Weekly Review

Time for another weekly review post.

First of all, election. I'll write up my thoughts properly at some point, possibly this weekend, but for now let it suffice to say that I'm surprised with the result and very much disappointed with my fellow Americans' reactions to it. That's what you get for having expectations.

The most immediate consequence is that I messed up my sleep schedule by staying up too late waiting for a final call. I'm still paying for that. Academically the situation is mixed. I did much better on the last flight dynamics exam than I'd expected, but structures is still challenging me. Over the weekend I spent a lot of time in the library working on that and aerodynamics, but clearly more time is needed. My laptop's battery life was a serious limiting factor in how long I stayed each day, so next time the charger goes with.

For similar reasons, I didn't write as much as desired, but that will probably change in the coming days. Of course, there's two exams next week, so my schedule isn't exactly wide open.

On a bright note, the rocket design club secured funding yesterday, so we'll be getting back to work on the hybrid engine after Thanksgiving break.

First Impressions

I've finished the prologue of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and want to write down a few brief thoughts.

Firstly, Diamond makes a considerable effort to assure his readers that he's not a eurocentrist. I can understand why he feels the need to do this, but from my perspective it just made him come across as a smug progressive.

It's perhaps worth noting that my general affect for Professor Diamond has been mostly negative, due to his reputation as, shall we say, a skeptic of civilization. For someone like me, with allergies, asthma, nearsightedness and an ideological affinity for modern world, that sort of mindset rubs me the wrong way.

I'm reading this book, not out of a genuine desire to fairly evaluate the works of people I disagree with, but because it was recommended. Not to me personally, but in general, by educational YouTuber C.G.P. Grey. In a pair of videos, Grey presented Diamond's hypothesis from the book, which sufficiently piqued my interest for me to suspend my suspicions and pick up a copy from the local used book store.

Getting back to the book itself--I think the prologue dismisses several alternative hypotheses out of hand. Now I'm not a professional geographer, so maybe there's a strong body of evidence that those hypotheses are indeed wrong, and Diamond's explanations are intended for convincing a lay audience, rather than a contrarian such as myself. Since in all likelihood the truth is an amalgamation of these possible causes, I'm willing to overlook these seemingly weak arguments.

Certainly I haven't been dissuaded from reading onward. The first chapter is clearly written and informative. My advice would be rather for a certain sort of reader to skip most of the prologue and its disclaimers, heading directly for the meat of the book.

Contrarianism and Systematization

Recommended Reading: The Glory of Systems, Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism

An idea I've been kicking around awhile is that contrarianism arises, in part, because of differences in systematization between individuals or groups. What I mean by this is that certain people are much more concerned with explicitly laying out the reasons behind their actions, beliefs, and behaviors than others. When this happens (particularly if the less systematizing people happen to be older or in a position of greater authority), contrarianism is a common response.

Perhaps contrarian isn't the right term. What I'm trying to describe might be contradictorian. Basically, an individual who goes out of their way to question your intentions and poke holes in your argument.

This was precisely me before my parents accidentally introduced me to Objectivism. I didn't have satisfactory answers to any of life's questions, but so far as I could tell, neither did anyone else. And because middle school me was a total nerd, that was a problem. I wanted explanations, desperately. I got into plenty of losing arguments trying to show other people that theirs were insufficient.

Part of the reason nerdy people get into weird belief systems, from the occult to Ayn Rand, is because those systems provide at least superficially complete worldviews. Many of them paper over important questions or internal contradictions, but they're a level or two higher than the soup of contradictions doled out by the schools and what's left of Christianity.

I'm not sure this is actually a bad thing, but then again my contrarianism eventually sent me back to the center after realizing how little certain anarcho-capitalist types care about consequentialist concerns. Based on my limited observation, the usual failure mode is to keep going up a notch until your peer group is all equally satisfied and nobody questions anything further. I was lucky insofar as someone sufficiently sideways of me to not pattern-match as "enemy" showed me new alleys of inquiry. If that hadn't happened...who knows.

