Left-to-Right Flipper Bridge

Time to revisit one of my favorite topics: crystal grain boundaries and the limits of annealing.

Of course you know what I’m really talking about is driving. Specifically: which side of the road do you drive on? Driving standards (any standards, really) make me think of polycrystalline solids, because they are assembled from an earlier chaotic and somewhat fluid state. First, people are driving all over the place, but if you and I live close to each other, then we’ll come to a social accommodation. Let’s agree to both stick to the right side of the road, and life will be much easier. Local conditions favor alignment of standards and these standards spread. But eventually you get two big pools of people, the left-drivers and the right-drivers, growing together, and they meet at a grain boundary. Despite the nuisance of life at the boundary, the standards have solidified, and it’s very difficult to change them. Behold, the grain boundaries of the driving world.

Sometimes, grains can realign in a process similar to annealing. The famous example of this in driving standards is Sweden: in 1967, they switched from left to right, bringing continental Europe under one standard. But this was just the last act in a long list of such changes. It works the other way too: Okinawa switched from right to left in 1978 and Samoa did the same thing only last year.

What happens at these grain boundaries? In a small economy without much traffic, it’s not a big deal. But it gets to be a problem as trade grows. One look at that map shows some long borders in places experiencing significant economic growth. This all brings me to Hong Kong and a report I saw on the Fast Company site: Ingenious Flipper Bridge Melds Left-Side Drivers With Right-Side Drivers. Why not just have the bridge do the flipping for you? Sadly, the bridge is notional. They didn’t win the design competition. But it’s still intriguing. And it turns out, such bridges really exist, as Wikipedia happily informs us. Here is a map of the Lotus Bridge in Macao. Trace the curves. That’s as easy as life at the crystalline grain boundary gets.

A flying Armadillo

In recent news under the heading “Private Enterprise Goes to Space”, most of the press coverage has gone to SpaceX’s launch of the Falcon 9 rocket. This is a genuinely big deal, and it deserves the glowing prose, but it overshadowed an impressive test by a smaller private launch company called Armadillo Aerospace.

Here’s a video of the test. You’ve seen dozens of rocket launches. No matter! Keep watching, because you’ve never seen a rocket land like this before.

Making that work is hard. I’d ask you to take my word for it, but since I’m no longer a practicing aerospace engineer, you’d have to take my word for it that it’s worth taking my word for it. I work in software now, and you can safely take my word for it that software is easier than launching rockets. But then again, I just realized that I can name three companies that are hard at work on commercial launch services, and in each case, the funding has come from software: Armadillo Aerospace (Jon Carmack’s Doom/Quake video game empire), SpaceX (Elon Musk’s PayPal), and BlueOrigin (largely funded by Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos).

The moral of the story appears to be that software may be easier than rocket science, but it also instills a powerful desire to make science fiction come true.

Should English spelling be reformed?

Did you catch much of the Spelling Bee last week? It finished up last Friday. The winner, Anamika Veeramani, knew how to spell nahcolite and stromur. Do you? Yes, you caught me: the correct spelling for a rheometer that measures arterial blood flow is actually stromuhr. Well done.

English spelling is full of oddities and inconsistencies. Humorists and reformers alike love to string together non-rhyming orthographic siblings like “The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough“.

Tough Coughs book

The humorist pauses for the laugh, but your true reformer plows (ploughs?) ahead with serious mean (I mean mien). Joe Little, my buddy from high school, is a true reformer. He puts his money where his mouth is too. Not only is he the director of the reform-oriented American Literacy Council, he actually traveled to Washington DC for the recent Spelling Bee so that he could protest its very existence. Not that he has anything against clever kids like Anamika Veeramani. It’s just that he thinks that, as his sign says: “English Spelling Spells Trouble”. Listen to what he has to say in this sympathetic USA Today video. By the way, that’s Joe in the bee costume.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/30317506001?isVid=1

Where do you come down? Are you convinced? Should English spelling really be reformed? The ever-informative Language Log has a good discussion about the relationship between spelling vs. rate of learning. But it all seems to be fairly equivocal. On the face of it, English spelling IS nutty. But who gets to reform it? And what gets left behind?

As I see it, the simplification of Chinese characters is a good historical lesson to learn from. In the name of stamping out illiteracy, Chairman Mao pushed through a set of drastically simplified characters. It’s easy to see the motivation, but the old characters didn’t go away, and as a result, some 2000 new (simple) characters have been added to the traditional set of around 50,000 characters. Is Chinese better off or not? The debate rages on.

Finally, now that you’re wound up about spelling, would you risk a wound to your pride by attempting the Spelling Bee’s sample test? If you take it, let us know how you did.

