perfidy

Hiding their air from us, apparently. New measurements and calculations from the orbiting Mars spy satellites indicate that Mars is losing about 20 grams of atmosphere a second. Which is not a whole hell of a lot. Even adding it all up over the course of billions of years, its still not a whole hell of a lot.

Extrapolating this measurement back over 3.5 billion years, they estimate that only a small fraction, 0.2 to 4 millibars, of carbon dioxide and a few centimeters of water could have been lost to solar winds during that timeframe.

Which means that either Mars never had the thicker, wetter atmosphere we think it did in the past, or else that atmosphere was not blown away atom by atom by the solar wind as we thought it did. Either way, something we though was so, weren't. If Mars did in fact have that thick atmosphere, it must be sequestered away somewhere in, around, or in the pockets of the planet. Which is a positive thought for all those budding junior scientists with their home terraforming kits. Martian air, perhaps hidden in underground reservoirs, or bound up in the crust or whatnot, would at least theoretically be amenable to be reintroduced into the atmosphere. Unless a third theory is true - that Mars' atmosphere was blown clear off the planet by a large meteor strike. So, to sum up, Mars doesn't have air, and is losing it slowly. It may or may not have air hidden. Mars may or may not have had a thick atmosphere in the past. Mars may or may not have been hit by an atmosphere-stealing asteroid. See how our knowledge grows?

[wik] I find it interesting, btw, that catastrophic explanations for what we see in the solar system are becoming more common.

Reuters reports that in the aftermath of the recent round up of hundreds of illegal undocumented aliens workers, known to me as scofflaw foreigners, some people in California are fearful. Why are they fearful? Let's hear what Rosa Maria Salazar has to say. She is a cook at a Salvadoran cafe in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles:

"We're terrified. The police could come for us at any time and deport us."

As an aside, she made the above comment in Spanish. Reuters helpfully translated. But why is Rosa Maria frightened? Because, well, she's an illegal alien. She is here in this country illegally, and she is working illegally. I am sure that Rosa Maria is a nice woman, hard working and eager to make a better life for herself. No doubt that was difficult in her native Guatemala. But I am not overly moved by her terror. She has every right to be concerned that agents of our government will come and send her away, because, that's their job and she is a utterly and completely legitimate target for their scrutiny. She's breaking our laws just by being in Los Angeles.

This Reuters article is full of not so sly bias toward the "victims" of this latest sweep. Observe:

The 55-year-old undocumented worker from Guatemala is among many Hispanics deeply shaken by recent immigration raids at the heart of Latino communities in southern California.

I imagine that most of those frightened Hispanics are also illegal aliens. American citizens of Hispanic descent really don’t have to worry, now, do they? Should we be concerned that criminals are “shaken” by police patrols?

The-seven day Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweep, dubbed "Operation Return to Sender," targeted jails across five counties in the Los Angeles area, where police took 423 of what they called "criminal aliens" into federal custody for deportation, after being held on charges unrelated to their immigration status.

And look, more than half of the people rounded up were already rounded up, albeit for other crimes. Is the Hispanic community, and indeed concerned citizens throughout this great nation expected to weep for shame because 400 people already in jail are deported? Sheesh.

Federal agents from seven teams also fanned out in local communities, where they nabbed 338 undocumented immigrants, more than 150 of whom were classed as "immigration fugitives" -- foreign nationals who ignored final deportation orders.

And of the other half, almost half of them were not merely here illegally, but were actively running from immigration officials. These aren’t the grey masses of illagals, people who are in this country but under the radar. These are people who we have specifically told to go home, and for some reason are still here. Why were these “final deportation orders” not accompanied by a Federal Marshall and a plane ticket? Of the others, these undocumented immigrants yearning to be free, well they are 188 out of an estimated 2.5 million in California alone. It’s a start, but hardly a solution.

