Category: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

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Neil Armstrong- Our Generation’s Lindbergh… Starbound

     Neil Armstrong lost his battle with heart disease on this day in 2012 and returned to the heavenly firmament he so boldly explored for us over 40 years ago.  He spent most of the years after his moon landing triumph in self determined obscurity, rather than take advantage of the international celebrity status his achievement would have brought him.  In that way, he ended his time on earth much as the great American explorer of the heavens that blazed the way before him, Charles Lindbergh, each separated from the mythic event by a distance from the public that would seek to adulate him.  How each came to be reclusive had as many different spins as could possibly be imagined, but they are weaved into the fabric of what it means to be an exemplary American hero, and what the pressures of mega-celebrity status forces inevitably of great achievers.

Neil Armstrong was the living, breathing representative of the archetype of the American hero. The American Hero was smart, unassuming, competent, brave, adventurous, matter of fact, and most importantly, successful.  When Armstrong was born, Charles Lindbergh was over three years removed from his epic Spirit of St Louis solo flight from New York to Paris and was a mythic figure. At just 25 years of age, Lindbergh singularly accomplished what teams of pilots died trying to do, achieve an airborne connection between the new world and the old using devices that were still in their infancy of development, the airplane. Lindbergh was the most recognized figure in the world – millions had come out to see him as he toured the world, and later with his wife Anne at his side, showed America that flight could be safe and predictable for travel, shrinking the world for all time – and in the process founding Pan Am and TWA airlines.  Lindbergh looked and acted  the part the Americans wanted to see as the very best we could produce – a person who was raised among us, had no special breaks, but through his grit and personal ability achieved greatness – and never acted any differently.   This was the type of hero Americans all hoped their children would emulate themselves after, and the Lindbergh archetype was promoted in the press and on radio so no American boy growing up in the thirties could possibly miss the connection.  Lindbergh’s persona became Jack Armstrong, All American Boy on the radio, very likely playing in the Neil Armstrong household radio in Ohio, a young man who never lied, worked with others, was brave and adventurous, but maintained the ah-shucks attitude that all Americans cherished through hard times.

Young Neil Armstrong, however, would have certainly been exposed to the other side of mega-celebrity, the public’s lust to know everything about their heroes, and invade their personal space sufficiently to uncover their human frailties.  Neil Armstrong growing up in Ohio would have  witnessed the obsessive coverage of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, subsequent trial, and the uncovering of the other side of Charles Lindbergh, the colder, more calculated, and reclusive character that through no fault of his own made him a less sympathetic figure than he by every right should have been.  Lindbergh was stunned with the public access to his personal life and forevermore sought a reclusive existence far away from his adoring public.  He would come forward only intermittently from then on into the public eye, and seemingly only to misstep time and time again, in driving his personal darker views of humanity against the public’s previously unquestioning opinion of him.  The young adult Neil Armstrong could not have missed the Lindbergh example as to how pedestal of celebrity adulation is shaky and precarious to those who would stand abreast it.  It likely impressed upon him that in the unlikely event he would find himself in such a circumstance, he would never permit the exposure to the heat of adulation that brought Lindbergh to such a reclusive end.  He would instead choose seclusion, rather than have it forced upon him.

Neil Armstrong quietly built the resume of an American hero, aerospace engineer, US Navy pilot in Korea, test pilot of the X-15, and subsequently in the very exclusive club of American astronauts, becoming command pilot of Gemini 8.  He was, in short, the epitome of Thomas Wolfe’s definition of The Right Stuff.  As the flight crews became selected for the order of flights for the planned conquering of the moon, it became apparent to NASA that the command pilot who would actually step foot on the moon would need to be above all seen as overwhelmingly competent by his crew, rather than back slapping and gregarious.  No one fit the mold better than Armstrong.  The story of Apollo 11’s epic flight has been told before in Ramparts.  The story of the final three minutes of the landing of the LEM module, with failed computers worthless for computer residual fuel, an analytic Aldrin calling out estimated fuel status and residual flight power calculated on his slide rule, and the flight commander Armstrong determining to land the craft manually on the moon, or die trying rather than abort, is the stuff of legend.  With a quarter of the the world’s population than watching simultaneously and breathlessly back on Earth, Armstrong then calmly planted his foot for the first time in history on another celestial object, just 66 years after man had achieved controlled flight, and only 42 years after Lindbergh set foot in Paris .  “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for Mankind”, Armstrong intoned, and the world gasped at the representative symbolic achievement that had just occurred – the linear path from man’s first wonderment of the heavens, to Armstrong physically claiming it for all humanity.

No one would likely have been positioned to be a more recognized figure, and therefore a very wealthy man, than Armstrong after successfully splashing down on Earth on July 24th, 1969 after his epic voyage.  But perhaps the images of Lindbergh’s fall from grace prepared him to let it go without taking advantage of the moment.  There would be no Senator Armstrong, no President Armstrong, not even retired astronaut extraordinaire Armstrong.  Neil Armstrong was instead perfectly willing to return to the obscurity of normal life, eventually taking a job as a engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati and establishing a farm in Lebanon, Ohio where he kept to himself and his closest friends.  He avoided most controversies and situations where his name and position could be abused by others, and as a result over time lost his status to newer generations as a immediately recognized figure, to his personal satisfaction, and to the loss of younger generations who are starving to know what a real hero looks and sounds like.

