According to astronauts on board the ISS, the interior of the SpaceX capsule has a “new car smell“. Seeing the world’s first commercial spacecraft dock with the ISS successfully is, well, awesome I think is an appropriate word here.
May 262012
May 222012
The Dragon capsule of SpaceX Corporation is on its way after a successful launch towards the International Space Station. If all goes well, it will dock with the ISS in two days’ time, making it the first commercial spacecraft to do so, and paving the way to eventual human flight to the ISS on board commercial vehicles. This really is the beginning of a new era.
And the end of an old one. The ashes of James Doohan, better known as Scotty to Star Trek fans, are reportedly on board the Dragon capsule, to fulfil the actor’s final wishes.
May 222012
I just read (link in Hungarian) that a far right member of the Hungarian parliament found it necessary to use a genetic test to prove that he is free of Jewish and Roma blood.
Even if it were possible to do so, I have no inclination to use a genetic testing service to find out the ethnicity of my ancestors. But, I do hope that I have Roma, Jewish, Hungarian, Slav, Russian, German, or for that matter Chinese or Indian ancestors. That is because there is only one group of people that I wish to belong to: the group of human beings. I have zero desire to join any subgroup whose sole purpose is to revel in the idea that they are somehow superior by birth to other subgroups. And, well, if all this makes me a mongrel or a tyke in the eyes of some with a better defined ethnicity… you know what, I don’t really like your purebred attitude either.
May 152012
I am really disappointed to learn this morning that the world will not come to an end December this year. According to a new discovery, the Mayan calendar may have had at least 17 baktuns, not 13 as previously believed, so we are good for something like another two millennia.
Just as I was getting ready to sell my house and all my earthly possessions…
May 112012
Here is a photograph of the cockpit of the Space Shuttle Endeavour, powered up for the very last time ever:
It is an emotional moment. But we must not let those emotions get in the way of reason. The Shuttle program swallowed up huge amounts of money and these orbiters, however wonderful, didn’t really take humanity anywhere.
Just consider: the Shuttle flew a few hundred kilometers from the surface of planet Earth. That is one one-thousandths (!) of the distance to the Moon, visited by Apollo astronauts over 40 years ago. But no human has been beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since Apollo 17 flew in late 1972. Now if all goes well, in a few short years one of the very first missions of NASA’s new spacecraft, the Orion capsule, may take humans beyond the Moon, to the L2 Lagrange point. At last, this is real exploration again… not just a routine (albeit dangerous) taxiing between the surface and LEO.
And the taxiing is not going to stop for Americans. The Dragon capsule of SpaceX corporation is set to fly to the International Space Station next week. It is still an unmanned flight but if all goes well, perhaps the next time they’ll ferry not just cargo but also people.
May 102012
In 2004, NASA landed two rovers on Mars, Spirit and Opportunity. Both far surpassed expectations, operating much longer than their planned design lifetime of 6 months.
Spirit was ultimately lost in 2010, but Opportunity, having spent the last five months in hibernation during the Martian winter, is now driving again. It is amazing that this machine is still functioning. Imagine leaving a solar powered remote control toy in the sandy desert somewhere. How long would it survive and remain drivable?
May 102012
It’s one setback after another, sometimes with tragic consequences.
Last year it was Phobos-Grunt, Russia’s attempt to return to deep space beyond Earth orbit after a 15-year hiatus. Alas, Phobos-Grunt never managed to go too far… it failed to reach escape orbit and eventually fell back to the Earth.
And now, it’s the Sukhoi Superjet’s turn. After more than two decades, Russia is again trying to capture a small segment of the passenger jet market. Their demonstration model was on an Asian tour, trying to impress new customers. Well, they certainly created an impression… just not the impression they were hoping for. More tragically, 48 souls perished.