"We hadn't seen anything like this here before, and it came as a shock," said Antonio Bernabe, a community worker who runs a day labor program at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Why the fuck would this come as a shock to you, Antonio? The fact that we haven’t enforced our laws for decades might have lulled you into a false sense of security, but the writing has been on the wall for a little while now. And why aren’t you in jail for helping criminals evade justice?

"The police didn't just take people with deportation orders, they took anybody ... guys who were just hanging out in the street and even from a Jack in the Box restaurant ... and now people are afraid to go out," he added.

Well, damn, that’s just like, terrible. They took anybody who wasn’t here legally. How… fascist.

"We used to feel secure here," Nicaraguan electrician Manuel Salomon told Reuters as he sipped coffee in a Mexican bakery in the city. "But it looks like that honeymoon is over."

I certainly hope so, Manuel. I hope that you get arrested and deported. And then I hope that you turn around, and make your way back to this country legally.

This article, and many like it, are ridiculous in the euphemistic treatment of this issue. Calling Manuel, or others, “Undocumented Workers” or some other truth dodging phrase does not erase the fact that they are people who are breaking our laws, and have been showing contempt for laws since the moment they slipped across the border. They are illegal aliens – a nicely accurate phrase that has almost completely disappeared from the major media. I am not against immigration. I do not hate Hispanics. I am against illegal immigration, and I think that most people on this side of the issue realize that they are different issues despite the efforts of some on the other side to conflate them.

Some pharmacist should lose a license over this, I guess. Either that or a zoologist, if such even have licenses.

Never give an iguana Viagra

Thu Jan 25, 2007 12:04pm ET

ANTWERP, Belgium (Reuters) - Mozart, an iguana with an erection that has lasted for over a week, will have his penis amputated in the next couple of days.

Veterinarians at Antwerp's Aquatopia had sought to treat the animal's problem, but decided removal was the only solution because of the risk of infection. The good news for Mozart and his mates is that male iguanas have two penises.

Mozart, sitting on the shoulders of his keeper as camera crews focused on his red, swollen erection, seemed unperturbed by the news.

"It doesn't bother him. He doesn't know what amputation means," said vet Luc Lambrecht, adding that Mozart's sexual activity should be undimmed by the operation.

"I don't think so. That's all in his head."

I'm happy to report that the Reuters report doesn't contain any pictures of swollen, red, iguana junk, so it's safe for work. I don't know which is sillier - the fact that someone gave the iguana Viagra, or the fact that some (presumedly different) person can assert, apparently straight-faced, that his sexual performance is all in his head.

[wik] This posting might be mis-titled - the iguana doesn't seem to actually have been too embarrassed by this malpractice.

[alsø wik] I wonder what role the physiology of the iguana plays in the psychology of penis envy?

[alsø alsø wik] The Reuters article might just as logically been entitled "Never Give an Iguana a Lit M-80 for Lunch", come to think of it.

Just heard, in a phone conversation with my buddy Ian:

He was speaking with a friend of his, during an event today in Orlando, and they discussed the fertility specialist that the friend and his wife were seeing, due to their difficulty conceiving a child.

His friend went in to visit the specialist, and the nurse handed him a cup and asked him to produce a specimen. After heading down to a fairly generic restroom and grabbing a stall, he did so, bringing the cup back to the nurse.

Who looked at it and said "No, I needed a urine specimen".

Ian asked him "So what did you do then?". Turns out he just left, utterly crushed by embarrassment, though he's since recovered after realizing that what he did, wanted or not, was something he'd been practicing his whole life for.

Ever the clown/instigator, Ian pointed out to him that he'd handled it all wrong, and should instead have replied "What do you think this is?"

"I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I'm gonna put pins into all the locations that I've traveled to. But first, I'm gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won't fall down." -- Mitch Hedberg

As impressive as they are to watch, rockets are a dangerous and in the end inefficient means of getting to orbit. Burning tons of liquefied oxygen and hydrogen and throwing away the rocket every time you want a satellite is not what your average beancounter would call sound economically. Imagine if, to fly from New York to Los Angeles, you built a brand new 747, flew it across the country, and jumped out over LAX for a parachute landing and let the plane crash into the Pacific. Getting a airline ticket would face a few more difficulties than just avoiding TSA’s watchlist.

