Year: 2012

Why Does the Mars Rover Curiosity Have 2MP Cameras?

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One thing that I’ve been wondering ever since Curiosity landed on Mars is why the cameras on the rover aren’t more sophisticated. Mike Ravine, project manager for Curiosity, explains that the choice for 2MP cameras was because the camera specifications were fixed as far back as 2004:

We developed all four cameras around a common architecture so the choice of sensor was hedged across all of them. We wanted to be able to capture high frame rates, particularly with the descent camera.’ he explains. MARDI, the downwards-pointing ‘descent camera’ had just a two-minute descent to the planet’s surface, so a high frame rate was essential. The KAI-2020 chip was the smallest Kodak made capable of 720p HD video. ‘We also looked at a 4MP sensor but it would have run around half as fast. And the state of CMOS sensors wasn’t credible in 2004. They’re an interesting option now, but they weren’t then.

Additionally:

Another factor was that the same sensor had to meet the needs of four different cameras (MAHLI, the two Mastcams and MARDI, the camera tasked with capturing the rover’s descent to the planets’ surface). ‘Everything in a project like this is sensitive to price and risk, both real and perceived. The cameras differ in terms of their optics, but by building them around a single platform, we didn’t have to re-test and qualify each of them separately. This makes them more dependable and less expensive than if you have to do it four times.

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In case you’re wondering where exactly on Mars the rover Curiosity landed, check out this post by Alexis Madrigal.

President Obama Reads News on His iPad

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From this New York Times piece, we learn that Barack Obama is an avid consumer of news. In particular, President Obama enjoys reading the news on his iPad:

A writer before he was a politician, Mr. Obama is a voracious consumer of news, reading newspapers and magazines on his iPad and in print and dipping into blogs and Twitter. He regularly gives aides detailed descriptions of articles that he liked, and he can be thin-skinned about those that he does not.

He typically begins his day upstairs in the White House reading the major newspapers, including his hometown Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, mostly on his iPad through apps rather than their Web sites. He also skims articles that aides e-mail to him, with the subject line stating the publication and the headline (like “WSJ: Moody’s Downgrades Banks”).

During the day, Mr. Obama reads newspapers on his iPad and print copies of magazines like The Economist and The New Yorker. On most Air Force One flights, he catches up on the news on his iPad.

My question: what blogs does Mr. President read? Sadly, the NYT article doesn’t disclose. It will be interesting to find out what’s on the President’s blogroll.

The NFL Joins the Olympics

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American football isn’t likely to become an Olympic event anytime soon, but the WSJ wondered what would NFL players excel in if they did participate in the Olympics. Meet Tim Tebow in judo and Michael Vick in javelin throw:

Javelin: Michael Vick, QB, Philadelphia Eagles.Vick’s combination of linear speed and arm strength makes him one of the NFL athletes that track and field coaches dream about. “We would always wonder how far Michael Vick would throw the Javelin if he were a track athlete,” said Rob Lasorsa of the National Throws Coaches Association. The real question is how much farther the Philadelphia quarterback could throw than NFL Hall-of-Famer Terry Bradshaw, a former high school javelin record holder.

Springboard Diving: Ray Rice, RB, Baltimore Ravens. Good divers are usually somewhere between 5-foot-5 and 5-foot-10 so Rice, a 5-foot-8 running back, fits the bill. He also makes adjustments at the line of scrimmage better than almost any other NFL running back. He excels in a role that requires explosiveness and extreme body control—all executed within the space of less than two seconds, said USA Diving’s Steve Foley.

Judo: Tim Tebow, QB, New York Jets. The most logical place one might see backup quarterback Tim Tebow strike his now-famous “Tebowing” pose is the middle of a Judo mat. Jiu Jitsu is the predecessor of Judo. This off-season, Tebow practiced a version of the sport with the famous Gracie Family, the founders of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. While Jiu Jitsu relies more on upright grappling and maneuvers than Judo, Tebow does seem to have one thing down: the mental side. “First you need to be a fighter in your mind,” said former French national judo competitor Sauveur Soriano, “and you need to be able to control yourself.”

Fun food for thought.

