Last year Dona Ana County in New Mexico voted for an increased tax to help build a new spaceport in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. Now it's time for Sierra County, including the town of Truth or Consequences, to take a vote. The county will vote on a 0.25% sales tax to help fund the construction of the spaceport. If the tax passes in Sierra County, then the government can legally begin collecting the spaceport tax. Apparently New Mexico tax districts are multi-county groupings. The new tax proposal has generated some news coverage by promoting contention between people who want the spaceport and people who don't want to pay the tax. A pretty common protagonist-antagonist match-up in the papers.

The hideous webapplication is done. For now. There are a lot of imperfections and little problems that make the application somewhat short of what I wanted to see. However, I made a decision to run with the release anyway. I need to see if anyone in the world is interested before go on working my nights away. It's a tough decision, because I don't like to share unfinished projects.

I feel like the nameless hero from Star Wars. "Almost there...Almost there...Almost there". Hopefully I'm not attacked by a tai fighter any time soon.

I'm a little late on the fortnight...my bad. I'm gonna blame my terrifically bad hobby for taking up too much of my time. This fortnight's Hot Nerd Girl is Ducky Doolittle. Why? A. Cause she's scorching hot. B. She's published several books. C. She looks better than Watson and/or Crick in a lab coat. D. She can say, 'The great thing about a vagina is...' and complete the sentence with an anatomical discussion. E. She can teach me anytime. (ex. see her video on Ben-Wa Balls below.)

I finally got the template system working for my web app. At least a rudimentary version of a template system.

It uses a region tag library from Advanced Java Server Pages. The code in the book didn't exactly work, so it required a few tweaks. In order to get the thing up and running I had to add a debugger to my development environment. I'm using jswat - which seems okay. At the moment I am not able to get the program to attach source code to jsp's that don't exist in the main directory. Super annoying. I may write a letter.

At the moment the code is nothing special, and in retrospect I have spent most of my time learning some basics of java that are usually taken care of by eclipse. Here's a quick run-down of what I've put together on my machine to get rolling in the development phase of my super secret project.

Star Simpson is the girl who was arrested at Logan airport for wearing a 'fake bomb'. Having a law that makes it illegal to wear fake anything is akin to the government saying, 'It's illegal for you to point out how stupid we can be'. Anyway, I think Star is sort of cute. She is definitely nerdy. She is a student at MIT and involved in all sorts of art / technology fusion projects. There is some more information about her at boing boing.

In any case

Whew. It's been a busy week. Workmen have been crawling all over my place for the last week. Generally they were screwing around and spending waay more of my money that I had originally intended. But they finished, and I should be warm this winter -- it will be the first time I've had a bona fide heating system in more than 6 years.
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Where's my coffee?
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I've also decided to undertake the creation of a new web application platform. I spent years and years working with php - but this time I'm going to work it up with java. The reason? Well I started this job and we do some jsp development stuff. The platform runs almost entirely on jsp and it's driving me crazy. All the php projects I made and/or worked on used some form of mvc - now I find myself in a shop that doesn't use it and the pain in my ass is unbearable. I figured it would be a valuable learning experience to create a platform that does things using some of the programming concepts developed over the last 20 years...unlike we do at work.

Recently, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing posted a short essay on why Science Fiction is really a foil for the present. He went on to say that any attempt to write futurism is at best simply a mirror for the hopes of the future experienced by the present generation. Of course, he's right. At least in a manner of speaking he's right. We are all but mere mortals trapped in this society during this epoch; any action an individual undertakes is necessarily a reflection of that time and society. I think that this reflection is evident in the reams of dystopian science fiction and post apocalypse fiction. I in no way mean to disparage the importance of having writers who can look upon the present with a clarity of vision. It is important to have a clear understanding of the present if we are going to push in the future. However, I believe that futurism plays an important role in shaping our society and it should not be tossed away lightly.

