Ig Nobel Laureates

As an Australian, I'm proud to be able to congratulate some fellow Australians, the winners of the Ig Nobel prize for Physics in 2003, Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams.

They won for their groundbreaking report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces." [.pdf]
[PUBLISHED IN: Applied Ergonomics, vol. 33, no. 6, November 2002, pp. 523-31.]

From one of the joint winners, Dr John F. Culvenor ::

The Ignobel awards are about research that "first makes you laugh, then makes you think". The funny thing about our research was that one of the conclusions was that it is easier to pull a sheep downhill. Newton was right! The serious side is that changes to workplaces to improve safety are sometimes fairly straightforward. Listening to workers and putting into place good ergonomics and good science can yield dividends.

Previous Australian winners of Ig Nobels have included:

• INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH 2002
  Karl Kruszelnicki of The University of Sydney, for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint -- who gets it, when, what color, and how much.
• TECHNOLOGY 2001
  Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.[pdf]
• LITERATURE 2000
  Jasmuheen (formerly known as Ellen Greve) of Australia, first lady of Breatharianism, for her book "Living on Light," which explains that although some people do eat food, they don't ever really need to.

There is no truth to the rumour that Jasmuheen has been employed as a consultant by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

1984 above the 38th Parallel

We must do something about North Korea.

Han, a Communist Party official in North Korea, was walking home from work when he heard he was in trouble. He had smuggled a radio back from China after an official trip. He listened to it late at night, huddled with earphones on and shades drawn, to hear music that brought him a whisper of sanity and took him away from the horrors of his day.

Now, someone had found it, or someone had told.

"It could have been my children who said something outside. It could have been my friend; one knew," said Han, 39, who spoke on condition he be identified only by his surname.

"If a farmer or laborer had a radio, he could have been released," Han said. "But I was an official. In my case, it would have been torture and a life sentence in a political prisoners' camp."

We must do something about North Korea.

• Because of what Juche/Ingsoc is doing to millions.


• Because of the export of heroin to finance the lifestyle of the inner party.


• And not least, because Big Brother/Dear Leader thinks the best way of extorting Foreign Aid is to threaten possible donors with Nukes.

OK, any suggestions?

The Basic Problems with Microsoftware

As a Computer Professional, I am constantly amazed at the shoddy goods the Software Industry has provided, and continues to provide. Customers who should reasonably expect better have come to consider unreliability to be normal. Instead of programmers making "Fault-Tolerant" programs that keep on working despite minor flaws, they've managed to make "Fault-Tolerant" customers instead.

From a recent ZDNet Computer Security Newsletter :

It seems like Microsoft is determined to stuff a BASIC interpreter into every piece of software it writes, even when it makes little sense to do so. No one in their right mind would want to allow people to run programs attached to e-mail messages, but VBScript does just that when you click an e-mail attachment in Outlook or Outlook Express.

It's possible that this idea made sense at one time–before the threat of viruses and worms became so high. But now VBA [ Visual Basic for Applications ] is simply an unwise feature to have, and using it isn't worth the risk. Average users don't benefit from VBA ; it only exposes them to undesired threats.
[...]
As soon as the world became obsessed with the idea that writing software was simple, a lot of people who really had no business writing software suddenly became programmers.

Don't bet that the so-called professional programmers at Microsoft are going to make their software any better in the near future. The kids writing exploits are beating the pants off the pros daily, and they'll continue to frustrate Microsoft--and the rest of the world--until Microsoft changes its design philosophy.

From Reuters :

LOS ANGELES/SEATTLE, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - News) faces a proposed class-action lawsuit in California based on the claim that its market-dominant software is vulnerable to viruses capable of triggering "massive, cascading failures" in global computer networks.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, also claims that Microsoft's security warnings are too complex to be understood by the general public and serve instead to tip off "fast-moving" hackers on how to exploit flaws in its operating system.

From CRN :

A panel of leading security experts Wednesday blasted Microsoft for vulnerabilities in its software, and warned that reliance on the Redmond, Wash.-based developer's software is a danger to both enterprises and national security.

