Science, Science Fiction

The end of the space shuttle

Leave a comment

A timely post on QT3 today reminded me that the venerable space shuttle is scheduled for retirement this year. The current mission by the Atlantis is its last one. The last mission for Discovery is in September later this year and the last mission for Endeavor will be in November. Huge crowds are expected at Cape Canaveral for these final two launches. After that, NASA will be relying on Russian spacecraft for its missions until the alternatives currently under development by private companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences come to fruition.

It’s sort of hard to believe that the space shuttle has been in service for close to 30 years now given that it’s such a icon of technology and humanity’s ambitions for space. Reading through its extensive Wikipedia page however, it’s sobering to realize how much of it is still based on 1970s technology. Its computers are probably less powerful than the cheapest netbooks you can buy today. Until 2007, the shuttles could not even be used in missions that started at the end of December and ended in January of the next year as the software couldn’t handle the transition to a new year.

Yet back in the 1980s, the space shuttle seemed like only a foretaste of greater things to come. I remember newspaper articles crowing about space habitats and colonies, complete with artists’ renditions of such wonders as torus-shaped stations large enough to create their own gravity and grow their own crops. It’s pretty humbling how far back we’ve scaled our ambitions since then. In an age when governments are busy dealing with economic recessions and unemployment, it seems that even keeping the International Space Station from falling out of the sky is an achievement.

Even my own views on space exploration have come a long way since I was a kid. Back then, I’d have happily voted for any big ticket space project, regardless of cost. Nowadays, I see that these projects yield relatively few benefits other than prestige and that actually useful scientific work can be better performed with unmanned spacecraft and at far lower cost. It’s clever stuff like the Mars Pathfinder that is the future of NASA while the development of manned spacecraft should depend on its ability to sustain itself financially through space tourism.

Of course, the space shuttle has more than earned its place in history even if it did cost too much and didn’t do as much real science as its boosters like to pretend. It’s so recognizable and has fueled so many dreams that it simply can’t be otherwise. I understand that one of the shuttles is to be given to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum while the two others will be sold off to private collectors. It would be interesting to see in whose hands they end being.

News & Politics

European hypocrisy in Greek crisis

1 Comment

So Greece is getting a bailout amounting to 750 billion Euros despite Angela Merkel swearing up and down that it wouldn’t happen. At least she’s getting some serious heat in Germany over it and it looks as if her days in political office are numbered. Apparently she gave in because she did not want to go down in history as the Chancellor who caused the Euro project to fail.

In the meantime, American commentators, such as Paul Krugman, have been talking up the disadvantages of the European currency union, which seems a bit mean spirited, unless you recall that the Europeans made similarly snide remarks about the health of American capitalism in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage blow up. What a difference a year makes!

More fun stuff:

  • Remember when the ratings agencies were blamed for the financial crisis and accused of conflict of interest issues due to rating CDO products too leniently? Now, they’re being blamed for rating European sovereign bonds too harshly. The rationale given is that the agencies are American, hence they must hate Europe.
  • European leaders have been outdoing each other attacking speculators for bringing about the current crisis in the first place, yet the Belgian finance minister has boasted that his country would make a profit on the loans it would make to Greece due to the spread between the rates Belgium pays for loans and the rates Greece needs to pay. As The Economist notes, it looks like speculation is not evil so long as governments are the ones doing it.

I’ve been previously been of the opinion that unified currencies are great. They should reduce cross border transaction costs and free central banks from government meddling. The corollary however is that governments then lose access to the toolbox of monetary policy to influence the economy. This should be okay, provided that governments are able to responsibly use the fiscal p0licy tools still available to them but I guess asking that governments be fiscally disciplined is too much of a pipe dream. This is why governments are forever hooked on the easy ways out of problems by playing with interest rates and devaluing their currencies.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (April ’10)

Leave a comment

A little late this month because I chose to write something about Ip Man 2 first this week. Four articles this time around with three of them on biology and the last one on astronomy. We’ll start with the more innocuous of the three biology articles first.

This is an article that appeared in Discover and concerns itself with gut bacteria, specifically those found inside of Japanese people. The Japanese as we all know, eat quite a lot of sushi and one of the main ingredients of sushi is seaweed. What most of us probably don’t know is that sea algae such as seaweed is a bit different from land-based plants and contain special sulphur-rich carbohydrates that are difficult for most of us to digest.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (April ’10) →

Films & Television

Ip Man 2

3 Comments

Despite all of the bad things that I had to say about the first film, Ip Man was still genuinely enjoyable due to the freshness and authenticity of its martial arts scenes. I am sad to say that this is not true of the sequel. While there is certainly a frisson of thrill as one anticipates the showdown between Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung, the overall quality of the fights in the sequel is dramatically lower, making it a thoroughly average martial arts film.

