perfidy

Ministry Crony and finance guru Mapgirl has the great honor to be the hostess of the 90th Carnival of Personal Finance. It's great to see Maps pushing the boundaries like this, and tackling subjects far afield from her usual material. You will also note that she has cleverly arranged the material in the carnival into several categories, an innovative and, dare I say, useful new blogging practice. With this sort of blog acumen, there can be little doubt that MFC will soon be one of the brighter stars in the blog firmament.

All these years, I've never really given much thought to them, and have remained uneducated about wolverines.

What, to my wondering eyes, should appear the other week but an article insert in the Economist of Feb 15th (really, just a sidebar), including a picture of a wolverine. Who knew they looked so much like beavers? Or would that be better stated as "fat-assed ferrets"? Silly me - I've always assumed it was just a small wolf. Not being from Michigan, I guess it's OK for me to have had such a gap in my knowledge. It's a shame that the online article omits the picture of the wolverine, as it was truly a nasty looking bugger. None of the first couple hundred wolverine pictures available in a Google Image search, after omitting those 90% which seemed to be related to the X-Men movies, came even close to capturing the bugger's nasty buggerishness.

Oh, and that article? (sorry - subscription only, near as I can tell, though how it classifies as "premium content" is a bit beyond me). It's about the proposed rebranding of Canada, and is entitled "Tenacious, smelly—and uncool". No, they weren't talking about Canada in the title, they were talking about what a poor choice a wolver-rat would be for a national symbol.

Close your eyes and think of Canada. Perhaps the picture that comes to mind is one of a country of cold winters and civilised prosperity. But Stephen Harper, the country's Conservative prime minister, has another idea. This month he suggested that the national image was best captured by the wolverine, a sort of weasel.

That seems odd. Wolverines have some unpleasant habits. They emit a foul-smelling musk and eat carrion. They are close relatives of skunks and their name translates as “glutton” in French. But Mr Harper was thinking of their reputation for aggression and tenacity in the face of much larger predators. Canada is no mouse beside the American elephant, but a wolverine next to a grizzly bear, he said. “We may be smaller but we're no less fierce about protecting our territory.”

The Economist goes on to remind readers that it's already suggested new symbology for Canada, back in 2003 - a moose wearing shades. So yeah, that's rather cool - a lot better than a nasty smelling sharp-clawed mole-like creature that eats carrion.

[wik] What? Ohio State fan? Moi?

Crazy Person or Bluetooth Headset? The Home Game.

Bad intelligence + bad logistics = International incident.

A while back – too long, to be honest, I posted the first part of my interview with Brian Dunbar of the Liftport Company (where you can now buy a one ounce ticket to space) - those magnificent crazies who are attempting to build a Space Elevator. Part one just got us started, so without any sort of further ado, here is the balance of the interview:

Beyond the technical issues, some other questions:

What obstacles do you see in the way of building a space elevator, assuming a technical solution is available – what legal, bureaucratic and safety issues will have to be overcome before we see a beanstalk?

We'll need to assure ourselves and whatever government agencies that evolve to regulate us that the thing is safe for normal operation and that when it fails it does so in a safe and controlled manner.

There are legal and bureaucratic issues that encumber a launch operator. These are probably evolved to deal with an industry that pokes along with a low launch rate; the appropriate agencies are going to have to perk up and move faster or that will be a bottleneck.

If I invented a strong enough material this evening, how quickly could your company build a beanstalk?

If you do that you should contact us soonest. We can offer you a heckuva deal.

About twenty years. It's not just about the material - we need to evolve an organization, design the power delivery system, the lifters, the platform, run tests to make sure this all works in the Real World. The good news is that the further down this track we go the more work we're doing that back fills the effort so when the ribbon is done ..

Think of it this way. You're at work, waiting for a lengthy process to finish so you can get busy. You can just sit around playing Solitaire or you can be productive and get other stuff done in the meantime. We're doing other stuff right now.

Do you see some sort of threshold for large scale access to space (via rocket) or experience in space construction that needs to be crossed before we can consider constructing a beanstalk?

