Today's picture is brought to you by the letter /b/.
20 October, 2007
19 October, 2007
Macbook toast
I got my macbook on-or-around March 6 of 2007. I don't recall why the "top case" was replaced, but it was replaced some months ago. This morning, my usb controller committed seppuku while my blackberry was attached to it. Initially I thought the blackberry (an 8300) had failed to charge overnight because I'd been using a really eensy-weensy no-shielding usb cable. However, the cable appeared unburnt and stuff. When I got to the office, I plugged it in as per usual (dvi, audio out, usb keyboard, usb for the blackberry, ethernet, power), and noticed my blackberry was still not charging.
As it turns out both of my usb ports are kaput. It won't mount or charge an iPod, won't talk to keyboards, etc. Toast.
Now, as, uh, luck would have it, my laptop has also been giving me sporadic random reboots, and can't be trusted to stay asleep (occasionally waking up and then running the battery down until it dies), or not rebooting in its sleep (so that when it wakes up, it's still charged, but i've got a fresh login screen). So it turns out the local Apple store had a motherboard in stock, waiting for me to just drop the machine off (as you can imagine, I'm pretty picky about anybody fussing with my machine, for fear of data loss). The USB thing has of course forced the issue.
So, that makes the failure time seven months.
I'm using Sandy's 17" MBP (2.4ghz), and I just don't see anything that makes me want to even upgrade to the bigger model. It kinda looks, from here, that the "upgrade" is in the vaio direction.
Sigh.
As it turns out both of my usb ports are kaput. It won't mount or charge an iPod, won't talk to keyboards, etc. Toast.
Now, as, uh, luck would have it, my laptop has also been giving me sporadic random reboots, and can't be trusted to stay asleep (occasionally waking up and then running the battery down until it dies), or not rebooting in its sleep (so that when it wakes up, it's still charged, but i've got a fresh login screen). So it turns out the local Apple store had a motherboard in stock, waiting for me to just drop the machine off (as you can imagine, I'm pretty picky about anybody fussing with my machine, for fear of data loss). The USB thing has of course forced the issue.
So, that makes the failure time seven months.
I'm using Sandy's 17" MBP (2.4ghz), and I just don't see anything that makes me want to even upgrade to the bigger model. It kinda looks, from here, that the "upgrade" is in the vaio direction.
Sigh.
18 October, 2007
Galley readers needed
I have eight short stories that are all mostly finished. One is presently out to a few people, but I need another couple people to read them. What I'm looking for are
If you'd like to subject yourself to this process (which is really just reading something critically, it only has to be as interactive as you want), please either comment here or let me know via email/phone. I am sending copies out as PDF and Word, both of which have annotation features you could use, but don't have to.
Again, I don't want to send them out and not hear back. I need the feedback. 5,000 words amounts to twenty five pages. For me, that's pretty quick. For others, that could be half an hour. Nothing's going to be longer than that.
Thanks.
(And JM, you are officially a hero for kicking my butt in the first round of stuff. Thank you. I wouldn't be here without having taken that first step)
- General impressions: did it suck?
- Tense changes. If it's present tense in one sentence and past tense in the preceding sentence, did it make sense? Was it for a reason?
- Dialogue: are you always able to tell who's talking?
- Pronouns: sometimes it's very clear to me what's going on, but using pronouns can sometimes confuse the reader. At the same time, we can't always say "Alex Avriette drove to work," we have to use the pronoun "he." And so on. This is usually an important one.
- Homonyms. They're/there/their, you're/your, things like this. Word usually doesn't catch these, unfortunately.
- Spelling. This is pretty unlikely. While I misspell here, Word catches most of my quickies, and the red squigglies make me angry, so I go look up the word and make sure Word knows about it or it ignores it.
- Composition/Comprehension. How did it flow? Sometimes we cut from present to past, or present to future, and cross-cut, and so on. Was it over-done? under-done? not done? Did the thing fit together like a train wreck, or did you read it afterwards thinking, holy shit, that train just slid right the fuck up inside that other train!
If you'd like to subject yourself to this process (which is really just reading something critically, it only has to be as interactive as you want), please either comment here or let me know via email/phone. I am sending copies out as PDF and Word, both of which have annotation features you could use, but don't have to.
Again, I don't want to send them out and not hear back. I need the feedback. 5,000 words amounts to twenty five pages. For me, that's pretty quick. For others, that could be half an hour. Nothing's going to be longer than that.
Thanks.
(And JM, you are officially a hero for kicking my butt in the first round of stuff. Thank you. I wouldn't be here without having taken that first step)
emusic.com
The, uh, #1 "independent music" site, with great independent acts like, uh, Moby, is giving away free music. Twenty five free tracks, in fact. Only free in this case is the same kind of free that porn sites use. On pornographic websites, they have these incredible offers. It's just $3.99 for four days! And, let's face it, that's a pretty good price for some prawns. But, as usual, behind the bait there's a hook and a guy called "the hedgehog," and all of a sudden on day 5, you get charged $49.99 for the first month's supply of dendrobranchiatites, and so on down the line until you get so irritated you actually call fisting.net up and ask that they cancel your service, at which point they beg and plead and offer you that $3.99 hook again, and so on.
Well, emusic is doing the same goddamn thing. And their business model even sucks. For my $0 down, I get twenty five free songs by Moby and Van Halen, and then I get to pay $20 a month thereafter for the amazing privilege of downloading 75 tracks. This sounds great, right?
Okay, so imagine Netflix, only they send you six CD's a month and charge you $20. Jeez. When I download music, I tend to download a lot of it, but most of it's garbage, and I really like probably 5% of what I get. So I'm probably never going to download 75 tracks every single month, and the ones that I do, I'm going to want more than 75 of, and they'll probably run me.... let me guess. $3.99 for the first five.
Well, emusic is doing the same goddamn thing. And their business model even sucks. For my $0 down, I get twenty five free songs by Moby and Van Halen, and then I get to pay $20 a month thereafter for the amazing privilege of downloading 75 tracks. This sounds great, right?
Okay, so imagine Netflix, only they send you six CD's a month and charge you $20. Jeez. When I download music, I tend to download a lot of it, but most of it's garbage, and I really like probably 5% of what I get. So I'm probably never going to download 75 tracks every single month, and the ones that I do, I'm going to want more than 75 of, and they'll probably run me.... let me guess. $3.99 for the first five.
