Friday, August 31, 2012
Election 2012: Post-RNC Update
Well ... that was certainly interesting. Given what went down last night, I think it would be appropriate to recap the Republican National Convention with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
The Good: I have been saying for some time that Mitt Romney's Vice-Presidential pick would give us a bit of a window into his decision-making. It's the first Presidential decision that the nominee makes. What, why and how gives you the template for their decision-making, and some idea of how their Administration would go. We saw Reagan and Clinton both pick former rivals as running mates. We saw Bush the Elder pick a non-entity. Bush the Younger picked Dick Cheney, who was the chair of the search committee, and who became a virtual shadow President. And do we need to rehash McCain's choice? Mitt Romney ended up picking Paul Ryan. And yes, I think that's a good thing. And yes, I think that reflects credit upon Romney as a candidate. He didn't pick someone to be a media-wowing "game changer". He picked someone with serious policy cred. Even if you don't agree with him (and in a lot of ways I don't) you can't dismiss him out of hand. Not only does he have some policy chops, and some legislative experience, he also comes from a swing state. That's a pretty canny choice. It brings me a bit of relief. The world probably won't end if Romney were to win.
The Bad: But ... what on God's green earth was Team Romney smoking last night? I mean, I like Eastwood as an actor. I like him as a director. But dear Lord, improv is not his form. And that was a huge speed bump in what could have been a perfectly stellar nomination night. The video got rave reviews, and was a great starting piece. If they'd slid from that into Rubio's speech, and if Rubio's speech has been more about Romney than about Rubio, then the lead-up to Romney's acceptance speech would have been an ascending crescendo of splendor. But no. Which makes you ask, who's driving this bus, anyway?
The Ugly: The purified, distilled crazy at the bottom of the pot, that would be my suspicion. The incident with the CNN camera operator -- you know, the one where they threw peanuts at an African-American and said "this is how we feed animals" -- tells you just about all you need to know about the sorry state of the GOP today. This is why I can't be a Republican. They can claim they were just random guys, but you know that they had to have been either delegates or alternates, which means that their home state party vetted them and sent them as their representatives. No one gets out on the convention floor that's not a delegate or an alternate. This is distilled, concentrated ugliness. The very idea of an African-American President utterly unhinges them. Republicans don't like it when people say this, but... Pray tell, where was the Tea Party, alleged "libertarians" that they claim to be, when the Patriot Act was being passed? Where was the Tea Party when Bush was spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave? Nowhere, that's where. They didn't show up until November 5, 2008. I find the timing suspicious.
And now, the numbers. As usual, my data sources are Intrade, FiveThirtyEight, and Pollster. Information is current as of Friday afternoon.
From Intrade:
Barack Obama (D): 57.4%, 281 EV (-0.4%, -6 EV)
Mitt Romney (R): 42.6%, 232 EV (+2.8%, -18 EV)
From FiveThirtyEight:
Barack Obama (D): 71.6%, 302.4 EV (+0.5%, +2.8 EV)
Mitt Romney(R): 28.4%, 235.6 EV (-0.5%, -2.8 EV)
From Pollster:
Strong D: 211 (+20)
Lean D: 20 (-79)
Tossup: 116 (+59)
Lean R: 16 (+16)
Strong R: 175 (-16)
The Pollster map is fascinating, as always, but I'm not really sure what it means. Both sides' support is softening in the negativity of the campaign. But the negativity is hurting Romney far more than it's hurting Obama. Romney is softening in places he can't afford to, and still has to clean up all but one of the toss-ups. Obama only has to pick up two or three of the toss-ups, so long as he can hold onto his "lean" states.
And I'm still curious about the divergence between the gambling public and the pollsters. I'm pretty sure it comes down to the fact that a man might lie to a pollster, but won't lie to a bookie.
What Romney Must Do: That last-day bobble at the convention was unfortunate. They needed a more coherent message. They're going to have to go at it hammer-and-tongs over Labor Day weekend, then there's a week-long blackout while all eyes are on Charlotte. There's really no option for them but the nuclear option: go negative, and go big. Negative advertising sickens independents and rallies the base, at least in theory. It probably won't work. But that's about the only card they have to play.
What Obama Must Do: Avoid major screw-ups in their own convention. Draw the public's attention to their accomplishments in domestic and foreign policy, such as they are. Obama never did a very good job of selling health care reform, this is his chance for a do-over. And Biden's idea for a slogan is still a pretty good one: "General Motors is alive, and Bin Laden is dead." (But sorry, Joe, I won't be watching your speech. You're on opposite Cowboys/Giants. I'll read the transcript later.)
And The Winner Is: Odds are holding steady at 3-2, as they have for months. I don't expect much movement in the next two weeks. I'd take Obama/Biden at 3-2 for the win, and I'd probably take 290 EVs for the over/under.
Remember, vote early, and vote often!
Friday, August 24, 2012
Enter Robespierre
If Lance Armstrong was the King, then Travis Tygart is his Robespierre.
The thunderbolt that struck the cycling community yesterday was the news that Lance Armstrong was, for possibly the first time in his life, giving up. He would not take the USADA's case against him to arbitration. He still maintains his innocence, but no longer wishes to contest the matter.
The evidence will come out, sooner or later. There are other tightly coupled cases coming forward. For example, Armstrong's long-time team director, Johan Bruyneel, will be taking his defense forward. In this matter, the two are practically joined at the hip. But...
But in the back of our minds, many of us always knew. Or at least suspected.
For over a decade, from 1996 to 2007, every winner of the Tour de France was either found guilty of doping offenses, or admitted to doping offenses. Bjarne Riis admitted to taking EPO during his 1996 Tour victory. Jan Ullrich's career ended in disgrace after Operacion Puerto. Marco Pantani was expelled from the 1999 Giro d'Italia, ostensibly for "health reasons". In 2006, Floyd Landis' title was stripped after he tested positive for testosterone, and the 2007 winner Alberto Contador has just finished serving a two-year ban. What were the odds that Lance Armstrong would be the only clean one?
But even so, his achievements were singular. No one disputes the fact that he contracted near-fatal cancer. And no one disputes that he clawed his way back to the top of his chosen profession. In a strange way, this may have been his key advantage. From the wastage of chemotherapy, he was able to forge for himself the ideal cyclist's physique. For most of a decade, he prepared himself monomanaically for those three weeks each summer. No one worked harder, or longer, or suffered more deeply. Whatever other pro cyclists were doing, Armstrong turned it up to eleven: training, diet, equipment, he was an innovator in all these areas. It stands to reason that if he was using performance-enhancing drugs, he'd be using the very latest and the very best.
And that's the last bit I'm still curious about. How did they manage to hide it for so long? How did they skirt the testing protocols? It's telling that so many of his former colleagues fell afoul of the tests after leaving his team. They tried to repeat the doping program, but failed to keep the parts that helped them evade detection.
That's why the case is still important. We need to know how. We need to know how, so that the testing protocols can be updated to account for it.
There's reason to think that some of the "how" has already been discovered. The new "biological passport" program has made large-scale cheating much harder to accomplish. And if you've watched the races year by year, you can tell that the riders are having a much harder time on the climbs now than six or eight years ago. It's a much cleaner sport now than it was then.
There are no winners here. The closest anyone comes to having "won" here is Greg LeMond. LeMond was one of the first to raise the flag of suspicion, and he was a virtual pariah for years as a consequence. But he was right. He was right, all along. So far as I know, he's said nothing in public. He probably isn't overjoyed at having been found to be correct.
The King, after all, has been found guilty of treason.
The thunderbolt that struck the cycling community yesterday was the news that Lance Armstrong was, for possibly the first time in his life, giving up. He would not take the USADA's case against him to arbitration. He still maintains his innocence, but no longer wishes to contest the matter.
