Floating A Trial Balloon For The Worst Experiment In The History Of Science

According to the New York Times, two Harvard professors are working on a proposal for a small-scale experiment in geoengineering.  The professors, James G. Anderson, who works in atmospheric chemistry, and David W. Keith, whose field is applied physics, are proposing to send a small balloon aloft to release microscopic amounts of sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to see how they react with naturally-occurring ozone and water vapor.  The researchers stress that the experiment will be small-scale and its effects highly-localized, or in Dr. Anderson's words: “this is an experiment that is completely nonintrusive.”

The good professors are laying on the qualifiers because the field of geoengineering aims to do nothing less than to change the climate of the entire Earth in an attempt to stave off the negative effects of global warming.  As we discussed earlier, geoengineering is basically an attempt to hack the climate.  Based on observations that volcanic eruptions can have a temporary cooling affect on global temperatures as volcanic dust shot high into the atmosphere reflects some of the sunlight falling on Earth back into space, geoengineerers proposed shooting massive amounts of sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect a portion of the sunlight on a global scale. The idea is that if the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth's surface is reduced, the resulting drop in temperature will offset the global rise in temperature due to the growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which prevent heat from naturally radiating off into space.

Sounds simple, even logical, right? Sure, except for the fact that it is the worst idea in the history of mankind.  Geoengineering has a few flaws. For one, there's the matter of this slight potential side effect: a permanent whitening of the skies.  Those particles meant to reflect some of the sunlight, also will likely diffuse it, meaning the sky will take on a white, washed-out appearance; in other words, so long blue skies... An even bigger problem is that once you start geoenginnering in a large scale, you can never, ever stop.

The reason is simple: geoengineering doesn't reduce the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere, it just tries to offset this gain with a corresponding reduction in temperature on the other side.  Those sulfate particles will eventually settle out of the atmosphere, meaning more will continuously have to be pumped in to take their place.  Stop pumping and the cooling side of the geoengineering equation goes away, leaving you with a runaway greenhouse effect that will cause global temperatures to spike upward.

Unfortunately, this crackpot idea has attracted the backing of some serious (and seriously rich) people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson.   But let's remember we've gotten ourselves in this greenhouse gas mess by pumping a lot of things into the atmosphere that shouldn't be there, pumping more things in at this point seems like a pretty bad idea. 

   

A Biocoal Steamer And The Problems Of Green Hype

This odd little story caught my eye: apparently a team from the University of Minnesota, along with a group called Sustainable Rail International (under the banner “the Coalition for Sustainable Rail”) are planning to rehabilitate a 1930's-vintage steam railroad locomotive as a showcase for biocoal technologies.

In case you've never heard of it, biocoal is a supposedly “green” and sustainable fuel source made from cellular plant that has been processed and compressed into a stable, solid fuel – hence the name “biocoal”, since the resulting fuel looks and acts like your traditional mined carbon coal.  Advocates claim that biocoal is green since the carbon it contains was fixed from the atmosphere when the source plants were growing and that it does not contain the heavy metals, like mercury, found in traditional coal.  Getting more biocoal simply involves harvesting more plants.

So far, so good with the story.  The choice of a test-bed – a 1930's vintage 4-6-4 “Hudson”-type locomotive, which has spent the past few years languishing at a museum in Topeka, Kansas is an interesting one, and a choice sure to net the Coalition for Sustainable Rail some added publicity if/when the project ever does hit the rails.  But it is at this point that the claims being made by the project's backers start to get a little ridiculous.

Engine 3463 during its working days.

The steam engine project is being called Project 130 by the Coalition for Sustainable Rail, since they plan for the resurrected Hudson to race down the rails at 130 mph.  This idea is utterly ridiculous.  The recognized speed world record for a steam locomotive is 126 mph, and that was set by a highly-streamlined loco, not the boxy Hudson selected for the project.  The Coalition for Sustainable Rail also claims that the steamer will cost less to fuel and maintain than a modern diesel freight engine; this claim is also dubious.  It is impossible right now to compare the economics of diesel fuel to biocoal, since the latter is not being produced in anywhere near the levels of diesel; but higher maintenance costs were one of the key factors that doomed steam engines, they are simply more labor-intensive than diesel engines.

And that gets to the “green hype” issue.  The Coalition for Sustainable Rail couldn't leave well enough alone by merely making the already impressive claim that the steam engine test would show biocoal's viability as a sustainable, less-environmentally impacting fuel, but one that could be substituted for traditional coal without modification to existing equipment; instead they have to dress their claim up will all sorts of impossible-to-execute frills, like claiming this museum refugee will fly down the rails like a formula-1 race car.  This is a trap that green advocates seem to fall into all too often – it is not enough to offer a substitute to existing energy technologies, they have to insist their new green tech will be better, not just incrementally better, but revolutionary better, and in the process they make promises they can't keep, which ultimately makes even successful demonstrations of their technology look like failures.

