SpaceX, a private company that is developing the capability to launch both manned and unmanned missions into space, today successfully launched their Falcon 9 launch vehicle into orbit from Cape Canaveral in Florida. This is the rocket that is designed to eventually deliver Dragon spacecraft to low Earth orbit, including to the International Space Station. It was quite a thrill to watch the launch live on webcam — there was one little glitch that delayed the flight at the very moment of planned launch, but they quickly recovered and made a successful attempt within today’s launch window. Congratulations to SpaceX!

Video via Steinn.

I’ve been dipping my toes in the new social regime. Of course, there’s the blog. But I’ve recently been convinced to give Facebook a whirl, start up a YouTube channel, and have now even set up a Twitter account (after being personally convinced to do so by Ev). It is not that I’m afraid of technology, or don’t see the point of all this stuff. It’s simply that time is precious, and I’m hesitant to add any further potential timesucks to my life. I haven’t heard anyone say that the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter trifecta actually makes one more efficient and productive.

However, in a recent blog post I included a video of stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at our galactic center (not Hollywood effects; this is real data, of real stars orbiting our neighborhood supermassive black hole). The movie comes from Andrea Ghez‘s group at UCLA; I put it up on YouTube so I could trivially embed it in the post. Within 24 hours, the video had received over 50,000 views. I find this number staggering, and immensely encouraging. I love the idea that 50,000 people, from all walks of life and from across the globe, are brought together to watch a movie of stellar orbits around a black hole.

It’s increasingly apparent that these social media tools aren’t just mindless fads. They represent something radically new and empowering. Although I’m still somewhat unclear as to how to harness their power for good.

Since March 30, when the LHC at CERN first collided protons at an unprecedented total energy of 7 TeV (7 trillion electron volts) the machine has been steadily moving from crawling to walking. Last Saturday, I’d say it took its first steps, and like any toddler, will soon be running.

The plot shows what we call “integrated luminosity” which is simply a measure of the number of collisions of protons in the interaction regions at the four experiments. In this case, it’s my own experiment, CMS, the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment. CMS and ATLAS are the two large general-purpose detectors, each with thousands of physicists eager for real physics data.

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We’re very happy to have a guest post from Malcolm MacIver. See if you can keep this straight: Malcolm is a professor in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern, with undergraduate degrees in philosophy and computer science, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience. He’s also one of the only people I know who has a doctorate but no high school diploma.

With this varied background, Malcolm studies connections between biomechanics and neuroscience — how do brains and bodies interact? This unique expertise helped land him a gig as the science advisor on Caprica, the SyFy Channel’s prequel show to Battlestar Galactica. He also blogs at Northwestern’s Science and Society blog. It’s a pleasure to welcome him to Cosmic Variance, where he’ll tell us about robots, artificial intelligence, and war.

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It’s a pleasure to guest blog for CV and Sean Carroll, a friend of some years now. In my last posting back at Northwestern University’s Science and Society Blog, I introduced some issues at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and morality. While I’ve long been interested in this nexus, the most immediate impetus for the posting was meeting Peter Singer, author of the excellent book ‘Wired for War’ about the rise of unmanned warfare, while simultaneously working for the TV show Caprica and a U.S. military research agency that funds some of the work in my laboratory on bio-inspired robotics. Caprica, for those who don’t know it, is a show about a time when humans invent sentient robotic warriors. Caprica is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, and as we know from that show, these warriors rise up against humans and nearly drive them to extinction.

Here, I’d like to push the idea that as interesting as the technical challenges in making sentient robots like those on Caprica are, an equally interesting area is the moral challenges of making such machines. But “interesting” is too dispassionate—I believe that we need to begin the conversation on these moral challenges. Roboticist Ron Arkin has been making this point for some time, and has written a book on how we may integrate ethical decision making into autonomous robots.

Given that we are hardly at the threshold of building sentient robots, it may seem overly dramatic to characterize this as an urgent concern, but new developments in the way we wage war should make you think otherwise. I heard a telling sign of how things are changing when I recently tuned in to the live feed of the most popular radio station in Washington DC, WTOP. The station had commercial after commercial from iRobot (of Roomba fame), a leading builder of unmanned military robots, clearly targeting military listeners. These commercials reflect how the use of unmanned robots in the military has gone from close to zero in 2001 to over ten thousand now, with the pace of acquisition still accelerating. For more details on this, see Peter Singer’s ‘Wired for War’, or the March 23 2010 congressional hearing on The Rise of the Drones here.

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Only one thought, actually: why don’t I have one? Don’t they know I’m a highly influential blogger?

Via Tom Levenson:

I did my graduate work at the University of Chicago, and lived in Hyde Park. On occasion I would take the bus (the #6 Jeffery Express) to downtown. Although the buses were scheduled to run every 15 minutes, I would invariably end up waiting a half hour. Sometimes more. Often in the freezing cold, or the sweltering heat. Most infuriatingly, when the bus finally arrived, there was always another one immediately behind it! The buses inevitably came in pairs. Sometimes even in triples or quads.

