And so when people hear that the prices of solar cells are dropping, and they’re made from silicon, it seems that they readily assume that it’s Moore’s Law at work.  Let’s see what Al Gore said a few years ago, as quoted in Vacliv Smil’s book Energy Myths and Realities:
“

[the] price of specialized silicon used to make solar cells was recently as high as $300/kg.  But the newest contracts have prices as low as $50/kg.  You know the same thing happened with computer chips – also made out of silicon.  The price paid for the same performance came down 50% every 18 months – year after year.

”
More or less the same argument was made by Paul Krugman in this New York Times op-ed, in a Scientific American article here, and in Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants.

What’s surprising is that you have extremely well-qualified people making similar proclamations, though without the fallacious reasoning.  Steven Chu, for example, is a Nobel laureate in physics and current head of the Department of Energy.  As stated in this 2004 conference paper, he conflates learning curves with Moore’s Law (and also fails to distinguish between windmills – which provide mechanical power, and wind turbines – which provide electrical power):
“

Every technology seems to follow a Moore’s Law curve, which means that the cost effectiveness improves exponentially as a function of the overall money invested in the deployment of that technology. Figure 1 shows Moore’s Law curves for photovoltaics, windmills, and gas turbines. As you put more money into a technology, that drives the price down.

”
Next we have two CEOs of solar companies.  Let’s start with this statement from the head of NRG:
“

A form of Moore’s law — the doubling every two years of the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit — applies to photovoltaic technology, according to Crane. In the last two years, the delivered cost of energy from PV was cut in half, he said.  NRG expects the cost to fall in half again in the next two years, which would make solar power less expensive than retail electricity in roughly 20 states, he said.

”
A few months ago the founder of Suntech, the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels, gave a talk at Stanford.  One of his slides compared the falling costs of solar to those of digital cameras, cell phones, and DVD players soon after they were first introduced.  He thankfully didn’t explicitly say anything about Moore’s Law, but the comparison nonetheless is not quite apples-to-apples.

So what’s the issue with all of these kinds of statements?

• Moore’s Law is specific to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit, and is not applicable to other fields just because they bear some superficial resemblance with the chip industry.
• The rate of progress in the solar industry (~30X cost reduction in the past three decades) is orders of magnitude below the ~40,000X increase in the number of transistors of a microprocessor of today compared to ones like the Intel 186 from 1982.
• The physics that limit and constrain solar cells are different from those of processors.  With solar cells, you’re fighting thermodynamics, and you’re never going to win the game.  Although we’ll probably get to a 50% efficient multi-junction solar cell soon, you can’t go past 100% – the ceiling is fixed.  With computation, though, there’s still plenty of room at the bottom.  Whether its single-electron transistors or room temperature quantum computers, we’re still very far away from nearing the ultimate limits of computation.
• The generally accepted formulation of the solar industry’s learning curve, which states that prices of solar modules will fall 19% every time production volumes double, makes no predictions about how quickly volumes will double (it may take one year or a hundred).  In contrast, Moore’s Law has a fixed time frame for each doubling of the number of transistors (18 months in its most recent, amended form).
• The market for solar panels is somewhat elastic; prices for solar panels have dropped recently not because of some major technological or manufacturing advance, but because supply has continued to increase, while demand has decreased (likely due to reductions of feed-in tariffs in Europe).  Solar panels are essentially commodity items (albeit, relatively expensive ones) that produce electrons, and any commodity’s price tends to be dictated by the pull between supply and demand, like a feedback loop. As the industry continues down its learning curve, however, the manufacturing cost/Watt-peak of the panels will decrease, putting downward pressure on the prices, irrespective of supply and demand.  You can think of the learning curve as a trend line with a negative slope, around which the market forces oscillate.  Five years ago, when polysilicon was in short supply, the price shot up above the trend line, and today when demand has dropped, we’re below that trend line. The amplitude of the oscillations tends to be large because while demand can change fairly quickly through changes in legislation (feed-in tariffs, tax incentives) and the economy (financial crises that suck up liquidity), it takes time for supply to adjust (polysilicon plants cost over a billion dollars and take years to build).
• The cost structures of solar cells are very different from those of microelectronics.  Silicon wafers make up about half the cost of solar cells; but when you can fit thousands of microchips onto a single wafer, the costs of silicon raw material per chip are minuscule.  The real costs lie in the $6 billion or so it takes to setup a new fab (expensive UV lithography equipment) and R&D.
• The areas where we have seen really stunning improvements over time have all been able to take advantage of engineering on the micro or nano-scale.  These include CPUs (Moore’s Law), hard disk drives (Kryder’s law), fiber optic communications (Butter’s law), LEDs (Haitz’s law), and DNA sequencing.  Solar cells and LCDs, however, have improved much more slowly, even though they too have borrowed many tricks from the microelectronics/optoelectronics industry.  The underlying reason is that the solar and LCD industries are building on the macro scale.  Their key metric is cost/area, whether it’s a solar module or a television.  Prices for LCDs have certainly come down, but not by the orders of magnitude we’ve come to expect (courtesy Hendy Consulting):

• The fundamental disparity between the technology learning curves can perhaps be understood by characterizing them based on density – of power or information flow.  A modern CPU can easily generate fluxes of over 300 Watts/square centimeter:
• Or consider high-brightness LEDs, dissipating heat at over 100 W/square centimeter.  Single mode fiber optic cables can transmit tens of gigabits per second along a fiber just a few micrometers in diameter.  Fourth generation DNA sequencers will use nanopores to read individual DNA bases much faster and more accurately than current technologies.  Hard drives have reached areal densities which are staggering (courtesy IBM):

• Contrast this with solar cells that receive no more than 1,000 Watts per square meter of area, which amounts to a flux of just 0.1 Watt per square centimeter.  Similarly, battery performance improvements in terms of energy density have been moving at a snail’s pace for the past century (courtesy this paper).  Products made on the micro and nano scale can pack a lot of power and information into a tiny space, allowing millions of units to be mass-produced with negligible raw material costs.  Products engineered on the macro scale have a much harder time improving performance or manufacturing.

In summary:

1. Just because a technology has a learning curve, doesn’t mean it’s Moore’s Law.
2. Not all exponentials are equal.
3. Macro-scale engineered solar panels and batteries improve performance over time, but nowhere near as fast as compared to micro-scale engineered products.

In the early days of long sea voyages, scurvy killed more sailors than did warfare, accidents, and other causes. For instance, of Vasco da Gamma’s crew of 160 men who sailed with him around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, 100 died of scurvy. In 1601, an English sea captain, James Lancaster, conducted an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of lemon juice in preventing scurvy. Captain Lancaster commanded four ships that sailed from England on a voyage to India. He served three teaspoonfuls of lemon juice every day to the sailors in one of his four ships. These men stayed healthy. The other three ships constituted Lancaster’s ‘control group,’ and their sailors were not given any lemon juice. On the other three ships, by the halfway point in the journey, 110 of 278 sailors had died from scurvy. So many of these sailors got scurvy that Lancaster had to transfer men from his ‘treatment’ ship in order to staff the three other ships for the remainder of the voyage….
Not until 1747, about 150 years later, did James Lind, a British Navy physician who knew of Lancaster’s results, carry out another experiment…
not until 1795, forty-eight years later… was [scurvy] immediately wiped out…
Why were the authorities so slow to adopt the idea of citrus for scurvy prevention? Other, competing remedies for scurvy were also being proposed, and each such cure had its champions. For example, Captain Cook’s reports from his voyages in the Pacific did not provide support for curing scurvy with citrus fruits. Further, Dr. Lind was not a prominent figure in the field of naval medicine, so his experimental findings did not get much attention.

”

There was another unsolved problem Britain was facing during the 1800s in the wake of the Felling mine disaster: how to design a safety lamp that wouldn’t lead to explosions.  The most eminent British chemist at the time was Humprhy Davy at the Royal Society, who had discovered several elements and was a spectacularly popular lecturer.  As Richard Holmes relates in the Age of Wonder, the accidents committee approached Davy to help them understand the problem.  He began analyzing the gas (known as fire-damp at the time) and visiting mines and speaking with miners and overseers.  Upon returning to London, he “summoned Faraday to his assistance” and ordered an “apparatus capable of withstanding an explosion.”  He soon discovered that “explosions only occur[ed] when methane reacted critical ratio of gas to air (1:8 parts),” and eventually realized that a fine gauge iron mesh/gauze surrounding the flame would prevent explosions by providing a high surface area for cooling.  He refused to patent his safety lamp, and having “subdued this monster” and “scourge of humanity” to “much public gratitude,” thank you letters poured in from miners across the country; some of the letters were drafted by mine owners, but “the signatures were genuine… 47 [miners] were illiterate and simply put ‘x’ against their names.”

