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An Eponymous Post

The author of Behold the Man pens a review of this weblog's eponymous novel. (I hasten to add that both books are in the not-for-everyone category; my appreciation for both of them is rather, shall we say, carefully modulated.)

[ 20020921 ]

 
I Get Letters

Nothing like a mention on InstaPundit to provoke responses. Here I'll deal with the comments on my claim that Desert Storm correlated only weakly with lunar phases (weakly - phases? get it?).

To get right to the point for once, I still contend that anyone who thinks they can develop an algorithm that will generate the date of the attack to within a day or two is kidding themselves. It might be possible to narrow it to a 10- or 12-day period each month, but that's about it.

Those who pointed out to me that the air campaign of Desert Storm began at New Moon were Bruce Campbell, John Tillinghast, and "Andy X," who pointed out that it actually began at 0300 local time on Thu 17 Jan 91.

But why 0300? Why fritter away more than nine hours of darkness (civil twilight in Baghdad, 44°25' E, 33°20' N, ended at 1745 Wed 16 Jan 91 and began again at 0639 the next morning) -- in fact, over 70% of the night?

Because we told them when we'd attack. The UN set a deadline of "on or before 15 January" for withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. We attacked precisely 24 hours after this deadline expired, at midnight GMT on the 17th of January. Baghdad is 3 hours ahead. Seven-tenths of a moonless night was gone -- and it didn't matter. If you're going to wait for most of the night to pass before attacking, it doesn't need to be New Moon -- it can be within 3 or 4 days of Full.

What happens next? Well, it's reasonably obvious that an attack won't necessarily wait for New Moon, and it certainly won't be confined to a couple of days around New Moon. This story notes that "any attack would begin with a lengthy air campaign led by B-2 bombers armed with 2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs to knock out Iraqi command and control headquarters and air defenses."

Presumably six B-2s will be moved to Diego Garcia from Whiteman AFB (just down the road from KC; they do flyovers here at baseball games and such every now and then). The B-2 bomber can carry 16 GBU-32 bombs, which are MK-84 bombs upgraded with JDAMs, most of which are likely to hit within 40 feet of their targets.

Consulting an atlas, we find that it's well under 3,000 statute miles from Diego Garcia to Baghdad, meaning that the B-2s could make the round trip without refueling, presumably in less than 10 hours. With sufficient ground support and enough pilots, each bomber could carry out 2 missions per day, indefinitely. In one month this would add up to nearly 6,000 bombs of the type described above.

An interesting question is whether we've even got that many. This source implies that the current inventory is, indeed, in excess of 6,000 (and notes that the catastrophic error rate -- that is, those which caused "friendly fire" casualties in Afghanistan -- was 2 out of 4,600), so based on this metric alone, the air campaign could last for a month. After which we could probably send in school-crossing guards in day-glo orange vests to round up prisoners.

 
Apollo 12: The Movie

Well, a piece of it, anyway, representing

Animations here; explanation of Langragian points here; calculation of L1's distance here.

L2, by the way, is where the Next Generation Space Telescope is to be stationed.

 
M1: The Movie

Background on the Crab Nebula here; movie here; high-speed connection recommended, though the *.avi is 1.7 MB, small enough to download in 8 minutes or so even with a crummy dial-up connection. Probably better than anything that just hit the theaters, even though it's only 16 seconds long.

Shockwaves propagate outward, in both X-rays and visible light, like ripples in a pond, except that this "pond" is 10 light-years across and the waves are moving at ~0.5c.

(All via Yahoo! and Space.com -- and the unsung hero of our time, the American taxpayer.)

[ 20020917 ]

 
Amateur Asteroid Searches

Glenn Reynolds mentions Timothy Ferris' new book. Possibly the largest amateur effort to find near-Earth asteroids is right here in KC.

 
The Hundredth Planet

-- is being announced at a conference today. Original news release here; also stories from Ananova, Reuters, and UPI.

What's it like? The short answer is "Jupiter," but nobody grazes around in Arcturus looking for short answers, so ...

According to the Hipparcos catalog, the primary, t¹ Gruis, has a trigonometric parallax of 0.03004 arc-seconds, which means that this star is 33.29 parsecs, that is 108.6 light-years, from the Sun. This source gives its visual magnitude as +6.04, so its absolute magnitude (that is, how bright it would be at 10 parsecs) is +3.43, which is 1.39 magnitudes, or 3.6 times as bright, as the Sun.