I suppose that from a Canadian (or Brazilian) perspective, this should be considered “good news”, since the Sukhoi Superjet 100 is intended to compete in a market that is dominated by Canada’s Bombardier and Brazil’s Embraer. But I don’t find this comforting. In fact, for the sake of the future of Russia’s commercial jet industry, I hope that this tragic accident will turn out to be a case of pilot error. Controlled flight into terrain.
May 102012
Astronomy is supposed to be a relatively safe profession. I suppose observational astronomers may occasionally injure themselves when working on a telescope, but it’s probably rare. For them to become murder victims is even more unlikely.
So why would a Japanese astronomer, working in Chile on the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, be murdered on the street just outside his apartment?
May 032012
Everyone who saw the 1986 disaster of the space shuttle Challenger remembers the words from mission control: “Flight control is here looking very carefully at the situation, obviously a major malfunction.”
I was watching a newly surfaced home video of the explosion courtesy of The Huffington Post. (Well worth watching. In particular, notice just how cold it must have been that morning, as evidenced by the clothing people wore.) This led me to a link about Steve Nesbitt, the NASA communications officer who uttered those sad but memorable words.
By the time NASA was ready to fly shuttles again, Nesbitt was already promoted to a new position. But he asked his bosses to be the announcer for the next flight, because “the last one ended rather badly.” Thus he became the voice of NASA in September 1988, when Discovery flew.
Nesbitt retired last year and the shuttles are now heading to museums. But, I admit, the emotional impact of the failed launch of Challenger remains just as strong today as it was 26 years ago.
Apr 242012
I was having a discussion with a lawyer friend of mine. I was trying to illustrate the difference between the advocating done by lawyers and the scientist’s unbiased (or at least, not intentionally biased) search for the truth. One is about cherry-picking facts and arguments to prove a preconceived notion; the other about trying to understand the world around us.
I told him that anything and the opposite of anything can be proven by cherry-picking facts. Then it occurred to me that it is true even in math. For instance, by cherry-picking facts, I can easily prove that \(2\times 2=5\). Let’s start with three variables, \(a\), \(b\) and \(c\), for which it is true that \(a=b+c\). Then, multiplying by 5 gives
$$5a=5b+5c.$$
Multiplying by 4 and switching the two sides gives
$$4b+4c=4a.$$
Adding these two equations together, we get
$$5a+4b+4c=4a+5b+5c.$$
Subtracting \(9a\) from both sides, we obtain
$$4b+4c-4a=5b+5c-5a,$$
or
$$4(b+c-a)=5(b+c-a).$$
Dividing both sides by \(b+c-a\) gives the final result:
$$4=5.$$
And no, I did not make some simple mistake in my derivation. In fact, I can use computer algebra to obtain the same result, and computers surely don’t lie. Here it is, with Maxima:
(%i1) eq1:5*a=5*b+5*c$ (%i2) eq2:4*b+4*c=4*a$ (%i3) eq3:eq1+eq2$ (%i4) eq4:eq3-9*a$ (%i5) eq5:factor(eq4)$ (%i6) eq6:eq5/(b+c-a); (%o6) 4 = 5
All I had to do to make this happen was to ignore an inconvenient little fact, which is precisely what lawyers (not to mention politicians) do all the time. Surely, if I can prove that \(2\times 2=5\), I can prove anything. So can lawyers and they know it.
Apr 232012
April 23, 2012, and this is what I see through my window:
A month ago, I had to run my air conditioner. Grumble.
Apr 172012
The Space Shuttle Discovery is on its way to its final resting place.
Many lament the end of the Shuttle program. They shouldn’t. Beautiful as these machines were, they really stifled the American space program. For decades, countless billions of dollars were spent… on going around, and around, and around, in low-Earth orbit, ultimately getting nowhere.
