Intellectual Pornography - Arousing Curiosity

Moving Today and Tomorrow

Today has been, and tomorrow will continue to be, quite busy as I move into a new place. I'll be back with the One O'Clock Daily on Wednesday. See you all then!

One O'Clock Daily - Illusory Privacy

Privacy rights have been high on my mind lately. In this world of facebook, myspace, twitter, and search engines, many people hold concerns about their personal privacy being spoiled by the panopticon of the internet.

But these technologies weren't developed to challenge and destroy personal privacy. Google's motto is "don't be evil", not "the world's best peeping Tom". It just so happens that in the process of not being evil, Google developed a tool that breaks the old systems of privacy.

If cryptography has taught us anything, it is that "security by obscurity" does not work. Our ability to find things, even if only accidentally, is constantly improving. And that's to be expected, because there's a lot of money in finding things faster, and with better results, than yesterday. But our ability to hide things is not similarly improving. In essence, the process of securing information is highly asymmetric. It's easy to discover things, but very hard to keep a secret.

This asymmetric problem space is fueled by the relentless drive of entropy. To bottle up a secret, once found out, is no more possible than bottling up all the molecules of a gas after they've been released into the atmosphere.

In fact, the privacy of yesteryear was never based on anything except the non-existence of certain technologies. The content of our back yards was private until we put satellites in orbit around the Earth, and made their imagery publicly available to anyone. Our daily shopping habits were private until we could follow our favorite haunts on twitter, and rate them on yelp. Even what we did last summer was private until Facebook allowed people to upload images; now, if any of your friends from that Vegas trip have an unsecured profile, what happened in Vegas won't stay in Vegas.

Even on the message boards and comment threads of the internet, privacy is hard to find. The prevalence of spam bots has driven many websites to require a verifiable email address as a prerequisite to posting. And while you can create a new, throw-away email address in thirty seconds through Google or Yahoo, it's still hardly perfect anonymity. After all, even anonymous accounts send the signal that the commenter wishes to remain anonymous. With a knowledge of the identity and motives of likely participants, the possible real-world ID of that Anon can be narrowed down; sometimes dramatically so.

Perfect anonymity and privacy can only be had when they do not appear to be desired. In the Bourne Ultimatum, the CIA is able to discover the identity of a leak not by checking the location-tracking logs of the agents' cell phones, but by checking which agents had their cell phones switched off during the time of the leak. Even the mere effort to escape the panopticon can get you caught.

So what next? If we give away our privacy with Google Latitude, and signal that we have something to hide by not using it, then we seem trapped in a cycle of damned if you do—damned if you don't. We need sophisticated tools for hiding our true actions. We need access to established forum accounts with a history of posting, to tools that spoof our GPS location reports, and that check us into our favorite cafes on Foursquare, even when we are miles away. And then we need to pray that nobody double-checks our actions in the real world. Either that, or we need to give up the idea that privacy was ever something that could be a universal right, or even something that was possible in a world of ever more capable technology. And that requires rewriting a lot of laws and social conventions.

One O'Clock Daily - Science Links of the Week, Redux!

• A directed EMP weapon - courtesy of Popular Science. While it's a great non-lethal application to be able to stop cars in their tracks, I'm curious about the results we'll see when this sort of technology is employed against aircraft. It would be the first anti-aircraft technology to not require ammunition, instead it would run off of electricity. With a tight beam, you could even mount such a weapon in a fighter plane and use it as the next word in air superiority. Fly by wire aircraft do not take kindly to sudden shutdowns of their electrical systems and onboard computers, and such a shutdown is almost certain to be fatal. On a slightly worrisome note, the widespread proliferation of this sort of technology might provide terrorist groups with the capability of downing commercial aircraft from a distance, with no typical, traceable weapons components—and even if airliners at cruising altitude are safe because of their distance above the ground, aircraft in approach for landing, or while taking off, will be vulnerable.

• Supersonic airflows achieved by making splashes with rocks - really, who knew? Apparently, when a rock is thrown into a lake, it forms an air-filled cavity beneath the surface in the shape of a converging-diverging nozzle, which, as it contracts, ejects air at supersonic speeds. The paper is fascinating throughout.

