This is a solvable problem. The serious danger to life (as in, kill you before you get to Mars) comes from unpredictable solar activity, and you handle that by storing your fuel, water, and other significant mass behind you (pointed towards the sun). The remainder of the threat comes from galactic cosmic radiation, and this is a predictable, low-level dose. We don't understand the impact of these long term low dose rates very well though... the projected cancer risk depends on the veracity of the Linear No Threshold model, and we've got good reasons to believe that this isn't telling the whole story. It very well might be the case that low levels of background radiation don't have a detectable impact on cancer rates. The fact that Colorado experiences higher constant radiation due to uranium in the soil and lower atmospheric shielding means that the residents experience more radiation than the rest of the US, yet Colorado's average lifespan is longer.
So, GCR might have an impact, it might not. Even assuming that LNT is accurate, though, the risk is still potentially tolerable. Suppose it doubles your cancer risk - there's still a good chance that heart disease is still the dominant factor in your lifespan, not to mention the considerable risk of launch and reentry. We shouldn't make radiation more of an issue than is warranted - if you've got a 1% chance of dying on launch/reentry, it doesn't make sense to call off a mission because it gives you a.5% chance of dying in the next 20 years from cancer. You're inconsistently allowing one type of risk and disallowing another.
One suggestion I've seen is to send smokers, who then quit cold turkey. Besides the obvious social/physiological issues with this, the data shows that a person quitting smoking and substituting the galactic background radiation would come out ahead in terms of life expectancy - so this tells you what level of risk we're talking about. If a trip to Mars poses less cancer risk than another legal activity that people willfully engage in, that says to me that it is an acceptable level of risk for an informed person to choose to take.
I agree with the sentiment of your post, but there actually wasn't widespread support for the Apollo program back when it was happening. The public level of support for NASA hasn't actually changed much throughout the years (outside of a couple of blips associated with the Space Shuttle failures). What happens instead is that support is lukewarm while a program is alive and costing money, and then once it has accomplished what it's set out to do everybody looks back on it with pride and admiration. The positive sentiment that accompanies the Apollo program is specifically because it is in the past, not because opinions are any different now.
I think it's something like the fair weather friend syndrome. Once something is paid for and you know it has been successful, it is easy to be supportive of it. Things in the future that have yet to be paid for and might fail, not so much.
Board members and share holders like revenue. It's all about the next quarter. They don't like pet projects that are giant money sinks without the remote possibility of a return. Persist on that path post-IPO Elon, and watch yourself be fired from your own company, ala Steve Jobs.
Which is why Musk isn't going public until Mars transport is alive and well.
NDGT is spot on the issue of exploration. It takes a government interested in (mostly) pure science without profit motivation.
You want to put people on Mars? I'll tell you what puts people on Mars - the U.S. government thumbing their nose in the face of Chinese ascendancy - Ala Cold War 2: Space Boogaloo.
Let the government, or team of governments blow tax dollars on building Mars mission tech. That tech will filter down to private enterprise years later, so the next generation of Elon Musks can farm minerals off asteroids, or some other future commercial endeavor.
Elon is overreaching with this.
Have you considered whether going to the Moon and building the ISS is sufficient government "trailblazing" to get private industry rolling? It's no secret that SpaceX has developed their rockets so cheaply thanks to leveraging all the data and tech expertise that NASA makes available. As well, your entire point relies on the idea that space access will continue to be as expensive as always (the cost is likely to come down an order of magnitude or so in the near future thanks to SpaceX's efforts). It has been almost 50 years since the Apollo program started. Government has had their shot, and they've shown that what they can accomplish in space is symbolic trips for national pride.
If we want to do new things, it doesn't make sense to keep relying exclusively on the same old institutions that have failed for decades to accomplish them.
Tesla is not producing affordable family car yet. He needs a gigafactory to make batteries first. Then got side tracked into packing people into some sort of tubes used by the tellers in drive through banking window. Then he is going on to Solar city that hopes to become a distributed power supplying utility that does not need any public rights of way. That requires mega billions in investments. Now suddenly putting a man in Mars.
Musk, any one project you have done would earn you a lasting place in history. If you successfully complete the solar city and electric passenger car alone, you will be compared to the likes of Ford, Bell, Edison... Please focus on finishing what you started instead of constantly shifting focus like someone afflicted with attention deficit disorder.
Because it's clearly impossible for affordable electric cars to be developed at the same time as affordable rockets... Musk isn't shifting focus. SpaceX has always, always been about getting to Mars. Musk has just been revealing more of that mission publicly, as he's gained credibility for his successes and won't be laughed off stage anymore. Many have suggested that SolarCity and Tesla are each part of that big picture as well - high efficiency power generation and transportation will both be significant requirements for a Mars colony.
The MCT concept he's described includes a free ride back to earth. I believe the architecture he's envisioned is something like the Aldrin cycler (at least in some respects). The transporter is going to move ~100 people from Earth to Mars, and then go back to Earth for another load. Adding a few homesick passengers for the return trip won't be a significant burden on that kind of vehicle.
I appreciate your optimism but I think it is misplaced. Such a mission would cost at minimum, many billions of dollars. Probably hundreds of billions if not trillions. For comparison, the International Space Station which is barely out of the Earth's atmosphere has thus far cost $150 billion and that is FAR less complicated than getting a man to Mars.
You forget that SpaceX has brought launch costs down by a significant factor already through nothing more than optimizing traditional launch architectures for cost. Making rockets reusable, which they have essentially demonstrated the capability of (at least for the first stage) promises to bring costs down by at least an order of magnitude, if not more. $200,000 is the cost for fuel IIRC, and of course you've got operations costs, but how much of the $60 mil per launch is on a throw-away vehicle? Don't forget the considerable engineering advantage that comes from having a (mostly) unsullied launch vehicle returned to the pad for analysis - that promises an ability to iteratively improve designs based on flight samples that simply isn't available with expendable launch vehicles.
