Fear of Little People : Faux Phobia?

Seemingly strange fears pepper the collective psyche of the human race, such as phobias of the sun (heliophobia), hair (chaetophobia) and even vegetables (lachanophobia).

A recent news article hints at the existence of a phobia of little people, a term referring those of smaller statures (4 feet 10 inches or shorter, according to Little People of America).

Ethan Wade, who describes himself as a little person, went inside a Greenville County, S.C. burger joint to correct his drive-through window order. As he walked up to the register, an employee behind the counter allegedly “threw her hands up in the air, started yelling ‘Oh, my gosh! Oh my gosh!’ and ran to the back of the restaurant, continuing to yell as she was in back of the restaurant,” Wayne is quoted as saying in an article published by WYFF4 of South Carolina.

The woman then claimed she had a phobia of little people.

So far, no such phobia is recognized by any institution — clinical or otherwise — despite the fact that many people claim their fear should be. Coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns, is likewise not medically recognized but commonly held to exist.

Recent studies show that humans are evolutionary equipped to acquire phobias of living things (such as bats, rats and snakes), but only time and more research can tell if little people fit into that framework.

The First Sound Recording

Thomas Edison gets all the credit for the first sound recording. But Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville beat him to the punch by 17 years.

Thing is, Scott (as he’s commonly called, if called anything at all) didn’t play his back. He created visual recordings of sound waves that he enjoyed looking at.

But some clever scientists have figured out how to play the recordings back. Check it out here, a scratchy rendition of the French folksong “Au Clair de la Lune” recorded on April 9, 1860 on a phonautogram and perhaps sung by his daughter.

NPR has a nice story about it.

Question for NASA Astronaut Canditates : How Long Can You Tread Water?

When I was in Houston attending the huge Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, I picked up an interesting NASA brochure, simply titled: Astronaut Candidate Program.

It’s a freshly printed handout, clearly dedicated to attracting future astronauts to the fold.

Couple of things caught my eye: “Following the shuttle retirement in 2010, trips to and from the ISS [International Space Station] will be aboard the Russian Soyuz vehicle. Consequently, astronauts must meet the Soyuz size requirements…standing height between 62 and 75 inches.”

So the shuttle going-out-of-business is a go for sure, at least according to the brochure.

Also I noted, if designated as an Astronaut Candidate, the person has to be able to swim 3 lengths of an 80-foot long (25-meter) pool without stopping, and then swim 3 lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes.

The good news is that there is no time limit for doing this…but you must also be able to tread water continuously for 10 minutes. Seemed semi-symbolic, to me, if budget cuts waylay NASA’s replanting of bootprints on the Moon and flinging flesh to Mars.

Meanwhile, check out all the current requirements at: www.nasajobs.nasa.gov/astronauts

The Axis of Evil Shortages : Food, Water, Feel

While we’re all worried about global warming, potentially epic shortages of food and water are sneaking up on us, both linked to the looming global shortage of fuel.

I’ve noted this problem before. But have you been to the grocery lately? Regular foodstuffs like eggs, milk and OJ are starting to put a noticeable pinch in the typical American pocketbook.

Sure, food prices fluctuate over time. But pricey food is a mounting and serious global problem.

In Asia, the price of rice has surged as much as 50 percent lately. Beef prices are rising around the world as soaring populations (many with a newfound taste for beef) demand more.

Rising fuel prices play a role in all these problems. And with oil destined to run out — pick your favorite time frame, but it will run out — the situation will only be exacerbated.

Meanwhile, numerous studies warn of looming water shortages in the United States and around the globe, owing to growing demand and prolonged regional droughts that’ll come thanks to climate change.

From an AP story today: The world’s cities are growing by 1 million people a week, and soon their aging water systems will not cope. “Something needs to change. It needs to change quickly, and it needs to be fairly dramatic,” said Carol A. Howe, an expert working for a UNESCO-led water development project.

