Mr Potty Mouth AC. Funny thing is, I did read it, in fact I read a number of different things on the subject, both before and since.
It actually seems like a pretty good muck-up and it is POSSIBLE it isn't all the fault of ServerBeach. OTOH these sorts of places are FAR too lax and ready to crap on their clients than they should be. Remember, there aren't hard and fast time limits on action for this kind of thing, nor is it necessary for a provider like SoftBeach to be perfect. In fact they could have simply passed the request on down to Edublog and probably been fine. There needs to be some balance of consideration between one set of interests and another.
Ultimately the DMCA is just badly written but even so this kind of thing shouldn't happen.
When you shoot 14 yr old girls for what they say or burn people alive for what other people said, then you are hateful and repulsive and no longer deserve to be part of the dialog or enjoy the protection of society, PERIOD.
As soon as it becomes OK to tell people what they can and cannot say we are ALL effectively enslaved. Those who cannot see that fall into Mr Franklin's "those would would give up their freedom for a little security" who "deserve neither".
Yes, those were amazing predictions, except of course anyone with a modest understanding of technology found them so unremarkable as to be hardly worth the name 'predictions'. There are of course many idiots out there who will say this or that was wrong, but I don't see how its remarkable at all to say that "gosh this relatively straightforward engineering problem will be solved (to degree N) in 10 years". Go back and read Ralf 124C41+ or watch Metropolis, etc and consider real prognostication.
Where Kurzweil and pretty much all of these people go wrong is in thinking they have any handle on where we go with things or what their effects will be. [i]Spiritual Machines[/i] isn't about when we'll have speech recognition in a cell phone, that was just Moore's Law sliderule stuff. It is about thinking machines, and what we will make, why, and what we will do with it. Mr Kurzweil has no more insight into that than I do, or probably half the readers here do. His ideas on social and biomedical issues seem completely off to me, and they are definitely just far enough out there and vague enough that we can't really measure their impendingness or lack thereof. I don't think this is especially deliberate mind you. I just think it is the pitfall and necessity of any prognosticator of this type. They're essentially selling dreams and ideas, not any sort of insight into the future.
Meh. Kurzweil obviously did some good work, but it seems far too generous to say that he INVENTED any of those things. I'd note as well that he's not made any further contributions to any of those fields. Kurzweil is a smart guy, and a good engineer, but he's one amongst millions. I say more power to him if he can get people to listen to him, but it doesn't change the fact that his prognostications and observations are just not special.
520 million years, or a good ways into the Atdabanian Stage. At that point trilobites have been around for at least 6 million years already. Surely they had fairly sophisticated arthropod brains. I dunno, this seems a little late, the primary radiation in Euarthropoda almost certainly came before this guy lived. In any case the systematics of arthropods are a mess.
I'd be less kind, but yeah. This stuff gets a reaction, so he says it. Nothing he ever says is really any more solid than Nostradamus. Its all comfortably 30 years hence and arguably the signs are on the wall. Of course "the cloud" (if you will) expands our 'brain capacity', so did clay tablets and hieroglyphics. This kind of thing is just pablum, value free nonsense. Crap I wish I could get payed 1/10th what this guy gets to spout out garbage like this. What a racket.
The usual combination of overoptimistic linear extrapolation of current tech trends with an utter lack of appreciation for their impacts on society. Not that anyone else has ever managed to do much better, maybe Hugo Gurnsback, maybe.
Oh, don't be so sure that the world will simply continue the way it started on that score. People want stuff that works. That doesn't mean it all has to come from some walled garden.
Eh, most people just don't want to build their lives around their PCs and never really did. The 90's were the golden age of the desktop machine, we went from Amiga 1000's to Pentium 4's and everyone and his brother had to have one. That will never be the case again. I do think eventually the basic desktop will vanish into the cloud, and into tablets, TVs, and phones, or whatever gadgets replace those. The generation that's just getting into school now, they're as at home in the world of iphones and ipads as today's college kids are into nettops and game consoles. My friend's 3 yr old is 3x better at messing with a tablet than any adult. He's 5 now and he makes us all look like idiots. He barely even knows what a keyboard is...
