Successful recovery of Falcon 9 booster during CRS-10 mission. Credit Flickr. Courtesy of SpaceX who has placed their photos in the public domain.
Just watched the recovery of a Falcon 9 booster. I missed the launch. Very cool video from the on-board camera as the booster descended through a cloud bank and landed dead center on the pad.
This mission, CRS-10, will deliver over 5,000 pounds of supplies to the International Space Station. Two really cool things. First, a private company providing supply runs to ISS is a thing. Second, it is almost routine to recover the first stage.
Liftoff of Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule on CRS-10 mission. Credit Flickr. Courtesy of SpaceX who has placed their photos in the public domain.
Does the graph remind you of the newspaper and music industry? Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
Several articles provide an in-depth view of the disruption taking place in several industries due to the IT revolution.
Hollywood is ripe for the same creative destruction we’ve seen in music, newspapers, and publishing.
New York Times is shrinking their physical space and staff size
Prime time TV still having a rough time
The question to ponder in the back of your mind is what are you going to do when this wave of disruption overturns your industry?
January 2017 – Vanity Fair – Why Hollywood As We Know It is Already Over– Looking for a good article on how technology is going to do to Hollywood what IT has already done to music and publishing? If so, this is what you’ve been looking for.
Check out the article to help understand the massive change surrounding us.
Disruption of music industry
First, music and newspapers. The author saw his first indication the music industry would collapse when he started downloading music. Instead of driving to a store somewhere and spending $20 to get one song he wanted, he could spend a buck and get the song immediately.
Author says the music industry has shrunk by half in the last decade. Remember that is after the first round of disruption hit.
Disruption of newspapers
Next were the newspapers. For a long time, the web part of the New York Times was physically separate from the headquarters. “Banished” is the word the author used. At the same time, startups like Instapundit (yeah Professor Reynolds!) and DailyKos were figuring out how to blog. Then WordPress and Tumblr allowed anyone on the planet to start blogging, and doing so for free.
Author says a lot of people didn’t want to wander over to a newsstand and buy a whole newspaper or magazine when instead they could read the single article they wanted, online, for free.
To illustrate the concept, I’ve never bought a copy of Vanity Fair and doubt I ever will. I certainly didn’t drive over to Barnes & Noble to buy the current edition so I could read this article. A blogger I read (see above!) mentioned it and I clicked over.
Is that robot telling other robots what parts to pull in an Amazon warehouse? Or is it searching databases to develop your profile before picking which call center operator to connect you to? Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
Here are a few recent reports of astounding things IT and AI can do:
Amazon warehouses are so heavily automated it only takes about sixty seconds of human labor to pull, pack, and ship your order.
Call centers can construct a profile of you while the phone is ringing.
In our society, where if there isn’t video to illustrate and prove a story, the story didn’t happen, it is getting easier to fabricate video.
Image courtesy of Dollar Photo Club before they merged into Adobe Stock.
Several recent articles reveal research into weaponizing drones:
Russian nuke-armed drone sub
DARPA trying to develop swarm capability
successful test of a swarm
converting full size plane into drone with drop-in package
12/8 – Bill Gertz at Washington Free Beacon – Russia Tests Nuclear-Capable Drone Sub – Published reports in Russia indicates their military is developing a drone sub that can travel 6,200 miles, dive to 3,280 feet, and zip along at 56 knots.
Most troublesome is it will equipped to carry a nuclear weapon, possibly up to the massively huge size of 100 megatons.
Antares booster on launch pad. Courtesy of Orbital ATK. Used with permission.
The number of private sector companies working to develop commercial exploration of space is amazing, as is the progress they are making. A few fun articles:
Blue Origin’s capsule escape test went well; check out the video
Orbital ATK successfully launched a Cygnus capsule on their Antares booster.
Lots of companies are working in the small sat market, with lots of competition in all sectors of the open space frontier
10/5 – Popular Mechanics – Blue Origin’s Rocket Test Just Went Better Than Anyone Thought Possible – Blue Origin just successfully completed the crew capsule escape test. The capsule’s emergency rockets fired 70,000 pounds of thrust off angle to the flight of the booster to separate the capsule from the booster.
Speculation on Twitter yesterday is the off angle push would topple the booster and require its destruction.
Instead, the booster survived the capsule’s escape, continued climbing to over 200,000 feet, fell back to earth, and successfully recovered two miles from the launch site.
Astounding.
Check out the video. Jump to the 1:07:00 mark for the launch and escape. Watch another five minutes for the astounding recovery.
[youtube=https://youtu.be/bqUIX3Z4r3k]
Amongst the other fabulous details, keep in mind the camera is tracking the booster at 200,000 feet, down through 100,000 feet, all the way to the ground. Amazing.
Imagine one of those providing enough bandwidth to allow merchant ships to sail the world without any crew. Imagine scaling that down to show-box size to allow a company to sell daily images of every spot on the earth. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
Technology is advancing at mind-boggling speed:
New rules for small drones allow commercial use of drones
Drones as bold security guards
Cubesats that can count all the cars in all the parking lots of a retailer
Research underway for merchant ships that can travel the world without any crew members on board
8/30 – Wall Street Journal – Business-Drone Rules to Take Effect – New rules governing business use of drones up to 55 pounds go into effect this day. Previously, rules required all drone operators to merely register with the feds. New rules allow business use of drones, by licensed pilots, within line-of-site, during the day, with drones under 55 pounds.