And here’s one of the greatest ironies of our age: While we look for alternatives to fossil fuels, in the interest of weaning ourselves off a dwindling resource and also curbing climate change, we’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. Again, from AP: A report published this month by UNESCO-IHE, the Institute for Water Education in Delft, The Netherlands, says it takes 70-400 times as much water to create energy from biofuels as it does from fossil fuels.

Update, March 29: The New York Times has an in-depth overview of how food shortages have caused unrest and even riots in many countries. The story also notes rice exporters are holding back to take care of domestic needs, causing rice-importing countries further woe. Examples: Egypt instituted a six-month ban on rice exports; Vietnam cut rice exports by a quarter; India banned exporting all but the most expensive rice.

Dead Pet Dog to be Cloned

A company called RNL Bio plans to clone the pit bull using tissue taken from its ear before it died. A California woman will pay $150,000 for what’s being billed as the first order for pet dog cloning, the BBC reports.

The cloning will be done at Seoul National University, where the first cloned dog, Snuppy, was created in 2005.

Booger’s owner, Bernann McKunney, “is said to have been particularly attached to the dog, after it saved her life when another dog attacked her and bit off her arm,” according to the BBC report.

Rovers all over, meanwhile, are getting stem cell therapy, another thing we’re skittish about applying to humans.

Mummy Found in Bathtub

Reports of newfound mummies usually come from Egypt. This one is from Phoenix.

Police found the partly decomposed mummy in a bathtub, covered with dirt and sand. Investigators think the person’s been dead for years.

Rather than heading for a museum, this mummy is off to the Maricopa County Coroner’s Office. “The bathtub was removed with the body still inside,” according to The Arizona Republic.

Weightless Engagements Make Wallets Lighter

Engagement ring: $3,080.50

Zero-gravity flight for two: $8,295

Proposing in weightlessness: Priceless?

According to a recent boingboing post, a man recently proposed to his fiancee in zero-gravity. She accepted, of course.

The couple betrothed not in space, but rather in the belly of an airplane during one of several 24,000-foot (7.3-kilometer) nosedives to create the sensation of weightlessness. Their flight from ZERO G, the company that operates the parabolic-flying Boeing 727, cost $3,950 plus a 5 percent tax per head.

Perhaps surprisingly, their free-fall engagement isn’t the first. Last May, a New York City couple set a date during a similar parabolic flight and others came before them.

As for marriage in space? Yuri Malenchenko, now on board the International Space Station as a flight engineer, is the only human to get married during a bona fide spaceflight… kind of.

The first engagement or marriage with both parties present on orbit still awaits any brave — and wealthy — takers.

Spysat Smackdown: A touch of Star Wars History

All signals are apparently go for the attempted missile smackdown of the errant U.S. spysat and its frozen cargo of nasty-to-be-near hydrazine.

During a Valentine Day Department of Defense media briefing, NASA Administrator, Mike Griffin joined Deputy National Security Advisor James Jeffrey, as well as General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - all there to talk about steps to counter the failed National Reconnaissance Office spacecraft.

It turns out that the NASA chief has some history — not noted at the media briefing — in regards to head-on collisions in space.

Prior to his NASA top job, Griffin held a post at The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory where he was a Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) project engineer for the 1986 Delta 180 experiment. It was the first space intercept of a target during powered flight - codenamed Vector Sum.

That experiment involved two Delta upper stages that were intentionally collided in low Earth orbit, orbital debris expert, Donald Kessler, advised me. The planning of that event was classified at the time, but is listed in the History of On-Orbit Satellite Fragmentations, issued by the NASA Johnson Space Center in July 1998.

Kessler worked with Griffin at that time as part of a safety panel to ensure that the experiment did not cause a hazard to other spacecraft. Griffin, the entire SDIO team, along with NASA, performed a safe experiment, obtaining loads of data in the process, Kessler added.

Griffin is very much aware of what could be done in the slamming of the rogue U.S. spysat, Kessler pointed out. “The on-orbit issues are nearly identical as in 1986 and the NASA orbital debris team has since developed the capability to understand the hazard on the ground,” he added.

