Completely agreed. Clicked Palm's "learn more" link and just about fell over laughing when I got a pretty page that said "Thinking ahead is a beautiful thing. Coming soon." That smacks of a subtle revolt of marketing drones told to hype vaporware.
Palm's banking on the goodwill that adheres to its name while signaling a complete change in direction. Typical. Palm had an identity crisis for nearly a decade, with dozens of hardware licensees and more than 100% turnover of its technical staff. Forget about your favorite PalmOS apps. They won't run on a modern OS and most were written by shops way too small to work with major carriers. Whether or not thinking forward is beautiful, time's run out for the Palm legacy.
Which just goes to show that the author didn't do his research on O'Neill colonies. O'Neill was a physicist, he knew the issues and addressed them (two cylinders tethered together, the agricultural ring, etc image here).
Actually, the author mentions all this. Besides, O'Neil was a particle physicist, not a rigid-body dynamicist, and even the mighty experts screw up now and then, as Explorer 1's flat spin illustrates.
And, of course, they do have constant dynamical control.
My original point exactly (though "do" is a pretty strong word for something that was never built). Living in an O'Neill colony would be like living in a tall building that depended on a complicated Rube Goldberg assembly of weights, chains and computer controllers to keep it balanced on a sharp point. I'd rather live somewhere that didn't collapse at the first glitch.
One of the less well-known aspects of Explorer 1 was how it surprised controllers by changing its axis of spin. It was launched spinning about its theoretically stable long axis like a drill bit, but due to mechanical energy dissipation in its flexing antennas, it ended its first orbit in a flat spin--"like a juggling club" according to this book, which points out that the same would have happened to O'Neill colonies without constant dynamical control.
...the ultimate goal of 500 years of the reformation is to turn us into borg and then replace us with robots that have no flesh to them at all.
Norbert Wiener said essentially the same thing in his 1948 book Cybernetics. His argument went something like this: robots are slave laborers. Inserting them into a wage-labor economy would bring labor into competition with slavery. In the ensuing race to the bottom, the terms of labor would become identical to those of slavery.
Exercise for the reader: without resorting to luddism, which component of this process can still be changed to avert enslavement?
i'm all for permanent exile. mainly because once a pedophile, always a pedophile. there is no cure. recidivism is guaranteed.
Nice sound bite. Too bad the science doesn't back you up: U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics found that only 3.3% of child molesters re-offended in 3 years (vs. 5.3% for all sexual offenses including crimes against adults and children, and a whopping 67.5% for all crime categories combined). In other words, your average criminal is 20 times more likely to re-offend than a child molester.
Also, by proposing an arctic gulag, you have completely undermined your prior argument against overwhelming punishments. Despair not, though: if anything, the success of sex offender treatment programs suggests that restorative, educational and therapeutic justice does a much better job of reducing crime than does punitive justice. So your original argument against cruel punishments was good and you should have stuck to it, M. Politician!
30 years ago, a simple +-*/ calculator was easily twice the size of today's standard calculators.
Yes, yes, and the ENIAC was bigger still. We all know that technology generally advances if you look at long enough stretches of time. What's not obvious to the young, though, is that this change is not smooth, uniform and linear like their coursework, but choppy, multiplex and shaped by random social and market forces. "Two steps forward, one step back" has left a hell of a lot of good design buried in the dustbin of history---the tiny Casio included. Its short tenure was not a simple overshoot of a size optimization problem. Who's to say it wouldn't succeed now that science and engineering include many more people with small fingers, pockets and handbags (i.e. girls, women, people from developing countries)? The longer you work in technology (especially design), the greater the chances that you'll profit by unearthing some of the treasures buried in the archeology of your own field. The past isn't just for dissing.
Remember what calculators and computers looked like 20 years ago? In a couple of decades we'll be...laughing ourselves silly at the description 'portable'.
Har, point taken, but you've gotta be kidding about calculators getting smaller. 25 years ago, I bought a Casio scientific calculator for $39. It was nearly credit-card sized and got me through somewhere between 100 and 160 semester credits of science and math, no sweat. I carried it in my pocket for years and only had to change the batteries once or twice. When the keys finally fell out, I could not find a replacement nearly as portable.
