Quantum Astronaut Sculpture

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RADAR

Toyota Grill

Saw this car yesterday and noticed three little round things in the grill. You might need to embiggenate the image in order to see them. I'm wondering what they are and then I realize they are likely sensors for looking at the road ahead. Might be cameras, might be RADAR, might be mystical quantum doodads.

10 Short Videos #6021

10 Short Videos #6021

Donkey hooves into Dominos

Importing Doctors

Trivial Infractions

Model Truck Gear Change

Deadly Lentils

Quantum Computer Chandelier

Sword of Amazon

Aunt Jemima

Mini Camping Stove

Nordic Inventions

X-ray Flourescence

It's a rock, man
Anique_Jewerly01

So the stuff the guy brings in is junk, but what is that gun-like thing the shopkeeper is using? Whatever it is, he seems confident in the readings he is getting.

Nito XL2 XRF Handheld Precious Metal Analyzer

It's not a Tricorder, but we're getting there. There are several companies making these things, and they've been doing it for a while. New ones cost between $20K and $40K. Used ones can be picked up for a tenth of that.

Functional schematic of a portable XRF instrument

The X-Ray Source is a vacuum tube. ThermoFisher Scientific explains:

Going to the Source: X-ray Tubes by Esa Nummi

 The major X-ray tube components are the cathode, anode, the tube envelope, the tube housing, and the window.

Cathode

The cathode serves to expel the electrons from the circuit and focus them in a beam on the focal spot of the anode. It is a controlled source of electrons for the generation of X-ray beams. The electrons are produced by heating the filament, i.e., a coil of wire made from tungsten, placed within a highly polished nickel focusing cup providing electrostatic focusing of the beam on the anode. Heat is used to expel the electrons from the cathode.

Anode

The anode represents the component in which the x-rays are produced. It is a piece of metal, shaped in the form of a beveled disk, connected to the positive side of electrical circuit. The anode converts the energy of the electrons into X-rays and dissipates the heat, considered the byproduct.

Envelope

An airtight enclosure that houses the cathode and anode. It is often made from metal and ceramic because these materials are able to withstand the tremendous amount of heat generated during X-ray production, but they can also be made of glass.

Housing

Provides protection and absorbs excess radiation.

Window

The X-ray tube window typically is made from beryllium because it allows X-rays to pass through but has sufficient strength to hold the vacuum required for the X-ray tube to operate. When an electrical current is passed through the cathode, the electrons generated by the cathode are accelerated by high voltage towards a metal target, or anode. X-rays known as Bremsstrahlung (“braking radiation”) are produced when the electrons are suddenly decelerated upon collision with the anode. When an atom in the sample is struck with an X-ray of sufficient energy (greater than the atom’s K or L shell binding energy), an electron from one of the atom’s inner orbital shells is dislodged. The atom regains stability, filling the vacancy left in the inner orbital shell with an electron from one of the atom’s higher energy orbital shells. The electron drops to the lower energy state by releasing a fluorescent X-ray. The energy of this X-ray is equal to the specific difference in energy between two quantum states of the electron. These X-rays all have sufficient energy to pass through the X-ray tube window and reach the sample. The measurement of this energy is the basis of XRF analysis.

Process of X-ray fluorescence generation

AZO Mining gives a brief history:

The United Nuclear XRF Probe

The earliest handheld energy-dispersive XRF probe was built by United Nuclear in the early 1980s, which was originally used to investigate highly radioactive holding takes, as well as the presence of uranium in the soil. Weighing over 70 pounds, this tool comprised of a measurement head connected to a cart, where the electronics displayed the received data.

Modified between 1982-1983, United Nuclear commercialized the MAP-1 device, which had the capability to detect uranium, as well as other elements in the soil through the creation of a “front pack,” while also reducing the weight of the instrument to 50 pounds. The evolution of these instruments continued through the 1980s as United Nuclear developed MAP-2 and MAP-3 analyzers for enhanced lead detection purposes.

XRF For Commercial Use

In 1994 electric contracting company Amptek developed the XR-100 X-ray detector for commercial use. This thermoelectrically cooled and simple to use detector replaced the need for liquid nitrogen to cool detectors in many applications. The XR-100 device was selected for the Pathfinder Mission to Mars, where it successfully analyzed rocks and soil in a cost-effective and precise manner.

The first fully-handheld XRF detector was created in 1994 by Niton Inc., a Massachusetts-based company, in which this Niton XL-309 instrument offered intensified analytical performance at a lower price than the previous instruments on the market.

