Aerojet-Rocketdyne just offered to buy ULA. ULA was planning on using Blue Origin's BE-4 engine for their upcoming Vulcan rocket, but if the AR purchase goes through there's no way the Vulcan will use anything but AR engines. Or maybe they'll just re-engine Atlas V with an AR replacement for the Russian RD-180 engine.
So I'm reading this as Bezos deciding that if ULA goes to AR, he's going to build his own BE-4 based rocket, with blackjack and hookers. If that pans out, we could have a pretty competitive landscape - BO vs SpaceX vs ULA/AR.
The question is if the launch market can support that many competitors, or if new customers will start to emerge. Historically we've only seen a market for a dozen or so yearly launches for this class of rocket, and if prices stay the same I don't imagine that will change much. We can root for a pricewar between Musk and Bezos which would expand the market, but that's a pretty rough prospect for ULA which does things the old, expensive way, and actually needs to turn a profit since there isn't a billionaire waiting in the wings to write them checks as needed.
True... origin stories are some of the most fun because there is inherently a ton of major character development. I also think D&D tends to be a blast when you are one or two hits from being wiped out at any given time... when you have single digit hit points you think seriously about your choices in combat.
The only way to do this is to have a sense of humor about it. There's nothing appealing about watching a bunch of nerds taking a game way too seriously - even playing D&D, the best games happen with people who have fun with it and embrace the fact that there's a bit of absurdity inherent in the process. That doesn't preclude drama or action, either. Anybody who has seen the Community D&D episode knows that you can mock D&D and celebrate it simultaneously.
By far the best option for this scenario is finding a machine owned by somebody else to use. Libraries have computers for public use, there are likely computer labs at the school that are free periodically, and students definitely have friends or relatives with computers. Work with other teachers and the IT department to come up with a solution - if everybody in the school took one evening a month to monitor a computer lab and allow students to continue working, the problem/excuse goes away. If you can't get traction in the school overall, get a desk and put one or two Goodwill computers in your room for students to use before/after school or during lunch.
Fundamentally the "I don't have a computer" problem is an excuse - I guarantee your students have Facebook, when they want to get connected they find a way.
Not to mention how hard it is to do source code control (svn, git, etc.) on CASE specifications, especially when (like LabView) they're in binary files. Sure, you can build a toy in a few days, but you can't maintain a large project with that shit because there's no way to track changes.
Visual LEGOid drag-a-block gooey editors are flashy and give PHBs boners, but change management is un-sexy and gets ignored by the people pushing that crap. (Once they've sold it to your PHB, their job is done!)
Don't I know it. We've got some legacy Labview stuff running around to control instrumentation, etc (exactly what Labview is for, in theory) but as feature creep sets in those things have gotten incredibly unwieldy. I'm trying to move us towards Python for automation and control scripts because at least it plays nice with SVN and is easy to document.
Even then, I suspect all you need to know are the equations and a few well-understood approaches to integration, actually understanding the math (or the physics) doesn't seem necessary.
So you don't need to understand math to program, you just need to know about integration and some equations. The statement is its own contradiction. That's why I've been arguing against it.
That's the thing though: you seem to think that these models are not realistic physics. They ARE. The fact that the math is simple does not mean that it is the obvious solution to the novice, or that it is unrealistic. I don't think that a downward constant acceleration is going to be obvious at all as a jump mechanic to someone setting out to create their own platformer - acceleration isn't an intuitive idea at all, consider the fact that humanity for thousands of years had it completely wrong.
You seem to believe that simple implementations are obvious or easy. I think the opposite is true: to get a movement model that is both simple and intuitive, the only real way to do it is to follow the simplicity of nature. I guarantee you that inspired these original models.
Saying you can program without math and physics is like saying you can build a house without power tools. Completely factually accurate, but completely neglects the fact that power tools allow you to do more complex work, in far less time, with much better results.
Start with what you got, not even math skills are necessary, and whenever you hit a wall, you can always ask someone or teach yourself what you are missing.
This, I agree with. However, I don't agree that the article was clear on that point. Based on the examples given and the general tone, it seemed to me dismissive of learning in math. In my experience, it is a hell of a lot easier to teach yourself programming than it is to teach yourself math - if you stumble across a problem that requires it in the course of your coding job, a background in math or science will be a huge asset.
