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[ 20030131 ]
Because It Can Become Good (IV)
Via Glenn Reynolds, in Tech Central Station's Simple Goodness, Lee Harris writes:
If the whole of the United States were to disappear tomorrow in a catastrophic earthquake like a second Atlantis, it would not materially benefit a single suffering man, woman, or child anywhere on our planet.
... there is only one way that ... goal[s] can be achieved on [an] extraordinary scale ... and that is if the United States of America continues to be rich, powerful, and superbly organized.
(For the exceptionally masochistic diligent reader, earlier posts in this series are here, here, here, and here.)
Jay Manifold [8:00 AM]
[ 20030130 ]
Nanotechnology, Risk Management, and Institutions
Again via Glenn Reynolds, the magisterial Freeman Dyson reviews Michael Crichton's Prey, and it's all about risk management:
What is the appropriate response to dangers that are hypothetical and poorly understood? In this matter, as in other situations where public health hazards and environmental risks must be assessed and regulated, there are two strongly opposed points of view. One point of view is based on the "precautionary principle." The precautionary principle says that when there is any risk of a major disaster, no action should be permitted that increases the risk. If, as often happens, an action promises to bring substantial benefits together with some risk of a major disaster, no balancing of benefits against risks is to be allowed. Any action carrying a risk of major disaster must be prohibited, regardless of the costs of prohibition.
The opposing point of view holds that risks are unavoidable, that no possible course of action or inaction will eliminate risks, and that a prudent course of action must be based on a balancing of risks against benefits and costs. In particular, when any prohibition of dangerous science and technology is contemplated, one of the costs that must be considered is the cost to human freedom. I call the first point of view precautionary and the second point of view libertarian.
Notice, however, that at the extremes, these are merely risk avoidance and risk acceptance; other risk response strategies, transference ("seeking to shift the consequence of a risk to a third party together with ownership of the response") and mitigation ("seek[ing] to reduce the probability and/or consequences of an adverse risk event to an acceptable threshold") are not explored (definitions are drawn from the PMBOK). K. Eric Drexler, and undoubtedly others, have addressed these, as for example in the idea of "fact forums" and "science courts."
Then Dyson draws a characteristically masterful analogy:
Three hundred and fifty-nine years ago, the poet John Milton wrote a speech with the title Areopagitica, addressed to the Parliament of England. He was arguing for the liberty of unlicensed printing. I am suggesting that there is an analogy between the seventeenth-century fear of moral contagion by soul-corrupting books and the twenty-first-century fear of physical contagion by pathogenic microbes. In both cases, the fear was neither groundless nor unreasonable. In 1644, when Milton was writing, England had just emerged from a long and bloody civil war, and the Thirty Years' War, which devastated Germany, had four years still to run. These seventeenth- century wars were religious wars, in which differences of doctrine played a great part. In that century, books not only corrupted souls but also mangled bodies. The risks of letting books go free into the world were rightly regarded by the English Parliament as potentially lethal as well as irreversible. Milton argued that the risks must nevertheless be accepted. I believe his message may still have value for our own times, if the word "book" is replaced by the word "experiment."
Though Dyson does not mention it, Milton's argument -- "look how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue" -- was undoubtedly based on Matthew 13:24-30.
This kind of hands-off approach, exemplified in the US by this Constitutional provision (see final sentence), would seem to be at odds with much popular opinion, as exemplified by this news item. But there is an important sense in which Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore is right: a selection process is underway, at the level of the nation-state, favoring those who develop the most effective and enduring institutions. His prescription, to my mind, is superficial and perhaps even superstitious, and his perspective on events is bizarre: where he sees "... Americans running to get gas masks because (of) some bearded man in Afghanistan ... Fear struck this country ... You see, there are consequences when we turn away from our source of our strength" -- I see Americans risking, and not infrequently giving, their lives to save others.
And many of the individual memes Moore seeks, however inappropriately, to promote are, in fact, those most likely to yield competitive advantage. At a minimum, honest, nonviolent people with good impulse control are all but certain to prosper relative to people who don't consistently practice such things. Throw in a few things like this and they just might be unbeatable.
Jay Manifold [1:27 PM]
Idiotarianism, Economics, and Risk Management
Via Glenn Reynolds, Arnold Kling's Economic Idiotarianism, over on TCS, which makes a provocative diagnosis: "The idiotarian approach to debating economic policy is to frame an issue as a conflict between Authority Ranking (bad) and Communal Sharing (good)" -- ignoring the other two relational models of interpersonal transactions, Equality Matching and (especially) Market Pricing.
Of course, people who are hosting anticommercial memes are going to ignore or deny market mechanisms. Perhaps more tellingly, they may ignore Equality Matching because it is almost completely spontaneous and has no one in charge.
The analogy I'm going to draw here, however, is between the four relational models and the four basic strategies of project risk management. This earlier post, among others, discussed risk management; I noted elsewhere that "... where Medact/IPPNW goes astray is by, in a phrase, failing to acknowledge that there are any risk management strategies other than avoidance and acceptance."
Interpersonal Transaction Relational Model | Risk Management Strategy | Definition |
Communal Sharing | risk avoidance | change plan to eliminate risk or condition |
Authority Ranking | risk transference | shift consequence of risk to third party, together with ownership of response |
Equality Matching | risk acceptance | deal with risks as they occur |
Market Pricing | risk mitigation | reduce probability or consequences of risk event to acceptable threshold |
Definitions are drawn from the PMBOK. Alert readers will notice that I have Medact/IPPNW inclining toward either family-of-nations communal sharing or nobody's-better-than-anybody-else equality matching. Is Medact/IPPNW idiotarian? Events will decide that one; if, as I believe, civilian casualties in Iraq turn out to be orders of magnitude below their prediction, then at the very least their model has some deficiencies.
As always, if you find these notions sufficiently intriguing or annoying, send feedback (if you haven't e-mailed me recently, you'll have to do a one-time confirmation).
Jay Manifold [10:15 AM]
Life Imitates The Onion (A Continuing Series)
You can't make this stuff up:
Iraq is in line to take over as chairman of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in May ...
India now holds it and will be followed by Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland and Israel as countries take the job in alphabetical order.
In related news, the next President of the United States will be from Utah, followed by Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. Hey, that's actually a nice east-west balance -- let's try it!
Jay Manifold [7:55 AM]
[ 20030129 ]
-- of the rhetorical techniques employed in GWBush's 2003 SOTU address is here. Lotsa jargon, but it's explained. An immensely valuable lesson. I again suggest taking a quarter of an hour out to Read The Whole Thing.
Jay Manifold [7:07 PM]
Full text here. What I liked:
- Accelerated tax relief. Tax simplification would be even better.
- "... end the unfair double taxation of dividends."
- "In this century, the greatest environmental progress will come about not through endless lawsuits or command-and-control regulations, but through technology and innovation."
- "In Afghanistan, we helped liberate an oppressed people. And we will continue helping them secure their country, rebuild their society, and educate all their children -- boys and girls."
- "... seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many.
"... the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief -- a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa. This comprehensive plan will prevent 7 million new AIDS infections, treat at least 2 million people with life-extending drugs, and provide humane care for millions of people suffering from AIDS, and for children orphaned by AIDS." - Project Bioshield.
- The Tolkienesque "two towers" and other phrases.
- "... Hitlerism, militarism, and communism ..." -- making up for not saying the c-word in his famous speech after 9/11/01.
- "... America's purpose is more than to follow a process -- it is to achieve a result ..." -- this positively warmed my project-manager heart.
- "Iranians, like all people, have a right to choose their own government and determine their own destiny -- and the United States supports their aspirations to live in freedom."
What's not so great:
- Education reform. Largely meaningless.
- The Department of Homeland Security is nothing to brag about.
- "... show some spending discipline in Washington, D.C." vs
- "... an additional $400 billion over the next decade to reform and strengthen Medicare."
- "... $1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles."
- "... a $450-million initiative to bring mentors to more than a million disadvantaged junior high students and children of prisoners."
- "... a new $600-million program to help an additional 300,000 Americans receive treatment [for drug addiction] over the next three years."
- "... $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean."
- "... almost $6 billion to quickly make available effective vaccines and treatments against agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola, and plague."
- Liberal invocation of "God," in civic-religion format.
In general, the two biggest problems were 1) the neo-Luddite, superstitious call for a ban on cloning (rant) and 2) numerous new spending initiatives which, however inspiring (especially the AIDS-in-Africa thing) are, with the exception of Project Bioshield, without Constitutional foundation.
Jay Manifold [6:15 PM]
Rand Study Establishes Costs/Benefits of Iraq War
... well, it's "just a couple-hour Rand study," actually, but still good enough for me to think that this is why blogging was invented.
Jay Manifold [12:05 PM]
[ 20030128 ]
What I Really, Really Didn't Like
About the SOTU address, that is. Can a Republican please crawl out of the woodwork and help me reconcile this
The American system of medicine is a model of skill and innovation, with a pace of discovery that is adding good years to our lives.
-- and this --
In this century, the greatest environmental progress will come about not through endless lawsuits or command-and-control regulations, but through technology and innovation.
-- and this --
This nation can lead the world in sparing innocent people from a plague of nature.
-- and this --
I ask you tonight to add to our future security with a major research and production effort to guard our people against bio-terrorism, called Project Bioshield.
-- yes, and this --
Intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families.
-- with this?
And because no human life should be started or ended as the object of an experiment, I ask you to set a high standard for humanity and pass a law against all human cloning.
A law, if it's anything like S.1899 in the last Congress, which would imprison scientists for ten years merely for working on somatic cell nuclear transfer.
Tomorrow: What I liked.
UPDATE: Senator Brownback is trying again -- and, incredibly, is in charge of helping to determine whether his own proposal is a good idea: "Brownback was scheduled to chair a hearing Wednesday examining the ethics of cloning." I am not making this up.
Jay Manifold [10:05 PM]
Others have linked to this, including Little Green Footballs, Meryl Yourish, and "N.Z. Bear," but I actually got to it from Blogdex: “The Shah Always Falls,” an interview with Ralph Peters. It'll take you maybe 15 minutes to read, a quarter of an hour well spent. My favorite line is the very Heinleinian "... the oppression of women anywhere is not only a human rights violation, it’s a suicide pact with the future."
Then there's this description of the American difference (which I have noted a couple of times before):
I believe that perhaps our greatest advantage is a tradition that grew up over centuries, that we inherited from England. This is our tradition of openness to new information, of respect for empirical data, and of resistance to theoretical constructs other than those generated within the scientific community. Theoretical constructs did fantastic damage to Europe in the twentieth century, and much of the rest of the world lives in a fantasy land.
Jay Manifold [7:51 PM]
... for SOTU is here; read & heed.
My own pre-speech commentary: The space geeks among us are all wondering whether GWBush is going to announce a Mars-or-bust initiative; I expressed doubts about a nuclear propulsion program back on the 17th, to the effect that if one is mounted, it will be nuclear-electric rather than nuclear-thermal. This is partly due to more easily handled propellant: liquid krypton at -153°C or liquid xenon at -108°C for nuclear-electric vs liquid hydrogen at -253°C for nuclear-thermal. In any case, nuclear-electric has much lower thrust -- and nonradioactive exhaust -- but much higher total impulse per unit weight of propellant; in fact, there is a > 3x difference in "specific impulse" (nuclear-electric has I > 3000; nuclear-thermal has I < 1000).
Applying mbo/m0 = 1/eDv/gI with Dv = 15.6 km sec-1 -- escape velocity from the Solar System, starting in low Earth orbit -- we find the following portions of spacecraft mass available for something other than fuel, that is, structural members, the propulsion system itself, and payload:
Type | Specific Impulse | Non-Propellant Mass |
chemical (hydrogen-oxygen) | 475 sec | 3.5% |
nuclear-thermal | 950 sec | 19% |
nuclear-electric (existing) | 3000 sec | 59% |
nuclear-electric (proposed) | 16000 sec | 91% |
I got that "proposed" number from the synopsis of an interesting paper, Nuclear Electric Propulsion for the Exploration of the Outer Planets.
On an almost-but-not-quite separate topic, it will have escaped the notice of few people who remember the events of 17 years ago today that this anniversary is an obvious opportunity to announce some sort of space initiative or other. Rand Simberg has, as usual, commented ably on this:
A key difference between [the Apollo fire] and the Challenger catastrophe was that in Apollo, we had a goal and a schedule. Accordingly, we dusted ourselves off, analyzed the problem, addressed it, and kept to the schedule.