Considering as well that LEO is half way to anywhere (in terms of delta v) and the costs that are working out, I don't think it is at all unrealistic. Challenging, yes, but Musk has a track record of making grandiose claims, and then following through.
In most cases, if what you care about is fuel savings, there are better approaches. I got a Mazda3 with a SkyActiv engine, and I've never gotten below 30 MPG, and have sometimes gotten into the low 40's. That for a reasonably sized car that is comfortably under $20k, and there isn't much case for a hybrid. You've also got to consider that fuel economy only has a decent payoff time if you drive a lot, and most people who drive a lot probably do it on the highway, where hybrid technology offers little benefit.
Really, the no-brainer use case for hybrids is somebody who drives all the time in city conditions... or basically taxi drivers. Which is why so many of them are hybrids now. There's a limited market for them outside of that, though - most other people are better served by good old ICE technology or by going whole hog with electric.
It's complicated. Technically, there is redundancy. ULA was formed out of Boeing (Delta IV) and Lockheed Martin (Atlas V). The Atlas V relies on the RD180 from the Russians. One of the big selling points of ULA for US govt flights has always been what they call "Assured Access", which means that if there's a problem with the Atlas V, they can use the Delta IV, or vice versa. The problem is, Lockheed has always sort of run the show at ULA, and when the merger happened they discarded much of Boeing's engineering, shoehorned a lot of Atlas V tech into the Delta IV, and have treated the Atlas V preferentially. So basically the Delta IV is now far more expensive, and useful only for extra heavy launches or if an Atlas V won't work for some reason.
People foresaw this problem in the past, and gave ULA some money to develop a domestic alternative to the RD180. That cash never did what it was supposed to. They also get fat checks regularly for assured access.
So yes, putting a bunch of government launches on a rocket using many foreign-sourced parts wasn't a great move. Some people did foresee these problems, and attempted to rectify them, but it was easier and more profitable just to continue outsourcing the engine work to the Russians. And, in all honesty, they are impressive engines and the Atlas V has an enviable launch record. So the reason we are in this situation today is a mixture of messy corporate infighting, ineffective government contracting, and massive organizational inertia, along with having a "good enough" solution up to this point.
In technical matters, it seems like I'm always having the experience of encountering people that have seemingly incredible technical abilities, and I aspire to learn more and become more capable. Learning robotics, for instance, you just want to make a light blink, then control a servo, then make a chassis drive, then combine sensor input into a fully autonomous vehicle and eventually you aspire to build a reverse-kinematics biped that destroys all humans. As I learn more, I just move on to newer and more complex kinds of challenges that seem almost unattainable, and then the process repeats itself. So I wonder, have you had this experience, and if so, what things are currently on your radar as aspirational challenges?
Further, tectonic activity has literally subducted and melted the entirety of the early Earth's crust, so the first billion years of our history - anything that happened/was built on the Earth's surface (even the ocean floor!) is completely gone and unknowable.
Oblig: http://xkcd.com/1194/
So problem solved, right? Let's have the teacher's union promote the use of this metric!
I do think the growth model is a reasonable step in the right direction - that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot more work to do.
Everyone like to parrot this, but the fact is basically every university looks at SAT scores as a major factor (not only, but still major) in deciding which student to accept. Unless you are going to claim that all universities are crazy, it IS a strong indicator that YES, standardized tests IS A USEFUL MEASURE of a student's ability (not to claim it is the ONLY measure, but a USEFUL measure nonetheless).
Actually, high school grades are a better predictor of student success in college than test scores are. There are a lot of things entrenched in industry, academia, politics, and basically all of human life that are used because of tradition and "common sense" despite the fact that there is little to no evidence supporting their use. And, my criticism of the education system and how it is measured extends to (and especially includes) higher education, which is doing a horrible job of educating teachers. I'm hesitant to look there for inspiration just yet.
So because we don't fully understand a thing, we should even TRY to measure it?
Well, politics is also a very ill defined concept, yet it doesn't stop people quantifying them as a single number (number of votes) and hold elections to decide who gets to be the POTUS. By your logic, we should just do away with election and have a tenure for POTUS.
You apparently didn't try to understand my statement. We should not place more importance on test data than we have a right to. This is like making engineering decisions with materials that are only partly understood - you're going to have failure modes that you aren't prepared for and you have no guarantee that your attempts to design an effective structure are going to have the intended effect. All the focus right now is on what policy decisions to make with test data, and that is putting the cart before the horse. We should be putting far more effort first into understanding test data, doing controlled studies and pilot programs to see what works, and then using that to inform our policy. I'm basically advocating applying our science and engineering knowhow to the problem of education. The problem is, this is expensive and time consuming, and we might find answers that don't fit cleanly with our comfortable ideologies.
By the way, politics in the US uses a pretty clean metric. The idea of democracy (representative or otherwise) is that the person who gets elected is the person who gets the most votes. It isn't about measuring how good a candidate is, or successful - just which one most people want in office. It's hard to argue that a popular vote doesn't measure popularity, at least to the first order. There might be issues with a specific voting system, but it's very unambiguous at a fundamental level. Also, I don't know if you want to use politics as an example of an effective system to emulate.
That IT person can complain all he wants, and is free to leave for another job. Yet you wouldn't say that because a shitty metric
is used, that IT person should have a lifelong tenure at this job, would you?
