Of Icarus and Caution

20 02 2010

Whenever I mention to someone that I’m working on Project Icarus, a multi-year endeavor to design a starship that improves upon the original Daedalus concept of the 1970s, the almost-inevitable response is along the lines of “Oh, you don’t want to call it that! Icarus fell into the sea!”

That’s quite true, but Kelvin Long, the project lead on Icarus, has highlighted a wonderful quote from Arthur Eddington’s 1927 book Stars and Atoms which nicely sums up my feelings on the matter too.

In ancient days two aviators procured to themselves wings. Daedalus flew safely through the middle air and was duly honoured on his landing. Icarus soared upwards to the sun till the wax melted which bound his wings and his flight ended in fiasco. In weighing their achievements, there is something to be said for Icarus. The classical authorities tell us that he was only “doing a stunt”, but I prefer to think of him as the man who brought to light a serious constructional defect in the flying-machines of his day. So, too, in Science. Cautious Daedalus will apply his theories where he feels confident they will safely go; but by his excess of caution their hidden weaknesses remain undiscovered. Icarus will strain his theories to the breaking-point till the weak joints gape. For the mere adventure? Perhaps partly; this is human nature. But if he is destined not yet to reach the sun and solve finally the riddle of its constitution, we may at least hope to learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine.





Making Marmalade

27 01 2010

A lesson in marmalade making will come as a boon…
First slice the orange over a bowl with a spoon.
Collect the juice! but leave the pith behind.
Put flesh, the juice and pips in a mixer and grind;
When smooth, then push the purée through sieve into pan.
Now scoop the pith from the shells as much as you can.
Then slice the rind to strips as thin as a match,
And add them to sieved flesh (mix all into one big mishmash).
Add lemon and water, and simmer until the rind’s soft;
It takes an hour or two, as often as not.
On low heat, add sugar and stir ’til the sugar’s dissolved,
And bring to the boil, skimming the froth to a bowl.
Take samples to fridge; when jellied, the conserve’s at par!
Then extract, and pour into clean and cool jars.

Rabbit Hole Day





Interstellar Communications

10 01 2010

My article on interstellar communications has been published on the Project Icarus blog.

This is my first public article for Icarus. I joined the team a few weeks ago, working primarily on the communication systems.





Report on Project Icarus Symposium

9 11 2009

My report on the recent Project Icarus Symposium has been published on Centauri Dreams.

Project Icarus is a study being carried out by the Tau Zero Foundation and the British Interplanetary Society to update the original Project Daedalus design from the 1970s with the benefit of 30 years’ advance in science and technology.





Frontiers of Propulsion Science

27 05 2009

Marc Millis and Eric Davis of the Tau Zero Foundation have released Frontiers of Propulsion Science, a compilation of emerging science relevant to interstellar propulsion technologies.

While decades of science fiction have accustomed us to the idea that the human race is destined to live on in distant solar systems, the harsh reality is that travel to the stars is really very very hard. Ridiculously hard. Even the closest stars to the sun are so far away that it would take thousands of years for a small probe to arrive using our current propulsion systems. Our technology is not even remotely close to being able to send humans on such a voyage.

But should we let our present limitations bind our conception of what is possible? Can we establish the limits of what physics will allow, even if the engineering challenges are beyond daunting at this stage? And having sketched out the theoretically plausible, can we work out a plan of action for tackling these problems both experimentally and theoretically so we can, in the near term, make progress toward our goals? Read the rest of this entry »





Hands-on RFID for Makers

10 03 2009

Tom Igoe and Brian Jepson ran a great RFID workshop at ETech 2009.

As the description on the page says:

Ever wanted to get a real understanding of how RFID works? In this workshop, you’ll learn about the different classes of RFID devices. We’ll discuss what RFID can and can’t do, what devices are already on the market, and what kinds of future applications are possible. Then, using your own RFID reader and an Arduino microcontroller, you’ll learn how to move data from the tag to the screen to the database. You’ll learn how to read to and write from tags, and how creative thinking about RFID reader antennas can lead to all new devices.

And that’s exactly what we did. Read the rest of this entry »





Python and the Stephen Fry compo

24 01 2009

The legendary Stephen Fry recently announced a competition on his twitter feed to celebrate his 50,000th follower:

L=50 in Roman. The best tweet containing exactly 50 Ls will win. All tweets to contain the tag #L and none to exceed 140 character limit SF

Well, this sounded like fun! I decided to have a go. Read the rest of this entry »





The myth of the resilient internet

1 01 2009

We’re often reminded that the internet was created back in the days of the cold war, an era in which an all-out nuclear exchange was perceived as a likely threat. The internet was designed to cope with the destruction of nodes; the traffic will just route around the damaged segments. The net as a whole may run slower in its degraded state, but the traffic will still get through by one route or another.

Recent events such as the Mediterranean cable cuts of December 2008 remind us that although the principle is true, in reality large sections of the net are actually connected to the other parts of the world by a small number of links, rather than a widespread grid of connections. Read the rest of this entry »





SETI@Home on Dell XPS m1330 running Ubuntu with CUDA

31 12 2008

SETI@Home can now take advantage of CUDA, the parallel processing engine at the heart of NVIDIA GPUs. This means that the GPU’s computations are added to those of the normal CPUs, resulting in faster processing of computation units, which is very handy for churning through the challenging Astropulse calculations.

I now have SETI@Home running on Ubuntu on my Dell XPS m1330. It’s not particularly difficult to set up, but if you want to try it yourself you may find these steps useful. Read the rest of this entry »





Why I switched from Windows Mobile to iPhone

20 12 2008

I’ve been using Windows Mobile PDAs and phones, for many years now, ever since Palm let me down with one of their ‘enhancements’. I have now switched to the iPhone. I’ll explain here what led me to change. Read the rest of this entry »