Should interested people be encouraged to learn programming regardless of their background? Yes. Should people devalue math education? No.
My contention is not that game physics are 100% real. I am rebutting your point that knowledge about physics is unnecessary for developing a physics engine. You said at one point: "When someone jumps, they go up for a bit and then come down. You slide on slippery things." How do you implement that, non-ambiguously, in an intuitive way?
You have to have something approximating gravity to make things "go up for a bit and then go down". You have to implement friction to make characters "slide on slippery things". Can it be done without physics knowledge? Sure, anything can be accomplished eventually through brute force and pure persistence, but the programmer with math and physics knowledge is going to do it better and faster, and likely more elegant, because it's hard to find something more elegant than the laws of nature.
As to the changing velocity in mid-air: you still have a physics model going on there, with acceleration applied based on player input. The only real disconnect with reality is that Mario's character design doesn't have a credible mechanism for propelling himself when he isn't in contact with the ground, but there's nothing non-physical about applying an acceleration midair. That midair acceleration still follows a realistic physics model even if the character designs aren't realistic.
It shouldn't be that surprising, as you're using the work of physicists. The implementation is just details after that. You don't need to understand it, all you need are the equations. There are already well-established methods for integration, so you don't need to invent that either, just implement one.
Even physicists aren't often invention equations from scratch. Understanding the equations and implementing them, and even understanding that integration is what you need are the parts that math helps you with. If you don't know what in the hell that weird S does and have never taken a calculus course, you won't even have the vocabulary to start researching to help yourself. A person with math or physics experience of some sort is going to do much better with these things.
When someone jumps, they go up for a bit and then come down. You slide on slippery things. I'll bet a nickle that the developers of Mario Brothers didn't concern themselves with physical accuracy, but how each action felt intuitively.
How do you make characters move intuitively? By making them inhabit a world that follows physical laws similar to our own. One of the major things that made Super Mario Brothers the groundbreaking success that it was is the fact that their physics engine was so responsive and intuitive. They did this by implementing gravity exactly as it is on Earth - a constant downward acceleration. A jump just gives Mario some initial upward velocity. There are a number of articles out there that have been able to determine exactly what kind of planet Mario must live on by making measurements of his movement in free-fall and therefore calculating the strength of gravity on his world.
Sonic is another great example. You'll notice that they spent a lot of time dealing with friction in Sonic's world. If you try to reverse direction, it doesn't happen instantly. Instead, Sonic moves himself by a constant horizontal acceleration. When you stop pushing one of the direction buttons, he doesn't stop immediately: he slows down by a constant negative acceleration from friction. How do you make sure that a character follows a realistic, predictable, intuitive parabola through the air when they jump? By implementing realistic 2-dimensional physics, with a constant horizontal velocity and a constant vertical acceleration.
This isn't tremendously complicated stuff, but if you haven't taken a physics course in high school or college you will have a very hard time building an intuitive movement model for a video game characters. You don't need multivariate calculus for most programming, but there are a lot of software problems that basic calculus and trigonometry solve very cleanly, and without familiarity with math you will struggle when you encounter them as a coder.
At this point I can only conclude that you either are being dishonest about the work you've done on physics engines, or you dramatically overestimate the math and physics coursework your average humanities major receives.
Take a look at the missions proposed for Mars. None of them have anyone coming back for a very long time. Until there is fuel production on Mars or in orbit around Mars no one is coming back.
What in the world are you talking about? There is no credible mission that has been proposed that involves a permanent stay at the beginning. Generating methane on Mars to fuel a return ship is technically feasible, and there are also plenty of mission profiles that could work (albeit expensively) without ISRU. And if you are talking about Mars One, that is complete baloney.
There is no scenario in which a person is living long-term (decades) on Mars before we've made many, many short-term (~1-3 year) trips. This test is not meant to apply to the long term case because it is both impractical to test and has little relevance for any mission in the foreseeable future. What's more, any person living for that length of time on Mars will not be doing it in a tiny capsule - the level of infrastructure that would be required for that kind of sustained presence would mean the scenario changes completely.
Don't criticize the test for not fitting some imaginary mission profile you made up.
