Author: gulley

The coming electric navy

One hundred years or so ago, Winston Churchill, in his capacity as the First Lord of the Admiralty, worked vigorously to convert the old coal-burning Royal Navy to a newer and more efficient oil-burning fleet. This turned out to be a strategically sound decision despite the fact that it entailed a new dependence on oil that the British Isles could not supply. Oil simply had too many advantages over coal to fret overmuch about the fact that it would have to be produced in and shipped from remote, difficult-to-manage locations around the world. This single fact has, by itself, largely shaped geo-politics across the last century.

Curiously, today the U.S. Navy is undergoing a Churchillian revolution of its own: ships are being converted from oil power to electric power. The change is somewhat subtle, because the electricity comes from onboard gas turbines that in turn are still powered by fossil fuels. But there are a number of advantages. You can put the gas turbine wherever you want, and you can use the enormous electrical power generated for other purposes, like vaporizing enemy ships and planes with high-power directed energy weapons. Superconducting electric motors can be put in movable pods outside the hull, thereby eliminating the awkward drive shafts that have dominated hull design and dramatically improving maneuverability.

If this sounds a lot like the move to hybrid cars from conventional gas powered cars, it is. The exact same principle is at work, which leads me to speculate that high-power directed energy weapons will be a popular accessory for the 2005 Toyota Prius.

France 1940

To Lose a Battle : France 1940

Hard to believe now, but the French army was widely considered the greatest in the world at the beginning of 1940. It is painful and eye-opening to see how quickly it was punctured, deflated, and slashed to ribbons by a smaller but infinitely better armed and trained German force in May and June of that year. This book paints an excellent picture of how inferior doctrine (static defense as opposed to fast-moving armor attacks) can absolutely wreck an army. Poor France. She lost so many men in World War I and then learned all the wrong lessons as a result.

The guy in the red Civic

Today my good friend Jay Czarnecki (who has guest-blogged here before) joins us once again with some rambles of his own about rambling across the Maryland countryside in a red Honda Civic. Leave a comment for him and tell him what you think. Here’s what he has to say…

These days I have an hour-long morning commute to work, but since it runs from one Central Maryland suburb to another, I travel through open farmland for much of the drive. There are places where it is quite scenic, although the sharp boundaries between green pasture and gleaming white housing developments can be jarring. The ascendant real estate market has made it inevitable that most large tracts of land will eventually be sold to developers. I imagine that each successive generation of the land-owning family must make the choice whether to keep and pass on the land or to convert it into an exorbitant amount of cash. The growing number of shiny new single-family homes dotting the landscape like dots on a scatter diagram tell me which outcome has the upper hand over the long term. Sometimes I wonder about the owners of these old homesteads I pass by – often set far back from the road at the end of a long driveway – I wonder if they watch me from behind their windows as I drive to work, just passing through, clearly not of this place. I wonder if they curse me and my fellow passers-through for clogging up their backcountry roads, so clearly not designed to deliver commuters from one part of the state to another. Do they blame me for driving up the cost of living with my high-tech job until they are forced to cash out because they cannot afford the tax assessments? Or instead, do they smile upon me as the benefactor who turned their patch of arable land into a gold mine, freeing them from it. I confess I never thought much about this until I occasionally began to see one of these unseen people, outside, an old woman with a large-brimmed white hat – and of course this sighting changed how I perceived that particular place. Before it was just the farm with the winding driveway that I zipped past each morning, and the idea of associating it with a real live person or persons was a vague notion at best. Just like any other of the landmarks that pace my morning routine – the crooked barn, the brick house unusually close to the road, the mini-mansion with ostentatious pillars marking the entrance – you just don’t focus on the fact that real people live there. It’s not unlike the way you perceive other cars while driving: always the vehicle, never the occupant. It’s the white Chevy that is going too slow, or the green minivan that didn’t use it’s blinker before turning – until you hit one or one hits you, and the driver emerges and you discover that the green minivan is actually a fat man with a New York accent in an ill-fitting suit. Who would’ve thought? I suppose it’s the same for him looking at me and thinking, “This guy is the red Honda Civic?”

So I begin to spot this woman outside on her property, the one that used to be labeled in my mind as the ‘the farm with the winding driveway’, but now is ‘the farm with the old lady with the white hat.’ I see her walking, slowly, down the long gravel driveway (it looks to be a quarter mile long) toward the road, or sometimes heading back toward the house if I’m running late. There is a mailbox at the street, but it is early in the morning, too early for rural mail delivery. And I also begin to see an old man out there as well, and of course I make the logical leap that they are husband and wife. But oddly, they never are walking together: one is always a good twenty or twenty-five feet ahead of the other. So I wonder: why wouldn’t a husband and wife, who have toiled together their whole lives to reap the Earth’s sweet fruits from the soil, why wouldn’t they share their morning constitutional together, side-by-side? Are they estranged? After many sightings, I have a theory. One of them wants to give in to the inevitable and sell the land to a developer who will fill their fields with cul-de-sacs and ftwo-story Colonials while the two of them head south with their windfall to Myrtle Beach or St. Petersburg. The other can’t bear to let go and will never leave. They used to take their morning tour together, but this irresolvable argument has come between them and now they walk separately as if connected by a long unbending pole, keeping them joined forever but at a fixed distance apart. I wonder who is whom – which one wants to cash out and head south, and which one wants to stay and be buried in the family plot out back? I am tempted to stop someday and ask, but I never will. I’ve already been intrusive enough, clogging up their backcountry roads on my way to work. Besides, I know they’d look at me and say, “This guy is the red Honda Civic?”

