diff --git a/fixtures/www.newyorker.com/1611473608343.html b/fixtures/www.newyorker.com/1611473608343.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4f1f87a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/fixtures/www.newyorker.com/1611473608343.html @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Hacking, Cryptography, and the Countdown to Quantum Computing | The New Yorker + + + + +
Skip to main content
Search
Search
Annals of Technology

Hacking, Cryptography, and the Countdown to Quantum Computing

Given the recent ubiquity of cyber-scandals—Colin Powell’s stolen e-mails, Simone Biles’s leaked medical records, half a billion plundered Yahoo accounts—you might get the impression that hackers can already break into just about any computer they want. But the situation could be a lot worse. The encryption methods that protect everything from online shopping to diplomatic communications remain effectively impregnable when properly implemented, even if, in practice, there are frequent breaches—whistle-blowers, careless clicks, and so on. This relatively happy state of affairs will not, however, endure. Scientists around the world are inching toward the development of a fully functioning quantum computer, a new type of machine that would, on its first day of operation, be capable of cracking the Internet’s most widely used codes. Precisely when that day will arrive is unclear, but it could be in as little as ten years. Experts call the countdown Y2Q: “years to quantum.”

In a laboratory in Shanghai, researchers work on developing a quantum computer—a new kind of machine that could make hacking much more common.Zhejiang Daily / AP

This looming but uncertain deadline hovered in the air at the Hilton Toronto last week, where government officials, cyber-security researchers, and representatives from companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Intel gathered for an international workshop on “quantum-safe cryptography.” Michele Mosca, a professor at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing and the co-host of the workshop, pegged the odds of reaching Y2Q by 2026 at one in seven, rising to one in two by 2031. But the exact date doesn’t really matter, because the time needed to invent, battle-test, standardize, and roll out new security algorithms Internet-wide might be just as long. Brian LaMacchia, the head of security and cryptography at Microsoft Research, has a working estimate of 2030. “The people who try to build quantum computers, who sit on the floor upstairs from me, said fifteen years last year,” he told me. “So I said, O.K., let’s work backwards from that. And I’m out of time.”

Classical computers encode information as a series of bits, which can be either 0 or 1, and then manipulate those bits according to simple rules. A quantum computer isn’t just a faster or better classical computer; it’s fundamentally different. Instead of bits, it stores information as qubits, which can be 0, 1, or both at once. That’s a consequence of the quantum-mechanical property of superposition, which allows physical objects to exist in multiple states, or even be in different places, at one time. Thus, two qubits can represent four states simultaneously (00, 01, 10, 11), and a hundred qubits can represent 1.3 quadrillion quadrillion. This quantum peculiarity allows the computer to find patterns in huge data sets very quickly—to get detailed information about a forest without looking at all the trees, as Mosca put it. The main mathematical challenge in breaking current codes is factoring very large numbers, which for classical computers is the equivalent of trying combination after combination to see if it opens a lock. As the keys get longer, the locks get tougher. It took about two years on hundreds of computers to unlock a single instance of the RSA-768 algorithm, which, as its name suggests, requires a key that is seven hundred and sixty-eight bits long. Doing the same for its more secure cousin, RSA-1024, would take about a thousand times longer, and RSA-4096 is effectively out of reach. A quantum computer, on the other hand, would tackle such problems effortlessly.

When quantum computing was first proposed, in the nineteen-eighties, it was mostly a theoretical curiosity. That changed in 1994, when Peter Shor, then at A.T. & T.’s Bell Labs, demonstrated how it could apply to cryptography. Once the significance of Shor’s work became clear, the race to actually build a quantum computer became one of the hottest tickets in physics. Among the biggest players was the U.S. government, which by 2007 was spending about sixty million dollars a year on quantum-computing research. It didn’t just want to build one; it also needed to know whether anyone else was getting close. After all, top-secret messages sent today could still be embarrassing or dangerous if they were intercepted and stored, then decrypted by a device built a decade from now.

So far, the best quantum computers have just a handful of qubits—five, for example, in a system that I.B.M. announced earlier this year. The company expects to scale up to between fifty and a hundred qubits within the next decade, which would be powerful but still short of the thousand or so that LaMacchia estimates would represent a serious cryptographic threat. (D-Wave Systems, a Canadian company that caused a stir when it announced a thousand-qubit computer last year, uses an alternative approach to quantum computing that isn’t suitable for code-breaking.) This may sound like painfully modest progress after two decades, but it has been steady enough in the past few years to shift the underlying question from if to when.