Internet-in-a-Box

While the State Department is criticized by some as yet another bloated Washington bureaucracy, they also sometimes come up with some pretty cool ideas. Case in point, the story that broke this weekend about the development of something that's being called “the Internet-in-a-Box”.

As we've seen from this year's “Arab Spring” revolts across the Middle East/North Africa region, the Internet has become the bane of despotic leaders around the world, after all, how can you have a good massacre of your citizens when some random guy with a cellphone and a YouTube account can go spreading word (and more importantly images) of your brutality to the world? The counter-move by today’s despot is simply to pull the plug on the Internet, a tactic we've seen used in Egypt, Libya and even on occasion in restive regions of China (like Tibet and Xinjiang). That's where the Internet-in-a-Box comes in. It is a trunk-sized device that can create a virtual network using cellphone handsets that can then connect to the World Wide Web independently of a given nation’s telecommunications system, thus bypassing any attempts at censorship or communications blackouts imposed by the local despot.

The Internet-in-a-Box will ensure that the world can bear witness to whatever atrocities are being committed against anti-regime protestors and will allow the lines of communications to stay open with whatever opposition forces have the Box. It's a pretty cool piece of tech, and yet another headache for the world's autocrats.

Weird Atmospheric Science

You might remember this story from last year about “Geoengineering”, an attempt, essentially, to hack the global climate. Well there's now another mad scientist-style idea floating around out there to fight global warming, and while this one won't have the Matrix-style affect on the skies that Geoengineering would, there's also a good chance that this plan could make global warming worse, instead of better.

The plan, as presented to the European Geosciences Union and reported by the BBC is simple enough in theory: Specially designed ships will sail to precise parts of the world's oceans where stratocumulus clouds are in short supply, the ships will then pump tiny droplets of seawater into the atmosphere to promote cloud growth to reflect more sunlight back into space, thus cooling the Earth. Simple enough, right? Well, in theory, yes, but it turns out that clouds are complex things and that the wrong size droplets could actually reduce cloud cover, rather than increase it. And fewer clouds would mean more sunlight would reach the Earth's surface, warming the globe rather than cooling it. Plus other scientists say that the plan drastically underestimates the amount of seawater that would need to be pumped into the atmosphere to achieve the desired effect in the first place.

Of course another way to fight global warming would be to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions pumped into the atmosphere in the first place. Just sayin'....

Chinese Stealth, American Research

China caused a stir, and something of a minor diplomatic incident, earlier this month when they undertook the first flight of their stealth fighter jet, the J-20, during a visit by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. I wonder if the Chinese were kind enough to thank Gates for all the help America unwittingly gave China in building the jet?

According to a new report on the BBC, the J-20 owes much of its stealthy design to parts from an American F-117 Nighthawk stealth jet shot down during the NATO-led, and US-backed bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999. The F-117 was the first operational stealth aircraft employed by any military in the world; a stealth aircraft uses a combination of shape and radio wave-absorbing materials to make the airplane nearly invisible to radar. Yet somehow the Serbians still managed to shoot one down during the conflict, military sources from the Balkan region say that Chinese intelligence agents reached the crash site and retrieved parts of the aircraft, which were believed to have given Chinese engineers a great advantage in building the J-20 they recently unveiled. The story does make some sense since in 1999 there were deep ties between Serbia and China, at the time the US angrily accused China of sharing military intelligence with Serbia. (It's worth noting that during the bombing campaign against Serbia, the Chinese embassy was “accidentally” struck by an errant bomb.) It is also strange, based on the BBC report, that the United States didn't make an effort to secure the wreckage of the F-117, or at least destroy it. The crash site was allegedly visited by Chinese, American and Russian officials and even today pieces of the F-117 are displayed in a museum in Belgrade, Serbia.

Of course China doesn't seem to have taken the most valuable lesson from the F-117 wreckage; namely that stealth technology isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Even though building a stealth jet today is the holy grail of the world's most advanced air forces, the planes do have one glaring weakness – while it is possible to make the aircraft itself nearly invisible to radar, it's not possible to disguise the turbulence it leaves as it moves though the air. Just like a boat leaves a wake in the water as it moves, so to does an airplane. And while American officials dismissed the Serbian downing of the F-117 in 1999 as a “lucky shot”, in fact the Serbs had figured out a clever way to use Doppler radar (the same kind your local weatherman uses) to track the wake of the F-117. All they had to do then was shoot at the point where the wake was starting to hit the airplane.

