We Choose Ares

NASA's next program for manned spaceflight is about to get underway, and it won't involve gliders, planes, or anything resembling the Starship Enterprise. 

This morning at 8:00 AM, The Ares I-X rocket lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  Weather pending, the launch will be a test for the Ares I model of rocket, which is being developed to replace the space shuttle after the shuttle's decommission in 2010.

Some might see the Ares rocket (and its program, Constellation) as a step backwards for NASA, reverting back to the designs and functions of the Apollo program.  I, on the other hand, prefer to think of it as a simplification after the Challenger and Columbia tragedies.  It makes sense for NASA to go back to what works and modify their approach from there.  Sure, we won't be seeing any fancy spaceships or star cruisers any time soon, but if a rocket is what it takes to get us to the Moon, Mars and beyond, then so be it.

NASA describes today's launch as "an early opportunity to test and prove flight characteristics, hardware, facilities and ground operations associated with the Ares I."  If inclement weather forces them to cancel the launch, another attempt will be made tomorrow.




Edit: It looks like inclement weather postponed today's launch. NASA's website states that they'll try again tomorrow.

Edit #2 (Wednesday):  Today's launch reportedly went off without a hitch.

The City of Lost Web Pages

When you've been on the internet as long as I have (10+ years), certain names come to hold certain connotations.  'Wikipedia' is synonymous with dubious information, '56k' means 'slow as molasses', and 'GeoCities' is synonymous with tacky homepages.  That is, until today.

Parent company Yahoo! announced back in April that it would be closing the GeoCities free web-hosting service on October 26, 2009.  Well, today is the day.  Ever since 1995, GeoCities has allowed web users to build and maintain personal homepages, fan sites, and other pages.  Many of the sites were rudimentary at best, tacky eyesores at worst.

Efforts to preserve and archive the GeoCities pages have been started by Internet Archive, InternetArcheology.org, and a number of other sites.  Webcomic artist Randall Munroe even changed the layout of his own website to commemorate the occasion:

Most people in their mid-twenties were first exposed to the internet through personal site builders like GeoCities.  I remember cobbling together fan sites for my favorite TV shows back when I was 10 or 11.  They're outdated technology in the age of Blogger, but it's good to know that us old internet fogies can go someplace to revisit the good ol' days of the web.

Fare thee well, GeoCities.  Your time has come and gone.

No Fate but What the LHC Makes

One of my favorite joke websites is called "Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?"  Clearly, it hasn't.  However, if there is some danger of the LHC turning the universe inside-out, the future may be trying to sabotage the project now in order to protect itself from being destroyed.

The way The New York Times' Dennis Overbye explains it, the result of the LHC's process "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one."  It's only conjecture and a healthy dose of wishful thinking, but that hasn't stopped some writers and scientists from wondering.

The idea itself sounds like something out of a Terminator movie.  In order to save the future from destruction, Kyle Reese is sent back to protect Sarah Connor from the Terminator.  Only in the real world scenario, the Terminator is the Large Hadron Collider, Sarah Connor is the universe, and Kyle Reese is, well, let's just call it fate.

Over the past two years, Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya have published papers theorizing the future's influence on the current LHC experiments.  Clearly not content to accept the fact that things break, the two are sticking to their theory after a number of malfunctions and false starts to the project.


On his own blog, Alan Boyle chronicles the history of superconductor malfunctions and science fiction regarding the phenomenon.  It's far too early to know whether this is simply a case of life imitating art, or if there is any credence to Nielsen and Ninomiya's idea, but as several others have said before, it's all likely just wishful thinking from daydreamers with Ph.D's.

A Glorious Dawn - 'Cosmos' Remixed

I first ran across this video on Bad Astronomy, but ever since then it's started making the rounds on other websites, so I thought I'd share it with you as well.  This is a music video that YouTube user melodysheep has created from various clips of Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos. 



What I love about this video is the use of auto-tuning to give Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking's speech patterns a sort of lyrical quality.  Incidentally, it also makes them sound like something out of a Kanye West song.

Having just recently rewatched the Cosmos series, this was a really fun way to condense Sagan's message for the YouTube-iPod-Wikipedia generation. There was already something poetic in the cadence of Carl Sagan's monologues, and the way melodysheep reconfigured it just underlines the fact.

Aircraft Design, the Avian Way

After 100 years of perfecting aviation, we are once again looking to the birds for clues on developing the next generation of aircraft.  Dr. Fuh-Gwo Yuan at North Carolina State University is leading one such project, one of only a handful around the world.  Recently, he and his graduate students have studied the flight mechanics of various bird species for traits that might be of use in designing future aircraft.

Of course, Dr. Yuan is not the first to have looked to the avian world for inspiration.  "The Wright brothers were also inspired by how birds fly," he noted, pointing out how Orville and Wilbur's airplane featured bendable wing-tips to mimic a bird's outer feathers.  Leonardo Da Vinci studied birds for 20 years in sketching out his first flying machines.

Dr. Yuan began his research with a question: How is an eagle's flight so efficient, when its brain measures only one cubic inch?  This inspired him to seek a model coupling that elegant design with modern scientific capabilities.  (For video of a bald eagle in flight, click here)

Dr. Yuan's team is hard at work revising the design for their proposed model.  While an eagle has feathers that perform different functions, they are still part of one fluid whole.  The wings of a commercial jetliner are segmented pieces constructed to imitate those parts of an eagle's wing which provide drag upon landing.  This is the point Dr. Yuan stressed above all others.  "We don't mimic the form," he said.  "We borrow the function."

Similar projects have also been conducted at the University of Notre Dame, Virginia Tech, and the University of California at Berkeley, where researchers have been seeking to develop "Micromechanical Flying Insects" since 1998.

On paper, the idea of a new aircraft design sounds like it might revolutionize the aviation industry, or at the very least push it into the 21st century.  However, you won't be seeing futuristic jetliners any time soon.  If the short-term goal is to perfect the design, the long-term goal could see miniaturized versions navigating under their own power as reconnaissance drones for the military.

"We'd like to make the vehicles more autonomous," Dr. Yuan explained, describing a scenario in which a Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) might navigate terrain without a human at the controls.  These planes could even find their way onto Mars as detachable surveyors on future missions.

For just over a century, humanity thought it had this flight thing all figured out.  As Dr. Yuan and his students are proving, understanding how a bird stays aloft and mimicking its design are two very different, very tricky things.  Within a year, we could very well have the answer to that riddle.

Coming Soon: The IMAX Wars?

Here's a fun bit of tech news for all you film buffs out there.  This morning, USA Today reported that Cinemark will be tossing its hat into the IMAX ring.  It seems they'll begin rolling out their own deluxe screens, called Cinemark XD, by Oscar season.  The IMAX rival will begin in twelve test markets, including Las Vegas and San Francisco.  Assuming the new screens prove to be a hit, Cinemark will likely begin converting theater screens across the country.

From a technical standpoint, Cinemark's system sounds comparable to IMAX in every respect, but they're claiming that their ace in the hole will be the ability to support any film format, celluloid or digital.  For films to be shown on IMAX, special prints need to be made to accommodate the projectors.

I don't know about you, but I see a flaw in this plan.  The reason IMAX film prints look as good as they do are due to A) the special formatting and B) certain films being shot with IMAX cameras.  For Cinemark XD to jump into this format with what sounds like a regular projector system on a larger screen, it's likely that this format will stretch a film's aspect ratio to achieve the effect.  If that's the case, this isn't going to make films look any better, and discerning theater-goers are going to notice the difference right away.

At this point, all we can do is wait and see how Cinemark's technology compares.  Do you IMAX has anything to worry about?