The “Y2Q” handle makes explicit the parallels between the quantum threat and the Y2K bug, which, at the turn of the millennium, was supposed to make the world’s computers think it was 1900 again, bringing civilization to a grinding halt. In the popular imagination, Y2K has become a punch line, a prophecy of doom unfulfilled, like the Maya calendar turned out to be in 2012. But for many of the people at the cryptography workshop—those responsible for establishing international standards for safe computing or signing off on data-security protocols for hundred-billion-dollar companies—Y2K was a relatively minor event only because the hysteria that preceded it mobilized an estimated three hundred to five hundred billion dollars in preventive action by governments and corporations. So far, Y2Q has failed to generate quite that level of interest.

One big difference is that it was clear, if inconvenient, what needed to be done to avoid Y2K. The best way to ward off a quantum attack, on the other hand, is still very much up for debate. The simplest approach is basically mathematical: come up with new encryption algorithms that quantum computers can’t break. That doesn’t require big changes in technology, but it’s very hard to know for sure which algorithms will be resistant, until they fail. The other approach is to directly harness the weirdness of quantum mechanics; since the mere act of observing a quantum system freezes it in one state, you can construct sophisticated communications links where it’s impossible, even in theory, to eavesdrop on the message without destroying it or betraying your presence. This approach sounds great, but is far harder (and more expensive) to implement.

Both approaches have been making progress in the real world over the past few months. China, for instance, has nearly completed a twelve-hundred-mile fibre-optic “quantum backbone” that will link Shanghai and Beijing, allowing signals to travel from one end to the other without losing their quantum properties. And the world’s first quantum satellite, launched from the Gobi Desert in August, will allow the country to send fully quantum-encrypted messages over much longer distances. For most of the companies and other governments represented at the workshop, though, quantum-resistant algorithms remain the focus. In July, Google announced that it would test a candidate algorithm dubbed New Hope in a small fraction of Chrome browsers. Soon afterward, the National Institute of Standards and Technology put out a public call for input on how it should evaluate such algorithms in the future. The organization may be ready to issue standards in draft form, a NIST cryptographer at the workshop estimated, by 2022 or 2023. Some members of the crowd reacted with audible consternation.

In a sense, then, the fundamental question isn’t whether we should do something to prepare for Y2Q. It’s how we balance the seeming necessity of doing something right now with the inconvenient fact that we don’t yet know what to do. The most persuasive answer to this dilemma came from Vadim Makarov, an exuberantly bearded, Hagrid-like figure who heads the University of Waterloo’s Quantum Hacking Lab. He and his colleagues work with companies to test their quantum-cryptography systems before they go public, and have demonstrated that even “theoretically perfect” setups can be hacked when they’re actually implemented—for example, by blinding the receiving device with a bright laser that makes it unable to distinguish between quantum and classical signals. Such vulnerabilities may suggest that quantum-safe systems aren’t yet ready for prime time, but Makarov, during a panel discussion, drew the opposite conclusion. “It’s a bit of chicken-and-an-egg problem,” he said in a thick Russian accent. It will be impossible to know which systems can resist attacks until they’re out there, in the real world, inviting attacks. Waiting for a perfect solution just brings the arrival of a quantum computer closer and closer, at which point it will be too late to fix things. “So, folks, please deploy more,” Makarov said. “We want real hackers, not the toy ones like me and my students.” He smiled, not quite reassuringly.

Alex Hutchinson is the author of “Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance.”
More:CryptographyQuantum ComputingYahooSecurity
Read More
Annals of Science
Dream Machine

The mind-expanding world of quantum computing.

Annals of Technology
Catching Dust

A changing NASA visits an asteroid, seeking the key to life’s beginning

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/fixtures/www.newyorker.com/1611475571383.html b/fixtures/www.newyorker.com/1611475571383.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ac644af6 --- /dev/null +++ b/fixtures/www.newyorker.com/1611475571383.html @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +Lessons from My Mother | The New Yorker + + + + +
Skip to main content
Search
Search
Personal History
December 5, 2016 Issue

Lessons from My Mother

I had a sense that she was a good teacher, but I had no idea that she was such an influential one, and in the very area I had chosen.

At my mother’s funeral, I was calmer than I had ever imagined being. She was eighty-seven and had lived a long and fruitful life, and for some time her body had been signalling its eagerness to depart: almost blind from macular degeneration, emaciated, she had been bedridden for months, after a bad fall. She died alone, but my father and I were at her side a few hours before her death. In the hospital room, grief conspired with natural curiosity: so this is how a body near death functions; this is how most of us will go. . . . Six or seven seconds passed between deep breaths; each was likely to be the last, and the renewal of breath, when it came, seemed almost like a strange, teasing physiological game—no, not yet, not quite. In the days before she died, a sentence from “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” kept coming to my mind. Peter Ivanovich is looking at Ivan Ilyich’s corpse: “The expression on the face said that what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly.” Those words sustained me. A long life, a fulfilling career as a schoolteacher, a merciful end (relatively speaking), three children and a devoted husband: what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly.