With Neil Armstrong’s passing, the cumulative can do spirit of a 1960’s American nation has passed with him.  Modern national goals are partisan and short sighted, and reflect the politicians who pronounce them.  The greatness of Neil Armstrong, and on so many levels he was truly great, is obscured by modern layers  of cynicism and self absorption.  We should ask ourselves if the American Hero model we so admired, and of which Neil Armstrong is an immortal example, should once again have credence in our age.  Neil Armstrong once said that one of his biggest disappointments in life was never dreaming of his time on the moon.  It might pleasure him to know, that he made the dreams of an entire nation and world come true.  God Speed, Neil Armstrong.

 

 

 

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Space is Big Again

This past week has been one of those weeks where those of us who revel in man’s need to explore the universe around us have a little more skip in our step.  Growing up, it was taken for granted that part of being a great nation was the constant propulsion forward of adventurers and adventurous science.  The concept of frontier has driven the American ideal and with the achievement of the civilized connection of the world through rail, sea, and air,  the ultimate frontier has been the vastness of the heavens above.  With moon as the prize, all energy and efforts went toward the conquering of a successful landing and return, but since the epic achievement of this goal became surprisingly mundane to the public in the 1970s, the concept of man’s ever outward exploration of the heavens was somewhat earthbound or, at least, “low earth orbit” bound with the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.

Stirrings of big things to come are now being seen, however, and two events this week make it clear that we may be back on the trail of some amazing times in exploration.

The first event to take center stage tomorrow night  is the attempted landing on Mars of NASA’s Curiosity Rover, a literal robotic Lewis and Clark  on wheels.  In the last decade, NASA achieved a spectacular success in robotic exploration with the landing and successful travels of the two rovers Spirit and Opportunity that provided years of data collection on the Martian surface living and functioning well beyond their expected usefulness and indelible pictures of the Martian landscape.  Curiosity is however a whole ‘nother animal compared to its two little ancestors – a jet plane compared to some puddle jumpers.  Curiosity is nuclear powered, massive,decked out like a full science laboratory and is potentially capable of limitless exploratory life and distance.  An adventuring behemoth, it will require tomorrow night a landing strategy that will make the Explorer rovers airbag landings of ten years ago seem like child’s play.  With instructions and feedback requiring 14 minutes to transit the millions of miles between home and Mars, Curiosity will robotically be on its own and will have to perform the complex landing manuevers without help.  The number of steps where something could go wrong is impressive, NASA’s landing team will sit by helplessly with the rest of us tomorrow night waiting for a signal the Curiosity made it to the surface intact and functional.  And if it does, what a wonder of visuals and science awaits us, as we look to determine  the eventual landing and living strategies for human exploration of Mars.

The second story coming out of NASA this week is nowhere near as flashy but perhaps even more important to the concept of finally moving space exploration forward again.  Since the moon landings were achieved, manned exploration has been held hostage by the overwhelming cost of governmental monopoly of manned flight and the frequently manipulated and diverted attention of governmental budgetors.  With the spectacular success this summer of the private company SpaceX in achieving linkage and successful return to earth of its Dragon spacecraft, NASA is realizing that the competitive private company model offers the opportunity to leap decades of budgetary infighting and largess and return America to manned space exploration to earth orbit, the moon , the asteroids and potentially Mars on a more revolutionary timetable.  NASA announced the awarding of government contracts to the tune of 1.1 billion dollars to three space exploration companies, SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada , each of which is solving independently the elements of manned flight and pointing their research and investment to routine manned space flight and eventual deep space travel and colonization.  NASA’s realization that private venues that have driven developments in computers, software, robotics and propulsion are better positioned to currently solve problems of efficiency, cost, and technological advancement for space exploration is new to the government but no surprise to those of us who have held that private conceptualization and enterprise, with its ability to make mistakes and rapidly adjust, has driven the technology revolution for the last two hundred years and is best positioned to do so in the future. Financial encouragement without playing favorites too early in the game is the best role government can play. It would be a welcome epiphany if the current government policy-driven overbearing touch in alternative energy development would take a lesson from what is being achieved in space and learn to keep its hands off the natural selection process so innate to private enterprise.

After several decades of casual neglect to progress in space, an exciting American revolution is developing and we are likely to see the benefits sooner rather than later.  Tomorrow night in a prime example of “can do” spirit, if a multi-ton behemoth, tens of millions of miles away from its controllers, can slow from 13000 miles an hour to 1000 miles an hour by retro rockets, slow to 200 miles an hour with a supersonic parachute, self guide a landing zone with a rocket and radar adjusted lander, hover at 2 miles an hour over the landing zone and lower itself safely with a skycrane to a soft landing on the Martian surface, man’s deep space exploration and with it affirmation of man’s incredible inventiveness may once again be on solid ground.  As Hal said in 2001: A Space Odyssey, its going to be Something Wonderful.

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The God Particle

The majesty and glory of the Universe is raised to supernatural mysticism by the very consideration of how it is possible to have existed at all.   To the best understanding of the unimaginable, the Universe Became from a single point and single moment, the Singularity, and from nothing came everything.  This creation has been theorized from the visible record provided by the expansive universe studied by scientists for centuries, referred to as the Big Bang, with only the resultant evidence available for interpretation billions of years after the fact to infer what must have occurred at the creation of everything.  The greatest creation scientists from Ptolemy acknowledging a heaven and earth, Copernicus defining the correct relationship of earth to those heavens,, Newton providing the natural laws that govern the heaven’s behavior, the quantum physicists constructing the building blocks, and finally Einstein reflecting how the energy of the universe and the building blocks creating all that is, are interchangeable and one and the same, have progressively pealed the shadows and fog off the light of truth.  With each achieved clarity of definition, we grow more and more in awe of that unknowable truth.

