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This is something I wrote back on October 6 and then decided to submit to The Washington Post’s Next Great American Pundit contest, which meant that I couldn’t publish it. I’m writing this summary on October 6, as well, so if you’re reading this here, then I think it’s safe to assume that I did not win the contest. Anyway, you may proceed. The Nobel Prizes are the biggest honors that scientists can receive that the general public is aware of. Unfortunately, that they are being given out right now is the extent of that awareness. How many people remember the names of the people who won last year, let alone 10 years ago? With few exceptions, there are no living Nobel laureates who are household names, and the exceptions are known only indirectly because of their science, for instance Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu or subject of the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind, John Forbes Nash, Jr. And why is that? Almost every person who is awarded a Nobel is still heavily involved with their discipline at the time that it is awarded. There is no connection between them and the public, because the work that they are being recognized for is usually more than 20 years old. But that’s the nature of the prize. It recognizes discoveries and ideas that have significantly advanced our knowledge, and it is hard to recognize those things within a year or two of their discovery. Fiber optics and CCDs — the subjects of this year’s Nobel in physics — are a major, if hidden, part of life for most people in developed nations. Telomerase is one of the fundamental aspects of our understanding of chromosomal DNA. But for people in the scientific communities, they are old news. It is wonderful that their discoverers/inventors are being recognized, but these global announcements about 20 year old advancements do little to spark interest in science among the general population. And no other awards generate the same amount of interest. The scientific community does itself a disservice by being unable to capture that interest and make use of it. As soon as the public realizes that the science is old hat, that it doesn’t signal that we are on the edge of bold new territories of knowledge, they move on to the next headline. In a world in which space exploration is a hot topic, where people are looking toward new technology to help counteract the effects of global warming, where humorous awards for “useless” science garner mainstream attention, the scientific community needs to find some way to harness the interest that the Nobel Prizes generate. The awards shouldn’t be changed, but perhaps a new category or two marking promising new discoveries that are relevant to the everyday person wouldn’t be amiss. As a follow up to my post yesterday on the state of commercial rockets, here’s some news about some of the technology that we might use when we get back to the moon or out to Mars. The Lunar Lander Prize competition has apparently had two successful completions of lander rockets which could repeatedly take off and land on two concrete pads 50 meters apart while remaining in the air for 90 seconds. The competition is a yearly event begun in 2006 with two levels of qualification. This year, Armadillo Aerospace and Marsten Space Systems both completed the level one challenge. The level two challenge of the competition involves a longer flight time, refueling, and landing on boulder strewn ground. There are also apparently two other companies who will try to surpass Marsten’s performance to claim the second place prize for the level one challenge. Armadillo Aerospace has apparently locked the win for the $350,000 first place prize. The Space Shuttle is scheduled to be grounded by the end of 2010, leaving the United States without any way to send humans into space except on Russian Soyuz rockets. This is a long standing part of the plan for NASA to develop the Ares rockets as part of the Constellation project to return to Apollo style rockets and habitable capsules. But as news leaks out of NASA and the cloud of program reviews and possible budget cuts looms on the horizon, it is possible that the predicted 5 year gap in American human space flight will be even longer. But the good news is that there are two private companies working to develop programs to take humans to space. The first, Scaled Composites, won the Ansari X Prize back in 2004 with SpaceShipOne, which was the first privately funded vehicle that was able to deliver humans into space. The company is currently developing SpaceShipTwo to capitalize on their earlier success. But for the people who are interested in space exploration, maintaining the International Space Station, and returning to the moon or moving on to Mars, SpaceShipTwo is dross. It is a sub-orbital tourist vehicle. And at $200,000 a ticket, it’s well out of the price range for most folks. At best, the program is inspirational for the folks who have the money to be able to help fund other projects for true human entry into space. The second is SpaceX, who I’ve mentioned before. They are currently in the process of moving one of their Falcon 9 rockets to Cape Canaveral, where