Pigeons with frickin' laserbeams on their heads
I wrote a perl script today to determine the size of lens I'd need to focus laser light. Essentially, the principle is, if you've got a tube that contains fiber-optic lasers, and arranges them around the circumference of the lens at the same radius, at the point of focus, their effect will be cumulative. Thus, with many smaller lasers, one is able to create a more powerful beam. A 2W laser that's actually capable of sustained use is actually incredibly expensive. However, air-cooled 500mW near-infrared fiber optic lasers are much cheaper. So, you take, say, four of them and put them in a 56mm tube (I use 56mm because that's the size of the objective on the riflescope I use). They don't take up a lot of room. Run a fan out the back and holes at the front, behind the lens (in a minute) to draw air from the objective (the lasing end) back through the actual lasers. Take said tube, and mount it atop an eight-cell battery for those new RC cars. The whole thing can then be mounted upon a very cheap "blank" rifle stock. Choose whichever trigger system you like. Since lasers actually have very little bullet drop, a simple red dot sight or even (this would be funny) a laser pointer on a picatinny rail could be use to aim.
The lens is not so hard. If you have a symmetrically convex lens of 18% curvature, with a diameter of 56mm, you'll have a focal length of right about 100 yards.
I chose a hundred yards because that's what most rifle shooters use as a sort of "point blank" and then adjust from there. The problem with the lasing system is that it isn't adjustable. Further, if you're not at 103.43 yards from the emitters, you're only being hit with n * 500mW lasers, which might or might not harm you, depending on how far away you are. So as a weapon, it's kind of useless. If the target is past 103 yards, the beams actually diverge, making it terribly inaccurate – you'd literally be "shooting" both up and down (or left and right, or ...).
Things do get interesting, though, the more capacity you add to the device. If you instead choose 120mm (a common objective size for spotting scopes), you can fit a lot more beams in there. If you can cool and afford the 1.5W lasers, running a few of those into a device that focused at 100yds (120mm lens, 25% symmetric convex, focal point = 127.64 yds), that might actually start to get pretty nasty.
However, for the 2-4 500mW lasers in a 56mm housing, it would be loads of fun to terrorize pigeons. I work pretty high up in a building and am offended by their shitting all over the buildings (well, not really, but it makes a good excuse to cover my sheer boredom). It wouldn't barbecue the suckers, but it probably would confuse the hell out of them.
Here's your perl:
$f = (($n - 1) * $d / $n * $r**2)**2;
where f is focal length, n is refractive index of your lens material (pyrex = 1.47, flint glass = 1.52), d is the diameter of your lens, r is the ratio of "convexness". e.g., if d = 56, and r = .1, the actual "roundness" is .56mm (greater than flat, which would be 0mm).
I don't have any formulas for how laser light of a given wavelength degrades in the atmosphere. Haven't been able to find any.
16 October, 2007
How long to Jupiter? Saturn? further?
Okay, so since this whole thing is really long, I'm going to answer the title question first, so you can just stop reading if you like. "Really fucking long. And, sorry, neither of us will be alive to see it." That is, unless we get sandbagged.
I want to talk about how near-space (as defined as perhaps as far as Jovian or Saturnian orbit) colonization. We need a few things to do this:
I'll start with the last one. The only reason that makes sense on the scale of a self-perpetuating population is economy. People don't want to leave home and live in a tin can for months on end to go hang out around some intensely radioactive ball of hydrogen that wants desperately to consume them. So there has to be money in it for them. The most commonly posited source of currency in Jovian (or Saturnian, Neptunian, or Uranian) orbit is fuel. Typically (I'll use the Peter Hamilton example), large "scoops" or other devices are "surfed" or "skimmed" into the atmosphere of these giants, collecting deuterium for a hydrogen fusion economy.
A hydrogen fusion economy is a pretty good bet if you want to have interplanetary travel. At least in the beginning. I'll get to fusion in a minute, but the first thing we have to do is define whether we'll get off the ground.
So there's monetary incentive in fuel. There's another incentive, which I'll call the Amber Incentive, in which the first few colonists out there will find themselves with near limitless resources for construction, similarly limitless available energy, and could rapidly define a new polity of possible
hostility to "in-system-ers." They could also be completely benign; but humanity is full of kooks, and they're all different, so you never know if you're going to get a Curious Yellow kook or something more like The Festival.
Since the reasons for going out there seem to be:
So there will be people who want to go.
How will they get there? Getting people into orbit, let alone to Jupiter, is expensive, dangerous, and politically unpopular. The answer is simple. Somebody will realize that they have one of the three above kookeries, a pile of cash, but they don't want to go themselves, because they're busy oppressing people down here in the dirt. So they offer deals with people willing to go. Consider Richard K. Morgan's Market Forces. The term he used was Conflict Investment. That's about perfect. Essentially, we will send you up there on the conditions that:
Hey, to a kook, that sounds like a good idea. Everyone makes out. For everyone not keeping track, we've got the Why and the Who worked out.
Life support is something that isn't very complex. The problem is there is so goddamn much of it. To keep twelve people alive for ten years in a tin can the size of a schoolbus becomes difficult. In the film Sunshine, of this year, we see that they maintain both a carbon dioxide-oxygen exchange and a source of food with enormous greenhouses attached to a similarly enormous ship.
The real problem I see with this is that all that life (the plants) require life support themselves. They need to be heated/cooled, watered, and be given the usual NPK. So even though you've solved your CO2/O2 problem, you've created this new problem of feeding a hundred thousand tons of hydro- or aeroponic plant cultures. And nobody's done any real research on exactly how many turnips, heads of lettuce, and so on, one needs to grow to feed people for however long.
No, I think we may grow food, but it won't be an Oklahoma-sized farm growing in some benign little spacefarm orbiting Jupiter. I think instead we will have food to put in our guts because they are designed to work that way (although there's no reason we couldn't remove the stomach and replace it with a section of small intestine; this is done all the time). The rest of the food can be delivered nightly, by IV bag. Sort of like incredibly sick patients at the ER (with influenza/pneumonia, etc) get a "banana bag", dextrose, and saline.