Some fifty years ago, a young theoretical physicist from Edinburgh named Peter Higgs surmised that some “structure” would have had to be in place to progressively “slow” and  collect particles from such an explosive birth, to explain how particles from an exploded singularity that should have progressively travelled away from each other began to collect together and form mass with atomic structure- resulting eventually in gases, stars, and planets.  The theoretical field, in order to slow and capture massive particles traveling near the speed of light, would be  comprised of innumerable particles that would create “drag” on the particles, much like barnacles on a ship.  The field has become known as the Higgs field, and the particle, the Higgs Boson.

Like all incredible mental leaps of theory, the theory remained just a mind exercise until technology existed that could possibly discern such fantastic conceptualizations.   It took five decades for man to finally create the environment that could finally prove the existence of such elusive particles. It appears that at Hadron Collider in Switzerland, a vast particle accelerator sending protons around a 27 kilometer magnified loop managed to achieve a head on head collision of protons that produced a briefly visible subparticle, existing for millionths of a second, that fits the expected field particle, the Higgs Boson to a tee.  Suddenly the unification of concepts of the fundamental particles and forces that control our universe from the time of its birth are starting to crystallize and the capacity of man to peak into the infinite and provide some measure of understanding is upon us.

Peter Higgs is about to join the select group of mind voyagers such as Galileo, Newton,  Heisenberg, Einstein, and others that have elevated our understanding of who we are and why we came to be.  The Higgs Boson has been referred to as the God particle for its elusiveness and its fundamental necessity of existence in order to explain how the entropy of Creation was possibly corralled into a conceivable universe.  Einstein himself felt that the immensity of what is required to conceptualize an entity like the universe would not be a discussion of elements, particles or theorems:

I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this       or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know       his thoughts. The rest are details.

Peter Higgs in one mystical way fifty years ago tried to imagine how God might think, and thanks to the window provided by the Hadron Collider and its scientists, we appreciate what is slowly unveiled, and gasp at the wonder of it all.

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People We Should Know #21 – Elon Musk

          If all goes according to plan, tomorrow, May 7th 2012 will be a seminal day in the annuals of American entrepreneurial know-how spirit and the advance of science.  The Falcon 9 spacecraft, a heavy load rocket capable of manned orbital flight, will blast off from Cape Canaveral for an intended rendezvous and docking with International Space Station.  The unmanned spaceflight, if successful, will represent the first wholly private commercial orbital space transit and will throw the doors open to a huge new venue of private American economic enterprise and development, private enterprise space.  The driving force for the breakthrough company, SpaceX, and another of those amazing individuals America’s free enterprise system with its risk/reward pathway seems to continually produce, is Ramparts People We Should Know #21 – Elon Musk.

     Elon Musk is among those rare individuals who maximize their talents and energies on the concept of creation.  Like unique human forces like Steven Jobs and Burt Rutan, Musk has been forever searching for the path to the end product he has already envisioned, and success and failure along the way are assumed characteristics of the eventual conquering of the vision.  Elon Musk has already achieved conceptualization and production of the world’s foremost internet financial transaction system, PayPal, devised and shepherded the most advanced production line electric drive train automobile, the Tesla, and with Monday’s launch, potentially will be America’s primary private cargo and eventually manned transport service for the United States, a country without an available transport system since the retirement of the shuttle.  If you feel that this represents several lifetimes of contributions to the advancement of civilization, recognize that Elon Musk will not celebrate his 41st birthday until June 28th.

     Musk was born in South Africa of a South African engineer father and a Canadian mother.  At 17, he determined to emigrate from South Africa to avoid compulsory military service and eventually live in the United States, as he was quoted, ” It is where great things are possible.”  Settling with relatives in Regina, Saskatchewan, he eventually emigrated to the United States where he attended the Wharton School of Business where he achieved dual undergraduate degrees in business and physics.  He was accepted to graduate school at Stanford in applied physics, but lasted only two days before he was tempted with an internet software entrepreneurial opportunity with his brother in California’s Silicon Valley.  Musk has stated a driving force for him intellectually was to be involved in solving “important problems” – particularly internet, clean energy, and space.  Early success with Zip2, the company he started with his brother, brought capital of over 300 million when they sold their fledgling company to Compaq.  Capital led to the start of Musk’s company X.com, a financial services and internet payment company that morphed into PayPal.  In just three years PayPal grew into a force in internet financial services and was purchased by EBay in 2002 for over a billion dollars. 

      A 31 year old Musk could have taken the money and bought yachts and castles, but instead poured the money into two venues with visions of spectacular advance and horrendous risk.  He started the electric car company Tesla Motors in 2003 and the space exploration and transport company SpaceX in 2002. Musk poured much of his own money in both start up ventures and by 2010 was almost completely tapped out.  As if that mattered to such people.  Musk began to see some light with the addition of more deep pocketed investors and the resources of the United States government – as well as that old stand by, creative success and innovation.  The Tesla Roadster, an all electric sports car initially produced in 2008, and the soon to come Tesla S sedan, have carved out a market for the innovation buyer, promising the drive capacity of a modern vehicle tied to the clean energy of all electric power.  SpaceX, if successful on the launch and orbital docking test on May 7th, is in line for a multi-billion dollar services contract with the U.S. for cargo and eventually manned transport, that will revolutionize space transport and likely explode innovation, as only private competition can do.