I think, currently at least, what you're describing is more of a 'desktop' machine, not a workstation. Then the question is what did Soulskill mean when he said "desktop", did he mean "cheap commodity non-portable machines" or did he mean "ALL single-user machines with a console that aren't portable"? If the former, then I agree, they'll slowly be relegated to being no more than docking stations ultimately. OTOH if people are talking about actual WORKSTATIONS? Yeah, those aren't really using laptop parts. I mean when I do a build I need 8 gigs of RAM, lots of fast drive space, and 4 fast cores. None of that has squat to do with laptop parts. Laptop chipsets, processors, memory, and disk drives simply aren't going to meet my requirements. At best maybe I could get by with a very high end laptop, but I can easily buy an equally powerful workstation and an 'ultrabook' for quite a bit less money than that... Now, one day maybe I'll be able to easily just farm out the number crunching and storage to say AWS or something, but what about my displays? I've got 2 23" 1920x1024 LCDs on my desk and that's one place where no mobile device is going anytime soon either. Obviously if we can put all the CPU power out in the cloud I can end up with a thin client, which could be eventually the same hardware that goes into a tablet basically, but I think we're a good 10 years from that being the norm. Maybe I wouldn't try building an empire around commodity workstation or desktop hardware right now, but its not a closed chapter, and I suspect there's always going to be a niche for stand-alone machines.
First of all you probably HAVE measured a lot of it. QM is about 'interactions', not some sort of conscious observation. Secondly there's nothing at all odd or wrong with saying that "everything is in superposition with everything else". The ENTIRE UNIVERSE can be described by a single quantum wave form. There is ultimately in QM no such thing as "this thing" and "that thing". You can't even assert that any given electron or proton is a 'certain one' because they are all indistinguishable. Notionally there are many electrons in the universe, but you can as easily assume there is exactly one electron, so what exactly is it that is or isn't in 'superposition' with everything else, or not?
Truly, 99.99% of the way we think about the world is simply not fundamentally applicable to the quantum world. So what is or isn't sophistry when the very concepts of locality, causality, identity, and existence don't apply to the regime we're talking about? This why Feynman said "nobody understands quantum mechanics". He wasn't kidding.
interpretation. In that interpretation there is no need to consider the question of 'observers'. Quantum states are relative, and to say that a waveform has 'collapsed' is just a statement about its relationship with certain other parts of the system. Thus it is irrelevant that the cat could 'observe itself', this is surely true, but then it is only alive or dead in relationship to itself (and the rest of the inside of the box). To observers outside the box it is in a superposition because that is how they are relating to the part of the system inside the box. Eventually probability dictates that information will leak out and the outside observers relationship to the state inside the box will evolve, they will see the waveform collapse and the cat will become definitely alive or dead to them as well. Note that again this is not just a way of saying that the people outside the box "don't know yet", there are ACTUAL experiments they can perform who's results differ between "don't know" and "waveform hasn't collapsed" (again, Bell Inequalities).
What bothered Einstein wasn't the superposition of dead and alive cats, it was the random nature of the collapse of the wave function in the first place. Einstein couldn't abide the existence of quantum statistics. He was opposed to the existence of the ENSEMBLE of cats. He would say that "God does not play dice" means that the universe is totally deterministic. He was in fact advocating for the existence of hidden variables which would restore causality to QM. Unfortunately for the good doctor Bell removed that possibility from the table decisively. There are no hidden variables, God does indeed figuratively 'roll the dice' and there is no way EVEN IN PRINCIPLE to know if the cat will live or die, even if you had the entire state of the quantum waveform of the whole universe and enough computing power to solve it for the cat's state, that state is still 50% dead and 50% alive, not one or the other.
The inside of the box is a system, it is isolated from the outside of the box. It is irrelevant that parts of the system inside the box can measure other parts. Quantum superposition is a relative state, as far as the insides of the box are concerned there is no superposition, but to the observers OUTSIDE, until they exchange information with the inside, the superposition exists. Moreover these superpositions are NOT just artifacts of insufficient knowledge. Bell effectively proved this back in the 60's, though it seems to have taken a few decades for the full implications to dawn on the physics community.
Actually there is again no discussion of an "internal world". That would be a type of 'hidden variable' which is again excluded by Bell and this has been experimentally demonstrated, ther eare no hidden variables. Thus there is no "hidden [...] world that follows reasonable laws". It is indeed "weird all the way down" and we have experimentally verified this.