The evidence will come out, sooner or later. There are other tightly coupled cases coming forward. For example, Armstrong's long-time team director, Johan Bruyneel, will be taking his defense forward. In this matter, the two are practically joined at the hip. But...
But in the back of our minds, many of us always knew. Or at least suspected.
For over a decade, from 1996 to 2007, every winner of the Tour de France was either found guilty of doping offenses, or admitted to doping offenses. Bjarne Riis admitted to taking EPO during his 1996 Tour victory. Jan Ullrich's career ended in disgrace after Operacion Puerto. Marco Pantani was expelled from the 1999 Giro d'Italia, ostensibly for "health reasons". In 2006, Floyd Landis' title was stripped after he tested positive for testosterone, and the 2007 winner Alberto Contador has just finished serving a two-year ban. What were the odds that Lance Armstrong would be the only clean one?
But even so, his achievements were singular. No one disputes the fact that he contracted near-fatal cancer. And no one disputes that he clawed his way back to the top of his chosen profession. In a strange way, this may have been his key advantage. From the wastage of chemotherapy, he was able to forge for himself the ideal cyclist's physique. For most of a decade, he prepared himself monomanaically for those three weeks each summer. No one worked harder, or longer, or suffered more deeply. Whatever other pro cyclists were doing, Armstrong turned it up to eleven: training, diet, equipment, he was an innovator in all these areas. It stands to reason that if he was using performance-enhancing drugs, he'd be using the very latest and the very best.
And that's the last bit I'm still curious about. How did they manage to hide it for so long? How did they skirt the testing protocols? It's telling that so many of his former colleagues fell afoul of the tests after leaving his team. They tried to repeat the doping program, but failed to keep the parts that helped them evade detection.
That's why the case is still important. We need to know how. We need to know how, so that the testing protocols can be updated to account for it.
There's reason to think that some of the "how" has already been discovered. The new "biological passport" program has made large-scale cheating much harder to accomplish. And if you've watched the races year by year, you can tell that the riders are having a much harder time on the climbs now than six or eight years ago. It's a much cleaner sport now than it was then.
There are no winners here. The closest anyone comes to having "won" here is Greg LeMond. LeMond was one of the first to raise the flag of suspicion, and he was a virtual pariah for years as a consequence. But he was right. He was right, all along. So far as I know, he's said nothing in public. He probably isn't overjoyed at having been found to be correct.
The King, after all, has been found guilty of treason.
Friday, August 03, 2012
Election 2012: Let The Games Begin
A man who's legally blind, who can barely read the morning paper, has recently set a new world record in archery. Another man, born with no feet, is competing as a sprinter. For only the fifth time in history, a weightlifter has cleaned three times his own weight. I love the Olympics. You see the very best of humanity on display, and you see the barriers of the impossible pushed a little farther back each time. But, as awesome as those Games are, those aren't the ones I'm talking about today.
In just over three weeks, the Republican National Convention gets underway in Tampa, Florida. In just about a month, the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Charlotte, North Carolina. And in 95 days, just over three months, we go to the polls to elect the next President of the United States.
The so-called "Silly Season" is just about over. The fall campaign is about to commence for real. Ladies and gentlemen, it's on like Donkey Kong.
As always, our numbers come courtesy of Intrade, from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, and from Pollster.
From Intrade:
Barack Obama (D) 57.8%, 287 EV (+1.9%, +/- 0 EV)
Mitt Romney (R) 39.8%, 250 EV (-1.2%, -9 EV)
From FiveThirtyEight:
Barack Obama (D) 71.1%, 299.6 EV (+2.8%, +/- 0 EV)
Mitt Romney (R) 28.9%, 238.4 EV (-2.8%, +/- 0 EV)
From Pollster:
Strong D: 191 (-30)
Lean D: 99 (+80)
Tossup: 57 (-50)
Lean R: 0 (-10)
Strong R: 191 (+10)
General Impressions: Pollster tells a fascinating story here. Obama and Romney have exactly the same amount of "strong" support in the Electoral College, but Obama has a ton more "leaning" states. Romney has none. That's an interesting point -- Romney goes straight from "strong" to "toss-up", with no states leaning in his direction. I don't know what that means yet. One thing it could mean is that the Bain attacks, and the mess with the tax returns, seems to be getting some traction. But it also shows a vulnerability in the Obama camp, his "strong" support has softened considerably since the last time we looked at the figures. One way to read this is that Romney has firmed up his soft support, while Obama's firm support has slipped. But, how does that scan when stacked up to the fact that the tossups seem to have broken all one way?
It's a confusing picture, but a very interesting one. It may well be that the people who like Romney really like him, but there's an awfully wide canyon between that and the undecideds.
I'm also curious as to the reason between the wide gulf between Intrade's percentages and Nate Silver's. Mind you, they both predict the same result. But the gambling public is giving Romney more love than the pollsters are, just right now. It'll be curious to see how closely these two sets of data converge, as we get closer to the big day. And, it'll be very interesting to see what the overnight trade volume does, the night before Election Day.
What Obama Must Do: His "You Didn't Build That" remark was a huge unforced error. He can't afford too many of those. The economic recovery is still very weak. Unemployment is still fairly high. The relatively good news is that gas prices aren't sky-high, and home prices seem to have bottomed out, and are on the rise again. What he needs to do at this point is sell the idea that he's on the side of the middle class, and also sell an agenda for sustainable economic growth. At the same time, he also has to convince the public that the Republicans either can't or won't do a better job. He's got a considerable advantage, even with the relatively soft economy. But the race is going to tighten, depending on how Romney plays the next three weeks.
What Romney Must Do: Diplomacy, not to put too fine a point on it, isn't his strong suit. Fortunately for him, though, the election isn't being held in London. Irritating foreigners not only isn't something that's likely to offend his base, it's liable to be something that endears him to his base. Which is helpful, since Romney is still running for the whole-hearted support of the hard right. If I were one of his advisers, the Pollster data above would be very troubling to me. With his "strong" and "leaning" support, Obama has enough EVs to win re-election. Romney simply must run the table in the toss-up states, and pull at least 21 EVs of Obama's current support. That may well be doable. Hell, it is doable. But it's going to be hard sledding for this particular candidate, who isn't overly blessed with warmth. I'm not saying he's a bad man, but he's got a fairly stiff public demeanor. For all his faults, George Bush was someone a lot of people could have a backyard BBQ with. But Romney looks more like the guy who just fired you. That's when he's not looking like a collaboration between the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Disney's Animatronics. And I'm not sure we've seen the real Mitt Romney stand up yet. But in three weeks' time, we'll get an unparalleled glimpse into his thought processes. As I've said before, the VP selection will speak volumes for the man's judgement, and how he goes about making decisions.
The VP pick is absolutely vital for Romney. His best option is someone personable, who's also palatable to the centrist voters out there. But he may feel stampeded into going hard-right, to cement the support of his base. If he does the former, we'll have a real race on our hands. If the latter, he's probably toast.
And The Winner Is... Intrade is back to giving 3-2 odds in favor of re-election. Nate Silver's numbers work out to 7-3 in favor, just shy of 2-1, but as I said last time, I'm not comfortable jumping into 2-1 territory yet. I want to see how the conventions go, and how the economy's shaking out come Labor Day.
Remember, vote early, and vote often!
In just over three weeks, the Republican National Convention gets underway in Tampa, Florida. In just about a month, the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Charlotte, North Carolina. And in 95 days, just over three months, we go to the polls to elect the next President of the United States.
The so-called "Silly Season" is just about over. The fall campaign is about to commence for real. Ladies and gentlemen, it's on like Donkey Kong.
As always, our numbers come courtesy of Intrade, from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, and from Pollster.
