“This is kind of the equivalent of the Golden Spike”

by Orange County Archives

Space Station crew likes new SpaceX transport vehicle
[Via Alaska Dispatch]

The crew of the International Space Station got its first look at the inside of its newest visitor – Space Exploration Technologies Corporation’s Dragon cargo ship – Saturday morning and pronounced it a keeper.

The craft made aerospace history Friday by becoming the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to rendezvous and dock with another spacecraft on orbit.

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Just as the the Golden Spike commemorated the linkage of America by rail, the docking of the Dragon Capsule to the ISS is a huge milestone for the linkage of Earth to outer space.

The transcontinental trains permitted cargo to transit the US in both directions.

So too can the Dragon capsule. It is the first cargo capsule for supplying the ISS that can also take material back to earth. It moves cargo in both directions.

The discovery of America was important but we would not be where we are today without the Golden Spike. I truly believe that in 100 years they will see this docking in a similar light.

Watch Nasa TV NOW!

They snagged the capsule and are getting ready to actually dock it to the ISS. The pictures are amazing.

From what I understand, actually docking and opening up the capsule is a large milestone because it must be man rated to do so. That is, it must meet ll the requirements for a manned capsule without actually having people inside.

That is a big deal.

And for the first time, a capsule full only with cargo will also be able to take stuff back to Earth since the Dragon capsule is recoverable.

More bullies get their come-uppance

by Eddie~S

New Jersey mayor, son, arrested on charges they nuked recall website
[Via Ars Technica]

The mayor of a small New Jersey hamlet has been arrested, along with his son, on federal charges that they shut down a website advocating the mayor’s recall after breaking into the online accounts of political foes.

According to federal officials, Felix Roque, mayor of West New York, New Jersey, and his son, Joseph Roque, were arrested early Thursday morning by FBI agents. In February, the pair planned and executed the silencing of www.recallroque.com by gaining unauthorized access to the GoDaddy account used to control the domain name. An FBI special agent filed documents with these allegations in a New Jersey federal court. The father-and-son team also obtained e-mails and messages sent among opponents after gaining unauthorized access to e-mail and Facebook accounts.

“I have always treated you with respect and courtesy, but I have copies of everything sent to the website and communications with names,” Mayor Roque wrote in an e-mail to one of the opponents, whose identity had remained unknown to the Roques until they gained illegal access to the accounts. “Remember, I am in the Army with many friends.”

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Hope they go away for awhile.

One thing about our new transparent society – bullies are also shown in the light of day. Communities have had ways of dealing with bullies since humans evolved. It is just that current society allows them to hide quite well.

At least society before the internet.

Best day at Caltech is today

Today Is Ditch Day! – Caltech Features
[Via Caltech Features]

Today Is Ditch Day!

One day each spring, kept secret until the last minute, seniors ditch their classes and vanish from campus, leaving behind complex, imaginative scavenger hunts, mazes, puzzles, and other challenges that are carefully planned out to occupy the underclassmen—preventing them from wreaking havoc in the seniors’ rooms. Follow today’s shenanigans on Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter!

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Ditch Day is a vacation day for seniors and underclassmen. I remember so many of the ones I dealt with.

We still had a lot of Brute Force stacks. The problem was not so much that there would be damage. It was that to construct one that would really work cost a lot of money.

There was one Senior who came back 3 years in a row for the third quarter. The rumor was that he purposefully failed the one class he still needed for graduation simply so he could come back for ditch day. (We worked at a real job the rest of the year.)

His brute force stack got more and more complex each year. Remember, for a brute force stack, the only entryways could be the windows or the door. Any external damage had to be repaired.

In one really great example, the doors and windows were heavily stacked and the Senior even stacked the sink that was in the room. But he stacked it thinking the sink would have to be moved UP to remove it.

We went in from the adjoining room that shared the plumbing and dropped the sink to get in. The stack he thought would take hours took just a few minutes He was crestfallen.

Back to the great brute force stack. The door stack was impenetrable. I think we actually dropped in a scope from the ceiling to scout it out.

The window stack was the only way in. Luckily we had an engineering student who had prepared to tackle the window stack with everything he had.

And he needed it. The window stack was several feet thick. with a concrete layer – with rebar,  a steel plate layer, a wood layer – with nails, etc. This meant that a single tool could not be used to get completely through the stack.

