Blogs / Cosmic Variance

I am not sure if this is clean, or it’s green, but at least it doesn’t emit CO2.  The net is full of stories recently about new, miniature self-contain nuclear reactors which supply  25 megawatts of power, when and where you need it.  The technology was developed at Los Alamos National Lab, and is now apparently being commercialized via a company called Hyperion Power Generation, Inc. 

The miniature power plant  is truck-sized and buried underground for the five years it operates.  HPG says it has no internal moving parts, needs no maintenance, and emits no pollution (though I am guessing there amy be a few neutrons and gamma rays flying around, which is a good reason to bury it; HPG doesn’t talk about this).   After five years, you replace it, like a battery.   

It may be a while before one of these is literally in your back yard, since you probably don’t need 25 megawatts of power, and also because one of the units purportedly costs 25 million dollars.  But for, say, a university like mine which already has its own power substation, it might be quite feasible to install one of these babies underground, and enjoy much cheaper power, selling any excess back to the power company.

But all this kind of set off my inner skeptic…let’s do the math. Present commercial rates for power are about about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. These mini-nukes last five years, putting out 25 MW. My trusty HP-15c tells me that this represents 219 million kilowatt-hours per year, or just over 2 cents per kilowatt hour!  That would be a nice savings. (Note – original post was in error here!)

Then, on the company’s own web site FAQ it ways that each module puts out 25 MW electric power, but 70 MW thermal!  Definitely don’t want that in my back yard – and so does one need a 70 MW cooling tower? Or use the waste heat somehow? This kind of ruins the nice picture of the thing sitting quietly underground while a couple strolls on the surface…70 megawatts is like 30 sticks of dynamite exploding per second.

In addition, of course, anti-nuclear activists will howl in protest: there are the obvious issues of nuclear waste storage (we won’t open Yucca Mountain until at least 2017), uranium mining, terrorism during transport, and more.  

But there may be plenty of applications where this would seem to be a great solution, like remote locations or already secure places with big power needs. In the long run we will need more nuclear power plants to offset carbon emissions.   Maybe this solution is better than giant multi-gigawatt installations?

In the post about my upcoming talk in Second Life, I gave a newbie’s sketchy perspective of the outlook for the medium. But you should also hear the pitch of someone who is a real expert, both in virtual worlds and their use for scientific research. So we’re very happy to have a guest post from George Djorgovski — Professor of Astronomy at Caltech, observer of galaxies, Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research, and Director of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics. He also goes by the name of Curious George, on the other side of the reality/virtuality divide. (Note: pretty pictures beneath the fold.)

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As an avid reader of CV, I was pleased and honored when Sean invited me to contribute a guest post. Now, CV is a very forward-looking enterprise, and its Blogmaster has already fallen into the wormhole described below, so here is a little (way?) out of the box riff for your enjoyment…

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It is not every day that you encounter a technology which may change the world. Especially if that technology is creating new worlds, albeit not in the chaotic inflation sense… (and unlike certain a priori untestable physical theories, these worlds are very much real, even if they are virtual — but let’s not go there now).

The development I would like to tell you about is immersive virtual reality (VR), or virtual worlds (VWs). It has originated largely from the on-line computer/video games, and that is still its main domain, but not for much longer. This technology has already gone well beyond the games, and I think it will go very, very far. It is in an embryonic stage now, sort of like the Web was circa 1993 (remember those ancient days, when you first heard about it? your first glimpse of the Mosaic browser?), or the Internet circa mid-1970’s (ask your grampa). Its prophets were science fiction writers of the highest rank: Stanislaw Lem, Vernor Vinge, Rudy Rucker, and pretty much the entire Cyberpunk movement and its offspring — William Gibson, Bruce Stering, Neall Stephenson, Charles Stross, to name but a few favorites. Credit is also due to the visionary computer scientist (and Unabomber victim) David Gelertner, whose book “Mirror Worlds” seeded some ideas in 1991 (before the WWW!). But this is no longer fiction, folks, and a growing number of us is trying hard to make it science. This is Serious Stuff. I think that this technology will be as transformative as the Web itself, and that the two will merge, soon, and change forever how we do, well, everything — science included.