One would therefore expect it to be more massive than the Sun; this source gives the relationship as L/L_Sun ~ (M/M_Sun)^3.9, implying about 1.4 solar masses. Sure enough, the new planet is described as orbiting 3 times as far from t¹ Gruis as Earth does from the Sun, and taking 4 years to do so. Kepler's Third Law yields a period of 5.2 years for a planet at this distance -- in our Solar System; speeding that up to 4 years would require a primary of around 1.3 solar masses, close enough to the theoretical result above to tell us that t¹ Gruis is a main-sequence star, or nearly so. And indeed, its spectral type is variously given as G₀V or G₃IV (lengthy explanation of spectral classification here).

A planet 3 AU from a star 3.6 times as bright as the Sun is getting 40% as much sunlight as Earth does, or just slightly less than Mars. So a sufficiently large, rocky moon of this planet (which is said to be 1.5 times the mass of Jupiter) could rather resemble Mars. Unless it were at least a couple of million kilometers from the planet, however, it would be likely to experience high charged-particle radiation flux, as do all the major moons of Jupiter except Callisto, making it an exceptionally hazardous place to be. Assuming tidally-locked rotation, getting it out of the radiation belt would give it a day/night cycle of a couple of weeks or more, not very much like Mars' 24½ hours.

Can I see t¹ Gruis? Not easily, if you're in the north temperate zone; it's over 48 degrees south of the celestial equator, so at my latitude it would never be more than 3 degrees above the southern horizon, and then (during early evening hours) only in October and November. Also, at sixth magnitude it requires either a good dark-sky site or binoculars. This map indicates that t¹ Gruis is just over 2° southeast, that is, below and to the left on the map, of b Gruis, the star at the "center" of the constellation. All this is around 20 degrees south of Fomalhaut, one of the brightest stars in the southern sky, and which I called "a portent of the end of summer" in my meandering Perseid meteor shower report.

Jay Manifold [10:01 AM]

[ 20020916 ]

 
Th' Inconstant Moon

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing to Tom Maguire's suggestion that

here is a new project for someone. The launch of Desert Storm was influenced by the lunar cycle - the US military likes to fight with a full moon, or a new moon, or something. Has to do with our relative advantage in night vision technology .... Anyway, check the dates for Desert Storm, research our military preferences, check the calendar, and you can pinpoint the start of a war in Iraq to within a couple of days in January, or in February.

Well, not really. Desert Storm began at 0400 Sun 24 Feb 91. Looking up some likely coordinates (and the time zone thereof) in an atlas and using this handy application produces the following output:

U.S. Naval Observatory Astronomical Applications Department Sun and Moon Data for One Day
The following information is provided for (longitude E46.0, latitude N29.0): Sunday 24 February 1991 Universal Time + 3h
SUN
Begin civil twilight	06:04
Sunrise	06:27
Sun transit	12:10
Sunset	17:52
End civil twilight	18:16
MOON
Moonrise	12:11 on preceding day
Moonset	02:51
Moonrise	13:17
Moon transit	20:34
Moonset	03:46 on following day
Phase of the Moon on 24 February:waxing gibbous with 76% of the Moon's visible disk illuminated.

Coalition forces advanced rapidly -- 170 miles on the first day in one instance; some units advanced 25-30 miles per hour. They won't be any slower this time, even if they bother massing at the border first rather than just dropping straight in. Baghdad is less than 300 miles from either Kuwait or Turkey. I conclude that only the first-night illumination conditions are worth worrying about.

In which case, the only constraint appears to be a Moonless sky for a couple of hours before civil twilight. Any time between New Moon and 3-4 days before Full Moon satisfies this, which is to say at least 11 days out of every month. Doesn't pin down the date of attack much. Here are the ranges for upcoming months:

Month	New Moon	Full Moon minus 4 days
October	Sun 6	Thu 17
November	Mon 4	Sat 16
December	Wed 4	Sun 15
January	Thu 2	Tue 14
February	Sat 1	Wed 12
March	Mon 3	Sat 15

This source notes that the Ramadan fast begins on Wed 6 Nov this year. It ends on Fri 6 Dec. So the November window may be somewhat less likely -- the regime could conceivably be toppled in 48 hours, but it's taking a chance. On this basis, therefore, any "October surprise" is likely to begin during the first full week of that month, and delay past mid-month pushes the attack out to the 2nd week of December.