The underclassman and his crew spent the whole day creating a big enough hole for the smallest person to get through. As I recall, they got in with minutes to spare. The look on the Senior when he saw the success was priceless.

He graduated for good that year.

We had some beginning finesse stacks using computers. My favorite stack in our house my Senior year had a computer terminal out in front of the room. The monitor simply said “Go away! Leave me alone”

But it also had a fun game to play that involved mapping a dungeon. So, of course, everyone played the game in order to find the clue to open the door.

When all they needed to do was actually leave the room alone for a set number of minutes – to actually ignore it. Then it would have opened by itself.

And I seem to recall he puts some sort of laser on the window to check to attempts from that direction.

There was simply no way the underclassmen would ignore his room and his stack successfully stood up.

UPDATE: Potentially as important as the Apollo missions

I cried at about 9:30 when the Falcon 9 achieved orbit. And listen to the cheers when both solar areas deploy at about 10:45.

We are into a new era of our exploration of space. For the first time a private organization – not a government – has launched a rocket into space, with a cargo that not only achieved orbit but is on course to set further milestones.

No private group has ever put into orbit a capsule capable of resupplying the International Space Station. On Friday, if all goes well, they will become the first such group to actually resupply the ISS.

The capsule will be able to carry men in a few more years. The era of relatively inexpensive travel to low Earth orbit has begun.

The exploration of space is now in a new stage, one where NASA can continue to do exploratory work and push the envelope but corporations can provide the development to make it realistic.

UPDATE: And supposedly James Doohan’s (Star Trek’s Scotty) ashes were on this rocket to be scattered into space. Gordon Cooper was also included in the remains of 307 people.

The rapid drop in intelligent Congressional speech

The changing complexity of congressional speech
[Via Sunlight Foundation]

Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record using Capitol Words.

[More]

The Constitution is written at 17.8 grade level. The Declaration of INdependence is at 15.1. Even the Gettysburg Address is at 11.2.

Congress now speaks at a 10.6 grade level.

In 2005, Republicans were the most eloquent speakers in Congress, as they had been for years. Their speeches were greater than the 11.6 grade level, better than the Democrats.

Within 4 years there was a tremendous drop in the GOP speech patterns. They had dropped to below 10.6 levels.

The Democrats stayed close to their normal patterns, not dropping below 11 until 2011.

The Republicans went from the highest grade levels in Congress to the lowest in just 4 years. Of the 20 lowest by grade level, 18 are Republicans.

Of course, what does the data actually mean? In the US, the average American reads at between an 8th and 9th grade level.

So are the legislators dumbing down their words  because they are dumber or are they trying to be better communicators?

I imagine only history will be able to separate out those two possibilities. I go for better communication because many are now having their words heard directly rather than filtered through the media and dumbed down there.

Watching the Space-X mission to ISS

Thirty minutes to go. I have not been this excited about a space launch in a long, long time.

Tech CEOs say dumb things because …

Why Tech CEOs Seem So Dumb. (It’s a trick question.)
[Via Dave Winer's linkblog feed]

Why Tech CEOs Seem So Dumb. (It’s a trick question.)

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Nice to have some recent examples of really dumb things said by the 50-something leaders of tech companies.

Here is how Steve Jobs put it and he is exactly right:

“I have my own theory about why the decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The product starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.”

Thus we have the head of Time-Warner cable who does not understand Air Play and also displays his ignorance of Apple TV, something that could potentially directly compete with cable.

I would go as far as to say do not invest in any tech company whose head is not ‘of’ the company. Ballmer is a sales guy. Tim Cook is a manufacturing guy. Which one really has a firm understanding of the tech underpinnings of the company?

I’d go with the guy who really understands how the things are built over the guy who really only understands how to market and sell the thing.

Surveillance of a treehouse by a Quadcopter

Quadcopter video tour of treehouse in BC Canada
[Via Boing Boing]

[Video Link] Here’s a quadcopter video tour of a treehouse somewhere in BC, Canada. (Via Llyod Kahn’s blog)

[More]

Just a sample of how quadcopters can take some amazing videos. As long as private people can also use these, they will be amazing tools.

But if only authorities are allowed to use them, then we are well on the way to oppression.

Because Wall Street is neither rational nor efficient viz-a-viz Apple

How is AMZN worth 13 AAPLs?
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

There seems to be a growing disconnect in Wall Street’s valuations

Click to enlarge. Source: Jeffrey Forsberg

FORTUNE — I know that comparisons, as Shakespeare’s Dogberry put it, are supposed to be odorous, but this one is beginning to stink.

