Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

Not everyone with an XY genotype presents as phenotypically male. Women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) are genetically male but are for the most part indistinguishable from women with the more typical XX chromosome profile. This happens for reasons, which you can read about here (fair warning: some plausibly NSFW pictures ahead):
Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome

xkcd's Randall Munroe writes that "The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics." I'm not sure if I'd rank gender as the most complicated thing I've spent a significant length of time thinking about, but it's certainly in the top five and probably does beat out quantum mechanics. Generally the rules taught in high school biology like "XY means male, XX means female" are true in most cases, but sex and gender aren't clear cut, and there are always exceptions. When the cells' androgen receptors are rendered inoperative by their genetic programming, the body simply doesn't develop according to the script.

What's interesting (to me, someone who hasn't taken a biology class since I augured in on the IB biology exam in high school) is that feminine development proceeds so smoothly once masculine development is roadblocked. Most women with CAIS don't find out about it until their teens, when an absence of menarche is the first noteworthy symptom to surface. Women with CAIS are always infertile, but other than that are nearly indistinguishable from women with a completely different genetic makeup. While the blueprint that governs human development is fixed at conception, clearly there's significant room for interpretation as life rolls on.

Also, there's at least one Reddit AMA with someone with CAIS. I found it interesting, and you might, too.

Parry Gripp

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Parry Gripp is a dude who makes songs that are on the internet and are pretty good. His official site is here, but his song-commentaries on youtube videos is what first caught my eye. They do exactly what their titles advertise, and are uniformly charming. This one, for example, is about a hamster on a piano (eating popcorn):

Since the 10 hour version is uncalled for, here's the original version of "Chimpanzee Riding on a Segway:"

Hamsters and chimpanzees not to your liking? Perhaps you'd prefer this video, which Gripp describes succinctly as "[a] song about a hedgehog eating a carrot with his head stuck in a toilet paper tube:"

Finally this last video became the unofficial anthem of my senior design class during my last year as an undergrad. My team was one of two that shared a workshop in the basement of the aerospace building, and the other guys looped this video like an instant replay of a stock car crash over and over again as we worked late into the nights that spring getting our airplanes ready to fly. Hearing it instantly summons memories of the smell of drying super glue and the sound of sandpaper turning balsa wood to powder:

Those are odd associations for a song about a baby monkey and a pig, but then, I'm an odd person, so this is one datum that lines up square on the theory.

D.B. Cooper

On November 24, 1971 an unidentified suspect hijacked a Boeing 727 en route from Portland to Seattle. The suspect, popularly known as D.B. Cooper, the alias under which he bought his ticket to Seattle, successfully extorted $200,000 and disappeared later that evening. You can read more about him here:
D.B. Cooper

Whoever Cooper was, he knew his airplanes. The 727 is designed with a set of airstairs at the aft end of the pressure cabin, allowing passengers and crew to enter and exit the airplane without a jetway or Bluth-family-surplus stair car. This is good for accessing remote airports and avoiding hop-ons. Cooper figured that what works on the ground might also work in the air at relatively low speed. After threatening to detonate a bomb if his demands for money and parachutes were not met, the flight crew circled Puget Sound for several hours as Seattle police and the FBI assembled Cooper's wish list. The airplane then landed at Sea-Tac Airport, where Cooper released the passengers, collected his ransom, and ordered the pilots to fly low and slow toward Mexico. After dark and over the thick evergreen forests of southern Washington, Cooper deployed the airstairs and left the airplane, never to be heard from again.

No one knows what happened to Cooper after his elegant exit, but the most likely explanation is that he didn't survive his jump. Even at "low" speed for a jetliner, the stairs would've been flailing under category 3 hurricane-force winds, and it's possible Cooper was incapacitated by moving aircraft structure on his way out. Once he departed the 727 Cooper descended in pitch darkness over an unpopulated mountainous area. Unless he pulled the ripcord immediately after exit, it's entirely possible that he impacted the ground without ever knowing it was right in front of him. Even if he successfully egressed and deployed his chute, the landing in dense pine forest without visual aid would've been necessarily rough, and he may have been too injured to move after landing in a thicket. Most tellingly, while every bill issued by the FBI to Cooper was photographed and microfilmed, the only ransom bills that have been recovered were found rotting on a bank of the Columbia River nine years later. It would be odd to go to all the trouble to hijack an airplane and extort the federal government only to disappear without spending any of the ransom.

This is all speculation. The fact is that nobody really knows what happened to Mr. Cooper, or who he was, or if he simply did this as a prank on the airlines and the governments of both Washingtons. Perhaps some day he'll come out of the woodwork to tell the story from his end. I'm not counting on it, but the truth is out there.

Leonid Rogozov

During the sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition, the only surgeon in the winter-over party at Novolazarevskaya Station contracted localized peritonitis. Since he was the only doctor at the station, Leonid Rogozov was forced to self-administer an appendectomy under local anesthesia. You can read more about him here:
Leonid Rogozov

The Antarctic interior is difficult to access during the dark, windy, and Martian-cold winter months today. In 1961 there was clearly no to evacuate Rogozov or bring doctors to him. Like the pioneer and explorer he was, Rogozov therefore took matters into his own hands, removing his own appendix with the support of an engineer and a meteorologist on station. Later he would earn a PhD for research on the treatment of esophageal cancer and serve a long career as a surgeon in Saint Petersburg. In either hemisphere, you were in good hands under Dr. Rogozov's knife.

