Hey a cool idea has a kick starter (Modular home lighting idea may be real)

Good Morning Readers (for those of you on the US East coast at 11:30 Tuesday 12/6/2016)
The article about designing modular home lighting tools for developing economies, has a real world/unrelated pseudo sibling.  This digital trends article (link here) describe a cool wall lighting design that has LEDs in a hexagonal pattern, that can be readily linked together to provide creative lighting solutions.  Very cool to see designers coming up with very similar ideas.


As usual please feel free to comment and provide suggestions for future articles and concepts.

The Traveler Pack Idea is Real

So it turns out the backpack concept proposed in "The Ultimate Traveler's Backpack" is a real product, so that is really cool.  Gizmodo had a run down on a backpack with many of the features I outlined which you can read here.

Make the Dark Side of the Moon Cool (Why We Should Build a Space Elevator on the Moon version 0)

This post will be part of a series, intended to serve as a reference point for how you might potentially write a white paper, in this case on promoting space elevators on the moon, each post in the series will build on the previous document, until the language meets the necessary level of professionalism.  The author asks that readers provide feedback and suggestions for this document.  Who knows maybe someone might actually use the idea.

Every year NASA gets a hyperbole inducing volume of suggestions* for how they should invest their research dollars, ranging from congressional line items, mandating what should be researched over the coming years, letters from school age children making their own suggestions on potential science experiments (like my little brother did when he was in the fifth grade), more seriously are research proposals coming from well reputed scientists working at various research institutes, and once in a while chicken scratch on the back of envelopes and napkins outlining how we really can build the starship Enterprise.  This article hopes to be a bit better than a back of the envelope mission proposal.

A major pain point of any mission sent into space from the planet Earth is minimizing how much mass is required for the mission.  Even relatively massive pieces like the lunar landers used in the Apollo missions where optimized down to the last gram.  As humanity's aspirations to the stars begin to become actual mission plans, those responsible for planning the mission will benefit from having as diverse a portfolio of design and system solutions as possible.  When planning a mission, sometimes engineers can plan on further improvements in technology to save mass, a key example would be the computers that control a space craft, during the Apollo missions, astronauts would brag about a machine that could fit in a single room, that same level of processing power now fits in your cellphone, not only that, the smaller computer requires far less electrical power, continuing a virtuous cycle of design.  Solar panels have also become far more efficient, with panels on satellites converting roughly 40% of the sunlight they are exposed to into useable electricity, compared to 14% in 1961.  Future missions might also benefit from the use of micro-gravity manufacturing techniques, instead of relying on components that must be strong enough to survive the harsh acceleration of gravity, engineers at firms like Made In Space, are producing 3-D printers capable of creating a range of potential space craft components.  These developments are exciting (at least for space and engineering nerds), but they are still relatively limited, because all of these technologies and solutions, need to be launched from the surface of the Earth, what if we had an alternative?  Enter the world of space mining.

The boom of space mining firms like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have sparked imaginations around the world, is humanity finally getting ready to live in the science fiction world's we used to dream about?  Fingers are most definitely crossed.  While mining asteroids for useful materials is exciting and over the coming generations our descendants will most likely be incredibly dependent on industries based around converting asteroids into useful materials there are resources much closer to Earth that should be considered.  The dark side of the moon is a near perfect near to mid-term location for humanity to expand its reach.  The lunar surface has incredibly large volumes of readily accessible oxygen, iron, and aluminum, while there are other resources to gather from the lunar surface, this article is intended to make a case using the most readily available and understood resources.  With access to relatively cheap sources of oxygen for rocket engines, iron for radiation shielding, and aluminum for structural elements, engineers would be empowered to change how they design deep space missions.  Instead of having to launch a probe with all of its fuel, future missions could fill up on oxygen before continuing on to other celestial bodies.  Future space stations would no longer need to launch with complex walls intended to minimize micro-meteorite damage while minimizing mass, instead, tiles of iron could be added to the exterior of the station on an as needed basis.

Outlining cool uses for the basic chemical elements of lunar regolith is all well and good, but how will future missions gain access to the surface of the Moon to use these resources, two words "space elevator".  A space elevator is roughly speaking, a long ribbon of material that has been placed in orbit around a planet or moon, where one end of the ribbon is in contact with the surface, on the other end of the ribbon, there is a counter weight.  The overall length of ribbon is dependent on two characteristics of the celestial body they are built around, the more massive the planet or the slower the day, the longer the tether needs to be.  The pull of gravity also impacts how strong the tether needs to be, on planet Earth you need tether's made out of materials that can, currently, only be made in laboratories in small quantities.  For a tether on the moon the elevator can be made from materials currently available, for example kevlar.  With an operational space elevator on the surface of the moon, future missions to and from the moon would only require sufficient fuel to dock with the space elevator, as opposed to requiring sufficient fuel to safely land on the surface and then fight against the lunar gravity well on the return trip.  Getting to the point where materials are routinely going to and from the surface of the moon will take many years, but might have a timeline as follows.

Phase 0:  NASA and partner organizations request contract bids for companies that will build the first Lunar Elevator

Phase 1:  The first space elevator satellite is deployed on the dark-side of the moon (Pink Floyd album sales experience a light resurgence).  The system is only capable of moving payloads of a few dozen kilograms per container (potentially more, but we are being conservative in estimations)   The small mass flow rate is not considered useful for industrial applications, but allows scientists of partner nations to do far more analysis of the chemistry of lunar regolith

Phase 2:  Improved versions of the initial space elevator probe are now deployed in a constellation around the initial space elevator satellite.  The larger number of probes allow the space elevator consortium to start shipping semi useful quantities of liquid oxygen and other resources.  One client for the liquid oxygen are space mining firms, looking to minimize their launch costs while pursuing asteroids further afield.

Phase 3:  Using the Phase 2 constellation, the Lunar Mining Consortium beings to manufacture their next generation space elevator, this elevator is intended to allow the transportation of thousands of kilograms at a time.   At this point there are multiple small semi-autonomous research stations and mining sites on the dark side of the moon.

Phase 4:  The Lunar Mining Consortium continues to add to the initial space elevator system.  There is a habitat at stationary orbit, serving as a depot and manufacturing facility, where space craft can refuel, receive modifications and exchange crews and/or cargo.  The number of facilities on the lunar surface continue to grow.  A small number of mirrors have been added to reflect sunlight towards various research stations to ensure they receive enough power during the Lunar night

Phase 5:  The elevator has multiple termination points across the lunar surface, including the north and south poles.  The mirrors now ensure that lunar facilities now only require battery power for <10% of the Lunar night.  Lunar manufacturing capacity has reached the point that more than 20% of the material put into space in a given year came from the Moon.  Only organics and more complicated electronics are likely to still launch from Earth in the coming decades.  As a result of the shear volume of materials arriving and departing the Lunar Elevator Station, engineers have added even larger engines and rail guns to preserve the elevator's orbit.

Phate 6:  Using lessons from the Lunar Mining Consortium, humanity forms the Mars Elevator Group, and begins to outline a Martian space elevator, opening up Mars for more ready colonization.

The motivations for developing space mining are quite reasonable, the more materials that can be harvested outside of the Earth's gravity well, the greater flexibility our civilization will have.  That being said there needs to be a dollars and cents argument made to those who hold the strings.  The easiest is for rocket fuel.  for traditional rockets that use hydrogen and oxygen, the oxygen makes up 8/9ths of the mass of the fuel needed (this doesn't include the tanks holding the hydrogen and oxygen).  Now imagine you have a reasonably affordable source of liquid oxygen on the moon.  Now you need way less mass devoted at launch to your liquid oxygen supply.  For crewed missions to Mars that will, potentially, be a massive saving.  Now to developing the space elevator itself, in theory engineers could make a massive rail gun on the surface of the moon, and use that to launch materials into space, true, but the applications are reduced, building a space elevator on the Moon allows scientists to have a  real test bed for space elevator technologies, these technologies could inform how we build a space elevator on Mars and maybe one day the Earth.
The rational behind suggesting the formation of the Lunar Mining Consortium is to promote international collaboration, projects like the ISS have done wonders for promoting cooperation here on Earth, a massive engineering project where dozens of governments can share in innovations and natural resources will hopefully promote a more unified Earth.