As interest in these analytical systems began to grow, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in conjunction with KeyMaster Technologies designed the first TRACER II unit, which included an argon transmission target. This aspect of the instrument allowed NASA and KeyMaster to create a portable vacuum XRF analyzer that had the ability to perform on-the-spot chemical analysis, which was a task previously only possible in a chemical laboratory.

The first applications of the TRACER II unit allowed NASA to quickly and accurately determine elemental composition on large objects, such as a rocket motor, which was a major breakthrough for this organization. Modifications to the TRACER II unit allowed increased sensitivity to specific metals, including a new ability to measure magnesium and aluminum content in aluminum alloys.

As demands for increased accurate and efficacious handheld XRF tools began to rise, competition between industries to produce grew as well. In 2008, Brucker Elemental produced Bruker XFLASHTM silicon drift detector (SDD) technology that was integrated into the first-ever SDD-based handheld XRF unit, also known as the S1 TRACER. Still a unit with one of the best resolutions, Bruker’s S1 TRACER allows the analysis of light elements, including magnesium, aluminum, and silicon in air, while also providing an increased concentration range for these elements of interest.

This summer plumbers came to the house to install a new water line. They also had some very sophisticated detectors.

Gears are Special

Final drive of the Centurion, a British Tank

Gears are very special. Someday I would like to study the geometry of the hypoid gears used in the final drive of rear wheel drive cars. In my next life I hope to understand heat treating at a quantum level.

Update July 2026. Deleted the video from Allies at War, which has gone 404. I found several videos on YouTube that purport to explain what they found, but they were all just long narratives pasted over a slideshow of various WW2 scenes, none that showed any images of the actual problem. So I asked Google what the problem was with the Panther transmission and this is what I got:

Weak Final Drives: To speed up manufacturing, engineers used a simplified double spur gear system instead of a robust planetary gear system in the final drives. The gears easily stripped and broke under the heavy load.

Quantum Bullshit

Quantum Computer

 Schneier on Security quotes a paper:

Cheating on Quantum Computing Benchmarks

Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus have a new paper—I think it’s new, even though it has a March 2025 date—that makes the argument that we shouldn’t trust any of the quantum factorization benchmarks, because everyone has been cooking the books:

Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed using sleight-of-hand numbers that have been selected to make them very easy to factorise using a physics experiment and, by extension, a VIC-20, an abacus, and a dog. A standard technique is to ensure that the factors differ by only a few bits that can then be found using a simple search-based approach that has nothing to do with factorisation…. Note that such a value would never be encountered in the real world since the RSA key generation process typically requires that |p-q| > 100 or more bits . As one analysis puts it, “Instead of waiting for the hardware to improve by yet further orders of magnitude, researchers began inventing better and better tricks for factoring numbers by exploiting their hidden structure”.

A second technique used in quantum factorisation is to use preprocessing on a computer to transform the value being factorised into an entirely different form or even a different problem to solve which is then amenable to being solved via a physics experiment…

Lots more in the paper, which is titled Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog. He points out the largest number that has been factored legitimately by a quantum computer is 35.

Previous posts that mention the word quantum, which may or may not be related to quantum computers.

Via Dennis.

Bose Einstein Condensate

The Genius Behind the Quantum Navigation Breakthrough
Dr Ben Miles

This thing is just nuts. Besides the subject matter, I don't think he actually names the genius behind this breakthrough. If he did, I missed it. I grew up hearing about inertial navigation and how these devices were big, complicated and expensive. Sometime between now and then, ring lasers came along, which was an improvement, but still comprehensible. Then came smartphones and MEMs and they just blew me away. I had been working in computers for a while, and all I had seen was bigger, faster machines doing gaudier and gaudier things. Then smartphone inertial navigation appeared and I was, let me just say this again, blown away.

Check out some these other posts on the subject.

Brain Frequencies

Scientists Discovery New Frequencies in the Brain
Dr Ben Miles

Older post talking about brain weirdness: Quantum Figments

Defeating Zuckerberg's Metaverse, w Stephen Fry

I've tried watching some of Stephen Fry's other videos, but, if I recall correctly, his politics put me off. This one doesn't go into politics much. The first part of the video talks about the history of computers and how computer chips are made now, and that portion is the best I've seen. Then he wanders off into AI (Artificial Intelligence) and quantum computing and he gets all spacey.

I don't know if AI is going to do that much for us. It might enable some whiz kids to develop some fancy new stuff that could make our lives better, but we're still going to be stuck with being human beings, version 1.0.