Problem solved, right?  Fast forward over 200 years.  A coal mine collapse earlier this year in Pakistan killed over 40 people when methane gas in the mine ignited and caused an explosion.  But what’s the root cause?  Methane doesn’t auto-ignite until over 500 degrees Celsius, and neither does coal dust below 425 Celsius.  That kind heat could have been generated through friction during mining activities, or even by but coal dust in a pile that oxidizes, leading to a runaway exothermic reaction.  But I think the picture below (taken recently) gives us a clue.  Some of the miners are still using kerosene lamps when they don’t have access to hard hats with electric lamps.  Why would anyone still be using kerosene lamps, when safe electric lamps have been available for almost a hundred years?  Because the people using the lamps are not the ones buying the lamps – the prototypical agent problem, as this article details:

“

a major reason why working conditions are bad at the mines lies in the ownership and operational structure of the mines. The mine owners do not actually own the mines; they are long leased from the government. They are then sublet to contractors, delegating the whole responsibility of operating the mine with all the risks involved…Since the contractors are not the legal operators of the mines, the law cannot hold them responsible for the absence of safety measures and equipment as well as accidents.

”

The kerosene lamps have a lower up-front cost than the battery-operated electric lights, so the mine owners/operators would favor buying them for the miners.  Even if the miners themselves know about electric lights, they’re simply too poor to afford them on their own.

• recognizing that problems of stability and control must be solved before attacking problem of powered flight;
• recognizing that given adequate aircraft, pilot must still learn how to fly;
• recognizing that to maintain equilibrium, control is more important than inherent stability;
• recognizing that use of aerodynamic forces superior to weight-shifting for maintaining control;
• using of wing warping to vary angles of attack from tip to tip for roll control;
• recognizing that aeroplane must bank its wings in order to turn;
• doing wind tunnel tests to determine lift/drag characteristics of different wings;
• realizing that the real value of Smeaton’s coefficient is really .0033;
• recognizing of the need for 3 dimensional control;
• understanding that the proper function of the vertical rear rudder is yaw control, not turning aeroplane;
• the development of a method to design efficient propellers;
• the development of a lightweight engine with sufficient horsepower.

The only real account from the brothers themselves, however, is in an old Harper’s magazine article, which I’ve scanned and posted below (I believe it’s out of copyright):

or download the MP3 here.

The approach that Synta is using is essentially high-throughput screening, which is nothing new for the pharmaceutical industry; what’s interesting, though, is seeing combinatorial/high-throughput experimentation techniques starting to be applied to chemistry and materials science – for discovering catalysts, LED phosphors, superconductors, thin-film solar cells, and battery electrodes. Unlike a century ago, when Thomas Edison and his team had to go through 6,000 iterations of light bulb filaments without much scientific understanding to guide them, today there’s simulation software available which can help direct the most promising experiments to conduct – MaterialsGenome and MaterialsStudio come to mind. Companies like Wildcat Discovery and Intermolecular even offer such combinatorial/high-throughput experimentation services, targeted towards the semiconductor and energy industries. What I’d like to see is a hardware platform coupled with open-source software that would allow you to do all the basics – synthesis (sputtering, CVD, or electrodeposition with masks/shutters), processing (inert-gas furnace), analysis (XRD, optical microscopy), and robotic handling for under $10,000.

Lick Observatory, pictured above, is situated in the mountains east of San Jose, and when it was constructed in 1887 it was the world’s largest refracting telescope (a title it held for about 10 years).  Its benefactor, James Lick, made his fortune buying up real estate during the California Gold Rush (and incidentally, was the one who convinced his Peruvian friend Ghirardelli to move to California and start selling chocolate).  According to the historian-in-residence, the 40-tonne telescope itself is so finely balanced that it can be turned around by hand.  Though to reach the eyepiece, you need to move up the entire wooden floor surrounding the base of the telescope, a feat that’s possible through a mechanical water elevator.

The observatory also recently dug up the only known seismogram of the 1906 California earthquake recorded in North America:

As it turns out, 2009 marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo‘s telescope (though he wasn’t the first to invent one – historical evidence suggests that honor goes to either Hans Lipperhey or Zacharias Janssen).  The progress of astronomy over time could be measured by tracking the resolving power or light-gathering ability of telescopes built:
“

A telescope’s ability to detect fine detail in object at distance is known as resolution or resolving power… resolution is inversely proportional to the size of a telescope’s primary mirror.  A 5-inch telescope… could distinguish two quarters placed an inch apart from 3 miles away.  A 1.3-meter telescope could distinguish heads from tails on the quarters.  A 10-meter telescope could read the letters on the quarter spelling out ‘in God We Trust’… bigger telescopes can also see fainter objects.  The light-gathering ability is determined by the area of the primary mirror.” – Robert Duffner, the Adaptive Optics Revolution

”
Based on the list here, you can see the progression over time:

One should note that most of the new telescopes achieve their apertures through either segmented mirrors (a bunch of small mirrors put together) or optical aperture synthesis (mirrors separated by some distance joining to create a single image through interferometry) – simply because it’s prohibitively expensive to make large, smooth, light-weight concave mirrors with the accuracy demanded by telescopes (the mirror surface for one of Keck’s telescopes required ion milling to within a few nanometers).  Even with all this, if it weren’t for adaptive optics, the huge telescopes would be generating blurry images due to atmospheric turbulence (which is why astronomers tried to bypass this by creating Hubble and launching it into space).  It was originally thought of by Horace Babcock in 1953, developed by DARPA at the Starfire Optical Range, and improved by Will Harper’s sodium waveguide laser concept.  Modern telescopes also use liquid-nitrogen-cooled CCDs (which increases their sensitivity to photons) to capture digital images of the stars.

What’s next?  The 30-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, the Giant Magellan Telescope (a description of how they make their mirrors), the James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to Hubble).  In addition, alternative designs using liquid mirrors and membrane mirrors are being developed.

If the monopoly board had only 40 property spaces, the probability of landing on any given space would be a uniform 2.5%.  However, because of chance cards, community chest cards, and the existence of jail, these otherwise uniform probabilities are skewed.  To figure out the new board probabilities, we created a probability matrix that answered the scenario: given that we are on square X, what is the probability that we came from square Y?  This matrix corresponds to a system of 40 linear equations with 40 variables, which we can then solve in MATLAB to determine the steady state probabilities of being on any given square.  To make sure that our steady state solution is applicable to our problem, we also used Excel to dynamically generate the board probabilities for a given turn, given that we start on Go.  Our analysis shows that we approach steady state by turn 30, well within the bounds of a typical monopoly game.

”
These are the probabilities of landing on any given square (boards derived from Wikipedia graphics):

Free Parking 2.92%	Kentucky Avenue 2.66%	Chance 1.08% ?	Indiana Avenue 2.62%	Illinois Avenue 3.07%	B&O Railroad 2.96%	Atlantic Avenue 2.60%	Ventnor Avenue 2.58%	Water Works 2.87%	Marvin Gardens 2.51%	Go To Jail 0%
New York Avenue 2.85%	MONOPOLY									Pacific Avenue 2.85%
Tennessee Avenue 2.91%										North Carolina Avenue 2.91%
Community Chest 2.32%										Community Chest 2.32%
St. James Place 2.79%										Pennsylvania Avenue 2.79%
Pennsylvania Railroad 2.44%										Short Line 2.44%
Virginia Avenue 2.57%										Chance 0.87% ?
States Avenue 2.29%										Park Place 2.29%
Electric Company 2.67%										Luxury Tax 2.67%
St. Charles Place 2.72%										Boardwalk 2.72%
In Jail/Just Visiting 3.49%/4.31%	Connecticut Avenue 2.31%	Vermont Avenue 2.33%	Chance 0.87% ?	Oriental Avenue 2.27%	Reading Railroad 2.98%	Income Tax 2.34%	Baltic Avenue 2.18%	Community Chest 1.90%	Mediterranean Avenue 2.14%	Go 3.07%

or if (like me) you’re more used to the British version:

Free Parking 2.92%	Strand 2.66%	Chance 1.08% ?	Fleet Street 2.62%	Trafalgar Square 3.07%	Fenchurch Street Station 2.96%	Leicester Square 2.60%	Coventry Street 2.58%	Water Works 2.87%	Piccadilly 2.51%	Go To Jail 0%
Vine Street 2.85%	MONOPOLY									Regent Street 2.85%
Marlborough Street 2.91%										Oxford Street 2.91%
Community Chest 2.32%										Community Chest 2.32%
Bow Street 2.79%										Bond Street 2.79%
Marylebone Station 2.44%										Liverpool Street Station 2.44%
Northumberland Avenue 2.57%										Chance 0.87% ?
Whitehall 2.29%										Park Lane 2.29%
Electric Company 2.67%										Luxury Tax 2.67%
Pall Mall 2.72%										Mayfair 2.72%
In Jail/Just Visiting 3.49%/4.31%	Petonville Road 2.31%	Euston Road 2.33%	Chance 0.87% ?	the Angel Islington 2.27%	King’s Cross Station 2.98%	Income Tax 2.34%	Whitechapel Road 2.18%	Community Chest 1.90%	Old Kent Road 2.14%	Go 3.07%

and here’s a spreadsheet with more data on the properties by group:

It turns out they define the “best” monopoly in terms of the profit, which is a function of the length of the game and the number of players.