PS: An earlier poster mentioned Harry Harrison, who indeed liked small devices. His Stainless Steel Rat series was full of pinlights and other improbably miniscule, un-ergonomic gadgets.
Powered ascent and descent results in a craft that is 4 times more massive...
Than what? What alternative are you suggesting for POWERED ASCENT? A giant cannon? Some sort of sky-hook?
As for descent, keep in mind that even the expendable Soyuz re-entry capsules have landing rockets. If you want a parachute system to be re-usable, you would need either landing gear or a structure and re-entry shield built strong and leak-proof enough to take repeated water landings. That adds mass, too. Parachutes are not enough.
A LOX-H2 SSTO design such as SSX has an easier time descending than may at first be apparent. It has a low terminal velocity due to its large, empty tanks, and a hovering propellant consumption rate some 25-30x lower than during lift-off (10x because it already burned over 90% of its propellants on ascent, times another 2.5-3x because it only needs to achieve one gee to hover). So a 1-minute hover on landing (already a significant safety factor) adds about as much mass as a 2-second hold-down at launch, which is to say, not much at all. It does need efficient throttling, but I doubt that adds much mass.
But the feigned insouciance: "oh, I'm not interested..." seems a bit prima donna-ish
Boy did you ever hit the nail on the head! The bane of any rocket company's existence is prima donna rocket scientists. You must never hire these guys, they'll sink your program and they're everywhere. Space attracts that personality type. I worked at a rocket company once, and we had 4 prima donna engineers each presenting their own redundant, slightly different designs as the "final" design to the customer. They routinely went over their manager's head to the company owner. Of course their rockets always crashed, though they swore that never happened in previous jobs.
According to Reps. Sensenbrenner and Conyers, the legislation is absolutely necessary because of the dire threat PCs and the Internet pose to the content-creation industry's very livelihood. Apparently, it's not nimble enough to keep up with advances in technology.
Who cares whether an obsolete industrial business model can keep up? When cars came along, laws occasionally were enacted requiring a flag person to walk in front of them so as not to scare horses. Didn't last long. Now film and plastic are fighting for their lives. Their best "argument" from the customer's perspective is that everything will look amateurish if we put big content out of business. Please. Like Participant Productions is amateurish. Even amateurish-looking Blair Witch proved the value of story and cultural savvy. As Steve Jobs' old dream of everyone being able to make a film or music album and share it instantly with the world is realized, there will be way more great stories, song and art out there than there are today. Filtering mechanisms (review blogs and the like) are already getting great exposure for the good stuff. I even made a decent living for five years creating and selling non-copy-protected original art directly to fans online. People are making money, some of them quite a lot of money. Especially the "content industry," but they're afraid their long run of protected profit is over. So they try to keep the rest of us down, and end up looking more backward than those who wanted flags to warn the horsies.
Any sufficiently advanced technology renders technical prowess from the era that brought it into being obsolete. (I'd get a lot more work done if it also neutralized bragging rights and uphill-through-the-snow stories.)
A little known fact is that it takes more energy to manufacture a turbine...
It's little-known because it's NOT a fact. Got a source? Here's what you're looking for. For every $1 you spend building and installing a wind turbine, you'll get $6-$80 worth of energy out of it over a lifetime. Compare that to $7-$29 for coal, $11-$60 for nuclear, and, contrary to popular myth, $4-$12 for solar. Then there's the fact that the Dutch found it economical to build turbines for centuries, long before the massive increases in efficiency we've seen in the past 20 years. Also, have a look at the graph on page 18 of the August, 2005 issue of National Geographic...
Totally agreed about fact checking (years before my science days I took journalism and wrote for a student paper). But I'm talking about interpretation: explanations why a phenomenon might occur, or what scientists lovingly call "hypotheses." Reporters are careful with facts, but feel it's their job alone to link them together into interesting stories. That often puts them in conflict with the scientist's job. If they're fuzzy on your explanation, some will make stuff up (e.g. MS again) without realizing they're putting hypotheses in your mouth---a huge embarassment for a scientist, and I've seen it happen a lot.
Just remember this post some day when it happens to you. It's not intentional disrespect, just a focus on their perceived audience's needs rather than yours. It's a blind spot and it stings.