Entertainment is great, but for all it's amazing forms, it's still just entertainment. The real world is still the basis for our lives. No matter how fancy video games become, they will never compare to interacting with real people.

Eluminator

Electric Ford F-100
Mashable

Pretty truck, though I think what makes it attractive is the paint job and the lowered stance. Not sure why that is. Perhaps it is years of conditioning. Stock cars have several inches of ground clearance to enable them to cope with real world roads, roads filled with all manner of obstacles. Custom cars, hot rods, race cars, super exotic cars all sit very low to the ground. It looks cool, but is totally impractical for anyplace besides a race track. I suspect they are feeding a fantasy - if you have this car you can go really fast on race track, a fantasy that completely ignores having to go to the grocery store to pick up a box of pampers.

The idea of an electric car is attractive, but the reality is a little hard to swallow. An electric car would probably work very well for me. I seldom make any long trips, the car would sit in the garage all night, every night, charging away. All I would have to do would be plug it in when I pull in and unplug it when I leave. Yes, all that plugging and unplugging would be a nuisance, but so is going to the gas station. Stopping at Costco for gas on my way into town takes an extra two miles and ten minutes, not counting waiting in line and at the pump.

There are other factors, like the cost and weight of the batteries, the possibility of a battery fire and the difficulty of putting out such a fire, but every modern convenience comes with risks and I suspect electric cars are less risky overall than others.

The one thing that concerns me is the electronic power controls. Being solid state, they are going to be reliable, but at some point they are going to start failing, maybe just of old age. When they fail they are going to very expensive to replace, partly due to their very reliability. If they never fail, there won't be a stout supply chain to supply replacement units. You'll have to go back to the factory where you will find that they quit making that model years ago and your best bet is to pick up one from a junkyard, or send it to Joe's Electric Power Control Repair Shop where they will tell you that the flux capacitor is blown, the ones used in your control box are very rare and will cost as much as a new control box, which you can't buy. Best just go buy a new car. Vunderbar.

The main reason I don't want an electric car is I allocated too much of my brain to the internal combustion engine. I could dive deep into how electric cars work, you can go all the way down to the quantum explanation of magnetism, but I don't think I've got the brain capacity for that AND all my knowledge about conventional automobile engines. Something would have to go, and since all my current knowledge was hard fought, I am reluctant to let my engine knowledge go. Of course, at my age, memory leaks are starting to appear (no they aren't!). I've made a couple of passes at trying to understand magnetism, but it gets really deep really quickly, and some of it just doesn't make any sense.

If your ignore the really deep parts of magnetism though, electric cars are simplicity itself, and I suspect that is one of the main attractions. Electric motors are ubiquitous in the modern American household, so people are familiar with them and how they operate. Internal combustion engines by comparison are horribly complicated. I can see how - for someone who is not mechanically inclined - they could be a little off-putting. You may as well tell a non-mechanical person that they need a new slankerator (an imaginary part) as tell them need a new head gasket (a real thing). For a non-gear head, it's all just Greek and could very well just be myths designed to extract money from their wallet.

Obligatory slam on the bogus green-ness of electric cars: most electric power in the USA comes from burning fossil fuels. So right there electric cars are producing just as much greenhouse gas as conventional cars. Add the amount of power lost in long distance power transmission and the efficiency of an electric car is worse than a conventional gasoline powered car. So electric cars are contributing more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than regular cars.

The Unwanted Blog has a post about the Eluminator.

Inventors

New Inventions That Will Take Your Bike To Another Level
Quantum Tech HD
This video is full of clever designs. They are, according to your view, either cool, crazy, wacky, useful or foolish. They are pretty much all designed and targeted at bicycle maniacs, people for whom the bicycle is the be all and end all, or people with a passing interest in bicycles and money to burn. We don't know whether any of them will be successful enough to support a business, but it shows that there are a bunch of people out there trying new stuff. And bicycles are just one the facet of this phenomena. All kinds of people are trying all kinds of new designs for all kinds of tasks.

There seem to be a zillion people busy inventing new things, but I suspect they make up less than 1% of the worldwide population. People's talents seem to fall into several distinct areas. They may be good at:

• speaking
• writing
• drawing
• working with things
• athletics

To really make an impact, you need all of these which usually means working with other people. And then there is thinking. But thinking by itself isn't much good. Only if you can apply it to the real world will it make any difference to anyone else. You can certainly spend a good deal of time in your head making yourself happy or miserable.

Update September 2024 replaced missing video.