Of course the REAL thing you guys are all debating here is that it is (supposedly) impossible to create the degree of decoupling of the inside and outside of the box that would be necessary to remain the cat in the superposition for any finite length of time. Of course this is proving to be a rather shaky proposition, as we have now demonstrated superpositions of assemblies of billions of atoms. Albeit these things are much smaller than a cat, but they are nevertheless large enough to (barely) discern with the human eye. How unlikely is it that we will perfect techniques to create cat sized superpositions? I would bet heavily on it being feasible, if difficult.
Untrue, and in fact the WHOLE POINT OF THIS ARTICLE is actually to describe why the 'classic' interpretation of the Uncertainty Principle doesn't work, because it doesn't explain how you can perform certain types of measurements on a set of entangled quantum states. This would not be possible if the "changing the state" interpretation was correct. In fact what is being established here is a more exact and in some sense looser type of Uncertainty Principle. Much like Newtonian Mechanics at the limit are indistinguishable from GR, so Heisenberg's UP is at the limit virtually indistinguishable from this new version they ARE different. The whole cat thing is just an illustration of ways in which they are different. Schoedinger's Cat is a lot like in classical physics accelerating something to relativistic velocities, the old-fashioned UP breaks down, we CAN observe some properties of the cat without deciding if it is alive or dead. In the end though once we DO know that, there's no going back, you'll never observe the dead cat and then the alive cat. That is still forbidden (technically just fantastically unlikely).
This was back in the days of Kernel Version 0.99. Believe it or not at THAT time (1993) you had basically very few choices in OS on servers. You could use some proprietary Unix (like Hitachi) but only on that OEM's hardware. You could use Netware of course, and you could use one of a very short list of other *nixes (Xenix being one of the major ones IIRC. Linuxware was also just then appearing). I recall my first commercial use was setting up machines for a guy to run a course on TCP/IP since there really wasn't anything else around you could get for free that would do it well enough to bother with.
From there I helped set up some of the early 90's local ISPs. We set up quite a few linux servers. It worked and it was free and you could do a lot with it.
Yeah, one of the things most people don't really understand is how SMALL the difference between these different trajectories is. At the 'top of the hill' (the energetic midpoint between Earth and Moon) the velocity of the stack is VERY low. In other words TLI JUST barely gives Apollo enough energy to coast up to the point where the Moon starts pulling you down the other side. That's why at a certain point direct abort could be accomplished with a fairly small burn, and why a free return could be either around the Moon or a very similar trajectory that just fell short of making it over the hump. IIRC the basic problem was that A) they were already past the most ideal point for a direct abort (already starting down towards the Moon) and the spacecraft would have to sort of 'hang there' for a good amount of time, which counter intuitively makes the longer swing around the Moon quicker. Then there was of course the question of whether or not they could use the SM's engine at all, etc. NASA was certainly well aware of their trajectory options...
Exactly, the whole TLI and Lunar transit process was designed to maximize the chances that the spacecraft would return to Earth by default. Nobody had to 'invent' anything. Truthfully the family of orbits that arise naturally out of the low energy Earth/Moon transfer largely have this property. Assuming your TLI burn works at all you're pretty much guaranteed to come back on flip side. Maybe someone from MIT flagged that option Kranz, but it sure wasn't some thing someone pulled out of their ass at the last minute. The question was only which option made sense, direct abort or a swing around the far side.
Yeah, I don't know, as you say the 'burning water' is 'probably' not a fracking problem. I'm not sure 'probably' is the right adjective there, but there is uncertainty. Still, there have been other issues as well, other types of contamination and things like air quality issues too, which have been passed off. It is true that nothing can be absolutely proven to be fracking related except in a couple rare cases, but there certainly are correlations that warrant more looking at.
Otherwise, yeah, making sure the regs are good enough and there's enough regulatory infrastructure to keep up with it is the biggie. This is where Bush was such a horrible administration. They absolutely gutted the regulatory agencies and put cronies from industry in charge of everything wherever they could. This is a largely silent issue that the press doesn't talk about, but the Obama administration has been doing a MASSIVE amount of work trying to undo the damage. Of course they're also vulnerable to regulatory capture, so it is a very uneven and slow process.
