Hard Drive Disaster Recovery

As Darth Vadar would say, “Most Impressive.”

When the Space Shuttle Columbia burned in the atmosphere in February of 2003, I thought it was safe to assume that nothing of scientific value would have survived the heat of re-entry. I was grossly mistaken.

“When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. We couldn’t even tell it was a hard drive. It was burned and the edges were melted,” said Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc., outside Minneapolis. “It looked pretty bad at first glance, but we always give it a shot.”

During Columbia’s fateful mission, the drive had been used to store data from a scientific experiment on the properties of liquid xenon.

Most of the information was radioed to Earth during Columbia’s voyage. Edwards was able to recover the remainder, allowing researchers to publish the experiment in the April issue of a science journal, Physical Review E.

Most of the data on the 340 megabyte hard drive was located together in the inner portion, which sustained the least damage. It was fortunate that NASA had not used a modern, state-of-the-art operating system, which commonly scatters information all over the drive, but a rather ancient and outmoded one. Perhaps you’ve heard of it - it’s called DOS.

Man On Asteroid?

Both Slashdot and Instapundit link today to this story in The Guardian:

Now an asteroid called 2000SG344, a lump of rock barely the size of a large yacht, is in the spotlight again, this time as a contender for the next giant leap for mankind.

NASA engineers have identified the 1.1m tonne asteroid, which in 2000 was given a significant chance of slamming into Earth, as a potential landing site for astronauts, ahead of the Bush administration’s plans to venture deeper into the solar system with a crewed voyage to Mars.

The mission - the first to what officials call a Near Earth Object (NEO) - is being floated within the US space agency as a crucial stepping stone to future space exploration.

This would be a three to six month round trip with a week on the asteroid. Designated 2000SG344, the asteroid is a rock about 150 ft. across, whose orbit crosses the Earth’s.

When Neil Armstrong and ‘Buzz’ Aldren were landing on the moon, they left Michael Collins alone in the Apollo capsule, farther away from home than anyone had ever been (and completely out of contact too, when he was on the Lunar far-side).  I recall feeling very sorry for the man in his alone-ness.  If this mission is attempted, only these people will have been further away.

White Rock

Up at The Planetary Society’s web site, Emily Lakdawalla has amazing photo’s taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  You gotta see ‘em to believe ‘em.
The subject is a peculiar, whitish rock formation, that appears to be the exposed portion of the bed-rock below the Martian surface.  The thumbnail that I’m showing on the right (or above, depending on your screen resolution) has the scale - the mark is 5 km in extent (about 3 miles).  That’s the lo-res shot.  For comparison, the second is from the Mariner 9 mission in 1972.  Yes, it’s that little brighter area inside the crater.  Viva la difference!

But that’s nowhere close to the capabilities of the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  If you have a broadband connection and anything like a decent monitor, you’ll be stunned at the full scale view which shows a portion of this area so that objects a couple of feet across can be picked out easily.  As Emily puts it,

Like most other HiRISE images I’ve looked at, this one fascinates but also stupefies me. It shows me Mars at a scale that I could walk with my own two feet. I can reach out and touch it. It seems that, with my previous experience in field geology, I should be able to interpret what I see intuitively. But it’s almost too close. I can’t wrap my mind around the features I’m seeing and figure out what they mean about the geology of the region as a whole.

I Want My Flying Car

Via Slashdot, if we can’t have our flying car yet, maybe we can have an airplane that you can legally drive.

It’s named the Transition, and the first full-scale model is taking shape inside a former machine shop on an industrial back alley in Woburn, MA. Between now and late July, the 10 employees of angel-funded startup Terrafugia will be spending “a lot of long days, nights, and weekends” in that shop, says CEO and founder Carl Dietrich. That’s because they want to show off their concept vehicle at AirVenture - the world’s largest aviation festival, held annually in Oshkosh, WI - and there’s a lot of work to finish first.

Some idiot drifted into my lane this morning while chatting on a cell phone and drinking coffee while negotiating a turn, poorly.  Imagine that person at altitude at about 100 knots.  The mind boggles.

Soyuz

James Oberg reports in the iEEE Spectrum:

What should have been a routine return from the International Space Station (ISS) on 19 April 2008 quickly turned into a heart-stopping drama for ground controllers and the three astronauts aboard a Soyuz TMA-11. The craft had disappeared during the descent and was then found on a scorched steppe some 400 kilometers from where it was supposed to land. Now the incident is a technological puzzle to space engineers and a potential political challenge to the international partnership behind the ISS.
Although the technical investigation will take weeks to resolve, NASA and Russian engineers have come to several credible preliminary conclusions. And internal NASA documents, such as “15S Ballistic Entry Outbrief” by George Kafka, chief of the Safety & Mission Assurance Directorate for the ISS program, reveal a plausible idea of what probably happened.

