35 years and still running (I had a 25 year old Toyota which did the same). What happened to us engineers? Where did we go wrong?
Spirit lasted six years on Mars; Opportunity is nine years and counting. That's a minimum of six years spent rolling around in the sand on a planet with nighttime temperatures well below freezing, without any maintenance. And NASA built two of them. Granted, that was ten years ago, but Curiosity is doing pretty well so far.
There's no reason why engineers, American, Japanese, or otherwise, can't build something that will last for decades under hellish conditions, if affordability is less important than durability. And they build stuff like this all the time - it's just that most consumer products (especially electronics) are relative crap, because there's no incentive for them to last forever. Who actually cares if your phone or DVD player breaks after a few years? There are also cases where it's stupid just on practical grounds to keep something around for 35 years - there certainly are computers that have lasted that long, but we usually discard computer equipment long before it stops working, simply because it's more efficient to replace it with something much faster that probably costs and weighs less too. An interplanetary probe is built to somewhat different specifications.
I'll bet that a small focused team, privately funded, will figure out a path to safe and large scale fusion before ITER does.
There are certainly many problems with the way ITER is planned - the way they've distributed the manufacturing to keep all of the member countries happy is a recipe for inefficiency - but I think you underestimate how difficult projects like this actually are. Keep in mind that ITER is actually a scaled down version of what they originally wanted to build, and an actual commercial plant would be even more massive. One article I read mentioned that ITER required 150,000 km of superconducting wire; this isn't exactly commodity hardware. There's simply no way this wasn't going to cost many billions of euros, and require the full-time efforts of thousands of people.
Perhaps Bill Gates will lead the charge.
I would love to see private investors step up to the plate, but Bill Gates' net worth is about $66 billion, and ITER is currently projected to cost around 20 billion euros, so he'd have to drop a huge chunk of his fortune on what is still only a proof-of-concept machine (actually commercializing fusion power would require many billions more). Funding biomedical research as he's been doing is relatively cheap by comparison.
The only way a small, privately financed team will figure out commercially viable fusion power is if any of the proposed "LENR"/"cold fusion" schemes turns out to be successful. Obviously it would be great if this were to happen, but I'm not holding my breath.
Can someone with ADD learn to focus without drugs? I don't know.
Some can. I can't take stimulants because they send my blood pressure through the roof (to the point where I feel physically uncomfortable) and tend to result in wild mood swings, especially when I tried taking a day off medication. They certainly did make it much easier to pay attention, though. When I was younger, I smoked cigarettes regularly (just several a day, at most), because nicotine also gave me intense focus. Now I stick to caffeine (which I've been addicted to since I was 15) and much milder drugs like older antidepressants. Some tasks are still a chore for me; if I tried to go back to school now I would probably go insane within a year. But I am far enough along in my career that my tasks are very specialized, and I try to structure my work in such a way that it plays to my strengths and not my weaknesses. Now I can actually work on plane flights, or sitting in airport terminals; when I was in college, I couldn't even read on the plane. Hell, I could barely read in the library.
I don't think this is a solution for everyone; my ADD is probably milder than many. But it is possible to structure your life so that it's a minor irritation rather than a constant obstacle. The problem is that so many careers lead through traditional academic education, where an otherwise intelligent person with ADD can find studying to be constant torture without cognitive enhancement. There are plenty of things I regret doing in college, but I'm still not sure if I could have graduated without coffee and cigarettes keeping my neurons going.
that's right, i just said the lord of the rings is a parable about drug addiction
Actually, I've often wondered whether Tolkein knew any opiate users - maybe WWI veterans who got hooked on morphine? I don't have any firsthand experience with them myself (aside from having my wisdom teeth removed, and Vicodin is pretty tame stuff compared to injected morphine), but the description of Gollum's cravings sounds a lot like what I've read about opiate addiction.
isn't there life in mono lake that uses Arsenic instead of Phosphorus because of the harsh conditions?