Well thanks for reading version 0, feedback and notes are appreciated.

*honestly the author isn't sure how many ideas NASA gets, but assumes it is a lot.

My First Lazy Programmer Moment

One of the ways I have been trying to improve my programming abilities has been to go to a website called Project Euler and do some of their coding challenges.  In one of the problems you are asked to write a program that goes over 400 numbers in a 20x20 array and manipulate the numbers

                12 07 44 

                38 90 13

                25 64 53 (something like this, but you know, bigger)

After cutting and pasting these numbers into Sublime (a coding text editor), I attempted to turn this grid of numbers into an array that I could manipulate for the rest of the challenge.  (for those less familiar an array is a way for a computer program to store a large number of pieces of information)

The easiest to make an array in ruby is to put square brackets [] around the pieces of information you are trying to work on.  in code it would look something like 

new_array = [12, 07, 44, 38, 90, 13,25, 64, 53]

For whatever reason my computer did not to recognize the array I made as actual numbers, (well it did but it was trying to treat the numbers like they were base 8, the 9s really confused it)

One tedious solution came to mind turn all of these numbers into strings.  (a string is a collection of symbols that you would see on your keyboard they are enclosed by "quotation" marks, a number in string form is treated differently than a pure number)

Within a few minutes of trying to make the array an array of strings.  Tediously adding quotes around each pair of digits another option came to mind.  Instead of turning each number into a unique string, turn the entire array into a string that can be used.  In the awesome weirdness of programming, computer languages like ruby will act as if strings are an array, with each individual letter/number/symbol acting as a different spot in the array.  With this in mind I wrote a new program, that would turn one massive string into all of the different elements of the array that I needed.

In code this solution looks something like this

number_source = "12 07 44 

                               38 90 13

                               25 64 53"

@storage=[]

def make_into_numbers(target_string)

biggest_size = target_string.length

counter = 0

while counter < biggest_size

@storage.push(target_string[counter..(counter+1)].to_i)

counter += 3

end

end

The way the program works is as follows.  The method make_into_numbers takes in a source string, in this case, our giant grid of number, and moves those numbers into a new array.  Because the numbers are always 2 digits long and followed by a space, it seemed easier to have the program jump three places grab the first and second number from that start point and continue on.  For a sanity check, I had am output that would displace particular positions in the array that I could visually confirm that I was generating an appropriate array.  Once I confirmed that it worked, that part of the code was removed.

I know for more experienced programmers something cleaner might have been used, where the numbers were extracted by looking for the next space in the grid, or even cleaner, but this approach took me less than 5 minutes to write and it made me a bit happy.  Suggestions for better approaches are always welcome.

  We have something called a method (methods are the pieces of code people write in ruby to get the various tasks they want done).  The method is called "make_into_numbers" in the parentheses we have "target_string" this is a stand in phrase allowing the computer to know what data to manipulate while allowing the programmer to more readily re-use the code with only changing a few words.  

Making Gravity In Science Fiction

This blog has highlighted on several occasions that I am a massive sci-fi nerd (if this is news to you, this is probably your first time reading here).  When science fiction writers or TV producers have a space ship generate (or simulate) gravity they achieve it in three major ways.  Spin the ship, in movies like Interstellar or 2001 a Space Odessey, the crew is provided with something akin to gravity by spinning part or all of the ship.  This rotation effectively pushes crew members outward and the ground pushing back feels something like gravity.  In the TV show The Expanse (which I highly recommend, the more people who watch it the more likely I'm going to get the 30+ seasons of the show that I desire (and now I jinxed it))(back to the expanse) in the show humans have created advanced engines that are so efficient that ships can be in almost constant acceleration, this means that so long as the ship is under thrust, crews will experience some degree of faux gravity.   Another alternative is the use of "mag boots" specially designed footwear or general attire that has the ability to be attracted to the surface of the ship when crew members need it to be, and when they move their foot up, the magnetic attraction is removed.  This solution is incredibly reasonable, unfortunately, no one seems to have made a show where people in "mag boots" mode actually looks like only their feet want to go down.  (this is not to say doing so is easy, just an observation that it would be cool to see a space battle where mag boots are in use and while a crew member is reloading they just let the empty magazines float there, or less dramatically, while fixing an engine crew members are surrounded by their tools floating nearby.)

The most popular option for ship,s gravitym hand wavium generators.  Hand Wavium Grav generators are popular in , Star Trek, Star Wars, Earth Above and Beyond, Farscape, Stargate...... read all of the shows.  What irks me is that writers generally ignore how weird the behavior of ships gravity is.  (the one exception that does come to mind is the first episode of the TV show Enterprise (the prequal Star Trek show with Scott Baccula), and all they say is that there are weird points in ships where the gravity doesn't quite work.

What would be nice is a middle ground from truly hard science fiction solutions to simulating gravity and just getting rid of the problem with a quick phrase that only power nerds care about.  A "gravity laser" for space craft.  A reasonably advanced civilization might be able to create a narrow beam of gravity that could provide a pulling force on the entire ship.  What is cool about this technology, is if this attractive force is only effective in a single direction you also have a means of reaction-less thrust, helping to minimize how much space the ship "needs" for fuel.  While this approach is still very much fictional, to me it feels a bit more grounded.

I hope you enjoyed the post and if you have any questions, feed back, thoughts, please feel free to comment.  I will try to add a drawing later tonight.

How Hot Gets Cold

This post is an attempt at create a reference page that is as reader friendly as possible.  If you think any of the examples are too dense, please feel free to comment, it means I need to work on getting better at communicating.

This blog, and a lot of mechanical engineering work has a really big question to answer, when you do any kind of work, moving a car, use electricity to power a chip, or launch a rocket into space, you have heat, more often than not that heat is not something you want in your project.  To get rid of heat engineers generally have 3 major ways to cool things off, conduction, convection, and radiation (not the nuclear kind).

First general rule of heat transfer, heat moves from where it is warmest to where it is coldest.  For that heat to get from the warm spot to the cool spot, any combination of conduction, convection, or radiation can be used.

Cooling through conduction.  Pick up a glass of ice water and your hand starts to feel cold.  This is the conduction of heat from your warm body to the cold glass.  Now instead of picking up a glass of ice water, you pick up a styrofoam cup filled with ice water, your hand doesn't feel nearly as cold.  The water in the cup is no cooler than the glass, but your hand feels colder, this is because of something called thermal resistance.  The greater the thermal resistance the harder it is for something that is hot to lose heat to something that is cold.

Convection is a bit more complicated in practice (but who cares, this is an intro).  Imagine using a fan on a hot day, even though the air the fan is blowing on you isn't any colder you feel more comfortable.  The reason you feel cooler in front of a blowing fan is because of something called "forced convection".  The faster you move air molecules away from your body the cooler you will feel, this is because your body is naturally conducting heat to the air around you, but the air does not necessarily want to move that heat away from your body, by blowing air, the warm atoms are more likely to move away from your body.*

Radiative cooling.  Instead of transferring heat by means of physical contact, radiative cooling lets heat escape through electro-magnetic radiation.  This is what allows the Predator to hunt Arnald Schwarzenegger in the first Predator movie.  The warmer an object is the more thermal radiation it will emit.  Where the concept of radiative cooling gets complicated, is that everything is emitting some amount of thermal radiation.  What does this mean for you or me, most of the time nothing that you need to worry about?  For blog posts like how the Death Star deals with its Heat, or more recently Window Cooling (better title suggestions are always appreciated) this concern for radiative cooling is really important, if the cooling system isn't pointed at something really cold, they won't work that well.  The best direction to point a radiative cooler is at the cold emptiness of space.

The blackest material made
potentially helping NASA
keep spaceships cold
source extremetech.com

Radiative cooling is often called black body cooling. The reason for this term is that the closer an object is to being as black as humanly possible the better it is at cooling.  If you want your spaceship to avoid losing heat, you make it as shiny and reflective as possible, to help with cooling, you want it to be as black as possible, this is one of the reasons scientists are obsessed with making really black materials.

