WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
A bit of an odd mix this week – I was thinking about the insane idea of a British spaceport, and one thing led to another... Other things covered include a self-washing car, some interesting Royal Society lectures in London and New York, the 50th birthday of the Basic computer language, a guitar two thirds of a mile long, and queues to get into the UK. URLs include SEC demands, hiding from Big Data, An XP patch from Microsoft (yes, really), and a Heartbleed patch for SCADA networks.
There may not be an issue next week – this is a difficult month, but I’ll see what I can do.
Analysis: A Brit Spaceport? WTF!
I just had to groan when I saw the UK government’s latest brainless-wave – building a space port in the UK. We don’t even have a space program, we abandoned that program over 50 years ago. Not only that, but the physical aspects of the UK make it probably the worst place in the whole world to site a space station.
Let me give you a few reasons why this is the case...
First, at the moment, you need good weather to fire off rockets. How often do you see NASA reports of launch delays because of weather? And that’s from launches in Florida where Brits go on holiday to get some decent weather! The UK doesn’t have the worst weather in the world in terms of extreme weather, but it does have some of the most unpredictable weather in the world.
This is because the UK lies on the junction of three of the world’s biggest weather systems: the north polar system (that’s the cold bit), the north Atlantic system (that’s the wet bit) and the north African sub-tropical system (that’s the warm bit). Rumour has it that the British Empire was founded by Brits trying to get some sunshine. Incidentally, when we Brits did have a space program, we put our launch site in Australia, a place well known for more sunshine than you ever want to encounter...
Second, there is the question of getting into space. It’s not that difficult. As the Astronomer Fred Hoyle once pointed out, “Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.” What he didn’t mention is that the problem isn’t the going up – it’s the staying there when you get up! This is done by going around the earth at a fast clip – something known as orbital velocity.
Now, as my readers will know, the earth rotates. In fact looking down from above the North Pole it rotates in a counter-clockwise direction. This means that if you launch in an easterly direction (the direction in which the earth is moving) you get a nice boost in your orbital velocity for free. In fact, a rocket sitting on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral is already moving in the right direction at a cool 800 miles/hour! (By way did you know the area code for Cape Canaveral is 3-2-1 ?)
OK – so when we fire the rocket east from Cape Canaveral not only do we get a bonus 800 mph, but we are also launching out to sea – a wide bit of water called the mid-Atlantic into which the bits can fall harmlessly if something goes wrong, and it also means empty fuel tanks don’t land on people’s heads.
We here in the UK also border on a wide bit of ocean, but, unfortunately, it’s to the west of us, which means that if we fire the rockets in that direction, not only will we lose the rotation advantage, but will actually start off moving in the wrong direction, and have to overcome that. Firing rockets off to the east is not recommended. There is, by my reckoning, something like 7,000 miles of land belonging to other people, including the cities of Oslo, Stockholm, and Moscow, all of whom would take exception to us dropping stray bits of spacecraft on their heads.
There’s also the fact that the further away from the equator you are the less bonus you get from the spin if you are launching east. The UK lies astride the 53rd parallel, Cape Canaveral is just south of the 29th parallel. The distance matters. I don’t know exactly how much difference it makes but I’d guess you’re looking at only half the boost that Cape Canaveral gets for a site in the UK. For the record, the European Space Agency launching site in Kourou, French Guiana, is a mere 4 degrees above the equator...
Nonetheless the government’s announcement that it was looking for a suitable site sparked a lot of interest in out of the way places like Newquay in Cornwall. Newquay is a little fishing village in the far southwest of England with bad transport links and a small summer tourist trade from surfers – wet suits not optional, the water is cold. My mate Ron’s parents retired there, and his sister ran a bed and breakfast place there for a while. If they really think that the UK government is going to buy them a spaceport, then I’ve got a nice bridge over the Thames in London that I’d be willing to sell them at a knock down price!
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/blogs/britain-seeking-remote-site-for-first-spaceport
http://www.cornishguardian.co.uk/Newquay-Airport-home-Britain-s-spaceport/story-21043196-detail/story.html
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Launchers/Europe_s_Spaceport/Europe_s_Spaceport2
Shorts:
And following on from that, a taste of what you can expect if you do arrive in the UK in a spacecraft... At the start of this month the UK Border Agency’s computers failed, resulting in queues up to 2,000 long for travellers as the immigration officials laboriously typed in the details by hand. Welcome to hi-tech Britain.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/01/computer_chaos_causes_mayhem_at_british_border/
(Cue sounds of Rose Royce singing ‘Car Wash’ from 1976) I see that Nissan have invented a ‘self cleaning’ paint for cars. Having gone out to my car in the morning and discovered a load of Saharan sand brought down by the rain on it (hey, could you have launches delayed by sand?) I would certainly have found it useful. The process is, apparently, to make a water repellent paint so that the dirt carried by the water doesn’t stick to it in the first place. Interesting idea, and from the video it seems to work. What about the bits you can’t paint over, like the headlights and windscreen, though? I think I’ll wait a while and see how other people find it before rushing out and buying a new car.
http://mashable.com/2014/04/25/self-cleaning-nissan-note/
Homework:
This week I’d like to tell you about some free meetings organized by the Royal Society, the UK’s premier scientific institution. The lectures are always worth going to, since they have access to the top scientists to give talks.
The first one is in New York on 29tMay at the Cooper Union, and it’s a discussion on writing about science for the technically untrained. I’d love to go to that one, but, sadly, I won’t be in New York.
The second is in London and is, how shall I put it, a little more hard core science, and it’s about the famous Higgs Boson. That’s in the Royal Society Building, on 20 May, and the panel sports an impressive looking list of physicists, and a journalist. I might well try and get to this one myself.
The final one is also in London at the Royal Society building and it’s a talk about whether learning maths changes the way we think. That sounds like it will be really interesting – it’s on 19 May. It’s probably a toss up whether I go to the Higgs or this one, since they are on successive days.
https://royalsociety.org/events/2014/05/science-and-story/
https://royalsociety.org/events/2014/we-have-a-discovery/
https://royalsociety.org/events/2014/learning-maths/
For Geeks:
Basic is 50 years old this month. Virtually everyone of my generation started to program by learning Basic. The first program I ever wrote was in Basic – an airport simulation game. The first commercial program I ever wrote, a magazine subscription and billing program, was in Basic – and it worked first time and had no bugs. It was still in use five years later when they rang me up to see if I knew where they could get a replacement disk drive. Try doing that with a modern programming language!
I mourn its passing, though it’s difficult to see where it would fit into computer culture now. Sad, but for everything there is an end – even computer languages.
http://time.com/69316/basic/
Here’s a classic created by Pedro Martin Ureta. It’s a picture of a guitar ‘painted’ by a forest two thirds of a mile long in the middle of Argentinian farmland. In fact it’s big enough that you can see it from space! Take a look.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=83561&src=eoa-iotd
Scanner:
SEC requests financial firms’ security details
http://www.darkreading.com/banking-finance/sec-requests-financial-firms-security-details/d/d-id/1234896
How one woman hid her pregnancy from Big Data
http://mashable.com/2014/04/26/big-data-pregnancy/
Microsoft: You know we said NO MORE XP PATCHES? Well ...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/01/internet_explorer_patch/
Siemens patches Heartbleed in popular SCADA system
http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/siemens-patches-heartbleed-in-popular-scada-system-241539
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Asti, Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
4 May 2014
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