It seems to me that coding without math knowledge is like travelling in unfamiliar territory without a map. You can describe your destination, but you have no big-picture understanding of the scenario, and a limited ability to find the most effective route from A to B. You have to rely on others to give you directions or take routes that have already been established by others.
On one hand, I appreciate the message that anybody can start learning code without having any particular skillset beforehand. However, I think the subtext (math, computer science, physics, computer architecture are unnecessary knowledge) is deeply misguided. Knowledge of the deeper, more fundamental topics is often what distinguishes a mediocre coder from a true expert.
I think that whole anti-science attitude comes from insecurity. The thing is, with math and the hard sciences, it can take months or even years of learning to even be able to understand a problem, much less solve it. There's a massive barrier to entry, and what's more, there are objectively right and wrong answers, so you can't B.S. your way through it.
I briefly enrolled as an English major before I wised up and got a physics degree. The thing about majoring in the humanities is that after a year or two of schooling, I was left feeling no more capable or informed than when I started. I read a bunch of books, and wrote a bunch of subjective papers that were subjectively graded, with no real right or wrong - the question was just if you could churn out a competently assembled essay in the allotted time.
When I was in physics, however, I would gain a new fundamental understanding or skill on a weekly or even daily basis. You try to do your assignments, get a wrong answer that doesn't make sense, and then try again until you are confident you've mastered the material. This matches coding far better than any amount of essay writing or literature reading ever could.
To play devil's advocate for a moment though: I also get tired of engineers with the attitude that writing well, understanding philosophical arguments, or appreciating the history and larger context of a field are pointless. There are a lot of folks with a technical background that seem entirely content to be ignorant about everything else out there, which is partly what creates that 'out of touch egghead' stereotype that is easy for insecure people to mock. Ideally both technical and non-technical people would love and respect learning of any sort.
This is a bit outside my experience, as all I've done there is a 3D physics engine for a game. Even then, I suspect all you need to know are the equations and a few well-understood approaches to integration, actually understanding the math (or the physics) doesn't seem necessary.
Wait, what? How can you "do" a 3D physics engine, AT ALL, without understanding physics? Unless by that you mean that you are making small modifications to an existing engine, there's no way you could create a physics engine, much less a 3D one, without decent physics understanding. Even something as simple as Mario Brothers had a fairly realistic implementation of gravity, friction, and acceleration - some physics knowledge is absolutely necessary unless you're just leveraging other people's work the whole time, or your application has completely unrealistic movement.
Test engineering is about replicating flight conditions as closely as possible, within technical, budgetary, and (in this case) ethical limitations. The two main objections you brought up are basically impossible to address within those limitations - literally, you would have to manufacture some sort of deadly threat to the participants, and you would have to make it so they never return to their homes.
Within engineering limits, this test is a perfectly adequate test of long-term isolation - close quarter confinement, minimal contact with the outside world, reasonable time frames, a variety of personalities. To be a useful test it doesn't need to comprehensively answer every question about the psychological scenario of a Mars mission, it just needs to answer some questions. We could certainly learn something from this experiment that helps the design of future interplanetary spacecraft, or helps with crew selection, or informs training for handling the isolation.
And? Is your point that we might as well not test anything until we do the real thing? Because arguably, no ground-based test is ever really valid, since the situation will be different in all sorts of important ways on an actual mission.
Alternatively, we could do controlled albeit imperfect tests to try to answer specific questions, so that we understand failure modes as well as possible before the real deal. This has worked pretty well for the aerospace industry for the past ~100 years.
I appreciate your apparent sincerity, but why doesn't Occam's razor immediately cause you to dismiss all this? What is easier to believe: that there's an incredibly well organized collusion between otherwise non-cooperative government entities in order to propagate an extensive disinformation campaign for no good reason, OR, that all the scientists, aerospace engineers, and travelers are just being honest about the earth and space?
Space isn't easy, but the technical challenges it presents are much easier to pull off than the kind of conspiracy you suggest. And, for what it's worth, I've personally worked on a sounding rocket experiment that went to space and took pictures in which the curvature of the Earth is very prominent, and I'm good friends with a guy who spent quite a while doing research in Antarctica.
I can't tell if you are a brilliant and committed troll or if you really believe this stuff. How do you explain a solar eclipse? If the moon is transparent enough to allow very weak starlight through, there's no way it could eclipse the sun.