• the battery pack in a Tesla roadster costs around $25,000
• battery technology is improving at 8% per year in terms of gravimetric or volumetric energy density
• there are approximately 12,000 fuses in the battery pack
• in terms of well-to-wheel efficiency, electric cars can currency reach 85% efficiency.
• hydrogen systems eke out 32% efficiency, through combined losses from electrolysis (70% efficient), hydrogen compression during storage (90% efficient), and fuel cells (50% efficient)
• an acre of solar cells can take a car 36x the distance than an acre of ethanol
• quoted Sheikh Yamani, a former Saudi oil minster stating “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

or download the MP3 here.

or download the MP3 here.

What this means is that the stock market had, almost immediately, labeled Morton Thiokol as the company that was responsible for the Challenger disaster… the steep decline in Thiokol’s stock price – especially compared with the slight declines in the stock prices of its competitors – was an unmistakable sign that the investors believed Thiokol was responsible… on the day of the disaster there were no public comments singling out Thiokol as the guilty party… regardless, the market was right… six months after the explosion… Thiokol was held liable for the accident.

”
First off, the word “competitors” is not accurate – because the correct comparison to be made is to other companies who manufactured parts for the space shuttle, not companies who were competing with Thiokol but had nothing to do with the spacecraft; but no worries, the paper he cites is a-OK in this regard.

The claim being made is that because the stock price of Thiokol went down further than the other manufacturers, the market must have “known” they were guilty.  Given the nature of insider trading, this is a possibility.  But can you make such a claim from the evidence?

Let’s look at the data, then: a few of the large companies that built components for the space shuttle included Lockheed, Martin Marietta, and Rockwell International.  Here are graphs of the stock prices, and traded volumes, of their ticker symbols (LK, ML, and ROK, respectively, along with Thiokol’s MTI) the month of the disaster (thanks to my friend Salman for digging up some of the historical data for me – the horizontal axis is in days the stock market was open, so day -18 is January 2, 1986):

while all 4 stocks have a jump in volume on the 28th (the day of the disaster), Thiokol’s certainly does dip lower than the rest.  According to the paper written by professors Mulherin and Maloney, Thiokol dipped 12% compared to 3% for the others.  They mention that the “data show no evidence of trading by insiders on January 28, 1986,” yet go on to make the claim that there was “no ambiguity that the stock market quickly isolated Morton Thiokol as the cause of the accident.”  Moreover, “the fact that market liquidity was available to maintain a market in Lockheed, Martin Marietta, and Rockwell while the market for Morton Thiokol dried up suggests that the stock market discerned the guilty party within minutes of the announcement of the crash” (an older draft of the paper used “is evidence that” in place of “suggests that”).

Even if it was statistically significant, I’d say the evidence is still inconclusive, simply because you can’t rely on correlation to be anything more robust than an indicator.  Perhaps I should proffer an alternative explanation for the larger fall in Thiokol’s stock price, then?  How about, Morton Thiokol was a much smaller, less-diversified company than any of the other three, and had the most to lose from the space shuttle disaster?  If I could get my hands on some of the annual reports to see what percentage of their revenues come from NASA contracts…

Nevertheless, I don’t think the argument holds water.  But I do love it when people anthropomorphize the markets

the Stock Market Reaction to the Challenger Crash

the Los Angeles Times kicked off a major series on forest fires.  Here’s part of what it said:

The government’s long campaign to tame wildfires has, perversely, made the problem worse. . . .  By stamping out most wildland blazes as quickly as possible, the Forest Service has stymied nature’s housekeeping – the frequent, well-behaved fires that once cleaned up the pine forests of the Sierra Nevada and the Southwest.  Now, woodlands are tangled with thick growth and dead branches.  When fires break out, they often explode.

Sound familiar?  Clearly, the analogy between financial crises and forest fires is solid.  And I told Tom that just as the Fed’s growing tendency to solve every problem led people to take greater risks, the policy of fighting fires early also created moral hazard by encouraging people to build homes further into the forest.  It fell to the community to keep those unwisely built structures safe, just as the government now feels it has to rescue subprime borrowers and financial institutions.

Capitalism can produce great results, but participants have to be allowed to both win and lose.

”
which reminded me not only of risk homeostasis, but a fascinating portion of the book Young Men and Fire, about the 1949 Mann Gulch fire which claimed the lives of 13 smoke jumpers, where he describes what the other fire fighters saw their leader doing as they tried to escape being engulfed by flames:
“

I saw him bend over and light a fire with a match.  With the fire almost on our back, what the hell is the boss doing lightning another fire in front of us?  We thought he must have gone nuts… what is this dumb bastard doing?… saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot ashes to let the main fire pass over him… Dodge instantly invented what was to become known as the ‘escape fire‘ by lighting a batch of bunch grass with a gofer match… in so doing, he started an argument that would remain hot long after the fire.

Traditionally set by plains Indians to escape from grass fires and that pioneers on the plains picked up invention from Indians – start one in the immediate vicinity of person or company in peril… at first small and harmless, the fire will soon burn over an area large enough to form a safe asylum, and when the sweeping cohorts of flame came bearing down upon the apparently doomed company, the mighty line would part as if by pre-ararngement and pass harmlessly by on either side.

His invention, taking as much guts as logic, suffered the immediate fate of most other inventions – it was thought to be crazy by those who first saw it… who kept going, most to their deaths.

”

from the 2008 race in Turkey, courtesy F1.com
they don’t show races on the tele here (not that I have one), but you can find them a few days later here.

Not that’s impossible to do so without trickery – this is an old picture of the late Bobby Fischer:

the example I remember of the man-in-the-middle attack is that of the South African air force.  Each airplane has a transponder on it that’s used to identify-friend-or-foe – yet an enemy side can impersonate them by intercepting the signal, relaying it to another South African station, recording their response, and replaying it to the airplane.

or download the MP3 here.

It was cool how he made a point of answering questions from children in the audience first – a true successor to Carl Sagan. I wanted to ask him how they navigate if there is no GPS system on Mars – it seems like this is the answer, which would have to be supplemented with visual calibration of some sort.  As Mars has days shorter than here on Earth, every team member had specially-designed watches made that would run on Mars time, bringing them into work half an hour earlier every day!

You can download and play around with the software that the engineers at NASA use to control the rovers, using real data.  You can fly around Mars as well, using digital elevation data with software like this or this.  Astronomy is becoming more accessible now thanks to Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope and Google Sky.

Most of the deep-space probes actually only send data using a single radio sideband in order to save power, and are received through the Deep Space Network (I visited the Goldstone site in the Mojave desert outside L.A. a few years ago, which is actually situated on the live-fire Ft. Irwin military base).

Here are some of the pictures/videos from his slide deck:

sunset on Mars:

dusty solar panels:

purgatory dune (video of the wheels burning rubber here)

the landing site:

soil test:

parachute testing in the wind tunnel at Moffett Field (they have great tours)

Mars rover petals unfolding

wheels burning rubber

dust devils on Mars:

the Mars 2020 video referred to in the Q&A session is here.

This is the best analogy I’ve seen for how it works, in the form of a puzzle:
“

You’re living in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s rule.  You’ve been jailed and sent to the gulags, but you must tell your wife in St. Petersburg to arrange for your release.  You’re afraid, however, that your mail will be read by the secret police, so you think of using a lock (assume that it’s not going to be broken due to the time it would take to do so).  The problem is, your wife doesn’t have the key.  This is how you’d do it: Put a lock on the package you send to your wife.  On the outside of the package, enclose a message that instructs her to put a second lock alongside your lock, and mail it back.  When the package is returned, remove your lock, then mail it once again to your wife.  When she receives it, she can then unlock it with her own key.

”

or download the MP3 here.

His “fools errand, version 2″ refers to his new project related to the elimination of nuclear weapons – he’s asking for help changing the “conventional wisdom” about nukes through online advocacy (he’s already got signatures from former heads/deputy heads of the NSA and CIA, respectively).

“Ringside seats for the ‘bomb’ were a hot ticket in 1951, when military
and civilian VIPs watched from the officers club on Enewetak, just 12.5
miles from ground zero.” –   courtesy the June ’85 volume of National Geographic.  That’s back when the Doomsday Clock was at 2 minutes to midnight.

Which brings me to the black hole that could quite possibly be created when they flip the switch on the Large Hadron Collider (16.5 miles long, compared to SLAC‘s 2 miles), set to commence operations a few months from now; though by all estimates it’d decay before it had a chance to suck in the world.

Curves similar to the ones shown below, in a picture I took at Macy’s of the lasers from what I believe is called an omnidirectional barcode scanner. 
Which looks surprisingly similar to a spirograph (video of one being drawn with an amusement park ride below – it’ll start drawing 10 seconds in to the clip, cool interactive ones online here and here).

Which bears striking resemblance to the spirals in a sunflower.

While I don’t have the toy version of a spirograph, I did order the Ball of Whacks, which I’ve been carrying around with me wherever I go.  Here’s some stuff I made:

I haven’t been able to make anything like this dodecahedron, printed in 3D sugar by Windell Oshakay from Evil Mad Scientist Labs (check out this picture, one of the first prototypes using the printer) and presented to me at a recent meeting of the Open Source Group:

Some other games that are in 3D include 3D versions of chess, go, John Conway’s Game of Life, and Mandelbrot’s 3d fractals.  Then there was the sphere-packing problem (what’s the most spatially-efficient way to stack a pile of oranges?) that, when solved (with the aid of a computer, like the 4-color map theorem), verified the common-sense answer.

