Responsibility

Responsibility. From the estimable Peggy Noonan

I talked to James Livingston of Mount Pleasant, S.C., a Marine, a warrior in Vietnam who led in battle in spite of bad wounds and worse odds. I told him I was wondering about something. Most of us try to be brave each day in whatever circumstances, which means most of us show ourselves our courage with time. What is it like, I asked, to find out when you're a young man, and in a way that's irrefutable, that you are brave? What does it do to your life when no one, including you, will ever question whether you have guts?

He shook his head. The medal didn't prove courage, he said. "It's not bravery, it's taking responsibility." Each of the recipients, he said, had taken responsibility for the men and the moment at a tense and demanding time. They'd cared for others. They took care of their men.

Longevity

If you want to live a long life - count me in - being smart might help you dodge senile dementia.

* 17 December 2005 * Lisa Melton

RICHARD WETHERILL was intolerably good at chess. Hardly surprising, for the retired university lecturer could think a mind-boggling eight moves ahead. But in recent months, his razor-sharp mind had started to dull. When he found he could no longer think five moves ahead, he was sure something was seriously wrong and arranged to meet neurologist Nick Fox at University College London's Institute of Neurology. Though his wife dismissed his complaints, Wetherill was adamant that he needed help. Yet Fox's battery of tests revealed nothing amiss: his patient sailed through every test designed to spot early dementia. Under a brain imager, his brain looked normal.

Two years later, in 2003, Wetherill died suddenly. Imagine Fox's amazement when the autopsy revealed a brain riddled with plaques and tangles, the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The anatomical evidence indicated advanced disease, with a level of physical damage that would have reduced most people to a state of total confusion. Yet for Wetherill the only impact was that he could no longer play chess to high standards. What on earth was he doing differently? What was cushioning the blow?

Wetherill's experience is a perfect example of a phenomenon that has long puzzled scientists: people who lead more intellectually stimulating lives, who are more intelligent, better educated and have high-status occupations, are somehow protected from the mental decline that comes with age. And not just age, but other insults too, from head injuries and alcohol intoxication to stroke, HIV, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Hope

William Gillis finds hope

And Spider Jerusalem walks out to his terrace after typing the most aloof and vilely pessimistic chapter epilogue possible. There’s a cool breeze on his bare back and I feel it because I haven’t shut the window.

It’s the sort of resolving breeze that presses you up against the skin of the world and wipes the fractal slate clean. It’s like the charge of life and even when it brings the sting of tear gas and pissed beer it still draws the arms wide. Where the lies and false idols are stripped bare. And all that’s left is a moist laugh, tickling harmonies of love for the world, and the charged wires of the soul, ever replacing passivity with resistance and hope.

Spider may have written cheaply in pursuit of narrative resolution. The magazine editors might have blown through their work with disregard. And I may be making a mistake betting on the laptop’s continued success in staving off that final crash. But nevertheless the breeze touches all of us. It's just that, unlike the primitivists, the rest of us express this love by refusing to give up on the future. Refuse a marriage of sacrifice.

Individual

Charles Mudede, I think, doesn't quite 'get it'.

This is the crux of an op-ed by a mother, Danette M. Will, of a young man who survived the Capitol Hill shooting:

I’m not angry at the things everyone is talking about, though. I’m not angry at the guns; the guns did not shoot at my son and kill his friends. I’m not angry at the after-hours parties, because billions of people of all ages have survived them. I’m not angry at the raves, drugs, alcohol, teenage rebellion, knives, bats, cars, etc., etc., etc.

I’m angry with Kyle Huff. Kyle Huff decided he wanted to end my son’s life. Kyle Huff decided to kill all of those kids. Not his arsenal, not his family, not alcohol, not drugs. Not anything or anyone except Kyle Huff. I’m angry with everyone who is trying to make themselves feel better about this by blaming anything or anyone except the person responsible.

The one thing I hate about American ideology, or basic American thinking, is that it places way too much emphasis on the individual. Only the one (instead of the many) is seen as largely (if not entirely) responsible not just for their crimes but also their standards of living. This Ideology pictures America, the land of opportunity, in this way: Everyone gets set, gets ready on the mark of the same white line and, at the sound of the bang, they are off to their careers. (I use “career” in both the old and modern sense of the word.) And so it is up to you—and you alone—to make it or break it. It is this kind of thinking that is responsible for the embarrassing lack of mental institutions, proper welfare services, a sensible safety net for all the citizens of the richest fucking country on the planet. Huff was less an individual and more a social being. He was a composite of others and not an isolated soul whose thoughts, emotions, drives were derived from nowhere else but himself. If the society is emphasized then society can change; if the individual is blamed than nothing happens to the power structures that govern our coexistence.

The problem is that society is a concept, an abstraction. It can't change; there isn't anything TO change. More than three people can't agree on where to go for lunch - Charles wants a society of millions of people to just agree to stuff and stop being mean? Good luck with that.