No, this has been pretty thoroughly debunked by now. There are fundamental chemical reasons why it was very unlikely to begin with, which have nothing to do with our supposedly naive assumptions about the nature of life, but are simply the unavoidable consequences of the basic properties of the elements.
life on Earth evolved the way it did because of the abundance of water, mild weather, our atmospheric pressure, and our gravity.
As far as we know, only the abundance of water is a prerequisite for terrestrial life. Organisms have been found thriving at anywhere from 0C to 100C and beyond, and at incredible depths in the oceans where the pressure would crush us. Microgravity may be unpleasant for complex animals, but bacteria are less picky.
There are an infinity of different ways to encode genetic information and assemble living organisms.
False - there are a finite number of stable elements, and a finite number of possible covalent chemistries. Moreover, while it is in theory possible for other types of biochemistry to exist, it is most probable that life on Mars would follow similar rules to life on Earth, i.e. CNOH-based chemistry. (Additionally, as another commenter pointed out, we have no evidence for other mechanisms.) What Venter hasn't made clear in any of the articles I've read is whether he expects that any Martian life would share a common ancestor with Earth life. If he isn't operating on this assumption, than two other assumptions fall apart: a) that the structure of Martian genetic material would be so similar as to permit DNA sequencing, and b) that the resulting sequence would be interpretable in the same way as Earth DNA, to the point of being able to reconstruct a cell. The latter point in particular is simply insane if you assume independent origins.
"“The impulse towards intolerance and violence may initially be focused on the West, but over time it cannot be contained. The same impulses toward extremism are used to justify war between Sunni and Shia, between tribes and clans. It leads not to strength and prosperity but to chaos. In less than two years, we have seen largely peaceful protests bring more change to Muslim-majority countries than a decade of violence. And extremists understand this. Because they have nothing to offer to improve the lives of people, violence is their only way to stay relevant. They don’t build; they only destroy. [...] The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.”
we've been stripping basic research funding to the bone, and then some.
I'm a biochemist working for the US federal government, and this is not very accurate.
What really happened was that the NIH budget grew explosively in the late 90s and early 00s, along with the government encouraging the training of new PhD students. This produced a glut of junior scientists, and the expectation that funding would continue to rise. When the economy tanked and the fiscal situation became more difficult (and Congress started passing continuing resolutions instead of real budgets), the funding was basically frozen. Obviously this has made it much more difficult to obtain funding, which is of course dismaying if you're one of those junior researchers. But it's hardly been sacrificed on the altar of fiscal prudence. In fact, the NIH has excellent bipartisan support; the Republicans have been very generous in that regard, despite their reputation.
It's possible the NIH will have to take a cut along with everyone else, but speaking as someone who depends on the NIH for funding, and really enjoys his job, I'd have a hard time arguing that we shouldn't share some of the pain. In fact, I rather think we shouldn't be training quite so many grad students, because there simply aren't enough private sector jobs to go around, and no one wants to be a postdoc forever. I really hope the time comes when the NIH funding can increase again, or maybe private donors get more involved. But considering the current state of the federal government, I think we're doing quite well.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not the government.
Granted, these guys aren't doing this research now, and it has become fundamental, but it's probably not going to be very long before seeing an American win a Nobel in science is rare
Brian Kobilka is winning the prize for work done in the last five years. The crowning achievement is the publication last year of a GPCR bound to its cognate G-protein, which made the cover of Nature. The only groups publishing GPCR structures right now are in the US and UK/Switzerland. The US is doing very, very well in this field, and there is no reason why that can't continue; Kobilka will have zero problem getting his grants renewed.
I'm a biochemist and crystallographer by training, so I don't mind that they won the chemistry prize for this... but I have to admit, this fits a lot better with the "physiology or medicine" category. Still, no one has ever turned down a Nobel prize because they won it in the wrong category.
these two were long past due on earning the Nobel for this work
Kobilka was hardly "long past due" - he isn't getting the prize for his work with Lefkowitz, he's getting it for the first structure of the beta-adrenergic receptor (and more generally, for figuring out how to make GPCR crystallization feasible), which was only in 2007, and especially for the structure of the GPCR:G-protein complex which was just published last year. Quite a few people expected that to seal the deal, but this is a relatively quick prize.