Getting back to the Chinese J-20, in addition to thanking the US, China probably also owes Russia a debt of gratitude as well. A few weeks ago, the Washington Post published this article about how despite their best efforts, the Chinese defense industry has had little luck in creating durable jet engines for their air force and were looking into long-term deals with Russia for a supply of aircraft engines. Just a little something to keep in mind next time you read an article about the growing might of the Chinese military.

When Dima Met Arnie

Talk about a political odd couple... Russian President Dmitry Medvedev apparently has a new friend in politics, outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and just to make the story a little stranger, the two have apparently arranged a ski date, via Twitter. Nice to see 2011 is off to a boring start.

The story actually makes a little sense once you start to dig into it. The two leaders met when Medvedev was on a tour of California's Silicon Valley; Medvedev's pet project has been to launch a Russian version of Silicon Valley in the Skolkovo suburb outside Moscow, an attempt to jump-start the Russian hi-tech sector and to diversify the Russian economy away from extraction activities, namely oil and natural gas (on a side note, Russia has passed Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil exporter). Apparently the two just really hit it off. For his part, Schwarzenegger is looking for the next act in his political career now that his role as governor is finished; Schwarzenegger himself has hinted about becoming a spokesman/cheerleader for the green energy sector, though there is also speculation that he may go back into business, his cozy relationship with Medvedev could indicate that he'd be willing to jump into the rough-and-tumble world of Russian business.

Schwarzenegger of course has some experience in Russia dating back to his role as a Russian super-cop in the 1988 film “Red Heat”, the first major American movie allowed to film in Red Square among other Russian locales. And for Medvedev it also means that he's friends with one of the few politicians in the world who could possibly beat up his political partner (and judo black belt) Vladimir Putin.

The two may choose to have their ski date outside of Sochi, Russia, which would help top promote the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics to be held in the city.

AWV Award Time!

With 2010 now behind us, it's time for our annual look back at the year that was and at all the strangeness this world has to offer. So, without further adieu, it's time for the A World View Awards, and as always, any sarcasm contained within is most surely intentional.

The Maxwell Smart Award – Anna Chapman
It's only fitting that an award named for a spy who continually screwed up, yet somehow always managed to find success goes to the redheaded femme fatale Anna Chapman. Apparently gone are the days when failing in your mission as a spy meant a dank prison cell followed by a bullet; after being caught in a ham-handed FBI sting (or betrayed by a rogue FSB colonel) and repatriated to Russia, Chapman has found nothing but success: taking a job as a spokeswoman for a Russian bank, singing songs with Prime Minister Putin, being named to the board of a pro-Kremlin youth group, having ballads written in her honor and even getting her own iPhone app. There's speculation that next year Chapman may try to represent her native Volgograd region in the Russian Duma, not bad for someone who apparently failed badly in her espionage mission. We should note, since the other ten alleged spies swept up with Chapman have all sunk into lives of relative obscurity, being hot helps:


Golden Lights of Democracy Award – Yahya Jammeh, The Gambia and Laurent Gbagbo, Cote d'Ivoire
A split award to two men doing everything they can to undermine the cause of democracy in Africa this past year. First is President Yahya Jammeh of The Gambia, even with the media firmly under his control and elections fully rigged, Jammeh decided this whole process of pretending to run for president was just a big ol' waste of time, his solution: attempt to have himself named King of The Gambia, an idea dutifully pushed by compliant political lackeys. But not to be out done is President Laurent Gbagbo of Cote d'Ivoire, who came up with a great way to respond to losing a presidential election: just don't stop being president! After his loss was certified, Gbagbo, who called the free and fair election a “coup”, had himself sworn into office again and for the past month has insisted he's still the president. Unfortunately he is backed by a vast security force augmented by members of the Ivorian military and allegedly mercenaries from neighboring Liberia as well who are brutally attacking supporters of the legitimate president, Alassane Ouattara; the whole situation is threatening to descend into civil war, which doesn't seem to bother “president” Gbagbo in the least.