Update: Blockquote corrected to include all of Ms. Will's comments.

Rich and warm or poor and cold

From Chaos Manor

Is a richer-but-warmer world better than poorer-but-cooler worlds?

http://members.cox.net/igoklany/richer-but-warmer.pdf

Indur M. Goklany

Greater economic growth could lead to greater greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously enhancing various aspects of human well-being and the capacity to adapt to climate change. This begs the question as to whether and, if so, for how long would a richer-but-warmer world be better for well-being than poorer-but-cooler worlds. To shed light on this issue, this paper draws upon results of the "Fast Track" assessment (FTA) reported in a special issue of Global Environmental Change: Part A 14(1): 1-99 (2004), which employed the IPCC’s emissions scenarios to project future climate change and its global impacts on various determinants of human and environmental well-being. Results suggest that notwithstanding climate change, through much of this century, human well-being is likely to be highest in the richest-but-warmest (A1F1) world and lower in poorer-but-cooler worlds. With respect to environmental well-being, matters may be best under the A1F1 world for some critical environmental indicators through 2085-2100, but not necessarily for others.

The conclusion drawn from the study is clear; a world which is warmer and is wealthy can adapt and is, all things considered, a better place to live. A colder world is generally a miserable place to live.

Some specific recommendations. Charmingly enough they are non-ideological, though implementation may be seen that way.

* Increase adaptive capacity by investing in efforts to reduce vulnerability to today's urgent climate sensitive problems that might be excaberated by climate change.

* Strengthen or develop institutions necessary to advance and/or reduce barriers to economic growth, human capital and the propensity for technological chance.

* Expand the range of no-regret options through R&D to improve existing technologies that would reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations more cost-effectively than currently possible.

* Allow the market to run its course in implementing no-regret options as their range expands with improvements in cost effectiveness i.e. reduce subsidies that increase energy use, land clearance, use of fertilizers.

* Develop a more robust understanding of the science, impacts and policies of climate change.

* Monitor the impacts of climate change to spot 'dangerous' impacts before they become imminent.

I am not sure what there is to disagree with this. Doubtless some will see any technological expansion as 'bad' no matter what the potential ill effects over the next century. There is no reasonaing with some people.

Anti-War snark from TJIC

From TJIC

Anti-war, pro-cuteness tshirt: Kittens Not Bombs

My response:

We tried kittens.

They didn’t explode.

Filf

One of those long evenings Kohn was sitting on the low forecourt wall of a pub in Golders Green, sipping with caution at a liter of Stella Artois. He wore shades in the twilight. The round, white-enameled table where the others sat was jammed against the wall, enabling him to lean gently on the shoulder of his current girlfriend, Annie. Like most of the girls around (that was where the shades came in, for covert appraisals) she was wearing a skin-tight catsuit that covered everything up to her chin, including each finger and toe. The gauzy, floaty shift which covered it somehow made its contours no less detailed or revealing. As one of his older workmates had remarked appreciatively when the fashion had first drifted down the street, it was filf, pure filf.
From 'The Star Faction' by Ken Macleod

Filf he muttered appreciatively, pure filf.

Two Dogs and a Boy

It's the principal of the thing.

I tried ... and failed .. to out-snark James Taranto. So I will blockquote him instead. From OpinionJournal.

Great Moments in Public Education--I
An article in New York Teacher, the magazine of the state teachers union, pays tribute to Jack Powell--but not for his professional accomplishments, which are rather meager:

A longtime singer and guitarist with the Zucchini Brothers and a substitute teaching assistant for Washington-Saratoga-Warren-Hamilton-Essex BOCES [school board], Powell has lived frugally for years. He works about three days a week as a sub, earning about $70 a day, with no benefits. From March to October, he rides his bike 20 miles to work when work is available.

Sometimes he works for a funeral home to make extra money. The shawl he has wrapped around himself on this winter day, he says simply, doubles as a blanket.

"I do whatever it takes to survive and live a socially conscious life," said Powell, who has a tepee in his yard.

Far be it from us to fault Powell for lacking ambition or being a bit eccentric. If he's happy leading a modest life with his bike and his tepee and his courgette fraternity, hey, more power to him. But why is New York Teacher honoring him? Well, that is because of a "principled stand" he has taken. To wit:

Part of that survival--or so he thought--included shopping at Wal-Mart to take advantage of cheaper prices for himself, his partner and her two children. Then his discussions about Wal-Mart with Sandra Carner-Shafran, a teaching assistant at BOCES and a member of the Board of Directors of New York State United Teachers, started churning inside him. . . .

"I don't like what Wal-Mart stands for," Powell said, noting the mega-chain's scanty health insurance for staffers. "Because of all those things they can lower the prices."