The group, which debuted its report at the first day of a two-day conference hosted by the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), was headed by Dan Geer, the chief technology officer of @Stake, a security consulting firm.

"As fast as the world's computing infrastructure is growing, vulnerability to attack is growing faster still," said Geer.

"Microsoft's attempts to tightly integrate myriad applications with its operating system have significantly contributed to excessive complexity and vulnerability. This deterioration of security compounds when nearly all computers rely on a single operating system subject to the same vulnerabilities the world over," Geer added.

Dan Greer was fired the next day : @Stake gets a lot of business from Microsoft.

Standards of Living

While perusing A Voyage To Arcturus, I happened upon a comparison table between costs in the USA in 1959 vs 2003, in terms of the average wage. Simply put, how long would the average American have to work to earn enough to buy various commodities? I've added the figures for Australia, which make an interesting comparison.

Amount of Work Required to Purchase:	1959	2003	Australia 2003
3-Bedroom House	2.5 years	4 years	12 years
New Ford	5 months	7 months	16 months
Gasoline, 1 gallon (3.8 litres)	7 minutes	5 minutes	14 minutes
Bread, 1 pound (400g)	5 minutes	3 minutes	7 minutes
Milk, 1 gallon (3.8 litres)	23 minutes	9 minutes	20 minutes
First Class Postage Stamp	55 seconds	1 min 10 sec	2 minutes

I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas

From The Australian :

The adherents of a strange cult will descend on the NSW town of Woy Woy this weekend as the town celebrates the life of the king of nonsense, Spike Milligan, who died last year.

There will be jazz bands, stand-up comedy and a backwards walk to emulate Milligan's song I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas Across the Irish Sea.

The gentlemen of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, Northern NSW Section, will be making the journey from Newcastle for the special day, led by incurable Spike fan Colin Randall.

Mr Randall, also president of the Tie Society of Australia, has been collecting Spike Memorabilia for 20 years and said the society would be displaying some of Spike's books on transport along with photos of suitably Milliganesque pieces of machinery.

"There is a need for eccentricity in life," Mr Randall said.

Spike's parents lived in Woy Woy and he was a regular visitor, once having himself delivered to their front lawn by truck in a large cardboard box.

Despite his description of Woy Woy as "the world's only above ground cemetery", the town has taken the British comic to their hearts.

Spike suffered from manic depression after shell shock in World War II and the festival has been timed to coincide with Mental Health Week.

His brother Patrick is one of the organisers and it is hoped SpikeFest will become an annual event.

In the spirit of previous posts about Dr Who, and in memory of a Certain Goon, may I present : The Home Life of Daleks.

The Spirit of Australia

In order to understand Australian Society, Australian Foreign Relations (especially with France), and Australian Politics, there's no finer encapsulation than a story on The Command Post.

Brain Food

A title I could have used for my last post, but in a fit of good taste [sorry...], didn't. Pork Brains in Milk Gravy. I've eaten and enjoyed Fish Eye Soup, Pork Knuckles and Jellyfish Salad, Snake, Crocodile, and Kimchi (fermented cabbage sauce), but Pork Brains in Milk Gravy...

Moving right along.

This post is something of a celebration. For MIT have now released their Open Course Ware (OCW) project.

Welcome to MIT's OpenCourseWare: a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world.
[...]
With the publicaton [sic] of 500 courses, MIT OCW offers educational materials from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT's schools.

OK, so maybe the spelling needs a little work... Never Mind.

I just wish I had a couple of dozen lifetimes, and a couple of million dollars for expenses, so I could just gorge on this feast of knowledge. As it is, I must limit myself to a few choice tidbits from the smorgasbord. A few succulent morcels from the school of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (what else?) as a starter. Then a juicy gobbet of Linguistics and Philosophy. Back to the Elec Eng and Comp Sci department for a dollop of Computer Ethics. I'll indulge myself with some tasty Literature, than for dessert, some Political Science.