It would be nice if we had massive experience with construction and assembly in orbit. We do have MIR, ISS and the lessons learned there are valuable but the work there is somewhat odd in that it's not being done by 'construction' guys but by middle-aged PhDs. This isn't bad but what we (as a culture) need are a lot of young guys with experience in
orbit.

We don't have that. We'll have to hire the guys from NASA who have ISS experience and think hard about our choices.

But now - no threshold for heavy lift rockets - the initial seed ribbon can get there using the rockets we've got.

Your website has a countdown timer – with a date in 2018. How do you get that date?

You'll note this was changed after you emailed these questions to 2031.

We chose 2018 after running some numbers and making best guesses about the tasks that needed to be done.

We calculated 2031 after sitting down this summer with interns, business guys and some terrifically smart skeptics. State of the art was evaluated, tests were designed, assumptions questioned and we emerged with a road map and a date of 2031. Which pleased no one (I'll be OLD) but is, we think, a more realistic date.

The road map is (PDF file) at http://www.liftport.com/papers/SE_Roadmap_v1beta.pdf

How cheap do you think space access can get (price per pound to orbit) with a working space elevator? On the order of air freight?

Eventually the cost to get to orbit will drop to match the cost of air freight, but air freight for what year?

We're aiming for an initial cost of $400 per pound. This value may change depending on how expensive it really turns out to be to build the first space elevator. It's not going to become 'cheap' for a while, but that depends on so many factors that I'd won't venture a guess as to the amount.

I like to think that we're working to get the transaction cost equivalent to transporting cargo to Australia. Maybe an Australian Cargo Equivalent (ACE) unit can be devised for a given year ....

What would be the effects of a working beanstalk? I know that's a big question, but how do you think the beanstalk will change the world?

It will change everything. Two minutes after that no one will notice and 'change' will be the new status quo. A few years later you'll notice that movies made before 20xx set in the future have a comical quality to them - something like watching James Bond in Moonraker flying with a fleet of Shuttles and doing battle in orbit with space Marines wearing MMU rocket packs.

The effects will be to lower the transaction cost to space. Soon after that we'll see if stuff like solar power from space (SPS), making 'stuff' in orbit and colonies of people living off earth are as viable an idea we might hope they are.

In real-life and non-snarking terms lowering the cost to orbit and ramping up the throughput will affect the satellite industry and what we do in orbit. The industry is built around a low launch rate and high reliability. When it's dirt cheap to make satellites and they can be replaced quickly and easily you might see done to them what happened to IBM and DEC when microcomputers took the world by storm.

Were the founders of the company inspired by Clarke and Sheffield's novels, and how have science fictional portrayals of space elevators affected what you're doing?

Eh. Speaking only for myself I read the Clarke book in high school and I liked it well enough but just another book. When the opportunity presented itself to work with Michael I got here via an interest in CNT and nano-tech.

SF has had an impact on us all, certainly. I'm reasonably sure that the other guys at Liftport are SF readers from way back and reading imaginative literature as a young child will warp you (smile) in ways odd and strange.

Does LiftPort have any plans for developing other, variant forms of beanstalks in the future, such as rotovators, lunar beanstalks, rotating free space tethers, or the like? If LiftPort is successful in building a terrestrial beanstalk, do you plan on creating a solar system wide mass transportation system?

Any thinking along those lines is years off and so speculative as to be in the realm of fantasy. However ...

The first company to build a space elevator is going to discover that they are the de-facto experts in civil engineering outside of the atmosphere. This will present some interesting challenges to the companies growth and it's natural desire to grow and do better than the competition.

Probably best to say that if there are customers and we can build it, we'll bid on the project.

How rich do you think you'll get as a early employee of a space elevator company? (Be honest.)

This question gives me the most trouble. Being objective, if this all works and I'm still working for Liftport in twenty or thirty years then 'rich beyond the dreams of avarice' might be a good description. But it's really hard for me to imagine having that much wealth. What would I DO with it all?

If it happens then I imagine I'll deal with it.

Finally, my co blogger had a question – what do you plan on naming the first operational space elevator? And a request – please, please don't name it "BeanstalkOne" or SpaceElevatorOne." What kind of nomenclature can we expect from LiftPort?

We're a small company working on a project that is barely on the fringes of respect in some circles. We can't really be too frivolous - it will cost us cred.