I have noted elsewhere that
The more disturbing question is whether an all-embracing national space program would result in recognizable achievements, even if lavishly funded over many decades. Manned exploration, in particular, is capable of swallowing almost any amount of money; Wendell Mendell of NASA-JSC recalled, in a speech to the first Commercial Lunar Base Development Symposium in Houston in July 1999, that the cost for developing a crane to assist in construction of a manned outpost on the Moon was quoted by NASA at $10 billion. Not the buildings, just the crane to help put them together. Present-day NASA spacesuits are custom-built at a cost of $10 million apiece, even though commercially available “hard suits” for deep-sea exploration, which cost $400,000 apiece, could be modified for space. There are undoubtedly innummerable other examples. At these prices, robotic exploration could be crowded out of budgets very quickly. The cost disparity between manned and unmanned space exploration is already at least two orders of magnitude, and may well be headed higher. The conflict between the two approaches, already acute, would likely worsen in a regime which attempted to combine them.
The lesson I would impart is: Beware of unlimited objectives being sought with unlimited means. The lack of any human (or active robotic) presence on the surface of the Moon, [over] 40 years ... after Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight, is exasperating. But planetary science did not lapse in the wake of Apollo. Every planet except Pluto, scores of moons, and several asteroids and comet nuclei have been visited by spacecraft since the last Apollo mission. More are on the way. The project-based approach works; not always as well as we would like it to, but it gets things done.
So watch for whether the President proposes a specific project or an open-ended program.
UPDATE: So much for that idea. Nary a mention of space in the SOTU address, and a call to ban all human cloning to boot.
Jay Manifold [5:27 PM]
Corrie ten Boom they're not.
Jay Manifold [9:21 AM]
Instructions for "Instalanchers"
Welcome, visitors from InstaPundit! After following the links in New to the Blogroll, below, you may wish to enhance your reading experience by grazing through the items under the heading "Important Stuff" in the left sidebar. Enjoy!
Jay Manifold [6:42 AM]
[ 20030127 ]
(Ref this earlier post.) Over on No Watermelons Allowed, J Bowen adds some info with The bubbles of Chernobyl. A commenter, David Gillies, states that
The explosion in the Chernobyl RBMK was actually a multi-stage process: the runaway core temperature was sufficiently high to start cat-cracking the water coolant on the zirconium sheaths of the fuel rods. The free oxygen then burnt with the graphite core, which then reacted with the hydrogen. Result: kablooie.
There were actually two explosions, and I'm not sure which one this was; possibly the second, after an initial steam explosion. This reads like something out of Blowups Happen, and this lists six "fatal errors" committed by operators and explains, in somewhat fractured English:
It took the shift manager thirty seconds to realize what was happening and shouted at another operators to press button AZ-5 which would driven all the control rods back into the core, but because the rods were melted from serious heat they didn't fit properly into the core.
The important point is that none of this can happen with modern reactor design. The risks to be managed are mainly those of nuclear proliferation.
Jay Manifold [7:28 PM]
The pseudonymous "blaster," who has modified a historical document to produce the amusing, and perhaps instructive, If William T. Sherman was in Charge of CENTCOM. I note, however, that in an era of precision-guided munitions, plus American occupation forces adept at arranging humanitarian relief, Iraq will suffer far less than Georgia did.
In fact, Iraq will suffer far less than it's suffering right now.
Jay Manifold [4:45 PM]
... of possible interpretations of my all-time favorite movie may be found here (thanks to Kevin Holtsberry for the link).
Jay Manifold [11:03 AM]
Indulge me in a couple of day-in-the-life posts, then it's back to the usual mix of amateur astronomy, general science, and risk management.
Virginia Postrel imagines herself to be "the blogger with the oldest car: a 1986 Civic with about 85K miles on it ..."
Well, OK, maybe the oldest. But nowhere near the most disreputable.
In the category of "what does your car say about you?," my answer is something like: "that I'll end up on Death Row."
Picture a 1992 Chevrolet G20 cargo van, plain white, with swing-out side doors. A ding or two, but relatively little rust. An appearance which, in this case, is most deceiving.
Heard of a van, loaded with weapons,
packed up and ready to go ...
It's on its fourth transmission. It has been driven somewhat more than 170,000 miles. I don't know how much more because the odometer occasionally runs backward and, when running forward, seems to record about three miles for every mile I actually drive -- this is especially fun to watch on the freeway.
Packed up and loaded with ... junk, of course; I keep the telescope in there (a 13" reflector) and some camping stuff, and the van becomes the temporary home of everything being removed from our house for relocation to the 1) dump 2) recycling center 3) library. Thus the various chunks of paneling, sacks of cans, and plastic totes full of 15-year-old issues of Astronomy and Reason.
It goes through about a gallon of antifreeze a month. Not leaking out the bottom -- boiling off as the engine frequently comes perilously close to overheating. This has been checked by the local shop (Henry's Auto, in Raytown) three or four times. They think the engine's got a crack in the block. How long can it be driven like this? I don't know, but I'm going to find out.
I'm just waiting for the Amber Alert that mentions a white van.
Jay Manifold [10:03 AM]
Yesterday the two-legged members of the Manifold household continued our tradition of ignoring the Super Bowl and seizing the annual opportunity of eating at this joint (charming older webpage here) on the one day when there isn't a 1½-hour wait for a table.
Why am I bothering to blog this? Because it's important.
You see, there's an analogy I like to use.
Imagine that it is sometime late in the first millennium. You are an untutored barbarian, specifically a Viking, who has been recruited into the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Emperor. For months, you have been traveling from your home in Scandinavia, through the forests of Russia and down the Dnepr to the Black Sea, then across it to the greatest city in the world, Constantinople. Your ship ties up along the Golden Horn; you disembark and march through the streets to the Hagia Sophia. You gaze up at the holy image of Christ Pantokrator, and you know that you have reached the very center of civilization, the pinnacle of all human culture and achievement.
... and that is what eating Kansas City barbeque is like.
Allow me to state for the record that I want their sauce smeared on the inside of my coffin. Bury a couple of bottles of it with me, too (this is admittedly inconsistent with my desire to have certain portions of my remains interred atop each of the Seven Summits, shot into solar orbit, etc). In fact, throw in a whole "Martin City Special" while you're at it (half a chicken, with turkey and barbecue Polish sausage, please, with the sides being hickory pit beans and cheesy corn bake).
Jay Manifold [10:02 AM]
[ 20030126 ]
I see that several bloggers are at least temporarily severing their relationship with Martin Roth's blogs4God over this, which is a sort of Photoshop Phriday for the less subtle of our pro-life brethren.
While I enjoy this kind of guerilla theater as much as anyone, have no intention of dropping my permalink to blogs4God, and think the Margaret Sanger-as-eugenicist meme in particular deserves much wider circulation, the legalism lurking behind some pro-life sentiment is ludicrous. Just how ludicrous, we should be finding out soon, at least in one prominent jurisdiction; this document, for example, allows no exceptions, irrespective of the cause of pregnancy or the condition of the pregnant woman. The party whose actions it supposedly guides now controls both houses of the state legislature, as well as all statewide offices.
Meanwhile, back in reality, via looking back ... looking forward, via Jordon Cooper, we find ianua's quietly shattering reminder: "It's so easy to be loud and male and defiant."
Jay Manifold [10:15 AM]
[ 20030125 ]
Great piece over on Winds of Change.NET about the police chief in Charleston (SC) advising local business owners to arm themselves.
I have a fantasy where GWBush 1) acquires a spine and 2) announces that the next major economic summit to be hosted by the US will take place in, say, Lubbock. Idiotarians everywhere make plans for the usual hi-jinks. Local authorities in Texas invite citizens to defend themselves from troublemakers by any means necessary. We all sit back and watch upper-middle class hooligans who've traveled thousands of miles to smash things get splattered all over the street by shopkeepers with shotguns.
Of course, in my fantasy world, homeowners would also be arming themselves against "no-knock" raids by law-enforcement personnel who have lost the plot, and young men would be arming themselves against conscription, should it be revived. A surprising number of political difficulties could be meliorated by greater individual willingness to defend one's life and property with lethal force.
Now for Celeste's questions, and my answers to them:
- What will I do if there is a nuclear strike on DC?
My naive pre-9/11 answer would have been "celebrate." And at this remove (1,100 miles or so), the answer is both vague and complex: assist in any way I can, while vigorously opposing authoritarian reflexes. Of course, living where I do, I should change the "D" to a "K," in which case the answer depends on the placement and yield of the device, and the wind direction at the time. Assuming something in the kiloton range, the random chance that I would become a prompt casualty is small; the challenge would be to deal with the effects of public panic and (perhaps) of evacuating a house full of animals. - What will I do if there is a smallpox outbreak?
Nothing, because I'm vaccinated, and smallpox vaccinations are good for at least 50 years (my wife, however, would need to be inoculated). - What will I do the next time some nutjob is randomly targeting citizens in my area for assassination?
Find the .380 and the 12-gauge, make sure they're loaded, and suggest that my wife put the .380 in the glove box of the car, while I conceal the 12-gauge in the van. Maybe spend some time at a shooting range. - What will I do if a terrorist attack takes out the communications and power infrastructure in my area?
About what I'd do in an ice storm. Evacuate eventually if they couldn't get it fixed, though I expect we'd put up with it for a couple of weeks before leaving.
The lesson here is that managing the risk of domestic terrorism is a mix of individual and institutional responses. We need to be both prepared as individuals, up to and including willingness to sacrifice our lives to save others (obligatory link), and capable of creating and maintaining functional, autonomous institutions to operate on larger scales.
Jay Manifold [10:33 AM]
Via Glenn Reynolds, the best 327-word sentence I've ever read (see final paragraph; language warning).
While we might not all be in perfect agreement about some of the items in the list (I hasten to add that I am in agreement with nearly all of it), anyone who is concerned with influencing the society in which they live -- in this case, to keep it from committing suicide -- should ponder what kinds of fears people find attractive, and craft their approach accordingly.
A while back I noted a striking correlation between one's occupation and the likelihood of signing the "Not In Our Name" petition. Now, suppose that there are enough such people to seriously influence public policy and thereby noticeably increase American vulnerability to terrorist attack. Those of us who feel otherwise should first be asking: what makes them tick?
Calling them all nitwits is no substitute for persuasion. And marshaling arguments of the sort one usually sees in the blogosphere is unlikely to be effective, by itself: ask yourself how many times your mind has been changed on a significant issue by a simple statement of fact, much less lengthy lists of facts interspersed with insults. (One person who did argue me around, many years ago, now has a blog; but I could count my number of purely rational changes of mind on one hand without running out of fingers.)
This event wasn't an essay in the pages of Foreign Affairs on the need to project American military power overseas, much less a Fisking on some blog read by a few dozen like-minded people. Encouraging our fellow citizens to respond appropriately to it will not be done by text alone. Warning: requires getting out from behind computer keyboard. And listening.
Jay Manifold [10:32 AM]
I love charts (via Winds of Change.NET). An interesting risk-management tool, courtesy of Blaster's Blog. I'd have drawn it a bit differently, myself, like by moving Pakistan and Saudi Arabia nearer the top, but the idea of using quadrants is sound.
Jay Manifold [10:32 AM]
[ 20030124 ]
Andy Cline's not paying me, really. But I just read a whole bunch of great stuff over there and recommend it highly. In particular, the idea of political spin points as evolving memes and the mathematical difficulties of reading and responding to citizens' comments on new regulations sound like, well, something I'd blog about if I actually knew anything about this stuff. ;)
Jay Manifold [4:32 PM]
Virginia Heinlein, 1916 - 2003
The real-life model for many of Robert Heinlein's fictional heroines -- surely among the strongest female characters ever depicted -- his wife Virginia, passed away on Saturday the 18th.
Thanks to The Truth Laid Bear, where I first saw the sad news. You may also wish to read this column by Spider Robinson, and this obituary at CalPundit.
Jay Manifold [4:06 PM]
Maybe Europe Won't Freeze After All
The recent suggestion that melting ice in the Arctic may be about to shut off the Gulf Stream and plunge western Europe into a temperature regime similar to Canada's might not be possible.
Via JunkScience.com, Columbia research reveals that Gulf Stream is not responsible for mild winters in Europe:
The Rocky Mountains play a major role. Analogous to an island in a stream, the Rockies set up a persistent wave in the winds downstream that brings cold winds from the north into eastern North America and warm winds from the south into western Europe. This pattern of movement of heat by the winds accounts for half of the total difference in winter temperatures between the two regions, with much of the other half attributable to the release of heat stored in the ocean.