Poetry at the Olympic Games

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Amanda Katz reminisces on the early Olympic games, which featured competitions in music, painting, and poetry:

Nine days into the Olympic Games of summer 2012, we’ve all been reminded that this event is not, in fact, a simple series of sports competitions. It’s an international, hallucinatory carnival of dancing horses, Coca-Cola, terrifyingly strong teenagers, Paul McCartney singalongs, badminton scandals, rude commentators, bodies doing the nearly impossible—and, of course, poetry.

Poetry? Yes, from every quarter. A quotation from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” has been carved into a wall at the Olympic Village. Canadian writer Priscila Uppal is in London as an Olympic “poet in residence,” posting new poems daily about the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Earlier this summer, a weeklong festival called the Poetry Parnassus brought hundreds of poets to London, one from each of the competing Olympic nations. Of course, there is a long association between poetry and the Olympics: At the ancient Greek Games, poets such as Pindar wrote famous odes in honor of the winners.

In recent history, however, the relationship went still deeper: For some decades, literature was actually an Olympic medal event. Today, the strange story of the event’s debut 100 years ago—and the florid, slightly unsettling poem that won—have been almost forgotten. But together, they offer a fascinating glimpse of the spirit of the Olympics at the time.

In 1906, the International Olympic Committee began discussing a proposal from the French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the man credited with launching the modern Olympics in 1896, to include arts competitions in the Games. Eventually, the committee announced that the 1912 games in Stockholm would include not just sports but also five unprecedented events: competitions in architecture, music composition, painting, sculpture, and literature. The rules called for entries to be unpublished or unexhibited works, “directly inspired by the idea of sport.”

Here is the winning poem titled “Ode to Sport” that won the gold medal at the 1912 Olympics:

O Sport, pleasure of the Gods,
essence of life, you appeared suddenly
in the midst of the grey clearing
which writhes with the drudgery of
modern existence, like the radiant
messenger of a past age, when
mankind still smiled. And the glimmer
of dawn lit up the mountain tops and
flecks of light dotted the ground in the
gloomy forests.

II.
O Sport, you are Beauty! You are the
architect of that edifice which is the
human body and which can become
abject or sublime according to whether
it is defiled by vile passions or improved
through healthy exertion. There can be
no beauty without balance and proportion,
and you are the peerless master
of both, for you create harmony, you
give movements rhythm, you make
strength graceful and you endow suppleness
with power.

III.
O Sport, you are Justice! The perfect
equity for which men strive in vain in
their social institutions is your constant
companion. No one can jump a
centimetre higher than the height he
can jump, nor run a minute longer
than the length he can run. The limits
of his success are determined solely
by his own physical and moral
strength.

The New York Times also had a recent piece on poetry at the Olympic Games:

For much of the 20th century, poetry was an official, medal-winning competition in the Games. The French visionary who revived the Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, always insisted Greek-style arts contests should be allowed alongside athletics. His dream was realized in 1912 at Stockholm, where literature, together with music, painting, sculpture and even architecture, became Olympic events in the so-called Pentathlon of the Muses, in which all submissions had to be “directly inspired by the idea of sport.” In seven Olympiads, writers — almost always poets — were awarded gold, silver and bronze medals alongside sprinters, weight lifters and wrestlers. The general literature category was then expanded in 1928, 1936 and 1948 to include specific contests for epic and lyric poetry.

Very interesting!

I Can Hear Music for the First Time Ever, What Should I Listen To?

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A reddit user, deafstoryteller, writes:

I’ve never understood it.

My whole life I’ve seen hearing people make a fool of themselves singing their favorite song or gyrating on the dance floor. I’ve also seen hearing people moved to tears by a single song. That was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around.

I was born profoundly deaf and all music sounded like trash through my hearing aids.

That is until a couple days ago when I put on a new pair of hearing aids for the first time in years.

The first thing I heard was my shoe scraping across the carpet; it startled me. I have never heard that before and out of ignorance, I assumed it was too quiet for anyone to hear.

I sat in the doctor’s office frozen as a cacophony of sounds attacked me. The whir of the computer, the hum of the AC, the clacking of the keyboard, and when my best friend walked in I couldn’t believe that he had a slight rasp to his voice. He joked that it was time to cut back on the cigarettes.

That night, a group of close friends jump-started my musical education by playing Mozart, Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Elvis, and several other popular legends of music.

Being able to hear the music for the first time ever was unreal.

