Seven Sons

On Saturday October 23, 2010 the International Space Station will have been continuously occupied for 3,645 days, breaking a record previously set aboard the Russian Mir space station. Humans will be able to claim a continuous presence off the surface of the planet for almost 10 years, and children born during that time may be the first generation not universally confined to the surface of our home planet.

Around the world nations are struggling to make difficult choices as their economies contract, and it would irresponsible to ignore the (pun intended) astronomically high cost of the space program when prioritizing budget line items. The space program does not deliver many obvious and immediate benefits beyond some stellar (there I go again) wall paper for your computer desktop. But I would argue that as we weigh the resources that we put into various efforts as a nation and as the steward species of the Earth, the space program should be grouped with investments in education, transportation and communications infrastructure as “weightless” on the balance.

While we humans have a penchant for quick fixes, instant gratification and impulsive decisions, we have proven for millennia  that we also have the unique ability among animal species to plan ahead, work together on a massive scale and lay the groundwork for future generations to survive and prosper. While space exploration and experimentation are still very expensive, our progeny three or four generations from now will not regret the resources spent on the hundreds of small things we are learning about living off-planet as they look out into the solar system for the raw material and real estate to thrive. Here is a small and very incomplete list of things we can only learn by continuing to support the manned exploration of space:

• long-term physical conditioning in micro gravity
• The psychological effects of long-term isolation
• nutrition in space
• re-acclimatization to the Earth after a long time away from it
• methods and protocols for communicating with the ground
• shuttle socking protocols, safety, methods, waste management
• power management
• the logistics of rotating crews and supplies from the Earth
• space debris monitoring and avoidance

For an even better discussion of human space flight by people who actually know what they are talking about, see this Freakonomics article.

Charlie Stross writes about the things he can and cannot do with his iPad while traveling.

I happened to be traveling also last week and my only internet device was the iPod Touch. And I discovered something that bugged me more than it should. I had read all the magazine articles that I had transfered to the iPod using FileViewer, and really enjoyed the experience (on the plane, on the deck of the lake house, over breakfast cereal in the kitchen…). I was out of reading material. So I found an open WiFi router, opened about 5 Safari pages, pointed them at various online articles, and then shut the thing off. Later I realized that when you open Safari while offline and browse a previously loaded page, it blanks it out and tells you that you have lost your connection. Why can’t it cache those pages that it has already downloaded?!?

My sister-in-law had another complaint; she has a first generation 8GB iPod Touch, and resisted upgrading to v3 iOS for a long time because Apple was charging for it. No problem; it was her choice to stay on the old software. The thing should still keep working, right? But then her work email server (she works at a University) was upgraded and no longer supported mobile email on pre-v3 devices. Her apps upgraded themselves automatically and many of them started breaking because they didn’t support the old iOS. So she decided to suck it up and pay for the upgrade. Now that v4 is out, many of the same problems are popping up again, but there is a new twist – iOS v4 doesn’t support the first generation iPod Touch hardware.

I’m a pretty good Google search user. I know a lot of the tricks and keywords, and I know how to access the special searches (for music, for source code, etc).  Mostly I have just learned how to phrase a search to get a high probability of success. But every once in a while I spend a few minutes looking for something specific, and fail. For example, I haven’t been able to find:

1. The name of something when all I can remember about it is what the thing does and the letter it starts with. The other day I was trying to find a kind of floor jack that starts with the letter “s.” Google couldn’t help. I still don’t know what it is.

Photo credit: Bill the stick maker

2. A video of the greyhounds catching the mechanical rabbit. It came up in a conversation one day, and someone said, “I’ll bet there is a video on that on the web.” Turns out there isn’t, or else Google just can’t find it.

3. How much electricity I am using at any given moment in my house. No, wait! They are working on a Google device that can do that! But that leads me to…

4. How much water I am using at any given moment in my house.

A simple electrical circuit

5. The history behind why electrical current is indicated by the letter i on a circuit diagram. This came up in a conversation years ago, pre-Google, because a colleague swore that current should be represented by the letter c. He had a textbook from the 1920’s that proved his point, and he further claimed that because his source was older than mine (a more recent textbook), his answer was superior. I went to the library, found a citation using the letter i from a 19th century textbook, and proudly presented it to him the next day. I can’t seem to find any similar sources or a history of the symbol selection on the web using Google. And yes I did find the answer at WikiHow or Yahoo Answers or something but I think those answers are crap.

I’ll challenge readers to find any of these things, or to report the Google search failures you have had.

In January, I bought a Dell Mini 9 netbook with Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows through the Dell Outlet for ~$200. It’s a pretty stripped version, with only a 4gb SSD, but I was tired of lugging my 7lb Inspiron through airports and I’d been inclined to try a Linux machine anyway.

It has worked out pretty well, though a bit sluggish. The Dell version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron, a Long-Term Support version) included a quick launcher bar broken down by category:

I found it generally more useful to go into the “classic desktop” view, however, since the quicklauncher wasn’t particularly suited to finding files. Dell recently started updating the version through their repositories (Linux sponsors provide “central” locations for updates) rather than the Canonical one, and I was hit with two updates in one week. The first seemed primarily about the battery manager and was welcome. The second sped up the machine, but somehow reorganized the “classic desktop” that I’d been using into something much more like the quick launcher, with a single drop-down menu (Windows-like) rather than the Apps/Places/System trifecta that traditionally rules Ubuntu. Furthermore, the power button disappeared from the screen, hidden (again) in the drop-down menu.

Trying my limited patience, I initially searched for a way to undo the “improvement” on the Dell boards. Time to try the “Netbook Remix” edition that is directly available from Canonical. It took about 20m to install off a USB key, and what a visual improvement:

It’s smaller (on the drive) than the Dell version, it’s faster, and it uses the limited screen size much more efficiently. I should have done this months ago. All the software is more up-to-date (Open Office 3.0 rather than 2.1, the latest version of Firefox, etc) and it’s overall prettier.

