172 Hours on the Moon is a young adult novel about three teenagers who go to the moon as winners of a global lottery, only to discover a terrible secret about why they were sent. Below, the prologue to the novel.

Prologue: February 2010 “Gentlemen, it’s time,” Dr. ----- said, eyeing the seven some of the most powerful people in the country, together in the largest meeting room at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. It was nearing eleven o’clock at night.

They would have to make a decision soon.

“So, what’s it going to be, then?” Dr. ----- asked impatiently.

The cigarette smoke in the room was thick and impenetrable, making the atmosphere even gloomier. All rules forbidding smoking in government offices had fallen by the wayside as nerves came to a head.

“Well,” one of the seven began, chewing on his pencil, “it’s an incredibly risky proposition. You must know that. Is it really worth it?”

“People had already completely lost interest in the moon missions before the last launch in 1972,” another one said.

“Why do you think they’d be on board with us going back?”

“It could be done,” a third said. “We could tell them there’s a good chance of finding large amounts of tantalum seventy-three at the moon’s south pole.”

The room was suddenly buzzing, the tension starting to crescendo.

“You don’t want to go back to the South Pole, trust me.”

“Of course not.”

“It’ll kill you.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“If you ask me, I say leave the whole place alone.”

“Gentlemen,” Dr. ----- interrupted, “do you have any idea how important a discovery tantalum seventy-three would be? Most current technology is dependent on this material. People would be throwing money at us.”

“So we’re going up there to search for natural resources? I thought —” one of the other men said.

Dr. ----- interrupted him again.

“No, we’re not.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff cleared his throat.

“Let me put the cards on the table for you, gentlemen. We are not going to the South pole of the moon, and whether or not tantalum seventy-three is found on the moon is completely immaterial.”

Confusion spread through the room.

“I presume some of you are familiar with Project Horizon?” he continued.

The man who had spoken first asked, “You mean the research done in the late fifties? The plans to build a military base on the moon? I thought that was scrapped.”

Dr. ----- shook his head. “The base isn’t military.” He looked at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “It’s just a research station. Isn’t that right?”

The chairman didn’t answer. He gave the man a friendly look. “It’s called DARLAH 2. It was constructed in the seventies under the name Operation DP7.”

Read the rest

Omer Petti is a 95-year-old USAF veteran with artificial knees and a heart condition. Madge Woodward, his partner, has an artificial hip. They recently flew home to Detroit from San Diego, and were humiliated and robbed at the San Diego airport TSA checkpoint. The metal in their bodies set off the TSA magnetometer, and Petti was instructed to put his $300 in cash in a bin. Then he was further detained when a swab detected the nitroglycerin residue from his heart pills. He and Woodward were subjected to humiliating patdowns, and then discovered that their $300 had gone missing. When Petti asked where his money had gone, the TSA agent required he and Woodward to remove their shoes again and empty out their pockets, and asked if they were "refusing his request" when they objected. The TSA manager checked the security footage, but reported that it was "too blurry" to see what had happened to the money. The two elderly people were loaded into their wheelchairs and taken to their plane at full tilt, barely making it. They never got their money back.

"Can you imagine an 85-year-old lady and 95-year-old retired Air Force Major in wheelchairs being treated like terrorists?" Petti asked recently sitting in the kitchen of the Bloomfield Township home he shares with Woodward.

On March 29 Petti and Woodward arrived at the San Diego International airport at 10 a.m. for a flight scheduled to leave at 11:36 a.m. As usual, Petti and Woodward removed their shoes, jackets and sweaters and put these along with their other belongings — belt buckles, carry on bags, purse and jewelry, including Petti's money clip — into a total of four rubber bins.

Petti says a security officer asked him to remove Kleenex and $300 in folded bills that he had in his pocket and send it through the detector. "I hesitated and said: 'You really want me to put my bills in there?' " Petti said. The officer said yes, so Petti put the cash into a fifth bin. Then he and Woodward proceeded through the metal detector.

Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300 (Thanks, ROSSINDETROIT!)

Foto Marvellini, a Milanese art workshop, posted a set of vintage portraits remade as contemporary superheroes called "Le Biciclette."

Le Biciclette - Milano (via The Mary Sue)

Wide angle lenses are some of my favorite. Imaging resource has identified the widest of wide angle lenses for sale at a bargain price: $160,000.

According to Amateur Photographer, the jumbo fisheye lens was created as the "the world's most most extreme wideangle lens to cover the 24x36mm image area when it was unveiled at the Photokina trade show in Cologne, Germany in 1970."

A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports on an experiment to test how pay-what-you-like pricing performs when compared with merchant-driven "discount" pricing, and suggests that people pay more when given the choice. Ironically, the paper isn't priced on a pay-what-you like basis (it's $10 for two days' access).

We investigate the role of identity and self-image consideration under “pay-what-you-want” pricing. Results from three field experiments show that often, when granted the opportunity to name the price of a product, fewer consumers choose to buy it than when the price is fixed and low. We show that this opt-out behavior is driven largely by individuals’ identity and self-image concerns; individuals feel bad when they pay less than the “appropriate” price, causing them to pass on the opportunity to purchase the product altogether.

