I don't know about "not been planning". The Bill Clinton administration proposed and initiated NASA's "Living with a Star" program, which GWB continued to fund throughout his administration, so if this is some kind of Democratic conspiracy, the Bush administration was in on it Obama's administration has been working on space weather for years, to their credit, although to be fair that's after this issue has been discussed by scientifically literate people ever since the '89 event.
The reason that conspiracy theorists come swarming out of the woodwork when something like this makes the news is that they get their news from lunatic fringe news sources. Ironically the mainstream media pays more attention to what is being said by crackpots than it does to articles in science and policy journals. For better or worse ignorant conspiracy theorists drive public discourse. If they haven't noticed the government has been working on this, then it must be new -- an therefore sinister.
The preparations you'd need for a nuclear attack would be vastly different, although clearly some elements would be in common.
I've noticed in recent decades that nuclear EMP has become a popular plot device among authors as a way to set up their crypto-cowboy stories. I have nothing against a good adventure yarn, but these authors clearly don't understand the phenomenon very well, and obviously can't be bothered to think though the logic of nuclear strategy. A pre-emptive strike has to wipe out the enemy's ability to respond faster than the enemy can respond. You can't do the kind of damage another Carrington event would do to US infrastructure with a single missile. You'd need a massive and readily detectable missile salvo.
What all those adventure story authors want is a great big, clean reset switch that will turn back the technology clock to the 1880s, but with better guns.
Not true. Executive orders are permissible but only to the extent that they align agencies with existing public law.
Of which there are many. And presidents have always interpreted their authority under those laws broadly, with few challenges -- and even fewer successful. The most stunning example was the Emancipation Proclamation which interprets the president's war-fighting authority in a breathtakingly broad way.
It is of course possible for a president to take unconstitutional actions this way. But executive orders are not unconstitutional per se just because the president is not explicitly directed in legislation to do some specific thing. It would be impossible given the text of most laws to carry them out if that were what the Constitution required. What is more the President can use all the power this grants him to enact any kind of policy he wants, unless that policy is expressly forbidden by law.
This makes the office of the Presidency very powerful. The corresponding legislative check on this is Congressional oversight, which is similarly broad. The whole checks and balances thing only works when Congress effectively uses the tools the Constitution gives it; if Congress is ineffective, then the president will automatically be more powerful than the framers intended. That's unavoidable.
It's probably worth noting that with 240 volts you can draw almost 3000 watts off an outlet (2990). If the minimum fill line on your kettle is 0.7 liters you can boil that in about 100 seconds.
Sure, it sounds ridiculous to spend 11 hours to make a cup of tea, but in the end he obtained tea by solving a more general problem. This opens up entirely new, previously unimagined possibilities. For example now he can tell it to make him a cup of tea when he's physically situated on the other side of the world.
The cultural differences thing is real. I inherited a team of Indian H1Bs which we picked up as a favor to a VC who had over-extended himself. It took me almost a year to figure out how to manage across the cultural divide.
While the first thing most Indians will tell you is that there isn't just one "Indian culture", it's fair to say that Indian business manners tend to be a lot more hierarchical than American manners. There are of course fire-breathing outliers; people are not cultural automatons, after all. But for the most part my Indian supervisees were much more reluctant than an American would be to do anything which might be construed as challenging my authority or competence in a public way.
That took a lot of adjustment; as an American you feel free to speak your mind to power; and as a supervisor you implicitly rely on your people to tell you to your face when you're going off the rails. I found I had to manage in a different way with the Indians; it wasn't better or worse, it was just different. What worked for me was to really get to know each of them; to take them out to lunch or drinks after work. One on one, in a relaxed and informal atmosphere I could get their true opinion of things. In a meeting they'd take my spitballing suggestions as orders to go out and fall on their swords. At least at first. As we got to understand and trust each other more they became more assertive, but I had to make the first move.
It was a rewarding experience, and I highly recommend it, but I really can't imagine navigating that divide with me in the US and the team in India. If your relationship was merely a matter of handing over specifications and reviewing finished code, maybe. You'd need to have a strict, well-thought out division of responsibilities that did not rely in any way on any kind of implicit communication.