Though what really fascinated me was this optical illusion from the excellent Tim Robbins film The Hudsucker Proxy:

which I tried to reproduce in Mathematica with some help (what I have so far is just 2 tilted toruses).  I really want to watch the film adaptation of the book Flatland.

The Boston Museum of Science had a really nice quincunx to demonstrate the normal distribution, as balls fell down and bumped into the pegs (which I couldn’t figure out at first, until I realized the balls were not starting uniformly distributed across the top, but at the middle). Is there a 3d equivalent of Pascal’s triangle?

or download the MP3 here.

Quite a few agencies have available the most requested information:
CIA – Che Guevara
FBI – John Lennon, MLK, Edward Said, Tesla, the KKK, Wernher von Braun, Malcolm X
NSA (so secretive it used to be referred to as ‘no such agency’) – attack on the USS Liberty
NRO

There’s a new documentary out about Nader, “An Unreasonable Man“:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

It describes how he got trashed by the Democrats for “spoiling” the election for Gore, when in fact every third-party candidate got more than the 537 votes in Florida that made the difference. Harvard prof Barry Burden even analyzed his campaign strategy and found no evidence that he had intended to mess with the Democrats (see paper). Nader’s campaign contends that he was made a scapegoat, when citizens should really be asking why 10 million registered Democrats voted for Bush. Nader was harshly criticized for saying there was no difference between the two parties, that they were two heads of the same corporate entity – but in the end, the Democrats proved him correct by backing down on every issue in Congress and not opposing the war. The influential presidential debates are run by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which describes itself as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan corporation” and is led by the former chairmen of the two parties; funded by corporations, it has denied both Ross Perot and Ralph Nader the opportunity to participate in ’96 and ’00, respectively – so far attempts to reform the system have not made much headway.

Another case in point: John Houbolt, a former NASA engineer who went on a crusade in the ’60s to ensure they used lunar orbit rendezvous for the Apollo missions to the moon. He was a lowly engineer at the time and faced fierce resistance from within the administration to his radical idea; he bypassed regular channels and wrote directly to the second-in-command, was promptly written off by the bigwig (page 4), and opened his response (page 5) with a classic:

“Somewhat as a voice in the wilderness, I would like to pass on a few thoughts on matters that have been of deep concern to me over recent months.” He ultimately prevailed. Document courtesy NASA.

source: pg. 181 of Coquery-Vidrovitch’s Le Congo au temps des Grands Compagnies Concessionaires, reffered to in Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost

I braved multiple barbed-wire fences to hike up close near the wind turbines scattered all over the Altamont Pass hills this morning in Livermore. They’re surprisingly quiet, and have colored tips to prevent birds from flying in to them (litigation by environmental groups on this issue has been one of the major impediments to new installations). Placement can get contentious if a different company places a turbine in front of an older one, blocking its wind – but neither really ‘owns’ the wind – it’s like cows grazing in the commons.

The energy produced by the turbines is roughly proportional to the cube root of the wind speed. Here are low-resolution maps of global wind speeds from a NASA/Stanford study, and here are links to more detailed maps of the U.S. While the global study estimated a capcity of 72 terawatts, Prof. Lewis at Caltech believes only about 2 terrawatts can be achieved realistically (not nearly enough for keeping up with human consumption).

Seen beside Rodin’s Burghers of Calais statues:

A geodesic dome built for some yet-to-be-determined purpose

Student messages posted to the wall of President Hennessy’s office, ala Martin Luther, during SLAC‘s living wage protests, to the tune of “Hennessy, Hennessy, foot the bill, give us some of that 33 mill” and “Hennessy, for goodness sake, could you live on what they make?” One of my friends who had been fasting for 8 days had a letter sent to his parents from the university informing them of his activities – needless to say, they were not amused.

Inside the abandoned and off-bounds chemistry building:

now is that any way to treat a double Nobel laureate?

Seen in the basement of Green Library:

It has begun.

An effigy of the Cal bear impaled on ‘the Claw,’ courtesy of the now-reinstated Stanford band.

“May 2, 1972: Shockley Denied Approval for Grad Genetics Course
Professor William Shockley was refused university approval yesterday to teach a graduate special course on his research into ‘dysgenics,’ the study of worsening genetic qualities… [dean of the graduate school Lincoln] Moses’ letter to Shockley, a Nobel prizewinner for co-invention of the transistor, stated, ‘your expertise for teaching this course is subject to doubt.’ The 62-year-old physicist responded yesterday that ‘this is so in keeping with… the unwillingness of the intellectual community to appraise things objectively and dispassionately.’ Shockley added that the threat to academic freedom was ‘trivial’ compared to the administration’s illusion that all races of mankind are genetically equal. He describes this is ‘the illusion of flat human quality.’
Shockley’s proposed course, on new methods of research dealing with ‘the determination of the Caucasian fraction of the ancestry of the American Negro populations,’ the ‘geneticity of IQ,’ and the relation between I.Q. and personality traits, took the five-member faculty committee three months to review.” – compiled by Kelley Fong

”
Perhaps he should have tried the GSB, which I recall reading has a ’1-year-rule’: any faculty can teach a course on any topic of their choice for one year, after which it comes under administrative review. See the new book on his life, Broken Genius. Tenure continues to have its benefits and its drawbacks – such as this emeritus Stanford professor’s tirade against Iranian students – which the numerous Persian students here have tried, and failed, to do anything about.

Wrong. Statistician Abraham Wald realizes selection bias in the sample when he sees it – specifically survivorship bias. The planes they’re looking at are all the ones that returned safely – therefore the hits they received were non-lethal and do not need protection. Wald instead mandated that the armor cover the areas of the planes not hit.

After finding mention of this in a stats book, I looked for his paper, “A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors” which wasn’t available online, so I’ve uploaded the PDF of the paper kindly provided to me by Mr. Clarence Frazier of the Center for Naval Anslyses, Department of the Navy.

an engineer would never have made such ambiguous arrows:

or download the MP3 here.

Some tidbits:
His mother was at a restaurant in Islamabad when she saw the CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour sitting across from her; right then she knew it was ‘all over,’ as a year ago Amanpour was covering Bosnia…

He started writing under Toni Morrison‘s tutelage at Princeton. His thesis at Harvard Law was the draft of his first book, which his advisor agreed to because he was so sick of reading the regular fare.

He would call his book a bestseller, except that it was extensively pirated.

When he showed up to vote in the presidential referendum in Pakistan, he discovered he was the only person at the poll station. As he was voting, a person came over to him and asked him to hurry up, even though they were 10 other empty booths. He said even Musharraf had to disown the results because they were so preposterous.

In his belief American patriotism has led to ‘self-censorship.’

As an investigative journalist he went to Gwadar (a small port town) and stayed in a truck drivers’ motel, buying tea for anyone who wanted to talk. Reminds me of a person I saw once at a Model UN conference in the Hague, sitting alone at a table with a sign saying “an American willing to listen.”

Made mention of how at one time, the news in Pakistan was broadcast in Arabic (even though virtually no one understood it) and how air conditioning separates the “masses from the elite.”

Recounted how he was forced to vacillate when an immigration officer asked him what the title of his book was, saying “I have my own idea, but the publisher disagrees.”

In a rather tragic unfolding of Prof. Huntington‘s ‘democracy paradox,’ the Palestinians, sick of their corrupt leadership, voted the ‘wrong’ way in a free election (Op-Ed, May 3). Bush decided to take a breather from trumpeting the spread of democracy in the Middle East for just long enough to punish the intransigent Palestinians by stanching nearly all essential aid. Not to be outdone, Israel then proceeded to bomb Gaza’s only power station and cut off water sources, plunging the million inhabitants of the world’s most densely-populated area into misery. The intention being, as the New York Times noted, to make the Palestinians “so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will” be forced to exercise greater discretion by “return[ing] to office… a reformed and chastened” leadership. Given that Hamas no longer insists on the destruction of Israel and has expressed its willingness to accept a two-state solution, you’d be excused for thinking the strategy of targeting the citizens of a government for their responsibility in it’s actions is working, and thus, justified. But alas, while these tactics may ring true to the actions of the U.S. and Israel , they are borrowed from the ideology of their morally decrepit erstwhile ally, Osama bin Laden. The emperor truly has no clothes.

Israel’s “concession” (Letter to the Editor, May 2) of forcibly withdrawing settlers from Gaza made for sensational television news, but should not be construed as progress; it occurred alongside an expansion of settlements in the West Bank – some of which, as detailed by the Israeli group Peace Now, are slated to house the very people evicted from Gaza. As Prof. Noam Chomsky stated in an interview, “What is called `the disengagement plan’ was an expansion plan… it was perfectly overt” and later formalized by Israeli Prime Minister Olmert with the express ‘green light’ of our Bush administration.

