Random Developments

That is what I really wanted to see. I believe it would be much more entertaining than the Martha Stewart version.

“You’re <beep> fired, you <beep> piece of <beep> <beep> <beep>. Get out of here [grabs chair] and go look for a job with <beep>ing Google [throws chair, hits camera]. And the rest of you, you <beep>s, go back to the <beep> suite and leave me <beep> alone! <beep>!”

The FCC wouldn’t like it, though.

This is one of the most interesting questions raised by the fleet of unmanned spacecrafts floating around (and outside) the Solar System. In short, the Pioneer probes are not where they should be, and nobody knows why.

The two Pioneers (10 and 11) were launched in late 1972 and early 1973 and are currently two of the most distant man-made objects in existence. Neither of them is active anymore; the last signal from Pioneer 11 arrived in 1995, and from Pioneer 10 in 2003. They are still moving away from us in more or less opposite directions: 10 is heading to Aldebaran, which it should reach in about 2 million years, and 11 will fly by the constellation of Aquila in 4 million years.

Being this far away from us and having travelled for such a long time, they are in an excellent position to show us unexpected news about the way the universe works, and they may have done just that. Their actual position over the last few years was consistently “wrong” when compared to their expected position; the error indicated that they were being subjected to a small force towards the Sun that exceeds what should be expected from gravity and other known effects.

Nobody knows what that force is, of course. It could be something as simple as a gas leak, but it would be definitely strange that this would cause exactly the same amount of force applied in the same direction in both probes (then, again, they are identical; if it’s a design problem or side-effect, it’s not so far fetched as it sounds). It could also be an observational error; old data is being revisited to try to rule this out.

We do have different probes that are as far away as the Pioneers: Voyagers 1 and 2 are still operating and have already left the outer-most planets behind; Voyager 1 is, in fact, farther away from the Sun than any other probe (Pioneer 10 trails it by almost 1 billion kilometres, and Voyager 2 by 3 billion). However, the Voyagers are too different from the Pioneers: their stabilization system is different, and it causes thrusters to fire quite often to keep them pointed in the right direction; these thrusters interfere with the trajectory of the ships and, thus, with the very small effect of this unknown force. Still, they seem to be affected in the same way, although data is not quite conclusive. The probes Galileo and Ulysses, which are stabilised in the same way as the Pioneers, never ventured so far away from the Sun that the effect on them could be conclusively measured.

It is expected that New Horizons, the new mission to Pluto, planned to be launched early next year and to reach Pluto in 2015, could bring some light to this issue; as the Pioneers, it is spin-stabilised and should be affected by the same forces. Whatever the reason for the anomaly turns out to be, and even if it is indeed something quite prosaic, we will certainly learn something new: either about some aspect of space flight that was previously overlooked, or about some new facet of the inner workings of the universe.

Funny how things come and go. Last year, when Sedna was discovered, it was announced as a possible 10^th planet; however, there was also talk of not only not considering Sedna as a planet but also demoting Pluto to a more general “Kuiper belt object”, leaving us with 8 planets again.

Then, earlier this year, an as-yet-unnamed object (2003 UB₃₁₃, unofficially referred to as Xena or Lila) was discovered that is larger than Pluto, and considerably farther away (Sedna is smaller than Pluto and, therefore, more easily brushed aside). This is one of possibly thousands of similar objects orbiting the Sun from very, very far away. Are those objects planets?

It turns out that it is very difficult to come up with a scientific definition of planet that will include the current set of nine and nothing else. It would be easy if Pluto were demoted; then you would be able to define based on size (it’s very unlikely, although not impossible, that there’s any undiscovered object larger than Mercury orbiting the sun) or even on distance from the Sun (which is somewhat arbitrary, though), or you could pick the definition currently chosen by many scientists: a large body that dominates a particular orbit. Pluto does not fit (Neptune would be the dominant body in that orbit), and neither do the inner Solar System asteroids or any of the Kuiper Belt objects (no single body dominates those orbits). However, any definition that tries to include Pluto will, certainly, include many other bodies.

The current set of nine planets is a historical accident: when Pluto was discovered, it was thought to be an one-of-a-kind object, which would make it an odd planet but not much of a problem. The subsequent discovery of the Kuiper belt opened a can of worms, of which at least two jumped out so far: Sedna and “Lila”. Nowadays, the working definition of “planet” is “whatever the IAU says is a planet”, and the IAU is working (without much success) to come up with a ruling on the new bodies and, presumably, any new ones that pop up.

Personally, I’d like to see “Lila” accepted as a planet, but I recognize that this would bring a different problem: we could end up with hundreds of planets over the next few decades, and that would trivialize the word “planet”. Nine is ok, ten is fine, eleven is all right… 137 may be a little too much. I think the easiest solution is to keep the name for the current nine planets for historical reasons (or add “Lila” as the 10^th planet to recognize its discoverers), retire the word “planet” as a scientifically significant word (therefore freezing the set of planets in the actual configuration) and adopt an official naming convention based on the characteristics of the objects being named. This would probably make everyone happy without being too disruptive.