Bad Science Idea of the Year Award – Geoengineering
2010 saw some ardent global warming skeptics come around to the idea that greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) are actually having an effect on the world's climate. Unfortunately rather than working to limit the amount of GHG pumped into the atmosphere – by taking steps like shutting coal-fired power plants, moving away from a car-centric culture and generally changing the way the developed world works – some scientists are proposing an idea called “geoengineering”, or essentially hacking the global climate. Geoengineering would involve pumping huge amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect a portion of the sunlight hitting the Earth back into space. With less sunlight hitting the Earth's surface, global temperatures would drop, or more correctly, would drop in a manner offsetting the rise in global temperatures caused by the GHGs, thus keeping things about where they are.
Two small problems: first is that once started, the sulfur dioxide pumping would have to continue, permanently; otherwise global temperatures could suddenly spike upward by several degrees, thanks to the GHG saturated atmosphere. The other problem is that the sulfur dioxide-reflected sunlight would cause a “permanent whitening” of day-time skies, an effect something akin to the skies from the movie The Matrix. Unfortunately, this daffy idea has the attention of some right-wing groups in the United States including the influential conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo of the Year #1 – Putin and Buffy
Russia's Vladimir Putin is a man who likes flying in jet fighters, sparring in judo matches and wading bare-chested through Siberian rivers (and critics will say rigging elections, limiting the freedom of the press and running a mafia-like empire); but just to show he has a softer side he also hugs adorable puppies!

The Merit Promotion Award – Kim Jong-un
For his first 27 (or 28) years, the only knowledge the world had of Kim Jong-un was a blurry photograph of a young Korean boy taken at a Swiss boarding school. But when your dad is the head of the world's last remaining Stalinist state, change can come quickly; this summer Kim Jong-un was elevated to the rank of four-star general (complete with the modest title of “Great General”) and named successor to the ailing Kim Jong-il. To prove his bona fides as the “Great General”, Kim Jong-un is allegedly the one who ordered the artillery attack on the sleeping South Korean fishing village on Yeonpyeong Island, which killed four people and brought the two Koreas to the brink of war, along with going down as one of the most lopsided military conflicts since the Klingons battled the tribbles. Unfortunately, Korea observers believe that there is still a lot of internal strife over the elevation of the 27 (or 28) year old Kim Jong-un to leader-in-waiting status, promising more uncertain times on the Korean peninsula.

The “Who Can It Be Now” Award – the Togolese “National” Soccer Team
“Friendlies” - matches between the national teams of two countries – are a fixture in world football (or soccer to us Americans) circles; so that Togo's national team traveled to the Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain for a match in September wasn't unusual. But the Bahrain team was surprised by the poor quality of the Togolese side, some of whom were so out of shape they reportedly had trouble making it from one end of the field to the other; it certainly wasn't a national-caliber team, and for good reason – it wasn't the Togo national team, but rather a group of imposters gathered together for the match. The resulting scandal led to dismissals among the management of the national football authority and was a black eye for Togo's team, which earlier in the year was the victim of a terrorist massacre in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that killed two team members traveling to the Africa Cup tournament in Angola.
Honorable mention in this category goes to “Mullah Akthar Mohammad Mansour”, or at least to the guy who posed as the Taliban commander who was apparently flown into Kabul by NATO for a high-level meeting with President Karzai and given $100,000 before disappearing into Pakistan with the loot. Imagine what would be going on if we weren't winning that war...

Photo of the Year #2 – The Irish Banking Crisis
Perhaps this photo of officials from the International Monetary Fund scurrying into a meeting in Dublin on the Irish financial crisis needs no set-up...


“They Pull Me Back In” Award – Doku Umarov
In August, Doku Umarov, the leader of the Islamic militant movement in Russia's Chechnya region and the self-styled “Emir of the North Caucasus Caliphate”, announced he was retiring from jihading during an Internet press conference. A few days later Umarov held another Internet press conference to announce he was un-retiring and would once again take up the cause for jihad in southern Russia; to quote Michael Corleone: just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in...
Analysts say that the move reflects a split in the Chechen militant community between Umarov's supporters, who have thrown their lot in with al-Qaeda and have bought into Osama bin Laden's idea of a worldwide jihad, and other Chechen factions who want to ditch the global jihad talk and get back to their original mission of using terror attacks to secure independence for Chechnya, this faction supposedly didn't want to win independence from Russia only to become a small part of some new regional caliphate. Whatever the reason, it is enough to win Umarov the Pull Me Back In Award and make him the first two-time winner in the history of the AWV awards.

The Golden Cockroach – Silvio Berlusconi
Named for nature's ultimate survivor, the Golden Cockroach goes to the national leader who somehow manages to stay in power despite everything they've done during the past year; and for 2010 there's no more fitting recipient than Italy's Silvio Berlusconi. While Italy's poorly-performing economy might be enough to doom most politicians, Silvio ups the ante by making racist comments about other world leaders, cavorting with underage lingerie models, making other of his ladyfriends members of the government and hiring escorts to attend to his VIP guests at his private villa; actions that have even his own daughter speaking out against him. In November it looked like Silvio was done for, facing a “no confidence” vote by the parliament; yet somehow Silvio survived, and there are indications his ruling coalition might emerge stronger following the next election. Silvio, this cockroach is for you, you've earned it.

