Malory Emane
From Ye Old Blogge:
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Science retrodate
Just been reading the New Scientist, 29 Mar 2003. It's the anniversary of that issue, after all.
As I was reading it, I had a few jogs of memory. For example, I recall a (very tiny) outcry over nanoscale particles causing lung damage, and realised that the idea's again recently surfaced on some science blogs, after only a year of waffling and avoiding issues and ignoring. I have a vested interest in nanotech and lungs, as my emphysema may one day be cured by nanotech, and the finding last year was a bit of a letdown... Still no light on the horizon for me, I guess.
SARS was a big thing. GM crops were being debated and found to be a mixed bag. Binge eating was rediscovered. And email FOAF harvesting tools were just being developed and used. Today, I am looking for FOAF (Friend Of A Friend, or social network and relationship discovery) software for our Sales and Tech Support people. Some technology gets a head start for being so universally useful. One other thing that NS didn't mention in that article was the rise and rise of blogging...
One article in there gave me a jolt. You see, years ago, when the world only had BBS systems and electronic mail (netmail and echomail for all us old farts) was a very avant garde technology, I was discussing with a bunch of people in the States, about the possibility of using Blackbird reconnaisance aircraft as cheap light shuttles. I had the idea that if you bought a Blackbird and modified it for a few million bucks, you could go up, mend or remove faulty satellites and space junk, and amortise the cost of the spacecraft in a couple of missions.
That wasn't it though. One of my correspondents mentioned that the heat of re-entry was a problem. And I had the answer right there - if you inject a layer of steam (steam is easy to create at the nose of a re-entering craft, after all - just add water to all that heat...) from leading edges of the craft, the steam should form a Leidenfrost layer and thus insulate the spacecraft from the heat. And there, on page 29, is my idea... Now I can only hope that those early discussions have served to kick this idea off finally, but I'd love to be mentioned as a "he thought of this first" annotation to the article at least. Damn I wish I had the archives of those old echomail days...
Cold fusion gets an ambivalent look, as do a heap of other things which are again coming up in the news this year, but the cold fusion article in particular caught my eye - do journalists just fish out year-old articles, flesh them over a bit, and release them again? Because everything that was in that NS article has also been in the more recent coverages online, and not much new has been added...
Also interesting - that "bat caves" placed around lakes reduced the number of mosquitoes and also produced around 2 tons a year of guano as fertiliser as well. That the bats were actually affecting the numbers of mosquitoes was and still is in doubt - maybe that needs to be investigated? Why not? I know of dozens of lakes and waterways around housing estates that would benefit from such natural protection. In fact, elimination of mosquitoes around inhabited areas costs millions a year, and leaves chemical residues, and causes other illnesses - so this would potentially be a tremendously beneficial piece of research.
So it's steam baths and bat poo time for me, perhaps I can design a shuttle that runs on batshit and bullshit and eats mosquitoes during descent, and find fame and riches as I go. hehehe later people!
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
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