Illustration by Gérard DuBois

And there was another “right” thing, which would have satisfied Tolstoy in his late religious phase. My mother died a Christian, sure that she was going to meet her Redeemer. I don’t share that belief, but in those last months I was sometimes consoled by the thought of my parents’ consolation. My mother had chosen all the readings and the hymns for her funeral, and I admired the optimism that filled the church. We ended the service with an old Methodist rabble-rouser, “Thine Be the Glory, Risen Conquering Son,” sung to a tune from Handel’s “Judas Maccabaeus.” It was hard not to be moved when the minister said that my mother was finally at one with the Lord she had spent a lifetime serving: she was now in the glory of his presence. Could these words, beautifully improbable, possess the power entrusted to them? For a moment, it seemed as if the ugly oak coffin, sitting on trestles near the altar, were less a final box than the husk of another husk, the body now joyously unimportant, finally discarded. The ancient promise: the soul has thrown off its impediments and is flying away.

There was a moment when I came close to tears, and it involved another set of words. I feared discomposure, didn’t want to be an embarrassment (that shaming English shame). But it was not so easy when the minister read this prayer: “O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.” It’s a beautiful plea—“a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.” But the phrase I found most moving was “and our work is done.” Like most mothers, mine worked very hard: the never finished labor of maternity. In many ways, she was an almost stereotypically Scottish mother (the goyish version of the Jewish caricature)—passionate, narrow, judgmental, always aspiring. Her children were her artifacts, through which she created the drama of her own restless ambitions. These ambitions were moral and social. She wanted us to be morally successful, to get the best possible grades from the Great Examiner. It was my mother who told me that my untidy bedroom was unworthy of good Christian living (it showed “poor stewardship”), that I should speak not of “luck” but of “blessing,” and who was made distinctly nervous by my talk of having a beer in a pub (“only ever half a pint, I hope”; her own Scottish mother had signed the “temperance pledge,” and never drank). The emphasis, in Protestant fashion, was rigorous and corrective. There was plenty of happiness in our household, but it was rarely religious happiness. The self was viewed with suspicion, as if it were a mob of appetites and hedonism. As an adolescent, I was often told that “self, self, self is all you think about,” and that “selfishness is your whole philosophy.” Life was understood to be constant moral work, a job that could never really be “done,” because the ideal was Jesus’ unsurpassable perfection. My mother and I quarrelled over the corpse of my religious faith. She told me that at night she prayed I would “come back into the fold.” As a young man, I lined up my pagan, life-loving heroes—Nietzsche, Camus, D. H. Lawrence, Keith Moon, Ian Dury—in glorious defensive formation: reasons to be cheerful.

Her social aspirations weren’t always compatible with her religious aspirations, though they proceeded from the same extraordinary will. The woman who wanted to assign luck to godly providence also believed deeply in the earned fortune of hard work. She understood, again in familiar Scottish fashion, that social advancement was best achieved through education. Her own origins were lower middle class, petit bourgeois: she had an uncle who was a doctor—the star of the family—but neither of her parents had gone to university. Her mother had a Scottish accent; hers came and went. She told me that she had been bullied at her fairly ordinary state school for affecting, like Margaret Thatcher, a “posh” accent a few stations above her class; it was always difficult for me to assess Mrs. Thatcher with any neutrality, because in demeanor and sheer force of will she so reminded me of my mother.

Teaching ran in my family. My father was also a teacher, and my mother’s grandfather was in charge of a small junior school, long gone, in a house situated in gentle fields outside Edinburgh. Mother remembered visiting him during the summer holidays, when, so she told me, he would coach private pupils, boys headed for expensive boarding schools in Scotland and England. Over the years, a few of these boys, suitably crammed with exam-busting power, went to Eton, and it was this knowledge that gave my mother the idea that if she had sons she would “send them to Eton.”

An absurd story, in part because women of my mother’s class were not exactly invited to think of Eton as within their reach. They had not enough money, and certainly not enough social standing. But I believe what she told me, because it sounds so magnificently like her, and because she achieved her ambition. It was financial insanity, even with the help of scholarships and bursaries, to try to send two sons to Eton and a daughter to a boarding school in Scotland, and it brought my parents to the verge of ruin. (I will never forget the moment when my father phoned me to ask if he could borrow five hundred pounds. He was sixty-two, and perilously close to being broke; I was twenty-five, had just started working for a London newspaper, and had my first regular salary.)