That would be too easy a shot. On July 25, 2005, at around 2:30 p.m. EDT, a professional accountant who works internationally with a large firm did, in fact, confide in me that he has never balanced his checkbook. But what's funny to me is that economists will actually brag about it to their classes. Same with astrophysicists, as another reply amply illustrates (I was hoping someone would bite on that one!). Journalists similarly get huffy when scientists offer to check their interpretations (such as the cause of MS). "Why, that's my story!" No, not when you ascribe it to a scientist who is not advancing that hypothesis.
People seem to be drawn to fields that challenge them, so a surprising number of professionals end up with blind spots. For example, neurotic psychologists, cosmetologists with bad hair, astrophysicists who don't know the constellations, economists who never balance their checkbooks, and (from TFA) journalists who prefer to shoehorn press releases into a familiar story format rather than call the primary sources.
OK, resolved, the fabled "system" failed with Katrina and there's plenty of blame to go around, public and private. It shook us up, and every thread seems to return to this. But the original thread was what Katrina means for NASA and what the delays mean for public vs private space.
The crushing news from TFA for us spacers is that the Space Shuttle not only won't be operational for awhile, but it never really was. Evaluated as a flight test vehicle, it is a complete failure. Not only has it fatally crashed twice in only 114 flights, but NASA's detailed models failed to predict the fluid dynamic environment on Discovery's external fuel tank where unexpected amounts of debris fell off, despite over two years of effort.
Any astronaut will tell you that we'll really miss the Shuttle when it's gone because it does so many things. And that's what's wrong! It was originally designed to accommodate a bewildering variety of exotic missions, such as snagging military satellites in truly funky trajectories. Profitable transport, on the other hand, depends on reliability and safety. Aircraft companies deliver this at reasonable cost by minimizing the number of flight profiles, each of which must then pass (not just survive) hundreds of instrumented flight tests before the vehicle can take paid passengers.
The private passenger space startups are looking at more expense than most people figure, because (among other reasons) with flaky fluid dynamics models, they'll need to do more expensive full-scale ballistic tests. These high costs will really give them incentive to build their systems (with appropriate aborts, natch) end-to-end around a single flight profile at first. And their hardware probably won't come from contractors in 48 states.
Ahh, you're right. I should have said private corporation, but of course that's an even nastier word...
To be organized exclusively for a charitable purpose, the organization must be a corporation, community chest, fund, or foundation...-IRS exemption requirements
Just to add to this point, here is a blurb from a private company set up for something other than profit:
The American Red Cross is not a government agency and all Red Cross disaster assistance is free thanks to the generosity of people like you. The value of your donation is increased by the fact that the ratio of volunteer Red Cross workers to paid staff is almost 36 to one.
Contributions to the American Red Cross, a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, are deductible for computing income and estate taxes.
Yeah, I know. Now I have to turn in my "liberal" card...
"The article mentions meat makers as home appliances..."
I don't see what the problem is. If the meat tastes like meat and has roughly the same protein and calorie content but costs much less then this can only be a good thing, right? Maybe we won't need to raise millions of cows just for meat production and we can change some of the food crop over to something more useful like grains.
And if the meat-o-matic runs on lawn and garden clippings, the result may have a healthier omega-3 / omega-6 fat ratio, like cattle fed on grass rather than grain used to have. Advantages: healthier meat, less yard waste, more decentralized food production, and slightly reduced ecological footprint.
Disadvantages: increased energy demand and a continued marginalization of nature. This later point, I think, is what creeps people out. When you can plug in an appliance that grows meat (and presumably some day also pure fruit and vegetable matter with no waste parts), your life is that much more removed from flowers, trees and the dazzling variety of species that make our world such a great place to live.
Actually, that's the main reason I quit microwaving chicken every night some years ago and have been a vegan ever since. Not for the ethics or health, but just to feel more connected to food and nature, in all its variety and splendor. Neat as the meat-o-matic is, I won't be rushing out to buy one.
All they EU is doing is facing the reality of the way technology is changing business practices and legislating appropriately which is so normal it should not be newsworthy.