• A conversation about grace, manners, and the meaning of the world 'gentleman' - This has absolutely nothing to do with science at all, but it's still heart-warming, and a treat to read—especially the comments.

One O'Clock Daily - NASA in the Age of Obama: Perspective From a JPL Engineer, Part 2

Obama's Budget and Plan

President Obama's 2011 budget and plan for NASA is a major change from both the program of record and the Augustine committee's recommendations.

ISS and Space Shuttle

The budget calls for the remaining 5 shuttle missions to flown and for the primary ISS construction to completed by the end of this fiscal year, as is the current plan. However, the budget is supportive of extending operations into the next fiscal year if delays make that necessary. It also supports operating the ISS until at least 2020.

Commercial spaceflight

This is one of the biggest changes in this budget: it has NASA essentially entirely getting out of the business of designing spacecraft and launching astronauts into space as it has done for almost 50 years (most of the actual fabrication of the spacecraft has always been done by commercial companies, but NASA has always operated those spacecraft itself). Instead, the new budget provides money for commercial companies such as SpaceX to design, build and launch vehicles to take US astronauts to LEO, as the Augustine committee recommended.

Constellation

This the other big change--the new budget scraps the Constellation program entirely, as well as any active program to explore beyond LEO. This cancelation terminates active development of an operational crew vehicle, the Ares I rocket, and any heavy rocket.

Technology Development

The budget heavily emphasizes the development of new technologies, which could one day make exploration of space, especially beyond LEO, much safer and cheaper. However, all of these technologies will be purely for research purposes ("paper spacecraft") for the foreseeable future, since there is no longer any active program to combine these technologies into a complete system for use on operational missions. Research will be done relating to:

• Heavy lift systems: Technologies that may one day be used to build an Ares V type rocket.
• In orbit fuel depots and transfers: Technologies to transfer cryogenic fuels in orbit have seen some development, but are not yet ready to fly on operation missions (we can transfer non-cryogenic fuels and consumables on orbit, as is done on the ISS).
• Self-contained/closed-loop life support systems: The ISS relies on a steady stream of supply craft; if we are going to make it to Mars (or even spend significant amounts of time on the moon), we need spacecraft that can go for months--or even years--without being resupplied. This requires new ways to recycle air and water, produce food, and otherwise maintain a habitable environment without external input of materials and supplies.
• Autonomous rendezvous and docking.

The budget also emphasizes continuing and/ or expanding several things that NASA already does extensively, such as environmental monitoring, robotic missions to various parts of the solar system, aeronautics research, education, and public outreach.

Reactions and opinions

Exclusive use of commercial commercial launch vehicles

This has been a very controversial topic, since, as mentioned earlier, it involves NASA essentially ceding a capability that it has had for almost 50 years. The idea of leadership in space exploration is very common theme in the debate about NASA's future. Since NASA was conceived, the space program has been vital for developing and maintaining US scientific and engineering talent. Dozens of technologies have come out of the space program, which have resulted in several multi-billion dollar a year industries; clearly, losing our leadership in space exploration would have major implications for our country's economic success and national security. There is concern that by outsourcing the launching of astronauts, the US losing a lot of its "institutional memory", launch capability and leadership.

However, in this respect I agree with the Augustine committee that using commercial providers to launch astronauts to LEO is a good plan. The companies taking over the launch responsibilities are US companies--SpaceX is headquartered just 20 or 30 miles from where I live and I know several people who work there--so I would think of this as more of a transfer of institutional memory and capability, rather than a loss of it, and I don't think that this alone will result in us losing our leadership in space exploration. Getting astronauts to LEO is pretty much a solved problem, and there isn't much leadership to be had by doing it, just a lot of money to be spent--a solved problem ≠ a cheap problem. The Falcon 9 should be cheaper to operate since it can launch a variety of cargoes, while the Ares I would do nothing but send astronauts to LEO, resulting in fewer flights and higher overhead on a per-flight basis. Additionally, most or all of the jobs lost from the government getting out of launching astronauts to LEO would be created by these companies, and there may even be a net creation of jobs.