This is generational provincialism. The fact is most people act like selfish pricks, but each generation succeeds the last, becoming precisely the things they despised in their parents' generation.
Having also worked on the business side of product development I can tell you one of the biggest mistakes you can make (and one that almost everyone makes sooner or later) is to assume that all, most, or even enough customers think like you do.
To some degree you need to approach customers like a xenoanthropologist studying an alien society. You have to expect that a lot of what they do and prefer will make little sense to you until you've spent a few years studying their strange habits.
Err... you do realize that design of a product like this is a team effort? What you would need is a conspiracy of engineers to seriously undermine, possibly even destroy the business division that employed them.
Having a problem in the battery cells or pack does not preclude having a problem in the "controller chip" or any other system component. But are we multiplying entities here unnecessarily? Gratuitously attributing failure to the battery when the fires could be attributed to other system components?
No. Because li-ion battery design is supposed to prevent fires in the case of other system components/software being faulty. This is because that battery chemistry is inherently fire-prone: you have a flammable organic electrolyte bathing electrodes that release oxygen, with the entire system subject to thermal runaway. Therefore Li-ion battery packs have to be designed, like a Norman castle, according to the principle of defense-in-depth. It follows directly that any battery fires when the pack is installed in the system require failures in depth.
Because the eccentricity of the Mars orbit is so much greater than that of the Earth orbit, the distance between the two planets varies from one opposition to the next. It ranges from 35 to 63 million miles approximately.
Earth and Mars make their closest approaches every 2.16 years roughly, but note that each time we get a launch window it's not equally favorable. That's because the orbits of Earth and Mars are elliptical, not circular. That means each time we get a launch window it's at a slightly more favorable or less favorable distance than the previous one because of the *absolute* positions of the planets in their elongated orbits.
This variation in the closeness of the closest approach follows a fifteen year cycle.
Note that a mission to Mars is still physically possible even if you launch in a year where the closest approach isn't very close (e.g. 2041). It just means that your mission takes longer, costs more, and requires vastly more energy. Since Mars is at the extreme of what we can probably do, your chances of success are much greater if you choose the closest possible approach for your mission.
Well, they kept working on them. That's bound to make a difference. There is immense value to be gained from decades of experience and improvement on the same basic designs.
I'm obsessed with UFOs. It's kind of an issue in my house. I'll start to watch a UFO documentary on Netflix and and without fail I get too pissed off to finish it. Sure, it's a given that the filmmaker is a nut or a charlatan, but I keep hoping that for once it'll be a better class of nut or charlatan. It's the utter lack of originality that I find so depressing. I mean we're talking about putative contact with a superior alien civilization, something that if it were true would make the world even more wondrous than it already is. Is a little imagination too much to ask?
Well, there is one good reason to say the "2030s" though: the energy requirement for a Mars mission is at its minimum in 2035. If the schedule slips to 2042, the energy requirements just to get the payload there will double, and your next "sweet spot" will be 2050.
For a lot of us there's a big difference between 19 years away and 34 years away. I'm 55, and in my prime tax paying years. If I'm funding a mission for 2050, there's a 50% chance as a male in my cohort I'll be dead by 2043. So for me (and President Obama, who's the same age as me), the difference between a 2035 landing and a later landing is the difference between one we'll probably be alive to see and one we probably won't be alive to see.
Very little, for two reasons. One, technical advances that go into weapons tend to be classified. Second, science and exploration are not only by definition more open processes, they are are also more complex and interdisciplinary.
It's safe to say that medical and food technology spinoffs from manned space flight would not have occurred in a missile-only program. Likewise most of the advances in materials technology wouldn't have happened either without the need to man-rate space vehicles and equipment. It is unlikely we'd have the photovoltaic technology we have today if we'd only done missiles alone. Chemical batteries will do for a short intercontinental hop.
I think some people here have a problem with cognitive dissonance: if nothing the government tries does anyone any good unless it's defense spending, then any benefits we got from the civilian space program must have been something we got because of the missile program. That simply doesn't fit the historical facts for the US space program after 1960 or so.
The Apollo program was not entirely symbolic, it was in large part an effort to develop rockets powerful enough to plant a nuclear weapon anywhere on Earth. This is also why budgets fell out after ICBMs were complete.