Expect more rules to address flight beyond line-of-site, and how to operate when people are underneath the drone.
Production line for that world-changing plane could possibly close in a few years. Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com
Ponder the remarkable contrast. We see phenomenal breakthroughs in space exploration almost weekly. On the other hand, the production line for the 747, the plane that opened up world travel to the masses, is slowing down and could be shuttered in a couple of years.
7/26 – Satellite Today – Sky and Space Global Details Vision for 200 Satellite LEO Network – The company, Sky and Space Global, plans to put 200 nanosatellites, or cubesats, into a low Earth orbit to provide a worldwide communications network. It is categorized as narrowband, providing only voice and messaging along with data forwarding.
Company estimates the cost for constellation of 200 satellites will be somewhere in the range of $120M up to $160M.
Would you trade your place in life today for life occupying the Gould-Guggenheim mansion when it was completed in 1912? Even if a billion dollars was tossed into the deal? I would not make the trade. Photo by Adobe Stock.
I suggest you are in fact richer today than John Rockefeller was 100 years ago. If it were possible for Prof. Don Boudreaux to switch places with John Rockefeller’s life and even if he could have a billion dollars after he arrived back in 1916, he would not make the switch. He would rather live as a comfortable professor today than be a billionaire 100 years ago.
I agree.
Here are three posts to explain this strange idea: first, what life was like 100 years ago, why Prof Boudreaux would not make the switch, and then why Coyote Blog wouldn’t either.
(Cross-post from Attestation Update. This post supports my conversation on ancient finances at that blog and also fits the discussion of how much life has improved over the last 200 years here.)
I will update a few of the stats in the Atlantic article where the author took a shortcut. When I browsed through the BLS report, I noticed some sentences which were repeated nearly verbatim in the article, which is okay since the report is a public document.
A few highlights:
Workers in factories averaged 55 hours a week. The fatality rate across the economy was 61 deaths per 100,000 compared to about 3.3 per 100,000 today.
A view of economic progress. Ponder the productivity improvement and resulting increase in wealth to go from this:
Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com
To this:
Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
The overall standard of living has increased by a factor of somewhere between 30 and 100 in the last 200 years.
The little side trip in this post and the next will lead me back to my discussion of ancient finances in general and Alexander’s haul from his military campaigns in particular.
(This is a cross-post from my other blog, Attestation Update. It is part of a series of posts discussing ancient finances, with a focus on the loot taken by Alexander the Great during his military campaign. This particular post is pertinent to this blog, so I will bring it here. The remaining conversation on Alexander’s haul will remain at the other blog, since that is where I talk about finance. You can find the discussion here.)
..in the two centuries after 1800 the trade-tested goods and services available to the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by a factor of 30 or 100. Not 100 percent, understand— a mere doubling— but in its highest estimate a factor of 100, nearly 10,000 percent, and at least a factor of 30, or 2,900 percent. The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has dwarfed any of the previous and temporary enrichments.
Let me phrase that another way. The value of what is enjoyed today by an average person is roughly equal to what 30 or 100 people had two centuries ago. That means the constant dollar value of what is consumed and enjoyed has grown by a factor of somewhere between 30 and 100.
A few fun things I’ve seen lately. Amazon announces it will soon open its 9th fulfillment center in California. Astounding video quality on a GIF presentation is close to photo quality.
3/15 – Behind the Black – Check out this animated video. Consider the question raised by Behind the Black – with this quality of animation, how soon until human actors aren’t needed because an apparently live action movie can be 100% animated?
[youtube=https://youtu.be/nPrWo5pEvyk]
As I mention the following two articles, ponder that I ordered something from Amazon early in the evening yesterday. It shipped this morning and will be delivered today.
Update: I ordered the items after 5 and they were delivered by 10 the next morning. Evening order, next morning delivery. Very cool.
A few fun things I’ve seen lately. Amazon opens its 7th fulfillment center in California. Animated short that is close to photo quality. GIF showing how applications have displace everything on a circa 1990 work station.
3/15 – Behind the Black– Check out this animated video. Consider the question raised by Behind the Black – with this quality of animation, how soon until human actors aren’t needed because an apparently live action movie can be 100% animated?
Previously mentioned a lot of players are involved with cutting edge efforts for space exploration. Russia is still a player. So is China. Here are a few articles on the Chinese efforts:
1/11 – Behind the Black – China has big plans in space in 2016– Summary of the following article. Recap says China has the goal of launching a new space station in 2016 and put staff on it along with initial launch of two new rockets.
Unless you have lots of gunpowder or thousands of buddies , I suggest you not mess with this guy and his 6,000 buddies. Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com
My friend John Bredehoft provides a different perspective on technology change. On 1/22 at his blog tymshft, he asked Do the essentials change?
He discusses a podcast comparing life today to about 35 years ago. For perspective, that puts us in 1981, or the range of the first year of the Reagan administration.
One of many points I draw from the discussion is related to Jon’s last comment:
But the speed of the processing chip in my smartphone is relatively meaningless.
Phrased differently, the smart phone in your hand may have an operating speed that is thousands or millions of times faster than 30 years ago but that increase doesn’t have an impact on your life in proportion to the increase in speed. Increased operating speed in the last decade probably hasn’t affected your life much at all.