While the inverse of the statement “Israeli independence = Palestinian catastrophe” (Letter to the Editor, May 2) would correctly imply the Israelis not having independence, it is first of all not logically equivalent to the original statement, and secondly, isn’t the point; there’s no sense in debating whether or not it has a right to exist, because it already does. What it was trying to convey was that it’s offensive to us that the Stanford Israel Alliance should be celebrating this day all hunky-dory, glossing over the simultaneous creation of millions of refugees and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages (“Celebration and protest of Israel,” Apr. 24). It’s akin to celebrating the end of British rule in the subcontinent without recognizing the millions that were evicted and slaughtered on both sides as they crossed the border between India and Pakistan . The reason you don’t see people from these countries protesting the others’ independence is perhaps that they both achieved it, and paid the same price in the suffering that accompanied it. Until the Palestinians gain their independence, it is likely to be the case that Israel’s will continue to be seen as a source of discontent.

The statistics on the violence bandied around by both sides seem to suggest that it’s a non-zero-sum conflict, with tit-for-tat violence leading to increasing suffering on both sides. Assuming both parties are equally committed to peace, the realpolitik way to shift to the other end of the spectrum would be for one side to have the temerity to declare a unilateral ceasefire, and for the other to reciprocate in kind. The Hebrew saying ‘ha possel be-mumo posel‘ implies that if you mistrust people, the tendency is for you to expect others to mistrust you. Yet there is no concept of trust inherently necessary to the model: it is built up over time as each side sticks to their end of the bargain. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, who are currently preoccupied with an internecine power struggle fueled by American military aid to Fatah (not to be confused with Fatah al-Islam, the group the Lebanese army is fighting with American support), the factions not in power keep sabotaging any attempt at striking a peace deal. When the stars do manage to align themselves, the BBC reports that the Israeli government, “consistently rejected ceasefire offers by Palestinian militants, saying it refuses to do deals of any kind with…terrorist organizations.” Such a rejection may make sense if you’re being asked to turn over your first-born child, but an end to aggression would not entail the lowering of Israel’s defensive shields. It would, however, spell the end of the occupation, which can only remain tenable with the continued use of force. It is likely that the potential cost incurred by ending its neo-colonialist ambitions that underlies Israel’s reluctance to put an end to hostilities.

Why is it that we’re constantly accused of ‘singling out’ Israel and whitewashing the other side? This is not the first time a divestment campaign has targeted the policies of a specific government; no one accused the groups pushing for divestment from Sudan and South Africa of having ‘other motives’ – what puzzles me, is that for the most part, our detractors do not deny that the violations of international law (the occupation, separation barrier, settlements, and home demolitions as stated in our petition) are taking place. People have trotted out a litany of facts about how well Israel treats its minorities as opposed to Arab countries; we don’t consider these to be skeletons in our closet, but simply outside our focus on Occupied Palestine and not Israel proper.

If students and faculty feel strongly about changing the status quo in other regions of the globe, we fully encourage them to take up such causes, but we should not be expected to blunt our campaign to accommodate them. As Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu opined, “Divestment from apartheid South Africa was certainly no less justified because there was repression elsewhere on the African continent.” The reason we choose to focus on Israel is because of America’s direct support of the continuing occupation and the role that Stanford may have, through its investments, in supporting the aforementioned violations.

Spent four hours at the Lucas Center at Stanford, part of the time inside a massive GE fMRI machine while wearing an electrode cap in order to conduct an EEG simultaneously. While scanning, it’s as loud as a jackhammer going off at five paces, though I surprisingly didn’t feel claustrophobic. It’s quite easy to fall asleep, which is a good thing as the researchers’ eventual goal is to study sleep apnea, though I was just a guinnea pig to calibrate some new EEG equipment. The tests themselves were banal – staring at changing checkerboard patterns, circles (beamed with a projector onto a mirror above my head), and listening to two alternating tones. I wish I could have seen if a different part of my brain is used when I read upside down, as I tend to do every now and then to see how I’ll fare.

The caption reads ‘always check that photoplethysmograph is mounted correctly.’

A few years ago a Canadian neuroscientist by the name of Persinger zapped the frontal lobes of his patients with a magnetic field and found that they pretty much all went through “religious” experiences, sensing another presence in the room. Unfortunately the paper was published in an obscure journal, but you can find coverage of the “God helmet” on BBC’s Horizon, Wired, and Discover.

On to Khosla. His VC firm hasn’t published their investments, but he went through some of them in his talk – in addition to the list here there is nanoh2o. One of the companies, LS9, was cofounded by Chris Somerville. Another, Amyris Biotechnology, has an interesting story. Founded to originally develop synthetic artimisinin for cheap malaria drugs with the help of the Gates Foundation, Khosla approached him to see if the same techniques could be applied to biofuels.

Further points from the speech:
- ethanol yields have been gowing up in Brasil for 25 years without advanced technologies
- biodiesel & corn ethanol won’t scale in terms of gallons per acre
- a report from the IPCC detailed how you can potentially have negative carbon emissions for driving your car, as plants sequester carbon while they grow
- imagines solar being used for electricity and biofuels for cars
- is betting on solar (concentrated) thermal such as power towers, not photovoltaics themselves. believes will be able to eliminate coal (though his estimates rely on the cost of carbon)
- thinks a cellulosic ethanol breakthrough is easier than a battery breakthrough as lithium batteries have a theoretical max that is 2-3x of today’s capacity
- imagines an entire industry of bio-refineries instead oil refineries, producing platform chemicals like succinic and lactic acid
- the time from financing to manufacture of a solar thermal plant is 10 months, compared to > 5 years for a nuclear plant
- coal power plants emit more uranium/thorium into air than from all nuclear accidents
- railed against the American Petroleum Institute’s claims that ethanol can’t be transported in existing pipelines – claimed is possible (they do it in Brazil), as long as it’s not mixed with oil
- the subsidy on ethanol went from the growers to the oil companies thanks to the ADM

Finally, he opined that people need to treat global warming as a tractable problem, instead of focusing on the symptoms. I’m guessing this is in reference to Branson’s carbon sequestration challenge. Just as in medicine, there are prophylactic treatments to prevent the problem, and palliative treatments to alleviate the symptoms. The best metaphor for carbon sequestration as a solution to global warming I can think of is that of my friend who used to smoke his way through a pack of cigarettes, and then scramble for his asthma inhaler when overcome with a coughing fit. Repeat ad infinitum until you drop dead or need a refill cartridge, whichever comes first.

While there seem to be a few E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) cars on the road, there’s not a single station offering it within 100 miles of me. Though I was shocked when I saw this notice on a Shell pump in a nearby station about ethanol mixed in with the gas.

“

The veterans of the war of 1812 did not get their general service pensions until 1871 – an interval of fifty-seven years. The veterans of the Mexican War languished through 39 years of unpaid patriotism before securing the first installment of theirs…We demand that, as is customary, the federal government pass immediately a law guaranteeing us each a bonus of one thousand dollars in 1965… plus three per cent interest retroactively compounded… call it ‘adjusted service compensation’…. Let us seize time by the forelock and follow the advice of Prof. Reining to ‘look to the future rather than to the past‘… the plan of compensation… is just because it gives to the veteran who willl die a right to enjoy his honors and emoluments while yet alive… there is nothing particularly intellectual about walking nowhere down the middle of the street, but the American people eat it up, so it must be worthwhile. In all these parades we must insist that the veterans of future wars be given a place ahead of all other veterans organizations. it is a matter of right, for the future should come before the past… we suggest that all veterans of future wars who are conscientious objectors to a bonus, should forthwith be incarcerated in concentration camps for the duration of the peace.

”

I almost fell out of my chair when I read this:

“

this idea was first advanced by a great ruler, the Nizam-al-Mulk, back in 1073 A.D.
According to our informant… ‘this celebrated statesman’s experiment is fully set out by the renowned Arab historian, Ibn Khaldun, in his monumental work, Kitab-al-Ibar… from the scroll of the calligraphy permit me to quote from book II, surah 3, how the vizier paid a bonus in 1073 to veterans of future wars: ‘in those days following, when sultan Alp Arslan had spread the fan of his arrows before him and by the will of Allah, of whom there is no other, victory had been given him… it came that Nizam-al-Mulk ruled the land as vizier… gave largesses to the soldiers who survived, as was the custom. Then it was that the vizier bethought himself how there were thousands plucked like fruit from the tree of life by the garnering scimitar to whom no earthly reward could be given… called a council of the philosophers, cadis, and imams at Basra to see how best it might be brought about that the young men who would yiled their lives in the harvest of wars to come might beforetime come to enjoy a reward while yet on earth… and a register was mode of those who in the coming four years might be called upon to grasp the scimitar and loosen the arrow… called these ‘utaqa-ul-hurub quisma-t “fated veterans of unborn wars”… decreed that ten jeribs of tax free land be given together with yearly stipend of one hundred pieces of silver to the veterans to be….’

”

Reminds me of the recent story of the Kuwaiti government rejecting a bill asking them to write off $27 billion of its citizens private debts (like Solon did way back when).

“

Each was told that he would have to get out by his own devices, essentially by convincing the staff that he was sane…. each was discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia “in remission.”