Fracking right now is very poorly regulated, that's obvious. I don't know that all fracking is going to cause problems, maybe not, but our actual knowledge of what goes on deep below our feet is exceedingly slim. You might want to do some research into the whole subject of disposal wells and related issues too. While disposal and fracking aren't ENTIRELY equivalent things they are related and certainly if you are finding that disposal is a process fraught with contamination issues then you have to ask yourself exactly how unlikely is it that fracked gas well, which by definition increases permeability in the surrounding formations, are also a significant problem.
The real core issue with the 'anti-science claims' story is that it is focusing on one specific aspect of the whole process and one specific issue. There are a LARGE number of issues that surround fracking. To say that it is fine because nobody has proven that this one specific set of issues are a big deal is disingenuous because that leaves a dozen other issues that are far less contentious and where time and time again experience has shown that gas production is a dirty and environmentally damaging process.
My perception of the whole thing is that the gas industry has largely achieved capture of the regulatory process. They get pretty much what they want, their data and assurances are all taken at face value by the regulators, the documentation etc are all quite lax, and when they do run into some issue their pet Congresscritters run right in and give them what they want without proper consideration for externalities and other reasonable considerations. The gas producers are thus very poorly regulated and every unknown is by default assumed to conform to their self-serving assumptions. This may be changing now, to some extent, and it is high time there was balance.
Its easy to pass off all the examples of polluted water and air is all. "Oh, well, you Mr Treehugger guy, your well was skanky all along, you're just blaming us for it, PROVE that you actually had drinkable water last year."
I mean, yes, there's annecdote, but there's also a lot of plain old evidence that fraking in contaminating acquifers. Just because some geologists say "gosh that's unlikely" means jack. They can't prove much about what the actual state of these different strata buried 1000's of feet deep actually is either. It is all guesswork and counter-claims on all sides at very best.
Still, when my family gets sick and my water burns and it starts right after you frak your gas wells, ummmmmmm, gosh, yeah, I'm just biased if I blame it on the fraking! ROFLMAO!
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Mr Potty Mouth AC. Funny thing is, I did read it, in fact I read a number of different things on the subject, both before and since.
It actually seems like a pretty good muck-up and it is POSSIBLE it isn't all the fault of ServerBeach. OTOH these sorts of places are FAR too lax and ready to crap on their clients than they should be. Remember, there aren't hard and fast time limits on action for this kind of thing, nor is it necessary for a provider like SoftBeach to be perfect. In fact they could have simply passed the request on down to Edublog and probably been fine. There needs to be some balance of consideration between one set of interests and another.
Ultimately the DMCA is just badly written but even so this kind of thing shouldn't happen.
Or are most of them just total crap? Frankly I think people need to sue a few of them real hard on this and lets see them cut the crap.
When you shoot 14 yr old girls for what they say or burn people alive for what other people said, then you are hateful and repulsive and no longer deserve to be part of the dialog or enjoy the protection of society, PERIOD.
As soon as it becomes OK to tell people what they can and cannot say we are ALL effectively enslaved. Those who cannot see that fall into Mr Franklin's "those would would give up their freedom for a little security" who "deserve neither".
Yes, those were amazing predictions, except of course anyone with a modest understanding of technology found them so unremarkable as to be hardly worth the name 'predictions'. There are of course many idiots out there who will say this or that was wrong, but I don't see how its remarkable at all to say that "gosh this relatively straightforward engineering problem will be solved (to degree N) in 10 years". Go back and read Ralf 124C41+ or watch Metropolis, etc and consider real prognostication.
Where Kurzweil and pretty much all of these people go wrong is in thinking they have any handle on where we go with things or what their effects will be. [i]Spiritual Machines[/i] isn't about when we'll have speech recognition in a cell phone, that was just Moore's Law sliderule stuff. It is about thinking machines, and what we will make, why, and what we will do with it. Mr Kurzweil has no more insight into that than I do, or probably half the readers here do. His ideas on social and biomedical issues seem completely off to me, and they are definitely just far enough out there and vague enough that we can't really measure their impendingness or lack thereof. I don't think this is especially deliberate mind you. I just think it is the pitfall and necessity of any prognosticator of this type. They're essentially selling dreams and ideas, not any sort of insight into the future.