We've made superfoods. People just like to masticate plant and animal matter. Moving to Jupiter means you don't get to eat meat. Tofu, though, that's probably doable.
The most frightening aspect of this is the incredible exposure to radiation one faces outside the atmosphere. Furthermore, radiation at Jupiter isn't just lethal, it's like severed horse-head in your bed lethal. So you have a couple of approaches.
I'm inclined to believe they're both reasonable. I don't think we'll see nanomachines anytime soon that will make sure that we're fixed as we get broken by stray neutrons, but I think it might be possible to make our tissues more resilient, thus making spacewalks possible, and even trips to the surface of
planetary bodies (the Jovians call these "moons").
Deflecting the radiation is entirely do-able, but of course gets much more difficult the size of the craft increases. It also precludes you from heading down to Callisto to pick up some good ol' H2O unless you have similarly shielded landing craft, similarly shielded suits (see above re: Sunshine), and
so on. It's an enormous pain in the ass.
So we can sustain and protect life in the harsh environment out there. That covers part of the "how."
We still need to get there, though. Unfortunately, nothing we have right now can get us there in any amount of time that will ensure an astronaut's return home alive. That is to say, the trip out and back is going to be too long.
There are a number of futurist-technologists out there, but one of the most practical I've read (probably because we both cut our teeth in IT and know when marketing shit is just that).
Charlie talks about the path technology would take over time in his notes for Accelerando.
Specifically, these two quotes:
and
Now, if you haven't read the book, that's fine. The above two and the rest of his notes are sufficient for this discussion. But let's look elsewhere (note: I am not going to link to Wikipedia, you can look the stuff up yourself there or at your local library). If we talk about space travel between now and 2107, using Charlie's technology vector, we entirely lose the ability to plot where things will be.
However, let's look at ion drives, which are very popular as space travel propulsion current s(peculative|cience) fiction. First, the drives were first written about in 1929, and operational by 1960. Today, we enjoy a pretty clear understanding of the devices, we've had several successful craft that use them, and to build a deep-space craft tomorrow that used an ion propulsion device would be trivial, technologically speaking.
The problem of course is getting it into orbit. Assuming that by 2107, building something in orbit will be trivial, that mass can either be accelerated out of Earth's gravity well, or that there's a new stream of materials that do not originate in the well, getting it into orbit isn't an issue.
Putting a reactor on it that produces the current required to spit Xenon ions out the ass end of the thing is not difficult, either. Thus it becomes trivially difficult to create arbitrarily large ion propulsion systems (wikipedia calls this a "nuclear electric rocket" although the terms 'rocket' and 'nuclear' are hardly applicable).
The question is, would we even want to? Assuming we can provide a limitless supply of fuel, and assemble in orbit, what would we do with both those advantages? The fuel could come from the asteroid belt (we have a mission to Ceres next year), or from Mars, or possibly Luna. Or, I guess, from cheaper, bigger launch technology. If the fuel is big ol' bricks o' deuterium or whichever, there's a lot higher power to weight ratio in the stuff you're lifting than in something like ammonium perchlorate.
Back to Charlie:
and
So let's look at both of these. First, we both think that it's silly to go waaaay out on a limb, especially for just 2030. I'm talking about 2107, and I still think that's not a great idea. In 1907 we had a lot of the technology we do today, just in far less refined form. We had motorcycles and cars, but we didn't have bluetooth in either. We had POTS, but not IP. Goddard and Tsiolkovksy were both talking about liquid-fuel rockets in the first decade of 1900, and we had the first launch in 1926. We had cathode-ray tubes, but not high-def or VR. We had advanced math, but no machines to crunch it with.
Is it then plausible to think that we've much to look forward to in the next 70 years, in terms of propulsion? Both Stephen Baxter and Stross have referred to quantum condensates and other wacky Higgs-related energy and/or propulsion. Reynolds seems to point at it, but never calls it by name. I don't even see hints of this happening. Sure, it's possible, but we're not at the point where we understand the physics yet. So we're not even at the "discovery" point from which we can extrapolate from the arc of other technologies.
My guess is that, no, we don't have a whole lot more to look forward to. I suspect if we have a similar trajectory, then we can look at early-stage fusion happening. We might see something that smells like Higgs, but if I were to invest money today, I'd put the majority of the money on technology that's well understood and has room to grow. You've got to hedge your bets, because, as the man says, "magical technology" will probably "come out of nowhere," "sandbagging everyone who isn't watching the ball."
An entirely different question is how you pick that 10% shot at a technology nobody saw coming. Maybe that's something like zero-point energy, or even reaching as far as negative matter or something capable of actually deforming space advantageously. But even if we got on those today, we can expect that in thirty years we'll have V-2's, not Saturn V's or Deep Space 1.
What this says to me is that if you want to look into a crystal ball, have your predictions not be entirely preposterous now, or a hundred years from now, you find, as I said, a mature technology with room to grow, and just extrapolate on that vector. Take ion drives, build them in orbit so the horrendous penalties of launch weight and low specific impulse don't bother them as much. Give them huge fuel capacities and thrust (through larger thrusters or groups thereof). Reaching for fusion as a power source for the ion generation seems like it might be okay, but fission is a much better understood process. I guess the problem is there's a lot more hydrogen in space than there is uranium or plutonium. You'd really have to get the uranium and plutonium into orbit, or come up with a good reason for it being there. I know somebody out there is screaming, "mine the asteroid belt!" Asteroids is not a good bet for the 2107 timeframe. The problem being very simple, if compound. First, how we get there and settle there. Second, how we manage to get that material back to Earth. Peter Hamilton had this neat idea for making the rocks into a sort of foam (think pumice) that was fragile enough to be worked on in orbit, but would ablate if it were to reentry rather than cause an apocalypse. We're just not there.
The other solution for powering the drives, long-term, is either fusion or antimatter. I'm going to call them equally probable. Both are kind of intractable at the moment, and both will become more reasonable as our understanding of high-energy physics improves. When the Large Hadron Collider
comes online, it should be able to produce antimatter by the kilogram. Ostensibly, if we can build drives in orbit, we can build a collider in orbit, freeing it from the traditional enemies (apart from politicians and budgets) such devices usually face. Again, the problem is of course supply for the material. I doubt getting the people up to orbit is going to be a problem in 2107. It might still be expensive, but cornering the antimatter-based or fusion-based economy in orbit is too appealing to miss on account of money quibbles.
