Posts Tagged ‘John Mahoney’
New Cars Make Me Feel Old
In which an admitted gadget nerd feels as confused as grandma when dealing with the modern automobile
But recently I've had some illuminating moments of empathy. And they've all come behind the wheel.
I haven't owned a car since I was in college (a 1989 Toyota Corolla--White Fang, rest in peace), but being on good terms with Popular Science's automotive editor comes with the occasional perk: I sometimes find myself with a new car to help test with a run to the grocery store or a quick road trip weekend. My promiscuity with many cars, rather than the reliably monogamous relationship most people have with one or two, has allowed me to frequently recreate the moment of first sitting down in an unfamiliar cockpit. Which means: I am frequently very confused inside an automobile. This confusion can take many forms.
Discomfort: After licking my lips at a torquey Mercedes E-350 BlueTec diesel (my first time behind the wheel of a Benz), I climbed inside to find that someone with a frame considerably smaller than my 6'2" had driven this beauty previously. No big deal, I thought, as I crept out of the parking garage into Midtown Manhattan traffic, hunched over the wheel. I've adjusted many a seat. But as I fumbled with the powered controls in what I thought was the universal-standard position—below the seat on the left side—I found all manner of lower lumbar support options, but nothing to slide the seat back. I remained hilariously hunched for the next 30 minutes, before realizing on the Manhattan bridge that Mercedes likes to put their main seat controls next to the door handle.
Mild Panic: As I pulled into a moderately skeezy parking spot in Queens in the same Mercedes later that weekend, I unexpectedly found myself unable to lock the door. I pressed the button on the electronic proximity-sensing key fob and heard the doors' latches lock. But upon pulling the handle to test, the door opened. This charade repeated several times, enough to start thinking that maybe I wouldn't be able to leave this car unattended. It wasn't until I gave my companion the key and had her step away from the vehicle that I realized the door was opening because the proximity sensor knew I was holding the key.
Frustration: Like many nicely furnished new cars, a Volkswagen Touareg I recently drove was equipped with another kind of proximity sensor—one that detects objects near your bumpers while the car is traveling at low speeds, beeping and lowering the sound system's volume if it thinks you're due for a fender bender. A nice feature. Nice, that is, until you find yourself in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Whitestone Bridge leaving the Bronx. There, we found our music volume fading out (and, curiously, not returning to its previous level) every few minutes, as the sensors detected the bumpers of our fellow frustrated gridlock victims. Even in standstill traffic, my passenger and I could not coax the touchscreen control panel to turn off this feature.
Helplessness: In a Mitsubishi Outlander driving in a decent rain shower, I fell victim to another smart feature that adjusts the speed of your windshield wipers in relation to how fast the car is moving. Like many drivers, I am particular about the frequency of my wipers—and yet my settings wouldn't stick. Until I found and switched myself out of Automatic mode on the wiper stem, I was beginning to entertain the idea that I had lost my mind.
Absurdity: Back in the Touareg, my driving companion plugs his iPhone into the audio system via docking cable in the glove box. immediately plays. It turns out, the system auto-plays by default the first song on the first playlist when it detects a connected iPod or iPhone. Needless to say, we became extremely well acquainted with the jangly opening bars of "Good Thing" that weekend.
Before this starts sounding too much like something from the desk of Andy Rooney, let me state plainly that smarter cars are a welcome development in the automotive world. The gadgetification of our cars has happened extremely fast, and it shows . But my confusion should not be taken as a general cause for worry—I’m sure all of the features that puzzled me initially can be tweaked to suit my needs and tastes, after a bit of stationary fiddling and manual-reading.
And for every confounding new feature, there are those that effortlessly improve the driving experience. The rear-facing backup camera, which I find in just about every new car I drive, makes parallel parking in a modern vehicle one of driving's most satisfying moments. And blind spot indicator lights in the side view mirrors, like those on a Mazda 6 I drove, are extremely useful when switching lanes in city traffic.
The greater point, then, is that I'm not used to feeling lost inside a new system. Each of the conditions above is unique in the type of resulting road rage, but they all have a common factor: confusion. It's almost refreshing for someone like me to be reminded of this feeling—one experienced by millions of people as they more frequently encounter technology in their lives in new, unfamiliar places.
But it also poses a challenge to the auto industry: make the increasingly sophisticated technology inside our cars easier to use. Features like blind spot indicators make driving safer, but I'd argue that tapping through a touchscreen to find out why the stereo keeps beeping might cancel out such a gain. Are we safer, then, on aggregate? I would think so, but from my outsider's perspective on new cars, there are times when it feels like we're not.
In an automobile, the fearless experimentation that allows a younger person to be more comfortable with technology is reduced—there’s only so much exploratory fiddling you can do at 60 mph. With the playing field so leveled, automakers must work even harder for simpler interfaces that require little to no familiarity or advanced knowledge to operate.
Because behind the wheels of our cars, for safety’s sake, we should all feel like master technophiles.
Kepler Spots a Planet Orbiting Two Suns, Just Like Star Wars’ Tatooine
Using data from the Kepler space observatory, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and SETI have discovered for the first time a planet orbiting a binary star system, passing in front of both its parent stars along its orbit.
The planet, Kepler-16b, resembles Saturn in its mass and gaseous makeup. That mostly rules out the possibility of any living beings being present to enjoy the double sunset view, although chances are good Kepler-16b has an icy, non-gaseous satellite or two, as Saturn does.
The two stars in the system are 20% and 69% as massive as our sun, respectively. The planet orbits at a distance analogous to Venus's orbit in our solar system, which typically would place it within the "habitable zone" of planets that could support life. But since the combined mass of the two stars is still less than our sun, Kepler-16b's Venus-like orbit is most likely a cold one.
An animation of Kepler-16b's orbit:
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Binary star systems, first cataloged at length by English astronomer William Herschel in the early 19th century, are key to our understanding of distant stars, since it's easy to derive each star's mass by studying their linked orbit (the two stars in a binary system both orbit around their shared center of mass). But whether or not such systems, which by some estimates account for about half of the stars in the known universe, could form and support orbiting planets has been a contentious topic--making today's finding significant not just for Star Wars fans.
"It's been pretty much a split vote amongst the theorists," said Alan Boss, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and a co-author of the Kepler 16-b paper. "Some say 'Yeah, we think it's possible to make a Saturn-mass object [in a binary star system].' Other papers say 'Well, no, we don't think it's going to work at all, because those changing gravitational forces from that central binary are going to screw up the process of trying to get little bodies to run into each other and grow bigger and bigger.'"
"One of the exciting things about this is: Kepler, as usual, has answered the question for us," said Boss.
The mission is to find and analyze potential Earth-like exoplanets throughout the universe. Today's discovery now significantly expands the working set of stars that could potentially harbor orbiting planets. That means more work for Kepler as it continues what has so far been an extremely successful mission.
The paper, authored primarily by Laurence Doyle of the SETI institute, appears in the journal Science today.
Today’s Must-Read: Getting Bin Laden, Minute-by-Minute
"Getting Bin Laden," published in this week's New Yorker and , has all the trappings of a Hollywood espionage thriller. Having spoken to numerous officials in the military, the Obama administration, and the Navy SEALS of Team Six, writer Nicholas Schmidle paints a thrilling play-by-play of the mission's preparation, execution and aftermath. Including the chilling radio message confirming the death of Osama bin Laden: “For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.”
You can find the .
Some particularly interesting scenes include the moments immediately following the crash of the first Blackhawk helicopter, caught in the rotor wash bouncing off the compound's walls:
“Eternity is defined as the time be tween when you see something go awry and that first voice report,” the special-operations officer said. The officials in Washington viewed the aerial footage and waited anxiously to hear a military communication. The senior adviser to the President compared the experience to watching “the climax of a movie."
The initial moment of contact:
"Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away."
And the disposal of the body:
"Bin Laden’s body was washed, wrapped in a white burial shroud, weighted, and then slipped inside a bag. The process was done “in strict conformance with Islamic precepts and practices,” Brennan later told reporters. The JSOC liaison, the military-police contingent, and several sailors placed the shrouded body on an open-air elevator, and rode down with it to the lower level, which functions as a hangar for airplanes. From a height of between twenty and twenty-five feet above the waves, they heaved the corpse into the water."
