According to Colwell

Higher gasoline prices are spurring carmakers to develop and introduce smaller cars, some of which have been available in Europe for years. Brazil will be entering the U.S. market with 50,000 of its “Obvio!” three-seater. Small, stylish, and with reasonable performance, this car has promise at a reasonable targeted price of $14,000, but the predicted mileage is only 40 mpg highway, and less than 30 mpg in city driving. But you can get that kind of economy with larger cars, like the Toyota Corolla and the Honda Fit. I don’t understand why someone would opt for this pocket-sized car instead, and more importantly, I don’t see why mileage on such a small car doesn’t outpace that of its larger siblings. The Obvio! website also mentions a very capable all-electric version with a range of over 200 miles on a charge and an estimated sticker price of $49,000. If they could get that down to $30,000 or so I think that would be an attractive vehicle for a lot of people. Depending on the number of batteries they’ve got stuffed in there, they should be able to do a version with a more modest range for commuters at a much lower cost.

I’m down with a cold, but this post at Science Blogs reviews some of the recent observations of the hill on Mars that some people insist is an artificial monument for reasons which are impossible for me to decipher.

Xcel energy, which provides electricity and natural gas to Colorado, has apparently completed the bidding process for a solar power facility that will generate 8 megaWatts (800 kW) of solar power. The cost is $60 million. That works out to $750 for 100 Watts, or a little more than what I guesstimated earlier in estimating the cost of solar power facilities to provide all of the country’s electricity needs. First, it’s nice to see the back-of-the-envelope estimate come in within a factor of two of the real cost. More importantly, this is a real-world cost for a large-scale facility, including all the related infrastructure. Future similar installations, if voters elsewhere demand them, like Colorado voters did in 2004, will be cheaper as more solar cell manufacturing plants come on line in the next several years.

I grew up watching the Apollo missions to the Moon and dreamed of being the first person on Mars. The fickle nature of political leadership pulled NASA’s manned program in several different directions while the unmanned program brought the planets to our computer screens with missions to every planet in the solar system. The space station, proposed by Ronald Reagan in 1984 and redesigned more times than I care to think about, now looks like it will be finished in 2010, just in time for the space shuttle to be decommissioned and the United States to abandon its investment in it. We have endeared ourselves to our foreign partners after luring them into a joint international space station effort only to lose interest and stick them with the ultimate white elephant. I opposed the station 15 years ago, before any of it was built, because it seemed to be a pointless activity. Low Earth Orbit, where the station resides, is a tricky place to hang out, and there’s not much point for people to be there. At least the Moon is a place. Anyway, once the station was a reality I looked for ways to use it, and I was poised to be a part of two experimental programs on it, both studying the physics of small colliding objects to better understand the processes that lead to the formation of the planets. With NASA’s attention redirected to the Moon, my funding for those experiments was redirected back to NASA HQ.

So, NASA is heading back to the Moon, and there are some interesting scientific experiments I’d like to see on the lunar surface. We’ll see how that all works out over the next several years, but given that I don’t have an application in the astronaut pool, it seems unlikely that I’ll be taking any of those experiments there in person. I was resigned to my dream of being an astronaut remaining just a dream. Now, however, there appears to be the very real possibility of tourist flights to space. Initially, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two promises a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the Earth from 60-70 miles up for the tidy sum of $200,000. Several other firms (see here, for example) are working on rockets to offer similar rides for similar prices. Spaceship Two may fly within three years, which is frankly pretty amazing to me. I don’t have $200,000 in spare change, unfortunately, and it would really have to be burning a hole in my pocket for me to spend it on this ride. If and when private companies start offering orbital rides, instead of the hop up and down of Spaceship Two and its brethren, that would be a temptation, but certainly too expensive for those of us who tried to become astronauts by learning science. I guess I had it all wrong when I was a kid: I should have gone into the business world so I could make millions and get to space that way.