”
You can read the entire paper, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” published in Science here.Reminds me of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the story of the depressed Stanford student who was put into solitary confinement against his will. Another reminder of the power of context as espoused by gestalt theory is this social experiment where the renowned classical musician Joshua Bell played his violin in a D.C. subway – and barely anyone stopped to listen.

The only list Stanford has of all its commencement speakers at graduation ceremonies from over the years is a sparsely-maintained list sitting in the Special Collections of Green Library, without any of their actual speeches. What a shame… if you have excerpts from any of these addresses or information on where to find them, please email me… the following is a transcription of the list; you’ll recognize a few names: Millikan (the oil-drop experiment), Trudeau (creator of Doonesbury), a smattering of Supreme Court justices, and two UN Secretary Generals.

Marcello, a Stanford CS masters student, also demoed his site 2draw.net, which is a collaborative online drawing site where you can see the drawing process as a time-lapse video by clicking on “show animation” for some of the submissions. Very cool.

This one’s a 4-minute shot of an LA to NYC cross-country drive:

This one shows phototropism in plants – something that trackers for solar arrays now use to keep solar cells perpendicular to the sun (as the power generated is proportional to the cosine of the angle of incidence with the rays):

“…President Truman was the first to put together two facts, only one of which was public knowledge.

In the spring of 1950 the Soviet Union had decided to boycott the Security Council because the General Assembly refused to have the Communist regime of mainland China replace Formosa – Taiwan – in the Security Council.

So at dawn of the North Korean invasion of the South, if the Russians wanted to have a say in the Security Council’s response, in other words if it was going to use its veto as it surely would have done, it would have to get a representative Russian delegate to New York as soon as possible.

What Harry Truman instantly remembered was that the Russians, at that time, had not developed a big commercial jet. They boasted about the superiority of a giant turbo-prop, but it was slower than a jet. Hence Harry Truman’s snappy order to Secretary Acheson: ‘Get to New York now – take a vote – go.’”

”
As an “empty seat” abstention is treated as non-blocking, the resolution went through.

The Stanford quad is surrounded by time capsules for every graduating year, and I like to frequent them to recreate the ‘carpe diem’ scene from the Dead Poet’s Society. I must have passed by these two at least 50+ times, and while I noticed they were different from the rest (which are perfect diamonds), never stopped to think why. But one day I realized it was too intentional to have been a mistake. So I thought to myself, what could have possibly happened a hundred years ago in 1906? OF COURSE – the 1906 earthquake. I’m guessing Stanford graduated both classes together in 1907. Incidentally, I’ve yet to hear of an old time capsule being unveiled – wonder how long we have to wait? The problem appears to be that none of the classes agreed at the time to have them exhumed at a later date. I believe Prof. Paul Saffo is teaching a class on time capsules next year.

Outside the math building lies a small courtyard where I stumbled upon this plaque buried underneath the fall leaves. The inscription was downright puzzling – “ornanda” sounds Spanish, “domo” Japanese, and the rest Latin. Finding nothing on the net, I decided to hit up my friend Justin Peagram, the editor of Babson’s newspaper and the only person I know who’s studied Latin. Sure enough, he replied back with a rough translation: “a man’s dignity is to be enhanced (or embellished) by his house or (his surroundings).”

When a member of a hiring committee at Stanford asked him for a C.V. to include with requests for letters of recommendation, Perelman balked. “If they know my work, they don’t need my C.V.,” he said. “If they need my C.V., they don’t know my work.”

”
and…
“

The acting director of the mathematics institute, attempting to explain the relative contributions of the different mathematicians who had worked on the Poincaré, said, “Hamilton contributed over fifty per cent; the Russian, Perelman, about twenty-five per cent; and the Chinese, Yau, Zhu, and Cao et al., about thirty per cent.” (Evidently, simple addition can sometimes trip up even a mathematician.)

”

For more, I would recommend “The Laundrymen,” a fascinating book on drug trafficking, tax evasion, and money laundering – the world’s third largest business, it claims. An excerpt:
“

A more brazen approach was used by a South African businessman who faked a badly-sprained ankle and convinced his doctor to put a cast on his leg. He was booked on a flight from Johannesburg to London and asked the airline to supply a wheelchair to help him get from check in to the gate. But, on the day of his flight, an anonymous call came into customs that a businessman with a cast on his leg was smuggling a large sum of money out of the country. When he wheeled up to the immigration desk on his way to the gate, he was stopped. Officers said they wanted to search him. He refused. They insisted. He demanded that he be permitted to ring his solicitor. Senior officials were called in and the argument continued long past the point where the plane was scheduled to leave. He categorically refused a body search and, by the time his solicitor arrived, the flight had left without him. Now he threatened to sue everyone in sight. His solicitor somehow managed to call him down and explain that the officers were well within their right. Protesting to the very end, he had no choice but to sit there while his cast was sawn off. And once it came off the officers found – absolutely nothing. Now the man raised hell. He started ringing everyone he knew in government. Red-faced apologies, though plentiful, were no good. The businessman ordered his solicitor to get everyone’s name and file lawsuits. He intended to sue the government and sue the airlines for allowing this to happen he not only wanted retribution, he wanted blood. He caused such a huge rumpus that the following day, with a new cast plastered over his ankle – and cash stuffed inside – customs & immigration officials personally helped him on to the plane.

”
Sweet.

* underestimated the amount of time & money it would take
* there was real excess heat – not some calorimetry problem
* some of his early funding came from EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute, MITE (the Japanese Ministry of Economy & Trade?), and DARPA. Collaborate with ENEA in Italy and the Naval research lab.
* calorimetry is BORING and experiments typically last a month
* mentioned a company in New Jersey, energetics, with some new superwave function
* quoted Max Born? who said “Physics advances one funeral at a time”
* 50% of the cold fusion papers he throws out, the rest he has reservations about
* most of the papers are theoretical, even though they’re all mutually exclusive theories (they can’t all be right!)
* they’ve spent 70 man-years, but only about 1% of that has been fruitful
* neutron detector is one of the flakiest instruments known to man, due to the fact that you can’t actually measure neutrons and have to rely on second-order effects
* his team searched for all sorts of products of a potential fusion reaction, including helium-4, x-rays, gamma rays, and charged particles
* found unmistakable evidence of tritium, though many of the results weren’t consistent or time-correlated (ie didn’t happen at the same time as the reaction itself)
* electrochemistry is very, very sensitive
* the claim that you can’t differentiate between helium-4 and D2 is a lie
* why does he work on it – the public paid for his education, and if cold fusion has the capability to solve the world’s problems with even the slightest probability, he owes it to the world to work on it.

Then I got a tour of his lab, with a lot of plumbing, bulletproof plexiglass, and a big container where the actual experiments would take place.

Driving down to Yosemite National Park for Thanksgiving, I reached the area depicted in the diagram and stopped at the red traffic light, noticing the sign that read “expect to wait 5 minutes” or something of that sort. Within a minute of the arrival of two police cars through the diversion road, the light changed to green and the police cars parked on the side of the road. Nothing special, right?

Then I noticed that the diversion road was in fact one-way and single-laned, and started to think about what the police cars were doing; my best guess is that they had to ensure that there’s only traffic going in one direction on the diversion road. I’ve thought of two ways of ensuring this, and one of them has something to do with Bill Gates’s first company (that’s right, a little-known fact, but Microsoft was his second company).

The most obvious, but tedious, is probably what the cops were doing: As soon as the light turns red from one side, they come across the diversion to make sure that no car is still en route – as they are the last ones to get across, if they don’t see anyone along the way, the route must be clear; as soon as they reach the other side, the light on the new side can be switched to green as there are no cars coming in the opposite direction. repeat ad infinitum.

The smarter way to do this would be to employ what I’ve seen on the roads coming in to Stanford’s campus: car-counting machines which are basically just a box connected to a thick wire strung along the road that registers a vehicle whenever one passes over. Put one at each traffic light, only change the traffic lights when both have the same tally, and you’re done. this was incidentally the idea for Gates and Paul Allen’s first company which they started in high school, which never got anywhere to the best of my knowledge.

Med school students kept asking him how to get statistical significance out of their results…
Was interested in PoliSci and took a number of classes
Most of his learning was outside of pro-forma classes
Studied under Paul Eckman (behavior) at the Center for Adv Studies & Behavior
Claimed to have invented the ‘blue box’ in 1962, before Captain Crunch, and was raided by AT&T
A friend once had a file on ‘how 2 write review of bad books by good friends’
‘forever knowledge’ changed career
With publishers you always lose, the question is how graciously.
Believed that one’s life & works should be self-exemplifying.
He took out a 2nd mortgage to print his book on his own.
Always designed with 2-page spreads as that’s how it looks in reality.
Ironically took early retirement from Yale to do research.

