During a Reddit AMA earlier this week, Elon Musk said he hopes to announce his Mars transport system plans.

As you’d expect, I’m incredibly excited about this. We are still obviously a long ways away from the first manned mission to Mars, but there is finally substantive work being done to get us there. Of course, NASA announced late last year that the Orion space capsule is a part of their plan toward a manned mission to Mars, which is terribly exciting. Humans conducting experiments on Mars and exploring the planet is something I hope to see before I die.

But Musk and SpaceX, I think, are even more exciting, because Musk’s intent is not just to send a scientific mission to the planet. Musk’s intent is to send waves of one-way missions to Mars full of people to colonize the planet. Musk’s intent, then, is a magnitude more ambitious than NASA’s. Musk’s intent is to start humanity’s expansion through space.

In October, I lamented our lack of progress with space travel. I hope more than anything that, in two decades, I can look back at that piece and laugh—while watching the greatest explorers in the history of our species make one more giant leap for humanity.

Jupiter beckons in the distance, a small light, the greatest planet of all
I stare through the window, timeless, as the light slowly grows larger
I wonder what it will be like to see it with my own eyes
Swirls of orange and red and brown, a globe so large I can’t comprehend
The Jovian moons circling around the greatest planet of all, enraptured,
Captured
It is growing larger through the window
Through the window that separates me from the void,
Separates warmth and air and life from emptiness and death
This is what we have constructed
To ferry us across the great emptiness of space
It is larger still, I see color!
To see it with our own eyes
I see the moons!
To see if there is life beyond our little blue dot, so far away
To strike off into the unknown once again
To extend humanity beyond our home
I see it, I see it! I see!

But oh, this is the dream of a child
A great dream, but a dream
Remembered by an old man,
What could have been

After China placed limitations on candidates for Hong Kong’s city leader, Hong Kong erupted in protest. This, of course, presents a large challenge to Xi Jinping and the PRC. Edward Wong and Chris Buckley write for the Times:

China’s Communist Party has ample experience extinguishing unrest. For years it has used a deft mix of censorship, arrests, armed force and, increasingly, money, to repress or soften calls for political change.

But as he faces massive street demonstrations in Hong Kong pressing for more democracy in the territory, the toolbox of President Xi Jinping of China appears remarkably empty.

It’s an especially difficult challenge for Beijing because their options are so limited. If they come to an agreement with the protesters, or even remove the limits entirely, it will not only show weakness on Beijing’s part (something they are loathe to do), but could encourage similar protests in China proper. But they also have little ability to clamp down on protests in Hong Kong.

This is as large a threat to the PRC we’ve seen in years, and it has the potential to rival the 1989 protests.

When I was growing up, I was fascinated by space. One of my earliest memories—and I know this is strange—is, when I was four or five years old, trying to grasp the concept of emptiness in space. I imagined the vast emptiness of space between galaxies, nothing but emptiness. I tried to imagine what that meant, but most of all, I tried to imagine what it would look like.

That question, what color empty space would be, rolled around my brain the most. I couldn’t shake it. I would be doing something–playing Nintendo, coloring, whatever–and that question would pop into my head again. What does “nothing” look like? First, I imagined that it would look black, the black of being deep in a forest at night. But that didn’t seem right, either; black is still “something.” And then, I remember, I realized I was thinking about a much worse question. I wasn’t trying to imagine what the emptiness of space would look like. I was trying to imagine what nothing would look like.

I have that memory, I think, because thinking about that sort of broke my brain. I couldn’t comprehend what nothing is.

That question, of course, begins down toward the central question of what our universe is and how it was created. I think that’s why space–the planets, stars, galaxies–so fascinated me then; it’s this thing so alien to our world, that dwarfs it on a scale that’s incomprehensible to us, and yet it is us. We aren’t something held apart separate from it, but intimately a part of it and its history.

Trying to understand the physics of our universe, its structure and history is also an attempt to understand ourselves. I think, at some gut level, I understood that as a kid.

I poured myself into learning about our solar system and galaxy. My parents’ Windows PC had Encarta installed, and I was enthralled. I spent countless hours reading everything I could find within Encarta (which, at the time, felt like a truly magical fount of knowledge) about Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. And when I exhausted that source, I asked for books about space, and I obsessed over them. They were windows into these incredible places, and I couldn’t believe that we were a part of such a wondrous universe.

