Extrasolar Planets

The big news this week is the discovery of the smallest exoplanet yet discovered, Gliese 581 e in the constellation Libra.  The new planet is just twice the mass of earth, and orbits it’s red dwarf parent star in just under 4 days.

Gliese 581 is just 20 light years away and has 3 other known planets.  Extra solar planet hunters are finding more and more multi planet systems around nearby dwarf stars.  Gliese 876, for example, is another similar multi planet system, just 15 light years away in the constellation Aquarius.  55 Cancri is another similar system, except it is a yellow dwarf binary system.  In spite of orbiting very different parent stars, these multi planet solar systems are structurally similar to our own solar system.

In other news, a recent article suggests our galaxy is probably dirty with sister earths, greatly increasing the likelihood of finding life on other planets.

Mercury

MESSENGER has finally sent back new images from it’s 3rd flyby of Mercury.

Earth

China has announced specifications for a new super heavy lifter.  The new launch platform will weigh 675 tons, and be capable of launching a 12 ton payload to GEO or 25 tons to LEO.  ESA has launched 2 new space telescopes, new space telescopes, Herschel and Planck.

Moon

India’s Chandrayaan-1 has sent new images of the moon to probe the possible existence of water in permanently shadowed craters.

Mars

Spirit has been plagued by troubles.  First, a glitch caused a loss of data from memory.  To make maters worse, Spirit has become badly stuck in loose sand.  Mission engineers are still working on a plan to try to get out of the difficult situation.

In other Mars news, the Russian Phobos-Grunt sample return mission to the moon Phobos will also include a sample of microbes from Antarctica to see if they can survive the trip.
 

DSR 2.8

We need to put this in the propper context.  Up until now there have been TWO countries capable of this feat.  The United States and Russia.  Now China has done so as well. 

The space walk is a key skill that needs to be tried and learned for any space program to be successful.  Many other capabilities that you would expect from a space program are based on this knowledge.

Congratulations China,

China counts down to Thursday space launch

In October 2003, China became the third country to put a man in space with its own rocket, after the former Soviet Union and the United States. It sent two more astronauts on a five-day flight on its Shenzhou VI craft in October 2005.

As an aside, the China National Space Administration has a pretty crappy website...just sayin.

Update: launched.

Forgive me while I drop into a more conversational voice.

Garrett and I took Friday morning off to go to the Yu Garden (another taxi ride, another $3.00).  The taxi driver left us off out in front of what looked like the entrance to an old village that had been retro-fitted into the ultimate ancient-chinese-village-cum-tourist-trap you have ever seen.

We wandered in and I had this feeling we sorta stunned the vendors.  You see it wasn't quite nine a.m. yet and I don't think they expect to see any tourists before nine.  I think we kind of broke an unspoken agreement...but I digress.

We had a tough time finding the garden entrance, it was a bit hidden back in the village, which of course necessitated a circuitous route through the gauntlet of vendors.  So I bought a Mao Tse Tung watch.

..eh...

Yes...more about that later.

We finally found the entrance to the Yu Garden, one lonely bored guard, one lonely bored ticket counter lady later and we're in.

It's hot.  There are stones and rocks put together in many interesting ways.  There is some most excellent Chinese palaces.  Coy ponds.  etc.

It's hot.

Let me have the pictures talk for me.

Cool rocks put together in interesting ways

Cool bridges.  Remember the bridges are built with angles so that evil spirits don't follow you because you see evil spirits can only go in a straight line...dontcha know.

More cool rocks.

Dragon sculptures.

Great palaces.

Well there is a bunch more, but well I know you were waiting to hear the rest of the story about the Mao watch. 

So you see, I paid 100 yuan for a Mao watch at the entrance to the village.  I bargained the man down from 120 yuan to 100 and was feeling pretty good about myself.  Well later we found a couple more stores and...well...Garrett got his for about 40 yuan. 

I will probably never here the end of it.  He's that type of guy.

Man it was hot.