I haven't said a word about tenure. I don't think tenure matters much (I think the unions place undue priority on it, and I think reformers place undue priority on abolishing it). You get shitty, long term employees in lots of industries that have no tenure. The problem is, teachers can't really leave for another job, except perhaps the tiny number of private schools or leaving the field entirely. This kind of policy is at least district-wide (change towns), often state-wide (change states), and sometimes nationwide (change countries). If all of IT was burdened by stupid metrics unilaterally, we would probably agree that there was an iss
I personally think we should do some research to develop a sophisticated assessment and understand exactly what it measures and how. I think, ideally, the best assessment would be one that has some predictive capacity for later success. We could build something that is a predictor of successfully completing later education, or attach it to future income projections, or even something like life expectancy or lack of criminal convictions. Defining success is a tough thing, and inherently subjective and value-based, but that really gets at the heart of the problem: we are trying to define what "education" is. Most people would agree that the point of education is to make you a more capable and successful adult. The problem is, we've basically been treating it like the point of education is to make a person score highly on an IQ test, and I don't see any merit in that in and of itself.
So, if we could develop some good predictors of student success, we could start to measure teacher behavior and how it impacts those attributes. We could then quantify what the best teachers can do, what the worst teachers do, and what a reasonable expectation is for improving the "success factor" of students in the class, and we could make attempts to control for other factors that influence things - measure improvement rather than comparing to a set value, account for things that cause greater difficulty like a large spread in student capabilities, which makes instruction difficult, or a problematic student/teacher ratio, or low per-pupil funding, or low regional income.
Yes, this is complex, it's a decades-long undertaking, and there's probably some dramatic simplifications and assumptions in here and the reality is much more difficult. But the truth is, taking an arbitrary measurement of an attribute we don't understand, when we don't have defined criteria for success, means that standardized assessment as it currently exists is a masturbatory political exercise that misleads the public. We need to make education rigorous, which means end-to-end reform (educational research is mostly a joke currently). We need better researchers, better teachers, better measurements, and then when we actually understand the problem we can have an intelligent conversation about how to fix it.
Note: Finland is already doing some of this. They have an amazingly rigorous teacher education program, and they've gone from very poor student performance, near the bottom of developed nations, to excellent performance, among the top nations in the world. It took them 30 years or so, though.
Almost EVERY SINGLE JOB IN THE WORLD IS LIKE THAT, it must be news to teachers who never worked other jobs.
Every salesperson in a store can only work with customers that come in the store. Every bank teller can only work with customers coming into the branch. Every programmer can only work on projects they were assigned to. etc, etc.
That doesn't stop all other professions' performance from being assessed.
The issue isn't that teachers don't want to be assessed (at least not for most of them). It is that they don't want to be assessed using shitty metrics. If you are a used Kia salesman nobody is going to expect you to bring in the kind of money that the Mercedes salesman at the rich end of town does. And, in that case, your job is to make money, and that is a single metric that is pretty unambiguous and can be easily measured to determine your performance. Teachers, though, have historically been expected to make Mercedes money selling used Kias. Things are getting somewhat better because states are moving towards growth models that look at a student's net improvement rather than just measuring them to a flat standard. So you are expected to make student improve, but not expected to make them all model students regardless of their starting point.
The other issue is with standardized testing. The only thing it really measures is how good students are at taking standardized tests. This has perhaps some connection to "intelligence" or "knowledge" or whatever the hell it is we're trying to produce through the education system, but the thing is we don't really know what it is we're trying to produce, much less measure. Seriously, intelligence, knowledge and education are not well defined concepts, and attempts to quantify them as a single number are misguided. There's been some effort in these areas recently, but it is rather backwards that we've started out by attaching nationwide policy and billions of dollars to these things before we even have any idea of what exactly they measure, how reliable they are, and what the issues are with them. Trying to base your entire assessment of performance on a concept that is not well defined, much less measured, is a good way to irritate your employees, and teachers are right to bitch about this being a stupid form of assessment.
You wouldn't blame an IT person who complains that their only metric is number of tickets closed, when that has no bearing on whether the problem was actually solved correctly, thoroughly, or at all. This isn't a question of whether teachers should be assessed. It is a question of how they should be assessed, and measuring all students from all regions against an arbitrary, fixed standard is a piss-poor way to do it that has little bearing on whether a teacher is good or not.
This sounds like multiple questions but it is really just clarification on one:
What advice would you give to a person who wanted to make a living in the "Maker" tradition - being able to spend your days designing, engineering, and building on technically interesting and creative maker projects? I'm most interested in the career aspect, assuming that you've already obtained a preliminary education: would you look for a job with a similarly minded engineering firm, launch a kickstarter, start a hackerspace, hack together some things and try to sell them through a webstore, work as a freelance engineer, or something else entirely?
The most useful and relevant modules would have been those that can provide artificial gravity - everybody is banking on this for enabling long term space habitation but we have just about zero on-orbit experimental data. If they only do one more thing with the ISS, that would be it. Japan even built a module for this, but it didn't get deployed so it is now just a museum piece.
Also known as the "Anyone who uses Wikipedia as an authoritative source is an idiot" issue.
Not sure that's exactly the problem. Wikipedia is fine as an authoritative source on what Wikipedia editors believe. This has some connection to general public opinion, which likewise has some kind of connection to the true nature of things. The issue is, any attempt to glean anything useful from Wikipedia needs to at least acknowledge this limitation, or better yet account for it and attempt to correct for it.
For most of human evolution, I would think that periods of scarce food supply were pretty frequent. I wonder if part of the human body is optimized for this - when there isn't enough food (cold winter), your body consumes itself, starting with the old and weak parts (think of wolves culling the elderly and diseased members from elk herds during the winter) and then when you have a surplus again (spring and summer) it switches on and builds healthy new ones.
With increasing research coming out about how important sunlight can be to cue physiological sleep/wake cycles, etc, I wonder if there are other environmental signals that produce beneficial responses in the body, and which of them that were around for most of our species' development have been totally lost in a century or so.
Yes, it is. Leaving guns aside, it's the way logic and statistics work together.
But while a correlation does not prove cause-and-effect, a lack of correlation -- or more properly, a negative correlation -- can DISprove cause-and-effect. Example: something -- all evidence points to one animal -- has been killing your chickens. You suspect the neighbor's dog. So you start keeping tabs on when the dog is let out, and when it is in the house. It turns out, after examination, that whatever it is has been killing your chickens when the dog was locked up in the house. There is no dispute... it is indisputable that the dog wasn't there when the chickens died. This negative correlation between the dog being out and dead chickens has DISproved your theory that the dog was killing the chickens.
It gets a bit more complicated when the numbers go up but the same principle still holds. If your theory is that X causes Y, and you find a negative correlation, for example X goes up while Y goes down, you have DISproved that X causes Y. Otherwise, barring other outside influences, you would have (no dispute) observed that Y went up as X went up. Anything else contradicts your theory.
Except that you can't "lock the dog up" in this case. You can require strict gun control laws in the US, but you can't change the fact that guns are still readily accessible just a short drive away. You can see that crime is going down, but in fact, gun ownership isn't going up in the way you suggest - the percentage of people who own guns in the US is decreasing, but gun owners, on average, own more guns than they used to. That in and of itself disproves your absurdly simplistic attitude.
And in the gun-control debate, we have in fact had ample time and opportunity to control for other factors.
No we haven't. All policy problems are difficult to deal with because every step along the way of trying to take a scientific approach is fraught with error. Methods of collecting statistics range from government reports and medical records to random surveys. None of these have a very good margin of error, and they all are susceptible to systemic inaccuracies.
There has been only ONE societal factor that has been found to satisfactorily correlate with the reduction in crime (see the movie Freakonomics, and that has been widely disputed.
You directly contradict your own statement here. You say earlier that "we have found no other causal factors that apply to the situation", and then cite one in the next paragraph. Of course this one is highly disputed, it deals with abortion which is itself a controversial policy issue.
Lacking any other evidence of outside factors, and even allowing for the one that (maybe) was found, we are still left with the simple mathematical fact that in the U.S., prevalence of gun ownership DOES NOT cause crime.
It isn't an opinion. It's as scientific as it gets.
This is total bullshit, and you are misrepresenting math and science to try to convince yourself (and others) that this isn't an emotional crusade for you where you look for evidence to fit your conclusion. Real statisticians and scientists have long been exploring data on this issue, but it is very difficult to make progress because the argument is so charged on both sides that the chance of having a rational discourse with anyone is basically zero.
Here are some things that are true: the US has the highest number of guns per 100 people of any country in the world. Among developed countries, we have the highest level of gun homicides per 100 people. Suicides by guns are trending upwards. Regardless of the fact that crime and violence are historically low and getting lower, we do seem to have a correlation that suggests our high rates of ownership have something to do with our high rate of firearm rel
An "expert" in theology?:) Is that like knowing what color the invisible unicorn is without looking it up? Or being able to count how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?
No, it's actually about being well read in a philosophical tradition that extends back many centuries and includes a great number of names that you'll recognize for their contributions to science and mathematics. Leibniz, Descartes and Pascal are just a few that come to mind. Regardless of what your position is on theism, it's a central part of philosophy and always has been. Many interesting questions have been explored primarily through the perspective of theology - questions about the universe and why it exists in the way that it does, questions about truth and knowledge and whether they and how they are attainable, and questions of morals and ethics and the dilemmas all people face. Many of the arguments from these thinkers are interesting in their own right and are relevant regardless of what world view you personally adhere to.
Dismissing any discipline that you aren't familiar with is a great way to stay uninformed. Philosophy may not have direct, profitable applications, but if you get acquainted with it you can avoid repeating rusty arguments that have been around far longer than this newfangled "science" everybody is so excited about. And along the way you might stumble across some interesting new ways to think about reality.
Dawkins is an expert in biology, but woefully uninformed about theology/philosophy - he presents many arguments that are centuries old, and expects to be celebrated for it. So it would be appropriate to say he and many of his proponents "know 1 thing, apply it to things outside of their field and make nonsense statements."
This guy has read Origin of Species (have you?) and he knows about piltdown man, which means he knows a fair bit about both archaeology and biology, far more than your average playboy bunny. He's also excellent at circuit design and technical writing, so he thinks clearly and analytically. On all fronts, he is somebody who is at least capable of intelligent discourse on the matter, probably to the same degree as you or I, and the fact that he holds a minority position doesn't make his ideas worthless.
I'm not saying that I agree with him - I don't. I also don't find his arguments compelling (he seems to be unaware of the Cambrian explosion, for instance) or particularly interesting. He isn't trying to mislead, though, and his contributions in physics and electronics have basically no connection to whatever he believes about theology or biology. So you've got no reason to criticize him for honestly answering a question, just because he has an opinion that differs from yours.
The relation between the two things is that financial value is increasingly divorced from real, productive value. This is demonstrated by highly profitable HFT which has no discernible connection to creation of value, and short-term CEO thinking which prioritizes things like firing your most capable employees to lower costs and increase profit. Looks great on the spreadsheet and is financially promising, but in reality is either neutral or actively destructive to real productive activity.
The point isn't that HFT is the cause of short-sighted corporate leadership. It is that both things are symptoms of an underlying trend - that finance is moving away from a connection to physical value, building products, businesses, etc, and is instead an abstraction where actual value is sacrificed at the altar of financial value.
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This is a solvable problem. The serious danger to life (as in, kill you before you get to Mars) comes from unpredictable solar activity, and you handle that by storing your fuel, water, and other significant mass behind you (pointed towards the sun). The remainder of the threat comes from galactic cosmic radiation, and this is a predictable, low-level dose. We don't understand the impact of these long term low dose rates very well though... the projected cancer risk depends on the veracity of the Linear No Threshold model, and we've got good reasons to believe that this isn't telling the whole story. It very well might be the case that low levels of background radiation don't have a detectable impact on cancer rates. The fact that Colorado experiences higher constant radiation due to uranium in the soil and lower atmospheric shielding means that the residents experience more radiation than the rest of the US, yet Colorado's average lifespan is longer.
.5% chance of dying in the next 20 years from cancer. You're inconsistently allowing one type of risk and disallowing another.
So, GCR might have an impact, it might not. Even assuming that LNT is accurate, though, the risk is still potentially tolerable. Suppose it doubles your cancer risk - there's still a good chance that heart disease is still the dominant factor in your lifespan, not to mention the considerable risk of launch and reentry. We shouldn't make radiation more of an issue than is warranted - if you've got a 1% chance of dying on launch/reentry, it doesn't make sense to call off a mission because it gives you a
One suggestion I've seen is to send smokers, who then quit cold turkey. Besides the obvious social/physiological issues with this, the data shows that a person quitting smoking and substituting the galactic background radiation would come out ahead in terms of life expectancy - so this tells you what level of risk we're talking about. If a trip to Mars poses less cancer risk than another legal activity that people willfully engage in, that says to me that it is an acceptable level of risk for an informed person to choose to take.
I agree with the sentiment of your post, but there actually wasn't widespread support for the Apollo program back when it was happening. The public level of support for NASA hasn't actually changed much throughout the years (outside of a couple of blips associated with the Space Shuttle failures). What happens instead is that support is lukewarm while a program is alive and costing money, and then once it has accomplished what it's set out to do everybody looks back on it with pride and admiration. The positive sentiment that accompanies the Apollo program is specifically because it is in the past, not because opinions are any different now.
I think it's something like the fair weather friend syndrome. Once something is paid for and you know it has been successful, it is easy to be supportive of it. Things in the future that have yet to be paid for and might fail, not so much.
Board members and share holders like revenue. It's all about the next quarter. They don't like pet projects that are giant money sinks without the remote possibility of a return. Persist on that path post-IPO Elon, and watch yourself be fired from your own company, ala Steve Jobs.
Which is why Musk isn't going public until Mars transport is alive and well.
NDGT is spot on the issue of exploration. It takes a government interested in (mostly) pure science without profit motivation.
You want to put people on Mars? I'll tell you what puts people on Mars - the U.S. government thumbing their nose in the face of Chinese ascendancy - Ala Cold War 2: Space Boogaloo.
Let the government, or team of governments blow tax dollars on building Mars mission tech. That tech will filter down to private enterprise years later, so the next generation of Elon Musks can farm minerals off asteroids, or some other future commercial endeavor.
Elon is overreaching with this.
Have you considered whether going to the Moon and building the ISS is sufficient government "trailblazing" to get private industry rolling? It's no secret that SpaceX has developed their rockets so cheaply thanks to leveraging all the data and tech expertise that NASA makes available. As well, your entire point relies on the idea that space access will continue to be as expensive as always (the cost is likely to come down an order of magnitude or so in the near future thanks to SpaceX's efforts). It has been almost 50 years since the Apollo program started. Government has had their shot, and they've shown that what they can accomplish in space is symbolic trips for national pride.
If we want to do new things, it doesn't make sense to keep relying exclusively on the same old institutions that have failed for decades to accomplish them.
Tesla is not producing affordable family car yet. He needs a gigafactory to make batteries first. Then got side tracked into packing people into some sort of tubes used by the tellers in drive through banking window. Then he is going on to Solar city that hopes to become a distributed power supplying utility that does not need any public rights of way. That requires mega billions in investments. Now suddenly putting a man in Mars.
Musk, any one project you have done would earn you a lasting place in history. If you successfully complete the solar city and electric passenger car alone, you will be compared to the likes of Ford, Bell, Edison... Please focus on finishing what you started instead of constantly shifting focus like someone afflicted with attention deficit disorder.
Because it's clearly impossible for affordable electric cars to be developed at the same time as affordable rockets... Musk isn't shifting focus. SpaceX has always, always been about getting to Mars. Musk has just been revealing more of that mission publicly, as he's gained credibility for his successes and won't be laughed off stage anymore. Many have suggested that SolarCity and Tesla are each part of that big picture as well - high efficiency power generation and transportation will both be significant requirements for a Mars colony.
The MCT concept he's described includes a free ride back to earth. I believe the architecture he's envisioned is something like the Aldrin cycler (at least in some respects). The transporter is going to move ~100 people from Earth to Mars, and then go back to Earth for another load. Adding a few homesick passengers for the return trip won't be a significant burden on that kind of vehicle.
I appreciate your optimism but I think it is misplaced. Such a mission would cost at minimum, many billions of dollars. Probably hundreds of billions if not trillions. For comparison, the International Space Station which is barely out of the Earth's atmosphere has thus far cost $150 billion and that is FAR less complicated than getting a man to Mars.
You forget that SpaceX has brought launch costs down by a significant factor already through nothing more than optimizing traditional launch architectures for cost. Making rockets reusable, which they have essentially demonstrated the capability of (at least for the first stage) promises to bring costs down by at least an order of magnitude, if not more. $200,000 is the cost for fuel IIRC, and of course you've got operations costs, but how much of the $60 mil per launch is on a throw-away vehicle? Don't forget the considerable engineering advantage that comes from having a (mostly) unsullied launch vehicle returned to the pad for analysis - that promises an ability to iteratively improve designs based on flight samples that simply isn't available with expendable launch vehicles.
Considering as well that LEO is half way to anywhere (in terms of delta v) and the costs that are working out, I don't think it is at all unrealistic. Challenging, yes, but Musk has a track record of making grandiose claims, and then following through.
In most cases, if what you care about is fuel savings, there are better approaches. I got a Mazda3 with a SkyActiv engine, and I've never gotten below 30 MPG, and have sometimes gotten into the low 40's. That for a reasonably sized car that is comfortably under $20k, and there isn't much case for a hybrid. You've also got to consider that fuel economy only has a decent payoff time if you drive a lot, and most people who drive a lot probably do it on the highway, where hybrid technology offers little benefit.
Really, the no-brainer use case for hybrids is somebody who drives all the time in city conditions... or basically taxi drivers. Which is why so many of them are hybrids now. There's a limited market for them outside of that, though - most other people are better served by good old ICE technology or by going whole hog with electric.
It's complicated. Technically, there is redundancy. ULA was formed out of Boeing (Delta IV) and Lockheed Martin (Atlas V). The Atlas V relies on the RD180 from the Russians. One of the big selling points of ULA for US govt flights has always been what they call "Assured Access", which means that if there's a problem with the Atlas V, they can use the Delta IV, or vice versa. The problem is, Lockheed has always sort of run the show at ULA, and when the merger happened they discarded much of Boeing's engineering, shoehorned a lot of Atlas V tech into the Delta IV, and have treated the Atlas V preferentially. So basically the Delta IV is now far more expensive, and useful only for extra heavy launches or if an Atlas V won't work for some reason.
People foresaw this problem in the past, and gave ULA some money to develop a domestic alternative to the RD180. That cash never did what it was supposed to. They also get fat checks regularly for assured access.
So yes, putting a bunch of government launches on a rocket using many foreign-sourced parts wasn't a great move. Some people did foresee these problems, and attempted to rectify them, but it was easier and more profitable just to continue outsourcing the engine work to the Russians. And, in all honesty, they are impressive engines and the Atlas V has an enviable launch record. So the reason we are in this situation today is a mixture of messy corporate infighting, ineffective government contracting, and massive organizational inertia, along with having a "good enough" solution up to this point.
In technical matters, it seems like I'm always having the experience of encountering people that have seemingly incredible technical abilities, and I aspire to learn more and become more capable. Learning robotics, for instance, you just want to make a light blink, then control a servo, then make a chassis drive, then combine sensor input into a fully autonomous vehicle and eventually you aspire to build a reverse-kinematics biped that destroys all humans. As I learn more, I just move on to newer and more complex kinds of challenges that seem almost unattainable, and then the process repeats itself. So I wonder, have you had this experience, and if so, what things are currently on your radar as aspirational challenges?
Further, tectonic activity has literally subducted and melted the entirety of the early Earth's crust, so the first billion years of our history - anything that happened/was built on the Earth's surface (even the ocean floor!) is completely gone and unknowable. Oblig: http://xkcd.com/1194/
So problem solved, right? Let's have the teacher's union promote the use of this metric!
I do think the growth model is a reasonable step in the right direction - that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot more work to do.
Everyone like to parrot this, but the fact is basically every university looks at SAT scores as a major factor (not only, but still major) in deciding which student to accept. Unless you are going to claim that all universities are crazy, it IS a strong indicator that YES, standardized tests IS A USEFUL MEASURE of a student's ability (not to claim it is the ONLY measure, but a USEFUL measure nonetheless).
Actually, high school grades are a better predictor of student success in college than test scores are. There are a lot of things entrenched in industry, academia, politics, and basically all of human life that are used because of tradition and "common sense" despite the fact that there is little to no evidence supporting their use. And, my criticism of the education system and how it is measured extends to (and especially includes) higher education, which is doing a horrible job of educating teachers. I'm hesitant to look there for inspiration just yet.
So because we don't fully understand a thing, we should even TRY to measure it?
Well, politics is also a very ill defined concept, yet it doesn't stop people quantifying them as a single number (number of votes) and hold elections to decide who gets to be the POTUS. By your logic, we should just do away with election and have a tenure for POTUS.
You apparently didn't try to understand my statement. We should not place more importance on test data than we have a right to. This is like making engineering decisions with materials that are only partly understood - you're going to have failure modes that you aren't prepared for and you have no guarantee that your attempts to design an effective structure are going to have the intended effect. All the focus right now is on what policy decisions to make with test data, and that is putting the cart before the horse. We should be putting far more effort first into understanding test data, doing controlled studies and pilot programs to see what works, and then using that to inform our policy. I'm basically advocating applying our science and engineering knowhow to the problem of education. The problem is, this is expensive and time consuming, and we might find answers that don't fit cleanly with our comfortable ideologies.
By the way, politics in the US uses a pretty clean metric. The idea of democracy (representative or otherwise) is that the person who gets elected is the person who gets the most votes. It isn't about measuring how good a candidate is, or successful - just which one most people want in office. It's hard to argue that a popular vote doesn't measure popularity, at least to the first order. There might be issues with a specific voting system, but it's very unambiguous at a fundamental level. Also, I don't know if you want to use politics as an example of an effective system to emulate.
That IT person can complain all he wants, and is free to leave for another job. Yet you wouldn't say that because a shitty metric is used, that IT person should have a lifelong tenure at this job, would you?