From Intrade:
Barack Obama (D) 57.8%, 287 EV (+1.9%, +/- 0 EV)
Mitt Romney (R) 39.8%, 250 EV (-1.2%, -9 EV)
From FiveThirtyEight:
Barack Obama (D) 71.1%, 299.6 EV (+2.8%, +/- 0 EV)
Mitt Romney (R) 28.9%, 238.4 EV (-2.8%, +/- 0 EV)
From Pollster:
Strong D: 191 (-30)
Lean D: 99 (+80)
Tossup: 57 (-50)
Lean R: 0 (-10)
Strong R: 191 (+10)
General Impressions: Pollster tells a fascinating story here. Obama and Romney have exactly the same amount of "strong" support in the Electoral College, but Obama has a ton more "leaning" states. Romney has none. That's an interesting point -- Romney goes straight from "strong" to "toss-up", with no states leaning in his direction. I don't know what that means yet. One thing it could mean is that the Bain attacks, and the mess with the tax returns, seems to be getting some traction. But it also shows a vulnerability in the Obama camp, his "strong" support has softened considerably since the last time we looked at the figures. One way to read this is that Romney has firmed up his soft support, while Obama's firm support has slipped. But, how does that scan when stacked up to the fact that the tossups seem to have broken all one way?
It's a confusing picture, but a very interesting one. It may well be that the people who like Romney really like him, but there's an awfully wide canyon between that and the undecideds.
I'm also curious as to the reason between the wide gulf between Intrade's percentages and Nate Silver's. Mind you, they both predict the same result. But the gambling public is giving Romney more love than the pollsters are, just right now. It'll be curious to see how closely these two sets of data converge, as we get closer to the big day. And, it'll be very interesting to see what the overnight trade volume does, the night before Election Day.
What Obama Must Do: His "You Didn't Build That" remark was a huge unforced error. He can't afford too many of those. The economic recovery is still very weak. Unemployment is still fairly high. The relatively good news is that gas prices aren't sky-high, and home prices seem to have bottomed out, and are on the rise again. What he needs to do at this point is sell the idea that he's on the side of the middle class, and also sell an agenda for sustainable economic growth. At the same time, he also has to convince the public that the Republicans either can't or won't do a better job. He's got a considerable advantage, even with the relatively soft economy. But the race is going to tighten, depending on how Romney plays the next three weeks.
What Romney Must Do: Diplomacy, not to put too fine a point on it, isn't his strong suit. Fortunately for him, though, the election isn't being held in London. Irritating foreigners not only isn't something that's likely to offend his base, it's liable to be something that endears him to his base. Which is helpful, since Romney is still running for the whole-hearted support of the hard right. If I were one of his advisers, the Pollster data above would be very troubling to me. With his "strong" and "leaning" support, Obama has enough EVs to win re-election. Romney simply must run the table in the toss-up states, and pull at least 21 EVs of Obama's current support. That may well be doable. Hell, it is doable. But it's going to be hard sledding for this particular candidate, who isn't overly blessed with warmth. I'm not saying he's a bad man, but he's got a fairly stiff public demeanor. For all his faults, George Bush was someone a lot of people could have a backyard BBQ with. But Romney looks more like the guy who just fired you. That's when he's not looking like a collaboration between the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Disney's Animatronics. And I'm not sure we've seen the real Mitt Romney stand up yet. But in three weeks' time, we'll get an unparalleled glimpse into his thought processes. As I've said before, the VP selection will speak volumes for the man's judgement, and how he goes about making decisions.
The VP pick is absolutely vital for Romney. His best option is someone personable, who's also palatable to the centrist voters out there. But he may feel stampeded into going hard-right, to cement the support of his base. If he does the former, we'll have a real race on our hands. If the latter, he's probably toast.
And The Winner Is... Intrade is back to giving 3-2 odds in favor of re-election. Nate Silver's numbers work out to 7-3 in favor, just shy of 2-1, but as I said last time, I'm not comfortable jumping into 2-1 territory yet. I want to see how the conventions go, and how the economy's shaking out come Labor Day.
Remember, vote early, and vote often!
Friday, July 27, 2012
Watch That First Step...
If plummeting were an Olympic sport, Felix Baumgartner would be a leading contender for a gold medal. On July 25th, he made the second test jump for the Red Bull Stratos project. He rode a balloon up to 96,640 feet, and jumped. Several minutes later, he popped his chute and floated down to a safe landing. Next up: the free-fall record.
I couldn't find an embeddable video, but here is the clip they posted on their own site. This is what they're aiming for, though:
But, I have to give an honorable mention to a man whose story I read about earlier this week. Cliff Judkins was a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, ferrying an F-8 Crusader fighter across the Pacific. What should have been a routine tanker rendezvous went horribly wrong. In short order, he experienced just about every kind of mishap you can have in an airplane. First, his engine failed. Then, it caught fire. If that weren't bad enough, his primary ejection handle failed, as did the backup. The manual canopy jettison worked, though. But his parachute didn't. Amazingly enough, he lived to tell the tale. Yes, you heard that right, he fell FIFTEEN THOUSAND FEET with NO PARACHUTE, and ... well, you don't exactly walk away from that, but after six months he was flying again.
Go here to read it. It's an amazing story.
I couldn't find an embeddable video, but here is the clip they posted on their own site. This is what they're aiming for, though:
But, I have to give an honorable mention to a man whose story I read about earlier this week. Cliff Judkins was a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, ferrying an F-8 Crusader fighter across the Pacific. What should have been a routine tanker rendezvous went horribly wrong. In short order, he experienced just about every kind of mishap you can have in an airplane. First, his engine failed. Then, it caught fire. If that weren't bad enough, his primary ejection handle failed, as did the backup. The manual canopy jettison worked, though. But his parachute didn't. Amazingly enough, he lived to tell the tale. Yes, you heard that right, he fell FIFTEEN THOUSAND FEET with NO PARACHUTE, and ... well, you don't exactly walk away from that, but after six months he was flying again.
Go here to read it. It's an amazing story.
Friday, July 20, 2012
The Real Space Age
Forty-three years ago today, we saw one of those moments that are true watersheds in history. Before July 20, 1969, humanity had only known one world; afterwards, it would forever know two. That said, for all its accomplishments, Project Apollo was always going to be a dead end. It was never going to lead to a long-term human presence on the Moon. There were a number of good reasons to go. One was the fact that no one had ever been, another was the fact that we didn't want the Soviets to get there first. But there just weren't very many good reasons in the early 1970s to stay.
One day, perhaps one day soon, that will change. The problem was always that there wasn't a clear way for anyone to make a profit out of it. Or if there was, the operating costs were so absurdly high that it just wasn't feasible. That's changing, slowly but inexorably. I've been saying for a while now that the center of gravity of the American space effort was shifting towards private industry. The successful mission in late May was an important signpost on that path. There will be more to come.
A while back, I made the statement that the real Space Age had just begun. Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to expand on why I think that's the case. SpaceX and companies like it are going to bend the cost curve to the point that proposals that were once ludicrously ambitious will become feasible. By way of example, let's look at two different proposals, one from about twenty years ago, and another more recent.
It's been speculated for a long time that ice could be hiding out in craters near the Moon's poles that never see sunlight. Vacuum is a very good insulator, and polar craters that are never sunlit can be very cold indeed. Water vapor that finds its way there somehow or other will freeze out, and never escape. The speculation was fanned to high heat by results from the Clementine probe in 1994, when a radar experiment returned reflections from polar craters that were consistent with ice sheets. Within the space enthusiast community, this solved one of the big problems attending lunar habitation: water. Hauling enough water up from Earth to sustain a settlement is hideously expensive. If there's a significant amount of water already up there, it simplifies things tremendously. But the problem remained, how do you finance the voyage to begin with?
Someone hit on the idea of financing it as an entertainment venture, at least initially. Sell the film rights. There'd be plenty of gripping, exciting footage from the mission. Then, once you're there, you can start up a mining operation. This was the beginnings of the Artemis Project, and of the Lunar Resources Company. I was never directly involved, as I was up to my earlobes in grad school at the time, but I kibbitzed on the discussion boards they had on GEnie. One suggestion was fairly well-received: I said that they should time the first mission to coincide with a lunar eclipse. I still think that's worth doing. It's a perspective no one's ever seen before. And, I think it'd be awesome to be able to see every sunset and every sunrise on Earth, all in once glance. They got an impressive amount of planning and preliminary design work done. That's about as far as they got.