Now, gentle reader, you may be a tad skeptical at this point; that is a perfectly normal and excusable reaction! (I know that, because that was how I reacted at first … . But if you indulge me for a moment and follow me down the rabbit hole, I promise that things will get curiouser and curiouser.

For a few years I have been reading about a rapid growth of the massive multi-user on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as The World of Warcraft (WoW). I never played any, or had a slightest interest (in fact, I’ll date myself by admitting that the last computer game I played was the Space Invaders, back in the grad school, as a pure procrastination device). There are about 6 million WoW players word-wide. But gaming is not what this is all about, even though in May of 2008, there was a first scientific conference held in WoW.

A more interesting development is the rise of VWs which are general, interactive virtual environments. They can be used for gaming or role playing, but also for more serious things. There are currently well over 300 VWs on-line, some of them very special-purpose, some purely as games, but many with broad and open goals, according to the Association of Virtual Worlds. By far the dominant VW is Second Life (SL), developed by Linden Lab (LL), a company founded in 1999 by Philip Rosedale, and backed by such Internet business luminaries as Jeff Bezos, Mitch Kapor, and Pierre Omidyar — and these folks probably know what they are doing.

Predictably, media accounts of SL tend to focus on cybersex and silly looking avatars, and so my own superficial initial reaction was “what a b.s., video games for adults”. I got intrigued after reading Wade Roush’s article “Second Earth” in the July/August 2007 issue of MIT’s Technology Review. However, my personal conversion was really prompted by an old friend, Piet Hut, a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Piet is a numerical stellar dynamics guru, and a person with a very creative and eclectic mind. So after he posted a couple of preprints describing his initial exploration of VWs on the arXiv server (astro-ph/0610222 and 0712.1655) I got really intrigued, and started a conversation. I was skeptical at first, but then in March of 2008 I jumped in, and it has been a fun and intriguing journey ever since.

Judging by my own experience, there is no way that you can really understand all this just by reading or listening; you have to try it. It is a fundamentally visceral, as well as an intellectual experience. It is as if you have never seen a bicycle, let alone ridden one, and someone was showing you pictures of people having a good time biking around, and telling you what a fun it is. Please keep that in mind. You gotta try it, then judge for yourself.

Let me give you a few factoids about SL first. There are over 15 million registered users worldwide, and typically about 60,000 are on-line at any given time. Nearly 300 universities have some presence in SL (typically a virtual campus), including the likes of MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. Numerous outreach organizations and museums (e.g., the Exploratorium), media programs (e.g., the NPR Science Friday), many scientific publishers (e.g., Nature) have active outposts. Hundreds of major brand companies, ranging from the usual tech giants (Cisco, Dell, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Sony, Xerox, etc.) to Ben & Jerry’s, Coca-Cola, Warner Brothers, etc., also have presence there. New business models are being developed, and companies whose business is only immersive VR are popping up. Many government agencies, both from the US (e.g., NASA, NOAA, CDCP, etc.) and from other countries, are active in SL, for outreach purposes, situational training, etc. Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds held a large conference in April 2008. Reuters has a news bureau in SL. Three countries (Sweden, Estonia, and Maldives) have embassies in SL. And so on.

There is a thriving economics in SL, which has its own currency (Linden dollars, L$) with fluctuating exchange rates, about L$ 250 – 260 for US$ 1. There is about US$ 25M in capital in SL, and the quarterly user transactions are around US$ 80M. For these reasons, the Congress held a mixed-reality (natch!) hearing, both in real life (RL) and SL, in April 2008 (see, e.g., this news report). You can find links to many other relevant news stories at LL’s own website. There are many SL blogs, which the readers of CV can surely hunt down on their own.