Eton was also unnecessary: there was a good grammar school not far from our town, a place that sent kids every year to Oxford and Cambridge. But who is defining necessity? I guess that my mother considered the unnecessary surplus of private education—the invisible social lift that a place like Eton offered—absolutely necessary. If not, why else put her family through the hardship and labor? And mostly that’s what it was. Not for me, the lucky beneficiary of my mother’s quixotic and self-abnegating striving, but for my perpetually impoverished parents. My father, a zoologist, had no more money than his modest salary from an English university; Mother taught at the local girls’ school. They needed every penny. Had they sat down, at the start of it all, and run the numbers on the back of an envelope, they would never have contemplated private education for their three children. But they believed in sacrifice, and they probably imagined that they could muddle through somehow, borne aloft by my mother’s surging triumphalism. And by extra work: in addition to his teaching, my father marked Open University and high-school exam papers in the summer vacation. And my mother, in addition to her weekday school teaching, took on a Saturday job, at a bookshop in town. There cannot be many old Etonians, in the entire history of that fabled and fortunate place, whose mothers, daunted by debt, worked a Saturday job, standing behind a cash register. When I was young, I wasn’t proud enough of her; indeed, I was probably a bit ashamed.

Yet that tremendous force of character was riddled with anxiety and doubt. Her anxiety was structurally related to her ambition; her vigilance resembled the omniscient uncertainty of immigrant parents. (The story of social class in Britain is, figuratively, one of emigration and immigration: a voyaging out of one station or place and into another. At Eton, I was a spy from the obscure North of England and the equally obscure middle classes, quickly learning the language and the signification of the surprisingly hospitable enemy.) My mother fiercely desired her children’s success, but never quite believed in it. We were like the parishioners who Jonathan Edwards warned were suspended over Hell by “a slender thread,” which an angry God might sever at any minute. Was this a theological fear that became a social one, or the other way around? Certainly, the two anxieties were inextricable: look away from the struggle, for one second, and you may fall. In our household, there could be no complacency. Mother didn’t assume I would go to Cambridge or Oxford; she didn’t assume I would get to university at all, despite indications to the contrary. If you get to university—that was the menacing conditional. Exams were sites of strenuous terror, doors that opened onto everything desirable but that could as easily be closed in one’s face.

“I’m starting to think humans don’t even like winning free cruises.”

For the same reason, she only warily encouraged my desire to be a writer. I might just be able to pull it off, but only if I worked at it, with devotion and Protestant modesty. The profession of letters was generally admirable, but the idea of my being a writer made her anxious: How would I earn a living? What sort of social status could I ever achieve? Was writing, at bottom, even a moral activity? I tried to make my case, aware of how flimsy and amoral my ambitions sounded. Her idol was the writer and politician John Buchan, the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister who rose from that relatively humble background to the heights of Oxford, later becoming a Member of Parliament and the governor-general of Canada: a man of substance. I didn’t take him very seriously as a writer; as I saw it, Buchan’s worldly success richly compensated for—and effectively obliterated—the eccentricity of his wanting to be a writer in the first place. But I understood why his example meant so much to my mother, and why she used it to push me on. John Buchan, she would intone, rose at five in the morning to write his books (not least “The Thirty-nine Steps”), before going out into the world and earning a living: “You will have to work like that if you want to achieve anything comparable.” She preferred the security of the law, or medicine (the path my brother took), or the academy (a shabby but dependable cousin to these grander professions). Her expressed hope was that when she answered the phone and a stranger asked to speak to Dr. Wood she could reply, “Which one? My husband, or one of my three children? We have four Dr. Woods in this house.” (She ended up with only two, her husband and my brother.)

In many ways, she was a natural teacher. She marched her children around English stately homes and told us the history of these places, in loud, confident tones; we sometimes feared that she might be mistaken for a docent. She took us to many museums, and to the great sites of Scottish history—Culloden, Glenfinnan, Glencoe. She certainly encouraged us; more often she goaded, enforced. But she also defended us. When my first-grade teacher reported that I could read “fluently enough, but without much comprehension,” she took it up with the school. Years later, when I got a B in an English exam (it was my best subject, so I was “supposed” to get an A), she made me sit for the exam again, the unspoken but hovering implication being that I would keep retaking it until the expected grade was achieved. My father, in his usual mild manner, went along with all these incursions and improvements.