How NASA keeps satellites from getting too hot (or cold)
source NASA

*there are cases where you can use convection to warm something, but the hope here is to keep the intro as straightforward as possible.

How hot things can get (added 10/19/2016)

Passive Window Cooling Idea

I may be a little obsessed with the Fan Group's research into radiative cooling.  (what can I say, I really hate excessive summer heat).

As the Greater Boston area is in the midst of a rather unpleasant summer heat wave, the mind turns to ways to help cool our human made environments.  (A big thanks to Willis Carrier for inventing modern AC)  While active heat pumping has the advantage of being incredibly fast, it does increase our civilization's energy demands, and until those energy sources are no longer adding greenhouse gasses, we are leaving ourselves in a nasty little feedback loop.  One potential means of increasing how efficiently we cool our homes, would be to create a window unit that passively provides radiative cooling while still allowing light through.  The design would have 3 major parts, the transparent cooling surface, heat pipes, and a small solar panel to power a fan.  After a user puts their cooling panels into place, the houses heat would be transported from the inside through the heat pipes.  To ensure that as much heat is being taken away from the house as possible, a small fan attached to a heat sink, similar to what you would see inside your computer, would blow air as necessary.  Sounds great in theory, but let's try to figure out how useful this idea would be.

Fig 1 On the left a flat panel trying to radiate heat away
on the right, the bumpy pattern points the heat towards space

 Each square meter of radiating material would provide roughly 850 watts of cooling or the equivalent to 2900 BTUs (about half the cooling of what a window unit made for a small room would provide.  This means that for a small room (about 125 square feet), you would need about 2 square meters of cooling surface (I am making a distinction for reasons I will go into later).  Without knowing how heavy all of the elements would be it would be pre-mature to comment on how unwieldy the mass of the system would be, that being said just that amount of area would be hard.  If this magical room had 4 decent sized windows, you would still need each panel to be at least 0.5 m by 1 m (or about 19.75 inches by 39.5 inches, unless this thing is folded up before you open it, not easy to safely place out of your window).  The reason the size of the panel needs to be at least half a meter by a meter, not exactly that size is a matter of how radiative cooling works.  Black body radiators need to be pointed at something colder than they are, in the case of this technology, the cold of space, if the surface of the panel is perfectly smooth, your cooling window is now most likely pointed at your neighbor's house, probably picking up the heat being reflected and or emitted by the neighbor.
 If the panel was to have a bunch of ridges creating a cool 3-D panel, probably a bunch of 45 degree slopes, you are only getting about 70% of the equivalent height of the array.  so now instead of being half a meter by a meter, the panel needs to be 0.5 m x 1.5 meters to get the same effect.  Now home owners have to spend the energy installing these far more massive panels, or putting in way more small panels to get a similar effect.

Fig 2:  Cooling panels to go outside big buildings

We are quickly running into a design that seems less and less appealing, which is what I came to realize, as excited as I am about passive window cooling units, they start seeming pretty silly as a primary means of cooling a home.  Small seasonal units might still find a niche market, for home owners who want to minimize the amount of work their actual AC system needs to work, but the real market for passive cooling technologies would most likely come from larger businesses that want seasonal cooling capacity.  Instead of designing a window unit that needs to be small and light enough for a home owner to put in, engineers should focus their efforts on creating two types of passive cooling installations, seasonal and permanent.  Designing a building to permanently have passive cooling systems on the outside, would make the most sense as to be customized for the building's use case (read too difficult to properly be analyzed in this blog), the seasonal solution is a bit easier (as I am looking at the problem from my perspective).  Imagine giant shutter looking structures. some intended to allow light in, others to maximize cooling.  Businesses and organizations who require massive amounts of air-conditioning could lease these panels and have them place around their building at the beginning of the summer, drastically offsetting how much energy the would need to devote to air-conditioning.  The challenge for this use case is the business atmosphere, realistically without either utility or government mandates to minimize peak energy consumption during the summer months, it could be difficult to inspire wide spread adoption of this kind of cooling technology.  If society had the will power to invest in more passive cooling technologies, there would be less demand for peaking power plants (the most expensive types of electrical generators), reducing the overall cost of energy, which is generally a good thing.

A quick note on the passive window unit.  While I don't think it makes sense for most American consumers, I do think the idea has merit in regions where power is less reliable or more expensive.

The idea behind this post is I generally only quickly outline an idea or act like I've seen the future and it must include my "brilliant" solution, I wanted to convey, at least in a small way, how I iterate through ideas and what problems I try to consider.  I hope this provides a small sense on how I try to create solutions to problems.

As always, questions, comments, feed back what-have-you always welcome.

Br(e)aking In Space

A common theme in the planning of deep-space missions(and this blog), is slowing a spaceship down enough to enter into orbit around a particular planet or moon.  As a general rule mission planners at NASA, ESA, and Roscomos need make sure the mission has enough fuel to get their ship going the right speed.  Generally speaking you can slow your ship down using two tools, rocket fuel and the gravity of other planets (I won't try to communicate gravity boosts/br(e)aking because I'm not familiar enough with the concept to do a reasonable highschool physics explanation(use the link if you want to know more)).  What I would like to suggest is a way to augment the rocket fuel option.

One of the many proposals that scientists and engineers have put forth for reducing the cost of launching ships into Earth orbit, is the use of micro-wave lasers (called masers) to help to heat up rocket fuel, the warmer the rocket fuel is, the more energy coming out of the engine's exhaust port.(this is like way over simplifying it).  This is awesome and hopefully sooner than later it will be another alternative way for research satellites to enter orbit (humans may not want lasers pointed at their rocket ship during the near term (personally it would depend on proven safety records of various technologies available), but how does it help us change velocity around other planets.  Short term, not at all.  Looking towards the future, it isn't unreasonable that there will be a relatively steady stream of space probes , and hopefully human explorers, trying to get around the inner solar system.  At that time governments and private bodies might begin to collaborate on creating a network of maser base stations on the larger rocks in the inner system of planets.  Initially the stations would only be placed on our Moon and one of Mars' moons.  Assisting astronauts on their missions to the Red planet and back, as time went on other large asteroids could add these laser arrays to increase mission flexibility.

While I am excited about this idea, that being said it wouldn't be perfect, getting the arrays at the target destinations would not be easy, so probably not a good idea for the first missions.

If engineers and budgets allowed for it, I would try to emphasize the energy beaming system to put out different kinds of power, from visible light to micro-waves.  The larger range of frequencies would allow for different missions to benefit, for space probes returning from the outer planets, the beams could focus additional power for the ion engines, either reducing the needed mass of the solar panels or just overall boosting thrust.  For missions not using ion engines, the focus would be on the use of the maser.

Additional ideas and comments are welcome, thanks for taking the time to read.

*7/26/2016 An edit I wrote break not brake, an observant reader had the decency to inform me of my mistake privately, Sorry 'bout that.

A Thought on Solar Sails

As several posts on this blog have already let on, I am very excited about Breakthrough Starshot.  (the collaboration between Steven Hawking and Yuri Milner into funding research into developing really small spacecraft, that by use of solar sails, would be launched towards Alpha Centauri)  

One of the questions that has been needling away in the back of my mind has been communication back to Earth.  (this question is also a focus for some of the Breakthrough Starshot team's research)  The problem is relatively straightforward, under this mission strategy to get probes to another solar system, you need to make really really low mass probes.  Less mass means less energy necessary to get to really high speeds.  Totally reasonable, the trade off is, the smaller you make the probe, the less space it has for things like, power generation and communication equipment.  The less energy you have to communicate, the harder it is to be heard.  Imagine trying to look for a lightning bug while looking at a massive spot light (this is not my analogy, I took it from a National Geographic story that I semi-recall on the search for exoplanets (alas I don't remember it enough to provide a source right now)).  The lightning bug in this story is our probe, the spot light, Alpha Centauri's stars.  Searching for this lightsource aka, the probes data transmission might just be too crazy, even for our future generation's technology.  