I realized that my old hearing aids were giving me a distorted version of music. they were not capable of distributing higher frequencies with clarity, instead it was just garbled gibberish.

When Mozart’s Lacrimosa came on, I was blown away by the beauty of it. At one point of the song, it sounded like angels singing and I suddenly realized that this was the first time I was able to appreciate music. Tears rolled down my face and I tried to hide it. But when I looked over I saw that there wasn’t a dry eye in the car.

I finally understood the power of music…

And then he goes on a “binge of music”, with the following five favorites in his brief exposure:

  1. Mozart’s Lacrimsoa
  2. The soundtrack to Eleven Eleven… I can see how this comes off as narcissistic, it being my own film and all but it’s such a personal work that when I listened to it for the first time I broke down. I felt like I was truly seeing the film for the first time ever. I’m grateful that Cazz was able to capture the tone perfectly. We discussed the film and specific scenes with essay-sized reasoning/deliberations on what should be conveyed. The critical response to the film surprised me and I still didn’t quite get it until seeing the visual images coupled with the soundtrack.
  3. Sig Ros’s Staralfur
  4. IL Postino-Luis Bacalov
  5. Minnesota’s A Bad Place

The comments are excellent. I echo those that are saying to start a blog and document your music listening adventures!

Curiosity Rover’s 17 Cameras

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The Mars Curiosity rover made a safe landing on Mars in the early hours of August 6 (I stayed up and watched the event live). I knew the complexity of the rover, and Wired provides a good overview of Curiosity’s 17 cameras on board:

First up is the Mars Decent Imager (MARDI), which recently beamed back an amazing video of the rover’s nail-biting descent. MARDI turned on during the final few minutes of the “Seven Minutes of Terror” and recorded a full-color high-definition movie as the ground rushed up to meet the rover. With this film (and the coming high-def version), you get to experience what the wild ride down to the surface looked like.

MARDI is a 2-megapixel wide-angle camera mounted toward the front on the port side of Curiosity. The camera came to life just after the spacecraft’s heat shield jettisoned, taking images of a roughly 2 by 2.5-mile square, with a resolution of about 8 feet per pixel. The final fully-in-focus images came when the rover was about 15 feet off the ground. In addition to a thrilling film, MARDI will provide scientists the opportunity to know exactly where Curiosity landed and learn a bit about the surrounding area.

Of course, a telephoto lens is also included:

One of the biggest requests that scientists had for Curiosity was the addition of a telephoto lens. The previous rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, could see details about as well as a person would on Mars. But MastCam’s right camera has a 100-mm focal-length lens that provides three times the resolution of previous Mars rover cameras. It can distinguish between a football and a basketball from seven football fields away. While the left camera, with its 34-mm lens, can’t see as well, it will provide much wider views – about 15 degrees versus the right camera’s five degree field-of-view.

The raw images from Curiosity are being uploaded on the JPL site.

A Brief History of Sleep

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From a very interesting Wall Street Journal piece on sleep, we learn some history about how humans used to get two sleeping chunks at night:

So why is sleep, which seems so simple, becoming so problematic? Much of the problem can be traced to the revolutionary device that’s probably hanging above your head right now: the light bulb. Before this electrically illuminated age, our ancestors slept in two distinct chunks each night. The so-called first sleep took place not long after the sun went down and lasted until a little after midnight. A person would then wake up for an hour or so before heading back to the so-called second sleep.

It was a fact of life that was once as common as breakfast—and one which might have remained forgotten had it not been for the research of a Virginia Tech history professor named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent nearly 20 years in the 1980s and ’90s investigating the history of the night. As Prof. Ekirch leafed through documents ranging from property records to primers on how to spot a ghost, he kept noticing strange references to sleep. In “The Canterbury Tales,” for instance, one of the characters in “The Squire’s Tale” wakes up in the early morning following her “first sleep” and then goes back to bed. A 15th-century medical book, meanwhile, advised readers to spend their “first sleep” on the right side and after that to lie on their left. A cleric in England wrote that the time between the first and second sleep was the best time for serious study.

The time between the two bouts of sleep was a natural and expected part of the night, and depending on your needs, was spent praying, reading, contemplating your dreams or having sex. The last one was perhaps the most popular. A noted 16th-century French physician named Laurent Joubert concluded that plowmen, artisans and others who worked with their hands were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their first sleep, when their energy was replenished, to make love.