That's not consistent with what I've read about this subject. For instance:
...in some quarters outright disbelief remains regarding the launch prices actually posted on the SpaceX website for the Falcon Heavy. No other company has posted fixed launch prices on the Internet — only SpaceX. The actual taxpayer cost of US government launches can only be guessed by calculating from the cost-plus contract costs, which are usually for multiple launches from the same customer. If SpaceX does multiple launches, the posted price would be reduced depending on the number of launches.
Rather than the traditional cost-plus model, in which companies are reimbursed the cost of a project plus an additional amount that guarantees them a profit, SpaceX and Orbital are working under newly established Space Act Agreements, in which NASA pays increments of a fixed price once the companies accomplish previously agreed upon milestones.
To reiterate, this is no guarantee that it will actually work better (and not just more cheaply) than the old system. For it to really be a success there needs to be a competitive market, a sustainable business model, and a lack of heavily subsidized competition from the Chinese. But I really hope it does succeed.
Libertarians rode the back of this and shouted about how much better it would be to privatise space. But in fact we're just right (*) here again, with SpaceX substituted for Boeing.
I think you'll find it's not just libertarians cheering for this - after all, privatizing the launch infrastructure has been a key element of Obama's space plans. The difference from the previous situation, where NASA relied on bloated defense contractors, is that SpaceX and its competitors will have to enter fixed-price bids, instead of the old cost-plus contracts which gave the contractors zero incentive for efficiency. Whether this will actually work in the long run remains to be seen, but it's hard to see how this is worse than the old system, and putting the federal government into the launch vehicle business sounds like a spectacularly awful idea.
this might be a shocker after that rant, but I'm quite liberal, support a national single payer health system, and believe that the individual is more important than ANY organization, provided that individual is not harming anybody but himself or herself.
+1
And I don't think this is all that uncommon a sentiment in the US, at least where I live (SF Bay Area). It doesn't seem to be very uncommon in Europe, either, where despite many decades of state "interference" in health care (ranging from subsidized/regulated insurance to semi-socialized to completely socialized medicine), smoking is still legal, and fairly common in many places. Most people I know would prefer that we simply tax tobacco (and booze, and weed) at a level commensurate with its societal costs - make the smokers pay for their eventual hospitalization. Same for fatty foods, HFCS, and so on. (And gasoline, while we're at it.) People should be made aware of and have to accept the consequences of their destructive behavior, but they should be free to go ahead and do it anyway. The fact that we may someday have to pay to have tumors carved out of their lungs is not a suitable justification for making it illegal. (If we're going that route, let's make sex illegal - it's not like this will negatively impact my social life right now.)
As for myself: I was a light smoker on and off through my 20s, starting in college. I was never pulled in cigarette ads or the supposed coolness - actually, I rarely smoked around other people, because I thought it was distinctly uncool. In fact I was self-medicating; my workload and my attention span were simply incompatible and nicotine was the only thing I found that kept me calm and focused (in tandem, of course, with generous quantities of coffee). Eventually I quit for good, but to be honest I still miss it often - nicotine is evil that way. I think if I'd know how deeply it would leave its claws in me I might have been more wary, but I knew it was addictive, I knew it could kill me, and I didn't care. Such is youth, and I don't think we need laws against it. Or marijuana, for that matter, but that's another rant.
I thought the most impressive part of Iron Man was the AI.
Perhaps, but I thought it was much less far-fetched than those staples of sci-fi, the extraordinarily compact energy source and propulsion system, both of apparently unlimited power, which give off nearly no waste heat.
All in all it's very hard not to think that the RNC must *really* want Obama to win his second term.
I've seen plausible arguments from serious (mostly liberal) commentators suggesting that a number of Republicans - especially the possible 2016 candidates - would prefer that Obama win, because they know that the economy is going to continue limping for the next four years, and continuing to blame Obama is much easier (and puts them in a much better position for 2016) than actually governing.
Birth control is made widely available in Africa, and population growth there is slowing at what can only be called a reasonable rate(i.e. current population kinda high, first derivative also kinda high, second derivative healthy negative). Your perspective is a common one towards Africa, and, in general, a kind of racist, imperialistic one.
Every time I read comments like the GP, I wonder if the same people would also have objected to distributing the smallpox vaccine in Africa.
I'm just curious: why hasn't this happened with any other diseases besides Smallpox? We've been vaccinating against polio, measles, mumps, etc. for ages now, probably longer than the time the smallpox vaccine was used.
I think there are two major reasons. One is that the smallpox vaccine was unusually effective. The second, and more important, reason is that smallpox was unusually deadly and horrific: Wikipedia says "Of all those infected, 20–60%—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease." Even in the 20th century it killed more people than every war combined; the survivors were frequently scarred for life. Once it was recognized that eradication was actually possible, it became a moral imperative.
People who doubt the effectiveness (or morality) of vaccines really need to read about smallpox; the eradication was one of the greatest medical advances in history. It was also one of the few examples of international governance working perfectly, with the US and the Soviet Union actually cooperating, and it managed to affect even the most chronically poor and strife-ridden areas of Africa. Most first-world citizens will have never encountered a smallpox victim (I was born the year it was officially eradicated), so they tend to be blind to how murderous the disease was, and how much its disappearance has improved quality of life worldwide. Far from encouraging overpopulation, it has probably done the opposite: nothing reduces the birth rate as effectively as decreasing childhood mortality (and generally improving economic conditions).
Polio is almost gone - it really should have been wiped out by now but there have been various organizational problems and recently there has been resistance to further vaccination in Nigeria and I think Pakistan. But I would be surprised if it isn't officially eradicated by the end of the decade.
Director Bolden, on his meeting with Obama on NASA strategy, mission: "...perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."
This was one throwaway line by a federal bureaucrat in a single substance-free interview, where he was obviously trying to pander to his audience. (And the White House very quickly corrected him, as has been pointed out previously.) Do you really believe that anything NASA has done since then has been designed to further this supposed goal? Please, explain how the Curiosity mission has been corrupted to soothe the feelings of Muslims.
It's the cheap profit seeking idiots who attempt to cut corners while running them. Fundamentally, Nuclear is a great idea! Unfortunately, Nuclear Power in the hands of a capitalist society which values immediate profit over the chance of blowing themselves up is actually really freaking dangerous.
Unless you lived in Soviet Russia, in which case nuclear power was in the hands of a socialist society which valued... actually, I'm not sure. But Chernobyl didn't work out too well either, so perhaps we should avoid simplistic assumptions about public sector versus private sector safety values. Building more of these things without heavy regulation and government oversight would be suicidal, but corporations don't have a monopoly on reptilian bean-counters.
I have read that by introducing fast spreading/oxegyn producing lichens, that Mars' could be 'terraformed' into having an breatheable atmosphere within 300-400 years.
There isn't enough CO2 in the Martian atmosphere right now for this plan to be viable. There is some in the ice caps and in the form of frost, but I thought it was unlikely to be enough for terraforming. More likely, you'd have to bring in frozen CO2 from asteroids, comets, and gas giants, which is a huge undertaking. (Of course, after you do all that, you still have to worry about the lack of a magnetosphere.)
I did read somewhere that only a small increase in air pressure would be required to make it possible to walk the surface of Mars with just an oxygen mask, which is pretty cool. Still a long way from "habitable", though.
How can a journal charging $15 to read a retractation notice can be considered nonprofit http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6041/404.1.full. So pay per article user must first pay to read the paper then pay $15 to read why it was retracted. They might be technically and legally non profit but they're certainly not non profit in spirit.
Just because an organization is non-profit does not mean that its budget appears out of thin air. Every publisher, including the academic publishers, charges either the readers of the journal, or the authors. The costs tend to be grossly inflated by the purely commercial journals (Elsevier is notorious for their 37% profit margin), but there are still editorial and production costs to cover. I think these could also be shaved down quite a bit, but even a journal like PLoS ONE, which is a fairly low-frills operation, charges upwards of $1000 per article.
(The practice of charging for retraction notices is insane, and another matter entirely.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen northern pike [wikipedia.org] eat ducks a few times and even a small dog once.