Let us not rely on the amount of signal a single gram of space probe can generate.  There is a beautiful alternative, and it is part of the probe's design, the solar sail.  The solar sail for even an incredibly small probe, would need to be huge, according to wikipedia, a solar sail 800 m by 800 m would produce just over 5 Newtons of force (imagine the amount of effort it takes to pick up a can of soda.  Now imagine you need enough material that when spread out the sail would cover 128 football fields.  That's a lot of area, potentially that is a lot of room for a potentially useful communications tool.  One potential means of using all of that area for a good secondary use, would be to create a material, that for some frequencies of light, it is incredibly reflective, preferably to the color of light that the lasers used to push the probe towards Alpha Centauri would use.  That part is easy, make a substance that is really reflective of one color, the challenge would be this, in addition to reflecting that one frequency of light, it would need the ability to change the frequency of light coming through one side to another on the other side.  Imagine for instance this special material when you shine blue light at it, on the other side yellow light would shine through.  Scientists are already doing work along those lines with materials called quantum dots.  If future researchers are very clever we could make special quantum dots that change one type of photon into another, but only if that quantum dot has been told to.  So now when we shine our blue light at this special material, normally blue light shines through, but when we specially alter that material (think apply a certain voltage, a chemical agent, what have you) now that light is yellow.  (I'm using actual colors for "ease" of communication).

2059 The first Breakthrough Starshot probe begins to fly through Alpha Centauri system, the incredibly small command module begins recording the data that scientists have waited over 25 years for, on its journey through this new solar system.  As the probe gets closer to Alpha Centuari A, systems unused since leaving the inner solar system over 20 years ago begin to activate.  On board controllers initiate a test sequence, confirming that the signalling quantum dots embedded in the solar sail can still convert the star's UV light down to one of A's emissions gaps.  After confirming that the system works, the probe begins to rapidly flicker, alternating between allowing light through unchanged, and emitting downshifted light that astronomers can detect trillions of miles away.

2063  Scientists confirm what had been suspected for years, clear indicators of potential microbial life changing the atmosphere of one of the moons of the Centauri system.

The core concept here doesn't necessarily require that the solar sails only manipulate one small band of the electro magnetic spectrum.  I honestly don't know what the limits would might be.  It could be that the system can alter several energy frequencies, but only be altered one time.  (this still leaves the potential for some simple yes/no messages being sent back)  for example Yes probe 1125 is working correctly and No it hasn't detected some type of organic molecule we associate with life.

Anyways I hope you enjoyed, feed back and questions are always welcome.

Augmented Reality and Getting Rid of Fences

Or How Technology Could Destroy the Cowboy

This idea is several years old, it lay dormant, until the joy of Pokemon Go brought it back.  Currently farmers who have live stock will often need to enclose their property with many miles of barbed wire or electric fencing to control where their animals are at a given time.  In an era with ever cheaper augmented reality technologies it could soon be possible to create smart goggles for animals.  Ok, I bet you're thinking, this is crazy, but bear with me.  If I have a large herd of cattle, I can equip them all with special goggles, that would allow ranchers to tell the cow should be at any time, all without herding the animal.
The goggles would provide a visual overlay onto a given animal's field of view, and at any time the cow, sheep, goat, etc... tries going into an area where a farmer doesn't want them, the goggles would provide a visual cue to make them want to go some other direction.  If the visual cue isn't enough, a system similar to a dog's shock collar would be activated to provide negative reinforcement.  The technology could go even further, scientists are developing bio-medical sensors to look for health indicators, the goggle system could actively report the health and location of all of a farmer's cattle, as time goes on the system would even include diet control, so when a cow goes up to its feed pen, the machine ensures that any nutritional gaps are filled.  Now the cost of this technology would need to be low, but in theory secondary cost savings could raise what that acceptable price would be.  First the reduced need for fence maintenance, probably a good thing, theft prevention, now the cows will only look for people that are authorized to do anything with the animal, if something isn't authorized, well it will look scary and the cow would go the other direction.  Harder to quantify now, but my gut says it might be useful, reducing ecological where wear and tear, as farmers no longer need to directly watch their herd, the computer can keep them grazing over a much more dynamic landscape, reducing the negative impacts of too many cows in too close an area over a given time.

(this article is now making me want to think more about smart farming, I'll try to keep coming up with additional ideas, and make a mega post later on)

As per usual, please feel free to comment share, feedback is always appreciated.

Edit July 14 2016
Another thought occurs, if this technology is affordable enough to equip the world's cattle with, we could start adding it to endangered mega-fauna (read elephants, rhinos, pandas)  There are stories of communities in Sub-Sahara Africa using lines of bee colonies to dissuade local elephants from entering into human farm land.  With augmented reality tech for wildlife, such needs could be reduced.  Secondary benefits could include the ability to monitor overall herd health, and serve as a way to provide evidence against poachers.  Another potential benefit for those in places like Alaska, young bears who haven't quite learned that entering human controlled spaces could be more actively convinced to not return to places with people, and when they see people in their territory, the human could look scarier.  (crap I should have been lazy and made this into a brand new post)

IoT and the 4th of July

Fireworks are awesome, but most of them are tubes of cardboard filled with things that go boom.  C'mon people, what's the problem, we live in an age where our cellphones have crazy features, a computer can beat a human being at Go, and some other awesome achievement like uhhh.. SpaceX (people like talking about them, for good reason reusable rockets are awesome).  Why aren't fireworks more sophisticated (there are probably good reasons but I'm being semi-rhetorical).  We live in an era of incredibly low cost computing.  $10 will now get you a computer capable of streaming video and handling 80% of the uses most people have for their computers (ok this doesn't include all of the required accessories, but the point remains).  What is to stop us from bringing these incredibly affordable platforms to making fireworks more awesome?  NOTHING!!! (aside from economics)
Imagine a small micro-controller that can be accessed via some kind of wireless network.  Possessing an internal timer, accelerometers providing up to 6 axis of pertinent information, and enough onboard power capacity to light the fire-work's fuse.  Now technicians for major events could go to an incredible degree of planning when it comes to the pyrotechnics.  During Boston's July 4th celebration, one of the cool fireworks, made a smiley face, totally awesome, unfortunately not all of the shells had the smiley face facing in the "correct" orientation, where the smile roughly occupied the bottom half of the explosion.  With accelerometers and orientation controls, the system could calculate at what time it could go off to look normal.  That's kid's stuff, let's go bigger.  One of the most dramatic parts of these displays is to have the grand finale follow allowing with a dramatic point in the local musical performance.  With a system that can be remote activated while in flight, now truly crazy displays could work with acoustic sensors near the musical performers and when the musical signal is given they go off.  Even crazier, you could set the activation code to start the detonation such that you would hear the blast of fireworks, right as the music is blasting.
Additional benefits could include safety in wiring.  Instead of having to manually wire to each individual cell, the technical crew could do much of their work in software.  Multiple redundancies in the activation mechanisms would help to minimize instances of the entire display going off all at once.  (For this to work, one approach would be to have the control chips to receive their power wirelessly and use that power to charge a capacitor, this would further help to reduce the potential for pre-mature activation)

Long term features, variable chemistry.  Some manufacturers might produce a limited range of smart fireworks.  The smart models would contain dynamically accessible chemistries, allowing for variation in the color and size of a given explosion.  Additionally moving to as bio-degradable a chip structure as possible, while it might be difficult to make the controller out of nothing but recyclable materials, the goal should be as close to 100% as possible.

More sci-fi.  3-D printing with the chips, hopefully, eliminating risks to the people responsible for making the explosive.

Starfleet Needs Better Androids

Sometimes you need to relax and zen out, for me that includes re-watching Star Trek.  During one of these viewings, I was reminded of something I wanted to comment on.  How smart is Commander Data?  In an episode titled "The Offspring"we are told that Soong type androids (read Cmdr Data and his "relatives") can perform over 60 trillion operations per second.  In the early 90's this number sounded insane, to perform a "mere" 1.9 billion operations per second you would need a Cray2 supercomputer, consuming more energy than 100 American homes (200 kW).  So now that we have a context for how powerful people thought a supercomputer needed to be to simulate a human being, let's look at today's state of the art computers, the fastest supercomputer is in China, the Sunway TaihuLight, it can perform 93 petaflops (thats 93 quadrillion operations per second), that make Data look downright dumb.  The PS4 and XBox One can both perform over one trillion operations per second (or 1/60th of Data's processing power).  If early 21st century engineers can produce this much processing power, what the hell is Star Fleet doing with all of their intellectual wealth?