There seems to be a renewed interest in space exploration, especially in big projects, lately. Or is that just my impression?

We had NASA saying that we’ll have people on the moon again by 2018, which seems to fit with what Pres. Bush said a few months ago. Very interesting project, and I hope it does happen (still, 13 years is a long time to sustain funding…).

Then the August edition of IEEE Spectrum has a cover story on space elevators, making the point that now would be a good time to start building one. A space elevator could reduce the cost of putting materials in orbit from US$20,000 a kilogram to around $200. According to a presentation I found at spaceelevator.com, the budget for a single elevator is around $10 billion US dollars, already including legal costs (I can imagine the cost of liability insurance…). Meanwhile, an American private company (Liftport Group) got FAA clearance to perform tests related to building an elevator; their homepage even counts down to their expected lift-off date (12 April 2018; what is it with 2018?).

Interestingly, the NASA plans for space exploration in the late 1960s included permanent moon bases by the early 1980s, and manned missions to Mars by 1985. Even the Shuttles should have been in space by 1973, if I’m not mistaken (the first launch was in 1981). We all know what happened, of course. Even the Apollo program only really succeeded because of the Russian competition, which prompted Kennedy’s challenge (put a man on the moon and bring him back by 1969); we don’t have anything like that now. Let’s wait and see.

This website was down for a few hours this morning (Melbourne time) due to a power outage that affected large areas of Los Angeles, and was a little slow for some time afterwards. Everything seems back to normal now.

Today I watched the first episode of Robert Cringely’s Nerd TV, featuring Andy Hertzfeld. Andy worked for Apple during the development of the Macintosh, and he is one of those folkloric Silicon Valley characters everyone seems to know about.

Nerd TV is an Internet-only TV show, featuring an one-hour interview with a single guest each week. It can be downloaded from PBS’s website or via BitTorrent. The roster of future guests has several impressive names, including Bill Joy, Steve Wozniak and Doug Engelbart. The interviewer, Cringely, is well known among geeks worldwide for his documentary “Triumph of the Nerds”, telling the history of Silicon Valley up to the mid-90s (with a follow-up a few years latter, “Nerds 2.0″).

The first interview was very interesting, with Andy talking about his upcoming book and telling several anecdotes about the early years of Apple. Recommended for evey geek.

By the way, if you just download the audio (not the video), you won’t miss anything. I just wish they had a RSS feed so that the content could be treated as a podcast and downloaded more easily.

This probably deserves some mention… Australian American scientists developed a mouse that can regenerate any damaged part of its body (including nerves) except for the brain; The Australian has the story. The mice successfully regenerated amputated toes (with joints), tails and ears, and healed damaged hearts and optic nerves.

The healing capability can also be passed on to normal mice through an injection of fetal cells from the “miracle” strain. This is the first recorded instance of mammals being able to regenerate lost body parts, and it is hoped that research on how, exactly, they do it will lead to the possibility that humans, some day, be able to do the same.

This is what the USA needs: Macgyver for President.

I don’t vote in the US, but I’m sure I can get a few votes for him.

And thus the footy year ends. Well, not really: we still have the finals. But the tipping competitions are over.

The final week brought no big surprises, except maybe for Adelaide beating West Coast (but that seemed somewhat likely given the results of the last few weeks). The lack of surprises brought a good number of hits (seven for money, six for ladder) but not good financial results (low odds on most matches).

The numbers for this week:

So, the big question: can you make money with these strategies? The answer seems to be “yes” for the “home” strategy (that is, tipping always the home team), but let’s look at a graph first:

The graph shows the cumulative net result of each strategy over the year. “Ladder” did very well in the first seven weeks, then went straight downhill; remarkably, that’s exactly the opposite of what I’d expect. The reason for this might be that, after a few weeks, the teams at the top of the ladder starting being the favourites and paying less. This would explain the series of coincidences between “ladder” and “money” in the final weeks.

“Money”, on the other hand, went straight down and remained there. It did stabilise after a while, but never really recovered. Very strange, to be honest.

“Random” was very random. Except for a big jump upwards in rounds 6 to 9, the rest looks like Brownian motion to me, with a slight tendency downwards.

Finally, “home” is pretty much stable most of the time, with a few jumps (rounds 4, 17, 18 and 21) providing all of the net gain. It looks to me like it only made money because of a few unpredictable results here and there, but it could easily have gone the other way.

One important point, which I noticed during the year, is that you can tip with two different goals in mind, and your strategy will need to be different depending on your goal. If you are part of a tipping competition, you need to tip on every match and the only interesting data point is the number of results you get right. For this, the “money” strategy can be useful, and in fact it may be enough to get you to win in small competitions (in your office or school, for example), but not in the large, public ones (the winner of the Channel 10 competition finished with 127 points; “money” would have finished around position #700).

If, however, you are looking to make money, you don’t need to tip on every match (and, in fact, you probably shouldn’t): part of the strategy must be to select which results to tip and which to ignore. None of these strategies are useful for that, although I believe it is possible to develop an automated method that can reliably make money. This is something to think about over summer…

Links:

• Round 21