There's a dispiriting article in the Washington Post this week entitled "Space Shuttles Bound to Technologies of the Past". It's not dispiriting for what it says - there are good points, and quotes from knowledgeable people - but rather for a certain kind of attitude towards technology that shows the science reporter doesn't really get it.

The article is correct in diagnosing the problem - instead of being a reliable, if unglamorous, space truck, the shuttle as it now exists is a fabulously expensive vintage roadster. It isn't just that there are no spare parts being made - we don't even have the machines to make the spare parts. The production lines are gone, and in many cases the expertise to build the production lines is gone, frittered away through decades of attrition. It would cost more to build a new shuttle now than it did to develop the original program.

What's troubling is the slant of the article. Early on, we hear from one critic of the program, a University of Maryland engineer who was asked by NASA to evaluate the shuttle's robotic arm:

Pecht found that the arm was still in good working order. But while the engineer answered NASA's questions, the space agency never answered his. "Why are we using this old technology?" he asked repeatedly. "Why don't we change the ways we buy and design so we can always be updating, so we can always be putting in the latest technology? I could never get the clearest answer on that."

From the rest of the article, it's clear that the author shares Pecht's attitude. But the answer to Pecht's question is ironic: the Shuttle program has to use old technology because it relied too much on new technology at its inception.

What Pecht should be asking in his evaluation of the robotic arm is the same question that we should ask about the Space Shuttle program: "Is the technology appropriate for the job at hand"? From an engineering point of view, it's the only question that matters. No one complains that their bathroom fixtures use 1850's technology, because nineteenth-century plumbing turns out to be a great solution to the problem of waste disposal. And maybe the robotic arm is actually a good tool for the job, with the added bonus of twenty years of testing and debugging to get the kinks out.

We know that no one asked that question of the Shuttle program because it's clear that the "job at hand" for the Shuttle was never defined. The program was sold to Congress as a reliable and cheap way to deliver people and cargo to low Earth orbit (never mind why that was necessary). But it was an impossible goal from the outset. Rather than abandon the project, NASA administrators just swapped the dog for the tail, and made the Shuttle's mission contingent on what the technology could realistically achieve. There was no way to point out that the design goals were not being met, because the design goals were constantly being redefined to fit the limitations of budget and technology.

The Shuttle program became the equivalent of the client who says "I want a website that uses Flash and Java, with a talking avatar", without defining what need the website is supposed to serve. Think Boo.com, with rockets attached.

There was nothing but new technology in the Shuttle. In addition to being the first reusable spacecraft, it was the fastest airplane ever built, and one of the first 'lifting body' airframe designs. It had not one, not two, but three of the world's most powerful rocket engines, all of them designed for multiple firings (another first). To lift the whole contraption into space, the designers needed to tack on a pair of the largest solid rocket motors ever built, and make them reusable, too. And for a crowning touch, the entire orbiter was encased in the now-infamous heat protection system, with its tens of thousands of frangible tiles. There was nothing like it in the world.

And there still isn't. The hodgepodge of new technologies made the shuttle an unmaintainable mess. The design was so complex that it could not be modified in the slightest without grave risks to safety. But the Washington Post reporter, proceeding from the assumption that new technology is always better technology, misses this point. She misses it most spectacularly in choosing to quote an astronomer critical of the Shuttle's onboard computer system:

"They have these ancient computers that are really pathetic," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., and a space program analyst. "They are many years out of date."

Indeed, to run high-speed science experiments, McDowell said, astronauts have to carry and plug in laptops. "It's a strange mix of very robust but very old computers that will absolutely work, and a bunch of notebooks that are running the latest version of Windows," he said.

And so the best thing about the Shuttle - its flight control software, probably the only bug-free complex software program ever written, comes off as a liability. To the reporter's credit, she cites a second source who explains why the computers have not been upgraded:

The computers haven't changed a lot since the advent of the vehicle," agreed Jeff Carr, a spokesman at United Space Alliance, a Houston company that runs the shuttle fleet. "It's one of those things that are very adequate for the job and have always been very adequate. They don't need to be faster. . . . There has never been any impetus or need to change them."