Honestly, comparing numbers just comes off as silly, I get that, the writers were creating material for a particular time period, and within the context of the late 80's/early 90's the number they provided gave a sense of power and also gave nerds a number to geek out over.  This is a challenge for writers and futurists, coming up with ideas that are fantastical enough to inspire, but grounded enough to feel real.  Alternatively, the definition that citizens of the federation use for operation could be far more complicated than what we use.  For citizens of the federation, an operation could include thousands of sub-operations, one example, when processing an image there are many steps required to determine if there is a face on the screen a Star Trek level of operation might be the full action of find all potential shapes.  Honestly I am making things up.

Fun things that Data couldn't do, but our computers can.

Use contractions
beat people at chess

Edit 7/11
win at poker, according to this article, mathematicians have created computer programs that are incredibly difficult to beat by humans.  If Cmdr Data wanted to it would be possible for him to install said program into his own abilities.

there might be others but I can't remember

A Virtuous Cycle For Rovers on Other Planets

OK I know I promised to start writing posts that were more accessible, but right now I just want to get this idea properly sketched out and for that, I need to use engineerese

First and foremost, I think Curiosity is one of the coolest pieces of hardware that humans have ever built, we have a nuclear powered robot massing in at 900 kg wandering around the surface of Mars, that is effing awesome (if you don't think so I don't know how you got to this blog post).  One of the challenges in the design of Curiosity, or any of the rovers on Mars is having sufficient power to move around.  Currently all of the rovers still active on Mars carry their power supplies with them.  What if instead of carrying their solar panels/nuclear generators , rovers operated similar to how the US Navy uses air-craft carriers and smaller planes, ok not a perfect example.

With this new approach the emphasis on rovers would be mission flexibility, each rover might only come with a small number of sensors and an electrical contact to allow them to receive power from the command pod.  The command pod would most likely carry the bulk of communications, power production(duh), and processing.  The individual probes receiving power from the mothership could be much simpler affairs, with relatively standard parts aside from their specialized sensors.  Each machine would have a very limited amount of on board power storage and production, this would be as a means of redundancy, as well as provide flexibility.   Assume rover A needs to get to a location that is too far away to get to with just its own tether, well rover A and rover B could roll out in the general direction of interest, once B and A have gotten to the maximum distance that their tether will allow, B parks in place, A connected to the mother ship through B, can continue the mission until it gets to the target.  This daisy chaining of mini-rovers could go for a decent amount of distance, of course there would be a limit, either by the number of rovers sent in the mission, or by voltage losses over the distance of transmission.

 There are some inherent trade offs from the maximum area of investigation, to potential mechanical complexity, etc....
The total mass of the mission devoted to all of their little motors will probably be slightly higher than what a larger multi-use rover would use.  You would need to be careful to not let the electrical tethers of the rovers get tangled with other rovers.   This isn't a mission that you do when it still costs $10,000+/kg to get something to Mars, this kind of mission makes sense when launches are 1/10th that (or hopefully less).  As time goes on scientists will want clearer details on areas for future landing sites, governments are going to be interested in quickly confirming whether a region has sufficient resources for larger manned missions.  Smart mission planners would have fall back projects, when the rovers start to fail, the mothership could still do activities, ranging form refining fuel for future missions, to weather research stations,  to acting as a data backup system for orbiting satellites (I know this is a stretch, but who knows).  The Viking probes operated on the surface of Mars for over 6 Earth years, considering Opportunity is still working (12 years passed its original mission length) who knows how long the mothership could do useful science/fuel production.

Any thoughts or alternative approaches are welcome please leave a note.

Utilitarian Philosophers Annoy Me

So I just read an article about the ethical questions associated with the safety goals of autonomous cars.  Generally the question is, "do you want your autonomous car to minimize casualties?"  People generally say "Yes I want an autonomous car that does what it can to minimize how many people die in a car crash" This opinion changes when people are told that this prioritization might mean that their car would end up letting them person die in a crash to save a bunch of toddlers (I'm adding that last bit).  The debate is based on a philosophy question, you are standing next to a switch that controls which path a trolley will take, for some bizarre reason their are people on both paths that the trolley will follow, on one track five people, the other there is one person.  If you do nothing, the trolley will remain on its path and kill five people, if you pull the switch it will go down the path with the single individual.  What do you do?  (this question doesn't need to be answered by you, unless you want to leave a comment)  My answer, who cares, the scenario is so abstract and unrealistic, why does it really matter in real terms?
The likelihood that you or an autonomous car are going to run into a situation where the option is kill a passenger or a group of pedestrians is negligible.  I am more likely to win the lotto, while I am being launched into space on my way to visit my empire of sexy cyborgs (okay maybe not that last detail).  Why can't I shout at the lone person on the track, or the people on the other track.  If a car suddenly finds that their are people in its way, why can't it lay on the horn?  I don't want to get pedantic, that's wasting everyones time, but I have a hard time envisioning a scenario where the options are so binary.  Instead of ethicists telling researchers to build around a one in a billion freak occurrence.  While I do believe engineers have a responsibility to make products as safe as they can, and ideally to the greatest benefit to society possible, we should not ignore solutions that are better than our current options 80% of the time and the rest of the time no worse than what we current have.  History is more impressive with really radical changes, but that doesn't mean we should ignore slow and iterative improvements.

Please feel free to leave a comment, if you agree or disagree please say why.

White Envelopes

After tragedies involving airplanes, news reporters will highlight the details associated with finding the "black box" more properly referred to as Flight Data Recorders and Cockpit Voice Recorders (the black box is in fact two different pieces of hardware).  These two pieces of equipment are vital in determining what led up to the incident.  What is unfortunate about the use of FDRs and CVRs in an air craft is the challenge of finding these pieces of hardware after an event.  Imagine if there was a technology platform that would augment the black box, something that fully embraces how small and robust electronics are.  They could be nicknamed "white envelopes" (you are now welcome to groan at this terrible attempt at a joke).  White envelopes would be a small collection of chips that would receive the same telemetry as the FDR and CVR, but instead of being in a single location, the white envelopes could be spread out through out the aircraft.  Now after a crash, pieces of debris can provide critical data that would improve the likely hood of finding the actual black box.

Currently black boxes mass in at around 4.5 kgs (10 lbs for those of us who landed on the moon) and generally two are required in commercial aircraft ( either an FDR and separate CVR or two boxes that have combined FDRs and CVRs).   The mechanical robustness of a black box is incredible, according to the NTSB an FDR needs to survive 3000+ Gs, being submerged in 20,000 ft of water, and being cooked at 1100 C for 30 minutes, that is frickin' nuts levels of hardcore engineering, part of the reasoning for this super robustness, you only have two eggs in roughly the same basket, the plane.  White envelopes could be far less robust, dozens or hundreds of small recorders don't need to be as survivable, a decent number of them are unlikely to face the same level of extreme circumstances.

The design challenges of the white envelope will be pretty tremendous, yeah you don't need to survive being baked at 1100 C but you still need to be passably strong, also what data is acceptable.  In the United States the transcripts of the audio on the CVR are generally extremely restricted, do you still include the audio?  Do the white envelopes record all of the sensor data provided by the aircraft? (which can mean you are potentially recording hundreds of sensors multiple times a second)   These are questions that engineering teams would need to discuss.   A minimum viable product might be around the size of multiple playing cards stacked on top of each other, this small volume would hold one or more memory cards (micro-SD would make the most sense under current technologies(in the opinion of the author, if you disagree please explain why other options make more sense)), wireless data recorders, and an on board controller.  The controller would ensure that sensor data is actually coming from the plane's computers.  In addition to this primary chip set, you would need small power packs, the reason for the power packs being separate from the data recorders stems from the mindset of maximizing system flexibility while minimizing the mass added to the plane.  For white envelopes inside the cabin of the air craft, power could come from any number of electrical systems, so why generate power.  Depending on where engineers decide white envelopes should be added to the plane that will dictate what the power packs would look like, ideally they would have a small battery and some kind of micro generator.  