If you could find the data, a map would be great for visualizing
arbitrage opportunities between different points on the globe, such as
the disparities in the costs of international phone calls (which became
the basis for callback systems and internet telephony).

the trial: page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5
the interview: page 2-1 page 2-2 page 2-3 page 2-4 page 2-5 page 2-6

Reminds me of the funeral traditions of the Zoroastrians that a friend mentioned the other day: their dead are placed on top of ‘Towers of Silence’ and left there for the vultures to feast on, and its still practiced to this day in some parts.

and then a fascinating picture of the border between two nations with different logging regulations in effect:

They had no idea what I was talking about when I asked them if they had any spare ones, but were nice enough to give me one off of another jacket… then of course there’s the convenient wind chill chart from the National Weather Service which indicates how long you have until you get frostbite – problem with both being they’re in Fahrenheit. Apparently above 40 MPH winds there’s no further chilling effect.

from an interview with the College Mathematics Journal:

“

It happened because during my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day at one of [Jerzy] Neyman’s classes. On the blackboard there were two problems that I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework — the problems seemed to be a little harder than usual. I asked him if he still wanted it. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever. About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o’clock, [my wife] Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: “I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.” For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard that I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.

”

I hear a professor or two at Caltech give students unsolved problems on their exams – but have yet to see a professor quite as sadistic as that here… though it’s certainly testament to what you can do if you’re not limited by pre-held assumptions.

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”

came across this in a book but couldn’t find mention of it online:

“

a mile of clean sand.
i will write my name here, and the trouble that is in my heart.
i will write the date & place of my birth,
what i was to be,
am what i am.
i will write my forty sins, my thousand follies,
my four unspeakable acts…
i will write the names of the cities i have fled from,
the names of the men & women i have wronged,
i will write the holy name of her i serve,
and how i serve her ill.
and i will sit on the beach & let the tide come in.
i will watch with peace the great calm tongue of the tide
licking from the sand the unclean story of my heart.
- edna st. vincent millay. paris, 1922

”

Not to mention Amazon Historical Pricing, which is a statistician’s dream (I spent an entire day trying to find sales & pricing data for pharmaceuticals for a statistics paper, only to find them in a yearly publication known as ‘the Red Book’ in the Med School library).

After the talk, I got a chance to ask him why you could sort by average customer rating with book searches, but not DVDs. He said it was possibly just an oversight, and asked me to email him.  Update: This seems to be possible now.

A few months ago I met with my friend Howard Shen who just finished up his MBA @ MIT and asked him about how Amazon’s warehouses work. He explained that there’s no classification system – items are placed randomly on shelves and employees simply scan the item and the item’s location into the database… when an order needs to be filled, you simply look up the number in the database and scan the item to make sure it’s correct. They measure efficiency in terms of how many errors they are between the database and the ‘physical’ reality.

Which gets me into recumbent bicycles, which hold the land-speed record for human-powered vehicles. While this is a regular bike, Olympic cyclist John Howard set a record back in 1985 going at an insane 152 MPH; if that sounds hard, he was helped by the fact that the vehicle he was trailing eliminated essentially all the wind resistence, as seen below (a similar technique is used in professional cycling, allowing the person in front to break the wind for you):

reminds me of the movie “the World’s Fastest Indian.”

It’s essentially what’s become known as a ‘man-in-the-middle’ attack to cryptography people… but it extends to other disciplines – such as the military. The example I remember is of the South African air force trying to detect whether a plane flying overhead is a friend or foe – because enemy planes can try to act as hidden communication intermediaries between the ground system and other South African aircraft, essentially passing the outgoing communications of one to the incoming channel of the other, and vice versa.

* Jacob Russ, Harvard, obsessive digital photographer
* Samat Jain, Columbia, taught me half of everything I know about Python
* Aaron Burton, Carnegie-Mellon
* Manu Kumar, Delhi Institute of Technology

I was working under Jim Gettys (co-authored the X desktop system) and Ivan Krstic (a Harvard stop-out) for most of the time; started off doing stress-testing, moved on to develop an email client which was cut off in favor of a webmail client, and then spent the rest of the time learning Python in order to do some crypto library work.

Nicolas Negroponte was the head of the initiative but as his assistant liked to say, he “spends 95% of his time travelling” so I only got to see him twice. Mary-Lou Epstein was the LCD monitor wizard who was in Taiwan half the time, but brought back the first demos of the high-res, non-volatile (meaning you turn off the power, you can still read it) monochrome/color LCD. We spent most of our time working with the prototype motherboards shipped over from Taiwan…

Spent our retreat at Barry’s house kayaking on the Charles River. Played Aerobee with the guys in a government lawn which we were subsequently kicked off of by a European security guard who couldn’t pronounce his negatives (You can play here…-OK… no, no, you can take pictures here). Two-hour lunch breaks at Anna’s discussing everything from spam to Chiapas, Mexico to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict… free passes to the Siggraph conference. Free pizza on Fridays with the rest of the office Spent some time roaming around MIT’s campus, tunneling through their underground catacombs, and got to see the fire truck on top of the dome to commemorate September 11th (there is no way to gain access to the roof – I’ve checked – but my friend Zaina thinks they must have climbed up and used ropes/pulleys).

The title of “fastest man on the earth” is not rightfully bestowed upon Superman or Chuck Yeager, but the erstwhile John Stapp, doctor, Ph.D., and Colonel of the U.S. Air Force. While the purveyor of all things right and good in this world, Wikipedia, attributes the seeding of Murphy’s law to him, his contributions to the matter at hand concern his studies on the effects of high G-forces on the human body. The tests involved seating a human subject on a sled dubbed the “Gee-Wiz” fitted onto railroad tracks and boosting the contraption to insane speeds with rockets, and then braking rapidly. The good doctor was himself a frequent guinea pig, and suffered numerous fractures and injuries after subjecting himself to 46 G’s. For some perspective, according to Popular Science magazine, a “fighter pilot pulling 9 G’s [would have to support]… 1,800 pounds.” All in the name of science.

His findings are the principle reason that child car seats and military planes today such as the C-130 seat their passengers with their backs toward the front of the transport vehicle. So if aft-facing seats are up to military standards and safe enough for our toddlers, why are we still flying face-forward in commercial airlines?

The only mention of this issue online seems to be two antiquated articles from the New York Times dating back to the fifties, and a more recent feature, “Flying backward, flying safer” in a backwater Oregon newspaper, the Mail Tribune. The ostensible source of the safety benefit is that with the seat back behind you, it provides cushioning and more evenly spreads the force in the event of a crash.

Many ‘experts’ try to dismiss the idea outright as near ludicrous, claiming that not only would you be more liable to be hit with flying debris, but passengers would not stand for it due to increased motion sickness. Let’s try to weigh the evidence. The U.S. Air Force reported that seating passengers facing the rear increased their chances of survival by a factor of 7; I think surviving is more critical than worrying about being hit by someone’s stray luggage.

As for the second claim, I have come to appreciate the capability of the human mind to adapt through firsthand experience. Earlier this summer I was foolish enough to respond to a flyer seeking volunteers for a supposed “antigravity experiment” conducted at MIT. Harboring delusions of grandeur at involvement with a soon-to-be-classic experiment, my interest was piqued and I showed up bright and early. I was promptly strapped into a horizontal bed, raised from the floor and rotating clockwise, in the complete dark. As soon as we got to 2 G’s, the fun began; the grad student told me to rotate my head to the side. I immediately felt as if I were tumbling back in space and flailed out for the red panic button, nearly losing continence in the process. After a few goes, however, I could repeat the process without feeling an overwhelming amount of nausea. In other words, let the passengers deal with it, close the windows, or give them a forward camera view to look at on their video monitors.

As with most endeavors, in practicality the underlying issue is one of convention and money. Someone, somewhere obviously made a decision, and through Thomas Schelling’s concept of “least effort” didn’t bother to consider any alternatives to the default, forward-facing seats. Ripping out the status quo would involve an unnecessary cost in the view of the already cash-strapped airline industry. Not only that, but due to technical considerations, such seats would need to be heavier than in our status quo. According to an article in Flight International magazine that refers to a study by a Japanese government agency, “A 440-seat Boeing 747… with rearward-facing seats would likely to weigh [7 tons] more…” and lead to increase in seat prices by 20%.

This may seem like a trivial matter to some, akin to asking why school buses don’t have seat belts (the larger mass of the bus as compared to a car, traveling at a lower speed means there’s less deceleration – making seat belts gratuitous). Planes, in comparison, travel near the speed of sound and have horrific crashes resulting in close to a thousand fatalities every year. The only way to push for such changes is to research ways to reduce the cost to airlines, or have the government subsidize the airlines. In either case, the wherewithal to actually make this happen would involve a lot of campaigning, probably to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Natural Transportation Safety Board. And once happens in this country, people overseas will start asking questions, and soon enough, it’ll tip and become the norm.

And oh, you might as well say goodbye now to your friends who fly the Club Class of British Airways with their flat, 180-degree reclining beds.

the test setup (pictures courtesy the ejectionsite).

“My name is Kate Kaplan, and I’ve worked with Dr. Dement at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Research Center for several years now on various sleep studies. Dr. Dement asked that I respond to your question on polyphasic sleep.

