j a c k *

I Hate Boss Fights...

I was never into video games as a child. The first home system I ever purchased was a GameCube when my wife and I had a young daughter and we thought there might be some interesting games that she could enjoy. And there were. She really liked Mario Party. The fact is that the GameCube was a perfect system for a family with young children and little gaming experience.

We’ve advanced, as we should. We bought our daughter a DS when Nintendogs was all the rage. And now we have a Wii which gives us the odd tennis game or bizarre tank battle. Plus we can play old GameCube games. This means that I can learn about video games that were new when I was young, and they can be new for me again. With the benefit of hindsight I can play only the games that my peers thought were exceptional. And thus I learn how badly I suck at everything.

Case in point #1: Chrono Trigger. It was recently re-released for the DS and I picked it up second-hand at our local game store. My daughter and I played it together for a while. She got stuck fighting a dragon tank, and then I got stuck fighting a mighty boss with independent hands and magic attacks. Great game; lots of fun puzzles, but impossible, impassible bosses.

Case in point #2: Metroid Prime. I picked this up because it was rated as one of the best GameCube games ever, and I’ve had a lot of fun exploring the worlds and solving the puzzles. It’s beautifully detailed with rich environments and complex sensor and attack systems. I first got stuck fighting Flaahgra. I went back and started again – from nothing – using web walkthroughs to find all the powerups and I finally beat Flaahgra. I got as far as the Omega Pirate. Now, despite all the details from the walkthroughs (which say he’s easy), I cannot defeat him. So I’m stuck.

Thus for games that were designed for entertainment I (and my daughter too) experience limited enjoyment. Why? Because of bosses that are too powerful. In case #1 I guess if I backtrack to find all the power-ups I could beat this boss. Maybe, but it took me so long to get to this fight that I’m simply not motivated. In case #2 it requires dexterity and reflexes that as a 50 year-old I no longer have, so I suppose I’ll never see the end of the game. I may try it a dozen more times but at some point I’ll give up, game unsolved, frustrated.

My plea to game designers of the future is this: please don’t make boss fights a brick wall. Some gamers will defeat the boss – and they should be properly rewarded – but some players cannot, for whatever reason. They should not be forever stuck, like Sisyphus pushing that rock uphill that will always roll down again and again. You should always provide another path, no matter how weak, for those players with limited skills. Or limited time.

- jack*

Consent of the Homebodies…

The most common interaction we have with the state is thus; the state demands property that we regard as our own, and if we refuse to hand this property over it sends men with guns to our house. If we resist these men with guns, they imprison us. If we resist too effectively, they kill us. This is true of every modern nation-state. Liberal democracies differ from authoritarian states in that they allow us to complain loudly about the process, to minimize its arbitrariness, and to have some (very) small say in how our property is reallocated. This difference isn't trivial, but it isn't as large as normally assumed.

Robert Farley, Lawyers, Guns and Money

I want to come back to one part of my previous post on consent, specifically my assertion that collection of taxes by the state isn’t theft or extortion. As evidenced by the quote above, many political scientists take the dimmer view that the threat of potentially lethal force – no matter how remote – taints the entire concept of taxation. This is also a formulation that Libertarians often start from to argue that all taxes are immoral.

This is based on the observation that the modern nation-state monopolizes the legitimate use of violence. This is not true of a feudal system, for example, since the various lords under the same king would war with each other. In many large societies in the past, assassination and physical intimidation were considered valid political tools for individuals or powerful families to use. The nation-state is different in that it reserves violence as a tool for exclusive use of state actors, and enforces this monopoly itself with threat of violence.

But modern, liberal nation-states go beyond this. The use of state-sanctioned violence is heavily proscribed by laws and regulations such that if a state actor is allowed use lethal force against you, you will know it. They will wear a uniform, display their weapons, announce their role and give you the opportunity to back down or surrender. Generally the use of violence has been subject to increasing constraints such that in countries that have abolished the death penalty the state use of lethal force against its own citizens is limited to self-defense, which is generally considered legitimate for anyone. The false equivalence between liberal nations and brutal, authoritarian ones in Rob’s quote above heavy handedly ignores this trend away from violence. (He also conflates war and law-enforcement, which is unreasonable, but we’ll pretend he was only talking about taxation.)

We have to ask, if nation-states monopolize the legitimate use of violence, where do they get their legitimacy? In liberal democracies the legitimacy of the state comes from the consent of the governed. We empower the police the enforce laws, and to use violence to a limited extent when doing so. The legitimacy of force, and thus the power the tax, originates not from the barrel of a gun, but from the ballot box.

