Science – Page 22 – Spinor Info

Full circle

Commerce, Computers, Mathematics No Responses »

Jul 022011

Yesterday, Intel lost the bid for the patent assets of defunct Canadian company Nortel, despite joining forces with Google.

Google bid some odd amounts; for instance, at one point they bid $1,902,160,540.

The digits happen to be those of Brun’s constant: B2 = 1.90216058…

Brun’s constant is the sum of the reciprocals of twin primes. B2 = (1/3 + 1/5) + (1/5 + 1/7) + (1/11 + 1/13) + … According to Brun’s theorem, this sum converges. The limit of the sum is Brun’s constant.

A professor of mathematics named Thomas Nicely once used a group of computers to calculate twin primes up to 1e14, computing Brun’s constant among other things.

At one point, Nicely’s computations failed. After eliminating other sources of error, Nicely concluded that the problem was a fault in the new Pentium processors present in some recently acquired computers in the group.

Nicely notified Intel, but it wasn’t until after a public relations disaster that Intel finally responded the way they should have in the first place, offering to replace all affected processors. This cost Intel $475 million.

Who knows, if they still had that extra $475 million cash in their pockets, they could have bid more and won yesterday.

A dozen dozen

Canada, Mathematics, Personal No Responses »

Jul 012011

Canada is 144 years old today. That is 12², or a dozen dozen. I am four dozen years old, and spent the last two dozen of these years here in Canada. Wonder what else is divisible by 12 this year.

Kaku again

Environment, Physics, Technology No Responses »

Jun 292011

The headline on CNN tonight reads, “An American Fukushima?” The topic: the possibility of wildfires reaching the nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos. The guest? Why, it’s Michio Kaku again!

What I first yelled in exasperation, I shall not repeat here, because I don’t want my blog to be blacklisted for obscenity. Besides… I am still using Kaku’s superb Quantum Field Theory, one of the best textbooks on the topic, so I still have some residual respect for him. But the way he is prostituting himself on television, hyping and sensationalizing nuclear accidents… or non-accidents, as the case might be… It is simply disgusting.

Dr. Kaku, in the unlikely case my blog entry catches your attention, here’s some food for thought. The number of people who died in Japan’s once-in-a-millennium megaquake and subsequent tsunami: tens of thousands. The number of people who died as a result of the Fukushima meltdowns: ZERO. Thank you for your attention.

Enigma

Programming, Science No Responses »

Jun 072011

One of the things I like the least about New Scientist (which, in many respects, is probably the best popular science magazine out there) is the “Enigma” brainteaser. I am sure it appeals to the “oh I am ever so smart!” Mensa member crowd out there but…

Well, the thing is, I never liked brainteasers. Are you really smarter than someone else because you happen to remember a random historical factoid? Does it really make sense to ask you to complete a series like, say, 1, 4, 9, 16, ? when the answer can be anything, as there is no compelling reason other than psychology (!) for it to be a homogeneous quadratic series?

But then… sometimes brainteasers reveal more about the person solving them than about the solution itself. I remember when I was in the second or third grade, our teacher gave us a simple exercise: add all the numbers from 1 to 100. (Yes, this is the same exercise given to a young Gauss.) Like Gauss, one of my classmates discovered (or perhaps knew already) that you can add 1+100 = 101; 2+99 = 101, 3+98 = 101, and so on, all the way up to 50 + 51 = 101; and 50 times 101 is 5050, which is the correct answer.

Trouble is, my classmate didn’t finish first. I did. I just added the darn numbers.

Between quick and smart, who wins? What if you’re so quick, you don’t need to be smart? Is it still smart to waste brainpower to come up with a “clever” solution?