Of course, this applies only if the Rocky Mountains aren't melted by global warming. ;)
Jay Manifold [11:39 AM]
Sky & Telescope's This Week’s Sky at a Glance reports a double satellite transit on Jupiter tonight (and again next Friday evening the 31st), plus a striking alignment of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Antares ("anti-Ares," almost exactly the same color as Mars) in the predawn sky early next week.
Locals have numerous opportunities to spot the ISS in the evening sky over the next week, and the Shuttle in the morning sky. That long, narrow rectangle of blue and white squares at the top of this page (just under the flags) is a local dark-sky forecast; click on it for a full explanation.
Jay Manifold [10:51 AM]
[ 20030123 ]
(Ref this earlier post.) Got a couple of responses from people who actually know what they're talking about.
Previously encountered reader Chris Weitzel wrote:
What's that saying about the simplest solution usually being the correct one? Variations in the weather is likely the answer.
This winter has been slightly warmer in Minnesota than the 1990's average, as measured by the number of Heating Degree Days (HDD).
-- and pointed me to The Gull Lake Story:
Although one is tempted to interpret days of ice cover as a measure of the severity of winter, it is important to realize that ice cover is sensitive to several environmental factors other than air temperature. In particular, cloud cover, winds, and snow fall all affect freezing and thawing.
Chris concludes:
Someone interested in spending more time on this could check the cloud cover, winds, and snow fall this season compared to most. Perhaps this has been a cloudier year than most, or less windy.
Presumably the surrounding lakes do not experience the same effect or the news report would have covered them as well. This is probably due to a difference in depth, width, or volume of the lakes.
Previously unknown reader (the best kind) Troy Loney then wrote:
Well, I'm no expert in heat transfer -- just a physicist by degree and an engineer by practice, but I think there's a well-known analog of this phenomenon in the Antarctic Ocean: polynyas.
Quick overview here, but the better discussion is here, and especially check the link on formation -- there are two different formation methods, for near-shore and open-ocean polynyas, and either one might apply here.
In either case, the water under the ice will be warmer than the ice ... just as the measurements showed.
I'd never heard of these things. This is cool.
Jay Manifold [1:15 PM]
Food + Clothing + Shelter < Taxes
Via Glenn Reynolds, via Edward Boyd, a poll which shows that about 4 out of 5 Americans think that top tax rates are too high and that only 1 in 50 actually supports the current level of taxation. Zonitics.com also quotes this Tax Foundation finding that median two-income families paid 39% of their income in taxes in '98, which was actually lower than in '96 or '97.
This turns out to be more than their expenditures for food, clothing, and shelter combined!
Specifically, locals -- notoriously a good cross-section of the country as a whole -- spend:
22.4% on housing
10.3% on food
+3.4% on apparel and services
-----
36.1%
A majority of voters think the tax burden should be cut in half, to less than 20% of income. Who will campaign on such an idea? Not these guys, I'll bet. (The threats made by GWBush and Rangers management in general during the campaign for the tax, to the effect that they were talking to other suburbs about relocating the stadium, were later revealed to have been fabricated. Bush et al made tens of millions of dollars by stampeding the Arlington electorate in this manner.)
Jay Manifold [12:50 PM]
Several correspondents have noted that my set notation in Set Theory, Anti-Terrorism Initiatives, and ... is garbled. I expect they're right. I could say it was just a typo, but I expect it's not. If I'd done it graphically rather than textually, I probably wouldn't have screwed it up.
I could also have saved myself some trouble -- though probably without "earning" the couple of thousand extra hits of an Instalanche -- by saying something much shorter, like: any law-enforcement measure that potentially criminalizes millions of people, whether in the name of fighting terrorism, effecting gun control, enforcing chemical sobriety, or limiting abortion, is a bad idea. And you don't even have to rely on a strong belief in individual rights to prove it.
Jay Manifold [10:14 AM]
[ 20030122 ]
I wrote Pejman to tell him I was slandering him, and he wrote back to offer an unsurprisingly able defense against my charges. Excerpts:
I wasn't trying to soft-pedal anything for a conservative audience, but rather to express my enthusiasm and fascination with the possibilities that nanotech could provide. Nor was I trying to "manage the risk of rejection" ...
... the lack of mention regarding government's role in mapping the human genome was an editing mistake on my part (likely caused by sending the wrongly saved article to the editors at TCS). Once I found out about the mistake, I sought immediately to have it corrected, and acknowledged the mistake in the comments section of the article. The language is now changed to indicate that the private sector played a "significant" role in mapping the human genome, rather than to imply that it played the only role.
... as you yourself mention, I discuss the ability of self-replicating systems to help and assist in oil spills. You mentioned that you would explain that matter "eventually," but since it does not appear that you have yet, I don't have anything to respond to.
Never tangle with a lawyer. Now I've gotta explain what I meant.
I ignored the oil-spills application because nanotech will practically eliminate the long-distance transport of raw materials (on Earth, that is). The inputs for molecular manufacturing are those of plant life: dirt, air, and sunlight. These are immediately available in the requisite quantities everywhere except certain urban areas of very high density. Molecular assemblers/disassemblers can furthermore recycle nearly any artifact or substance into any other (excepting, of course, transmutation of elements), so all organic waste and discarded items become raw materials for new food, clothing, shelter, and devices for personal transportation and communication.
In particular, the abundance of carbon in readily-available soil and organic waste matter will entirely obviate the need to pump hydrocarbons out of the Earth's crust and haul them halfway around the world. The diamondoid structural members of buildings, vehicles, etc, will similarly transcend the need for mining of metals. Resource extraction (on Earth) is not going to be a great business in another generation or so.
The radical degree of local autonomy all this will permit has interesting sociological implications, to say the least, but that's a post for another time.
(Please note that both Pejman and myself are members of the Secret Organization of People with Funny Last Names Planning to Take Over the World, so any appearance of conflict is nothing but a smokescreen in any case.)
Jay Manifold [5:55 PM]
And for Today's Anniversary ...
I encourage perusal of these polling data, which (to my mind) indicate an admirable ability on the part of the American public to draw distinctions in this area. See especially the graphic of "Abortion Attitudes: By Trimester." Roe v Wade respects the Tenth Amendment -- it allows states to ban 3rd-trimester abortions and regulate 2nd-trimester ones.
A ban on 1st-trimester abortions, however, would run into the same problems presented by gun control and Total Information Awareness, that is, defining an enormous (> 107 persons) criminal class into existence. See also Glenn Reynolds' comments on Congress' lack of Constitutional authority to legislate in this area.
Jay Manifold [5:07 PM]
For My Visitors from InstaPundit
The "Nuclear Rocket to Mars?" post is here; Glenn may have directed you to one about nanotech instead -- not that I mind you reading that one!
While you're here, you might browse through the seven (so far) posts listed under "Important Stuff" in the left sidebar. Enjoy, and don't hesitate to send feedback.
UPDATE: I've got Spam Arrest on, so if you do e-mail me, you'll get an e-mail asking for a one-time-only confirmation.
Jay Manifold [7:44 AM]
[ 20030121 ]
Set Theory, Anti-Terrorism Initiatives, and ...
This one's for Alphecca.
Over on Transterrestrial Musings, Rand Simberg points to Do the Math: Rooting Out Terrorists Is Tricky Business, by the invaluable John Allen Paulos.
(Before reading further, you may wish to brush up on Venn diagrams.)
In the scenario presented by Paulos, the universal set is the entire population of the US; set A is the set of future terrorists; and set B is the set of those apprehended, via some technology which is 99% accurate in anticipating their culpability. The conditional probability P(A|B) is quite high; nearly all future terrorists are apprehended.
Unfortunately, the 99%-accurate-technology operates on the universal set, not merely on set A -- and the universal set is several orders of magnitude larger than set A. As a result, while the conditional probability P(U|B) is relatively low, set B is overwhelmingly comprised of innocent members of the universal set.
Now to apply this to another public-policy problem ...
Once again, the universal set is the entire US. This time, set A is the set of owners of devices known as -- well, let's call them "kinetic projectors." Set B is the set of -- well, let's call them "impulsive redistributors." It is common knowledge that the conditional probability P(B|A) is fairly high; that is, many impulsive redistributors are owners of kinetic projectors. Law enforcement organizations make it a priority to apprehend members of set B. On this basis, it becomes public policy to restrict, and wherever possible to ban, the ownership of kinetic projectors, potentially subjecting all of set A to legal action, including criminal charges.
Ignoring for the moment any framework of individual rights that might be present, whether this public policy makes sense or not clearly depends on the relative sizes of sets A and B, to one another and to the universal set. If they are both small, we can hope to avoid the situation as presented by Paulos, where thousands of innocents are arrested for every guilty one; the conditional probabilities P(A|B) and P(B|A) may be roughly equal, and (taking set C as those apprehended for kinetic-projector possession) the conditional probability P(U|C) would be acceptable.
But if set A is much larger than set B, and is itself a large portion of the universal set, then the conditional probability P(A|B) is small and conditional probability P(U|C) is large -- in less fancy terms, we've just made criminals out of a big chunk of the population. I hope it's clear, from the Paulos scenario about botched anti-terror efforts, that this is not a good idea.
What are the actual numbers? The universal set is just over 290 million; set A is one-quarter of the entire population; set B (crudely assuming as many violent criminals outside of prisons as nonviolent criminals inside them) is 3% of the entire population; and the conditional probability P(B|A) -- the prevalence of gun use in violent crimes -- is approximately 8%.
But the conditional probability P(A|B) is less than 0.002 -- and for murder, it's only about 0.00003. So, just as in the Paulos scenario, thousands of innocents will be apprehended for each guilty member of set C.
I conclude that no one who is opposed to the Total Information Awareness initiative should support gun control.
Jay Manifold [8:31 PM]
[ 20030120 ]
Lest I appear unappreciative of this day's significance:
... stereotypes can be stable, even when they are not based on any objective differences. The Blues believe that the Greens are mean, and whenever they meet a Green, they have their beliefs confirmed. The Greens think that only other Greens will reciprocate cooperation, and they have their beliefs confirmed. If you try to break out of the system, you will find that your own payoff falls and your hopes will be dashed. So if you become a deviant, you are likely to return, sooner or later, to the role that is expected of you. If your label says you are Green, others will treat you as a Green, and since it pays for you to act like Greens act, you will be confirming everyone's expectations.
This kind of stereotyping has two unfortunate consequences: one obvious and one more subtle. The obvious consequence is that everyone is doing worse than necessary because mutual cooperation between the groups could have raised everyone's score. A more subtle consequence comes from any disparity in the numbers of Blues and Greens, creating a majority and a minority. In this case, while both groups suffer from the lack of mutual cooperation, the members of the minority group suffer more. No wonder minorities often seek defensive isolation.
-- Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (pp 147-8)
It gets even more depressing over the next couple of pages, enough to make any effort, to say nothing of a successful effort, to combat race prejudice seem virtually miraculous. Perhaps we should devote the MLK holiday to a celebration of game theory.
Jay Manifold [6:09 PM]
A Telescope Pointed Down Instead of Up
Over on The Kolkata Libertarian, Suman Palit points to Israel, India to launch shared satellite. Maybe they could share something like this, parked at about 60°E longitude ...
Jay Manifold [11:43 AM]
Over on ABCNews.com, we find a Great Void:
Smack in the middle of North Long Lake, surrounded by eight miles of ice thick enough to drive on, there is a gaping black hole nearly a half-mile long.
It is a lake within a frozen lake — a huge crescent of open water that, for some reason, refuses to freeze over.
(The lake is here.)
At the Sportland Cafe, a combination gas station, diner and convenience store, conversation centers on the mystery.
"It must be some kind of volcanic action," said a waitress topping off a cup of decaf.
"It could be aliens or someone's septic backing up," added a man in coveralls between bites of his waffle.
But Ed Peck, sitting on a swivel stool nearby, doesn't think any of his neighbors' theories hold water. "I think it's a bunch of hooey myself. It's no mystery. We live on an earthquake fault up here. People don't realize that."
I like the alien septic tank idea, or whatever that was, myself. Interestingly, Figure 2 in this document does indicate a fault line in the area (it's the one just beneath the "15" on the map), but the document itself says
Minnesota has one of the lowest occurrence levels of earthquakes in the United States .... Minnesota earthquakes, like those elsewhere in the Midwest, are attributed to minor reactivation of ancient faults in response to modern stresses.
