Mr. Fusion?

There are people who lament the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot run for President. I would offer up the point that, possibly, he's doing a sufficiently good job as Governor of California that he shouldn't leave that job any time real soon. Case in point: According to this piece at Next Energy News, Governor Schwarzenegger is set to pony up some cash to Robert Bussard's fusion energy outfit. (Hat Tip: Instapundit)

Ladies and gentlemen, this could be huge. Beyond huge. In fact, this may well be the most important thing to happen yet this year.

One of our most significant problems today is the fact that our energy economy depends upon materials that are relatively rare: oil, coal, and other fossil fuels. Even uranium is not especially plentiful. What we really want to do is break away from that, and find an energy source that is more plentiful.

The obvious choice is fusion, but this carries some problems with it. The most easily sustained fusion reactions involve deuterium and tritium, and D-T reactions spit out stray neutrons. Neutrons are not wanted, not even a little bit. For one, being neutral particles, it's damn hard to extract energy from a hot neutron. For another, stray neutrons tend to make things around them radioactive. But fortunately for us, that's not the only fusion reaction available.

The one that Bussard has been working with lately involves the fusion reaction bewteen a proton and Boron-11. Boron-11 is the most abundant isotope of Boron, and can be found in abundance in the mineral borax. It's sufficiently common that it's often used in detergents. And best of all, the proton/Boron-11 fusion reaction releases no stray neutrons. The proton fuses with the Boron-11 nucleus to form Carbon-12, which decays to Beryllium-8 and Helium-4. The Beryllium-8 nucleus, in fairly short order, decays to two Helium-4 nuclei. So you start the reaction with one proton and one Boron-11, and end up with three Helium-4 nuclei, and energy.

This could be revolutionary. This could change everything.

Applications abound beyond stationary plants to power cities and industry. Units can be built small enough to power ships, both of the ocean-going variety and the kind for going into orbit. A rocket based on this technology will be both vastly powerful and very efficient, something current rocket technology cannot achieve.

More information on Bussard's work can be found at Wikipedia. I've been following this topic for quite some time, and this article seems pretty accurate.

Now, there's many a slip 'tween the crouch and leap, and results will be some years in the making. But keep your fingers crossed that this actually takes off and starts running. The sooner we get started on this, the sooner we can tell those primitive cretins in the Middle East to go drink their damn oil.

A worthy goal, don't you think?

Fatum Iustum Stultorum

Holy Groin-Stomp, Batman!

Alexandre Vinokourov has been bounced from the Tour de France, for injecting himself with extra red blood cells to boost his sagging performance. More coverage can be found here, if you care to look.

You know, this just proves the old adage: Some men can learn by reading about others' mistakes, and some can learn by hearing about them, but there are a few who just have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

Team Astana is probably toast after this, and for their epitaph I nominate this post's title: Righteous is the destiny of fools. Because the guy who told Vinokourov that this stunt was a good idea is a true paragon of drooling idiocy, and anyone taking his advice isn't far behind.

It boggles the mind. But Vino, after suffering two crashes and falling far behind in the general classification, was a desperate, desperate man. Desperate men take desperate measures. Even when they don't make a whole lot of sense to those of us standing on the outside.

Granted, we are talking about the same lab whose clown-tastic methodology I spoke about earlier. But this test is sufficiently idiot-proof that even LNDD couldn't screw it up. You mix in a little dye with the blood sample, you run it past a laser, and if the colors change, presto! You've found evidence of blood-diddling. A trained monkey could probably run this test.

So: If this doping technique is so damn easy to spot, why does anyone bother using it? Beats me. But people do stupid things all the time. Hundreds of times daily, poor dumb bastards lose their shirts in Vegas trying to draw to inside straights, for example. And every spring some fool goes on an impromptu boating trip when he tries to drive his truck across a rain-swollen creek. And every last one of them thinks that they're the clever one who'll beat the odds.

Right. Sure they are.

Vino gambled and lost, and in the process has dug a nice smoking hole for his career. And like the leader of a flight demonstration team who augers in, he's liable to take his team with him. And you know what? I really can't say that I feel for them.

There's no way this is the result of lab incompetence. This is something that Vinokourov and Astana have brought upon themselves, and they only have themselves to blame.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Sony: The Punchy MacAngry School of Customer Dis-Service

Apparently, Megan McArdle has had her Sony VAIO laptop die and go to Customer Service hell. They claim that they're going to fix it, but they're making it inordinately difficult to do so.

