Final Flight

This picture was taken out of the window of a flight from Florida to Chicago and is a great picture of the last flight of Discovery.

It marks an interesting point in time whereby the future of the American space program is still to be decided and it asks interesting questions about the amount of money spent on such programmes.

I found a list of the top 10 NASA inventions you might use every day. Invisible braces, scratch resistant lenses, ear thermometers, cordless tools and even water filters have their roots in the NASA R&D department.
The question remains though, was the amount of money spent in the last 50 years of space exploration worth it?

A related question is; given that Apollo 11 had a 1MHz processor with 4 x 16 bit registers to guide it to the moon (for the non-geeks, that is an extremely small amount of processing power, a standard modern computer is over 10000 times as powerful) , would/could we send men to the moon with an iphone?

Surprisingly though, if you were to compare the computer currently helping pilot Discovery to perhaps your xbox, you’d be amazed to learn that you’d need 2000 of said pilot computers to rival the processing power of your console. The reason behind such a counter intuitive fact is that the shuttle doesn’t have to do anywhere near the number of calculations of a modern computer.

Most of the processing power in your PC is tied up doing fancy graphical wizardry and to make complicated programs run. Shuttle computers don’t need this functionality and are designed simply to do lots of mathematical calculations, something that computers are generally pretty efficient at.

Before this slightly lengthy tangent started I was asking whether or not space exploration was worth it, which my point about computers has kind of put in perspective. Whilst the computational requirements of the shuttle haven’t changed too much over the last 20 years, the technological age in which we live has evolved rapidly.

The space race was a result of big investment in technological development to try and stimulate economic growth, and whilst it did these things to some extent the context now is very different. The technology boom has made the world smaller, bringing us much more in touch with the issues faced by so many across the globe. In some ways the growth of technology is starting to bring a changing social perspective where spending the amount of money we have to compete for control and power of the sky is less important than international unity and peace.



As we see Discovery docking for the final time with the ISS, increasingly I feel that we should look to solve the problems we have on Earth rather than investing in the luxury of exploring the skies.

The Science is coming to get us...

Emeritus Professor and Fellow of King's College Cambridge Bob Rowthorn recently published a perturbing paper.



Using basic genetic ideas as well as the idea that in the western world religious people are likely to have more children that their secular peers, he concludes that a genetic predisposition towards joining a religion is likely to dominate the population in the future.

Rowthorne says that an individual's leaning toward religious belief is determined by a 'religiosity' gene which makes then more likely than average to become or remain religious.

Some people, even though they carry the religiosity gene, will of course abscond from religion due to a variety of environmental factors but even a high defection rate wont stop the flood he argues.

The rationale behind this is interesting.
Known as 'Cultural Hitch-hiking' some genes take advantage of the fact that certain cultural practices (like high fertility rates) allow for high proliferation.

So what of the defectors? When they spread their seed amongst the secularists, offspring will potentially pass on the religiosity gene, widening the reach of the predisposition towards religion.

Where's a good proof against religion when you need one?!

Click Here for original article.

Tired of the same old ideas...

Just seen something about climate change so thought I'd write down some thoughts and see where it takes me....

Barely an hour goes by without us being reminded that we need to turn off our lights or eat more hummus instead of steak, but is it making any difference to the world?

People cruise around in their hybrid or electric cars seemingly immune to the irony of the colossal environmental damage caused in the building of their vehicles and blissfully ignorant to the fact that when they plug their car into the wall, the electricity they are using is more than likely coming from a massive natural gas power station.

Of course I exaggerate but I think people are so bored of hearing about climate change, and to be fair I don't really blame them. People have lives and jobs and families such that saving the planet features pretty low on their "to do" list.

Ill conceived quick fix-ideas like Sulphur Dioxide aerosols are banded about as being sexy new technologies to solve all our weather woes but when it comes down to it the real issue is surely sociological.

We consume more than we need, we waste what we don't use and we carry on having babies!
Am I any different, of course not!
I work hard, get paid fairly and enjoy the things in life that I feel I deserve.

So how do you change consumerist, self-confident and mostly successful society into an altruistic utopia?

Answers on a postcard.

Here's a link to some ideas that may be worth a shot.

Heads or Tails, or Both?

An international team this week have reached a new milestone towards quantum computing.
The team consisting of scientists from the UK, Germany, China and Japan have succeeded in creating 10 billion bits of quantum entanglement.

In quantum mechanics, classical scientific ideas go out the window, for example simply observing objects drastically changes their behavior.
When two objects are said to be entangled, they exist such that the quantum state of each are inextricably linked. Put another way, even if entangled objects are separated by great distances, changing/observing on one of the objects immediately defines the state of its entangled partner.

My cat's namesake and, more importantly, one of the foremost developers of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrodinger is quoted as saying "Entanglement is not one, but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought."



1 "bit" of quantum entanglement is essentially a pair of objects possessing the ability to be either a 1 or a 0 just like in regular computers. When one of the pair is "observed" it becomes either a 1 or 0, with it's partner becoming the opposite. However until the pair is observed it exists in such a state that the pair is both a 1 and a 0.

This additional variation on traditional computing is where quantum computers gain ground and provide far greater processing power.

We are still some way off though. As Richard Feynman said of Quantum mechanics:
"If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."


http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-billion-bits-entanglement-silicon.html

Signs of a Change

If your birthday falls between November 29th and December 17th then you can now confidently claim to be born under the sign of the serpent bearer Ophiuchus.

You may go on to proudly explain that due to the probabilisitally insignificant event of your birth in this 19 day window you are honest and jealous as well as being sexually magnetic and easily bored.

News comes that due to the precession of the earth, cracks are forming in the the granite foundations upon which Astrologers build their trade. Due to a wobble in Earth's orbit, the direction in which the north pole point changes over a 25,000 year or so cycle. This means that all Ptolemy's hard work in charting the skies back in around 100A.D. is now slightly out of kilter.

So the new zodiac goes a little something like this:

Capricorn: January 20 to February 16
Aquarius: February 16 to March 11
Pisces: March 11 to April 18
Aries: April 18 to May 13
Taurus: May 13 to June 21
Gemini: June 21 to July 20
Cancer: July 20 to August 10
Leo: August 10 to September 16
Virgo: September 16 to October 30
Libra: October 30 to November 23
Scorpio: November 23 to 29
Ophiuchus: November 29 to December 17
Sagittarius: December 17 to January 20

In central central London today, one person is quoted as saying;
"Oh no, I'm a bloody Aquarius. They're more innovative, which makes sense, but Aquarius sucks balls. Why can't I be Ophiuchus?"