US-A

Between 1967 and 1988 the Soviet Union operated a constellation of nuclear-powered active-radar reconnaissance spacecraft to monitor oceanwide NATO and merchant vessel traffic. This is the most widespread use to date of nuclear reactors in space, and as could be expected given the Soviet Union's environmental track record, it had consequences, most of which were not good. You can read more about the program here:
US-A

Officially the program was known as Upravlyaemy Sputnik Aktivnyj. The internet claims that this roughly means "Managed Active Satellite," but I suspect some nuance is lost on Google's automation. In the west the program was known by the almost-equally uninspiring name "Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite," or RORSAT. Whatever you call it, to this day the program is responsible for a significant slice of the total orbital debris pie. The reason for this has to do with the satellites' mission and powerplant.

The inverse square law is not kind to interplanetary watchmen. Each doubling of the distance a radar pulse travels quarters its intensity on a one-way trip, so the intensity of the echo of an active radar ping drops with the inverse-fourth power of distance. Double the distance between ship and satellite, and the ship's radar signature dims by a factor of 16. Looking at Earth's oceans from space, the physics shows that it's more reasonable to fly as close to the atmosphere's top as possible rather than jacking up the dish's power. The US-A constellation was nuclear-powered to avoid the drag penalty of hauling large sail-like solar arrays in a low orbit where drag is significant. Each spacecraft (33 in all) was powered by a liquid-metal-cooled reactor producing between two and six kilowatts of electrical power routed into a large radar antenna.

Even the environmentally-challenged Soviet government knew it wouldn't do to let a nuclear reactor fall indiscriminately on some unsuspecting part of the Earth once its mothership's mission was complete. Except for the time that totally happened. Aside from one launch failure and two on-orbit failures, each US-A successfully launched its reactor into a higher disposal orbit at the end of its mission. These reactors will continue to orbit for centuries to come as their fuel gradually decays away from lethality. Unfortunately thousands of pellets of solidified sodium-potassium collant were released in the disposal process, adding significantly to the debris hazards of low Earth orbit, and the derelict reactors continue to shine like signal flares in the gamma-ray spectrum, disturbing the astronomy that studies exotic physics in space.

Citing the many technical, reliability, environmental, and political problems of occasionally dropping unshielded nuclear reactors on NATO countries and often dumping swarms of metal pellets into the paths of unsuspecting satellites, the final Soviet premier shut down the program as the Cold War came to a close. I presume the Russians have since found other ways to keep close tabs on American shipping, but I won't be surprised if nuclear reactors have their day in space once again, this time for the exploration of the cosmos.

4'33"

In 1952 John Cage composed a versatile piece for any instrument or ensemble of instruments entitled "Four minutes and 33 seconds." It would be difficult to call it music, strictly speaking, for reasons that are obvious once you read more about it here:
4'33"

Wikipedia describes John Cage as notable for his non-standard use of musical instruments, but it's the disuse of musical instruments that's most notable in 4'33". Played correctly, there should be no sound from the instruments during the piece's duration. The point that Cage was trying to make is that ordinary life is full of a menagerie of sounds and sensations that we rarely pay much attention to, and that by encouraging the audience to sit and contemplate them silently he aimed to make them more mindful of the aural environment around them.

In the event, much of the audience didn't get it and walked out during its first performance.

The Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse

In July 1981 the tension columns supporting an elevated walkway inside the lobby of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Kansas City failed, allowing the walkway to fall four stories to the lobby floor. This remains the deadliest structural failure in American history other than acts of terrorism, and you can read more about it here:
The Hyatt Regency walkway collapse

It's usually hard to pin down a single reason why engineering disasters occur, but the causal chain is actually pretty clear-cut here. The following illustration included in the Wikipedia article is insightful and horrifying once you realize what it's showing:

The blueprints for the walkway design called for long columns to come down from the ceiling, through the the fourth-floor walkway beams, and terminate in the second-floor walkway beams. When contractors had a difficult time finding and working with columns long enough, the choice was made to split each column into two members each half as long, one reaching between the walkways, and one connecting the upper walkway to the ceiling. As the illustration shows, this doubles the force carried by the nut capping the lower side of the upper walkway-ceiling beam. Even in civil engineering, where large factors of safety are easy to apply to everything, doubling the load carried by a fastener without accounting for it in the design is completely and obviously unacceptable.

With the nuts' carriage loads doubled the fasteners were able to hold the dead load of the structure and occasional walkway traffic. The redesigned structure was completely inadequate when the walkways were flooded with spectators during a dance competition, though, and the nuts snapped off, allowing both walkways to fall to the ground at the least opportune time, when both were full of people. By the time the rescue was complete 14 hours later, 114 were dead and 216 injured because someone having a bad day forgot how free-body diagrams work.

How do events like this happen? That's not a rhetorical question. People train for years academically and professionally before our society allows them to sign off on the kind of life-supporting structural work that failed here, and this work is never (supposed to be) done without many people watching over each other, making sure that everyone's work is done in good faith with the physical world. The good news is that structural failures like this are very rare, and the industry does make some effort to learn from what went wrong. Hopefully this particular failure mode will never happen again.