Well, that was pretty much accomplished in 1957 by Sergei Korolev with the R-7 rocket that put Sputnik in orbit, and von Braun a few months later with the Juno 1. The Minuteman 1 (n.b. a solid fuel rocket) went into service in 1962, and from that point forward there wasn't really a lot of overlap between the US space and ballistic missile program. The situation was different in the Soviet Union, whose space program was really much more a step-child of the weapons programs. Soviet designers were just as capable as America (and America's Germans), but they could only dream of the kind of funding Apollo got.
Anyhow the whole argument about "symbolic" vs "practical" is naive. Something as massive a the Apollo program doesn't happen for "a" reason. It is necessarily the confluence of many different interests and purposes. One of them was clearly "symbolic", although that does *not* mean it wasn't practical. At its peak Apollo approached almost 1% of US GDP, and the politicians who approved it were not all interested in space at all. They had very practical, Earth-bound reasons to value the symbolic power of a US Moon landing.
Well, General Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence, believes so, although we are not privy to all his lines of evidence. Clapper was appointed to the DNI position by Obama, but also served in the Bush administration as Director of National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and later as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
The complete text of the TPP is online, along with executive summaries of each part of the treaty. The executive summaries are sufficiently compact that it's reasonable to read them all, and if you do you'll find there's a lot of good stuff in there. What's harder to see is what bad stuff may be in there, something that will take many, many months of serious attention.
I have. One of my college buddies at MIT was in one. He had a duffel bag with his equipment which he used to collect his fecal output, and the only thing he could eat all semester were these nutritional shakes. Once a week he'd show up at the lab and eat a couple pounds of radioactive cheese.
You get a sense for why such well-controlled studies are rare, because to get volunteers they had to pay them a LOT. He chose this as his semester "job" because it left him with the most free time, but otherwise it was grueling.
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I don't know about "not been planning". The Bill Clinton administration proposed and initiated NASA's "Living with a Star" program, which GWB continued to fund throughout his administration, so if this is some kind of Democratic conspiracy, the Bush administration was in on it Obama's administration has been working on space weather for years, to their credit, although to be fair that's after this issue has been discussed by scientifically literate people ever since the '89 event.
The reason that conspiracy theorists come swarming out of the woodwork when something like this makes the news is that they get their news from lunatic fringe news sources. Ironically the mainstream media pays more attention to what is being said by crackpots than it does to articles in science and policy journals. For better or worse ignorant conspiracy theorists drive public discourse. If they haven't noticed the government has been working on this, then it must be new -- an therefore sinister.
Sick AC here - you know, the question we want to know is: WHY NOW?
You're begging the question. As in actually asking a "have you stopped beating your wife" question.
Just because you haven't been paying attention doesn't mean this is something new. Obama's space weather initiatives go all the way back to 2010.
Right. So leaving the country completely helpless in the wake of Carrington event has no defense implications.
The preparations you'd need for a nuclear attack would be vastly different, although clearly some elements would be in common.
I've noticed in recent decades that nuclear EMP has become a popular plot device among authors as a way to set up their crypto-cowboy stories. I have nothing against a good adventure yarn, but these authors clearly don't understand the phenomenon very well, and obviously can't be bothered to think though the logic of nuclear strategy. A pre-emptive strike has to wipe out the enemy's ability to respond faster than the enemy can respond. You can't do the kind of damage another Carrington event would do to US infrastructure with a single missile. You'd need a massive and readily detectable missile salvo.
What all those adventure story authors want is a great big, clean reset switch that will turn back the technology clock to the 1880s, but with better guns.
Not true. Executive orders are permissible but only to the extent that they align agencies with existing public law.
Of which there are many. And presidents have always interpreted their authority under those laws broadly, with few challenges -- and even fewer successful. The most stunning example was the Emancipation Proclamation which interprets the president's war-fighting authority in a breathtakingly broad way.
It is of course possible for a president to take unconstitutional actions this way. But executive orders are not unconstitutional per se just because the president is not explicitly directed in legislation to do some specific thing. It would be impossible given the text of most laws to carry them out if that were what the Constitution required. What is more the President can use all the power this grants him to enact any kind of policy he wants, unless that policy is expressly forbidden by law.
