No FTL neutrinos; The Mesa Az debates; Every person’s personal drone

View 714 Wednesday, February 22, 2012

ALAS:

‘FTL neutrinos’ result caused by inattention to Pournelle’s Law?

<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/neutrinos-faulty-cable/>

Roland Dobbins

The applicable Pournelle’s Law was one of troubleshooting: 90% of the time it’s a cable. I first formulated that back in S-100 days, and it’s still true. Now it may be that we’re better off without faster than light neutrons, but I for one regret that they’re going away. Of course this was always the way to bet it, but it was a more intereresting universe when everything we thought we understood was fundamentally wrong…

Of course we still have the situation where some large portion of the universe is composed of dark matter which we can’t see or detect, and dark energy which we can’t find but have to believe in on faith. Of course one explanation of the data that forces us to believe in these undetectables is a revised aether theory such as Petr Beckmann’s aether as an entangled gravitational field – see Einstein Plus Two by Beckmann, and that would be interesting. Do note that I’m playing games. I do wonder about the proliferation of hypothetical constructs and intervening variables in physics. I thought those were a monopoly of the social sciences…

The Republican Debates

I watched the CNN-moderated Republican candidate debates that took place this evening in Mesa, Arizona.

The clear winner was Newt Gingrich. The clear loser was Senator Santorum, who was often petulant rather than presidential. It wasn’t a fatal loss, but Santorum must learn to stop taking the bait. The moderator, and others, all tried to get him to jump Romney rather than be presidential, to defend some past record rather than state what he would do now, to be apologetic rather than positive – and Santorum rose to the bait every time. Then he got into a long term slanging match with Romney. Neither of them looked very good in that, and neither came off all that well, but Romney looked more presidential than Santorum. Senator Santorum really has to learn the first rule of campaigning: don’t let the opposition set the agenda. Don’t respond and react. Santorum’s touchiness won’t hurt him as President. He’s sound in principle, and unlike British Prime Ministers, don’t have to engage in debates unless they want to, and being able to debate isn’t terribly important one way or another in actually governing the country. Debate talent is important for campaigning for the office of President, but not for executing that office.

That, of course, is one of the major flaws of democracy. We require those who would be president to spend most of their lives learning how to get the office, and almost none on learning how to be President once they get there.

Incidentally, Newt knows this. Campaigning actually bores him. He prefers to be among smart people discussing possibilities, in a situation in which he doesn’t have to be guarded but can say what he thinks as the ideas spring up. Most fresh and original ideas aren’t all that useful. They can lead to something useful, but we don’t use the phrase ‘half baked” for no reason. Many half-baked ideas do bake out, sometimes into very good things indeed. But of course campaign debates are not the place to spring new concepts; those need discussing in private and among friends who aren’t playing ‘gotcha’. When Newt was an unknown Congressman making speeches about the nature of the Constitution to the empty House chamber after hours, he was quite different from when he was Minority Whip, and when he found that it might be possible to win a Republican Majority for the first time in forty years and he went into campaign mode he had to change once again. Part of that was time, but part was the requirements of campaigns.

His experience at this came across during the debate. He stayed on target, didn’t rise to the bait and use his time on petty denunciations of others or in reacting to some accusation, and he pretty well stayed on point: we’re in big trouble, and it’s going to take some fundamental and profound changes to get out of it. We’re going to need energy independence to break our enthrallment to the Middle East. Breaking our energy dependence is a first requirement for independence and liberty. Fortunately we have the resources; all we need is to get the government out of that way.

Ron Paul came off well. When asked what single word best described him, he said “consistency” and he’s right. He doesn’t have plans and programs for education because the Constitution doesn’t give the government any rights or powers over education. It’s not a matter for either Congress or the President. He applies this principle to most of the matters brought up. He’s also keenly aware that we are spending money we don’t have, much of it on matters the Federal Government has no Constitutional power to spend it on. His return to the first principles of Constitutionalism seems absolute, and as the campaign goes on you begin to realize that he really means it. Whether that’s possible – whether the American people even want such a thing – isn’t clear to me, and I suspect it is not clear to him; but that’s his position, and he’s going to stick to it. Ron Paul reminds me of John Quincy Adams. We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but we are the guardians only of our own. We do not go abroad seeking dragons to slay. We have enough to do preserving our own liberty.