Last week’s New Scientist Enigma puzzle caught my attention because it reminded me of this childhood memory. It took me roughly a minute to solve it. Perhaps there is a cleverer way to do it, but why waste all that brainpower when I can do this instead:

/* New Scientist Enigma number 1647 */

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    int d1, d2, d3, d4, d5, d6, n;

    for (d1 = 1; d1 <= 9; d1++)
        for (d2 = 1; d2 <= 9; d2++) if (d2 != d1)
            for (d3 = 1; d3 <= 9; d3++) if (d3 != d1 && d3 != d2)
                for (d4 = 1; d4 <= 9; d4++)
                    if (d4 != d1 && d4 != d2 && d4 != d3)
                        for (d5 = 1; d5 <= 9; d5++)
                            if (d5 != d1 && d5 != d2 && d5 != d3 && d5 != d4)
                                for (d6 = 1; d6 <= 9; d6++)
                                    if (d6 != d1 && d6 != d2 && d6 != d3 &&
                                        d6 != d4 && d6 != d5)
    {
        n = 100000 * d1 + 10000 * d2 + 1000 * d3 + 100 * d4 + 10 * d5 + d6;

        if (n % 19 != 17) continue;
        if (n % 17 != 13) continue;
        if (n % 13 != 11) continue;
        if (n % 11 != 7) continue;
        if (n % d4 != d3) continue;
        printf("ENIGMA = %d\n", n);
    }

    return 0;
}

Yes, I am quick with C. Does that make me smart?

Distant worlds

Politics, Space No Responses »

May 312011

Neither I nor anyone else alive today would likely see the end of such a mission, but… the possibility that I might live long enough to see just the launch of humanity’s first interstellar space mission is simply awe-inspiring.

Of course it’s highly unlikely that it will happen. Mediocrity and politics will see to it that it won’t. But then… Apollo happened, didn’t it? Sometimes, miracles do occur.

Preserving data

Computers, Physics, Politics No Responses »

May 312011

One of the biggest challenges in our research of the Pioneer Anomaly was the recovery of old mission data. It is purely by chance that most of the mission data could be recovered; documents were saved from the dumpster, data was read from deteriorating tapes, old formats were reconstructed using fragmented information. If only there had been a dedicated effort to save all raw mission data, our job would have been much easier.

This is why I am reading it with alarm that there are currently no plans to save all the raw data from the Tevatron. This is really inexcusable. So what if the data are 20 petabytes? In this day and age, even that is not excessive… a petabyte is just over 300 3 TB hard drives, which are the highest capacity drives currently no the market. If I can afford to have more than 0.03 petabytes of storage here in my home office, surely the US Government can find a way to fund the purchase and maintenance of a data storage facility with a few thousand hard drives, in order to preserve knowledge that American taxpayers payed many millions of dollars to build in the first place.

The sky

Astronomy No Responses »

May 162011

Here’s one good reason to quit your day job: spend a year or so lugging a set of six astrophotography cameras across two continents, to take some 37,000 exposures of the night sky and stitch them together into an amazing all-sky picture called The Photopic Sky Survey. The scientific value of this picture may be negligible, but it is beautiful to look at, and I am sorely tempted to buy a high-quality print to hang somewhere on my wall. It is one of those pictures that give a true sensation of depth: you can see how nearby stars slowly dissolve into a diffuse, milky background, you can see how dust lanes obscure the Milky Way behind, you can see how the light of distant galaxies filters through. I wonder how a picture like this would have influenced The Great Debate.

Extreme weather

Television, Weather and Climate No Responses »

May 012011

CNN is wondering why extreme weather keeps happening at 7PM. Funny… I’m pretty sure the windstorm the other day was more or less over by 7PM.

Gagarin

Space No Responses »

Apr 122011

Fifty years ago today, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin flew into outer space, becoming the first human to orbit the Earth.

I often wonder why it is so that fifty years later, space travel still remains an incredibly expensive novelty. After all, 50 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, transoceanic air travel was a daily reality, and the jet era and mass air travel were just around the corner.

But then, perhaps it is unfair to compare Gagarin’s flight to that of the Wright brothers. Perhaps it’s more like the Montgolfier brothers’ first manned flight in a balloon, in 1783. After all, a space capsule in an inertial orbit has a lot more in common with a balloon blown about by the wind than a modern, highly maneuverable airplane. So perhaps before space travel becomes routine for the masses, it is essential to make a technological leap similar to that between a primitive hot-air balloon and powered, heavier-than-air flight.