How does it work? In a nutshell, you can sign up for SL for free (a paid membership allows you to own virtual land, and has a few other privileges). Explore the SL website links. You download an SL browser from there. The way this works is that LL runs a grid of servers, which contain a vast database of who and what is where and how are they moving, communicating, etc. It sends the local data to your browser, which does the graphical rendering; you need a fairly new machine for this to run well, probably not more than 3 years old. SL is a “flat earth” world, and endless ocean with islands and continents. The basic unit of virtual land is a “sim” or an “island” (even if it is completely land-enclosed), and it is 256 meters square; it is mapped to a single compute note in the LL grid. Every user is represented by a human-like avatar; you get a pretty rudimentary one upon signing in, but you can acquire better designed ones for free or for money. (One annoying feature of SL is that you have a restricted freedom in choosing your avatar’s name; my nom de pixel is Curious George, and I lucked out on that one.) You can communicate with other users by voice or text; either one can be public, heard within a radius of about 20 – 30 meters, or private. You can move around by walking, flying (very cool) or teleporting (even cooler). And then … it’s all up to you, your curiosity and imagination. Users generate essentially all of the content – buildings, arts, gizmos and gadgets. There is a scripting language and a graphical editor. Or you can just buy stuff from creative and enterprising people who are good at making things in SL. You can also get a lot of free stuff, some of which is of a surprisingly high quality. SL is all about people interacting and creating content, very much a Web 2.0 in that way, even though it presages the Web 3.0, or 4.0 or …

What really surprised me — knocked my virtual socks off, so to speak — is the subjective quality of the interpersonal interaction. Even with the still relatively primitive graphics, the same old flat screen and keyboard, and a limited avatar functionality, it is almost as viscerally convincing as a real life interaction and conversation. Somehow, our minds and perceptive systems interpolate over all of the imperfections, and it really clicks. I cannot explain it — it has to be experienced; it is not a rational, but a subjective phenomenon. It is much better than any video- or teleconferencing system I have tried, and like most of you, I have suffered through many of those. As a communication device, this is already a killer app. Going back to the good old email and Web feels flat and lame.

So what has all this got to do with science and scholarship?

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Ten or fifteen years from now, virtual worlds will be as prevalent as web pages are today. I remember fifteen years ago when I had just set up my first web page and was trying to explain to my friends that this was going to be really big. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t very convincing. “The other day I found a web page that you can use to order a pizza to be delivered!” “You know, we already have a technology to do that — it’s called a phone.”

Likewise, I don’t have an especially clear picture of how virtual worlds will be put to use in the years to come. Right now, by far the leading presence in the game is Second Life, which remains clearly marked by the signs of geekdom which tend to characterize early incarnations of technological advances — for example, you have to choose a pseudonym for your avatar, the surname of which must come from a list of more-or-less goofy selections. And, admittedly, the most popular activities seem to be roleplaying and cybersex. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But the scientific community is catching on. Rob Knop, erstwhile astronomer and science blogger, now works for Linden Labs, creators of Second Life. Organizations like the Exploratorium have set up bases in SL, and one ambitious fan of the Large Hadron Collider built a mock-up of the ATLAS detector. At the research level, astronomers have set up the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, which uses SL and other virtual worlds for a number of different activities — collaboration meetings, data visualization, outreach, etc. Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study, who founded the group, has posted a few papers on the arxiv about how he envisions the possibilities, e.g.:

Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds
Piet Hut (IAS, Princeton)

All of which is preamble to mentioning that Rob has invited me to give a popular talk in Second Life, which (I think) will be happening next Saturday, November 8, at 10 a.m. Pacific time. So if you regret not being able to come to my arrow of time talk in so-called “real life,” here is your chance to hear it. It’ll be taking place at the Galaxy Dome at Spaceport Bravo — that’s a Second Life URL, or SLURL; if you have already signed up, just click that link to appear at that location in-world (as they say). It looks something like this:

Chances are that you don’t have your own Second Life identity, but here’s your excuse to join up and spend a couple of hours this weekend building your avatar and buying clothes. There’s no need to spend any money at all if you don’t want to, but if you do, there is a real economy with its own currency and a variable exchange rate with US dollars. (Just like real life, fashion choices for women vastly outnumber those for men. Unlike real life, you get to buy your skin and hair, or even your shape — or just modify the default stuff you are created with.) Here’s a useful startup guide, if you don’t mind receiving instructions from a mermaid.

Look forward to seeing you Saturday. Or rather, Seamus Tomorrow does.

As of my last post on the LHC, following the quench incident on Sept. 19, little was known about the cause of the incident nor the extent of the damage. In fact, so much liquid helium was released into the tunnel in the affected sector of the machine that it was too cold for people to enter until last week. A colleague of mine quoted the team who entered the sector as saying that when they got to the magnets that were affected, “it wasn’t a pretty sight”.

CERN has released a report today giving an initial summary of what happened and the extent of the damage, and indeed it turns out to have been quite serious: 24 of the long dipole magnets and 5 of the quadrupole magnets (which focus the beam) suffered serious mechanical damage when the liquid helium enclosure between two of the magnets ruptured, allowing helium into the vacuum jacket surrounding the enclosure. This led to a chain of events which resulted in an extreme overpressure in the vacuum jacket on a long chain of magnets, seriously damaging them. The forces were great enough to physically tear the magnet stands out of where they were bolted to the concrete floor.

Normally CERN shuts down accelerator operations every winter due to the high cost of electricity in the winter (Europeans mainly use electricity for home heating) and this was foreseen for December. Repairs to the damaged sector will proceed in parallel with the previously scheduled work during the shutdown. But clearly any hope of high energy colliding beams in 2008 was lost following this incident, and it looks likely to be months before the machine will turn on again. At that point, there is still a many-week period of commissioning before the machine can collide protons at high energies, probably 10 TeV initially.

But now the tough questions: what was the ultimate cause of this incident, and what can and must be done to prevent a similar occurrence in the future? The report concludes optimistically that improved quench detection systems and increased pressure relief devices will ensure safe powering of the machine. I take that to mean that they will do a retrofit on the entire 27 km accelerator. I guess we’ll see how long it really takes. The Director General’s statement accompanying the report only says the machine could be restarted “in 2009″…

On a recent trip, with my car in cruise control, I noticed something interesting: if the car in front of me slowed down, my car would slow down along with it. Apparently it’s equipped with proximity sensors in the front and back, which serve to protect against lazy drivers who hit cruise control and then start reading email on their iPhones while zooming down the highway. (Not me!) Which is great, but I couldn’t help but imagine the obvious next step: once you have cruise control and the ability to adjust to the speed of traffic, not to mention cars that park themselves, you are most of the way to self-driving cars.

You will be unsurprised to learn that I’m not the first to think of this. Tim Lee has written an interesting introduction to the state of the art, as well as speculations on what the effect of automatic driving would have on urban cityscapes. (Via Yglesias.) A big one: parking is incredibly resource-intensive, but if your car can drive away and wait for you at some central location, vast stretches of land can be returned to human uses rather than automotive uses.

Will we have self-driving cars within the next few decades? I don’t think it’s such a leap, given what technology is already available — and that technology can be confined to the cars themselves, there is no need to put rails down or any such thing. There is even a sensible phase-in strategy, where we convert present-day carpool lanes into automated-driving lanes. But Atrios is skeptical:

I think self-driving cars are going to be here some time after flying cars, my jetpack, and Glenn Reynolds’ sexbots, but this little thought experiment is useful for highlighting that while we talk about highways and roads and whatnot, the biggest problem with cars generally is parking. They take up space. Lots of it. That space reduces density most places, and reduces the benefits of density in places where it exists.