The crew survived, not because of any heroics, and certainly not because of anything the ground team did, but because of a robust spacecraft design and some good engineering.

Hat tip to Rand Simberg for the link.

A Sign Of Global Warming?

Is the Myanmar Cyclone a sign of global warming?  Yes, says a Nobel Prize winner.

Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview on NPR’s May 6 “Fresh Air” broadcast did just that. He was interviewed by “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross about the release of his book, The Assault on Reason,
“And as we’re talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated,” Gore said. “And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China - and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.” in paperback.

Others disagree.

In October 2007, CNN Meteorologist Rob Marciano disputed Gore’s claim that there is a strong correlation between intense storms and global warming. He explained that “global warming does not conclusively cause stronger hurricanes like we’ve seen,” pointing out that “by the end of this century we might get about a 5-percent increase.”

Bubble, Bubble

It cost more than you thought you could afford to pay, but they gave you the loan anyway.  They said it was a good idea - a good investment.  In fact, since the government was backing it up, it’s hard to see the down side in just walking away from the payments.  And you certainly know plenty of people who’ve done just that, with no consequences whatsoever.  Now that you know that you bought an extremely overpriced lemon, walking away looks like the smart move.

The mortgage lending crisis?  Noooooooo!  It’s the Higher Ed Bubble, and it’s going to pop.

This bubble, like all bubbles, will have its tragic stories, so I don’t want to cheer this on. But if there’s a silver lining, it’s that it may make people rethink the value of those four years that polite society assumes you need.

Predicting The Future

From Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy, a look at a bit of the year 2000, as seen from the 1930s.

Are you wearing your aluminum dress, complete with headlight today?

Hey - don’t laugh!  “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” - Yogi Berra.

Teaching Science at Dartmouth

Is this how it’s done?

Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” She continues: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”

Hey! I recognize that idea. It’s post-modern deconstruction. Text is the only reality, and text is a social construct.
Apparently some of the students questioned that idea. Imagine that - students questioning the answers! Why, the very idea! Surely a lawsuit is the appropriate response.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

Aaaagggg! So, why is her course called “Science Studies” anyway?

H/T to Jonah Goldberg.

Adventures In Dvorak

Many of you know that the qwerty keyboard was made intentionally to be slow. The letters were placed so that commonly used letters would be typed with “weak” fingers or common combinations be widely separated in so that fast typists would be less likely to jam mechanical keyboards. Gee - somehow, I found a way to do that, regardless. But I digress. The Dvorak layout was an attempt to correct that by using a more ergonomic letter placement. Some say that once you master it, typing speed increases.

What you may not be aware of is that you can change the configuration of your keyboard right now to the Dvorak standard (for Windows users, look in the Control Panel under Keyboard). This layout hasn’t succeeded in replacing the older standard, but because of the ubiquity of personal computers, there’s been a (slight) increase in interest in anything that might make typing more comfortable.

Now, I’ve been typing for over 40 years on the qwerty, and maybe switching layouts at this stage in my life was merely a masochistic exercise. But I did it. Yes, I went through this tutorial and after practising for under an hour a day for about 10 days, I made the switch. It makes the brain go SPROOOOONNNGGGGG!, and it’s very good at inducing headaches. But after 10 or 11 days I made the switch permanent and haven’t looked back.

No, I’m not typing faster, and in fact, I’m pretty sure that I’m typing more slowly than before (but I was never a remarkably fast typist to begin with). Worse, if I was to go back to the old layout, I’d probably be slower than I was.

But after a month, I must admit that it’s more comfortable. My brain is no longer going SPROOOOONNNGGGGG! and the headaches have stopped. - Oh, Okay - I jest.

Why did I do this, you ask? I just wanted to know that I still could.

Phoenix Mars Lander

Mars or bust.

May 25 is the day that the next Mars lander touches down on the red planet. This one won’t bounce, but will have a powered landing, if all goes well.

Launched in August 2007, Phoenix is a stationary lander equipped with a trench-digging robotic arm to bite into the martian surface and scoop up samples of nearby soil and water ice. The probe’s top-mounted suite of ovens and wet chemistry instruments are designed to help determine whether its arctic plain landing site - a region similar in latitude to central Greenland or northern Alaska on Earth - could have once proven habitable for primitive life.

“We’re looking for all the ingredients for life,” Phoenix deputy principle investigator Deborah Bass of JPL told SPACE.com.

Phoenix also includes a martian atmosphere-monitoring station designed to provide daily weather updates during the probe’s planned three-month mission.

For more on the mission, try here.  News and current mission status can be found here.

Hope We ARE Alone (’Cause That’s A Good Thing)

Nick Bostrom at Technology Review:

It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.
Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple, extinct life-form–some bacteria, some algae–it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something that looked like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news. The more complex the life-form we found, the more depressing the news would be. I would find it interesting, certainly–but a bad omen for the future of the human race.

