18 December, 2006

This thing all things devours

In recent months I've been in the habit of setting my AIM 'Available' message using interesting units of measure. E.g., 53.4 Röntgens, 126.6 Teslas, and so on. Currently it's 0.77 megaparsecs, the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy. It's been stuck on that for a while, so I thought it deserved a change. I don't think I've ever used Kelvins, so I was hunting around for interesting high-temperature objects that could be measured in petakelvins. Supernovae set a pretty high bar, up to 1 billion kelvins, but it seemed like there ought to be something hotter than that, around 1 trillion degrees.

This led me to a press release on some interesting work in the development of metallic glasses. "Neat," I thought, and proceeded to read along, some genial feeling spreading in some corner of my heart. But then it died:
Hufnagel, whose studies are funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office, has set up a lab at Hopkins to test new alloys. He is trying to create a new metallic glass that will remain solid and not crystallize at higher temperatures, making it useful for engine parts. The new metallic glass may also have military applications as armor-piercing projectiles. Unlike most crystalline metal projectiles, which flatten into a mushroom shape upon impact, Hufnagel believes the sides of a metallic glass head will sheer away on impact, essentially sharpening the point and providing more effective penetration.

Some numbers, if you aren't familiar. The NIH budget these days runs at around $28 billion. NSF is around $4.5 billion. The Pentagon, meanwhile, manages $74 billion in research funds. A portion of this supports basic science research; e.g. my ex's extremely archane atomic physics research was supported by a DOD grant, and another friend's even loopier biophysics research was funded by the US Navy. But $63 billion goes directly to funding weapons development, including the extremely unfortunate anti-ballistic missile defense endeavor, currently spending ~ $8 billion a year and climbing.

A lot of research is plastic, and readily molded to a myriad of uses. And of course everyone in the business of getting grants quickly learns how to change their stripes for spots when necessary (e.g. in 2001, when suddenly it became obvious that everyone was, in fact, doing research with a great deal of relevance to homeland security). But knowledge can only be bent and twisted so far, and sometimes small gaps in understanding can turn out to be surprisingly hard to step across, unless specific interest is taken in a more careful exploration of their subtle landscape.

In other words, having turned a vast portion of our engineering prowess to the task of building more efficient killing machines, is it any surprise that the remaining spheres of life have seen little improvement? This is why we don't have flying belts.


My belt flies if I throw it hard enough. And then there's the Kuyper Belt, which does a good job of maintaining its elevation, anyway.

To take your point a step further, there's the problem of military research that it's costlier and slower than civilian work. Where civilian research can be publicly displayed and critiqued, allowing rapid advancement through inexpensive peer review, military research tends to be classified. This means that the researchers themselves can demand more money, as there's a limited supply of cleared researchers, and also that relatively few brains are available to critique the research, and those brains available are biased toward being military thinkers already, as not just anyone can get a clearance.

The big exception is in medical research, where civilian ethics rules slow things down and military battlefield "experiments" are instantaneous. The problem with that is that these rapid experiments are poorly controlled if at all, leading to useless "research" into products like this . (Cliff Notes for the lazy-to-click:

American military doctors in Iraq have injected more than 1,000 of the war's wounded troops with a potent and largely experimental blood-coagulating drug despite mounting medical evidence linking it to deadly blood clots that lodge in the lungs, heart and brain.... "When it works, it's amazing," said Col. John Holcomb, an Army trauma surgeon and the service's top adviser on combat medical care. "It's one of the most useful new tools we have."

Yet the Army's faith in the $6,000-a-dose drug is based almost entirely on anecdotal evidence and persists despite public warnings and published research suggesting that Factor VII is not as effective or as safe as military officials say. 

Posted by hedgehog

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