Extending ISS operations to 2020

This one is a no brainer--extending the ISS is clearly the right thing to do. The list of things its already accomplished is growing every day, and the things that it could do is a mile long. Doing the same things through other means would be either much more expensive or impossible. Additionally, there's enormous support among international partners to extend it, and not doing so would probably alienate them and destroy the possibility of similar future collaboration. The new budget does emphasize more international cooperation, along the lines of the ISS, for manned exploration of space, which I think is a good thing.

Cancellation of Constellation

One of the major criticisms of the Constellation program is that it essentially planned to repeat the accomplishments of Apollo, with little in terms of new technology, accomplishments or scientific gain. This criticism certainly has its merits; Bush's goal was basically to get there as quickly as possible, through use of old (but proven) technology. Like so many things in Bush's presidency, the Vision for Space Exploration was far better at creating a flashy press conference and good PR than at creating useful and achievable policy. Taking a step back and developing new technology certainly has many benefits in the long run. However, the Constellation program was not without merits, and I think that Augustine Committee's "flexible path" was a good way to address many of the criticisms mentioned above.

While I think it isn't necessarily important for NASA to launch humans to LEO, I do still believe that it is important for NASA to operate some spacecraft itself--especially ones pushing the limits of technology and exploration. Without any NASA operated spacecraft performing exploration (especially once the ISS is eventually retired), I think that a lot of the concerns about losing skills and leadership become valid. The frontier of exploration will almost never be commercially beneficial or successful while it is still at the frontier, and therefore will almost never be pursued by commercial entities. However, it is still important to explore in order to push that frontier outward, as many things that are at, or beyond, the frontier will eventually become commercially successful and benefit mankind greatly. NASA should push the frontier outwards through an operational human spaceflight program.

In particular, there are an enormous number of things that the space shuttle and ISS can do that commercial providers cannot duplicate. For example, there are many pieces of station hardware which are too large to fit in any existing or planned cargo delivery system other than the space shuttle. The space shuttle is also the only system that can bring a significant ammount of supplies and equipment back to earth (for example, completed experiments to be analyzed on the ground, or failed parts to be refurbished). It is also the only platform that can do significant on orbit satellite maintenance, such as was done with Hubble. Without some next generation exploration program (and for such a program to be operational by the time the ISS is retired, assuming this is in 2020, it would have to be started now), no one in the US will be doing those things anymore, which would result in losing talent, institutional memory, and leadership.

Conclusion

There are certainly some merits to the new direction that Obama is setting for NASA. NASA administrator Charles Bolden talked about how this is a "bold challenge" for NASA that "will enable our path beyond low Earth orbit," but without any actual, operational program to follow that path. Certainly developing new technology is important, as is encouraging more international cooperation. However, I feel that Obama outsourced the more solved parts of what NASA does (launch to LEO), but is not having NASA work on the unsolved parts in an operational system--doing research about parts of the problem without putting it together into a complete system is not the same thing.

The lack of political motivation and NASA's inability to follow through on projects is also frustrating. There have probably been a half dozen or more attempts to replace the shuttle over the last 20 years, and they have all been canceled after varying amounts of investment. At least previously the shuttle continued operating.  This time the shuttle program is genuinely shutting down, without a replacement. Building the ISS would have been impossible without the capability of the shuttle; there is no system past, present, or currently planned with anywhere near the capability or versatility of the shuttle, and without an operational program to replace it, it seems that a lot of this capability may be lost entirely.

References

• Summary of the NASA budget proposal (pdf)
• Spaceflight Now article
• Another Spaceflight Now article about the future of the ISS
• Charles Bolden's statement (pdf)
• Augustine Committee's final report (pdf)
• NY Times graphic showing the entire federal budget. See if you can find NASA in there!

----- ----- ----- -----

Ken Oslund works on radar data as a software engineer at JPL. In his free time he enjoys rock climbing, wilderness backpacking, skiing, good beer, and large explosions*, which can only lead to one conclusion: He must have started out life as a mountain goat in the Bavarian alps before being transmogrified into a human after a bizarre incident involving a young boy, his pet tiger, a cardboard box, and CERN. The exact details are unknown though, and the Swiss and Germans have refused to acknowledge anything.