I haven't said a word about tenure. I don't think tenure matters much (I think the unions place undue priority on it, and I think reformers place undue priority on abolishing it). You get shitty, long term employees in lots of industries that have no tenure. The problem is, teachers can't really leave for another job, except perhaps the tiny number of private schools or leaving the field entirely. This kind of policy is at least district-wide (change towns), often state-wide (change states), and sometimes nationwide (change countries). If all of IT was burdened by stupid metrics unilaterally, we would probably agree that there was an iss
I personally think we should do some research to develop a sophisticated assessment and understand exactly what it measures and how. I think, ideally, the best assessment would be one that has some predictive capacity for later success. We could build something that is a predictor of successfully completing later education, or attach it to future income projections, or even something like life expectancy or lack of criminal convictions. Defining success is a tough thing, and inherently subjective and value-based, but that really gets at the heart of the problem: we are trying to define what "education" is. Most people would agree that the point of education is to make you a more capable and successful adult. The problem is, we've basically been treating it like the point of education is to make a person score highly on an IQ test, and I don't see any merit in that in and of itself.
So, if we could develop some good predictors of student success, we could start to measure teacher behavior and how it impacts those attributes. We could then quantify what the best teachers can do, what the worst teachers do, and what a reasonable expectation is for improving the "success factor" of students in the class, and we could make attempts to control for other factors that influence things - measure improvement rather than comparing to a set value, account for things that cause greater difficulty like a large spread in student capabilities, which makes instruction difficult, or a problematic student/teacher ratio, or low per-pupil funding, or low regional income.
Yes, this is complex, it's a decades-long undertaking, and there's probably some dramatic simplifications and assumptions in here and the reality is much more difficult. But the truth is, taking an arbitrary measurement of an attribute we don't understand, when we don't have defined criteria for success, means that standardized assessment as it currently exists is a masturbatory political exercise that misleads the public. We need to make education rigorous, which means end-to-end reform (educational research is mostly a joke currently). We need better researchers, better teachers, better measurements, and then when we actually understand the problem we can have an intelligent conversation about how to fix it.
Note: Finland is already doing some of this. They have an amazingly rigorous teacher education program, and they've gone from very poor student performance, near the bottom of developed nations, to excellent performance, among the top nations in the world. It took them 30 years or so, though.
Almost EVERY SINGLE JOB IN THE WORLD IS LIKE THAT, it must be news to teachers who never worked other jobs.
Every salesperson in a store can only work with customers that come in the store. Every bank teller can only work with customers coming into the branch. Every programmer can only work on projects they were assigned to. etc, etc.
That doesn't stop all other professions' performance from being assessed.
The issue isn't that teachers don't want to be assessed (at least not for most of them). It is that they don't want to be assessed using shitty metrics. If you are a used Kia salesman nobody is going to expect you to bring in the kind of money that the Mercedes salesman at the rich end of town does. And, in that case, your job is to make money, and that is a single metric that is pretty unambiguous and can be easily measured to determine your performance. Teachers, though, have historically been expected to make Mercedes money selling used Kias. Things are getting somewhat better because states are moving towards growth models that look at a student's net improvement rather than just measuring them to a flat standard. So you are expected to make student improve, but not expected to make them all model students regardless of their starting point.
The other issue is with standardized testing. The only thing it really measures is how good students are at taking standardized tests. This has perhaps some connection to "intelligence" or "knowledge" or whatever the hell it is we're trying to produce through the education system, but the thing is we don't really know what it is we're trying to produce, much less measure. Seriously, intelligence, knowledge and education are not well defined concepts, and attempts to quantify them as a single number are misguided. There's been some effort in these areas recently, but it is rather backwards that we've started out by attaching nationwide policy and billions of dollars to these things before we even have any idea of what exactly they measure, how reliable they are, and what the issues are with them. Trying to base your entire assessment of performance on a concept that is not well defined, much less measured, is a good way to irritate your employees, and teachers are right to bitch about this being a stupid form of assessment.
You wouldn't blame an IT person who complains that their only metric is number of tickets closed, when that has no bearing on whether the problem was actually solved correctly, thoroughly, or at all. This isn't a question of whether teachers should be assessed. It is a question of how they should be assessed, and measuring all students from all regions against an arbitrary, fixed standard is a piss-poor way to do it that has little bearing on whether a teacher is good or not.
This sounds like multiple questions but it is really just clarification on one:
What advice would you give to a person who wanted to make a living in the "Maker" tradition - being able to spend your days designing, engineering, and building on technically interesting and creative maker projects? I'm most interested in the career aspect, assuming that you've already obtained a preliminary education: would you look for a job with a similarly minded engineering firm, launch a kickstarter, start a hackerspace, hack together some things and try to sell them through a webstore, work as a freelance engineer, or something else entirely?
The most useful and relevant modules would have been those that can provide artificial gravity - everybody is banking on this for enabling long term space habitation but we have just about zero on-orbit experimental data. If they only do one more thing with the ISS, that would be it. Japan even built a module for this, but it didn't get deployed so it is now just a museum piece.
For your reading enjoyment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
Also known as the "Anyone who uses Wikipedia as an authoritative source is an idiot" issue.
Not sure that's exactly the problem. Wikipedia is fine as an authoritative source on what Wikipedia editors believe. This has some connection to general public opinion, which likewise has some kind of connection to the true nature of things. The issue is, any attempt to glean anything useful from Wikipedia needs to at least acknowledge this limitation, or better yet account for it and attempt to correct for it.
For most of human evolution, I would think that periods of scarce food supply were pretty frequent. I wonder if part of the human body is optimized for this - when there isn't enough food (cold winter), your body consumes itself, starting with the old and weak parts (think of wolves culling the elderly and diseased members from elk herds during the winter) and then when you have a surplus again (spring and summer) it switches on and builds healthy new ones.
With increasing research coming out about how important sunlight can be to cue physiological sleep/wake cycles, etc, I wonder if there are other environmental signals that produce beneficial responses in the body, and which of them that were around for most of our species' development have been totally lost in a century or so.
Yes, it is. Leaving guns aside, it's the way logic and statistics work together.