When Barack Obama opted for a variant of the Augustine Commission‘s “flexible path” approach, some pundits called it the end of America’s space dominance. I think the contrary is true. Instead of opting for an overly ambitious but ultimately unrealistic space program that would eventually die on the floors of Congress due to lack of funding, Obama chose a space program that places the emphasis on sustainable development: a long term vision of expanding human presence beyond Earth orbit in the solar system, not necessarily with spectacular landings on Mars (however desirable such a landing may be, it’s also insanely risky and expensive) but with building the infrastructure for a permanent human presence beyond the protective shield of the Earth’s radiation belts.
Apr 152012
At the very end of tonight’s episode of The Simpsons, just before the end credits, we caught a brief glimpse of Pioneer 10 (or was it 11?), along with an extraterrestrial intently studying Carl Sagan’s famous golden plaque.
But wait a minute… stupid alien is holding the plaque upside-down. No wonder he can’t make sense of it.
And they didn’t get the shape of the RTG fins right. Can’t really blame them; way too many artistic depictions of Pioneer show the generators with the small, rectangular fins that, I believe, were on (non-nuclear) engineering mockups used during testing.
Apr 152012
Now here is a way to use physics more cleverly than Sheldon Cooper to avoid a costly ticket for a moving violation: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0162.
The brief, two-sentence abstract reads: A way to fight your traffic tickets. The paper was awarded a special prize of $400 that the author did not have to pay to the state of California.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the paper is dated April 1. But the story, it appears, is real nonetheless.
Apr 142012
I just came across this delightful imaginary conversation between a physicist and an economist about the unsustainability of perpetual economic growth.
The physicist uses energy production in his argument: growth at present rates means that in a few hundred years, we’ll produce enough energy to start boiling the oceans. And this is not something that can be addressed easily by the magic of technology. When waste heat is produced, the only way to get rid of it is to radiate it away into space. After about 1400 years of continuous growth, the Earth will be radiating more energy (all man-made) than the Sun, which means it would have to be a lot hotter than the Sun, on account of its smaller size. And in about 2500 years, we would exceed the thermal output of the whole Milky Way.
This, of course, is nonsense, which means terrestrial energy production will be capped eventually by basic physics. If GDP would continue to grow nonetheless, it would mean that the price of energy relative to other stuff would decrease to zero. This is also nonsense, since a limited resource cannot become arbitrarily cheap. But that means GDP growth must also be capped.
What I liked about this argument is that it is not emotional or ideological; it’s not about hugging trees or hating capitalism. It is about basic physics and elementary logic that is difficult to escape. In fact, it can be put in the form of equations. Our present energy production \(P_0\) is approximately 15 TW, which is about 0.002% of the Sun’s output that reaches the Earth:
\begin{align}
P_0&\simeq 1.5 \times 10^{13}~\rm{W},\\
P_\odot&\simeq 7 \times 10^{17}~\rm{W},\\
\eta_0&=P_0/P_\odot \sim 0.002\%.
\end{align}
For any other value of \(\eta\), there is a corresponding value of \(P\):
\begin{align}
P=\eta P_\odot.
\end{align}
Now all we need is to establish a maximum value of \(\eta\) that we can live with; say, \(\eta_{\rm max}=1\%\). This tells us the maximum amount of energy that we can produce here in the Earth without cooking ourselves:
\begin{align}
P_{\rm max}=\eta_{\rm max}P_\odot.
\end{align}
On the economic side of this argument, there is the percentage of GDP that is spent on energy. In the US, this is about 8%. For lack of a better value, let me stick to this one:
\begin{align}
\kappa_0\sim 8\%.
\end{align}
How low can \(\kappa\) get? That may be debatable, but it cannot become arbitrarily low. So there is a value \(\kappa_{\rm min}\).
The rest is just basic arithmetic. GDP is proportional to the total energy produced, divided by \(\kappa\):
\begin{align}
{\rm GDP}&\propto \frac{\eta}{\kappa}P_\odot,\\
{\rm GDP}_{\rm max}&\propto \frac{\eta_{\rm \max}}{\kappa_{\rm min}}P_\odot,
\end{align}
And in particular:
\begin{align}
{\rm GDP}_{\rm max}&=\frac{\eta_{\rm max}\kappa_0}{\eta_0\kappa_{\rm min}}{\rm GDP}_0,
\end{align}
where \({\rm GDP}_0\) is the present GDP.
