The Biggest Plane Ever Built

If you’re minimally knowledgeable about such things, when you saw the header, you said, “Oh sure – the Spruce Goose.” At least, that’s what I would have done. But seventy years later, there’s a new
title-holder.

The Stratolaunch is currently in production at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port. Aerospace firm Scaled Composites has headed-up development of the mammoth aircraft, and befitting such a sizable plane, the technical details are jaw-dropping. Stratolaunch, nicknamed “Roc” after the mythical bird of prey, features two fuselages, six Pratt & Whitney jet engines, 28 landing gear wheels, and a whopping 385 foot wingspan.

“If you were to put the center of this airplane on a football field,” mentions Scaled Composites president Kevin Mickey in a KGET interview, “its wingtips would extend beyond the goalposts by about 15 feet on each side.”

Those dimensions make it 65 feet wider than the legendary “Spruce Goose” H-4 Hercules … it is being constructed using pieces of two already quite large planes–a pair of disused Boeing 747s.

The purpose of the plane is to launch satellites.

The Stratolaunch is designed to carry a three-stage rocket (equipped with a satellite) between its two fuselages. Upon reaching the correct altitude, the rocket will detach, blast off into space, and later release the satellite.

Samsung Intros the See-Thru Truck

Ever been stuck behind a big semi on a not-divided highway, and you don't know whether it's safe to pass it or not? Of course you have.

Well, those days may soon be coming to an end, thanks to this great new piece of technology.

In an attempt to make the roads safer for drivers, Samsung has unveiled a new ‘transparent’ truck. 

The prototype truck uses a front-facing camera that is live streamed onto its back doors, so drivers following the over-size vehicle can see what is ahead. 

“This allows drivers to have a better view when deciding whether it is safe to overtake,” Samsung wrote in a blog post.

Thank you, Samsung.

How to Print a Bridge

I still want my flying car. I was promised one, and I expect the promises to be fulfilled.

In the meantime, though, this is almost as cool.

The 3D-printed home has been accomplished — and apparently the next step is something a little more structurally challenging. A 3D-printing company based in Amsterdam has developed a revolutionary, multi-axis robotic 3D printer that can “draw” structures in the air — and it’s planning to build a bridge over a canal in the heart of the city.

Construction is scheduled to begin in September. The accompanying picture is an artist’s conception of the process. A video and bridge plans are at the link.

The Long, Weird History of the Flying Car

People of my generation (and even those less ancient) often ask, “Where is that flying car that I was promised as a kid?” I know I figured we'd have them by now, but hell, we're just closing in on driverless cars (something I'm really looking forward to – why couldn't we have had them when I had that godawful 35mi each way commute to downtown Chicago?)

Anyway, this is from Popular Mechanics.

Self-Driving Cars as Imagined in 1956

Great video (if you enjoy outrageously cheesy stuff, as I do) by General Motors from 1956, showing the self-driving cars that we would have in 1976.

That it all happens to crowds of similarly choreographed cars threading through cloverleaf interchanges in the middle of a desert, complete with rocky prominences straight [out] of a Roadrunner cartoon, is icing on the cake.

The plan for 'self-driving' seems to have been for the roads to control the cars, with a very top-down, somewhat militaristic, governmental authority running things.

Bought a Lenovo Laptop Recently? Sorry to Hear It

It’s hard to believe that a computer company could be stupid enough to sell their laptops pre-loaded with adware, but Lenovo is indeed that stupid. What’s double amazing is that they try to justify it as enhancing the customer experience.

Since at least September, Lenovo has been shipping OEM Windows laptops preloaded with Superfish “adware,” which would rudely inject its own shopping results into your browser when you searched on Google, Amazon, and other websites. This sort of behavior is associated more with spyware than with factory-shipped operating-system installs, and by itself would be a new low for Lenovo. But Superfish is more than just pesky. It’s the most virulent, evil adware you could find. 

