Space workers unite!

I wonder if construction in space will ever become common enough that they will form there own union? This past weekend the crew of the Space Shuttle replaced a gyroscope on the International Space Station and did some construction work in space. They performed a space walk and there is some cool footage on NASA internet TV.

In the meantime, scientists are increasing the scope of NASA's future missions by discovering potentially planet sized objects beyond Pluto in the Solar System. They totally spin the story by saying a "Tenth Planet" has been discovered. How many times can they do that before we stop getting burned? I am not going to get all weak kneed at the possibility that these objects are larger than Pluto and constitute a tenth or eleventh planet, until the study is confirmed. Back when Sedna was discovered, it was explained that the Oort cloud is a big place and that there is likely a whole family of objects with a distribution of sizes, of which Pluto is on the large end, floating out there, waiting to be discovered.

I hope some day we can go out to see them.

What the hell is a skipjack?

This past Saturday we were invited on an afternoon cruise of the Chesapeake Bay near Havre de grace for a friend's 30th birthday. Happy Birthday!

It was a beautiful day. I got to add the Concord Point Lighthouse, (another) oldest continuously operated lighthouse in the United States to my list of lighthouses. We actually set sail and didn't just cruise around on the motor. My gung-ho fiance helped to hoist the mainsail while the lazy party goers (my disinterested self included) watched.

The funniest part of the day was getting there. The directions were a little inconclusive and I was driving and looking for a lighthouse instead of paying attention to the task at hand. I must always listen to the navigator. We made it to the dock and the final advice, as if to clear things up, is to look for the skipjack, it is the only skipjack in the harbor, and one of the last working oyster dredger skipjacks.

Excuse me? What the hell is a skipjack? How does that instruction get me any closer to the destination? We found a sign and looked for people to complete the mission. Clever fiance that I have did finally ask Cap'n Bill what a skipjack was and we learned a dark secret - the boat was actually a bateau! Scandalous. Conveniently, that term also means nothing to me. I imagine, for those boat geeks really interested in this sort of thing, that I have made a horrible faux pas at greatly belittling a controversy which has existed for years and on which civilization depends.

What is a skipjack or a bateau you ask. Who cares. We had a nice sail on a sailboat, and I wouldn't eat oysters from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay anyway. (Authors disclaimer: I do not like oysters.)

Space Shuttle Mission Watch 2

We finally launched the Space Shuttle again, although there is a lot of tension for this mission because it is a test of the many changes that were made to ensure the safety of the crew and success of future missions. Those tests brought us the cool video of the Space Shuttle somersault to let the space station crew photograph tile on the shuttle underside.

Just when the Shuttle was docking with the International Space Station and that success was achieved, NASA cancels all future flights until the issue with the foam falling from the fuel tank and potentially damaging the shuttle can be addressed. Now there is cautious hope that another Shuttle mission could occur this year.

I reiterate my wish for a cheap, easy, safe way to get to Space. It is not much of a space age if all we send are robots and satellites. Those things are useful, but a human presence is the way to move forward with space industry and robots can only explore so much. If people were on Mars right now we could just look and see if it is water or there is life instead of all of this inference.

Googlize your blog title - or anything

Everybody is doing it so I though I would hop on the bandwagon. I went to a page to Googlize my blog title.

Isn't it lovely. Don't bother searching for anything from The Honest Hypocrite on Google, though. I am nowhere to be found. Searching for The Honest Hypocrite on Yahoo has me as the second link. I am sure that those of you out there that are knowledgeable of these things can tell me why. I suspect that because no one is linking to me that Google won't find me, but that Yahoo has found me because I added the RSS feed to My Yahoo page.

I am not sure if I care. I must because I looked, but it is up to the world to find me interesting to generate the links. I remember taking great pains to search the name before I titled the blog so that there wouldn't be obvious overlap and then later I found www.honesthypocrite.com, oops. He seems really interested in math so he can't be all bad.

Parking Lessons

Slashdot had a good story on someone who collected all of the bad parking at Yahoo's headquarters.

I feel compelled to show this one I had to interact with in my own travels. I parked next to the fancy car anyway. I think the spaces are painted to narrow to begin with but that is no excuse.

I will point out that I am not without sin. But today this park job by the fancy porshe bugged me.

Freakonomics should teach you to form your own conclusions

I may have misled you. I read Freakonomics by economist Steven Levitt and journalist, Stephen Dubner and put it on my sidebar to tell the world about. I liked the book. The authors take an econometric look at some topics that don't normally get addressed by academics and they do it in a style that is readable and enjoyable. They come to some controversial conclusions the most famous of one is that legalizing abortion in the seventies is responsible for the reduction of violent crime in the nineties because children that would have otherwise been unwanted were never born. I don't think you could come up with a more controversial statement than that. It turns out that it might not be true (see Did Legalizing Abortion Cut Crime by Steve Sailer).

What I took away from the book is that you can and should apply econometrics to your hypotheses and be open to the conclusions even if they may be counterintuitive. The knowledge of why a thing is the way it is may allow you to change it or fix it or simply understand it. This is always with the caution that correlation is not causation. I am a critical thinker myself. I find myself unable to stop applying an almost mathematically rigorous approach to problems around me, at least for setting them up, even if I never have the time to follow through, collect the data and solve them. This applies to something as simple as whether I could recover the heat from the drain water in the shower and save energy to something as complicated as allocation of resources in my work or actual Chemical Engineering.