I’m not a hardcore Linux nut, but I appreciate the open-source software movement and use a variety of open-source programs already on my Windows work machines (Firefox, R, 7-Zip). The Ubuntu flavor is improving quickly, with new releases every 6 months. I don’t know that it will ever be as big as Windows or Apple, but for those willing to try it out, it’s already “there” in terms of usability, and it will make you start wondering why anyone pays for operating systems currently. I’ll probably upgrade the SSD in the near future.

Yeah, it wasn’t your neighbor’s cable line when three black SUVs turn up within minutes of you saying “That wasn’t suppose to be here.”

Classic move on AT&T’s part to try and stiff the construction company with the bill for the repair bill for a line not on the map.

No idea what I’m talking about?

Construction Crew Severs Secret ‘Black Line’ via Wired.com

So the media, being handed a scientific breakthrough story, are falling over themselves to call this thing the missing link. But since evolution is a slow, incremental, and continuous process that really isn’t a great term for the primate skeleton that was unvieled this week. My favorite comment on this story so far has to be one by user DeafDumbBlind on slashdot… “Great, 2 more gaps created in our fossil records.”

“As modern cosmologists rely more and more on the ominous “dark matter” to explain otherwise inexplicable observations, much effort has gone into the detection of this mysterious substance in the last two decades, yet no direct proof could be found that it actually exists. Even if it does exist, dark matter would be unable to reconcile all the current discrepancies between actual measurements and predictions based on theoretical models. Hence the number of physicists questioning the existence of dark matter has been increasing for some time now. “

I’m no physicist, but I have a pretty good grasp of the scientific method and of statistics, and if your theory requires massive forces that you’ve been unable to actually detect despite decades of trying, then it might be that your theory needs revision.

I know that the Einstein relativity-based model of the “large” things in the universe is incompatible with the quantum model of the “small” things, even though both have been tested and shown to work. I understand (somewhat) how string theory might bridge the gap between the two models, but I can’t recall what it says about dark matter. Regardless of whether string theory ever develops into a standard testable model, it’s time to dump this whole dark matter thing and start looking for better answers.

A guy has remixed Bohemian Rhapsody using old computer hardware. Some may not be impressed by this, but I am.

…and yet there is still no such thing as a drip coffee pot that is both transparent and insulated.

Add this to the list of things that should have been invented by now, including a washing machine that also dries your clothes, batteries that keep a charge for weeks instead of hours, and a cell phone that completely replaces everything else in your pockets including cash, credit cards, membership cards, discount cards, coupone, insurance information and a swiss army knife. Honestly, how hard could these things be to build?

That’s free as in beer.

Here’s a list of the open source and otherwise free software that I download immediately whenever I set up a new computer. It is a Windows-centric list, though most of these packages will work on Linux and probably some on Mac OS as well.

For everyone

• CutePDF: Install this and you can “print” to create a PDF file just like you print to a printer.
• Fastone Image Viewer: This is by far my favorite photo viewer. It is super fast; it loads the whole folder into memory when you click on a photo, and then you can page through them, full-screen, using the arrow keys. Moving the mouse to the edges of the screen gets you different menus, including a gallery slider (on top) and quick-resize and crop (on the left). Lots of hot-keys if you want to get really efficient.
• Fastone Image Resizer: Need to make a quick set of thumbnails from photos of various sizes and orientations, and rename them all with a “T-” prefix at the same time, while changing the .JPG suffix to lower case? This will do it in one step.
• GIMP: An open source Photoshop, full featured and powerful.
• Google Chrome: Google’s recent entry into the web browser wars. I like Firefox and its extensions, but Chrome simplifies everything (for example, there is only one text box for web address AND search, and it always knows which you are trying to do). Plus, it is FAST.
• Google Earth: Fly around the planet. I’m sure this has practical applications, but I don’t care. You can spend hours just looking for that secret swimming hole you found in Kauai, or trying to guess when the satellite image of your house was taken.
• Google Sketchup: Draw 3D models of things. Used this to re-design our kitchen recently. It helps to go through their online video tutorial.
• Open Office: The de facto Microsoft Office replacement. It is compatible with MS Office most of the time. I have also been using Google Docs extensively, but for different purposes; in short, Google Docs is good for sharing docs between computers and people, but it is far from full featured.
• Skype: Make free calls through the internet to other Skype users in your circle of family and friends. I got my parents up and running using Skype to video conference in no time.
• TVAnts: I’m pretty sure this is on the edge of legality if not well over. TVAnts is a video player with an associated directory that allows you to basically watch someone else’s TV. It seems to be geared primarily to sporting events. We don’t have a TV at home, so we used this to watch the Superbowl this year. We still get the ads, but I’m pretty sure we weren’t counted in the Nielsen ratings.
• Video Editing: I haven’t really played too much with open source video editors, but I’ll provide this link to a list of packages in case it is useful. We have been using the Flip video camera which comes with its own built-in editing software – very nice, if not professional level.

For the more geek-oriented

• Cygwin: Creates a unix-like command prompt on your PC. You can use this to download and compile source code or perform shell scripts on text files, which sometimes is the only way to go.
• FileZilla: A simple, straight-forward ftp client (and server).
• HTML-Kit: A nice HTML editor. I wish it wouldn’t keep bugging me to upgrade, but I find the interface otherwise very easy to use.
• XAMPP: Apache, MySQL, php and perl. Install this and you have a database-driven web server up and running in a matter of minutes. Use it as a “sandbox” before publishing web pages to the internet, or drive an internal server for a home or business.