Yeah, normally, a power shift this tiny ((O)100 million euros, small compared to e.g. telecoms) might not make the news. But because they're proposing to tear down some very restrictive borders that block the flow of information in a cultural area that touches nearly everybody's lives, it's a newsworthy example of Europe's commitment to unity.
We have centuries of management science to help us with problems like that.
Yes, and "Management Science" in practice mostly boils down to the art of dodging blame. The 'nauts got themselves into this mess by agreeing to this mission, and they will definitely get themselves out well before they have a chance to starve.
I've provisioned and sailed small boats several thousand miles at a stretch with a crew of 2. No long-range radio, no mission control, no layers of scientific managers to obscure the blame. When our water went bad on one occasion (yes it was our fault), we literally bet our lives on our limited backup rations and our next course of action.
It's not that complicated. Don't get in the vessel until you have verified it's adequately provisioned and you are ready to accept the consequences of any single point failure. Including getting your butt home intact once you're done being a "consummate professional" who "will do whatever is required and asked of" you by a scientifically managed NASA flight surgeon (quoted in the article).
If this situation worsens in any way, future crew members can look forward to each tracking the entire food inventory independently, with daily reconciliations and periodic video audits by ground control. And it will be their own damn fault. Some people will put up with anything to fly.
Cool factoid - thanks! Of course, pilots and builders don't always agree, as you saw in the photo-op after Monday's flight.
With FasTrac, Roton was too heavy, even on paper. But numerous elements of the original integrated engine/structural design were shedding rather than gaining mass as the test-and-build process progressed (almost unheard of in rocketry). The design may not have been destined to converge, but I have a feeling the engine team was not the tall pole, especially given their achievements after leaving. These stand in sharp contrast to NASA's work with FasTrac.
I wish I could have been there to see the flight. I caught it on CNN.com at an ungodly hour of the morning.
Makes you go hmm, that's for sure. I've been for this sort of thing for a long time, but now I have my doubts.
NASA is very competitive in its own right, having been invented essentially to put the Soviets out of the space biz. After Apollo (mission success?), the Agency refused to die, and, sadly, its competitive culture survived along with it, with dire consequences for progress in space.
Hallway talk at NASA centers is brazenly disdainful of outsiders. This results in frequent miscommunications with contractors. This broken flow of information played a major role in the failure of Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander.
NASA officials routinely steer potential investors clear of launch startups. This happened to the Rotary Rocket engine team, who were labelled "amateurs." NASA recommended its own FasTrac engine instead. Investors went along with it, and Rotary's engine team got canned. BTW, the rotary team re-formed as XCOR, which, on a pathetically tiny shoe-string budget, built numerous rockets and the first rocket plane ever licensed to perform at an air show. Meanwhile, FasTrac limped along into obscurity.
NASA is brutally competitive. It's used every rule at its disposal for over 46 years to keep space exploration within a small, trusted club of fat insiders. It will be trivially easy for NASA to stack its prizes with enough complex filing and eligibility rules to keep the rabble distracted and on the ground.
After all, the people don't control it. Revolution isn't profitable to those who do control it.
Sure, access to and control of information are important, but they distract from the Internet's most revolutionary aspect: making it relatively easy to implement new systems of commerce and governance. In other words, the value may lie more with the new processes the Internet allows than with the content it carries.
Unfortunately, Kurlantzick's article focuses mostly on content and access to content, so it misses this. It also misses the main element of Internet architecture: the revolution occurs at the periphery. As is often the case with disruptive technology, those who directly challenge the old order straightaway get swatted. They're not strong enough yet. The ones who will ultimately prevail over entrenched power will do so by finding and serving unnoticed markets and constituencies.
Throughout history (especially in Asia) groups that were fussiest about counting beans tended to thrive and rule. Now the Internet arrives, and with automation so abundantly available at its periphery, places organizational powers once reserved for nations and large corporations in the hands of small groups and individuals.
Because the technology is new, people use it like they did phone, radio and TV. That will change, as it has started to here in the USA. E-bay and Amazon.com have massively shifted commerce, and social networking sites are creating volunteer organizations and political caucuses out of thin air. These changes constitute a revolution that is gradually working its way inward from the periphery. Even in Asia, I expect, if you know where to look.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely agreed. Clicked Palm's "learn more" link and just about fell over laughing when I got a pretty page that said "Thinking ahead is a beautiful thing. Coming soon." That smacks of a subtle revolt of marketing drones told to hype vaporware.