Aloha Airlines Flight 243

Image source

In April 1988, a partial structural failure occurred on a Boeing 737 over the Pacific Ocean while the airplane was en route from Hilo to Honolulu, Hawaii. You can read more about that here:
Aloha Airlines flight 243

There are a number of things that went wrong here, but the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the organization that investigates such events, identified inadequate maintenance on the part of Aloha Airlines as the root cause of the failure. Physically, the accident was enabled by the rapid turnaround and operating environment of inter-island flights. Airplanes' lives can be measured three ways: By calendar time since exiting the factory, by hours in the air, and by the number of takeoff and landing cycles completed. Each of these aging metrics is relevant in different ways, but the number of cycles is most important for fatigue. Each time an airplane is pressurized and it experiences the shudders of turbulence and landing, microscopic damage accumulates in its structure.

The airplanes that Aloha flew between islands spent only an average amount of time off the ground for machines of their pedigree, but the flights were very short, meaning that the planes racked up flight cycles quickly. Add in the warm, tropical air of Hawaii, and the fatigue and corrosion environment was punishing. That said, the NTSB is right that Aloha's maintenance crews should've caught the cracks growing in the skin of this 737 before they coalesced and allowed an 18-foot-long fuselage section to blow out. It's a minor miracle that the flight crew was able to land the aircraft safely on Maui. Similar structural failures occurred in the DeHavilland Comet early in its career, and both times the affected airplane was completely destroyed. The only fatality aboard Aloha 234 was a flight attendant who wasn't strapped down when the fuselage skin departed the airplane.

All things considered, this is a story with a (mostly) happy ending. The airplane was totaled, one woman died, and 65 passengers were injured, but it could easily have been much worse. If nothing else, the accident is now a textbook case of the importance of designing for fatigue, corrosion resistance, and inspectability. Since engineers tend to be visual thinkers and Aloha 234 left behind stunning imagery of failure, I suspect these lessons learned will stick around for quite a while.

Project Orion

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Rockets are nifty for getting off Earth's surface, but their exhaust is slow compared to the speeds needed to venture into the solar system. This means that chemical rocket engines need a tremendous amount of propellant to go anywhere quickly, and more efficient alternatives with high exhaust velocity like ion engines and Hall effect thrusters create pitifully small thrust compared to the power they need to operate. It would be nice to have a spacecraft engine that creates lots of thrust with hot, fast exhaust, and that wouldn't require a gigantic powerplant to run. Why not power your spaceship with a series of nuclear bombs? A research team at General Atomic, led by virtuoso weapons designer Ted Taylor and all-around badass physicist Freeman Dyson and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA), looked into this idea in the late 1950s and early 1960s. You can read more about that here:
Project Orion

The concept is stupidly brilliant, the kind of thing a 5-year-old would propose and her parents would later be startled to realize could actually work. A nuclear explosive device is a relatively lightweight machine that can generate an obscene amount of power for a short period of time. Detonate one after another after another just behind your ship, and you're bound to be pushed forward rather quickly by the stream of apocalyptic nuclear invective headed your way. It may seem like nothing built by human hands could survive such an environment, but it turns out that when placed near the conditions in a nuclear explosion most metals behave in an odd way. A thin (atoms-thick) surface layer vaporizes within microseconds of the heat pulse's onset, but that layer is almost completely opaque to the incoming ultraviolet and X-rays from the explosion. That opacity protects the rest of the thick, sturdy pusher plate and keeps its temperature low enough to hold together. Add large, very sturdy shock absorbers and springs to connect the pusher plate to the ship while keeping the crushing vibration of the nuke-nuke-nuke pulse tolerable, and you're ready to fly.

The capabilities of an Orion-type ship relative to the spacecraft we've operated so far in our space programs are jaw-dropping. Once the Orion research team realized that none of the physics problems with nuclear pulse propulsion (as it's technically referred to) are intractable, or even terribly difficult to solve, they began seriously talking about launching destroyer-size ships with crews of 100 to Mars by the middle of the 1960s and to the moons of Saturn by the end of the decade. The concept scales up better than it scales down, so the larger ship for outer planet exploration would be fast almost beyond imagination, reaching Saturn in a matter of months. Contrast that with the voyage of Cassini, the only spacecraft ever to orbit the sixth major planet, which took seven years to get there, and will never be able to return since she used all her propellant en route and on arrival. There was even talk of building city-size colony ships to embark on a century-long trek to Alpha Centauri. Forget the pyramids of Giza, the walls of China, and the cathedrals of Europe. This would be the greatest monument to the ingenuity, teamwork, and motivation of humanity in all our history.

There are good reasons not to use nuclear pulse propulsion in real life, as the reader has probably already guessed. Detonated within Earth's atmosphere, pulse units (as the nuclear explosives used for propulsion were euphemistically called) irradiate soil, dust, and air itself, creating significant fallout with every launch. Outside of the atmosphere, the radiation created by nuclear explosions is trapped in Earth's magnetosphere, intensifying the lethality of the Van Allen radiation belts and showering satellites everywhere with circuit-board-frying X-rays and charged particles. Orion ships don't make good neighbors. It was for this reason, along with the shift toward the various R&D programs of Project Apollo, that research into the concept was shelved.

Granted, the plans to send Orion ships to Mars and Saturn while the Vietnam War still raged were irrationally exuberant. But as Carl Sagan points out in the video below, Orion is entirely practical, as bewildering as that sounds. We can do this, now. We don't need a breakthrough in materials science or computer modelling or the production and containment of antimatter to transform a journey to the planets of Alpha Centuari from a dream into an historical fact. We need only the will to do so.