Advertisement

It was a joke in our family that my mother and Muriel Spark’s great fictional creation, Miss Jean Brodie, shared a certain temperament, as well as a profession that was really a vocation. Like Miss Brodie (or like Maggie Smith’s impersonation, in the 1969 movie), my mother had a genteel Anglo-Scots accent, taught at a private girls’ school, was forceful and opinionated, had firm ideas about education, and was clearly a wonderful presence in the classroom, filling the girls’ heads with strange stories, historical gossip, unusual dates, nice prejudices, delicious facts. I know that she loved talking to her classes about her own children; over the years, I would encounter some of her former pupils, and was amused by how much these young women knew about our family life. (They invariably knew that I played the trumpet, and had been to Eton.) When my mother used John Buchan’s work ethic as a moral goad, it was hard not to hear Miss Brodie telling her girls that she was going to learn Greek: “John Stuart Mill used to rise at dawn to learn Greek at the age of five, and what John Stuart Mill could do as an infant at dawn, I too can do on a Saturday afternoon in my prime.”

In Spark’s novel, we never see Miss Brodie not performing, we never see her just at home, offstage, not being a teacher. If she was anything like my mother, that may be an authorial mercy. Though authoritative with her young pupils and with her own children, my mother was not a confident or worldly woman. The anticipation of teaching made her extremely nervous, physically sick at times. The days just before the beginning of term, after the blessing of the holidays, were always tense and furious, full of melancholy and complaint. If she was a natural teacher, she was never an easy one. One of my fondest childhood memories is of standing outside the bathroom door and listening to her on the other side, as she methodically whispered words and dates: she had a history textbook with her in the bathroom, and was cramming for class. If I had been asked, when I was a child, how my mother liked teaching, I would have replied that she hated it. And because of this knowledge my siblings and I were sometimes condescending toward my mother’s work. Today, I would probably say that she disliked it but was powerfully, helplessly drawn to it. Now that I am myself a parent, I realize how perpetually exhausted and overloaded she must have been, how every muscle and nerve must have been pulled taut: three children, a week’s work at school, an extra job on Saturdays, the constant drag of debt. And Sunday, alas, was not a day of rest, but more work—what seemed like endless churchgoing.

A few months after the funeral, I got an e-mail from one of her former students, Katrina Porteous. I knew her name, because she is a poet, who has written eloquently about the North of England, in particular about the Northumberland coast, where she lives. She was one of my mother’s great success stories—Durham High School for Girls, a brilliant history degree at Cambridge University, a Harkness Fellowship to Berkeley and Harvard, and several acclaimed books of verse since the publication of her first collection, “The Lost Music,” in 1996. Mother had spoken of Katrina, and, a year before she died, had given me one of her books. But she was five years older than me, and we hadn’t known each other. We had learned of each other’s movements, literary and otherwise, intermittently and remotely, through my mother.

Katrina had not been in touch with my parents for a long time, and was writing to ask if my mother was in good health, “and whether it might be possible to contact her.” She went on, “I’d like to thank her for the encouragement and inspiration she gave me. She really was the most wonderful teacher. I’ve recently published a new poetry collection with Bloodaxe, and would love to send it to her. Would that be possible?”

It was strange to receive this message, so soon after my mother’s funeral, as if Katrina had some eerie premonition that all was not well, as if the long silence were speaking to her, laden with significance. It was strange, too, to be communicating as two middle-aged people. In my mind, my mother’s “old girls” were still girls, as I was still my mother’s boy. What linked us was lost in our far-off childhoods; and here we were, two graying adults talking across a waste of gain and loss. I wrote to her on Christmas Day, and told her that my mother had died in July. I added that I had been moved by the tributes my father had received from former Durham High School girls. Her e-mail, I told her, was one of the most moving: because she was a writer, and because of the accident of its timing.

Katrina replied four days later. She said she was especially touched to hear from me at Christmas, when she was at home with her own parents, now in their eighties, “in the house from which I travelled to Durham High School every day as a child. One is powerfully transported back to earlier times in those moments.” She continued, “Your mother was and will always remain a profound influence in my life. She gave me the confidence to believe in myself as a ‘writer’ at a precocious age, when I had no right to think of myself as such, but every opportunity to become one. (I am still trying.) Growing up in Consett, the only child of a scientist and a lovely but utterly unbookish mother, I encountered in yours the first ‘woman of letters’ I had met. She was also kind, sensitive, principled and spirited. I adored her. I am so sorry not to have taken the opportunity when I had it to tell her how much her example has meant to me.”