... so I think we can forget about "volcanic action." Nonetheless, assuming the affected area to be 800 meters long, an average 100 meters wide, with an ordinary ice thickness of half a meter, something is elevating the temperature of about 40,000 tonnes of water by 30°C or more. At around 1 million calories per tonne per degree, this is not trivial.
Then there's the change of state: an 80-calorie difference for every cubic centimeter of water that freezes. That's another 80 million calories per tonne. So the total amount of heat energy looks to me like ~ 4 trillion calories.
That's ~ 4 million kWh. Suppose it would take a couple of weeks for the ice to freeze to its ordinary thickness. The power required to prevent this from occuring is upwards of ten megawatts, which is pretty near the entire electricity budget of Brainerd, population 13,000.
Anybody who actually knows something about heat transfer is invited to send me your comments.
Jay Manifold [11:14 AM]
Over on No Watermelons Allowed, fellow Missourian blogger "J Bowen" imparts a fine engineering lesson, by way of explaining such things as the "pinging" noises in steam radiators and the "slamming" sound one sometimes hears when shutting a faucet off. Obscure hydrodynamics have consequences:
Bubbles are a really big deal with nuclear reactors ... pressurized water reactors (PWRs) (like ... Callaway in MO, Wolf Creek in KS ...) are not to have noticeable bubbles in them under any circumstances ...
This is what led to the worst nuclear accident of all; Chernobyl had a "positive void reactivity coefficient," a fancy way of saying that since steam absorbs fewer neutrons than water, overheating created a positive feedback loop -- more fission, more heat, more steam, more fission -- ending in disaster.
And while you're over there, don't miss this intriguing art project.
Jay Manifold [10:23 AM]
I foolishly got my PC infected with the Klez virus yesterday. It's cleaned up now, but the virus may have e-mailed itself to a bunch of people through my machine. The fix is available here; my apologies if anyone else was inconvenienced.
Jay Manifold [10:23 AM]
[ 20030118 ]
David Appell points out, correctly, that Pejman Yousefzadeh's nanotech article on TCS is not a model of objective reporting. Not really surprising, since like all articles on TCS, it's an editorial.
David is somewhere to my left, and Pejman is somewhere to my right, so I can easily imagine writing things which would annoy either or both of them; but I find them both valuable, and I hope my readers do, too. I'm going to use this as a springboard to share some of my biases.
Pejman's portrayal of nanotech is far weaker than mine would have been; I'm something of a purist and would have likely gone straight to the source and stepped through the applications as presented therein. Indeed, I suspect that Pejman was soft-pedaling it for a conservative audience. Telling certain kinds of people that we're one generation away from, for example, indefinite life extension, may get a strong reaction of cognitive dissonance (at best). Feeding it to them slowly, and mentioning only those benefits with which they are sure to agree, is a strategy for managing the risk of rejection. -- Not a trivial risk, given that overwhelming majorities of Americans are terrified of reproductive cloning, which is, pardon the expression, child's play compared to nanotech (I note that the results of this search indicate that the TCSers do not share this fear).
Ironically -- given that David is criticizing him for downplaying the Federal role in sequencing the human genome -- Pejman retold the one we've all heard about how DARPA built the Internet. This isn't much more than an urban techno-government legend, like the one about how NASA invented the microchip. If one development can be singled out as having "created" the Internet, which is a highly debatable notion in any case, it was probably UC Berkeley's connection to BITNET in 1982, which prior to that time was a network of "elite East Coast institutions," not the US Department of Defense (source, p 316). But I digress.
The importance of nanotech as a means of providing us with truly long life in an open Universe is such that Spider Robinson has written that a future civilization may make our A.D. 1986 its year 1, because that's when Engines of Creation was published. Much of Drexler's book is not about the technology itself but about the institutions needed to manage its risks. Looking around the world today, one could easily be forgiven for believing that such institutions will not be successfully created on Earth, and the price of a decent existence, a few decades from now, will mean living someplace like this instead.
I would nonetheless emphasize the environmental benefits, which Pejman did not mention at all:
Consider the toxic waste problem. Whether in our air, soil, or water, wastes concern us because they can harm living systems. But any materials that come in contact with the molecular machinery of life can themselves be reached by other forms of molecular machinery. This means that we will be able to design cleaning machines to remove these poisons wherever they could harm life.
With replicating assemblers, we will even be able to remove the billions of tons of carbon dioxide that our fuel-burning civilization has dumped into the atmosphere. Climatologists project that climbing carbon dioxide levels, by trapping solar energy, will partially melt the polar caps, raising sea levels and flooding coasts sometime in the middle of the next century. Replicating assemblers, though, will make solar power cheap enough to eliminate the need for fossil fuels. Like trees, solar-powered nanomachines will be able to extract carbon dioxide from the air and split off the oxygen. Unlike trees, they will be able to grow deep storage roots and place carbon back in the coal seams and oil fields from which it came.
I believe that nanotech will play a crucial role in resolving the "Crisis of 2020" predicted by Strauss and Howe (terminology). But technology needs institutions, or at least memes, to manage it; so perhaps the Federal role should be to do these things rather than to develop the technology itself.
Jay Manifold [6:05 PM]
Forgive the implied antiwar-protest topic; I've moved on ... this is a tip o' the virtual hat to another blog, For What It's Worth, which just did a follow-up on my Satire Barely Stays Ahead of Actual News.
Jonathan Fox linked to this piece by Richard Hall of connexions, which provides some ammo to those of us who have never trusted the NIV.
Jay Manifold [2:37 PM]
Slow News Weekend Creates Anti-War "Movement"
This and many other stories (including this local one) are perfect examples of one of the main structural biases in news reporting, namely the impulse to create a narrative where there just isn't much of a story.
(My own support for the war is reluctant. Given that the Bush Administration will not directly confront the Pakistanis or [especially] the Saudis, this is as good a risk-management strategy as we're going to see for the next several years. I just want us to get it over with.)
But no amount of wishful thinking will turn Iraq in 2003 into Vietnam in 1968:
- There is no draft to provide soldiers for the war, there is no income tax surtax to pay for the war, and neither is even remotely likely.
- The war will last days, not years. The casualty ratio will be at least 1,000:1 in favor of the US. Thanks to precision-guided munitions, prompt civilian casualties will likely be in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands as widely predicted.
- The "anti-war" demonstrations are being organized by Stalinists (source).
- Support for a war with Iraq is greater than support for the war in Vietnam was in 1968.
- And not to overlook the obvious: we will win, and the population of Iraq will celebrate.
UPDATE: Thanks to Damian Penny for pointing to this sickening account of American grovelling to the House of Saud.
Jay Manifold [2:04 PM]
This is my several-days-late follow-up to this earlier post; contributors to the following include, and may be limited to, Alan Henderson, Bob Hawkins, Leo Johns, and Bill Walker (whose only suggestion was that the Fox version of the Disaster Channel be called When Entropy Attacks). If I forgot anybody, send me a denunciatory e-mail.
Channel | Themes | Killer App | Typical Sponsors | Competition |
The Elaborate Hoax Channel | deceptions and conspiracies, historical and contemporary | Rael: The New Eoanthropus dawsoni | www.crank.net | World Wrestling Federation, Jerry Springer,Howard Stern |
The Self-Referential Channel | people watching the SRC | people watching people watching the SRC | same as for Reality Television | Reality Television |
The Channeling Channel | Houdini,Ramtha | Raelian Reality: T or F? | the IRS | Sci Fi Channel, channelling-online.com |
|
The English Channel | swimming, tides, the Gossamer Albatross | Chunnel Terrorism: Fire in the Hole | boat manufacturers; Speedo | Baywatch |
The Archetypal Channel Channel (Channel 57) | What Makes Good Television? | The Lyrics of Bruce Springsteen | A Voyage To Arcturus | the entire blogosphere |
The Funeral Channel | funerals of the rich and/or famous | Kennedys | funeral homes, life insurance companies, florists | cable news channels |
Channel | Theme Music and Logo (all suggestions from Alan Henderson) |
Cuteness Channel | Either Symphony #6 (first movement) by Ludwig van Beethoven, or "Carnival of the Animals" by Camille Saint-Saens. Music accompanies scene of playful puppy, kitten, and toddler (maybe Gnat Lileks could get the gig) that, through the magic of CGI, morphs into the network's logo. |
Disaster Channel I | Overture of Richard Wagner's opera "Die Valkure" (not to be confused with "Ride of the Valkyries"). When I heard the low rumbling of the cellos for the first time, I thought it should have been on the "Twister" soundtrack. Music would accompany a video clip of a tornado that morphs into the network's logo. |
Disaster Channel II | "Burning Down the House" by the Talking Heads. Music would accompany video clip of burning building (make it FEMA headquarters for laughs) that morphs into the network's logo. |
Wretched Excess Channel | "Money Money Money" by Abba. Music would accompany video clip of a 1940s Bentley pulling up in front of a mansion just as a Lear jet flies overhead - this morphs into the network's logo. |
Lurid Channel | Carmina Burana ("O Fortuna") by Carl Orff. I'll let someone else suggest the visuals. |
HP Lovecraft Channel | One of those reminiscent-of-a-slasher-movie-soundtrack Bela Bartok compositions. Music would accompany video clip of Antarctic explorers. They creep along as a giant shadow looms over them. As the violins screech at maximum volume, a blast of dense snowfall conceals the scene for a couple of seconds and then thins out, revealing that the expedition has disappeared. Antarctic scenery morphs into logo, which might be some creepy city ruins or simply a mountain range with a mysterious glow behind the horizon. No, it won't be a hundred CBS eyes :-) |
Jay Manifold [12:58 PM]
[ 20030117 ]
Not so fast, says NASA spokesman Don Savage in this Leonard David story on Space.com, which attempts to clear up some of the confusion; the Nuclear Systems Initiative is more about electric power generation for space probes than about propulsion, much less a manned mission to Mars (as I reported last March from LPSC).
The closest this comes to nuclear rockets is described in a news release as
Nuclear electric propulsion -- or the use of nuclear reactors to generate heat, which is converted into electrical power for high-performance electric thrusters -- has the potential to greatly improve the capability, sophistication and reach of future science missions. The development of high power thrusters and power conversion systems are critical components to enable future nuclear-electric propulsion systems.
"Electric propulsion systems," more familiarly known as ion rockets, are fantastically efficient (I = 3000 sec) but have very low thrust, and therefore cannot be launched from Earth but are excellent for moving spacecraft around the Solar System -- or even leaving it altogether. A spacecraft in low Earth orbit, as noted in the post below, needs an additional 3,300 m sec-1 or thereabouts to escape from Earth. It then needs another (Ö2 - 1), or .414, ´ Earth's orbital velocity of 29.8 km sec-1, to escape from the Sun. All this totals to Dv = 15.6 km sec-1.
Even a very efficient chemical rocket, burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and with I = 450 sec, must devote so much of its mass to propellant as to leave almost nothing left over for payload. This time, the relevant form of the rocket equation is
1 - (mbo/m0) = 1 - 1/eDv/gI
Plugging in the values for Dv and I and recalling that g = 9.81 m sec-2 and e = 2.718... shows that 97% of the entire mass of the spacecraft is propellant! Everything else -- rocket engines, propellant tanks, structural members, and payload -- must somehow fit in the other 3%.
This is why we have to use gravity-assist maneuvers so that our chemical-rocket-launched probes can make it to the outer Solar System. But change I to 3000 sec, and the propellant mass fraction drops to 41%, leaving nearly three-fifths of the spacecraft mass for engine, tank, structure, and payload.
The Deep Space 1 probe has already demonstrated this technology; of course, its electricity came from solar panels. Beyond Mars orbit (1.524 AU; by the inverse-square law, 43% the sunlight Earth gets) solar panels become impractical -- I've been told that they're ineffective even on the surface of Mars any farther than 30° from the equator. Thus the emphasis on nuclear generators of some kind to provide the electricity.
Wherever the word "nuclear" appears, there's sure to be a sideshow of protest, and in this case, it's being provided by this organization.
Jay Manifold [9:01 PM]
-- but no fun with the Ariane 5-ESCA rocket, whose new 1.3 million-newton (290,000-lb) thrust Vulcain 2 engine blew up during a launch last month, thereby significantly delaying the launch of the Rosetta comet probe, even though "[i]t will go up on a standard version of the Ariane 5 - not the new configuration that was lost on 12 December."