Space Elevator

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To date, most of the ideas proposed for transportation of things from Earth's surface to space have attacked the problem with speed. Accelerate one way or another to about 8 kilometers a second of sideways speed, and it's easy to stick around in space. There's another way to get there, by going up rather than fast. Space elevators are proposed megastructures that allow payloads to be slowly transported upward from a planet's equator to planet-stationary orbit, and you can read more about them here:
Space elevator

On Earth the geography is a little limiting, since geostationary orbits can only be achieved over the equator, and the vagaries of geopolitics have led the set of countries with space programs to have almost no commonality with the set of countries that lie on the equator. That's not a big deal, though, compared to the technical challenges that remain, and some proposals have worked this problem by imagining the tether extending down to a mobile ocean-going barge rather than a fixed ground station. While there are some political issues that remain with the basic concept, such as who's responsible if the cable breaks and crashes into the equatorial countries, or who's in charge of defending it from terrorism and orbital debris, but the technical hurdles that remain make these look like child's play.

First, there's the strength problem. The only material known to chemical engineering that has the strength necessary to keep a tether intact all the way form Earth's surface to 36,000 kilometers up is carbon nanotube, a peculiar carbon allotrope that's difficult to manage in macroscopic quantities. When the best way people can think of to handle a material is by grabbing it with scotch tape, it's probably a long way from megameter-long ribbons. Interestingly, although a tether from the L1 Lagrange point to the surface of the Moon would be much longer than one from Earth's surface to GEO, because the Moon's gravitational pull is so much less than Earth's, presently workable materials like Kevlar could be used to make a lunar space elevator. Too bad nobody lives on the Moon.

There are also major controls and other practical issues that are often overlooked by elevator enthusiasts. How do you keep a 36,000+ kilometer-long tether going the right direction with no friction to damp things out during the deployment phase? How do you moderate the Corriolis acceleration that elevator cars induce on the tether? How do you power the cars? How heavy does the radiation shielding on the cars need to be, given their slow passage through the Van Allen belts? The idea is physically plausible, but these concerns need to be addressed. My engineer's intuition is that overcoming the design challenges in the way of low cost reusable rocket-propelled vehicles is a much less difficult task than overcoming the basic material, controls, power, and political problems of the space elevator.

That said, the concept has many fans, among them Randall Munroe of xkcd fame. Perhaps one day his camp will be vindicated. We'll see, but I know where my bet is.

Zladko Vladcik

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Santo Cilauro is most famous for the music videos his semi-satirical alter ego Zladko "ZLAD!" Vladcik produces. This one may be relevant given last week's world events:

If, like a reasonable person, you don't find that terribly edifying, ZLAD! takes on the sci-fi futurepunk culture in this wonderful video:

None of this is particularly germane to gaining insight into the great bohemian triangle of truth, beauty, and love, but sometimes I just like laughing at silly things.

The MV Cougar Ace

There are many large seaworthy vessels that ply the oceans to connect the threads of commerce and economic interaction across the world. Some carry bulk containers, some oil, some high-value products like cars. The MV Cougar Ace fits into that last category, and as impressive as her engineering is, she's mostly famous for a bizarre and photogenic mishap that occurred on a cruise during the summer of 2006. You can read more about the vessel and her misadventures here:
MV Cougar Ace

En route from Hofu, Japan to Vancouver, British Columbia, the Cougar Ace suffered a  loss of stability accident while transferring ballast between trim tanks. Details on the mechanics and sequence of what happened are scarce, but the result was an uncorrectable 60-degree list to port stranding the vessel south of the Aleutian Islands. This is a particularly bad place to fall on your side, and the crew was quickly recovered by the US Coast Guard and salvage efforts begun. While the ship was eventually towed to Portland for repairs and a return to service, the cargo of 4,703 Mazdas intended for the North American market were all ultimately scrapped due to a combination of damage during the list and fear of a bad public reaction to their sale.

While this was a bad event for international shipping in general and Mazda in particular, it was a key moment in the history of internet memes. The dramatic images of the Cougar Ace languishing on her side earned the tag "failboat," which will forever be symbolic of when things just don't work out the way they should.

Existentialism

One of the most influential schools of philosophy in recent times has been driven by the idea that philosophy must start not with logical axioms or the fruits of observation, but with simple contemplation of the strangeness inherent in being human. A diverse range of reactions to this idea have evolved over the years, but they all fit under the umbrella known as existentialism. You can read more about that here:
Existentialism

The range of value systems covered by the label "existentialist" is truly remarkable. Kierkegaard is often cited as one of the first influential existentialists, but the ideas here are a lot older than the 19th Century. Maybe I was in high school and not thinking very clearly, but I found the ideas in Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus eerily similar to those written millennia earlier in the book of Ecclesiastes. The movement picked up steam and became aligned more with atheism than Christianity in the 20th Century, with the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir particularly influential. The French connection to existentialism is so strong that Jean Gerard listed it as one of the three most important French contributions to society in Talledega Nights (along with crepes and the menage a trois). I probably would've put pasteurization in there somewhere, but reasonable people can disagree about such things.

I'm not fooling anyone am I? The real reason I'm writing this is as an excuse to post the following video:

Mushroom Cloud

When large amounts of energy are released quickly close to Earth's surface, a dynamic pyrocumulus phenomenon known as a mushroom cloud results. Unsurprisingly, mushroom clouds are usually (but not always) shaped like mushrooms, and you can read more about them here:
Mushroom clouds

In the public consciousness mushroom clouds are usually associated with nuclear explosions, but in reality any old explosion will do so long as enough energy is released close enough to the ground. Large conventional explosions, volcanic eruptions, and asteroid impacts also produce mushroom clouds under the right conditions. The basic idea is that big explosions energize large volumes of air, causing the space around the energy pulse to expand, become fluffier than the air around it, and rise to an altitude where the water vapor contained in the mushroom stem condenses into cloud. At some point, the cloud expands further due to the reduced pressure at altitude, and eventually it drifts and disperses with the prevailing winds. There's a lot more going on in a real mushroom cloud than just that, though. The reader is encouraged to see what Wikipedia has to say.