Words to read and heed, if you're in the market for a new computer. There's a certain manufacturer whose name starts with "S" that you'd be well advised to steer clear of.

Do yourself a favor. If you need a new PC, you can do much, much worse than to get a Dell.

Mind you, there are still days when I want my Mac back. But I haven't had a moment's trouble out of this Dell desktop in almost two years. And when we bought our laptop through Dell and started having trouble with the keyboard, they sent a tech around to replace it. No charge. Took me maybe ten minutes to arrange the house call through their service department, and haven't had a moment's trouble out of the laptop since, either.

For these reasons, Dell has earned the TTS Seal of Approval.

Yeah, I know, that and a buck might buy them some coffee. I still say they're a great company to do business with.

Orion: Have You Called Jenny Yet?

My suspicions have been confirmed, sort of, by a post over at Transterrestrial Musings. The new Orion spacecraft is having some [ahem] girth issues. Now, to a degree, this is a chicken-and-egg problem: is Orion too damn heavy, or is the Ares I booster too puny? Most experienced spacecraft engineers will tell you it's the former. There are a number of good reasons for that.

As I said earlier, I was rather less than astonished to see that the estimated mass of the Orion spacecraft grow during the various iterations of the design process. There hasn't been a flying vehicle yet from the Wright Flyer on up that hasn't experienced weight creep. It just happens. You think you've hit all the angles, and toted up everything you're going to put on the vehicle. But every time you turn the crank to re-compute the gross weight, more mass appears almost as if by magic. Because there's always something you didn't consider. There's always a bracket that doesn't quite fit, and needs re-design. Always, re-design means that the part in question gets heavier.

No, that's not what's got people talking. Some weight creep is expected. What's causing the uproar is the amount of weight creep. And more to the point, the amount of weight creep relative to where we are in the design process.

What I find somewhat unnerving is the number of changes being made, as suggested by this document. They're fiddling with a whole bunch of things that really ought to have been nailed down tight already. I worry rather less about the specifics of the trade-offs than I do about the fact that they're being made NOW, not two years ago. This ain't good. But on the other hand, it's been thirty years since we last designed a manned spacecraft. To an extent, we're having to re-learn the discipline. The guys what did it last time are retired, dead, or both.

Doing it for real isn't the same as doing it on paper.

That said, we're just going to have to face facts, and accept that the schedule is going to slip to the right as they iron out these problems. They're going to have to force Orion onto a strict diet, and find a way to shed some unsightly pounds. And as I said earlier, there are plenty of good reasons they're going that route, rather than either beefing up the Ares I booster or upgrading to a more powerful model.

Every extra pound at the top of the stack has many, many unwanted effects. You have to burn that much more fuel to get it there. The extra fuel translates into bigger fuel tanks, more structure, more weight, and so on. It's easy to get into such a vicious spiral that you no longer have enough power to leave the ground at all, much less reach orbit. Plus, every pound you shave off of Orion is an extra pound of payload that can go to the Moon lander. More equipment, more sample return capacity, more flexibility on that end of the mission. These savings can also have unexpected benefits. The Apollo spacecraft had similar weight problems, and a design decision was made to shift some of the mass budget over to the lunar lander. The extra fuel and consumables ended up saving the lives of the Apollo 13 crew, since the upgraded LEM now had the capability to function as a lifeboat.

So, bearing all that in mind, my mood is slightly annoyed, but not truly alarmed. These are some pretty sharp folks. They might have to go through a few more iterations to get it just right, but they'll get the job done.

Fear and Loathing at Pepperdine

Meanwhile, back at the Batcave, we still don't know for sure who won last year's Tour.

That's because the title is in limbo, pending the decision of the arbitration panel that heard the Landis case in early May, at Pepperdine University in California.

They have about two months, give or take, to render a decision. I don't envy them their job. This decision could swing either way, and truthfully, you could defend their decision either way. It's not that I don't care, although I don't have much emotional investment one way or the other. The evidence is sufficiently convoluted that it's damn hard to figure out what's what.

The process goes something like this: At the outset, the accused enjoys a presumption of innocence. That is, until the USADA presents evidence of cheating from an internationally-certified laboratory. Then, the burden of proof shifts to the defense, who has to prove somehow or other that the results are tainted. If they can do that, the burden shifs back to the accusers, who then have to prove the validity of their results.

Grounds for doubt were shown, I think, in two key areas: chain of custody, and laboratory procedures.