Beauchamp Tower

Beauchamp Tower - Alison Avery
Part of the Tower of London castle

I am trying to figure out just how air bearings work and I come across an engineer by the name of Beauchamp Tower, but when I Google him, I get the Tower of London. Huh, don't suppose there is any connection do you?

Kingsbury Tilting Pad Thrust Bearing

Beauchamp (the engineer) is chiefly known for his discovery of hydrodynamic lubrication. Kingsbury used this knowledge to develop the Tilting Pad Thrust Bearing.  The pads are mounted on pivots and due to magic, the trailing edge tilts toward the bearing surface, but because of oil magic, they never make contact.

Near as I can tell, these bearings were originally developed for propeller shafts for big ships and are still in use today. They can support loads of 100 tons, which is kind of what you need when you want to push a gazillion ton ship through the water at 20 knots. I mean the propellers are generating the necessary thrust, but you really need to to transfer that thrust to the hull of the ship. Hence, you need a big-ass thrust bearing.

This whole air bearing thing is a bit opaque. There is a lot of mumbo jumbo about how they work, but I haven't found any kind of clear explanation of the principles involved, which leads me to suspect that either a) they don't really know, or b) it's some kind of quantum effect, which means it may as well be magic.

Far Side of the Moon

Chang'e 4 Lunar Landing In Detail
Mr. Manley does a good job here. But how is it that we know any of this at all? When we sent Apollo spacecraft to the moon 50 years ago, they were cutoff from communication when they went behind the moon. So how are we getting these pictures? We have sent probes around the moon and they have taken pictures, but they had to come back into view before they could transmit their images. This Chinese probe is on the moon, it isn't coming back into view, ever. Have the Chinese invented a new kind of super-quantum-licious communications technique that allows them to transmit through a thousand miles of rock? No, they sent another satellite, a communications relay, out to Lagrange point 2 which is out beyond the moon.


Queqiao relay satellite enters L2 orbit
Notice that this satellite doesn't just sit at the 'point', the 'point', after all, is unstable. Any slight disturbance from this location will cause the satellite to fall away from the 'point', never to return. Also sitting at the 'point' wouldn't do us any good, as the 'point' is directly opposite the Earth and so is blocked from radio communications by the moon. Instead the satellite goes into a halo orbit where it never actually crosses the point, instead it orbits the 'point'. The James Webb Space Telescope will be using a halo orbit when it eventually gets launched, which is expected in a couple of years.

Jeremy "More Power" Clarkson

Jeremy "More Power" Clarkson

The post isn't about Jeremy Clarkson. It's just that I needed a title, "More Power" seemed appropriate, but I can't say "More Power" without thinking of Jeremy Clarkson, so there we have it.

Piper Twin Commanche

I'm sitting here in the backyard, taking it easy after a hard day of being retired. I'm sitting here and every few minutes a small airplane flies over. Not too surprising, we live about a mile from the Hillsboro Airport, the second busiest airport in Oregon, not that that's saying much since there is only one real-international-fly-anywhere-in-the-world airport in Oregon: PDX.

Anyway, these small planes are flying over and they are making noise, as small planes are want (wont?) to do. And I'm thinking these guys are really struggling. They have the biggest engine they can afford / that the plane can carry, the engine is working as hard as it can, and they can't afford the loss of power and lift that carrying a decent muffler would cost them.


3.0-Liter V6 Twin-Turbo 400-HP Engine | INFINITI Q60 Coupe | INFINITI USA
What we need is a better engine. Maybe we should be using automobile engines. Automobile engines are getting crazy powerful these days. 300 horsepower out of small displacement V-6 is common. But we don't need 300 horsepower, we have that in existing Continental and Lycoming engines. What we need is 1,000 horsepower. No, make that 2,000. You can never have too much power.

Why should you need that much power in an airplane? Cars can go just as fast as small planes, and they generally have more power (200 vs. 100 HP). Because we are taking a big step up. 500 MPH is not just 5 times as fast as 100 MPH, it's 100 times as fierce. It's like the difference between chucking rocks at beer cans in your backyard and hitting a watermelon at a thousand yards with high-powered rifle.

Now I'm wondering why piston engines for airplanes have stagnated. Jet engines certainly haven't. And then I realized that the decision to pursue jet engines was made by the military and the military wanted speed and power, hang the cost. They didn't want to be distracted by two different engine development programs. They went with the one that promised the most power the soonest.