Let’s assume that the buses are supposed to arrive every 15 minutes. If the buses adhered to their schedule, and I showed up at a random time, I should generally have to wait roughly half the mean bus arrival time: 7.5 minutes. If the buses were totally random, then I would have to wait the average time between bus arrivals: 15 minutes (if you haven’t thought about this before, this statement should sound crazy; perhaps I’ll do a future post on it). So the question is: why did I always end up waiting roughly 30 minutes or more?

I always assumed that the Universe was conspiring against me. This is a common feeling in graduate school. However….

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Jane McGonigal thinks they can help. She’s a game designer who gave a talk at the TED conference this year (although her talk isn’t up yet).

McGonigal makes some good points in this short video, especially about how dealing with things in a video-game environment — like failure, or social interactions — can be greatly helpful when one eventually has to deal with them in the real world. She also helped put together Urgent Evoke, a large-scale multiperson game where you collect achievements by performing world-saving tasks.

The kids these days, they love their gaming. So it makes sense to ask how that passion can be put to good use. Personally I’m fascinated by the prospects of using games to teach people science. Not just facts and features of the real world — although those are important — but the scientific method of hypothesis-testing and experiment. Games already feature exactly those features, of course; everyone who figures out the “laws of nature” in the game world is secretly doing science. It wouldn’t be that hard to tweak things here and there so that the techniques they were practicing connected more directly with science in the non-virtual reality.

Last week in Aspen we learned that this week would be when a major decision was reached by CERN at the annual Chamonix meeting as to how to operate the LHC at high energy. Following the magnet quench incident in September 2008, a year-long shutdown ensued for repairs to the magnets, and retrofitting of the rest of the machine for better quench protection circuitry and helium pressure release valves. Not all sectors were warmed up to room temperature for the retrofit last year, but all magnets were trained to go as high as beam energies of 5 TeV (design energy is 7 TeV per beam).

In November and December the LHC commissioning resumed, and it became the world’s highest energy collider on December 8, eventually delivering about 50,000 collisions at 2.36 TeV to CMS and ATLAS before shutting down for Christmas.

But the question facing the LHC managers this week was whether attempting to operate the LHC at 5 TeV on 5 TeV in 2010 was worth the risk to the machine itself. Clearly another disaster of the scale of the one in 2008 would cripple the program for a long time. In the end the decision is to operate the LHC at 3.5 TeV on 3.5 TeV (7 TeV collision energy, 3.5 times that of the Tevatron) and accumulate a substantial amount of physics-quality data: 1 inverse femtobarn, or stop by the end f 2011, whichever comes first. This corresponds to something like ten trillion proton-proton collisions, of which only a small fraction will yield events interesting enough to record for later analysis by the experiments, and of these, only a tiny fraction yielding data relevant for physics.

After a one to one-and-a-half year shutdown in 2012 to retrofit the rest of the machine and make other preparations, the LHC will attempt to double the energy, to 14 TeV in the center of mass, in 2013 and accumulate substantial physics data. My best guess is that if the Higgs boson is to be discovered, it will be at high energy with this large sample of 14 TeV data. We might be able to rule it out at 95% confidence in certain mass ranges if it’s not there, but we ought not be able to do that if it is, right? Patience, patience!

Nevertheless, there is no question that in a few weeks, when operated at 7 TeV collision energy, the LHC will become an awesome discovery machine. There are many new physics scenarios in which we will be able to see new phenomena with just a fraction of the full 1 fb^-1 sample. Will nature give up her secrets so readily though? She may not – we may spend this year and the next rediscovering the Standard Model, building up understanding of the detector, and sharpening our analysis tools in order to discover quite subtle effects. No matter what happens, this is the most exciting time in particle physics in decades.

This year’s Edge World Question Center is out, posing the query mentioned in the title. My own answer is kind of lukewarm — the internet did allow me to find my future wife, which certainly changed the way I think about a lot of things, but that’s not the tack I wanted to take for this project. Instead, I’m basically giving credit to you blog readers for keeping me honest. (Among other things.)

But many of the other answers are fascinating. Just to pick some at semi-random, I enjoyed the responses from Danny Hillis, Anthony Aguirre, Frank Wilczek, Victoria Stodden, Martin Rees, Scott Atran, Lisa Randall, Irene Pepperberg, and Clay Shirky. Keep thinking!

We occasionally joke about the looming robot menace, but seriously. Discoblog has picked out the Niftiest Robots of 2009, but “Scariest” would have been an equally appropriate appellation.

Yes, there is a robot that crawls around inside your colon, not to mention a Japanese emobot, but the one I would least like to meet in a dark alley is Chembot. It’s a blob-shaped thing that uses jamming in granular materials to make a robot that can alter its shape.

Still pretty primitive, but you can see where we’re headed here. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.