I worked part of my way through college as a credit clerk, processing credit applications for a national chain of jewelry stores. We maintained an airtight custody chain for those applications. When we got one in over the fax, it was timestamped and logged. When an operator got it, he/she noted the time they began to work on it. When a supervisor approved or declined the application, the time was also noted. You had a cradle-to-grave hand-to-hand chain, and you could tell by looking exactly who had it at which time, and what they were doing with it. Where I work now, we also deal with sensitive information. These items also have a cradle-to-grave custody chain. By glance, you can tell from the log exactly where it was and who was responsible for it, 24/7/365, no questions about it.

The French lab has an appallingly lax chain of custody. There were hours -- hours -- when the only evidence you could present about the location and custody of a sample was the tech's say-so. Unacceptable. Completely unacceptable.

Second, laboratory procedure. Adherence to process is vital. For me, at my job, our processes are the key to repeatable success. We know what works, we know the steps to take to achieve success at every step in the development process. Deviation from the process in not acceptable, without project-specific tailoring approved in writing. Execute to plan, and routine success is very likely.

The French idea of process adherence is also appallingly lax. They didn't even have the freaking manual for the machine they were using to run the tests! How in the name of God can you testify to the results, when you can't even know for sure that you're using the machine right? Basically, every time they bring a new tech in, they're playing "telephone". You remember that old campfire game, where one guy thinks of a sentence, and whispers it to the guy on his right. The process is repeated, until you work your way around the campfire. What usually happens is that the original sentence mutates beyond recognition, and everyone has a good laugh. Except that this is scarcely a laughing matter.

So: I can completely understand if they decide to throw the results out as invalid. This lab has some serious issues that need to be addressed before they can regain any shadow of credibility. It's particularly telling that the French Open elected to have their compliance samples sent to a lab in Montreal, rather than use the lab in Paris.

But on the other hand...

Cheating is endemic in cycling. Let's look at the record:

Bjarne Riis, Jan Ullrich, Marco Pantani, and Floyd Landis have all either been implicated in, or have outright admitted to cheating. Even Lance Armstrong, who has never failed any test, remains under suspicion in some circles. These five men comprise every winner of the Tour de France since 1996. As the podium goes, so goes the rest of the peloton, if they desire to be competitive. It's open knowledge among cycling fans that just about everyone does it.

If that's to change, some big names have to go down.

To an extent, that's happening. Jan Ullrich was forced into retirement. Ivan Basso, a favorite for this year's Tour, admitted his role in Operacion Puerto, and has drawn a two-year ban. Bjarne Riis admitted to doping in the 1996 Tour, and is giving back his jersey.

This is a good start.

So, while there's enough reson to doubt the lab results that I won't be very upset if Floyd wins vindication, I will have no sympathy for him whatsoever if the panel rules against him. If he cheated and got caught, he deserves to pay for his poor judgement.

And maybe, just maybe, we can look forward to a good, clean race this year.

They start rolling again next Saturday, July 7, in London. It's anyone's race again this year, and I'll be watching to see how it turns out on the road.

May the best man win!

Doldrums

Generally speaking, I try not to skip whole months. I blame two things. One, World of Warcraft has eaten into my blogging time, for which I make no apology. Two, not much has caught my interest of late.

It's been a slow summer. You'll notice I've pretty much stopped writing about Iraq. That's because (1) all the important decisions have already been made, and (2) I don't much care to beat a dead horse. My opinions haven't changed much: Saddam had to go, but the occupation has been mishandled with an ineptitude that would shame the Italian General Staff. Not mishandled by our soldiers, mind you, they've performed with bravery and tenacity, largely in the finest traditions of the service. Our civilian leadership, on the other hand, has let them down terribly. This is unlikely to change, as the Bush Administration limps through its last two years like a gut-shot mule. So it goes.

Another interest of mine is space exploration, and while quite a lot has been going on, it hasn't lent itself to much writing. Supposedly, the Ares I booster is up for a design review, but I haven't heard how that went. Rumor has it that it's underpowered, and can't lift the Orion spacecraft to orbit. Color me shocked, he said sarcastically; vehicles always gain weight during the design process. Design is an iterative process, and they'll arrive at a workable solution eventually. I'll keep an eye on it, and when something interesting happens, I'll chime in.

Politics is one of my favorite indoor sports, but it's too damn early to start bloviating about the next election. Wake me after football season.

But buck up: It's July, which means that the world's cycling aficionados are converging on the land of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. The Tour de France is always good for some entertainment. More about that in future posts.

It's a good life. But I don't always feel motivated to write about it...