Is it sick and wrong that my first thought on reading this was, "I would pay at least $25 to see this happen"?
35 years and still running (I had a 25 year old Toyota which did the same). What happened to us engineers? Where did we go wrong?
Spirit lasted six years on Mars; Opportunity is nine years and counting. That's a minimum of six years spent rolling around in the sand on a planet with nighttime temperatures well below freezing, without any maintenance. And NASA built two of them. Granted, that was ten years ago, but Curiosity is doing pretty well so far.
There's no reason why engineers, American, Japanese, or otherwise, can't build something that will last for decades under hellish conditions, if affordability is less important than durability. And they build stuff like this all the time - it's just that most consumer products (especially electronics) are relative crap, because there's no incentive for them to last forever. Who actually cares if your phone or DVD player breaks after a few years? There are also cases where it's stupid just on practical grounds to keep something around for 35 years - there certainly are computers that have lasted that long, but we usually discard computer equipment long before it stops working, simply because it's more efficient to replace it with something much faster that probably costs and weighs less too. An interplanetary probe is built to somewhat different specifications.
This probably won't help much with that, especially considering in this case the x-ray laser source uses a GeV electron accelerator.
And is several miles long - it's dug into the hillside above Stanford.
I'll bet that a small focused team, privately funded, will figure out a path to safe and large scale fusion before ITER does.
There are certainly many problems with the way ITER is planned - the way they've distributed the manufacturing to keep all of the member countries happy is a recipe for inefficiency - but I think you underestimate how difficult projects like this actually are. Keep in mind that ITER is actually a scaled down version of what they originally wanted to build, and an actual commercial plant would be even more massive. One article I read mentioned that ITER required 150,000 km of superconducting wire; this isn't exactly commodity hardware. There's simply no way this wasn't going to cost many billions of euros, and require the full-time efforts of thousands of people.
Perhaps Bill Gates will lead the charge.
I would love to see private investors step up to the plate, but Bill Gates' net worth is about $66 billion, and ITER is currently projected to cost around 20 billion euros, so he'd have to drop a huge chunk of his fortune on what is still only a proof-of-concept machine (actually commercializing fusion power would require many billions more). Funding biomedical research as he's been doing is relatively cheap by comparison.
The only way a small, privately financed team will figure out commercially viable fusion power is if any of the proposed "LENR"/"cold fusion" schemes turns out to be successful. Obviously it would be great if this were to happen, but I'm not holding my breath.
Can someone with ADD learn to focus without drugs? I don't know.
Some can. I can't take stimulants because they send my blood pressure through the roof (to the point where I feel physically uncomfortable) and tend to result in wild mood swings, especially when I tried taking a day off medication. They certainly did make it much easier to pay attention, though. When I was younger, I smoked cigarettes regularly (just several a day, at most), because nicotine also gave me intense focus. Now I stick to caffeine (which I've been addicted to since I was 15) and much milder drugs like older antidepressants. Some tasks are still a chore for me; if I tried to go back to school now I would probably go insane within a year. But I am far enough along in my career that my tasks are very specialized, and I try to structure my work in such a way that it plays to my strengths and not my weaknesses. Now I can actually work on plane flights, or sitting in airport terminals; when I was in college, I couldn't even read on the plane. Hell, I could barely read in the library.
I don't think this is a solution for everyone; my ADD is probably milder than many. But it is possible to structure your life so that it's a minor irritation rather than a constant obstacle. The problem is that so many careers lead through traditional academic education, where an otherwise intelligent person with ADD can find studying to be constant torture without cognitive enhancement. There are plenty of things I regret doing in college, but I'm still not sure if I could have graduated without coffee and cigarettes keeping my neurons going.
that's right, i just said the lord of the rings is a parable about drug addiction
Actually, I've often wondered whether Tolkein knew any opiate users - maybe WWI veterans who got hooked on morphine? I don't have any firsthand experience with them myself (aside from having my wisdom teeth removed, and Vicodin is pretty tame stuff compared to injected morphine), but the description of Gollum's cravings sounds a lot like what I've read about opiate addiction.
isn't there life in mono lake that uses Arsenic instead of Phosphorus because of the harsh conditions?