The Doppelgänger Distance

In the latest American Scientist, I came across a book review of Paul Davies’ new book The Eerie Silence. It’s another take on the old Fermi Paradox that bedevils the SETI crowd. Very briefly, it goes like this: if aliens exist, where are they? It sounds flip, but the more you pick at it, the more you realize it’s a significant puzzle. Shouldn’t we at least be able to detect other civilizations, since they’ve had ten billion years or so to get busy? You’d have to guess that we’re arriving late to the party. Only… where is everybody?

In this context, Davies touches on the concept of the Great Filter (which I’ve discussed before). The idea here is that, gosh darn it, intelligent life IS rare. And why? Here’s a quote from the review:

… given that we don’t see any evidence that other intelligent creatures have taken over big chunks of the cosmos, some Great Filter must be operating to prevent life from evolving to the point of colonizing our galaxy. […] Perhaps we’ve already made it through the Great Filter and will go on to colonize the visible universe ourselves. But it may be the case that civilizations as advanced as ours typically go on to destroy themselves before they reach the star-hopping phase, and that we have a Great Filter in our future.

This is why I’m interested in the the Doppelgänger Distance. It’s the distance from earth at which, given our current technology, we could hear the noise made by an exact copy of the current earth, assuming this noise was arriving right now (i.e. don’t worry about the time of transit). The Doppelgänger Distance could grow with either the sensitivity of our ears or the noise of our voices. Assume the listener knows where to listen, but the speaker is making no special attempt to be heard.

As the Doppelgänger Distance gets larger, we can feel better and better about having passed through the Great Filter. This is because, even if we are eventually so foolish as to do ourselves in, at least we will have rocked the neighborhood (which neighborhood being our Twin-o-Sphere, or the spherical volume for which the the Doppelgänger Distance is the radius). Someone clever in the vicinity will have heard us. And more importantly, we will have heard them. So: if we don’t hear anybody at all, then maybe we’re the first. Which would place the Great Filter behind us (in all likelihood).

If we make it this far and then wipe ourselves out, that would totally suck.

Robot helicopter’s impossible tricks

“Controls” is the branch of engineering that deals with the regulation of moving things. Thermostats and cruise control are the obvious examples, but control systems show up all over the place: temperature control, power control, attitude control… anything that, if left untended, is likely to become a puddle, a crater, or a ball of flame. Behind each one of those regulatory control systems is some code, probably written by a grad student, that spells out how the system should behave.

I was once a controls grad student, and one of the things we learned is that, once you’ve figured out how to control something, it’s not very hard, mathematically speaking, to control it amazingly well. Crank up the gain high enough, and you can make a tractor tap dance or a jet skywrite in cursive. In theory. The situation is similar to the old Archimedes quote “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.” It’s a nice line, but I checked the catalog, and they’re currently back-ordered on those super long space levers.

From a practical point of view, to do amazing things with control design, you need fast, accurate sensors with very clean signals and fast, accurate actuators with very clean response. This makes for a system that is heavy, hot, power-hungry, and very very expensive. Or rather, it always did until now. Everything is getting so much smallerer and betterer that old-timers like me can scarcely believe what’s possible. This is the best time ever to go to engineering school. Look at what you can build. Behold the insane quadrotor built by a group (of grad students!) at Penn.

Pardon my French, but that’s some crazy shit right there. Every working controls engineer in the world is wishing they were starting grad school right now.

The tactical value of these systems is obvious. Imagine snooping spy-bats that can perch on walls and quietly eavesdrop before flitting away into the night. Here’s a nice piece on perching planes at Stanford.

Prepare to see an unparalleled rush of innovation in micro-aircraft.

Go For Launch!

We just did a space topic yesterday, but I can’t resist this video. It’s called Go For Launch!. That name makes me think of Okay Go and their recent Rube Goldberg-inspired video. And I think: you know, this space shuttle launch prep is a pretty wacked-out Rube Goldberg sequence too. Only it ends with a freakin’ rocket ship flying into space. All they need are some marbles and a better soundtrack.

http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?deepLinkEmbedCode=RubG9lMTqZ8NXX6isUWNsRSv0RpJLQcs&autoplay=0&embedCode=RubG9lMTqZ8NXX6isUWNsRSv0RpJLQcs

The shuttle in the video is Discovery. She is primping for her penultimate voyage. The 25 year-old Atlantis has already flown her last mission. She survived 32 transits to the void and is now on her way to a retirement community outside Palm Springs where she hopes to play golf and Canasta with her surviving sisters.

Saturn in the Big Picture

I remember, as a kid, being mesmerized by these cheesy old sci-fi paintings of the frozen surface of a moon IX around Tau Ceti 4, or some such thing. Frosty rocks in the foreground, a gas giant looming large above, and maybe a space ship for good measure. I was aware of how speculative these paintings were, but they could still get you to ask the question “What would it be like to be there?”

