Tech Tuesday 12/19 – Space Fashion Edition
Aerospace
AERO1 – About damn time. I remember what an absolute clusterfish this was getting it all rolling (because the USAF was being a whiny git), and what a clusterfish development was, largely because of hard it is to upgrade technology that feature heavily in the massive regulatory process of commercial airliners.
AERO2 – I’m honestly surprised this hasn’t been done before. I can only assume that we’ve finally reached a state of the art in electric motors where the necessary torque output is finally high enough and the motor weight low enough to make this feasible.
AERO3 – Everything you’d want to know about Space Suits. As materials improve, so do space suits.
AERO4 – How low does it go? (about 350km, it seems).
AERO5 – Aircraft controls through thrust vectoring. Why not, it’s how it’s done in space (well, that and gyros)?
AERO6 – SpaceX flies the first mission using a recycled rocket.
Bio/Medical
BIO1 – A Brazilian amphibian may hold the key to reversing liver damage.
BIO2 – The needle free injector evolves.
BIO3 – Nano-particles can find cancer long before traditional imaging can.
BIO4 – Taking a page from the electric eel to power implants.
Energy
ENRG1 – A piezoelectric amino acid that is much cheaper to produce than ceramic piezoelectric materials.
Materials
MAT1 – The ultimate reversible jacket.
MAT2 – A new metallic glass. A metal glass is metal that is not allowed to form a crystalline structure, so it remains amorphous. The new process furthers the amorphous nature by further limiting the crystal structure.
MAT3 – Clear frosted glass, just add water. Or if you want reflective glass to be clear, just add oil of wintergreen.
Physics
PHYS1 – Excitonium sounds like something made up for a Hollywood movie or comic book (Unobtanium, anyone?). Apparently, it’s a real thing.
Technology
TECH1 – 3D printing wifi sensors that work without batteries.
TECH2 – 3D printing bacteria laden tattoos. Gotta use bacteria because they can actually survive being printed.
TECH3 – 3D printing in three dimensions. Using holograms, because holograms are cool.
TECH4 – NVIDIA has a new GPU for scientific simulations. We’ve long kicked around the idea of using GPUs to run sims, but in the end, the wide range of variation among manufacturers made the problem not worth the effort. Some GPUs work great with common parallelization libraries and schemas, some don’t. And there is a lot of variation among floating point operations and math co-processors, such that it is common to get two very different sets of results from two different GPus for the same simulation. NVIDIA is smart to develop a single GPU/family of GPUs for scientific simulations, it’ll give them the ability to develop the standard others will have to follow if they want into that market.
TECH5 – I wish I had this on my car, might have helped figure out when someone punched a hole in the front fairing (I think someone backed into my car on the street, but I have no idea when it happened).
TECH6 – Exosuits have long been a staple of military SciFi, but in reality, they are finding their initial footing in warehouses and factory floors.
Transportation
TRANS1 – Ride-sharing is reducing the reliance on ambulances, and that can be a good thing.
Weird, Wacky, and Wonderful
WWW1 – This is mostly just pictures, rather than discussion about architectural innovation. I like the Lego house, and I really like the re-purposed grain silos.
WWW2 – Part of me would love it if the future had this kind of style.
WWW3 – As if I needed another reason to hate tailgaters.
Image by the_jetboy 
ADRO3 – an interesting interview with Nicholas de Monchaux author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo. From the interview:
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Tech 3:
See this is where I weave 3D printing, together with a UBI and liberal IP laws into my Distributionist Social Justice utopia.
A post-scarcity society of decentralized production, with cottage industry of makers and artisans, freed from the crushing cycle of debt and consumerism, and freed from the need to live in expensive cities.
Instead of mass production, we would have individualized bespoke production and universal land ownership.
Hey, its my fantasy- deal with it.Report
I like your fantasy. It’s not that far from the original Star Trek, in fact. 😉
My first thought in reading that was one more baby step toward replicators.Report
@chip-daniels One assumes you’ve read Walkaway? If not, I think you might dig it. Not because it directly agrees with you, but it’s playing with the same constructs.Report
I will have to try it out- Thanks!Report
I’m grumpy this morning, but will limit myself to what I think is your biggest hurdle: energy. Neither automation nor 3D printing get around the energy needed to change matter from one form to another, or to move it from place to place. (And 3D printing consumes significantly more energy per item produced than many other methods.) Post-scarcity societies almost by definition postulate free nearly-unlimited high-quality energy.Report
One of the reasons what Chip envisions is appealing is a lot of companies charge a premium on parts versus the entire assembly. There is a considerable price premium on, say, a piece of plastic fairing for your car when you have to buy the piece as a replacement part, as opposed to what the factory pays per part to mount it on the car at production.
And, of course, that price premium increases as the car ages and the part becomes scarce. At some point, it would become cheaper/faster to just print the thing at home, than it would to find out who has it and order it, or prowl a boneyard for it, save for the fact that the manufacturer has the 3D file locked up in IP*.
What I find appealing isn’t being able to make a quickie part for my car, it’s being able to make something unique for my car, or being able to use a printer to make unique things for a one off that I want to build. It’s an artisan kind of ideal, rather than a Federation Replicator.
*Maybe, I don’t know how diligently manufacturers protect the after market, although secondary makers who paid for the rights probably do.Report
@oscar-gordon @michael-cain
I can’t speak to the energy aspect of this, but I think the convergence of different technologies and political ideas allows for a radical change, similar to how mechanized power coupled with Enlightenment ideas helped bring about the Industrial Revolution, as well as the political concepts embedded in socialism and capitalism.