On the other hand we can't be too dour and serious. There has to be a balance between 'gonzo' and 'staid corporate blah'.

One of our prototype lifters was named 'Squeek' - I've attached the artwork Nyein created for her. The monikers we gave the others escapes me for the moment but that's a good example.

Will it always be like that? I hope so; you have to keep your perspective.

That was a fantastic interview, and thanks to Brian Dunbar for taking the time to answer my perhaps overly long list of questions. There are many things going on right now, of which most people are unaware. Now, that is always true, of course, but one of the unique things about the time we find ourselves in is that in dark corners of hidden laboratories, very bright people are inventing things – as we speak – that have the potential to utterly transform our world. Not just one or two. Any number of developments in the realms of genetic engineering, computing, nanotechnology (or the confluence of any two – like the Remote Control Pigeons of Doom) could overnight transform not just our world, but our perceptions of it, ourselves, and our place in it.

Liftport, and Brian, are certainly of that caliber and potential. Brian says that two minutes after the first cable car goes up the magic rope trick, everyone will forget that things were different, and in that he’s right. But things will be different, more than we can imagine. Just yesterday, I was talking with a friend about life before cell phones, ten years ago. Life after space travel is as easy (or, given the nature of train travel in this country, easier) as hopping an Amtrak train will be what? Wonderful, unimaginable, horrific? What it will be, is bigger. A bigger world to play in, war in, think in. Our horizons will be expanded, even if most of us aren’t exactly aware how they got expanded.

I’d like to comment on a couple items that we discussed. In part one, I asked Brian if he thought that there is any similarity between the historical development of railroads and the future growth of space elevators. Brian responded,

blockquote > The railroad analogy is flawed, I believe, if you look at the American West in the 19th century. There the railroad companies gained wealth by owning sections of land adjacent to the tracks, and selling them at a profit. Towns were created by virtue of their being a railroad stop. This falls down with a space elevator - there isn’t any value in owning space next to the ribbon. It’s all about the anchor, GEO and the bitter end.

I think his last sentence is arguing with the ones before. The space elevator, should it be built, is not just a transportation system. It will be, in itself, real estate. Bigelow, with his funding of the orbital space prize and his own development of space habitats, realizes this as well. In orbit, it is very nearly true that there is no “there” there. We have to build our own. Real estate will be constructed habitat space. At the top of the beanstalk, there will be a space station, and whoever built it will own that land, and control who can rent it.

That may well prove to be a greater profit engine (as it was for the railroad barons) than the mere transportation of goods along the rails.

The other thing is from this half of the interview. Of all the rocky planets in our solar system, ours is the biggest, and therefore has the steepest gravity well. Building a beanstalk here is harder than anywhere else. I think there’s a decent chance that space elevator technologies might actually come into common use elsewhere before we actually get around to building a beanstalk on earth.

If we assume (and it’s even now a big assumption) that commercial activities like Rutan’s or Jeff Bezos’ will lower the cost of rocket travel to space significantly, then we can project that people will start heading into space in a big way. (Imagine lumbering and clumsy Conestoga wagons from before the railroads…) If we have a large presence in space, and start moving out to the moon, the near Earth asteroids, the belt and Mars, tether technology could provide a huge boost to our capabilities.

First, imagine that we could cut half of the rockets out of getting to the surface of the Moon by building a Lunar beanstalk. With only a sixth of the gravity of Earth, a lunar beanstalk would be within even current materials technology – requiring only the development of crawlers and such.

More likely, I think, is the use of rotating tethers as launch mechanisms. A free spinning orbital tether, spun up with solar power and maintaining its orbit with electromagnetic force, could launch payloads in a very cost effective manner. Dock your payload at the middle, lower it to the end of the cable, and wait for the right moment to let go. A flinger like that could be very useful.

More to the point, developing these tools would give us the experience to build a Earthly beanstalk so that we can ride to the stars in comfort and safety.

Thanks again to Brian, and Liftport, for giving us this exclusive interview.

I couldn't top the title, so I stole it. It seems that evil and mad scientists in China have created the world's first remote control pigeon. No more worrying about running out of batteries with your rc plane, just throw some crumbs on the ground to refuel your pigeon. Then, send them out on bombing missions.