What killed them, in the end, was transportation costs. With high-lift launches costing upwards of a quarter-billion dollars, there was no way on (or off) Earth that they were going to be able to drum up that kind of money. This is the same wall that every effort has run up against to date. Every time you have a plan that requires the fabrication of a lot of equipment down here that needs to be put up there, you run up against the fact that the cost of moving it from here to there puts the cost out of reach.
And that's the thing that's changing. New entrants into the launch market are going to bend the cost curve down to the point where ambitious projects become practical.
Earlier this year, a company calling itself Planetary Resources unveiled their plan to mine nearby asteroids for both metals and for water. They're not going to jump right into it, of course. First, they have to be able to spot likely candidates for exploration. Then, they have to get a close-up look. Finally, they have to develop an automated mining and processing unit. Accordingly, their first product is a small space-based telescope. It can be used to look both ways, down towards Earth and up towards space. That's their first revenue stream: people will pay to look at stuff. Universities will pay for telescope time for a variety of reasons. Not just astronomy departments, you can do a surprising amount of archaeology work from a high vantage point. But what Planetary Resources actually intends to use the Arkyd-100 for is to find and prospect likely mining targets. Then, the next step is to fit a small engine to such a telescope, and maneuver it towards such a target for a more detailed look. The last step is obvious: land, and begin digging up goodies. Metal for sale Earthside, and water for fuel.
The reason that they haven't been laughed out of the room yet is that the Arkyd-100 is small enough that it's going to be damn cheap to put one into orbit. They're piggybacking on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic project for their initial launches, from what I hear, and even if they weren't the Arkyd-100 doesn't weigh a whole lot. Maybe 100 kilograms. They can ride along on just about any satellite launch, for a relatively tiny fee. Eventually, they'll have to be the primary customer, because the mining plant isn't going to be especially small. But by then they'll have a nice bankroll to work with. And they'll have a choice of powerful and relatively inexpensive rockets to choose from.
If successful, they'll attract investors to the market looking for other angles to exploit. That's where things will get really interesting. Because many of our problems are problems of scarcity: not enough materials, not enough energy. There's plenty of both out there, once we learn how to get at it.
Forty years ago, we crawled out of our cradle. Now, we're learning to walk. Soon, we'll learn to run. I wonder what kind of adults we'll be, when we've grown up?
One day, perhaps one day soon, that will change. The problem was always that there wasn't a clear way for anyone to make a profit out of it. Or if there was, the operating costs were so absurdly high that it just wasn't feasible. That's changing, slowly but inexorably. I've been saying for a while now that the center of gravity of the American space effort was shifting towards private industry. The successful mission in late May was an important signpost on that path. There will be more to come.
A while back, I made the statement that the real Space Age had just begun. Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to expand on why I think that's the case. SpaceX and companies like it are going to bend the cost curve to the point that proposals that were once ludicrously ambitious will become feasible. By way of example, let's look at two different proposals, one from about twenty years ago, and another more recent.
It's been speculated for a long time that ice could be hiding out in craters near the Moon's poles that never see sunlight. Vacuum is a very good insulator, and polar craters that are never sunlit can be very cold indeed. Water vapor that finds its way there somehow or other will freeze out, and never escape. The speculation was fanned to high heat by results from the Clementine probe in 1994, when a radar experiment returned reflections from polar craters that were consistent with ice sheets. Within the space enthusiast community, this solved one of the big problems attending lunar habitation: water. Hauling enough water up from Earth to sustain a settlement is hideously expensive. If there's a significant amount of water already up there, it simplifies things tremendously. But the problem remained, how do you finance the voyage to begin with?
Someone hit on the idea of financing it as an entertainment venture, at least initially. Sell the film rights. There'd be plenty of gripping, exciting footage from the mission. Then, once you're there, you can start up a mining operation. This was the beginnings of the Artemis Project, and of the Lunar Resources Company. I was never directly involved, as I was up to my earlobes in grad school at the time, but I kibbitzed on the discussion boards they had on GEnie. One suggestion was fairly well-received: I said that they should time the first mission to coincide with a lunar eclipse. I still think that's worth doing. It's a perspective no one's ever seen before. And, I think it'd be awesome to be able to see every sunset and every sunrise on Earth, all in once glance. They got an impressive amount of planning and preliminary design work done. That's about as far as they got.
What killed them, in the end, was transportation costs. With high-lift launches costing upwards of a quarter-billion dollars, there was no way on (or off) Earth that they were going to be able to drum up that kind of money. This is the same wall that every effort has run up against to date. Every time you have a plan that requires the fabrication of a lot of equipment down here that needs to be put up there, you run up against the fact that the cost of moving it from here to there puts the cost out of reach.
And that's the thing that's changing. New entrants into the launch market are going to bend the cost curve down to the point where ambitious projects become practical.
Earlier this year, a company calling itself Planetary Resources unveiled their plan to mine nearby asteroids for both metals and for water. They're not going to jump right into it, of course. First, they have to be able to spot likely candidates for exploration. Then, they have to get a close-up look. Finally, they have to develop an automated mining and processing unit. Accordingly, their first product is a small space-based telescope. It can be used to look both ways, down towards Earth and up towards space. That's their first revenue stream: people will pay to look at stuff. Universities will pay for telescope time for a variety of reasons. Not just astronomy departments, you can do a surprising amount of archaeology work from a high vantage point. But what Planetary Resources actually intends to use the Arkyd-100 for is to find and prospect likely mining targets. Then, the next step is to fit a small engine to such a telescope, and maneuver it towards such a target for a more detailed look. The last step is obvious: land, and begin digging up goodies. Metal for sale Earthside, and water for fuel.
The reason that they haven't been laughed out of the room yet is that the Arkyd-100 is small enough that it's going to be damn cheap to put one into orbit. They're piggybacking on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic project for their initial launches, from what I hear, and even if they weren't the Arkyd-100 doesn't weigh a whole lot. Maybe 100 kilograms. They can ride along on just about any satellite launch, for a relatively tiny fee. Eventually, they'll have to be the primary customer, because the mining plant isn't going to be especially small. But by then they'll have a nice bankroll to work with. And they'll have a choice of powerful and relatively inexpensive rockets to choose from.
If successful, they'll attract investors to the market looking for other angles to exploit. That's where things will get really interesting. Because many of our problems are problems of scarcity: not enough materials, not enough energy. There's plenty of both out there, once we learn how to get at it.
Forty years ago, we crawled out of our cradle. Now, we're learning to walk. Soon, we'll learn to run. I wonder what kind of adults we'll be, when we've grown up?
Friday, July 13, 2012
The Last One
The Universe is a very weird place. But one of the weirdest things is also one of the most subtle.
Mathematics is a thing of pure logic, something that people built up over the centuries by deducing its principles starting from a handful of axioms. It is pure abstraction. Ostensibly, it has no actual connection to the real world. Teachers of geometry in ancient Greece were actively offended if their students suggested that their studies might have practical benefit.
How very odd, then, that mathematics should be so very useful for describing the world we live in.
Isomorphism is the word for it: if two systems are sufficiently similar to one another, then insights gained in one can be applied to the other. Gradually, natural philosophers came to understand that for reasons that no one adequately understood, mathematics and physics were isomorphic. The first fruit of this insight was Isaac Newton's masterwork, Philosophiae Naturalis Prinicipia Mathematica, which laid the groundwork for both differential calculus and the science of physics as we know it today. Ever since then, advances in physics have always been preceded by advances in mathematics. Before physicists could find the words to describe new phenomena, they had to learn nature's syntax in its own native tongue.