Spitfire Merlin engine replacement*

So what's the difference between a Merlin V-12 that was used in a Spitfire and a modern 1,000 HP conventional reciprocating engine? I suspect there isn't any one thing you could put your finger on, rather it's anything you touch. Everything is different, subtly, you wouldn't notice anything if you weren't intimately involved with the design. Oil, materials, machine techniques, just everything, but the end result is that a new 1,000 HP engine would weigh a fourth of what a Merlin weighs. (Okay, that might be pushing it. If anyone knows different, let me know.)

African Homebuilt Airplane

There are some people in home-built, experimental airplane circles who have been putting automobile engines in airplanes with mostly positive results, but commercially the small airplane industry is stuck in 1950. If it wasn't for the FAA, there would be more progress in aviation. So maybe the answer is to go someplace where the FAA isn't. Africa, I'm looking at you. Here's your chance to build your own FAA, one that isn't bogged down in bureaucratic bullshit. You could be a force in the airplane world. Yeah, right. Fat chance of Africa ever managing to get their shit together.

But maybe that's the way of future, total government incompetence, who you trust based entirely on rumor because nothing you hear from the media can be trusted. So you buy your car / house / airplane based on what the guy at the gas station said, and the only products that succeed are the ones from giant corporations that can afford a massive guerrilla marketing campaign.

Okay, I got a little distracted. The point I was trying to get to is why are propellers so large? A 100 hp engine swings a propeller that is as large in diameter as a good size jet engine. The one thing I hear when I ask this question is 'efficiency'. Well, screw efficiency, what we want is more power. The speeds modern car engines are like the speeds that jet engines turn than the prop speed of a 1000 HP Merlin. Maybe what we need is a small, high speed fan connected directly to a high speed engine. You are going to need some duct work since the blast from the small diameter will be directed directly at the engine. You might be able to generate enough thrust just from the suction, but it would be nice if you got a kick from the blast as well. Directing it at the engine will ensure that it is wasted. It might not be as efficient as a propeller, and it would require some fancy ductwork, but you wouldn't need the speed reducer, a heavy thing that might break.

Pratt & Whitney Speed Reducer
Looks remarkably like the ones used in WW2 radial aircraft engines

On the other hand, Pratt & Whitney is stuffing their old WWII speed reducers in a jet engine in order to lower the speed on the fan. Or maybe we go electric: engine drives generator, generator drives motor. No gears. No mechanical connection except for a couple of fat cables. Works like magic.

Of course if we really knew what we were doing, we would be using electric power to push the air past airplane directly through some kind of magically, subatomic, quantum mumbo-jumbo.

*this picture only exists inside of a search engine. I got it from Google, who claims it comes from Pinterest, but Pinterest claims it came from Google.

UFO

Posthip Scott sent me a webpage about a UFO encounter. It mentions that some F-15's were scrambled out of PDX last October. Hey, wait a minute, didn't I see some F-15's taking off from PDX? I did, and when was it? It was the same date!

While we were waiting at the traffic light at the corner of 82nd and Air Cargo Road, four F-15's took off, one after another in quick succession. That was pretty cool. I've seen them parked at the airport before, but I've never seen them in motion. While we are marveling at seeing these aircraft take off, four F-16's take off in quick succession. That's the most jet fighters I have seen flying all at one time.

So that's what was happening. Cool. A visit to YouTube turns up video of the fighters taking off:


Four "US Air National Guard" F-15's takeoff from Portland International Airport PDX

Four F-16A Fighting Falcons Take Off From KPDX On Runway 10R
I am not a big fan of UFO's. They make for some good entertainment, but nothing you can really hang your hat on. But sometimes I wonder if there isn't some kind of quantum neurological mass hypnosis phenomena going on. Like everyone is projecting very faint brainwaves, but occasionally enough of them sync up and reinforce each other and then they start causing observable effects, like inducing hallucinations or possibly even physical manifestations, like changing the refractive index of a ball of air so it looks like something.

This is one of the things some of the old time philosophers were going on about, how the world is an illusion and what we see and experience is only a shadow of the real world. The philosophers were talking about it ancient Greece, and Ibn Sina was talking about it more recently (about a thousand years ago). I don't buy it, mostly on account of the Arab world falling down into a rathole of philisophical debate which ignored much of what was going on in the 'real' world.

But we really don't know how the universe works. We have a much better idea now than we did in Ibn Cenna's time, but mostly what we've learned is that the world is infinitely more complicated that we ever imagined. So I am willing to allow that quantum neurological mass hypnosis phenomena might actually be a real thing. I am not going to try and hang my hat on it though.

Update February 25, 2018. My current theory is that is was a business jet being flown by a drunk pilot who just didn't give a shit about rules and regulations. Or it could have been a smuggler who was counting on being just one of the flock, or a Russian, seeing how far they could stick their nose in without getting caught. Australian news site news.com.au has the story. So does Popular Mechanics.