Jay Manifold [5:53 PM]

[ 20020914 ]

 
In Response To A Certain Infamous Bumper Sticker

I CELEBRATED 9/11
THE PROPAGATOR OF THESE OPINIONS KNOWINGLY PARTICIPATES IN AND CONDONES THE CREATION AND SPREAD OF ANTI-SEMITIC CONSPIRACY THEORIES, PSEUDO-ENVIRONMENTALIST DOOMSAYING, AND APOLOGETICS FOR ISLAMOFASCIST TYRANTS; IS ENGAGED IN VANDALIZING OF OTHERS' PROPERTY IN THE GUISE OF FREE SPEECH; AND IS URGING THAT AMERICANS RENEGE ON THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO MEANINGFULLY DEFEND THE FREEST NATION ON EARTH.

UPDATE (legal advice): Lest this get out of control, dear reader, let me say that if I were you, I wouldn't print this thing out and go slapping it on cars. Nor would I necessarily lay a hand on anyone trying to put one of the original "I Caused 9/11" stickers on my vehicle. We're all no doubt envisioning worthless adolescent punks who deserve to lose some teeth, but what if the perpetrator is female, or a precocious 12-year-old?

If you think you're at risk of involuntary receipt of an "I Caused 9/11" sticker, I recommend keeping something like this handy, with which to disable the vandal, and of course a mobile phone with which to call the police. Be prepared to press the most serious charge that can stick, whatever it might be, with an eye to giving the perpetrator some jail time.

Jay Manifold [10:11 AM]

[ 20020913 ]

 
In the Front Lines of the Florida Election Mess

An election judge in Duval County sends me this account:

Early on we had just a bit of trouble with the new machine that is an optical scanner that reads & records votes. People fill in ovals with a pen or #2 pencil, it was kicking ballots back out but it was quickly solved. The Inspector clerks who check voter IDs with the registration books & were not tearing the ballots out at the perforation quite smoothly. They were on a heavy type paper. We had 3 ballots, Dem. Repub. & non Partisan.

In the beginning of the day when I was "Accu vote clerk" I sat by the new machine & told voters how to put their ballots in to be counted. Also handed out the "I Voted" stickers.

Around 6:30 the man who was supervisor (a Republican) of our polling place got so angry when he learned he had to keep the place open til 9, he was ranting & raving & turned on the TV in this clubhouse to see what was happening on the news (it is against the law to do that, no TV, radio or newspapers alllowed in the polling places down here) he kept saying it was Janet Reno's fault that she made them do it & made all sorts of other nasty remarks about her. He went outside & shot off his mouth to Fox News who sent a camera & reporter out to our polling place.

Later sometime before 9 o'clock 2 people from the election board came out & asked him to come outside, he yelled at them & refused to go at first but finally did. I think he was told he would not be working anymore elections.

When he came back inside with them he yelled "You haven't heard the last of this, I'm not giving up".

The fact of the matter was that alot of polling places in several counties scattered all over the state did not get open until 8:30 to10 AM or later & Jeb Bush ordered the polls to stay open til 9 PM.

Most bloggers who've commented on this seem to agree with the GOP supervisor quoted above. To be charitable, it isn't obvious why. I guess some people think that human foibles correlate with partisan orientation.

Jay Manifold [10:11 AM]

 
I Wannabe Anarchy

I'm seeing various mentions (including Instapundit's, of course) of this Reuters story:

Once an infrastructure is established the costs of getting to Mars will go down, which could open up the possibility for different types of expeditions.

"If they were governmental or international (expeditions), Antarctic-style restraint might be feasible. On the other hand, if the explorers were privately funded adventurers of free-enterprise, even anarchic disposition, the Wild West model would be more likely to prevail," [Sir Martin Rees of the Institute of Astronomy] said.

The historical record, however, indicates otherwise:

[Jonathan] Karpoff [, Metcalfe Professor of Finance at the University of Washington’s School of Business Administration] examined 91 arctic expeditions during the “heroic age” of 1818-1909. He looked at the expeditions’ objectives, countries of origin, leaders’ experience, funding and modes of travel. The most important determinant of an expedition’s success, he concluded, was whether the expedition was funded by public or private dollars. Private expeditions, such as Peary’s, achieved most of the noteworthy arctic successes. Publicly funded expeditions, such as Greely’s, suffered a disproportionate share of the tragedies.

