Information warfare

Originally shared by Jay Dugger

INFORMATION WARFARE: The Power Of Misdirection And Confusion http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20160129.aspx
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20160129.aspx

Rocket reusability : not all it's cracked up to be ?

"Mr Charmeau added: "And we have other specificities in Europe, such as the technology of propulsion, which is much better than the US one, both in solid and cryogenic propulsion. This allows us to launch [two satellites at once], which is another factor for competitiveness, maybe much better than re-usability - we will see in the future. And one characteristic, for example, is that we have only one (main) engine on the Ariane 64, whereas our competitor is going for re-usability because he is using much more engines. (The Falcon 9 has nine engines on its first stage.)"

""I could talk for two hours about the advantages or disadvantages of re-usability. Is it appropriate for the European situation? I don't say 'no'; I don't say 'yes'. I just say 'we're discussing it'; we're looking into it in detail."

Hmmm.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35435108

Sexy, sexy driverless cars

If they work in central London they'll work anywhere.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35432687

More research ! More I say ! Hang those who talk of less !

Percentage of research papers concluding that "more research is needed" 1960-2015, found on the internet, source unknown.

Probably because usually more research is needed.

A proper re-usable rocket

Yes, OK, it's not an orbital vehicle, but it is a re-useable rocket that lands vertically. And that's pretty neat. Well, really neat. Awesome, even.

And this time their video wisely does not include any CGI that looks like it belongs in 1997. No CGI at all, in fact.

Originally shared by Friends of NASA

Launch. Land. Repeat. | New Shepard Does It Again! | Blue Origin
"Blue Origin's vision: Millions of people living and working in space. You can’t get there by throwing the hardware away."
"Watch the re-flight!"

"The very same New Shepard booster that flew above the Karman line and then landed vertically at its launch site last November has now flown and landed again, demonstrating reuse. This time, New Shepard reached an apogee of 333,582 feet (101.7 kilometers) before both capsule and booster gently returned to Earth for recovery and reuse."

"Data from the November mission matched our preflight predictions closely, which made preparations for today’s re-flight relatively straightforward. The team replaced the crew capsule parachutes, replaced the pyro igniters, conducted functional and avionics checkouts, and made several software improvements, including a noteworthy one. Rather than the vehicle translating to land at the exact center of the pad, it now initially targets the center, but then sets down at a position of convenience on the pad, prioritizing vehicle attitude ahead of precise lateral positioning. It’s like a pilot lining up a plane with the centerline of the runway. If the plane is a few feet off center as you get close, you don’t swerve at the last minute to ensure hitting the exact mid-point. You just land a few feet left or right of the centerline. Our Monte Carlo sims of New Shepard landings show this new strategy increases margins, improving the vehicle’s ability to reject disturbances created by low-altitude winds."

"Though wings and parachutes have their adherents and their advantages, I’m a huge fan of rocket-powered vertical landing. Why? Because—to achieve our vision of millions of people living and working in space—we will need to build very large rocket boosters. And the vertical landing architecture scales extraordinarily well. When you do a vertical landing, you’re solving the classic inverted pendulum problem, and the inverted pendulum problem gets a bit easier as the pendulum gets a bit bigger. Try balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger. Now try it with a broomstick. The broomstick is simpler because its greater moment of inertia makes it easier to balance. We solved the inverted pendulum problem on New Shepard with an engine that dynamically gimbals to balance the vehicle as it descends."

"And since New Shepard is the smallest booster we will ever build, this carefully choreographed dance atop our plume will just get easier from here. We’re already more than three years into development of our first orbital vehicle. Though it will be the small vehicle in our orbital family, it’s still many times larger than New Shepard. I hope to share details about this first orbital vehicle this year."
- Jeff Bezos (Yes...of Amazon.com fame)

Credit: Blue Origin
Release Date: January 22, 2016

Blue Origin
Amazon.com
Commercial Spaceflight Federation

#NASA #Space #BlueOrigin #Astronauts #Rocket #Exploration
#Human #NewShepard #Vehicle #Capsule #JeffBezos #Technology #Propulsion #Engines #Engineering #Earth #USA #UnitedStates #Spaceflight #Texas #Launch #STEM #Education #SpaceTourism #NewSpace #Commercial #HD #Video

Giant fairy rings

I blame the fairies.

Originally shared by Joerg Fliege

Up in Ontario, there are "rings" of stunted tree growth, sometimes 2km of diameter.

And there are more hypotheses trying to explain the phenomenon than you can shake a stick at.
http://www.bldgblog.com/2016/01/rings/

Switzerland tries the Nazi gold trick again

What the hell, Switzerland ?
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35323315

Burping antimatter - yes, really

The nice thing about running simulations all day is it gives me plenty of time for reading.