Not all nuclear and exotic explosions create mushroom clouds. Nukes detonated underwater, underground, or above the atmosphere disperse their energy differently, as do asteroids that break up high in the atmosphere. The energy released by the Chelyabinsk meteor earlier this year was comparable to that of an ICBM-sized thermonuclear weapon, but it was delivered over a long enough time high enough in the atmosphere that it created a plasma train rather than a mushroom cloud. Likewise, shield volcanoes that deliver their heat slowly to the surface emit plumes of gas rather than mushroom clouds. Interestingly, nuclear mushroom clouds do have one distinctive feature that chemical, volcanic, and impact clouds lack. The initial fireball of a nuclear explosion is so hot it transforms some of the nitrogen and water vapor around it into nitrogen dioxide and nitric acid, tinging a nuclear cloud an industrial-gunk reddish-brown color. Volcanoes are just too cool to do this.

Sometimes I have a hard time selecting the images to go with these posts. I like that the one above is distinctive in its absence of a stem and jarring in the juxtaposition of the sublime beauty of a horrifically-exotic physics event with the gentle, feminine beauty of the dancer. Mushroom clouds are a sign that something wicked, and possibly truly evil, this way comes, but their forms are intricate and charmingly pretty. This picture early in the Wikipedia article must be one of the best displays of that beauty ever captured:

Conway's Game of Life

In 1970, a Cambridge mathematician named John Horton Conway penned a simple set of rules for changes in population location that can be easily represented graphically. This makes Conway's game of life, also known as the Game of Life or simply the Game, sound arcane and boring when it's actually accessible and exciting. You can read more about it here:
Conway's Game of Life

To really get a feel for the game, it's best to play around with it for a while. When the game of life was conceived iteration was a time-consuming pain, but the proliferation of computing power in modern times means anyone with a decent internet connection can explore Conway's work to hir heart's content. One decent simulator is here.

As an aside, I like that Wikipedia describes Dr. Conway as an expert on things like knot theory and combinatorial game theory. Those statements aren't very meaningful to me since I have only a vague idea of exactly what knot theory entails and not the slightest idea of what happens in the combinatorial branch of game theory, but it sounds exciting to me that things with names like these exist. At least knot theory is covered by topology, the results of which are beautiful even if the nuts and bolts behind them are mind-numbing to behold.

The basic idea is this. The game board is a grid of arbitrary size composed of square cells. At the beginning of the game, the player selects an arbitrary shape of cells as "live," the rest being "dead." Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies of loneliness, any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies from overcrowding, and live cells with two or three live neighbors live on. Dead cells with three live neighbors are made fertile by their companions, and are revived in the next iteration. It's a simple set of rules, but it leads to a wild menagerie of forms, patterns, and narratives.

Random arrangements typically evolve into a static pattern of stills and high-frequency oscillators, but some careful planning can create beings that reproduce indefinitely or march across the board endlessly. That such complexity could be found in a simple, easily-understood and totally-defining set of rules is the kind of thing that excites mathematicians and other easily-amused people. If nothings else, it's fun to watch the shapes rising and rambling like surf on a beach while the rules and iterations tick along.

Controlled Flight Into Terrain

While some technical nomenclature obfuscates what's really going on, controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) is a term that means exactly what it sounds like. When an airworthy, uncompormised aircraft is flown unknowingly into the ground or water, a CFIT accident results. You can read more about that here:
Controlled Flight Into Terrain

CFIT doesn't happen as often as it used to, and it's almost unheard of in commercial airline service in the developed world. Lack of visibility is always a contributing factor, since windows do a good job at letting situational awareness in so long as there's light and clarity in the air. That said, CFIT accidents can and have happened everywhere from rural nights in Florida to tropical fog in Colombia to austral whiteouts in Antarctica. Significant research has been invested for decades on keeping airplanes from wandering into the ground without their pilots' knowledge, and it looks like it's paying off. The last time a revenue service flight went down over US soil because the pilots lost track of the ground's location happened in Guam 16 years ago.

Since light, general aviation aircraft have fewer tricks than airliners have to light the way through flight at night, in the rain, and in fog, CFIT accidents are much more common among the Cessnas and Pipers than they are among Boeings and Airbuses. With some good fortune and a better regulatory and engineering environment, the trend for big planes today will hopefully become that for small planes tomorrow.

Because really, this sort of thing just shouldn't happen.

Vi Hart

Vi Hart is a self-described recreational mathemusician and a serial creator of wonderful things. She has a blog here, but it was her videos that won my heart. Since the American style of rendering dates matches March 14 with the first three digits of pi, let's start with a few videos about pi:

Lest you think Ms. Hart has no love at all for pi, this should rehabilitate your view:

There's much more than circles to math, of course, although it's hard to escape the topological significance of curvy things no matter how many dimensions your candy has. If that last sentence made no sense, this video might help. Or not:

That last video was tagged in my mind as "a place where something really cool happens," but I'd forgotten the result of the Mobius strip trisection until just now. Good golly, topology is a most beautiful kind of insanity. Some of Hart's videos also touch on science, like this one about the perception of sound:

Lastly there's this one that has no particular mathematical significance but is seriously one of the greatest things I've ever seen on youtube:

There seems to be a pattern of interesting math majors coming into my life and significantly changing the way I perceive reality. Vi Hart has actually done this the least of the three that come most readily to mind, but I could still watch her videos all day.