Liberal nations will also freely issue passports and will generally not interfere with emigration. Although there can be other barriers to free movement such as economics or local politics, many people have left a nation hostile to their wishes and settled in a more suitable country. In the end most Americans stay put because they want to be here, and the US government functions to maintain the conditions in which people want to stay. I’m not saying you should “love it or leave it,” but the fact that you can leave puts lie to the notion that taxation is something against your will.

- jack*

Qui Tacet Consentit…

And the idea that somehow we are torturing people in Guantanamo is absolutely not true, unless you consider having to eat chicken three times a week is torture

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA)

Their food is better than the food that they fed us as senators and staff that went down

Sen. John Ensign (R-NV)

They wouldn’t be treated any better in the United States, and they wouldn’t have the tropical breezes blowing through

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

anyone, any detainee, over 55 has an opportunity to have a colonoscopy

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK)

These could almost be offered up without comment except that some individuals apparently lacking any sense of irony or self-awareness will publically argue that waterboarding isn’t torture because our soldiers have sometimes done it to their own comrades during rigorous survival training. What conservatives seemingly fail to grasp, time and time again, is the important concept of consent. Consent is the difference between training and torture. Consent is the difference between a vacation and indefinite detention. Consent is the difference between sex and rape. Consent is the difference between motherhood and forced pregnancy. Consent is the difference between taxation and extortion. Consent is the difference between art and war crime.

As a man approaching a certain age I’m particularly struck by the last quote. The honorable Senator from Oklahoma meant the colonoscopy remark as a joke, of course, because as all rich white people know a colonoscopy is a terrible inconvenience and a painful embarrassment of getting old.

Now none of them take 'em up on it, because once they explain what it is, none of them want to do it

Funny. Unless you’re one of 20% of Americans with no health care insurance at all, or the nearly all Americans who pay way too much relative to the rest of the world. Why are the law-abiding, tax-paying workers of this country entitled to less preventative care than the most hardened of criminals in solitary lockup?

So we’ll take our government colonoscopies please. By the way Senator, they are much less icky and uncomfortable when done with consent.

- jack*

Raging Steele On…

I don’t need some judge sitting up there feeling bad for my opponent because of their life circumstances or their condition. And short changing me and my opportunity to get fair treatment under the law. Crazy nonsense empathetic. I’ll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind. Craziness.

Thank you Michael Steele, for helping us laugh at love. Again.

Never mind all the other qualities and qualifications that Obama asks for in a justice, the right wing has latched onto empathy. Damn straight! Who wants empathy? When you curl up with your weepy movie and carton of ice cream, sure, maybe empathy is good; fun even. But not when doing the hard work of judging. That’s tough stuff. That requires something more – I don’t know – manly. As Steele reminds us:

Come on, Chairman, you know it's not about being against empathy, it's about applying the rule of law and having jurisprudence that you can trust, not a judge who may have a bad day or be overly sensitive to my condition.

Right. Who could trust someone who’s over-sensitive, you know what I mean fellas? Who among us hasn’t been judged unfairly just because of a “bad day?” Hell, might even be a bad “time of the month” and that’s just too unfair. Unless you’re Michael Steele of course, in which case you simply threaten to beat the woman into submission.

Wait, did I say woman? I meant hypothetical Supreme Court nominee.

- jack*

Bonds of Love and Blood…

With the recent victories for equal rights in courthouses and statehouses, there’s been a suggestion recently that somehow we could sidestep the whole question of gay marriage by getting the government out of the “marriage business.” After all – the argument goes – civil unions can be an arbitrary legal arrangement leaving marriage to religion where it belongs. Apparently it requires an atheist to explain that marriage is not about religion; it’s about family.

It’s easy to see why so many find this confusing. Most people cannot imagine going through a significant life event – birth, adulthood, marriage, childbearing, death – without having a priest standing nearby. But religion does not make these events happen nor does it make them more significant than they already are. Religion is like the creepy kid who wants to hang out with you but always insists that anything fun you’re doing was his idea in the first place and you need to do it his way.

Marriage is a complicated cultural phenomenon, and religion has historically gotten its parasitic claws deeper into it than other traditions, but as a happily married atheist I can assure you that religion is entirely superfluous. I cherish the bond that my marriage represents as personally and significantly as any theist. No passionless civil contract would have the same active and vital force in my life, and clearly no dreary religious ritual. So if it’s not a function of the state or the church, then what is it?

