* This weblog provides an "online diary" to provide notes on current events, interesting items I run across, and the occasional musing. It promotes no particular ideology. For update notifications, follow "gvgoebel" on Twitter.
* FUTURE FLIGHT (3): Airlines remain wedded to operational procedures refined over decades, generally working on the "hub and spoke" concept, with small airliners operating over short "spoke" routes feeding large airport "hubs" supporting long-range traffic. An alternative idea, the "air taxi", has repeatedly come and gone over the past decades, the vision being large numbers of small aircraft operating directly from airport to airport. For the moment the idea appears to have "gone", attempts to sell "very light jets (VLJs)" to support the market having proven such a bust that the term "VLJ" has all but disappeared from sales literature -- now they're just small business aircraft.
Innovative aviation designer Burt Rutan, just recently retired from his Scaled Composites firm, believes the idea is not permanently dead. He points out that, in terms of door-to-door time, air transport isn't any faster than it was almost a half century ago: "Throw a dart at the map of the US and find any two locations and look at how long it took to get from one to another, and it will take you about the same time or longer than it did in 1961." The current air transport system is also under pressure from teleconferencing and other communications technology on one hand, which reduces if not eliminates the need to "be there", and from security and cost-cutting on the other hand, which makes air travel a paranoid and wearying experience.
Rutan says that air taxi schemes would have an edge by making travel easier and less unpleasant, with air taxis providing greater effective speed by traveling "from the nearest smallest airport to another small airport near where you want to go. There are thousands of smaller airports across the country and you could fly from those when you want, rather than on somebody else's schedule, and without having to use the gridlocked roads to get to those major airports."
Rutan concedes that intercontinental travel would still rely on jumbo jets flying from hubs, that the air taxi scheme is irrelevant on that scale. For those critics who say that the air taxi scheme means vast numbers of little aircraft flying around, Rutan replies, in effect: exactly, so what? "There are 13,000 taxicabs in Manhattan; if there were 5,000 the system wouldn't work, people would get frustrated ... so how do you have an on-demand air taxi system for the US? ... It would need around 10,000 to 12,000 aircraft to get up to this threshold. It would be done with very little non-revenue flying and insurance costs would be tiny, because the crew flying rate would be high and it would be a mature system ... [with] the potential to halve the door-to-door time."
Scheduling air taxi flights, which would have been cumbersome to the point of impossible a few decades ago, should be straightforward in an era of smartphone apps and cloud servers. The worse problem is trying to control the expanded air traffic, but even with tens of thousands of aircraft flying around, America's airspace is vast and the perceived difficulty of managing the swarms of aircraft is partly an artifact of the constraints of the current system -- the air traffic system is inflexible, being under centralized control and forced to converge at hubs. Rutan believes that modern technology greatly reduces the need for centralized control, with flight planning performed at will by cloud server systems, and aircraft equipped with comlinks and smarts to provide their own navigation and collision avoidance. In this view, the air traffic control system would simply identify and deal with aircraft not acting as "good citizens" instead of specifically telling them where they can and cannot go.
Libertarianism for air transport? Possibly, but Rutan believes it's an idea whose time is finally coming, saying that in the new era the airlines will "wither like the Greyhound buses did. If they're smart, they'll realize they're in the transportation business rather than the bus business."
* Although Rutan sounds radical, the European Commission is investigating a vision that in some ways is even more ambitious, through the "Personal Plane (PPlane)" effort. PPlane's concept is for increased use of small civil aircraft, in the 4 to 8 passenger range, for short-range flights as a more efficient alternative to ground transport.
The idea is, by intent, thinking out of the box; few would think that on the face of it air transport would be more economical than ground transport for short-haul service. However, given aircraft designed for economical operation at the expense of performance -- still retaining performance much better than ground transport -- and efficient flight operations, that may not necessarily be the case. It is a particularly attractive idea for European Union members in the East where the transport network is underdeveloped, and no doubt the same technology could be applicable to undeveloped regions such as Africa.