As a footnote of sorts, the maiden flight of the Space Shuttle also occurred on this date, 30 years ago. Unfortunately, the Shuttle was far from being that necessary breakthrough. Its winged elegance notwithstanding, it’s still a chemically powered rocket, and chemical propulsion is just not sufficient… space flight will never become routine if you need 3000 tons of propellant to put a 100-ton payload into orbit.

Fermilab’s new result

Physics No Responses »

Apr 082011

I just finished reading Tommaso Dorigo’s excellent blog post about the new results from Fermilab. The bottom line:

There is a reason why a 3-σ result is not usually accepted a proof of discovery;
The detected signal is highly unlikely to be a Higgs particle;
It may be something exotic going beyond the Standard Model, such as a Z’ neutral vector boson;
Or, it may yet turn out to be nothing, a modeling artifact that will eventually go away after further analysis.

Interesting times.

Weird forecast

Weather and Climate No Responses »

Apr 052011

So how can the daily high be 8 degrees centigrade; the low overnight, 14; and the daily high the next day, 2 degrees? Must be global warming. Or Fukushima. Or Muslims. Whatever.

Taking apart a Shuttle

Space No Responses »

Mar 312011

At the Kennedy Space Center, they began to take the space shuttle Discovery apart, and I don’t feel sad.

Why should I? Come on, these venerable machines are older than most airliners still in service. And taking them apart offers a unique opportunity to learn how reusable space vehicles actually fared after a large number of missions. Besides, some of the parts are truly reusable and may, in fact, end up being used in future hardware. Isn’t that a better legacy than simply stuffing a Shuttle in a museum somewhere in its last flight configuration?

Of course, it means that we lose the illusion that the Shuttle we’re looking at is ready to fly, if only one fueled it up. But then, without an external fuel tank, booster engines, and a launchpad, it’s not like they could get very far anyway.

I hate to argue but…

Physics No Responses »

Mar 192011

Let me preface this with… I have huge respect for eminent physicist Michio Kaku, whose 1993 textbook, Quantum Field Theory: A Modern Introduction, continues to occupy a prominent place on my “primary” bookshelf, right above my workstation.

But… I guess that was before Kaku began writing popular science books and became a television personality.

Today he appeared on CNN and astonished me by suggesting that the best course of action is to bury and entomb Fukushima like they did with Chernobyl.

Never mind that in Chernobyl, the problem was a raging graphite fire that had to be put out. Never mind that Chernobyl had no containment building to begin with. Never mind that in Chernobyl, there was a “criticality incident”, a runaway chain reaction, whereas in Fukushima, the problem is decay heat. Never mind that in Chernobyl, the problem was localized to a single reactor, whereas in Fukushima, it is several reactors and also waste fuel pools that are threatened. Never mind that the critical problem at Fukushima is the complete loss of electrical power. Never mind that a single chunk of burning graphite flying out of the Chernobyl inferno probably carried more radioactivity than the total amount released by Fukushima after it’s all over. Who cares about the actual facts when you can make dramatic statements on television about calling in the air force of the Red Army, and peddle your latest book at the same time? I do not wish to use my blog to speak ill of a physicist that I respect but I think Dr. Kaku’s comments are unfounded, inappropriate, sensationalist, and harmful. I feel very disappointed, offended even; it’s one thing to hear this kind of stuff from the mouths of ignorant journalists or pundits, but someone like Dr. Kaku really, really should know better.

Messenger at Mercury

Space No Responses »

Mar 182011

Amidst all the bad news about crushed uprisings, devastated nuclear plants, and thousands killed by a tsunami, here’s a bit of good news: for the first time in history, a spacecraft is in orbit around the planet Mercury.

RTGs

Physics, Society, Technology No Responses »

Feb 212011

I have written several papers concerning the possible contribution of heat emitted by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) to the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft. Doubtless I’ll write some more.

But those RTGs used for space missions number only a handful, and with the exception of those that fell back to the Earth (and were safely recovered) they are all a safe distance away (a very long way away indeed) from the Earth.