Had Katrina spoken this at my mother’s funeral, I would not have stayed so calm. She, as a pupil, said what I, as a son, could not. Her words were simple and forthright and grateful, while mine would have been complicated and wary and not grateful enough. Did I want to take Katrina’s words as my own? Was I jealous of the easy literary encouragement she received? Perhaps, though surely what made her tribute so moving was precisely that it came from someone else. All sons adore their complicated mothers, in one way or another. But how powerful to encounter, from someone else, the beautifully uncomplicated statement “I adored her.” And Katrina’s message was a revelation, as if one of Miss Brodie’s girls had materialized, in order to write a letter to me. I had a sense that my mother was a good teacher, but I had no idea that she had been such an influential one, and in the very area I had chosen, and struggled to succeed in, often in the face of parental doubts. She had been not just a good teacher but a crucial literary encourager, and I had not been able to see this well enough—because as a mother her pedagogy was so fraught, so anxious and vicarious, and was such a difficult companion of her role as a parent.

Sometimes, in anger or rebellion, I had felt that it was at best a frustration and at worst a misfortune to be the son of such a possessive and sharply gifted teacher. But my father knew better. To my surprise, he had these words put on her gravestone: “A devoted mother and grandmother and dear friend of many, including her former pupils.” He had properly assessed the components of her identity, the parts of her great labor, the variety of her lifework. What was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly. Her work was done. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 5, 2016, issue, with the headline “The Teacher.”
James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. In November, he will publish “Serious Noticing,” a selection of essays.
More:AtheismDeathDoubtEtonEulogiesFaithFamiliesFuneralsMemoirMoneyMothersMuriel SparkParentsReligionSchoolsScotlandSonsStudentsTeachersWritersWriting
Read More
Video
Office Hours with George Saunders

George Saunders, the author of "Tenth of December," on reading, and writing, and teaching at Syracuse University.

Personal History
Becoming Them

Our parents, our selves.

Personal History
The Fun Stuff

My life as Keith Moon.

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/fixtures/www.wired.com/1611475755063.html b/fixtures/www.wired.com/1611475755063.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3ad27192 --- /dev/null +++ b/fixtures/www.wired.com/1611475755063.html @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +The Rosetta Spacecraft Ends Its Mission as It Flings Itself Into a Comet | WIRED + + + + +
Skip to main content
MoreChevron
Search
Search
link banner logo
Science

An Ode to the Rosetta Spacecraft as It Flings Itself Into a Comet

Time to break out the tissues, space fans.
Rosettaimpact.jpg
ESA/ATG

Today, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will engage its thrusters for one final maneuver: a suicidal plunge toward the comet it has been orbiting for two years and chasing for a decade. After Rosetta collides with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, its systems will go dark. Scientists will never hear from it again. And eventually, as Chury's repeated treks around the Sun slowly evaporate the cosmic snowball's icy surface, Rosetta's body will completely disappear beneath the comet's gathering dust.

People are getting real weepy about it.

Is that kind of nuts? Sure. Rosetta is an aluminum box. Nobody laments the demise of their toaster. But for something that's not even three meters long (not counting those giant 32-meter solar panels), Rosetta and its even tinier companion, the Philae lander, have had an outsized impact. They had mesospherically high scientifically stakes, a soap operatic journey, and weird, anthropomorphic social media presences. So, as geeky as it is to pour emotion into a scientific instrument ... we're going to miss Rosetta.

A History of Firsts

Before this mission, no spacecraft had ever rendezvoused with a comet—let alone landed on one. There are a million reasons why that's tricky to do, but for simplicity's sake: Have you ever tried to hit a moving object by throwing something at it? Hard, no? And Rosetta had to meet up with Chury at just the right speed—slow enough to get caught up in its gravity and avoid faceplanting on the surface.

After launching in 2004, Rosetta had to whip around the inner solar system for years, repeatedly slingshotting off of Earth and Mars' gravity to get its trajectory right. "We had ambitious goals," says Rosetta's former mission manager Gerhard Schwehm, who has been involved with the mission for over 30 years. "People said we were crazy." To add to the pressure, Rosetta had to go into hibernation from June 2011 until January 2014 while it waited for Chury to get into the right spot. After sleeping for so long—it being so flipping cold hundreds of millions of miles from the Sun—Rosetta's team was genuinely concerned it might never switch back on.

For many close to Rosetta, the emotional flashpoint was that wakeup, rather than Rosetta's rendezvous with Chury. “When the signal was 18 minutes late—relative to all the guesses of people who’d worked on the mission for ten years—it was seriously distressing," says McCaughrean. "But then it came, and it was euphoria. You knew finally you had a mission.”