Palm's banking on the goodwill that adheres to its name while signaling a complete change in direction. Typical. Palm had an identity crisis for nearly a decade, with dozens of hardware licensees and more than 100% turnover of its technical staff. Forget about your favorite PalmOS apps. They won't run on a modern OS and most were written by shops way too small to work with major carriers. Whether or not thinking forward is beautiful, time's run out for the Palm legacy.
Which just goes to show that the author didn't do his research on O'Neill colonies. O'Neill was a physicist, he knew the issues and addressed them (two cylinders tethered together, the agricultural ring, etc image here).
Actually, the author mentions all this. Besides, O'Neil was a particle physicist, not a rigid-body dynamicist, and even the mighty experts screw up now and then, as Explorer 1's flat spin illustrates.
And, of course, they do have constant dynamical control.
My original point exactly (though "do" is a pretty strong word for something that was never built). Living in an O'Neill colony would be like living in a tall building that depended on a complicated Rube Goldberg assembly of weights, chains and computer controllers to keep it balanced on a sharp point. I'd rather live somewhere that didn't collapse at the first glitch.
One of the less well-known aspects of Explorer 1 was how it surprised controllers by changing its axis of spin. It was launched spinning about its theoretically stable long axis like a drill bit, but due to mechanical energy dissipation in its flexing antennas, it ended its first orbit in a flat spin--"like a juggling club" according to this book, which points out that the same would have happened to O'Neill colonies without constant dynamical control.
Norbert Wiener said essentially the same thing in his 1948 book Cybernetics. His argument went something like this: robots are slave laborers. Inserting them into a wage-labor economy would bring labor into competition with slavery. In the ensuing race to the bottom, the terms of labor would become identical to those of slavery.
Exercise for the reader: without resorting to luddism, which component of this process can still be changed to avert enslavement?
i'm all for permanent exile. mainly because once a pedophile, always a pedophile. there is no cure. recidivism is guaranteed.
Nice sound bite. Too bad the science doesn't back you up: U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics found that only 3.3% of child molesters re-offended in 3 years (vs. 5.3% for all sexual offenses including crimes against adults and children, and a whopping 67.5% for all crime categories combined). In other words, your average criminal is 20 times more likely to re-offend than a child molester.
Also, by proposing an arctic gulag, you have completely undermined your prior argument against overwhelming punishments. Despair not, though: if anything, the success of sex offender treatment programs suggests that restorative, educational and therapeutic justice does a much better job of reducing crime than does punitive justice. So your original argument against cruel punishments was good and you should have stuck to it, M. Politician!
30 years ago, a simple +-*/ calculator was easily twice the size of today's standard calculators.
Yes, yes, and the ENIAC was bigger still. We all know that technology generally advances if you look at long enough stretches of time. What's not obvious to the young, though, is that this change is not smooth, uniform and linear like their coursework, but choppy, multiplex and shaped by random social and market forces. "Two steps forward, one step back" has left a hell of a lot of good design buried in the dustbin of history---the tiny Casio included. Its short tenure was not a simple overshoot of a size optimization problem. Who's to say it wouldn't succeed now that science and engineering include many more people with small fingers, pockets and handbags (i.e. girls, women, people from developing countries)? The longer you work in technology (especially design), the greater the chances that you'll profit by unearthing some of the treasures buried in the archeology of your own field. The past isn't just for dissing.
Remember what calculators and computers looked like 20 years ago? In a couple of decades we'll be...laughing ourselves silly at the description 'portable'.
Har, point taken, but you've gotta be kidding about calculators getting smaller. 25 years ago, I bought a Casio scientific calculator for $39. It was nearly credit-card sized and got me through somewhere between 100 and 160 semester credits of science and math, no sweat. I carried it in my pocket for years and only had to change the batteries once or twice. When the keys finally fell out, I could not find a replacement nearly as portable.
PS: An earlier poster mentioned Harry Harrison, who indeed liked small devices. His Stainless Steel Rat series was full of pinlights and other improbably miniscule, un-ergonomic gadgets.
