Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

[...S]ince the human desire for sweetness surpases even our desire for intoxication, the cleverest thing to do with a bushel of corn is to refine it into thirty-three pounds of high-fructose corn syrup.
That at least is what we're doing with about 530 million bushels of the annual corn harvest—turning it into 17.5 billion pounds of high-fructose corn syrup. Considering that the human animal did not taste this particular food until 1980, for HFCS to have become the leading source of sweetness in our diet stands as a notable acheivement on the part of the corn-refining industry [...]

—The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pg. 103.

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And Now, The Links

• Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: NASA’s Lost Female Astronauts – I've read of this before, but it deserves any extra publicity it can get.
• Managers give approval to continue Ares 1-X preps
• Ares 1-X rocket breezes through key readiness test
• Ares I-X on track for rollout – Constellation set lunar summit date
• Constellation reviews Crew Exploration Vehicle Aero-science Project Status
• Rocket company tests world's most powerful ion engine
• Blasted into space from a giant air gun – Routinely proposed. Never executed. (Though HARP was on the verge.) Will this time be different?
• Xombie Qualifies for Lunar Lander Prize
• No plume, but a firehose of data from NASA moon bombing
• Lunar smash produces surprise, disappointment
• Rest easy, Earthlings: Slim impact odds further reduced
• Myths about the U.S. Economic Model
• Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit
• Senators Vote to Renew Patriot Act Spy Powers
• Neutrinos could encode messages to submarines
• Navy Looks to Stop Enemy Ray Guns
• New Video: Laser Gunship Blowtorches Truck
• Missile Silo Fixer-Upper Now Swanky Bachelor Pad
• Apple abandons U.S. Chamber of Commerce over climate policy
• Why the 'peak oil' debate is irrelevant
• EPA Announces Plan to Review Six Controversial Chemicals
• Melting glaciers bring 1980s pollution revival
• Google Begins Fixing Usenet Archive – It's about time. (In both senses.)
• Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles
• Microsoft’s Danger SideKick data loss casts dark on cloud computing
• DRAM study turns assumptions about errors upside down
• Memory-Chip Camera Sensors Are 100 Times Smaller Than CCDs
• Inside the Nobel Prize: How a CCD Works
• Big bang flashgun to snap atomic anatomy
• Wired Explains: How 3-D Television Works
• The Making of a Mind-Blowing Space Photo
• Observations: 17th-century Brueghel paintings trace the early, mysterious history of the telescope
• 35 Years of the World’s Best Microscope Photography
• Weather Geeks Champion New Armageddon-Worthy Cloud
• 7 Glow-in-the-Dark Mushroom Species Discovered
• Bird Cam Captures Albatross, Killer Whale Rendezvous
• Infrared Video: 500,000 Bats Emerge From Cave
• Flu in pregnancy leaves a mean legacy
• Pandemic Payoff from 1918: A Weaker H1N1 Flu Today
• Targeted therapies exploit tiny chinks in cancer's armour
• ‘DNA Transistor’ Could Revolutionize Genetic Testing
• Souped-up stem cells rescue damaged limbs
• Is Life Expectancy Reduced by a Traumatic Childhood?
• How Memories are Maintained Over Time
• Are you asleep? Exploring the mind's twilight zone
• You Snooze, You Lose--Weight
• Look into my eyes: The power of hypnosis
• Bering in Mind: The problem with psychopaths: a fearful face doesn't deter them
• Carrying a gun increases risk of getting shot and killed
• Birth of a Notion: Implicit Social Cognition and the "Birther" Movement
• Has the pill changed the rules of sexual attraction?
• Long-Awaited Research on a 4.4-Million-Year-Old Hominid Sheds New Light on Last Common Ancestor
• Volcanoes Wiped Out All Forests 250 Million Years Ago
• Primeval Villain Looks for a Return to Mayhem in Reborn Series
• Oct. 5, 1895: Cycling’s ‘Race of Truth’

Attacking Disease with Your Computer - Stanford's Folding@Home

Stanford University is operating the "Folding@Home" distributed computing system to try to develop a better understanding of how proteins fold, or misfold. This may sound extremely esoteric, but as their disease FAQ points-out, this understanding is relevant to Alzheimer's, Huntington's, cancers associated with malfunctions of the p53 protein, Osteogenesis imperfecta, and the development of antibiotics.

The existence of this project is old news to a lot of us—it's been going on since 2001 at least—but it stands to reason that most of the Internet community is still unaware of it, so I wanted to give it a plug in case it happens to be news to anyone reading this. Having lost one friend to cancer this year, and watching another one fighting it, the cancer-related work of this project has acquired new meaning for me.

Anyone with a Macintosh, Linux, or Windows machine can download and run the Folding@Home software, as can owners of PlayStation 3 game consoles, and begin contributing your computer's spare time to shed light on the aforementioned diseases, and many other problems.