The astonishing unreliability of launch vehicles is a topic for another time, though I could save some effort by simply referring my readers to Transterrestrial Musings, where Rand Simberg frequently discusses the economics (and politics) of the space industry. Let me put it this way: the first liquid-fueled rocket was launched 77 years ago; the first successful gasoline-powered internal-combustion four-cycle engine was produced in 1876; imagine it's 1953 and there's a 1% chance that a car will explode every time it's driven. That's how ridiculous this situation is.
But I blog to have fun, so upon reading in Mark Wade's incomparable Encyclopedia Astronautica that the Ariane 5 can put 6,800 kg in geosynchronous transfer orbit, and then grazing over to the Rosetta Spacecraft Design page and finding
... maximum 'wet' (spacecraft and fuel) mass is 2 900 kg, with a propellant portion of more than 50%. This mass limit is governed by the launch capability of Ariane-5 ...
A total amount of at least 1 578 kg propellant will be accommodated.
-- for a total Dv of 2200 m sec-1, I'm off to the races. You can read this for background if you want; I'll be working from the Manifold Condensed Version, as it were.
The information given about Rosetta is sufficient to calculate the efficiency of its propulsion system; the form of the equation to use for this is
I = Dv/(g ln (m0/mbo)), where
I is specific impulse in seconds
Dv is change in velocity in m sec-1
g is acceleration due to gravity at sea level on Earth, 9.81 m sec-2
ln is the natural logarithm (to the base e, 2.718...) of the following term
m0 is the initial mass of the spacecraft, that is, fully fueled, and
mbo is the mass of the spacecraft at "burnout," that is, after all propellant has been expended
We have:
I = 2200 m sec-1/(9.81 m sec-2 ln (2,900 kg/1,322 kg))
Result: 285 sec. So what the heck does that mean?
It means, first, that a given weight of propellant can yield the same amount of thrust for this number of seconds, ie 1 pound of fuel and oxidizer will produce 1 pound of thrust for 4 minutes and 45 seconds in the main rocket engine onboard Rosetta. Or 285 pounds of propellant could produce 285 pounds of thrust for 1 second. The higher this number, the more efficient a rocket engine is.
Secondly, this is typical of more or less room-temperature (non-cryogenic) propellants, such as N2O4/UDMH, which are often described as "earth-storable" or "space-storable" -- suitable for lengthy missions; Rosetta is to operate for over a decade.
Now let's look at the Ariane-5's capabilities. Its upper stage has I = 324 sec, m0 = 12,700 kg, and mbo = 2,500 kg; this is all to put 6,800 kg into GTO. In this application, we're putting 2,900 kg into an escape orbit. What's the highest possible velocity?
The form of the rocket equation now becomes
Dv = gI ln (m0/mbo)
With g and I as stated, m0 = 12,700 kg + 6,800 kg = 19,500 kg, and mbo = 2,500 kg + 6,800 kg = 9,300 kg. Result: 2,350 m sec-1.
Replacing the baseline 6,800 kg payload with the Rosetta 2,900 kg payload changes m0 to 15,600 kg, mbo to 5,400 kg, and the Dv to 3,370 m sec-1, or 1,020 m sec-1 extra velocity.
But how fast is GTO? Better yet, what is GTO?
Geosynchronous transfer orbit is a highly elliptical orbit (with eccentricity e ~ 0.7-0.75) connecting two circular orbits: a lower one typically a few hundred kilometers above Earth's surface, and a higher one 35,786 km up, where one orbit takes exactly one day, thus keeping the satellite above the same point on the equator. It takes almost as much velocity to get from low Earth orbit (LEO) to GTO as it does to get from LEO into a completely independent orbit around the Sun.
Specifically -- and I built a spreadsheet to do this for me a while back, drawing heavily on Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, so there won't be any more equations in this post -- to go from a 200-km orbit to GTO requires 2,455 m sec-1 of additional speed. Since the actual Dv rating of the Ariane-5 upper stage, as we have seen, is 2,350 m sec-1, we may infer that its starting point is somewhat higher than 200 km. It turns out to be about 560 km.
But to go from 560 km to solar orbit, that is, to escape from Earth entirely, requires only about 3,140 m sec-1, that is less than 800 m sec-1 more. So the Ariane-5/Rosetta combination, with 3,370 m sec-1, can do this and have 230 m sec-1 left over.
Jay Manifold [3:10 PM]
Airliners vs Anti-Aircraft Missiles (III)
Further reinforcing the remarks of Arcturus correspondent Maj. Emery S. Almasy in this earlier post, via Glenn Reynolds, via Noah Shachtman's Defense Tech, a WaPo article, U.S. Acts to Thwart Missile Threat Against Airliners. Worth reading in its entirety for a variety of risk-management considerations; perhaps the most immediately practical development is this:
Officials said the government will initiate a program to retrain commercial pilots in the technique of landing a jetliner once it has lost an engine. Each missile seeks out the heat that emanates from a plane's engine, but some aircraft with two or more engines have been landed after being hit by one of the missiles.
But the story makes no mention of the threat from ordinary automatic weapons; as Maj.Almasy wrote: "4-5 terrorists with AK-47s can down an airliner if they stand near the end of the runway."
Jay Manifold [8:26 AM]
[ 20030116 ]
Photo/Caption/Story Mixup of the Day
I've got a feeling this is going to be fixed pretty soon, so graze on over and check it out. The story is about the ongoing computer-age instantiation of Matthew 12:36 --
So, you think you cleaned all your personal files from that old computer you got rid of?
Two MIT graduate students suggest you think again.
Over two years, Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat bought 158 used hard drives at secondhand computer stores and on eBay. Of the 129 drives that functioned, 69 still had recoverable files on them and 49 contained "significant personal information" medical correspondence, love letters, pornography and 5,000 credit card numbers. One even had a year's worth of transactions with account numbers from a cash machine in Illinois.
But this is the picture, the caption of which reads:
Lisa Miner, right, and her partner Sandy Figueroa, left, stand under a rainbow flag in front of their house in Arlington, Mass., Thursday, Jan. 9, 2003. In March 2002, Miner shot an intruder at her home. Miner doesn't know if she was targeted because she and her girlfriend live openly. But like other members of a burgeoning group called the Pink Pistols, she is challenging the notion that gays and guns don't mix.
Enjoy it while you can ...
Jay Manifold [5:56 PM]
Oops.
My fellow Arcturians, it's time to show what we're made of. Graze on over there and hit Iain's tip jar as you are able. Oh, and by the way, you can send feedback to Iain's former employer here. There's a phone number listed, too. And a fax line.
Their advisory board is listed here; perhaps its members should be encouraged to reconsider their affiliation.
UPDATE: Here are some e-mail addresses which might be useful ...
childers@sas.upenn.edu
eberstadt@aei.org
htaylor@harrisinteractive.com
james.wilson@anderson.ucla.edu
ngilbert@uclink4.berkeley.edu
nwpolsby@socrates.berkeley.edu
pope@mclean.harvard.edu
sbaliunas@cfa.harvard.edu
srothman@smith.edu
SStrauss@GlobeAndMail.ca
wolfgang.donsbach@mailbox.tu-dresden.de
Jay Manifold [9:08 AM]
[ 20030115 ]
Over on The Edge of England's Sword, Iain Murray struggled with formatting a table in this post. Here's what it's supposed to look like:
| London | NYC | | ||
| No. | Rate/100k | No. | Rate | Ratio London:NYC |
Murder | 189 | 2.5 | 584 | 7.3 | 0.3:1 |
Rape | 2762 | 37 | 2018 | 25 | 1.5:1 |
Robbery | 40630 | 549 | 27116 | 339 | 1.6:1 |
Assault* | 42513 | 574 | 20686 | 259 | 2.2:1 |
Burglary | 116048 | 1568 | 31226 | 390 | 4:1 |
GLA** | 60389 | 816 | 26364 | 330 | 2.5:1 |
* Felonious Assault in NYC, Grievous Bodily Harm + Actual Bodily Harm in London
** Grand Larceny Auto in NYC, Taking a Motor Vehicle in London
And I don't even get paid to do this ... ;)
Jay Manifold [4:02 PM]
Satire Barely Stays Ahead of Actual News
This story in the Onion is only a few months ahead of events, as recounted here and here:
As soon as visitors walk through the front doors of the museum, realistic, life-size scenes providing a snapshot of what the world may have been like before sin and the Curse will challenge evolutionary worldviews. Popular beliefs about the history of the universe (millions of years, age of the dinosaurs, etc.) will be confronted ...
I am not making this up.
Jay Manifold [12:02 PM]
Lots of people are linking to International Update: Why We Won’t Invade North Korea, by Orson Scott Card. Notwithstanding Card's many accomplishments, which are far more impressive than any of mine are ever likely to be, I found it a bit underwhelming. Here's one reason:
The Chinese have very clear memories of what happened when communism fell in Romania. That’s why they ordered soldiers to fire on their own people in Tiananmen Square.
Unfortunately for this idea, the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred on 4 June 1989, and the Romanian revolution took place from 20-31 December 1989.
It also strikes me as unlikely that China would militarily defend North Korea's nuclear capability. And while they may be willing to rein in North Korea in the way Card describes, we can't wait forever; the DPRK is producing weapons-grade plutonium in sufficient quantity for tens of warheads per year and undoubtedly has missiles that, if launched from a ship in the eastern Pacific -- and in the absence of an American anti-missile defense -- could inflict an EMP shot which would render the west coast of the US virtually uninhabitable.
This map identifies 16 known or possible North Korean nuclear facilities. None are more than 200 km from international waters or less than about 30 km from the Chinese border. The Tomahawk cruise missile has a range of nearly 500 km even in its most demanding applications, has been successfully used against hardened bunkers, and has an accuracy on the order of 1 meter. An overwhelming attack which neither puts any American servicemember in harm's way nor even remotely threatens China seems entirely technically feasible. Ought we perhaps to remind all concerned of this successful (and far more difficult) operation?
Jay Manifold [9:21 AM]
[ 20030114 ]
New Real Estate (A Continuing Series)
New Moons Found Around Neptune, announces the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; an excerpt, to which I have added hyperlinks:
To locate these new moons, Holman and Kavelaars utilized an innovative technique. Using the 4.0-meter Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile, and the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, Hawaii, they took multiple exposures of the sky surrounding the planet Neptune. After digitally tracking the motion of the planet as it moved across the sky, they then added many frames together to boost the signal of any faint objects. Since they tracked the planet's motion, stars showed up in the final combined image as streaks of light, while the moons accompanying the planet appeared as points of light.
A resulting discovery image is here. An e-mail to CfA public affairs officer Christine Lafon asking about orbital elements got a response within 5 minutes. Now that's service! Anyway, she pointed me to IAU Circular #8047, in which we find that their orbital semimajor axes a range from 0.135-0.147 AU, which is to say that their average distances from Neptune are 20-22 million kilometers. This is four times as far from the planet as the next-closest moon, Nereid, and 60 times as far as the only large moon, Triton (source). One of the new moons is in a retrograde (clockwise as seen from the north) orbit with i = 121°; the other two are prograde but in high-inclination orbits (i = 43° and 57°). Orbital periods range from just under 7 to nearly 8 years (source), which means they go around Neptune a couple of dozen times in one Neptunian "year."
All are tiny, perhaps 30-40 kilometers in diameter, and if typical of outer-solar-system moons, are comprised mostly of water ice. Assuming density r = 1.0 g cm-3 and applying g µ M/R2, we find that their surface gravity is about 1/2000 that of Earth. From any of them, Neptune would appear only about a quarter the size the Moon does from Earth, and would always be at least 4,000 times fainter than a full Moon -- about the brightness of Venus as seen from Earth. The Sun would shine over 900 times fainter than it does on Earth, but still nearly 500 times as bright as a full Moon. Surface temperature is probably in the mid-30s Kelvin (around -235°C, -390°F).
In related news, the discovery of a Neptune Trojan at the L4 point of Neptune's orbit was announced last week.
Jay Manifold [1:03 PM]
I got to thinking some more about the burrowing nuke of Baghdad and realized that there are significant, possibly favorable, risk-management implications of the behavior of subterranean nuclear explosions.
Referring again to Rob Nelson's Low-Yield Earth-Penetrating Nuclear Weapons, a prepublication version of which David Appell of Quark Soup kindly sent me, shows that the detonation of a buried 1-kiloton bomb, acting through a combination of seismic waves and ground-motion-induced airblast, would cause "severe damage to residential housing, and related injuries from falling material and projectiles, over an area of several kT1/3 square kilometers." Assuming "several" to be 5, this represents over 3 times the area similarly affected in a surface burst.