“So NASA did have a lot to bring to the table for the spysat case,” Kessler concluded.

Spaceship Builder, Burt Ruran: Post Surgery Medical Update

Legendary aerospace designer, Burt Rutan, is back in high-gear after suffering months with an energy-draining heart ailment.

In a February 22 email message to reporters, Rutan reported that he underwent open-heart surgery earlier this month to take care of the problem: constrictive pericardium.

Following his February 7 operation at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, Rutan said that he’s feeling better every day, although complete recovery will take some three more months.

In response to my email query regarding his medical status, Rutan praised the UCLA doctors. “My problem is often missed since it is rare and it is not easily discerned on x-ray, sonogram, angiogram, or even CAT Scan. I owe my life to a real sharp doctor who figured it out,” he told me.

Burt Rutan, space travel technologist. Credit: Virgin Galactic

Cause of Rutan’s medical problem had remained a mystery for five months. Once diagnosed, he underwent open heart surgery two days later.

“My heart is fine…it just now has room to do its pumping. The problem will not reoccur since the bad hardened sack was removed,” Rutan explained.

Rutan said he’s doing great post-surgery, gaining strength each day.

As leader of his Scaled Composites team in Mojave, California, Rutan and his fellow builders are deep in work on building the huge White Knight Two drop plane, as well as SpaceShipTwo, the customer-carrying suborbital spaceliner for Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

“It is great to have Burt back beginning to fire on all cylinders again after what has been a very tough period for the whole Scaled family…and a very worrying time for all of Burt’s own family as well,” added Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic.

“As was evident in New York, when we launched the final design of White Knight and SpaceShipTwo, Burt has a great engineering team at Scaled Composites…but they have missed his personal touch and good humor on the shop floor on a day to day basis recently,” Whitehorn told me. “The knowledge that he is on the mend is another great start to the “Year of the Spaceship” in Mojave where work is on track to commence flight testing of White Knight Two this summer,” he said.

Where's Tech Support in Space?

When my laptop goes kaput, my first instinct is to chuck it out the window, but astronauts in space don’t have such luxuries.

Consider this: Yuri Malenchenko, a veteran cosmonaut and flight engineer aboard the International Space Station, had the unenviable job this week of wrestling with a glitchy computer laptop in the outpost’s Russian segment.

While I can call tech support, my computer programmer brother-in-law, or just pay someone to take it out of my sight until it’s fixed, Yuri and his Expedition 16 crewmates have to keep those space laptops running or the $100 billion station doesn’t work.

“It says software license warning,” Yuri told Mission Control in Korolev, Russia, just outside of Moscow on Wednesday during NASA’s daily hour of live video from the space station.

Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko works with communication equipment on the ISS.

Flight controllers and engineers there were talking Yuri, who has commanded the station in the past, through the steps to reinstall programs from a software DVD. They were speaking Russian, with a handy English translator, but frustration knows no language.

“[It says] the computer cannot copy the file, and data error,” said Yuri, as he and Mission Control hammered through their troubleshooting.

I may not be a spaceman, but I know how it feels to have that blue screen of death standing between me and my files. At least I only have to face off against one computer at a time, but it’s a different story for station astronauts.

According to the folks at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas – home of the U.S. astronaut corps and shuttle/space station Mission Controls – there are no less than 69 laptop computers watching over the International Space Station right this minute. Here’s a breakdown:

• 50 computers govern all NASA core functions on the station, including operations and many of the payloads.
• 5 of those 50 NASA machines are directly linked to the station’s core avionics computers to send commands and receive telemetry
• 12 laptop computers support all of the station’s Russian core functions, operations and payloads
• 7 new laptops watch over the new, European-built Columbus laboratory for the European Space Agency.

And there’s more coming, I’m sure. On March 11, NASA’s shuttle Endeavour will launch with the first segment of Japan’s massive Kibo laboratory – the station’s largest research module – along with a Canadian-built, two-armed robot called Dextre that will be mounted outside. Kibo will likely need its own laptop computers.