Of course, PPlane is just an investigation, considering options to see what might be workable. PPlane research has focused on unconventional aircraft configurations -- roadable aircraft and tilt-rotors, for example -- with unconventional propulsion -- electric or hybrid propeller propulsion, for example. The flight infrastructure is a particular concern, since PPlane envisions a vast expansion of light-aircraft traffic and inclement-weather operation. The concept is that the aircraft will be piloted, but the pilots won't be much more highly trained than taxi drivers are, with a largely automated flight control system doing most of the work. A modified Diamond DA42 Twinstar civil aircraft has been modified for trials. The PPlane investigation was begun in 2008 and is scheduled to end this year.
* Air taxi schemes lead to notions of personal air vehicles. Various "flying car" concepts have been around for a very long time, but they've never been anything but toylike in concept and rarely have gone beyond concept. Nobody sees much else happening in the near term, but optimists think that new technologies will change that. Given highly efficient aircraft, small air vehicles may become competitive with ground transport; given increased leverage off of robotics and other advanced tech, it should be much easier to operate large numbers of small air vehicles with an acceptably low accident rate, conceivably even lower than that of ground traffic on a passenger-mile basis, with robot vertical takeoff and landing machines capable of shuttling cargo or people anywhere. [TO BE CONTINUED]
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: The saga of claims for a link between the virus known as XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has been traced in these pages since the story began in 2009, being last discussed here only a few months ago. That entry described how the issue has become nightmare for all concerned, with some researchers being threatened by CFS victims and deciding to take their research efforts elsewhere.
Now the matter seems to have come, at least officially, to an end. In late December 2011, the journal AAAS SCIENCE formally repudiated the 2009 paper by Dr. Judy Mikovits and her colleagues supposedly establishing the link. The researchers could not agree on the wording of a full retraction, so the editors of AAAS SCIENCE issued the retraction on their own, an unusual step. The retraction of the Mikovits paper was followed by a retraction of a complementary 2010 paper publishing the PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, in this case the authors more conventionally issuing the retraction on their own. There are no other papers still active that support the XMRV-CFS link. Those working on CFS are being very cautious about publicizing results of their studies, and as noted some of them have got out of CFS work completely.
Such scientific controversies are a tempest in a teacup to the general public, but in the science community they are graveyards of professional reputations. Mikovits might not have been done too much harm had she acknowledged something was wrong, but she was stubborn and refused to budge; it appears the reason that AAAS SCIENCE's editors had to perform the retraction was because Mikovits refused to sign one herself. It was a nasty Christmas present for Mikovits, compounding troubles with accusations of theft of materials from a previous employer that sent Mikovits to jail for a short time and still has her staring down the muzzle of a court case.
* Being badly burned is a nightmare prospect, resulting in injury, pain, and potentially severe disfigurement. As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST Online ("No More Hard Graft?", 15 June 2011), treatment of severe burns traditionally demands that patches of skin be taken from one place on the victim's body and used to patch the burn. It is laborious and the results are not always pretty. Two researchers working independently -- Joerg Gerlach of the University of Pittsburgh and Fiona Wood, a plastic surgeon in Perth, Australia -- have come up with what they feel is a better idea: spray the skin back on.
The source of the "spray skin" is still skin taken from the victim, but in the spray-on scheme the skin is dissolved into individual cells using an enzyme solution. The cells are then applied to the burn wound with a pneumatic spray or a syringe. The spray method currently takes a little longer to perform, but it has significant advantages. One of the biggest is coverage: in traditional grafting, a patch of skin is stretched to three or four times its original size to get the most leverage, but the spray method gets up to 20 times the coverage.
Gerlach and Wood also believe that the spray method results in less scarring, though given the fact that the scheme is so new that hasn't been validated yet. However, it is certainly true that the ability to fix a big burn with a small patch of skin means it's easier to match color of skin; in fact, Wood says she's sanded down old burn scars and used spray to achieve a better tone.
Right now, the spray technique only works with second-degree burns. For third-degree burns, those in which both the dermis and epidermis have been destroyed, spraying has to be used in conjunction with grafting since spraying cannot regenerate dermal tissue. Gerlach is currently investigating ways extracting and spraying the specific stem cells needed to regenerate dermal tissue. The US military is very interested in Gerlach's work, since burns are not at all unusual among combat casualties.
* Stink bugs are members of the hemipterans, the group of insects referred to as "true bugs", somewhat less distinctive than other groups of insects such as wasps, butterflies, or mosquitoes. There are a fair number of species of stink bugs in the USA; as reported by THE ECONOMIST, one is making a nuisance of itself.