"These rules may not hold for all the super-heavy elements. In their atoms, the electrons near the nucleus are so tightly bound by the positively-charged nucleus that they travel at immense speeds. They are so fast that they feel the effects of Einstein's theory of special relativity, which states that objects moving close to the speed of light gain mass. As a result, the inner electrons become heavier. The upshot is that "relativistic" effects can mean a super-heavy element does not behave as we would expect it to."

But, how would it behave then ? TELL ME ! I NEED TO KNOW THIS !!!

"...it seems that nothing untoward happens to the energies of the innermost electrons until atomic number 173. Even then the atoms can remain stable, but all the same something weird happens. It turns out that the innermost electrons of element 173 might be in an unusual, unstable state that can evoke these "virtual" particles. If one of these electrons gets kicked out of its shell, for example by zapping it with an X-ray, it will leave a hole behind. This hole will be filled by an electron that appears out of nothing. But for this electron to form, a positron must also form, and this will be emitted by the atom. In other words, the electron clouds of these really huge elements might occasionally burp out particles of antimatter."

Well that's cool.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160115-how-many-more-chemical-elements-are-there-for-us-to-find

Testing the wisdom of crowds

This is ongoing research so for now it's just a hypothesis, but definitely one to follow. There's a website (http://www.eyethink.org/index.html) but it doesn't seem to contain any more information, probably because this is for an ongoing PhD. I hope they'll put out a press release when the paper/thesis is published.

"Group conformity stands in marked contrast to the “wisdom of crowds” effect, whereby aggregating the opinions of large numbers of people gives answers or predictions more accurate than those of any individual. This happens only when members of a crowd make their judgements independently of each other, and it is most effective when a crowd is diverse. In cohesive groups, on the other hand, where members share an identity, the urge for unity overrides all. So when Richardson presents us with a picture of a killer whale and asks us how much the creature weighs, he’ll be better off taking the average of the answers we give independently, rather than following the scramble of dots on the screen."

Sounds like stuff I've been saying for a while, and well worth testing.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160113-are-your-opinions-really-your-own

We're (not really) monkeys on the Moon...

I had some sea monkeys once. Turns out they neither live in the sea nor are they monkeys. Also known as brine shrimp, except that they're not really shrimp either. May as well call 'em sea monkeys then.

Mine only lived for about six weeks, which is a fair way short of the advertised 10,000 years. More accurately the eggs can survive at least 10,000 years. They're not like tardigrades where the fully-developed creature can just say, "nope" and go into uber-hibernation if it gets bored. On the plus side they're a lot bigger than tardigrades, and they use a similar process to preserve their eggs.

"For most animals, losing too much bodily water doesn't just shut things down, it causes lethal damage. Humans can only lose 15% of our bodily water, and few animals can lose more than 50%. As water is removed, the molecules inside our cells lose the three-dimensional network that buoys them up. Proteins, sugars, and chromosomes become warped and break down. Ice crystals act like tiny knives, ripping cells apart from the inside out.

The challenge is to allow molecules to keep their shape as they dry out. For this, brine shrimp have a sweet solution: they turn their cells into solid sugar. The cysts are loaded with an unusual sugar called trehalose, which makes up 15% of their dry weight. It forms a solid rather like the glass in windows. This "matrix" props up proteins and membranes, maintaining their structures, and freezes them in place."
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151217-the-tiny-creatures-that-flew-to-the-moon-twice-and-survived

Gecko skin for five year olds

"Together with the rolling of larger droplets, this ‘bubble dance’ also removes any contaminants from the lizard’s back. In other words, gecko skin is unwettable and self-cleaning. It is also inherently antibacterial. “The hairs seem to kill the bacteria not with chemistry or anything, but [they] seem to penetrate the bacteria,” Greg says. Although it is lethal to microbes, larger cells – such as human stem cells – are not harmed by this spiky surface."

"“There are a lot of pressures now, where you have to publish or perish, so to speak,” says Jolanta. “But Greg and I have a very firm philosophy that science is about discovery and just basic human curiosity. A lot of our projects just come about from really never growing up,” she says. “We’re always at that five-year-old stage, where we pick things up and we look at them.”

I agree. Always be five years old.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160114-one-gecko-has-skin-so-waterproof-the-water-literally-jumps-off

The tyranny of reading

It's maybe not as bad as the headline suggests.

"His employer had discovered that he was using Yahoo Messenger for personal contacts, as well as professional ones. Because it believed it was accessing a work account, the judges said, the firm had not erred."

Obviously, your employer has the right to check your work messages. On the other hand they shouldn't be able to check your private messages. Mixing the two in the same account causes complications. I suppose having two separate accounts would be the obvious solution, but who wants to remember yet another password ?
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35301148

Latter-day Adam and Eve ?

The short answer is "maybe, but for God's sake don't try it you twit."
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160113-could-just-two-people-repopulate-earth

Lessons for the Bene Gesserit

Lessons for the Bene Gesserit.

Researchers have created a digital audio platform that can modify the emotional tone of people's voices while they are talking, to make them sound happier, sadder or more fearful. New results show that while listening to their altered voices, participants' emotional state change in accordance with the new emotion.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-affects-mood.html

We're roving on the Moon...

