The Wounds of Richard III: an Intrusive Attack

One of Richard III's wounds is a blow that penetrated his pelvic bone after he was stabbed in the right buttock. This has been interpreted as a wound inflicted after death to humiliate him.

But I believe it could well have been struck in combat. An attacker can defeat plate harness worn with a mail skirt by moving in close and stabbing upwards with a dagger from below. This is entirely consistent with the wound on Richard's pelvis. This is easiest when the victim, like Richard, faced several assailants. Then an attacker could easily move close enough to strike a low blow upwards from behind.  But it was effective enough that even a single attacker might attempt it as in this 1403 encounter at Valencia recorded by Monstrelet:

"Then Sir Jacqes de Montenay threw down his axe, and with one hand seized Sir Pere de Moncada by the lower edge of his lames. In the other he had a dagger with which he sought to wound him underneath."

The Wounds of Richard III: an Uncovering Attack

One of the wounds on Richard III's skeleton is a shallow cut to to his right mandible. I believe that this was very probably inflicted when someone cut away his helmet strap with a double-edged dagger, leaving him helmetless. Seven other wounds are still visible on his skull and most if not all were inflicted after he lost his helmet. At least two would have instantly put him out of the fight, and been fatal soon after.

The nearly contemporary romance Tirant lo Blanc also notes this vulnerability of the sallet style helmet popular at the time. In the narrative, one of the protagonist's combats is recounted to a hermit: both the hero and his opponent tried to cut the other's helmet cord. The tactic was common enough that even the hermit, who has never borne arms but has passed some time with a skilled knight, knows a remedy: the helmet cord should be made of flexible wire wound with silk cord like a ribbon.

Printing Fossils

Instead of laboriously chipping delicate fossil bones from their enclosing matrix of rock, paleontologists  like Brett Nachman are printing out 3D models of the bones based on CT scans of the fossils still locked in the rock. Elegant!

Asteroid Redirect Mission

NASA has put forward an interesting proposal to use a spacecraft with electric propulsion to redirect a small asteroid, or a large piece of a larger one, to high lunar orbit where astronauts could visit and examine it and bring back samples. By small, I mean something on the order of 500 tons. In comparison, the entire Apollo program brought back 382 kg or 842 lb of samples.

Here is an overview and fact sheet. Here are more details.

NASA has also proposed placing an outpost in Translunar Space, mostly based on existing hardware. Such an outpost would greatly increase the safety and efficiency of exploring such an asteroid.

It is probably the most interesting early manned mission we can do beyond Earth orbit. With an outpost, it compares favorably with the more difficult project of visiting a near Earth asteroid in its original orbit. Austere missions to the most favorable targets contemplate missions of six months or more for a five day visit to the asteroid.

It seems to me that if you are going to spend that much time soaking up radiation beyond the Van Allen belts, it's better to spend most of that time actually at the asteroid, and it's better to be seven days from earth in an emergency than 90.

One attractive consideration for this type of mission: more than half of the cost of bringing back the first asteroid is designing and building the spacecraft. Refueling it and replacing the capture mechanism to get another will cost much less.

Also, one of the benefits of the program is a considerable increase in the power and thrust capability of electric propulsion, which will be useful for many other potential missions.

We don't know nearly enough about the insides of asteroids. It appears that many are more like blobs of rubble than monolithic hunks of rock. It would be well to know them better before we are confronted with the need to divert one in a hurry.

If the first one brought back turns it to be mostly rubble, after everyone's appetite for rock and regolith samples is sated it might be very useful to run a series of controlled experiments to determine what kind of explosive and impactor force the remainder can take without breaking up into something more dangerous. For science!

Spin-Offs Upwards

Another lesson from India's Mars mission: a richer world can afford more space exploration!

Cautious Optimism About Our Push Beyond Earth

I started writing this blog in 2006. Since then:

Robots have gotten better.

Sensors have gotten better.

Electric propulsion for planetary missions has become more capable.

Our ability to land a payload on Mars has increased a lot. In 2003 we landed a pair of 185 kg. rovers on Mars.  The earlier Viking landers were heavier, but that included the dead weight of the landing stage on the surface. The Curiosity rover we landed in 2012 massed 899 kg. This took a lot of challenging, complicated engineering, but we made it work.

Our ability to support the ISS is more robust.  In 2006, only two spacecraft were capable of carrying significant supplies to the ISS: Progress and the Space Shuttle.  Currently, five can: Progress, Europe's' ATV, Japan's HTV, and the privately designed and built Cygnus and Dragon spacecraft from the U.S.

A privately developed launcher, SpaceX's Falcon 9, has made several successful flights, as well as one flight of an upgraded version. It doesn't have the payload capacity of the best western launchers developed under government contract, and it hasn't demonstrated equal reliability, but its pricing is attractive enough to draw a substantial launch manifest. If it can reliably launch at a tempo that satisfies demand it could lower launch costs. There's nothing like a spade-happy billionaire to push the envelope for space capabilities.

The worst development is the gap between the U.S. retiring the Shuttle and developing a replacement. NASA's hypersonic Ming vase was retired in 2011. Unfortunately, both NASA and Congress preferred to insist on launching the replacement Orion capsule on a new launcher designed to preserve as much as possible of the former Shuttle workforce, contractor spending, and NASA infrastructure and overhead.