Aside from the detailed tick-tock of the operation, another point of interest here is the future precedent set in the special operations world by the mission's success: Several administration and military figures, including vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright, are quoted expressing confidence in the likelihood (and success) of similar missions in the future.
But perhaps most interesting of all is the revelation of just how frequently covert missions are staged inside Pakistan. A special operations officer quoted anonymously in the article cites ten to twelve prior missions performed by the same elite SEAL team in Pakistan.
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The First Clown In Space Shares His Photos With The World
In 2009 Laliberté became the seventh civilian to spend a two-week vacation aboard the ISS by way of a ride on a Russian Soyuz capsule, arranged by Space Adventures. And he may be the last for some time; Space Adventures has suspended paid civilian rides now that the Space Shuttle's retirement has left the Russian Soyuz as the only way to ferry astronauts and supplies up to the ISS (though the Russians have plans to build an additional fifth Soyuz vehicle for launch in 2012, which could potentially carry a space tourist).
Laliberté is the first Space Adventures passenger to come from a primarily creative rather than scientific background, which is an intriguing first. Given that, it's only fitting that he's become the first space tourist to present his souvenir photographs as a body of artistic work for the public.
It's also interesting to remember that the stunning oeuvre of photographs taken from space over the last half century have all been the work of government employees on scientific missions. Which is certainly not to diminish their status as one of the great visual examples of human creativity, but in Laliberté's case, like all the space tourists before him, he was able to fire away from the ISS porthole with no other agenda other than his own. As a result, many of the images take a more abstract view of the Earth from orbit, a view we're not as accustomed to seeing. Many of the images are almost biological in their texture, with fields of lakes and and mountains resembling muscle cells under a microscope.
"Trust me, these are great pictures," Laliberté told me, speaking of the imagery captured by astronauts on NASA missions. "But I think as an ensemble, [my work] has its own personality, and that's what I'm proud of."
Click here to launch a gallery of Laliberté's images
Laliberté worked with the Nikon D3 and D3x DSLRs already aboard the ISS, paired with a variety of long telephoto lenses ranging from 200mm to a gigantic 800mm supertelephoto. (Recall also the work of astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who during his time aboard the ISS). That Nikon 800mm f/5.6 lens weighs 12 pounds here on Earth, but in microgravity, it's considerably easier to wield.
To keep track of the locations in the frames (which Laliberté left largely uncropped for the book), the photos' timestamps were synced with the ISS's mission computer, which were then placed and sorted with Google Earth. There are plans to make a much wider collection of the images available via a similar Google Earth application in the future.
As someone who enjoys travel photography myself, I'm often interested in those moments where you decide to actually put down the camera and acknowledge that for some experiences, photographs don't really suffice as an accurate representation or memory. If you enjoy it, it's important to shoot, but also important not to shoot. For Laliberté, these moments came at night, which happens to come in 30 minute bursts 16 times per every 24-hour Earth "day," as the ISS orbits at over 17,000 mph.
"These were the times where I lived more personally," Laliberté said. "I was not taking too many pictures during those times. Even if there was a full moon, I was living that for myself. I was just stunned. But then, after that, I got to work."
See What Yuri Saw in "First Orbit," a Minute-by-Minute Recreation of His Historic Mission Shot From the ISS Window
Every six weeks or so, the International Space Station's orbit matches the same arc around the world traced originally by Yuri Gagarin's Vostok capsule, 50 years ago today. A few weeks ago who, working with an astronaut aboard the ISS, set out to film exactly what Yuri Gagarin saw out of the porthole. Today, the fruits of their labor, First Orbit has been released. Set your YouTubes to HD, folks—this is great.
The footage, shot by astronaut Pablo Nespoli, is synced in real time with mission control radio communications. So when Gagarin marvels at seeing the Earth from space for the first time, seeing green forest fading into white snow, so do you.
The film is free to download (the site is currently under a fair bit of load, as you might imagine) and stream on YouTube, and it will be shown at what is sure to be a raucous at locations around the world.
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