     Elon Musk will create, because that is what he was genetically programmed to do.  We can all be thankful that people such as Elon continually focus their talent and energies on risky but worthy projects that benefit all of us, and make our lives better.  In a special way America’s unique entrepreneurial laboratory continues to produce amazing results that drive progress better than any organized educational process.  College dropouts like Steven Jobs and William Gates, savants with 3 months of official schooling like Thomas Alva Edison, and Google Stanford schoolboys Larry Page and Sergey Brin join Musk among the many who have thrown their talents into the success and failure game of American entrepeneurial adventures and advanced civilization beyond the what could be devised from an advanced degree.  What a magnificent creative cauldron is the American ideal of personal initiative, risk, and reward.  We do honor to our past by recognizing the elements of society that help nurture the Elon Musks of this world, and protect our future by preventing government from interfering with this very successful but fragile process.  Elon Musk will soon be 41, and one can only imagine what he has yet to offer.  Ramparts salutes Elon Musk as People We Should Know #21, and looks with certainty to next Elon Musk somewhere in our American midst, as long as we remember to let them fail or succeed upon their own unique vision – without us getting in the way. 

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“Peak Oil” Joins The List

 

     The modern marriage of science and politics has not seen such a loving relationship since the Catholic Church and Geocentric theory.  Control the conclusions and the power to direct policy and sublimate people is yours.  The concept of  the Earth as the center of the universe and all celestial bodies revolving about it were the brilliant conceptualizations of great men of science such as Aristotle and Ptolemy, providing for their time far reaching logical interpretations of the natural world. The piggybacking of the religious conception of an omnipotent God whose acknowledged greatest creation was Man and the planet man inhabited dovetailed nicely into the scientific tome.  When the “settled” science developed cracks – and what science could be more settled than the science of an omnipotent supreme being’s creation – the Church found the observations of those such as Galileo heretical.  The very concept of an alternative universe where the earth was just another planet orbiting a sun of many suns was antithetical to a universe where God expressed Himself most perfectly through his earthly creations, and most importantly, through His placing of the Church in the position of earthly arbiter of What Is.  The beauty and mystery  of God’s creation is undeniable and awe inspiring, but what is also clear is the many facets of the Mystery is not held forever in the hands of a solitary truth. Science untethered from restrictive thought evolves ever more masterfully toward bringing clarity to the natural world’s mystery. Tie its existence and conclusions to the current elite, and what you have is a recipe for trouble.

     Thus, the framing of  The List.  The list is many examples through history of “settled” science threatened by the progression of knowledge and objective vetting, resulting in violent reaction and suppression. The list extends over the centuries in linear fashion, from the geocentrism of the middle ages, to Man as God’s directed creation rather than through Darwinian evolution, to the Racialist Theories of National Socialism, to the globalist theories of “anthropogenic global warming”.  Each declared a settled science to maintain the political and economic levers such settled conclusions provided, and dictatorially suppressed any other conclusions.

     The concept of “peak oil” takes its roots from similar origins of other such dire armageddon theories of the last five decades, such as “Population Bomb”, “Nuclear Winter”, and “Global Warming”.  Each defined the Development of Western Man  as the culprit, a out of control species that destroys the careful balance of the natural world for his own selfish interests, plundering the Earth, and plowing onward to the destruction of everything out of his own spiteful need for individual expression and pursuit of happiness.  Only a global consortium of like minded tenders can “manage” this tendency for self destruction, and through the levers of economic control and rationing, assure a fair and appropriate distribution of the diminishing resources of the planet.   Science joined into this radically reactionary tome for the same reasons Willie Sutton stated bank robbers rob banks – that’s where the money is. The dolling out of billions of dollars of “directed” research money assured that those with appropriate conclusions prospered and those contrarians starved- and thus the “settled” science.

      “Peak Oil” has been typical of this science vein, nurtured on strands of facts and locked in against any potential threats.  The simple tome goes like this – there is a defined amount to available oil carbon based energy on the planet, the amount has been discovered, and the earth’s spiraling need for oil will come up against this finite and ever diminishing source with dire consequences unless we immediately transition to other sources of energy and live “within our means”.   The concepts are based on known oil sources and extraction capacities, progressive utilization, and the untoward effect of continuing reliance on oil on the environment.   As the “Peak Oil” advocates similarly harp to similar dire predictions, the science of diminishing oil has long been “settled”.

     Unfortunately for elitists, and to the benefit of those who seek a self directed individual life defined by freedom and choice, science is never settled.  Anthropogenic global warming has recently crashed against the rocks of facts, and now Peak Oil is seeing a similar demise.  The driving forces in the United States promoting the concept of Peak Oil have run up against the explosion of technology, that has separated the facts from the “science”.   Available oil has always been artificially limited by availablity and now through new technology availablity has sky rocketed.  New technological feats in shale oil extraction and deep water drilling have opened the United States, Canada and the world to spectacular new oil finds, to the extent that known available oil has doubled with no end in sight.  The United States in particular, once the nunber one oil producer in the world, but in production decline since the 1940’s  due to ever cheaper easily available middle east sources, now finds itself in the midst of an oil boom on the scale of the original oil rush , and could amazingly prove oil self sufficinient by 2022.  This accounts only from newly discovered resources and does not take into account the spectacular availability of carbon based energy locked in coal  that has yet to find a science to safely harness, and of which the United States is uniquely blessed with abundance.