Update July 2019 replaced 2nd video with similar one from 2013. Why was the one from 2017 taken down? Enquiring Minds want to know.

Cold Welcome

I finished the book this evening. I just picked it up Thursday afternoon at Powell's and I'm already done. I think that's something of a recent record. Not too many books are easy enough to read and keep me interested. Easy as in smooth, well written, the words slow smoothly by.

Grace Darling Lifeboat Rescue

Space travel doesn't figure much in the tale. It's mostly a tale of surviving in a lifeboat in the North Atlantic during a winter storm and then washing up on the shore of Greenland. Well, the first half of the book is, and it's not the North Atlantic and Greenland, it's some other ocean on some other human-habitable planet.  Slotter Key, that's the name of it.

Tunnel

The second half of the book involves exploring a giant underground military base, empty at the moment, but well stocked and equipped, so maybe they only use this place during the summer.  There is something odd about this place though. Most everything is normal, but they run into something they don't understand, like the lights or the remote controls, things that are just odd enough they must be alien or very old. Nothing like what anyone uses now. But I don't remember aliens in any of Ms. Moon's early sci-fi adventures, so this a new twist. Then again, they might not be aliens, they just might be really old.

Space Mercenaries

The main thrust of the story is how do you protect two dozen people when a couple hundred heavily armed, blood-thirsty men are coming to kill you in four days? Ky's strategy is to abandon their safe underground redoubt and run away. You have mystery vehicles you can ride in, but they only go 15 MPH and we don't know what kind of range they have. You could travel on the surface. Traveling for 24 hours a day, you ought to be able to cover 300 miles, baring impassible abysses which are common enough in places where there are no maps. (What do you think happened to all the map makers who ventured into these uncharted areas?)

Or you could follow the mystery tunnel. It's mostly a tunnel, there are doors off to the side occasionally, but we ignore them, press on! is the order of the day. This is Ky's choice. They drive for 12 hours a day and then they stop to rest and recuperate. They travel for 3 days and cover hundreds of miles. This is one really long tunnel. This has got to be aliens.

But wait, this is a space faring civilization, the have some kind of Warp drive that lets them travel to nearby stars in a matter of days. I'm pretty sure if you can do FTL, digging a tunnel completely around the planet is not out of your reach. Why anyone would do that is, well, crazy people who want to build gravity trains, they would.

Gravity Defying Spaceship

Some of the details about the technology this civilization builds and uses were a little thought provoking. They have interstellar flight, but they don't land their spaceships, they stay in orbit. They have shuttles to carry people and cargo to and from orbit. Of course the military do have star-ships that can land, but they cost extra.

Spaceship

An FTL spaceship is happiest in space. Once you have gotten out of the gravity well, you really don't want to go back in there if you can help it. FTL ships would be happiest navigating between stars, that is about as far out of the gravity well you can get, at least within our galaxy. Coming in toward a star (to visit your parents or pick up some fresh fruit) you are going to have to loose a lot of speed. Not just the speed you accelerated to get here in time for grandma's birthday party, but also the speed you acquired falling down the gravity well to this sun. It would really be nice if we could get a handle on gravity. I'm not really counting on it. We just now managed to detect a gravity wave using very large and expensive machines, and it was a wave from a granddaddy of an explosion, at least in our quadrant of the universe. I'm more in favor of whatever comes after the fusion rocket, say, 500 years down the road.

Space Elevator

Anyway, shuttles are a really terrible way to get up to orbit and back. Surely if they can build FTL spaceships they could build a space elevator, but then I realized that you would need a serious amount of interstellar traffic in order to justify the construction of one. That's how we build bridges, you need to have the demand first in order make building a bridge, or a space elevator, a viable proposition.  Building a space elevator would be an enormous undertaking, not to mention that we don't know how to do it yet. This is a world that was only colonized a few hundred years ago, so while interstellar trade exists, it isn't swamping their ability to handle it.

Everyone has a smart phone implanted in their head, well, everyone except those weirdos in that one weird sect. Mizzy-something. They don't. Ky also has an ansible, science-fiction's solution for instantaneous interstellar communication, implanted in her head as well. Now I can't remember any reference to the power for the skullphones, but Ky has to connect her head to a power outlet with a wire in order to run the ansible. This to me just sounds like a really bad idea. Anything using that much power is sure to be giving a noticeable amount of heat unless it's turning that energy into instantaneous quantum fluctuations. And why carry it around in your head if you need to plug it in anyway?