Heh, you really crack me up. OK, I'll integrate that equation. It's great for parachutes. Perfectly accurate...
(wait for it...)
...on the Moon!
Powered ascent and descent results in a craft that is 4 times more massive...
Than what? What alternative are you suggesting for POWERED ASCENT? A giant cannon? Some sort of sky-hook?
As for descent, keep in mind that even the expendable Soyuz re-entry capsules have landing rockets. If you want a parachute system to be re-usable, you would need either landing gear or a structure and re-entry shield built strong and leak-proof enough to take repeated water landings. That adds mass, too. Parachutes are not enough.
A LOX-H2 SSTO design such as SSX has an easier time descending than may at first be apparent. It has a low terminal velocity due to its large, empty tanks, and a hovering propellant consumption rate some 25-30x lower than during lift-off (10x because it already burned over 90% of its propellants on ascent, times another 2.5-3x because it only needs to achieve one gee to hover). So a 1-minute hover on landing (already a significant safety factor) adds about as much mass as a 2-second hold-down at launch, which is to say, not much at all. It does need efficient throttling, but I doubt that adds much mass.
But the feigned insouciance: "oh, I'm not interested..." seems a bit prima donna-ish
Boy did you ever hit the nail on the head! The bane of any rocket company's existence is prima donna rocket scientists. You must never hire these guys, they'll sink your program and they're everywhere. Space attracts that personality type. I worked at a rocket company once, and we had 4 prima donna engineers each presenting their own redundant, slightly different designs as the "final" design to the customer. They routinely went over their manager's head to the company owner. Of course their rockets always crashed, though they swore that never happened in previous jobs.
According to Reps. Sensenbrenner and Conyers, the legislation is absolutely necessary because of the dire threat PCs and the Internet pose to the content-creation industry's very livelihood. Apparently, it's not nimble enough to keep up with advances in technology.
Who cares whether an obsolete industrial business model can keep up? When cars came along, laws occasionally were enacted requiring a flag person to walk in front of them so as not to scare horses. Didn't last long. Now film and plastic are fighting for their lives. Their best "argument" from the customer's perspective is that everything will look amateurish if we put big content out of business. Please. Like Participant Productions is amateurish. Even amateurish-looking Blair Witch proved the value of story and cultural savvy. As Steve Jobs' old dream of everyone being able to make a film or music album and share it instantly with the world is realized, there will be way more great stories, song and art out there than there are today. Filtering mechanisms (review blogs and the like) are already getting great exposure for the good stuff. I even made a decent living for five years creating and selling non-copy-protected original art directly to fans online. People are making money, some of them quite a lot of money. Especially the "content industry," but they're afraid their long run of protected profit is over. So they try to keep the rest of us down, and end up looking more backward than those who wanted flags to warn the horsies.
Any sufficiently advanced technology renders technical prowess from the era that brought it into being obsolete. (I'd get a lot more work done if it also neutralized bragging rights and uphill-through-the-snow stories.)
A little known fact is that it takes more energy to manufacture a turbine...
It's little-known because it's NOT a fact. Got a source? Here's what you're looking for. For every $1 you spend building and installing a wind turbine, you'll get $6-$80 worth of energy out of it over a lifetime. Compare that to $7-$29 for coal, $11-$60 for nuclear, and, contrary to popular myth, $4-$12 for solar. Then there's the fact that the Dutch found it economical to build turbines for centuries, long before the massive increases in efficiency we've seen in the past 20 years. Also, have a look at the graph on page 18 of the August, 2005 issue of National Geographic...
Totally agreed about fact checking (years before my science days I took journalism and wrote for a student paper). But I'm talking about interpretation: explanations why a phenomenon might occur, or what scientists lovingly call "hypotheses." Reporters are careful with facts, but feel it's their job alone to link them together into interesting stories. That often puts them in conflict with the scientist's job. If they're fuzzy on your explanation, some will make stuff up (e.g. MS again) without realizing they're putting hypotheses in your mouth---a huge embarassment for a scientist, and I've seen it happen a lot.
Just remember this post some day when it happens to you. It's not intentional disrespect, just a focus on their perceived audience's needs rather than yours. It's a blind spot and it stings.