And, just to address Vinge and the Singularity, fusion and even antimatter aren't strong enough to invoke a singularity. Presently, AI is not anywhere near the stage at which it could sort of run away and build itself. Even in a hundred years I suspect we'll start to have things that resemble actual intelligence, but which cannot build more of themselves, or improve upon the design (there's a good Hans Reiser interview on filesystem semantics that shows just how far behind we really are). Aliens showing up are equally probable (or less, even) than your average comet smacking into the Pacific. I think for the next hundred years, at least, that it's a lot safer bet that we'll get better at what we do already than we will pull some fancy technology out of our collective ass and develop it so well as to be easily and productively useful (and safe to travel with).
So I really doubt anyone's still reading, but here's where I am at with my predictive process (as I don't want to write a book that's rubbish right from the start). Since I can't predict Charlie's "sandbag," I shouldn't add it to the equation. I've actually been using project management software (of several
different varieties, thank you very much), all of which fail when the scale is increased to, oh, three hundred years or so.
I see the following "tasks" to be deposited into a Gantt chart, or similar, but I refuse to write the software to do it. Maybe some RoR person will do it because HTML in perl is such a pain in the ass.
So:
1. Heavy lift vehicles. Ares will suffice. (5-10y)
1a. Commercial heavy lift processes. This isn't Rutan. (5-15y)
1b. Continual, civilian, skilled, human labor, in orbit (20y)
Provided we accomplish 1a-b, we are now 20 years out. Here's where the bio stuff goes.
2a. Better O2 scrubbers. (5y)
2b. Better, lighter, radiation shielding. (5y)
2c. Biological (or nano/mechanical) radiation protection. (5y)
2d. Superfoods. (2-5y)
So if we've progressed from 1 to 2 here, we're now 25 years out, and we're very comfortable in orbit. Radiation doesn't bother us much, we have a heavy lift-to-orbit industry on the planet, we most likely have a large orbiting habitat for perhaps fifty to a hundred people. With that, we can provide lift and engineering for a number of things (these are "ors" not "ands"):
A trans-martian orbit telescope
A lunar base
A ship capable of reaching Jupiter and returning in fewer than ten years
You can guess where I'd spend my money, but I'm not certain anyone else really cares. Assuming we go with Door #3, we then also have to begin construction of a shipyard in orbit. Building ships repeatedly on the ground and reassembling them (or expanding them or spinning them up, or whatever) in orbit is wasteful. Humanity has a presence in orbit, let them make vehicles in orbit. Materials are needed, and these likely will have to be heavy-lifted, or perhaps someone will find a use for the moon.
We're now forty years out. The ship to Jupiter has not yet returned, but what it has shown us is we want to go back. Facilities in orbit have increased in size to the point that there are several thousand people in orbit at any given time, from tourists to people working there, to the ultra-rich deciding to live there.
What's more is we have orbital facilities to build stuff. This means if somebody gets a wicked transrectal itch (and has enough currency), they can build their own craft to head out to Jupiter. If they have the resources to actually colonize out there, say a few dozen people and start gathering rocks, those people are going to be really, really, rich in a hundred years when the rest of the humans make it off their ball of dirt. Anyone wanting to go out past Jupiter (Neptune and Uranus are both pretty
useful places, to say nothing of the Kuiper Belt) will wind up working with the people at Jupiter orbit, taking on fuel or material, or whatever else is produced out there.
The problem is, it'll take at least seventy years for a ship intending to colonize (and by colonize I do not mean Babylon Five, I mean a dozen people trying to squeeze resources out of a mean, one-and-a-half-eyed giant). It'll take them another thirty at least before there's any kind of commerce happening.
So in a hundred years, if humanity started today with the intent to colonize the Jupiter system, we might be getting close.
One can look at this and see that in two hundred years, Jupiter is probably old news. However, we're still nowhere near the point where we can even reach the Oort cloud, let alone another star.
My guess is fission will reign as power in space for the next fifty years. If we manage to pull off fusion, it will take over. However, I think (and this may seem silly) that the Large Hadron Collider is going to show us it just may be easier to make antimatter, stuff it into a bottle, and annihilate heavy atoms.
So fifty or so years of the same old stuff, followed by a hundred years of refining the new stuff, and by the time we're at Saturn, we've got enough power for maybe fractional C. Maybe. And that's maybe like a percent, two or three percent, but I don't think we're going to see ten or more percent simply
because it's going to take so much energy to slow down when you get to wherever it is you're going (and this of course is to say nothing of, you know, the stray speck of dust hitting you at .1C.
The only other alternative to us getting around really, really, fast, is the one that Charlie has already pointed out. You have to digitize people and transmit them at the speed of light. There are lots of nerds out there (the stardestroyer.net types -- (just be aware, I'm with Charlie when I say I go to cons to see fans...)) who have done calculations on how "improbable" it is to actually deconstruct and reconstruct a person. Even a brain. So, it's an idea, but hardly seems implementable.
The only thing that really seems to guarantee colonization of the universe by humanity is the Dyson Chickens. It's just so painfully slow. Slow enough to make you want to take a The Algebraist-style nap for a few million years.
(note: reformatted in jan of 09 because somebody saw it in the atrocious state it was in. no other content was changed)
I want to talk about how near-space (as defined as perhaps as far as Jovian or Saturnian orbit) colonization. We need a few things to do this:
- Fuel
- Propulsion
- Life support
- People willing to do it
- A reason to do it
I'll start with the last one. The only reason that makes sense on the scale of a self-perpetuating population is economy. People don't want to leave home and live in a tin can for months on end to go hang out around some intensely radioactive ball of hydrogen that wants desperately to consume them. So there has to be money in it for them. The most commonly posited source of currency in Jovian (or Saturnian, Neptunian, or Uranian) orbit is fuel. Typically (I'll use the Peter Hamilton example), large "scoops" or other devices are "surfed" or "skimmed" into the atmosphere of these giants, collecting deuterium for a hydrogen fusion economy.