Here's a summary from Science magazine:

...scientists tested pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing in three experiments. In the first, some boat tour riders were given the option to pay $15 for a photo of themselves, while others were asked for $5, and still others were asked for PWYW. More people bought photos under the $5 plan, about 64%, than when they could name their own price, about 55%. (Only 23% opted for the $15 photos.) Scientists think that when people have to decide on a fair price, fear of looking cheap keeps some from purchasing altogether, they report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In a second trial, researchers found that attendees at an amusement park paid five times more for a photo of themselves on a ride (such as the one above) under PWYW pricing if told that half the proceeds would go to charity. And in the third experiment, guests at a restaurant with PWYW pricing either paid someone directly for their meal or paid anonymously by slipping money into a box near the door on their way out. Customers paid about 13% more when they were anonymous than when they paid someone directly. In all cases, the team says, PWYW seems to work because we want to feel good about ourselves when doing it.

Pay-what-you-want, identity, and self-signaling in markets (Thanks, Isaak!)

The PayPal Product Name Generator automates PayPal's nasty habit of giving stupid product names to the companies they acquire. I got "PayPal Website Advanced Checkout Online," "PayPal Online Pro Advanced," "PayPal Payflow Payments Express," and "PayPal Payments Link Checkout."

PayPal Product Name Generator

In The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies (PDF), by Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, the authors calculate that the average Internet user would have to spend one full working month per year in order to skim all the Internet privacy policies she encounters in a year. Mike Masnick reports on Techdirt:

In fact, a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year -- or about 30 workdays. The full study (pdf) by Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor is quite interesting. They measure the length of privacy policies, ranging from just 144 words up to 7,669 words (median is around 2,500 words) and recognize that at a standard reading pace of 250 words per minute, most privacy policies take about eight to ten minutes to read. They also ran some tests to figure out how long it actually takes people to read and/or skim privacy policies.

They put all of this together and estimated that it would normally take a person about 244 hours per year to read every new privacy policy they encountered... and even 154 hours just to skim them.

Here's the key takeaway from the abstract: "Studies show privacy policies are hard to read, read infrequently, and do not support rational decision making."

Of course, that's just the privacy policies. Throw in the EULAs and other fine print and you've got yourself a full-time job.

To Read All Of The Privacy Policies You Encounter, You'd Need To Take A Month Off From Work Each Year

Henry sez, "Harvard Library's Faculty Advisory Council is telling faculty that it's financially 'untenable' for the university to keep on paying extortionate access fees for academic journals. It's suggesting that faculty make their research publicly available, switch to publishing in open access journals and consider resigning from the boards of journals that don't allow open access."

Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.

The Library has never received anything close to full reimbursement for these expenditures from overhead collected by the University on grant and research funds.

The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.

Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing (Thanks, Henry!)

(Image: HBS Library, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from wagnertc's photostream)

Over the weekend, I stumbled over a great Damn Interesting post about the history and future of the banana. Some of you already know the basic story here: Bananas, as we know them, cannot reproduce. The ones we eat are sterile hybrids. Like mules. The only way that there are more bananas is that humans take offshoots from the stems of existing banana trees, transplant them, and allow them to grow into a tree of their own. It's basically a cheap, low-tech version of cloning, and it has a long history in agriculture. (Note: This would be why Christian evangelist Ray Comfort's video on bananas has become a classic Internet LOL. In the video, Comfort presents the banana—particularly its seedless flesh, handy shape, and easy-access peel&mash;as a testament to the perfection of supernatural design ... completely ignoring the fact that all those things are the result of human-directed agricultural selection.)

The downside to this is that clones are, shall we say, not terribly genetically diverse. Turns out, a lack of genetic diversity is a great way to make yourself vulnerable to disease. Back in the 1950s, a fungus all but wiped out a variety of banana called the Gros Michael. Up until then, the Gros Michel had been the top-selling banana in the world. It was the banana your grandparents ate. You eat the Cavendish, a different variety that replaced Gros Michael largely on the strength of its resistance to the killer fungus.

Read the rest

On Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of watching Perhaps Contraption ("a twisted brass, art punk marching band") at Saturday night's White Mischief steampunk night in London. They've got a shitload of horns onstage, rhythm for days, and some badass vocals. Perhaps you will enjoy them, as well.

Perhaps Contraption | Perhaps Contraption is an astonishing, twisted brass, art punk marching band.

On Saturday, I spoke at an Earth Day Tweetup at the Science Museum of Minnesota. As part of the event, the museum took tweeters on a behind-the-scenes tour, including the exhibit workshop. (The Science Museum of Minnesota is one of the few science museums in the United States that designs and builds all its own exhibits from scratch.) Also on the tour: Science House, a nifty resource center for Minnesota teachers. That's where this photo comes from.

Science House is a separate, detached building, set in the Museum's "backyard", that's open to teachers during after-school hours and during the Summer. It's home to a vast array of science paraphernalia. Besides this collection of skulls and plastic biology models, there's also racks of microscopes and chemistry glassware, a bookshelf full of solar system models, a regiment of Van de Graaf generators, and a full human skeleton dangling from a hook in the ceiling. There's also dozens and dozens of intriguing red plastic tubs lined up on shelves. The tubs are full of equipment, tools, and books that aren't available in every school. Teachers can check out any of these things from the museum, like you'd check out a book from a library.

See more pictures from the tour at my Google+ account.

Find out more about Science House, and how teachers can use the space.