The Law of Requisite Parsimony

At some leadership class, I learned "The Law of Requisite Parsimony."  Despite its having a ridiculous name, it's a fun and useful thing to remember:

The human brain can only keep track of 7 things, plus or minus 2.

Oh, how true.  (Digits of pi, 41 in my case, don't count.  That was just a bored day in high school physics.)  Which is why I must admit to the masses that I have begun to write down some hints to the passwords required on work systems.  This was a big source of frustration for me at work last Friday.

In any working environment, you're going to have a few different systems that you interact with.  For me, as a contractor, it's a lot: there's this client's system; there's that client's system; there's the "mother ship" encryption scheme ... I counted, and I interact with no fewer than 7 different systems on a daily basis.

Each requires its own password.  Some can have no greater than 8 characters.  Some can have no fewer than 9 characters.  They all must be changed quarterly, biannually, or annually.

I have no hope of keeping them straight; the Law of Requisite Parsimony is hopelessly broken.  In each system's attempt to be as secure as possible, they have put me in the untenable position of keeping each system's requirements' separate and up to date.  The best I can do is write reminders to myself -- hints and suggestions, not the actual passwords -- but I can't wait for the day of biometric scanners becoming more ubiquitous.

A Time of Crisis

The Deepwater Horizon oil well continues to spew crude oil into the Caribbean at a rate of 210,000 gallons per day.  Initial attempts at using undersea robots and capping the well were all unsuccessful.  Clearly, this is a very, very difficult technical problem located 100 miles offshore and about 1 mile below ground.

In a mighty need to appear relevant and action-oriented, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing today, grilling the BP America Chairman, the CEO of Transocean, and a senior executive at Halliburton.  NPR has a good wrapup of today's testimony, for more details.

(the above image is taken from the webcast; I assume that material is public domain and nobody will complain about copyright issues.  If I'm wrong, please tell me in the comments.)

Come on, Congress.  Really?

Here's my beef: This is a waste of resources at this time.  Testimony before Congress is not taken lightly by anyone.  I've helped prepare Congressional testimony for two different jobs now (on much lower-profile issues than this), and there is a small team of people spending the better part of a week scrutinizing every word, every phrase, every nuance of testimony.  There is A LOT of time sunk into preparing for these events, and I can only imagine that it's been a similar story for the executives who gave today's testimony.  But these folks have better things to do with their time.  Even though only a few dozen people will probably ever watch the whole hearing (it can be found here; and I haven't watched all 218 minutes of it), a few Senators got to Look Tough and grill the executives for a while on what they knew and when they knew it.  A particularly juicy -- and at this point irrelevant -- exchange starts at 184:45.  Watch thru 187:00.

Now don't get me wrong -- there is plenty of blame to be placed here, either on the manufacturer of the blowout preventer, or the operating company who had shoddy work practices, or the owner of the operation who's ultimately responsible for it all.  But now is not the time to be hauling these folks in front of Congress while 210,000 gallons of oil continue to spew into the ocean every day.

Is diverting these senior executives from their day jobs really the most helpful thing Congress can do right now?  I don't think so.  It would seem to me that lending Army Corps of Engineers, available Navy and Coast Guard vessels, and oil booms and oil dispersants to the problem would be a better use of resources.  And we'll do the finger pointing and blaming AFTER the leak is stopped.

The lawyers need not worry.  Hundreds of lawsuits have already been filed; some enterprising group has even taken out the domain name www.bplawsuit.net and populated it.

My heart goes out to the engineers, scientists, boat operators, and trade craft who continue to diligently (and un-gloriously) work nights and weekends, desperately trying to solve this fiendish problem.  I'm pulling for you guys.

Bloatware

Just because we have gigabytes (and even terabytes) of storage available on our modern computers, it's no reason that programs need to use all that space up.

Take, for example, the venerable Adobe Reader program, designed to be the One PDF Reader To Rule Them All, be it for Windows, Mac, Linux, or whatever operating system you're running.

On its website, Adobe describes the Reader program as follows:

Adobe Reader is the global standard for viewing PDF files. It is the only PDF viewer that can open and interact with all PDF documents. Use Adobe Reader to view, search, digitally sign, verify, print, and collaborate on PDF files.

But, mind you, this is just the reader, not the full blown development program.  Because of a somewhat-fancy pdf file I needed to read, I had to download the latest version of Adobe's Acrobat Reader.  This is what the install screen presented me with:

Are you kidding me?  Nearly 300 MB so I can read a pdf file?  I posit that the "Portable" in "Portable Document Format" is a misnomer if the reader program requires 300MB to install.  The installer download alone was 50MB -- suppose I don't have access to a high speed internet connection?

And so it goes; the inexorable climb towards ever bigger and more complex software, providing more and more opportunities for nasty viruses and other bad things to be inserted into the programs.  The installer for Microsoft Office 2010 is 600MB; the whole suite of programs is 3.5 GB.

Whatever happened to elegance and simplicity?  I remember the old days of the Mac classic, where the operating system and all your applications and files would fit neatly on an 800K floppy.  The first shipping version of Adobe Photoshop fit on an 800K floppy.

The risk, as I suggested above, is that it creates many unknown trap doors for people to take advantage of and cause unintended consequences.  I wish Adobe, Microsoft, and the other software giants out there would realize the utility and need for fast-and-light access to their wares.

A suitcase full of money ...

The bag men have it tough these days.

See, despite the brand spankin' new C-note unveiled by the Treasury Department a few days ago, Ye Olde Benjamin just isn't all that he used to be.  Life is just getting harder and harder for the poor thugs who have to carry around the Big Money.

The culprit?  Inflation.  See, The Office of Management of Budget publishes the official figures for how much inflation is from year to year.  Those figures can be recorded and flipped to see how much inflation has decreased the value of money over the years.  For things like, say, a suitcase full of money.  In this case, a suitcase full o' money today is only one third as valuable as that same suitcase was in 1977.  The following chart illustrates what I'm getting at, for a hypothetical "suitcase value" of $100,000 in 1977.

See, if your average suitcase could hold $100,000 in 1977, the poor thug would have to drag around three and a half suitcases today to be able to seal a deal of equivalent value.

Not that I regularly tote around suitcases full of money.  Come to think of it, I have never toted around a suitcase full of money.  But if the Department of Treasury wants to address the needs of shady businessmen and others who may need to tote around suitcases full of money, they may want to consider a $500 note or even a $1,000 note.  Poor old Benjamin Franklin just isn't worth what he used to be worth.

More Moon Shot

Other posts are in the works, but I thought I'd take a minute to do some navel-gazing on a timely post about going back to the moon.

Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Eugene Cernan have published a strong critique of President Obama's NASA budget that stops funding the Constellation program.  In so doing, the US's only option to get to outer space means hitching a ride on the Russian's Soyuz platform ... and Russia just doubled the per-seat cost from $25 million to $50 million. (Hey, they know when they've got the market cornered!)  The three astronauts opine that:

For the United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond earth orbit for an indeterminate amount of time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.

Strong words from truly admirable men.  They mourn the fact that we're basically abandoning the roughly $10 billion that has been spent on Constellation so far.

But...

In my humble opinion, I do not think the Administration is out on a limb here.  The Augustine report from October 2009 (careful, that's a few megabyte pdf, but worth every electron) starts out by saying the following:

The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory.  It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.

I can't possibly put it better.  Yes, I truly lament the fact that we're not pursuing the Constellation program and all that it could stand for.  But the $10 billion wasn't just wasted -- it has supported thousands and thousands of hardworking and dedicated engineers for a long time, and furthered the maturity of whatever program comes next.  What I'm afraid Messrs. Armstrong, Lovell, and Cernan do not recognize is that the Constellation program will require an estimated $97 billion to complete.  The Augustine Report got that.

Again, without the fear of the Soviets driving us to the moon, there will be no justification for that kind of expenditure in today's budget-minded world.

Energy Density is a Double Edged Sword

Ever since electricity started to be used to do useful work, there has been a drive towards increasing our ability to store that energy in a battery, ready to provide electricity at a moment's notice.

It started with lead acid batteries.  These relatively simple devices have plates of lead separated by an acid.  Placed in series, they create an electric potential across the layers, and the standard has been to put enough of them in series to make 12 volts.  Bigger plates, the more current the battery can provide.