A friend and one of my wife's bandmates is creating a documentary on the life and music of John Hartford. I did their website, as part of my soon to be announced part-time bidness of blog consulting. So far, I've designed one website, consulted with a Senate office, and have my next client on deck. Things may be moving quick, but in the meantime, check out Twangcentral, and give them money so that they can finish the damn movie, already.

Of all the commentary on the iPhone that I've read over the last couple months, this is probably one of the better ones. A sample:

In the same way, it seems to me that designers are always adding additional direct ways of doing things in a hope of making the device easier to use. The first IBM PC had “function keys” across the top of the keyboard … they are still there today! The belief is that extra specific keys is a way for people to be more efficient.

But in most human based interactions we find a finite set of learned primitives and then we combine them to achieve what we want – language, gestures, alphabets. By adding more and more keys and having combinations of keys cntl + shift + F3 for example, we end up having to memorize something that is only relevant here and from which we cannot springboard to a wider arena.

The use of gestures is the opposite. For example, on the Macintosh today you can do “2 finger dragging” to scroll a window up and down. If you are reading some text, like this essay, and what you are reading is at the bottom of the page on your laptop screen, you place 2 fingers instead of one down on the pad and slide them down and the window scrolls up. What do you think you do to get it to move left or right or up? See?

The second radical aspect of the iPhone is the introduction of a new set of gestures that the user makes with her fingers on the screen to accomplish most of the intended functions of the device. There are gestures (that we know from the iPhone demo) to magnify, fast scroll. My guess is there will be others. The approach that Apple is taking is no buttons, rather a flexible touch screen with high graphical resolution. Ultimately flexible and open to a variety of gestures.

That's pretty much what struck me about the iPhone. It's not merely that it has all these functions, or a touchpad - all of which have appeared one place or another before. It's the integration, and the simplification of the interface - making something that despite its complexity is elegant in its use. My cellphone has internet, email, text messaging and other features. However, they are painful enough to use that I don't typically, ever use them. I only use the camera to take the occasional picture of my kids, so I can show them to people. Emailing those photos is a pain in the ass. The UI on my phone doesn't make me ever want to use anything except the most simple and basic feature - calling. The iPhone will make using the complete features of the phone reasonable. Once I started using google, and then google maps on the computer, I never looked back. I imagine that looking things up on google maps on the phone will be no different, and in fact even more compelling, seeing as I have often complained to my long suffering wife that not being able to consult google maps en route is a serious crimp in my lifestyle. In a couple months, it won't be any longer.

Justin Long and John Hodgeman have invaded my brain, and I have decided that over the next several months I will be migrating my home IT infrastructure to the Mac platform. This is not without precedent - in the dark days before the new millennium, I once was a mac user. I had a pre-PowerPC Quadra, running OS 8. And I was happy. (That computer still works, by the way, as does my 91-vintage Mac laptop.) In the late nineties Windows, despite its manifest (and still lingering) flaws, was ever present and prospects for Apple looked grim. Buying another mac computer seemed at the time a very bad idea indeed. Compatibility with the Windows world was nonexistent, Macs were overpriced and underpowered, and as I launched my career in tech writing I needed to have a system that would allow me to run the same software I used at work.

So, I bought a PC – an HP pavilion as I recall. Over the last ten years, I've purchased and built several PCs. And I've also spent a lot of time managing and fixing those systems. Though at the time it didn’t seem so, the breaking point, the straw to my humpy back, was last fall. I spent two weekends doing slash-and-burn reinstalls of XP on my computer, my wife's computer and the laptop thanks to a particularly ah, virulent, virus infestation. My frustration with windows peaked about 11:00 pm on the second Saturday, while reinstalling for the third time a suite of anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-badness software. I came to the painful realization that at my billable rate, I had just blown well north of $2000 of time getting my computers back to where they had been a fortnight earlier.

Pissed off, frustrated, tired and angry, I did what every man faced with this dilemma does. I bitched and moaned like a little girl and didn't do a damn thing.