Hopefully this idea or something like it, could help in improving our ability to understand what happened after the loss of an airplane much more quickly.

Any questions of feed back please feel free to write a note

A Better Cable Box

Recently the FCC ruled that cable companies can no longer restrict which cable boxes work on their network.  Now cable providers will, horror for them (sarcasm), actually have to compete on the quality of the cable box that they say you need to rent.  What if they decided to be proactive on developing a media box that actually benefitted both the customer and the cable company?   Currently my cable provider, Comcast, requires that I rent all of my equipment, modem and cable box from them, which honestly while annoying is not terrible.  What kind of annoys me, is the fact that they have a wifi module in my modem, that is used to provide random strangers access to the Comcast network.  (really I'm just annoyed that I am paying them for the pleasure of improving their wireless network, there should be some kind of discount for the power I pay for, anyways)
Let us look to the future of what ISPs can do for customers while benefitting themselves.  Cable boxes/modems that are rented, can be a lot more sophisticated.  Companies like Microsoft are already trying to turn their gaming consoles into the ultimate home entertainment hub.  A smart cable company or ISP could collaborate with console or computer manufacturers to create a box that is more than just the ability to channel surf and record content.  I would like to suggest a smart box that not only records my content, but also acts as a mini-server, distributing the data load across thousands of homes.  Now when you rent a movie from your cable provider's on demand service, the bits don't need to go nearly as far (while the distance the data moves is relatively trivial, the need for the discrete servers is a potential cost).
Potential features for the smarter cable box could include.
Localized server capacity for distributing media
On board game platform
Massively distributed data backups, you're data could be safely backed up and encrypted in multiple locations across the city.  Said service could be included in your monthly service subscription
A shared node for streaming users content to their individual smart devices
general purpose server capacity.
Home command center for smart home technologies.

Ideally users would not be charged for the full feature set, if the service provider was smart, the cable box would have tiered features.

Crowd sourcing better vacation photos

This idea came to me while walking past tourist taking their personal photos around MIT's campus, how often are your photos ruined by other people walking by, taking their own photos etc.. probably a lot.  Practiced photographers will take many photos to increase their chance of a great picture, but what about those of us with less time? What if we could pool our images, popular tourist spots could have a pool of hundreds or thousands of photographs that could be merged into a useful template.  Now if you want a romantic picture of you and your date, or to change the sky from overcast to true sky blue. A series of smart algorithms would allow you to easily change a seen, to just the people you are with, or the scenery around you.

Some examples to be added (6/8/2016).  Photoshop's tool that allows you to eliminate tourists, microsoft's photosynth.

Friends with photoshop skills if you would be willing I would love to collaborate on making a few mockup images

General Updates June 6 2016

After a chat with some family and friends, I will start going back through my post history and adding explain like I'm 5 posts (there were concerns that my posts were too engineering nerd focused, which is a totally fair assessment)  as there is a relatively small readership, I am happy to do start doing follow up posts requested by you the reader.

An unrelated note, I have been meaning to link to my github account and various projects, the biggest is "RattleBoat"  a reworking of the classic boardgame Battleship, this game can be played within your computer's command line.  The version that this post links to is the most up to date as of today, and is more in debug mode than production ready, but I like feedback.  

For windows user, open your command prompt, drag the file into the cmd prompt, and press enter, it should run.

For mac users if the file is on the desktop, open your terminal and type "cd desktop" and press enter, after that type "ruby rattleboat661440.rb" followed by enter, the program should be running. 

Riding the Centaur (a long term plan for putting research satellites in orbit around Alpha Centauri)

Stopping when you are going really fast is hard, stopping or slowing down while going really fast while flying through the vacuum of space is really hard, slowing down while going really fast in space without using fuel wicked hard to do.

Breakthrough Starshot, the joint initiative between Stephen Hawking and Russian Billionaire Yuri Milner, discussed in the post Additioanl Uses for the Hawking Milner Interstellar Probes (sorry I didn't know the name of the initiative, if I had studied journalism or writing I would feel far more guilty about the mistake), is currently outlined as a fly-by mission, similar to how NASA's New Horizon spacecraft whipped past Pluto.  As stated before, the faster you're going in space the harder it is to slow down.  For an initiative like Breakthrough Starshot slowing down is probably right out off the table for the first generation of probes, the reason is simple, any fuel the probe would carry with it, would make the mission that much more difficult to get to a useful speed, and the amount of fuel you would need to slow down from .2C, well we won't be doing the math today, but it would be a poop ton (possibly quite literally).  

If mission designer's at Breakthrough Starshot can't use fuel how could they slow down their probes enough to achieve orbit?  

Quick answer, using probes to focus the star light of Alpha Centauri (this will not be as easy as it sounds)

The long answer:  The initial generations of Starshot probes will most likely be relatively simple in design, a large surface area solar sail attached to the actual sensor and communication suite, at least at launch, it seems (to this rather uninformed nerd) unlikely the space craft will try to remain attached to the solar sail once outside of the range of the laser propulsion system.  Why would the probe keep carrying something that can increase the likely hood of colliding with a piece of material that could throw everything off course?  As technology gets better it may become possible to create a solar sail material that can be manipulated in ways similar to how blinds can be manipulated to alter how much light can enter your home.  The ability to create a solar sail that can dynamically alter its shape after deployment would open up a world of possibilities, now the probe can protect their sails across the interstellar void, patiently waiting until the probe gets close enough to its target star and start to put on the breaks.  

(note to self add some drawings 6/1/16, dear readers please remind me to make some artwork)

Alas, as noted before, putting on the breaks when you are going at such extreme speeds would be difficult under even the best of circumstances.  In out solar system sunlight doesn't have sufficient density to provide any real pressure much past the orbit of Mars*.  With Mars having an average distance to the sun of about 1.5 AU, for sunlight to reach Earth at 1 AU it takes 8 min 20 seconds, or 12 min 30 seconds for light to reach Mars' orbit, this means if you are going at 20% the speed of light, that means you have just over an hour to use sunlight to slow yourself down, this makes it unlikely that your probe will sufficiently slow down before burning up.  

But we aren't thinking about the individual probes, Starshot probes are like ants in a colony individually cool but not super effective, but when they work together they can achieve wonderful things.  The probes that are able to control their sails will work together.  A simplified mission profile would look something like this.  Wave A is sent out, they are definitely all going to die horribly, when approaching their target stars, they reconfigure their sails to act as Fresnel lenses, focusing starlight towards those who will come behind them this focused light will increase the amount of breaking force supplied to the probes.  The waves will continue, some waves will be launched with lower initial velocities, the slower you are going when you leave the more time you will have to break on the other side, but it also means you are waiting that much longer to get results.  Eventually you will have a steady string of probes focusing the light of a far off star further and further out, providing a breaking zone for larger probes who come down the line.  Many years after the first wave of probes either burn up in the fires of Alpha Centauri or are left to wander the void beyond, a probe massing a whopping 10 grams slows enough to enter orbit.  This probe left Earth going a mere 5% the speed of light, but has now slowed to a much more manageable 22 km/s to begin its orbit around Alpha Centauri A.  

The advantage of this approach is that all of these probes could be made and launched incredibly cheaply, and if an individual probe is lost, no harm no fowl.

The negative, and it is potentially a big one, it will take at least 80 years for the suggested 10 gram probe to get all of the way to its target destination.  If we don't figure out how to make a space ship that can carry enough fuel to park itself in orbit or some truly sci-fi sounding propulsion method no big deal, humans weren't going to really be heading that way in the near term anyway.  On the other hand, if it turns out we can make some kind of FTL drive, or a fusion powered starship, we suddenly have a rather dangerous traffic jam of dangerous bullets on a potentially intercept course with your ships.  Who knows?

Another version of this idea, will be written about later, which will instead be optimized for helping really really big spaceships get into planetary orbit.

Any suggestions, questions, please leave a comment.

*citation will be added, as of June 1 2016 I am going off of recollection of some research I did.