Ahhhhhhh. But I suspect that will take up most of the one lifetime I have. And I have something even more important in my life - a 2 year old son, who takes up a lot of my time. I wish I could play with him even more than I do though. And more time for my long-suffering partner-in-crime and wife of 22 years, Carmel. How she puts up with me, I do not know.

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous : a site brought to my attention by Evil Pundit, Australia's Wackiest Academic Websites. "We put the ACK!!! back in Academia".

The older universities tend to lag in this area, but UNSW [University of New South Wales] can provide supervision on such hot topics as `Cyberspace and embodiment' and, with the self-referentiality on which postmodernism prides itself, `Well-being through movement: Exploring the PhD degree'. Macquarie University has drawn even with recent research showing that "Tattooing is just a literalist process of marking and being marked, which is really what life is.".
NEW! Macquarie has blitzed all comers with its `Bodily modifications' conference: see the Herald-Sun's report. (If you think this article is exaggerating, check the conference abstracts, such as `What an arse can do: affect, time, and intercorporeal transformation'.)

As me good mate and fellow blogger Evil Pundit says :

One of the cool things an arse can do is win a tenured position at an educational institution by spouting postmodern gibberish.

Quite.

A swift digression: When I was a mere lad, in about 1974, I attended a Pacific Poetry Seminar at the then newly-opened Macquarie University, the reward for having some minor work deemed worthy of publication - I forget what it was. Anyway, I took part in a seminar amongst the Best and the Brightest of what was shortly thereafter to be called "The Pacific Rim". Delegates from Tonga, Fiji, much of Micronesia, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, California, New Zealand and so on. Lo and Behold, the first item to be lovingly dissected was my own poem. Well, they managed to read into it things I'd never intended. I remember Kierkegaard and Joyce being mentioned as "obvious inspirations". When they got onto the bit about how it reflected the metaphysical essence of "A la recherche du Temps Perdue" I decided to call a halt to the whole farce – and was roundly shouted down. What did I, the mere author, know of what I was trying to communicate? Didn't the professionals know far more than I? As a 15 year old who had never encountered Marcel Proust (in the original or otherwise) and to whom Soren Kierkegaard's Existentialism was a closed book, I sat in silent awe at the Intellectual Self-Abuse that went on for a good two hours. They never did get to the next item.

I decided then and there that much of Literary Academe was Hokum, a power game played for the benefit of the participants, and sadly, of little interest to me. "'Tis a Tale told by an Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying...... nothing." Oh, there was a core of meaning, of value, that I would dearly have loved to explore. But with so much accreted nonsense around it that to study it while retaining a shred of intellectual honesty was beyond my poor abilities. Macquarie University thus taught me a valuable lesson, even though I never attended a single class there.

I might add that under a former lecturer of mine, Jan Hext, Macquarie University's Computer Science department was later transformed into a first-rate institution, one of the best in Australia, if not the world. The Universe is full of strangeness, wonder and Irony. And of course Pork Brains in Milk Gravy.

Today's Brain Post

I've been blogging about Politics, about Serendipitous Intellectual puzzles, and about Space recently. But not much about Brains. Well, over at A Small Victory, I found .... Pork Brains in Milk Gravy. I repeat, Pork Brains in Milk Gravy.

Ponder on that for a while.

If you follow the link, and read the comments, you'll find a recipe for a dish I have a certain fondness for - Black Pudding. I eat it about once every 2 years or so, but have one in my fridge now.

But after looking at Pork Brains in Milk Gravy. Pork Brains in Milk Gravy. Pork Brains in Milk Gravy... suddenly I'm not particularly Hungry.

Pork Brains in Milk Gravy.

Gadzooks.

Comments:

Why?! Why?! Why?!
You don't understand! I just finished a nice bowl of clam chowder and now......ooooh, I don't feel so good! Really!
How could you?! How could anyone write those words let alone...

:: Cara Remal

My sympathies. If it's any consolation, I was just finishing off some lamb chops when I got your e-mail in reply. Just being reminded of the article.... let's just say that our Dog was grateful.