Concerning flying cars and jetpacks, I’m likewise pessimistic (at least sometimes). But those sexbots are on the way. And they’ll be arriving in self-driving cars.

So, when we last left our poor afflicted orbiting telescope, it had lost side A of its CU/SDF (Control Unit/Science Data Formatter), which is responsible for translating the data taken by an instrument into bits that can be readily transferred down to the ground. Luckily, one of the things that NASA does really, really well is redundancy, so there is a side B that is ready and waiting to be turned on. Before doing so, however, the Hubble folks need to make sure that they understand what happened to side A, and that they know how to safely turn on side B without fragging anything else. The latest news is that Goddard completed an independent review last week, and they think they understand what happened, and how to safely turn on side B. The staff at Goddard has been practicing with a spare SIC&DH (Science Instrument Control and Data Handling System, which contains the CU/SDF) on the recplica HST that’s been in cold storage for the past 18 years or so (see what I mean about redundancy?). A final Transitional Readiness Review was held, and they’re recommended starting the switch to side B. If this is approved, the switch should take place in the middle of next week.

The cool thing is that Hubble has been keeping itself scientifically busy doing astrometry (high accuracy positional measurements) with the Fine Guidance Sensor. Past papers that have come out using FGS data are some of the coolest and most underpublicized Hubble results, so I’m jazzed to see that they’re cleaning up while everyone else is idle!

Ron Cowen at Science News has a fun story about the very first political recordings. A century ago, amidst the 1908 Presidential election campaign, the two candidates — William Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan — took time to record messages on wax cylinders for mass distribution. Previously, recordings had been made of actors reading the text of various speeches, but this was the first time the candidates themselves got into the game.

Best of all, you can listen to the recordings themselves. Hear Bryant speak on “The Security of Bank Deposits”, and Taft talk about the “Rights and Progress of the Negro.”

Happily, those problems have been completely solved by now.

CNN is reporting that NASA is delaying the upcoming Hubble servicing mission till at least next year. The data handling and communications system has failed, so the telescope has stopped sending down data. This obviously needs to be fixed, but with the launch scheduled for two weeks from now, there is no time for the astronauts to practice doing the repair. The astronauts spend months and months of time training to do repairs (in the very nifty Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory), and you can’t just say “Oh, while you’re up there, do you mind putting a bit of duct tape over here? Thanks much!”. The repair process needs to be designed as well. NASA thinks they can get a backup control channel working in a few weeks, in which case more data can come down in the interim. On the other hand, there’s no plan for observations during the coming year — the plans were all based around instruments that were supposed to be up there by late October, but that are instead going to be sitting in a clean room.

Another bit of fallout is that before this happened, the EVA (extra-vehicular activity) schedule was extremely tight, with a good chance that either the ACS or STIS repair would have to be scrapped if even the slightest activity went slower than planned. If you stick in a computer repair as well, I think the odds that we’ll get either instrument in are way down. On the other hand, the teams who work on these missions are vewwwwwwy, vewwwwwy clever, so who knows.

Oh, and yet one more awful thing is the havoc this plays with budgets. In large missions like these, time is money. There are hundreds of people supporting the repair mission in various ways, and while they’re critical to its success, the budgets were not anticipating having them working on repair issues during the next year.

The only bright spot is that this failed before the launch. If they had gone up there, installed all the fancy new hardware, and then had the data transfer system fail, we’d be well and truly hosed. But to dim that bright spot again, there are a number of ancient systems on the telescope (gyros, thermal blankets, etc) that are essential to keeping the spacecraft healthy. They’re scheduled for repair as well, and one can only hope that they can last another year.

And I suppose the post I was going to write crowing about how I get to go to the launch is tabled until next year too…

Update: Steinn has a lot more details over at his place.