This is a sound argument for reusable spaceships. But it is an even better argument for taking a step away from rockets altogether. Instead of rockets, why not have an elevator? Walk through the doors, take a seat, and ride into space with as much fireworks and commotion as getting on the express elevator in the Empire State Building. Building a physical structure that extends from the surface of the earth to orbit and beyond seems fantastical, but the idea actually has an extensive pedigree.

The idea for space elevators goes back to the misty dawn of the space age. Russian space theorist Konstantine Tsiolkovsky first proposed the idea of an orbital tower in his 1895 paper "Day-dreams of Heaven and Earth.”

On the tower, as one climbed higher and higher up it, gravity would decrease gradually; and if it were constructed on the Earth's equator and, therefore, rapidly rotated together with the earth, the gravitation would disappear not only because of the distance from the centre of the planet, but also from the centrifugal force that is increasing proportionately to that distance. The gravitational force drops ... but the centrifugal force operating in the reverse direction increases. On the earth the gravity is finally eliminated at the top of the tower, at an elevation of 5.5 radii of the Earth (36,000 km).

However, it was soon realized that no material could withstand the compressive stress of the weight of the tower. Half a century and more down the road, another Russian, Yuri Artsutanov, proposed what we now think of as the space elevator. Artsutanov suggested using a satellite in geostationary earth orbit (GEO) as a construction base, and extending a cable downward while simultaneously paying out a counterweight upwards to maintain the center of gravity in GEO. Artsutanov also described using a tapered tether to reduce the stress on the cable.

Over the last several decades, many people have examined the idea. Charles Sheffield and Arthur C. Clarke both used the idea as the central focus of their novels Fountains of Paradise and The Web Between the Worlds in the late seventies. And more thorough research has established many of the engineering requirements for a working space elevator. Most of these problems are solvable by a suitable application of engineering or politics – for example, building a working elevator car for the cable would be a straightforward, if difficult, application of the principles currently used in maglev trains.

But the biggest obstacle is the creation of a structural material for the elevator cable. Our strongest materials until recently fell short of the required tensile strength by a large margin. At a minimum, beanstalk cable material should have a tensile strength of 65 GPa (gigapascals, a measure of stress), and a density on the order of graphite. (Too much weight, and it doesn’t matter how strong the cable is.) The strongest steel is at about 5 GPa. Kevlar hits about the same, but is much lighter. We’re off by at least an order of magnitude. Quartz fibers and diamond filaments would reach up to the twenties. But then, in the nineties, came carbon nanotubes. Their theoretical tensile strength is in the range needed for a beanstalk.

But, the strongest actual observed GPa was only in the fifties, and the tensile strength of a cable would likely be less than that of its nanotube components. There are also difficulties with making bulk quatities of nanotubes and making them into suitable strands. Cost is also a factor, as nanotubes run about $25 a gram. But there is hope – carbon nanotubes have applications far beyond making space elevator cables, and someone, sometime, will for his own purposes invent a cable that is suitable for our beanstalk.

These developments in materials science put a working beanstalk in sight. And one company has formed to pursue the creation of a space elevator. I ran into Brian Dunbar of the Liftport Company in the comments section over at Murdoc Online, and asked him if he’d do an interview. He graciously agreed, and below, part one of our interview:

Brian, what is your role at the LiftPort Corporation?

I have two roles at Liftport.

Systems Administration - setup accounts, monitor disk usage, setup the web server

Gadfly - I flit about the Internet, looking for blogs, websites and forums that talk about space access, and specifically Liftport and the space elevator. If there are questions or misunderstandings, I correct them or point to a resource for better answers.