Centralized, mass organizations of people made possible by centralized mass production giving rise to massive accumulations of capital made centralized government a logical response;
When the production of things is decentralized and highly variegated, how would that affect the governmental structure?Report
Hey, I’m all for decentralizing power, warts and all. But there are a lot of moving parts that have to be decentralized.Report
Greater California, encompassing basically the 11 states in the Western Interconnect, as an independent country :^) I claim that’s the scope at which an all-renewable electricity supply, and water supplies, make sense.Report
Basically, split the USA in two at the Continental Divide?Report
For various reasons, down the center of the Great Plains: (1) matches existing state borders better; (2) matches existing East/West Interconnect split in the electric grid much better; and (3) my friend the anthropologist claims (and I agree) that the east/west cultural changes are between the east and west edges of the Plains, not along the Divide.Report
You know, it’s been a long time since I annoyed folks with cartograms. A cartogram turns out to be useful for illustrating the difference between drawing the dividing line down the center of the Great Plains versus following the Continental Divide. Graphic is here, you’ll probably want to download into a separate window.
Start with a map of the 48 contiguous states (plus DC). Overlay a uniform rectangular mesh rather than using county boundaries, since county boundaries are irregular and vary widely in size. That’s the top image. Then distort the map and mesh to equalize population densities [1] — areas with high density expand (the mesh lines are farther apart), those with low densities contract (mesh lines get closer together). The distortion is extreme enough that it can be difficult to recognize specific areas, even with the (distorted) state borders included. With a little practice, though, one can pick out which “bulges” are which major metro areas.
The left of the two vertical green lines is roughly the Continental Divide; the right one is roughly the Great Plains center. (In the flat image, these would be arcs rather than straight lines.) In between the lines are three bulging metro areas: Front Range Colorado, Albuquerque/Santa Fe, and El Paso. Deciding which east-west dividing line to use is largely a matter of deciding how to classify those three.
Why do I think they are western? Among other things, elevation (all >3500 ft), dry (west of the line where any kind of dryland farming is feasible), African-Americans are not the largest minority group by a substantial margin, they are in areas that lack the small-town-every-few-miles settlement pattern prevalent east of the Great Plains, and at least from time to time you can take some version of a snow and mountain picture in all of them.
[1] I used county populations since that information is readily available. There are still issues. Southern California should be bulging more near the coast and less near the Nevada and Arizona borders because average values for the large counties (eg, Riverside and San Bernardino) don’t accurately reflect the concentration of people.Report
There was supposed to be a link to a El Paso snow and mountain picture in there.Report
Yeah it’s appealing and also very similar to, the TNG and later portrayal of the United Federation of Planets (or at the minimum the Earth portion of it).Report
@chip-daniels
This is the sort of thinking that I wish more people were doing. Just because Market capitalism is the best economic model we have yet created, doesn’t mean that will always be true. New ideas and technologies may at some point call for a new economic paradigm, so it’s good to see people thinking about what it might be.Report
I keep thinking about how we are trapped in 20th century thinking, where everything revolves around the epic struggle over economic theories.
Its like how in those few centuries of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, virtually every conflict in Europe had as its underlying theme, Catholic versus Protestant.
A time traveler dropping into the war for Scottish independence in 1752 who asked whether these rebels were socialist or capitalist, would have been greeted with puzzled looks.
History never stands still, and I believe that we are witnessing the ending of the Industrial Age, the ending of totalizing economic theories, and its evolution into something else, which I won’t pretend to be able to foresee.Report
@chip-daniels
Agreed, I suspect the political conflicts of future centuries will be utterly incomprehensible to us, while ours will look as quaint to them as the disagreements between thevFederalists and the Democratic-Republicans.Report
If you would like to hear the audio of what happened when Chuck Yeager discovered inertia coupling, it’s here.
Holy Crap.Report
I wouldn’t want to be the guy who had to clean out the cockpit after that test flight.Report
Was this the same event dramatized in The Right Stuff?Report
I think so? This is the crash at the end? I think? (Which also addresses Oscar’s point.)Report
No, it was mid-way through the movie.Report
Oh no, having your aircraft try to rip itself into a flat spin or worse is plenty harrowing enough to fill your flightsuit. No need to execute an uncontrolled intercept into terrain.Report
Yep, it’s Yeager’s second flight that we see depicted, the one where he goes into a flat spin and has to punch out.
That movie is a massive local favorite, as you might imagine: it is set at and was mostly filmed right around here. And yes, there are streets on base named for fallen pilots to this day. Two major thoroughfares in our community are also named for Columbia and Challenger; all the Shuttles were built here.Report
Aero4 – I’m surprised how fast the temperature goes up in that animation of ‘atmospheric’ flight, but it could be that it’s providing a slightly misleading sense of scale.Report
It is in Kelvin, and it’s going from cold as space to really hot (400+ K). Of course, the pressure should also be displayed, because I’m betting it’s climbing sharply as well (the ‘probe’ is over 200 km deep into the clouds), which makes the temperature rise not so dramatic.Report
That’s still something I wouldn’t have expected – that you can be above 100 degrees C that far out in the solar system at a still relatively shallow depth in the Jovian atmosphere. Does the higher gravity just lead to that much more pressure? Which then leads to a higher temperature due to friction I guess?
(200 km is twice Earth’s Karman line, though I don’t think the Karman line is that ‘scientific’ in terms of definition)Report
Depends on where you are.Report