. Sneaky, maybe, but it's far preferable to the threats and sabre-rattling of not so long ago. A Chinese foreign policy based on mass production of pandas seems much more charming than one based on missiles.
There's another bright side to the story. Pandas are very rare, with only about 1,600 living in the wild and about 200 in captivity. The dwindling numbers in the wild have mostly been due to human encroachment on panda habitats, and the authorities have been taking measures to give the pandas more space. Pandas were once seen as ridiculously difficult to breed in zoos, but it turned out that the problem was less the pandas than the zoo-keepers, who penned the bears up in uncomfortable habitats, didn't feed them right, and weren't sensitive to the peculiarities of panda romance -- for example, females are only in heat three or four' days a year, and it must be admitted that the pandas don't make it easy for the zoo-keepers, either. As a result of improved methods, in recent years Chinese panda facilities have had so many cubs that they are being forced to find new facilities to house them all.
* In other China news, BBC WORLD Online reports that the Chinese have become very enthusiastic about interactive online gaming, with gaming systems like WORLD OF WARCRAFT having strong followings. The Chinese government wants to get in on the action and is investing in the online gaming industry. At the same time, however, the government doesn't want youngsters to be spending hours glued to the screen, so wrapped up in the game that they don't even take time to eat. As a result, the government has mandated that the games make it increasingly difficult for a player to score points as time passes; after five hours, the player can't score any points at all.
Of course, players can dodge the system by maintaining separate accounts or jumping from game to game. The authorities are aware of this, and they will soon be testing an authentification system: players will be limited to one account, which will be linked to their personal ID card and validated by a government database. Words fail me for further comment.
* WELCOME TO 2006 (5): There were a number of other different things that the past didn't get quite right about the future.
As far as military technology goes, the only consistent vision of the future was the use of death rays of some sort. This mindset was so ingrained that when one of the inventors of the laser was persistently queried by a reporter about the possible use of the device as a weapon, the inventor finally reluctantly conceded that it might be useful in such a fashion, at least a good time in the future. The reporter immediately wrote an article on the use of lasers as death rays.
Actually, the military picked up on lasers as weapons very quickly, though it turned out that their usefulness was primarily as a guidance scheme, a precision pointer that could place a bomb or missile through a particular window in a building. Nobody had forseen such a simple concept, and the more recent idea of guiding weapons with a navigation satellite constellation was completely beyond the past's imagination, as was the idea that such weapons might be controlled from across an ocean, with the operator observing the action using video over a satellite link. Once again, the past failed to generally recognize that 21st century technology would be much smarter than theirs.
As far as most military hardware goes, modern tanks, artillery, automatic weapons, and the like are not fundamentally different from those available in 1950, though there have been considerable refinements in design -- for example, many modern assault rifles have clear high-impact plastic ammunition magazines, allowing a soldier to see how much ammunition is left at a glance. Still, some of the weapons that are in service now were in service in 1950 -- the Browning Model 1911 0.45 caliber automatic pistol or the Browning M2 0.50 caliber heavy machine gun as instructive examples.
It might be a bit startling for a 1950s visitor to find that 21st-century M1911s -- generally used by special-operations forces who prefer it over less potent 9 millimeter automatics -- have whizzy features such as plastic grips, polymer coatings, and an attachment for laser sights, while still being recognizably the old Browning automatic, now approaching its hundredth birthday and still going strong. The M2 machine gun hasn't changed too much, new features being a more easily replaced barrel and improved mounts, but it can fire a much wider range of ammunition, such as the "sabot launched armor piercing (SLAP)" round, a subcaliber bullet fired using a plastic "sabot" shroud that attains much longer range. The assumption that the future would necessarily discard the past turns out to be silly; of course, in many cases it's much more effective to build on the past.
* The past's vision of future medical technology verged on expecting miracles, such as immortality, replacing lost organs or limbs, or curing male baldness. It's hard to think that such notions were taken very seriously at the time, and somebody from 1950 would probably think that medical practice hasn't advanced too much in over a half a century. This is not true, since there have been advances all along the board: a colleague who survived lymphatic cancer through chemotherapy told me that his chances would have been nil a few decades earlier.