From a safety perspective, having astronauts with laptops is ideal, because you never have to risk introducing bugs into the core computer system. Just imagine the nightmare of having to upgrade a Shuttle's entire computer system every two years, or discovering subtle hardware bugs in the new processor during a space mission. The hardware is ancient, and God bless it.

But the tone of the article suggests that these kinds of archaisms are both an embarrassment and a liability - that somehow the Shuttle is an old beat-up jalopy, and that we have not kept it up as well as we should. When the reality is that the original design, by adopting too much at once, effectively froze the project in place.

The Shuttle design is too brittle and too complex to allow for the kind of incremental improvements that are the cornerstone of safety. Boeing can continuously improve and rejuvenate the 747, originally built in 1969, because the underlying design is resilient to change. By contrast, the Shuttle is almost too complex to touch. Hell, it's almost too complex to fly.

To really see the difference between high and low technology, compare the Columbia disaster with the nearly fatal re-entry of Soyuz-5, a Soviet space capsule, in 1969. During that flight, the equipment module failed to separate from the command module on re-entry, and cosmonaut Boris Volynov found himself in a falling spacecraft pointing exactly the wrong way:

As the spaceship fell back into the atmosphere, [Volynov] heard grinding as the deceleration stresses built up. The ship was slowly tumbling end over end, exposing all of its surface to the growing fireball. Then it stabilized with its nose forward, which was exactly the wrong orientation possible because that part of the capsule's skin was the thinnest. In the top area, there was only an inch of insulation, compared to the 6 inches along the bottom, and during a normal reentry three inches of that was expected to burn away

[At this point my gilfriend remarked "I hope Russian cosmonaut suits are brown!" They are!]

Volynov survived because the equipment module finally burned off during reentry, and as soon as it got free, his command module flipped around to face the right way, heat shield forward. It flipped around because of simple, passive design - it was shaped to point in the right direction. Put a tennis ball in a sock and throw it, and you have the technology that saved Volynov.

On the shuttle, a single pencil-thin puncture on the leading edge is enough to doom the spacecraft, and there's no way to fix it.

(There's a full account of Volynov's flight in this article, which wins extra bonus points for non-ironic use of the phrase "fiery death".) [link]

Over the last few days I have been reading a lot about proteins - protein structure, protein folding, how proteins interact with DNA to control gene expression. It is absolutely marvelous stuff. (It gets lonesome here, stuck with no social life in midwinter twenty-two miles from the nearest cinema).

There are two big mysteries with proteins. The first is that they're all left-handed. For some reason, all known living creatures contain only left-handed amino acids. No one has the faintest idea how this could have happened. Most people are shocked that amino acids even have hands. The creationists love it.

The second mystery in proteins is folding. Proteins start off as long strings of amino acids, like pearls on a necklace. Each pearl has a residue sticking off of it; twenty kinds of residues all together (collect them all!). As soon as you build up an amino acid string, it folds up into a complicated three-dimensional shape, full of helices, sheets, and curlicues. Some of these have great names - the jelly-roll barrel, the zinc finger.

The way the protein folds up makes sense when you look at the final shape - there are certain residues that like to touch one another, others prefer to be surrounded by water. And a given protein will always fold up the same way, spontaneously. But even for short sequences, with gigantic computers, it's impossible to predict the fold. Too many choices.

I was reading all about this second mystery, the problem of prediction, and it got me thinking about the recent predictions about the war, the economy, and everything else. It seems to be the same problem - everything looks logical in hindsight, but as soon as you try to look ahead, the number of plausible outcomes becomes overwhelming.

Of course, this lousy track record has never deterred people from making predictions. It's especially fun when you get to revisit old ones, and see how well they fared . Over at LA Weekly, they've scanned in a 1979 issue predicting what the world would be like in 2002. The first article is the best - it gets the fun things wrong:

Bobby grew up as one of the calculator toy babies of the '90s. who learned to love read-outs right in his crib. Fascinated by calculators, he has never been without one. Lately he carries a simple 30-function with a mid-range size memory.