He and his partner agreed to go on food stamps for their family rather than shop at Wal-Mart any longer.

Powell, that is, has generously permitted American taxpayers to subsidize his unaffordable moral tastes. Pardon us if we regard him as something less than a profile in courage.

Space Elevator - Logarithmic Drawing

Tom writes in the Liftport Group (The Space Elevator Companies) Forum

I thought this Logarithmic Map of the Universe
was pretty cool - go check out the full scale map. I took the sub-map
that only covers the area near Earth, and added roughly where the SE
would be. Obviously the line thickness is greater than the real SE, but
I think I got the angle hour and height roughly correct. You have to
read their paper to see how they calculated things (and note that the
size of the Moon is exaggerated). But it’s interesting to see all the
objects in orbit, and just how far up the SE will go.

Cross posted in the Liftport Blog

Customer

I won't tell you the name of the vendor. You've never heard of them, so it hardly matters. Names and details changed to salve my conscience.

We have a need to enable a small group of wireless clients to access an application. We're at release 6.1. To enable this costs $6,500. Per server. We own three of these servers. If you upgrade to release 6.2 the service we need is .. free. Bundled with the application.

We can't really upgrade before we need the wireless service. We really don't want to spend $2437.50 per device to enable connection.

We've been using this application for over three years. We promise to upgrade to 6.2 asap following go-live. Could the vendor give us a break and .. you know let us borrow the needed service until we upgrade.

Oh hell no. They'll rent us the service. For $4,500. Per server.

So they get nothing. We'll be aggressive, I'll pull a few late nights and loose my weekend. We can't just stop using the application - there are some serious development hours and a scripts to customize ... it's not like buying Toyota if the Lexus dealership irritates you.

But it feels wrong. 'Anally raped by monkeys wearing lemon-juice lubricated condoms' wrong. We spend hundreds of man hours installing your application, spend serious bucks for a complicated system, send guys to your training and when we need a small break THIS is what happens?

This is why thingamy is so damned attractive.

One single system to run your business.

No need for other enterprise software nor middleware.

No need for hierarchies nor information tree structures.

No need for management to run the workflow.

Enter the future at your own pace, start small or big.

Refine your business model and processes continuously.

And yes, you're not the first to utter unbelievable, bollocks, bullshit, etc. under your breath.
We like that, leaves us only one task: Prove that the system actually works.

Would that not be kind of cool if we did?

It would be all kinds of cool. Stay tuned, I've begged to be let in to the beta ....

Warm Lunar Fuzzies

This image (found here) gives me the warm fuzzies.



Yes, Bruce is making fun but the implications of his photoshop leave yours truly awed. Private enterprise on the moon and all that implies: "Here's to the great Capitalist Conspiracy to which I've always wanted to be a part of!"

Like Discovering a New World

It is a pleasure to work with people like Tom.

On my way home from the SAMPE presentation Tuesday night, it struck me again how amazing it is to work on the space elevator. In a way, it’s sort of the engineering equivalent of being among the first few scientists to work in a new field, sort of like the first physicists to work on quantum mechanics. Despite the work of Artsutanov, Pearson, Edwards, and others, the design of space elevators and issues surrounding it are still in their infancy, ripe for anyone to come along and make progress. Working out these issues feels more like discovery than simple number-crunching, and is at least part of the reason why so many people get so excited about the SE. And because so many of the SE issues rely on well-understood engineering principles, they can be tackled by a much wider group of people than could, say, the early development of quantum mechanics.

But the SE is even more useful as a learning tool. Even if students replicate prior work, doing homework problems that are centered on the space elevator would, in many cases, be more “fresh” and interesting than some older problem sets. Which would you rather have assigned as a homework problem: Working out the stresses in a steel bridge, or in a carbon-nanotube space elevator ribbon?

Valor

Submitted without comment. From OpinionJournal

When Medic Michelle Chavez tried to remove Sgt. Smith's helmet, she realized that it was holding his head together. A bullet--one of the last fired from the tower--had entered through Sgt. Smith's neck and traveled up into his brain, shattering his skull from the inside. There were 13 bullet holes peppered over his armored vest--the impact from any one of them enough to knock a man down. The vest's ceramic armor inserts, back and front, had been cracked in numerous places.

"Sapper Seven," the wiry, hollow-cheeked guy who had been so hard on his men in training, so exacting, so insistent on "doing it right"; the guy who had led them into battle on the first day of the war with a rock-'n'-roll tape blaring from his Humvee; the guy who had personally got down on his knees in front of their convoy to patiently, carefully extract the deadly mines when they ran into a minefield near the Karbala Gap, was dead.

A chaplain and a sergeant in dress uniforms came to Birgit Smith's home near Fort Stewart, Ga., late on the night of April 4 to break the terrible news. Mrs. Smith, the German girl Paul had met and married during his tour of duty in Western Europe in 1992, listened numbly to her visitors. She fought the growing dread and pain by grasping at a desperate hope:

"Our name is so common," she said, tears welling up in her eyes. "Maybe it's a mistake."