Marriage is a method to change family relationships at will, specifically to join otherwise unrelated family units into larger extended family networks. Other cultures and other times could do this in multiple ways. Powerful Roman families used adoption to create family ties between unrelated adults to the benefit of both. Many cultures used to recognize blood brothers, men not related by birth who had nonetheless chosen to codify their fraternal love and commitment to each other, and treated those oaths no less seriously than marriage vows. Obviously the people directly involved were most strongly affected by these choices, but the effects would ripple through the rest of their families and their entire community. In the case of royal families these mergers could shift the course of nations.

In the modern west marriage is the only tool we have for altering the architecture of our families, and since our business and politics are less organized around family relationships marriage mostly involves the couple and the family unit that they create by their declaration of relatedness. But seen in this light it’s clear that denying this fundamental power to a segment of the population, based on criteria that would be illegal to use to decide employment or housing, is clearly discrimination. Religion and sexual orientation have nothing to do with it.

- jack*

Some Things that Scare the Heck out of me…

This is just a quick note on stuff that borders on the bizarre.

#1) Lawyers, Guns and Money is one of my must-read sites. It’s second only to TPM in its first-must-read-in-the-morning, uh, ness. Imagine my dismay when I found this post from one of the regular contributors. To save you the pain of wading through the extended comment thread that included two more follow-up posts, basically Paul is arguing that the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision to allow gay marriage is nothing more than sophistry in support of a political, liberal agenda. Nevermind several other posts brilliantly crediting the decision.

It’s odd from a blog about law to hear that legal arguments are meaningless to the point of nihilism. Equal protection statues are not “vague” – they include very specific language which is undergirded by strong rhetorical traditions. Nevertheless, even if they are “vague”, they are no vaguer than the playground concept of “fairness” which even elementary school children can understand perfectly well. If you compose an argument that by virtue of “fairness” you should be able to take my lunch from me every day, then that doesn’t prove you are a legal genius. It proves you are a bully. And I don’t want any legislative policy, even my preferred policy, to be enforced by bullying.

#2) PZ has largely taken this one apart, but if you want to see a truly scary manifestation of religious logic, there’s nothing better than the argument that Bernie Madoff – of epic ponzi scheme fame – is morally superior to Chesley Sullenburger, the Humble Hero of the Hudson. Aparently this is because Bernie was Jew who gave some fraction of his 65 billion dollars in ill gotten dollars to charity, while “Sully” was just using his immense skill, long experience and expensive training to save his own life – the selfish SOB.

OK, the second one doesn’t scare me so much as make me want to laugh and point while holding my hand over my mouth. I can only hope that more religious logic will play itself out like this. The religious will hoist themselves with their own petars and we militant atheists will be able to carefully box up our deadly petars, dismantle our armor and play a relaxing game of pool instead.

I like pool – it has geometry. And what happens has some relation to reality.

- jack*

Too Big to Exist...

Back in the good old days, when we still didn’t know how bad things really were, I wrote a very short post about how it wasn’t clear how to solve the financial crises, but maybe the geniuses on Wall Street shouldn’t be allowed to make things worse by consolidating. I kept it short because being a layman in such issues it wasn’t clear that my random thoughts would be very helpful. Of course now it’s clear that my uninformed ravings are pretty much just as good as any Wall Street or Federal Reserve whiz, so here goes.

This is my plan – the one I formulated back in post-election 2008 when Paulson was so visibly floundering. Any bank or other financial institution that’s facing insolvency needs to design their own breakup. Basically the conglomerate needs to split itself apart based on business units such that all the smaller companies have independent charters. For example if a company has a successful lending business, that should be spun off as a separate company and any other fragments of the company should not be doing lending. Once broken up, the government will take over one of the spin-offs.

By setting some limit on size, like requiring any sub-business to be less than 50 percent of the original company, we can assure that conglomerates will be fractured into parts substantially smaller than the parent business. There will also be an incentive for the principals in the franchise to spin off as much of the toxic parts of their balance sheet into one subsidiary – the one the government will take over. Of course the government will have to agree to the breakup plan, so it can’t be arbitrary or unreasonable, and to assure more sanity in the owner’s self-interest, none of the new businesses can be swallowed up by other firms for a period of two years. They have to be able to make it independently.

The incentive will naturally be to divest all the bad assets into the one spin-off business that the government will take into receivership, something that – we’ve been told – only the people who created the mess are smart enough to do. But they’ll also want to reduce their exposure by making the “bad” business as small as possible, which might motivate them to mark some of those toxic assets to closer to their market value, something they’ve been unwilling to do so long as they pollute their balance sheet.

The main advantage of this plan is that we get something that we need – smaller banks instead of ‘too big to fail” financial behemoths. It’s just a happy coincidence that the people who suffer most would be the CEOs and high-level executives. It’s not necessarily a requirement, but it sure would feel good.