I think Edmund Hamilton may have had it right; his

most popular and most reprinted story is not a space opera, but a serious look at the colonization of space. He first wrote this story in the 1930's as Colonists of Mars, but it was universally rejected by editors as too grim. At the urging of his wife, Leigh Brackett, he dusted this story off and revised it. It was accepted by Thrilling Wonder Stories (for which it had been rejected earlier) and appeared in the December 1952 issue as What's It Like Out There?

-- an astonishingly downbeat story from the Golden Age of SF; it reads like something written by a disillusioned Vietnam veteran.

Jay Manifold [9:44 AM]

[ 20020911 ]

 
On Rediscovering Myself as an American

I could write a long, unconsciously narcissistic 9/11 piece redolent with the odor of Boomer self-regard. I could imply that what's really important about the past year is how it's affected my generation. I could go on and on about my personal struggle to develop a proper mental framework for the world we now live in. I could lament about how I am still a Libertarian, but my party has fallen behind.

But what I think really happened is that I grew up. In this post, I'm going to draw an analogy between the development of people as employees and their development as citizens, with remarks on the maturation process in general. I ask my readers to consider the analogy carefully, as some aspects of it -- which I will try to explain in greater detail -- could be easily miscontrued, which would lead immediately to accusations of statism, warmongering, and general nastiness.

Several years ago I received training, through my former employer, on the Blanchard concept of "situational leadership." This is based on the notion that employees can be characterized as exhibiting one of four main "development levels," namely:

• D1 - "Enthusiastic Beginner"


• D2 - "Disillusioned Learner"


• D3 - "Reluctant Contributor"


• D4 - "Peak Performer"

Employees usually progress from D1 to at least D2, and often D3, on their own. The trick is getting them through the D2/D3 trough and on up to D4. Where an employee falls on this scale is determined by comparing their competence with their commitment:

• D1 - low competence, high commitment


• D2 - some competence, low commitment


• D3 - higher competence, variable commitment


• D4 - high competence, high commitment

(Very, very few managers in Corporate America practice true situational leadership, but that's a rant for another time. Besides, this post isn't about how to lead. It's about how to behave, or rather, how to meaningfully contribute, in what I regard as a fight for the life of human civilization.)

Here is a graphical representation. Alert readers will notice that I have replaced the Ds with Cs, preparatory to catapulting my analogy in their general direction.

high	C1			C4
Commitment			C3
		C2
low		Competence		high

I contend that one begins, sometime in childhood, with very little knowledge but great enthusiasm; think of first-graders saying the Pledge of Allegiance. In late childhood and early adolescence there is greater knowledge but also an attitude of cynicism, if not outright rebellion. In late adolescence and early adulthood still greater knowledge may be accompanied by a great variety of attitudes. Later in adulthood, some people achieve a greater degree of maturity -- which does not mean political unanimity, as I will explain below. Nor, just to make things more complicated, is there necessarily a neat progression by age. For that matter, the same person can be a C4 in one situation and a C2 in another, as I will also attempt to explain below.

In the context of citizenship development, by "competence" I mean not only one's familiarity with political processes, but with any vocation or avocation as well. Here I introduce a new term: "technological quotient," abbreviated TQ. Someone with a high TQ has a high value of TC/OC, where TC and OC simply mean "technical competence" and "other competence." I use the idea of TQ to distinguish among technologists, non-technologists, and technologists with good people skills -- or those with good people skills who happen to be fairly technical as well.

"Commitment" is harder for me to define. "Patriotism" would be best, were it not loaded with negative connotations. C4s, and many C1s, are not loudmouthed rednecks. Perhaps "cooperativeness" or "constructive engagement" will do. What commitment emphatically does not mean is "unquestioning obedience to governmental authority," nor does it imply political agreement among all high-commitment people -- though I would expect broad adherence to something like The American's Creed; high commitment does suggest fairly strict conformance to principles.

With that said, examples of each type are:

• C1 - children; many economically marginalized people (rural, ghetto, barrio)


• C2 - adolescents; many low-TQ people (literati, non-technical academics)


• C3 - young adults; many high-TQ people (techies, most Libertarians); many skeptical Democrats and Republicans


• C4 - many relatively prosperous people; most mainstream Democrats/Republicans; some Libertarians

In this scenario, what the blogosphere has dubbed "idiotarians" are C2s, or possibly alienated (low-commitment) C3s. Most political bloggers are C4s.