A hydrogen fusion economy is a pretty good bet if you want to have interplanetary travel. At least in the beginning. I'll get to fusion in a minute, but the first thing we have to do is define whether we'll get off the ground.
So there's monetary incentive in fuel. There's another incentive, which I'll call the Amber Incentive, in which the first few colonists out there will find themselves with near limitless resources for construction, similarly limitless available energy, and could rapidly define a new polity of possible
hostility to "in-system-ers." They could also be completely benign; but humanity is full of kooks, and they're all different, so you never know if you're going to get a Curious Yellow kook or something more like The Festival.
Since the reasons for going out there seem to be:
- We're bored on Earth (read: kooks)
- We want to get in on the "ground floor" of the Jovian economy (call these perhaps the "Methuselan Economists")
- We really dislike Earth, or the Nation-du-jour, and we want to get out there and build something to kick their asses. (the space-faring militarists)
So there will be people who want to go.
How will they get there? Getting people into orbit, let alone to Jupiter, is expensive, dangerous, and politically unpopular. The answer is simple. Somebody will realize that they have one of the three above kookeries, a pile of cash, but they don't want to go themselves, because they're busy oppressing people down here in the dirt. So they offer deals with people willing to go. Consider Richard K. Morgan's Market Forces. The term he used was Conflict Investment. That's about perfect. Essentially, we will send you up there on the conditions that:
- You do not fire on us
- Any new technologies you develop, we own
- We get 7% of your GDP in perpetuity
- We reserve the right to cut off support or funding if we deem your mission a failure.
Hey, to a kook, that sounds like a good idea. Everyone makes out. For everyone not keeping track, we've got the Why and the Who worked out.
Life support is something that isn't very complex. The problem is there is so goddamn much of it. To keep twelve people alive for ten years in a tin can the size of a schoolbus becomes difficult. In the film Sunshine, of this year, we see that they maintain both a carbon dioxide-oxygen exchange and a source of food with enormous greenhouses attached to a similarly enormous ship.
The real problem I see with this is that all that life (the plants) require life support themselves. They need to be heated/cooled, watered, and be given the usual NPK. So even though you've solved your CO2/O2 problem, you've created this new problem of feeding a hundred thousand tons of hydro- or aeroponic plant cultures. And nobody's done any real research on exactly how many turnips, heads of lettuce, and so on, one needs to grow to feed people for however long.
No, I think we may grow food, but it won't be an Oklahoma-sized farm growing in some benign little spacefarm orbiting Jupiter. I think instead we will have food to put in our guts because they are designed to work that way (although there's no reason we couldn't remove the stomach and replace it with a section of small intestine; this is done all the time). The rest of the food can be delivered nightly, by IV bag. Sort of like incredibly sick patients at the ER (with influenza/pneumonia, etc) get a "banana bag", dextrose, and saline.
We've made superfoods. People just like to masticate plant and animal matter. Moving to Jupiter means you don't get to eat meat. Tofu, though, that's probably doable.
The most frightening aspect of this is the incredible exposure to radiation one faces outside the atmosphere. Furthermore, radiation at Jupiter isn't just lethal, it's like severed horse-head in your bed lethal. So you have a couple of approaches.
- Deflect the radiation
- Reduce the harm of radiation to manageable levels
I'm inclined to believe they're both reasonable. I don't think we'll see nanomachines anytime soon that will make sure that we're fixed as we get broken by stray neutrons, but I think it might be possible to make our tissues more resilient, thus making spacewalks possible, and even trips to the surface of
planetary bodies (the Jovians call these "moons").
Deflecting the radiation is entirely do-able, but of course gets much more difficult the size of the craft increases. It also precludes you from heading down to Callisto to pick up some good ol' H2O unless you have similarly shielded landing craft, similarly shielded suits (see above re: Sunshine), and
so on. It's an enormous pain in the ass.
So we can sustain and protect life in the harsh environment out there. That covers part of the "how."
We still need to get there, though. Unfortunately, nothing we have right now can get us there in any amount of time that will ensure an astronaut's return home alive. That is to say, the trip out and back is going to be too long.
There are a number of futurist-technologists out there, but one of the most practical I've read (probably because we both cut our teeth in IT and know when marketing shit is just that).
Charlie talks about the path technology would take over time in his notes for Accelerando.
Specifically, these two quotes:
Moore's Law -- that the power of microprocessors will double every 18 months -- is looking a bit hairy these days. Firstly, the doubling time has contracted to every 15 months. Secondly, the limit to shrinking track sizes (below which quantum effects like tunneling screw our existing technologies over) is within grasp -- it's only another 5-10 years away. However, once we hit the minimum scale for today's architectures, chips can carry on growing for a bit longer. First, they can go 3D, with multiple slabs of circuitry layered on top of each other (subject to solving the heat dissipation problems). Secondly, quantum computers were science fiction in 1991; in 1994 some theoreticians came up with algorithms for exploiting these SF-nal devices; in 1996 somebody was muttering about building a "qu-bit" storage device; then in 1999 the NSA suddenly shut up about banning exports of strong cryptography tools -- strong, if you assume that finding the common prime factors of a long number is an intractable problem. If you have a working quantum computer it's anything but, and the NSA are rumoured to be 5-10 years ahead of the commercial state of the art in supercomputing ...
and
Finally, expect one entirely new magical technology to come out of nowhere and sandbag everyone who wasn't watching the ball roughly every five years (1990's), three years (2000's), and then annually or faster (2010's).
Now, if you haven't read the book, that's fine. The above two and the rest of his notes are sufficient for this discussion. But let's look elsewhere (note: I am not going to link to Wikipedia, you can look the stuff up yourself there or at your local library). If we talk about space travel between now and 2107, using Charlie's technology vector, we entirely lose the ability to plot where things will be.
However, let's look at ion drives, which are very popular as space travel propulsion current s(peculative|cience) fiction. First, the drives were first written about in 1929, and operational by 1960. Today, we enjoy a pretty clear understanding of the devices, we've had several successful craft that use them, and to build a deep-space craft tomorrow that used an ion propulsion device would be trivial, technologically speaking.