Better Living Through Chemistry

Oh. My. God.

It all starts sanely enough. Floyd Landis finally gets his day in court, and the case begins to unfold before an arbitration panel. The question at hand is a very technical one, and no one in the media is paying close attention to the arguments, with the exception of a handful of obsessives. [raising hand] I admit to some curiosity. If it can be proved that the labs were grossly negligent, then the positive test result is called into question. The first three and a half days of testimony are fairly routine. Dull as dust, but going pretty well for Landis and company. They make a few salient points. LNDD's chain of custody is pretty shoddy. They have a fairly relaxed understanding of blind testing, and when it comes to the press they leak like a sieve. Does any of this seriously compromise the test results? That's for the arbitrators to decide. Be that as it may, things were looking pretty good for Team Landis.

But then, things gurgled noisily down the toilet when Greg LeMond took the stand.

Greg LeMond, the first American to win the Tour de France, and one of only eight riders to win it three times or more. His reputation has suffered of late because of numerous criticisms he's laid against Lance Armstrong. Nevertheless, he knows wherefrom he speaks, and he cannot be dismissed out of hand.

What he actually had to say was not especially interesting, in a sense, since LeMond claimed months and months ago that Landis had implicitly admitted doping in a private phone call. This much is old news, old enough that I'd forgotten it. The bombshell was that, the night before, Landis' business manager had left LeMond a voice mail, obviously intended to intimidate LeMond. I shan't go into the sordid details of that message, they're easy enough to find if you're interested. But the implications are shocking. And it's made me think.

This is a huge unforced error for Landis' team. Greg LeMond is a cyclist, not a scientist, and can not possibly have anything to say relevant to laboratory testing protocols and procedures. So why bother contacting him at all? Especially when your case seems to be going well so far? Mind you, the bombshell does bugger-all to further USADA's case. Yes, it was a reprehensible and dishonorable thing to have done. Yes, it was a felony under California law.Yes, it proves conclusively that Landis' manager is dumber than a bag of hammers. Yes, LeMond's testimony might be thrown out anyway as being irrelevant to the case. But...

It makes me think back to that day in July, and look more critically at what took place.

Testosterone has a fairly short half-life within the body. The kidneys process out any excess fairly rapidly, generally in a few hours. This short half-life is what cheaters rely on. If you only use a little bit, and drink plenty of water, the evidence is left on a roadside somewhere. And, testosterone use actually does have some short-term benefits: it increases aggressiveness, and energy.

Looking back, what I remember seeing was a man on fire, face lined with rage, drinking a seemingly endless supply of water. "Hydrating like King Neptune" was a phrase I remember a commentator using that day.

Well, hell. The circumstantial evidence starts to look pretty bad at this point, doesn't it?

Which means exactly squat, as far as the hearing goes. The hearing isn't about the circumstantial aspect, it's about the physical evidence, and the test results. But now, even if he wins the hearing, Landis' public relations case has taken a hit at the waterline.

Because, seeing what I've seen and knowing what I know, it's awfully hard for me to come to any other conclusion but that he's guilty as charged.

Brave New World?

Every so often, I get to wondering about the future, and how things will be. My overall impression is that while things are never going to be quite as nice as some futurists would have you believe, neither will they be quite as bad as the doom-criers say. We'll muddle along, much as we always have. Well, maybe...

Because, every so often, something happens that forever changes what follows.

For example, the last hundred years changed two fundamental facts about the human condition. For most of our history, no one ever moved faster than a horse could gallop. And for most of our history, doctors were pretty much confined to treating the symptoms of disease. In the last hundred years that has changed. Now, at least in the industrialized world, we have unprecedented mobility: cars, planes, trains, you name it. Also, many diseases can be treated quite effectively with modern medicines. Doctors can fight back against disease now, and win more than they lose, these days.

This has changed us in ways we don't often think about. Our cities look vastly different, now. They're sprawling and decentralized. It's easy to tell a city that grew up before the automobile. It's got a well-defined city center, and people still live there. It's got a great subway system. And almost no one drives. As much as people bemoan urban sprawl, that bell isn't likely to be un-rung. People like living in the suburbs, and like the convenience of driving, for the most part.

Anyway, what will the next hundred years bring? Charles Sheffield is a science fiction author, which means he speculates on the future for a living. He's got some interesting conjectures. Money quote:

Meet your descendants. They don't know what it's like to be involuntarily lost, don't understand what we mean by the word "privacy", and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us.