There was no mistake. Paul Ray Smith had given his life protecting his men and his position. He had almost single-handedly blunted an overwhelming attack which might well have overrun the nearby aid station.

"There are two ways to come home, stepping off the plane and being carried off the plane," Sgt. Smith had written in an unsent email to his parents. "It doesn't matter how I come home, because I am prepared to give all that I am to insure that all my boys make it home." He had been the only American killed in the courtyard fight.

James Lovell

Matt from Begging to Differ describes a new statue at Alder Planetarium in Chicago

On the Apollo 8 flight Lovell, whose main duty on the trip was navigation, held up his thumb and covered the entire disc of the Earth, which brought home for him how far away he was. (Hanks has this as part of his Apollo 13 movie.) A new statue at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago commemorates this historic gesture. It shows Lovell, space suit glove off, navigational book in hand, holding his thumb up to the capsule window, where a small Earth is visible. Beside the statue an inscription reads, "I have seen the Earth as it truly is... a grand oasis in the vastness of space." Thirty-seven -- 37! -- years on and still not many people can truly say that.

It says a great deal about a culture - much of it not good - that we sent a handful of men to the moon and then just stopped going.

Chtorr

I love David Gerrold's writing. His wit, his way with puns, the obvious fact that he sweats the details and works hard at his craft .. I admire that. From 'A Method for Madness'

Instantly, the pilot reached up and tapped the yellow panel of the device. This would give him a more detailed report. “Gas particulate limits exceeded. Non-recoverable performance loss.”

“What the hell—?”

“You’ve flown through something. That was the bump we felt,” I said. “Possibly a hovering cloud of stingflies. They’re invisible. They follow the worms.”

“I never heard of that—”

“Gee, that’s too bad,” I said sympathetically. “In that case, maybe we won’t crash. God grants dispensation if you have a good excuse.”

He's been working away on the Chtorr Wars series (with book six promised Real Soon Now) since I was in high school. Not exactkly a blistering pace but they're worth the wait.

Thanks to Dave at Garfield Ridge I know exactly what a Chtorrian looks like when it's doing what comes naturally.

Not for the easily nauseated. You have been warned.

Man murders six, incites name calling in a forum

I was reading 'The Stranger' forum, where the horrible news from Seattle has been breaking. Kudos to 'The Stranger' for doing journalism right.

The predictable happened. Eli Sanders suggested that the gun-show loophole be closed

I wonder: When they trace the weapons used in the Capitol Hill shooting back to their original source, will the original source be an under-regulated gun show?

Which caused a flurry of hatred, name calling and general bad feelings in the comment thread.

I support total gun control.... this might help get some measure or two passed next legislature. We can hope.

Mind you we don't know where Kevin Huff got the weapons he used. Or that gun control would have deterred him much.

I suggested

If anyone at the party had been carrying the guy could have been put down before he killed so many.

There are two sides to the issue - keep that mind.

and was denounced as a nut

It amazes me how idiotic gun nuts are. Clearly the guns were the problem in this issue not the lack of guns by other parties. Ask the cops if they would've prefered more people at the party carrying guns.

Clearly the guns were the problem, not the shooter. How un-nuanced of me.

There is name calling and some crap from left field

So maybe you'd like to take your repulsive Wild West fantasies of defending the homestead back to Montana or Texas, someplace where you won't bother anybody. We've got a city here, and we're suffering through a horrifying tragedy, and all you want to talk about is what kind of ammo your cock substitute takes. Well, we don't want to hear it.

Unh hunh. The fellow also misses the point

This guy wasn't crazy and he didn't "snap". He was a nice normal responsible gun owner, liked to hunt, polite to old ladies. But he had a huge arsenal. And any hint of a suggestion that maybe there ought to be some way to prevent people from amassing arsenals like that brings out the Second Amendment die-hards, the Dick Cheneys and the Charlton Heltons.

I'm not sure what you call multiple murder plus suicide if not 'snaping'. Surely not part of your normal routine? How all people with 'arsenals' handle stress related events?

Let me put out my .two cents here. I am not ideological - I go with what works. If what works goes against my own belief system, too bad for that system because the practical always trumps ideological.

In a word - ideology sucks.

You simply cannot control what people want to have. It's been tried. People have also in various times and places tried to control sex, booze, drugs and pornography. Yet all of those are still around.

However the polar opposite of gun control would be open carry and unlicensed fireams. This would be suboptimal for a place like Seattle, probably.

What is the best way to keep people like Kevin Huff from multiple murder and suicide? I have no idea. But I do know what doesn't work.