The problem of course is getting it into orbit. Assuming that by 2107, building something in orbit will be trivial, that mass can either be accelerated out of Earth's gravity well, or that there's a new stream of materials that do not originate in the well, getting it into orbit isn't an issue.
Putting a reactor on it that produces the current required to spit Xenon ions out the ass end of the thing is not difficult, either. Thus it becomes trivially difficult to create arbitrarily large ion propulsion systems (wikipedia calls this a "nuclear electric rocket" although the terms 'rocket' and 'nuclear' are hardly applicable).
The question is, would we even want to? Assuming we can provide a limitless supply of fuel, and assemble in orbit, what would we do with both those advantages? The fuel could come from the asteroid belt (we have a mission to Ceres next year), or from Mars, or possibly Luna. Or, I guess, from cheaper, bigger launch technology. If the fuel is big ol' bricks o' deuterium or whichever, there's a lot higher power to weight ratio in the stuff you're lifting than in something like ammonium perchlorate.
Back to Charlie:
This brings me as far out as I feel like writing right now -- this is simply an attempt to scope out the period 2000-2030, without going unduly overboard on the implications of mature nanotechnology, development of artificial intelligence, mind uploading, or the other gosh-wow trappings of extropian SF. These are predictions I hope to be around to feel embarrassed about when the deadlines roll round ... the rest will come later.
and
The 1990's examples were the internet and genetic engineering. The 2000's are shaping up to be quantum computing, stem cell derived tissue regeneration, microtechnology, and maybe Bose-Einstein condensate manipulation ("atomic holography"). The 2010's will include mature molecular nanotechnology and cthulhu-only-knows-what-else. Sapient business models? Practical applications of Higgs bosons (e.g. for producing new states of condensed matter)? Mind uploading/AI/EI?
So let's look at both of these. First, we both think that it's silly to go waaaay out on a limb, especially for just 2030. I'm talking about 2107, and I still think that's not a great idea. In 1907 we had a lot of the technology we do today, just in far less refined form. We had motorcycles and cars, but we didn't have bluetooth in either. We had POTS, but not IP. Goddard and Tsiolkovksy were both talking about liquid-fuel rockets in the first decade of 1900, and we had the first launch in 1926. We had cathode-ray tubes, but not high-def or VR. We had advanced math, but no machines to crunch it with.
Is it then plausible to think that we've much to look forward to in the next 70 years, in terms of propulsion? Both Stephen Baxter and Stross have referred to quantum condensates and other wacky Higgs-related energy and/or propulsion. Reynolds seems to point at it, but never calls it by name. I don't even see hints of this happening. Sure, it's possible, but we're not at the point where we understand the physics yet. So we're not even at the "discovery" point from which we can extrapolate from the arc of other technologies.
My guess is that, no, we don't have a whole lot more to look forward to. I suspect if we have a similar trajectory, then we can look at early-stage fusion happening. We might see something that smells like Higgs, but if I were to invest money today, I'd put the majority of the money on technology that's well understood and has room to grow. You've got to hedge your bets, because, as the man says, "magical technology" will probably "come out of nowhere," "sandbagging everyone who isn't watching the ball."
An entirely different question is how you pick that 10% shot at a technology nobody saw coming. Maybe that's something like zero-point energy, or even reaching as far as negative matter or something capable of actually deforming space advantageously. But even if we got on those today, we can expect that in thirty years we'll have V-2's, not Saturn V's or Deep Space 1.
What this says to me is that if you want to look into a crystal ball, have your predictions not be entirely preposterous now, or a hundred years from now, you find, as I said, a mature technology with room to grow, and just extrapolate on that vector. Take ion drives, build them in orbit so the horrendous penalties of launch weight and low specific impulse don't bother them as much. Give them huge fuel capacities and thrust (through larger thrusters or groups thereof). Reaching for fusion as a power source for the ion generation seems like it might be okay, but fission is a much better understood process. I guess the problem is there's a lot more hydrogen in space than there is uranium or plutonium. You'd really have to get the uranium and plutonium into orbit, or come up with a good reason for it being there. I know somebody out there is screaming, "mine the asteroid belt!" Asteroids is not a good bet for the 2107 timeframe. The problem being very simple, if compound. First, how we get there and settle there. Second, how we manage to get that material back to Earth. Peter Hamilton had this neat idea for making the rocks into a sort of foam (think pumice) that was fragile enough to be worked on in orbit, but would ablate if it were to reentry rather than cause an apocalypse. We're just not there.
The other solution for powering the drives, long-term, is either fusion or antimatter. I'm going to call them equally probable. Both are kind of intractable at the moment, and both will become more reasonable as our understanding of high-energy physics improves. When the Large Hadron Collider
comes online, it should be able to produce antimatter by the kilogram. Ostensibly, if we can build drives in orbit, we can build a collider in orbit, freeing it from the traditional enemies (apart from politicians and budgets) such devices usually face. Again, the problem is of course supply for the material. I doubt getting the people up to orbit is going to be a problem in 2107. It might still be expensive, but cornering the antimatter-based or fusion-based economy in orbit is too appealing to miss on account of money quibbles.
And, just to address Vinge and the Singularity, fusion and even antimatter aren't strong enough to invoke a singularity. Presently, AI is not anywhere near the stage at which it could sort of run away and build itself. Even in a hundred years I suspect we'll start to have things that resemble actual intelligence, but which cannot build more of themselves, or improve upon the design (there's a good Hans Reiser interview on filesystem semantics that shows just how far behind we really are). Aliens showing up are equally probable (or less, even) than your average comet smacking into the Pacific. I think for the next hundred years, at least, that it's a lot safer bet that we'll get better at what we do already than we will pull some fancy technology out of our collective ass and develop it so well as to be easily and productively useful (and safe to travel with).
So I really doubt anyone's still reading, but here's where I am at with my predictive process (as I don't want to write a book that's rubbish right from the start). Since I can't predict Charlie's "sandbag," I shouldn't add it to the equation. I've actually been using project management software (of several
different varieties, thank you very much), all of which fail when the scale is increased to, oh, three hundred years or so.
I see the following "tasks" to be deposited into a Gantt chart, or similar, but I refuse to write the software to do it. Maybe some RoR person will do it because HTML in perl is such a pain in the ass.
So:
1. Heavy lift vehicles. Ares will suffice. (5-10y)
1a. Commercial heavy lift processes. This isn't Rutan. (5-15y)
1b. Continual, civilian, skilled, human labor, in orbit (20y)
Provided we accomplish 1a-b, we are now 20 years out. Here's where the bio stuff goes.
2a. Better O2 scrubbers. (5y)
2b. Better, lighter, radiation shielding. (5y)
2c. Biological (or nano/mechanical) radiation protection. (5y)
2d. Superfoods. (2-5y)
So if we've progressed from 1 to 2 here, we're now 25 years out, and we're very comfortable in orbit. Radiation doesn't bother us much, we have a heavy lift-to-orbit industry on the planet, we most likely have a large orbiting habitat for perhaps fifty to a hundred people. With that, we can provide lift and engineering for a number of things (these are "ors" not "ands"):
A trans-martian orbit telescope
A lunar base
A ship capable of reaching Jupiter and returning in fewer than ten years
You can guess where I'd spend my money, but I'm not certain anyone else really cares. Assuming we go with Door #3, we then also have to begin construction of a shipyard in orbit. Building ships repeatedly on the ground and reassembling them (or expanding them or spinning them up, or whatever) in orbit is wasteful. Humanity has a presence in orbit, let them make vehicles in orbit. Materials are needed, and these likely will have to be heavy-lifted, or perhaps someone will find a use for the moon.
We're now forty years out. The ship to Jupiter has not yet returned, but what it has shown us is we want to go back. Facilities in orbit have increased in size to the point that there are several thousand people in orbit at any given time, from tourists to people working there, to the ultra-rich deciding to live there.
What's more is we have orbital facilities to build stuff. This means if somebody gets a wicked transrectal itch (and has enough currency), they can build their own craft to head out to Jupiter. If they have the resources to actually colonize out there, say a few dozen people and start gathering rocks, those people are going to be really, really, rich in a hundred years when the rest of the humans make it off their ball of dirt. Anyone wanting to go out past Jupiter (Neptune and Uranus are both pretty
useful places, to say nothing of the Kuiper Belt) will wind up working with the people at Jupiter orbit, taking on fuel or material, or whatever else is produced out there.
The problem is, it'll take at least seventy years for a ship intending to colonize (and by colonize I do not mean Babylon Five, I mean a dozen people trying to squeeze resources out of a mean, one-and-a-half-eyed giant). It'll take them another thirty at least before there's any kind of commerce happening.
So in a hundred years, if humanity started today with the intent to colonize the Jupiter system, we might be getting close.
One can look at this and see that in two hundred years, Jupiter is probably old news. However, we're still nowhere near the point where we can even reach the Oort cloud, let alone another star.
My guess is fission will reign as power in space for the next fifty years. If we manage to pull off fusion, it will take over. However, I think (and this may seem silly) that the Large Hadron Collider is going to show us it just may be easier to make antimatter, stuff it into a bottle, and annihilate heavy atoms.
So fifty or so years of the same old stuff, followed by a hundred years of refining the new stuff, and by the time we're at Saturn, we've got enough power for maybe fractional C. Maybe. And that's maybe like a percent, two or three percent, but I don't think we're going to see ten or more percent simply
because it's going to take so much energy to slow down when you get to wherever it is you're going (and this of course is to say nothing of, you know, the stray speck of dust hitting you at .1C.
The only other alternative to us getting around really, really, fast, is the one that Charlie has already pointed out. You have to digitize people and transmit them at the speed of light. There are lots of nerds out there (the stardestroyer.net types -- (just be aware, I'm with Charlie when I say I go to cons to see fans...)) who have done calculations on how "improbable" it is to actually deconstruct and reconstruct a person. Even a brain. So, it's an idea, but hardly seems implementable.
The only thing that really seems to guarantee colonization of the universe by humanity is the Dyson Chickens. It's just so painfully slow. Slow enough to make you want to take a The Algebraist-style nap for a few million years.
(note: reformatted in jan of 09 because somebody saw it in the atrocious state it was in. no other content was changed)
15 October, 2007
Ubuntu on the HP nc2400
I pretty much dislike how "friendly" and "earth-loving" Ubuntu is, so I've never had much use for it. I just figured everyone who used it (including you, Dan) was a kook of some sort or other. However, when I got my new work laptop, this nc2400 thing, nothing would run on it. I tried Solaris, I tried OpenBSD, NetBSD, SuSE (the preferred Leenucks at work), and they all failed. Miserably. In fact, Ubuntu failed too, the first time around. I had to actually give it an RJ45 connection that was attached to a network (not my choice for a new machine, really...). Apparently, it was noticing that the wired interface was unusable, and then it tried to bring up the wireless. However, I essentially work in a Faraday cage (well, sort of, but you get the idea), so there wasn't wireless for it to mooch on either. After the cute little orange bar got stuck, I C-a-5 or whatever'd to get to a terminal that actually had the boot process on it. I hit control C. The fuckery that had hosed the boot process died, and the thing came up. I had to continue to use the control-c hack during boot, every single time, until I attached it to my network at home (which has an ssid with punctuation and spaces in it, so it's tough to get right in the shell).
When I then connected it to a wired network and gave it dhcp, it greedily sucked down half a bazillion patches, including kernel patches that it strangely told me not to install (for the same reason, is my guess, that RedHat tells you not to use rpm -U to install kernels). Anyways, at that point it was more or less useful. The resolution was hideous, and I wandered the internet trying to find stuff that would help, and didn't have a lot of luck. I am using a Samsung 204BW, which is 1680x1050. The xorg.conf follows. The display is a bit distorted, given its aspect. I think this is xorg's retarded handling of wide screens. Who knows. It's certainly serviceable in firefox or the terminal which is really all I need.
Also note that I am not using the laptop's display, but rather have it attached to the external.
I don't have hwacel, and I don't expect it given the garbage video chipset in this laptop. Its saving grace is how tiny it is. It's funny that it uses almost exactly the same hardware as my Macbook, and manages to be over a full pound lighter.
Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi"
# path to defoma fonts
FontPath "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "i2c"
Load "bitmap"
Load "ddc"
Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx"
Load "int10"
Load "vbe"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "0 Intel 945GM"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
Screen 0
Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
Option "DRI" "false"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "0 nc2400 Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "0 Screen"
Device "0 Intel 945GM"
Monitor "0 nc2400 Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1680x1050"
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "0 Screen"
Option "Clone" "off"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
InputDevice "Configured Mouse"
InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection
Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection
When I then connected it to a wired network and gave it dhcp, it greedily sucked down half a bazillion patches, including kernel patches that it strangely told me not to install (for the same reason, is my guess, that RedHat tells you not to use rpm -U to install kernels). Anyways, at that point it was more or less useful. The resolution was hideous, and I wandered the internet trying to find stuff that would help, and didn't have a lot of luck. I am using a Samsung 204BW, which is 1680x1050. The xorg.conf follows. The display is a bit distorted, given its aspect. I think this is xorg's retarded handling of wide screens. Who knows. It's certainly serviceable in firefox or the terminal which is really all I need.
Also note that I am not using the laptop's display, but rather have it attached to the external.
I don't have hwacel, and I don't expect it given the garbage video chipset in this laptop. Its saving grace is how tiny it is. It's funny that it uses almost exactly the same hardware as my Macbook, and manages to be over a full pound lighter.
Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi"
# path to defoma fonts
FontPath "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "i2c"
Load "bitmap"
Load "ddc"
Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx"
Load "int10"
Load "vbe"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "0 Intel 945GM"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
Screen 0
Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
Option "DRI" "false"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "0 nc2400 Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "0 Screen"
Device "0 Intel 945GM"
Monitor "0 nc2400 Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1680x1050"
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "0 Screen"
Option "Clone" "off"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
InputDevice "Configured Mouse"
InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection
Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection
Shooting today
We took the Rem 700/22-250 out for a spin today. The main problem was the last time we took the gun out, we zeroed it at 600 yards. In other words, to compensate for the intense bullet drop that far out (we're talking a 55-grain projectile here), we had adjusted the scope (a Nightforce NXS 22x56, illuminated mil-dot reticle), well, way "up," by way of "clicks" (the elevation adjustment is a gear, which you turn left or right to get the impact higher or lower, respectively).In the case of our scope (and in most long-range, vs tactical and urban) each click is a quarter-MOA.
Anyhow, it didn't turn out so bad. We burned through a box of Winchester softpoint 55gr rounds (about twenty, excluding one dud, and one I didn't get a chance to fire).
We zeroed in first at 50 yards to give us an idea of where the scope was, adjust it to get it closer to the "10" (a perfect score on an 8" target). After we got it sighted in at 50, I couldn't resist just putting a few more holes through the ten. They were literally going through the ten, each time. I was proud of myself, I was proud of my gun and I was feeling a lot better about the absurd price of the scope (hint: scope cost three times what the rifle did)
But I wanted to zero at 100 yards, because that's how we define a minute of angle (MOA). Things get really complicated from here, but basically, if you zero a gun (that is, calibrate ["click"] it so it hits the "ten" every time) at 100 yards, you can do the math (hopefully in your head; sniper teams keep logbooks, we have started to do so as well). The logbooks are so you can keep track of what bullets/loads your rifle likes, and how much adjustment at whichever range led to the desired impact. Rifles change slowly over time, largely due to their metal parts, so it's good to have a record.
Thus, with adequate scope, zero'd at a hundred yards, to engage targets at fifty yards, we'd back two "clicks" out of the elevation ring, for 1/2 MOA. Maybe one day when it's not 0315 I'll explain how the mil-dot reticle works, and how it can tell you how far a target is away from you so that you can adjust the elevation knobs on your own (although it helps to have a spotter with a high magnification spoke to tell you where your shots are landing).
So we got the scope pretty well zeroed to 100 yards today.
Sort of. It turns out that the NRA range in Fairfax measures their range in feet, which are of course interchangeable trivially with yards. However, doing the conversion actually requires doing trigonometry, and I don't feel like doing that. So, next time we're out at NRA (or more likely Quantico), we'll park a bench on the firing line, grab another box of those 55gr soft point.
I have a feeling these Winchesters (the one I say was a dud was not so much a dud as its soft point had deformed to the degree the breach wouldn't take it). They were nice and consistent, but they also hd a huge lift; from fifty feet (not yards) to 100 feet, the bullet had risen an entire four inches (this is not very accurate, which matters, because it's a varminting gun.) Hornady, and I think Federal (which is cool, because they're also ATK-Thiokol), make specific, high-velocity (4300fps; I think the Winchesters are in the neighbrhod of 375fps_, )low-ish weight, high expandability (read: they have a tremendous impact on small bodies, and since the bullet is largely plastic, the lead bits expand to take out a good chunk of what you hit. There's a lot of video of varmint hunting on youtube. It can be kind of comical, but be not confused; it is exploding carcasses of cute fuzzy mammals.
For the curious, Sandy took the above shot with her iPhone. When I offered her the righle, she aimed at the center of the target. I stopped her, and said, you know, you gotta lean into it a little, keep your eye back so you can see the reticle over the target. She gives me this flustered, "I know!", and then proceeds to fire a single shot, right through the ten. There isn't a better shot you can make. Now, I'd spent a half hour sighting the gun in, so there's no question it's n accurate weapon. And that Nightforce scope.... Well, I know the next rifle I buy will have one. They're worth every penny and more. But even with the NXS on a zeroed rifle you have to account for your heart beat, your breathing, the break of the trigger and motion of the gun.
A perfect shot on a gun somebody has just handed you (this was her first – and only – shot of the day) is impressive no matter the circumstances. She's a phenomenal shot, has been since day one, and it amazes me still. She does't like long distance rifle shooting because it's "boring." She'd rather shoot Trap or pistols.
Me, I like rifles. I love the big satisfying muzzle blast, the affirmative kick in your shoulder, and the hole sudenly appearong on a shoot-n-see two (or more! .338 Lap Mag anyone? .410 Chey-Tac?). It's just as much fun to get to talk to the other rifle shooters who are there for the same reason.
If you're local, we don't have a lot of nice weekends left this year. We've got extra ear protection, thousands of ruonds of ammo, appropriate storage, and everything. Drop us an email if you're interested shooting to getback into it, or shooting for the first time. We've taught a lot of beginners and love to do it.