4/11/54: The Most Boring Day

Just in case you were wondering what was the most boring day of the 20th century, detailed computer analysis has determined that it was in fact April 11, 1954. On that day there was an election in Belgium, a Turkish academic was born and a British soccer player died. That was about it.

The “Most Boring Day” honor was bestowed upon 4/11/54 by True Knowledge, a data search engine developed by Cambridge University that has compiled a database of 300 million facts, figures and events. The scientists at Cambridge designed True Knowledge to be a better Internet search engine, not to pick the most banal day of the 20th century, but its programmers figured the boring day challenge was a good test of True Knowledge's abilities. April 11, 1954 stood out for its not-worthiness since no notable people were born or died, nor were there any major news events. According to the Times of India, April 30, 1930 had previously been considered the dullest day of the century based on a BBC news bulletin that simply said of the day: “There is no news.”

India’s Laptop For The Masses

On Friday the government of India announced plans to produce and sell a touch-pad laptop computer, with many of the same features of Apple’s new iPad, for the bargain-basement price of just $35. India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal, said the device was designed by the India Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science, two of the country’s elite universities; and that the cost-savings came in large part by using low-cost components: the device uses flash memory instead of a hard drive for data storage and uses an open-source Linux-based operating system.

The Indian device is similar in concept to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, a low-cost computer aimed at students in developing nations who otherwise couldn’t afford one and is meant to prevent them from being left behind in the digital age by giving them access to the Internet and teaching them how to use digital technology. The OLPC laptop and the new Indian device both rely on the idea of “economy of scale” for their low, low prices; economy of scale reasons that most of the cost of a given device comes in its design and prototype phase, once it is put into production though the cost will drop with every unit produced – make millions and the per unit cost will be quite small.

But OLPC never actually hit its target price of $100, each unit sells for about twice that (though they did succeed in creating a rugged, easy-to-use laptop for students in the developing world). Critics of the Indian project say that the Indian government’s price-point of $35 is utterly unrealistic. Minister Sibal admitted the government still needs to find a producer for the laptop, and that the government tapped scientists on staff at the universities to develop the prototype after the private sector failed to meet a government tender to do so. The Economic Times of India also notes that one in two Indians (roughly half a billion people) already regularly access the Internet via their mobile phones, questioning whether the cheap touch-pad laptop is even needed in the first place.

An earlier attempt by the Indian government to create and distribute a low-cost laptop never got off the ground, we’ll keep an eye on this second attempt and see if it fares any better.

As The Warship Turns…

Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin used a state visit to Paris to again push French officials to finalize a deal that would allow Russia to buy one, if not four, Mistral-class warships from France. The two sides have been negotiating the deal for months, much to the worry of Russia’s neighbors Ukraine and Georgia.

The Mistral is an amphibious assault ship; its mission is to rapidly deploy several hundred battle-ready troops ashore with their tanks and other heavy equipment and to carry a squad of helicopters to provide air cover for the invading troops. Critics have questioned why Russia – the country with the world’s longest land borders and few overseas possessions – would need amphibious assault ships in the first place. The Russian military didn’t help to quell their neighbor’s fears when a high-ranking general remarked how much more smoothly Russia’s August 2008 conflict with Georgia would have gone if Russia had the Mistral in its arsenal. But last week Russian Armed Forces Staff Gen. Nikolai Makarov gave the official explanation as to why Russia needs to buy Mistrals from France – to protect the Kuril Islands.

The Kurils are a chain of rocky, barren islands in the Northern Pacific. In August 1945, Josef Stalin finally made good on a pledge to open a second Pacific front in World War II against the then all-but-defeated Imperial Japan. One of the bits of territory snatched by the Red Army in the closing days of the war were the Kuril Islands. Sixty-five years later, the Russians are still there, while Japan is still demanding the return of the four southernmost Kurils – a small dispute that has actually kept Japan and Russia from signing a peace treaty to formally end World War II. The dispute over the Kurils brings to mind an old joke about the British-Argentine war for the Falkland Islands: that it made as much sense as two bald men fighting over a comb.