     How can this be?  How is it possible that in three short years, one has gone from a convinced world in which man induced global warming and plundering of self limited natural resources, is now a world that appears to be cooling despite man’s efforts and is bountiful in cheap energy?  It is of course the result of individual man’s ever searching intellect, that drives forward toward truth no matter what artificial constraints are applied to suppress it.  These innate internal drives are what drove the discovery of the telescope by which Galileo exposed the universe’s reality,  and what powered the intellects of the supposed racially inferior Jewish scientists cast out by Germany that powered U.S. atomic technology winning the race with German scientists to the secrets of the atom. 

     The List is an elitest one, designed to suppress free expression economically and materially, so that a certain hierachy is maintained.  Their brief setbacks, created by facts they have not yet found the means to control, has given us all a brief respite.  It is, however, an eternal struggle, and those striving for control of the nation’s and world’s resources control governmental avenues of power, and are not about to easily give up their drive for ultimate control of the new religion of “settled science”.   Whenever necessary, we must stand strong and express doubt regarding their conclusions and demand independent observation.  It is the way of science, it is the way of this democracy, and it is the way of free will.

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An Inconvenient Truth

 

     The several decade long crusade to achieve directorship of the western world’s economies through the mantra of stopping so-called anthropogenic global warming is finally beginning to come up against the rocks of unbiased scientific analysis.  As leaders of this blog know, I have been a long standing skeptic of the argument of human directed global warming for its lack of historical perspective, the nonsense of arguing the concept of investigatory science as “settled” when the science is in its infancy, and the obvious and overt political overtones of those who would “redirect” our resources in an effort to “stop” the unstoppable.  Science as politics has been a long standing failure in regard to scientific truth, and a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who rest their argument on their superior will, rather than the available data.  Whether it was the Church’s long standing earth centric vendetta against the science of Galileo or Copernicus, or the race theories of the National Socialists propped up in the pseudoscience of Eugenics, there has been a dark suppression to individual thought and contrary opinion through history by those who desired to “own the truth” for their own political purposes and profit. 

      The critical tenets of linking the natural processes of climatic warming and cooling to man’s societal advancement through the use of carbon based energy offered a massively powerful tool to those who would seek to “control” man’s individual initiative in favor of some specified collective good.  The weapon of choice was to tie the natural component of the atmosphere the gas carbon dioxide to the moniker “greenhouse” gas, and the production of it as a byproduct of an advanced society, the driver of ‘dangerous and irreversible’ global warming.  Through such linkage lay the mother-load of environmental activism, governmental activism, and massive fortunes for politicians and politically connected scientists and industrialists.  The king of the scare Prophets was the American politician Al Gore, who recently rejected by the American electorate in the close election of 2000, found a post-election venue for political idolatry and personal fortune in the narrative of anthropogenic global warming.  His thrown together cinematic slide show of patchy science and ludicrous predictions, An Inconvenient Truth, electrified the political left and created the edifice for the argument that only through the reining in of the superior economic position of the West through elimination of their reliance on a carbon energy economy and the ‘redistribution’ of the West’s ill-gotten wealth to the impoverished, less developed world, could the globe be saved from utter destruction.  It was a socialist’s wet dream – the critical key to reforming 500 years of individual initiative and progress, and putting the acquired wealth into the hands of the bureaucratic few who would be considered ‘smart and sensitive to the planet’.

     Whole nations have stood in line since the Kyoto protocols of the 1990’s to profess their subservience to the dogma of “settled science” and thereby prove their fidelity to the mother Earth.  They have allowed the climate data to be collected and doled out by a few chosen oracles such as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without asking the critical questions all science should be required to withstand- is the data sufficient to prove a hypothesis, is the data set reproducible, are the data points incontrovertible or corrupted, does the science hold up to skeptical scrutiny?  It turns out, with the billions and billions of dollars and euros at stake, the delicious conclusions were too desirable for those responsible for the science to question their own observations for risk of being cut out of the moneytrain or the exalted position as oracle to the world.

     The “settled science” has finally come under appropriate scrutiny, and we have the intrepid computer hackers of the East Anglia University e-mails to thank.  The thousands of e-mails between the oracles of the settled climate science have shown them to be data corrupted, politically biased, suppressive of their own contrary evidence, and willing to bend their own work to fit the narrative they had established regardless of the facts – a perfect storm of pseudoscience and politically twisted desires.  The fact that scientists can be tempted into self corruption based on their all too human flaws of ego, political bias, or evangelical sense of mission shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone given the immense power, money, and influence that was waved in front of them by political pirates such as Al Gore for whom they served his purpose.

     Thankfully, despite the willful suppression of information, a more balanced interpretation of the science of climate and the multiple effects upon it are beginning to emerge.  The inconvenient truth that appears to be forming is that multiple factors influence global temperatures, and that man’s effect is difficult to isolate, and perhaps minimalist in effect.  It has been clarified that the computer models that suggested direct correlation between CO2 levels and temperature have been shown to be incorrect, with the world in a cooling, not warming,  phase since 1998 while Co2 levels have continued to climb.   As Karin McQuillan’s review article in the American Thinker cogently observes, climate scientists are finally finding the courage to speak out when the data does not fit the assigned narrative:

But within a week, Muller’s lead co-author, Professor Curry, was interviewed in the British press (not reported in America), saying that the BEST data did the opposite: the global “temperature trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.”