The brown marmorated stink bug was introduced to America from Asia in the 1990s and really likes it here, having spread over 30 states. It feeds on figs, mulberries, corn, citrus fruits, soybeans, and dozens of other plants, including some weeds. It won't kill the plants, but it renders their produce unmarketable. It has attacked peaches in Pennsylvania, peppers in New Jersey, and apples all along the mid-Atlantic states, and things are expected to get worse. The brown marmorated stink bug has no natural enemies, and it breeds rapidly, twice a year in temperate regions -- six times a year in warm ones, which means it could really go wild once it reaches the US Southeast.
The US Environmental Protection Agency has issued exemptions for unusually heavy applications of pesticides, but nobody sees that as either an attractive or a long-term solution. Researchers are investigation the import of a parasitic wasp that keeps the bug in check in its homelands; it is likely to take several years to evaluate the wasp to make sure it doesn't have any "unintended consequences". Until then, growers are just going to have to put up with the pest.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: As reported by BUSINESS WEEK, in May 2011 three software designers were sitting around at their workplace, the facility of French game developer Ubisoft in the suburbs of Paris, feeling disgusted with things in general and bored. They got to sticking up "post-it" sheets on a window to piece together a classic "Space Invaders" icon. A few days later, they found a more elaborate "Pac-Man" icon, tacked up in post-its in the windows of the bank across the street.
And so the "post-it war" began, with companies whose buildings faced each other across the business districts of Paris competing to out-post each other. The push was originally for classic videogame icons, since their coarse little graphics were easily translated into post-it notes, but they gradually escalated, with banker Societe Generale posting giant figures of the Gallic warriors Asterix and Obelix, beloved all over Europe, made up of 11,000 post-it stickers.
The fad then began to die out in Paris, but by that time it had spread around the globe, from Melbourne to Warsaw to Seattle: WORLD WAR POST-IT. Giant 3M, where the post-it was invented -- by legend, from the Zen perceptiveness of a researcher who came up with a glue that didn't stick very well -- took an aloof attitude towards the fad, doing nothing to encourage the frivolity but making sure that product was available. Like all other fads, the fad will pass -- but now I'm getting an itch to put a Space Invader on my front window.
* I was playing games with my phone answering machine lately. I never answer the phone directly, and I kept hearing people getting the answering machine and hanging up promptly. I got annoyed with it and set up an answering machine message to make it sound like someone had answered the phone.
That was just silliness; the interesting thing was I found out who was calling. I was thinking a lot of the calls were wrong numbers, but it turns out such are rare. Lots of them are fake charities, such as the "Policeman's Protective Fund" -- actually a legal charity, but disreputable, gives away the smallest proportion of the take possible to allow it to qualify as a charity. Some of the fakes only ask for hand-me-downs, it seems there's some money there if they pile up enough goods.
It's hard to say what proportion of the callers are fakes, particularly since sometimes fakes like to pretend to be real charities or use very similar names -- but it doesn't matter. Cold-calling is obnoxious, and I have no reason to bother with a charity that plays that game when I can give my money to charities I know are legitimate. Besides, people who call me and won't leave a message are telling me I've got no business with them in the first place.
* As noted last month, I was very glad to get done with the JFK assassination materials. It wasn't just because the subject was obnoxious, it was also because for whatever reason it ended up being an "extra" project that didn't fit into my regular work schedule -- meaning that over the two years I worked on it, I increasingly had to steal time from scheduled work to get it done. At the end, when I was determined to get it out the door at all costs, I was dropping other things and they piled up. I ended up with another set of bookmarked links in my web browser that ran off the screen, while my queue of blog articles was starting to thin out, all the more so because I threw out about a dozen blog postings on the JFK assassination. I still had materials in the queue for about eight weeks, but I didn't like the trendline.
The last time I got backlogged like that, it took me about three months to fix things, but this time the queue of blog articles was almost fully reloaded by the end of the month, putting me increasingly in the position of looking for items to discard since the queue was beginning to overflow. I'm still behind the learning curve on various things, but having got rid of a sink for time I'm in the position of actually getting caught up, after increasingly falling behind over the last two years. Funny how things sneak up on oneself.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE