Alexis C. Madrigal

This is not your average Tumblr full of cute animal pics. Prepare for the sublime.

There are animal photos and there are animal photos. While I'm a fan of Instagrams of cats and dogs, the images in the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year show at the Natural History Museum in London are no mere social-media fodder.

Here we see a Japanese macaques in repose. A Dutch photographer, Jasper Doest, visited the hot springs of Jigokudani Valley in central Japan, and found about 30 monkeys soaking in the warm water. This one fell asleep right in front of him.

'The warm water has a very relaxing effect on the monkeys, and most of them were asleep.' He watched with delight as this youngster became increasingly drowsy and eventually closed its eyes.

The eyelashes! The bridge of the nose! I know that we have to be careful about projecting human emotions onto non-humans, but... who doesn't recognize this as Hot Tub Face? Doerst named the photograph, "Relaxation."

There are dozens of other delightful images of animals of all kinds. I'll include just two more here, but the microsite at the Natural History Museum is full of them (albeit with some janky gallery navigation).

The first is dark, nearly sinister, almost ruin porn. Finnish photographer Kai Fagerström captured a squirrel in an abandoned cottage in Finland. Check out that reflection. Ghostly! (Also: memeable.)

And finally, I leave you with pure delight. A fox in Yellowstone leaping high to pounce on unsuspecting earthbound prey. 

Down with the Idea Men!

The Onion's take on the genre of the TED Talk is as wickedly funny as you'd expect. Featuring a spiky-haired, self-proclaimed "visionary," it's as much an indictment of a certain kind of entrepreneur as a skewering of the ubiquitous conference brand.

I don't want to explain the joke, but this is its rhetorical core:

We're looking in the eyes of two horrible birds. And we just need a rock that is big enough, efficient enough, and innovative enough to bludgeon them. That rock is an idea. My idea to create a car that runs on compost. So how does it work? Well, it's quite simple. Instead of using gas, it uses compost. [applause]

In short: Down with the Idea Men!

And really, who could complain?

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This day in 1899 was the key date in the life of our country's most celebrated rocket scientist.

A rare misstep combined with worse-than-expected quarterly numbers to send investors into a panic.

Missile. Missile. Missile.

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When something goes awry in the relationship between the big-oil producers and the United States (or other powers), all hell breaks loose. In 1973, geopolitical (and perhaps economic) considerations pushed a group of Arab oil producers to decree an oil embargo. Dealing with the impacts of that decision consumed a big chunk of Henry Kissinger's time at the State Department as detailed in a just-released 1,000-page report from the Office of the Historian at the agency. 

Maybe, just maybe, you can turn it into a true alternative to oil.

It wasn't all that long ago -- the 1970s -- when American natural gas production was waning. If you look at the graph above, production of natural gas hit a peak in the early '70s that it did not reach again until the late '90s or supersede by a great margin until just the past few years. Almost all of the recent production bump has come from unconventional sources -- shale gas, most prominently. And, if the projections of Energy Information Administration are to be believed (a subject of legitimate debate), the United States, China, and Canada are about to experience an explosion of natural-gas production. 

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On the political level, natural gas is a winner on the right and (most of) the left as a domestic fuel that also (with some disputes) generates less CO2 when burned. So, let's take this bounty at face value and say that we're going to be awash in natural over the next few decades at a time when oil production -- especially in the US -- is in a slowish, long-term decline. 

Given that context, it'd make a lot of sense to see if you could make some things that are currently made with crude oil with natural gas. You'd have steady (or even declining?) feedstock costs while your crude competitors were getting killed. 

That's the basic idea behind Siluria. Their basic technology can take natural gas and convert it into ethylene. Three interesting things about ethylene. First, it's the most widely produced organic compound; more than 110 million tons of the stuff were made in 2011. It ends up in stuff like plastic bags and antifreeze. Second, it's actually a very simple compound. Methane, i.e. natural gas, is one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms. Ethylene is two carbon atoms bonded to four hydrogen atoms. Third, once you've got ethylene, you can build the mix of hydrocarbons that we call oil.

"The investment proposition behind what we're going after is making natural gas into an economically advantaged and abundant competitive replacement to oil," Siluria's president Alex Tkachenko tells me in the video below.

But it's not easy to string together a bunch of natural gas molecules. And that's where their core technology -- a new kind of catalyst -- comes into play. It's based on the work of MIT's Angela Belcher, who uses different organisms (literally, living things) to build complex new materials. She has figured out how to play with the DNA of these organisms so that they produce different (and previously very difficult to manufacture) materials like the catalyst used in Siluria's technology. The best analogy I can think of is coral: biological creatures build a structure that can then be repurposed for other things. That's basically what's going on but at much, much smaller scales.

Returning to our original question, there have been several plans about what to do with the natural gas bounty. The most prominent idea is to stick methane into the transportation sector, which runs almost exclusively on oil. Natural gas cars already exist, though the fueling infrastructure remains sparse. Some people think you should put the U.S. truck fleet on natural gas and concentrate the fuel infrastructure spend on the nation's trucking corridors (i.e. highways).