First of all, Stross' story Palimpsest, for instance, is one of the most innovative and well-executed sci-fi stories in recent years. A Hugo award winner, incidentally. Some of his stuff is better than others, but no question he is an excellent author. Second, sounds like you're talking about the Laundry Files, which I'll admit isn't usually award-winning material but is a hell of a good time if you can keep up with the inside nerd jokes. Which maybe you can't.
Second of all, trying to read some big conspiracy into all of this is just foolish. What's easier to believe, that a handful of second-rate authors just don't tend to write award-grade material, or that there's a secret group that is coordinating behind the scenes to keep out nonbelievers? Occam's Razor, etc.
The only 'clique' that exists is people who enjoy Stross' work - fans.
This was basically a big whine session from Baen authors and fans who complain that they never get Hugo awards, and rather than accepting the truth (Baen publishes primarily mediocre, escapist, wish-fulfillment sci-fi that is undeserving of any kind of literary award) they invented a conspiracy out of wholecloth to make themselves feel better and try to force their way into recognition.
The 'club' that Stross refers to is nothing more than the existing sci-fi community - you know the one, it actually recognizes talent and innovation.
That calculation has to happen with absolutely everything. Wind power? Workers are going to fall off of turbines during installation and maintenance, and die. Solar power? Same thing, with roofs. The dangers of hydroelectric have been well described below.
The thing is, in terms of Deaths/MW of delivered energy, nuclear is among the very safest technologies. Accidents are noteworthy because they are so very rare, and because it's easy for sensationalist reporters to exploit the scientific illiteracy of the public to make nuclear accidents sexier and more frightening.
If they are going through 5000 jokes a week and comparing whether a human assessment and computer assessment agree, there are at least 3 sig figs to work with. You could add some additional measurement uncertainty, I suppose, but you are already measuring something subjective - are you worried about incorrect button clicks or something?
That's a fairly contrived example, but even so: Can you imagine normal drivers making those value judgments within the bounds of their reaction time and subjective bias? I would feel much more comfortable leaving that situation in the control of a computer, programmed by teams of engineers who thoughtfully considered the corner cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Aerojet-Rocketdyne just offered to buy ULA. ULA was planning on using Blue Origin's BE-4 engine for their upcoming Vulcan rocket, but if the AR purchase goes through there's no way the Vulcan will use anything but AR engines. Or maybe they'll just re-engine Atlas V with an AR replacement for the Russian RD-180 engine.
So I'm reading this as Bezos deciding that if ULA goes to AR, he's going to build his own BE-4 based rocket, with blackjack and hookers. If that pans out, we could have a pretty competitive landscape - BO vs SpaceX vs ULA/AR.
The question is if the launch market can support that many competitors, or if new customers will start to emerge. Historically we've only seen a market for a dozen or so yearly launches for this class of rocket, and if prices stay the same I don't imagine that will change much. We can root for a pricewar between Musk and Bezos which would expand the market, but that's a pretty rough prospect for ULA which does things the old, expensive way, and actually needs to turn a profit since there isn't a billionaire waiting in the wings to write them checks as needed.
True... origin stories are some of the most fun because there is inherently a ton of major character development. I also think D&D tends to be a blast when you are one or two hits from being wiped out at any given time... when you have single digit hit points you think seriously about your choices in combat.
The only way to do this is to have a sense of humor about it. There's nothing appealing about watching a bunch of nerds taking a game way too seriously - even playing D&D, the best games happen with people who have fun with it and embrace the fact that there's a bit of absurdity inherent in the process. That doesn't preclude drama or action, either. Anybody who has seen the Community D&D episode knows that you can mock D&D and celebrate it simultaneously.
By far the best option for this scenario is finding a machine owned by somebody else to use. Libraries have computers for public use, there are likely computer labs at the school that are free periodically, and students definitely have friends or relatives with computers. Work with other teachers and the IT department to come up with a solution - if everybody in the school took one evening a month to monitor a computer lab and allow students to continue working, the problem/excuse goes away. If you can't get traction in the school overall, get a desk and put one or two Goodwill computers in your room for students to use before/after school or during lunch.
Fundamentally the "I don't have a computer" problem is an excuse - I guarantee your students have Facebook, when they want to get connected they find a way.