But it also scores a home run:

Helped in part by Bobby's computer skills, the group learned to interrupt feeds from the entertainment companies and transmit their own materials. Through underground news bulletins, the Cable Phreaks managed to open the way for "guerilla" musicians and artists long ignored by the entertainment conglomerate to get their work before the public "Guerilla art," it was called, and though denounced by the L.A. Times editorial page as "juvenile" and "undemocratic," it had found a waiting audience and was being taken very seriously. Security people from AT&T and the entertainment companies, backed strongly by the FBI, were searching hard for the "guerillas"-in part because of their potential economic impact should the trend grow; in part because of federal worry about organized crime use of the codes....Only last month a San Francisco "guerilla" had been sentenced to four years in prison.

Anybody else know of good past-predictions websites? I predict that if people send in suggestions, I will post the best links next week.

I don't much like to write about politics, but it's a day for strong feelings about the impending war.

So here is my own position: I'm pissed off at being treated like an idiot.

Specifically, I'm pissed off at being asked to believe that the most imminent threat to our safety, in an age of militant religious Islamic terrorism, is a third-rate secularist dictator whose ass we have already kicked from here to Sunday.

To hear the Bush cabinet tell it, Iraq is now a greater and more imminent danger than North Korea, a country that actually has nuclear weapons and is busy making more, a country that will sell weapons to any buyer who can pony up the cash. More importantly, a country that now has an untested ballistic missle capable of hitting the West Coast.

And it's more of a threat than radical elements in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed radical Islamic state now likely to be harboring Osama Bin Laden, a state where militant Wahabbism is on the rise, and where one coup separates al-Qaeda sympathizers from an actual arsenal of tested nuclear weapons. A state whose head nuclear scientist has spent many months working in North Korea, in what is presumed to be an exchange of missile technology for nuclear expertise.

Not only is Iraq supposed to be more of a threat, but we're told that it is such an immediate threat that we must act right now, without taking the time to build United Nations support, even if we could easily build that support by agreeing to a harmless (if ineffective) extension of the current inspection effort.

Not only that, but we're told that countries opposing our immediate (and unprecedented) invasion of Iraq are doing so out of cravenness and cowardice, motivated by a mix of anti-Americanism, greed, and a historical fondness for surrendering to evil dictators. No matter that those countries are our closest allies and trading partners.

The truth is, Iraq is nothing compared to the real threat we face from nuclear proliferators and al-Qaeda. The Iraqi nuclear program is completely moribund (even the Bush administration has had to concede this), and the chemical and biological weapons that Iraq is hiding are ones that they have been successfully deterred from using (against Americans and Israel), even when under massive attack during the Gulf War. Our own CIA estimates that the Iraqi regime would only use those weapons if it were convinced that it had no hope of survival, which is what we're setting up for ourselves right now.

The purported ties between Iraq and terrorism are so insignificant compared to the documented ties between al-Qaeda and groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia and even South America, as to be laughable. Someone got medical treatment in Baghdad. Some group set up shop in northern Iraq - in Kurdish-controlled territory.

Above all, the timing is not this urgent. More urgent things are happening elsewhere. The real parallel with the world's reluctance to attack Iraq isn't Chamberlain appeasing Hitler. The parallel is if in 1939 we insisted on invading Spain to save the world from Franco.

Al-Qaeda is an international network of terrorists that would seem to be out of some second-rate Bond movie if it weren't real. They are willing to die as long as they take the maximum number of infidels with them. North Korea is a regime so divorced from reality that it is officially ruled by a dead man. Pakistan is unstable and barely under the control of its own military. And we're invading Iraq.

I'm not above a little war-mongering myself. Saddam Hussein is an evil man. He is a danger to regional stability. I believe that United Nations resolutions mean nothing unless we show ourselves ready to back them by force. Sometimes a country under sanctions will call our bluff, and we need to be ready to fight.