How can Apple (AAPL), with $110 billion in the bank, annual sales of $140 billion and earnings that nearly double every year, be valued so much lower than Amazon (AMZN), which has $6 billion in the bank, sales of $50 billion and earnings that fell 35% last quarter?

This is a question that reader Jeff Forsberg has been asking for nearly a year. On Friday he sent the chart above, an updated version of the coiled spring visual metaphor he introduced last June, when Amazon’s price-to-earnings ratio was 81 and Apple’s was 16.

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After a year, Apple, with great and increasing profits, is worth even less than Amazon, which has falling earnings. There is no good fundamental reasons for this.

Amazon is viewed as some sort of growth stock , even though it is not really growing, while Apple is viewed like a utility, even though it is growing substantially. And has been for many quarters.

The stock market is betting that Apple’s earnings will only grow roughly 12% next year. Apple earned $26 billion last year. So Wall Street is valuing  Apple to make an extra $3 billion in 2012.

Yet in the first quarter of 2012, it increases just its cash hoard by over $16 billion. In one quarter, it made 5 times more just in cash than Wall Street is now predicting it will make for the next year. It is very likely that the simple interest on its cash from 2012 will be larger than Wall Street thinks its entire earning will be.

There is no sane or fundamental reason for Apple to be where it is right now. At least in a rational and efficient market.

Returning to 1959 is all right with the GOP

 

by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

House pares NASA’s 2013 spending back to 1959 levels, suggests Europa mission
[Via Ars Technica]

The Appropriations Committee of the US House of Representatives has set May 8 as the date they will begin debating an election year budget that pares NASA back to its lowest level as a percentage of the Federal budget since 1959, surpassing last year’s record low of 0.48%. In absolute terms, it will roughly match the 2006 Bush levels, cutting money from the Space Technology and Commercial Crew program requests for a third year, while adding funds to the Space Launch System and the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, two House favorites.

[More]

I wrote about this the other day. NIce to see it hitting the mainstream.

And the Republicans in the House want to kill private expansion into space – they want NASA to pick only one company to support, rather than 4. As NASA is a prime contractor for many companies, this would seriously set-back efforts.

They gave NASA half what they asked for here – $406 million. Meanwhile, they gave NASA $1.3 billion to develop its own system.

The biggest curiosity in the space business is currently the Space Launch System, labeled by many as the “Senate Launch System” because NASA seems to have been forced to take a rocket they didn’t specify and don’t want. Both the House and the Senate require the Space Launch System by law to have the capability to lift 130 metric tons to orbit, even though no mission exists yet for the giant rocket and no one is sure that one will exist for the forseeable future.

The SLS is so expensive that NASA will only be able to afford to launch it every two years at best, giving rise to a strong suspicion that the rocket will be cancelled before completion. In attempt to spare all parties from further embarassment, the new House bill orders NASA to come up with a list of possible missions and destinations for SLS.

$1.3 billion. To put this in perspective – from a recent report –  using just the current technology we have, $2.6 billion would fund a ten year project to find, reach and move a 7 meter asteroid to lunar orbit, ready to mine. Two years of funding for a boondoggle NASA does not want would have use mining asteroids in 10 years or less!

Why fund a purely government program that is already late and years over budget that is not wanted when fairly supporting a public-private partnership would put Americans in space rapidly,would have us mining asteroids and doing what else? Why force NASA to spend money on a system it does not want and that will not really provide any benefits? Why hurt the progress of a real path to space that we can do right now for continued funding of a white elephat ‘maybe’?

Why? I’d guess because, like most government welfare, it serves to fund projects in their states. They do not care if it actually produces anything but the money will fund jobs.

This is their stimulus – hurt American progress into space, put America at a disadvantage compared with other countries – so that they can create make-work in their states. I’d have more respect for them if they came out and said that was exactly what they were doing.

Private corporations are going to be hiring lots of those people now working on the NASA boondoggle. Too many companies and those jobs disappear at NASA and then where  will those politicians be. Much better to reduce the competition so those jobs the GOP are fighting for stay put.

The companies realize this which is why Space-X just announced it is seeking permission to have a launch site in Texas. The Texas delegation has been very protective of jobs at the Johnson Spaceflight Center. But perhaps if those jobs migrate to the private sector in Texas, the politicians will be mollified.