I was away from an Internet connection for a few days, I have a few entries written and already to go.  I'll post them retroactively over the next day or so.

But for now here is some of my impressions of Shanghai.

Everybody there is doing something.  20 million people all doing, selling, buying, building, cooking, playing, learning, shopping.  That's a lot of people doing a lot of things.

...and it feels like it.

****

There is construction going on everywhere.  Buildings are getting built left right and center.  Jeff (my Chinese colleague) told me a joke about construction in Shanghai, it goes something like this:

"Did you know that there are ONE thousand construction cranes in the world and that Shanghai has TWO thousand of them."

****

Labor is cheap.  I bought some chopsticks at a chopstick store in the shopping district on East Nanjing Road.  The store was no more than 500 square feet, tiny.  Inside there were about six customers.  And serving them? eight staff members.  Essentially each little glass display case had its own staff member.

Restaurants are another place where there is a surplus of labor.  For our fancy dinner overlooking the Bund we had at least four waitstaff taking care of us, they even poured your beer, refilling it after you had drunk it down a third, from the bottle sitting on the table right next to it...I mean I could do that.  It was actually a bit uncomfortable.

This is an example of inefficiency in the economy.  They may be growing at 10% a year but when they have restaurants overstaffed by at least double and stores by at least a factor of four it's a symptom of a not quite fully matured market.

The price of labor must increase significantly before this occurs first.

Did I mention it was hot?

Cool panarama shot by Rich from the Bund looking at Pudong and the Pearl.

Thanks to Rich for the great photographs.  Rich had a great camera and this cool tripod that could bend and grip things.

Excellent dinner last night at South Beauty.

We had spicy catfish, spicy tofu, spicy lamb chops, vegetables with a wasabi dipping sauce and of course the spicy frog bits.  It was a bit spicy.

You enter the restaurant via a long mirrored hallway with waterfalls going down the side.  It's pretty striking.

We were served by a crew of four or five people and it was a "dim sum" sort of ordering.

Awesome!

Dessert.  Kind of a walnut soft roll with a sweet center.

Karthik in a repose of spicy contentment.

Remember back in the day when you were scrounging for quarters?  When you weighed the benefit of dropping a whole five spot into the coin changer to get a few extra one?  Joust, Tron, centipede, Donkey Kong.  Well there's a modern reflection of that going on in China (and I assume elswhere) - Internet Cafes.

ICafés are full of the same sort of kid, maybe a bit older (say 19-22 instead of 12-16), but they are all in here to play games and more. 

It's a geeky social thing.

This is interesting in a couple of ways. 

1. Many of those same geeks that went to the video game parlors back in the day are now technology professionals.  Will that be the same thing here in China?
2. What does it imply for the next wave of video-game-arcade / iCafe.  What will the next generation of social-computer-geek-play-hangout place look like?

...although it's a bit smokey for my tastes because they all smoke like chimneys.

I did go through the exercise of washing my clothes in the sink last night...which was fun, but as it turns out unnecessary.

There were meetings, there were deployment tests it was good and informative.  We found some good news and some issues we need to resolve.

The diversity here in Shanghai is striking.  There is a mall wherein you can get any phone of camera you could possibly want.  Rows of iPhones.  Cameras. PCs.  But the prices are the same as in the US, so why buy it here.

And then you see a guy riding down the street on a bicycle with the back piled high with cardboard.

And then you see the street full of Lexus and Audis.

And then you see people sweeping the street with ancient brooms.

And then you see the HUGE LCD screens on the side of buildings.

It's got everything.

Anyways here are a few more camera pics.

Mall of America...er Metro Tower Mall.

Here we have a couple more of my fellow Microsofties.  Karthik and Rich along with Garrett.  We are very near the Microsoft office in Shanghai on a pedestrian overpass over a very busy downtown intersection.

Same place at night.

So Shanghai is big and busy.

I mean really big and really busy.