       This is nowhere near what the climate models were        predicting,” Prof Curry said.  “Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.”  In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.  They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

          The telling argument regarding global warming hysteria is that it fit a political rather than scientific narrative, long before the infant science had a chance to develop into a rational understanding of the influences on climate, and man’s relationship to them.  No one desires a world without clean air, clean sources of water, efficient utilization of resources, but the dominance of bureaucratic oversight at the risk to personal freedoms must be understood for what it means for humanity’s future development.  The argument ultimately turns out not to be one of the temperature of the earth, for we live on a globe that was dramatically both hotter and colder than the one we currently inhabit, but rather, who will define human progress, individual rights, and the means to achieve personal happiness.  We are stumbling our way to an inconvenient, but, universal truth, that the last five hundred years of human achievement, driven as it was by the hard fought acquirement of individual expression, property rights, and individual freedom, is the best possible device to preserve the world for the greatest proportion of those who inhabit it.

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People We Should Know #17 – Burt Rutan

  

   Something soon and very special is going to occur in the New Mexico desert that will change our relationship to the heavens, and rejuvenate our gene for innovation and adventure.  Sometime after Christmas 2012, a slender, beautiful space craft will take off from America’s first private commercial Spaceport and transport six passengers and two pilots into sub orbit over Earth.  The dream of passenger space travel has been the continuous dream of the adventure driven head of Virgin Atlantic, Sir Richard Branson, and he has put his energy and money behind accomplishing safe and entrepreneurial process to bring space travel to the masses.  With Paul Allen of Microsoft, Branson has brought the heft of private enterprise investment to the challenge, but the technology to make the dream not only feasible but actionable is the brilliance of one man.  Burt Rutan is the genius designer behind the space crafts, and has been for thirty years, one of America’s greatest aircraft designers.  For innovative technological breakthroughs one after another that have changed forever our view of flight, Burt Rutan is Ramparts People We Should Know – #17.

     Burt Rutan has been an aerospace innovator his entire adult life.  Born in Oregon in 1943, Rutan was always interested in flight, graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering at Cal Poly in 1965 and a flight project test engineer in the US Air Force until 1972.  He has always thought out of the box, and has been enthralled with the idea that flight is a right of every individual.  His job has been to try to reduce the complicated engineering of flight into a economic and efficient reality.  He formed his own design company in 1982, Scaled Composites,LLC., which has been the platform for some of the most leading edge ideas in flight over the last thirty years.  Refining the shape and weight of aircrafts using carbon composites, Rutan has produced brilliant  concepts that have influenced craft design ever since.  In 1986, Rutan’s Voyager craft, piloted by his brother Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeagar, became the first airplane to fly non-stop around the world without refueling, accomplishing the task in 9 days.  So revolutionary in design, it became the first of the Rutan vehicles to receive the honor of being retired to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, hanging next to Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis and the Bell X1 craft, the first to fly faster than sound.  Incentived by the AnsariX Prize, awarded to the designer who could build a craft successful of space flight twice in two weeks, lifting the equivalent of 3 passengers, and reusing 80% of the craft, Rutan produced SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 achieve the prize requirements, and made the concept of private space travel a realistic consideration.  SpaceShipOne is now also in the Air and Space Museum as one of the icons of flight.

     Rutan’s success with SpaceShipOne led to a flurry of activity in a new entity, the private space industry.  The State of New Mexico became the sight of a developed private space port, SpacePort America, 45 miles north of Los Cruces, with capacity for both space travel and vehicle freight launch. Sir Richard Branson, inspired by Rutan’s success, successfully convinced him to partner in a program to bring private space travel to fruition, and Virgin Galactic was formed. With sufficient funds Rutan has progressed his design to SpaceShipTwo, capable of travel for six paying passengers, zero G experience, and controlled re-entry with Rutan’s breakthrough technology of wing “feathering” in which the craft is literally bent in two to reduce the speed and heat of re-entry into the dense atmosphere.  The first flight should occur sometime after Christmas 2012, and it is likely that the next generation of Rutan vehicles will auger in private transportation of the nation’s astronauts to orbital missions.

     Burt Rutan is a classic American success story, devising individual achievements, without the need, and more importantly, without the burden of overbearing governmental influence.  His achievements are stimulating other designers to enter into the competition for the enormous potential of a private space industry.  His carbon composite structures have proven strong and versatile and are the influence behind Boeing’s Dreamliner 787 aircraft that will reduce the expense and improve efficiency in routine passenger flight.  Burt Rutan is a quiet genius that someday will be looked upon as the Thomas Edison of flight, and may offer America an industrial revolution in spaceflight that might finally shake it loose from its recent self induced defeatism and malaise.  Burt Rutan is in the tradition of the American garage geniuses, and takes his place next to the Wright Brothers, Edison, Bell, Cray, and others who utilized the freedom and opportunity unique to America to create a better world.  Burt Rutan is a worthy member of Ramparts People We Should Know – #17.

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The End of Bricks and Mortar

    

      The time has come to put down the trowel and let the bricks lie, they are no longer needed.  Since 9/11, there has been a huge drive in technology to protect and reproduce the function of a datacenter (Backend technologies) in the event of a disaster.  Typically, companies will purchase or rent a building for the purpose of operating an identical or similar datacenter.  The idea is to fail over to the secondary datacenter and allow system processes to continue in the event the production (primary) datacenter becomes unavailable.  In some cases, the multiple buildings are purchased.  This “just in case” plan comes at a high operational cost to the organization. Funds are needed to build or rent the phyiscal location, then there is the simple cost of keeping the “lights on.”