But while a correlation does not prove cause-and-effect, a lack of correlation -- or more properly, a negative correlation -- can DISprove cause-and-effect. Example: something -- all evidence points to one animal -- has been killing your chickens. You suspect the neighbor's dog. So you start keeping tabs on when the dog is let out, and when it is in the house. It turns out, after examination, that whatever it is has been killing your chickens when the dog was locked up in the house. There is no dispute... it is indisputable that the dog wasn't there when the chickens died. This negative correlation between the dog being out and dead chickens has DISproved your theory that the dog was killing the chickens.
It gets a bit more complicated when the numbers go up but the same principle still holds. If your theory is that X causes Y, and you find a negative correlation, for example X goes up while Y goes down, you have DISproved that X causes Y. Otherwise, barring other outside influences, you would have (no dispute) observed that Y went up as X went up. Anything else contradicts your theory.
Except that you can't "lock the dog up" in this case. You can require strict gun control laws in the US, but you can't change the fact that guns are still readily accessible just a short drive away. You can see that crime is going down, but in fact, gun ownership isn't going up in the way you suggest - the percentage of people who own guns in the US is decreasing, but gun owners, on average, own more guns than they used to. That in and of itself disproves your absurdly simplistic attitude.
And in the gun-control debate, we have in fact had ample time and opportunity to control for other factors.
No we haven't. All policy problems are difficult to deal with because every step along the way of trying to take a scientific approach is fraught with error. Methods of collecting statistics range from government reports and medical records to random surveys. None of these have a very good margin of error, and they all are susceptible to systemic inaccuracies.
There has been only ONE societal factor that has been found to satisfactorily correlate with the reduction in crime (see the movie Freakonomics, and that has been widely disputed.
You directly contradict your own statement here. You say earlier that "we have found no other causal factors that apply to the situation", and then cite one in the next paragraph. Of course this one is highly disputed, it deals with abortion which is itself a controversial policy issue.
Lacking any other evidence of outside factors, and even allowing for the one that (maybe) was found, we are still left with the simple mathematical fact that in the U.S., prevalence of gun ownership DOES NOT cause crime.
It isn't an opinion. It's as scientific as it gets.
This is total bullshit, and you are misrepresenting math and science to try to convince yourself (and others) that this isn't an emotional crusade for you where you look for evidence to fit your conclusion. Real statisticians and scientists have long been exploring data on this issue, but it is very difficult to make progress because the argument is so charged on both sides that the chance of having a rational discourse with anyone is basically zero.
Here are some things that are true: the US has the highest number of guns per 100 people of any country in the world. Among developed countries, we have the highest level of gun homicides per 100 people. Suicides by guns are trending upwards. Regardless of the fact that crime and violence are historically low and getting lower, we do seem to have a correlation that suggests our high rates of ownership have something to do with our high rate of firearm rel
An "expert" in theology? :) Is that like knowing what color the invisible unicorn is without looking it up? Or being able to count how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?
No, it's actually about being well read in a philosophical tradition that extends back many centuries and includes a great number of names that you'll recognize for their contributions to science and mathematics. Leibniz, Descartes and Pascal are just a few that come to mind. Regardless of what your position is on theism, it's a central part of philosophy and always has been. Many interesting questions have been explored primarily through the perspective of theology - questions about the universe and why it exists in the way that it does, questions about truth and knowledge and whether they and how they are attainable, and questions of morals and ethics and the dilemmas all people face. Many of the arguments from these thinkers are interesting in their own right and are relevant regardless of what world view you personally adhere to.
Dismissing any discipline that you aren't familiar with is a great way to stay uninformed. Philosophy may not have direct, profitable applications, but if you get acquainted with it you can avoid repeating rusty arguments that have been around far longer than this newfangled "science" everybody is so excited about. And along the way you might stumble across some interesting new ways to think about reality.
That sounds like every side in every theological debate ever.
Fair enough. :)
Dawkins is an expert in biology, but woefully uninformed about theology/philosophy - he presents many arguments that are centuries old, and expects to be celebrated for it. So it would be appropriate to say he and many of his proponents "know 1 thing, apply it to things outside of their field and make nonsense statements."
This guy has read Origin of Species (have you?) and he knows about piltdown man, which means he knows a fair bit about both archaeology and biology, far more than your average playboy bunny. He's also excellent at circuit design and technical writing, so he thinks clearly and analytically. On all fronts, he is somebody who is at least capable of intelligent discourse on the matter, probably to the same degree as you or I, and the fact that he holds a minority position doesn't make his ideas worthless.
I'm not saying that I agree with him - I don't. I also don't find his arguments compelling (he seems to be unaware of the Cambrian explosion, for instance) or particularly interesting. He isn't trying to mislead, though, and his contributions in physics and electronics have basically no connection to whatever he believes about theology or biology. So you've got no reason to criticize him for honestly answering a question, just because he has an opinion that differs from yours.
The relation between the two things is that financial value is increasingly divorced from real, productive value. This is demonstrated by highly profitable HFT which has no discernible connection to creation of value, and short-term CEO thinking which prioritizes things like firing your most capable employees to lower costs and increase profit. Looks great on the spreadsheet and is financially promising, but in reality is either neutral or actively destructive to real productive activity.
The point isn't that HFT is the cause of short-sighted corporate leadership. It is that both things are symptoms of an underlying trend - that finance is moving away from a connection to physical value, building products, businesses, etc, and is instead an abstraction where actual value is sacrificed at the altar of financial value.
Ya, I realized that shortly after posting this. A more knowledgeable poster said it was MPEG4 in an MPEG-TS transport stream.
Sprint has never been GSM. They've always been CDMA - which makes this merger puzzling, because they have two incompatible networks.