But we should do it for honest reasons. Our government should not have to resort to scare-mongering and bullshit, trying to convince me that Al-Qaeda and North Korea are nothing compared to the threat posed by some pissant Stalin wannabe.

I don't know why Bush wants this war so much. I don't know why he couldn't be bothered to go through the simple motions of garnering international support, something that would have made his diplomatic position much stronger. I don't know why he has maneuvered the situation to make it impossible for us not to fight Iraq without a great loss of face. I don't know why he has allowed North Korea to reach a point where they have a nuclear deterrent against our own cities, or why he has decided to gratuitously alienate most of Europe with bombast and stupid taunting.

I do know that we should be able to understand our own country's foreign policy without having to psychoanalyze the Executive Branch. If immediate war with Iraq, without UN support, is in our national interest, then it should be possible to articulate that in a convincing and forceful way without resorting to sophistry. But instead we have scare-mongering from the party in power, and a complete abdication of duty on the part of the Democratic opposition, who have failed to either articulate a credible defense of this stupid war, or go on the record against it.

My only consolation is that the Iraqi people will be rid of a horrible burden.

Our local grocery store recently got one of these automated checkout counters. I don't know how prevalent they are, I assume if they've shown up in Vermont, then they've already shown up everywhere else on God's green earth.

The idea is that you walk up with your groceries, scan and bag them yourself, and then pay the machine. It cunningly detects whether or not you are a shoplifter. You save time, the grocery store can fire some minimum-wage tellers, and everybody is happy.

But the interface sucks rocks.

For one, check out the number of widgets on the thing (you can click the image for a bigger version). There's a big touch screen on the left, with instructions on how scan your items. Under that is the scanner, with a built-in scale. Over to the right, there's a smaller screen with instructions on swiping your credit or debit card. In between the big screen and the little one are a slot for putting in coupons, a slot for putting in paper money, a slot for putting in coins, a slot that spits out your receipt, and a little dish that returns your coins. And way the hell over to the left, under the scanner part, down near knee level where you will never see it, is a tray that spits out paper money.

To make the multimedia experience complete, there are also two hidden interface elements - a speaker that tells you what to do, and weight sensors under the metal racks for holding the bags that detect whether you've properly bagged your item. But more about those later.

All in all, there are thirteen different components, not counting the on-screen widgetry on the touch screen. It is unclear to me why, in the year 2003, we must have separate slots for inserting cash, getting cash back, getting a receipt, and entering coupons, instead of some kind of composite slot good at handling thin papery things. It would seem within the scope of our modern technology to have one slot do all four - in fact, with a little DARPA funding it would seem possible to incorporate the coin slot as well, creating a kind of Grand Unified Slot. The mind shivers.

But the slots are small potatoes. Much worse than excessive slotting is how the little coin return bin is positioned way the hell back, above, and well to the right of the tray where you get your cash returned to you. The devices are nearly two feet apart. Since all the payment options take place on the the right side of the machine, you have to remember to elbow your way over the left, past the person getting ready to use the machine, and collect your bills from their little nook below the scanner.

What makes this particularly infuriating are the half-assed attempts by the designers to clear up what they knew was a terrible design. Not only is there a little sign next to the coin tray pointing you to the cash return bin, but the cash bin itself has an enormous "Cash Out" sign stuck over it right at groin level, just to serve as a reminder. If you step far back from the touch screen and scanner where you do all of your work, you can actually see it. And there is even a duplicate little baby "cash out" label under the big one, just to rub it in your face that the whole business was thrown together by monkeys.

I carp about the cash out bin because you inevitably forget it exists, pay for $19.85 worth of groceries with a hundred-dollar bill, absent-mindedly leave the store with the handful of nickels that plonks out into the little tray while the machine is spitting out eighty bucks in change over in the next time zone. Except that none of this happens, because (as the hand-lettered yellow sign taped next to the dollar slot graciously tells you) the machine will not accept hundred-dollar bills.