Specifically, the 5-psi overpressure radius of a 1-kT surface explosion (see this post for the formula) is about 420 meters. This overpressure will destroy all wood-frame structures, uproot all trees, and burst eardrums. Survival inside it is problematic. The 2-psi overpressure radius of a 1-kT surface explosion is just over 700 meters; this corresponds to the "severe damage" area as defined in the Nelson paper, within which few buildings would remain usable and streets would be blocked by debris. The area covered is about 1.6 km2, or 400 acres. As noted above, this is more than tripled by burying the bomb -- in English units, to nearly 2 mi2, or ~1,200 acres.
In most of Manhattan, this area would represent at least 200 city blocks. A bomb underneath the Empire State Building would thus affect everything between about 24th and 42nd Streets, and Third and Eighth Avenues, including Madison Square Garden, Penn Station, Macy's, the New York Public Library, and numerous other landmarks. Times Square, on the north, and the Flatiron Building, on the south, would be just outside the severely damaged area.
Lesser damage, such as all windows blown out, would extend to the southern tip of Manhattan, north perhaps as far as 125th St (Columbia U, Harlem, etc), and cover parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and the inner New Jersey suburbs on the west side of the Hudson. Depending on the timing of the explosion, vast numbers of people on the streets could be injured in this way.
Then there's fallout. A 1-kT nuke would have to be at least 90 meters underground, and possibly as much as 120 meters, to avoid producing a crater and thereby expelling a huge cloud of radioactive debris into its surroundings. If buried at a depth of 30 meters, it would produce a crater the size of a football field, and the ejecta would cover 10-20 acres, or at least 2-4 Manhattan city blocks. Everything within about a kilometer of the bomb (>3 km2), that is, nearly 800 acres or perhaps 150 city blocks, would be inside the highly radioactive "base surge cloud," which would then disperse according to local weather conditions. Assuming, and this may be optimistic, that 10 km2 of Manhattan received a fatal dose of radiation, the death toll from this effect alone could easily exceed a quarter of a million.
I note that the greatest depth of the subways appears to be less than 50 meters; my NYC readers, if I have any left after posts like Manhattan is Obsolete, are invited to enlighten me on this point. They're also probably wondering where the good news is -- I did use the phrase "possibly favorable risk-management implications" above. But since this post is too long already, I'm going to make that a separate topic.
Jay Manifold [11:42 AM]
[ 20030113 ]
Or, how not to oppose the death penalty -- unless, of course, you want to build an entire career out of opposing it, rather than actually ending it and then needing to find something else to do. Bush Urged to Follow Illinois Lead on Death Penalty is the headline of the Reuters article by Dominic Evans which rounds up the usual suspects:
"This is a chance for President Bush to bring the United States in line with the world trend against the death penalty," [London-based human rights group] Amnesty [International] spokesman Kamal Samari told Reuters. "He could take a moral stand and signal that the death penalty is not the deterrent to criminals it is presented as."
This betrays the usual European misunderstanding of the American federalist system; as the article helpfully notes -- well, maybe not so helpfully, because it's 20 paragraphs later:
... even if Bush were to support a national halt to executions, it would not necessarily impact the states. Each governor has jurisdiction over laws regarding state death penalty cases.
So much for that idea. Meanwhile:
Mexican President Vicente Fox called Ryan on Sunday to praise him for his step, which affected three Mexicans. Mexico does not have the death penalty and has clashed with the United States on the issue repeatedly in connection with Mexicans sentenced to death in the United States.
"Fox called Ryan by telephone to express his profound recognition for the historic measure," the Mexican president's office said in a statement.
This actually makes sense, given the historical context, but is in no way a direct call for GWBush to perform an analogous action -- which he couldn't do anyway until just before leaving office. As I explained below by quoting from The Evolution of Cooperation, Americans don't elect people to office in order to hand out a bunch of last-minute pardons; in fact, so far from constituting advances in public policy, such things are perceived as risks to be managed by punishing the officeholder's political party at the next election.
While some of the intricacies of game theory aren't for everyone, this isn't that hard to figure out. So when we read things like
"I sincerely hope that this is a step toward the abolition of the death penalty in the whole of the United States," [human rights watchdog Council of Europe] Secretary General Walter Schwimmer said in a statement.
and
In Kenya, sociology professor Katama Mkangi who was imprisoned without trial in the 1980s for human rights work, described the commuting of the sentences as "a breath of fresh air in a rotten system."
"His decision is a wake-up call for the United States justice system to catch up with the rest of civilization."
-- the question arises: are these people really that stupid, or do they know what they're doing after all? They now have another flail with which to garner media attention and raise money. Is the object of the game abolition, or self-perpetuation?
Readers are invited to identify other political movements guilty of similar tactics ...
Jay Manifold [1:30 PM]
[ 20030112 ]
Crimson Skies of Ice and Fire (II)
(Ref this earlier post.) Well, Peter Sean Bradley tried to guess where I got the headline from, but he's from California. What was needed, it turns out, was somebody a lot closer to, and in fact residing in ... Kansas. Thanks to semi-regular contributor Leo Johns for the answer.
... and for pointing to this remarkable tribute to the Challenger, thematically organized around Icarus ...; I've often thought that a video for the song could make excellent use of footage from a Shuttle flight. Michael E. Brooks has now done just that, using the most fateful mission of all.
Jay Manifold [8:49 PM]
Over on McFreedom, Brett Thomas has Thoughts on the Great Depression, one of which, as paraphrased by me, would be "Roger Rosenblatt is a loathsome social parasite." (Brett was a lot nicer than that.) Read the whole thing; it's great commentary, and the photo exhibit is stunning. My favorite paragraphs:
The current economic downturn Mr. Rosenblatt makes so much of in his essay have left all of us tightening our belts, certainly. But to liken this period to that demeans the suffering ordinary men and women went through then.
The reason we don't take pictures like these anymore is because no one in this country is that miserable, today. I, for one, am very proud of that. I'd encourage Mr. Rosenblatt to count his blessings, rather than spending his time romanticizing that horrific experience.
The connection here is that Brett sent me an e-mail keying off my earlier remarks, where I said: "If I were a typically parasitic newspaper columnist instead of a blogger, I'd start going on about how 'we' have lost that ethos of sacrifice that used to characterize us ..."
Since it's Sunday, this will become a brief sermon. Members of a certain subculture to which I belong, one unfortunately sometimes renowned for its ahistoricity, are known to complain of "persecution" -- notwithstanding things like this, which certainly appears to state that complaints are not in order, and that the "persecution" in question usually turns out to be, say, a boss whom the complainer doesn't get along with, or perhaps a court ruling about religious activities in government-owned facilities with which the complainer disagrees. Not a dead body in sight.
And not very respectful of real martyrs, either. To say nothing of the 20th century.
Jay Manifold [5:37 PM]
Hendersonian Extrapolations Galore
Graze on over to Alan's blog for how bloggers would have written The Lord of the Rings and for the considerably more serious combination of the UM World Values Survey recently noted by the Economist and the 2003 Index of Economic Freedom. Now that's some value-added blogging!
Jay Manifold [9:50 AM]
[ 20030111 ]
The Girl Who Was Plugged In, Coming to a TV Screen Near You
I see that the #3 item in the Blogdex Top 10 is Skipping Ads? TV Gets Ready to Fight Back. Somewhere, Alice Sheldon is smiling ...
(Lots more info about "James Tiptree, Jr" is here.)
Jay Manifold [12:04 PM]
This superficially astonishing announcement:
CHICAGO (AP) -- Gov. George Ryan will commute the death sentences of all 156 inmates on Illinois's death row ...
-- begins to make more sense when we consult the State Journal-Register:
As he has prepared to leave office, the governor has been besieged by groups on both sides of the issue, seeking to influence his constitutional powers to commute sentences or pardon inmates.
Ryan's elected successor to the executive office, Democrat Rod Blagojevich, had no comment about the governor's actions Friday, a spokeswoman said.
No kiddin'? Blagojevich takes office the day after tomorrow as I write this, so the commutation is occurring about 48 hours before the end of Ryan's term. This would not surprise Robert Axelrod:
From the point of view of the public, a politician facing an end of career can be dangerous because of the increased temptation to seek private goals rather than maintain a pattern of cooperation with the electorate for the attainment of mutually rewarding goals.
Since the turnover of political leaders is a necessary part of democratic control, the problem must be solved another way. Here, political parties are useful because they can be held accountable by the public for the acts of their elected members. The voters and the parties are in a long-term relationship, and this gives the parties an incentive to select candidates who will not abuse their responsibilities. And if a leader is discovered giving in to temptation, the voters can take this into account in evaluating the other candidates of the same party in the next election. (pp 183-4)
I believe that this feedback loop is significantly weakened by the system of primary elections (as opposed to conventions) for selecting candidates, but that's a topic for another post. The immediate effect of Ryan's commutation is likely to be a strengthening of public support for the death penalty, or at the very least the energizing of its organized advocates; opponents are foolish to celebrate this announcement. It's not some kind of evolution of public attitudes; it's gaming the system. As a death-penalty opponent myself, I do not look forward to the fallout from this event.
I expect Andy Cline to have some sharp commentary on this topic as well, so Arcturus readers are encouraged to keep an eye on Rhetorica for the next few days. Besides, there's a picture of me over there now (I'm in the middle, third from the left).
Jay Manifold [11:08 AM]
[ 20030110 ]
Previously encountered reader Patrick Whittome grazed in again from Angola (!) to ask:
I understand that the moon raises tides on earth and in so doing slows the rotation of earth, and also in so doing gradually raises its orbit. If I'm right the day will come when the earth turns so slowly and the moon is so far away that the moon will be in geo-stationary orbit and there'll be no more tides. Is this true? When will it come pass? How long will the day/month then be? How far away will the moon then be? Will this then be an equilibrium with no further slowing of rotation or raising of the moon's orbit?
This one was easy, because I recalled reading something about it many years ago, and was able to find the source almost immediately. Turning to p 11 (in the chapter "Time and Tide") of Asimov on Astronomy, we find:
There is a limit to how much the Earth's rotation will be slowed. Eventually, the Earth will rotate about its axis so slowly that one side will always face the Moon as the Moon turns in its orbit. When that happens, the tidal bulges will be "frozen" into place immediately under the Moon (and on Earth's opposite side) and will no longer travel about the Earth. No more friction, no more slowing. The length of the Earth day will then be more than fifty times as long as the present day; and the more distant Moon will turn in its orbit in twice the period it now turns.
Applying P2 ~ D3 yields a lunar distance of 610,000 km (380,000 miles), and an angular diameter of the Moon as seen from Earth of just under 20 minutes of arc, a little under two-thirds its present size.
I don't know how long it will take for the Earth's rotation to become tidally locked to the Moon. So I foresee a sequel to this post; besides, to further quote the late Dr. A:
Of course, the tidal bulges of the Sun will still be moving about the Earth some seven times a year and this will have further effects on the Earth-Moon system, but never mind that now.
Argh. I'll start looking into it ...
Jay Manifold [10:28 AM]
[ 20030109 ]
The Burrowing Nuke of Baghdad (II)
This post is almost in the "semi-original reporting" category, because it's based on a prepublication version of a paper, Low-Yield Earth-Penetrating Nuclear Weapons, by Rob Nelson of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton. David Appell of Quark Soup sent it along after my earlier attempt at evaluating the risk of using a nuclear warhead to take out deeply-buried underground bunkers inside a city.
The abstract states:
An EPW would most likely excavate a crater of apparent radius Ra ~ 50 kT1/3 m, throwing out a large amount of radioactive dirt and debris. A one-kiloton earth-penetrating "mini-nuke" used in a typical third-world urban environment would spread a lethal dose of radioactive fallout over several square kilometers, resulting in tens of thousands of civilian fatalities.
Now I'm going to concentrate on the biggest mistake I made in the earlier post, namely "[t]he aboveground blast and thermal effects of such an explosion would be minimal." The explosion I was talking about was a shaped charge, so there would be no (in the case of a 1-kT nuke) hundred-meter-wide crater, but this misses a crucial point. To quote from the Nelson paper:
Because the ground is nearly rigid, most of the air shock energy from an aboveground nuclear burst is reflected back into the atmosphere; the large density contrast between the air and ground creates a mechanical "impedance mismatch," and only a small fraction of the total energy is transmitted into the ground. Several meters of dirt will protect most hardened structures from all but the highest-yield weapons.