Differences among C4s are likely, especially in the present situation, to concern the proper role of government, especially at the Federal level, and might (in project management parlance) be described as "inclusion" vs "exclusion." Should airline security be Federalized? Alternatively, should more aspects of air travel, eg airport construction and air traffic control, be privatized? Should we invade Iraq, or blockade Saudi Arabia, or both, or neither? What about missile defense? Immigration? There is no particular reason for C4s to agree with one another on these issues, or many others.

The implied title of "Situational Citizenship" for this whole model suggests that people can temporarily become C4s. Both juries I've served on were utterly solemn convocations of deeply committed participants who likely exhibited a wide variety of behavior outside the courtroom; and the countless heroes of last September must have been as diverse a collection of people as can be imagined until the awful events began to unfold. It could be argued that everyone in a voting booth is a momentary C4.

Then there's little ol' me. In the past year, I've gone from being an anarcho-capitalist, low-commitment C3 -- or maybe even C2, depending on who you ask -- to still-pretty-much-of-an-anarchist C4, to the extent that such a thing is humanly possible. I don't think I'm the only one. Some have said that we should try to live as we did before the attacks, or the terrorists will have forced a change upon us. But there's nothing wrong with becoming a Peak Performer. This is our time. And we will win.

Jay Manifold [5:22 AM]

[ 20020910 ]

 
Watch This Space

No more posting today, but be sure to drop in tomorrow; I'm trying to launch a meme, or rather a model, and have chosen the first anniversary of you-know-what to do it.

Jay Manifold [1:05 PM]

 
Hoag's Object

Matthew Gifford, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, and Iain Murray (and probably others as well) have thoroughly scooped me on this. I can only add pointers to the Hubble Heritage page and this charming amateur observation.

Jay Manifold [8:20 AM]

[ 20020909 ]

 
It's A Midwestern Thing -- I Don't Understand

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing to this Jeff Jarvis rant about Californians.

Nothing would be easier for your Midwestern correspondent to agree with -- if he hadn't opened up the KCStar yesterday morning and found a special section called "Voices from the Heartland," which contains two of the most hateful pieces of writing ever to disgrace that newspaper. They don't seem to have put this section online, so I'll just type in some excerpts to give you the flavor.

Evan S. Connell, who wrote the KC-based novels which were turned into this Merchant-Ivory film, quotes H.G. Wells as having written: "If you make men sufficiently angry or fearful the hot red eyes of cavemen will glare out at you." Except that the "cavemen" Connell has in mind turn out to be us, not al-Qa'eda. "We are frightened, angry, thirsty for blood, glaring out at the world with hot red eyes." Americans have a "feeble grasp of history." The President "exhibit[s] that dangerous obtusity we have come to expect" and "... goaded innumerable Muslims, never mind North Korea, with his axis-of-evil comment."

And ultimately, it's all the fault of ... well, it's our fault, of course, but there is the antecedent of "... a legacy of hatred bequeathed to the Muslim world centuries ago by Frankish Crusaders."

Well, that certainly helps explain all those Confederate terrorist cells who keep blowing up buildings and buses full of damnyankees.

What? There aren't any? Hmm ... maybe that feeble grasp of history isn't a bug. Maybe it's a feature.

The other steaming pile in the special section is from Daniel Woodrell, who wrote the novel which got made into this movie. He proclaims that any military response is nothing but revenge -- presumably by Christian fundamentalists: "Yes, sure, of course, blood must be the answer. Blood of them all, each and every, high and low, smite them, bomb them from flesh to vapor, cleanse them from our fears with that savage scouring release of blood. We know it well. Yea, verily. The jawbone of an ass and laser-guided missiles. I walk not through the valley of the shadow and fear not since my boots splash in the warm flowing blood of them and theirs."

Or maybe it's that big-oil conspiracy we all know about: "The jumble of people and places, the drums pounding, jets fueling, troops waving farewell at the dock, babes crying amidst rubble, the roar of dollars whooshing into the pipeline."

But fear not, there is a faithful remnant: "... faint sounds of dissent are heard." Well, not so faint, actually -- getting a full page of one's vitriol in an aggressively promoted section of the KCStar is pretty nearly the PR windfall of a lifetime. But I digress. "Still there are fellow citizens who forget to tug their forelocks in meek obedience but do remember the virtues of balky stances, and these anchorites would ask hard questions of our leaders concerning motives and means and profit and ultimate designs." We can stop The Conspiracy!

