Seventy years ago today, Poland suffered invasion. Today, the United States shut down its Eastern European missile defense program. This act could mean one of two things:

1. A giant middle-finger to Poland and other nations like Czech Republic; to simply let them twist in the wind if or when Russia decides to roll on in.

2. A bargaining chip with Russia; Something we can diplomatically point to as “See? We lowered this defense because we trust you. Help us kick ass militarily/economically/etc against Iran/Korea/China.”

I don’t know if I can give our administration credit for the second scenario, but it certainly is easier to swallow even if it’s not entirely easy to digest. If the second situation holds, it has likely already been used for negotiation for under-the-table dealings with Russia. What would we have to gain from weakening our position on pure speculation? Maybe that’s why I don’t feel comfortable giving this administration credit: I can imagine it being so poor at diplomacy to try it to see if it worked.

The Kindle from Amazon is a super-cool device and I want one simply because it’s a gadget. For now, I’ve got my iPod Touch though and that’s good enough for me (so no, Ame I don’t really want one!). Also, I say Kindle, but I really mean all e-book reader devices. The portability is amazing, and, I know I hate the environment, but the paper-savings are enormous (a quick sidebar though – for all the R&D placed into the Kindle, is there really a net-gain?).

I’ve not used or even seen a Kindle in person, so all I have to go on are reviews and hearsay, but I hear the display technology is what puts it over the top: it looks and receives light like real paper with real ink on it. The only problem is there’s one page and, for all intents and purposes, nailed to the device.

The device I want is very simple to imagine. In short, it is the only book you will ever own. For the purposes of this discussion, I will describe my favorite book and backtrack later – it’ll make more sense this way, I promise.

Imagine a nice-sized hardcover book at about 250 pages – not too thick, not too daunting, but just right. Each of these pages is a double-sided version of the Kindle’s superpaper technology and looks, feels, bends, and even smells exactly like paper (extra credit for bits of pulp thrown in). You can start any book you like on page one, and flip through to the end on page 250 without pushing a single button.

Well, not quite no buttons, but close. You can select which book you want to read, by using the touch interface on the front cover. To keep the aesthetic value of this book high, no touch-screens as we know them like on an iPod, but an optical projection with adequate sensors to detect what choices  are made (very much like those laser projected keyboards out there). Storing text is trivial and flash memory is ridiculously cheap and falling dramatically on top of it, so space for books is effectively unlimited.

Some questions immediately arise though. First, what if the book you want to read is not exactly 250 pages? The weasel answer is of course, “it’s up to you,” but there are some options: Have the book’s software typeset the text for you; shrink or enlarge the text to fit the space; or if there’s more than 250 pages in the book and you reach the end, place a bookmark and simply close and re-open the book to an earlier physical page and resume reading (which leads into the next point, even).

Physical bookmarks are problematic. If the text of the book can fit in those 250 pages and that is the only text you read, then a bookmark will suit you fine. You can place a bookmark, close the book, and resume reading later – just like a low-tech book today. If you change texts, the bookmark will be on the wrong page – or will it? Again, options: Changing texts when a physical bookmark is present will simply move the words to accommodate the bookmark, so when the book is opened, the last page you were on (or even the first page, if you never opened it before) will show; Ignore the bookmark and display the text to whatever page is opened – this seems a more likely and elegant solution. To elaborate on this second point, the book likely doesn’t care where you put a bookmark – it has no way of knowing what a physical bookmark is. What the book does know is on what page you were last. I submit that is all that matters to the reader; picking up where you left off.

That’s just my book though. Yours might be a paperback, or be like an unabridged War and Peace. The number of pages doesn’t even matter – it could be as few as one or as many as 10,000. The important part is there should be pages you can turn and touch. The interface and storage don’t necessarily have to be in the book itself, but certainly helps for portability. One possible scenario is the book has no interface or long-term storage, but simply an antenna with which to receive the appropriate data.

I said it would be the only book you will ever own, but really, where’s the fun in that? Sometimes you want a large hardcover, other times a magazine format. Maybe you want to scatter your house with them so you can pick up and read wherever you are. Portability is a selling point to be sure, but hey, “what if?”

I’ll leave marketing departments and focus groups to the name of this device, and you know it’ll be something stupid like Kindle. Yes, I said it. The name Kindle is terrible. You’re Amazon of all things! You’re named for a rainforest! Pick a tree that grows in the Amazon Rainforest and make sure you pick a cool sounding one! That’s enough rant for now, but I want my damn book!

First, I’ll let you get up to speed here, as well a short summary. A Lagrangian Point is a point where you can be between the Earth and the Moon and not have the pull of either body’s gravity take you to them. There are a handful of them in the Earth-Moon System, and they are not unique to Earth either. Anywhere there are orbiting bodies, there are these gravitational “back-eddies.” These Lagrangian points are cool because you can just sit there and be pulled along with the Earth and Moon and not have to worry about falling to either of them. They each pull you an equal amount and you just float.

A Lagrangian Point is an ideal location for a micro-gravity semi-stationary space platform of significant size. On this platform, you could have a factory churning out space-ships and launching them from there. If you could take advantage of a zero escape velocity, think of all the cool stuff we could put in a spacecraft not mostly dedicated simply to getting to space, and focus on the stuff for being in space.

Getting into outer space from Earth is no small feat because you have to push so very hard. Most of the volume of a spacecraft launched from Earth is devoted to getting to orbit and beyond.

There’s a major problem with all of this though - there always is, isn’t there? I don’t see this discussed whenever I happen upon Lagrangian Points out there on the Intertubes, but what happens when the mass of whatever placed in the Lagrangian Point is no longer neglibile? It changes the system. The Lagrangian Point for a two-body system will move. Intuitively, to save energy, you would simply move the space-station to the new point. Doing so would move the point further, and continuing to move would be like chasing your own tail. The more prudent solution would be to maintain the relative position between the two bodies and hope for the best.

Then again, a non-negligible mass is nothing small. To be considered significant, the mass of such an object would be so large, that technology may have advanced enough to build a structure of such a size that we could live on it and move to wherever we wanted. Planets be damned!

“‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun”
Tom Lehrer 

*It turns out I just had to read further, and I’m not the only one to think of the problem of stability. Honestly, I’m not surprised – far more and smarter people than me are astronomers and physicists, and this is their bread and butter. Small observational platforms already exist in specialized orbits around other Lagrangian Points