This makes the office of the Presidency very powerful. The corresponding legislative check on this is Congressional oversight, which is similarly broad. The whole checks and balances thing only works when Congress effectively uses the tools the Constitution gives it; if Congress is ineffective, then the president will automatically be more powerful than the framers intended. That's unavoidable.
It's probably worth noting that with 240 volts you can draw almost 3000 watts off an outlet (2990). If the minimum fill line on your kettle is 0.7 liters you can boil that in about 100 seconds.
Sure, it sounds ridiculous to spend 11 hours to make a cup of tea, but in the end he obtained tea by solving a more general problem. This opens up entirely new, previously unimagined possibilities. For example now he can tell it to make him a cup of tea when he's physically situated on the other side of the world.
The cultural differences thing is real. I inherited a team of Indian H1Bs which we picked up as a favor to a VC who had over-extended himself. It took me almost a year to figure out how to manage across the cultural divide.
While the first thing most Indians will tell you is that there isn't just one "Indian culture", it's fair to say that Indian business manners tend to be a lot more hierarchical than American manners. There are of course fire-breathing outliers; people are not cultural automatons, after all. But for the most part my Indian supervisees were much more reluctant than an American would be to do anything which might be construed as challenging my authority or competence in a public way.
That took a lot of adjustment; as an American you feel free to speak your mind to power; and as a supervisor you implicitly rely on your people to tell you to your face when you're going off the rails. I found I had to manage in a different way with the Indians; it wasn't better or worse, it was just different. What worked for me was to really get to know each of them; to take them out to lunch or drinks after work. One on one, in a relaxed and informal atmosphere I could get their true opinion of things. In a meeting they'd take my spitballing suggestions as orders to go out and fall on their swords. At least at first. As we got to understand and trust each other more they became more assertive, but I had to make the first move.
It was a rewarding experience, and I highly recommend it, but I really can't imagine navigating that divide with me in the US and the team in India. If your relationship was merely a matter of handing over specifications and reviewing finished code, maybe. You'd need to have a strict, well-thought out division of responsibilities that did not rely in any way on any kind of implicit communication.
This is generational provincialism. The fact is most people act like selfish pricks, but each generation succeeds the last, becoming precisely the things they despised in their parents' generation.
Having also worked on the business side of product development I can tell you one of the biggest mistakes you can make (and one that almost everyone makes sooner or later) is to assume that all, most, or even enough customers think like you do.
To some degree you need to approach customers like a xenoanthropologist studying an alien society. You have to expect that a lot of what they do and prefer will make little sense to you until you've spent a few years studying their strange habits.
Err... you do realize that design of a product like this is a team effort? What you would need is a conspiracy of engineers to seriously undermine, possibly even destroy the business division that employed them.
Let's practice a little logic here, shall we?
Having a problem in the battery cells or pack does not preclude having a problem in the "controller chip" or any other system component. But are we multiplying entities here unnecessarily? Gratuitously attributing failure to the battery when the fires could be attributed to other system components?
No. Because li-ion battery design is supposed to prevent fires in the case of other system components/software being faulty. This is because that battery chemistry is inherently fire-prone: you have a flammable organic electrolyte bathing electrodes that release oxygen, with the entire system subject to thermal runaway. Therefore Li-ion battery packs have to be designed, like a Norman castle, according to the principle of defense-in-depth. It follows directly that any battery fires when the pack is installed in the system require failures in depth.
https://www.amazon.com/Space-C...
Earth and Mars make their closest approaches every 2.16 years roughly, but note that each time we get a launch window it's not equally favorable. That's because the orbits of Earth and Mars are elliptical, not circular. That means each time we get a launch window it's at a slightly more favorable or less favorable distance than the previous one because of the *absolute* positions of the planets in their elongated orbits.
This variation in the closeness of the closest approach follows a fifteen year cycle.
Note that a mission to Mars is still physically possible even if you launch in a year where the closest approach isn't very close (e.g. 2041). It just means that your mission takes longer, costs more, and requires vastly more energy. Since Mars is at the extreme of what we can probably do, your chances of success are much greater if you choose the closest possible approach for your mission.