Through elementary school, my love for space continued to blossom. Then, NASA were my heroes. To my eyes, they were the people designing and launching missions across our solar system so we could understand even more about it. Many of the photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that I was so enraptured by were taken by spacecraft designed, built and launched by people at NASA. They were the people who had risked their lives to leave Earth and go to the Moon, to do something that most people up until just decades prior couldn’t even imagine as being possible. And they were the people who were exploring Mars with a little robotic rover called Sojourner that very moment.

They were my heroes because they were the people pushing us to explore our solar system, to learn what was out there and what came before us. I felt like I was at living during a momentous time in the history of humanity, and that I would live to see advances as incredible as 1969′s Moon landing. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.

That year, in 1997, I was nine years old. It’s been seventeen years.

Since then, we have indeed made great advances. In that time, we’ve sent three separate rovers to Mars, and we discovered that Mars certainly had liquid water on its surface long ago in its history. We landed a probe on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, which sent back these photos. We’ve discovered that our galaxy is teeming with solar systems.

All truly great things. But we are no closer today to landing humans on Mars than we were in 1997. In fact, we are no closer to putting humans back on the Moon today than we were in 1997.

Some people would argue that’s nothing to be sad about, because there isn’t anything to be gained by sending humans to Mars, or anywhere else. Sending humans outside Earth is incredibly expensive and offers us nothing that can’t be gained through robotic exploration.

Humanity has many urges, but our grandest and noblest is our constant curiosity. Through our history as a species, we have wondered what is over that hill, over that ridge, beyond the horizon, and when we sat around our fires, what are the lights we see in the sky. Throughout, someone has wondered, and because they wondered, they wandered beyond the border that marks where our knowledge of the world ends, and they wandered into the unknown. We never crossed mountains, deserts, plains, continents and oceans because we did a return-on-investment analysis and decided there were economic benefits beyond the cost to doing so. We did so because we had to in order to survive, and we did so because we had to know what was there. We were curious, so we stepped out of what we knew into certain danger.

And yet that tendency of ours to risk everything to learn what is beyond everything we know is also integral to all of the progress we have made as a species. While working on rockets capable of leaving Earth’s atmosphere, it would hardly be obvious what that would allow us to do. Would someone then have known that rocketry would allow us to place satellites into orbit which would allow worldwide communication, weather prediction and the ability to locate yourself to within a few feet anywhere on Earth? Economic benefits that result from progress are hardly ever obvious beforehand.

But it is more than that. It isn’t just that exploration drives concrete economic benefits. We think in narratives. Since the Enlightenment and industrial revolution, we have built a narrative of progress. With each year that passes, we feel that things improve. Our computers get faster, smaller, more capable; we develop new drugs and treatments for diseases and conditions that, before, would be crippling or a death sentence; with each year, our lives improve. For a century and a half or so, that feeling hasn’t been too far from reality. But most especially, we have continued to do something that cuts to the very center of what it means to be human: we have explored. We explored the most dangerous parts of Earth, we have explored our oceans, we put humans into space and humans stepped foot on a foreign body. There is a reason that, when we think of our greatest achievements as a species, landing on the Moon comes to mind with ease. At a very deep level within us, exploring the unknown is tied up with what it means to progress.

As exciting and useful as it is to send probes to other planets and moons, it fails to capture our imagination in the same way that sending people does. The reason is because doing so–exploring the unknown ourselves–is such an incredible risk. What Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins did in 1969 was unfathomably dangerous. They knew–everyone knew–that there was a very good chance that they would fail to get back to Earth. But they accepted that risk, because for them, learning about the unknown was worth that risk.

Abandoning human exploration of space, then, has consequences more far reaching than what its proponents intend. We would not just be abandoning putting humans into space, but at some fundamental level within us will be resigning ourselves to staying here. We will have decided, as a species, that we have gone far enough, we will leave our borders at our planet’s atmosphere, and leave the rest of the solar system and galaxy to nature. And with that decision, we will resign ourselves to no longer exploring in the general sense.

That’s why it is so integral that we continue exploring. Pushing on the edge of what’s possible is what fuels our desire and ability to explore in all other areas, too.