Meh. Kurzweil obviously did some good work, but it seems far too generous to say that he INVENTED any of those things. I'd note as well that he's not made any further contributions to any of those fields. Kurzweil is a smart guy, and a good engineer, but he's one amongst millions. I say more power to him if he can get people to listen to him, but it doesn't change the fact that his prognostications and observations are just not special.
520 million years, or a good ways into the Atdabanian Stage. At that point trilobites have been around for at least 6 million years already. Surely they had fairly sophisticated arthropod brains. I dunno, this seems a little late, the primary radiation in Euarthropoda almost certainly came before this guy lived. In any case the systematics of arthropods are a mess.
I'd be less kind, but yeah. This stuff gets a reaction, so he says it. Nothing he ever says is really any more solid than Nostradamus. Its all comfortably 30 years hence and arguably the signs are on the wall. Of course "the cloud" (if you will) expands our 'brain capacity', so did clay tablets and hieroglyphics. This kind of thing is just pablum, value free nonsense. Crap I wish I could get payed 1/10th what this guy gets to spout out garbage like this. What a racket.
The usual combination of overoptimistic linear extrapolation of current tech trends with an utter lack of appreciation for their impacts on society. Not that anyone else has ever managed to do much better, maybe Hugo Gurnsback, maybe.
Oh, don't be so sure that the world will simply continue the way it started on that score. People want stuff that works. That doesn't mean it all has to come from some walled garden.
Eh, most people just don't want to build their lives around their PCs and never really did. The 90's were the golden age of the desktop machine, we went from Amiga 1000's to Pentium 4's and everyone and his brother had to have one. That will never be the case again. I do think eventually the basic desktop will vanish into the cloud, and into tablets, TVs, and phones, or whatever gadgets replace those. The generation that's just getting into school now, they're as at home in the world of iphones and ipads as today's college kids are into nettops and game consoles. My friend's 3 yr old is 3x better at messing with a tablet than any adult. He's 5 now and he makes us all look like idiots. He barely even knows what a keyboard is...
I think, currently at least, what you're describing is more of a 'desktop' machine, not a workstation. Then the question is what did Soulskill mean when he said "desktop", did he mean "cheap commodity non-portable machines" or did he mean "ALL single-user machines with a console that aren't portable"? If the former, then I agree, they'll slowly be relegated to being no more than docking stations ultimately.
OTOH if people are talking about actual WORKSTATIONS? Yeah, those aren't really using laptop parts. I mean when I do a build I need 8 gigs of RAM, lots of fast drive space, and 4 fast cores. None of that has squat to do with laptop parts. Laptop chipsets, processors, memory, and disk drives simply aren't going to meet my requirements. At best maybe I could get by with a very high end laptop, but I can easily buy an equally powerful workstation and an 'ultrabook' for quite a bit less money than that...
Now, one day maybe I'll be able to easily just farm out the number crunching and storage to say AWS or something, but what about my displays? I've got 2 23" 1920x1024 LCDs on my desk and that's one place where no mobile device is going anytime soon either. Obviously if we can put all the CPU power out in the cloud I can end up with a thin client, which could be eventually the same hardware that goes into a tablet basically, but I think we're a good 10 years from that being the norm.
Maybe I wouldn't try building an empire around commodity workstation or desktop hardware right now, but its not a closed chapter, and I suspect there's always going to be a niche for stand-alone machines.
First of all you probably HAVE measured a lot of it. QM is about 'interactions', not some sort of conscious observation. Secondly there's nothing at all odd or wrong with saying that "everything is in superposition with everything else". The ENTIRE UNIVERSE can be described by a single quantum wave form. There is ultimately in QM no such thing as "this thing" and "that thing". You can't even assert that any given electron or proton is a 'certain one' because they are all indistinguishable. Notionally there are many electrons in the universe, but you can as easily assume there is exactly one electron, so what exactly is it that is or isn't in 'superposition' with everything else, or not?