We have drugs that can seriously fight viral infections -- an impossible idea in the mid-century. Laparascopic surgery, in which operations are performed through a small incision using various kinds of remote-manipulation tools, now allow patients to be up and around far faster than they would have been with traditional surgery. Robotic systems are now being introduced to extend the concept.
On the other hand, progress in organ transplants and prosthetics has been slow, if not nonexistent, and modern medical practice has to deal with some formidable new threats. One is the fact that bacterial pathogens are evolving to outwit antibiotics, something which the inventors of antibiotics knew would happen sooner or later, and we're not developing new antibiotics fast enough to keep up. Another is the emergence of new diseases, such as HIV / AIDS. HIV is such a devious pathogen that it's hard to imagine how long it would have taken medical researchers of 1950 to figure it out. Of course, flu viruses have always been a threat, and due to their rapid mutability, they remain almost as dangerous as they ever were.
The reading of genetic codes of humans, animals, plants, and pathogens, does seem to promise a true revolution. We've managed to write out the book of life, though now we have to figure out how to read it. Sometimes technologies go through incredible growth spurts, such as aviation from 1940 to 1960, or computing from 1980 to 2000. Once we get our fingers into the genetic code, biomedicine may go through a similar growth spurt.
* And then there is the issue of energy. Inasmuch as the past thought about such things, the matter hardly seemed to be a worry. We'd have nuclear power or something like it that would provide all the energy we'd ever need. There were people who warned that oil was a finite resource a long time ago, but nobody paid too much attention to them.
Nuclear power turned out to be much trickier than most expected, and the limited nature of the supply of oil is much more obvious now. The later 1970s dreams of a "green" future haven't panned out all that well, either; windmills, solar power, and the like are more in evidence now than they were 30 years ago, but they're still a minority contributor in total. More can be made of such technologies, and if the future is as unclear as ever, it is obvious that big changes are in store.
* The past would not be too much surprised at cellphones, since the idea of everyone having a "walkie-talkie" of some sort has been around a long time. The bells and whistles on such phones, such as built-in cameras, might be a surprise.
Camera phones are also something the past expected, at least in a way. Usually in old cheapo sci-fi serials the heroes talked over video phones. The idea of actually talking to someone's face over the phone line did turn out to be a nonstarter, though it has cropped up in video conferencing. After all, staring at somebody's face would generally seem a bit tiresome; I've heard stories that there's a fad in China for nude picturephone chats between couples, but I suppose calling this a "face to face" conversation would be a bit inexact.
It is more useful to use a camera phone to send information, such as a picture of a landmark where a meeting should take place, or of a lost dog. Camera phones are increasingly widespread, and videos taken with them have dramatically captured emergencies, such as the London Underground bombings on 7 July 2005. In some places, camera phones also have barcode scanning capabilities, allowing them to read data off posters and signs.
That leads to the consideration of the increasingly widespread use of security cameras, another thing that the past did rightly predict, and again in a way. George Orwell played with this notion in his novel 1984, and it likely wasn't original to him. The irony is that people would embrace the technology because of the security against crime that it offered. Indeed, one of the downsides of 21st century technology is the creeping way it has eroded privacy. Most people don't lose that much sleep over the tracking of their personal data and tastes -- I don't myself -- but a moment's thought over the matter can induce a bit of unease. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* TV-GPS: As reported in an article in POPULAR SCIENCE some months back ("Television Watches Back", August 2005), a company named Rosum is promoting a radio navigation system based on TV broadcast signals.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation of navigation satellites provides an excellent location service for users anywhere on the globe, but it has a number of limitations, one of them being that the signals from the satellites are very weak and they can't be reasonably picked up indoors. Urban TV broadcast systems operate at high powers at much shorter ranges, meaning that such signals can be picked up indoors. Why not, so Rosum asserts, use signals from TV broadcast towers as location references in urban environments?
Rosum's "TV-GPS" system is a bit more devious than it sounds. The obvious idea would be to obtain the directions to multiple TV broadcast towers, but that would imply a directional antenna system, which would be tricky to implement in a handheld device. A GPS receiver doesn't normally have a directional antenna, instead being able to determine the time it takes for signals loaded with synchronization patterns to arrive from the satellites, a scheme known as "time delay of arrival (TDOA)". GPS-TV takes a similar approach, using synchronization signals provided normally in digital TV (DTV signals).