No, this has been pretty thoroughly debunked by now. There are fundamental chemical reasons why it was very unlikely to begin with, which have nothing to do with our supposedly naive assumptions about the nature of life, but are simply the unavoidable consequences of the basic properties of the elements.
life on Earth evolved the way it did because of the abundance of water, mild weather, our atmospheric pressure, and our gravity.
As far as we know, only the abundance of water is a prerequisite for terrestrial life. Organisms have been found thriving at anywhere from 0C to 100C and beyond, and at incredible depths in the oceans where the pressure would crush us. Microgravity may be unpleasant for complex animals, but bacteria are less picky.
There are an infinity of different ways to encode genetic information and assemble living organisms.
False - there are a finite number of stable elements, and a finite number of possible covalent chemistries. Moreover, while it is in theory possible for other types of biochemistry to exist, it is most probable that life on Mars would follow similar rules to life on Earth, i.e. CNOH-based chemistry. (Additionally, as another commenter pointed out, we have no evidence for other mechanisms.) What Venter hasn't made clear in any of the articles I've read is whether he expects that any Martian life would share a common ancestor with Earth life. If he isn't operating on this assumption, than two other assumptions fall apart: a) that the structure of Martian genetic material would be so similar as to permit DNA sequencing, and b) that the resulting sequence would be interpretable in the same way as Earth DNA, to the point of being able to reconstruct a cell. The latter point in particular is simply insane if you assume independent origins.
How about the full quote?
"“The impulse towards intolerance and violence may initially be focused on the West, but over time it cannot be contained. The same impulses toward extremism are used to justify war between Sunni and Shia, between tribes and clans. It leads not to strength and prosperity but to chaos. In less than two years, we have seen largely peaceful protests bring more change to Muslim-majority countries than a decade of violence. And extremists understand this. Because they have nothing to offer to improve the lives of people, violence is their only way to stay relevant. They don’t build; they only destroy. [...] The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.”
we've been stripping basic research funding to the bone, and then some.
I'm a biochemist working for the US federal government, and this is not very accurate.
What really happened was that the NIH budget grew explosively in the late 90s and early 00s, along with the government encouraging the training of new PhD students. This produced a glut of junior scientists, and the expectation that funding would continue to rise. When the economy tanked and the fiscal situation became more difficult (and Congress started passing continuing resolutions instead of real budgets), the funding was basically frozen. Obviously this has made it much more difficult to obtain funding, which is of course dismaying if you're one of those junior researchers. But it's hardly been sacrificed on the altar of fiscal prudence. In fact, the NIH has excellent bipartisan support; the Republicans have been very generous in that regard, despite their reputation.
It's possible the NIH will have to take a cut along with everyone else, but speaking as someone who depends on the NIH for funding, and really enjoys his job, I'd have a hard time arguing that we shouldn't share some of the pain. In fact, I rather think we shouldn't be training quite so many grad students, because there simply aren't enough private sector jobs to go around, and no one wants to be a postdoc forever. I really hope the time comes when the NIH funding can increase again, or maybe private donors get more involved. But considering the current state of the federal government, I think we're doing quite well.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not the government.
Granted, these guys aren't doing this research now, and it has become fundamental, but it's probably not going to be very long before seeing an American win a Nobel in science is rare
Brian Kobilka is winning the prize for work done in the last five years. The crowning achievement is the publication last year of a GPCR bound to its cognate G-protein, which made the cover of Nature. The only groups publishing GPCR structures right now are in the US and UK/Switzerland. The US is doing very, very well in this field, and there is no reason why that can't continue; Kobilka will have zero problem getting his grants renewed.
I'm a biochemist and crystallographer by training, so I don't mind that they won the chemistry prize for this... but I have to admit, this fits a lot better with the "physiology or medicine" category. Still, no one has ever turned down a Nobel prize because they won it in the wrong category.
these two were long past due on earning the Nobel for this work
Kobilka was hardly "long past due" - he isn't getting the prize for his work with Lefkowitz, he's getting it for the first structure of the beta-adrenergic receptor (and more generally, for figuring out how to make GPCR crystallization feasible), which was only in 2007, and especially for the structure of the GPCR:G-protein complex which was just published last year. Quite a few people expected that to seal the deal, but this is a relatively quick prize.