We know \(\eta_0\sim 0.002\%\). We know \(\kappa_0=8\%\). We can guess that \(\eta_{\rm max}\lesssim 1\%\) and \(\kappa_{\rm min}\gtrsim 1\%\). This means that
\begin{align}
{\rm GDP}_{\rm max}\lesssim 4,000\times {\rm GDP}_0.
\end{align}
This is it. A hard limit imposed by thermodynamics. But hey… four thousand is a big number, isn’t it? Well… sort of. At a constant 3% rate of annual growth, the economy will increase to four thousand times its present size in a mere 280 years or so. One may tweak the numbers a little here and there, but the fact that physics imposes such a hard limit remains. The logic is inescapable.
Or is it? The word “escape” may be appropriate here for more than one reason, as there is one obvious way to evade this argument: escape into space. In a few hundred years, humanity may have spread throughout the solar system, and energy amounts enough to boil the Earth’s oceans may be powering human colonies in the hostile (and cold!) environments near the outer planets.
That is, if humans are still around a few hundred years from now. One can only hope.
Apr 122012
Our second short paper has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.
I have been involved with Pioneer 10 and 11 in some fashion since about 2002, when I first began corresponding with Larry Kellogg about the possibility of resurrecting the telemetry data set. It is thanks the Larry’s stamina and conscientiousness that the data set survived.
I have been involved actively in the research of the Pioneer anomaly since 2005. Seven years! Hard to believe.
This widely reported anomaly concerns the fact that when the orbits of Pioneer 10 and 11 are accurately modeled, a discrepancy exists between the modeled and measured frequency of the radio signal. This discrepancy can be resolved by assuming an unknown force that pushes Pioneer 10 an 11 towards the Earth or the Sun (from that far away, these two directions nearly coincide and cannot really be told apart.)
One purpose of our investigation was to find out the magnitude of the force that arises as the spacecraft radiates different amounts of heat in different directions. This is the concept of a photon rocket. A ray of light carries momentum. Hard as it may appear to believe at first, when you hold a flashlight in your hands and turn it on, the flashlight will push your hand backwards by a tiny force. (How tiny? If it is a 1 W bulb that is perfectly efficient and perfectly focused, the force will be equivalent to about one third of one millionth of a gram of weight.)
On Pioneer 10 and 11, we have two main heat sources. First, there is electrical heat: all the instruments on board use about 100 W of electricity, most of which is converted into heat. Second, electricity is produced, very inefficiently, by a set of four radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs); these produce more than 2 kW of waste heat. All this heat has to go somewhere, and most of this heat will be dissipated preferably in one direction, behind the spacecraft’s large dish antenna, which is always pointed towards the Earth.
The controversial question was, how much? How efficiently is this heat converted into force?
I first constructed a viable thermal model for Pioneer 10 back in 2006. I presented results from custom ray-tracing code at the Pioneer Explorer Collaboration meeting at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland in February 2007:
With this, I confirmed what has already been suspected by others—notably, Katz (Phys. Rev. Letters 83:9, 1892, 1999); Murphy (Phys. Rev. Letters 83:9, 1890, 1999); and Scheffer (Phys. Rev. D, 67:8, 084021, 2003)—that the magnitude of the thermal recoil force is indeed comparable to the anomalous acceleration. Moreover, I established that the thermal recoil force is very accurately described as a simple linear combination of heat from two heat sources: electrical heat and heat from the RTGs. The thermal acceleration \(a\) is, in fact
$$a=\frac{1}{mc}(\eta_{\rm rtg}P_{\rm rtg} + \eta_{\rm elec}P_{\rm elec}),$$
where \(c\simeq 300,000~{\rm km/s}\) is the speed of light, \(m\simeq 250~{\rm kg}\) is the mass of the spacecraft, \(P_{\rm rtg}\sim 2~{\rm kW}\) and \(P_{\rm elec}\sim 100~\rm {W}\) are the RTG heat and electrical heat, respectively, and \(\eta_{\rm rtg}\) and \(\eta_{\rm elec}\) are “efficiency factors”.
