Author: Robert Zimmerman

China plans first commercial rocket company

9:13 am

The competition heats up: A Chinese company has announced plans to start a new commercial rocket company to compete for the burgeoning space launch market.

China Sanjiang Space Group Co. is preparing to enter the commercial-rocket business with a launch slated for 2017, Xinhua reported Tuesday, citing the company’s chief engineer Hu Shengyun. Some Internet companies have expressed interest in collaborating on commercial launches, Hu said.

The Kuaizhou-11, translated as “fast vessel,” rocket is being developed by the Fourth Academy of China Aerospace Science & Industry Corp., a major missile supplier to the People’s Liberation Army, according to China Daily.

There is not much information at the link. The rocket was first launched in 2013, but not much has been revealed about it since.

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What next for the computer Go program?

9:07 am

Link here.

The software uses neural networks to learn from experience. For example, to train for its Go match the computer program studied 30 million Go board positions from human games, then played itself again and again to improve its skills.

DeepMind’s founder and chief executive Demis Hassabis mentioned the possibility of training a version of AlphaGo using self-play alone, omitting the knowledge from human-expert games, at a conference last month. The firm created a program that learned to play less complex arcade games in this manner in 2015. Without a head start, AlphaGo would probably take much longer to learn, says Bengio — and might never beat the best human. But it’s an important step, he says, because humans learn with such little guidance.

DeepMind, based in London, also plans to venture beyond games. In February the company founded DeepMind Health and launched a collaboration with the UK National Health Service: its algorithms could eventually be applied to clinical data to improve diagnoses or treatment plans. Such applications pose different challenges from games, says Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington. “The universal thing about games is that you can collect an arbitrary amount of data,” he says — and that the program is constantly getting feedback on what’s a good or bad move by playing many games. But, in the messy real world, data — on rare diseases, say — might be scarcer, and even with common diseases, labelling the consequences of a decision as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ may not be straightforward.

Hassabis has said that DeepMind’s algorithms could give smartphone personal assistants a deeper understanding of users’ requests. And AI researchers see parallels between human dialogue and games: “Each person is making a play, and we have a sequence of turns, and each of us has an objective,” says Bengio. But they also caution that language and human interaction involve a lot more uncertainty.

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Fifteen-year-old pilot wins 250K at drone race

8:58 am

A fifteen year old has taken the top prize in the first World Drone Prix, held in Dubai on March 11 and 12.

Some 150 teams, hailing from all around the globe, started out in the World Drone Prix. Entrants were able to remotely qualify for the event via an American Idol-style submission video. Then, at an indoor qualifying track at Skydive Dubai, this number was whittled down to 32. The field then pitted their drones against one another on an outdoor, 591-m (646-yd) race track. The illuminated course tempts the more audacious competitors with Mario Kart-style shortcuts and makes for quite a spectacular setting with Dubai’s towering skyline in the background.

The 32 was cut down to a round of 16, followed by semi finals and then a grand finale on Saturday night. Bannister’s Tornado X-Blades Banni UK team claimed first place in the final, beating out Dubai Drone Tek, VS Meshcheriakov and Dutch Drone Race Team SQG , whose hauls of $125,000, $50,000 and $25,000, respectively, aren’t exactly pocket change either. By way of comparison, and to demonstrate how the sport has exploded in popularity, last year’s inaugural US Drone Racing National Championship offered a total purse of $25,000.

Be sure to check out the video at the link.

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Akatsuki to finally begin studying Venus

8:46 am

After a five year delay because its initial attempt to enter Venus orbit failed, the Japanese probe Akatsuki is finally about to begin science operations.

Its present orbit is less than ideal, passing 440,000km from the planet at its farthest point. That is roughly five times greater than initially planned and means the orbit time is now nine days. The change in orbit has affected the probe’s observation plan. Of its seven planned missions, Akatsuki will be able to complete only one: taking serial images of clouds. Unfortunately, the probe’s five cameras, each capturing images in different wavelengths, including infrared and ultraviolet, will not be able to provide the same resolution at this greater distance. Observing volcanic eruptions on the Venusian surface may also be difficult.

There is an upside to the situation, however. Takeshi Imamura, an associate professor at JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, says the longer orbital period means the probe will be able to collect longer continuous stretches of data.

Considering everything, it is magnificent that Akatsuki will be able to do any science at Venus at all.

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Pinpointing Curiosity’s location in Gale Crater

3:07 pm

Curiosity's traverse

The Curiosity science team recently released a new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image, showing Curiosity’s overall route since its landing on Mars in August 2012. I have posted a reduced version on the right.

Similarly, on the Curiosity website you can view this more detailed map of its traverse route. This map is updated regularly as Curiosity continues its climb up Mount Sharp.

Neither of these maps is to me very satisfying or useful, however. Neither shows the overall location of Curiosity within Gale Crater. Nor do they give one a sense of how far it is has come on its climb up the mountain. In fact, it is very unclear how close the rover actually is to the peak from either image.

Thus, I decided to do a little research to get some better context of Curiosity’s position and its overall journey.
» Read more

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Iran to launch satellite?

