Month: January 2018

Enlarge / Ursula Le Guin at home in Portland, Oregon, December 15, 2005. (credit: Dan Tuffs/Getty Images)

Before Donald Trump ever uttered a word about building a wall, author Ursula K. Le Guin, who passed away on Tuesday, wrote of a world that had built one—a wall that divided two ideologies:

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

—from The Dispossessed

I read Le Guin's The Dispossessed when I was 16. While the author's six-part Earthsea book series had a lasting effect on me as well—it influenced, among other things, my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns—The Dispossessed came at a time when I was starting to become more aware of how science fiction could be political and social allegory as much as great space adventure. Newly displaced from the city I had spent most of my life in and settling into a new town, I spent the months before my senior year of high school at the library and used book stores. I largely spent my nights holed up reading books my parents assumed were light summer reading: Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, Asimov's Foundation books, and various forms of Vonnegut. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, a book I would read later, further demonstrates how completely Le Guin synthesized earth-bound philosophical questions with interplanetary travels.

The Dispossessed held a mirror up to American capitalism and culture in the form of the planet Urras and contrasted it with the anarchist-syndicalist "utopia" of the Odo on Urras' moon, Anarres. Of all the books I read in my youth, that one stirred the greatest amount of internal debate. I was politically aware before, in the way teenagers who go to model Congresses and stage mock presidential debates are politically aware. But the "extremes" of The Dispossessed were a direct assault on what I had been taught about the way the world works, while at the same time foreshadowing language I would hear from all political sides later in life.

There was smoke, there was fire—and, most importantly, nothing on the launch pad appeared to blow up. Shortly after noon ET on Wednesday, SpaceX test fired all 27 engines on its Falcon Heavy rocket, a key step toward launching the massive booster from Florida.

The company did not immediately provide details about the technical performance of the booster during the test. On Twitter, however, company founder Elon Musk said the test fire was "good," and that this cleared the way for a launch within "a week or so." Although the company has not provided a date for launch, it is likely to occur no earlier than some time in early February.

Musk has promised excitement during the launch—either because the most powerful rocket since the space shuttle will take off and soar into space, or there will be some kind of spectacular in-flight anomaly during the test flight. No rocket with three cores and so many engines has successfully launched from Earth before.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Following the publication last year of the data collected by Windows 10's built-in telemetry and diagnostic tracking, Microsoft today announced that the next major Windows 10 update, due around March or April, will support a new app, the Windows Diagnostic Data Viewer, that will allow Windows users to browse and inspect the data that the system has collected.

Windows 10 has two settings for its data collection, "basic" and "full." The documentation last year described all the data collected in the "basic" setting but only gave a broad outline of the kinds of things that the "full" setting collected. The new app will show users precisely what the full setting entails and a comparison with what would be sent with the basic setting.

The utility of the app will tend to vary depending on what data is being inspected. The presentation is low-level (Microsoft's screenshots show JSON structured data using various magic numbers—numeric values that encode information, but without any key to explain what information each number encodes), so straightforward reading and interpretation will remain limited.

Rocket Lab

Last weekend Rocket Lab successfully reached orbit for the first time with its Electron booster. Before the launch from New Zealand, the company publicized a handful of commercial payloads on board. But it turns out the rocket also carried a secret payload into space at the behest of the company's founder, Peter Beck.

This was the "Humanity Star," a disco ball-like geodesic sphere, which measures about 1 meter in diameter. It served no business purpose, but rather reflected Beck's philosophy that by going into space humans can improve our lives on Earth. With his first orbital launch, Beck wanted to make a statement by putting a bright object into space that people back on Earth could observe.