The New MacArthur Geniuses are in.

I was intrigued when I first saw this new announcement of the MacArthur fellows winners. So I did some digging and found this article written in 2000 in Slate: The MacArthur Geniuses - How to become one of them. By David Plotz. What is fascinating is that one can see how the winner's prototype description back in 2000 follows nearly word by word the description of some of the 2004 fellows. Tunnel vision anyone ?

Watching a volcano erupt

With the new volcano advisory, one can now watch the Mount St. Helens Volcano erupts from your own living room.

Yes....one more to go

The first attempt by SpaceShipOne was successful. One more to go to win the Ansari X-prize. Our friends at Ecliptic provided a video of the event. Virgin Galactic will provide rides on this bird later at the tune of $200,000. This is about 4 minutes of zero-g for $200 K and the disctintion that you can now be called an astronaut. For about a hundred times less you can spend comparable amount of time in zero-g in a parabolic flight in a plane but no astronaut title.

16 years, 16 days, what's two orders of magnitude among friends

It looks like the most precisely expected earthquake is 16 years late. At least we know what to expect of this prediction.

MREMS: Micro-Radioisotopic-Electro-Mechanical Systems

This feature article of IEEE spectrum does a good job mentionning the issue of radioactive microbatteries that could power future MEMS.

My own preference is for Polonium-210 which has the ability to release about 120 W per grams. This is huge. Unfortunately, as said in the article:

At the diminutive dimensions of MEMS devices, the ratio between an object's surface and its volume gets very high. This relatively large surface makes it difficult to sufficiently reduce heat losses and maintain the temperatures necessary for RTGs to work. So we had to find other ways of converting nuclear into electric energy.

For a sphere, surface area decreases as the square of the radius whereas its volumes decreases as the cube of the radius. Hence, as the size decreases, the surface area become more important for the volume: i.e. major heat loss is expected from this sphere. Realizing this, Tom Blanchard from Wisconsin-Madison decided to look at this through the building a micro heat barrier. Hopefully, we will be able to keep high temperatures in that sphere so that thermoelectric generators can be used. It is also wrong to think that NASA has been looking at only Plutonium as an RTG sources. Back in the 1960's Strontium was looked into as a source of power for autonmous buoy at sea. Even polonium was looked at but the mission scenario requiring this type of sources with a half life of 138 days were non-existent. I recall the preliminary design needing a lot of shielding and being heavy. But then again, if the only issue is about having polonium not surrounded by a thermally conductive material, what about using aerogel instead ?

See it from the ground, see it from the sky. Part II

After the moon tracks of the Apollo 17 mission rover, here are the different views from the ground and from the sky of the Mars of the tracks of the MER-A robot (Spirit). If we can see the lander and the chute, does it mean we can better see Beagle-2 or the Mars Polar Lander ?

Local Weather Prediction for the People III

As I mentionned in a previous entry, here is a service that is developing itself in order to provide better weather information: ForecastWatch -- The Weather Forecast Accuracy Authority.

Airport Terminals Collapse

There is an eerie feeling that the Dubai airport terminal collapse looks too familiar to the Paris Terminal collapse. In fact they both have the same architect whose recent project include the following terminals:

Dubaï, Terminal 3

Charles de Gaulle, Terminal 2 E,

The commission that looked into the first collapse in Paris seemed to say that the sudden collapse is linked to the perforation of the concrete roof by the struts (supporting it). The science of concrete is a very difficult one, especially when it comes to computing its performance in an inventive type of architecture. Hopefully these accidents will be studied very carefully so we can have an answer like we did for the sleipner platform collapse which also included concrete walls.

On a related note, I think I understand how people get to be chosen in order to bid on contracts like these and I can see how a certain amount of ego goes into the decision making process. But, I do not understand how little emphasis there is on the functionality of these airports. When I fly out of Charles de Gaulle, I certainly do not expect the nice design of the buildings to give me a more interesting flight experience. I would rather that they put an emphasis on, the following:

• Is security good ?
• How cheap is the airfare ?
• Can I get for free on one of these airlines clubs ?
• Do I have an internet connection in these clubs ?
• Can I board first ?

When I land in Paris, I look at the following:

• Can I get out of the plane first ?
• Can I get to customs without having to ask people where to go ?
• Can I get through customs without having to wait for an hour (because they are all at lunch) ?
• Can I get my luggage fast ?
• Can I find some ATM machine fast ?
• Can I quickly find a Taxi or a shuttle bus ?

Most of these items do not need the airport buildings to look good. Most airports including CDG fail at providing a decent solution to these expectations.

Perfect Storms

One can only wonder if the collision of several seemingly unrelated facts is the precursor to a perfect weather/financial storm. Take for example, the oil price going up because of the, now, fourth hurricane hitting the Gulf of Mexico and Florida and the increase in foreclosures in Houston because of a hot summer (actually not the hottest one in the past five years.) Knowing that the weather is getting drier/warmer in Texas when there is a hurricance in Louisiana/Mississippi like it happened two weeks ago with Frances.....

Local Weather Prediction for the People II

In today's previous entry I mentionned that there seems to be small markets that are pretty much untouched for weather predictions since the brunt of previous and current efforts have been focused on very hard to solve problems such as predicting Jeanne's tortuous path or figuring out why in Europe, August 10-12th is a period of strange weather patterns like in 2002 or 2003 or trying to figure out if one should evacuate New Orleans or Miami. They have such tremendous economic value that the trade-off of investing in tools to predict them is seen as worthy by governments. But aside from these very weird events, minimal variations in the weather patterns over short distances (less than the coarse grid designed for supercomputer input) are now becoming important enough that it affects events with attendant economic value. I will try to mention these in a future entry.