Not to mention how hard it is to do source code control (svn, git, etc.) on CASE specifications, especially when (like LabView) they're in binary files. Sure, you can build a toy in a few days, but you can't maintain a large project with that shit because there's no way to track changes.
Visual LEGOid drag-a-block gooey editors are flashy and give PHBs boners, but change management is un-sexy and gets ignored by the people pushing that crap. (Once they've sold it to your PHB, their job is done!)
Don't I know it. We've got some legacy Labview stuff running around to control instrumentation, etc (exactly what Labview is for, in theory) but as feature creep sets in those things have gotten incredibly unwieldy. I'm trying to move us towards Python for automation and control scripts because at least it plays nice with SVN and is easy to document.
Here's your original contention:
Even then, I suspect all you need to know are the equations and a few well-understood approaches to integration, actually understanding the math (or the physics) doesn't seem necessary.
So you don't need to understand math to program, you just need to know about integration and some equations. The statement is its own contradiction. That's why I've been arguing against it.
That's the thing though: you seem to think that these models are not realistic physics. They ARE. The fact that the math is simple does not mean that it is the obvious solution to the novice, or that it is unrealistic. I don't think that a downward constant acceleration is going to be obvious at all as a jump mechanic to someone setting out to create their own platformer - acceleration isn't an intuitive idea at all, consider the fact that humanity for thousands of years had it completely wrong.
You seem to believe that simple implementations are obvious or easy. I think the opposite is true: to get a movement model that is both simple and intuitive, the only real way to do it is to follow the simplicity of nature. I guarantee you that inspired these original models.
Saying you can program without math and physics is like saying you can build a house without power tools. Completely factually accurate, but completely neglects the fact that power tools allow you to do more complex work, in far less time, with much better results.
For anything really complicated they skip the Labview (that's what the LEGO GUI really is) and go straight to fast and powerful C.
Start with what you got, not even math skills are necessary, and whenever you hit a wall, you can always ask someone or teach yourself what you are missing.
This, I agree with. However, I don't agree that the article was clear on that point. Based on the examples given and the general tone, it seemed to me dismissive of learning in math. In my experience, it is a hell of a lot easier to teach yourself programming than it is to teach yourself math - if you stumble across a problem that requires it in the course of your coding job, a background in math or science will be a huge asset.
Should interested people be encouraged to learn programming regardless of their background? Yes. Should people devalue math education? No.
My contention is not that game physics are 100% real. I am rebutting your point that knowledge about physics is unnecessary for developing a physics engine. You said at one point: "When someone jumps, they go up for a bit and then come down. You slide on slippery things." How do you implement that, non-ambiguously, in an intuitive way?
You have to have something approximating gravity to make things "go up for a bit and then go down". You have to implement friction to make characters "slide on slippery things". Can it be done without physics knowledge? Sure, anything can be accomplished eventually through brute force and pure persistence, but the programmer with math and physics knowledge is going to do it better and faster, and likely more elegant, because it's hard to find something more elegant than the laws of nature.
As to the changing velocity in mid-air: you still have a physics model going on there, with acceleration applied based on player input. The only real disconnect with reality is that Mario's character design doesn't have a credible mechanism for propelling himself when he isn't in contact with the ground, but there's nothing non-physical about applying an acceleration midair. That midair acceleration still follows a realistic physics model even if the character designs aren't realistic.
It shouldn't be that surprising, as you're using the work of physicists. The implementation is just details after that. You don't need to understand it, all you need are the equations. There are already well-established methods for integration, so you don't need to invent that either, just implement one.
Even physicists aren't often invention equations from scratch. Understanding the equations and implementing them, and even understanding that integration is what you need are the parts that math helps you with. If you don't know what in the hell that weird S does and have never taken a calculus course, you won't even have the vocabulary to start researching to help yourself. A person with math or physics experience of some sort is going to do much better with these things.
When someone jumps, they go up for a bit and then come down. You slide on slippery things. I'll bet a nickle that the developers of Mario Brothers didn't concern themselves with physical accuracy, but how each action felt intuitively.
How do you make characters move intuitively? By making them inhabit a world that follows physical laws similar to our own. One of the major things that made Super Mario Brothers the groundbreaking success that it was is the fact that their physics engine was so responsive and intuitive. They did this by implementing gravity exactly as it is on Earth - a constant downward acceleration. A jump just gives Mario some initial upward velocity. There are a number of articles out there that have been able to determine exactly what kind of planet Mario must live on by making measurements of his movement in free-fall and therefore calculating the strength of gravity on his world.