It’s hard to believe the Russians would look to spend $2 billion to buy four Mistral warships to guard against a hypothetical invasion over a collection of wind-blown rocks… Russia’s interest in the Mistrals actually has less to do with the ships themselves and more to do with the technology inside them. In terms of technology, Russia’s military is lagging behind their NATO counterparts, particularly when it comes to integrated command-and-control systems (ones that link together satellite imagery, GPS coordinates, the ability for soldiers to communicate with HQ, etc). These weaknesses were shown during Russia’s 2008 conflict with Georgia. The Mistral, meanwhile, is also a command-and-control hub for the troops it sends ashore. So buying a Mistral from France would give Russia direct access to this state-of-the-art technology; building Mistrals in Russia under license (the deal Putin is pushing for) would give the Russians even more hands-on experience with these systems.

The United States has been pressing France not to make the Mistral deal, precisely for this reason (which is a bit odd since we’re all suppose to be friends now). But France has shown a willingness recently to sell their technology as a way to make big arms deals. Brazil is looking to upgrade their air force and is considering bids from the United States, Sweden and France. Only the French bid though is willing to include a transfer of key technology to Brazil as part of the deal. It remains to be seen if France is willing to cut Russia the same bargain regarding the Mistrals. One sign of how much Russia wants this agreement to go through is a separate offer made by Putin during his visit to allow France’s petroleum firm Total SA bid for a 25% stake in a Siberian natural gas field – Putin has long been a strong proponent for keeping Russian natural resources in Russian hands.

Life On Titan

Last weekend I spent some time reporting for The Mantle from the World Science Festival. During a presentation titled “The Science of Star Trek”, one of the panelists said he believed we would find fairly conclusive proof of life outside of Earth within the next 20 years. That’s why this story from Russia’s RIA Novosti caught my eye: according to the report, NASA scientists analyzing data from the Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn has discovered what they think might be signs of primitive life on the planet’s moon, Titan.

Titan is a bitterly cold (-300 degrees) place where there the seas are made of hydrocarbons rather than water (insert your own BP joke here). Scientists studying the chemistry of the surface from data collected by Cassini have found a lack of acetylene on the surface – some biologists theorize that because of the extremely low temperatures on Titan’s surface, life that uses liquid methane as a basis for their biological functions, rather than water like lifeforms on Earth, may have evolved there. These methane-based life forms would likely “eat” acetylene, which could explain the lack of the material on the surface.

Of course there could be a host of non-lifeform related reasons for the lack of acetylene as well, but scientists at NASA aren’t dismissing the idea of life on Titan just yet and are planning to collect more data from future Cassini fly-bys to try to sort out the mystery.

Happy World Pinhole Day

In case you didn’t know (and to be honest I didn’t until reading about it in the BBC’s “Viewfinder”, their wonderful blog about photography), today is World Pinhole Photography Day. What is pinhole photography? Like the name implies, it is the art of making a photograph using tiny pinhole in place of a camera lens. As far back as the Middle Ages, people realized that, under the right circumstances, a tiny hole poked in the wall of an otherwise darkened room would project an image of a brightly-lit external scene onto the wall of the dark room (called a camera obscura). The modern art of photography began as the quest to find a way to permanently record the image of the camera obscura; all of the earliest cameras were in fact pinhole cameras.

Today, pinhole photography remains an active niche in the photographic world. Since pinhole cameras don’t use glass lenses for focusing, pinhole photographs often have a soft, even ethereal quality to them. And because the pinhole lets so little light into the camera, exposure times for pinhole photographs are long – usually from several seconds up to several minutes, so motion tends to become blurred during pinhole exposures adding to their otherworldly quality.

For a gallery of pinhole photographs, check out the official World Pinhole Photography day website.

Update on Russia’s Corruption Cop

According to Russia’s RIA Novosti news service, Major Alexei Dymovsky, the former police officer from the southern Russian city of Novorossiisk who shot to fame after posting a plea on YouTube to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin begging him to investigate rampant police corruption, was scheduled to be released from jail on Sunday. Shortly after appearing at a press conference in Moscow following his YouTube appeal, Dymovsky was fired from his police job on charges of libel and attacking the reputation of the police force. He was subsequently arrested on charges of abuse of office during his time as a police officer.

Dymovsky claimed that his superiors forced police officers to routinely report solving non-existent crimes to boost the crime clearance rate of the department; Dymovsky himself said he got his promotion to major after prosecuting a man he knew to be innocent on the orders of his superiors. He also claimed that officials ignored widespread corruption on the police force and even rented out on-duty police officers to work as private security agents. He has been in jail since late January, and could face up to 10 years in prison. RIA Novosti reports that Dymovsky will be placed under house arrest after signing a pledge not to leave Novorossiisk before his trial.