Luckily, flight controllers in Russia and the U.S. have extensive – if not altogether desired – experience working through minor and major computer glitches aboard the ISS. Just last summer, the station’s primary Russian command and navigation computers crashed due to a faulty circuit. Cosmonauts jerry rigged a workaround until the computers could be replaced later.

The station’s main U.S. computers inside NASA’s Destiny lab have also experience their own growing pains, including a major crash back in April 2001.

The folks with NASA’s computer resources and architecture department say that space station computers receive new software updates for different applications several times a year to support new requirements, interfaces and new arrivals of modules and other hardware as the orbital laboratory’s construction continues.

Putting 'Global Cooling' to Rest

One of the most common retorts I get to stories I write on the projected outcomes of global warming is the old “How can we trust the scientists are right when they were predicting a new ice age in the’70s?” It’s one of the main arguments skeptics use in their claims against the science of climate change.

I’ve addressed this argument before, but thought it worth bringing up again because the scientists over at RealClimate.org have a post about a literature review done on studies of climate from 1965 to 1979 (which is currently in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society). They found only 7 articles that predicted cooling would happen, 20 that were neutral, and 44 that predicted warming.

As the authors of the post, John Fleck (a journalist who has written about climate change) and William Connolley (a climate modeller with the British Antarctic Survey) say, “The dominant view, even then, was that increasing levels of greenhouse gases were likely to dominate any changes we might see in climate on human time scales.”

Neither they nor I think that this study will lay this particular skeptic point to rest, but it pretty clearly refutes it.

Cows Pass Gas to Utility Pipeline

Many efforts to supplant traditional energy sources have amounted to a lot of talk and millions of dollars in research so far. But one idea is no bull.

A new processing plant in California captures natural gas (methane) from cow manure, Reuters reports.

Water is added to the manure to make a liquid put into a tank the size of five football fields and 33 feet deep. The gas is siphoned off and piped to a PG&E power plant to produce electricity.

Since the methane, which is considered a greenhouse gas, would have been released into the air, the setup is viewed as a double-bonus. But there are limits to the idea’s potential: Not all of the state’s 2 million dairy cows poop close enough to methane pipes for feasible collection, the story states. Could it not be stored and trucked?

U.S Spysat Orbital Debris Tracked

The results from that missile intercept of the out-of-whack USA 193 spysat continues to be assessed by orbital debris experts.

One of those experts is T.S. Kelso of The Center for Space Standards & Innovation in Colorado Springs. He operates CelesTrak that posts info on orbital debris.

Kelso’s “USA 193 Post-Shootdown Analysis” shows that the missile launched from the USS Lake Erie occurred 38.5 seconds after the rogue spacecraft rose above the horizon as seen from the ship.

A plot of debris from USA-193’s destruction. Credit: AGI.

So far, there are 45 pieces of leftover debris from the intercept that are cataloged. A plot for the event shows debris ranging from 104 miles (167 kilometers) altitude at perigee (low point) all the way up to 1,670 miles (2,689 kilometers) at apogee (high point).

Kelso notes that he will be adding an orbital lifetime analysis to assess how long this debris might continue to present an increased risk to satellites in low-Earth orbit.

In a follow-on item, the analysis of the orbital lifetime of the debris is admittedly tough to do, Kelso explains. The original USA 193 spacecraft was some 4.5 meters long and 2.4 meters wide, according to open sources. Given that — and a cylindrical shape — that would give it a volume of 21.4 cubic meters, he figures.

Furthermore, given a reported spacecraft mass of 5,000 pounds (2,300 kilograms), subtracting the fuel weight of an announced 1,000 pounds - all that equals to a dry mass of about 1,800 kilograms and yields an average density of 85 kg/m3.