Lead acids are great: they're fairly cheap, they're reliable, and they can hold a charge for a long time.  But compared to petroleum or other chemical means of storing energy, they suck.

See, most people don't realize just how much ENERGY there is available in something like diesel fuel.  140,000 BTU's per gallon, and diesel fuel is fairly stable.  You can actually drop a lit match in diesel fuel and it will extinguish, not ignite.  (Sorry, YouTube doesn't have any cool videos of this.  You'll just have to trust me and the internet on this one.)

Do NOT try this little experiment with gasoline.  Gasoline is more volatile, has a lower flashpoint, and although it "only" has 125,000 BTU's per gallon, it WILL ignite with a match.  It's more common in American engines because it burns faster, so high-output engines that we Americans love so much can be smaller and a little lower weight.

So petroleum has a lot of energy stored in it, it's reasonably easy to pump around and store in large tanks, and the world has grown around it.  It's a very handy form of energy transfer and storage.

If only we could develop a battery that had the same energy storage capacity.  Lithium ion batteries seem to do pretty well at storing a lot of energy in a small and lightweight package -- which makes them ideal contenders for things like laptop batteries and electric car batteries like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt.  According to this site, lithium batteries can store about 128 watt-hours per kilogram.  To put that in real-world terms here are a few comparisons:

• A 5 pound lithium ion battery could run your average hairdryer or microwave for about 12 minutes.  
• The amount of energy in a 5 pound lithium battery would be completely consumed by the time you tried to accelerate a 3,000 pound car -- about average by today's standards -- to 60 miles per hour.   Those same 5 pounds of gasoline is about two thirds of a gallon, which could drive your average car 15 to 20 miles.  Or power a really nice Honda EU2000i generator to provide 2000 watts of electricity for almost 8 hours.
• For a more direct comparison, diesel fuel has 140,000 BTU's per gallon, which weighs 8.1 pounds.  8.1 pounds of a lithium ion battery would provide about 1600 BTU's.

That's about two orders of magnitude difference.  Ouch.

So battery technology still has a ways to go, and there's still the other edge of the sword.  Lithium batteries can be kind of finicky; they require active electronic controls to keep everything hunky-dory.  Failure of those electronic controls can result in bad things.  Remember the spate of laptop batteries catching fire that caused a massive recall?  Active circuits are required to prevent the lithium battery from "going bad."

As energy densities go up, the amount of energy released if the battery is shorted get worse.  There's a serious problem that happens when all that energy decides it wants to get out at once, and it can be hard to stop.  The battery fire I had on my boat, due to shorting a very large (Group 8D) lead-acid battery is one such example:

It's like the famous Ford Pinto problem, setting fire to the gas tank.  Lots of energy all released at once.

The road towards higher and higher energy density batteries will be a slightly bumpy one.  As they get more and more common in cars, there will be battery fires.  There will be accidents.  But we shouldn't lose hope.  Just like the catastrophic failures experienced by the early steam engines that powered truly massive locomotives, we must keep perspective of the overall greater good that we're accomplishing by doing this.  

Moon shot

The US is not going back to the moon in the next 50 years.

As an engineer, it pains me to admit that.  I want a "reach for the stars" project (pardon the pun) that motivates and inspires an entire country -- heck, the entire world -- to want to be the next generation of scientists and engineers.  I want a focused, challenging program that requires a a few percent of the country's resources in order to make it happen -- and to be able to reap the benefits of the side technologies that must be created to support the greater mission.  For instance, teflon was invented during the Manhattan Project, as the K-25 engineers needed something that would withstand the corrosive effects of uranium hexafluoride.  We're still reaping the benefits of all the "side technologies" that fell out of the Apollo program.  I want to be able to point to something so that in 50 years we can look back and say, "See what our generation accomplished?"

But it won't happen in today's society.  We are a fundamentally reactive society, and the impetus just isn't there to do it.

Why did we go to the moon in the first place?  Because the Soviets had just cleaned our clock by launching Sputnik and then Yuri Gagarin into space.  An argument can be made that we could have beaten Sputnik into space -- Wernher von Braun was chomping at the bit to launch his Jupiter rocket -- but that government bureaucracy didn't want to take the risk of a high-profile failure.  Why did we develop the atom bomb?  A weapon of unspeakable terror, it also launched the nuclear power industry, but we started it because we were afraid the Germans (and possibly the Japanese) were going to get there first.