Siluria's answer to the question, however, is more interesting than rebuilding the entire nation's transportation fuel system. They want to make use of that infrastructure by solving the scientific and technical challenges in turning methane the gas into ethylene.

In a post next week, I'll try to handicap their chances of success. The short version: Things certainly are going well, but there's a long way to go.

Dark social is even more important across this broader set of sites. Almost 69% of social referrals were dark! Facebook came in second at 20%. Twitter was down at 6%.

I love NASA nerds. They tirelessly mine our nation's space history looking for forgotten stories, adding to databases, correcting metadata. And sometimes, they encounter a string of images from a flight that was 43 years ago and reconstruct them into a beautiful new movie.

Leonard Richardson stumbled across a series of shots that Michael Collins (The Other Guy on the Apollo 11 mission) took at decently regular intervals. Richardson realized he could transform the images -- which are archived at a spectacular old-school NASA History site -- into a short movie. The GIF you see at the right is the most dramatic moment from this resurrection of the footage.

Also, fascinatingly, someone else posted a (less well-made) version of the same series of images a month ago, which Richardson stumbled upon while working on his own movie. Enjoy these convergent nerd outs! 

Even a toy drone with an HD camera scrambles our sense of property and privacy rights.

The AR.Drone.2.0 in action in my backyard.

My poor kitten, who my unfortunate Instagram contacts know too well, gets beat up every time he goes outside. There's a bully cat in the neighborhood who appears to relish in attacking cute, fluffy things as soon as they get out of human oversight. So, naturally, I bought a Parrot AR.Drone.2.0, a remote-controlled quadcopter with an HD camera attached, to see if I could spot where the punk bully cat hangs out.

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After some training runs in which I crashed the little UAV every fifteen seconds, I started to get the hang of where to push on my iPad to get the little AR.Drone to go the way I desired. And then, dodging trees and power lines, I sent the machine flying higher in the sky and scooted towards the fence, popped over it, and -- terrified of crashing in territory I didn't control -- sped back across to the safety of my own backyard, and engaged the automatic landing sequence. 

Technically, I'd gone over the fence line, and if I'd done so on foot, intentionally, I would have nominally been guilty of trespassing. But if I were flying in a helicopter, a few hundred feet up, I would *not* have been guilty of trespassing. So, what about the air in between? 

There aren't many specific laws or cases on the books to address my specific situation, but we do know that the idea of airspace has changed in the decades since humans started flying around. 

"Once upon a time, you had the rights to your property under the soil and to the sky.  It went by the colorful, Latin label "ad coelum et ad inferos"---to the heavens and hell," Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor and former research director of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, told me. "But subsequent case law recognized the limits imposed by commercial aviation and other realities of the modern world.  Now you own the air and soil rights you might reasonably use and enjoy."

That original dictum -- ad coelum et ad inferos -- was never part of legislation, but rather passed to us from British common law. The process by which this notion of property was limited really began in the early twentieth century, when we began to regularly reach into the heavens and nominally closer to hell. Timothy Ravich is an aviation lawyer who contributed an article to the North Dakota Law Review (UND is a major hub of civilian aerospace training) on "the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles into the national airspace." I figured if anyone knew the legal status of my neighborhood flights, it would be him. 

"If you were to take your Parrot drone over my house, I suppose at one level, it is a trespass," he said. "You were not invited there and could potentially have disrupted my quiet enjoyment of my home. I suppose I could sue."

Whoops, I thought. But it's not really that simple. Regardless of whether someone technically had the right to stop me from flying my little UAV over a house, "It's quite another thing to exercise those rights in a court of law," Ravitch said. "If someone does take a Parrot and fly it over your house every day for a year. Are you injured? What are the actual damages?"

In other words: what are you gonna do about it?

"What [property] rights you have beyond what you can physically touch has always been difficult for the law to grapple with," Ravich told me. 

"Good fences make good neighbors," Ravitch said. "But we don't build fences in the air."

The drone's eye view, sadly no Bully Cat in sight.

There are two fascinating analogous cases to look at. The first reaches all the way back to the early 1800s, when balloonists (!) were first making their uncertain journeys skyward. In 1822, the Supreme Court of New York heard the case of Guille vs. Swan. Guille was a balloonist. Swan had a vegetable garden. Guille launched himself in a balloon near Swan's patch and as he descended, hilarity/mayhem ensued. Here's the court's description of the situation:

The facts were that Guille ascended in a balloon in the vicinity of Swan's garden and descended into his garden. When he descended his body was hanging out of the car of the balloon in a very perilous situation and he called to a person at work in Swan's field to help him in a voice audible to the pursuing crowd. After the balloon descended it dragged along over potatoes and radishes about thirty feet when Guille was taken out. The balloon was carried to a barn at the further end of the premises. When the balloon descended more than two hundred persons broke into Swan's garden through the fences and came on his premises beating down his vegetables and flowers. 

Guille was found liable both for the damage his own balloon caused and the damage perpetrated by the crowd following him. But in that case, the problem was not the flight over Swan's veggies, but its descent back down where property rights make more sense. 

The real touch point for UAV law in civilian air space, though, is the case of United States v. Causby, which the Supreme Court heard in 1946. It demolished, "ad coelum et ad inferos." The Thomas and Tinie Causby owned a few acres of land near Greensboro, North Carolina on which they farmed chickens. It happened to be underneath one of the glide paths to a municipal airport, so planes passed roughly 83 feet above his property. The planes -- old-school bombers and fighters in many cases -- scared the wits out of his chickens. They literally killed themselves flying off the walls in fright. "As many as six to ten of their chickens were killed in one day by flying into the walls from fright. The total chickens lost in that manner was about 150," the Court noted. Production also fell off. The result was the destruction of the use of the property as a commercial chicken farm."

What resulted from this set of circumstances, though, was a triumph for aviators. The Court affirmed that "the air above the minimum safe altitude of flight... is a public highway and part of the public domain." Poor Causby and his chickens were out of luck. 

[The] doctrine [of cujus est solum ejus est usque ad coelum] has no place in the modern world.  The air is a public highway, as Congress has declared.  Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits.  Common sense revolts at the idea.  To recognize such private claims to the airspace would clog these highways, seriously interfere with their control and development in the public interest, and transfer into private ownership that to which only the public has a just claim.

The question remains: what do private citizens and the public have just claims to? The reasoning of the court in these old decisions is one that I like: the air should be a space for everyone, not whoever can purchase the most square acreage on the ground.

But the wide availability of UAV technology (combined with HD video) scrambles my sense of what is right. Specifically, it points out how much of our sense of privacy is intimately connected up with our expectations of our property rights. Drones -- as flying, seeing objects -- scramble our 2D sense of property boundaries, and along the way, make privacy much more complicated.

"This idea of a reasonable expectation of privacy has always been accepted as the standard and the interface of that privacy right and emerging UAV technology is fascinating," Ravitch said. "There is not an answer. The best we can do is arrive at laws and practices of the then-existing sensibilities of the population."

Because while my hunt for the neighborhood's bully cat is a lighthearted endeavor, the real difficult decisions in this domain will come when local police have as many unmanned aerial systems as they do trained dogs.

While hunting for information on an obscure type of DIY records, I stumbled across a DIY site that's a perfect example of the early Internet ethos.

Was a disco a dress before it was a nightclub? That's the surprising implication of the evidence OED researchers have uncovered while revising the entry for disco n. The earliest quotations our editors have found for the word, which is shortened from discotheque, mean 'a type of short sleeveless dress' (such as one might wear to a discotheque) and date from July 1964... 

It isn't until the September 1964 issue of Playboy that we see disco meaning 'a nightclub' (though references to disco dancing are found as early as August)

The ISS sends a few mini-experiments on their way.

Behold three CubeSats launched from the International Space Station, aka The Mothership. Future ISS commander Chris Hatfield tweeted the photo this morning, calling it (accurately) "surreal." Two other CubeSats were launched from the ISS, as well. They were all part of a technology demonstration by the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA.

The CubeSat program has been a cheap way for researchers at universities and elsewhere to fly experiments in orbit without paying for a whole launch themselves. The tiny satellites are only about 4" on a side, so they can be piggybacked on larger missions. That means the total cost of a CubeSat can be kept under $100,000. 

The basic tech was developed at Cal Poly and Stanford in the late 1990s, and roughly 75 of the cute little guys have made it into space.

Via Tim Maly

The company's hypergrowth began long after younger Americans had adopted the service.

The aesthetics of wind and solar are unlike any power source that's gone before them.

Energy analysis is a dry business. It's underpinned by spreadsheets showing depletion rates, carbon intensities, and kilowatt hours.

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It is not, in short, normally associated with high fashion. And yet, here we see Chanel's ready-to-wear show. Models strut on a solar panel walkway underneath towering wind turbines.

Forget that the wind turbines were almost certainly powered by electric motors or that the solar panels were not producing. Obviously, the producers of the show were not trying to make a green-in-practice statement. No, what's really fascinating about this is that Chanel thought that the renewable energy future's aesthetic was worth abstracting and displaying. They were not after the electricity generation but the *look* of the panels and the *rhythm* of the wind machines.

To my eye, perhaps the most interesting thing is that this does not come out looking dystopian. Imagine this same kind of display with an oil refinery or a coal mine or a power plant. Or consider the feel of the show set near a tiny nuclear power plant giving off the trademark Cherenkov glow. There's almost no way to imagine models walking through those landscapes without it feeling like a commentary about humans *against* the machines. 

In Chanel's show, the models are dwarfed by the turbines, but not threatened. The world is fresh and clean. Though both these technologies have been around for decades now, this still feels like The Future, capital F.

Via Cara De Fabio