Month: September 2012

Project Orion: We gotta get out of this place / If it’s the last thing we ever do

As a species, at some point we’re going to need to get off this rock and find another suitable place to live. The problem, of course, is that the vast distances involved in space travel that goddamn rule about not traveling faster than the speed of light really limit our options.

Project Orion was an effort in the 1950s to try to push those limits as far as possible. Proposed by physicist Stanislaw Ulam in 1946 and then led by Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson, the goal of Project Orion was to create a space faring vehicle that could attain a significant fraction of the speed of light.

You can’t do this with chemical rockets, solar sails have obvious problems for long range exploration, and anti-matter engines are unforgiving of even the tinniest of mistakes. So what’s a potential spacefaring race to do? Nuke your way to the nearest star. Seriously.

Basically you have a cylindrical shape ship with a specially designed rear pusher plate (like in the NASA-produced artist’s depiction to the right) that is designed to transfer the energy from nearby nuclear explosions into momentum that accelerates the ship.

Then you just have to set off a series of nuclear explosions. Lots of nuclear explosions. As in setting off 300,000 one-megaton devices one after the other every 3 seconds for 36 days. Hypothetically, that would get the interstellar ship accelerated to a rate of 8 to 10 percent of the speed of light (half that if you want to include enough fuel to slow down once you arrive near where you’re going).

Ten-percent of the speed of light puts Alpha Centauri at a one-way trip of 44 years.

Dyson, Taylor and others worked on the project until 1964 and found solutions to a number of technical problems that would have to be overcome, such as how to deal with the inevitable failed nuclear detonation. They even did some tests using conventional explosions to propel a test launch vehicle.

The program came to an end with the signing of the Comprehensive-Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty which forbid the use of all nuclear testing/detonation that was not conducted underground. According to Wikipedia, the United States tried to insert an exception for nuclear-powered space flight but the Soviets weren’t having any of that.

Klingon Disruptor

This Klingon Disruptor from Diamond Toys is a nice companion to the various phasers and other lower-end Star Trek replicas the company has come out with the past few years. Personally, while I have a lot of Star Trek toys and replicas, Star Trek is something I’ve come to love to hate rather than just love over the years.

Light Pollution — The Nerd Version

I recently bought a Vantec SATA to USB 3.0 enclosure and put a WD Caviar Black hard drive in it. So far its been excellent. I bought it for recording video game footage with FRAPS, and CrystalDiskMark puts the sequential write speed at 127mb/s—good enough for me.

But what is with the explosion of lights on every piece of computer hardware these days? It isn’t enough that the Vantec enclosure as a power or status light, but instead it has a blue LED that runs the entire length of the case.
Vantec is very proud of the light. According to the manual that came with the enclosure, its specifications include (emphasis added),

Attractive Blue LED Indicates Power & HDD Activity

Really? Hey baby, what’s an attractive LED like you doing in a place like this?

Anyway, I hate the proliferation of lights. At least give the end user the option to turn them off and on without having to turn the device itself off and on. Vantec includes a physical fan control, presumably for folks who don’t want the additional noise from the fan, so why not a physical LED control?

The Alternative World Drug Report

The Alternative World Drug Report was created as an alternative counterpoint to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2012 World Drug Report (12.5mb PDF).

According to the Alternative World Drug Report’s website,

In its 2008 World Drug Report, the UNODC acknowledged that choosing an enforcement-based approach was having a range of negative “unintended consequences”, including: the creation of a vast criminal market, displacement of the illegal drugs trade to new areas, diversion of funding from health, and the stigmatisation of users.

It is unacceptable that neither the UN or its member governments have meaningfully assessed these unintended consequences to establish whether they outweigh the intended consequences of the current global drug control system, and that they are not documented in the UNODC’s flagship annual World Drug Report.

This groundbreaking Alternative World Drug Report fills this gap in government and UN evaluations by detailing the full range of negative impacts resulting from choosing an enforcement-led approach.

The 108-page Alternative World Drug Report is available as a PDF (2mb PDF) and is released under a Creative Commons license.