The problem is that the DTV synchronization signals were never designed for navigation purposes and are, in themselves, not up to the job of providing precise positions; although one TV station's signals may be repeated on strict intervals, there is no need for the synchronization between stations needed to permit timing reference between each other. TV-GPS gets around this limitation by siting three or four "monitor units" around an urban area that pick up both GPS and TV signals and characterize the errors in the TV signals. This data is sent to a "location server", which communicates with the handheld location units and provides the appropriate corrections to give a precise position.
Rosum has been talking with a number of potential partners to work towards fielding the system. One of the beauties of TV-GPS is that it requires a fairly modest infrastructure -- one set of monitor units and location servers per urban area. If the system catches on, there may come a time when the correction information will be sent as part of the DTV signal itself -- meaning the handhelds wouldn't need to communicate with the location server -- or, preferably, all the TV stations operate in synchronization and no corrections will be necessary.
* COSMIC RAY MENACE: A recent article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ("Shielding Space Travelers" by Eugene N. Parker, March 2006) points out the hazards of cosmic rays to astronauts on long space voyages.
Cosmic rays are space ions that have been propelled to high velocities by various processes -- some cosmic rays have extremely high velocities and nobody can figure out any process that could drive them to such speeds -- that smash into our upper atmosphere on a continuous basis, generating sets of high-energy particles that cascade down to Earth. The Earth's magnetic field does have some influence on cosmic rays, but it is the atmosphere that blocks them; the Earth's magnetic field undergoes periodic reversals, with no net magnetic field and no injury during the transition.
Astronauts flying to Mars will not have a thick atmosphere to shield them from cosmic rays, and Mars itself has a very thin atmosphere, meaning they will not be safe from cosmic rays even after they make landfall. A recent report from the US Federal Aviation Administration's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute in Oklahoma City suggests that astronauts on a voyage to Mars would endure more than 80 rems of radiation a year. In contrast, the safe limit for a nuclear plant worker is 5 rems per years. One in ten male astronauts would die of cancer; since women are more susceptible to breast cancer, one in six would die. Astronauts would also have to worry about the floods of energetic particle radiation emitted by the Sun through solar flares.
The US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) set up a Space Radiation Shielding Program in 2003 to consider the problem. One option is simply to surround a spacecraft with shielding. To get the equivalent of full atmospheric protection would require a kilogram of shielding mass per square centimeter of external spacecraft area, though half that mass would likely be workable. For a small space capsule, that would be equivalent to a shell of water 15 meters (50 feet) thick around the spacecraft. That would run to hundreds of tonnes.
Water is an attractive shielding material because the crew would need it anyway to stay alive. A polyethylene shield would be 20% lighter -- not a big mass reduction, but polyethylene doesn't require tanks that could leak and could also provide micrometeorite protection.
Another approach is to use a magnetic field to divert the cosmic rays. However, to provide adequate shielding would require a field strength of 20 teslas -- about 600,000 times the magnetic field strength of the Earth at the Equator. A team under well-known physicist Sam Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has designed a superconducting magnetic field generator that weighs 9 tonnes (10 tons).
Since a magnetic field is polar and provides no obstacle to charged particles at its poles, the living quarters of a spaceship would have to be donut-shaped. Nobody has any idea how astronauts would survive in a magnetic field of 20 teslas; one physicist who stuck his head into a 0.5 tesla field found that whenever he moved, he would see flashes in his eyes and get an acid taste in his mouth, apparently because of the electrolysis of his saliva. An opposing electromagnet system would likely be needed to keep the astronauts healthy, with the secondary system increasing cost and weight.
There have been other proposed solutions, but they suffer from significant weaknesses. One alternative idea is to generate a strong negative electrostatic field that repels the positive cosmic rays -- but this would require a good deal of power, and would also strongly attract the flux of negatively-charged space electrons in the solar wind, making them just as dangerous a source of particulate radiation.
For the moment, the situation does not seem very promising. However, NASA and other organizations are only beginning to consider the problem; in time the outlook may improve, though whether it does or not remains to be seen.
* ED: The cosmic ray problem does not actually rule out long-duration human space missions so much as it rules out such missions on a small scale. Surrounding a space capsule with a 15-meter layer of water is ridiculous, but surrounding a space colony of reasonable size with such a layer would be no great problem: the surface area would go up by the square of the diameter, while the volume would go up by the cube. However, we're not going to be thinking this big in a serious fashion any time soon.