*Intentional and controlled explosions, viewed from a safe distance, like fireworks, etc

----- ----- ----- -----

This is Part 2 of a 2 part piece. You can find Part 1 here.

One O'Clock Daily - NASA in the Age of Obama: Perspective From a JPL Engineer, Part 1

As many of you know, yesterday President Obama made some stark announcements about the future of NASA, and manned spaceflight in the United States. In response to that, I'm delighted to bring you a two part piece by Ken Oslund, a JPL engineer, and former classmate of mine at Caltech. Today, Ken will be covering NASA's direction over the last six years—the programs that were in place, and their planned direction. Then, tomorrow, Ken will be summing up exactly what Obama's plan is for NASA, and what it means for the future of space exploration.

----- ----- ----- -----

Obama's Human Spaceflight Plan

Today (Feb 1, 2010) president Obama presented his FY 2010, and through that budget laid out major changes for NASA and particularly for US human space flight.

Before Obama's budget: Human spaceflight programs over the last 6 years

First, a brief summary of human spaceflight plans that have existed for the last 6 years.

Bush's program: Constellation

After the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry on Feb 1, 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) made a number of recommendations to improve safety, but essentially concluded that they did not consider the space shuttle to be sufficiently safe, and that every component of the system should be recertified if the shuttles were going to fly beyond 2010.

In January of 2004, the Bush administration responded to this by announcing Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration." That vision called for using the shuttle to complete the ISS, then retiring the shuttle in September 2010. It also created the Constellation program, which was meant to replace the space shuttle and take astronauts both to the ISS and beyond low earth orbit (LEO) to the moon, and ultimately Mars. To do this quickly and cheaply, it called for primarily using existing technology to create, among other things, two new launch vehicles: the Ares I to launch crew, and the Ares V heavy lifter to launch all other equipment. However, subsequent Bush budgets gradually decreased the funding for NASA, putting Constellation's success at risk.

NASA has already spent about $9 billion on the Constellation program, much of which has so far gone into development of the Ares I rocket and the associated crew capsule, since these would be the first things to fly, and (ideally) would be used to support the ISS.

The Augustine Committee

After President Obama took office, he formed the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee, usually known as the Augustine Committee, since it was chaired by Norman Augustine, and the full name is a bit of mouthful. The committee's responsibility was to determine what NASA could do with human spaceflight, how much it would cost, and how long it would take. Their principle finding was that the current program of record—Constellation—was underfunded and could not be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time with current funding projections. They found that due to a lack of funding, rather than exceedingly difficult technological problems, Ares I, which had been planned to start flying astronauts in 2015, would probably not be ready until at least 2017, Ares V faced even bigger delays and essentially no money existed at all for the lunar lander, delaying its completion indefinitely.

The committee postulated that an additional $3 billion/year (to put these numbers in perspective, NASA's 2010 budget is $18.7 billion, and the total federal 2011 budget is ~$3.69 trillion) would allow NASA to get the Constellation program back on track. They also made a number of recommendations about which path to take with human spaceflight, and while the Augustine Committee did not officially endorse one path over another—it was chartered only to determine possibilities, not to make recommendations about which possibility should be chosen—the members of the committee ended up favoring one of the possibilities over the others, and I will summarize that possibility here:

Space Shuttle

Fly out the remaining shuttle missions to complete the ISS, but allow those launches to extend into FY 2011 in case of unforeseen problems or delays (currently the last shuttle mission is supposed to launch in Sept 2010, and FY 2011 starts in October 2010). After those missions are finished, retire the shuttle as planned.

ISS

Funding for operating the ISS currently extends only through 2015, at which point the "plan of record" is to dump the ISS into the pacific ocean. However, there is widespread support among the international partners to extend the space station's operation through 2020, and no money exists in NASA's budget to build a way to de-orbit it anyways. The Augustine committee recommended that ISS operations be extended to 2020, but more about this will be decided at a meeting between station partners in Tokyo this March.

