Geek stuff – Page 7 – a sibilant intake of breath

3D printing in metal and at large scale

Producing items additively by combining small pieces instead of starting with unshaped materials and cutting into them offers many intriguing possibilities, most notably the ability to make structures which would be implausible or impossible to make via conventional techniques and the option to customize every item produced to the dimensions and other specifications chosen.

This video from the architecture and furniture design group MX3D gives a sense of what is becoming possible:

Networked citizen science ecology

Promoted by a recent Economist article on biodiversity and Alie Ward’s podcast on foresting ecology, I am trying out the iNaturalist app.

My outdoor pursuits mostly consist of walking at a steady pace for exercise, so plant and wildlife observations aren’t my priority. Nonetheless, it’s neat to be able to take a break anywhere in the city and use the map in the app to see what people have documented in the neighbourhood.

31 years of science from orbit so far

It seems that after a recent computer failure the Hubble Space Telescope is back online in a backup mode.

Link rot and citations in authoritative publications

Researching social movements — where relevant information is often on social media, or the websites of NGOs, universities, or corporations that reorganize them frequently — link rot is an acute problem. Increasingly, the default way to let a reader see the source you’re referencing is to provide an internet hyperlink, and yet there is no assurance that a link on a site which you don’t control will continue to work.

Jonathan Zittrain has an instructive article in The Atlantic about many of the dimensions of the problem. Strikingly, he cites a study by Kendra Albert and Larry Lessig that half the links cited in court opinions since 1996 no longer work, along with 75% of the links in the Harvard Law Review.

Beyond the Wayback Machine, which I already use extensively both to find material which is no longer online and to preserve links to live content that may be useful in the future, Zittrain suggests several other initiatives to help with the problem, including Perma and Robustify.

The origin of ceramic reactor fuel

I’ve noted before the exceptional and enduring influence Hyman Rickover (‘father of the nuclear navy’) has had over the subsequent use of nuclear technology. Richard Rhodes’ energy history provides another example:

At the same time, Rickover made a crucial decision to change the form of the fuel from uranium metal to uranium dioxide, a ceramic. “This was a totally different design concept from the naval reactors,” writes Theodore Rockwell, “and required the development of an entirely new technology on a crash basis.” Rockwell told me that Rickover made the decision, despite the fact that it complicated their work, to reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation: it’s straightforward to turn highly enriched uranium metal into a bomb, while uranium dioxide, which has a melting point of 5,189 ˚F (2,865 ˚C) requires technically difficult reprocessing to convert it back into metal.

Rhodes, Richard. Energy: A Human History. Simon & Schuster, 2018. p. 286

Examples like this illustrate the phenomenon of path dependence, where at a certain junction in time things could easily go one way or the other, but once the choice has been made it forecloses subsequent reversals. Examples abound in public policy. For instance, probably nobody creating a system from scratch would have used the US health care model of health insurance from employers coupled with the right to refuse coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, yet once the system was in place powerful lobbies also existed to keep it in place. The same could be said about many complexities and inefficiencies in nations’ tax codes, which distort economic activity and waste resources with compliance and monitoring but which are now defended by specialists whose role is to manage the system on behalf of others.

Lego Hubble Space Telescope from shuttle and Women of NASA sets

Lego Space Shuttle Discovery and shuttle from Women of NASA set

Lego Space Shuttle Discovery deploying Hubble Space Telescope

Lego Women of NASA

Nancy Grace Roman with the Hubble Space Telescope; Mae Jemison and Sally Ride with the Space Shuttle; and Margaret Hamilton with listings of the software she and her MIT team wrote for the Apollo Program

Waiting for my Lego shuttle

In part because of housing uncertainty — and mindful of George Monbiot’s excellent advice about true freedom arising from low living expenses “If you can live on five thousand pounds a year, you are six times as secure as someone who needs thirty thousand to get by” — I have been avoiding and minimizing taking on new physical possessions.

Nonetheless, with my interest in space and the Space Shuttle program specifically, I could not resist ordering Lego’s new Space Shuttle Discovery and Hubble Space Telescope set on the day of its release.

The Hubble is arguably the greatest scientific achievement of the Space Shuttle program and certainly one of the most powerful instruments humanity has ever created for understanding the vastness and history of our universe. The dimensions of the Hubble also did a lot to dictate the final size and configuration of the shuttle (less for the telescope itself, and more for the secret Earth-observing versions operated by the National Reconnaissance Office). Those design decisions, in turn, did much to shape the shuttle’s operational characteristics and history, including the design choices that contributed to the Challenger and Columbia losses.

The set will be fun to put together, and I should be able to find somewhere to display it even if I end up living in a tiny space.