Well, I guess it's hard to beat the publicity factor for a car company of being able to say, "We built a freakin' lunar rover."

Nothing is mentioned about how they plan to get the rover to the Moon though, which is, I gather, generally considered a fairly important part of the process. Target date is end of 2017.

Via Joerg Fliege.

Originally shared by Thomas Ortiz
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/11/10746926/audi-lunar-rover-xprize-detroit-auto-show-2016

Defining "human"

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160111-what-is-it-that-makes-you-a-human-and-not-something-else

Bertrand Russel's guide to life

Placebos alter self-knowledge but not the actual condition

" this paper analyzed hundreds of medical studies focusing on all types of conditions. Crucially, its authors didn't simply focus on studies that involved groups of patients receiving placebos, but on studies that involved a group of patients receiving placebo treatments and a group of patients receiving no treatment whatsoever, so that the impact on the two groups could be compared."

"In short, this paper suggests that placebo treatments don't affect people's physical state in any measurable way, though they can improve patients' perception of their own condition. That's an important distinction — it suggests that while placebos may improve patients' mindsets, the popular idea that placebos can trick people's bodies into spontaneously healing themselves may be nothing more than smoke and mirrors."

Interesting, though I'd always assumed the placebo effect had been measured precisely by comparing patients with and without placebo treatments. It's difficult to believe that this hasn't been done before.
http://www.clearerthinking.org/#!How-powerful-is-the-placebo-effect/c1toj/568bd3e70cf21f6856d88bb3

Studying the spread of ignorance

See also http://astrorhysy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/consensus-and-conspiracy.html

Originally shared by Jenny Winder
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance

A summary video on dark matter

Very nice summary. Though the Bullet Cluster technically does not prove the existence of dark matter, it's just fully consistent with the predictions of dark matter. MOND might be able to do this too, but right now no-one has a good relativistic version of it to test its predictions. Also, although MOND does require some dark matter, the amount would be consistent with the missing baryons predicted from Big Bang nucleosynthesis, so it wouldn't require a new particle.

Originally shared by Marijan-Marijan Manson (macee)

Ok. ;"even worse". :)
https://youtu.be/z3rgl-_a5C0

An almost practical flying car

Well now, this is getting close to being a useful flying car. It can fit in a normal parking space (with the propellers folded), charge in two hours and fly for twenty minutes. Cruises at 300m altitude at a top speed of 60 mph (my education has left me with a strange preference for mixing imperial and metric units). If even six of the eight propellers are lost, it can still land (OK, crash) relatively safely. The user doesn't have to do anything except tell it where to go. The company video is rather impressive too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vGd1Oy7Cw0

Of course it's still hopelessly expensive (>$200,000) but then it's a prototype. Nothing is said about how the autopilot system actually works - how does it avoid obstacles ? How would it deal with lots of other Ehang 184's flying about ?

But even if it didn't fly, it still looks ten times cooler than Google's self-driving car.

Via Sakari Maaranen.

Originally shared by Phys.org

Chinese drone maker unveils human-carrying drone - Chinese drone maker Ehang Inc. on Wednesday unveiled what it calls the world's first drone capable of carrying a human passenger.
http://ow.ly/39NyC0

Bendable screens are for phones, not TVs

"Why would you want a bendable TV? LG says it's ideal for making displays, like in a shop, but also for people who no longer want to sacrifice an entire corner of a room to a television."

Umm, I can imagine much better uses. I don't think people would particularly want to get rid of their huge status symbol that they plan their living room around anyway. Maybe having a pull-down screen in smaller houses but that's about it.

Instead, I'm thinking mobile phones and replacement tablets. The screen isn't truly foldable yet, but even a screen you could unroll would save a lot of space. Computing-wise I'm (ultimately) thinking a powerful central hub that transmits the signal wirelessly to multiple soft touchscreens. More short term, perhaps a cross between a book and a tablet. Multiple pages so you can flick back and forth between content and compare things but with interactive content - the best of both worlds.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35230043

A consensus is stronger with disagreement

Well now this is fascinating.

Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made. 

In a new paper to be published in The Proceedings of The Royal Society A, a team of researchers, Lachlan J. Gunn, et al., from Australia and France has further investigated this idea, which they call the "paradox of unanimity." "If many independent witnesses unanimously testify to the identity of a suspect of a crime, we assume they cannot all be wrong," coauthor Derek Abbott, a physicist and electronic engineer at The University of Adelaide, Australia, told Phys.org. "Unanimity is often assumed to be reliable. However, it turns out that the probability of a large number of people all agreeing is small, so our confidence in unanimity is ill-founded. This 'paradox of unanimity' shows that often we are far less certain than we think."

[It seems to be that if they all agree because of a systematic effect, then they are not truly independent - at least, they are all subject to the same common problem.]

http://godl.es/1TA7gNe