That would be too easy a shot. On July 25, 2005, at around 2:30 p.m. EDT, a professional accountant who works internationally with a large firm did, in fact, confide in me that he has never balanced his checkbook. But what's funny to me is that economists will actually brag about it to their classes. Same with astrophysicists, as another reply amply illustrates (I was hoping someone would bite on that one!). Journalists similarly get huffy when scientists offer to check their interpretations (such as the cause of MS). "Why, that's my story!" No, not when you ascribe it to a scientist who is not advancing that hypothesis.
People seem to be drawn to fields that challenge them, so a surprising number of professionals end up with blind spots. For example, neurotic psychologists, cosmetologists with bad hair, astrophysicists who don't know the constellations, economists who never balance their checkbooks, and (from TFA) journalists who prefer to shoehorn press releases into a familiar story format rather than call the primary sources.
OK, resolved, the fabled "system" failed with Katrina and there's plenty of blame to go around, public and private. It shook us up, and every thread seems to return to this. But the original thread was what Katrina means for NASA and what the delays mean for public vs private space.
The crushing news from TFA for us spacers is that the Space Shuttle not only won't be operational for awhile, but it never really was. Evaluated as a flight test vehicle, it is a complete failure. Not only has it fatally crashed twice in only 114 flights, but NASA's detailed models failed to predict the fluid dynamic environment on Discovery's external fuel tank where unexpected amounts of debris fell off, despite over two years of effort.
Any astronaut will tell you that we'll really miss the Shuttle when it's gone because it does so many things. And that's what's wrong! It was originally designed to accommodate a bewildering variety of exotic missions, such as snagging military satellites in truly funky trajectories. Profitable transport, on the other hand, depends on reliability and safety. Aircraft companies deliver this at reasonable cost by minimizing the number of flight profiles, each of which must then pass (not just survive) hundreds of instrumented flight tests before the vehicle can take paid passengers.
The private passenger space startups are looking at more expense than most people figure, because (among other reasons) with flaky fluid dynamics models, they'll need to do more expensive full-scale ballistic tests. These high costs will really give them incentive to build their systems (with appropriate aborts, natch) end-to-end around a single flight profile at first. And their hardware probably won't come from contractors in 48 states.
Ahh, you're right. I should have said private corporation, but of course that's an even nastier word...
To be organized exclusively for a charitable purpose, the organization must be a corporation, community chest, fund, or foundation... -IRS exemption requirements
Just to add to this point, here is a blurb from a private company set up for something other than profit:
The American Red Cross is not a government agency and all Red Cross disaster assistance is free thanks to the generosity of people like you. The value of your donation is increased by the fact that the ratio of volunteer Red Cross workers to paid staff is almost 36 to one. Contributions to the American Red Cross, a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, are deductible for computing income and estate taxes.
Yeah, I know. Now I have to turn in my "liberal" card...
BTW, in case you're wondering why they aren't in New Orleans...
"The article mentions meat makers as home appliances..."
I don't see what the problem is. If the meat tastes like meat and has roughly the same protein and calorie content but costs much less then this can only be a good thing, right? Maybe we won't need to raise millions of cows just for meat production and we can change some of the food crop over to something more useful like grains.
And if the meat-o-matic runs on lawn and garden clippings, the result may have a healthier omega-3 / omega-6 fat ratio, like cattle fed on grass rather than grain used to have. Advantages: healthier meat, less yard waste, more decentralized food production, and slightly reduced ecological footprint.
Disadvantages: increased energy demand and a continued marginalization of nature. This later point, I think, is what creeps people out. When you can plug in an appliance that grows meat (and presumably some day also pure fruit and vegetable matter with no waste parts), your life is that much more removed from flowers, trees and the dazzling variety of species that make our world such a great place to live.
Actually, that's the main reason I quit microwaving chicken every night some years ago and have been a vegan ever since. Not for the ethics or health, but just to feel more connected to food and nature, in all its variety and splendor. Neat as the meat-o-matic is, I won't be rushing out to buy one.
All they EU is doing is facing the reality of the way technology is changing business practices and legislating appropriately which is so normal it should not be newsworthy.