What a weird reversal where the Democratic members want to get private companies to take over much of the low Earth orbit work while the GOP wants big government to fund worthless projects.

Republicans in Congress already has pushed back private efforts 1-2 years because of the approach in previous years of underfunding the private/public partnerships. Now they want to kill it almost totally. So they can hand it to just one contractor – apparently Boeing. Which is at least one if not more years behind the others.

All so they can keep a large white elephant going and supply jobs for a useless rocket system.

Pay more for slower development. That is what the GOP in the House is supporting.

Idiots. The inability to launch Americans into space sits solely at the feet of the GOP members in the House if they follow through with this.

They really do want to return to a pre-Sputnick funding approach to space.

One cent for NASA

We need to dream again.

[yputube=http://youtu.be/Fl07UfRkPas]

“How much would you pay for the Universe?”

The current budget for NASA – estimated to be $17 billion in 2012 – is 0.48% of the total US budget. This is a lower percentage for NASA since 1959!

NASA has not had 1% since 1993, when its budget peaked at $19.6 billion. Both Democrats and Republicans bear the blame for this.

But they could shoulder the benefits by simply raising NASA’s budget to what it was in 1993. No need to dream of  60s era levels of funding at 4% or higher. Just 1%.

It would be great to live in a country where we could all dream about the future, instead of grub around for the leavings allowed us.

Pilot error combined with poor user interface design?

by abdallahh

Air France Flight 447: ‘Damn it, we’re going to crash’. (A
[Via Dave Winer's linkblog feed]

Air France Flight 447: ‘Damn it, we’re going to crash’. (A tragic, deadly story of UI design.)

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It is a really sad story but one that seem to come up every so often with the fly-by-wire- planes – figuring out what is going on in an emergency sometimes takes the technological benefits past the point where they work well in informing the pilots.

In this crash, it appears that the pilots were not getting the right feedback information to inform them of what was actually happening – one of the pilots apparently tried to lift the nose of the plane so high that it stalled.

In an older plane, there would have been many obvious feedbacks to inform the pilots of what each was doing but these new planes make it very hard to see what the other pilots are doing. So if one makes a huge mistake, the others have a hard time figuring it out.

And even when they did start to figure it out, the computer’s actions made them stop. It stopped working and blanked out screens rather than give ‘incorrect’ data to the crew. This is not likely to be helpful in an emergency like this.

Because what happened is that the stall warnings stopped also because the data was all messed up. When the pilots then actually did the right thing, the computer understood what was happening, feed the data back and the stall warnings started again.

So they did what anyone would do it their action seemed to cause a stall warning to start again – they stopped doing it, even though it was correct.

By the time the captain figured it out, it was too late. He pushed down to gain speed. But, because the other pilot was still pulling up – and the manner of the side joystick prevented the others from seeing this – the computer ‘averaged’ their dual inputs.  This was fatal as one pilot was absolutely right and the other was absolutely wrong.

Many user interfaces are designed well but the outlier behaviors – something every programmer knows and why beta tests are done – really determine the robustness of the interface.

It certainly seems here that – while pilot error may be the underlying mistake – the way the controls were designed contributed a lot to the inability of the crew to correct a mistake.

I expect that Air France bears a lot of responsibility here but it seems to me that some tweaks in the Airbus UI could be productive.

The Garageband equivalent from the 80s

Virtually everything that Giorgio Moroder had in his studio can now be carried around in an iPad or even an iPhone.

Only we don’t have to switch around patch cords or have a live drummer.

Garagepad and otehr apps actually allow us to do even more without having to even know how to play the piano.

Big test for SpaceX on Monday. Watch it live.

SpaceX Falcon 9 engine test will be webcast live (woo, fire! woo, space!)
[Via Boing Boing]

If you like space and/or rockets and/or awesome flames, you’ll want to tune in to spacex.com on Monday, April 30 to watch “a static fire test of the Falcon 9 rocket’s nine powerful Merlin engines in preparation for the company’s upcoming launch.” The test is scheduled to begin at 2:30 PM ET/ 11:30 AM PT, with the actual static fire targeted for 3:00 PM ET/ 12:00 PM PT. Actual launch to space is currently targeted for May 7.

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I watched one of their previous launches live. The test on Monday and then the big day on the 7th.

And that is not all that is going on. In Britain, they are testing another approach right now – a plane that can use both jet and rocket engines.

Space is looking better and better.