As a technological aside, here's hoping that they produce a client that will use the OpenCL technology in Apple's forthcoming Snow Leopard operating system (Mac OS X 10.6) to harness the power of the GPUs in Macintoshes (something that the project has thus far neglected, as, indeed, they neglected to ever take advantage of the multi-CPU PowerPC Macs).

Weekend Links

• Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't be read.
• Scientific American's "Top 10 New Species Discovered in 2008".
• Conservation setback may doom Christmas Island pipistrelle bat to extinction.
• Don't cure cancer, stablilize it.
• Racetrack Memory: The Future Third Dimension of Data Storage.
• NASA's Slender New Rocket to be Tested for Stability Before Launch.
• Mars robots may have destroyed evidence of life – Naughty perchlorates.
• Mars orbiter imagery boosts Curiosity rover's life search – Evidence grows that Mars may harbor life. So, can we drop an SUV-sized rover on it?
• Great Expectations – Wayne Hale of NASA on the last Hubble servicing missing, and his conclusion that fewer servicing missions would not have meant more space telescopes. Wayne richly deserves his say on that matter. I include my thoughts below.

Were the Challenger catastrophe and the fuzzy Hubble going to kill NASA?

Wayne Hale's qualifications and experience are impeccable, and the quality of his perspective is rare (and all are infinitely superior to my own), and he raises good points. However, though it pains me to say so, I'm not yet persuaded by his arguments, as expressed in his blog entry, "Great Expectations", referenced above. I'm not convinced that NASA was on the brink of disbandment after flying Hubble with a botched mirror, and destroying Challenger and killing her crew. It was undoubtedly in deservedly terrible shape politically, and therefore some sort of penance was inevitable. Maybe that even made the first Hubble servicing mission a necessity, in order to do some repair to the reputations of Hubble, Shuttle and NASA. However, NASA has its centers and it contractors and subcontractors spread all over the nation, and killing it outright would have meant job losses in almost every state, and a great many congressional districts. That puts a lot of Senators and representatives in Congress in a very awkward situation when talking of making big changes to NASA, let alone killing the agency. Some say NASA has made a practice of spreading the work around to protect itself. In other cases, it seems that politicians have made it happen for their own benefit. In practice, it means that NASA's work, especially its human spaceflight programs, are ensured to go on in some form, provided that a minimum of congressional districts are left out in the cold by any change. (I've often wondered if this was the main reason the original Constellation architecture relied so completely on Shuttle and Shuttle-derived hardware, even where that raised obvious problems.)

I must confess that, as a child of Apollo, Shuttle has always looked to me like a dead-end and a disaster, despite the incredibly hard work that was, and is, put into it. It was over budget and behind schedule – not uncommon in such things, but as a kid those schedule slips felt like they took forever. More siginificantly, it promised two-week turnarounds, and a dramatic reduction in the cost of reaching low earth orbit, neither of which it delivered (not even close, in the former case, and quite the opposite in the latter). Of the five shuttles flown, two have failed catastrophically and a third came within inches of doing so, so its safety record is terrible, but roughly, I gather, what NASA originally predicted (98%, if memory serves). If the out-of-focus Hubble and the loss of Challenger had killed the Shuttle program, I wouldn't have missed it. If that had eventually translated into more robotic exploration, I'd've been well pleased. But I don't see how the politics of government spending would have left us without a human spaceflight program of some sort for too long (the gap between the end of Shuttle and the beginning of Ares I flights is causing enough trouble). Maybe the replacement would even have been one that could, as Constellation promises to do, take us somewhere beyond low earth orbit. Which, though I prefer the bang-for-buck that robotic exploration delivers, I must admit still excites the child of Apollo in me.

Weekend Links

• National Ignition Facility is Ready – Big science to deliver fusion in small doses.
• Sponges Descended From Unique Ancestor – Procaryotes, eucaryotes, and archaea related by a common ancestor, but not sponges?
• Hundreds Of Natural-selection Studies Could Be Wrong, Study Demonstrates
• Texas vote leaves loopholes for teaching creationism
• Banking on the Brink – Paul Krugman quotes, of all people, Alan Greenspan (once Mr. Laissez-Faire Capitalism and Ayn Rand's pet economist) recognizing that nationalizing some banks may be a good idea. The article is six weeks old, but still worth a read.
• Tripping the boundary layer: Shuttle's re-entry experiment
• Soldiers Blinded, Hospitalized by Laser 'Friendly Fire'
• A Chip against Cancer: Microfluidics Spots Circulating Tumor Cells
• The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S. Water Source
• A (Radioactive) Cut in the Earth That Will Not Stay Closed – Not as interesting an article as it suggests, but not without some worthwhile bits.
• Scientists Find 'Baffling' Link between Autism and Vinyl Flooring
• Caffeine Cuts Workout Pain
• Fact or Fiction: Raw veggies are healthier than cooked ones

• Computers, Clocks, Astronomy and The Making of the Modern World – The Long Now Blog points to episode 5 of James Burke's outstanding TV series "Connections", which, strangely, can be found on YouTube. If you've only seen the series "Connections 2", and "Connections 3", which seem to be re-run routinely (while the original "Connections" sits on the shelf), you've missed-out. IMHO, the original series stands head and shoulders above its sequels, which I've long thought should be renamed "That Reminds Me", because the connections they document are weaker and not necessarily causal.