I’ve been wanting to write a post on the political issues that will shape the upcoming mid-term elections, but I find the entire state of affairs too depressing. The United States used to pride itself on setting an example of liberty, equality, prosperity, and human rights for the world. Now we’re the country that complains that article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which states that combatants (and non-combatants) who are no longer in the field of combat “shall in all circumstances be treated humanely”, is too vague. A recent poll says only 25% of the country approves of the job congress is doing, but district gerrymandering almost assures that there will be very little turnover in the House of Representatives. The national debt is enormous, (in fact, it dwarfs even my crude estimate of the cost of converting the country’s entire electrical grid to solar photovoltaics) and Bush is returning to fear-mongering about not only terrorists, but higher taxes if Democrats are elected. Whatever happened to the GOP being fiscally conservative?

Last weekend was a unique occasion for the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. Normally, Cassini is not allowed to point its cameras very close to the Sun (15 degrees in most circumstances) to avoid hurting the sensitive detectors with too much sunlight. Last weekend the spacecraft spent 12 hours in the shadow of Saturn; safely shielded from the Sun, Cassini was able to look back toward the Sun and see the ring system in a whole new light. The effect is similar to being in a dark theater and looking back toward the projector: you can see the dust and smoke in the air quite clearly. The first three of many images that Cassini took in this unique geometry have been released and they are spectacular. In one, we see our home planet from a vantage point of 850 million miles. Not since Voyager took a family portrait of the planets have we seen our world from such a distance. It’s a humbling reminder of our place in the universe.

In astronomy we’re fond of making order-of-magnitude estimates. These are also called “quick and dirty” or “back of the envelope” calculations. By playing fast and loose with the details one can frequently come up with an answer that while not highly accurate, should be at least within a factor of 10 of the true answer (that is, within one order of magnitude). Following up on my estimate for the area of solar power cells needed to supply the entire country’s electricity needs, I thought it would interesting to estimate the cost of such a system.

I estimated 460 million kiloWatts as the continuous average electrical energy consumption for the country based on data from the Department of Energy website. (As a quick check on this estimate, that is about 1.5 kW, or 15 100-Watt bulbs lit 24/7 per American. That seems like a reasonable number.) A web search for companies that sell rooftop solar panels to homeowners gave me a price of $600 for a panel that supplies 100 Watts (0.1 kW). If we did our whole country with those panels at that price, it would take 4.6 billion of those panels, and at $600 apiece that comes to about $3 trillion. This particular order-of-magnitude estimate is almost certainly high because at the scale needed for utilities, bulk manufacturing would drive the price way down. But even with this high estimate, that is $10,000 per American, or 10 Iraq wars. That’s to supply all the country’s current electrical needs. Of course such a large system would take many years to put in place, and not all of the country’s power needs should be switched to solar. But these order of magnitude estimates show that it is feasible both technically and economically to be electrically self-sufficient.

“The Last Kiss” starts with four nearly-thirty-year-old guys (a big point is made about them being 29) facing their late-arriving adulthood with various degrees of panic. Michael (Zach Braff) and his girlfriend of three years, Jenna (Jacinda Barrett), announce to Jenna’s parents that she is pregnant. At the wedding of their friend, Michael starts to freak out at the apparently immutable trajectory the rest of his life will follow: kid, marriage, house, and, well, it’s never really spelled out what it is. It is not the quality of it that scares him, but the finality of it, so he plays along with a flirtatious college student, Kim (Rachel Bilson), who, if nothing else, represents a departure from that picture perfect trajectory. Meanwhile Chris (Casey Affleck), cannot handle the pressures of having a wife and young child, and Jenna’s parents (played by Blythe Danner and Tom Wilkinson) deal with their own crises.

The movie is uniformly well-acted, and the story of Michael and Jenna is involving, but all the characters are stereotyped by gender. All the young men are panicked at the idea of marriage and kids, while all the young women are eager to settle down and start raising a family. The only exception is Izzy, the man who has an unhealthy obsession with his ex-girlfriend. It would have been nice for at least one guy to find the idea of getting married and having a family - at the age of thirty, no less - less than terrifying. I also found it hard to buy that cute, sexy, 20-year-old college student Kim would so eagerly pursue Michael, a fairly geeky older guy with nothing in common with her. And yet I did find myself caring what happened to Michael and Jenna, and the movie also deals with their relationship and its problems in a believable and uncompromising way.