However, RTGs were also used here on the ground. In fact, according to a report I just finished reading, a ridiculously high number of them, some 1500, were deployed by the former Soviet Union to power remote lighthouses, navigation beacons, meteorological stations, and who knows what else. These installations are unguarded, and the RTGs themselves are not tamper-proof. Many have ended up in the hands of scrap metal scavengers (some of whom actually died after receiving a lethal dose of radiation), some sank to the bottom of the sea, some remain exposed to the elements with their radioactive core compromised. Worse yet, unlike their counterparts in the US space program which used plutonium, these RTGs use strontium-90 as their power source; strontium is absorbed by the body more readily than plutonium, so my guess is, exposure to strontium is even more hazardous than exposure to plutonium.

The report is a few years old, so perhaps things improved since a little. Or, perhaps they have gotten worse… who knows how many radioactive power sources have since found their way into unauthorized hands.

Card security

Computer Security, Cryptography, Society No Responses »

Jan 252011

The other day, I saw a report on the CBC about increasingly sophisticated methods thieves use to steal credit and bank card numbers. They showed, for instance, how a thief can easily grab a store card reader when the clerk is not looking, replacing it with a modified reader that steals card numbers and PIN codes.

That such thefts can happen in the first place, however, I attribute to the criminal negligence of the financial institutions involved. There is no question about it, when it’s important to a corporation, they certainly find ways to implement cryptographically secure methods to deny access by unauthorized equipment. Such technology has been in use by cable companies for many years already, making it very difficult to use unauthorized equipment to view cable TV. So how hard can it be to incorporate strong cryptographic authentication into bank card reader terminals, and why do banks not do it?

The other topic of the report was the use of insecure (they didn’t call it insecure but that’s what it is) RFID technology on some newer credit cards, the information from which can be stolen in a split second by a thief that just stands or sits next to you in a crowded mall. The use of such technology on supposedly “secure” new electronic credit cards is both incomprehensible and inexcusable. But, I am sure the technical consultant who recommended this technology to the banks in some bloated report full of flowery prose and multisyllable jargon received a nice paycheck.

Scientific ethics

Health, Science No Responses »

Jan 062011

I am reading the articles from the British Medical Journal about the Andrew Wakefield case. Wakefield was the British physician who published a fraudulent study in 1998 linking vaccines to autism, causing a worldwide scare which may have resulted in the deaths of many unvaccinated children over the years.

What I didn’t know was that Wakefield wasn’t merely incompetent: he was a fraudster. According to the BMJ, he deliberately and fraudulently falsified data while being paid by a legal firm that was planning to sue the vaccine manufacturer.

I also do scientific research. My research (thankfully) has nothing to do with people, vaccines, or diseases; it’s about things like historical spacecraft or obscure aspects of gravity theory. Even so, I find the idea of altering or “massaging” my data, be it for fame or for profit, totally unthinkable and abhorrent. To do so when people’s lives are at stake… The likes of Wakefield not only undermine the credibility of the entire scientific community, they also put people’s lives at risk for monetary gain.

I wonder if Wakefield will ever face criminal charges. Perhaps he should.

Popular science

Personal, Physics, Space No Responses »

Dec 162010

It’s official: the work we are doing about the Pioneer Anomaly qualifies as popular science according to Popular Science, as they just published a featured article about it.

I admit that it was with a strong sense of apprehension that I began reading the piece. What you say to a journalist and what appears in print are often not very well correlated, as politicians know all too well. My apprehension was not completely unjustified, as the article contains some (minor) technical errors, misquotes us slightly in places, and what is perhaps most troubling, some of the work that it attributes to us was done by others (e.g., thermal engineers at JPL). These flaws notwithstanding (and this article fares better than most that appeared in recent years, I think), it is nice to have one’s efforts recognized.

38 years

Space No Responses »

Dec 112010

A sad anniversary: it was 38 years ago today that a human being landed on the Moon for the last time. Who’d have thought back then that nearly half a century (!) later we have yet to venture beyond low Earth orbit again?

Deep space

Space No Responses »

Nov 262010

Now here’s an interesting concept for a realistic mission that combines a lunar project with deep space goals: why not send humans on a medium duration manned mission to the Lagrange point on the far side of the Moon?

I like it. I wish I could believe that it would actually happen.

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