ValleyProofs

The Google solar installation is the largest corporate solar electric installation in the world generating about 1.6 MW which covers about 30% of our electrical need in the campus in Mountain View. The panels, 9212 of them or about 20 shipping containers, are installed on roofs and newly erected carports. The specs for the Sharp ND208U1F are here. They generate 208 W of power (max.) with an efficiency of 12.8% and these days sell retail for about $1150. Fourteen 208 Watt solar modules are wired in series in each circuit with the output DC voltage sent to one of 10 SatCon Power Inverters. The inverters, which are tied into Google’s power system and the state grid, convert the generated DC voltage into utility-grade AC with 96% efficiency. The system covers almost 20,000 square meters of flat roof space and parking lot shades, it will generate over 2.6 million kWH of energy per year saving almost $400,000 annually. At this rate, the system which has an expected lifetime of 30 years, will pay for itself in just 7.5 years.

Shortly after our NASA visit we had a tour of SETI and a demo of the Senseta robotics platform we are considering for the NASA / Mars Society project. More on this with images from both places are posted now here. Moreover, I am hosting Dr. Shostak for a tech talk at Google in April. I’ll post a link to the video of the talk in due time. For the time being here’s a short summary.

“The scientific hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence is now into its fifth decade, and we still haven’t uncovered a confirmed peep from any cosmic company. Could this mean that finding aliens, even if they exist, is a project for the ages — one that might take centuries or longer?

New technologies for use in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) suggest that, despite the continued dearth of signals from other societies, there is good reason to expect that success might not be far off — that we might find evidence of sophisticated civilizations within a few decades.

Why this is so, what contact would tell us, and what such a discovery would mean, are the subject of this talk on the continuing efforts to establish our place in the universe of thinking beings.”

Scientists from NASA Ames started a robotics research project with the Northern California chapter of the Mars Society. The goal of the project is to extend available commercial hardware by developing a software platform that will field test several augmenting concepts for human exploration of Mars. The hardware and guidance system field trials will take place in the Mojave desert. Teleoperation, autonomous capability and research simulations will be conducted at the Society’s Mars Desert Research Station where NASA will operate the robotic facility during several crew rotations. Dr. Chris McKay, the NASA lead on this project arranged for us a tour of the facilities and explained the various research projects and spaceflight preparations that take place there - very, very, interesting. I am not a big fan of large pics in this blog, but I had to make an exception for the one above. There’s a more extensive collection of photos on my photography blog. You can reach it here.

The CHM is a block away from Google headquarters. I took the opportunity today to attend the demonstration of the first commercial quantum computer. The computer, designed by a collaborating network of scientists from several countries under leadership from Dr. Geordie Rose, was built by D-Wave and features 16 qubits or quantum bits. The hardware for a quantum computer (QC) can be one of the following: assemblies of individual atoms trapped by lasers; optical circuits, for example using photonic crystals; semiconductor-based designs, usually including atomic-scale control of dopant atom distribution or quantum dots; and superconducting electronics. Dr. Rose chooses superconducting electronics as the basis of this computer since the fabrication is a known and it scales well. The qubits themselves are not atomic sized but macroscopic features as they use a property of superconducting materials named Cooper pairs. Cooper pairs are bosons, which have no restrictions into how many can occupy a given quantum state. Thus as long as there are no pair-breaking effects, such as temperature or magnetic fields, the paired state has lower energy. At sufficiently low temperature and high pair density, the pairs may form a Bose-Einstein condensate. It is this last property that allows for qubits larger than atomic sized structures, something that makes fabrication and commercialization straightforward with existing technology. But it is also the “sufficiently low temperature” constraint that has this computer operating at 5 mK, very close to absolute zero and about 550 times cooler than interstellar space.
So what do you do with 16 qubits? In 1936, mathematician Alan Turing addressed the problem of computability. His thesis was that all computers were equivalent, and could all be simulated by each other. By extension, a problem was either computable or not, regardless of what computer it was run on. This led to the concept of the Universal Turing Machine, an idealized model of a computer to which all computers are equivalent. However, Turing’s work, and conventional computer science, are only valid if a computer obeys the rules of Newtonian physics. Information (and computation) can never exist in the abstract. Information is always tied to the physical material where it’s stored, what is possible to compute is completely determined by the rules of physics. For example, many important numerical problems reduce to computing a unitary transformation U on a finite dimensional space, a general description of something like, a discrete Fourier transform for example. As it turns out crafting reversible n qubit quantum gates, which are not unlike classical reversible logical gates - well except for the engineering challenge of keeping them coherent at their connection points - provides a way to build a circuit which can carry out such transformations by using an n-qubit state for the input and measuring the transformed qubit state at the output. Sounds easy, well it’s not really, fundamentally there’s no way to setup the input qubits or to read the output qubits without affecting the result. This is where engineering a system that prepares inputs and samples results statistically is necessary, and this is what changes the speedup over a classical computer. Take for example Grover’s algorithm, whereas searching an unsorted database is a linear problem or O(N) the use of a quantum computer and Grover’s algorithm brings this down to O(N^1/2) or what is called a quadratic speedup. This operation is equivalent to inverting a function and it can be used to search exhaustively over a set of possible solutions to solve NP-complete problems. In other words it can speedup significantly any of these.