Well, they kept working on them. That's bound to make a difference. There is immense value to be gained from decades of experience and improvement on the same basic designs.
Sure. The Soviet space program was only a story of extreme daring and ingenuity in the face of overwhelming odds. Total yawn.
I'm obsessed with UFOs. It's kind of an issue in my house. I'll start to watch a UFO documentary on Netflix and and without fail I get too pissed off to finish it. Sure, it's a given that the filmmaker is a nut or a charlatan, but I keep hoping that for once it'll be a better class of nut or charlatan. It's the utter lack of originality that I find so depressing. I mean we're talking about putative contact with a superior alien civilization, something that if it were true would make the world even more wondrous than it already is. Is a little imagination too much to ask?
Well, there is one good reason to say the "2030s" though: the energy requirement for a Mars mission is at its minimum in 2035. If the schedule slips to 2042, the energy requirements just to get the payload there will double, and your next "sweet spot" will be 2050.
For a lot of us there's a big difference between 19 years away and 34 years away. I'm 55, and in my prime tax paying years. If I'm funding a mission for 2050, there's a 50% chance as a male in my cohort I'll be dead by 2043. So for me (and President Obama, who's the same age as me), the difference between a 2035 landing and a later landing is the difference between one we'll probably be alive to see and one we probably won't be alive to see.
Very little, for two reasons. One, technical advances that go into weapons tend to be classified. Second, science and exploration are not only by definition more open processes, they are are also more complex and interdisciplinary.
It's safe to say that medical and food technology spinoffs from manned space flight would not have occurred in a missile-only program. Likewise most of the advances in materials technology wouldn't have happened either without the need to man-rate space vehicles and equipment. It is unlikely we'd have the photovoltaic technology we have today if we'd only done missiles alone. Chemical batteries will do for a short intercontinental hop.
I think some people here have a problem with cognitive dissonance: if nothing the government tries does anyone any good unless it's defense spending, then any benefits we got from the civilian space program must have been something we got because of the missile program. That simply doesn't fit the historical facts for the US space program after 1960 or so.
The Apollo program was not entirely symbolic, it was in large part an effort to develop rockets powerful enough to plant a nuclear weapon anywhere on Earth. This is also why budgets fell out after ICBMs were complete.
Well, that was pretty much accomplished in 1957 by Sergei Korolev with the R-7 rocket that put Sputnik in orbit, and von Braun a few months later with the Juno 1. The Minuteman 1 (n.b. a solid fuel rocket) went into service in 1962, and from that point forward there wasn't really a lot of overlap between the US space and ballistic missile program. The situation was different in the Soviet Union, whose space program was really much more a step-child of the weapons programs. Soviet designers were just as capable as America (and America's Germans), but they could only dream of the kind of funding Apollo got.
Anyhow the whole argument about "symbolic" vs "practical" is naive. Something as massive a the Apollo program doesn't happen for "a" reason. It is necessarily the confluence of many different interests and purposes. One of them was clearly "symbolic", although that does *not* mean it wasn't practical. At its peak Apollo approached almost 1% of US GDP, and the politicians who approved it were not all interested in space at all. They had very practical, Earth-bound reasons to value the symbolic power of a US Moon landing.
Well, General Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence, believes so, although we are not privy to all his lines of evidence. Clapper was appointed to the DNI position by Obama, but also served in the Bush administration as Director of National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and later as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Sensible position: TPP is a mixed bag.
The complete text of the TPP is online, along with executive summaries of each part of the treaty. The executive summaries are sufficiently compact that it's reasonable to read them all, and if you do you'll find there's a lot of good stuff in there. What's harder to see is what bad stuff may be in there, something that will take many, many months of serious attention.
Yeah, because what nerds *really* want is to read an earnest exegesis of their subculture by Jon Katz.
That wasn't Elvis, it was D.B. Cooper.
I have. One of my college buddies at MIT was in one. He had a duffel bag with his equipment which he used to collect his fecal output, and the only thing he could eat all semester were these nutritional shakes. Once a week he'd show up at the lab and eat a couple pounds of radioactive cheese.
You get a sense for why such well-controlled studies are rare, because to get volunteers they had to pay them a LOT. He chose this as his semester "job" because it left him with the most free time, but otherwise it was grueling.