Papal Tiara

Until the election of Pope John Paul I to the western Catholic papacy, for 800 years the election of a new pope was followed by a coronation ceremony in which a three-tier crown (shown in the coat of arms of the Holy See above) was placed on his head. You can read more about the bizarre device here:
Papal tiara

I get the idea of pomp and circumstance and the desire to imbue rare, significant occasions with fanciness, but I can't be the only one to find the triple-crown papal tiara hideous. At some point the bells and whistles of tradition can repel more than attract the presence of mind to the event at hand, and I think it was a good move on Jon Paul I's part to simplify the post-election ceremony. Still, the "tiara" is an interesting oddity in the mountain of interesting oddities present in the history of the Catholic Church.

Admiral Grace Hopper

The archetype of skinny, buzz-cut, chain smoking male engineers with skinny black ties working with computers, rockets, bombs, and other assorted Cold War toys isn't always how the story of technology in the mid-20th Century was born. One of the most influential people in the development of modern electronic computers was a female naval mathematician named Grace Hopper. There's a wonderful SMBC comic about her, and you can read more about her here:
Grace Hopper

Outside of the arcane world of computer science (and probably even within it), Admiral Hopper's name is virtually unknown, but it's hard to overstate how important her work was in laying the foundation for the computers nearly everyone in the developed world interacts with every day. Before Hopper computers were treated as dumb machines handy only for mindlessly plowing through mountains of basic arithmetic operations. After her contributions to early computer languages and her work building the first compiler, it soon became apparent how much more was possible. Naturally, the Navy sought to apply this work to ballistics calculations and computational modelling of the hellish worlds of nuclear explosions and missile warhead reentry, but the peaceful world got a lot of mileage out of the computer revolution as well.

How many more talented women like Hopper were (and still are) deterred from contributing to the technical world by the backward attitudes about gender that our society still feels a hangover from? It's a tragic thing, but there's much to be thankful for from those who stuck it out.

Project MKUltra

In the 1950s and '60s, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted human experiments on the application of drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and isolation toward mind control and information extraction. You can read more about the program here:
Project MKUltra

Much of the research centered around using psychedelic drugs to influence thought in subjects, mainly using the gold standard of psychedelics, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). To really understand why the CIA was so interested in this line of research, it's important to consider the context of MKUltra.

The enthusiasm bubble that quickly built after the discovery of LSD in 1943 reached a crescendo at the start of the 1960s. Like penicillin, LSD was uncovered by accident, and like penicillin it seemed to be a wonder drug during its initial clinical trials. Study after peer-reviewed study showed it to be effective at treating addiction, alcoholism, obsessive-compulsive personality, and post-traumatic stress disorder. LSD was the first truly effective antidepressant to enter the arsenal of psychiatrists, and more recent research has shown it to be capable of easing cluster headaches and end-of-life anxiety in terminally ill patients. Naturally, the CIA wanted to find out if this penicillin for the soul could be weaponized.

The concept of weaponized psychedelic hallucinogens seems terrifying enough to me, but in addition to the basic uncouthness of the idea the CIA insisted on testing the effects of altered-consciousness interrogation on uninformed, unconsenting participants. There's substantial evidence that Ted Kaczynski was a subject in one of the experiments, and even if this had no influence on his later stint as the Unabomber, surely there was much unnecessary suffering rendered on the American public by the trials. Like the enhanced interrogation program of the Bush years, this is hopefully a chapter of history that the American intelligence community would rather not repeat.

Also it turns out that LSD doesn't work for mind control. Thanks CIA, lesson learned.

Project HARP

Transportation from the ground to low Earth orbit is expensive. Why not make it cheaper by firing things from Earth into space Jules Verne-style with a giant cannon? This was the idea behind a joint US-Canadian program called Project HARP, which you can read more about here:
Project HARP

HARP in this case is a rather uninspired acronym for "High Altitude Research Project," which gives the program the unfortunately redundant name "Project High Altitude Research Project." Sloppy English aside, the engineering was sound, and resulted in the installation of a 40-meter-long modified naval gun in Barbados capable of accelerating a 180 kilogram payload from zero to 3.6 kilometers per second between breech and barrel. The premise was to test ballistic missile reentry vehicles by sending them high above the atmosphere and back to the ground without requiring rockets. HARP wound up setting a record for the highest altitude ever reached by gunshot, about 112 miles above Earth's surface, and was quickly cancelled thereafter.

Gerald Bull, the chief engineer on the Canadian side, was a big believer in guns' ability to decrease launch costs. While HARP's muzzle velocity was less than half the speed needed to reach LEO, he had plans to build light-gas guns using explosively-compressed hydrogen or helium to achieve even higher launch speeds. Unfortunately the only nation interested in funding such a device was Iraq, and Bull was murdered under ambiguous circumstances (that totally have nothing to do with the Mossad, according to the Mossad) after offering to programmatic help to Saddam Hussein's regime.

Reaching such high speed so quickly so low in the atmosphere puts tremendous acceleration, aerodynamic, and thermal loads on the vehicle, and much of the launch energy is wasted by creating an arc of superheated air along the spacecraft's trajectory low in the atmosphere  There's zero potential for human spaceflight here, and I think the extra hassles placed on the payload by the insane launch loads render it infeasible for robotic systems as well. Still, the cost of orbital transport is unacceptably high today, and if there's potential here I'm all for it being pursued.