There are still incredible mysteries for us to unlock. We don’t know whether Mars had life early in its history. We don’t know whether, in Europa’s and Enceladus’s oceans, there are lifeforms swimming through them as I write this. We don’t know whether there is intelligent life living on planets in solar systems in the Milky Way and beyond. We don’t know how life began on Earth, let alone how life began at all. And most of all, we don’t know whether it is possible for us to move beyond our own solar system.

But what I do know is this: I want to know. I want to know.

Tesla plans to build a massive new lithium ion factory that would double world production volume. Doing so could dramatically change the car industry:

When Tesla first began working on its Model S saloon barely five years ago, lithium-ion batteries were priced at about $1,000 a kilowatt-hour (kWh). Manufacturers are notoriously secretive about pricing details, but industry insiders hint that prices have now slipped to anywhere from $400 to $750 a kWh. Even so, that means the 85 kWh pack in a Model S costs Tesla between $34,000 and $63,750. A study by the Boston Consulting Group projected that prices would need to come down to $200 or less per kWh to make electric vehicles truly competitive with the more familiar car that relies on internal combustion. The gigafactory would slash these production costs.

Tesla intends to do so, presumably, to reduce cost enough to make an affordable Tesla.

People enjoy making Hyperloop jokes about Elon Musk, but there’s really no one else in the world doing such ambitious work. How can you not love that?

Amy Harmon wrote a terrific article for the New York Times about a Hawaiian town’s “debate” over whether to ban genetically-engineered crops, and the insanely stupid things said about them:

A report, in an obscure Russian journal, about hamsters that lost the ability to reproduce after three generations as a result of a diet of genetically modified soybeans had been contradicted by many other studies and deemed bogus by mainstream scientists.

Mr. Ilagan discounted the correlations between the rise in childhood allergies and the consumption of G.M.O.s, cited by Ms. Wille and others, after reading of the common mistake of confusing correlation for causation. (One graph, illustrating the weakness of conclusions based on correlation, charted the lock-step rise in organic food sales and autism diagnoses.)

The left’s global warming.

Fascinating article in Popular Science about the development of insect-like drones:

They teamed up with Wood, whose lab had since joined Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and together they applied for an Air Force grant. Wood’s group then used an image-capture system to record and analyze fly behavior before, during, and after collisions with glass. By closely observing the positions of the flies’ body parts, they could measure the exact flip and twist of wings and legs. 

When Guiler and Vaneck slowed down the film, they were amazed at what they saw. “I thought the fly would tumble a bit and lose a lot of altitude,” Vaneck says. “But the fly recovery was elegant. It happened so rapidly; it was breathtaking.”

One of the more thought-provoking articles I’ve read in a while. What struck me while reading it is how much we are now learning about life by observing and understanding how the simplest creatures—worms and insects—deal with and thrive in a complex, changing and threatening world. We may be the dominant and most intelligent species, but we have much to learn about how life succeeds. And by casting away the arrogance that being the dominant species engenders, we will learn much, much more.

Glenn Reynolds thinks China’s Moon mission could touch off a new space race, and that would be a good thing:

So if the the Yutu rover finds something valuable, Chinese mining efforts, and possibly even territorial claims, might very well follow. And that would be a good thing.

What’s so good about it? Well, two things. First, there are American companies looking at doing business on the moon, too, and a Chinese venture would probably boost their prospects. More significantly, a Chinese claim might spur a new space race, which would speed development of the moon.

In the foreseeable future, the only realistic path toward humanity moving farther into space is through the private sector. If China making a territorial claim on the Moon is what it takes, then I’m all for it.

Michael Belfiore’s excellent profile of Elon Musk:

Thinking it would be pretty cool to land a plant-growth experiment on Mars but finding the cost prohibitively high, Musk started his own rocket company to bring the price down.

Musk is building a space exploration company while much of the technology industry—the self-described home of “disruptive” “innovation”—is building a better way to sext and sell ads.

That might be a little glib, but it’s also largely accurate. How can you not love someone who’s not only built the best electric car in the world, started a successful solar company, and whose motivation story for starting a space exploration story is that he wants to see humans visit Mars?

North Korea executed Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek, just days after he was removed from power. Here’s the PRK’s press release:

However, despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him.

