Activities in space and on Earth today continued the opening of a new chapter in spaceflight. An uncrewed capsule, hight Dragon, containing a nominal mass of otherwise expendable and relatively unimportant cargo, docked with the International Space Station (ISS). This it the first time a commercial construct has docked with the ISS; previously, only capsules officially from governments have done …
Perceived Powerlessness?
The news in several places that the recently released movie, The Avengers broke the $1 billion mark for ticket sales (see here, for example) left me wondering, Why? What is it about this movie that has knocked earlier blockbusters (such as the Harry Potter canon) off their pedestals? I mean, I love a good movie, and may even set things …
Taking Big Bites
A couple of weeks ago there was much sound (and some fury) at the prospect of a group of billionaires coming together to form an entity that would seek out and mine asteroids. I loved it! That asteroids may be sources of multiple gigatons of useful materials (metals, mostly) has long been known. That mining them could bring untold riches …
What Would You Do If You Could Not Fail?
I came across this question recently via two different communications channels (Wired magazine and a YouTube video), both referring to the same person. That person is Regina Dugan, who—until March 2012—was director of the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, or DARPA. She left DARPA to move to Google, and faced lots of criticism for the way she allocated work to …
Cleaning Up an Error
Back in September 2011 there was a report from the OPERA experiment at the Large Hadron Collider that neutrinos could travel faster than the currently universally accepted limit of the speed of light. I described my own reactions to this report here. As noted then (and to cite Carl Sagan’s popularization of the phrase and concept), “extraordinary claims require extraordinary …
Functional Fixedness
What do a flock of starlings (known as a murmuration) and ferromagnetism have to do with each other? On the surface, probably nothing. Nothing, that is, unless you are a team of scientists with a perspective and approach that goes outside what their nominal area of study seems to call for. A team headed by William Bialek at Princeton University …
It Must Be Magic
A little item has crossed my desk twice in the past week. As is often the case, it came from two different correspondents, a continent apart. How and why such things spread is worthy of another post, but for now, allow me to point you to this: A little thought and some research that confirmed my hypothesis was very satisfying, …
Hydrodynamics and Crowds
I took some time today to try to catch up on readings that have eluded me owing to other, perhaps more pressing matters. An article in the December 2011 issue of Communications of the ACM 54(12) caught my eye, with the engaging title of “Visual Crowd Surveillance through a Hydrodynamics Lens”, by Moore, Ali, Mehran, and Shah (included just for …
A Thought for Today
The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; someone strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary …
Organic Connections
The Communications of the ACM (Vol. 54, No. 6, June 2011) had a fascinating article entitled, “Biology-Inspired Networking”, wherein the author described how a team at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a new networking algorithm. Their approach is based on the observation that developing neural cells in fruit flies organize not just themselves, but also the cells around them to …