San Juan Island

San Juan Island is the second-largest and most populous island in the archipelago between the Puget Sound coast of Washington and Vancouver Island in British Columbia. You can read more about it here:
San Juan Island

I knew little of the Pacific Northwest and nothing about the San Juan Islands before I arrived in Seattle for my internship at Blue Origin a few years ago. For an area that doesn't get much press in the rest of the country, the waterways of Puget Sound and the Salish Sea are shockingly beautiful. In the summer, when days are long, blue, and gently warm, it's a place at once accessibly close to Seattle and alluringly exotic. Since there are no bridges to the archipelago, a seaplane or ferry are the only options for reaching Friday Harbor and the lavender fields of San Juan, and either trip alone is worth the cost of admission. If you want to see the natural wonder that America has to offer, the northwest corner of the country will not disappoint.

Alpha Centauri Bb

As of this writing, the smallest known extrasolar planet ever discovered is also the closest known planet to Earth outside of our solar system neighbors. It was discovered by a European team of astronomers working at the Very Large Telescope in the Chilean high desert, and you can read more about it here:
Alpha Centauri Bb

So far no human eye or imaging chip has yet seen Alpha Centauri Bb, so little is known about the place. We know what astronomers have inferred from a masterful analysis of mountains of radial velocity data acquired from the telescopes at the VLT over a period of several Earth years and hundreds of Bb years. The motion of the pair of the Alpha Centauri stars around each other, the starspot cycle of Alpha Cen B, and the atmospheric turbulence high over the Andes mountains all dwarf the signal of B's little companion, but the computer algorithms were able to clever that signal out into the open. UC - Santa Cruz astrophysicist Greg Laughlin wrote an excellent overview of this modern scientific masterpiece here.

And what of the planet itself? It's small, only a little bit more massive than Earth, and since detectability is directly proportional to planet mass, it's an astounding feat to uncover such a little world so far away. Bb is a wild place, as well, completing a revolution around its parent star in a little over three days, baking its day side to a temperature where iron glows with incandescence and rock melts and runs like taffy. Clearly this is an interesting place to investigate, but not a good place for a summer home. With luck, there may be such a place a little ways further out from Alpha Centaur B, and if it's there, we're sure to find it with a few more years of data. It may be a long time, but either our eyes or those of our electronic surrogates will get there one day.

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

The word "torture" is full of negative connotations, so when the administration of Bush the Younger approved the torture of detained terrorist suspects beginning in 2002, the euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" was adopted instead. You can read more about that here:
Enhanced interrogation techniques

There was some debate during the last decade as to whether elements of the enhanced interrogation program  constituted torture. Christopher Hitchens, a virtuoso essayist and professional angry person for Vanity Fair at the end of his life, grew tired of the theoretical arguments, and decided to see for himself how much suffering waterboarding can really cause. The video of that experiment is here:

I don't intend for this blog to have a political agenda, but I also don't think that this issue merits political baggage. Civilized countries where people aspire, like Google, to not be evil don't subject people to hounding, freezing, sleep deprivation, humiliation, psychological terror, and drowning. That seems simple enough. America should be that civilized, but our leaders voluntarily chose the path to evil themselves when evil was thrust upon us on 9/11. Avoiding the clearly-labelled path to Hell should've been reason enough to shoot down these techniques when they were suggested, and even if that first layer of conscience was penetrated, the impracticality of the operation should've been enough as well. In the end we chose to become more like the horror we saw from Al-Qaeda because we couldn't think of anything better to do.

Van Cliburn

In 1958 the Soviet Union sponsored the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, an event intended to show Soviet superiority in matters cultural. Since the previous year the Soviets claimed a major technological victory in launching Sputnik 1 before any western satellites had yet flown, the clear propaganda goal was to showcase the triumph of the east over the west. The competition was won by a man from Fort Worth, and you can read more about him here:
Van Cliburn

Clearly things didn't turn out the way the cultural propagandists planned, and the event wound up being one of the more amusing tales from the deadly serious epoch of the Cold War. Beyond his achievement at the Tchaikovsky competition, Cliburn also played for every president from Eisenhower to Obama, and led a musical career full of accomplishments. A little of the richness of Texas was lost with him last week, but the Lone Star state is full of optimism, and there are surely many more as gifted in their own ways as Cliburn practicing there right now.

Operation Credible Sport

Image credit

After the fiasco of Operation Eagle Claw, the United States made one more attempt to extract the workers held hostage at the American embassy in Tehran in 1980. The program was called either "Credible Sport" or "Honey Badger," depending on who you talk to, and you can read more about it here:
Operation Credible Sport

Eagle Claw failed mostly because of the complexity of the operation. It required a squadron of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to rendezvous at a remote location in a hostile country under harsh weather conditions and set up a forward operating base, then go recover civilians under intense guard in the capital of Iran. Credible Sport aimed to simplify. One airplane, one landing, one extraction, one takeoff. It was simple, but the mission was so demanding it required a bit of creativity in airplane design.