Or fifties.

But that's not even the best part. The best part is that the machine is paranoid and will accuse you of theft at the slightest opportunity. The white platforms where you are supposed to stand your bags rigged to be weight-sensitive. After you scan each item, you have to drop it in to the bag on the platform, so the machine knows you haven't surreptitiously pocketed it ("But if I already scanned it, why can't I just..." No! No item for you!). Even if you're only buying a stick of gum, you have to open a bag and drop it in. And if you're buying more than three bags' worth of groceries, you're out of luck - take a bag off before paying, and it sounds the alarm. Try to scan a big item, like a sack of cat litter, or some firewood, or a case of soda, without putting it into the bag, and the alarm sounds. Shop with an eco-freak like my girlfriend, with her reckless canvas bags, and spend the night in jail. Wait too long before dropping an item in - alarm time. Try to rearrange the items in a bag - BZZZZZZZZ!

When the alarm sounds, you get a pleasant display saying "Please wait for security check". And then a fifteen year old comes over, enters her secret password on the touchscreen in front of you, and hits "Reset" without even looking, because she has to do this fifty times a day.

And of course, if you actually want to steal anything, all you have to do is not scan it in the first place.

All in all, a great Bronx cheer to the Shaw's automated checkout.

The O'Reilly Bioinformatics conference was a happy old pot luck. Proteins over here, starches over there, a vector-space model or two in the soup tureen. There were biologists just getting into computing, and programmers just getting in to biology, and a very smart few who had been doing both for many years. And there were winter refugees like me, grasping at any excuse to visit San Diego in February, reading frantically on the plane to try and catch up on my genetics. My closest claim to biological expertise is through my microbiologist uncle. But maybe heredity means nothing there. I don't know, I haven't read that far yet.

The biologists were a fascinating crowd. It is a mirror-world. Ordinarily I'm used to people from non-computer disciplines being quite shy about programming. Software to them means Outlook and Microsoft Office, running on Windows. Open source and scripting languages don't get a lot of respect - the real prestige is in 'enterprise computing' and languages like Java.

The bio people are totally different - they come from Unix backgrounds, they're used to dealing with nasty command-line tools, they've had bad experiences with belly-up closed-source software that leaves their data stranded. Perl is a serious language for them, because they have a thousand file formats to parse and interconvert. Programming is just another skill to pick up, like titrations or using the microscope. I guess a 'for' loop doesn't look that intimidating when you've done five years of post-doctorate research in protein synthesis.

To make it even more exciting, there is the electrifying sense of urgency. Every problem we face on the general Internet comes up in more acute form in bioinformatics. Imagine having Google searches that routinely take three hours, or having to cut and paste spam out of the body of your email messages, and you'll have some idea of what the biologists put up with. The data isn' t clean, or reliable, just voluminous. What they desperately want is tools to help them sift through enormous amounts of it, and make it intelligible. After dealing with educators and humanities types for so long, it's quite exhilirating to find people who aren't cowed by computers. These people deal with biochemical feedback loops, they know from complexity.

A big deal at the conference was Steven Wolfram, who gave one of the keynotes. That this man is not on a private island somewhere, perfecting a mind-control laser with which to subdue the world, says a lot about the rising cost of Pacific island strongholds. I was particularly eager to see his talk because he is such a cultural iconoclast in the research community. We don't normally think about cultural norms in science, because it is supposed to be a dispassionate pursuit of knowledge. And after all, many famous scientists were also famous misanthropes. But just because the regular social rules don't apply to scientists doesn't mean they don't have their own set of norms, equally strong. Some of them are strong enough to be taboos. You always cite other people's work. You publish results in scientific journals, and adopt an impersonal written style. You attend conferences and referee others' work.

A lot of this functions as a kind of sanity check. The rule is, if you stick to the conventions, we'll vouch for your reputation even if your actual results get wild and crazy. It's a mechanism form distinguishing the true genius from the incomprehensible kook. If you think about it, there are only a very few people who can judge theoreticians at the most rarefied levels on the merits, and their attention is limited. The rest of us have to take it on appearances, and on the opinions of qualified people we trust. So we depend on scientists to be rigid conformists in some areas, and to discuss their work with other scientists, oftentimes to teach. It all serves as proof that they are serious and coherent enough to be worth listening to, and lets other people evaluate them personally and professionally, like in any web of trust.

Wolfram is a problem becuase he has holed himself up for years, and done much of his work behind the barrier of a private software company. He huffed and puffed for twenty years before publishing a gorgeous book in the twenty-pound range, full of pretty pictures and of footnotes - but the footnotes all cite Wolfram. He took a lot of credit and made grand claims, many of them requiring years of work to corroborate. So now no one knows how much of it is the genius, and how much is the cook. His book is very dense, some of his ideas are very beautiful - but you can't help but feel suspicious.

And Wolfram isn't helping much. His talk was an attempt to condense the thousand pages in his book into forty minutes, but as time ran out it morphed into a product pitch for his software, Mathematica. He seemed annoyed that few people in the audience used it. Wolfram has a soft, lovely speaking voice, and a striking resemblance to George Costanza from "Seinfeld". It's pretty riveting. Wolfram's central thesis was that we should study his book and use Mathematica before doing any further work in biology - it was kind of like hearing a pitch for Mao Ze-Dong Thought, except that the Little Red Book is much easier to wave in one hand. We almost lost the presentation when he managed to spill a copious amount of water into his laptop keyboard. Four hundred biologists and one imposter sat quietly while the father of a New Kind of Science stood there draining his Dell. He seemed like a very nice man, not creepy at all, just a little bit lost in the aether. [link]

I'm in San Diego, sitting in the lobby of the Westin Hotel with a bunch of other computer addicts. Everybody is here for the bioinformatics conference, and the O'Reilly people have set us up a wireless network. We come like moths to the flame. If you are wondering what I know about biology, the answer is "More than ever!".

Nobody here is having a good hair day.

I had a devil of a time finding my room in this palace, and shuffled around for a good five minutes on the fifth floor looking for the correct door before I realized that I had been shuffling along carpet. Back home that would have meant I was guaranteed to get the mother of all electric shocks from the next metal object I touched. Back home I would already have arced to the wall. Chances are good I would have vaporized one of the cats. At home I get shocks when I walk from the library to the kitchen, a distance of twelve feet. When I pet the cats, they have little seizures, and they give off blue flashes. They have started avoiding me. "Bad lightning man, he hurts us. He HATES us..."

So I gritted my teeth and touched a doorknob, and nothing happened. Of course nothing happened - I'm in San Diego.

I got here at dinner time and went out hunting for a fish taco. I walked and walked what turned out to be the heart of the city, a swank restaurant row. It's a weird neighborhood here, a mix of very upscale restaurants and barred-up check cashing places.

There were no taquerias, but I did see a Hooters, and for the upteenth time did a little double take. I still can't believe that Hooters is an actual viable chain restaurant. I keep thinking it's a put-on of some kind, sponsored by the Onion (for the benefit of non-US readers, Hooters is a pub-like restaurant chain where all the waitresses are permablonde girls in tight T-shirts and high-cut shorts. 'Hooters' means 'tits'). It bills itself as a family restaurant. It even manages to offend me, which is kind of like a football hooligan being put off by gratuitous violence. What gives?

But there was a table in the window with three women, wearing the Muslim hejab, and their conservatively dressed male companions. They were tucking in to some Hooters skillet supper, having a grand old time. I moved on and found a fast-food Mongolian barbeque joint, complete with bins of frozen pork shavings.

People are starting to reminisce about backup systems they have known. It is like a standup act for the server-room set. Picture the evil mastermind from "A Princess Bride", except with long black hair and a paunch, talking about head seek access times. Nature or nurture? [link]