I like Ubuntu very much, but they cannot rest on their laurels yet. Here is the list of bugs I’ve found.

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 17 – When President Bush greeted Secretary General Kofi Annan on Wednesday, he gestured toward John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador, and asked, “Has the place blown up since he’s been here?”

The internal United Nations television sound boom that picked up the jest did not record any response from the Secretary General, who simply smiled.

I have no idea if people still read my blog after my 15 minutes of fame, but they will again soon–I’ve got an interesting interview with Dr. Bradley Edwards I will put up as soon as I finish transcribing and cleaning it up.

In the meanwhile, I just wanted to write a quick note about how I got a new IBM T-43 laptop as my old Sony was falling apart. I shrunk the Windows XP partition down to as small as possible and installed Ubuntu on it and I’ve now come to love computers again. Here is a screenshot:
Isn’t it a polished, modern thing of beauty? Note my screen is messier than normal, but I wanted to give a feel for that apps I use, all of which are standards-oriented, solid, easy to use and have the power whenever I need it. (To give one example of the 1000s I’ve noticed, the sound recorder in Windows only records up to 1 minute.)

Here are the apps I’m using:
FireFox
Thunderbird (I want to try out Evolution, but didn’t get it working with gmail yet)
OpenOffice Writer
Audacity (for manipulating audio files)
Synaptic Package Manager (Apps to do anything I want just one click away)
Art Manager (Custom themes, icons, beautiful background images, window decorations, etc. Your desktop a personal computer.)
Totem (with w32codecs extension I can play any Microsoft files I want.)
Bash (way better than cmd.exe)
Gaim (Instant Messenger)
Nvu (For tweaking HTML I’ve composed in OpenOffice)
Gimp (Photoshop)

On my server, I’m using
Apache
Java
PHP
phpBB2
Gallery2
Drupal
WordPress
MySql

The Gnome desktop is beautiful, simple and functional. (I tried KDE and I hate it.) With these few apps I’m only scratching the surface of the tools available, I’ve only been using Linux for a few months.

The best thing about it is any time I run into the problem, Google has the answer. I couldn’t use Linux without Google.

Linux is powerful, robust and I never run into walls. Anything is doable, sometimes it’s just a little bit of work the first time.

Are you a Windows user who has tried Linux recently or thinking about it? Post your thoughts below.

I just spent several enjoyable hours browsing NASA’s website and I am impressed with the breadth and depth of their work. We tend to think of NASA as being mostly about the Space Shuttle, and now the Moon and Mars, but they are doing work in fields such as nanotechnology, personal aircraft, ramjets & scramjets, and lots of other fundamental research–my links are just a small sampling.

I read the transcript of the public rollout of NASA’s new Moon and Mars work, and the new NASA administrator, Michael Griffin made it clear that NASA’s new efforts will not take away any money from NASA’s other scientific research and I think that is wise. The only question I have is whether they are doing everything they can to get those ideas into commercial enterprises. How many billions of dollars of intellectual property are currently locked up in their laboratories?

As for the Moon and Mars plan, from reading what little public data is available, it is clear that their proposal rests on a fundamental underlying assumption, which is the use of Apollo-style rockets as the mechanism of transport. The implications of this assumption spread far and wide; the lunar lander’s design is clearly inextricably intertwined with the rocket which will launch it.

So what happens when that fundamental assumption is replaced? Who knows! It will be interesting to find out. That lander could clearly be launched from a space elevator, but if it wasn’t constrained by the underlying assumption, it might built very differently, much bigger, but what else? Perhaps, it should also be scrapped, as maybe the first logical step to the Moon should be to build a lunar space elevator. Otherwise, at the pace of NASA’s current vision, it will take a long while to fill the Moon up with fun things. I do believe that going to the Moon first is a great place to start, a 384,000 km warmup lap for further explorations.

The best reason to build a space elevator is not just that it is cheaper than NASA’s current plan, but that it will make Space accessible to all of us. NASA’s budget is $16 billion, only 5% of the cost of Katrina cleanup, and yet they still have to fight for this money. I believe people would be willing to spend much greater sums on space (10x NASA’s current budget) if they could see the benefits.

That is why space tourism and other commercial enterprises need to become more important over time and NASA needs to figure out what it’s role is. It isn’t relevant yet with NASA’s current plan because for the next 13 years and more, they will build and deploy everything with little room for independent companies to participate. Once we have a space elevator, it becomes possible for Hilton to put up a hotel, then we will need to answer the question of what NASA’s role should be in designing and certifying it?