At the very least, keep this problem in mind if you have children.

Weekly Review

It's Thursday, so let's try this weekly review thing again.

My major observation is that I don't tend to be very productive on Tuesday nights, after I get back from the SEDS meeting. There's usually assignments due the next morning, but nevertheless I'm very unmotivated to complete them at that late date. My proposed solution is designating that as mid-week relaxation time (barring any exams on Wednesday) and finish that homework over the weekend.

Next Tuesday is election night, so I don't expect to get anything done that night, anyway.

Speaking of the election, I've given up on my plan to write an extended post about the case for third-party votes. My outline keeps spiraling out of control, and there's no way I'm writing a 15,000 word treatise on the failings of the American political system before Tuesday. It's also been really boring. Perhaps once the dust settles I'll rework it as a post-mortem.

I've finished House of Leaves and will be posting my review of it....eventually.

Blogvember

As mentioned on Twitter earlier, I'm deferring NaNoWriMo for another year.* However, I will be attempting a month-long project of writing each day. This won't optimize for quantity in the same way as my Daily Journal last December. Instead I'll be writing every day with the goal of publishing several posts I've been putting off.

Off the top of my head, I already have three posts I definitely want to push out, and ideas for several more which may or may no go anywhere. Some will go out on my main blog, some here, and perhaps I'll even make use of my public Tumblr. As usual there will be links post at some point in the month.

Additionally, the way my schedule works this semester means that Thursdays are really my effective Fridays. Consequently, they make a more natural time for weekly review, so I will try once again do reflection writings.

*More likely two, considering I'll be in the midst of senior design next fall.

Links for October

Shot, chaser.

The latest news on modular nuclear reactors.

The Nazi war machine ran on meth.

Weird Sun Blog: Judgement as Fake Explanation

David Chapman gives us a first lesson in meta-rationality.

Good though not great interview with a sociologist who spend 5 years studying Red Tribe up close.

How Paul Krugman made Donald Trump possible. Speaking of Trump, Megan McArdle argues that he's no Goldwater.

Natural language processing of the first Presidential debate.

FiveThirtyEight: Religion and education explain the white vote.

Grognor on Umeshism.

Tyler Cowen discusses the Chinese economy.

Links for September

Scott Alexander with a new argument for the simulation hypothesis.

Non-horrifying clothes for small children.

Apple updates an operating system from the 1980s for the first time since I was born.

The Future Primeval argues politics is upstream of science and why.

Simon Penner at Status 451 discusses social gentrification as it pertains to nerd culture. Keep in mind the difference between nerddom-as-community and nerd-as-identity while reading.

Related: Scott Alexander again, this time with a fascinating neurological hypothesis integrating hallucinogenic drugs, schizophrenia, and autism. It would explain a lot and definitely needs more research.

The Economist reports that the corporate approach to introverts is getting worse.

Kerbal Space Program nears version 1.2

David Chapman on the glory of systems.

My review of Hive Mind by Garret Jones is finally up.

Fifteen Years

You know what this post is about. I don't have to tell you. Just look at the date on it.

Fifteen years is a long time. I was seven then; I'm twenty-two now. The world has changed in ways that none of us could have imagined then. I certainly couldn't. I'm a weird case, too young to live in the old world but too old to live in the new one. "Normal" has changed forever and there's no real going back.

The aftermath was what my brain was first trained on, when trying to comprehend the outside world. Before the 2000 election I had only the vaguest notion of politics or current events. During the following year my progress leaving that cocoon was still very slow. The Twin Towers falling forced the process into overdrive.

For me, it's not a great tragedy. It was, but all those people dying wasn't an exception for me. In many ways that was the norm, the first major event I became aware of, something almost...prototypical. The rhetoric around terrorism certainly was. It's what I grew up on and I wonder what that's going to mean when my generation takes political power.

Fifteen years. It's my own life and still I can barely conceive of a timespan that long. Some long range thinker I am. Let's hope the next fifteen are better.