Hey, with the high holidays this week, I was just wondering...do you think pork brains in milk gravy is kosher? could you check the can for me?

::Jeremy

Kosher? Why, it's even more Kosher than Oysters Kilpatrick!

Let's see...
Fish without scales - check
Meat and Milk together - check
Meat from a non-ruminant - check
I think the Worcestershire sauce is OK though, so only 3 Ecclesiastical Dietary laws are not–so–much–broken–as–shattered.

As regards checking the cans...

I'm in Australia. That means that it's likely that the nearest cans of Pork Brains (with Milk Gravy) are at least 10,000 miles away from me, in the far-off USA, with the Pacific Ocean separating me from them.

You have no idea how comforting that thought is. Even though I'm not a Red Sea Pedestrian.

Turn of Phrase of the Day

From a mailing list I'm on, discussing the latest findings regarding probabilities of extraterrestrial life :

> The smart money is on the idea that bacteria [are] all over the Universe.
> What it has evolved into is anybody's guess.

This would explain a lot of things -- telemarketers, for instance.
-Chris Weuve

British Understatement

From the Grauniad :

Captain Byambaa Chinzorig is, perhaps not surprisingly, a little touchy about 1258 and all that. When Mongolian forces last came to Iraq, led by the great warrior Prince Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, they sacked Baghdad, killed an estimated 800,000 people, brought to a bloody end the Abbasid caliphate and destroyed a vast array of ornate public buildings and a sophisticated irrigation system. Today, 745 years later, their plans are much more modest.

"We all know the history of the 13th century when the Mongolian soldiers captured Iraq but this time is completely different," said Capt Chinzorig, 30, a proud graduate of the Military University of Mongolia, Ulan Bator's equivalent of Sandhurst or West Point. "Of course, we have a different mission."

Or so one hopes.

What's Mandarin for "The Right Stuff"?

Some breaking news from The Australian :

A pool of 14 Chinese astronauts has arrived at a base in northwestern China ahead of the country's first manned space flight.

The pro-Beijing Wen Wei Po newspaper said two instructors Li Jinlong and Wu Jie were among the 14, but it denied reports in Hong Kong that the two would be chosen to orbit the earth in the Shenzhou V spacecraft.

Speculation has mounted over when China plans to launch its first manned space flight, with officials on September 16 saying only that it would take place in the next three months.

However, other space analysts have said the launch could come as soon as October 1st.

Three astronauts could in theory man the space flight, but according to analysts only one or two of the 14 who have undergone a decade of training would be chosen.

Snippet from a Mate in Iraq

"Got a letter from JA, seems to be vulnerable to "the Bug". Was told he couldn't blow up the munitions they found as the last blast raised a cloud that the weather satellites picked up :)"

Taboo - A Quiz about Morality

From Butterflies & Wheels, a blog that Norman Geras highly recommends,, comes a quiz about personal morality. I came across as less permissive than most, (Moralising 0.53 vs average 0.25), Interference Factor 0.4 vs average 0.16, that is, more likely to stick my nose into other people's business, and a Universalising factor of 1.00 vs an average of 0.42, completely disregarding custom as affecting moral decisions.

I think the test is slightly flawed - there are questions involving both private and public matters that are intermingled in the evaluation section which are quite seperate when asked. I won't give the game away by giving concrete cases, let's just say that I believe that certain actions which are harmless when performed by consenting adults in private should be publically discouraged should society be forced to become aware of them. Without a smidgin of hypocricy such as this, privacy has no value. But more than a smidgin is too much. Example : Shouting "Whites should be exterminated!" in one's own home, with no-one to hear, harms none (except possibly the speaker, though I think it to be a symptom not a cause of self-harm). Yet if such actions became known, sanctions should be imposed. Not legal ones (IMHO, and in this case), just expressions of societal disapproval, because a purely private act has, by being published, become a public one, (a tautology, to state the bleedin obvious) and hence of a different character.

