Category Archives: Technology

Making yourself a slave

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I went to college in Germany (there called Universität) and the semester fees were about 23 Marks – maybe 10 Dollars. I lived with my parents but was registered at a friends house so that I could draw state funded study support, part of which was a loan. (I still owe some of that today, by the way.)

So, I have to say, my college education was pretty – – inexpensive. At least for me personally, maybe not so for the rest of the population. But my justification was always that later in my professional life I will earn well and pay lots of taxes.

OK, the latter did not really happen. First, I was self employed most of the time and I first saw my money in my account and then had to write a check (instead of it being collected before the wage earner even sees it), and that created a rather intense resistance, so I did everything possible to avoid writing big numbers on those checks.

And second, I left Germany after just about six or seven years.

At one point it becomes acute to think about those things for my son. He is still a few years away from any college thoughts, but eventually it will be something to consider.

Now I ran into this video that paints a bleak picture of the current college situation here in the old US of A…

There is not that much to add in terms of the facts, that it really does not seem to be worth to go to college any more, but what I do want to add is the following from my very own experiences.

I studied physics and got up to the equivalent of a masters degree – 6 years. It was fun to a bigger degree, especially my little stints down at CERN, to mingle with world class scientists – for example the internet was born down there (no, it was not Al Gore!)

But I did not go into a career in science, but moved into the computer field which was just then starting to be something to be reckoned with. What later became computer science was, in the beginning, manned by physicists and mathematicians.

So, after college I never did anything much of physics. I did practice forcing my will onto computers during my college days, but this was more or less a side effect because the experiments I conducted produced lots of data and we happened to have PDP 11 at the physics chair where I did my work. My first contacts with computers, a little bit before that, I had in my spare time when I taught myself to program a big IBM mainframe (I think it was an IBM 360) through the use of punch cards. I did this just because I was fascinated by these machines not because of any career goal.

All this happened during a time when in most cases you could still do the job you trained for, for the rest of your life. With the accelerated development in technology and science that is definitely not true any more. Sure, programming the PDP 11 in assembler gave me some basis but certainly did not prepare me for optimizing web sites and writing that occasional php application. All what I do now is self-taught and did not require me to sit in some auditorium and listen to a professor who has given the same lecture for the last 20 year, who can not be replaces by something younger and more up-to-date because he has tenure.

This is why I have to wholeheartedly agree with the implied conclusions in the above video that going to college at this time is a waste of time and money, and at these costs would just make you a slave for the rest of your life. It was scary for me to learn that not even a bankruptcy can get you out of these student loans – do I see debtor’s prisons on the horizon?

Maybe my son is really smart that at his young age he is really embracing the digital world, because that might be the area that we will be living in in 10 – 15 years. You better learn how to become an entrepreneur in Second Life.

Shooting the Router DI-784

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When I got my new computer it had 802.11a built in – you know the one using frequencies in the 5 GHz band. As my old router was dieing I decided double the amount of money and get a dual band D-Link router DI-784.

What a lemon!

I had three and all three did not work. D-Link Support did not even bother to wipe the settings in the last router they sent me. Guess they hoped that the router that was sent back by somebody else might work for me – not true.

Obviously I was not very happy about it because it cost my time. They offered me to send me a single band router instead, but would not refund me the price difference (remember, double the price) so I decided to get a Netgear router and take out my anger on that poor router.

I intended to do this quickly to make it a PR nightmare for D-Link, but life events were frequent, and it was forgotten.

Until now, when I converted all my mini DV tapes to computer files because I am not sure how long there will still be devices to play those tapes.

So, there you have it – shooting the router.

ISS – View out of the Cupola

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There are always two sides to a coin, and today I had to reflect on these two side in regards my my anarchistic conviction.

It is easy and righteous to be an anarchist, and to help as little as possible for all those things most of us abhor. War, extortion, corruption, etc. But there are a few things that I like that these guys are doing, like helping to get pictures like this…

Tracy's View out of the Cupola on the ISS

This is just one sample of the pictures taken by astronaut Douglas H. Wheelock during  his stay at the International Space Station just about 200 miles straight up. I can’t help considering other people who do not appreciate this venture out into space, just as I don’t appreciate beating up the Irakies or toppling a South American Dictator.