- jack*

Politico Ad Absurdum…

If you ever did proofs in high school algebra you’re probably familiar with the Latin phrase redutio ad absurdum. It’s a formal argument that starts by assuming as true the thing you want to prove false. You then make a series of substitutions of one thing with another known to be logically the same and end up with a clear contradiction, like 1 equals 2. Since your initial assumptions produce something that is not true, you know the assumption is false. Quod erat demonstrandum.

A similar, informal type of argument is a cornerstone of our common sense. As I have argued before, we are very good at doing certain specific types of moral reasoning. Some statements of principle might sound reasonable in one context, but a careful and introspective person needs to probe them more fully before accepting that they are generally applicable, or that they are even fair or reasonable in the first place.

“What if a Democrat had said that?” is such a test. Normally this question is asked in slack-jawed disbelief over the inane utterances of some right-wing pundit or spokesman in the national media. And yet those same people keep getting interviews and aren’t laughed off the national stage. Why is that? I can only assume that conservatives in this country, and the media that enable them, have forgotten how to honestly vet their own political biases.

For example, take Bobby Jindal’s recent careful parsing of the idea that Republicans want the president to fail. “'Do you want the president to fail?'” he rhetorically asked himself, “It depends on what he is trying to do." So the general principle being justified here is “If the president is trying to do something that I disagree with, then I hope that he fails.” Other Republicans have made the argument that they only want Obama’s policies to fail, something like “If the president employs policies that I disagree with, then I hope those policies fail.” Can either of these pass a simple, informal reduction to absurdity?

We can easily test these general principles by trying them out with specific examples. For “the president” let’s use George W. Bush. For the thing being done that I disagree with let’s say “invade Iraq.” Many Democrats (and others) including myself vehemently disagreed with Bush’s intention of invading Iraq. I went to the very first protest rally of my life, listened to the self-serving speakers and went on the stupid march for all the good it did. That’s how strongly I felt; my disgust at Bush’s policy preferences overrode my natural cynicism. But do the Republicans stand by their logic when it opposes one of their own?

Using Jindal’s formulation we get: “If George W. Bush is trying to invade Iraq, then I hope that he fails.” The other more subtle one is: “If George W. Bush employs invasion as a policy, then I hope the invasion fails.” First of all we can see that these are substantively the same. Since the thing Bush wants to do is invade, and we hope that he fails at that, that’s the same as saying that we hope the invasion fails. Hoping the policies fail is the same as hoping the president fails, because the president is backing those polices.

Second, I remember what it was like after the invasion of Iraq. The right wingers told us in no uncertain terms that if we didn’t wholeheartedly support the war once it was started that we were traitors. If any high-profile Democrat said they wanted Bush to lose the war the Republicans would have pilloried and demonized them as “fifth column” leftists, probably calling for their execution or assassination. Of course none of us really did that. My wife and daughter spent many months participating in vigils protesting for an end to the Iraq war, but no one was hoping for the troops, the war, or the president, to fail.

Now, you might not accept that war and economic crisis can be taken as equivalent. But I think that’s what Chuck Todd was trying to get at with his somewhat off-key question a couple of days ago. These were both – at least according to their respective presidents – situations that were forced upon us and to which we had no choice but to react. Agree or disagree on the policy, once the president had set his plan in motion attempts (or even wishes) to sabotage it amount to obstructionism at best, or anti-Americanism at worst.

This isn’t what I say – this is what Republicans have said in response to Democratic critics of Republican presidents. A little bit of common sense, properly applied, leaves hypocrites very little room to stand.

- jack*

Keeping it Simple for Financial Geniuses…

I’m not a huge fan of punitive taxation. I prefer to see taxes levied such that they do not distort incentives significantly except possibly in rare cases where individual recklessness causes undue public cost. But here’s the deal. Government relaxed regulation on Wall Street in the expectation that it would police itself. If you are a Wall Street executive you stood to make bundles of cash out of the deal, which no one has a problem with. Seriously, go to town, we don’t care. America believes in Capitalism, and we would all prefer it to be us who wins, but we don’t begrudge you your success.

If, on the other hand, giant Wall Street firms which have grown “too big to fail” require massive taxpayer bailouts to stay afloat they should not also – at the same time – take huge bonuses for themselves. I don’t know much about the culture of high finance, but I’m sure there’s a mechanism by which you enforce commonly acceptable standards of behavior. If you don’t, or if you did not employ it to prevent taxpayer outrage, then that is a spectacular failure of self-policing.