The sad thing, of course, is that this country needs an intelligent anti-war opposition. Instead it's got Connell and Woodrell. God help us.

Thankfully, these two are more than counterbalanced by the other nine contributors, and thank you, Jesus, for Buck O'Neil, whose "feeble grasp of history" suits me just fine:

One thing about it is, the attacks brought us together. For a little while there after September 11, it didn't matter if you were a Democrat or a Republican [or a Libertarian -- JDM]. Yeah. It didn't matter if you were white or black. Yeah. We were Americans. We gave blood. We gave money. We cried. We all cried.

That's the America we can be. This is a wonderful country. That's why some people hate us. They hate us because we're wonderful. They hate us because we're strong. When the Egyptians were powerful, people hated them. When the Romans conquered the world, people hated them. It's our time now.

Our time.

Jay Manifold [4:25 AM]

[ 20020908 ]

 
The Sentinel

Dave Trowbridge nails it with the astonishing coincidence of today's reading from the Episcopal lectionary; here's a link to the passage from Ezekiel 33.

And here are the words of another sentinel:

"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

Jay Manifold [7:10 PM]

[ 20020906 ]

 
But Does He Support ...

-- the Kashmir Resolution? Lileks, I mean (via Instapundit).

Jay Manifold [1:24 PM]

 
Gold vs Brains (III)

A while back, I semi-predicted:

How many years [will] it be before someone genetically engineer[s] a bacterium to extract [gold]?

Well, it's already happening with alfalfa, reports Lee Dye on ABCNews.com:

"I think we can get 20 percent of the weight of the plant in gold," [Jorge Gardea-Torresdey of UTEP] says.

More info here and here; this paper says:

The nucleation of Au nanoparticles inside living plants is a remarkable phenomenon, which deserves a deeper study in relation with possible applications .... it may constitute a new method for the mining of gold from solution and soils as an inexpensive method for the purification of economically important elements.

and

The results indicate that live alfalfa plants may be viable cost-effective means of phytomining gold from soils at low and high concentrations.

Of course, the technique will eventually be expanded to other heavy metals as well. Someday, a farmer's field -- or an evaporation pond -- will be the infrastructure for producing a weapon of mass destruction.

Jay Manifold [8:58 AM]

[ 20020905 ]

 
Nano, Nano (A Continuing Series)

UPI points (well, with some digging) to Atomic scale memory at a silicon surface. Browsing the *.pdf of the entire article, we find:

The highest density achieved in hard-disk demos is about 100 Gbit inch^-2, whereas the Si atom memory exhibits 250 Tbit inch^-2 [ie, an improvement by a factor of 2,500, from 10¹¹ to 2.5 ´ 10¹⁴ -- JDM]. However, the push towards the atomic density limit requires a sacrifice in speed, as demonstrated in figure 5. Practical data storage might evolve in a similar direction, with the gain in speed slows [sic] down as the density increases. Somewhere on the way to the atomic scale ought to be an optimum combination of density and speed.

A glance at figure 5, "Trade-off between readout speed and storage density at the atomic limit," suggests that megabit data-transfer rates could be achieved at a storage density of 100 terabits per square inch.

Jay Manifold [3:09 PM]

 
Manhattan is Obsolete

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing to Geitner Simmons' comments on Nicholas Kristof's commentary on the High Plains. To be sure, the economy characteristic of rural Nebraska a century ago is a dwindling irrelevance; the swath of green running from North Dakota to west Texas on this map, and reaching as far east as north-central Iowa, tells the tale. But it tells another tale too: with virtually no exceptions, the largest growth in the past decade occurred in exurbs and in the intermountain West.

To quote myself:

The density of central cities is an artifact of an earlier time, where the value of information combined with limited bandwidth and personal transportation to require close physical proximity. Information is still valuable, but bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper by at least an order of magnitude each decade. Commuting by car, even with only one person per vehicle, is only one-third as expensive as it was in 1980.

My day job is [NB: that was then; this is now] at the main headquarters office campus of a telecommunications firm, which I understand to be the largest build-to-suit office construction project in the world. The tallest building is five stories. I have seen the future, and it's about 50 feet high.