One of the most heard arguments against anarchy (in the sense of a society without a ruling government – not the definition of ‘chaos in the streets’) is “but somebody will have to build and maintain the roads!” On first glance that seems to be a valid argument, but thinking a bit further there are possibilities that don’t make it look so good. For one, a private builder who builds an area with houses he wants to sell, will make sure that there is a road that lets people get to these houses. Would make the houses probably a bit more expensive but considering that the buyer does not pay any taxes to a usually very inefficient government, the house with the street factored in would probably come cheaper than the house plus the taxes.

But what about highways and freeways? In part of the US we already have toll roads and they seem to be working just fine, and again the saving in taxes factored in, traveling might actually become cheaper. But lets assume that it would actually be more expensive to travel longer distances along toll roads – maybe other means of transportation would have been invented if they would be now more competitive without any government strong-arming the use of the road and car system. Maybe there would be already flying cars that don’t require expensive road building – or we would actually have the rolling roads of the early Heinlein – would THAT be cool!

Back to the space pictures. It might have take us a bit longer to reach the moon, but there is a good chance that we would have a flourishing space industry if there would have been no monopolistic government involved. A good chance that I might be able to afford a trip to Bigelow’s Space Hotel in one of Burt Rutan’s SpaceShip 4’s.

There would have been less people contributing to the cost of developing these space technologies, because right now each and every tax-paying citizen is a contributor. But if only the people who wanted it would be contributing, which is far less, it still could be more, as – first – an inefficient middle man is cut out of the loop, and – second – the people who do contribute really want it, and how much energy does does real intention add to the equation?

But despite all these ifs and whens I can still enjoy the great images from the ISS that were created with all our contributions – willing and unwilling – even forced. Here again the link to astronaut Wheelock’s images.

Sir, you have been selected for additional screening

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Wonder when this will become a reality – could not be very far away, though…

  1. let us look at your shoes
  2. let us look at your underwear
  3. let us look at your genitals

And I just read an article with a very convincing argumentation that these new scanners that actually look through your underwear will miss a few hundred gram of explosive that could bring down an airliner easily if it’s just formed naturally with tapered out edges to mimic fatty tissue.

But I guess the penis scanner will now make us really safe.

Flying over all that traffic

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When I started to read science fiction at the tender age of 15 I was sure that we would have settlements on Moon and Mars, would criss-cross our solar system (if not the Milky-way) and have flying cars for sure once I reached the age I’m at now.

That did not quite work out that way. I still put the same old gas into the tank of a car that is completely earth-bound. The only real advance in space travel had been a winged space ship – but that is about to retire now and it all looks like it’s back to the old vertical take-off and landing in the ocean routine that we had when I was a kid. The only real hope for a proper space ship is Burt Rutan with his space-ship 2. But Burt, you gotta work on that anti-gravity device so that you can get rid of that silly way to get into space.

OK, we now have the internet, something totally not expected when I was little. What prompts me to write these lines is that finally there is – as long as we remain earth-bound – at least a glimmer of hope for that flying car…

From Mohave to Aldebaran

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With all this brouhaha going on right now about the fifth space tourist (officially: participant) being up at the international space station I remembered an article I wrote nearly two years ago in June 2004 after we had returned from Mohave, California where we watched the first civilian attempt to reach space without any government funding.

I think it’s in order to review this event and realize that private space travel will be required to get you and me (or at least your and my kid) off this planet.

watching space ship one

Watching Space Ship 1

I missed the flight of the Wright Brothers, I was on vacation in Spain when the Eagle landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong said his famous “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” and I have never observed a space shuttle flight.

Did I mention that I have also not visited the International Space Station yet either?

So I, for sure, did not want to miss the first attempt of civilian space flight!

Maybe a little bit of background. There is no boundary between earth atmosphere and space as the air is just getting thinner and thinner as we go up and at some point there is so little that we define that as nothing and that is then space.