Fire In The Sky

From Peggy Noonan

We forget to notice the everyday courage of astronauts. We forget to think about all the Americans doing big and dangerous things in the world--members of the armed forces, cops and firemen, doctors in public hospitals in hard places. And now, famously again, astronauts. With their unremarked-upon valor and cool professionalism. With their desire to make progress and push on.

Buzz Aldrin captured it this morning. He tried to read a poem about astronauts on television. He read these words: "As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky." And tough old Buzz, steely-eyed rocket man and veteran of the moon, began to weep.

He was not alone.

The rest of that poem goes

Now the rest is up to us, and there’s a future to be won:
We must turn our faces outward, we will do what must be done:
For no cradle lasts forever; every bird must learn to fly:
And we’re goin’ to the stars–
See our fire in the sky!

Why now? Gee, Brian, the Columbia, Challenger, Apollo 1 month was last month's news.

The song came up in iTunes. Any my boyo .. he was not just listening he was listening if you catch my drift. Sure you can't get there by good intention and filk but neither one hurts.

Sunday can be like that around the Dunbar house

Sunday morning is our busy day on the weekend. Everyone is home, friends come over for breakfast, Rammro's Sunday hours are Noon to Four so no one is rushing out the door to open.



A lot like that, actually. Read Little Dee - it's good for your soul.

Note of caution - the Rammro site is under construction - be kind.

Light A Candle

I'm not so happy about blogging about 9/11. It happened, we shouldn't forget it. I'm reluctant to be in your face about it. Nevertheless an exception

It is one of the most chilling images to emerge from the horror that has become, simply, 9/11. Against the steel-and-glass background of the World Trade Center, a man falls headlong 1,300ft to the street below.

While pictures of the Twin Towers billowing smoke and flames will remain the most enduring image of the terrorist attacks, this one man's dying moments somehow humanise the toll of New York's darkest day.

And yet, as famous as the image is, the man's identity has remained a mystery. Until now.



Five years after the horror of September 11, 2001, the falling man has finally been identified as Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old who worked in a restaurant at the top of the north tower.

Rest in Peace.

And never forget.

Yoyodyne Logo

Young people these days just do not appreciate the classics . . .

Don't Blame Me ..

If you don't get this .. what have you been doing on Friday night?

From
Via Dean Esmay and hundreds of others.

From "Why Do We Have A Manned Space Program? " by Peter Taylor

Researching for the presentation I'm giving at Oddcon and found this. Nothing directly to do with the subject at hand.

But I like Heinlein and I love The Door into Summer. How cool to see an old favorite given a new twist.

Why Do We Have a Manned Space Program

A variation of the "wake me up when..." theme was described to me in terms of the cat that gave Heinlein's novel, The Door into Summer, its name. The cat meows at a succession of doors during winter, trying to command its owner to open the right one, the one that leads into summer. The cat doesn't understand that the time is not right, and it will just have to wait. Similarly, space colonies and the other important things that space futurists want to build will just have to wait; the technology is not ready, and sending humans into space at current launch costs with current life support, power supply, and manufacturing technology is like the cat scratching at the door to make it be summer.

Pete found his door into summer. Maybe ours is the one we're meowing at now.



Update: I fear that it is possible I might fall into a Bruce Gagnon like state where I utter pretentious krep and start to take myself way too seriously. Feel free to admister repeated doses of 'boot to the head' should this happen. Thank you!

Weather

My father sent me this picture taken on 3/22



Pretty, hunh?

What the future could look like

A snapshot from a possible future.


Squint a bit and paint the sky red. This could be a research outpost on Mars. Or foolish dreams in the Utah desert.

You get to pick.

Photo courtesy of MDRS 47 Gallery. Go Dawgs.

Flood Maps

A mashup I like.

It's amazing what people are doing with the Google Maps API. I'm really digging the Flood Maps, which show you where the water would be if the seas rise by anywhere from 0 to 14 meters. Looks like 8 meters is the sweet spot for me -- so far as I can tell, that puts my condo right on the new beach.

For me the sweet spot is 14 meters. At that point the patch of land occupied by the Liftport office building becomes an island.

That bit in the middle

Now, all of this is a bad thing. Horrible. But a frikin' island. That would be a cool place to work from.

Just _do_ that thing

Whatever it is that you do.

Needless to say things go downhill fast from there. I become sort of
ornery and nitpicky on the phone and do the thing that studio
executives and my wife hate more than anything: I bring up problems
without providing any sort of solutions.

People hate that.

So I don't do the job and someone else does and frankly at that point I
lose interest in following the SNAKES ON A PLANE saga. The movie could
be the Next Great Deadly Animal Loose on a Plane movie and my heart'll
always be a little sad. And believe it or not maybe there's a little
screenwriting lesson in here somewhere:

If you're gonna do it, do it. Don't creep right up close to it, think about doing it, and then back off just a bit and try to convince yourself you're still doing it. You're not. It's binary. You either have faith or you don't. You're either doing it, or you're not.