Constellation

This is where it gets interesting. In a nutshell, the committee felt that the Ares I would see relatively few flights, since all it can do alone is take astronauts to LEO, and would therefore be very expensive on a per-flight basis. Basically it would be the world's most expensive taxi. They recommended that NASA scrap the Ares I rocket, and fund or purchase commercial launch vehicles, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, to transport crew members to LEO. This would free up resources at NASA to develop the Ares V, or another heavy lift vehicle.

But what would NASA do with this heavy lift vehicle? The committee recommended what it refers to as the "flexible path". In order to land on the moon, you have to develop an enormous amount of technology: you need a crew capsule, a crew launch system, a heavy launch system, a lunar descent and landing system, various surface operation systems, such as the lunar rover, and an ascent/return system. However, to visit other interesting near by targets, such as Lagrange points or near earth asteroids (NEOs - Near Earth Objects), you only need about half that stuff: the crew capsule and the launch systems; the gravity of asteroids is low enough that you don't so much land on one as dock with it, so "landing" systems are much simpler. Thus you could visit some NEOs and test parts of the system while developing your lunar, or Martian, landing and surface systems. You'd get to the moon or Mars in about the same amount of time for only slightly more money compared to going straight there, and you'd get to do some missions that are both scientifically and technologically useful in the process. The Augustine committee still thought, though, that the moon and/or Mars should be ultimate destination.

----- ----- ----- -----

Ken Oslund works on radar data as a software engineer at JPL. In his free time he enjoys rock climbing, wilderness backpacking, skiing, good beer, and large explosions*, which can only lead to one conclusion: He must have started out life as a mountain goat in the Bavarian alps before being transmogrified into a human after a bizarre incident involving a young boy, his pet tiger, a cardboard box, and CERN. The exact details are unknown though, and the Swiss and Germans have refused to acknowledge anything.

*Intentional and controlled explosions, viewed from a safe distance, like fireworks, etc

----- ----- ----- -----

Now that you've got the background info, come back tomorrow for the full summary of Obama's new plan, and discussion about just what it means for the future of NASA and manned spaceflight.

One O'Clock Daily - Science Links of the Week

• The data visualization gallery of Michael Paukner - as demonstrated by the lovely graphic above. Fear Russia's space junk! The flickr gallery includes the work above, the work below, and many others. Thanks to Gizmodo for the pointer.




• More on barefoot running - A recent Harvard University study earned its place in the pages of Nature, as it examined the results of a extensive body of data on barefoot running, concluding that "[barefoot] runners use the architecture of the foot and leg and some clever Newtonian physics to avoid hurtful and potentially damaging impacts, equivalent to two to three times body weight, that shod heel-strikers repeatedly experience". Bye, bye running shoes. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that ten years from now, the traditional thick-heeled running shoe will be all but extinct.

• A Los Alamos teen developed an underground radio - and in the process, set a new depth record for successful radio transmissions, won an international science fair, and created a device that will prove invaluable to cavers and underground rescue teams everywhere. The problem he solved is an interesting one, but not a difficult one. I've often wondered why there aren't more stories of youths tackling real problems, and I'm beginning to think that it's a symptom of living in cities and suburbs. In the more "civilized" places, we tend to protect ourselves from the unclean realities of life. Could a teen living in Los Angeles, NYC, or San Francisco have developed this same technology? Yeah, no problem. But would such a teen ever have known about or recognized the issue of deep-cave communications? Not a chance. So, thank you to the Los Alamoses of the world, where youth are still able to cut their teeth on wild nature.

One O'Clock Daily - The Staring Abyss of Video Games, Part 2

It should be no surprise to long time readers that video games are having an effect on our lives, but while video games may have a more-or-less indisputable passive effect—making us better at things related to playing games, like pushing buttons on a controller, or reacting to changes on a screen—it's rare that video games have been able to add to the theoretical knowledge base of a subject.