That's not consistent with what I've read about this subject. For instance:
Or this:
To reiterate, this is no guarantee that it will actually work better (and not just more cheaply) than the old system. For it to really be a success there needs to be a competitive market, a sustainable business model, and a lack of heavily subsidized competition from the Chinese. But I really hope it does succeed.
Libertarians rode the back of this and shouted about how much better it would be to privatise space. But in fact we're just right (*) here again, with SpaceX substituted for Boeing.
I think you'll find it's not just libertarians cheering for this - after all, privatizing the launch infrastructure has been a key element of Obama's space plans. The difference from the previous situation, where NASA relied on bloated defense contractors, is that SpaceX and its competitors will have to enter fixed-price bids, instead of the old cost-plus contracts which gave the contractors zero incentive for efficiency. Whether this will actually work in the long run remains to be seen, but it's hard to see how this is worse than the old system, and putting the federal government into the launch vehicle business sounds like a spectacularly awful idea.
this might be a shocker after that rant, but I'm quite liberal, support a national single payer health system, and believe that the individual is more important than ANY organization, provided that individual is not harming anybody but himself or herself.
+1
And I don't think this is all that uncommon a sentiment in the US, at least where I live (SF Bay Area). It doesn't seem to be very uncommon in Europe, either, where despite many decades of state "interference" in health care (ranging from subsidized/regulated insurance to semi-socialized to completely socialized medicine), smoking is still legal, and fairly common in many places. Most people I know would prefer that we simply tax tobacco (and booze, and weed) at a level commensurate with its societal costs - make the smokers pay for their eventual hospitalization. Same for fatty foods, HFCS, and so on. (And gasoline, while we're at it.) People should be made aware of and have to accept the consequences of their destructive behavior, but they should be free to go ahead and do it anyway. The fact that we may someday have to pay to have tumors carved out of their lungs is not a suitable justification for making it illegal. (If we're going that route, let's make sex illegal - it's not like this will negatively impact my social life right now.)
As for myself: I was a light smoker on and off through my 20s, starting in college. I was never pulled in cigarette ads or the supposed coolness - actually, I rarely smoked around other people, because I thought it was distinctly uncool. In fact I was self-medicating; my workload and my attention span were simply incompatible and nicotine was the only thing I found that kept me calm and focused (in tandem, of course, with generous quantities of coffee). Eventually I quit for good, but to be honest I still miss it often - nicotine is evil that way. I think if I'd know how deeply it would leave its claws in me I might have been more wary, but I knew it was addictive, I knew it could kill me, and I didn't care. Such is youth, and I don't think we need laws against it. Or marijuana, for that matter, but that's another rant.
Imagine what the Republicans and Tea Party would do and say if somebody proposed government-enforced limits in the USA.
Why pick on the Republicans here? I'm relatively liberal, and I know plenty of other liberals who would be just as outraged.
I thought the most impressive part of Iron Man was the AI.
Perhaps, but I thought it was much less far-fetched than those staples of sci-fi, the extraordinarily compact energy source and propulsion system, both of apparently unlimited power, which give off nearly no waste heat.
All in all it's very hard not to think that the RNC must *really* want Obama to win his second term.
I've seen plausible arguments from serious (mostly liberal) commentators suggesting that a number of Republicans - especially the possible 2016 candidates - would prefer that Obama win, because they know that the economy is going to continue limping for the next four years, and continuing to blame Obama is much easier (and puts them in a much better position for 2016) than actually governing.
Birth control is made widely available in Africa, and population growth there is slowing at what can only be called a reasonable rate(i.e. current population kinda high, first derivative also kinda high, second derivative healthy negative). Your perspective is a common one towards Africa, and, in general, a kind of racist, imperialistic one.
Every time I read comments like the GP, I wonder if the same people would also have objected to distributing the smallpox vaccine in Africa.