I hope I've made myself clear.

Yes. In spades. Time to get busy.

Via Dean Esmay

Memo to the New York Times - get to the point - why are the French throwing a hissy fit?

Yes, rioting in the streets. Tear gas, students, nationwide protests. Making me wait until the 'next page' to find out what they're rioting about is .. well lame. As is the reason for the riots.

They want the abolition of a new law known as the "First Employment Contract"

Oh. Well yes then by all means riot. A nationwide hissy fit over employment law. As Hugh Macleod said

Yes, France, you are correct. The 21st Century was indeed invented by the Anglo Saxons for no other reason than to mess with you.

Infotechnicalization

Infotechnicalization. But what does it mean? Ah, that's half the fun.

The Heralds of Resource Sharing

Bowties! Really big honking computers and terminals. A chalk talk on film. Men wearing ties, crewcuts. J.C.R. Licklider . . . holey moley it's history a technophile can appreciate.

A 1972 documentary on ARPAnet, the early internet. A very interesting look at the beginnings of what is now a huge part of most of our lives.

Cool.

What he said

Meme Therapy is rounding off an internal debated over manned vs unmanned space programs. They conclude with sentiment near and dear to my heart.

While the desire to make a fast buck may not be as noble a motive as the desire to expand the sphere of human knowledge, we should not forget that the history of exploration and colonization here on Earth is the history of mercantilism and exploitation, albeit often with savage consequences for those who have been exploited. At least in space we shouldn't have that problem. Manned and unmanned space exploration go together, hand in glove, and we shouldn't rule out one in favour of the other. The real question is what is the most efficient way of getting out there, and the answer to that is to take the project out of the hands of the bean counters, bureaucrats and politicians and into the hands of those driven by that most basic of human desires, greed. While businessmen and corporations may not be paragons of human virtue, at least they have a tendency to get things done, because if they fail they cannot hide behind walls of bureaucracy and political manoeuvring, instead they go bust, and the technology and patents they have developed are snapped up by their competitors to be used again, rather than disappearing into the governments' archives, never to be seen again. We will get out there someday, but as long as the space program is a slave to the whims of government, of national expediency, of the military, and indeed of science, it will be a long, long road with many switchbacks, reversals and pauses, and I for one could do with rather less white elephants sitting in the middle of the road.

Greed is good.

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good.

Greed is right.

Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind.

And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

I do not think Oliver Stone set out to make a pro-capitalist movie but he seems to have captured the essence of what makes it all work.

Update: Broken link corrected.

Why a space elevator?

People ask "why a space elevator?" Lower transaction cost to space, freedom, resources, profit.



Or maybe I'm more like Vachel than I want to admit.

Little Dee courtesay of Chris Baldwin.

Missing the point

Ms. Supkis misses the point.

Blogger has really screwed up now, it seems they have lost four months of my postings! This is really ticking me off. PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR NEW CULTURE OF LIFE NEWS PAGE!

Google just got a gazillion dollars and they can't keep this site afloat. Says a lot about corporate responsibility!

Ur, no. It says a lot about Google's business practices, but nothing about corporate responsibility. That is all down to statutory obligations. Perhaps she means corporate social responsibility? I am hard pressed to see how they have a social responsibility to provide a free service to bloggers. Elaine can have cloudy opinions on whatever she pleases - but by no means does anyone have to think she knows what she is talking about.

TANSTAAFL.

SFChronicle on orbital debris

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle talks about orbital debris, quotes Jordin Kare and Brad Edwards

“It’s very likely — I’d say certain — that we don’t yet understand all the ways a space elevator can fail, so the current designs may well underestimate how much damage a small impact could do,” said Jordin Kare, who has a doctorate in astrophysics from UC Berkeley and is now a private consultant to the aerospace industry in Seattle.

A veteran researcher on the subject, Bradley Edwards, formerly of Los Alamos National Laboratory, disagrees. He is confident that the space elevator can be safely moved out of the way before space debris hits it. Thus “we can eliminate any concern related to space debris.”

Kare counters that such “an active system will always have a chance of failure, whether through mechanical failures, or plain old human error.” He wryly imagines this frantic exchange between the tracking officials and the elevator operator: “Move the ribbon left! No, the other left!”

I was waiting for someone fromt the engineering side at Liftport (The Space Elevator Companies) to respond before I said anything. Tom obliged last night

I have to side with Jordin on this one. I agree that we will need an active debris avoidance system, and it will do a lot of good, but nothing is fool-proof.

No kidding. Murphy was a grunt and then used the GI Bill to attend MIT, I suspect. Things will break and anyone who seriously wants to build anything more complicated than a toaster would do well to keep this in mind.

Preston Reed Video

Hugh MacLeod said

I'll say it again, if you haven't watched Preston Reed's concert video, you are seriously missing out.

