SpaceX making history this week?

In 2014, I thought I was in luck. We were going to Disney World and SpaceX was going going to run its first attempt at launching a rocket with landing gear. I was going to see history being made. Except I didn't in the end. A range safety failure closed down Cape Canaveral to launches for a few weeks and the historic launch was postponed.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Tuesday's historic launch will fly without a hitch. This time, they're trying to actually land a 1st stage Falcon 9 component. It's landing site is going to be on an autonomous barge in the Atlantic ocean for now but the ultimate aim is to have return flights go directly back to a maintenance facility where the stages can get refurbished and reused.

If a full Falcon 9 can get reused even once, it will chop off 40% or better of the cost to launch as the $54 million construction cost can be amortized over two launches. If the components can be reused more than once, the savings get even more spectacular.

These are heady days for spaceflight, even if Tuesday's launch develops a glitch. I'm very confident that they'll get it done relatively quickly.

Unhackable systems and the dumbness of trying to get into it on twitter

It is theoretically possible to create an unhackable system. From Instapundit today Neil deGrasse Tyson shows how not to talk about the subject.

Nanotube capacitors starting to enter the market

In 2006, MIT wrote up the invention of carbon nanotube improved capacitors, saying that if all goes well, the technology should enter the market within five to ten years time. I love reading about potentially disruptive technologies in materials and low level, common components. They really are the hope for us to get enough breathing room to fix the massive financial mess we're all busy digging ourselves into across the first world. But there's a long distance between technology in the lab and technology for sale in real products that make a difference so I filed it in my "check every couple of years" mental category and moved on. I should have checked more often.

The technology is starting to enter the market now, shipping first products in spring of 2013 and it's a major game changer for the economy, one that most people haven't mapped out the implications of yet. The technology was spun out of MIT into FastCAP Systems and they are now offering product to, of all things, the oil and gas drilling field, allowing for the elimination of batteries entirely in the advanced technology of measuring while drilling (MWD) and logging while drilling (LWD) or a doubling of system lifetime when used in conjunction with batteries. These "extreme environment ultracapacitors" are safer than their competition, lithium batteries, as they simply don't explode. Their shipping technology operating temperatures are rated to 150C, which is quite impressive.

But conventional oil and gas drilling is a means to an end for FastCAP as their aim is to reduce drilling expenses and increase drill capacity to viably tap geothermal energy as their technology has been recently validated at Sandia National Labs in use at 200C and the company seems to be going for 250C as a next step. This translates out to MWD/LWD operations out to 8km depths and the ability to extend modern techniques of horizontal drilling to greater depths than before.

All of a sudden, widespread geothermal energy doesn't look as impractical as it did yesterday.

Ethereum - Bitcoin on steroids

Bitcoin was only the beginning

Ethereum is bitcoin style disruption (blockchain technology) that is generic across anything writable in software. That's huge.

Etherum is not ripe. It's not something you want to devote a lot of resources to but it is something you want to keep your eyes on to monitor because any successful etherum software can disrupt any field of endeavor as bitcoin is disrupting banking. Look to hear about ethereum in a mainstream news outlet near you in mid 2015.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is not what you think it is.  This is the sort of thing that comes out when you listen to Bitcoin insiders who actually build the software that makes Bitcoin a thing.

Everyone in this room understands that Bitcoin is not a currency. It is a value transfer network with a decentralized consensus mechanism. 

Translating from techno-geek to poli-geek, Bitcoin makes voluntary polities. In plain english it allows people to congregate into one or more novel, voluntary associations, entering and exiting them at will.

The point of doing that is to establish convenient states of "we" as in we dollar spenders, we mastercard holders, and even we believers in this or that social habit or norm. This is incredibly valuable. It allows participants to exchange value within an enhanced trust set of rules. In the real world, this is a more granular edition of what european countries faced when they looked at joining the euro zone. A number of countries for whom joining was economically a bad idea did it anyway because they saw advantage in adopting a shared identity. Greek euro bonds suddenly sold at nearly the same low interest rates as German euro bonds. The market priced nation state bonds by the identity, and the repayment risk, of the most trustworthy of the big euro economies for years. It took the admission of a massive violation of trust and the rules of the euro (Greece's accounting fraud scandal) before national bond pricing was restored.

In this view, nation-states create a massive bundle of shared values, and a number of them are expressed through the currency. Bitcoin as software allows anyone to express shared values, sometimes economic, sometimes as expressions of solidarity. The politics of which shared values will be expressed is independent of the software. It pretty much can be anything.