He's extrapolating the convergence of two technologies here: the ubiquity of GPS technology, combined with the ubiquity of mass storage. The social changes this will bring about are quite astonishing, when you sit down to think about them. Further, Andrew Sullivan linked to a rather interesting line of research being pursued at a university in Germany. Apparently, your brain is very nimble when it comes to interpreting new sources of sensory data. You can learn to "see" by touch-sense input on your back, even on your tongue. Wild ... And there's more, like the compass belt Andrew mentions in the snip that he listed. If you always know which way is north, the world begins to look different to you.

As an engineer, I tend to see tools as the means by which we shape our environment. I tend to think about shaping tools to solve a particular problem at hand. But to what extent do our tools shape us? And is this something we should start worrying about?

Or should we just embrace it?

And Then There Were Two

Sad news today: Wally Schirra is dead of a heart attack today, age 84.

Only two of our original seven Mercury astronauts are left alive: John Glenn, 86, and Scott Carpenter, 82. Wouldn't it be somewhat ironic if Glenn, the oldest by far of the original seven, would also be the longest-lived?

Grissom was the first to go, in his prime, at the relatively young age of 41. He was only 33 when selected. Could anyone even qualify today, at age 33? It was a different world, then, and many of the most qualified test pilots either didn't meet NASA's requirements (Yeager) or just didn't want the job (Crossfield). Grissom was also the only one of the seven so far not to die of natural causes.

Deke Slayton was next, in 1993, of a brain tumor. Then Alan Shepard died in 1998 of leukemia. Gordo Cooper, one of the more colorful and interesting characters in the Mercury story, died of Parkinson's in 2004. And now, Wally.

Which is inevitable, of course. Time catches up to everyone, eventually. But it's still sad, and still diminishes us, when living minds who witnessed such great things are no longer with us. But we who are left behind can remember, and teach our children to remember.

Because hereoes never really die, as long as their stories are freshly re-told.

What Can We Do?

If there is one perfectly predictable result from the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, it's that lessons would be learned almost immediately, and that they would be the wrong lessons. Dr. Pournelle wrote much the same after the Columbine shootings, and not much has changed in our body politic since then.

Predictable response number one: calls for more gun control.

And this would have helped ... how? Virginia Tech was already a gun-free zone, and there's already a law against murdering your classmates. Besides, "gun-free zone" derives from the ancient Sanskrit phrase meaning "target-rich environment." A bit of prompt return fire might have cut his spree short, don't you think? But any time is a good time for the usual suspects to take more weapons out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. Feh.

Predictable response number two: super-vigilant crackdown on "suspicious writings."

While this makes sense on the surface, and comes a little closer to the mark, it still doesn't address the root problem ...

Generally speaking, I detest "root problem" arguments. They're a shuck, a dodge. They allow an intellectual to bloviate, pontificate, and otherwise wax eloquent, looking very in-touch and knowledgeable, without any messy necessity to actually try to solve the problem at hand. But at the same time, band-aid solutions are scarcely any kind of solution at all, when we're talking about problems of behavior that have roots that are decades deep. Cracking down on students who turn in works of "creative" writing full of violent fantasies isn't going to help much. The roots of what's going to cause him to snap run deeper than that.

But what can we do about it? Because we all know what the problem is, don't we?

We have a kind of "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" acceptance of bullying in our schools. Boys will be boys, and all that rot. After all, any TV program about high school will show you that there are the cool kids, and then there are the nerds, and of course the nerds have to be ridiculed and humiliated.

If he'd had one real friend, just one, would he have gone off the deep end like that?

Mind you, he might have: sometimes something's just not right with the wet-ware. Wet-ware problems scare people. We don't understand them, and really don't know how to deal with them. Sometimes we can treat them with medication, sometimes not. Sometimes we can identify a physical cause and remedy, sometimes not. Sometimes they just go away, as mysteriously as they came.

But sometimes, monsters are made, not born.

But what can we do? As parents, we can do our best to insist that our children not mistreat their peers. Tell them, and show them by our actions, that making fun of the weird kid is not OK. Encourage them to befriend them instead, and be nice to them. Be the one who makes their lives better, not worse. And for those of us who are teachers, stress the same things with your students. But I don't have to tell you that, do I? You see it every day, and surely know the situation far better than I.

The only real answer here is one of the most difficult things that I know of: loving the unlovable, and becoming instruments of mercy and grace. Love is the only thing that can heal the wounds of bitterness and hatred. As it was written so long ago: "And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love." (1 Corinthians 13:13)