Terry Farrell as Jadzia Dax on Star Trek Deep Space 9

There could be reasons, like it's some kind living organic mesh that lies on top of your brain and communicates directly with your synapses. So it's not just a bad idea, now it's creepy too. But then there was that really good looking babe on Star Trek that was hosting a living symbiot. That was a little creepy. Good looking woman, but the creep factor was a little disturbing. What if that thing in her decided to colonize your brain and it was able to do that because the girl favored you (biblically, so to speak)?

Or it could be a function of the times, like somebody figured out how to a do a brain to computer interface, and the first computers they used were so small and such low power that a power cable wasn't needed. Maybe they used a radioactive battery like a pacemaker does, or maybe they had a flexible device that generated power when it got bent. Or maybe they had some kind of organic-chemical battery that sucked oxygen from your blood, or electrons from your neurons. Whatever, it wasn't an issue, but the brain-computer interface was such a hit, people started using it for all kind of things, and when the ansible came along, implanting it seemed like the logical solution, because it uses this same brain-computer interface as the skullphones all use. So it uses a little extra power, we'll just give her a cable and she can plug it into the wall. It is a prototype after all, not our fault if she fries herself.

Bear Claw

There is one scene at the end where our heroes are being closely pursued by the bad guys. They can hear the bad guys climbing the stairs a dozen flights behind them. But now the passageway ends in a mountain cave home to a hibernating bear. Our heroes manage to sneak by, but you just know the bad guys aren't going to be the least sneaky and they are going to wake up bear and there is going to be hell to pay for all concerned. On one hand I want our intrepid band to block the stairway. It's basically a small passage in a mountain, a cave if you will. Of course a blast big enough to block the stairs is liable to upset the bear as well.  Kind of a tough choice, especially since you didn't bring any dynamite with you. Or rock-drills, which you kind of need if you are blasting in rock.

Then there is the business of anti-gravity aboard the spaceships and the existence of tractor beams. If you have these, then what do you need with aircraft and space shuttles? Okay, they are technology heavy and you can't justify using them if ordinary methods will get the job done. Space ships get anti-gravity because it's just a side benefit of being able to warp space. Kind of like an automobile heater is a side benefit of having an internal combustion engine*. Great Aunt Grace has tractor beams holding up the driveway to her corporate headquarters. Don't want anybody driving up to your front door? Just turn off the tractor beams and suddenly big holes appear in your driveway. At least that's how I interpreted what I read.

So it's a rough and tumble sort of story with plenty of action and people dealing with daily problems. But there is also another thread about the stability of society. There was a civil war within living memory here and apparently not everyone is satisfied with the way it turned out. On the surface all is calm, but treachery lurks in the shadows, and there are lots of shadows here. The corruption is well entrenched and runs deep. I look at what's going on in the world and it's not that much different than what's in the story.

Look at our world. For instance, Russia has always gotten bad press. First when they were Communist and now with Putin in charge and they are resurgent once again. I suspect that at the higher levels things aren't much different than they are here. Oh, maybe Putin will have you killed if he finds something about you that he doesn't like, but over here they just ruin your life to the point where maybe you wish you were dead.

I'm all in favor of rooting out corruption, but there doesn't seem to be any end to it. Maybe it's just the nature of our society. Maybe that would change if we just changed a couple of the rules. But what rules could those be? I was thinking it would have to be small change, but with the right propaganda we could implement almost anything. So basically anything is on the table, but I really don't know what the rule would be.

* Internal combustion engines that throw off a whole bunch of waste heat. Two thirds of the energy from the fuel they burn is wasted. The amount of heat produced by the heater is a small fraction of the energy available.

Optimize

Started working on a coding problem over at CodinGame.com yesterday. It seemed straight-forward enough until I got down to the real nitty gritty. We have a bunch of boxes that need to be loaded on a bunch of trucks. The boxes are all different sizes and weights and each truck needs to be loaded with about the same weight, so how do we go about figuring out which boxes get loaded on which trucks? My first thought was to use the same scheme you might use to add up all the numbers from one to one hundred: add the largest to the smallest. That worked fine until I found that some of the boxes are bigger than the average load for each truck, so that's going to tilt the scales a bit.

So we load each of the largest boxes onto their own truck, and adjust our average for distributing the rest of them to the remaining trucks. Continuing with my scheme, we pick off the heaviest boxes for our next truck until it would tip us over the average. Now we have four relatively simple cases, we just need to pick the one that will bring us closest to the average. We could:

1. Leave it as it, so we'll be under.
2. Add the next largest box, then we'd be over.
3. Add small boxes while we remain under the limit, or
4. Add one more small box and go over.