This simple force model is very useful because it can be incorporated directly into the orbital model of the spacecraft.
In the years since, the group led by Gary Kinsella constructed a very thorough and comprehensive model of the Pioneer spacecraft, using the same software tools (not to mention considerable expertise) that they use for “live” spacecraft. With this model, they were able to predict the thermal recoil force with the greatest accuracy possible, at different points along the trajectory of the spacecraft. The result can be compared directly to the acceleration that is “measured”; i.e., the acceleration that is needed to model the radio signal accurately:
In this plot, the step-function like curve (thick line) is the acceleration deduced from the radio signal frequency. The data points with vertical error bars represent the recoil force calculated from the thermal model. They are rather close. The relatively large error bars are due primarily to the fact that we simply don’t know what happened to the white paint that coated the RTGs. These were hot (the RTGs were sizzling hot even in deep space) and subjected to solar radiation (ultraviolet light and charged particles) so the properties of the paint may have changed significantly over time… we just don’t know how. The lower part of the plot shows just how well the radio signal is modeled; the average residual is less than 5 mHz. The actual frequency of the radio signal is 2 GHz, so this represents a modeling accuracy of less than one part in 100 billion, over the course of nearly 20 years.
In terms of the above-mentioned efficiency factors, the model of Gary’s group yielded \(\eta_{\rm rtg}=0.0104\) and \(\eta_{\rm elec}=0.406\).
But then, as I said, we also incorporated the thermal recoil force directly into the Doppler analysis that was carried out by Jordan Ellis. Jordan found best-fit residuals at \(\eta_{\rm rtg}=0.0144\) and \(\eta_{\rm elec}=0.480\). These are somewhat larger than the values from the thermal model. But how much larger?
We found that the best way to answer this question was to plot the two results in the parameter space defined by these two efficiency factors:
The dashed ellipse here represents the estimates from the thermal model and their associated uncertainty. The ellipse is elongated horizontally, because the largest source of uncertainty, the degradation of RTG paint, affects only the \(\eta_{\rm rtg}\) factor.
The dotted ellipse represents the estimates from radio signal measurements. The formal error of these estimates is very small (the error ellipse would be invisibly tiny). These formal errors, however, are calculated by assuming that the error in every one of the tens of thousands of Doppler measurements arises independently. In reality, this is not the case: the Doppler measurements are insanely accurate, any errors that occur are a result of systematic mismodeling, e.g., caused by our inadequate knowledge of the solar system. This inflates the error ellipse and that is what was shown in this plot.
Looking at this plot was what allowed us to close our analysis with the words, “We therefore conclude that at the present level of our knowledge of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft and its trajectory, no statistically significant acceleration anomaly exists.”
Are there any caveats? Not really, I don’t think, but there are still some unexplored questions. Applying this research to Pioneer 11 (I expect no surprises there, but we have not done this in a systematic fashion). Modeling the spin rate change of the two spacecraft. Making use of radio signal strength measurements, which can give us clues about the precise orientation of the spacecraft. Testing the paint that was used on the RTGs in a thermal vacuum chamber. Accounting for outgassing. These are all interesting issues but it is quite unlikely that they will alter our main conclusion.
On several occasions when I gave talks about Pioneer, I used a slide that said, in big friendly letters,
PIONEER 10/11 ARE THE MOST PRECISELY NAVIGATED DEEP SPACE CRAFT TO DATE.