Santorum said little I disagreed with, and many things I liked, but I found myself shouting at him when he took the bait and went off on another silly tirade either attacking someone else, or defending his record in the Senate. I know why he does it, but I would far rather he showed himself being presidential rather than reacting as if — but no, I’m not going to frame that image. Let’s just say that he’s capable of looking presidential, and has done so, notably the night he won in Iowa but at other times as well. His positions are consistent and generally defer to the constitution. He’d do better if he displayed them rather than apologizing for voting for No Child Left Behind.

Day of the Drone

The two links below point to something astounding.

There was a time when I was the world’s most informed authority on inertial guidance. This wasn’t because of my expertise, it was because I was editor of Project 75, the USAF comprehensive survey of ballistic missile technology, and I had both the clearance and the access authority – need to know – for all of that. The result was a report that I wrote or edited every page of, but which was classified at a need to know level above mine – which makes sense because it literally had everything we knew about our missiles and everything we thought we knew about everyone else’s. Naturally I could get at every part of the document, but not all of it at once, because the number of copies was limited for very good reasons. Anyway, in those days inertial guidance depended on mechanical gyroscopes, and electronics to get the gyroscopic data. We were developing and hoped soon to deploy gyros which used lasers to pick off the spin rates and other pertinent data, which would increase accuracy because reading the data wouldn’t affect the gyroscope as much as the current electronic means would.

But for all that, an inertial guidance platform with three axis gyroscopes and three axis accelerometers was a fairly large and terribly expensive thing. Moreover, the computer that this had to feed was large too. Our other analyses indicated that the major improvement we needed in the ICBM force was not number of warheads or large yields, but accuracies at intercontinental range; and that required on-board guidance computers. (Obviously you couldn’t use any kind of midcourse correction system: no ICBM could be allowed to accept instructions from the outside because that would instantly become the major one point vulnerability of the missile. But that’s another story for another time.)

On board guidance computers had to be made smaller and more powerful and one result was a recommendation for major investments in large scale integrated circuits.

Once all that was done – we had smaller and lighter gyros and accelerometers, and much more powerful and smaller computers with kilobytes of memory, we still ended up with guidance packages that were large, heavy, and expensive,

Now go look here: http://invensense.com/mems/gyro/mpu9150.html

What’s described is a gyro and accelerometer system. In chips. Micromachines. You can buy it to put into your game controller. You can add GPS if that’s not already in it; it’s just another chip. And for about $1700 you can get a quadricopter, a four motor helicopter, complete with control system, GPS, battery life of more than ten minutes, payload of more than a pound. It will fly to where you send it, to an accuracy of a couple of meters, using GPS to find it. It can be given altitude constraints. Such as stay more than 20 and fewer than 30 meters above the local ground level (there’s a camera so you can see obstacles to go over or around).

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to think of the sort of things a geeky kid who has decided he really hates his school and those bullies who make his life miserable might come up with in a week of thought. I can think of things I might have done with something like that on a particularly lousy day. They’d probably involve sprayers and agar agar, or perhaps inorganic chemicals. Fortunately my geeky kid being bullied experiences were all when I was too young to do anything; by the time I was able to make nitroglycerine I didn’t have any such motives. I didn’t get bullied in high school because my friend was a very large guy who really really wanted to pass Latin…

But I do leave you with the thought for the day. Also I point out that guidance systems for drones don’t cost much. They’ll control fixed wing “model” aircraft of sizes up to tens of kilograms just as easily as they’ll control a small one pound payload quadricopter. The day when any geek can have his own personal drone is not only coming, it’s pretty well here.

Sleep tight.

https://store.diydrones.com/APM_2_0_Kit_p/br-ardupilotmega-03.htm

http://invensense.com/mems/gyro/mpu9150.html

Newt makes his case

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M415AGqnVrg&feature=player_embedded# !

If he would just keep this up.

Phil

Well, it does make his positions quite clear. I can say from personal experience that Newt talks like this and has done so since the 1980’s. He’s being interviewed so it’s not an interactive conversation, but he is paying attention to the questions. I’ve had conversations like this with him many times.

If you’re wondering about Newt, he directly answers the questions about his temperament. And as my reader says, he states his case quite well.