The controversy over the definition of the word “planet” could have a similar counterpart in the definition of “moon”, at least at Saturn where the line between moons and ring particles is a bit fuzzy. While I’m sure schoolkids are not going to be as interested in whether Saturn’s moons Pan and Daphnis, for example, are called moons or relegated to ring particle (or dwarf moon?) status, the same general underlying principles hold for this situation as for the planet definition. In fact, Saturn’s rings are frequently used as a local small-scale model of the disks in which planets formed. There are some very important differences, of course, but there are also a lot of similar processes at work in Saturn’s rings to what we expect took place in our forming solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

This cool picture from Cassini illustrates all of these points. This is the outer edge of the A ring, near the outer edge of the main ring system of Saturn. That gap, about 30 km across, is kept clear by that little moon, Daphnis. Since it is capable of clearing the neighborhood of its orbit (one of the IAU planet criteria), it makes sense to distinguish this as a moon rather than a ring particle. Unofficial Cassini project nomenclature calls Daphnis and many of the other small moons of Saturn “rocks” to distinguish them from the main satellites that are hundreds of km across (Daphnis is less than 10 km). Moonlet is a more distinguished term for the same idea: a moon that is too small to be round (another criterion for planethood, remember, is that it is big enough to be round). Daphnis is doing some interesting things to the ring material around it. Notice the wavy edge of the gap near the moonlet, and the diagonal wakes trailing up and to the right away from Daphnis (Daphnis is moving down relative to those particles, and up relative to the ring material on the left of the image, so the wake it leaves, unlike that from a boat, goes in opposite directions on either side of the moon - er, moonlet). The similarity to planet-forming disks can be seen in the many bright features in the ring. These are density waves produced from the gravity of nearby moonlets Pandora and Prometheus. Density waves in protoplanetary disks are believed to be created by forming giant planets. These waves in a protoplanetary disk can play an important role in the formation of the planets themselves. Cassini is allowing us to study the physics of density waves right here in our own backyard so we can have a better idea about not only Saturn and its rings, but planetary systems in general.

Hollywoodland stars Diane Lane who first charmed me in “A Little Romance” with Laurence Olivier. Have I told you about the time I didn’t meet her? Well, that’s for another post. In this movie Adrian Brody plays a sad sack private eye in 1959 Los Angeles who gets turned onto the case of the apparent suicide of actor George Reeves as a way to make a buck and boost his business. Lane plays Toni, the bored wife of studio exec Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), who becomes Reeves’ sugar-momma, buying him a swank house and providing him some inside connections. He makes her feel young, and she makes him feel important. Reeves (Ben Affleck) drinks a lot and is frustrated by his inability to get parts in the movies. He considers his role as Superman in the low-budget TV show aimed at kids as beneath him. The movie alternates between Louis Simo’s (Brody) investigation and the life of Reeves leading up to his death.

Simo becomes genuinely intrigued by the possibility that there was a murder instead of a suicide, but the murder mystery aspects of the movie are secondary to the portrayal of characters on the margins of their professions, struggling to be successful in a town where fame is fleeting and success is all or nothing. Simo, a WWII vet, is struggling to get by and to get along with his ex-wife and their son who is devastated by the death of Superman. Reeves, who was in “Gone with the Wind”, is struggling to come to terms with the end of his moment in the Sun and the realities of grunt-work acting, and Toni is facing the golden years with a grunt. The movie is shot in the faded yellows and browns and slight overexposure reminiscent of photographs from that era. It does a good job of immersing you in the atmosphere of the time. One can’t help but notice the irony that, today, playing a comic book superhero is the height of Hollywood superstardom, while for Reeves it was the final indignity. This movie is more atmospheric than dramatic, and works better as a character study than mystery.