It is our contention that no altered sleep schedule can replace a physiological sleep need in adults that ranges from 6 to 9 hours (and even longer in younger individuals). As Dr. Dement emphasizes in his dormitory lectures, all accumulated sleep loss translates to increased sleep debt, and the size of the sleep debt has serious ramifications for daytime alertness, fatigue and mood variables. Polyphasic sleep does not only truncate total daily sleep times (and, indeed, sleep need has in a number of situations been documented to be far greater than 5 hours a night, although researchers once believed that this amount was sufficient), but it also runs counter to many biological and environmental triggers that govern the sleep wake cycle. There exists in every individual a natural alerting system that increases in the morning, subsides a bit after lunch, then becomes stronger in the dinner and evening hours. Moreover, closely related to this system are natural environmental stimuli (known as zeitgebers), such as sunlight and physical exercise, that affect circadian alertness and the body’s natural clock. Trying to sleep every four hours might be easy to do at certain times, but very difficult and ultimately fruitless at others. For these reasons, we think that only a sustained nighttime sleep episode, perhaps coupled with a short nap as alertness subsides in the afternoon, is the best schedule for students to maintain.”

Describes T. Henry Moray and his experiments with his energy device – excerpts from The Sea of Energy in Which the Earth Floats are available here.

Portrays the late Paul Brown, discoverer of the Nucell nuclear-powered battery using strontium-90. The company turned into Nuclear Solutions and dropped research due to problems sustaining the materials… but the science seems to be sound. His idea of photodeactivation of radioactive waste lives on, though. Don’t know if it’s had succesful tests yet. He says he had to give up research:
“I began to receive threats; securities fraud charges were then filed against my company and myself; then the tax man; i lost control of my company; my home has been robbed three times… ; twice now I have been accused of drug manufacturing… my advice is to keep a low profile until you have completed your endeavour; be slective in choosing your business partners… know that the nightmare stories are true.”

Apparently the Hollywood producer Brian de Palma had a brother, Bruce, who taught at MIT and retired early to pursue research – his N-machine relied on antigravity effects and “claimed an efficieicny of 2820% or 28.2 times over-unity.” In essence, he was claiming it was a perpetual-motion machine. However, independent tests by the stelle group reported that the machine had “back torque,” i.e. friction, debunking such a claim. Prof (emeritus) Robert Kincheloe tried to replicate the experiments, but I can’t find a word of mention of him on the web. Did he ever try to “close the loop” and actually make it a perpetual motion machine? No – why not, you ask? Because “I would get my head blown off,” i.e. would be killed.

This part is so amazing I’m going to quote it at length:
“

The story of the Methernitha community and its electrical generating machine called the Thesta-Distatica reads like a bizarre modern folk tale. in the late 1950s a small group of Swiss citizens came together to establish a new community based on christian ideals and a concern for the environment,.. bought land up in mountains, wanted to be free of dependencies on outside resources.” They claimed to have created a machine that could produce energy seemingly from the ether, in the form of a “single rotating whell a number of antennae, magnets and coils, pair of glass leyden jars.” “Paul Baumann, the main inventor, has little scientific training, and is an ex-watchmaker.”

”

But they “kept it secret, as it could be used for good or bad, and the world wasn’t ready for it yet.”
“NASA offered them an undisclosed sum for secrets of machine… got requests from all over world,” from people who “would not be forgiven if they failed to carry out a due diligence test – especially if this turned out to be the technology that would end the oil economy.”

In fact, it mentions that Pons/Fleischmann were pressured into announcing to world, because some other guy threatened to do so before them. In their words “It was a singularly unfortunate time to make this announcment. it was the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of nuclear fission, and the o fusion brigade were just gearing themselves up to ask for a lot more money…. I wanted to have it published in The Annnals of Utah Science, of which i believe they only print seven copies.”

The employee at MIT’s press office resigned and called for an investigation (never convened) after he discovered apparent scientific misconduct in the reporting of the fusion center’s findings on cold fusion – “they preferred to get rid of a scientific claim in which they did not believe, and which threatened their federally funded program, by playing politics with the media, trivializing their experiments, and ultimately foisting on the world highly flawed data.”

He claims that cold fusion is a misnomer for “what actually happens when youput differen types, sizes, and thicknesses of palladium and platinum electrodes in jar of deuterium oxide (heavy water) and run an electric current through it.”

SRI (formerly the Stanford Research Institute) apparently is still working on cold fusion and “has an informal collaboration of four of five major research institutions in the U.S. … the sponsors of these institutions may not want their involvmenet to be known.”

By far the most promising technology seems to be that of Blacklight Power, founded by Dr. Randell Mills; normally “hydrogen burned gives off energy, but never give you more energy than it takes to get the hydrogen in first place…. with Mills, hydrogen with potassium-based catalyst gives up hundreds of times the amount of energy released thru simple burning.”

Jim Griggs did hydrosonic pump cavitation, where shock waves heat water in a similar manner to “sonoluminesence” – the water bubbles give off light & heat when hit by high freq. sound.

The Japanese are obviously pursuing this as well, at the forefront of their efforts are yoshiaki Arata and Ye-Chang Zhang. “Such is the level of respect that professor Yoshiaki Arata commands at Osaka University that he even has a building named after him. A university booklet takes some forty pages to list his academic and scientific accomplishments. He is the only physicist in Japan ever to have been awarded the emperor’s medal.” Wow.

Also, something that popped up again: palladium. Turns out it’s one of the most expensive materials in world, used in catalytic converters (in cars, among others) Could be a significant barrier in scaling up these efforts. We “have to be way to use titanium or nickel or other metal as catalyst.” I wonder who’s researching how to solve this…

The field now goes by the name of “low-energy nuclear reactions” and has yearly conferences.

The best resource for finding out more is Infinite Energy magazine. Not the kind of mainstream publication you’ll find at your local bookseller.

* Order of Magnitude = so much larger/smaller than you can imagine
* Q.E.D. = I’m done
* Beyond the scope of this text…. = the modern version of Fermat’s “not enough space to write in this margin.”
* non-trivial = the problem is a pain
* well-posed problem = it’s not something I thought of in a dream
* without loss of generality = extrapolating beyond the realms of imagination
* hand-waving = what you do when you try to conceal the fact that you don’t know/can’t remember how to get from one step to another

My Erdos number is currently at infinity…

Ernest Nathaniel Smith, class of 1908, courtesy quake06.stanford.edu.

I’ve actually started reading a page a day upside down, just to shake things up a bit… slows my reading speed down by about a factor of four, I would say. I was wondering how many extra calories you burn by doing intense mental work as opposed to being idle – might be kind of hard to measure.

reminds me of Simon Singh talking about his new book Big Bang…. the cool part was
where he plays back ‘stairway to heaven’ in reverse, and shows us the demonic message hidden inside. how did anyone even figure that out?

* driving into a dark, narrow tunnel, you slow down… as soon as you get out, you speed up again.
* a famous study in Munich where anti-lock brakes were installed in half of the cars in the sample which were secretly monitored for 3 years; conventional wisdom would dictate that the new brakes would decrease the number of accidents, but in fact the number of accidents remained unchanged – from the theory’s perspective, due to the drivers compensating for the better brakes by driving more agressively.
* the introduction of zebra crossings – again, didn’t change the accident rate because pedestrians had a false sense of security.
* child-proof caps on medicines: actually increased the number of poisonings due to parents getting complacent and leaving them around the house.

“

Gates didn’t get it: he was interested in population control and thought that improving the world’s health might even run counter to that goal. (“It was only when I dug into it a bit that I came to understand that better health leads to lower populations with more resources,” he said.)



Gates began to approach scientists for advice. One of them, William Foege, is a former director of the C.D.C. and one of the country’s most experienced public-health officials. I ran into Foege not long ago and asked him about his first encounters with Gates. He laughed and said, “The guy came to me and said he wanted to learn about public health and he wanted to help. Do you know how many times before I have heard those sorts of things? Rich people say that all the time. I gave him a list of eighty-two books. I saw him a couple of months after that and I asked, ‘How are you doing on those books?’ And he said, ‘Well, I have been so damn busy I have read only nineteen of them.’ I still didn’t know whether to believe him, so I asked, ‘Which was your favorite?’ He didn’t hesitate for a second. ‘That 1993 World Bank report was just super,’ he told me. ‘I read it twice.’” By then, Foege had signed on as an adviser to the foundation. He now splits his time between Seattle and Atlanta.



The 1993 World Bank Development Report helped change the way public-health officials calculate the relationship between disability and the value of life. In the report, for the first time, bank economists focussed on the concept of the “disability-adjusted life year” (DALY), which has come to serve as the standard measure of how to assess the burden of a disease. In the past, the impact of any illness–cancer, the common cold, and everything in between-was usually evaluated on the basis of how likely it was to kill you. But life without good health also carries enormous costs for individuals, families, and societies. The disability-adjusted life year combines years of potential life lost owing to premature death with years of productive life lost to disability. Blindness is an example of a health problem that, while not causing death, can dramatically reduce one’s quality of life or ability to function within society. Alzheimer’s disease is another.

”

or download the MP3 here.

Highlights:
Keeps a high signal (engineers) -to-noise (management) ratio
Venture Capitalists travel in packs
Dropped out of Stanford and lived in his office, showered at the YMCA

or download the MP3 here.