[Preston Reed's blog is here.]
[Preston Reed homepage is here.]

He's right.  The man can flat out play.  His posture looks uncomfortable but what do I know?

MarsCon 2006 Report - Anecdote

SF readers are an interesting lot - those who self-select and get into fandom are even more interesting. One staple of Cons is a blood drive - picture the Red Cross bus filled with fen in costume, one guy dressed as Dr. Who another wearing pirate garb, talking about fanish things - the fellow who just made a Storm Trooper costume for example and was going to wear it to Masquerade that night ...

I'm the last one to be tapped. I'm dressed in a suit because we are representing a company that aspires to earn enough confidence to be entrusted with billions of dollars of capital. Which makes me stand out.

Nurse: What do you do?
Me: I'm representing my company here, handing out literature, spreading the good word.
Nurse: And what do you guys do?
Me: We're building a space elevator.

I love this moment. Are you serious? What is that? We're at a Con, she's probably heard some outlandish stuff today ...

Nurse: And that is ..
Me: Cable on the ground, attached to a satellite and ascend the cable mechanically. For 80% of the cost of a rocket

Long pause while the nurse assimilates this, and decides that I'm not obviously insane.

Nurse: You're .. serious? You are. Wow.

I love moments like that.

Cross posted at Liftport.

MarsCon 2006 Report - Personal

Over here is my professional report covering MarsCon 2006. A personal reaction?

Pretty damn cool.

From the IEAS (they build and fly really big rockets .. for fun) at the next table: "When are you guys gonna get that thing built so we can fly these where they belong?"

Met Liftport stockholder Frank Smith who drove up from Kansas City. His first con as well.

Was it worth it? Sure was. Walked in and the very first person I saw was a fan on wheels. In costume. Said costume was from Earth Defense Forces and leaned heavily to berets, black camo and replica firearms from the late 20th century. Peace bonded of course. How cool is that? Plus the puns, the cameraderie and so on. All good stuff.

India

President Bush travels to India, a historic moment. Welcome to the Anglosphere, India.

Not many people are thinking about what this really means. They should be. Bush's trip to India, and the deal made there today, may end up being the single most consequential act of the Bush presidency.

Proving James' point, the lead on CNN? Arms sales. Granted CNN isn't there to cover the grand sweep of things but c'mon.

The perspective from India?

The most powerful man of the world found his reception at (Rastrapati Bhawan) President House breathtaking. Landmark Indo-US nuclear deal went through successfully and the joint statement made people all over India very excited about the totally changed Indo-US relation. It was 'historic' for one and 'necessary' for the other. It may be the happiest day for Manmohan Singh and his expressed it words and gestures too. The whole world today recognizes the necessity of India in decisions on matters of global importance, and does also consider it a responsible nation. Bush openly talked of the significant contributions that Indians in US are making for the American economy. I consider Bush sincere and brave to whatever he commits, and he can go to any length. I don't doubt if he can make his Congress change the law to make the deal effective. His braveness is clear from his body language. Bomb blast in Pakistan today killing number of persons including one American officer can't deter him from going to Pakistan. I heard one former ambassador considering Bush as the most committed admirer of Indian democracy. I remember the years of Eisenhower and Dulles' diplomacy and how badly we used to feel.

Bush is going to Hyderabad on Friday. It is Hyderabad, as Chandra Babu Naidu by his personal endeavour built and brought the city worthy enough to come on global radar. In evening tomorrow, Mr. Bush will address a select gathering the 16th-century Old Fort (Purana Qila) that will become the focal point of the global attention or some time. This will be a first-of-its-kind event for an Indian monument. Mugal Emperor Humayun built it. And Sher Shah defeated Humayun, occupied it, and built Sher Mandal and a magnificent mosque, the Qila-I-Qunah. Humayun after the death of Sher Shah occupied the fort again, and used Sher Mandal as his library. Humayun fell to his death from the steps of this building. And Friday evening, this dilapidated fort will see and hear the voice of the most powerful ruler of the world getting transmitted all over the world. Is this not a surprising and breathtaking event of history?

Not, to me, surprising but it is breathtaking.

Opening Space for Business

I was going to blog the Business 2.0 article on developing space at Liftport - Tom beat me to it. Then all the space orientated bloggers I read did it and now I feel like a Me-Too Molly when I think about blogging the thing.

It is an important article no doubt but I can't say much that isn't being said by hundreds of other bloggers. Luckily William Gaddis has a way with words.

I know it's already made it's way to Slashdot, but still. Twenty Trillion Dollars. Fuck your small-minded primitivist models. Fuck the Crash and fuck dying in the cradle. Fuck anyone who doesn't think we can or should have it all. Fuck any "utopia" that makes concessions. Fuck all those people who so delight in social power that they would keep us all crippled and chained to weakness.

The resource model is not closed. The future is not the past. There is room for progress.