* METHANE HYDRATES: An article in POPULAR MECHANICS ("Fire In Ice" by Babara Maynard, April 2006), followed the voyage of the ocean research drilling vessel, the JOIDES RESOLUTION, as it roamed the seas in search of "methane hydrates".
Methane hydrates are clumps of methane and water ice that are found in a layer under some parts of the ocean floor where the pressure is high and the temperature is low; it is also found in much smaller quantities under some permafrost regions on land. When a chunk of it is brought to the surface, it looks like a hard-packed snowball that quickly hisses and pops and evaporates away. Set a match to it and it burns.
Methane hydrates are a tempting source of energy. A minimal estimate of the worldwide supply of hydrates provided by the US Geological survey (USGS) runs to 1E17 cubic feet (2.8E15 cubic meters); the high estimate runs to 3,000 times that. Says a US Department of Energy (DOE) official: "There's more energy potential locked up in methane hydrates than in all other fossil energy resources combined." One field discovered off the coast of the Carolinas has enough methane hydrates to supply the US with natural gas for 110 years at current consumption rates.
The problem is to find an economical way to extract them. The JOIDES RESOLUTION is characterizing the ocean deposits to determine which might be the most promising for exploitation. Several methods are being considered to do the job. The simplest is to drill into the hydrate layer, with the methane drawn out simply by the low pressure up the drill pipe. A second scheme is to pump hot water down the pipe to force the methane out. Both these schemes have been tested in the Canadian northlands; a third scheme involves pumping down carbon dioxide to displace the methane, but it's only been tested in the lab.
The carbon dioxide approach seems to be the most difficult, but it has the advantage that it gets rid of carbon dioxide that could contribute to global warming. This consideration does lead to one of the big potential downsides of exploiting methane hydrates: methane is 21 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, and if any appreciable quantities of it were lost in the drilling operation, it would give global warming a big and unwanted boost. There is also the worry that extracting the methane might cause the seafloor to slump, causing tsunamis. Research continues.
* MICRODRIVES: The "Working Knowledge" column in the March 2006 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN focused on the miniaturized hard discs with a capacity of a few gigabytes found in iPods and other small portable devices. Like their bigger cousins, such "microdrives" are built around a spinning disk-shaped "platter" covered with magnetizible material arranged in concentric "tracks" that are split into pie-slice "sectors". An actuator system moves an "arm" with a "read-write head" at the tip to find sectors with desired information for reading, or unused sectors for writing.
Of course, the components of such microdrives are highly miniaturized. The disk is thinner than a dime, and the electromagnetic motor that spins it around could easily fit on a thumbnail. The motor is generally a "permanent-magnet synchronous" design: the spinning rotor is mounted with permanent magnets, ringed by a non-moving stator with a half-dozen or so electromagnetic teeth, which are sequentially activated to drive the rotor around.
While the platters of big disc drives spin on ball bearings, it isn't practical or cost-effective to miniaturize such a bearing system, and microdrive platters spin on a liquid bearing surface instead. The liquid, usually an oil, must have consistent and stable properties over the full range of temperatures the microdrive is specified to tolerate.
The arm mounting the read-write head is usually moved by a "voice coil" actuator. In this scheme, a coil is mounted to the rear of the arm behind the pivot, with a flat permanent magnet fixed underneath. Sending varying currents through the coil moves the read-write head back and forth across the platter. The read-write head can sense the magnetic field changes on the platter to detect written bits, or generate a magnetic field to change the bits on the platter.
Microdrives still have room for improvement. Manufacturers are now investigating air bearing systems to support higher speeds. Another scheme under investigation is a piezoelectric drive to replace the magnetic drive currently used by microdrive platters; in this concept, the platter drive shaft is wrapped with a piezoelectric material that flexes when an electric current is run through it, twisting the shaft around. A particularly interesting idea is a "micromotor" read-write head, fabricated with micromachining processes. As discs become denser, it becomes more difficult to find the tracks using the read-write arm. The micromotor read-write head will be able to hunt around under the tip of the arm to find tracks, and may be able to repair damaged tracks as well.