Meanwhile on Saturday 150, or 1,000, demonstrators – depending on whether you accept the figures provided by the Moscow police or the protest organizers – gathered in the capital to demand reform of the nation’s police forces. Russia’s official government Ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, was among the protesters who were calling for the resignation of the nation’s Interior Minister (who oversees Russia’s police forces) and for the end of the “persecutions” of honest police officers. Unlike many protests not sanctioned by the government, there were no reports of arrests at the anti-corruption rally.

North Korea’s Own OS

“Juche” is a concept at the core of the ideology of the Kim Jong-Il regime in North Korea; loosely translated it means “self-reliance”. Apparently the Juche ideal extends even to computers and the Internet – North Korea already operates its own Internet-like information network, free from the oversight of the United States-based group ICANN, which regulates the use of Internet domains and addresses around the rest of the world. Now, North Korea is also offering up its own Linux-based OS called the “Red Star Operating System”.

Thanks to a Pyongyang-based student/correspondent, Russia Today is giving us a first-person test drive of Red Star (along with RT’s own NoKo-inspired take on the Linux penguin logo). According to “Mikhail”, Red Star is a pretty decent OS, albeit one that requires a relatively new processor and a good chunk of hard drive space (3 gigs) to run. The basic Red Star install includes a word processor, web browser, picture viewer, media player, and of course, a small selection of games like “minesweeper” (no word on whether or not the NK version of minesweeper is set in the DMZ between the two Koreas). A selection of applications that include a graphics editor, email client, notebook program (called “My Comrade”) and Windows emulator is available separately. Mikhail had Red Star up and running in about 15 minutes.

Mikhail’s review of Red Star provides an interesting insight into the way North Korea – the world’s most secretive nation – operates. It also reminded me of this story from last February about the Cuban government launching their own Linux-based OS, which they called “Nova”. The Cubans developed their own OS as a way to exercise their “technological sovereignty” and avoid, they claim, backdoors built into other operating systems by US security agencies.

The developments in Cuba and North Korea would seem to beg the question: will home-built computer operating systems become the latest tool of oppressive regimes around the world?

Russian Military Soars Into Future

The Russian military took a huge step into the future on Friday as the prototype of the Sukhoi T-50 finally made its successful maiden flight. The Sukhoi is Russia’s first “fifth generation” fighter aircraft and is slated to become the backbone of the Russian Air Force during the next decade. Fifth generation fighters incorporate stealth, advanced electronics, extreme maneuverability and the ability to fly as supersonic speeds for extended periods of time into their design; currently the United States Air Force’s F-22 Raptor is the only fifth generation aircraft in service anywhere in the world.

The T-50 is more than just Russia’s way to keep up with the Americans though; the successful flight shows that Russia’s defense contractors are able to build world-class, advanced weapons systems. Much of the Russian military is still equipped with Soviet-era weapons and most of what the Russian arms manufacturers are building are systems still based on Soviet designs that are two, three, or more decades old. For example, two of the Russian Navy’s newest ships – the submarine Nerpa and the frigate Yaroslav Mudry – were projects actually begun in the early 1990s at the end of the Soviet Union that laid dormant for more than a decade due to lack of funds and are only being completed now, almost 20 years after their construction began. This lack of modern equipment was on display during 2008’s conflict with Georgia. The Russian army that rolled into battle lacked the unmanned drones, precision guided weapons, integrated computer system and many of the other hi-tech gadgets that their Western counterparts possess, in many ways it was the same army that entered Afghanistan in 1979 (though they were able to handily defeat Georgia’s NATO-advised troops).

“This is an epic event, because it's the first time in post-Soviet history that [the Russian military industry] has been able to create something brand new,” Alexander Khramchikhin, an expert with the independent Institute of Political and Military Analysis in Moscow told the Christian Science Monitor in an interview on Friday, giving an idea of the significance of the jet’s first flight. The Sukhoi T-50 also highlights the growing military ties between Russia and India. The Indian and Russian air forces are each scheduled to eventually purchase 250 of the new Sukhoi aircraft. In addition, the Indians are picking up 25% of the development costs of the project and are supplying the software for the T-50’s computer control systems (fifth generation fighters rely on computers to make minute adjustments to the aircraft’s control surfaces every second just to keep them in the air – it is a system that makes the planes incredibly maneuverable).

And if Wikipedia is correct (which is always an “if”), someone at NATO has a sense of humor about the Sukhoi. Its NATO designation will supposedly be “Firefox”, which also happens to be the title of a late Cold War-era novel and film about a high-tech Soviet jet fighter.