... less than one meter of burial increases the energy coupling by more than an order of magnitude.
... expect complete destruction of buildings due to seismic waves at distances R
£ 0.5 kT0.35 km, and considerable damage out to a distance R £ 2 kT0.35 km.When the seismic shock from a buried explosion reaches the surface, the ground moves rapidly up and down like a piston, creating a sharp air pressure pulse.
... expect severe damage to residential housing, and related injuries from falling material and projectiles, over an area of several kT1/3 square kilometers.
Since the paper notes that the population density of Baghdad is at least 5,000 persons km-2, it is likely that prompt civilian casualties would exceed 104 due to seismic energy coupling alone, irrespective of radiological effects.
The unanswered questions remain: what are the "entrance criteria" for using a tactical nuclear warhead in a densely-populated area? My thoughts are that these would include 1) an exceptionally lethal threat to the American populace (like this) and 2) the ability to quickly secure the city after the detonation so as to minimize delayed civilian casualties.
And do we have shaped-charge nukes, or not? As my earlier post quoted, Ted Taylor considered them technically feasible thirty years ago. Their availability could help us manage otherwise overwhelming military risks, but it would also make the nuclear option more tempting.
Jay Manifold [11:11 AM]
[ 20030108 ]
I was going to do a follow-up to The Burrowing Nuke of Baghdad, thanks to David Appell, who has been immensely helpful, but then I belatedly discovered via my referrer-log thingy that Piquant Rants and Sassy Impudence has linked to Arcturus, and so have returned the favor. Rachel has a remarkable account of her experiences working in a nursing home in the middle of the last decade.
My problems would be solved. My problems would be solved?
What about Helen's problems? You know, that little issue she has with not wanting to poop in her own bed?
I took a long ride on the "midlifecricycle" today, all the way out to Wellsville and back. Lots of other bikers out and about, as it was ~70°F, sunny, and not too windy -- probably broke the record high for this date. It occurred to me on the way back, somewhere on that tremendous pastoral stretch of 223rd St in Miami County, that I find certain sacrifices difficult to contemplate. -- As well I might, riding a ten-thousand-dollar motorcycle through some of the prettiest landscape in the country on a perfect afternoon in January, for God's sake.
Given that I appear unwilling to, for example, spend beautiful days wiping rear ends in old folks' homes, I could decide that I've fallen far from the days when I volunteered every week for this -- probably the hardest thing I ever actually did up to that point in my life, and I wasn't very good at it, either, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the point. I could bemoan my unwillingness to, I don't know, sell the house and volunteer at a homeless shelter, or something, notwithstanding that my duty as a husband is, shall we say, not exactly congruent with sudden Thoreauesque lunges at this stage. If I were a typically parasitic newspaper columnist instead of a blogger, I'd start going on about how "we" have lost that ethos of sacrifice that used to characterize us; I could even point to my unsubtle posting of last Easter for an example of The Way Things Used To Be.
What I'm gonna do instead is blog. And work on the house, and keep looking for a job, among other things, and do them all the best I can (I particularly like the JPS TaNaKh translation, which uses the phrase "if you produce what is noble out of the worthless"). One of the things I'll try to do with this blog is encourage my readers to be open to trying things like what Rachel's doing with her History Project, or for that matter, wiping old people's bottoms. The only "entrance criteria" are that it has to do somebody some good and it has to be hard, in the ordinarily-you'd-be-doing-almost-anything-else sense.
Now to tackle all those equations in the paper David sent me and tell you all how wrong I was about blast effects ...
Jay Manifold [8:34 PM]
-- could well be the headline of New World of Iron Rain:
Intriguingly, the temperature of OGLE-TR-56b's upper atmosphere is theoretically just right to form clouds, not of water vapor, but of iron atoms. Earlier this year, astronomers reported evidence for iron rain on brown dwarfs. However, such storms only occur over a short portion of a brown dwarf's lifetime, while the newly discovered 4 billion year-old OGLE-TR-56b should still be experiencing this exotic weather, thanks to strong heating from the nearby star.
The confirming work was done with this instrument. A picture of the star, with a chart showing it to be just above the tip of the "spout" of the "teapot" asterism in Sagittarius, is here. It seems that the primary is slightly smaller than the Sun, and the secondary -- that is, the planet -- is thought to be larger than Jupiter.
This is also the first extrasolar planet discovered in the Sagittarius Arm, which lies beyond the Orion Arm, nearer the galactic center. The observation exploited the same gravitational-lensing effect used in the "speed of gravity" discovery, below; this is expected to enormously increase the number of "hot Jupiters" which can be detected.
OK, where'd I get the title of this post? Send your guesses here.
Jay Manifold [6:17 PM]
That's the result found by a team at Mizzou in work strongly reminiscent of Eddington's 1919 experiment during a solar eclipse. Kopeikin et al used Jupiter, rather than the sun, and the Very Long Baseline Array, rather than an optical telescope. They achieved an angular resolution of 50 microseconds of arc, or 1 part in 4 billion -- "the width of a human hair seen at 250 miles, [Ed] Fomalont [of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, VA] said."
A background interview from just before the observation was made is here. Thanks to Leo Johns for the tip and some of the legwork as well.
Jay Manifold [5:45 PM]
[ 20030107 ]
Don't Read This If You've Got High Blood Pressure
Or, why I don't blog about political stuff as much these days. While terrorists are planning to kill us and we're gearing up to take out a rogue state -- which buildup is itself stretching law-enforcement resources thin -- government agencies nonetheless have the budget and headcount to imprison someone for 14 months for carrying some dope at age 18, then imprison him again for 8 months and threaten to deport him to his country of origin, which he has not seen since age 8:
Ureta has been jailed since May, under a 1996 immigration law that cracked down on foreigners who commit crimes.
"All I know is this country, Columbia, Missouri," said Ureta in a telephone interview from the Shawnee County Jail in Topeka. "I don't even speak Spanish."
Of course, you can always find somebody who thinks that the solution is to be consistently Draconian:
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said the cases highlight the lax nature of immigration law, with people persuading Congress to pass special legislation for specific cases.
"Part of the problem is that these cases get so politicized because there is such ambivalence about enforcing the law," Krikorian said. "Immigration control needs to be seamless and across the board."
Partial sanity may be making a comeback, however; via Glenn Reynolds, via TalkLeft, via Eve Tushnet, from Reason magazine, Battlefield Conversions, which includes an interview with former KC police chief Joseph D. McNamara (locals may recall that he succeeded Clarence Kelley, who became the second director of the FBI after J.Edgar Hoover died).
Jay Manifold [6:17 PM]
[ 20030106 ]
Now THIS is a "Midlifecricycle"
I know what I want for my next birthday:
Chrysler ... on Monday unveiled the Dodge Tomahawk -- essentially the 8.3 liter engine from a Dodge Viper mated to a motorcycle frame.
The 1,500-pound Tomahawk can reach 60 miles an hour in about 2.5 seconds, and has a theoretical top speed of 300 mph.
Maybe this will show up on the Wretched Excess Channel. (My current midlifecricycle, a paltry 1100, is here).
Jay Manifold [8:06 PM]
Tradition vs Self-Expression -- Not
Thanks to Iain Murray for pointing to Living with a superpower, in which a remarkable chart ("America's strange place") has the effect of showing that "traditional" and "self-expression" values do not contradict each other, though the Economist seems incapable of fully realizing this, attributing it instead to "... two Americas: one that is almost as secular as Europe (and tends to vote Democratic), and one that is more traditionalist than the average (and tends to vote Republican)."
In this connection, Arcturus addicts should read (or re-read) The Joy of Sets, The Joy of Sets (II), and a follow-up, Odd Alliances, Indeed, all from last June.
Jay Manifold [9:46 AM]
Guns, Germs, Steel, Fractal Coastlines, and Alternate History
I grazed over to CalPundit and found a post about Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I just read a few weeks ago. Kevin liked it, and so did I. He points to Megan McArdle's review; I left this comment over on Asymmetrical Information:
As a complement to the book, I strongly recommend reading The Ideal Form of Organization, a subsequent essay by Diamond which appeared in the Wall St Journal. It answers many of the questions raised by commenters here. Much of Europe's "optimal fragmentation" arose as a result of the fractal dimension of its coastline; in proximity with the suite of domesticated plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, this made it the likely long-term winner.
I don't feel that I can otherwise improve on the reviews and comments I've read, so I'll just quote my three favorite passages from the book. First, an encapsulated account of why the Fertile Crescent was the Silicon Valley of 6000 BC:
... early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses [beans, peas -- JDM], with 20-25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil; flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport. (pp 141-142)
This helped reinforce my Idealist-generation conviction that anyone in the world can have what the wealthiest societies enjoy:
... when Europeans first reached the highlands of eastern New Guinea, in the 1930s, they "discovered" dozens of previously uncontacted Stone Age tribes, of which the Chimbu tribe proved especially aggressive in adopting Western technology. When Chimbus saw white settlers planting coffee, they began growing coffee themselves as a cash crop. In 1964 I met a 50-year-old Chimbu man, unable to read, wearing a traditional grass skirt, and born into a society still using stone tools, who had become rich by growing coffee, used his profits to buy a sawmill for $100,000 cash [over half a million dollars today -- JDM], and bought a fleet of trucks to transport his coffee and timber to market. (p 252)
Finally, this delightful tidbit of alt-hist (emphasis in original):
It's true, of course, that some large African animals have occasionally been tamed. Hannibal enlisted tamed African elephants in his unsuccessful war against Rome, and ancient Egyptians may have tamed giraffes and other species. But none of these tamed animals was actually domesticated -- that is, selectively bred in captivity and genetically modified so as to become more useful to humans. Had Africa's rhinos and hippos been domesticated and ridden, they would not only have fed armies but also have provided an unstoppable cavalry to cut through the ranks of European horsemen. Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened. (p 399)
But what if it had? Harry Turtledove, call your office.
Jay Manifold [8:13 AM]
Introducing the Archetypal Cable/Satellite Package
FCC: Cable subscribers will see 60 new channels, says KC Bus J; the very first line of the article is: "Make way for the Puppy Channel." Given the realities of human nature, the Puppy Channel will probably do quite well, and be joined in short order by the Kitten Channel (I wouldn't put any money into the Larva Channel, though).
A while back it occurred to me, probably after watching the nth tornado-chasing vid on the Weather Channel or TDC or TLC or whatever, that a generic "Disaster Channel" could co-opt a good deal of what's on the quasi-educational video outlets. I mean, who doesn't like seeing completely out-of-control forces of nature -- safely confined to the TV screen, that is -- buildings falling down, people scurrying for cover, etc? 24-7 vicarious thrills and schadenfreude, all interspersed with safety PSAs and ads from insurers and charitable relief organizations.
This is clearly an idea that needs to be taken to extremes, so here they are:
Channel | Themes | Killer App | Typical Sponsors | Competition |
The Cuteness Channel | kids, animals | baby animals | toy mfgs, pet food | Animal Planet |
The Disaster Channel | earthquakes, floods, volcanoes | asteroids | insurance co's, Red Cross | TDC, TLC |
Disaster Channel II | man-made disasters | don't ask | PACs | C-SPAN |
The Wretched Excess Channel | mansions, private jets | Martha Stewart | fast food outlets, liquor industry | HGTV |
The Lurid Channel | sex, violence | you don't want to know | just about anybody | FOX News |
The HPLovecraft Channel | aliens, Antarctica | Cthulhu | you really don't want to know | the Old Ones |
Feel free to send your ideas and refinements. Deadline 2359 CST Fri 10 Jan (0559 UT Sat 6 Jan); I'll post 'em early next week.
Jay Manifold [6:13 AM]
[ 20030105 ]
Via stpeter, Milton Batiste's Intellectual Property and Middle-Earth, about how Tolkien dealt with the unauthorized publication of his work without resorting to litigation -- and probably made more money than if the unauthorized version had never been published.
Jay Manifold [5:55 PM]
Randall Parker -- a busy man (FuturePundit.com, ParaPundit.com, StoryPundit.com, and TechiePundit.com) -- writes to note that contra an earlier post, 757s don't have 4 engines, and almost no other commercial airliners still flying in the US do, either. So a 2-missile attack could conceivably bring one down. Randall also notes, in a comment on my predictions, that the proximity of Hindus to areas of Islamist terrorism could make them a substantial fraction of all victims of religiously-motivated violence.