Yeah, normally, a power shift this tiny ((O)100 million euros, small compared to e.g. telecoms) might not make the news. But because they're proposing to tear down some very restrictive borders that block the flow of information in a cultural area that touches nearly everybody's lives, it's a newsworthy example of Europe's commitment to unity.
We have centuries of management science to help us with problems like that.
Yes, and "Management Science" in practice mostly boils down to the art of dodging blame. The 'nauts got themselves into this mess by agreeing to this mission, and they will definitely get themselves out well before they have a chance to starve.
I've provisioned and sailed small boats several thousand miles at a stretch with a crew of 2. No long-range radio, no mission control, no layers of scientific managers to obscure the blame. When our water went bad on one occasion (yes it was our fault), we literally bet our lives on our limited backup rations and our next course of action.
It's not that complicated. Don't get in the vessel until you have verified it's adequately provisioned and you are ready to accept the consequences of any single point failure. Including getting your butt home intact once you're done being a "consummate professional" who "will do whatever is required and asked of" you by a scientifically managed NASA flight surgeon (quoted in the article).
If this situation worsens in any way, future crew members can look forward to each tracking the entire food inventory independently, with daily reconciliations and periodic video audits by ground control. And it will be their own damn fault. Some people will put up with anything to fly.
Cool factoid - thanks! Of course, pilots and builders don't always agree, as you saw in the photo-op after Monday's flight.
With FasTrac, Roton was too heavy, even on paper. But numerous elements of the original integrated engine/structural design were shedding rather than gaining mass as the test-and-build process progressed (almost unheard of in rocketry). The design may not have been destined to converge, but I have a feeling the engine team was not the tall pole, especially given their achievements after leaving. These stand in sharp contrast to NASA's work with FasTrac.
I wish I could have been there to see the flight. I caught it on CNN.com at an ungodly hour of the morning.
Makes you go hmm, that's for sure. I've been for this sort of thing for a long time, but now I have my doubts.
NASA is very competitive in its own right, having been invented essentially to put the Soviets out of the space biz. After Apollo (mission success?), the Agency refused to die, and, sadly, its competitive culture survived along with it, with dire consequences for progress in space.
Hallway talk at NASA centers is brazenly disdainful of outsiders. This results in frequent miscommunications with contractors. This broken flow of information played a major role in the failure of Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander.
NASA officials routinely steer potential investors clear of launch startups. This happened to the Rotary Rocket engine team, who were labelled "amateurs." NASA recommended its own FasTrac engine instead. Investors went along with it, and Rotary's engine team got canned. BTW, the rotary team re-formed as XCOR, which, on a pathetically tiny shoe-string budget, built numerous rockets and the first rocket plane ever licensed to perform at an air show. Meanwhile, FasTrac limped along into obscurity.
NASA is brutally competitive. It's used every rule at its disposal for over 46 years to keep space exploration within a small, trusted club of fat insiders. It will be trivially easy for NASA to stack its prizes with enough complex filing and eligibility rules to keep the rabble distracted and on the ground.
After all, the people don't control it. Revolution isn't profitable to those who do control it.
Sure, access to and control of information are important, but they distract from the Internet's most revolutionary aspect: making it relatively easy to implement new systems of commerce and governance. In other words, the value may lie more with the new processes the Internet allows than with the content it carries.
Unfortunately, Kurlantzick's article focuses mostly on content and access to content, so it misses this. It also misses the main element of Internet architecture: the revolution occurs at the periphery. As is often the case with disruptive technology, those who directly challenge the old order straightaway get swatted. They're not strong enough yet. The ones who will ultimately prevail over entrenched power will do so by finding and serving unnoticed markets and constituencies.
Throughout history (especially in Asia) groups that were fussiest about counting beans tended to thrive and rule. Now the Internet arrives, and with automation so abundantly available at its periphery, places organizational powers once reserved for nations and large corporations in the hands of small groups and individuals.
Because the technology is new, people use it like they did phone, radio and TV. That will change, as it has started to here in the USA. E-bay and Amazon.com have massively shifted commerce, and social networking sites are creating volunteer organizations and political caucuses out of thin air. These changes constitute a revolution that is gradually working its way inward from the periphery. Even in Asia, I expect, if you know where to look.