Note that last leap of logic in the last phrase : it assumes without proof that public acts and private acts are by their nature, different. Which sounds suspiciously to me like "begging the question", and I'm the one who wrote it. Still, it's what I believe, and I'm willing to listen avidly to reasons why I'm wrong, wrong, Wrong.

Matters of Ethics and Morality are important to me. I've been involved in the past with making "better ways to kill people", and carry the burden and responsibility for at least 2 enemy deaths in combat caused by the use of systems I've created. The same techniques used to make weapons are exactly the techniques used to make so–called "Safety Critical" systems, things like Railway Control systems and Avionics, which have to work to a certain minimum level 100% of the time or lives will be lost. When teaching people who make such systems, I always get them to consider their ethical and moral responsibilities. This is serious stuff, just one mistake can kill people, directly or indirectly. Screw up, and that "smart bomb" hits an orphanage, not the Uranium enrichment plant nearby.

Anyway, the quiz gives one furiously to think. Please go visit the rest of the site, it has some truly erudite (and sometimes hilarious) demolition of Fashionable Nonsense.

Comments:

First, thanks for some time ago adding lots of much needed detail to a comment I made at Winds of War
about the Pauline in prison affair. Much appreciated.

Now: public and private acts and are they (always) different.

First, let's see if we disagree.

I came out with logically consistent views but a "tension" in my answers because I regarded the failure on the bad son go visit his dead mother's grave as doing harm.

Partly this is a point of religion: those who wrote the quiz assumed dead=nonexistent, whereas I take a more Egyptian view: dead but not nonexistent. (I would not regard an undiscovered tomb robbery as being a private or harmless act either.) And naturally I don't
expect agreement on that, so there's no point in arguing it.

But I do think the private (~> no harm ~> no evil except perhaps by violating the arbitrary dicta of the gods) vs. public (~> undesirable hedonic consequences ~> perhaps evil) division breaks down with acts to which there were living witnesses, but to which there are or will be no living witnesses.

If the bad son's promise to his dying mother is irrelevant because there are no living witnesses, I am going to tell a story about Jim and Joe in a lonely place, and how frail old Jim brought Joe's IOUs, and burly young Joe brought rope, a shovel and some heavy duty garbage bags. Whatever passed between Jim and Joe in that lonely place is now irrelevant: it is now a private act, and Joe never felt a bit bad about it as he enjoyed a life less burdened by debt.

I think this is what it may come to if you take the view that acts, including speech acts, involving the soon to be dead count as public (and are therefore stringently assessed in moral terms), until the witnesses are dead, at which point the accounting is redone on the basis that the non-living/nonexistent don't count.

While I do not see a logical flaw if someone says "that is right, I would disapprove of the act till there was nobody living who had been harmed by it, and then I would reverse my moral judgment on Joe and what he did and give them both a pass," I do not like it a bit.

For this reason, I think that the public/private distinction, which I agree is very sensible and necessary in most circumstances, hits an awkward patch here. And the awkwardness ought to be resolved in favor of the dead.

Which means that since the son's promise to his mother was not a solitary act when he made it, it still has its moral force, and he ought to be reproved for his conduct and pressed to keep his word, if it was possible to do so. And in my story, not only is Joe a
murderer, he still owes Jim his money, and on both counts, Joe should be made to pay.

Your opinion?

Or were your issue with public/private distinctions in the example cases different?

David Blue

Irrelevant afterthough: I remember once reading a philosophical argument, the details of which I cannot at all recall, that meant that you could not pre-empt, because you have no rights against merely notional or prospective violence, it is only actual violence against which you have rights. Put that together with some sound materialist view that only the living have rights, and you can conclude that Jim had nothing to complain about before or afterwards, but the full protection of moral philosophy at the exact moment the shovel smashed his skull. :P

::David Blue

Someone who believes in an Omniscient Deity would have to argue that no act is truly "private", as God Sees All. I'm an agnostic rather than an atheist, due mainly to various abstruse physical phenomena and the partly intuitive, partly rational evaluation that for an uncaring Universe, there's far too much good around us. Why are Auschwitz and 9/11 the exception rather than the rule? The main reason for not having faith in some Deity is because one is not neccessary, yet I find much in the world that can plausibly be explained by postulating the existence of one. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist, but nowhere near enough faith to be a deist. I said "plausibly", not "most plausibly".