Truly, 99.99% of the way we think about the world is simply not fundamentally applicable to the quantum world. So what is or isn't sophistry when the very concepts of locality, causality, identity, and existence don't apply to the regime we're talking about? This why Feynman said "nobody understands quantum mechanics". He wasn't kidding.
interpretation. In that interpretation there is no need to consider the question of 'observers'. Quantum states are relative, and to say that a waveform has 'collapsed' is just a statement about its relationship with certain other parts of the system. Thus it is irrelevant that the cat could 'observe itself', this is surely true, but then it is only alive or dead in relationship to itself (and the rest of the inside of the box). To observers outside the box it is in a superposition because that is how they are relating to the part of the system inside the box. Eventually probability dictates that information will leak out and the outside observers relationship to the state inside the box will evolve, they will see the waveform collapse and the cat will become definitely alive or dead to them as well. Note that again this is not just a way of saying that the people outside the box "don't know yet", there are ACTUAL experiments they can perform who's results differ between "don't know" and "waveform hasn't collapsed" (again, Bell Inequalities).
What bothered Einstein wasn't the superposition of dead and alive cats, it was the random nature of the collapse of the wave function in the first place. Einstein couldn't abide the existence of quantum statistics. He was opposed to the existence of the ENSEMBLE of cats. He would say that "God does not play dice" means that the universe is totally deterministic. He was in fact advocating for the existence of hidden variables which would restore causality to QM. Unfortunately for the good doctor Bell removed that possibility from the table decisively. There are no hidden variables, God does indeed figuratively 'roll the dice' and there is no way EVEN IN PRINCIPLE to know if the cat will live or die, even if you had the entire state of the quantum waveform of the whole universe and enough computing power to solve it for the cat's state, that state is still 50% dead and 50% alive, not one or the other.
That was good, you should post from an account! ;)
The inside of the box is a system, it is isolated from the outside of the box. It is irrelevant that parts of the system inside the box can measure other parts. Quantum superposition is a relative state, as far as the insides of the box are concerned there is no superposition, but to the observers OUTSIDE, until they exchange information with the inside, the superposition exists. Moreover these superpositions are NOT just artifacts of insufficient knowledge. Bell effectively proved this back in the 60's, though it seems to have taken a few decades for the full implications to dawn on the physics community.
Actually there is again no discussion of an "internal world". That would be a type of 'hidden variable' which is again excluded by Bell and this has been experimentally demonstrated, ther eare no hidden variables. Thus there is no "hidden [...] world that follows reasonable laws". It is indeed "weird all the way down" and we have experimentally verified this.
Of course the REAL thing you guys are all debating here is that it is (supposedly) impossible to create the degree of decoupling of the inside and outside of the box that would be necessary to remain the cat in the superposition for any finite length of time. Of course this is proving to be a rather shaky proposition, as we have now demonstrated superpositions of assemblies of billions of atoms. Albeit these things are much smaller than a cat, but they are nevertheless large enough to (barely) discern with the human eye. How unlikely is it that we will perfect techniques to create cat sized superpositions? I would bet heavily on it being feasible, if difficult.
Untrue, and in fact the WHOLE POINT OF THIS ARTICLE is actually to describe why the 'classic' interpretation of the Uncertainty Principle doesn't work, because it doesn't explain how you can perform certain types of measurements on a set of entangled quantum states. This would not be possible if the "changing the state" interpretation was correct. In fact what is being established here is a more exact and in some sense looser type of Uncertainty Principle. Much like Newtonian Mechanics at the limit are indistinguishable from GR, so Heisenberg's UP is at the limit virtually indistinguishable from this new version they ARE different. The whole cat thing is just an illustration of ways in which they are different. Schoedinger's Cat is a lot like in classical physics accelerating something to relativistic velocities, the old-fashioned UP breaks down, we CAN observe some properties of the cat without deciding if it is alive or dead. In the end though once we DO know that, there's no going back, you'll never observe the dead cat and then the alive cat. That is still forbidden (technically just fantastically unlikely).
BEYOND not funny. Pretty much about as not funny as Buzzard Feed.
Gosh, I could sell tickets to this cat fight! ;)
This was back in the days of Kernel Version 0.99. Believe it or not at THAT time (1993) you had basically very few choices in OS on servers. You could use some proprietary Unix (like Hitachi) but only on that OEM's hardware. You could use Netware of course, and you could use one of a very short list of other *nixes (Xenix being one of the major ones IIRC. Linuxware was also just then appearing). I recall my first commercial use was setting up machines for a guy to run a course on TCP/IP since there really wasn't anything else around you could get for free that would do it well enough to bother with.