Polaroid Primed For Comeback

News broke on Thursday that thrilled camera buffs around the world - Polaroid would relaunch production in 2010. Until digital cameras became commonplace items in the past decade, if you wanted to be able to see the picture you just took (almost) instantly, then you needed a Polaroid. But the digital revolt cut deeply into Polaroid's business, the company went bankrupt in 2001 and again in 2008. During that second reorganization, the company announced that it would give up its film-based instant camera business in favor of digital imaging.

Even though its commercial business had dwindled, Polaroid still had legions of fans around the world who still preferred the old analog format to digital. On Thursday China's Summit Global announced they would start producing a new line of cameras under the Polaroid name. But what makes a Polaroid a camera and not just an oversized paperweight (like the two I own) is the unique film, a lesson that the Soviet Union's camera industry once learned (*see end note), and that's where "The Impossible Project" steps in.

The story of The Impossible Project is fascinating in itself - after Polaroid shuttered their Enschede, Netherlands plant, a group of former technicians stepped in and acquired the factory and all its fittings. Their goal was to produce a new version of the Polaroid film for the thousands of instant picture enthusiasts out there. This meant figuring out the chemistry that essentially puts a whole darkroom on a sheet of paper - from scratch, something they themselves dubbed "the Impossible Project". But they'll be putting their film into production this year as well. Instant photography fans rejoice.


*The Soviet Union produced their own version of the Polaroid camera called the "Moment". Unfortunately for Soviet photographers, Soviet camera technicians were never able to master the production of instant film, meaning Moment owners had to try to buy Polaroid film on the black market. Few were able to and the Moment was a flop.

Go, Russia!

In my latest post over at The Mantle I talk about Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's state-of-the-nation address entitled "Go, Russia!" Unfortunately a lack of specifics in Medvedev's roadmap for the future of Russia has left a lot of the comments about the speech to focus on talk of time zones, YouTube clips and the body language of Vladimir Putin. And while in the speech Medvedev makes a point of talking about how he enjoys reading comments made by average Russians on his official blog, I have to wonder if the recent spate of YouTube confessionals by corrupt Russian cops was the kind of social media interaction he had in mind.

Bird Foils Big Bang

Ok, this is a little scary - the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the multi-billion dollar science experiment that is suppose to simulate the conditions of the Big Bang was brought to a screeching halt this week by a bird, specifically a bird that dropped "a bit of baguette" into the works.

According to officials at the LHC, a bird snacking on a piece of bread at one of the machine's capacitors caused a temperature spike that caused the LHC to shut down. The LHC uses 16 miles of supercooled tubing to accelerate hydrogen atoms to nearly the speed of light before smashing them into each other in an attempt to create sub-atomic particles.

I guess it's a good thing that the machine shut itself down when it detected a problem, it is a little scary though to think such a huge, complex thing could be knocked out by a snacking bird.

The Domain That Refused To Die

My latest bit of writing over at The Mantle - nearly two decades after the end of the Soviet Union, one piece of the old empire persists: the Internet domain ".su", despite all the best efforts to delete it. In my post I take a look at the ."su" domain, who uses it and what the future holds for the last vestige of the old Soviet empire.

Stalin Looms Over Russian Remembrance

Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev used his official Kremlin blog to rip into those who are attempting to "rehabilitate" the image of former Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

Medvedev's post comes on the "Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions", an official day set aside to remember those purged, imprisoned and executed during the reign of Stalin. According to the KGB's own state archives 800,000 people were executed during Stalin's rule - by comparison only 3,000 death sentences were carried out in the four decades between the end of Stalin and the end of the Soviet Union, and of the 800,000 executed under Stalin, 75% had their death sentences posthumously overturned. The Russian civil rights group "Memorial" marked the day in central Moscow by reading out the names of 30,000 people executed under the orders of Stalin between 1937 and 1938 in Moscow alone.

Medvedev warned against the "falsification" of history in attempts to excuse Stalin's crimes. He went on to say that: "no success or ambitions of the state, should be achieved through human grief and loss. Nothing can be valued above human life, and there is no excuse for repression."

But Stalin remains a complex and controversial topic in Russia and apparently within the Russian leadership. Current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been accused of soft-pedaling the crimes committed by Stalin and his regime in an effort to promote the positive aspects of Soviet history and boosting the image of Stalin as a "strong leader" as cover for his own attempts to consolidate power in modern Russia.

Meanwhile Russia's top news agency RIA Novosti also used the Day of Remembrance to blast a story by a European journalist that RIA Novosti was working with an American PR firm in an effort to polish the image of Stalin.