Now, sometime earlier, I had bought myself a nice 30GB iPod – the one that came out right before the even nicer video iPod. This little device, as is well known, is a wonder of preternaturally slick design, easy to use interface and tight integration with an equally well designed iTunes software. I dig it. It holds all my Perry Como and Dean Martin music, with 30GB left over for files, photos, and even other music. For weeks after I got it, the wife and I marveled at how well thought out the iPod was, and wistfully remembered our old Quadra. But nothing clicked.

When we, by which I mean my wife, were pregnant with child #2, we got another iPod, a nano, so that she could conveniently and stylishly listen to her hypno-birthing CDs without lugging around an antediluvian Walkman-like cd player that would skip every time the baby kicked. Again, we were stunned to (near) speechlessness by the impressive design that condensed all the features of our (now seeming clunky and Godzilla-sized) older iPod into a form factor a quarter the size and an eighth the weight.

Wow, thought we, those Apple geeks really know their stuff.

Then, the life changing moment. Apple announced the imminent arrival of the iPhone. I posted on that here earlier, and there has been voluminous coverage elsewhere. I know, because I've read most of it. The iPhone is the iPod on crack, steroids and espresso. The multitouch interface is brilliant (even if, like with the original Mac, they didn't invent it – they did implement it.) It makes my up to that very moment cool Motorola Razr phone look like chipped flint on a stick. It occurred to me, as it must have to the design team at Apple two and a half years ago, that no one had ever really made any effort to design an efficient and clean interface for a phone.

Looking at the iPhone and marveling at the seamless design, it finally occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, there was actually an alternative to Windows.

So, I went to the local Apple store and played with an iMac. And I was impressed. I read up, and it's pretty clear that the new world of Mac is much different than the one I left behind a decade ago. All the basic concerns about switching are, on deeper analysis, not really reason to be concerned. As I see it, the main worries are compatibility, power and price.

On compatibility, you have three options. For things like office documents, you can just use the mac version, and the documents it makes work just fine on windows versions. For where you have need to run actual windows software, thanks to the recent shift to Intel chips in newer macs, you can either boot in XP (or Vista) and use them just like you always did. Or, you can run a virtual windows installation on software like Parallels, which will run your windows apps at almost native speed. You can copy and paste between the OSes, too. And with the newest version of Parallels, you can even run Windows apps straight from the dock, without having to futz around with the Windows window at all.

On price and performance, there's no longer an issue. Apple is using intel chips, so you can make a direct comparison – and the price difference between a 24" iMac and a comparably equipped model from, say, Dell, is minimal – less than a couple hundred. Comparing a mac to a entry level $200 mcComputer isn't really a valid comparison – though you can get a mac mini for $600. If you’re willing to fork out the cash for a high end PC, there’s no reason not to get a Mac, where you get the same performance – plus unparalleled Apple design. The iMac looks better than any other PC, flat out.

And on top of all that, you get OS X, which, after playing with it at the Apple store, I find to be as slick and well designed as the iPod and iPhone, which didn't really come as a surprise. OS X, both because of its design and its relatively small market share, is relatively immune from virus and malware attacks. Which means that my experience of last fall will not be repeated, and the $2000 worth of time can beused to justify the cost of a new Mac. At least, in my mind it can.

Surprisingly, though, the wifey is remarkably cool with this whole risky Mac conversion scheme. She’s even more frustrated than me with the flaws of Windows PCs, seeing as she doesn’t have my experience in fixing them. She has to wait for me to get things working again, and she certainly doesn’t get even the minimal enjoyment I get from fixing Windows cock-ups. So getting something that is beautifully designed, easy to use, and, as the Apple website says about ten thousand times, “Just Works™” is alright with her.

Rumor around the playground has it that the new version of OS X, Leopard, will be coming out in the spring, and that there may be a hardware refresh on the iMac line at about the same time. As soon as that happens, I think I'll be getting me a 24” iMac. In the meantime, maybe I can convince the home finance minister that the wireless router is going south, and we need a Mac Mini and an Airport. You know, just to start the migration.

A former Canadian defense minister is calling for governments around the world to release the alien technology that they've gathered, and use that knowledge to fight global warming. Well, hey, why not?

This story makes several implicit comments: 1) on the seriousness of the Canadian military efforts of the last few decades, 2) solving magical problems with magical solutions is appropriate, and 3) people assume that alien technology will be better just because it's alien.