Sonic is another great example. You'll notice that they spent a lot of time dealing with friction in Sonic's world. If you try to reverse direction, it doesn't happen instantly. Instead, Sonic moves himself by a constant horizontal acceleration. When you stop pushing one of the direction buttons, he doesn't stop immediately: he slows down by a constant negative acceleration from friction. How do you make sure that a character follows a realistic, predictable, intuitive parabola through the air when they jump? By implementing realistic 2-dimensional physics, with a constant horizontal velocity and a constant vertical acceleration.
This isn't tremendously complicated stuff, but if you haven't taken a physics course in high school or college you will have a very hard time building an intuitive movement model for a video game characters. You don't need multivariate calculus for most programming, but there are a lot of software problems that basic calculus and trigonometry solve very cleanly, and without familiarity with math you will struggle when you encounter them as a coder.
At this point I can only conclude that you either are being dishonest about the work you've done on physics engines, or you dramatically overestimate the math and physics coursework your average humanities major receives.
Take a look at the missions proposed for Mars. None of them have anyone coming back for a very long time. Until there is fuel production on Mars or in orbit around Mars no one is coming back.
What in the world are you talking about? There is no credible mission that has been proposed that involves a permanent stay at the beginning. Generating methane on Mars to fuel a return ship is technically feasible, and there are also plenty of mission profiles that could work (albeit expensively) without ISRU. And if you are talking about Mars One, that is complete baloney.
There is no scenario in which a person is living long-term (decades) on Mars before we've made many, many short-term (~1-3 year) trips. This test is not meant to apply to the long term case because it is both impractical to test and has little relevance for any mission in the foreseeable future. What's more, any person living for that length of time on Mars will not be doing it in a tiny capsule - the level of infrastructure that would be required for that kind of sustained presence would mean the scenario changes completely.
Don't criticize the test for not fitting some imaginary mission profile you made up.
It seems to me that coding without math knowledge is like travelling in unfamiliar territory without a map. You can describe your destination, but you have no big-picture understanding of the scenario, and a limited ability to find the most effective route from A to B. You have to rely on others to give you directions or take routes that have already been established by others.
On one hand, I appreciate the message that anybody can start learning code without having any particular skillset beforehand. However, I think the subtext (math, computer science, physics, computer architecture are unnecessary knowledge) is deeply misguided. Knowledge of the deeper, more fundamental topics is often what distinguishes a mediocre coder from a true expert.
I think that whole anti-science attitude comes from insecurity. The thing is, with math and the hard sciences, it can take months or even years of learning to even be able to understand a problem, much less solve it. There's a massive barrier to entry, and what's more, there are objectively right and wrong answers, so you can't B.S. your way through it.
I briefly enrolled as an English major before I wised up and got a physics degree. The thing about majoring in the humanities is that after a year or two of schooling, I was left feeling no more capable or informed than when I started. I read a bunch of books, and wrote a bunch of subjective papers that were subjectively graded, with no real right or wrong - the question was just if you could churn out a competently assembled essay in the allotted time.
When I was in physics, however, I would gain a new fundamental understanding or skill on a weekly or even daily basis. You try to do your assignments, get a wrong answer that doesn't make sense, and then try again until you are confident you've mastered the material. This matches coding far better than any amount of essay writing or literature reading ever could.
To play devil's advocate for a moment though: I also get tired of engineers with the attitude that writing well, understanding philosophical arguments, or appreciating the history and larger context of a field are pointless. There are a lot of folks with a technical background that seem entirely content to be ignorant about everything else out there, which is partly what creates that 'out of touch egghead' stereotype that is easy for insecure people to mock. Ideally both technical and non-technical people would love and respect learning of any sort.
This is a bit outside my experience, as all I've done there is a 3D physics engine for a game. Even then, I suspect all you need to know are the equations and a few well-understood approaches to integration, actually understanding the math (or the physics) doesn't seem necessary.