Ambient displays

Here in Boston, we have an ambient weather display built into the skyline: the old Hancock building (not to be confused with the sleeker newer Hancock tower by I.M. Pei) has a beacon atop it that changes color with the weather. There’s even a little rhyme to help you remember how it works.

Steady blue, clear view.
Flashing blue, clouds are due.
Steady red, rain ahead.
Flashing red, snow instead

During baseball season, the flashing red signal is means the Red Sox game has been rained out. Cocktail party conversation tidbit: a few years ago, opening day was delayed because of snow, making both senses of the flashing red signal true.

If you don’t live in Boston, you can now use the Ambient Weather Beacon from Ambient Devices. It uses a slightly different semaphore to get the message across.

The Beacon … glows more red when warmer weather is forecasted, and colder blue hues if cooler temperatures are on the way. The Beacon will also subtly pulse to show the chance of rain or snow.

A quick glance is sufficient to tell you which coat to grab on your way out the door. The Economist just ran an article about Ambient that includes this quote from the company’s CEO David Rose, “There’s a fallacy that more details are better,” he says. “What you actually want is awareness first and details on demand.” Details are vastly overrated.

Islam

Islam: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles)

Given America’s problematic relationship with Muslims, I wanted to learn more about Islam. Karen Armstrong’s book filled the bill nicely. It’s a readable and sympathetic view of Islam. Armstrong goes out of her way to correct many of the negative biases that Western readers bring to the topic. She points out that fundamentalism, for example, shows up in every religion, and is almost everywhere violent and a distortion of the basic faith. She also does a good job describing the rise of secular society in the West as a slow and thoroughly disruptive process (think of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation). Secularism was later forced onto colonies of the West at breakneck speed in a superficial way. Backlash was inevitable… and is obviously still ongoing. I appreciated the altitude she gave to the topic; it’s helped me view current events in a more historical light.

Synthetic Biology 1.0

I’m off for a vacation this week, but here’s a good parting shot: EETimes (that is, Electrical Engineering Times) covered a biology conference last week. That must be a first. What conference was it? Synthetic Biology 1.0. Why does EETimes care? Here’s what they have to say.

A small group of about 300 attended the Synthetic Biology 1.0 conference here on the edge of the Massachussets Institute of Technology’s campus. Biologists from a variety of subdisciplines mixed with AI experts, circuit designers and chemical engineers along with a small clutch of researchers from the biotech industry. It seemed remarkable that this group has a common language, and one that an uninitiated EE would find strangely familiar.

Here’s the full article: Conference kicks off synthetic bio revolution. The electrical engineers and biologists are dancing together… the penultimate convergence is upon us. The last convergence will be when the poets, priests, and philosophers join in.

There’s more good information at http://syntheticbiology.org/.

Naipaul on Islam

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

Naipaul writes unflinching and often unflattering stories about his travels in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This book was written in the late 1970s, around the time the Shah was deposed and the American embassy in Tehran was overrun by student radicals. Despite its age, the book feels like it could have been written last year. Naipaul’s directness on this thorny topic is refreshing: he describes a populist Islam that is unsurpassed at seduction but weak at construction. Again and again he hears magical faith being prescribed as the cure for all ills, particularly those imposed by external forces of Westernization. Since Islam defines itself as a religion that also encompasses politics, economics, and law, its cultural scope in an Islamic country is almost boundless.

Car buying tips

The last time I bought a car, I thought I was pretty well-informed by reading from sites like Edmunds.com and KelleyBlueBook.com (both have the obligatory Ten Steps to Buying a New Car: here and here). I read the buying guides, collected the data, and learned all my lines before the day of the big showdown at the dealership. But that was all years ago (way back in 2000), and the web just gets richer and denser every year. These days if you want to buy a car, you shouldn’t miss CarBuyingTips.com. The guy behind the site is clearly obsessive… obsessive in a way that’s good for you. I can’t vouch for his personal happiness, but he can sure do you some good.

Inane Popular Mechanics

Many years ago, say in the 1970s, science magazines didn’t have nearly as much to report as they do these days. Popular Mechanics in particular always seemed to be hyping silly cover stories, stories that bore no relation to things that were likely or economically worthwhile, like a hotel on the moon or a personal helicopter in every garage. It’s tabloid science, but hey, it sells magazines. “Someday you will send superfast mail through transcontinental pneumatic tubes!”

These days, there’s enough fast moving science and engineering to fill a thousand magazines, but still Popular Mechanics insists on pitching things in an absurd way. Here’s an article about nuclear aircraft that is a beautiful throwback to the days of the 1958 Ford Nucleon and the family submarine:
The Return Of Nuclear-Powered Aircraft. It’s not like the story is a pack of lies, but it’s told with the breathless excitement of Tomorrowland, when after all, they’re talking about flying nuclear reactors. But the thing that really delighted me was the painting associated with the story. Look closely at the picture and you’ll see Mom, Dad, and the kids getting out of the cockpit while hazmat-suited technicians pull nuclear material out of the back. Meanwhile, two other nuclear planes are zipping merrily through the air on an apparent collision course. Are you buying this? A fully loaded 767 is a bad enough hazard without dumping in a bucket of hafnium-178 and a powerful x-ray machine.

To be fair, they themselves acknowledge this story has been here before: “Older POPULAR MECHANICS readers may recall that an atomic plane was featured as our January 1951 cover story.” I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the atomic plane. Perhaps this latest issue of Popular Mechanics will show up in a future edition of Yesterday’s Tomorrows.