People outside ESA caught the Rosetta bug as well. There are songs about it, and hundreds of videos of people who have jobs and other things to do screaming "Wake up, Rosetta!" to an inanimate object in deep space. Rosetta's fans have stayed with the mission through the wakeup, the successful rendezvous, the Philae's launch and disastrously bumpy landing, and its sudden communication and eventual re-discovery. And now, to the bitter end: #CometLanding.

“The public’s engagement has been quite amazing," Mark McCaughrean, senior science advisor for ESA. "There’s nobody eating sandwiches on Rosetta, but the mission has very human concerns: water and life." That's at least partially due to the mission's unconventional social media campaign, which cast Rosetta and Philae as chatty, bantering traveling companions.

But for McCaughrean, it was important that the anthropomorphizing didn't drown out the science—it was for drawing people in, and keeping them invested. "I think we’ve redressed the balance about people’s short attention span and need for instant gratification," he says. "And that’s important. You can’t just go to Mars today because Elon says you can go. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul.”

A Future of Firsts

Rosetta's long haul is ending, but it has proved the value of extended space exploration at every point of its journey. “Learning how to fly around the comet was a masterpiece of spaceflight,” says Andrea Accomazzo, head of ESA’s solar and planetary missions division, and flight director for Rosetta. When Rosetta arrived at Chury, Accomazzo's team was flying blind. They had to infer the mass of the comet—and the velocity Rosetta needed to maintain to stay in orbit—by measuring how much the comet was perturbing Rosetta’s trajectory. Rosetta's team at ESA shared everything they learned with their collaborators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who had taught them interplanetary flight in previous years. It's all pretty kumbaya.

Which seems about right, given that Rosetta's mission is uncovering clues to humanity's history. Rosetta and Philae collected molecular oxygen that had been trapped in the ice for billions of years, which suggests that the comet must have formed someplace cold and distant, far from active stirring by larger bodies. And as for life's origins, they found carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen as well—and even the simplest amino acid, glycine. "There’s just a whole primordial soup of stuff," says McCaughrean.

But while the mission has been long, it is far from complete. Rosetta has been collecting data for two years, and scientists have analyzed only a fraction of it. And they'll get more even as Accomazzo's team pilots the craft to its final resting place. "The mission for me is all the science data that was collected," says Accomazzo, "and it's a good feeling that scientists will use them for ages."

But for now, pulling the plug on Rosetta is a difficult job. “There will be a piece of our lives that is gone," says Accomazzo. "After the landing we do have a party—otherwise it would be too depressing.” And Accomazzo is far from alone in being emotional.

Even with the distance of retirement, Schwehm compared the end of Rosetta's transmissions to a flatlining heart monitor. “We’ll never have that closure with Rosetta like we did with Philae because there’s nothing out there to take a picture,” says McCaughrean. "I think we'll see a lot of people go off into the corner for a cry when it's over."