The institutional incentives are as obvious as the results are lamentable. Instead of simply building a capsule and putting it on a version of the existing Delta IV with some spending to improve reliability, money that could have sped Orion capsule development has been wasted on other projects, first to pay for the aborted Ares I launcher and later for the Congressionally mandated SLS launcher,  justifiably mocked as the Senate Launch System. Congressional underfunding of Commercial Crew Development is shameful.

On the brighter side, the U.S. still excels at missions beyond Earth orbit, and our Delta IV Heavy is the currently world's most capable launcher. And we have a laser-equiped robot on Mars!

But other nations have developed their own areas of excellence: Russia for flow-cost reliable launchers,  Italy for habitable modules, and Canada for robotic arms. Here's to specialization and the benefits of trade!

Welcome to Another Player in the Great Game

There's a thing we humans do. It's like the Olympics, only different. Like the Olympics, it has a lot to do with national pride, but it's harder and more rewarding. Not only do you earn the laurels for being the best competitor, but you learn things previously unknown.

In the Great Game we compete to throw robots towards other planets. This is much harder than bobsledding, so not everyone can play.  Arguably the most challenging league of all is currently Beyond Lunar Orbit. (Just putting a robot in lunar orbit is an elite club).

Until recently, the Beyond Lunar Orbit club consisted of the United States, the state currently known as Russia, a European consortium, and Japan. China attempted to compete, but failed its last attempt.

Now India has a spacecraft orbiting Earth, poised for an attempt to reach Mars.

Good luck and Godspeed, India. It is a good thing to live in a richer world. The more players, the better the game!

The Obscene Horror of Subsidized Maternity Care

One of the objections to the Affordable Care Act is that it forces people who currently don't intend to have any, or at least any more,  children to pay higher premiums than they would if they could select a policy that excludes maternity coverage.

The most obtuse version is the men that complain about being charged for maternity coverage. Dude, the insurance company knows that offering you maternity coverage costs them nothing, and you will be charged accordingly.

Greg Mankiw, who is a pretty smart guy, and usually smarter than this, presents a somewhat less stupid version:

In the law, having children has been deemed a pre-existing condition, although it is not quite described as such. Everyone is now expected to buy insurance to pay for pregnancy and maternity care, even those who never intend to have children. The goal is to spread the risk of childbirth among the larger community. 

But having children is more a choice than a random act of nature. People who drive a new Porsche pay more for car insurance than those who drive an old Chevy. We consider that fair because which car you drive is a choice. Why isn't having children viewed in the same way? 

I don't know the answer to these questions. But it does seem that fairness in health insurance pricing is being viewed very differently than fairness in pricing other types of insurance. I wonder why.

I don't. Children aren't just consumer goods. Little Porsches don't grow up to be workers and inventors and  entrepreneurs.  Children who become productive adults do. They produce surplus, and most of that doesn't go to the parent.

The person who would rather buy a Chevy doesn't care if nobody buys a Porsche. The person who chooses not to have children is usually making an implicit assumption that someone else will raise the generation that empties their bedpan and keeps the electricity running when they are too old to do it themselves. And I'm fine with that choice, as long as they don't start treating raising a child to productive adulthood as a purely selfish act of personal consumption exactly like buying a more expensive car.

So even the childless by choice have some interest being generous to those that aren't.

But where will it end? Conceivably the tax code might some day give a deduction for dependent children.

The Proportions of the Denominations in English Mint Outputs, 1351-1485

This is a useful article for people interested in this question. Like, for example, people who are doing living history who wonder what ratio of coins they should have in their purse.

A lot of the evidence conflicts, and some is clearly biased. Coin hoards were biased towards the largest denomination available to the hoarder.  There are repeated complaints that the mints underproduced smaller denominations, regardless of their indentures.  Coins reserved for pyx trials in each denomination may not have been directly proportional to the total minted. Coin dies for larger denominations may have produced fewer coins per die.

Taking all this into account, we may still make some very rough guesses for the period covered, taking the second highest value coin in each metal as a benchmark.

For every 10 gold half nobles, there were three nobles and five quarter nobles in circulation.

For every 10 half groats, there were 5 groats, 14 pence, six halfpennies and six farthings.

Gold Coins in England 1351-1465

How common were gold coins in use England in the late 14th and Early 15th century? Coin hoards give some indication. 62 hoards were dated between 1351 and 1465. 34 contained only silver coins, 8 a mixture of gold and silver, and 20 only gold, typically all nobles. The all silver hoards averaged 7s 6d in value, a little more than the value of a single gold noble. The mixed hoards averaged 10 pounds 7.5d in value and the all gold hoards 15 pounds 6s 5d.

Gold was used, then, for sums of money large enough to make gold more convenient. Martin Allen suggests by 1377 the value of gold coins circulating in England was greater than the silver coins, although of course the number of coins was much smaller.

Allen notes a common petition in Parliament in 1363, asking that, in addition to half pence and farthings, half nobles be minted "for the purchase of food and other commodities." The government responded that this was already being done.