Soooooo….taking into account the U.S. Department of Defense view that “no parts larger than a football survived the strike” - that means 11 inches long and 21 inches in circumference, based on the tape measure rolled across a regulation NFL football, Kelso says. Since the U.S. Space Surveillance Network typically cannot track objects smaller than 10 centimeter in size, these spysat fragments should range from 10-20 centimeter in diameter.

Soooooo…(part 2) all this suggests that the last of any 10-centimeter chunks should decay and fall into Earth’s atmosphere 53 days after the intercept; in the 20-centimeter fragment department, the last object decays 105 days after the intercept.

If any of the pieces are larger than reported, they will take progressively longer to decay, Kelso concludes.

What Teens Don't know?

A new study of U.S. teens finds many lack knowledge of basic things that some experts say help form the underpinnings of a common culture.

According to an article in USA Today, among 1,200 17-year-olds surveyed:

• 43 percent knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.
• 52 percent could identify the theme of 1984.
• 51 percent knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

Looking at the glass as half-full, as pundits and journalists seldom do, one might say lots of teens know something about their country’s history. Indeed, 88 percent knew the bombing of Pearl Harbor led our country into World War II. One reason so many knew that: It’s taught in school.

So, let me see if I get this: If we teach teens something, they learn it. If we fail to, then we complain that half of them don’t know it. Sure, teens can be lazy (and fail to do chores, and seem simply to not care). But these poll results are as much a reflection on our education system as on teens.

Space Ship Two: Eerily Familiar

Those of us who sail catamarans tend to hold a prejudicial belief that “two hulls (like two heads) are better than one”. Apparently, Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites team think so as well.

But when Space Ship Two / White Knight Two made its debut appearance this week, there was something even more enticing about it. Like the wind driving Humanity’s future in space was about to shift. We began to see how the rest of us might tack our way into the black sky for more than just 6 or 7 minutes of floating fun.

And, for some of my aeronautically knowledgeable friends, it was deja vu all over again. Like: “where have we seen this before?” It was downright ghostly:

Take a look at this design – circa 1979 or so – from the Russian Myasishchev Design Bureau as modeled by aerospace scholar Alex Panchenko:

It’s an extreme makeover of the Russian Air Force’s 3M bomber (aka the “Bison”) which had been in service since 1955. [Anyone who knows more about this, please reply with comments: below.] The plan was to drop a rocket-boosted vehicle, “X-15 style”, in the upper atmosphere - at subsonic but significant velocity - which would then light its candle and transit out of the atmosphere. In other words, a Virgin Galactic lift ticket.

Here’s another amazing Panchenko model-photo of the Bison space-launcher beast. It was called the 3M-2 concept. Bison bombers were made-over pretty often in that period. One of them even got puffed up (Super-Guppy style) to carry large parts for the Soviet Buran space shuttle and its Energia booster.

Apparently, the 3M-2 was to have had multiple permutations for various roles: It would have made a dandy crew delivery vehicle. Yes, also a handy satellite killer. And ambitious commanders, no doubt, dreamed of delivering squads of elite Soviet troops anywhere on Earth in a couple of hours (even as our USMC’s SUSTAIN program concept seeks to do in the coming years).

Alex Panchenko’s photos are postcards from the future as well as the past. Please remember, the first word in Scaled Composites is “scaled”. The rampant speculation, of course, is that Rutan has sold Sir Richard’s team on the idea that Scaled’s Level Two design will easily and inexpensively scale to an orbital Level Three configuration.

No surprise: that’s precisely the mission for which the Myasishchev group was designing the 3M-2 back in the late 1970s / early 1980’s.

Composer Igor Stravinsky (stealing from artist Pablo Picasso) supposedly once said: “the merely good composer borrows; the great composer steals!” Aerodynamic artist Burt Rutan would likely agree. His Space Ship Three / White Knight Three design, in Virgin livery colors, may just steal the entire orbital people-mover market by dropping the price to levels mere mortals can maybe afford.

So perhaps we’ll be sailing - sooner rather than later - into the space industrial revolution on twin keels.