It’s very improbable that our technological civilization is here.  That’s a fact, and the only question is “How improbable is it, Johnny?”  Every day that goes by without us “hearing” extra-terrestrials makes intelligent life (life intelligent enough to build a radio, anyway, which is a pretty low bar) more unlikely.

So why does the prospect of finding Little Green Men (LGMs) on Mars scare Nick Bostrom so?  Because if even simple life is unlikely (and not found, even on Mars) then we’ve already been lucky enough to get past the rough patch, the thing or things that make other life in the galaxy really, really difficult.

But if we find the remnants of LGMs on Mars or anywhere else, then that means that we can expect a great deal of trouble ahead.  It means we’ve yet to face some existential threat that no other civilization in the galaxy has survived.  He calls that “The Great Filter”.

[I]f we discovered the fossils of some very complex life-form, such as a ­vertebrate-­like creature, we would have to conclude that this hypothesis [that the Great Filter is behind us] is very improbable indeed. It would be by far the worst news ever printed.
Yet most people reading about the discovery would be thrilled. They would not understand the implications. For if the Great Filter is not behind us, it is ahead of us. And that’s a terrifying prospect.
So this is why I’m hoping that our space probes will discover dead rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and everywhere else our astronomers look. It would keep alive the hope of a great future for humanity.

Have I scared you yet?

Why Are Oil Prices So High?

The title is imprecise. We know that the answer (in 25 words or less) is [bigvoice enhancement=echo]“The Law of Supply and Demand.” [/bigvoice] The real question is “Why are we so beholden to the Saudis and unable to reduce our dependence on oil?”

In an uncharacteristically lengthy (but characteristically lucid) post, the Instapundit enlightens us. Glenn Reynolds references a story that sheds light on the topic - the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 was modified at the last minute to ensure that cheaper alternatives to Saudi oil would not reach our gas tanks. Quoting the Arab News: “In an interesting tussle, a virtually unnoticed clause was added almost at the least moment to a US energy bill that bars the government, in particular the Department of Defense, from using Alberta crude because it is deemed unconventional and too dirty.” We prohibited ourselves from using Canadian oil in what looks to be a secret deal? Now who would do such a thing? “California Democrat Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Republican Tom Davis added the clause.”

Gee. I was going to blame George Bush, myself. Not. He goes on:

But I’m sure it’s just a sincere concern for the environment. I had missed this story, and I suspect most people did. Via Jerry Pournelle, who observes:

The easy way to make ethanol is to import sugar from Brazil and use that. Of course we don’t and won’t do that.

The easy way to bring oil prices down is to drill offshore and on the North Slope. Of course we don’t do that.

The easy way to bring electricity prices down (you can make fertilizer with electricity) is to build nuclear power plants, expensive but cheap compared to wars. Of course we won’t do that.

And why won’t we?
UPDATE: Environmentalists are indefatigably trying to block this new source of energy:

I seen the enemy, and it is us.

More On The Soyuz Landing Mishap

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings leads us to more information about the incident 11 days ago.  He points to the MSNBC report by Alan Boyle.

Three spacefliers are still recuperating from this month’s rough ride back down to Earth from the international space station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and the investigation into the glitches that caused the April 19 shake-up is just getting started. But a multiplayer blame game already has begun - with the potential targets ranging from shoddy Russian workmanship, to saboteurs of the space effort, to the entire female sex.

If you’re wondering, it’s the Russians who are blaming the entire female sex.

Initially, Russian space agency chief Anatoly Perminov told reporters that the crew’s bad luck was due to the fact that women were in the majority - and that “in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of women will not surpass” the number of men.

Just thought you should know.

The cause of the mishap is unknown at the moment, or ‘they’re not telling. - and would they tell us anyway?  It is, after all, politicly sensitive and will echo through the decisions to retire the Space Shuttle.

Publications of this kind are designed to disrupt a Russian-U.S. agreement on NASA’s purchases of Progress and Soyuz spacecraft after shuttles stop flying” to the international space station in 2010, he said.

Perminov himself hinted darkly that the rumors were fueled by “people who are interested in destabilization of our relations with the American partners.”

Perhaps he’s talking about me.

Life After College

Marty Nemko at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they’d still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound - they’re brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

College graduates do undoubtedly earn more, lifetime, than those who don’t have a college degree. The problem, increasingly, is that over 40% of college freshmen at four year institutions don’t graduate after six years. They’ve spent the money, though.

Also, the past advantage of college graduates in the job market is eroding. Ever more students attend college at the same time as ever more employers are automating and sending offshore ever more professional jobs, and hiring part-time workers. Many college graduates are forced to take some very nonprofessional positions, such as driving a truck or tending bar.

Somehow, when someone asks the question “Where are the men?” I can’t help but think that this is part of the explanation.