     Enter Virtualization, a miracle technology that dribbled into the late 60s and early 70s with IBM mainframes, but did not make a resounding bang until the early 2000s.  Virtualization has been created and developed by such companies as VMware (EMC Corp) and Microsoft.  The idea is to take a single server, or central processing computer, and create several operating based systems on that single server hardware.  There are other virtualization technologies in the market place, but for the purpose of this article I will be singling out server virtualization.   So, you are probably wondering how this “virtualization” technology will ease the budgets of organizations with the operational overhead of a bricks and mortar datacenter.  It is a great concept summed up in one word…”resources.”  An organization pays for resources (such as servers, bandwidth and storage) and does not pay for the building that houses the machines. 

     So where is this virtual datacenter?  It is hosted by a 3rd party company.  One such company, Savvis (http://www.savvis.com), offers a new concept…Infrastructure as a service.  A whole infrastructure (routers, switches, servers, security devices, etc) is now offered as a service that is hosted at a Savvis Datacenter.  Essentially, an organization pays Savvis to use resources in their physical datacenter.  The benefit comes from an a la carte of infrastructure choices that can be selected in a virtual portal.  A simple datacenter can be created in less than an hour, on the Savvis site, and have the full benefits as if it were hosted internally at the organization itself.  Each device selected is virtual with respect to the organization, but in reality may either be shared on a physical server with other organizations or on a solitary server for only that organization.  Savvis offers several levels of cost depending on devices and bandwidth used by the organization, but falls far below the cost of actually building a physical datacenter. 

      There are definite benefits with regard to cost savings for organizations to use hosted infrastructure solutions, but they don’t stop at disaster recovery.  Small businesses that have space restrictions or global organizations can set up and use virtual datacenters anytime, anywhere with virtually little wait time to get the datacenter up and running.  It may be very soon that most organizations rid themselves of all bricks and mortar datacenters and adopt a plan to use fully virtual infrastructures.  Look for more infrastructure hosting companies to enter this new market place as old bricks crumble to dust.

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The Motherlode Under the Prairie

     The north center core of the United States has for several hundred years been seen as the desolate outback of the country. Sparsely inhabited at one time by nomads, it was seen initially as an endless ocean of grass to be navigated and surmounted to reach the desired bounty of the more inviting western and Pacific states. A residual back water for wheat farmers and isolationists, the prairie states of the Dakotas with their vast spaces and brutal winters were suggested to be economically inviable and best left to be returned to the condition of a laboratory for unhindered and uninhabited nature.

     No one is suggesting that now.

     It is not that the massive distances, snowstorms and winter temperatures in the 40 below range have suddenly disappeared or that large numbers of people have irrationally determined they actually like to live in arctic cold.   What has changed everybody’s mind lies some ten thousand feet under the gentle undulating prairie, formed from ten of millions of years of  accumulation of the detritus of living organisms.  It turns out that the state once voted most likely to uninhabit itself out of existence, North Dakota, is sitting on potentially the largest oil field in the continental United States, and may yet be positioned to become the Saudi Arabia of North American oil production.

     Like so often in America’s past, it is the combination of technological advance and entrepreneurial know-how that has converted North Dakota into a dramatic economic powerhouse and a magnet for job growth.  The Bakken formation, a geological formation of shale and sandstone, has been known about since the 1950’s as a potential bountiful repository for oil.  The first well was drilled in 1951.  The formation required a set of conditions however to make it profitable to drill that has not existed until recently.  For decades the easy access of the wells in OPEC countries and the transportation highway provided for by the world’s oceans left the difficult to access, expensive oil drilling process of the prairie oil fields unattractive to large oil producers.  It also left the world hostage to the manipulations of the OPEC collaborators both to price and the enormous political power of the world’s energy supply.  North Dakota drilling required two essential ingredients to be profitable, a stable oil price and the invention of two techniques, horizontal drilling and frakking, to unleash the oil from the shale rock and start the oil really flowing.  The process of horizontal drilling allows a single well access to a massive amount of teritory of oil, and frakking, the process of fracturing rock under high pressure to release capture deposits of oil, have proved ideal to the conditions present in the geology of North Dakota and Eastern Montana.   Both conditions are present today and North Dakota is rocketing up the oil production charts, soon to pass California as the largest continental oil producer with the sky , according to the US Geological Survey, the limit.  The recognition of the huge economic potential is drawing thousands of people anxious for work and economic stability to the once desolate climes of the northern prairie.

     It would seem that a process that may provide the United States with stable and bountiful energy supplies, free it from the blackmail politics of OPEC, provide hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, and achieve energy independence in a safe onshore, environmentally controllable way would be extremely attractive to the US government.  The current administration, however, bound to the storyline that carbon is an evil energy source and that only “green” sources are worth exploring and investing in, continues to place a mountain of regulation in front of the numerous small growing energy companies that took the leap to invest in the Bakken when the larger companies felt it not worth their attention.  In a Wall Street Journal interview with Harold Hamm, the entrepreneur who unlocked the Bakken formation, Hamm quotes President Obama in a meeting he had that shows the President’s tone deaf aversion to success in North Dakota, seeing it as a direct threat to “green” investment.  Hamm recalls the conversation:

“I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this.” The president’s reaction? “He turned to me and said, ‘Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.'”