From long ago, Jang had a dirty political ambition. He dared not raise his head when Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were alive. But, reading their faces, Jang had an axe to grind and involved himself in double-dealing. He began revealing his true colors, thinking that it was just the time for him to realize his wild ambition in the period of historic turn when the generation of the revolution was replaced.

Worth reading.

Popular Science’s Tom Clynes has an excellent profile of Taylor Wilson, a high schooler who built a fusion reactor:

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that the older of the Wilsons’ two sons would be a difficult child to keep on the ground. It started with his first, and most pedestrian, interest: construction. As a toddler in Texarkana, the family’s hometown, Taylor wanted nothing to do with toys. He played with real traffic cones, real barricades. At age four, he donned a fluorescent orange vest and hard hat and stood in front of the house, directing traffic. For his fifth birthday, he said, he wanted a crane. But when his parents brought him to a toy store, the boy saw it as an act of provocation. “No,” he yelled, stomping his foot. “I want a real one.”
This is about the time any other father might have put his own foot down. But Kenneth called a friend who owns a construction company, and on Taylor’s birthday a six-ton crane pulled up to the party. The kids sat on the operator’s lap and took turns at the controls, guiding the boom as it swung above the rooftops on Northern Hills Drive.

To the assembled parents, dressed in hard hats, the Wilsons’ parenting style must have appeared curiously indulgent. In a few years, as Taylor began to get into some supremely dangerous stuff, it would seem perilously laissez-faire. But their approach to child rearing is, in fact, uncommonly intentional. “We want to help our children figure out who they are,” Kenneth says, “and then do everything we can to help them nurture that.”

The story’s worth reading for many reasons, and there are many parts of it worth discussing, but I found the above section to be particularly important. Rather than discourage Wilson’s fascination with what are incredibly dangerous things (including mixing—and setting off in the backyard for family and neighbors—explosives), or see it as something dangerous to him and others, they tried to nurture it. His parents have certainly been indulgent, but they also helped their child to learn enough—and cultivate the right group of supporters around him—to do something very few people of any age are capable of doing.

Some might think that this anecdote doesn’t have much relevance for most parents and most schools with kids who are not as gifted as Wilson (clearly) is. But I think that’s bullshit. Children have a remarkable amount of curiosity. Kids want to learn things about the world around them—in that sense, Wilson is no different from any other kid. What’s different in this case is that his parents, and the number of professors and researchers he contacted, embraced his curiosity and helped give him the tools to explore things he was interested in.

Not every kid needs to achieve something as remarkable as Wilson has. But what I think this shows us is that we are holding children back at home and in schools by not embracing their fascinations and harnessing it toward learning. If a child is fascinated by dinosaurs, is that not a perfect entry-path toward learning about biology, evolution and ecosystems, and even the solar system by way of the extinction of dinosaurs? If a child loves airplanes, isn’t that a great opportunity to learn about aeronautics, and the value of thinking through different designs and testing their effectiveness? And on and on. Children shouldn’t be forced to learn about such things, but parents and teachers can embrace their enthusiasm for certain things and provide them with the resources, tools and—most importantly—the encouragement to explore them further.

In Tampa, a test is underway in eight middle school classrooms to see how effective “interleaved” curriculums are for learning:

Dr. Bjork and others have shown that studying mixed sets of related things — paintings, birds, baseball pitches — greatly improves people’s ability to make quick, accurate distinctions among them, compared with studying as usual, in blocks. Others have found the same improvements when the items being mixed are specific kinds of problems, like calculating volumes, or exponents.

A growing number of cognitive scientists now believe that this cocktail-shaker approach could improve students’ comprehension of a wide array of scientific concepts, whether chemical bonds, parallel evolution, the properties of elementary particles or pre-algebra.

Interleaved curriculums mix questions on related, but distinct, topics. This contrasts with the traditional approach to teaching most of us experienced in school, where students focus exclusively on one concept at a time and repeatedly answer questions about it. This is called “blocked” curriculum.

The Institute of Education Sciences designed the test such that half of each class received “interleaved” homework assignments for two kinds of questions and blocked assignments for another two, while the other half of the class received blocked assignments for the first two kinds of questions and interleaved for the last two.

The test is fairly small, but the results were dramatic: at the end, students were given a surprise cumulative exam of the material covered. Students answered 38 percent of the normal, “blocked” material correctly, and answered 72 percent of the interleaved material correctly.