But I digress.

Your point, if I understand rightly, was that given the existence of some individuality post-mortem, then both logic and intuition give the same results: killing people is wrong, regardless of whether someone lives to tell the tale. And without such existence, there is a mismatch.

The mismatch is more perceived than real though, if you assume that Evil is timeless - an act that was once Evil remains Evil despite future happenings. For in the long run, everyone dies. The Sack of Magdeburg in the 17th century remains a horror, despite there being no-one now alive who witnessed it.

I'll reply more and at length in a future post. But may I state my thanks for giving my ethics a good work-out, and I'm glad I was able to help a little with the details of the Hanson affair.

Memorable Phrase of the Week

Quoted on Mark Steyn, this from Rich Lowry :

Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the west's idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam's idea.

The X-Prize

From Space.com :

In a race to achieve the first privately funded manned spaceflight, two teams of rocket engineers are poised to compete for the $10 million X Prize by launching people to the edge of space and bringing them back safely twice within a two-week period.

Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, said he expects that one of the two teams will launch within the next few months, using rockets and spacecraft that are already being tested and prepared for the daring venture. A Mojave Desert airport in California has already been approved for use as a launch pad for the suborbital missions.

``We expect to have a winner within the next nine to 12 months,'' said Diamandis in a presentation Friday to officials of the Federal Aviation Administration.

The first front-runner (in Alphabetical order) is Armadillo Aerospace, which is using a conventional but shoestring rocket A quote which gives you an idea of how "sealing-wax and bailing-wire" their approach is:

We did some more work on our Russian space suit now that the blown zipper has been repaired....

Nonetheless, I wish them well, and their chances of a safe flight aren't too bad. Probably the same as Gagarin's. After making allowances for the 2nd-hand gear, and the commercial-grade equipment, they're going about things in a professional way. Hell, Wehner Von Braun and Co did more with 1940's vintage gear, and today's standard commercial metallurgy and quality-control is far superior to the best they had then. It's better than the late-50's and early-60's too, which is what Gargarin, Sheppard and so on had to rely on. Glad I'm not riding it though.

The other front-runner is the same mob that built the Voyager, the round–the–world non–stop amateur–built aircraft. That project barely succeeded by the skin of its teeth, but suceed it did. The organisation is Scaled Composites, and they have an X-15–like concept : a manned rocketplane dropped from a Mothership. In concept, less ambitous, but in execution, rather more. I hope they take fewer risks than they did with Voyager.

I doubt the winner will cover their own costs from the prize itself. But commercial endorsements for both winner and runners-up will be worth far more.

Go have a look at the X-prize team list. Those two are the current front-runners, but unforeseen problems could mean that one of the others could get in first. And those are just the contestants who have made it through the entry criteria. UFOs R Us otherwise known as Gravity Control Technologies of Budapest didn't make the cut, despite having some very ambitious designs based on quite possibly valid physical theories. The problem is that, amongst other things, their designs require technologies and materials that don't exist, in fact wholesale leaps in the bounds of Science. And the bulk of it smells suspiciously like snake-oil. Robert Fisk is more credible (though John Pilger less so). If they ever make a series of working models, I'd be very interested. But I think the probability of that is approximately..oh..about..umm.. zero. Yes, zero. Pity. I like the idea of genuine Flying Saucers.

UPDATE : Rocket Man has an interview with John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace.

But the Greatest of these is Charity

Today I did a swift doorknock around the local street for the Heart Foundation. A terrific spring day, bright sunshine and a cool, crisp wind. Blossoms everywhere.

And I was stunned by the outpouring of charity and goodwill. I doorknocked about 30 houses, got about 20 at home, and only 3 of those didn't give a few dollars, despite being disturbed late on a Sunday Morning by a complete stranger.