Diary

I finished writing my diary last night. By which I mean it's filled, one end to the other.

I've been writing in it since Pi Day, 2002. I was seven at the time; now I'm 22. That's a full 65% of my life with this as my diary. During most of that time I wrote inconstantly and erratically, but it was always a thing I had around. Finishing it feels...weird.

Another journal was purchased long ago, so I won't be stopping entirely. In recent years I've also used various social media platforms and blogging sites to record my life, including this one. Nevertheless, I've found that private writing is more conducive to introspection than anything else, so for the time being that's not going anywhere.

MidAmeriCon Notes, Day 5

Please understand that my memory is not perfect, and that my summaries may misstate or misconstrue the views of the speakers. These should also not be taken as complete synopses of the talks given. I take notes mainly for my own use, and what is included reflects this fact. You can find a full listing of programming here.

Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four.

My final day of the World Science Fiction Convention started out with a panel on worlds with Two Suns in the Sky. This was a discussion of a few hypothetical concepts and largely-unvalidated models that are nonetheless the best we can do. These include Niven's notion of a planet with an off-center core, and planets which orbit in a Figure-8.

Trying to determine the properties of a planet about another star is difficult. We can obtain the mass and approximate density from orbital characteristics, but finding chemical composition requires huge telescopes to do spectroscope. A related instrument limitation is that the Kepler Space Telescope can only find about 3% of possible exoplanets around target stars, as the ecliptic must pass between their star and our own.

For a close binary pair, it's estimated that two stars about 80% of Sol are the most likely to produce a habitable planet. Binary systems are much more likely to eject planets than single star systems. (About 30% of star systems are binary.) The minimum stable orbit radius is about 2-4 times that of the stars. It's not necessary for the planet to have formed there.

Is Asteroid Mining Feasible? The next panel set out to answer that question. The first question is which asteroids you're trying to mine. Near-Earth Objects are much easier to reach than the Asteroid Belt. The next question is what you want to mine. Are you searching for water or rare minerals. For the latter, it may just be cheaper to mine them on Earth until an adequate industrial base is built up in space. Note, too, that asteroids are not subject to many of the geophysical and geochemical processes which produce terrestrial ore deposits.

Water and other volatiles would be valuable as chemical propellants. Refueling satellites would be an obvious near-future application, but there's a sort of chicken and egg problem. Until the technology is developed, no one will build satellites with refueling capability. But the technology won't likely be developed until there's a market. Many companies don't appear to be grappling with this economic problem. A business plan emphasizing spin-off applications is desirable as it aids profitability and reduces the capital investment.

There's also legal implications. The Outer Space Treaty is quite vague about the use of off-world resources. It probably won't get resolved until prosecutions begin. Another interesting fact is that, according to one panelists, Americans and Australians are the primary supporters of space mining. Those from other nationalities are often opposed (though Luxembourg is investing in such technologies). Canada may tag along, but this seems to be mostly an Anglospheric obsession.

A higher-level concern is that asteroidial resources contribute to our current linear, one-pass economy, reducing pressure to develop more sustainable infrastructure. However, in space the perspective is different. Dragging materiel up from the gravity well is both expensive and requires considerably more structural strength than machines manufactured on orbit would.

More futuristic questions were considered by Jordin Kare's talk on SailBeam and the Bussard Buzz Bomb, two hypothetical technologies for reaching the stars within a human lifespan. His goal is a 50-year time horizon, which requires reaching speeds of at least 0.1c. Nuclear fission propulsion doesn't get us a tenth of the way there, even with staging. Fusion would be slightly better, but we still don't have that technology and only marginally improves the situation.

Using external energy gets us around the rocket equation, but most approaches to this don't allow us to slow down at the other side. Flying through an alien star-system at cruising velocity isn't really worth it, and this is the key limitation of the standard laser-driven sailship. Additionally, Robert Forward's original design had to be over a kilometer across, with a laser a thousand times that size. Dividing it into many smaller sails reduces the laser requirements but also the payload, down to a few milligrams. Considering any data sent back would need to be transmitted by laser, there's really not a whole lot there.

