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7QT: Breaking Bicycle, Weight, and Genre Rules

7QT: Breaking Bicycle, Weight, and Genre Rules

Last updated on: October 9, 2015 at 12:12 pm by Leah Libresco

7QT: Breaking Bicycle, Weight, and Genre Rules 2015-10-09T12:12:43-04:00 Leah Libresco

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I know, from personal experience, that the expression “It’s like riding a bike, one never forgets” is false, but I still really enjoyed seeing the design for a bike designed to go fast, flouting all the rules for road races.

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And speaking of changing standards, Nautilus has a nice piece on the efforts to replace the Platonic Kilogram (it exists! it’s in Paris) with a benchmark for weight that doesn’t require a physical object.

Some basic units have already been upgraded. The second, for example, used to be defined as some fraction of a day, but is now defined by how often electrons in an atom of cesium transition between energy levels. The meter, too, is spiffier than it used to be. At the end of the 18th century, the French Academy of Sciences defined a meter as one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator, along the meridian that went through Paris. Nearly 100 years later, the meter became the length of a specific platinum-iridium bar. Most recently, in 1983, the meter was defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second. This linked the meter to the speed of light, one of the fundamental constants of nature. The candela, the unit of luminous intensity, once depended on the brightness of a specific kind of candle. Now it is also tied to the speed of light.

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But, on some issues, it’s worth holding the line, no compromises. That’s what Catharine A. Conley does as a planetary protection officer. It’s her job to make sure our missions to other planets (particularly Mars) don’t wind up contaminating these worlds with our bacteria.

Because of the residual microbes, NASA’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers are prohibited from visiting what are known as “special regions” — places that Earth bacteria might happily call home. (InSight, NASA’s next Mars lander, to be launched in March, and the next rover, to be launched in 2020, will also not be sterilized. In considering landing sites for the 2020 rover, NASA has crossed off those in special regions.)

[…]

Areas treated as special regions include the periodic dark streaks known as recurrent slope lineae — R.S.L.s for short — spotted on the sides of craters, canyons and mountains. Scientists last week said they were generated by the percolating of liquid water, one of the essentials for life.

The caution brings up a Catch-22. NASA at present cannot explore the places with the greatest potential for life — one that could come into play for Curiosity, which is slowly climbing a mountain in Gale Crater.

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Speaking of Mars, I want to recommend The Martian. When I came home from seeing it, I was so excited I just blurted to the doorman at my building that he should see it, and he told me I was the third person that night to tell him. It left me feeling very “Eff yeah, engineering! Eff yeah, humans!”

The book is great, and I certainly think reading it first deepened my enjoyment of the movie (since it gets a bit more detailed about all the MacGyvering the protagonist does) but I think you’ll enjoy it a lot either way.

(It’s also just fun to watch a movie that I contrasted with Gravity by saying “You know how in Gravity, running out of air is a metaphor for the way the protagonist needs to decide to live fully again? In The Martian, it’s a metaphor for RUNNING OUT OF AIR”

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Salon has a nice piece on how the KGB caught CIA operatives. The CIA was convinced they must be using moles, but, in fact they were mostly using logic and observation:

Back in Moscow he began systematically combing the KGB archives for consistent patterns observable in the postings of CIA counterparts. The research was extended to take in the records of the KGB’s allies, Cuba and the Warsaw Pact. The open source literature from the United States was also exploited to the full. And wherever possible access was obtained to data compiled by the local police authorities.

What Totrov came up with were 26 unchanging indicators as a model for identifying U.S. intelligence officers overseas. Other indicators of a more trivial nature could be detected in the field by a vigilant foreign counterintelligence operative but not uniformly so: the fact that CIA officers replacing one another tended to take on the same post within the embassy hierarchy, drive the same make of vehicle, rent the same apartment and so on. Why? Because the personnel office in Langley shuffled and dealt overseas postings with as little effort as required.

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Speaking of the art of deduction, the BBC released its trailer for the Sherlock Christmas special.

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I really like that fanfic impulses are going mainstream. If the Sherlock showrunners (who are already writing AU fic) want to put their take on the characters in another AU, I say go for it! So I’m also pleased by the exuberance of the below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWr3mLI8Xl8

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