  • Connections, episode 5, part 1
  • Connections, episode 5, part 2
  • Connections, episode 5, part 3
  • Connections, episode 5, part 4
  • Connections, episode 5, part 5

  And for a nuts and bolts perspective on computers, the episode of The Secret Life of Machines about the word processor is still wonderful, like the whole series. Equally strangely, it can also be found on YouTube.

  • The Secret Life of Machines: Word Processor, part 1
  • The Secret Life of Machines: Word Processor, part 2
  • The Secret Life of Machines: Word Processor, part 3

  On the subject of time, there's also an episode on clocks in general, and quartz watches in particular:

  • The Secret Life of Machines: Quartz Watch, part 1
  • The Secret Life of Machines: Quartz Watch, part 2
  • The Secret Life of Machines: Quartz Watch, part 3

Margaret Bamberger in the Austin American Statesman

My friend Margaret Bamberger received a nice write-up in the Austin American Statesman newspaper today.

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The following photo is from Margaret's anti-strip-mining days, as mentioned in the Statesman article. Margaret is kneeling in the foreground, with a copy of her crying cow artwork held up behind her.

Bill Carter, by way of Margie Crisp, writes the following about this photograph:

This picture at Hub Cap Annie's was part of the "Don't Buy It" campaign to keep Austin from investing in a lignite unit at the Fayette Power Plant — after Austin opted out, LCRA dropped plans for the lignite plant and went in with Austin on another Western coal unit. If the lignite unit had been built, a large part of Fayette County would have been strip-mined — hence the crying cow, which also appeared on fund-raising letterhead and so forth.

All the folks in the picture other than Margaret and me were part of the pre-city council Max Nofziger entourage. Max is on my left (to my right in the photo) in shades and cap. On the other side of me is Ester Matthews, who was Max's administrative assistant when he was on the City Council. I don't remember the other folks' names.

Goodbye Margaret

Margaret Bamberger died this morning. More information can be found in her obituary, which it was my burden and privilege to write.

Goodbye old friend, you changed my life.

Saying Goodbye to Margaret

My dear friend Margaret Bamberger is sleeping comfortably. She is not expected to wake up. Her fight with cancer is nearly over.

I had spoken with her by telephone on Sunday. Her responses were slow and her speech slurred, but she was still there, just barely. Yesterday, I called the ranch to ask about her. To my surprise, I received an email reply today telling me that she was still smiling at familiar voices, and that if I wanted to come out and be with her, I was welcome. I got to the ranch as quickly as possible.

In Margaret's bedroom, I found her daughter, Margie, looking after her. Margaret, bald from a month of full brain irradiation, was asleep in a hospital bed that had been brought in for her. She was no longer responding to familiar voices. She slept. If she was aware of voices anymore, I believe it was only when they bled through the thin spots in her dreams. I hope they were good dreams, and that we made them a little bit better.

I spent about four hours there, talking with Margie, Margaret's husband David, and a few visitors, sorting out some computer problems that were arising from Margaret's absence, enduring awkward silences, blowing my nose much too often, and crying as little as I could. I was grateful for every distraction that came along. Without them, all I could do was watch Margaret die a little more with each breath, and struggle to think what I would say to her whenever I finally managed to leave. In all those hours, it seemed that I ought to be able to find some right set of words that would capture a small, choice fraction of what she'd meant to me. Something I could leave behind in her dream, echoing warmly, slow to fade.

I never found those perfect words. In the end, I stroked her head with one hand, stammered-out a few essential truths, and made my exit into the recently fallen night as quickly as I could.

Sometime later, as I eased my truck past the end of the ranch house driveway, a large bat dove through my headlights, and a nightjar flushed from the side of the road. Those are things Margaret would have liked. Of course, Margaret loved almost everything about the ranch, and much too soon for all of us who knew her, she will be laid to rest there. The grave has been dug. A green burial is prepared. The ceremony will be restricted to immediate family and the ranch family. She has too many friends to do it otherwise.

I have seen my friend Margaret, who added so much to my life, for the last time. When I'm not numb, it hurts a lot.