SailBeam is a way around this, by using multiple one-meter sails launched in succession, transferring momentum to one-another. One major aspect of this is that it requires a different material. The enormous heat flux of the laser blast, combined with tremendous accelerations, rules out metals. Dr. Kare proposes using a dielectric material, which will either reflect or retransmit most of the energy without absorbing. By his calculations this design would allow a sufficiently large laser to accelerate the sailship from zero to lightspeed in a few seconds (ignoring relativity).

There's still a lot of engineering problems to work out, of course. Guidance is one--trying to rendezvous one-meter objects across light-weeks of space would be a real challenge. Control is another--spin stabilization would require about 600,000 rotations per minute. Laser guidance, exploiting high-velocity dust impacts, and shedding small amounts of mass are possibilities to pursue.

Finally, the sail-probe would use a magnetic sail to slow down, dragging against the interstellar medium. This uses a similar technology to another proposed starship design, the Bussard Ramjet. Unfortunately, we now know that the interstellar medium is too thin for the Bussard Ramjet to produce adequate thrust. The magnetic fuel scoop would end up producing more drag than the engine thrust, just like the SailBeam. However, it's possible to seed the route leading out of the solar system with pellets of fusion fuel. Guiding these into the combustion chamber would need a much smaller scoop, which could be repurposed as a small shield once reaching cruising velocity. A "runway" a few light-days long would be adequate, which the ship would cover in a few weeks time. By the end, it would be experiencing about 30 fusion explosions per second.

The next panel I went to was about Human Culture in Remote Space Settlements, which by and large didn't really address the question. For me, it raised another: what makes a panel work? Does it depend on the moderator? A coherent question? Relationships between the panelists? We don't know.

I did take away a few good points, however. One is that many of the worlds around nearby stars are likely to be tidally locked, which poses a challenge to colonization. It's quite possible that fixating on planets is the wrong approach, when we could much more easily build nice, comfortable space colonies from the resources of the system. This solves the problem addressed in the generation ship panel on Friday, asking why colonists would bother getting off the ship.

Another thing discussed was the notion of athletics in space colonies. There would be the normal sports we know, combined with low-gravity and zero-gravity activities that are yet to be invented. Depending on the size of the habitat, some of them may need to be adapted to account for Coriolis forces. Physics class will be very different in an O'Neill Cylinder or Stanford Torus.

The afternoon's main attraction was a chat between George R. R. Martin, Pat Cadigan, and Michael Swanwick reminiscing about the first MidAmeriCon in 1976. I jotted down a few things, but won't try to condense them into something coherent.

MidAmeriCon I memories dialog #MAC2 pic.twitter.com/t8QK7yV556

— Nathaniel M. Routh (@NathanielMRouth) August 21, 2016

The final event I went to was dialog on asking Can Hard Science Fiction be too Hard? The answer is: it depends on your readers. Different people have different preferences and levels of scientific literacy--whose your target audience?

Appreciate the limits of infodumps, and ask if you should explain your work in the text. There's a sort of taboo against putting equations in your books, but some readers really like that sort of thing. Part of the problem is dislodging popular misconceptions before inserting the truth of the matter.

Science fiction shouldn't really be hard for hardness' sake. Real-world difficulties should cause difficulties for your characters. A common example is the lightspeed delay. Just because a story is set in space and deals with that doesn't mean it has to be a Mohs 11.

Many readers will forgive small errors if you get the big stuff right. Asimov said that there's a relativity of wrong, and he was right. Our modern models are true in broad strokes, but many of the details may change as the scientific method continues its process of refining and revising. If you reach the limits and veer into speculation, be honest about it. Speculative physics, biology, or psychology can still make for a great story.

That's the final report. WorldCon was a great experience, but it was also a lot of work. I'm almost relieved to be back at engineering school.