The Art Neuro Weblog

Ansari X Prize Update
In case you forgot all about it, the space race amongst private consortiums is still on. There is mounting speculation that there will be an announcement on July 27th. The noises emananting from the SpaceShipOne camp say:

"When we do get ready to do the X Prize flights, we will be ready to fly three flights, not two," Rutan said. "We can fly SpaceShipOne a little quicker than in one week. In other words, we can fly three flights in two weeks," he added.

Rutan said that SpaceShipOne could conceivably fly every week. An early plan of Rutan, in discussions with the projects backer, billionaire Paul Allen, was to fly the craft every week for five months.

"What that would do it would give us a lot more data on our operating cost," Rutan said. "We jointly decided not to have that one funded...and find out how it flew first."

Meanwhile here's the interesting one. A consortium from Canada plans to fly up with a Helium Balloon, then launch a rocket.

Canadas da Vinci Project's flight plan calls for a giant helium balloon to hoist Wild Fire, the team's spacecraft, to an altitude of 80,000 feet (24,384 meters).

The da Vinci Project, led by Brian Feeney of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, registered as a contender for the X PRIZE on June 2, 2000.

This concept utilizes a reusable helium balloon to lift the teams spacecraft, dubbed "Wild Fire", to high altitude. At that point, Wild Fire's rocket engines will ignite and propel the crew to edge of space and the Ansari X Prize winning altitude.

Now that, pardon the pun, would be gas.

Stephen Hawking Update
As was reported previously, Stephen Hawking did change his mind on Black Holes and made news. If I change my mind on the Black Holes, that won't make news. The thing is, he did all this fancy calcualtion stuff that eventually showed that matter can't just dissappear, something has to be outputted. Me on the other hand just typed that on the blog page because I read it, which underscores the major difference between a celebrity Physicist and an under-employed bum. :)

Hawking, 62, said he no longer believes a 1980s theory that black holes might offer passage into another universe, a rival explanation for identifying where matter and energy go when consumed by a black hole.

Hawking now sides with particle physicists who have long insisted that any matter swallowed by a black hole can't just disappear but must eventually generate a specific output. The latest theory offers hope that scientists one day may identify the history of what a black hole has taken in over the eons — by decoding what it emits.

"There is no baby universe branching off (inside a black hole), as I once thought. The information remains firmly in our universe," Hawking said in a speech to about 800 physicists and other scientists from 50 countries. "I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes.

"If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognizable state."

What's amazing is that he did all of his rethinking because of a bet with a particle physicist, John Preskill (nice name). And the Particle Physicist who won the bet now gets a baseball encylopedia. So much for that; there, but to underscore the greatness of baseball, I guess. :) 

Singing Praises
A couple of days ago, there was snarky commentary about Linda Ronstadt getting thrown out of a Las Vegas Casino-Hotel. Well, here's the deal according to her.

"This is an election year," she told the Los Angeles Times Tuesday. "I want people to get their head up out of their mashed potatoes and learn something about the issues and go and vote. ... I'm not telling them how to vote. I'm saying, get information about the issues."

Now that sounds about right to me. The Las Vegas Casino Hotel then went on to say they wouldn't ask her back and she said she'd already told them she didn't want to go back and their grapes were sour enough. However, she did make an interesting point:

"I didn't even know there was trouble," she said. "Those places operate like little city-states. They are all-powerful..."

In Los Angeles, there were about 100 calls for refunds for Ronstadt's performance at the Universal Amphitheatre Tuesday night. 

So  a singer says on stage, get your info, and watch this movie, you might learn something. People get angry and storm out, demanding their money back. Doesn't this strike you as over-reacting? Yet I believe the true nature of politics in fact lies in this very point.

Politics, Niccolo Machiavelli said, was about emotions. And so when people are challenged in their positions, they tend to get a little self-righteous: "This is What I believe. How can I possibly be wrong, given my accumulated life-experiences, study and observation?"
While this is somewhat simplified, it explains why people get so agitated by politics. Political discussion and discourse on the whole is predicated on the emotional need for the other guy to be wrong (more than one's need to be right). On the whole, when you discuss things rationally with people, you find that when it comes to politics, it's never really rational as they claim they are; quite often it's outright an issue of allegiance. Which is fine. We all have allegiances. I owe allegiances to things just like everybody else, but I am honest enough to say "It's irrational. There is not a rational argument on the planet that explains my allegiance to the New York Yankees. And they're not even a political cause."  

Now Linda Ronstadt is not my idea of a communist. She's a '70s pop star, eking out a living in the twilight of her career; singing in casino amphitheatres for crying out loud. She, like others in a democratic world is entitled to her opinion and to express them at her own forum, her stage and her work. And in turn, the Casino-Hotel mini-City-States are allowed to banish her and look like tin-pot dictators. I mean how much moral high ground can the Casino-Hotel claim when they ply their trade in gambling and prostitution? As for the people walking out and demanding their money back, that's not even political. That's called scamming.

- Art Neuro