Not only will the honor system be revoked, but there will be a price to pay for failure. I’m not sure I’m keen on the mechanism, but it has to be done and most other avenues have been forclosed. If you are part of Wall Street culture and think you weren’t involved, you were. You really can’t complain.

- jack*

Curse of Living in the Meso-scale…

This comic makes a point – albeit clumsily – that has been on my mind lately. As I’ve been mentally composing posts that involve discussions about very large numbers (and sometimes very small numbers), I find that it’s difficult to express to a literate but non-scientific audience issues of relative magnitude. Or even absolute magnitude. Our options are remarkably limited.

1) Common names. Most people understand thousands well enough, but go beyond millions and things get very dicey. The first problem is the so-called short scale and long scale used by different nationalities. In America “billion” and “trillion” differ by factors of a thousand, while in France they differ by factors of a million. Thus an American “trillion” is equivalent to a French “billion”, and they have some “milliards” and “billiards” thrown in to patch the holes.

2) Exponential notation. You probably learned exponential notation in fifth grade and promptly forgot it once the test was over. These are numbers of the form “something-point-something times ten to the something.” The “something-point-something” part is a decimal fraction somewhere between one and ten, and the “ten to the something” part tells you where to put the decimal. It’s a great way to express big numbers (“3.5 times 10 to the 11” is 350 billion) and small numbers (“1.0 times ten to the -6” is one one-millionth) but unless you learned to live and breathe these kinds of numbers in college science they mean nothing.

3) Standard prefixes. Somewhere between the science and the lay lies the Greek. “Kilo” for thousands, “Mega” for millions, “Giga” for billions, “milli” for thousandths, “micro” for millionths and “nano” for billionths – these are terms that have specific meanings and can be employed widely. Unfortunately they have also been bastardized by popular culture such that “mega” just means big and “micro” just means small. Indeed there has been inflation in their usage so that advertisers now have to resort to “giga” and “nano” to make customers take notice. “Tera” and “pico” can’t be far behind.

4) Standard common names. Even if we pick a system of common names, say the more logical short scale, we can very easily get names for values that are well out of the middle range for which these common names are useful. Who can visualize the 602 sextillion molecules in 18 grams of water? It doesn’t really help to call it 602 billion trillion either, as no one can honestly grasp what it means to have a trillion of something, let alone if that something consists of a billion of something else.

5) Comparisons to other things. So we’re finally left with the hokiest of all options, the “football field” comparison. Take some incomprehensible number, like the cost of the Iraq War so far (6.5x10¹¹ dollars), and convert it to something tangible, like quarters. This would make a stack 2 million miles tall (1.8x10⁶ miles), which is like going to the moon and back 4 times. And the distance to the moon is about as long as an airport security line composed of every living person their carry-on and pets, which – even with a thousand scanners running full time – would take 2000 years to process. And if you took your mother and her mother and all your female ancestors going back 2000 years and had them stand hand in hand, they’d be the length of a football field, which is finally a largish thing that everyone can visualize.

- jack*

Causality in Copenhagen…

Editor, Scientific American Magazine; Dear Sir:

Thank you for your recent article about quantum mechanics and special relativity (Albert & Galchen, March 2009). While it was good to read an in-depth treatment of a fascinating subject I think it failed to state its case succinctly or cover it completely.

Many years ago studying physics as a mere undergraduate it was clear to me that Bohr and Einstein were fundamentally in conflict. An isolated part of a quantum mechanical system, like an individual particle, can be described by a wave function expressing a range of probabilities about that particle, including where it’s located. In practice, however, when a particle is measured it can be found at only a single specific place. The Copenhagen interpretation, if taken literally, says that at the instant of measurement the wave function “collapses” and the position of the particle is known everywhere. But such an “instant of measurement” must be a moment in absolute time in contradiction to special relativity. If we know that a particle is here and that it’s “simultaneously” not there, we’re potentially violating causality in opposition to all our intuitions (and theory).

But this is a general problem for the very concept of wave function collapse, not a special feature of quantum entanglement on which the article unnecessarily focused. Entanglement just allows a wave function involving multiple particles to grow to macroscopic scales where we can all be freaked out about its instantaneous collapse. I also don’t feel that the article’s alarmist tone about the end of physics was justified. There may be many ways to resolve this issue without having to retreat to some contrived, neo-classical interpretation:

1) Given that there is no inherent difference between an entangled particle and a non-entangled particle except its history, perhaps knowing a particle is entangled makes the observer “entangled” in its history in a similar way. Treating observers as godlike and objective has been a prejudice of physics that perhaps should be questioned. After all the “knowledge” of entanglement had to move at no more than the speed of light just like the particle itself.