After I got in to my hotel last night I hopped in a taxi with Garrett (co-worker from Redmond) and Jeff (our co-worker from Shanghai).  He took us out to a local place to eat.

The taxi rides around here are great, I'm reminded of Istanbul and Athens.  Is it only in America where people pay attention to the rules of the road?  I mean the traffic flows like a river and each car is merely an H2O molecule going downstream.  Chaotic...amorphous...fluid.  And being in the middle of it is a strangely detached sort of experience.

Here are some pics from the ride. [camera phone pics]

There are so many apartment buildings.  Although they aren't apartment buildings exactly, everyone "owns" a flat for a period of time (Jeff has one for 70 years).

Miles of them.

Here's the road where the restaurant we at dinner is located.

Jeff.

Garrett and I.  I'm the good-looking, smart one in the glasses.

Dinner was awesome!  Kind of a dip and cook your own.  I am obsessing about going back to the same small little hole in the wall restaurant for my entire stay.

Crawdads.

Dip and cook yourself.  mmmm mmmm good.

I thought I would enumerate the electronic devices that I am traveling with and juxtapose that with what a business traveler may have gone with in eras past.

1. I have my laptop of course.  This is the primary weapon of the modern business traveler. 

2. But lucky me I get to carry a second laptop built with the correct environment for testing and displaying our application in China.

3. Camera.  My families steady and true Cannon SD110.  Nicked scratched and battered but clicking along just fine thank you very much.

4. My 30gig Zen Music player.  Crucial for drowning out the airline noise.

5.Noise canceling headphones.

6. My Blackjack 2.

7....and bringing up the rear a couple of thumb drives.

Impressive and confusing.

Now. Let's go back as far in the past as  1990.  What of those devices would a traveler have had along with them...

1. Camera (film based)

2. Walkman (maybe)

and a newspaper.

Remember what I always say - In the future what is simple will be complicated...and today is yesterday's future.

Let me tell you something about Air Canada: It Rules!

I'm flying business class to China and boy do I feel pampered.

This is very different than my expectations of current-day plane travel.  The chairs are pivoted to allow for sleeping, they served scallops for dinner, and some stiff pours of port.  The seat has more settings than a dentist chair, in flight entertainment system, USB ports, a 110v receptacle,

Take a look at this thing...it's got an electric foot rest for Pete's sake.

Hello to all my loyal readers,

Over the next week I will be traveling to China for work. I will be posting on techrivet.com about my observations and thoughts on the experience.  It's gonna be a great trip; certainly for me and hopefully an interesting read for you.

I'd like to take this moment to recognize Microsoft, who I work for, and the forward thinking team and group I am part of.

I work for the Unlimited Potential Group.  We're focused on the emerging markets and bringing Microsoft technology to bear in the effort to raise everyone's quality of life.  To quote our mission statement: "Ultimately our mission is to enable sustained social and economic opportunity for those at the middle and bottom of the world’s economic pyramid—the next 5 billion people."

I won't be discussing what I am doing for Microsoft in China (although it is quite cool), but intend to focus on the personal experiences and people I meet.  I will of course be looking at it from a technical perspective whenever appropriate.  Hopefully it will keep you entertained.

So tune in.  I'll be posting here as often as I can, hopefully at least once per day and perhaps more than that.  I depart for China on the 19th of July and return on the 26th.

Very interesting article over in the New Yorker about Li Yang, the founder, head teacher, and editor-in-chief of Li Yang Crazy English.  He's tapping into a strong urge on the part of many Chinese to learn English.

Turns out he's quite the salesman and showman. 

Some very interesting statistics jump out of the article.

Linguists estimate the number of Chinese now studying or speaking English at between two hundred million and three hundred and fifty million, a figure that’s on the order of the population of the United States.

This is somewhat ironic right now as I am going to be going on a business trip to China in July and will be working on learning some basic Chinese.

Anybody have any good advice on learning some Chinese in 6 weeks?  I'm not looking for fluency, just some pleasantries and finding the toilet and ordering a beer, etc.  You know the important things.