12:26 pm

Does this make you feel safer? Iran is preparing to launch a new ballistic missile capable of placing satellites in orbit.

The Simorgh rocket is a new development not seen previously. Its launch would also be a violation of a UN resolution forbidding Iran to do such research, but who cares about that? It wouldn’t be violation of the great deal Obama negotiated for us with Iran, a deal that they themselves never endorsed.

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Mathematicians discover pattern in prime numbers

9:18 am

The uncertainty of science: Mathematicians have discovered that, among the first billion prime numbers, there is a peculiar uneven distribution that is not random to the last digit of each prime.

[I]f the sequence were truly random, then a prime with 1 as its last digit should be followed by another prime ending in 1 one-quarter of the time. That’s because after the number 5, there are only four possibilities — 1, 3, 7 and 9 — for prime last digits. And these are, on average, equally represented among all primes, according to a theorem proved around the end of the nineteenth century, one of the results that underpin much of our understanding of the distribution of prime numbers. (Another is the prime number theorem, which quantifies how much rarer the primes become as numbers get larger.)

Instead, Lemke Oliver and Soundararajan saw that in the first billion primes, a 1 is followed by a 1 about 18% of the time, by a 3 or a 7 each 30% of the time, and by a 9 22% of the time. They found similar results when they started with primes that ended in 3, 7 or 9: variation, but with repeated last digits the least common. The bias persists but slowly decreases as numbers get larger.

As the article notes, this pattern does not appear to have any practical use, though it definitely fascinates everyone who hears about.

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ExoMars blasts off

8:46 am

The European-Russian Mars orbiter/lander ExoMars was successfully launched on a Proton rocket this morning from Baikonur.

It will still take most of today for the rocket’s Briz-M upper stage to complete several additional engine burns to send the spacecraft on its path to Mars, but the most difficult part of the launch has now passed.

The article does a nice job of summing up Russia’s most recent track record in trying to send spacecraft to Mars, thus illustrating the significance of today’s success:

For Russian scientists, the launch marks the resumption of a cooperative effort with Europe to explore the Solar System, after the failure of the Phobos-Grunt mission in 2011.The launch of the ExoMars-2016 spacecraft will be Proton’s first “interplanetary” assignment in almost two decades. During its previous attempt in November 1996, Proton’s upper stage failed, sending the precious Mars-96 spacecraft to a fiery desmise in the Earth’s atmosphere and effectively stalling Russia’s planetary exploration program for a generation.

Further in the past, during the Soviet era, the Russians tried numerous times to either orbit or land on Mars. Every mission failed. If this mission successfully reaches Mars and lands it will mark the first time the Russians played a major role in a mission to Mars that actually reached its goal and worked.

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It’s a sweep!

8:44 am

Google’s AlphaGo computer program today completed a three game sweep of Go professional champion Lee Sedol.

This might be the best quote from the article:

The algorithm seems to be holding back its power. Sometimes it plays moves that lose material because it is seeking simply to maximise its probability of reaching winning positions, rather than — as human players tend to do — maximise territorial gains. Jackson thinks that some of these odd-looking moves may have fooled Lee into underestimating the machine’s skills at the beginning of game 1 — which, I suppose, makes AlphaGo a kind of computerized hustler.

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Blue Origin engine testing update

9:33 am

The competition heats up: Jeff Bezos has released an update on Blue Origin’s test program of its BE-4 rocket engine, being built as a possible replacement for the Russian engines in the Atlas 5.

Bezos’s final comment kind of explains why Boeing has favored them over Aerojet Rocketdyne for this engine:

One of the many benefits of a privately funded engine development is that we can make and implement decisions quickly. Building these two new test cells is a $10 million commitment, and we as a team made the decision to move forward in 10 minutes. Less than three weeks later we were pouring the needed three-foot thick foundations. Private funding and rapid decision making are two of the reasons why the BE-4 is the fastest path to eliminate U.S. dependence on the Russian-made RD-180.

I imagine however a lot of Congressmen are upset by this. If they do it too cheaply or too quickly there will be far less opportunity to spend pork in their districts!

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Second SLS flight delayed until 2023?

9:14 am

Government in action! The second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, originally scheduled for around 2021 as the first manned mission, faces a possible delay of two years to 2023 so that it can be outfitted to launch the lander/orbiter planetary probe to Europa rather than flown manned.

The upper stage will be a new design that has never flown before. Thus, it has to be flown at least once unmanned to test it. Moreover, Congress in its most recent budget mandated that SLS be used for the Europa mission, probably in a team effort with NASA management to find a purpose for this missionless rocket that Congress has micromanaged from the beginning.

NASA has not officially decided to replace SLS’s original lunar manned mission for this second flight with the Europa mission, but I fully expect them to do so. They can’t fly the rocket with humans on it without first testing that upper stage engine at least once. Furthermore, the entire goal of SLS is not to fly missions but to employ people in Congressional districts. Delaying the first flight two years to outfit it for an unmanned planetary probe serves that absurd mission wonderfully.