"Good Morning, Good Morning! It's that time of day again, when all the doorknockers and scroungers try to get you to part with your hard-earned cash for worthy causes. This one's for the Heart Foundation, would you care to make a Donation? $2 and up is Tax deductible."

Of the three, one was a young bloke with a house full of toddlers (I felt like giving him money rather than asking him for some, he looked as if he needed it), one was an old Greek (by the accent) who was obviously "careful with his Brass" and not about to give it away to moochers, and one was an aging Yuppie with a case of the Irrits and possibly PMT. I don't blame any of them for saying 'No'.

Everyone else – Everyone – gave me something. Sometimes only what pocket change they had immediately available. Sometimes after spending several minutes looking throughout the house for some petty cash. Always after examining my credentials and ID, they weren't paying me to go away, they wanted to "give so someone else could live".

These are people who live on my street, but most of whom I've never met. Unbelievable that such kindness could exist around me without me being aware of it.

In addition to the money, they gave me a greater gift : a restoration of my faith in the common human decency of ordinary people.

That SMARTs

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

Europe's first mission to the moon has blasted off aboard a European Ariane rocket, space officials said.

Minor nitpick : last time I looked, Russia was part of Europe. Their first probe was sent over 44 years ago.

The Ariane-5 rocket carrying the SMART-1 Moon exploration probe and two commercial satellites blasted off at 8.14pm today (0914 Sunday AEST) from the European Space Agency (ESA) launch centre at Kourou in French Guiana on the northeast coast of South America.

Forty-one minutes after launch, the rocket released SMART-1 into space to begin a 15-month journey to reach lunar orbit. The 370kg probe will scan the Moon for up to 30 months.

For more details, see a previous post.

SMART-1 would cover a distance of 100 million kilometres to reach the Moon with only 60 litres of fuel, Giuseppe RACCA, ESA Project Manager said before the launch.

Even better fuel consumption than my Daihatsu Charade, which gets 17 km per litre. And that's the thing about Ion Drives – they don't accelerate very quickly – it will take 100 days to get to lunar Orbit compared with the Apollo's 3 – but their fuel efficiency is truly remarkable. Closer to the Sun than the Asteroid belt, Solar-powered Ion propulsion is the way to go. Further than that, you'll need a nuclear heat source, but still an Ion drive.

And in other news, Nigeria's first Satellite has been launched successfully by the team at Plesetsk. Congrats to all concerned.

Dr Who Fortieth Anniversary Celebrations

23rd November 1963...... a day of portent. Originally scheduled for the day before, but delayed because a bloke called Kennedy had gotten himself shot on the 22nd, was the screening of the first episode of "Dr Who".

To celebrate the upcoming fortieth anniversary, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) is showing the complete series. I've been told this includes some episodes long lost, and supposedly found in a shed in New Zealand, some 700 episodes in all, but can't confirm it. At 4 episodes a week, the series should be broadcast continuously till what, some time in 2006.

A snippet from a recent programme on the ABC, repeating a segment that must be decades old :

MOLLY MELDRUM: What's it like to be in Australia, considering you travel the universe and span 500 years?

TOM BAKER: Oh, good. Good.

MOLLY MELDRUM: Sometimes they say Australia's 500 years behind the rest of the world. I mean, what is your assessment of that?

TOM BAKER: Oh, I would have thought it's longer than that.

I was going to leave it at that. But there are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, and music that should have never, under any circumstances, been performed or recorded. And two such objects appeared on my scopes when I did some research on the subject.

So if you have Broadband, or at least a 56K modem, I present 2 tracks, each of 2 Megabytes. One by the Punk Band "The Go-Gos", entitled "I'm gonna spend Christmas with a Dalek", and the other (inspired by George Formby of Happy Memory), by a group called "Dalek Beach Party", a track entitled "Exterminate! Exterminate!, a contender for the Anthem of Al Qaeda.

