Entries Tagged 'Geek' ↓

As I said, I started watching BSG somewhat late; I finished season 1 just after Channel Ten started showing season 2, and have been catching up with the episodes since. And this weekend I did it: I watched the sixth episode of the third season (“Torn”), and had a very weird feeling afterwards: there were no episodes left to watch! (until next week, that is) That’s a first for me.

About the latest episodes (possible spoilers ahead): the start of season 3 redeems any problems from the end of season 2. Episode 4 (“Exodus pt 2″), in particular, is probably the single best TV episode of any genre of the last several years. Although… it’s a bit odd that, at the end of episode 5, we’re almost back to the middle of season 2: Laura is the president, there’s only one battlestar, Adama Jr. is the CAG, Thigh is drunk… even the number of survivors is sharply down from the peak reached right after the Pegasus showed up. At least Thigh’s very annoying wife is gone.

The “cylon disease” plot shows some promise; I still can’t quite figure out what Baltar plans to do, but probably the best guide is what Lt Gaeta (is he still an official?) said: his ability for self-preservation has no match. He may now be about to realise that staying with the cylons is not the best way to do that.

Waiting for the next episode…

I got “addicted” to the new version of Battlestar Galactica somewhat late; I watched the miniseries on DVD a few months ago, and then ran through the whole of the first and second seasons as fast as I could (which was not that fast; I just finished season two this weekend, and I’m already four episodes behind in season 3). The rest of this post may contain spoilers to anyone who has not finished watching season 2 yet; in Australia, the last episode broadcast on Channel Ten was 2-12, “Resurrection Ship, Part 2″, with eight episodes left to the end of the season.

For those who don’t watch it: the story is basically a war between humans and intelligent robotic assistants created by them, known as cylons, who rebelled against their creators; the humans don’t live on Earth, but on twelve planets known as the “twelve colonies”, with Earth being a mythological thirteenth colony. As the miniseries starts, a truce is in effect and humans and cylons live in separate solar systems in relative peace; the cylons break the truce with a surprise attack and manage to kill almost every single human being on the twelve colonies. The few remaining ones (mostly people who were in transit between planets at the time of the attack), protected by the only remaining military ship (Battlestar Galactica) flee their solar system and are pursued. The rest of the series follows what happens next; at the end of the second season, there are just over 47,000 humans left.

One thing that is interesting about this series is that there are no “role models” among the characters; there’s not a single one of them that is not significantly flawed in some way (or, to put it in another way, the characters are human). One could say that the “villains”, the cylons, are usually more admirable than the remaining humans, but the fact that they did kill 20 billion people makes them hard to recommend as role models.

I also like the way in which the human society is not shown as “utopic”; it is depicted more realistically, with dissenters, strikers, criminals, terrorists, religious fanatics, corrupt government officials etc. One particular episode deals with the black market that comes to life across the surviving ships; other, with whether abortion should be outlawed in a society that desperately needs people to reproduce. A recurring theme is whether captured enemies should be treated as prisoners or as “equipment” (they are not human, but machines).

The second season has much less “action” that the first, but it’s much more entertaining exactly because it deals in more interesting themes. I liked all episodes (some more than others… 2-14, “Black Market”, was not particularly good in my opinion), except what happens in the season final after the text “One year later” appears on the screen. It’s not that the rest of the episode is bad… it was more the general feeling of “o how the mighty have fallen”… and the webisodes that advanced the plot before the start of season 3 keep the same feeling going.

Speaking of the final of season 2: Gaius was exactly the kind of president I would expect him to be, but I was left with a few questions (which won’t make sense to people who are not following the series):

• how come Adama (the father) accepted Gaius’s orders so readily? he was always ready to confront the former president and to go against her orders when they did not make sense militarily, but he sets out to do what Baltar tells him with no argument, even after the nuclear explosion that destroyed Cloud 9; why is that? it seemed very much out of character
• how does the cylon occupation of New Caprica fit with the message delivered by the cylon “preacher” and the apparent de-occupation of the original Caprica (and, supposedly, the other eleven colonies)?
• the original Caprica is not exactly a “nuclear wasteland”, as mentioned by the then president Rosslyn; haven’t the rescue-party members (or the rescued people, for that matter) related back about how habitable is the planet?