Why? Public support alone won't get us cheap access to space (CATS), but we won't get CATS without it. More specifically to Liftport we'll need a favorable legal and political climate to operate in. This is one way of doing that.

I'm not sure if there is a better way - would you trust us more if we ran commercials on TV? I wouldn't - and we don't have the funds for a massive traditional PR campaign so it's moot.

Could you give us a capsule description (for the sake of those readers who are not space enthusiasts) of what LiftPort is trying to do?

Build a space elevator system. Make money. Have fun.

To do that you need an organization that is going to be around for a few decades. This implies cash flow.

Our answer to that is to use the ancillary technology for a space elevator to build a series of businesses to provide short-term capital and long-term seriousness.

We're talking 'niche market' stuff here. Our robotics group is a good example; a lifter rolls up and down a ribbon to a balloon thousands of feet overhead. Going up it can carry fresh batteries or other consumables. Coming back it brings home the dead battery. This enables your load to have a much longer mission life, and it can power a higher energy device than a solar array could.

Potential uses are for wireless internet connectivity for areas where it's problematic to build towers or the towers have not been built yet, disaster recovery efforts, radio relay for the military.

So .. while it appears to be a two steps up one step back kinda deal this seems to be an optimal way to keep a private organization going while driving onto the main goal.

On your website, you always refer to your goal as a "space elevator." Is this a conscious decision to avoid the (Perfidy preferred) term "Beanstalk?"

Ya it is. 'Beanstalk' is a reference to 'Jack and the Beanstalk' of course and that story may not be known or internalized across the world. Space elevator .. everyone knows what an elevator is.

At this point the term 'space elevator' is more widely known than beanstalk. No one person set out to make this so it just happened.

Do you feel there is a strong analogy between the historical development of railroads and the future development of space elevators? Or does some other analogy present itself?

It's possible to use analogy while recognizing that space is different and analogies to previous eras don't really apply very well.

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.

The railroad as experienced in Europe might be a better analogy – there lines were constructed along existing communication links, improving the throughput between established locations. I'm dumbing that down for the sake of brevity of course.

It might be better to state that 'decreasing transaction cost on a transportation link always generates wealth' and leave it at that.

A few questions about technology:

What is the state of the art in materials technology, and how close are we to beanstalk grade materials?

I am no expert - it's not where I work and once you get beyond the most elementary description and math most of it is beyond me. The state of the art appears to be that it's possible to generate the material in the required strength in lengths of a few centimeters but beyond that, nothing. Yet.

Depending on who you talk to we're about a decade, or decade and half from 'space elevator' grade material. Or twenty years to never.

I am confident that the economic benefits of having such material would apply broadly across a number of disciplines - body armor, structural members, etc. So this should keep people beavering away at it.

What technologies need to be developed for a working beanstalk besides ribbon material?

We need a reliable vehicle or system that can traverse a variety of environments, without fail, at high speed. This isn't 'a' technology so much as engineering but neither is it a trivial exercise.

A power system for delivering energy from ground to the lifter needs to be devised. We're pretty sure that microwave aren't going to cut it (the rectenna would be huge) so that seems to leave a free-electron laser. You can't just go get one of these at Ace Hardware but they do exist as tested units in the lab. These need to gone over to see what efficiencies in manufacturing and operation could be had.

Organization. What does an organization that builds and operates a space elevator system (we certainly hope to have more than one in service) look like? We don't know. There have certainly been private operators of launch services but they've been geared around a low launch rate. Things are going to speed up and the org will have to be geared up to that fact.

The anchor. We think that the anchor is going to need to be mobile and capable of an average speed of 12 km/hour. This is faster than deep-sea oil platforms, and we'll move far more often than they're capable of doing. This implies some engineering of the concept.

What alternative uses for this technology is your company pursuing in the short term?

Currently we're standing up a CNT furnace in New Jersey - this will function as a new products integration lab for testing and (we hope) small scale manufacturing of CNT material.

Liftport Robotics to leverage the lifter work into a revenue stream (see above).