Jay Manifold [5:54 PM]
[ 20030104 ]
Return to the Medieval 'Town House'
I'm still getting mileage out of my correspondence from Scott Cole, who wrote:
You might not ever think about this but that time I went to Kansas City the thing that really struck me was all the land available. When the airplane was making its approach I remember seeing all these houses with large yards and swimming pools. Richards-Gebaur [AFB] is a rural area but only a few minutes away from the city by car. I guess I'm used to the Tokyo/Yokohama megalopolis but I am looking forward to returning to the U.S. soon and enjoying the space.
I think about it a lot -- partly because of the politically-correct hectoring Americans are subjected to by "environmentalists" about "suburban sprawl," partly because I consider myself to be living in one of the most attractive places in the country, partly because I think that a lot of the people who live here have no idea how good they've got it, and partly because I'm interested in human behavior and motivations.
There is more space out here than most people can imagine -- even people from St Louis are surprised by it, and almost anyone from any farther east or north (or the west coast) is flabbergasted. Have a look at this picture of my neighborhood (please note that I do not live at the address indicated, but am nearby -- my house is in the picture; I just won't say exactly where). This is not far from the center of a metro area approaching 2 million in population.
I'd be lying if I said that everybody here lives like this, but the trend is unmistakable; even the poorest areas of the city consist almost entirely of detached, single-family houses. I have commented before (here and here) on low density as the trend of the future; more recently, I explicitly said that "... what's happening here is progress toward country-estate densities, characterized by acres per household rather than households per acre."
What's causing this is an innate human desire for a savanna-like environment; as Steven Pinker states:
... people do not have a mystical longing for ancient homelands. They are merely pleased by the landscape features that savannas tend to have. [Biologists George] Orians and [Judith} Heerwagen surveyed the professional wisdom of gardeners, photographers, and painters to learn what kinds of landscapes people find beautiful .... [t]he landscapes thought to be loveliest, they found, are dead ringers for an optimal savanna: semi-open space (neither completely exposed, which leaves one vulnerable, nor overgrown, which impedes vision and movement), even ground cover, views to the horizon, large trees, water, changes in elevation, and multiple paths leading out. (p 376)
He notes that the post-WW2 American suburb is in many respects a large-scale re-creation of a savanna environment; in wet, heavily-forested areas, residents frequently clear underbrush and cut down most (but not all) trees, while in more arid regions they water their lawns and plant trees. My contention is that this process is nowhere near its end; real per capita GDP has grown an average 3.1% per year in the US over the past 30 years (source), making each of us -- all other things being equal -- 2½ times better off. In combination with readily available broadband (see Exhibit 2) making telecommuting more feasible, those "views to the horizon" become more realistic and affordable every year.
Where will it end? In Cities and Commutes, I noted that a 5x increase in commuting speed, and therefore a 25x increase in area reachable per unit time, may be only a few years away. Nor will we run out of room; Missouri's 2 million or so households would get 22 acres apiece if all the land in the state were divided among them. At a couple of acres each, the place would still be nine-tenths farmland, prairie, and forest.
By way of explaining the title of this post, I further predict that we will see the return of the townhouse, in something intriguingly close to the original sense of the word. From The Sphere Illustrated History of Britain, c 55 BC - 1485:
The larger burhs were more than just fortresses, and soon acquired an important role in the local rural economy. Manning the defences was the responsibility of neighbouring landowners, who were able in return to use the area for their own purposes. Often they built 'town houses' in the burh to store their produce for marketing: Domesday Book records several links between urban tenements and rural manors. Traders and craftsmen followed, and the strongholds of the late ninth century became the thriving towns of the tenth. (pp 93-94)
What I'm suggesting is a reversal of the 20th-century pattern of making one's living in the city and, if one prospered sufficiently, buying a place in the country to get away for weekends and vacations. Sometime in the 21st century, it will become the norm to live and work in the country and get away to the city -- a high-density, "charm industry" community where one's residence is an apartment or condominium and most attractions are within walking distance. Perhaps I should put quotes around city, because the new burhs may nucleate not within our present cities but in small towns already predominantly organized around tourism, like Eureka Springs and, God help us, Branson. Indeed, many may be built de novo.
Finally, I should tell a story about Japan, or rather about Japanese. Back around '85 I was working for a small electronics firm. One day I was asked to take some Japanese engineers from our facility in Lenexa up to KCI airport. I drove them up I-35 and I-635 to I-29; the portion of the route from which one can see the most residential areas is on 635 where it goes through Kansas City, KS. Not to provoke my KCK readers, if there are any, but KCK is widely regarded as the least attractive part of the metro area. Well, not to these guys; they were staring at those dinky little falling-down houses on tiny lots as though they were getting a glimpse of the Promised Land. It occurred to me, seeing this, that what we were being told in the '80s about how the Japanese were doing things better than Americans might be missing some pieces of the puzzle.
Jay Manifold [11:16 PM]
[ 20030103 ]
Scott Cole wrote back to note that my link to an exposé of Gary North in this post leads quickly to something else altogether. The exposé itself is reasonably sound, but what you will find one level up at the Council on Domestic Relations is a farrago of nonsense and anti-Semitism.
Coincidentally, Glenn Reynolds points to an LATimes article (registration req'd) mentioning the "surreal attraction" between Islamists and neo-Nazis.
Jay Manifold [10:07 AM]
ibidem points to Bubbly Threat to Spain's Rare Lynxes, in which we learn that the Worldwide Fund For Nature (WWF) has actually figured out that silviculture is good for the environment. A page in Spanish that I can't read much of is here, and a page in English that unfortunately doesn't mention the cork forests is here.
Jay Manifold [9:31 AM]
Also via ibidem, a Village Voice article by George Smith headlined The Burrowing Nuke, about the 340-kT B-61:
To get a handle on the full power of the B-61, consider that the WW II A-bombs produced fireballs about 800 yards across. Seventeen times more powerful, a B-61 over the tip of Manhattan would probably provide decent annihilation, engulfing most of the borough while extending the same courtesy to Brooklyn, Queens, and a good chunk of Staten Island.
In the context of a subterranean explosion, however, this is quite misleading.
A rough rule of thumb is that an underground detonation will vaporize the same mass of rock as the TNT equivalent yield of the bomb, in this case 3.4 × 108 kg. Since Earth's crust has an average density of 2,800 kg m-3, this translates to a volume of 120,000 m3. Applying V = 4pr3/3, we find that the radius of a spherical cavity of this volume is just over 30 meters. So the B-61 could be intended for use against targets less than 200 feet underground.
If the B-61 is instead a shaped charge, such that it essentially drills a hole rather than excavates a cavern, in the form of a prolate spheroid (cigar shape) whose long axis is 10 times its short axes, we have (sparing you the algebraic transformation) the semimajor axis a = 3Ö(30V/4p), which in this case works out to 66 m; the hole could be over 400 feet deep.
The aboveground blast and thermal effects of such an explosion would be minimal -- not that I'd want to be standing on top of it, mind you; but it would not flatten or burn down square miles of Baghdad. The venting of radioactivity would be something else again, though even it would drop below dangerous levels within days. Not healthy for anybody downwind, of course. The upshot of all this is that prompt civilian casualties, even in a heavily populated area, would be < 103; delayed civilian casualties could be ~ 104 in the absence of an effective American occupation. We are not talking about a repeat of Hiroshima and Nagasaki here, much less the annihilation of most of NYC.
My point is not that the first explosion of a nuclear weapon in warfare in 58 years would be an incremental or trivial extension of conventional combat. The necessary preconditions for it, and the resulting chasm of world opinion vs American public opinion, are awful to contemplate. My point is that numbers matter -- and lying about numbers matters.
Referring way back here and working the equation therein, we find that a full-yield B-61 airburst would have a 5-psi overpressure radius of 1.58 nmi = 1.82 statute miles = 2.93 km. The area thus affected would be about 27 km2. Baghdad has a population density of about 12,000 persons km-2, so if the death toll equaled the number of people inside this radius (a common assumption), it would be over 300,000. This is orders of magnitude higher than the likely number resulting from actual use.
Criticism of the nuclear option thus risks descending to the level of European fabrications about an Israeli "massacre" in Jenin, with everything scaled up by about 1000x, and ignoring Saddam's death toll of 200,000 per year.
UPDATE: David Appell of Quark Soup correctly notes that I made some whacking great simplifying assumptions (he was actually quite polite about it) and points to Ground below Zero, his article in the Jul 02 SciAm, for more information. The engineering of ground-penetrating projectiles is both nontrivial and controversial, which is why I speculated that the B-61 might have shaped-charge characteristics; it would then be detonated at or just below the surface, directing most of its energy forward.
In The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee quotes nuclear weapon designer Ted Taylor: "A one-kiloton fission device, shaped properly, could make a hole ten feet in diameter a thousand feet into solid rock." (p 115)
Alert readers may notice that this represents ~6 million kg of vaporized material, whereas my rule of thumb above (also lifted from TCOBE) calls for only ~1 million in the case of a 1-kT bomb. The shape and volume of cavities, tunnels, etc excavated by nuclear blasts vary enormously by soil composition. I expect that the US military has detailed projections of what would happen in likely target areas in Iraq, but this is not the sort of information that gets openly bandied about.
This source quotes an estimate "that ... a [300-kiloton] warhead, used against an underground target in downtown Baghdad, would cause between 10,000 and 40,000 deaths within 24 hours due to radioactive poisoning." Given my guess at Baghdad's density, readers may draw their own inferences about the area contaminated; in calm air or light winds, many people could evacuate on foot beyond this area in less than an hour, greatly reducing the death toll. Contrariwise, a detonation in a steady breeze, especially late at night and immediately upwind of crowded neighborhoods, could fatally dose even more people than this estimate calls for.
All this is somewhat ironic, as nuclear weapons, when used against cities, are ordinarily big incendiary bombs whose blast effects are secondary and whose radiation effects may be virtually ignored, especially for high-altitude airbursts. In any case, the prospect of a large number of delayed noncombatant casualties in an American-occupied Iraq is sufficiently politically unacceptable that our situation would have to be truly desperate before using a nuke inside a city. So we need to keep it from getting desperate in the first place.
Jay Manifold [9:30 AM]
-- to do this at 2100 UT (3 PM CST) today. Pay a visit to Wormtalk and Slugspeak while you're at it -- to send congratulations for this astounding discovery development (via Alan Boyle).
Jay Manifold [6:53 AM]
[ 20030102 ]
AtlanticBlog suffers through Our quality of life peaked in 1974. It's all downhill now (Bill also has a follow-up post). Seems that conservatives aren't the only ones who think that the past was better and that a drastic reordering of society is necessary to return to an ideal state.
Meanwhile, on my planet, Earth, from 1000 to 2000 AD, "... world population rose 22-fold, per capita GDP 13-fold and world GDP nearly 300-fold."
George Monbiot is going to hate the next few decades. Here's one reason, and here's another.
Jay Manifold [12:14 PM]
[ 20030101 ]
January 1, 20?? (APUPI) -- President Glenn Reynolds became the first American chief executive to travel beyond low Earth orbit last month when he attended the Tycho Summit with Chancellor Rand Simberg of the Cislunar Federation. After descending on the Space Elevator to its equatorial anchor point in the Pacific, President Reynolds hosted a state dinner for last year's Nobel Prize winner for Literature, James Lileks, Poet Laureate Will Warren, Nebula Award winner Dave Trowbridge, and Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator Alan Henderson. He then flew to the Tennessee White House to spend the holidays with family and friends.
The Tycho Summit was also attended by Australian Prime Minister Tim Blair, Atlantic-Canadian PM Damian Penny, and British President and constitution-writer Iain Murray. Pacific-Canadian PM Joe Katzman attended by videoconference from Edmonton, where negotiations regarding the status of Ontario and petitions by some western provinces to join the United States were underway.
Defense Secretary Stryker appeared with US ambassador to Israel Meryl Yourish and the Israeli Cabinet to formally inaugurate the Active Shield defense, which is widely regarded as a working prototype for other Anglosphere nations. Indian Defense Minister Suman Palit has requested a demonstration of the technology in the near future.
Federal Reserve Chairperson Leigh Ann Manifold announced the granting of regional autonomy to the 12 Fed districts to set their own monetary targets, preparatory to the relegalization of free banking in the US. Many observers expect that the first competing currency-issuing private banks will appear in the Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco districts this year.
Lowe-Murtaugh Pharmaceuticals announced the availability of NanoCarve, an injectable, self-replicating device the size of a blood cell which clears arterial walls of plaque. LMP's stock rose 17% on the announcement, to $124.
Jay Manifold [9:58 PM]
