Centauri's Thoughts

this is interesting

The Langley group's conclusion: if you want a spaceship that operates like an airplane, power it with rockets and only rockets.

Trying to build a spaceship by making airplanes fly faster and higher is like trying to build an airplane by making locomotives faster and lighter - with a lot of effort, perhaps you could get something that more or less works, but it really isn't the right way to proceed. The problems are fundamentally different, and so are the best solutions.

I know they are looking at both approaches, and air-breathing hybrids with rocket engines seems in the news, so this gives pause for thought.

We have been taking advantage of the sun-harvesting planet for eons. Either in living form as food, or as trees and shrubs we cut down and use for fire. Farther down the chain is hydrocarbons as gas and oil.

Our efforts at harvesting sunlight so far could be improved, and there are a few techniques which are being looked at or experimented with.

One sure method is concentrating the solar energy onto a smaller cell. Of course this has (thermal) limits, but it generally a good idea.

One of the biggest problems with solar cells is the light bandwidth in which they convert light to power. Of all the whole color spectrum of light, PV cells are very narrowband in what they can convert. The obvious solution should be to convert much of the incoming light (via prismatic lens or something similar, so that as much light power can be extracted.

This technique could be used for all PV cells whether on Earth or in space.

I have seen Tag Clouds in use for about a year or two now, but I believe they have some interesting potential for a visual reference of content in many more ways than is being seen.

One recent app I saw was based on the bio's of your twitter followers: http://twitpwr.com/5vk/

So, armed with that knowledge, I made my own small app that text can be pasted into. It strips common words like a, an, of, the, by, for and so on.

Give it a try at http://www.centaurihome.net/cloud.php

Apparently, there is a special kind of twitter hiccup that happens on occasion (as it did today) and people lose 1,000s of followings (friends) (it acts like a person just stopped following other people).

This happened today to at least 2 people that I know, and I dont follow very many (yet).

Due to the nice API set out there, it looks like someone has already thought about this, and there is a way to back up your followers and those you follow.

You can also back up your favorites, direct messages, etc., but I imagine the biggest thing is the followers and friends (as it is called on tweetake)

Here is an excerpt from the about page:

Why bother to do this? Many reasons:

• Twitter may lose followers again like it did in June / July
• You may change your Twitter name and want to re-follow the people you were following, and contact the people who were following you
• You may want to refer to an older Tweet - currently Twitter does not keep all of your older Tweets
• You may just like backing things up, ‘just in case’, like us

It creates a CSV file suitable for saving in many types of spreadsheets (or text software if you have the patience to read comma separated values that way

The Kepler mission is due to launch next week (March 6th)

It is the first mission with the ability to find planets like Earth -- rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone where liquid water could be maintained on the surface. Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.

"Kepler is a critical component in NASA's broader efforts to ultimately find and study planets where Earth-like conditions may be present," said Jon Morse, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars."

The Kepler spacecraft will watch a patch of space for 3.5 years or more for signs of Earth-sized planets moving around stars similar to the sun. The patch that Kepler will watch contains about 100,000 stars like the sun. Using special detectors similar to those used in digital cameras, Kepler will look for slight dimming in the stars as planets pass between the star and Kepler. The Kepler's place in space will allow it to watch the same stars constantly throughout its mission, something observatories like Hubble cannot do.

The method used will be the “transit” method (star-crossing orbit). We have seen venus do this: here and here.

Of course, this method wont detect every planet orbiting a star, because the planet must pass directly in front of that star, and given solar systems random alignment compared to ours, the Kepler mission is figuring lower odds for detection. But given the large survey sample (100,000) they feel that the number found will tell us more about how common planets are in other solar systems.

References and more reading:
Keplers Home Page

space.com article

Scientific American Article

My understanding of Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds as I read and use it. In the span of five days, I have seen that followers come and go, but some interesting things happen out there. Of course, it really depends on who you are reading, and the content is only as good as the posters.