Now that's all changing, and the horsemen heralding this intellectual apocalypse are as unlikely a pair of bedfellows as there ever were: Madden Football and FoldIt. The one is a best-selling sports simulator, produced by video games giant Electronic Arts. The other is a scientific curiosity, created by two scientists at the University of Washington as a research exercise. In Madden Football, players, well, play football. In FoldIt, players are challenged with finding the protein folding configuration that leads to the lowest potential energy—a computationally hard problem that even the most powerful supercomputers are hard pressed to solve.

Both of them are making waves. Madden's video game tactics are starting to appear on real fields, while FoldIt's leaderboard has become a quest for the nobel prize, as players try to design new proteins from the ground up, to tackle diseases like cancer, AIDS, and Alzheimer's.

But these two games share common traits which lets us gain a deeper understanding into just how they're tapping into the human brain. You see, the human brain is particularly good at working with abstractions. Our ability to talk about aggregate demand, temperature, and #hashtags is one of the defining characteristics of our species. But before any one of us can actually work with the abstractions we've created, we must understand the concepts behind the abstraction—and that's often the hard part.

To understand the abstractions in football requires an understanding of the complicated movements of the players, of where, during the play, their attention is focused, and of how, and when, they can react in certain ways. The entire system of offenses and defenses, and their interplay, is built on this core of individual reactions.

The molecules of FoldIt, on the other hand, obey physical laws. Their properties are determined by Maxwell's equations and by quantum mechanics, and the potential energy of every atom—and there can be hundreds, or even thousands of atoms in a single protein—depends on all the others. The energy of the whole protein, then, is the result of the combination of millions of individual interactions. The scientific term for this mess of interrelated equations is grunge.

Video games like Madden Football and FoldIt serve as shortcuts to the abstraction. Madden Football lets us understand the interaction of offense and defense, without having to mentally keep track of the actions and motions of all the individual players. FoldIt lets us make changes to a protein, moving around just a few atoms, or even entire chains of them, and understand the effect of those changes on the total energy, without needing to understand partial differential equations. In both cases, the game keeps track of the grunge, letting us focus on understanding the abstraction.

That the results are remarkable should come as no surprise. Video games like these are doing nothing less than letting people focus their entire brainpower on the high level problems in question. Prior to FoldIt, even professional scientists would have to study for years to understand anything about the nature of protein energies. Now, you can download the program and begin playing in less than five minutes.

These games have also drastically reduced the learning cycle. By shortening the time between the test and the result, the reinforcement cycle, something very much present in humans, is strengthened. We learn instantly that this offense beats that defense, and if we want to make a subtle change to the way our players are standing on the line of scrimmage, or how they move once the play is in action, we only have to hit the reset button. There's no time wasted waiting for real players to walk back up the field, learn the new play, and assume their positions. The virtual linebackers are instantly ready, with a perfect knowledge of what we want them to do.

And where do we go from here? Video games have long been used as a recruiting and training tool by the US Army, but they have not yet, to my knowledge, begun to influence actual battlefield tactics. Maybe that's the next step. The list of problems out there to be abstracted is wide and varied, and we're just now seeing the tip of the iceberg.

----- ----- ----- -----

This is Part 2 of a 2-part series. See Part 1, here.

One O'Clock Daily - Placeholder

I've been feeling i bit sick this morning, so I'm going to push today's One O'Clock Daily to tomorrow.  I'd rather give you guys the full effort when I'm feeling better, than a half-job.

One O'Clock Daily - The Staring Abyss of Video Games, Part 1

"If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you."
—Friedrich Nietzsche

On Monday, Wired posted a new piece about the changing nature of video games. But it wasn't about how video games are changing—it was about how video games are changing us.

So check out the article, and the video of a football play that could only have been thought of in a video game, and come back tomorrow for the discussion.

One O'Clock Daily - What If the Earth Had Rings?

Science is at its best when it opens more questions than it answers—when it makes us ask, "What if?"

From the video's description:

What the rings would look like from different cities and latitudes accross the world. It's interesting to imagine how it would effect culture throughout time. It would have influenced religion, mythology, navigation, etc..

I think we can safely say that in such a world, flat-Earth theories would be dead on arrival, but would Christ the Redeemer still have been built in the same spot?