The plan was to modify a Lockheed C-130 Hercules, an airplane with plenty of cargo capacity and admirable short takeoff and landing (STOL) capability, and strap rockets to the front, back, and bottom of the airplane Wile E. Coyote style. After taking off from the US mainland and refueling on the way five times, a C-130 would cruise low on a moonless night toward Tehran, then land at a soccer stadium across the street from the embassy. To slow the airplane down in time to land at such a short field, braking rockets would decelerate it while lifting rockets would prevent it from crashing to the ground during the inevitable aerodynamic stall that would occur while slamming on the brakes. A team of Delta Force commandos would then rush out, storm the embassy, retrieve the hostages, fight their way back to the the C-130, then rocket themselves off the ground and toward a friendly aircraft carrier waiting in the Persian Gulf. It was expected that the carrier's sickbay would then begin treating about 50 wounded troops and ex-hostages, probably the most reasonable assumption in the whole plan.

In the end the plan was doomed by its schedule. There wasn't enough time for adequate testing of all the subsystems shoehorned into the aircraft, and during one of the final tests before it was to go into action the retrorockets fired early and the C-130 slammed into the ground, hard, breaking the back of its structure. Somehow nobody got killed, which might be the most remarkable part of the story. It's probably just as well. The hostages would soon be freed after a negotiated settlement with no loss of life, and Credible Sport surely would've been a bloody operation in practice. Good or bad, the video of the the flight testing is a spectacle to behold:

The Abilene Paradox

Sometimes groups of people aren't as good at making decisions as individuals. One of the ways group decision-making can fail happens when people make bad assumptions about each others' preferences and don't stand up for their own. Management theorist Jerry B. Harvey calls this the Abilene paradox, and you can read more about it here:
The Abilene paradox

The basic idea is that sometimes individuals in a group don't make their true preferences clear, and since people tend to want to establish and agree with consensus, this can lead to a large group of people collectively deciding to do something that none of them want to do. In the example case, this action is a trip to Abilene, hence the paradox's name. As for me, my only experience in Abilene was that time I saw the movie Twilight, a mistake and example of the Abilene paradox I don't intend to make again.

Polyus

Image credit

In 1987, the Soviet Union launched a manned space laser battle station called Polyus toward low Earth orbit. You can read more about that here:
Polyus

I say "toward" LEO rather than into LEO because Polyus didn't wind up making it that far. The spacecraft weighed about 80 metric tons fueled and ready for launch, and the only rocket capable of delivering such a large spacecraft into orbit was the brand-new Energiya system.

Incidentally, "Energiya" means "Energy" and "Polyus" means "Staff" (the kind you'd use to fight off ninjas) in Russian, so the combined Energiya-Polyus launch stack literally means "Energy Staff." Russians really have the best names for everything.

Energiya was an awkward beast primarily designed to launch Buran, the Soviet knockoff of the American space shuttle orbiter. While she was flexible enough to also launch heavy outsize payloads, there was no payload fairing or attachment system at the top of the launch vehicle. Instead, the payload had to be bolted onto Energiya's side and would have to provide its own protection from the aerothermodynamic loads of ascent.

As it turned out, the easiest way to accommodate Polyus was to mount it upside-down, engines facing forward, on its launch vehicle's side. As Randall Munroe notes, if you want to go to space, the engines need to face backward, so Polyus was programmed to rotate 180 degrees after separating from the launch stack, then fire its engines briefly to enter its final orbit. In a heartbreaking turn of events, Energiya worked just fine on her maiden launch, but a software glitch caused Polyus to yaw through a full circle rather than the planned half circle after separation. The spacecraft slowed, and plunged into the south Pacific near New Zealand about half an hour later.

It's probably for the best that things turned out this way. Polyus was armed with a megawatt-class carbon dioxide laser capable of rendering enemy (which meant American in those days) satellites useless across thousands of miles of empty space. The functional cargo block attached to the aft end housed propulsion, a defensive cannon, and quarters for a maintenance crew, though in a good move for a peaceful world, the nuclear space mines were deleted form the final launch configuration. It seems the Soviets just couldn't give up on the spectacle of a manned military space program, and stuck it with mega-engineering projects in space right to the end of the Cold War.

One last thought: As insane as this whole idea was, the sight of an 80-tonne space laser lurching off the pad in blizzard conditions is a grotesquely beautiful thing:

The Habanera Chain

The story of this post starts with me trying to find an excuse to post the following video:

This is the most delightful apparition of Bizet's "Habanera" I've yet seen, and while the song was stuck in my head during a meeting today my mind wandered its appearance in Up:

As an aside, my favorite remix of Up is the following video by Pogo, a brilliant trance musician who makes such things:

Carmen is old enough that I suspect there was no copyright fuss over Pixar's use of "Habanera" in the film, but other parts of Up's soundtrack are more problematic. A leitmotif that runs through the movie is a fairly transparent ripoff of this section of the soundtrack of Lucia y el sexo:

As Jon Hamm's staring face suggests in that last video, I first heard "Me Voy a Morir de Amor" during the episode of Mad Men where Betty Draper dreams/hallucinates vividly after a nurse sedates her for childbirth. That got me thinking- were there mainstream medical treatments during the 1960s that would cause the kind of visions Betty sees? Aside from a few niche uses, dissociative anesthetics never really caught on, and Mad Men's portrayal of the subjective effects of LSD was flippant enough that I'd hardly consider the show any kind of authority on such matters. Oh well, here's Wikipeida's article on dissociatives because if it's for anything this blog is a place for info-dumping.

I seem to collect facts and associations between them the way some people collect stamps or bottle caps. This is probably not entirely healthy, but it's good when I find myself at pub trivia competitions. As it turns out, people like people who can help them acquire free beer.

Happy Friday, everyone!