No one knows why the Universe works this way. It just does, and we go along for the ride.
The latest stop on this road began with Einstein's discovery of Special Relativity in 1905 and his discovery of General Relativity in 1916. It continued with the development of Quantum Mechanics by Max Planck and others, in parallel with Einstein's work on Relativity. The mathematics got more and more complex, but the predictions kept bearing fruit. Scientists began to plumb the secrets first of the atoms, then of their nuclei, and at last of the protons and neutrons themselves. They began to see clues that these weren't fundamental particles after all, but were themselves made up of smaller parts.
Then, in the 1960s, Sheldon Glashow discovered an internally-consistent way to describe a unification between the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. The only problem was that this method predicted that all of the particles would have zero mass. This was obviously not true, so the problem was then to figure out how to get around that issue. Later on in the decade, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam found a way to apply the Higgs mechanism to Glashow's theory, which then allowed the particles to gain mass. This paved the way for what we now call the Standard Model: a list of all of the Universe's fundamental parts. The Standard Model, as of 1967, was able to describe all of the sub-atomic particles then known. But it predicted a whole bunch of particles that hadn't been seen yet. Theoretical physicists then settled in for a long wait, while experimental physicists worked feverishly at ever-larger atom smashers to discover them.
Most of the quarks were found fairly early. The heavier ones took longer. The bottom quark was discovered in 1977, but the top quark wasn't discovered until 1995. By then, only a handful of holdouts remained. In 2000, the tau neutrino was discovered at Fermilab. That left one last piece to find.
Leon Lederman wrote a book about it in 1993, with the famous title The God Particle. His original manuscript had another four letters in the title, but of course they'd never publish it that way. He never meant to imply that the search for the Higgs boson was akin to finding God. He meant that it would be excruciatingly hard to find. And he was right. It would take an absurdly powerful scientific machine, straddling several national borders, to reach the staggering energies required to summon it out of its hiding place. A machine so mind-meltingly powerful that some people were afraid that if it ever ran at full power, it would mean the end of the world.
Nonsense on stilts, of course. The Large Hadron Collider is an incredibly powerful instrument, but it won't bring about the end of everything. Except, that is, for the end of the hiding place of that most elusive of particles. On July 4th, the announcement confirmed the rumors that had been flying around for a while. Not quite four years after it had been first turned on, instruments in the LHC had detected the prey for which it had been built.
Mind you, they're not quite calling it a capital-D discovery just yet. They need to do some confirmation tests, and comb over the results to be absolutely, totally sure. But they did call it a five-sigma result. To me, that says that unless someone on their team has discovered a brand-new way to screw up experiments, they've got the sucker dead to rights.
So, does this mean the end of physics? Not hardly. There's still a rather impressive list of unsolved problems in physics. They've found the Higgs boson, they still don't necessarily know why it works. And there's also dark matter and dark energy, about which we know next to nothing. What this probably does mean, though, is an end to new particle discoveries for a while. Quite probably a very long while. Unless the Standard Model is incomplete, and quarks themselves have constituent parts, that was the last one.
Mathematics is a thing of pure logic, something that people built up over the centuries by deducing its principles starting from a handful of axioms. It is pure abstraction. Ostensibly, it has no actual connection to the real world. Teachers of geometry in ancient Greece were actively offended if their students suggested that their studies might have practical benefit.
How very odd, then, that mathematics should be so very useful for describing the world we live in.
Isomorphism is the word for it: if two systems are sufficiently similar to one another, then insights gained in one can be applied to the other. Gradually, natural philosophers came to understand that for reasons that no one adequately understood, mathematics and physics were isomorphic. The first fruit of this insight was Isaac Newton's masterwork, Philosophiae Naturalis Prinicipia Mathematica, which laid the groundwork for both differential calculus and the science of physics as we know it today. Ever since then, advances in physics have always been preceded by advances in mathematics. Before physicists could find the words to describe new phenomena, they had to learn nature's syntax in its own native tongue.
No one knows why the Universe works this way. It just does, and we go along for the ride.
The latest stop on this road began with Einstein's discovery of Special Relativity in 1905 and his discovery of General Relativity in 1916. It continued with the development of Quantum Mechanics by Max Planck and others, in parallel with Einstein's work on Relativity. The mathematics got more and more complex, but the predictions kept bearing fruit. Scientists began to plumb the secrets first of the atoms, then of their nuclei, and at last of the protons and neutrons themselves. They began to see clues that these weren't fundamental particles after all, but were themselves made up of smaller parts.
Then, in the 1960s, Sheldon Glashow discovered an internally-consistent way to describe a unification between the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. The only problem was that this method predicted that all of the particles would have zero mass. This was obviously not true, so the problem was then to figure out how to get around that issue. Later on in the decade, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam found a way to apply the Higgs mechanism to Glashow's theory, which then allowed the particles to gain mass. This paved the way for what we now call the Standard Model: a list of all of the Universe's fundamental parts. The Standard Model, as of 1967, was able to describe all of the sub-atomic particles then known. But it predicted a whole bunch of particles that hadn't been seen yet. Theoretical physicists then settled in for a long wait, while experimental physicists worked feverishly at ever-larger atom smashers to discover them.
Most of the quarks were found fairly early. The heavier ones took longer. The bottom quark was discovered in 1977, but the top quark wasn't discovered until 1995. By then, only a handful of holdouts remained. In 2000, the tau neutrino was discovered at Fermilab. That left one last piece to find.
Leon Lederman wrote a book about it in 1993, with the famous title The God Particle. His original manuscript had another four letters in the title, but of course they'd never publish it that way. He never meant to imply that the search for the Higgs boson was akin to finding God. He meant that it would be excruciatingly hard to find. And he was right. It would take an absurdly powerful scientific machine, straddling several national borders, to reach the staggering energies required to summon it out of its hiding place. A machine so mind-meltingly powerful that some people were afraid that if it ever ran at full power, it would mean the end of the world.
Nonsense on stilts, of course. The Large Hadron Collider is an incredibly powerful instrument, but it won't bring about the end of everything. Except, that is, for the end of the hiding place of that most elusive of particles. On July 4th, the announcement confirmed the rumors that had been flying around for a while. Not quite four years after it had been first turned on, instruments in the LHC had detected the prey for which it had been built.
Mind you, they're not quite calling it a capital-D discovery just yet. They need to do some confirmation tests, and comb over the results to be absolutely, totally sure. But they did call it a five-sigma result. To me, that says that unless someone on their team has discovered a brand-new way to screw up experiments, they've got the sucker dead to rights.
So, does this mean the end of physics? Not hardly. There's still a rather impressive list of unsolved problems in physics. They've found the Higgs boson, they still don't necessarily know why it works. And there's also dark matter and dark energy, about which we know next to nothing. What this probably does mean, though, is an end to new particle discoveries for a while. Quite probably a very long while. Unless the Standard Model is incomplete, and quarks themselves have constituent parts, that was the last one.
Friday, July 06, 2012
Election 2012: RNC Minus 52 Days And Counting
The summer doldrums are upon us. Genuine news items are few and far between, so the silly stuff gets amped up to eleven, and passed off as real news. This is a direct consequence of modern cable news. They have twenty-four hours a day to fill, regardless of whether or not anything truly interesting is happening. If no real news is available, they have to invent it.
The biggest news of the last week was less interesting than it might have been. The most interesting story was always, "What will Obama do if his signature domestic policy initiative is overturned by the Supreme Court?" But we'll never know, since the Supreme Court upheld the ACA. There's an untold story there that's probably pretty fascinating. Justice Scalia's dissent actually reads as if it were written for the majority, which means that Chief Justice Roberts jumped sides at some point, probably fairly late in the game. We may never know exactly how or even why Scalia peed in Roberts' Wheaties ... but the result is purely status quo ante. It might become an issue for the fall campaign. It might prove to be an energizing factor for the Tea Party fanatics. But in the end, it will probably mean far less than the unemployment rate, gasoline prices, and overall consumer and business confidence. Those will be the telling figures of merit this fall.