Maybe some of these are answered in the first episodes of the third season… time to start working on them!

Great article: Faith Based Programming.

I think I know some people who practice it.

Or, diary of a novice amateur astronomer, part 1.

I have recently started giving more attention to something I’ve been interested in for a long time: astronomy. Part of this included being a little more “hands on”; that is, not only reading about it, but also going out there and doing something. Which, in the case of astronomy, means observing.

In my particular case, I am disadvantaged by the fact that I live in the middle of a large city. Not only is my field of view severely limited by tall buildings (and the lack of a backyard), but also light pollution effectively hides from view everything but the brighter bodies (so much so that it is almost impossible to identify constellations; the limiting magnitude from my place is very close to 0).

magnitude is a measure of brightness of celestial bodies; the lowest the magnitude, the brighter the body; Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, has magnitude -1.44; the magnitude doesn’t change with time for most stars, but does change for variable stars as well as for planets, asteroids and other solar system bodies

limiting magnitude is the highest magnitude for which bodies are visible in a particular location (and viewing with a particular piece of equipment, if that’s the case); for locations away from any light sources (“dark sky” locations), the naked eye limiting magnitude is usually around 6 for most people

In any case, one of my first steps into the observing world (or universe) was joining the Astronomical Society of Victoria (ASV). Apart from monthly general meetings, the society also has several special interest sections that meet regularly. It also makes available to members some observing facilities: a small observatory in the suburbs of Melbourne, a dark-sky site in country Victoria, portable telescopes for limited-time loans and some limited access to the historical observatory located at the Botanical Gardens. There are many benefits, such as a subject-specific library, but probably the best one is the contact with other similarly interested people.

The second step, in a way, was to acquire some observing equipment. I’m too much of a novice to be trusted with a decent telescope, and I didn’t really want to spend money with a cheap one (since I don’t plan on being a novice for too long, and I’d want a better one very soon). Binoculars, on the other hand, are reasonably inexpensive, easy to operate, portable and very good for beginners. I’ll write about how to choose a binocular in the next article.

Now, I started this blog intending to write, at least at some level, about subjects related to software development (hence its title). I even did that, every now and then, and still plan on doing. So, if that’s what you look for, don’t despair: it will show up. Possibly even with an astronomical inclination.

I, Woz, by the Woz. As soon as it comes out (supposedly in November).

This is probably not new, but I just noticed it… if your search query to Google contains words spelled in the British way, Google will search for both spellings:

But it doesn’t work the other way around:

Does this mean that those of us who spell things in the British way are getting more complete results from Google?

(the word “search” is in the query just to give slightly better results; if you search just for “color” or “colour” you will notice the same effect; also, try “license” and “licence” etc.; Yahoo! doesn’t seem to do the same)

As I write this, the person working on a spare desk in my office is Wietse Venema. He’s here for SecureCon, where he’ll make the keynote speech and a presentation on Postfix.

It has arrived.

Songs cost $1.69 each, Pixar videos go for $3.39. No Desperate Housewives or Lost, of course.

Not that I am a big music buyer, but it’s nice to know that I can, if I want to.

Launched on 12 August and scheduled to arrive to its destination on 10 March 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will bring something very important to Mars: high-bandwidth communications.

The MRO will spend its first six months in Mars slowly adjusting its orbital path, doing several aero-braking manoeuvres over more than 500 orbits until it settles on a path 300 km above the surface. From there, its high-resolution cameras will be able to photograph features that are less than one meter wide. And, when I say high resolution, I mean it: the main optical instrument, named HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), is actually a 20-inch telescope coupled to a 800-megapixel digital camera. As an example, the photo on the left is the Earth’s Moon seen by that camera from a distance of 10 million kilometres.