Some call it micro-blogging, but that too, depends on your style of blogging, I suppose

It seems many use twitter in conjunction with tinyurl.com to make new blog posts known, and I use it myself for that purpose for specific blog entries.

Of course, on the spot news is a great use, as is instant communications between a group (I dont know how much twitter is currently used in the capacity).

I'll definitely be keeping an eye out though, just to see where things are heading.

This stuff looks pretty wild! Interesting video

This same video has also been getting coverage on CNN's edge of Discovery.

When the information technology guys discover how painful it can be to upgrade their current PC hardware to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 7 — the successor to the much-maligned Windows Vista — they may be tempted to switch to Linux or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac OS X.

Part of the problem is that you can’t install Windows 7 beta directly from Windows XP. Instead, you have to upgrade to Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later before attempting an install — a process the Channel Web team found to be non-trivial.
Among the scariest quotes in their report:

• “While Microsoft has assured the world that if the hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7, the reality is that is misleading at best.”
• “We’ve almost lost count of the number of blue screens we’ve seen in the CRN Test Center during the Windows 7 evaluation process.”
• “We tried to do the upgrade on an Acer TravelMate, but were stopped in our tracks by Bluetooth driver incompatibilities.”
• “On a series of 3-and-a-half year old ThinkPad T43s, an IBM security processor refused to let the notebooks boot up with Windows 7. We needed to crack open a couple of four-year old desktops … to add memory just to try to get a system image.”
• “Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, “known issues” and unknown issues.”

Bring it on! It cant happen soon enough for me to see legions leaving the crippling M$ world and come to their senses.

The entire article can be read at http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/02/25/windows-7-trouble-on-the-upgrade-path/

In Fluxworld, after designing pre-programmed failures into the equipment after some set amount of time (10,000 hrs usually), it became apparent that with all of this built at roughly the same time, it was all failing about the same time.

To slow or change this, a new verb was added for maintainers, called refurbish. It pays almost as well as a true fix, but is based on the MBTF (Mean Time Between Failure) and the actual hours since the last fix or refurbish. If actual time in use is 5,000 hours on something with a 10,000 MTBF then 50% of the fix amount is paid.

This optional verb can be used to clean up some older equipment to prevent a string of failures on the Grid. This also adds to some of the realism of the simulation, as the goal is to keep the grid up and running at capacity or better.

TheGrid always evolves as we add power sources and drains to it, from the solar sources which have to account for daytime and cloud cover, the the windmills which must be ever-mindful of the breezes.

Just learning how to manage the Grid on an hourly and daily basis is useful instruction.

We started eons ago as separate beings with separate thoughts, completely isolated.

Through the advent of language, we got better at communicating with each other, but this was still a long ways from truly understanding anothers thoughts. We are a sea of of islands, each completely distinct in thoughts.

As time went on, we got better at communicating with each other. Not only in spoken word, but with the written word as well. Writing also allowed people to speak across time, for once something was written, it could be read at any time, whether that was ten minutes later, or ten years, or ten centuries!

In the past ten years, our level of communications has gone up yet another level. Our written word is not just a daily newspaper or a letter. We went from e-mail, to web pages, to blogs, to chat, twitter and IM.

Communication now is almost instantaneous amongst so many of us, and the connectedness of us is starting to resemble the kind of connection in a large brain. Each of us has many contacts, and each of those contacts has many more, and not all of them overlap. the concept of a “meme” spreading over the global community is somewhat like a “thought” becoming known to the whole.

The concept of the Borg in StarTrek: The Next Generation was a bunch of beings tied together at the thought level. We are working our way towards this, although we have a long ways to go. for one thing, we dont (as of yet) have a chip implant to be always connected to the centralized system (thats coming!). There is also the question of being able to turn it off (the Borg didnt have this choice).

The way we can currently get legions of computers to work together on a problem (via the SETI distributed method, or parallel processors) could prove very interesting when this is applied to human minds. Imagine if solving a problem suitable for human could be sent to 100 or a 1,000 minds to each ponder and resolve all or a part of it, together.

IF we dont blow ourselves up, I feel this last point will not be a question of if – but when