And now, with fifty-two days until the Republican convention kicks off in Tampa, we'll take another look at the numbers. As always, our figures are from Intrade, from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, and from Pollster.
From Intrade:
Barack Obama (D) 55.9%, 287 EV (+2.4%, N/A)
Mitt Romney (R) 41.0%, 259 EV (-2.1%, N/A)
From FiveThirtyEight:
Barack Obama (D) 68.3%, 299.6 EV (+5.5%, +7.8 EV)
Mitt Romney (R) 31.7%, 238.4 EV (-5.5%, -7.8 EV)
From Pollster:
Strong D: 221 (-4)
Lean D: 19 (-26)
Tossup: 107 (+30)
Lean R: 10 (-11)
Strong R: 181 (+11)
General Impressions: There's a new market on Intrade for predicting the Electoral Vote count. It was not available last time, so we don't have any deltas yet. Speaking of Intrade, there's a potentially interesting story regarding the ACA decision. I was checking the market early Thursday morning before the decision was announced, and saw that prices for the "Overturn" contract had fallen from 80% to 67% in fairly heavy overnight trading. Maybe someone in the know unloaded their positions? Suffice to say I was rather less than astonished when the decision came down. I'm thinking someone blabbed, but there's no way to prove it.
FiveThirtyEight is showing a fairly substantial improvement for President Obama's re-election bid, though the reason why is not so easy to determine. He may be getting a small bounce from the Court's affirmation of his key domestic policy initiative. It's a sure thing he'd have taken a huge hit if it had been overturned. But I'm not sure how durable such a bump is. Economic conditions are far more important ... and they're not all that bad. They're not all that good, either. Things will be far clearer come September.
Pollster tells an interesting tale. The race is tightening, somewhat. Pollster tells us that Obama's support has softened slightly since we last looked, but Romney's support hasn't improved. It's firmed up, but he's not expanded into the middle. And that's a problem for Team Romney going forward. If he's still running for the support of his base going into the convention, he's got some really hard sledding ahead of him.
What Obama Must Do: I could almost cut-and-paste my last entry. He has to remind the public that while things aren't as good as they could be, they're nowhere near as bad as they might be. But he can't lean too hard on what the previous Administration did or did not do. The Court decision gives him an opening to run on the ACA's more popular provisions -- no more pre-existing conditions, less people uninsured, and the ability to keep dependents on a parent's policy until age 26. And the Court's decision in regard to the Arizona immigration law gives him an opening to highlight the Tea Party's aversion to people of the wrong color. Tea Party supporters hate it when people say this, but I've said before that the Tea Party was originally going to call themselves the "White Guys Hopping Mad That A Black Guy Got Elected President" Party, but that wouldn't fit on their business cards. I think it's a fair criticism. Where was the Tea Party when President Bush enacted Medicare Part D? Where was the Tea Party when President Bush signed the Patriot Act? Where were they on issues where serious libertarians had serious problems with President Bush? Nowhere, that's where. But the day after Obama's election... Yeah. I find it really hard to take their libertarian posturings seriously. They give us a bad name.
What Romney Must Do: Hang the current economic woes around Obama's neck like an albatross. He can use the Right's anger at the ACA to keep the troops excited, but I'm convinced that the economy is the real swing issue this cycle. But he's got to be careful, very careful, using the ACA as a wedge issue. It's the sweatiest of sweaty dynamite in his hands. It was his baby, after all. Deny it as he might, its paternity is a matter of public record. Rarely was a more apt slogan coined when Pawlenty called it "Obamneycare." Every time he mentions it, he raises the dread possibility that people will remember whose idea it was in the first place.
And The Winner Is... Nothing important has changed, so I'd still take 3-2 odds on re-election. If you use Nate Silver's numbers, the odds are closer to 2-1, but I'm not sure I'd go that far yet. We need to see how the conventions go, first, and what the economy's doing.
Remember, vote early, and vote often!
Friday, June 29, 2012
Video Del Fuego, Part LV
During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union had rather large programs dedicated to building bombers capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the other's territory. Needless to say, both sides also spent quite a bit of effort on defensive measures. Sometimes, the cycle of move and counter-move had some surprising results.
In the middle of the 1950s, the United States began to get concerned about the ability of their then-current nuclear bombers to reach their targets deep within the Soviet Union. Why they were so concerned is an interesting question, since the aircraft whose survivability they were so concerned about is still flying combat sorties, while most of its intended replacements bleach in the sun at Davis-Monthan ... but I digress. Anyway, planners decided that higher and faster was definitely the way to go. And so, they decided to proceed with plans to build a bomber capable of flying at altitudes of over 70,000 feet, and at speeds of up to Mach 3. And so, the XB-70 project was born.
Born, but never brought to maturity. By 1959, it was apparent to the Air Force that the B-70 as designed would be vulnerable to Soviet anti-aircraft missiles. It was downgraded to a research and development project studying high-speed flight.
Not that everyone believed that it was being downgraded, mind you. The XB-70 and the SR-71 both represented an unprecedented ability to penetrate Soviet airspace, which was a major cause for concern. Therefore, there was a very sudden need for an interceptor capable of meeting these possible intruders. This would prove to be a very tall order, indeed. One that was just barely possible.
Building an aircraft capable of cruising at Mach 3 at high altitude is one kind of technical challenge. But to build an interceptor, you don't need to meet that kind of sustained performance, you only have to get close enough, and that only long enough to get a couple of missiles off. So, a plan began to come together...
First, get a couple of engines. Really BIG engines. The biggest and most powerful that can be built. Then, because the airplane would have to deal with a lot of heat, build the airframe out of nickel steel. It'll be heavy as hell, but you've got two whacking huge engines, so who cares? And put an enormous radar in the front, so you can spot the intruder far enough away to tell your missiles to sic 'em. This was more or less how the MiG-25 Foxbat came about.
The best word to describe this airplane is enormous. Its simple, spare lines howl pure power. It was built to go in a straight line very fast, and it does that quite well. It doesn't turn worth a damn. And if you do get it up to Mach 3, you won't ever be able to use those particular engines again. But the engines will last just long enough to drag down a high, fast intruder, or to overfly a contested area for some surveillance pictures.
Now, here's where the story gets a little weird. While the Soviets were building an interceptor to take down a bomber that the USAF decided not to build in the first place, the USAF began to get wind of this hot new super-fighter the Russians were building. The specifications were troubling: two powerful engines, large delta wings, and a powerful radar. Clearly, the Soviets were building an air superiority fighter, one that would outmatch anything in the American inventory. So, the USAF put out an RFP for a fighter that could beat this new menace. And so, McDonnell Douglas responded with what would become the F-15.
For years, analysts debated what would happen if these two behemoths ever went head-to-head. In 1991, they finally found out. American F-15s squared off against Iraqi MiG-25s ... and it wasn't a particularly close fight. The MiG was built to kill bombers, not fighters, and the results showed it. The pure interceptor is an idea whose time has been and gone. The only airplane that can stand up to something built to kill fighters, is another airplane built to kill fighters.
Still, this is one magnificent beast. How big are the engines, you ask? Check out the guy sitting on the nozzle lip. He's not a dwarf.
And dear God, it's a loud 'un. It'll shake your fillings loose, if you get close enough.
There are still a few two-seaters kept in flying trim, to take a few paying customers up to the edge of space.
The older I get, the more I realize that while there's beauty in sophistication, there's also a beauty and an elegance in simplicity. And the Foxbat is a very straightforward, uncomplicated thing. They sure don't make them like that anymore.