We reacted to get to the moon.  We reacted to split the atom.  GNP-sized projects like these don't spawn out of ambition; they spawn from necessity.

And so President John F. Kennedy made his famous declaration in 1961 that Americans would land a man on the moon and have him return safely by the end of the decade.  It was only with the specter of the Soviet Empire nipping at our heels that the US was able to dedicate the resources, funding, and drive that was necessary to make the goal of landing on the moon.  Sure, LBJ launched his Great Society during this period, and the entanglement in Vietnam grew larger and larger over the decade, but the continuous fear of the Soviets beating us to the next major target -- the moon -- was what allowed the US leaders to be able to divert something like 10% of the federal budget towards NASA's mission to the moon.

That can't happen today.  

President Bush made occasional headlines throughout the 2000s when he and then-NASA Administrator Mike Griffin established a plan to officially retire the Shuttle Transport System and develop the Constellation program that would get us back to the moon.  It was a longer term project, getting a person to the moon by around 2020, that would rely on generally well-established rocket technology.  But even that has suffered a demise in the Obama Administration, as the shifting economic winds force budgeteers to take a hard look at what can be funded and what cannot.  Today's astronauts are upset, and my heart goes out to them.

We can't honestly justify spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that will be necessary to go to the moon, when there are more pressing domestic and international needs that have to be tended to.  Many will argue that every billion dollars spent by NASA is a billion dollars that could be spent better elsewhere: education, health care, Social Security, paying down the national debt, rebuilding infrastructure … the list goes on and on.  

So, when the Cost Benefit Analysis inevitably gets developed for going to the moon, the cost will always be too high and the benefit will always be too low.  A cost benefit analysis is mutually exclusive with going to the moon; the social and political environment has to be such that performing a cost benefit analysis is unthinkable.

And the road to success with big projects like this is a bumpy one, fraught with failure.  Today's risk-averse society appears, to me at least, to be unwilling to accept the kind of risks that would be involved with a project like going to the moon again.  In January 1967, three prominent astronauts died in the tragic Apollo 1 fire during a drill on the launch pad.  The unmanned Apollo 4 (there was no Apollo 2 or 3) successfully launched in November 1967 - a scant 9 months later, and astronauts were pissed that it was unmanned.  For comparison, after the Challenger incident in January 1986, the next shuttle launch did not occur until September 1988,  full 33 months later.  Similarly, after the Columbia accident in January 2003, the next shuttle launch did not occur until July 2005, a gap of 30 months.  

So I don't look for innovation and inspiration to come from these huge, GNP-sized projects in my lifetime.  For better or for worse, I don't believe the geo-political forces are in play to support them.  Societies just won't stand for it while societies perceive better ways to spend the money.  In the meantime, we'll have to look to companies and smaller institutions to provide innovation and inspiration -- which may be no less impressive, but just on a smaller scale than going to the moon.

Incidentally, JFK is famously remembered for his prediction of getting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.  But that wasn't his only "by the end of this decade" prediction, and history has kindly overlooked his other predictions that did not come true.  At the University of Texas in 1963, JFK also predicted that the US would develop its own supersonic transport, that would compete with the UK & France's recently unveiled Concorde program, but fly at three times the speed of sound, not just twice the speed of sound like the Concorde.  Due to budget overruns and a general lack of support, this program was cancelled in 1971.  No prototype ever flew.

Loss of time

I happily spent a fair amount of time in the evenings over the past few weeks watching the Olympics, which negatively affected the amount of time I had to update the blog.

I fear that with this new development, I may lose more time:

Popular Science has scanned in all 137 years of their articles, and made them freely available for all to search and peruse.  It's not that Popular Science is the paragon of all things scientifically truthful, or that Popular Science is the Oracle of Things to Come, but at least they consistently write about things that are just plain cool.

To really crank up the nostalgia, enter a yesteryear into the search field ... say, 1950 ... and enjoy reading about the latest Russian car designs from 1950.

My one complaint is that the interface is hokey.  Why can't I make the viewing window bigger?