We could sort through all of the boxes and try and find the best combination that would bring us closest to the average, but that could take a lot of fussing, and there is no guarantee that you wouldn't end up with some combination of boxes that would be way off of our target. Besides, this is supposed to be gone quickly. If we had a quantum computer, solving this problem would be a piece of cake, but we don't, so I'm just gonna code this scheme up and see what happens.

The Copenhagen Model is Wrong

Is This What Quantum Mechanics Looks Like?
Maybe. I really like this video because not only does it seem to explain the double slit experiment with resorting to hocus pocus, it treats particles as including a wave, which is kind of what they have been saying all along.

Previous posts that mention the word quantum, which may or may not be related to quantum mechanics.

Killing Titan - Greg Bear

Sunlight glints off of Titan's northern seas this near-infrared, color mosaic from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Credits: NASA/JPL/Univ. Arizona/Univ. Idaho

Killing Titan is book 2 of a Science Fiction adventure trilogy by Greg Bear, but I didn't figure that out until I got to the end and they start telling me about book 3. There oughta be a law that requires bookstores to keep all volumes of a series on the shelf so you can see what you are getting into, or more importantly, so you can start at the beginning. Whatever.
    There were some very good pieces in this book, but the overall tone of gloom, despair and willful ignorance was a bit much. Our 'hero' has some issues and he spends an inordinate amount of time obsessing about them.
    The giant machines in space and on, or in, Titan are good, as is the mysterious quantum-something space drive that takes them from Mars to Titan in a matter of days. (Cassini took years). We also have machines that grow from 'seeds' and/or finish constructing themselves out of whatever material is at hand. There are some mental shenanigans that seem to be an essential part of space adventures these days. I'm pretty sure that's never gonna happen, but then man was never going to fly either, so what do I know?
    The best part is diving into the liquid methane oceans on Titan. That was pretty cool. NASA is thinking about it.


Titan Submarine: Exploring the Depths of Kraken Mare
You can buy a copy from Amazon for $12. I paid $15 for the one I purchased at Branes & Noble  in Twin Falls, Idaho. You can also buy a copy from Amazon for $80. What's up with that? Who would pay $80 for a $12 book? I've run into out-of-line prices before on Amazon and I still don't have any idea what's going on.

True North, Part 2

Superconductivity and the London Moment
Still looking into this business of figuring out which way is north, I wander into Wikipedia's article on Gyroscopes, where I found this passage about London Moment. It reads like something out of Science Fiction:

London moment[edit]

A London moment gyroscope relies on the quantum-mechanical phenomenon, whereby a spinning superconductor generates a magnetic field whose axis lines up exactly with the spin axis of the gyroscopic rotor. A magnetometer determines the orientation of the generated field, which is interpolated to determine the axis of rotation. Gyroscopes of this type can be extremely accurate and stable. For example, those used in the Gravity Probe B experiment measured changes in gyroscope spin axis orientation to better than 0.5 milliarcseconds (1.4×10⁻⁷ degrees) over a one-year period.^[41] This is equivalent to an angular separation the width of a human hair viewed from 32 kilometers (20 mi) away.^[42]

The GP-B gyro consists of a nearly-perfect spherical rotating mass made of fused quartz, which provides a dielectric support for a thin layer of niobium superconducting material. To eliminate friction found in conventional bearings, the rotor assembly is centered by the electric field from six electrodes. After the initial spin-up by a jet of helium which brings the rotor to 4,000 RPM, the polished gyroscope housing is evacuated to an ultra-high vacuum to further reduce drag on the rotor. Provided the suspension electronics remain powered, the extreme rotational symmetry, lack of friction, and low drag will allow the angular momentum of the rotor to keep it spinning for about 15,000 years.^[43]

A sensitive DC SQUID is able to discriminate changes as small as one quantum, or about 2 ×10⁻¹⁵ Wb, is used to monitor the gyroscope. A precession, or tilt, in the orientation of the rotor causes the London moment magnetic field to shift relative to the housing. The moving field passes through a superconducting pickup loop fixed to the housing, inducing a small electric current. The current produces a voltage across a shunt resistance, which is resolved to spherical coordinates by a microprocessor. The system is designed to minimize Lorentz torque on the rotor.^[44][45]

Gravity Probe-B Gyroscope

"the polished gyroscope housing is evacuated to an ultra-high vacuum" Heh. It means they opened the airlock door.