That small of a test doesn’t confirm interleaving is superior, and certainly doesn’t confirm that it’s superior for all students and all material. But the logic makes sense; by mixing in prior material into homework assignments, students have to go through another step that they don’t have to do while answering blocked questions: they have to identify what the question is asking, and then decide what tool they’ve learned will help them answer it. As a result, they should better understand the material itself, and they should form an association between the tool they’ve learned and the kind of problem it applies to.

In mathematics courses I took, I became very good at learning whatever concept we were focusing on at the moment and applying it to each question by rote. Rather than focus on identifying what the question was asking and figuring out the best way to solve it, I would instead identify the template that each question related to that topic followed, identify each constituent part, and insert them into the concept. Since that was quicker than trying to analyze each question as if it was unique (they nearly always were not), I did whatever would get me to the correct destination the fastest.

In addition, this also resulted in me forgetting material covered toward the beginning of the semester toward the end. I would need to re-learn much of it for final exams. That suggests I wasn’t so much learning the material as learning a mechanical process to follow.

Interleaving is interesting to me because it should help reduce that tendency. Not only will it better force students to interpret what each question is actually asking (and thus better understand whatever topic they learned), but it’s a built-in review of prior material which should reinforce it.

After detaining David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s partner, at Heathrow airport for 9 hours under a law meant to allow police to question people that may be involved in planning terrorist attacks, the United Kingdom said this to justify it:

A Home Office spokesman said Monday that the detention was an operational police matter and that neither he nor the police would provide any details. “Schedule 7 forms an essential part of the U.K.’s security arrangements,” the spokesman said. “It is for the police to decide when it is necessary and proportionate to use these powers.”

There you have it. If the UK government wants to detain, harass, and take a journalist’s partner’s electronics based on a terrorism law, it is up to them to decide when it’s necessary.

We will do whatever we want, and you should just shut up. Actually, that’s basically what the UK told the Guardian:

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.”
…
And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. “We can call off the black helicopters,” joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

You’ve had your debate.

Ross Douthat thinks it’s about time we abandon our unwavering support for Egypt’s regime:

But there also moments when the ground moves, and you have to take a step back and reassess whether the approach that realism seems to dictate is actually realistic. So, for instance: There is a difference between supporting a longstanding, creaking dictatorship on terms negotiated during the Cold War and supporting a second-generation junta that’s just deliberately overturned a democratic election. There is a difference between supporting a leadership, however corrupt, with a proven record of delivering relative stability and a leadership that so far is mostly delivering bloody chaos. And there’s a difference between supporting a government that’s willing to bend to your wishes at crucial moments and a government that seems intent on embarrassing you while telling the world it doesn’t need your help.

Douthat is right. While I think President Obama has largely handled the tumult Egypt correctly over the last two years—that is, he hasn’t jumped in to support any side, and has tried to maintain the U.S.’s close relationship with the Egyptian military—at this point I think it’s clear that trying to use that relationship, and funding, to influence the military’s decisions has failed. The military has crushed the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters despite our attempts to broker a deal and an inclusive government. What good, then, is treading lightly with our remarks and with our military funding? What has it gotten us?

This relationship has provided us with significant influence during Mubarak’s reign and acted as a bridge between Egypt and Israel—the main bulwark of relative stability in the Middle East since the 1970s—but that influence seems to be gone. Pretending that it isn’t, and continuing to provide aid despite that and despite the military government’s massacre of Muslim Brotherhood supporters, only further reduces our influence by making it appear that the U.S. needs its friendly regimes more than they need the U.S.

It’s difficult to know what this path will mean for Egypt and Israel, but it’s rather apparent that maintaining our relationship and funding with absolutely zero strings attached isn’t going to prevent Egypt from heading down it.

Researchers have found more evidence that dolphins may refer to each other using names:

For decades, scientists have been fascinated by dolphins’ so-called signature whistles: distinctive vocal patterns learned early and used throughout life. The purpose of these whistles is a matter of debate, but new research shows that dolphins respond selectively to recorded versions of their personal signatures, much as a person might react to someone calling their name.

Our treatment (abuse) of dolphins and whales is going to be one of those things that when people look back on it in the future, they’ll wonder what the hell was wrong with us.