The WTC should not be rebuilt; such verticality is wretchedly obsolete. Tenants of high-rise buildings should move out to where there's some room. And while they are unlikely to relocate to the Sand Hills (Carhenge notwithstanding), this map (warning: > 2 MB *.pdf) tells the story of America, a story that is far from over.

Jay Manifold [1:27 PM]

 
The Unsurprising Results

With thanks to the pointer from Iain Murray, proprietor of my favorite virtual pub, The Edge of England's Sword ...

What revolution are You?
Made by altern_active

Jay Manifold [6:48 AM]

[ 20020904 ]

 
Who Says Astronomy Isn't Practical? (IV)

(Those just grazing in may wish to read this post and its predecessors.) NASA to select new space telescope all but announces that NGST-class instruments are already on orbit -- as spy satellites:

NASA and its contractors turned to the military to figure out how to launch a [six-meter] mirror ... on a rocket with a payload container measuring just five meters in diameter. The container also must hold a sun shield roughly the size of a tennis court when fully extended.

"All the deployables have heritage in the (Department of Defense) world," said [project manager Bernard] Seery. "We've had to push the state-of-the-art."

Borrowing from de-classified spy satellite technology, Lockheed and TRW both are proposing fold-up mirrors that would unfurl in space after the telescope reaches its intended orbit.

Turning to this handy page, we find that the diffraction-limited resolution of a 6 m aperture at, say, 5500 Å works out to 0.02307 arcseconds. This equals 1.12 ´ 10^-8 radian, or 1 part in 8.9 million of distance to target. So at "940,000 miles," ie 1.5 million km, the NGST would have 170-meter resolution. But at 500 km, that is, in low Earth orbit, it would have a resolution of 5.6 centimeters, and in geosynchronous orbit it would have a resolution of 4.5 meters.

If such a telescope were equipped with the CCD array mentioned in this post, the "footprint" of a single image would be, respectively:

6 meter aperture; 20k ´ 20k CCD; l = 5500 Å
Distance (km)	Resolution	Footprint
1,500,000	170 m	3,400 ´ 3,400 km
40,000	4.5 m	90 ´ 90 km
500	5.6 cm	1,120 ´ 1,120 m

One interesting constraint on operations is the data rate. That 400-megapixel CCD would produce -- assuming 24 bit-planes, 8 each for red, green, and blue, the ubiquitous "16.7 million colors" -- 9.6 gigabits per image. Assuming the use of a 30:1 compression scheme, this would drop to 320 megabits per image.

To quote myself from a while back ... a few years ago I built a spreadsheet based on pp 6-15 of this book, which includes some fairly hairy formulas and arcane terminology (eg, "transmitter modulation loss," "received signal-to-noise spectral density ratio in the data channel," etc). Here's a snapshot of possible performance for an NGST-class spysat in GEO:

User Inputs
total spacecraft transmitter power	20 watts
total Earth-station transmitter power	1000 watts
downlink frequency (X-band)	10000 MHz = 10 GHz
spacecraft antenna radius	1 meter
Earth-station antenna radius	5 meters
bandwidth	10 MHz
Constants
p	3.141592654
distance	40,000 kilometers
spacecraft antenna pointing loss	0.78 (-1.1 dB)
transmitter modulation loss	0.39 (-4.1 dB)
Boltzmann's constant	1.38E-23 w/Hz-K
system noise temperature	37 K
Downlink Outputs
transmitting-antenna gain	46.42 dB
receiving-antenna gain	60.40 dB
space loss	-204.48 dB
normalized noise power spectral density	5.11E-22 w/Hz
total received signal-to-noise spectral density ratio	127.19 dB
received signal-to-noise spectral density ratio in the data channel	125.04 dB
signal power	1.63E-09 watts
noise power	5.11E-15 watts
channel capacity	183 Mbits/sec
Uplink Outputs
transmitting-antenna gain	59.69 dB
receiving-antenna gain	45.71 dB
space loss	-203.77 dB
normalized noise power spectral density	5.11E-22 w/Hz
total received signal-to-noise spectral density ratio	144.54 dB
received signal-to-noise spectral density ratio in the data channel	142.40 dB
signal power	8.87E-08 watts
noise power	5.11E-15 watts
channel capacity	240 Mbits/sec

From the above, it appears that such a satellite could transmit a new image as often as every couple of seconds, permitting continuous real-time monitoring of, for example, vehicle movement over an area of 8,100 km².

Jay Manifold [4:33 PM]