Glenn Reynold’s latest Tech Central Station article is interesting, but doesn’t go into much detail on the technical details and benefits to get going on it.

I personally think NASA is acting stupid in the way only a big bureaucracy can by suggesting we spend 100 billion dollars and use 40 year-old Apollo-style rockets to get us to the moon and Mars. How can their engineers be motivated to get out of bed in the morning to work on such a small-minded plan which does nothing more than get us 4 men back on the moon in 13 years?!

NASA needs to quit sniffing the glue used to affix the ceramic tiles, ignore the idea that a space elevator sounds like science fiction the way going to the moon sounded like science fiction in 1960, and just start work on it. Scientists have been speculating about how to build such things for 50 years and have understood that with long strings and counterweights it would be much cheaper to put a pound into space than attaching it to a bomb as we do today. The biggest holdup has been in the materials science, but in 1991 carbon nanotubes were invented which allow us to build a string the width of a human hair which is strong enough to lift a car.

With that alone, we have the essential technology which has been holding things up and we can build something which is 10-2000x cheaper per pound than conventional technology.

However, we can build space elevators even more cheaply by taking advantage of other new technologies which are well understood in the laboratory but which needs to be built at largescale by the engineers with the big budgets. We need to build a set of devices which will climb the first string (which will initially be installed by rockets or the space shuttle) and add another string to it, eventually building a ribon. These climbers could be powered by conventional mechanisms, but it is much smarter to leave the the power source on the ground and use laser beams (first demonstrated by Bell Labs way back in 1960) to beam the energy to the climbers. This keeps the climbers lightweight which we will need in the bootstrapping process. NASA would need to build new types of drives to convert the laser energy to work; the best appears to be magneto-plasma-dynamic (MPD) drives which shoot out ions at 40,000 m/s, another technology waiting for an application for productive use.

These are just two of the biggest breakthroughs which will come out of our space elevator research and all of it can be ours for only $6 billion. In addition, there are many more small and interesting problems that building the space elevator will force scientists to undertake. Beyond the nanotechnology, which may get widespread use because of this effort, there is much more materials science work to build ribbons, support structures, housing, etc. to withstand the elements and the oxidation and the radiation from space and other new challenges. It becomes important to build systems to track (and eventually clean up) the junk floating in space which could threaten the ribbon. We will learn very much building and maintaining this big system.

The space elevator will not only make it dramatically cheaper to put a pound into space, it has the potentially to fundamentally change many things. The idea of building big rockets may become obsolete when most of the energy getting from here to there is handled by space elevators on the Earth and Moon and Mars. (Once you build the first one, subsequent ones are much cheaper to build.) Satellites are built in a particular way because they are launched at high Gs and it takes a year and $500 million to fix them. When these dynamics change and they become more disposable, it will improve the diversity and quantity of them. Space tourism and other commercial enterprises will drive most future efforts in space, and the tourism might start with a modest hotel in .1 g 14,000 km out. ³He could be used in the future for nucular reactors and it is available in very large quantities from the moon which has been collecting it from the sun. A kilo of ³He put into a nucular reactor is worth 157,480 barrels of oil. It puts into perspective our silly worries about oil when we have so many energy sources available.

This scratches the surface of the changes to our world which will occur when space becomes affordable: could even Tim Berners-Lee predict how the Internet would change our world in 1990? A great book which discusses in more detail most of what I have written is The Space Elevator by Bradley Edwards & Eric Westling, I encourage you to read it–it is more exciting than sci-fi! I sent 20 copies of this book to the White House 2 weeks ago; hopefully they haven’t gotten lost. It is currently only #86027 on Amazon.com’s list, but it must be more important to humanity’s future then that!!

We should demand our government seriously consider investing $6 billion to build us a 200 ton space elevator in 5 years. If we told ourselves it would take 50 years, we would build it in 51. If we had to build it in 5, we could build it in 5. The rabbit hole is waiting.

— UPDATE: — I have written more about how Institutional Inertia rather than glue could be what has completely blinded NASA to recognizing a transformation technology in a new post above.

— UPDATE 2: — Arthur C. Clarke and I both make recent predictions about when humanity will start work on the space elevator here. Check it out and put your thoughts in!