This will, of course, generate huge amounts of data to be sent to Earth. Due to the large distances involved and the difficulty of sending high-powered equipment to space, exploration vehicles have always returned data to Earth somewhat slowly. One of the more recent missions, Europe’s Mars Express (which is used to relay part of the data generated by the NASA surface rovers Spirit and Opportunity), sends data at no more than 200 kilobits per second (and as little as 30 kilobits per second, depending on conditions). The previous rover mission, Pathfinder, sent data at 1 to 2 kilobits per second, and the even older Voyagers managed up to 7.2 kilobits per second (as they didn’t have to land, they had larger antennas and heavier transmitters).

Clearly this would be less than appropriate for a spacecraft that can generate the equivalent of a 1,000 megapixel image every three seconds (and that is not counting the other instruments on board, plus occasional data relayed from the surface rovers — current and future). For this reason, MRO was fitted with a telecommunications system that includes a very large antenna (3 meters across), a fast computer and a high-powered (100 watt) transmitter which will allow it to send data at up to 6 megabits per second. Considering that this data will be sent over more than 100 million kilometres, that’s very impressive.

Together with this, the craft has also a second transmitter that will be used to test communications with Earth over a different range of frequencies (32 Ghz – Ka Band – instead of the usual 8 – X Band); if the test is successful, the new band can be used in future missions to increase even more the data rate of transmissions. The reason the higher frequencies aren’t used already is that transmissions in that range are more “fragile”, and are especially sensitive to moisture in Earth’s atmosphere (that is, if it rains, you’re out of luck). Better equipment and higher power may be enough to overcome these problems, and that’s what will be tested.

During its full mission (which lasts until 2010), MRO is expected to send 34 terabits of data to Earth; that is more than the amount of data returned by all previous JPL missions put together. It is expected to increase our knowledge of the red planet by orders of magnitude, and open the way to future scientific missions already being developed.

Last night I went to the theatre to watch Joss Whedon’s Serenity, the movie version of the TV series Firefly (very mild spoilers ahead). For those who don’t know it, it’s a little bit like Old West movies, but set 500 years in the future and with a touch of Japanese culture thrown in.

Having never watched the series, I have to say that the movie is pretty good. It’s fairly easy to draw parallels with Star Wars (the original trilogy): a renegade captain and his crew, with a somewhat old spaceship, suddendly take aboard two passengers that are more than they seem to be and find themselves as the target of the organisation that rules the known universe. Yes, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I like the type of humour displayed in the movie: somewhat sarcastic, almost self-derrogatory and still violently to the point. The acting seemed a little off in the first scenes, though, and some of the dialogue was, hmm, almost cheesy; I’m not sure whether it’s supposed to be like that, but it gets better as the movie progresses (or maybe I got used to it). Still, the characters are great, but they needed to better developed (perhaps the series does that). And have I mentioned the humour? It’s fantastic.

It’s refreshing to see a sci-fi movie set in a universe that follows most of our normal physical laws: ships actually have to go through re-entry procedures when landing in planets! They need heat shields! They have seat belts! That’s something you don’t usually see. Still, a few things were a little on the “plot device” category, but that was not really a problem.

All in all, it was lots of fun, and now I need to get my hands on the DVDs of the TV series.

Interesting developments in the outer solar system: it turns out that 2003 UB₃₁₃, the possible 10th planet (code-name “Xena”), has a moon. That body, which I discussed in a previous post, is larger than Pluto and orbits the Sun in such a way as to intersect Pluto’s orbit, which makes it the most similar body to other planets that was discovered so far.

The moon doesn’t have a name yet (it was discovered less than a month ago, on 10 September) and is officially known only as “S/2005 (2003 UB₃₁₃)”. The discoverers are calling it “Gabrielle”, though (understandably). Its discovery is very important because it will help astronomers to find out how massive “Xena” is by studying the way the moon orbits the main body.

Oddly enough, the discovery of a moon around it doesn’t mean that “Xena” has any more hope of being called a planet than it had before. Many other bodies in the solar system have moons around then, including several small asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter.

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.

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.