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has a new entry on Cassini’s latest adventures around Saturn, and the amazing thing is how much these honest-to-goodness photographs resemble those old sci-fi paintings. For instance:

I half expect to see a busty astronaut in a tight-fitting space suit floating nearby, a disintegrator pistol at her side. If one of those shows up the next set of pictures, man, I will be impressed.

Alan Taylor, the editor of The Big Picture, is a Saturn-o-phile from way back. Here’s a Cassini Flickr set from his pre-Globe days.

In other planetary exploration news, I regret to inform you that your little Mars lander Phoenix did’t make it through the winter. A noble spaceship among the frosty rocks and under pink skies, Phoenix, may you rest in peace.

Typography from around the world

I’ve always loved strange symbols and exotic writing systems. Although of course, exoticness is in the eye of the beholder… The exuberant and effervescent curves of Tamil look otherworldly to me, but to 66 million people (66 million! So help me, I saw it in the Wikipedia!) it’s just what they print in the newspaper. Same old same old.

For a script fancier like me, these are the best of times. It wasn’t so long ago I was thrilled to find a rare book like Akira Nakanishi’s Writing Systems of the World. I would linger over the pages of wandering ink, scratches and spots carrying civilization on their tiny backs, one particle at a time. Messages in bottles bound for people I could scarcely imagine.

The mystery is still there, but the rarity is gone. I used to work hard to find examples of unusual scripts, but those days are over. The web is ideal for this kind of thing. I can drink in the Wikipedia Tamil page in Tamil, or flip through the pages of Dinakaran (Number 1 Tamil daily, if you take their word for it). Lately I’ve been having fun with the Google Transliterator. You don’t have to understand a word of it to enjoy rolling around in the graphical otherness of 22 different languages.

Finally, I came across this excellent piece in Smashing Magazine. The Beauty Of Typography: Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World. The explanations and illustrations are top notch, and the level is perfect for a dilettante like me.

Eyjafjallajökull in time lapse

My nephew Ben sent me this nifty video of the Keyboard Volcano (you know, EyjafjallajökulljalfjakofeyjaKABOOM!). I love the time lapse, but I was especially struck by the camera’s motion. Something about moving the camera during the image capture process completely changes the character of the movie. With a normal time lapse image, I can see, in my mind’s eye, a camera bolted to a tripod for the hours or days required. But when the camera translates through space, it feels like the dreamy vision of a slow moving creature.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11673745&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

I first saw this technique on the recent Life series that Oprah Winfrey made in her spare time. The Filming Plants short video on the Life site gives you an idea what I’m talking about. The camera doesn’t so much record the plant as dance with it as it grows.

In the way of all things technical, this high-end trend is being made available to hobbyists. In the notes under the volcano video, filmmaker Sean Stiegemeier thanks MILapse for his motorized dolly. MILapse turns out to be Jay Burlage, and he’ll help you build an open source hardware motion control system for your high dynamic range time lapse video system. God bless the hobbyists! Amazing stuff.

Arrested development or pedomorphic edge?

It’s remarkable how much a baby ape resembles a small human. The similarity decreases quickly with age, but it does help explain how we can share so much DNA with them. In many ways we’re just slowed down versions of them. We carry that flat forehead and big brain cavity (relative to skull size) right into adulthood. I’ve often thought that chimps must look at us and shake their heads at how absurdly childish we look. Geez! These researchers, I swear they get younger every year.

In biological terms, this physical retardation goes by the name pedomorphosis or neoteny. And despite the insane length of time we have to spend sheltered by adults, we humans like to think that our childishness has treated us well. That big fat brain doesn’t blossom overnight, but when it finally pops, watch out!

A neuroscientist once explained to me that some fairly dramatic changes in brain physiology occur in late adolescence. Regions that were more plastic become more hardwired, or “burned in”. This is a reasonable biological response — your brain is saying “Hey, now that you know how things work, I can save us both a lot of time and energy by just looking up the answer on these note cards.” It’s also obvious: anyone can see that learning changes as you age, the best example of this being language acquisition. When you come to be old person, you canna learn to speaka da language… but never like a native.

On the other hand, maybe it’s time for us to let that brain be plastic a little longer. Call it Pedomorphism 2.0. After all, there’s a lot to learn these days, and it’s changing all the time. And right on cue, there is a rise in pedomorphic behavior. The average age of entry into adulthood is rising. Living at home as long as you can is a pretty sound strategy. And those extra graduate degrees may well come in handy some day.

That 28 year-old slob who plays video games all day in the basement of his parents’ house (a.k.a. Area Man)? He may well represent the future of the species. But only if he can be induced to get a girlfriend.