Friday, June 22, 2012
It Ain't Easy Being Green
An interesting bit of good news this week: the U.S. has cut its greenhouse gas output. While part of this is due to the lackluster economy, and part is due to a turn to greater efficiency and renewable power, much is due to greater use of natural gas. While this is an improvement, it still adds CO2 to the atmosphere. There's a reckoning that simply must be made, eventually ... but do not delude yourselves that it will be an easy one.
The reasons why we need to cut our reliance on fossil fuels are many. The brown haze that hangs over most of our cities is one. The foreign entanglements that result from guaranteeing our access to petroleum is another. Still another is that we really don't know where this particular road ends. We're running an open-ended experiment on the effects of elevated CO2 concentrations, and that's probably not a great idea.
But we still need to face the fact that reversing our reliance on fossil fuels will not be easy. Let's look at a summary of our energy use from 2009, courtesy of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:
That's a pretty big, pretty dense picture. But there's a lot of useful data here. Let's take a detailed look at where our energy comes from: (Note: Quad = Quadrillion BTU)
Total Energy, Non-Carbon Sources: 12.21 Quads
Total Electrical Energy Input: 38.19 Quads
Total Non-Electrical Input, Carbon Sources: 138.57 Quads
The interesting thing to note here is that we already realize almost a third of our electrical power from non-carbon sources. But if we were to totally go green electrically, we'd have to treble that capacity just to match our current power generation capability. That's a whole lot of generators. But it actually gets worse than that. Much worse. You see, to totally get off of carbon, we'd have to go to an all-electric energy economy. Which means that, every watt of energy we use, no matter where or how, would have to be delivered to the consumer over the power lines. And that's a problem.
A lot of energy gets eaten up between the generator and the consumer. Joule heating is a harsh taskmaster, and there's just no way to get around that. When you push electrical power down a line, you heat it up, and you cannot recover that waste heat. Basically, for every watt that's useful for the consumer, we need to drum up 3.16 watts at the generator. Which means that if we electrify the segments of the energy economy that currently aren't electric, we have to generate 3.16 times that power to effect that replacement.
That comes to (138.57 x 3.16), or 437.88 Quads. This brings the total energy budget up to 476.07 Quads, or nearly twelve and a half times as much power as we generated in 2009. Or, in terms of our then-current non-carbon energy sources, thirty-nine times our 2009 capacity.
OK, that's the bad news. Now for the good news: there is a clear road out of this mess. Ingenuity got us into this fix, and ingenuity can get us back out.
For one thing, with every year we come to a clearer and more complete understanding of the phenomenon of superconductivity. Every few years, the highest critical temperature creeps a little higher. There are three obvious applications. First, electrical motors become much more efficient, allowing for possibly less power demand by the consumer. Second, electrical generators become much more efficient (since generators and motors are mechanically about the same thing), making power plants themselves more efficient. And third ... a superconducting power line makes Joule heating go away. Give us superconducting power lines, and at a stroke we triple our deliverable power capacity. That's huge. Not enough to close the gap by itself, but it's still such a tremendous efficiency multiplier that it's worth just about any amount of research funding to make it happen.
For another, we're getting closer by the year to some pretty awesome large-scale power options.
For years now, I've been keeping an eye on the Polywell project. They're currently in the middle of a long-term U.S. Navy project to develop a potential fusion reactor. We don't know exactly how well they're doing, since the Navy wants them to play their cards close. But they haven't been shut down. This is a pretty strong indication that they're onto something. It's taking longer than I originally expected, but this is looking like a pretty strong contender to provide a lot of clean, abundant power. Especially if the p-B11 reaction pans out. Any controllable fusion reaction would be good news, since hydrogen is something we're unlikely to run out of before the Sun burns out ... but reactions that don't spray out stray neutrons are even better.
There are also some other strong candidates. Dense plasma focus is one, as well as the paths being explored by the National Ignition Facility and the Z-Machine. One of these is bound to work. Maybe even more than one.
So although we're in a fairly sticky situation, energy-wise, I don't think despair is called for. A lot of extremely brilliant people are working very, very hard on these problems. As long as they've got the resources they need to pursue their work, there's good reason to be hopeful.
Remember, we thought our way into this. We can think our way out.
The reasons why we need to cut our reliance on fossil fuels are many. The brown haze that hangs over most of our cities is one. The foreign entanglements that result from guaranteeing our access to petroleum is another. Still another is that we really don't know where this particular road ends. We're running an open-ended experiment on the effects of elevated CO2 concentrations, and that's probably not a great idea.
But we still need to face the fact that reversing our reliance on fossil fuels will not be easy. Let's look at a summary of our energy use from 2009, courtesy of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:
That's a pretty big, pretty dense picture. But there's a lot of useful data here. Let's take a detailed look at where our energy comes from: (Note: Quad = Quadrillion BTU)
Total Energy, Non-Carbon Sources: 12.21 Quads
Total Electrical Energy Input: 38.19 Quads
Total Non-Electrical Input, Carbon Sources: 138.57 Quads
The interesting thing to note here is that we already realize almost a third of our electrical power from non-carbon sources. But if we were to totally go green electrically, we'd have to treble that capacity just to match our current power generation capability. That's a whole lot of generators. But it actually gets worse than that. Much worse. You see, to totally get off of carbon, we'd have to go to an all-electric energy economy. Which means that, every watt of energy we use, no matter where or how, would have to be delivered to the consumer over the power lines. And that's a problem.
A lot of energy gets eaten up between the generator and the consumer. Joule heating is a harsh taskmaster, and there's just no way to get around that. When you push electrical power down a line, you heat it up, and you cannot recover that waste heat. Basically, for every watt that's useful for the consumer, we need to drum up 3.16 watts at the generator. Which means that if we electrify the segments of the energy economy that currently aren't electric, we have to generate 3.16 times that power to effect that replacement.
That comes to (138.57 x 3.16), or 437.88 Quads. This brings the total energy budget up to 476.07 Quads, or nearly twelve and a half times as much power as we generated in 2009. Or, in terms of our then-current non-carbon energy sources, thirty-nine times our 2009 capacity.
OK, that's the bad news. Now for the good news: there is a clear road out of this mess. Ingenuity got us into this fix, and ingenuity can get us back out.
For one thing, with every year we come to a clearer and more complete understanding of the phenomenon of superconductivity. Every few years, the highest critical temperature creeps a little higher. There are three obvious applications. First, electrical motors become much more efficient, allowing for possibly less power demand by the consumer. Second, electrical generators become much more efficient (since generators and motors are mechanically about the same thing), making power plants themselves more efficient. And third ... a superconducting power line makes Joule heating go away. Give us superconducting power lines, and at a stroke we triple our deliverable power capacity. That's huge. Not enough to close the gap by itself, but it's still such a tremendous efficiency multiplier that it's worth just about any amount of research funding to make it happen.
For another, we're getting closer by the year to some pretty awesome large-scale power options.
For years now, I've been keeping an eye on the Polywell project. They're currently in the middle of a long-term U.S. Navy project to develop a potential fusion reactor. We don't know exactly how well they're doing, since the Navy wants them to play their cards close. But they haven't been shut down. This is a pretty strong indication that they're onto something. It's taking longer than I originally expected, but this is looking like a pretty strong contender to provide a lot of clean, abundant power. Especially if the p-B11 reaction pans out. Any controllable fusion reaction would be good news, since hydrogen is something we're unlikely to run out of before the Sun burns out ... but reactions that don't spray out stray neutrons are even better.
There are also some other strong candidates. Dense plasma focus is one, as well as the paths being explored by the National Ignition Facility and the Z-Machine. One of these is bound to work. Maybe even more than one.
So although we're in a fairly sticky situation, energy-wise, I don't think despair is called for. A lot of extremely brilliant people are working very, very hard on these problems. As long as they've got the resources they need to pursue their work, there's good reason to be hopeful.