One of the reasons why the first film was so exciting was because it featured martial artists with styles that were visibly and palpably different one from the other, even to the inexpert eyes of martial arts laymen. This was possible because the film frequently used full body shots of the actors and long camera takes. This contributed to the feeling of the fights being authentic and grand, making every punch and every kick feel real and visceral.

Continue reading Ip Man 2 →

News & Politics, Politics

Subsidized holidays for Europeans

Leave a comment

Okay, the headline is pure sensationalism and the anti-EU slant is blatant since this is an article from the Murdoch-owned The Times, but even after filtering out the propaganda, I think it’s still a pretty dire example of EU socialism. It’s a scheme to subsidize holiday travel for under-privileged citizens of the EU. From the article:

The scheme, which could cost hundreds of millions of pounds a year, is intended to promote a sense of pride in European culture, bridge the north-south divide in the continent and prop up resorts in their off-season.

Tajani, who unveiled his plan last week at a ministerial conference in Madrid, believes the days when holidays were a luxury have gone. “Travelling for tourism today is a right. The way we spend our holidays is a formidable indicator of our quality of life,” he said.

Now, this might not sound so bad if you think of it as just another form of economic stimulus though you’d think that they’d come up with better ideas to stimulate the economy than funding subsidies. How about throwing more money into education and job retraining programs instead? But what is really annoying is that the EU still wants to increase its expenses when the budgets of many of its member countries aren’t in such hot shape. Greece recently had one of its worst bond sales ever and there’s now a real chance that it could get ejected from the Euro.

The talk of traveling for tourism being a right also makes it a good case for making a distinction between positive and negative rights. I don’t really want to go into this debate again but it’s just one more example of how adding more and more “rights” just dilutes the really fundamental ones that actually deserve the moniker.

Science

The scam of beauty foods

5 Comments

My wife was introduced to collagen supplements over the weekend, which rang all of my skeptical alarm bells. I’ve actually heard of this before (LYN is full of people trying to sell this kind of stuff) but I never took the time to think about them properly. Once you do however, it’s immediately obvious to me that there’s something fishy about the whole idea.

The basic concept is that collagen is the main protein that is used to construct connective tissues in animals and is hence a vital component of skin tissue. However, as the body ages, collagen production slows down and the degradation of collagen causes aging. Therefore, the idea goes, taking collagen supplements orally should replenish the body’s supply and retard the formation of wrinkles.

Except that biology doesn’t work that way. Collagen is a type of protein and your body needs to create all of its own protein for it to use. In fact, it doesn’t matter what you put into your stomach as your stomach acids will just digest it and turn it into more basic substances. This is the reason why the protein supplements that bodybuilders use to build muscle don’t contain pure protein. Instead, they contain amino acids, the basic building blocks from which all proteins, including collagen, are made.

As this New York Times article points out, it’s not as if collagen supplements don’t do anything. It’s just that the body treats them as a source of protein like any other and breaks them down into amino acids which it can then use to build proteins of its own. You might as well just eat a piece of chicken and it would work just as well but be much cheaper. If you want a megadose of collagen, you might try eating gelatin based desserts, which are almost pure collagen.

What’s sad is that this sort of misinformation is pervasive in the cosmetics and beauty foods industry. While manufacturers make all sorts of claims about the effectiveness and health benefits of their products, most people are not aware that generally such claims are not verified by independent authorities. This is unlike the situation for pharmaceutical drugs where manufacturers must be able to prove to the government that they work as claimed before being allowed to sell them.

Consumers are also either not scientifically literate enough or lack the critical thinking skills needed to evaluate the various claims made by manufacturers. In the Internet age, it is easy enough to Google for more information when you’re in doubt, but it seems that few people make it a habit. This allows companies to get away with selling products that are the modern equivalent of snake oil, but dressed up in scientific language.

Religion

British atheists call for arrest of Pope Benedict XVI

Leave a comment

Well, this is a rather dramatic turn of events. The article’s title is a bit of an exaggeration as Richard Dawkins has since clarified that the idea came mainly from Christopher Hitchens and he never actually said that he would personally arrest the Pope, but the basic facts remain the same. Two lawyers, Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens, will try to bring the Pope to justice for his role in covering up child abuse cases involving clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. They will either convince the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch a civil suit of their own or have the case referred to the International Criminal Case.

The case will of course be complicated by the embarrassment that this will bring to the British government and the fact that the Pope is the head of state of the Vatican City, but the current plan is for something to be ready by the time of the Pope’s planned visit to the UK in September later this year. This may end up as being no more than a publicity stunt and the British atheists seem to happy if all that they’ve managed to achieve is to force the Pope to cancel the trip.

Continue reading British atheists call for arrest of Pope Benedict XVI →

The unexamined life is a life not worth living