A Glimpse into the Future

2022  While driving down the highway your car alerts you, energy prices are at the day's likely low point, a combination of clear skies across the East Coast and a particularly windy system in the Dakotas in contributing to power prices less than 1/4th of what you would normally pay.  Since the family is on a road trip anyway you ask your car where it can stop with an attraction that will let the kids blow of some steam.  Your car adjusts course and guides you to a small diner off the highway.  By gauging your interests and the demands of other individuals on the available amusements in the area, there is almost no wait for food and the cute museum that you and your partner visit is just adorable.  The kids distract themselves on the playground nearby, where your nanny drone keeps an eye on the kid, alerting you to any potential risks to your child or if they try to wander away from the bound areas.

(I am going to need to get back to this nanny drone idea, I kind of like the premise (with some trepidation, I do loathe helicopter parents, but at the same time having a way to let kids be kids without you directly watching them is kind of nice))

Who's doing a post idea better?

Short Answer Microsoft.
Slightly longer answer, Microsoft R&D is developing smart phone technologies that will allow phones to more proactively adapt to how you are interacting with the device at a given time, similar to the post "Hopefully a semi-unique approach to user interfaces"  using a suite of sensors, the phone adjusts how menus are displayed according to the proximity of a user's appendages.  

Additional Uses for the Hawking Milner Inter-stellar Probes

In the middle of April Steven Hawking and Yuri Milner announced plans to invest roughly $100 million into researching technologies that would allow incredibly small spacecraft to be accelerated by laser light towards Alpha Centauri, hopefully going fast enough that the probes would reach one of our nearest celestial neighbors in under 20 years from launch day.  Many nerds, myself included, got a tad excited, but there are nay-sayers, as well as those who wonder why we should invest in such projects.  Why should we spend so much energy creating probes that may or may not A) reach their intended foreign star, B) provide data that probably could be gleaned by telescopes based in this star system, and C) produce any tangible benefits to humans here on earth.  In order this article should respond.
A) Will the probe reach the target destination?
Answer:   this is the wrong way to phrase the question, these probes will mass less than the spare change in your pocket (assuming you aren't hoarding coins in your pants).  The rational behind this kind of mission would be similar to that of how ant colonies work, individual ants may not make it back to the colony, or necessarily provide that much information about the world they explore, but thousands of ants cumulatively do achieve great things.  The many hundreds or thousands of probes we send out towards Alpha Centauri will most likely have at a respectable number reach their target trajectory.
B)  Will the data be better than that we can get from space based telescopes that we will deploy in this solar system?
Answer:  Hard to say, the size of the probes will mean the type of data will be different than that collected by radio or optical telescopes.  The kind of data they could collect will be unique, and that should be worth considering.  For example the chemical composition of the heliosphere of Alpha Centauri, nano-scale chemical tests could differentiate what molecules are actually found floating around empty space and other stars.  If the probes have visual sensors they could take snap shots from angles that are simply not possible from another solar system, even low resolution images at a different angle can provide tremendous clarification on what might be found.  Better space buffs will probably have better answers than me.
C)  What are the tangible benefits?
Glad you asked, this is where creativity comes in.  We are talking about infrastructure designed to launch and accelerate relatively large numbers of super tiny probes into space to 0.2C (which is amazingly fast)
Asteroid Deflection.  (hardish)
With the ability to launch these probes, humanity can start being more proactive about how it deflects asteroids.  As soon as we detect potentially threatening asteroid orbits, we can bombard asteroids with micro-impactors, the specific impulse for a given impact will be low, the chance of hitting the asteroid will also be relatively low, shooting at moving targets, from a moving object, is hard to do, but it is easier to change a trajectory years out, as opposed to the Armageddon approach (where we wait until the killer is within the moon's orbit).  (it is unlikely that the probes would be going at 0.2C (even if the platform could get probes going that fast) as there will be less time to accelerate)
Space Exploration Augmenting. (depends on the target, easy to hard)
Depending on how much targeting control the probes have, one use could be uncovering surfaces on asteroids and moons, similar to how NASA intentionally shot the LCROSS at the Moon to look for evidence of water.  This would make future space mining initiatives far more targeted.
Alternate Propulsion for Larger Spacecraft (really hard)
One of the craziest proposed methods for powering large scale spacecraft capable of brining humans along for the ride is Project Orion, a vessel powered by the detonation of successive nuclear bombs.  For those who don't want to follow the link, imagine a space craft in with two primary features, an upper section, filled with crew quarters, supplies, sensors etc... and a lower section comprised of a giant plate, connected to the upper section by massive hydraulic pistons.  While on course towards another body the spaceship would drop a nuclear bomb into position, where the nuke would explode, causing some of the push plates material to evaporate off and provide force.  In the current culture we live in, launching a spacecraft into orbit with hundreds, if not thousands of nuclear bombs is just not feasible.  But the core idea can be reused, instead of having nuclear bombs push against the plate, hundreds of probes hitting a large spacecraft at 0.01 C or above could conceivably achieve the same goal.  A long term space craft could gain velocity from the impact of tens of thousands of accelerated probes.  There are some challenges (understatement of the day for me) with this idea.  The probes would need to hit the ship with incredible accuracy, too much deviation from the optimal impact angle could cause the ship to spin excessively.  The period where the probes could actually be used to augment the acceleration of the ship are also limited.  The efficacy of this means of propulsion would require quite a bit of study.
Counter arguments to this suggestion should also be considered.  As the smaller spacecraft are primarily being powered by Earth based laser energy, why not directly accelerate the larger craft with the lasers.  For short term missions I agree, if you are close enough that the laser can provide sufficient power, for the love of god, use that as an energy source.  This strategy is intended for when the larger spacecraft is beyond the point where the laser light is dense enough to provide useful power.  It is only at that point where it would make sense to use the impactor suggestion.

If you have any questions comments, feedback, please feel free to write something.

Another Edition of Someone Else Did it

Recently I met some team member's from tankutility, a company that has developed a system intended to help propane tank owners wirelessly track fuel levels, similar to my blog post Making Homes smarter.  There are some critical differences between their technology and what I wrote about A) they actually built it, winning the 2015 CleanTech Open, so props to them B) the system doesn't use a convoluted light and camera solution, so that's like way better.  and C) I thought I had something for that.  As per usual it gets me really excited to see that once in a while posts from this blog end up partially matching with reality.

Spoiler Mode for Youtube

There should be a way for smart content, video, blog posts etc..., so that you can live as spoiler free a life as possible, ideally content with spoilers could be flagged for a given subject matter, and users could choose to select which spoilers they would like to avoid.  Worried about how the Real Housewives keeps getting spoiled, well now you won't have to worry about your internet stumbling leading to spoilers.  Until your DVR is caught up, you won't see anything about later episodes.  Ideally this platform would integrate your viewing platforms, allowing for maximum convenience on avoiding spoilers.

The Next Generation of Electric Submarines

(please note this post is a shameless plug piece for my job application at OpenWater Power)
Military submarines are the silent hunters of modern warfare, for nations like the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, these vessels are frequently nuclear powered, allowing for vessels to go years without needing to surface (if the vessels did not have pesky humans requiring fresh food).  Other countries have less sci-fi sounding diesel electric submarines, where the vessels will surface as needed to bring in air to allow the diesel generators to recharge the vessels on board batteries.  Newer vessels are even looking towards hydrogen fuel cells, I would like to suggest an alternative, a vessel that possesses "hot swappable" power packs composed of Aluminum water fuel cells.
Aluminum water fuel cells have an incredible ability to store energy, over 2.00* kWh/liter, all without requiring air to be added to the system for power production.  Navies of the future could design vehicles that exclusively use these swappable fuel cell systems to power the vehicles energy needs.  By eliminating the requirement of a mechanical generator and the associated acoustic dampening vessels could be made smaller, contributing to the difficulty of being detected.  Depending on the design strategy of the organization creating these new fuel cell based submarines, the swappable elements could also include replacement air supplies, food stuffs and other materials for long term operations.

For navies working to extend their reach more covertly the swappable fuel cells could be hidden inside of shipping containers and said containers could "accidentally" be lost at sea for ships to pick up reserve power, the logistics would be complicated but not beyond the abilities of a mid-sized blue water navy.

Ok back to class work, the StartUp Institute is kicking my butt and I need to keep up with the torrent of projects and homework.  I will try to make some sketches during my lunch break, although it wouldn't be that crazy for the swappable fuel cells to go into bays similar to the ICBM launch tubes found on Ohio class submarines.