The phrase is “segmented sleep” and it can be reproduced:

Studies show that this type of sleep is so ingrained in our nature that it will reappear if given a chance. Experimental subjects sequestered from artificial lights have tended to ease into this rhythm. What’s more, cultures without artificial light still sleep this way. In the 1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms to describe it.

Fascinating.

Comparing Usain Bolt’s Record to 116 Years of Olympic History

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Usain Bolt set an Olympic record last night after he ran the 100 meter race in 9.63 seconds. The New York Times has a brilliant interactive showing how Bolt’s performance compares to other Olympic runners in history:

Usain Bolt interactive shows how his 9.63 seconds in the 100m dash compares historically. Click on the photo to watch the video.

Based on the athletes’ average speeds, if every Olympic medalist raced each other, Usain Bolt (the London version) would win, with a wide distribution of Olympians behind him. Jesse Owens raced the 100m in 10.3 seconds in 1934. Carl Lewis did it in 9.92 seconds in 1988.

The question is: when will we see a sub-9.5 second time for the 100m sprint? And will we ever see a sub-9 second time in the 100 meter race?

Update (8/8/12): You can watch the video below:

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Note: while you’re at it, you should also check out the NYT interactives on the 100 meter swim and the long jump.

The Most Ruthless Takedown of the TED Ecosystem

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Evgeny Morozov has a scathing piece in The New Republic claiming that TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas “worth spreading.” Instead it has become something ludicrous, and a little sinister. His takedown is ruthless, and begins with a recent book published by TED:

Khanna’s contempt for democracy and human rights aside, he is simply an intellectual impostor, emitting such lethal doses of banalities, inanities, and generalizations that his books ought to carry advisory notices. Take this precious piece of advice from his previous book—the modestly titledHow to Run the World—which is quite representative of his work: “The world needs very few if any new global organizations. What it needs is far more fresh combinations of existing actors whocoordinate better with one another.” How this A-list networking would stop climate change, cyber-crime, or trade in exotic animals is never specified. Khanna does not really care about the details of policy. He is a manufacturer of abstract, meaningless slogans. He is, indeed, the most talented bullshit artist of his generation.

Morozov is a brilliant tactician with words, and dishes out paragraph after paragraph like the following:

As is typical of today’s anxiety-peddling futurology, the Khannas’ favorite word is “increasingly,” which is their way of saying that our unstable world is always changing and that only advanced thinkers such as themselves can guide us through this turbulence. In Hybrid Reality, everything is increasingly something else: gadgets are increasingly miraculous, technology is increasingly making its way into the human body, quiet moments are increasingly rare. This is a world in which pundits are increasingly using the word “increasingly” whenever they feel too lazy to look up the actual statistics, which, in the Khannas’ case, increasingly means all the time.

The main argument against TED made by Morozov:

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.”

I don’t agree with a lot of Morozov writes, but he makes some great points about “techno babble” and how we can be easily swayed by some ideas that are fairly obvious.

A Cautionary Tale about iCloud

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Mat Honan, technology writer based in San Francisco, got hacked over the weekend. He describes his experience in a blog post (it is quite a story):

At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. My password was a 7 digit alphanumeric that I didn’t use elsewhere. When I set it up, years and yearsago, that seemed pretty secure at the time. But it’s not. Especially given that I’ve been using it for, well, years and years…

The backup email address on my Gmail account is that same .mac email address. At 4:52 PM, they sent a Gmail password recovery email to the .mac account. Two minutes later, an email arrived notifying me that my Google Account password had changed. 

At 5:00 PM, they remote wiped my iPhone

At 5:01 PM, they remote wiped my iPad

At 5:05, they remote wiped my MacBook Air.

A few minutes after that, they took over my Twitter. Because, a long time ago, I had linked my Twitter to Gizmodo’s they were then able to gain entry to that as well. 

Honan confirmed with the hacker and Apple that it happened when the hacker got in touch with Apple tech support and via “some clever social engineering” let the hacker bypass the security questions. I want to know more details about this clever social engineering. Because I have an iCloud account of my own and it shouldn’t be this simple to have the password reset. I wonder if Apple will make a formal acknowledgement of the issue and provide some guidance on how iCloud will be made more secure.