Mr. Hamm is owner and developer of one many small companies that took the leap in North Dakota and Eastern Montana that now own the greater portion of the Bakken formation and are likely through their success to be major contributors to an economic resurgence in the United States. The impediments put forward by the current administration are bound to be a political issue that will resound in next year’s election. The aversion to real science in the climate change debate has shackled this administration to the myths of the evil nature of carbon energy and left it throwing money away on green ventures too earlier in their scientific development to be of any rational help to this country’s and the world’s developing energy needs. It required fifty years for the economic conditions to be right for Mr Hamm and others to exploit the new technologies of  horizontal drilling and frakking that have made the North Dakota motherlode accessible and economically viable.  Noteably, it was not governmental oversite that identified the potential of the fields and developed the technologies.  As usual, it was the intrepid pioneer, with indomitable will, creativity, good ideas, and some really hard work that may yet allow all of us to reap the benefits.  If you are finally listening, Mr. President, THAT is the American story….

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Los Alamos

 

    I have been away for a well deserved trip and traveled to a favorite corner of the world, northern New Mexico.  As a humbly self described amateur historian, the pulse of history that surges through this unique land could occupy me for months.   The visible chapters of the untold millennia of earth’s history is unrivaled in the geologic variety and infinity vistas, and the area is just as rich in the human story of civilization since the last Ice Age.  The historical books come together in the special corner of the world that forms the mesa on which the little town of Los Alamos rests.  The several hundred million years since the inland seas receded and left the spectacular vistas of New Mexico at the base of the southern rockies seems, at times, eternally fixed, but the past thousand years, a geologic eyeblink, saw amazing human intersessions upon this timeless land.  From the civilized mesa dwellers at Bandolier, to the Pueblos of the native American, the intense migration of the Spanish civilization, and the American merchant invasion via the Santa Fe Trail the land at Otowi, New Mexico has seen a special immersion of cultures.  No migration, however, has probably had the permanent and profound effect of the human experience as did the most recent one – the 1942 migration of the scientist clan onto the Otowi mesa assuming their new home in the Los Alamos County Ranch School and changing science and history forever.  From 1942 to 1945, the ancient mesa at Otowi became the center of scientific research and development that opened the secret of the atom and resulted in atomic energy and the most devastating weapon ever devised by man, the atomic bomb.

     The story is best told in two wonderful books that are a must for anyone wants to understand the incredible tale of Los Alamos and the atomic quest.  The first is Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb .  There is no better and more understandable treatise of the incredible genius that ties Ernest Rutherford’s 1890’s discovery of the atom to the brilliant teamwork of the great collection of scientists that Robert Oppenheimer corralled in Los Alamos in the 1940’s.  The human story of discovery and commitment is best told in Jennet Conant’s wonderful book, 109 East Palace.  Ms. Conant captures the personalities, immense work and breathtaking achievements of the team at Los Alamos preforming under unimagined stress and complete secrecy in a more innocent time. 

     Los Alamos became the site for the most intense science project known to man due to a memory of the director of the search for the secret of the power of the atom, J. Robert Oppenheimer.  The secret project, assigned to the Army’s Manhattan Corp of Engineers, and thereafter known as the Manhattan Project, required a special individual to be in charge and attempt to achieve the impossible in an insufferably short period of time.  It required an individual of special brilliance, who could understand and coordinate physicists, mathematicians, engineers, metallurgists, explosives specialists, chemists, and warriors, hold them together, and finish the job under the enormous pressure of a country fighting for its very life in a race against its enemy for the ultimate weapon, harnessing the power of the atom.  The country found such a man in J. Robert Oppenheimer from the University of California.  Oppenheimer, in looking for the right secluded location for such an enterprise requiring space, water, and the capacity for secrecy, remembered the horse trails of his youth in the region of the Bandolier Indian ruins and went with General Leslie Groves to seek out the location as a home for the project in 1942.  The site proved perfect and the decision was to base the project at the site of the Los Alamos Ranch School in Otowi, New Mexico.  The school had been a place where children of wealthy parents could immerse their children in a life of rigor, scholarship. and self confidence that the life of the  West was considered to represent.  Oppenheimer assembled a team of hundreds of scientists whose average age was twenty five, who subjected themselves to the rigors of the task, with the spirit of the school that had preceeded their community at Los Alamos.  In less than three years, Los Alamos proved to be the most successful science experiment in history, taking a theoretical possibility, that the atom, held together by immense forces, could be, in a controlled fashion, be persuaded to release those forces.  On July 16th, 1945, in the desert outside of the town of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the forces of nature were released from a device conceived, created, constructed, and culminated by the geniuses of the little community of the Ranch School at Los Alamos, and the world for good and bad willl never be the same.   The test of the atomic weapon, referred to by the group as “The Gadget” proved to all that man holds the unique ability to covert thought into reality, limitless in scope when the effort was total.

     The town of Los Alamos continues to this day as a leader in science and atomic energy, and the Bradford Museum of Science located there, is very worthy of a visit to understand the task of nuclear scientists that continue to this day.  The Ranch School still stands and the little museum located on Bathtub Row brings to life the community Oppenheimer led, and reminds us of the world of 1940’s northern New Mexico that made it possible.

     The amazing story is told well in the documentary below, A Moment in Time.  Although an hour in length, it is worth every second to bring the unique story  of Los Alamos to life. The trip off Highway 25 onto Highway 502 in northern New Mexico to the little town of Los Alamos holds an unlimited amount of storyline to the human experience that make getting away to special places worthwhile.