Remember, we thought our way into this. We can think our way out.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Election 2012: RNC Minus 78 Days And Counting
Theoretically, the primary season isn't over until the respective parties have had their conventions and officially chosen their candidates. It's a nice theory. The problem with that theory is that it hasn't worked that way since 1968. The Democratic National Convention of 1968 was a goat-rope of such epic proportions that both parties have since reworked their primary processes that everyone knows who the nominee will be with months to spare before the convention gets underway. We've had ten primary contest seasons since then, and not one has yielded anything like a surprise. The closest we came was in 1976, when Team Reagan tried to push a rules change through the week before the convention. It's 78 days until the RNC opens for business, and 85 days until the Democrats bang the opening gavel in Charlotte, North Carolina. But the issue they're ostensibly meeting to decide has already been decided. There are only two other interesting questions in play: first, who will the respective VP nominees be; and second, what will the details of the party platforms look like?
The first bears more weight than the second. That's partly because the parties do a decent job of describing themselves, and therefore, the party platform shouldn't contain any surprises. And that's also because a nominee's VP pick is a huge "tell" as to how their decision-making process goes. All eyes are on Mitt Romney for this, since we all know who Obama's VP nominee will be.
I'm not going to engage in any speculation on what that choice will be. I don't know the man well enough. But I'm telling you, it's important. Everything up to this point has been smoke and mirrors. This is the first real, Presidential decision the man will make. It will give us a template of how he will make every other decision. Not until then will we really know what Mitt Romney is made of.
What I will speculate on is who will win in November. As usual, my go-to information sources are Intrade, Nate Silver, and Pollster. All three deal with the same basic kinds of information, but each presents it in a slightly different way. FiveThirtyEight and Pollster both deal with poll aggregation. But the key difference is that Nate Silver performs a kind of Monte Carlo analysis on the data, teasing probabilities out of the polls. But Pollster has a breakdown of Strong-Lean-Tossup states that I like. Intrade is more or less a result of bouncing that data off the general public, and lets us watch where people are putting their money. People might lie to a pollster, but they won't lie to their bookie.
And so, from Intrade:
Barack Obama (D) 53.5% ( -7.3% )
Mitt Romney (R) 43.1% ( +5.1% )
And from FiveThirtyEight:
Barack Obama (D) 291.8 EV, 62.8%
Mitt Romney (R) 246.2 EV, 37.2 %
And, lastly, from Pollster:
Strong D: 225
Lean D: 45
Tossup: 77
Lean R: 21
Strong R: 170
General Impression: So far, Obama enjoys a slight advantage, an advantage that is eroding slightly due to economic issues. That's what I see from the Intrade results, that have gone from 3-2 odds in favor of re-election to 5-4 odds in favor. The polls don't reflect this yet. But if things continue on this path, they might. For the partisans on either side, the economic issues don't matter. They'll show up for their side in November either way. But for the handful of voters in the middle, the economy is key. That's the handful that will decide the toss-up states, and may flip some of the weaker states from one column to another. The story that each campaign must sell to these undecided voters, the thing that they must convince them of, is that they will be better able to enact policies that will favor economic growth and more jobs.
What Obama Must Do: First, he has to show, clearly show, what he's done to arrest the economic nose-dive that was underway in late 2008 and early 2009. But he has to do that without looking like he's still blaming Bush for the current state of the economy. Whether that's true or not is beside the point. It's been four years, and people tire of that explanation. The second thing he has to do is highlight the dark side of Romney's business expertise. He's done that, albeit with a bit of a heavy hand. The third thing he has to do is shine a big, bright spotlight on Congress' inaction, paying special attention to the Republicans in the House and Senate that keep anything useful from being done. Running against the do-nothing Congress might even prove more effective than running against Romney.
What Romney Must Do: Simply this: hang the current economic pain around Obama's neck. Just that. Against that, tout his executive expertise in both the public and private sectors. It'll require a bit of fancy dancing around some of the things Bain Capital has done, and also a bit of fancy dancing around the fact that his official portrait as Governor has him holding a copy of the dreaded Health Care Reform he'd passed. But he's already done that dance in the primary. He might be able to do it again this fall. Or not, since Obama's bound to say this at least once during the debates: "Hey, I got the idea from that guy."
And The Winner Is... I'd still take 3-2 odds on Obama winning the general election. No elaborations above and beyond that -- we need to see what the private sector does over the summer, and what the economic picture is on or around Labor Day. Barring an implosion, 3-2 still seems like a good bet.
The first bears more weight than the second. That's partly because the parties do a decent job of describing themselves, and therefore, the party platform shouldn't contain any surprises. And that's also because a nominee's VP pick is a huge "tell" as to how their decision-making process goes. All eyes are on Mitt Romney for this, since we all know who Obama's VP nominee will be.
I'm not going to engage in any speculation on what that choice will be. I don't know the man well enough. But I'm telling you, it's important. Everything up to this point has been smoke and mirrors. This is the first real, Presidential decision the man will make. It will give us a template of how he will make every other decision. Not until then will we really know what Mitt Romney is made of.
What I will speculate on is who will win in November. As usual, my go-to information sources are Intrade, Nate Silver, and Pollster. All three deal with the same basic kinds of information, but each presents it in a slightly different way. FiveThirtyEight and Pollster both deal with poll aggregation. But the key difference is that Nate Silver performs a kind of Monte Carlo analysis on the data, teasing probabilities out of the polls. But Pollster has a breakdown of Strong-Lean-Tossup states that I like. Intrade is more or less a result of bouncing that data off the general public, and lets us watch where people are putting their money. People might lie to a pollster, but they won't lie to their bookie.
And so, from Intrade:
Barack Obama (D) 53.5% ( -7.3% )
Mitt Romney (R) 43.1% ( +5.1% )
And from FiveThirtyEight:
Barack Obama (D) 291.8 EV, 62.8%
Mitt Romney (R) 246.2 EV, 37.2 %
And, lastly, from Pollster:
Strong D: 225
Lean D: 45
Tossup: 77
Lean R: 21
Strong R: 170
General Impression: So far, Obama enjoys a slight advantage, an advantage that is eroding slightly due to economic issues. That's what I see from the Intrade results, that have gone from 3-2 odds in favor of re-election to 5-4 odds in favor. The polls don't reflect this yet. But if things continue on this path, they might. For the partisans on either side, the economic issues don't matter. They'll show up for their side in November either way. But for the handful of voters in the middle, the economy is key. That's the handful that will decide the toss-up states, and may flip some of the weaker states from one column to another. The story that each campaign must sell to these undecided voters, the thing that they must convince them of, is that they will be better able to enact policies that will favor economic growth and more jobs.
What Obama Must Do: First, he has to show, clearly show, what he's done to arrest the economic nose-dive that was underway in late 2008 and early 2009. But he has to do that without looking like he's still blaming Bush for the current state of the economy. Whether that's true or not is beside the point. It's been four years, and people tire of that explanation. The second thing he has to do is highlight the dark side of Romney's business expertise. He's done that, albeit with a bit of a heavy hand. The third thing he has to do is shine a big, bright spotlight on Congress' inaction, paying special attention to the Republicans in the House and Senate that keep anything useful from being done. Running against the do-nothing Congress might even prove more effective than running against Romney.
What Romney Must Do: Simply this: hang the current economic pain around Obama's neck. Just that. Against that, tout his executive expertise in both the public and private sectors. It'll require a bit of fancy dancing around some of the things Bain Capital has done, and also a bit of fancy dancing around the fact that his official portrait as Governor has him holding a copy of the dreaded Health Care Reform he'd passed. But he's already done that dance in the primary. He might be able to do it again this fall. Or not, since Obama's bound to say this at least once during the debates: "Hey, I got the idea from that guy."
And The Winner Is... I'd still take 3-2 odds on Obama winning the general election. No elaborations above and beyond that -- we need to see what the private sector does over the summer, and what the economic picture is on or around Labor Day. Barring an implosion, 3-2 still seems like a good bet.
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