And they confirmed the predictions of Newton and Einstein, with spectacular accuracy, by measuring the gravitational field of the Sun in situ, all the way up to about about 70 astronomical units (the distance of the Earth from the Sun).
Mar 272012
The cover story in the March 3 issue of New Scientist is entitled The Deep Future: A Guide to Humanity’s Next 100,000 Years.
I found this cover story both shallow and pretentious. As if we could predict even the next one hundred years, never mind a hundred thousand.
They begin with an assurance that humans will still be around 100,000 years from now. They base this on the observation that well-established species tend to hang around much longer. True but… what we don’t have in the Earth’s prehistory is a species with the technological capability to destroy the Earth. This is something new.
So new in fact that we cannot draw far-fetched conclusions. Consider, for instance: nuclear weapons have been around for 67 years. In these 67 years, we managed not to start an all-out nuclear war. Assuming, for the same of simplicity, that all years are created equal, the only thing we can conclude from this, if my math is right, is that the probability of nuclear war in any given year is 4.37% or less, “19 times out of 20” as statisticians sometimes say. Fair enough… but that does not tell us much about the “deep future”. Projected to 100,000 years, all we can tell on the basis of this 67-year sample period is that the probability of all-out nuclear war is less than 99.99……99854…%, where the number of ‘9’-s between the decimal point and the digit ‘8’ is 1941. Not very reassuring.
The authors of the New Scientist piece would probably tell us that even if nuclear war did break out, it would not wipe out humanity in its entirety, and they probably have a point, but it misses my point: namely the futility of making a 100,000-year prediction on the basis of at most a few thousand years of known history.
And while nuclear war may be a very scary prospect, it’s by far not the scariest. There are what some call technological singularities: developments in science and technology that are so profound, they would change the very basics of our existence. Artificial intelligence, for starters… reading about Google’s self-driving car or intelligent predictive search algorithms, about IBM’s Watson, or even Apple’s somewhat mundane Siri, I cannot help but wonder: is the era of true AI finally just around the corner? And when true AI arrives, how far behind is the nightmare of Skynet from the Terminator films?
Or how about genetically altered superhumans? They mention this, but only in passing: “unless, of course, engineered humans were so superior that they obliterated the competition.” Why is this scenario considered unlikely? Sometimes I wonder if we may perhaps be just one major war away from this: a warring party in a precarious situation in a prolonged conflict breeding genetically modified warriors. Who, incidentally, need not even look human.
I could go on of course, about “gray goo”, bioterrorism, and other doomsday scenarios, but these just underline my point: it is impossible to predict the course of history even over the next 100 years, never mind the next 100,000. This is true even from a mathematical perspective: exceedingly complex systems with multiple nonlinear feedback mechanisms can undergo catastrophic phase transitions that are almost impossible to predict or prevent. Witness the recent turmoil in financial markets.
Surprisingly, this overly optimistic New Scientist feature is very pessimistic on one front: space exploration. The first quote a figure of 115,000 years that would be required to reach Alpha Centauri at 25,000 miles an hour; this, of course, is a typical velocity for a chemically fueled rocket. The possibility of a better technology is touched only briefly: “Even if we figure out how to travel at the speeds required […], the energy required to get there is far beyond our means”. Is that so? They go on to explain that, “[f]or the next few centuries, then, if not thousands of years hence, humanity will be largely confined to the solar system”. Centuries if not thousands of years? That is far, far, far short of the 100,000 years that they are supposed to be discussing.
I called this cover feature shallow and pretentious, but perhaps I should have called it myopic. In that sense, it is no different from predictions made a little over a century ago, in 1900, about the coming “century of reason”. At least our predecessors back then had the good sense to confine their fortunetelling to the next 100 years.
Mar 202012
I am holding in my hands an amazing book. It is a big and heavy tome, coffee table book sized, with over 600 lavishly illustrated pages. And it took more than 30 years for this book to appear finally in English, but the wait, I think, was well worth it.