*A previous version of this post listed the energy density as 200 kWh/liter, not the official 2.00 kWh/liter, I apologize for the confusion, I did not read the specification as closely as I should have.

Depressing Foods of the Future

Articles discussing how species of bacteria have adapted to metabolize varying types of plastic.  One can imagine a sci-fi writer having the most impoverished part of a planets population eating foodstuffs derived from the bacteria that have consumed waste plastic.

*Yeah I know this post was short, I may write a short scene later, but I wanted to get better about posting, sometimes length will take a hit, which may or may not be a bad thing, you decide

Getting My Game On

I'm growing up, I admit it, I no longer burn through a twelve pack of mountain dew in one night, my obligations are more than summer job and gaming with buddies, I'm growing up, why is it so hard for me to play with grown ups?  I want a service, ideally one that knows all of the various games and platforms I own and enjoy and when I have time to play with people online, and my friends are busy, I want a platform that lets me be a casual player with other casual players.

This idealized app would allow you to link your steam, xbox live, etc... accounts into a single shareable tool, where you can conveniently broadcast to the world that you're down for playing with someone online.  When I start my time slot for gaming, I would press the broadcast button, letting other people with my game list know that I am playing game X.  If someone else joins my game, we can have a trial period of working together in the game, after the time has elapsed you can let them know if you are going to keep playing or not.

A challenging social tool is noting whether people enjoyed playing together and whether or not they want to play together again.  As time goes on the system would  learn what gaming personas you enjoy playing with most and try to best match players.

Imagine a world where when you want to decompress after a long week you aren't duking it out against squeaky 12 year olds or aspiring pro players who can't understand that people have lives outside of a game.  That world is possible.

The Passive Aggressive House

Modern home building designs are beginning to focus on ways to make homes as energy efficient as possible, from better insulation, to thermal pumps, low flow toilets, solar generators.  These innovations are doing wonders to reduce humanity's impact on the environment, yet they could go further.  Humans are the weak link in home designs, with this realization Smart Home Innovation and Technology Tomorrow and Yesterday (SHITTaY) has come out with a complete product portfolio for creating the very first passive aggressive house.  The passive aggressive house is a wondrous convergence of machine learning, smart sensors, and proprietary technologies, working together to guide residents to a more sustainable life-style.  Each door and window has a sensor noting when the door was opened and the ability to ask itself "did someone really need to leave me open for that long? (I mean they're wasting all of this power trying to heat the outside)"  if the answer is that the door or window should have been closed sooner, the passive aggressive house will politely leave a sticky note on the offending door the next day, reminding the user how much energy they wasted.  Light-bulbs have similar concerns, should they have been run as long as they were, could the user have gone to a brighter spot in the house? if power was wasted users will get a snarky text, several hours or days after the offending action, asking the home owner to be smarter about when they use a light.

The wonders and innovation of SHITTaY don't stop with energy management, the passive aggressive house is deeply concerned about your health.  Networking with smart health and activity monitors, the passive aggressive house knows how much exercise you have done in the past 24 hours and will comment on your snack selections accordingly.  Did you miss your step goal for the day? Not a problem the passive aggressive house will leave judgy messages on your refrigerator's smart display custom tailored to your snack selection.  And if the house feels you really should eat a healthier snack it will push your chocolate eclairs to the very back of the fridge and let them rot there.

Developers at SHITTaY are working tirelessly to provide more natural language interface with the passive aggressive house.  Currently the system is limited to text based interaction, but in the near future the company hopes to integrate actual spoken interface, with voice options including, Fran Drescher from the Nanny, Gilbert Godfrey, your annoying ex, and if research goes well a modulated version of the user's voice from when they were going through puberty and having their voice crack.

The tomorrow's of tomorrow are that much more exciting thank's to the research from the SHITTaY team.

Happy April 1st everyone.

Distributed Servers of Tomorrow*

One of the major challenges facing modern internet infrastructure is the energy required to actively cool the laundry list of thermally inefficient micro-processors.  The majority of server farms are so concerned with keeping their infrastructure cool without spending too much money on cooling.  A solution that industry analysts  have been investigating in and investing in, has been air cooled servers, where the server is more directly cooled by the ambient environment, as opposed to having an intermediary air conditioning system.  These air cooled servers have come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and I would like to suggest one more,
Street Lights (I'm not kidding)
Streets lights have the potential to serve as a fantastic platform for distributed computing infrastructure, they are ubiquitous in the world's communities, there is a decent amount of un/under-used surface area for mounting, and as lighting infrastructure moves towards LEDs there is already an inbuilt AC/DC converter.  At the current time the idea is relatively vague, I readily acknowledge that, as the characteristic constraints are hard to pin down.  Ideally these smarter street lights would be connected to a robust internet infrastructure at the local level.  Similar to how server farms have fungible racks of individual server elements, easily added or swapped by a technician.  As Moore's law has begun to slow, at least when it comes to density increases of transistors (I honestly haven't kept good track on actual cost per transistor) this infrastructure can be built up for more long term planning

Potential markets include, municipal governments trying to provide their own localized equivalent to larger online cloud services, local ISPs minimizing their concentration of servers, cable companies/Netflix and other video on demand service providers where last mile delivery concerns are legitimate, and honestly who knows who else.
*(this is a quick and dirty post for the moment, I will do follow up later, my schedule has gotten rather crazy, but I really like this idea March 22, 2016)

A follow up post will have notes on a starting template for a streetlight system intended to promote a hybrid of air cooled servers, battery storage infrastructure to keep things going, and for snowier climbs who knows maybe a heat pump to melt snow around the server.

Making Faster Than Light Travel Safer (for the people at your destination)

The Alcubierre drive is currently considered one of the most plausible means of an intelligent life form creating a faster than light vessel.  Needless to say, this is awesome.  Unfortunately there are some potential risks that come with violently bending the universal speed limit of light.  In rough terms, the way an Alcubierre drive would work involves warping space time.  By expanding space time behind the space craft, while simultaneously contracting space time in front of the vessel, the ship is able to isolate itself from the universe at large and get from point A to point B really fast.  So while this is really awesome, the contracting of space time at the front of the ship has a strong potential to become a rather dangerous weapon, the contracted space time would pull in dust and gases through out the journey, forming a super dense plasma, when space time returns to normal, all of the energy in that plasma is released, potentially fatally for the planets in the star system the ship was trying to visit.
Generally speaking, explorers aren't trying to kill the star systems they are visiting, to prevent the built up energy from being destructive, there are a few options.  One simply aim the ship so that when you stop, you are unlikely to kill anyone with the blast of energy.  Two limit your travels to relatively short hops, minimizing how much energy is built up.  Three (my idea), create a pocket universe in front of your ship.  A group advanced enough to create a faster than light ship, might also be advanced enough to create artificial pocket universes.  These artificial pocket universes could be generated right in front of the ship, providing a temporary storage volume for untold quantities of energy, ideally, the super hot plasma would be stored in the pocket universe where the energy could be slowly let out.  This torrent of energy could assist in allowing the ship to power up when it moves on to the next star system.

Gauging the Truth in the News

Currently more of a nugget of an idea than anything else, but I would love to see an app or service, similar to shazam, so that when I hear a news report on one of the major networks, I can see their reference materials and ideally as much information from their sources.  As it is unlikely that anyone could absorb all of that information in real-time, users could book mark stories that they are interested in following up on, and at a later time the app would allow them to look back on stories.

Future iterations could start to account for statements made by major political candidates, using services like politifact and (ideally) alternative data sources, a user could ask about candidate A's accuracy in presenting the facts on the benefits of space exploration budgeting.  On another day users could see if candidate B has changed their stance on fossil fuel subsidies and whether or not those changes are a closer match to their own.  Truly wishful thinking would be that the app/service could provide a reasonable estimate on how likely Candidate C is to actually stick to their campaign promises, I would only find this feature acceptable if it clearly communicated any publicly stated rationals behind why that stance was changed, or why they didn't vote for that initiative.  Politics is a messy game and it should not be trivialized to make people feel better.