Wait, what? How can you "do" a 3D physics engine, AT ALL, without understanding physics? Unless by that you mean that you are making small modifications to an existing engine, there's no way you could create a physics engine, much less a 3D one, without decent physics understanding. Even something as simple as Mario Brothers had a fairly realistic implementation of gravity, friction, and acceleration - some physics knowledge is absolutely necessary unless you're just leveraging other people's work the whole time, or your application has completely unrealistic movement.
Test engineering is about replicating flight conditions as closely as possible, within technical, budgetary, and (in this case) ethical limitations. The two main objections you brought up are basically impossible to address within those limitations - literally, you would have to manufacture some sort of deadly threat to the participants, and you would have to make it so they never return to their homes.
Within engineering limits, this test is a perfectly adequate test of long-term isolation - close quarter confinement, minimal contact with the outside world, reasonable time frames, a variety of personalities. To be a useful test it doesn't need to comprehensively answer every question about the psychological scenario of a Mars mission, it just needs to answer some questions. We could certainly learn something from this experiment that helps the design of future interplanetary spacecraft, or helps with crew selection, or informs training for handling the isolation.
And? Is your point that we might as well not test anything until we do the real thing? Because arguably, no ground-based test is ever really valid, since the situation will be different in all sorts of important ways on an actual mission.
Alternatively, we could do controlled albeit imperfect tests to try to answer specific questions, so that we understand failure modes as well as possible before the real deal. This has worked pretty well for the aerospace industry for the past ~100 years.
I appreciate your apparent sincerity, but why doesn't Occam's razor immediately cause you to dismiss all this? What is easier to believe: that there's an incredibly well organized collusion between otherwise non-cooperative government entities in order to propagate an extensive disinformation campaign for no good reason, OR, that all the scientists, aerospace engineers, and travelers are just being honest about the earth and space?
Space isn't easy, but the technical challenges it presents are much easier to pull off than the kind of conspiracy you suggest. And, for what it's worth, I've personally worked on a sounding rocket experiment that went to space and took pictures in which the curvature of the Earth is very prominent, and I'm good friends with a guy who spent quite a while doing research in Antarctica.
I can't tell if you are a brilliant and committed troll or if you really believe this stuff. How do you explain a solar eclipse? If the moon is transparent enough to allow very weak starlight through, there's no way it could eclipse the sun.
First of all, Stross' story Palimpsest, for instance, is one of the most innovative and well-executed sci-fi stories in recent years. A Hugo award winner, incidentally. Some of his stuff is better than others, but no question he is an excellent author. Second, sounds like you're talking about the Laundry Files, which I'll admit isn't usually award-winning material but is a hell of a good time if you can keep up with the inside nerd jokes. Which maybe you can't.
Second of all, trying to read some big conspiracy into all of this is just foolish. What's easier to believe, that a handful of second-rate authors just don't tend to write award-grade material, or that there's a secret group that is coordinating behind the scenes to keep out nonbelievers? Occam's Razor, etc.
The only 'clique' that exists is people who enjoy Stross' work - fans.
This was basically a big whine session from Baen authors and fans who complain that they never get Hugo awards, and rather than accepting the truth (Baen publishes primarily mediocre, escapist, wish-fulfillment sci-fi that is undeserving of any kind of literary award) they invented a conspiracy out of wholecloth to make themselves feel better and try to force their way into recognition.
The 'club' that Stross refers to is nothing more than the existing sci-fi community - you know the one, it actually recognizes talent and innovation.
That calculation has to happen with absolutely everything. Wind power? Workers are going to fall off of turbines during installation and maintenance, and die. Solar power? Same thing, with roofs. The dangers of hydroelectric have been well described below.
The thing is, in terms of Deaths/MW of delivered energy, nuclear is among the very safest technologies. Accidents are noteworthy because they are so very rare, and because it's easy for sensationalist reporters to exploit the scientific illiteracy of the public to make nuclear accidents sexier and more frightening.
If they are going through 5000 jokes a week and comparing whether a human assessment and computer assessment agree, there are at least 3 sig figs to work with. You could add some additional measurement uncertainty, I suppose, but you are already measuring something subjective - are you worried about incorrect button clicks or something?
That's a fairly contrived example, but even so: Can you imagine normal drivers making those value judgments within the bounds of their reaction time and subjective bias? I would feel much more comfortable leaving that situation in the control of a computer, programmed by teams of engineers who thoughtfully considered the corner cases.