As we as, humans, have the tendency to label, measure and categorize everything we, or somebody, has defined the border of space to be at an altitude of 100 km, or 62 miles.

The first person to get above that and fly around our globe was Yuri Gagarin, very much to the dismay of America. But the situation was somewhat remedied when Alan Shepard made it up into space just a few weeks later. Not quite as impressive because he was just shot up and fell back down while the Russian had circled the globe, but nevertheless, an American had been in space.

We all know more or less what happened since, and we also know that this stuff is EXPENSIVE! Just lately we had a few civilian space tourists paying 20 million a pop to get up to the space station. All this seems so far away from the idea of a space smuggler outrunning some government cruisers with a batch of Whiskey from Vega and reaching Aldebaran safely. Especially unrealistic as long as the government has a monopoly in space travel.

Civilian space travel is thus needed. One attempt to spur that is the X Prize. This is a prize of 10 million Dollars awarded to the first team to reach space with a three man crew and repeats this trip with the same vehicle within two weeks.

There are a few contenders for this prize around the world, but lucky for us Californians, the group apparently ahead of the crowd is ‘Scaled Composites’ in Mohave, California, about an hour and a half away from Los Angeles. Under the leadership of Burt Rutan this little company had build a space ship.

Funding did not come from any government, only from one private source, Paul Allen, the second man of Microsoft. Some might argue that this is just as good as government, but hey – there is a difference!

The price so far being paid for this whole spaceship and everything else to get it into space had been in the same range as one tourist ticket to the international space station.

Now, for Monday morning, the 21st of June 2004, Scaled Composites had announced that it would attempt to reach space – remember – 100 km. Scaled had been very quite about its test flights, but this time there was a big announcement.

Zen and I had been planning a trip out into the desert to sleep under the open sky anyway, so the idea was to combine these two events – sleep out there under billions of starts and then get to the air/space-port early to witness the event. I had not considered that others might have the same idea. But that became clear soon, when I learned about all the things the air/space-port was planning for all the people who would come – – – after it had been built.

Gigi decided to also come along and I made an announcement at Zen’s school to allow other parents to take their children out to this historic event but they all decided to miss it and probably later regret it, just as I regret to have missed the flight at Kitty Hawk. But Zen’s teacher Rose came and brought her husband Doug and graduate Ariel.

So, on Sunday night we headed north into the desert, stopped in Rosamond for dinner and to meet Rose, Dough and Ariel and were soon at the entrance to the first (official) American inland space port. We just wanted to check it out, so that the next morning we would easily find our way to the best vista point, but then we paid the stiff price for a spot in the RV and tent area and stayed there for the night. It had become so windy that it probably would have been more or less impossible to sleep under the open sky without being blown away.

We made do with sleeping (somewhat) in the car and finally crawling out into a perfect morning. The winds had calmed down to nearly nothing, there was hardly a cloud in the sky and with sunrise we got on the short way to the end of the taxi-way where the takeoff would commence.

A Future Traveller to Aldebaran

Even though I have never seen a rocket takeoff live, I have to admit that the takeoff of ‘Space Ship One’ was way unimpressive. No big explosion of fire – just the taxi of the carrier ship ‘White Knight’ with ‘Space Ship One’ strapped under it’s belly, a turn at the end of the runway and then a pretty long roll before taking off into the clear air over Mohave.

I will not report about the technical aspect and the interviews and events as they have been covered in the media and on the web much better than I could do.

But I have to report about this one brief moment when ‘Space Ship One’, twenty minutes after it had been in space – just barely – glided down in one last circle over the air/space-port and landed right in front of us and the crowd cheered – that was darn emotional.

I think we got a bit closer to the day when the Millennium Falcon will outrun some empire battleships.

UPDATE 2019-11-11:  It looks like we (or better Virgin Galactic which arose from ‘Scaled Composits’) are not too far from finally going into space with some real space tourists.

Still, the trip seems to be a better deal – 20 million for a week in space versus four minutes for a quarter million.