Well into my household’s Year of Sensory Input Issues, my husband is dealing with a detached retina. It’s been a sometimes frightening experience — for example, did you know that if you have to leave an international flight en route, that the customs agent will come out and clear your passport on the ambulance? And that in spite of their stinginess with blankets and pretzels, United Airlines really can come through in a crisis? Annoying as it’s been, the experience has been filled with Cool Applications of Physics, which helps me pass the time.

A retinal detachment involves the retina (which lines the back of your eye like wallpaper) sagging away from the back of the eye (as your wallpaper might do in a damp bathroom). Now, if you’ve ever tried to wallpaper a curved surface, you know it’s not easy to get some intrinsically flat thing to stick smoothly to the inside of the curve, especially when that bitch Gravity is pulling it down all the time. The clever way that retinal surgery deals with this (squeamish people stop reading now, please) is to suck some of the goo out of your eye and replace it with a gas bubble. You then tilt your head into the right position to have the gas bubble float up into the correct portion of the eye while the retina re-attaches. For a month. If you’re lucky, you get to sit up, but if you’re unlucky, you spend a month looking at the floor. In addition, you cannot go up or down in altitude by more than a thousand feet or so, because when you have an air bubble in your eye pressure changes are not a great idea.

My husband has been lucky enough to have a sitting-up kind of detachment so far (though I’m writing this while waiting for him to get out of surgery a second time, since it seems to have detached again, and based on where he lost vision and knowing the inversion of the image that takes place in the eye’s reimaging system, I’m worried he’s going to be a floor-looking guy when he comes out). The cool bit about getting to look at him face-on is that you can actually see the bubble! He looks like a human level, as the bubble readjusts as he tips his head.

The other physicsy bit is that when you have a gas bubble in your eye, your index of refraction is all wrong, and in spite of having a working retina attached in the right place, you still can’t see, because the air-lens interface steers the light to the wrong place. This gets better as the air is absorbed by the body and replaced with fluid. It’s also better when you tip your head down so the bubble floats away from the lens.

The upshot of all this is that I think that modern medicine is pretty darn clever, though I wish I didn’t have to know about it.

Several months ago, in the heat of the republican primary, Yahoo news asked the candidates: Mac or PC? McCain’s response was revealing… and disturbing.

Neither. I am an illiterate who has to reply on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.

Now come some even more impressive quotes in an interview with the New York Times.

He said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.

“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

…

Mr. McCain said he did not use a BlackBerry, though he regularly reads messages on those of his aides. “I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail,” Mr. McCain said.

I know the internets are confusing and all, but I’m frankly a bit baffled by this. He needs help “getting on”??? To read newspapers? Hard to imagine that there’s not a computer he could use somewhere, already attached to the internet, and probably even with the browser already installed. I’m guessing he wouldn’t have to learn how to set his DNS servers in order to read the New York Times. Is it typing the URL that’s difficult? My grandmother, by the way, who is more than a decade older than McCain, seems to have figured this out just fine, even without a campaign staff to help.

The level of cluelessness here is deep — not only does he admit that he’s completely illiterate, he demonstrates a basic lack of familiarity with the terminology (he also mentioned that his staff shows him Drudge, because “Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge.”), much like his colleague Senator Ted “series of tubes” Stevens, opposer of net neutrality.

And it’s important. At the risk of stating the obvious: Internet policy has direct relevance for our most fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, privacy, and democratic access to information. Computing is increasingly critical to our increased understanding of the Universe, financial markets, and disease. The internet and social networking tools are rapidly revolutionizing the way we interact with each other, citizen’s access to and engagement in government, and government accountability. These things are central not only to innovation and the global economy, but to 21st century democracy in America and the world. It’s really hard to see how you can fully appreciate these issues if you don’t know the most basic things about operating a computer. Leadership matters.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has a twitter account. (He also hired one of the Facebook founders to start his myBarackObama site, which has clearly been responsible for a good deal of his internet fundraising and organizing.) He gets it.