I'm just curious: why hasn't this happened with any other diseases besides Smallpox? We've been vaccinating against polio, measles, mumps, etc. for ages now, probably longer than the time the smallpox vaccine was used.
I think there are two major reasons. One is that the smallpox vaccine was unusually effective. The second, and more important, reason is that smallpox was unusually deadly and horrific: Wikipedia says "Of all those infected, 20–60%—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease." Even in the 20th century it killed more people than every war combined; the survivors were frequently scarred for life. Once it was recognized that eradication was actually possible, it became a moral imperative.
People who doubt the effectiveness (or morality) of vaccines really need to read about smallpox; the eradication was one of the greatest medical advances in history. It was also one of the few examples of international governance working perfectly, with the US and the Soviet Union actually cooperating, and it managed to affect even the most chronically poor and strife-ridden areas of Africa. Most first-world citizens will have never encountered a smallpox victim (I was born the year it was officially eradicated), so they tend to be blind to how murderous the disease was, and how much its disappearance has improved quality of life worldwide. Far from encouraging overpopulation, it has probably done the opposite: nothing reduces the birth rate as effectively as decreasing childhood mortality (and generally improving economic conditions).
Polio is almost gone - it really should have been wiped out by now but there have been various organizational problems and recently there has been resistance to further vaccination in Nigeria and I think Pakistan. But I would be surprised if it isn't officially eradicated by the end of the decade.
Director Bolden, on his meeting with Obama on NASA strategy, mission: " ...perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."
This was one throwaway line by a federal bureaucrat in a single substance-free interview, where he was obviously trying to pander to his audience. (And the White House very quickly corrected him, as has been pointed out previously.) Do you really believe that anything NASA has done since then has been designed to further this supposed goal? Please, explain how the Curiosity mission has been corrupted to soothe the feelings of Muslims.
It's the cheap profit seeking idiots who attempt to cut corners while running them. Fundamentally, Nuclear is a great idea! Unfortunately, Nuclear Power in the hands of a capitalist society which values immediate profit over the chance of blowing themselves up is actually really freaking dangerous.
Unless you lived in Soviet Russia, in which case nuclear power was in the hands of a socialist society which valued... actually, I'm not sure. But Chernobyl didn't work out too well either, so perhaps we should avoid simplistic assumptions about public sector versus private sector safety values. Building more of these things without heavy regulation and government oversight would be suicidal, but corporations don't have a monopoly on reptilian bean-counters.
Wait, wait, I don't think Mars needs any more CO2:
Sorry, I may be mixed up - it's probably the nitrogen base that needs to be imported (or produced locally, but I don't know if that's feasible).
I have read that by introducing fast spreading/oxegyn producing lichens, that Mars' could be 'terraformed' into having an breatheable atmosphere within 300-400 years.
There isn't enough CO2 in the Martian atmosphere right now for this plan to be viable. There is some in the ice caps and in the form of frost, but I thought it was unlikely to be enough for terraforming. More likely, you'd have to bring in frozen CO2 from asteroids, comets, and gas giants, which is a huge undertaking. (Of course, after you do all that, you still have to worry about the lack of a magnetosphere.)
I did read somewhere that only a small increase in air pressure would be required to make it possible to walk the surface of Mars with just an oxygen mask, which is pretty cool. Still a long way from "habitable", though.
How can a journal charging $15 to read a retractation notice can be considered nonprofit http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6041/404.1.full. So pay per article user must first pay to read the paper then pay $15 to read why it was retracted. They might be technically and legally non profit but they're certainly not non profit in spirit.
Just because an organization is non-profit does not mean that its budget appears out of thin air. Every publisher, including the academic publishers, charges either the readers of the journal, or the authors. The costs tend to be grossly inflated by the purely commercial journals (Elsevier is notorious for their 37% profit margin), but there are still editorial and production costs to cover. I think these could also be shaved down quite a bit, but even a journal like PLoS ONE, which is a fairly low-frills operation, charges upwards of $1000 per article.
(The practice of charging for retraction notices is insane, and another matter entirely.)