they will be able to test launch the rocket for the first time. The first stage of the Falcon 9 is powered by 9 of the Merlin engines that SpaceX developed for the Falcon 1, a light lift vehicle that has already successfully reached earth orbit. The Falcon 9 is a medium lift vehicle that will be able to carry 2 versions of the Dragon spacecraft — one designed for cargo and one designed for humans, and is scheduled for 3 test flights next year before being used to resupply the ISS in 2011. There is also a heavy lift version of the Falcon 9, which, due to the modular nature of the design, simply adds two more of the Falcon 9 stage 1 boosters to the sides of the main booster. I would love to take a trip down to Florida to see the first launch of the Falcon 9, but I think I’ll have to be content with watching a webcast of it. I am definitely going to do everything in my power to be there for the first launch carrying people in 2012 or whenever that happens. Sub-orbital flight is all well and good, but the future of human spaceflight is going to rest on rockets like the Falcon 9. I finished book 11 of the Wheel of Time last week. Having not read the series in several years, and not having done a full read-through of the series since there were only 8 or 9 books, despite having read the first 6 books around a half dozen times, this was a new experience. For years, my criticism (and others’) of the series is that it got too bloated. Jordan followed six primary characters and also had chapters from at least as many secondary characters as he wove his story, and it often made for slow reading as he’d focus on one part of the fabric for extended periods of time. But this new read through showed me that in part, this “bloat” is a product of the gaps that develop in the reader’s memory between the publishing of the new books. Reading the 8097 pages and 3,308,867 words in approximately 25 days definitely compensates for that. Yes the story is complicated, and yes, Jordan “ignores” some characters for a book at a time, but he did a very good job of a very difficult task of telling up to 6 different story branches concurrently. He could either switch point of view every chapter and end up with a jumbled mess with no continuity, or do what he did and maintain continuity, but seem to abandon a character for a while. I think that latter option is definitely the better choice. And I have to say that this really rekindled my love for the series. While I’m waiting for October 27, I’ve moved on to Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold, which is set at some point after the events of his First Law series. I discovered his books through Patrick Rothfuss’ blog, and I really enjoy them. His style is very much traditional hack and slash fantasy in the tradition of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, just with more profanity. Lots more profanity. You should check it out. I’m in the midst of re-reading the Wheel of Time. I started the series around the Labor Day weekend, and I’m up to book 6 as of last night. And it’s been several years since I read these books now. But re-reading them has reminded me of just how good the first books in the series really are. Well-developed characters in a world that feels just as real as Tolkien’s with excellent writing and a plot and narration that really keeps things moving along. I received the first 6 books as a set one Christmas, back in high school, or maybe middle school, and absolutely devoured them. My first screen name on AIM was wotmaniac## and in college, I used the name ‘aielman’ on a forum I frequented. I eagerly looked forward to the coming of the next books. And for years, I held out hope that the decline in the quality of the series was just temporary and hurried to the bookstore or to order online when the next book was released. I read the first books in the series probably a half-dozen times, especially before a new book came out, but I didn’t continue that for the last 3 or 4 books. I followed Jordan’s efforts to complete the final book and his battle with amyloidosis, and didn’t expect that the series would be finished in his lifetime, though I hoped he would be able to see it through. And I was excited to hear that his wife and publisher were going to find an author to finish the series. And any bit of news I found about the progress on it excited me. The series, up and down though it has been, still stands as one of the major, truly epic, fantasy series of the last 20 years, and I wanted to see how it ended. I’ve invested too much time in reading the books over the last 10 years to give up on it now. So re-reading the series again has been quite a little reminiscent joy for me. But I’m not sure how well that will hold up as I move into the later books. I’m hoping that reading it all together in the span of just a month and a half will help it all stay a bit more coherent. Why am I doing this, and why in a month and a half? Because Brian Sanderson has finished the first part of the final book, and it is being released at the end of October. And I’ll be at a bookstore not long after I get off work on that day to pick up a copy. |
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