Lawrence, a colleague from Google took pictures of most of the slides at the presentation. Here’s also a link to dwave. So why is not IBM or Intel doing this? Good question read here for a take on that.

It’s late and my eyes are a bit strained so I’ll keep this short. Computer scientist and Turing award laureate Jim Gray was reported missing on January 28th. The Coast Guard and also many of his friends immediately started a search operation. The Guard with C-130s, helicopters and patrol boats his friends with smaller private planes. He was sailing from San Francisco bay to the nearby Farallon islands when reported missing. On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area, generating thousands of images, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is used to distribute the imagery among Internet users everywhere in order to shard the effort of searching for Jim’s boat. Being a sailor myself, I just reported on over 200+ pieces of imagery and quick scanned about the same number. We’ll see in the coming days if this changes anything for his family and friends, it’s certainly an inspired merge between satellite imagery and Internet technology. Pitch into the image analysis effort here.

Continuing on Mars a little bit, one of the interesting long term consequences of exploring and eventually colonizing Mars is the fact that the colonists may be branching human civilization. Zubrin and Wagner don’t go into great depths trying to describe what the civilization would look like but note that it would give a fresh start to part of humanity and it would certainly be a different start as the physical conditions on Mars are radically different than those on earth. As part of mission support in simulations on earth on the arctic and desert stations I witnessed human factors research - however, this research was in essence limited to the workings of small teams in an isolated environment and for short periods of time. There was nothing touching on economy or social order in those simulations, and it couldn’t be as the crew sizes and objectives were completely different.

Now apparently a group of people from Sweden and their supporters are trying to, in a way, create a “new branch”. For completely different reasons - to create a shelter for torrent tracking servers. The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a ‘micronation’, and claims to be outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country. Now in order to raise the money, and this is the catch, they plan to give citizenship to donors. Sure, maybe it’s a great PR move or maybe they mean it but the forum is already full of discussion of topics you rarely see touched in this times of more or less established nation states. On the weak side, if this guys pull the purchase off, will they face sanctions, will they become members of the UN, how will they derive income, what about the constitution, will they be able to plug into the rest of the internet, will they face a military invasion? I am almost sure they would face economic sanctions if not a military strike by a country bought by the RIAA. The discussions are light at best, still I must admit I’ve never seen an experiment like this before. Here’s the link to Buy Sealand and to an article with more info.

New observations just came in from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, areas imaged in 1999 and 2000 were recently re imaged. Comparing the two sets of images revealed new features in the more recent set of images hinting strongly at the presence of liquid water on the red planet. This is not the only data indicating the possible presence of subsurface water on Mars. But as it was said at the press conference held at JPL, “There are basically several lines of evidence. The first is the.morphology of the features that we see suggests that they were emplaced by a afluidized material, as opposed to a liquid material, something that was dirt mixed in with something that gave it mobility. The attributes that we see, it moved very slowly on a steep slope, which means that it was changing its properties as it was moving down slope. But it’s easily diverted around very, very subtle topography and it has very long, finger-like terminations at the ends of these flows. Those are all attributes of something that has liquid water in it.”