FileMaker Pro Advanced 11 Business Productivity Kit 3.0

Filemaker has not updated their Business Productivity Kit since Filemaker 11 but I have a license for that program and, if you ask nicely, they'll email you a download link to it. I'm currently updating the email campaign solution in FMP12 format and am looking forward to create something internal for a Citizen Intelligence campaign with it.

Economic Models vs Climate Models

The New Economics Foundation is a UK think tank. They just put out an analysis claiming that climate models are at least as accurate as economic models and somewhat better on average. That being said, we don't treat economic models as serious planning tools 80 years out. We barely believe them for decisions 10 years out.

This is why Rep. Ryan's observation in 2012 that the US economy will shut down in 2027 according to CBO estimates of current path spending didn't freak the entire country out. Nobody believes that is a credible forecast. Too many things will change in the intervening 15 years to get worked up about it.

You can see Tim Geithner trying but not entirely succeeding in laughing at the ridiculousness of projecting things out past ten years. The relevant section about the economy shutting down is between 2:20 and 2:40 in the video below.

so even granting the point that climate models are just as good as the economic models, they must suffer from the same sorts of limits to forecast that the economic models do. Perhaps they are a bit better, perhaps not. Let's be generous and give them 15 years. Virtually no climate measures are justifiable based on the climate model projections 15 years out. The scary numbers don't show up for decades beyond. So who are they trying to fool here? 

Sharing to Google Plus vs Scheduling Posts

I'm experimenting with a new posting style on my blog that absolutely will not work without scheduling posts. Up to yesterday I've been posting live as the mood strikes me but there were a number of posts that never got written because my writing muse tends to be bursty and it just didn't make sense to publish all those posts at one time. So yesterday I posted once every two hours for the full day, time shifting 2AM to 3AM because blogger would not let me post then.

I did very well on traffic yesterday, up perhaps 25% but looking back the conversation was nil. All my comments are apparently coming in via Google+ and when you schedule posts via blogger, auto-sharing on Google+ does not work. A very significant number of my readers are coming in via other channels so the traffic went up but it went up entirely without my Google+ audience.

There doesn't seem to be a good set of choices here. I like the community and conversation I'm getting out of Google+ but I need scheduling to fully take advantage of my posting capability and to move posts to a more predictable stream instead of having them come out in clumps. Anybody out there have a simple solution for this situation?

The Future of Computing Hardware

There's an itch building that we can't scratch. We are depending on black box technology that we cannot truly control because the specifications are all burdened with patents and copyrights. In a world where we could trust big players to leave those black boxes alone, that would not be a tremendous problem. It's growing clear that this is not the world we live in.

Novena is an open source hardware laptop project. It's also a peek into the future of computing, which will include relatively modest specified machines that we can actually assure ourselves are under our own control. Looking at this project reminds me of looking at early Mozilla builds. You see the potential for a world beater, but you know that it's a long way from doing what it needs to do to survive in the marketplace as more than a curiosity.

HT: +Josh Williams

We need to start figuring out how to maintain our own DNS

I don't believe in DNS censorship. It's one of the more futile versions of state control. Reading about the US/Mexican censorship of 1dmx.org it took me about 3 minutes of research to realize these were not my kind of people (they seem to be allied with the hard left PRD) and about half a second more to decide that their ideology didn't matter. An attack to hide a sight by taking down their DNS entry doesn't stink less because I don't like the people being attacked today. The targets will change soon enough.

The solution seems obvious enough, crawl the DNS tree from the roots and take snapshots to create a database of the DNS tree over time, similar to the way the Apple's Time Machine does for the contents of your desktop PC. The model is there for everybody to see at archive.org which keeps a handy time machine of much of the Internet. Setting up a distributed network of older DNS entries that can be queried by others in case of takedown would allow for cross jurisdictional barriers to be set up so that political censorship would have a much tougher time shutting up timely sites.

Something New

Platonic solids, Archimedean solids, Kepler solids, we haven't found a new class of solids for 400 years, until now with the naming of Goldberg polyhedra. Conceptually, you take a regular solid and blow it up like a bouncy castle ride, bowing out the planes. Fill in those bulged out planes with polyhedrons and you get what has been called Goldberg polyhedra since about 1937. But apparently while that satisfied graph theorist Goldberg back in the day, the polyhedrons themselves weren't flat and thus weren't satisfying to Stan Schein who figured out how to make the polyhedrons flat. The only unoriginal thing about it is that he wants to give them the same name as the 1930s discovered shapes, Goldberg polyhedra. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

Nobody knows for sure how this will all play out but it's nice to see in a very geeky way.

HT: Instapundit

Had to Change my Twitter Password

Somebody decided that I would do well to follow about 900 extra people on twitter. I'm sure that there are some tools to ease removing all the extras because doing it one by one is not looking very attractive.

Well, the new password is a bit more secure.