I should have applied this critical thinking to the conclusions of Freakonomics. The difficulty in a popular books like that is that most people don't have the time to check all of the facts, and I don't have the time to collect the data and review the results myself. So Freakonimics gets points for a catchy title, easy reading on a sometimes boring subject, and the great idea of applying econometrics to a wide ranging set of problems, but it gets some negatives for drawing the wrong conclusions from the data and oversimplifying the topic to make it accessible to the reader. Perhaps they themselves they weren't critical enough in their approach. All of these thoughts were brought to mind today by the review of Freakonomics at Stay Free! Daily.

I am a glutton for the econometrics, so if you would like a better, much more staid but rigorous popular book on the subject you can read Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things by Ray C. Fair or go to Fair's wesbite at Yale. Here is the presidential vote equation. As always when I find some good things like this I will pass them on. My own book, if I would ever pick a topic and write one, is years and years away.

All these videogames, and she wants to play Tetris!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have finally taken the plunge and become a poseur gamer. I have been enjoying my X-box but I don't seem to find too much time to play with it because I work for a living and have a life to live, pesky things like that. My fiance warmed up to the idea of the system after she saw how advanced the games have become. "Destroy All Humans" serves as an example. Yet with all of this advanced technology she is truly only happy with Tetris.

I can't stand Tetris so I would rather have someone play it for me. On "Attack of the Show" they highlighted an efforts to combine artificial intelligence and Tetris. You can download the program and have it play Tetris in front of you at an enormously accelerated rate (clearing 160 rows/second for instance). I, for one, would like to be the first to welcome our artificial intelligence Tetris playing overlords.

I figure since I started the programon my computer, I get to claim the score. It went to 8,000,000 before I shut it down. Beat that! Luddite, un-enhanced human Tetris players!

Shuttle is in space once again!

The Space Shuttle had a successful liftoff today. I am really pleased because it certainly looked like we were running out of chances to ever put people into space again on a regular basis. We all know that the Space Shuttle has to go away someday, I just would like there to be a replacement.

It does look like the civilian replacements, such as SpaceShipOne, and the encouragement provided by the X-prize for first manned civilian spaceflight, have more of a chance of being around than any government sponsored activity. Call me a futurist but I really think that going into space is an activity that an advanced civilization should be able to do. I have heard much on the uselessness and usefulness of space. Space exploration is a vanishing small part of the gross product of the planet but could have a spectacular payoff. Putting robots out there is a start, but we should touch these places with out own hands (gloved perhaps) and make them our own.

This Shuttle mission is 12 days. I am officially starting mission watch today. Let's see if the media attention will keep up for that long.

Other Fans of They Might Be Giants are out there!

On the web, someone has already thought of it, already put together a website glorifying it and gathered up a cadre of like minded people to do a better job of it that you can every imagine. Case in point the photos and the wiki below about They Might Be Giants.



I had such a great time at the They Might Be Giants concert on Penn's Landing in Philadelphia on Saturday that I though I would go see if other people had commented on the concert already. A variety of Google searches didn't get me any specific comments but Flickr already had a lot of folks that put up picture from the They Might Be Giants Concert. I can't point us out to you on them because I am close to the stage and not quite in any of the pictures, but we were there. Go see dougward's photos, or Sarcasmo's photos, or I am a Librarian's photos.

For more information than you could ever need, want, or imagine about They Might Be Giants, please use this TMBG wiki. Info on the TMBG concert in Philadelphia is there as well.

Our distopian future? Oh, it won't be that bad.

This weekend I have been reading the Behemoth series by Peter Watts and it has caused me to use the word distopian over and over, much to the annoyance of some (distopian, distopian, distopian). The books are what I would call aggressively distopian. They are set in the near future and more so than in other series many separate bad things go wrong in this particular future to create the distopia. The books do center on a group of "rifters", divers modified to handle the extremes of working in the extreme deep ocean near rift vents. As such the claustrophobia is often palpable in the novels. The author has also included a heady mix of psychosis and chaos brought on by human hubris as well. I can't really say more without giving the plot away but I suggest you read them.



In the serendipity field that seems to permeate my life I have noticed several series on cable about the weird undersea life at the very bottom of the ocean that serves as paractically a main character in Perter Watts' novels. There are things at the bottom like the angler fish which use a phosphorescent light at the end of protrusion from there nose to lure fish into a cavernous maw full of teeth. These fish come from your worst nightmares, good thing they are only a few inches long. Even the Simpsons got in the act last night, where the couch gag was that the family sat on their couch, which turned out to be the very angler fish lure I just mentioned and then they all got gobbled by the fish.

I had found out about the books from Boing Boing a while ago, and there was a mention yesterday that Peter Watts placed the earlier books of the series online (there are four) under a creative commons license. Now you can explore his distopian future without an initial purchase to decide first if you like them.

By the way, maybe it is my normal naive optimism but I don't think that these disptopias will come to pass. More on the many ways the world will end (or has ended) but hasn't in a later post.