By installing a single self-signed root certificate (trust me: That’s really bad) across all of Lenovo’s affected machines, Superfish intentionally pokes a gigantic hole into your browser security and allows anyone on your Wi-Fi network to hijack your browser silently and collect your bank credentials, passwords, and anything else you might conceivably type there.

The linked article contains sites you can use to test whether your computer is infected with this garbage. Die, Lenovo, Die!

Firefox Commits Suicide by Intolerance

Just about a year ago, Mozilla, the parent of Firefox, gave in to a band of vigilantes and fired their CEO for having made a political contribution several years previous to a ballot initiative against gay marriage in California. After that happened, several church-related groups called for a boycott of Firefox.

In the last 12 months, Firefox's user share -- an estimate of the portion of all those who reach the Internet via a desktop browser -- has plummeted by 34%.  

I support equal rights for gays including gay marriage. I do not, however, support getting people fired because they hold views opposing mine. If Mozilla goes belly-up because of this, it will be something they had coming.

Crystal Gayle Was Just Ahead of Her Time

There is a laser treatment (awaiting FDA approval) that will change brown eyes to blue – if you think doing so is worth five grand.

According to ophthalmologists, we all have blue eyes below our brown eyes, under a thin layer of pigment. 

A California company has now developed a laser treatment that disturbs the melanin in the pigmented part of the eye and causes the body to eliminate it over time. The procedure only lasts seconds, but it may take weeks before the blue tint emerges. 

This laser treatment is not available here in the U.S. yet, but has been tested overseas with success. Researchers claim it is safe but have to conduct more clinical trials before they can apply for FDA approval.

Help Wanted: No Robots Need Apply

It may be that someday the last job requiring actual human beings may be stitching baseballs for use in the big leagues. Unfortunately for Americans, the work is done in Costa Rica.

The average baseball is only used for a few pitches in the U.S. Major Leagues, but for the Costa Ricans who make them each ball is the result of hours of painstaking stitching by hand. 

For 10 hours a day, workers at the world's only factory authorized to supply Major League Baseball, in the town of Turrialba in central Costa Rica, sit at desks yanking strands of waxy red fiber to form each baseball's 108 stitches.

Apparently, efforts have been made to automate the stitching process, but the results have been deemed unsatisfactory.

In Internet Heaven

Just out of curiosity, I ran a speed test on the internet where I am currently staying (with my daughter and son-in-law). The speed was just over 26 megabytes per second.

That will not sound remarkable to anyone in the US, but it would be like heaven to any internet user in the Philippines. I did a post back in March about the atrocious infrastucture of the Philippines -- roads, electricity, and sidewalks as well as internet -- and another in May about my SmartBro wireless modem. I will summarize that I seldom got as much as 1 mbps in the Philippines from my wired connection at my apartment; the SmartBro, which was alleged to deliver 'up to' 5 mbps, actually delivered less than 0.5).

The Ereader, 1935 Version

It’s not surprising this didn’t catch on. I doubt many 1935 housewives would have allowed such a monstrosity in their living rooms (or was ‘parlor’ still the correct term in 1935?)

Anyway, it is basically just a microfilm reader (such as we used to find in libraries) mounted on a pole.

The text carries the information that microfilm was patented in 1859, which is much earlier than I would have guessed and that

… New York banker George Lewis McCarthy … developed the first practical use for microfilm in 1925, allowing him to make miniaturized copies of bank documents.

Which reminded me that when I was in college in the late sixties, I worked nights at Valley National Bank (at the time the largest bank in Arizona), and a big part of my job was feeding checks into a microfilm machine. Not very exciting work, and the pay sucked too.

Maybe Things Aren't as Hopeless as They Seem

Instapundit has a post featuring a tweet by Sen. Ted Cruz:

TED CRUZ EXPLAINS THE DIFFERENCE: “Reaganomics: You start a business in your parents’ garage. Obamanomics: You move into your parents’ garage.”

Clever. And I understand (I think) what Cruz is trying to say -- he's contrasting a period that welcomed and encouraged and celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit with ... uh, today.