2) More fundamentally (and of course I am a relative layman here) perhaps the wave function shouldn’t be computed in absolute time in the first place. That’s an acceptable Newtonian approximation for small-scale events, but as we all well know it can’t be correct. Just as there is spatial uncertainty in quantum events, there should be a level of temporal uncertainty as well, probably with a factor of c in there someplace. Instead of throwing bricks at Einstein maybe quantum theorists should try to incorporate our basic knowledge of unified spacetime into their formulations from the ground up.

- jack*

I Would Not, Could Not in a Box…

I could not help but notice that the President’s approach to bi- (or post-) partisanship with regard to the stimulus (aka jobs) bill resembled a high-stakes game of Green Eggs and Ham. Barak Obama cast in the role of Sam-I-Am offered a sequence of compromises for the curmudgeon (Congressional Republicans) to get them to swallow the chartreuse breakfast (the aforementioned bill). Will you pass it with a fork? Will you pass it with some pork? Will it take a tax-cut lump? Or should we take out worker’s comp? Like the timeless Seuss classic most of the words have been about what the Republicans don't like, and ultimately they don’t like the thing itself – government spending on popular social programs like schools and family planning.

In the story the curmudgeon ultimately succumbs to the overtures of the always optimistic Sam-I-Am and actually tastes the item he claims to despise. Thus converted he sings a grand mea-culpa of how he will support the stimulus – er, rather eat the food – here, there and anywhere. But is this brilliant piece of children’s literature a realistic model for modern bi-partisanship?

Evidence so far points to “no”. The President’s overtures – and we learned in his press conference that offering Gregg a cabinet position was explicitly a bi-partisan overture – have netted him something between zero and three Republican votes. Of course it takes only freshman-level political calculus to see that this is the approach that congressional Republicans must and will take. The question is, can Obama get anything beyond harsh obstructionism?

I suppose it’s possible. While unlikely I suppose that moderate Republicans could taste the green eggs and ham – progressive policies – and see how those could advantage them in future elections. Or they could just become Democrats. More likely though, is that they could see their popularity fall in proportion to how much they obstruct and reject not only a popular but also a demonstrably correct administration. This means that bipartisanship must remain at best a velvet glove around an iron fist of committed policy. What we can learn from Sam-I-Am is that no matter how the curmudgeon ranted, the narrative was always under Sam’s control and he never faltered in his calm determination. Fundamentally Obama must always keep the debate under his terms.

- jack*

Project Lunar Flea…

What would it cost to send a cell phone to the moon? Wait – let’s back up a few steps.

There’s this thing called the Google Lunar X PRIZE, which hopes to award $20 million to the first privately-funded team to put a robotic rover on the moon, send back HD video and travel 500 meters. Although people generally start with the idea of how to design a rover, the more pressing questions is what’s the most cost-effective way to get to the moon?

JPL has enjoyed good success sending rovers to Mars, so let’s consider copying their method. Basically a lunar transit vehicle is boosted into Earth orbit. There it burns fuel to get up to escape velocity and falls towards the moon. At the moon the descent vehicle separates, and burns fuel to decelerate to the lunar surface where the rover deploys. We can calculate the cost by working backwards.

Let’s assume we want a rover about the same size as Sojourner, the first and smallest of the current family of six-wheeled Mars rovers. It was approximately 10 Kg (about 25 lbs, but metric is the only way to go when you’re doing rocket science). Let’s assume the descent vehicle – rocket engines, airframe, navigation system, power supply, etc. – is about 5 times the mass of the rover. That makes the rover plus descent vehicle 60 Kg. This is the “dry mass” (vehicle without propellant) we have to land on the moon.

The change of speed required to soft-land on the moon – “delta-V” in rocket terms – is about lunar escape velocity: 2400 meters per second (m/s). If we use solid rocket boosters, which are the simplest to implement and control, we need about twice as much fuel as the mass we want to land. So for a 60 Kg descent vehicle we need 120 Kg of “reaction mass” to slow it down, so the total mass for lunar approach is 180 Kg.

We can already see the terrible multiplying effect of the rocket equation. The rover weighs about as much as a typical desktop computer, but landing it on the moon takes a machine that weighs as much as two grown men. And it will be put into its lunar approach orbit by an even-larger transit vehicle. The transit from low Earth orbit (LEO) to lunar approach requires enough delta-V to make up the difference between LEO and Earth’s escape velocity. This is about the same as before, 2400 m/s, so the mass ratio using solid rockets is the same. If we assume that the transit vehicle is twice the mass of the descent vehicle (longer trip so bigger power supply) that would make it 100 Kg. The transit vehicle dry mass is 280 Kg, and fully fueled it would be 840 Kg.