I recently became interested in Archimedes Screws. So I figured that I would look up some information. It turns out that information is pretty spread out on the web. I suppose there is plenty of info in books somewhere (library, maybe). But my first stop is the internet. Here's what I found so far...I hope to update this post as I learn more.

Application

• The Archimedes screw was used as the original design for ship propellers.
• Wiki Info on Propellers
  

Google is having a Sketch Up contest to see who can create the best model of their college campus. The winner gets a free trip to Mountain View, CA to participate in 3D modeling workshop with some of the experts at Google. The judging panel is a very distinguished group of professionals from the gaming, graphics, and architectural communities. Entries are due June 1, 2007.

Yesterday I looked through a few of the entries for the contest, as well as some of the other figures uploaded to the '3D warehouse'. I was inspired by the amount of quality work and interesting junk already uploaded. It also struck me that Google appears to be the largest contributor of images to their online catalog. I suppose Sketch Up isn't the most popular feature of Google.

The National Space Society has an informative article on the history of the L5 society. The L5 society was started by Gerard K. O'Neill and others with the intention to put human space colonies at L5. L5 and L4 are spots in earth orbit that a mass can orbit indefinitely without expending energy. The L5 society envisioned space colonies that were large bio-sphere's, spinning in order to create an artificial gravity. The space colonies would have provided solar power to earth, among other economic activities. NSF funding for research projects, most notably the Solar Power Satellite project, stopped in 1981.

Aerogel is a class of materials characterized by its extreme lightweight, and solid state. It is made by replacing the liquid of a gel with gas. First developed in the 1930's, it has seen a revitalization since being used by NASA. Experiments have shown that "producing aerogel in a weightless environment can produce particles with a more uniform size and reduce the Rayleigh scattering effect in silica aerogel, thus making the aerogel less blue and more transparent. Transparent silica aerogel would be very suitable as a thermal insulation material for windows, significantly limiting thermal losses of buildings." -- from Wikipedia.

Given that the Chinese have demonstrated the capability to obliterate satellites in low earth orbit, what does this mean for US military capabilities?

What do we know from publicly available sources?

1. The Chinese have blown up a satelitte in low earth orbit. Low Earth Orbit being commonly defined as 200 - 2000 km above the earth.
2. In the fall of 2006 the Chinese succeeded in illuminating a US satelitte with a laser. This was known by US intelligence agencies.
3. The Project for the New American Century stated in their 2000 defense review that one important objective for the US should be the 'control of space and cyberspace'. This document has been followed extensively by the Bush administration and the military over the last 7 years. There is no reason to suspect that the US military would have slacked on 'control of space' while completing all other objectives. And in fact there is evidence to support that the US has publicly attempted to push forward with the 'control of space' objective by organizing of the US Space Corps, as a division of the US Air Force. To my knowledge this plan did not go forward publicly or directly.
   

Not very long ago, I posted a youtube video of ferro magnetic fluids in action. I thought it was an amazing, cool, and new idea. Well over the course of a couple weeks I kept hearing references to ferro fluids. One such reference was when looking into the Future Warrior project from DARPA. It was suggested that ferro magnetic fluids would make it possible to have an advanced type of anti-ballistic body armor. The body armor would remain soft until a magnetic field was applied, thereby making it rigid and 'bullet proof'. A few days later I heard about a not so dramatic use of the material - automotive shock absorbers. So I got to looking up some bona-fide information on the subject.

NASA will continue missions to the international space station through 2020 with the, as yet undeveloped and unbuilt, Orion space craft until 2020. The current plan for shuttle fleets from NASA is to run missions using the current fleet until 2010. Between 2010 and 2014, NASA will rely on international partners to resupply the space station. In 2014 the fleet will be replaced with the Orion shuttle. The Orion Shuttle will run missions to the space station and the moon between 2010 and 2020. NASA plans to run at least two missions per year to the space station using the Orion Shuttle as well as missions in support of the planned moon colony.