Emma Grey Ellis is a staff writer at WIRED, specializing in internet culture and propaganda, as well as writing about planetary science and other things space-related. She graduated from Colgate University with a degree in English, and she resides in San Francisco.
Staff Writer
TopicsAsteroidsESAPhilaeRosettaspace
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/src/extractors/custom/www.newyorker.com/index.js b/src/extractors/custom/www.newyorker.com/index.js index 80ae620c..2d7975e7 100644 --- a/src/extractors/custom/www.newyorker.com/index.js +++ b/src/extractors/custom/www.newyorker.com/index.js @@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ export const NewYorkerExtractor = { domain: 'www.newyorker.com', title: { selectors: [ + 'h1[class^="content-header"]', 'h1[class^="ArticleHeader__hed"]', ['meta[name="og:title"]', 'value'], ], @@ -12,13 +13,17 @@ export const NewYorkerExtractor = { author: { selectors: [ + ['meta[name="author"]', 'value'], 'div[class^="ArticleContributors"] a[rel="author"]', 'article header div[class*="Byline__multipleContributors"]', ], }, content: { - selectors: ['main[class^="Layout__content"]'], + selectors: [ + 'article.article.main-content', + 'main[class^="Layout__content"]', + ], // Is there anything in the content you selected that needs transformed // before it's consumable content? E.g., unusual lazy loaded images @@ -31,8 +36,10 @@ export const NewYorkerExtractor = { }, date_published: { - selectors: [['meta[name="pubdate"]', 'value']], - format: 'YYYYMMDD', + selectors: [ + 'time.content-header__publish-date', + ['meta[name="pubdate"]', 'value'], + ], timezone: 'America/New_York', }, @@ -41,7 +48,7 @@ export const NewYorkerExtractor = { }, dek: { - selectors: ['h2[class^="ArticleHeader__dek"]'], + selectors: ['div.content-header__dek', 'h2[class^="ArticleHeader__dek"]'], }, next_page_url: null, diff --git a/src/extractors/custom/www.newyorker.com/index.test.js b/src/extractors/custom/www.newyorker.com/index.test.js index caf06f07..4b303989 100644 --- a/src/extractors/custom/www.newyorker.com/index.test.js +++ b/src/extractors/custom/www.newyorker.com/index.test.js @@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ describe('NewYorkerExtractor', () => { url = 'http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/hacking-cryptography-and-the-countdown-to-quantum-computing'; const html = fs.readFileSync( - './fixtures/www.newyorker.com/1557138180688.html' + './fixtures/www.newyorker.com/1611473608343.html' ); result = Mercury.parse(url, { html, fallback: false }); }); @@ -73,7 +73,7 @@ describe('NewYorkerExtractor', () => { // the article. assert.equal( lead_image_url, - 'https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097a5e8b51cf59fc4239f5/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/Hutchinson-Quantum-Computing.jpg' + 'https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097a5e8b51cf59fc4239f5/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/Hutchinson-Quantum-Computing.jpg' ); }); @@ -97,7 +97,7 @@ describe('NewYorkerExtractor', () => { // the article. assert.equal( first13, - 'In a laboratory in Shanghai, researchers work on developing a quantum computer—a new' + 'Given the recent ubiquity of cyber-scandals—Colin Powell’s stolen e-mails, Simone Biles’s leaked medical' ); }); }); @@ -109,7 +109,7 @@ describe('NewYorkerExtractor', () => { url = 'http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/05/lessons-from-my-mother'; const html = fs.readFileSync( - './fixtures/www.newyorker.com/1557145645680.html' + './fixtures/www.newyorker.com/1611475571383.html' ); result = Mercury.parse(url, { html, fallback: false }); }); diff --git a/src/extractors/custom/www.wired.com/index.js b/src/extractors/custom/www.wired.com/index.js index eabaf5ea..f3cfcf8f 100644 --- a/src/extractors/custom/www.wired.com/index.js +++ b/src/extractors/custom/www.wired.com/index.js @@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ export const WiredExtractor = { domain: 'www.wired.com', title: { selectors: [ + 'h1.content-header__hed', 'h1.post-title', // enter title selectors ], @@ -12,6 +13,7 @@ export const WiredExtractor = { author: { selectors: [ + ['meta[name="author"]', 'value'], 'a[rel="author"]', // enter author selectors ], @@ -19,6 +21,7 @@ export const WiredExtractor = { content: { selectors: [ + 'article.article.main-content', 'article.content', // enter content selectors ], @@ -34,7 +37,10 @@ export const WiredExtractor = { }, date_published: { - selectors: [['meta[itemprop="datePublished"]', 'value']], + selectors: [ + 'time.content-header__publish-date', + ['meta[itemprop="datePublished"]', 'value'], + ], }, lead_image_url: { diff --git a/src/extractors/custom/www.wired.com/index.test.js b/src/extractors/custom/www.wired.com/index.test.js index 3ea68823..49c3444c 100644 --- a/src/extractors/custom/www.wired.com/index.test.js +++ b/src/extractors/custom/www.wired.com/index.test.js @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ describe('WiredExtractor', () => { url = 'https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ode-rosetta-spacecraft-going-die-comet/'; const html = fs.readFileSync( - './fixtures/www.wired.com/1475256747028.html' + './fixtures/www.wired.com/1611475755063.html' ); result = Mercury.parse(url, { html, fallback: false }); }); @@ -62,7 +62,7 @@ describe('WiredExtractor', () => { // Update these values with the expected values from // the article. - assert.equal(date_published, '2016-09-30T07:00:12.000Z'); + assert.equal(date_published.split('T')[0], '2016-09-30'); }); it('returns the lead_image_url', async () => { @@ -74,7 +74,7 @@ describe('WiredExtractor', () => { // the article. assert.equal( lead_image_url, - 'https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rosetta_impact-1-1200x630.jpg' + 'https://media.wired.com/photos/5926b676af95806129f50602/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/Rosetta_impact-1.jpg' ); }); @@ -98,7 +98,7 @@ describe('WiredExtractor', () => { // the article. assert.equal( first13, - 'Today, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft will engage its thrusters for one' + "Today, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will engage its thrusters for one" ); }); });