So we need to loft nearly a metric ton of spacecraft and fuel into Earth orbit. At around $20,000 per Kg, this will cost about $17 million. The X Prize is not nearly so sweet if 85% of it is used just getting the raw mass into orbit. Anything beyond $3 million to build the vehicle we have to eat.

Of course the Prize is intended to spur innovation. We could double the mass of the transit vehicle and use an ion engine instead. Since an ion engine needs only 40 Kg of reaction mass to make the lunar transit, the whole thing would only weigh 420Kg and need $8 million to get into orbit, which gives us an extra $9 million. Of course we also have to develop an ion engine.

This is how all the traditional tradeoffs work. You can improve efficiency at any stage and get incremental reductions in booster costs, but the resulting technology is more complex, expensive to develop and prone to failure. It would be far better to use proven rocket technology and instead make the lunar payload smaller. Much smaller.

My cell phone weighs about 100 grams: 0.1 Kg. If you upgrade the camera to HD and replace the parts that aren’t needed on the moon – like display, keypad, and the motor that makes it vibrate – with a system for locomotion, it would make a serviceable moon rover. Using this same analysis the total mass of a vehicle to get a cell phone to the moon would be 8.4 Kg and cost about $170,000 to loft to LEO. Remarkably the dry descent vehicle weighs about the same as a can of beans, but this is a level of miniaturization that we take for granted on a daily basis and it totally changes the balance of the economics. The cost of the booster, which is normally the lion’s share of the total, becomes instead a background expense on a par with a single engineer’s salary. All the investment can be sunk into the technology to make it light, durable and reliable.

But we could go even beyond that. Imagine a rover massing only 10 grams – a little lighter than an iPod shuffle. Why couldn’t such a device carry a tiny camera, battery and transmitter? Setting it down softly on the moon could be done with a cell-phone scale descent vehicle burning less than a pop-can worth of propellant, and is made easier by the fact that smaller devices tend to be much more rugged than large ones. A 10 gram rover could hit the moon with considerable residual velocity and survive, reducing the required complexity of the descent vehicle. The complete transit vehicle, including its kilogram of solid fuel, would tip the scales at 1.6 Kg, less than the weight of a two-liter soda bottle. Cost to LEO: $32,000.

There are a couple problems to solve. A tiny transmitter is unlikely to be readable from Earth, so it needs a relay. This can be done by using the same transit vehicle but instead of the 0.3 Kg descent vehicle payload it could carry a simple radio relay. This would be launched after the descent vehicle and would act as repeater for the rover until it crashed on the moon, hopefully after mission objectives were complete. A relay with the power of three cell phones could certainly reach receivers on Earth.

Another problem is that wheels on such a small rover would be useless. Going the 500 meters required by the prize would take hours or days and could be thwarted by even small rocks or gravel. Fortunately the moon’s low gravity gives us another option: jumping. A tiny motor would tension a spring, and releasing the spring would kick off against the ground. The rover weighs almost nothing on the moon and could easily travel 100m in a single hop. Even taking more modest jumps the rover could cover 500m without taxing its battery. As long as the jumps could be properly stabilized, taking video from the apogee of a jump would be much more interesting than what you’d get just a few centimeters off the surface. Naturally there are many engineering problems doing this kind of miniaturization with respect to radiation and dust, but I think the reduction in launch costs are well worth the research.

Project Lunar Flea is not just my proposal for winning this X prize; it’s a vision for robotic space exploration in general. Why not have masses of tiny robots swarming over other planets rather than a few large rovers? Not only is it cost-effective but it also has benefits here on Earth in terms of learning how to make smaller, more rugged, more long-lived consumer devices. The main drawback may be the relative lack of “light-lift” rockets since most commercial systems are built to carry large payloads. Maybe it’s time to reconsider that approach.

- jack*

An Analogy is to God as … uh …

This analogy [...] makes a great deal of sense if you believe that the idea of God is an absurdity dreamed up by crafty clerics in darkest antiquity and subsequently imposed on the human mind by force and fear, and that it only survives for want of brave souls willing to note how inherently absurd the whole thing is.

Ross Douthat, The Teapot Analogy

Wait – stop right there. Do I have to explain how analogies work? Apparently so.

Arguments using analogies are a weak form of Reductio ad absurdum – a reduction to absurdity. The case being argued has features that make supporters believe that the case has merit. Attack by analogy requires preserving the essential features of the base case while replacing others with what is basically a parody of the original. The absurd features of a successful analogy allow open-minded supporters to see the errors in the base case.