The name of Charles Simonyi, Microsoft billionaire and space tourist, is fairly well known. What is perhaps less well-known in the English speaking world is that his father, Karoly Simonyi, was a highly respected professor of physics at the Technical University of Budapest… that is, until he was deprived of his livelihood by a communist regime that considered him ideologically unfit for a teaching position.
Undeterred, Simonyi then spent the next several years completing his magnum opus, A Cultural History of Physics, which was eventually published in 1978.
Simonyi was both a scientist and a humanist. In his remarkable, unique book, history and science march hand in hand from humble beginnings in Egypt, through the golden era of the classical world, through the not so dark Dark Ages, on to the scientific revolution that began in the 1600s and culminated in the discoveries of Lagrangian mechanics, thermodynamics, statistical physics, electromagnetism and, ultimately, relativity theory and quantum physics.
And when I say lavishly illustrated, I mean it. Illustrations that include diagrams, portraits, facsimile pages from original publications decorate nearly every single page of Simonyi’s tome. Yet it is fundamentally a book about physics: the wonderfully written narrative is well complemented by equations that translate ideas into the precise language of mathematics.
I once read this book, my wife’s well worn copy, from cover to cover, back in the mid 1990s. I feel that it played a very significant role in helping me turn back towards physics.
Simonyi’s book has seen several editions in the original Hungarian, and it was also translated into German, but until now, no English-language translation was available. This is perhaps not surprising: it must be a very expensive book to produce, and despite its quality, the large number of equations must surely be a deterrent to many a prospective buyer. But now, CRC Press finally managed to make an English-language version available.
(Oh yes, CRC Press. I hated them for so many years, after they sued Wolfram and had Mathworld taken off-line. I still think that was a disgusting thing for them to do. I hope they spent enough on lawyers and lost enough sales due to disgusted customers to turn their legal victory a Pyrrhic one. But that was more than a decade ago. Let bygones be bygones… besides, I really don’t like Wolfram these days that much anyway, software activation and all.)
Charles Simonyi played a major role in making this edition happen. I guess he may also have spent some of his own money. And while I am sure he can afford a loss, I hope the book does well… it deserves to be successful.
For some reason, the book was harder to obtain in Canada than usual. It is not available on amazon.ca; indeed, I pre-ordered the book last fall, but a few weeks ago, Amazon notified me that they are unable to deliver this item. Fortunately, CRC Press delivers in Canada, and the shipping is free, just like with Amazon. The book seems to be available and in stock on the US amazon.com Web site.
And it’s not a pricey one: at less than 60 dollars, it is quite cheap, actually. I think it’s well worth every penny. My only disappointment is that my copy was printed in India. I guess that’s one way to shave a few bucks off the production cost, but I would have paid more happily for a copy printed in the US or Canada.
Mar 182012
Today is March 18. It’s still winter, presumably, in what is supposed to be the second coldest capital city on Earth.
So how come it’s hotter outside than inside? (And no, my furnace did not break down.)
Mar 182012
The Weather Network has this neat plot every ten minutes, showing the anticipated minimum and maximum temperatures for the next two weeks.
The forecast for Wednesday is off the chart. It is going to be so much hotter than the two-week average, it did not fit into the plot area.
Of course it could be just nonsense. They did predict 7 degrees Centigrade as the overnight low. It went down to 2 in foggy areas (most of Ottawa, I guess). Then again… even if it turns out to be 10 degrees colder than the predicted 24, it’s still a remarkably mild winter day. March 21, after all, is supposed to be the last day of winter. And I may have to fire up the A/C.
And it’s not just Ottawa. For Winnipeg (Winnipeg, for crying out loud!) today’s forecast is 28. A once in a thousand years event, says The Weather Network. Either that or the new norm, if global warming is to be believed. (Not necessarily bad news for many Canadians.)