The situation thus is that SLS will have a launch rate of once every five years, with a giant standing army of NASA and contractor employees paid during those years to do practically nothing while waiting for the next launch. While the article notes the high cost of building anything for SLS, it doesn’t explain that the reason things cost so much is that the government is slow-walking the construction of everything.

Note also that this means that Lockheed Martin will have an additional five years or so to finish its third Orion capsule. By that point the company will likely have spent about $20 billion, to build three capsules. Only a fool and a Congressman would consider this a good buy for the money.

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Democratic fascists force cancellation of Trump rally

12:25 am

Fascists: Upset that a Republican candidate they disagree with planned to hold a rally in Chicago, thousands of protesters threatened violence at tonight’s Trump rally and forced Trump to cancel the event.

In a telephone interview after postponing his event in Chicago, Trump said he didn’t “want to see people hurt or worse” at the rally, telling MSNBC, “I think we did the right thing.”

But Chicago police said they had sufficient manpower on scene to handle the situation and did not recommended Trump cancel the rally. That decision was made “independently” by the campaign, said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.

I am not a supporter of Donald Trump, but I will always defend to the death his right to speak. These protesters are merely an extension of the oppressive academic leftwing movement that tolerates no dissent, and does whatever it can to silence and squelch any opposition. That was their goal tonight, and they succeeded. And if you doubt my conclusions, consider this quote from the above article:

Veronica Kowalkowsky, an 18-year-old Trump supporter, said she had no ill will toward the protesters — but didn’t think they felt the same way. “I feel a lot of hate,” she said. “I haven’t said anything bad to anyone.”

Chicago community activist Quo Vadis said hundreds of protesters had positioned themselves in groups around the arena, and they intended to demonstrate right after Trump took the stage. Their goal, he said, was “for Donald to take the stage and to completely interrupt him. The plan is to shut Donald Trump all the way down.” [emphasis mine]

Sadly, it was Trump’s nonchalant encouragement of violence against protesters that helped inflame this situation. In some ways he is as guilty of misbehavior as are these protesters.

Update: Read this eye-witness account of what happened at the rally tonight, and weep for the death of free speech and freedom in America.

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The bigotry in the Democratic Party

10:53 am

The bigotry in the Democratic Party is not racial or ethnic. It is political. They hate Republicans so intensely that they are willing to let veterans die rather than work with Republicans to fix the problems at the Veterans Administration.

A federal employee union president is wracked with regret because veterans likely died at a time when she knew about gross misconduct within her Department of Veterans Affairs facility but didn’t tell congressional leaders because they were Republicans.

“If I would’ve gone to him two years ago, who knows what kind of lives could’ve been saved,” Germaine Clarno told a radio interviewer Monday, referring to the Republican leader of a VA subcommittee. Clarno, a lifelong Democrat and social worker at the Hines Veterans Affairs Hospital in Hines, Ill., has been president of the union representing doctors at the hospital since before the deadly wait-time scandal unfolded.

Several things about this story. First, my close reading of it does not indicate that this union official “is wracked with regret.” I think she is bothered, but not much more than that.

Second, as a union official she clearly works hand-in-glove with Democrats, who reciprocate that relationship. And in the case of the corruption at the Veterans Administration, that close working relationship between elected Democrats and unions was so strong that none of the Democrats this union official spoke to were willing to do anything to help sick vets, because to do so might do damage to the government unions and workers who were running the VA as their private little playground.

Third, the hatred of Republicans runs so deep in the Democratic Party and leftwing unions that not only were they unwilling to work with Republicans to help sick vets, they were willing to use the corruption at the VA to attack the very Republicans who had been the only politicians willing to deal with the problem. Consider for example this quote from the article:
» Read more

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March 10, 2016 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast

9:40 am

Embedded below the fold. I would dub this podcast an updated summary of what I in 2005 called the new colonial movement.

We are at the dawn of a new colonial age. The growing space competition between nations is in many ways very reminiscent of the 19th century competition between the European powers to colonize Africa and the South Pacific. In the 1800s, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom aggressively competed to carve up the undeveloped world. The result was foreign-run colonies controlling most of the Third World, for both good and ill, for almost a century.

Today, a new list of nations – India, China, Japan, Russia, Europe and the United States — are throwing their resources at space exploration in much the same way. Their goal, unstated but indisputable, is similar to the colonial powers of the 19th century: to obtain future domination over unclaimed territories in space.

This quest will, like the previous colonial efforts, be a long, complex and difficult historical process. Just as the colonial movement dominated much of 19th century politics and history, the growing desire by nations today to settle and control the solar system is also likely to dominate human history for centuries to come. The significant difference, however, is there are no aborigine peoples in space. The colonization of the solar system offers the hope of oppressing no one while bringing benefits to everyone who does it.

» Read more

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Good HDL cholesterol might not be so good

8:55 am

The uncertainty of science: New research now suggests an explanation for why in some cases having a high level of the supposedly good HDL cholesterol is not a good thing.

They think it is genetic, and that some people are missing the genes that help the HDL work to clean cholesterol out of the body. It is important however to recognize the uncertainties here. They still do not understand very well how this all works.

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