Liftport Media is stood up to exploit the media possibilities of the enterprise.

Traditionally, (in science fiction and elsewhere) a space elevator was portrayed as a cable. Why has LiftPort moved to a ribbon concept?

It's easier for the lifter to clamp onto a ribbon. Generally the answer 'cheaper and/or easier' will be valid for most of the choices we'll make.

How does LiftPort envision a beanstalk construction effort? Will it be built incrementally, or constructed in space and then deployed?

Yes.

The Plan calls for a seed ribbon to be built and lofted into orbit, in several loads. Once there we mate them together, then deploy the thing. Once it's down lifters ascend and add on more ribbon until we have 'enough' to support a few 20-ton climbers at a time.

Consider the phrase, "Behind every great man is a woman". We're all familiar with the thought, if the precise wording varies: that there is causation between the presence of a woman and the success of her affiliated man.

Does it follow then that behind every loser is a bad woman? Does the causation flow downhill too?

Discuss.

Apple to impose 50% fanboy sucker tax on iPhone consumers, reports AppleInsider. (h/t to gizmodo) It seems that it's only going to cost about $250 to manufacture the iPhone, and so Apple gets the 50% profit margins that in the past have made it rich, yet contributed to its marginal status in the computer industry. And Cingular gets a two year lock for free, since they ain't subsidizing shit. This is as annoying as it always is. It's why I've never purchased a new Mac computer.

I think I might wait a little bit until the fanboy rush subsides and competition, hopefully, forces Apple to lower prices. But competition from Dell, HP and a thousand others never forced Apple to lower Mac prices. Will competition from Nokia, Samsung, Sony/Ericsson and others come to the same? Or will Cingular try to convince Jobs to lower the price to keep people coming? You'd think Jobs would have learned by now that if you sell a hundred computers at a 10% margin, you make a lot more money than selling five at 50%. (Assuming about the same price to manufacture, you make twice as much.)

Gary Farber is in a panic. Despite chronic physical ailments, and wrestling with crippling depression, Amygdala has been one of the most consistently excellent blogs I know. In keeping with the Ministry tradition of not linking to anyone, or in fact doing anything that would increase our popularity, I have only linked Gary a couple times. But I read. And the other day, he explained why he has been in a panic. One of the few dependable sources of income he has has evaporated. He needs cash.

Imagine you're a cute, fuzzy deer. You wander onto the highway. You see some lights, you freeze. You think to yourself, "I've got to get out of the highway." The lights get closer. You think, even more urgently, "I've really got to get out of the highway." But you can't move. Imagine that feeling lasting for months or years at a time. People with chronic ailments like diabetes can take insulin or whatever to control their disease. There is nothing about diabetes that actively tries to prevent you from getting help. Depression does. It's five miles of fog between you and reality. It's all the color in your life going away, and not all cute like in Pleasantville. It even makes you like the Cure and the Smiths. And all the while, people tell you to cheer up, or get your shit together, or for godsakes just do something. You feel that whatever talents or gifts you have, which - in the hands of anyone else - would have allowed them to become wildly successful and boink supermodels all day, are really just a mocking curse from a cruel god because you have them, and can't use them for anything.

I think that Gary might be feeling better, thanks to the generosity of those who've already pitched in. Make him feel a little better, if for no other reason than so I can keep reading his blog.

By way of Princess Cat, I see that there is a contest (with actual prize money) for best milblogger over at the VA Mortgage Center blog. $3,000 cash money to the winner, and $250 to the top ten finishers. It seems they need someone to straighten out the prize money statement. Regardless, folks will be getting checks. Cat has suggested that you all vote for Sgt. Hook, to help him subsidize his trip to the Milblogger conference this spring here in the Nation's capitol. But I noticed, to my horror, that Murdoc had not been nominated. I corrected that grievous oversight, and I hope that he'll be sending more links our way. Of course, I could make it easier for him by posting more often.