Dreams of Space

Courtesy of A Voyage to Arcturus comes a link to the literature and Artwork of the Space Age that never really was. The referring page has a heartbreakingly poignant title : "You Will Go To The Moon", something that it was possible for some of us born in the late 50's to believe, and with good reason. Still, an earlier post of mine has already covered that.

More on the Nigerian Space Programme

Updating my previous post on the subject comes an article from Space Daily :

A joint team from Surrey Satellite Technology, Nigeria and Turkey have completed the preparation, test and integration of three new spacecraft as part of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation and are scheduled for launch onboard a Kosmos rocket at 06:11 GMT on Friday 26 September 2003.

The three spacecraft are: BILSAT for Turkish customer Tubitak-ODTU Bilten, NigeriaSat-1 for Nigerian customer National Space Research & Development Agency and UK-DMC funded by the UK Government.

Each spacecraft has passed through a rigorous testing process covering all flight equipment to ensure that they remain in full flight readiness following their transit from SSTL at the Surrey Space Centre in the UK to the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia.

The joint SSTL, Nigerian and Turkish launch team have concluded tests on all payloads, gathering and analyising data to ensure that each system is fully operational and ready for launch.

Each of the onboard batteries have been trickle-charged to full power and the propulsion tanks filled with butane, having mounted each spacecraft on a special jig to enable the filling process.

Electro-initiators on each spacecraft to separate from the launch vehicle have been prepared and full checks carried out with the Kosmos launch vehicle to ensure that electrical interfaces are compatible to provide sufficient power for proper operation of the separation systems.

Throughout the three-week test and integration process, know-how training has continued for the four Nigerian and Turkish engineers at Plesetsk. Meanwhile, SSTL engineers will continue to train Turkish and Nigerian ground station engineers in Ankara and Abuja respectively as satellite commissioning commences immediately after launch.

Launching even a small satellite requires an awful lot of these steps, and each one absolutely, positively has to be 100% right. But once you've got a team trained up, the Sky's no longer the limit.

The DMC will provide daily imaging at 32m resolution and up to a 600km swath across the world, enabling rapid repeat imaging for regular updates of disaster situations - something not achievable by any other commercial satellite currently in orbit.

The DMC is a novel international partnership, brought together by SSTL and supported by the British National Space Centre (BNSC) MicroSatellite Applications in Collaboration (MOSAIC) programme, which has given financial assistance to small satellite programmes.

An enhanced DMC satellite for China, currently under construction at SSTL at the Surrey Space Centre, will join the DMC when it is launched in early 2005.

So much for the Economist's surmise that this is just some "Prestige Boondoggle by the Jungle Bunnies".

While the Politicians, Philosophers, Press and Pundits are playing paltry power-games, some of us Nerds are trying to do something concrete about a few of the world's problems. Though not all Politicians have recto-cranial inversion. Kudos to the UK Govt for financing this. Someone's got their priorities right.

You know in order to get this constellation up and running, there must have been intimate co–operation and trust between all parties. The Russian launch service providers. The Turks, Nigerians, Brits, and Chinese operators. Literally hundreds of people from very different walks–of–life, religions, ethnicities, cultures, all having to do their own bit 100% right, no less, in order to have a chance of success (Bad Luck can still cause failure, but Good Luck is not sufficient to succeed).

It was exactly the same with FedSat, a quite similar satellite. Everyone in Sweden (who provided the Star Camera), South Africa (who provided the Magnetometer Boom), Canada (who provided the Attitude Control System), NASA (who provided the GPS system), Japan (who provided the launcher), and all the Universities and Companies in Australia who did the rest had to work hand-in-glove, and did so. And let's not forget the Brits who did the basic design, or all the people at the European Space Agency who developed the telemetry and telecommunications protocols we used.

Maybe there's a lesson here somewhere...

To my British, Turkish, Nigerian and Chinese Brothers–in–Arms, Good Luck mates! May you too soon know the joy of being able to look up in the sky and know that you placed that star up there, and that it benefits in some small way all Humankind.