But I don't think he is factually correct, if he is trying (as I think he is) to point to the era of garage start-ups that launched the technology boom. Apple and Microsoft were both founded during the Ford administration. The software that made personal computers useful tools rather than toys (spreadsheets: Visicalc; word processors: WordStar and WordPerfect) were created during the Carter years.

These products flowered during the Reagan administration, but they started during a time when the White House was occupied by two of its biggest clowns ever (we all remember 'malaise', but we shouldn't forget WIN buttons either).

And I find that very encouraging. If entrepreneurs can keep producing great new ideas through an era of such economic ignorami, then perhaps there are some great tinkerers out there today, coming up with things that will come to fruition when the country frees itself from Obamanomics.

Immigration and Databases

I have rather mixed feelings on the subject of immigration. I am strongly in favor of legal immigration, and think it should be easier for qualified immigrants to enter the US; at the same time, I am strongly opposed to illegal immigration. My opposition to illegal immigration is, as I see it, a part of my support for expanded legal immigration; if the US has too many immigrants now (an arguable point that depends on the question "How many should we have?" – something we as a country have not even debated, much less defined) then that diminishes the number we can allow in legally. And, frankly, I’d rather have immigrants who start off respecting the laws of their new home, therefore I'd rather have more legals and fewer illegals.

(Note: If you read this blog, you know by now that I don't worry about PC terminology: 'illegal' is a perfectly good description, as far as I'm concerned, for a person who is in the country illegally).

With all that said, I can’t see any feasible way that all the illegals currently present can be deported in anything approximating a humane manner, even assuming that that was the best thing to do. So I’m perfectly willing to accept some form of amnesty (short of full citizenship) for those already in the country – as long as it is preceded by a thorough securing of the border.

A major part of securing the border is, in my opinion, making it impossible (or as nearly impossible as can be) to get a job if you are in the country illegally, backed by extremely strong penalties for employers who hire illegals. It’s a workable supply-side solution: if there are no jobs, then there’s no reason to sneak across the border.

Therefore, I don’t have any objection to the intent of this:

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system. 

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID. 

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo. 

This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants.

Such a database would give the government immense power over each of us, because they would know everything about us. 'Knowledge is power' and all that.

It would begin, of course, as described above, with only our social security number and age tied to the biometric data. But how long would it be before your full job history, already tied to the SS#, is added to the database? And your police records would be added the next time there is a terrorism outrage or a mass shooting. And soon your taxes, your school records, your voting history, your donations to political causes, what books you checked out of the library, your marriages and divorces … and everything else.

I don’t think of myself as a paranoid, but in light of the IRS scandal, I’m not in much of a mood to trust the government to not use every tool it has to quash opposition. And this would be quite a tool.

If you are a Democrat, and are thinking right now: “Barack Obama would never use such a database against his political enemies” (even after the IRS revelations), then consider that sometime in the relatively near future, perhaps as soon as 2017, there will be a Republican president. Do you want that power to be in the hands of Ted Cruz, or Bobby Jindal, or Mike Huckabee?

Perhaps I'm overreacting. But I think this is just a realistic assessment of the way government power has steadily advanced for almost a century now.

Battery Breakthrough at Urbana-Champaign

This is pretty exciting, if it works out.

A new type of battery has been developed that, its creators say, could revolutionise the way we power consumer electronics and vehicles.

The University of Illinois team says its use of 3D-electrodes allows it to build "microbatteries" that are many times smaller than commercially available options, or the same size and many times more powerful.

It adds they can be recharged 1,000 times faster than competing tech.

 As an example of the potential power of these batteries:

"You could replace your car battery with one of our batteries and it would be 10 times smaller, or 10 times more powerful. With that in mind you could jumpstart a car with the battery in your cell phone."

I like the idea of recharging much faster – an objection I have to electric vehicles is the long recharge time. It sounds like recharging these batteries would take less time than refilling your gas tank. The weight and size of batteries for electric vehicles is another problem that these would overcome.

The difficulties that remain are overcoming safety problems (currently there are combustibility concerns) and proving that they can be manufactured in quantities. Definitely worth watching how it develops.