* ANOTHER MONTH: People following the blog may notice it has now evolved to a Monday through Friday format. Actually, it should have earlier, since from the start I vaguely figured that five postings a week were about right. Seven days a week isn't reasonable, though I may write up and archive articles on the weekends.
Made progress this last month -- finally released THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR (AKA the Nazi-Soviet Conflict) onto the website. It had actually been more or less complete in June 2004, but I got sidetracked into trying to build maps for it. As it turned out, maps are harder to implement than they look, and I ultimately decided to take a minimalist approach to them: "If it's not straightforward, don't do it." This is the first major installment of what I want to be a full history of World War II. I'm trying to do it in segments; it took me seven years of work to finish THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR document, and I need to break up the task a bit better this time around.
At the rate I'm going, I may also well kill off the backlog of junk I have sitting around the house, waiting to be outlined -- a directory of downloads off the Web, a set of hyperlinks to websites, a pile of articles pulled from magazines, a stack of videotapes. I've been tossing as much of it as I can to get the pile smaller; I think I've cut it in half over the last month or so, which not only reduces the overhead but helps me focus on what I actually want to get done. I won't live long enough to finish everything I want to, but at least I can kill off all this "lowgrade" so I can get more substantial and interesting things finished.
Still not quite done updating the site illustrations. I was thinking I was flagging on the effort, but this last month I cooked up 39 new images, some photographs included, which was a lot more than I was thinking I could get done. I'm putting in plenty of work, it's just that there's so much to do. I'm falling behind my two-year revision cycle on some of the articles that require substantial artwork update, but no matter: I've been able to work ahead a month or two, updating less troublesome articles to keep the backlog from piling up. It ends up in practice being a sort of load-leveling, allowing me to pace the artwork updates out to completion sometime this summer. I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I did add a major feature to the site this month: a public-domain high-resolution photo archive. (Just go to the home page if you're curious.) I've got 128 images at the outset, which is enough to keep people from laughing at me, but I need at least a thousand good-quality pix to be taken seriously. I keep trying to figure out interesting shots to take; the "shutter bug" has sunk its teeth into me hard.
* Another thing I got done was updating my UAVS document. I'd been struggling to find time, and I finally decided to not do quite the job I wanted just so I could get it finished.
I had a comment at the end: "I have found attempting to contact companies for information to be troublesome and unproductive and have given it up as a bad idea." It might not seem obvious why this would be so, but in general the queries were rarely answered -- like DUH, the companies are busy, and I'm neither an active nor potential customer -- and when they were, the answers weren't necessarily all that useful. Attempting to get clarification could lead to friction.
This leads to the related observation that company websites are not necessarily a particularly good place to get detailed information about that company's products -- they can be in some cases, but in other cases company websites are not very useful. It often seems that companies put together a website because they feel they have to as a business measure, but that doesn't imply putting much in the way of resources into doing it, or bothering to keep it very up-to-date.
I get a particular half-disgusted laugh out of what I think of as "stereotype corporate" websites, which come up with beautiful graphics, video, Flash animations, and all sorts of stylish bells and whistles. I immediately think: "This will take forever to load, and I won't be able to find anything useful."
I had a photo I took of a new-build jetliner down at Denver and hit the website of the manufacturer to figure out what particular model it was, but after sitting through repeated loads of Flash animations I finally had to give up. (It took me a little longer to look over the photo and notice that the model number was painted on the airliner's fuselage.) I have seen a few sites that manage to skillfully balance prettiness with usability, but they're more the exception than the rule.
This is one of the big reasons I keep my own site as plain-vanilla as possible: it may not look snazzy, but it loads fast and it's maintainable. Maintenance, not so incidentally, is a major issue with a site that has what is approaching a total of 600 web pages. The other is that I prefer to focus on content and, as a good engineering type, don't like nonfunctional clutter anyway. I did get a (polite) complaint about my "white background and Times Roman text" style -- to which I (equally politely) replied: "Do you know that you can set your own default background colors and font styles to whatever you like in your browser?"
No reason for me to dictate such things when readers can configure them as they please. HTML is not rocket science; anything I've felt like implementing, I've figured it out. Flash looks like it would lots of fun to play with, but so far I haven't been able to see it as particularly useful for my purposes. It's not a question of a lack of ability to put together something snazzier. I just don't see the point of it for the time being.