From there I helped set up some of the early 90's local ISPs. We set up quite a few linux servers. It worked and it was free and you could do a lot with it.
Yeah, one of the things most people don't really understand is how SMALL the difference between these different trajectories is. At the 'top of the hill' (the energetic midpoint between Earth and Moon) the velocity of the stack is VERY low. In other words TLI JUST barely gives Apollo enough energy to coast up to the point where the Moon starts pulling you down the other side. That's why at a certain point direct abort could be accomplished with a fairly small burn, and why a free return could be either around the Moon or a very similar trajectory that just fell short of making it over the hump. IIRC the basic problem was that A) they were already past the most ideal point for a direct abort (already starting down towards the Moon) and the spacecraft would have to sort of 'hang there' for a good amount of time, which counter intuitively makes the longer swing around the Moon quicker. Then there was of course the question of whether or not they could use the SM's engine at all, etc. NASA was certainly well aware of their trajectory options...
Exactly, the whole TLI and Lunar transit process was designed to maximize the chances that the spacecraft would return to Earth by default. Nobody had to 'invent' anything. Truthfully the family of orbits that arise naturally out of the low energy Earth/Moon transfer largely have this property. Assuming your TLI burn works at all you're pretty much guaranteed to come back on flip side. Maybe someone from MIT flagged that option Kranz, but it sure wasn't some thing someone pulled out of their ass at the last minute. The question was only which option made sense, direct abort or a swing around the far side.
Yeah, I don't know, as you say the 'burning water' is 'probably' not a fracking problem. I'm not sure 'probably' is the right adjective there, but there is uncertainty. Still, there have been other issues as well, other types of contamination and things like air quality issues too, which have been passed off. It is true that nothing can be absolutely proven to be fracking related except in a couple rare cases, but there certainly are correlations that warrant more looking at.
Otherwise, yeah, making sure the regs are good enough and there's enough regulatory infrastructure to keep up with it is the biggie. This is where Bush was such a horrible administration. They absolutely gutted the regulatory agencies and put cronies from industry in charge of everything wherever they could. This is a largely silent issue that the press doesn't talk about, but the Obama administration has been doing a MASSIVE amount of work trying to undo the damage. Of course they're also vulnerable to regulatory capture, so it is a very uneven and slow process.
Fracking right now is very poorly regulated, that's obvious. I don't know that all fracking is going to cause problems, maybe not, but our actual knowledge of what goes on deep below our feet is exceedingly slim. You might want to do some research into the whole subject of disposal wells and related issues too. While disposal and fracking aren't ENTIRELY equivalent things they are related and certainly if you are finding that disposal is a process fraught with contamination issues then you have to ask yourself exactly how unlikely is it that fracked gas well, which by definition increases permeability in the surrounding formations, are also a significant problem.
The real core issue with the 'anti-science claims' story is that it is focusing on one specific aspect of the whole process and one specific issue. There are a LARGE number of issues that surround fracking. To say that it is fine because nobody has proven that this one specific set of issues are a big deal is disingenuous because that leaves a dozen other issues that are far less contentious and where time and time again experience has shown that gas production is a dirty and environmentally damaging process.
My perception of the whole thing is that the gas industry has largely achieved capture of the regulatory process. They get pretty much what they want, their data and assurances are all taken at face value by the regulators, the documentation etc are all quite lax, and when they do run into some issue their pet Congresscritters run right in and give them what they want without proper consideration for externalities and other reasonable considerations. The gas producers are thus very poorly regulated and every unknown is by default assumed to conform to their self-serving assumptions. This may be changing now, to some extent, and it is high time there was balance.
Its easy to pass off all the examples of polluted water and air is all. "Oh, well, you Mr Treehugger guy, your well was skanky all along, you're just blaming us for it, PROVE that you actually had drinkable water last year."
I mean, yes, there's annecdote, but there's also a lot of plain old evidence that fraking in contaminating acquifers. Just because some geologists say "gosh that's unlikely" means jack. They can't prove much about what the actual state of these different strata buried 1000's of feet deep actually is either. It is all guesswork and counter-claims on all sides at very best.
Still, when my family gets sick and my water burns and it starts right after you frak your gas wells, ummmmmmm, gosh, yeah, I'm just biased if I blame it on the fraking! ROFLMAO!