As an example, let’s imagine that people paid to make money in a given industry were also paid to regulate that same industry. Perhaps a good-faith argument could be made that these are the people that know the industry best and therefore know what regulations will be most effective. Opponents will analogize that this is like the “fox guarding the henhouse.” While we are not talking about literal foxes or hens, the meaning is clear. The incentives are wrong. If you had a real henhouse to guard you’d buy a dog. Dogs might bark at the hens or get in fights with the rooster, but if you got a fox instead – despite their similarity to dogs – a fox would want to kill the hens and steal the eggs. By analogy perhaps we can see that using lobbyists as regulators is a bad idea.

This is actually one of the most universal forms of human reasoning and argument, but it does require a little bit of discipline. It especially requires that everyone understand how the analog maps to the real case. By focusing on the absurd features of Russell’s teapot analogy, Douthat demonstrates that he has no serious interest in engaging the argument and simply wishes to dismiss it out of hand. Complaining about the crazy-sounding parts of an analogy is like complaining about the alcohol in a cocktail; it’s a defining feature and if you take it out you have something completely different.

The teapot analogy is really about the epistemic status of unverifiable belief. The theist says, “I cannot prove the existence of god, but neither can you prove his non-existence. Therefore our beliefs are both equally valid.”

“Not so,” says the atheist, “The default position is to disbelieve in the absence of evidence. By your logic we should seriously entertain belief in a celestial teapot.”

“But a space teapot is absurd,” rejoins the theist, “while belief in god is reasonable.”

“Then please give those reasons,” replies the atheist, “for those constitute the evidence underlying your positive belief. Universal ignorance can never be a satisfactory reason to accept belief in anything.”

Bloggers who try to dissect logical arguments need to understand what those arguments are about before displaying how ignorant they are. Glad I could help.

- jack*

Stimulating Partisanship…

Early last week I was working on a post, following Scott and Nate, arguing that perhaps Obama shouldn’t try to make the stimulus bill so bipartisan. Don’t get me wrong – I’m generally sympathetic with Obama’s approach. The instinct for Democrats who have been effectively locked out of governing for eight years or more by Republican partisanship would be to marginalize the minority party. After all their leadership failed and they lost the election, why should they have any say? The effect of this, however, is that it forces Republicans to retreat to their base where their positions and ideology become more extreme. Engaging them in governance should have the reverse effect – forcing them to moderate their policy positions to be more palatable to a national audience.

So I wasn’t going to argue against engagement – I think that’s still a correct political approach, especially when Obama enjoys broad-based popular support – but the stimulus bill itself might be a bad place to practice it. It needs to pass quickly and needs to be effective, and compromising with conservatives damages both. Maybe the bipartisanship could have waited for the next bill.

At least that’s what I was going to write until the bill passed the house without a single Republican vote. That’s a pretty jaw-dropping outcome. If Republicans had “defected” at the same rate as Democrats we would have expected 6 or 7 Republican yes votes. To get none means that the leadership whipped every single Republican house member to vote against the bill. They were sending a message. Obama extended his hand, but they did not unclench their fist.

The conservative base was thrilled, some referring to it in a bizarre reversal as Republicans “growing a spine.” To their base the GOP is saying that they had no input and that the bill is full of socialist pork. Boehner complained “there was no Republican input at all,” a somewhat surreal sentiment given how much the bill was tailored to woo Republican support. But how will this stance fare outside of tight-knit red districts?

I thought it was very interesting that for the very first time a Republican agreed to appear on The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC in order to make the case about this vote to a national audience. Unfortunately we didn’t really learn much from Rep Don Manzullo because his comments bordered on incoherent. (I can’t figure out how to link to a specific video on MSNBCs weirdo website, so just look for the “Elephants in the Room” segment from the Jan 28 show.) He started out well enough, saying that he would vote for a “true” stimulus bill that contained more infrastructure spending and nothing with a term longer than about a year. Fair enough. But when pressed on why renovation of the National Mall, which Obama had removed in response to Republican pressure (they ridiculed it), would not be a stimulus his logic kind of fell apart. He said the money would just go to existing bureaucrats and not create new jobs, and when Rachel observed that makes no sense, he went into some bookkeeping jargon and how spending would increase the deficit. Duh. Oh yeah, his stimulus plan is to give everyone a voucher for $5000 off a $20,000 new car, presumably using magic Republican money that doesn’t increase the deficit.

The upshot is that I’m glad the President stayed true to his word and tried to include the minority party. That they chose to play to their base rather than have meaningful input ironically makes it easier to ignore them in the future. Democrats didn’t have to banish them to the outskirts of politics; they did it themselves.

- jack*