Scientists hypothesize that the water is coming from deep in the ground. “It’s warmed as it gets closer to the center of Mars. The outer parts of Mars are really, really quite cold, but the inner part is probably still warm, just as the Earth’s interior is warm. As the water came up, it reached the surface and initially froze at the surface. But as more and more water came up, it would build pressure behind the frozen water in front of it and eventually it would break out of behind that barrier and flow down the surface. So we think there’s an ice dam that is holding back water for some period of time, and then that dam breaks, and water comes out, and as it comes out, and as the dam breaks, it consists of rock debris from the rock around that water, it includes ice fragments from the dam and it includes liquid water.” Once on the surface it flows down these very steep slopes, 20, 30 degree slopes and picks up rock debris and spreads out and forms the deposit that is seen in the picture below. It is possible that there’s a trickle of water initially just sort of building up pressure behind the ice dam. After a certain period of time eventually there’s a rapid release of many thousands of cubic meters of water, like swimming pools amounts of waters come rushing out of the ground in a very short, brief event and then the surface refreezes. As more water builds up over time it eventually breaks again.

Subsurface water on Mars would mean a difference for any future exploration or even colonization of Mars, a good read on this topic is Zubrin and Wagner’s book “The Case for Mars“. More recent articles are available here.

Last week a talk on fusion by Robert W. Bussard was posted on Google video. He is a physicist and proponent of fusion through inertial electrostatic confinement. An approach that does away with large scale engineering of machines that cost billions of dollars and have yet to break even and actually output energy harnessed from fusion. Though electrostatic confinement has its detractors Mr. Bussard claims the majority are defending their own very expensive rice bowls. In his talk he provides data and an overview of the technology involved in achieveing reliable fusion while saving vast amounts of money, which he points, are currently being absorbed by the ITER project. It is an interesting geopolitical issue as well, it’s a fact that classic tokamaks are expensive technology mastered only by a handful of most affluent nations whereas electrostatic confinement is demonstrable at a garage level (another one). Bussard’s experimental setup is not much larger and if feasible could mean an inexpensive, radiation hazard and nuclear proliferation free way to produce significant quantities of energy not associated with greenhouse gas emissions. Fusion holds the bold promise of averting oil wars and reverting the global warming trend. Apart from giving much information on fusion, confinement and physics details, the talk is full of witty comments on the working of large government agencies and their bureaucracies. Unfortunately in the slide where the diagram of a tokamak and an ec fusor are compared the human figure given for scale is not clearly visible, but it is at this place where he calls the tokamak design - superconducting cathedrals. The 90 min. talk is available here. Nuclear fusion - I’ve heard of it as the project always 50 years into the future, well, we may know sooner if it’s feasible this time around - if Mr. Bussard manages to secure funding the EMC2 needs to continue his work. Meanwhile ITER is receives 12 bil. USD in funding, results are expected in 2016, commercial exploitation perhaps sometimes after that, the funds eating saga continues.

It came to my attention that Microsoft has finally, once and for all, solved the problem of computer viruses. Super IT, an ordinary IT guy, who after receiving supernatural powers from Black Hood the Overlord goes and frees the world from computer Viruses. The translation follows below.

Black Hood the Overlord: The world will become safer if protected by Super IT! Quick, take off your shirt!

Super IT: Me, me, Super IT.

Black Hood the Overlord: With the help of this Super IT t-shirt you will defeat all the viruses and spam in the world.

Super IT: With my powers I turned the virus into dust.

And so Ivo became Super IT.

Guy: Ivo, will you clean my computer too?

Super IT (to himself): He doesn’t realize that I have already cleaned everything…

[ To be continued… ]

And so, Ivo lost his shirt but saved the world. And you can claim your Super IT t-shirt at this Microsoft web site.

This video came by email a couple of minutes ago. And a story that ran on CNN.

“HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.”