Absolutely, positively don't do this

It's like the XKCD reached deep into my collection of technical nightmares and fished out the big one. 

All your health information belongs to us

Federal law requires that when a private corporation is hacked and customer information is stolen, it must notify the victims of the theft. This is a reasonable requirement that lets people rush out and buy identity theft protection and/or keep a close eye out for funny charges showing up on their bills. 

In the case of the federal healthcare exchange, there is no legal requirement to report such breaches. Individuals on the federal exchange are without such protection though most states do have reporting requirements. The issue came up during regulatory comments and HHS apparently declined to support any sort of mandatory reporting rule. They'll let us know when they feel like it. 

To add salt to the wound, HIPAA privacy protections do cover insurance companies and health providers accessing federal government systems but the federal government itself is not obligated to honor those protections. Fancy that. 

HT: National Review

VMX kickstarter

I'm quite interested in a kickstarter from VMX which is advertised as computer vision for everyone. Having a simple way for computers to identify objects in video streams is a huge game changer in a lot of fields.

Personally, I could probably use an alarm that reminds me that it's time to take out the garbage cans and only runs if nobody's done it by 8pm the night before they pick it up at 6am in the morning. I've said hello to the garbage guys a bit too often as I haul out the cans as they turn the corner. I mean they're nice guys and all but I'm just not very social at that hour of the day.

I'm going to cover my business interest in this technology tomorrow over at the citizen intelligence blog, God willing and I can stave off writer's block.

scheduled posting in wordpress works nicely.

I experimented for the first time posting ahead on my business blog today and it went off without a hitch. It's actually interesting splitting up my writing to two different blogs and I think it was a wise move to choose two different platforms. It makes it more difficult for inappropriate subjects to bleed over, as nonsensical as that may sound. Having a different set of tools puts my mind in a different mood.

Technical notice

I just set up feedburner on this blog so if you're consuming the information here via RSS/Atom and something just hiccupped, that's what's going on. Please comment below if there is any difficulty.

Bitvisitor payment delays

Bitvisitor seems to be having payment problems again. They've had periods where they hiccuped and delayed payments for a time before and it's happening again now. This time, they've changed the code so you can actually see how late they are. The promise payment every 60uBTC, here's how far behind they are on my account.

Balance: 189.352 uBTC - Payment is sent every 60 uBTC!

This translates out to about a week behind promises. Since the amount is so small and they've recovered from these hiccups before, I'm still grinding out these little ad views anyway for now.  I'm sure a lot of their viewers are. Past a certain point it starts to get to be a problem and it's time to cut them loose. Any ideas on what an appropriate level might be?

Update: And they finally released the balance at 193.35 uBTC on the 20th at 9PM. It's a classic bitvisitor hiccup and exactly the sort of problem that bitcoin transactions regularly have.

21st Century Government - The Homestretch

I'm walking backwards, laying out a practical pathway to get to a decent vision of 21st century governance. The home stretch is all about implementing consensus to create 21st century governance. This is a consensus that doesn't currently exist but at this phase, the vision's been laid out, talked out, consensus has been forged and a critical mass of the politicians have come on board or been booted from office. Expectations have been reset and now it is time to get on with the work.

Actually implementing 21st century governance is exactly the sort of mid level work that many are claiming is disappearing and will never be seen again. Grabbing data and creating scripts to reformat for import, creating reports and even dashboards takes more patience than intelligence. It's production, and like most repetitive production does not require extremely high levels of intelligence to execute. Ordinary education, ordinary workers can accomplish the vast bulk of this job.

On the government end this is mostly accomplished by adding in requirements for openness into their normal IT development schedules and not with flashy big bang exercises that will suck up all their scarce IT dollars. After all, the only thing that they need do on their end is dump the raw data in a directory. It's such a simple task that it's going to be hard to explain why they would resist doing it. Once they do it, then it's up to the private sector to interpret the data into something that everybody can use.

Sometimes great work requires great tools

Sometimes great work does not require great tools. But other times it does. Here's where I'm somewhat departing from Seth Godin. He's right to say that creativity can produce even in the absence of tools. What is produced, however, is to some extent dictated by tools.

If what you are doing requires machine production tolerances down to 0.5mm and society hasn't invented that yet, that particular project simply is not going to get done. This doesn't stop you from doing great work that doesn't require the use of tools that haven't been invented yet, nor does it necessarily stop you from inventing the tools. But until the prerequisite technology is invented, by you or someone else, no project that requires them is going forward.

Tool capability level channels your creativity into projects that can be accomplished by what is available. This is why I often get very excited about tools. It is not the tool itself that provokes my enthusiasm so much as the vistas of creativity that become possible.