Another world is possible.

Many, many, many other worlds.

Awesome Business Card

Too bad Frank already a) leaped on the idea and b) got Hugh MacLeod to say "go ahead and use it. no worries".



Now if we had one with a hacked up Liftport logo ... no, it's still no good. Frank has been to that well and used it up.

Not for everyday use of course. The cards would be to hand out at places like, oh, Marscon.

This isn't the future I wanted

Ben Huset sent me links to pictures from last year's MarsCon - to me know what I'm getting into next weekend - and I found this . .

Somehow I find that I have now slipped into an alternate future, one where it takes the combined resources of our world's industrial nations and ten years to build but one space station... and its crew will only be 6, not 250.

20 years ago, 25 years ago, there were people who would say, "If we can send a man - to - the - Moon, why can't we" [insert favorite cause here]? Those people no longer say that; they have gotten their way. Not that we have solved any of the problems - of - the - world, but 'at least' we no longer have the technology to send anyone beyond low Earth orbit.

I do not like this future.

Yes, I will beat the drum for our tiny 6-person space station, but it isn't enough. Yes, I enjoy a ripping tale presented with the latest digital effects ...a brief escape into fantasy... but that isn't enough either. I want Mars Direct, hollowed-out asteroids, solar power satellites & L5 settlements. I want to battle the industrialists for the right to keep the far side of the moon as a quiet refuge for radio astronomy. I want to join the debate over whether we will terraform Mars -- even though I don't know yet if I will be a 'red' or a 'green'. I'll work to get others to see what I see, and want it as much as I do.

And someday, when 'they' aren't watching, I just might slip back into my future.

Sounds like a good reason to buckle down and work hard to me.

Why? Well why not?

Weekend not wasted

Spent the weekend and learned a fair bit about postscript. The idea is to automagicaly take input from a php form (like this), slap it into postscript and fire back a PDF via email.

I knew - but never thought about it much - that PostScript is a language. It's a complex language, part of my learning curve was thinking the thing was on a level with shell script when it's really a complex and powerful language. You can DO stuff with PostScript - my hat is off to PostScript hackers everywhere.

However part of this was a wash - I ran slap bank out of time to turn the Offering document into a valid postscript file AND to gin up a script to slap in the variables. So this offering is going to be semi-automated, and hence a bit slower to return the documents than we'd like.

However the next offering promises to be automated - right up until the paperwork comes back to us wherein it devolves into a messy trail of paper again.

Cross posted at Liftport Staff Blog.

Marscon

We're going to Marscon next weekend.
I am so going to enjoy this. Get out of the house - great. Take my woman and boys along for the trip? This is going to be so cool. I'm giddy, I say, giddy. And better - it's a work trip.

From last year's con

I will have to get my wife this t-shirt.

Don't Tread On Me

Henry Rollins received a letter from the government ..

I just got a letter from a nice woman who told me the man I sat next to on the flight from Auckland to Goldcoast Australia reported me to the Australian Government because of the book I was reading.

" ... The person who sat next to you on the flight from New Zealand does not agree with your politics or choice of reading and so nominated you as a possible threat. As they were too cowardly or stupid to leave their details I can’t call them to discuss their idiocy with them.”

Please tell your government and everyone in your office to go fuck themselves. Tell them twice. If your boss is looking for something to do, you can tell him I suggest he go fuck himself. Baghdad's safer than my hometown and your PM is a sissy. You have a nice night.”

I really don’t take kindly to that kind of shit. I like it though. Love it. Confrontation. Tension. Adversarial relationships. More please. It’s the only time it gets real.

Sometimes you've got to spit on your hands and haul up the 'Don't Tread On Me' flag.

First flag of the Continental Marines of course.

Via.

Private Spaceflight - new Wikipedia article

Fascinating new Wikipedia article

Private spaceflight
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

During the early years of spaceflight only nation states had the resources to develop and fly spacecraft. Both the U.S. space program and Soviet space program were operated using mainly military pilots as astronauts. During this period, no commercial space launches were available to private operators, and no private organization was able to offer space launches.

Cool beans. Go forth and contribute if you know what you are talking about in that area.

Via.

Watch that last step

The view from GEO on 4/12/2018


And the view from a bit further away


I tell ya' - real-time imagery beamed from 'up there' to wherever is going to be a minor but valuable revenue stream.

Screen shots from Celestia.

Nifty Comment on /.

Nifty comment on /.

Does the firm have any ideas on how to avoid tremendous death and destruction if this immensely long cable were to fall to the Earth, possibly hitting certain areas twice as badly if it were long enough to wrap more than once around?

Yes. They're going to deploy a massive cushion [wikipedia.org] around the Earth, consisting of a total of about 5000 trillion metric tons of gas. Roughly 78% will be nitrogen, and 21% will be oxygen.

If the cable breaks, the lower half will encounter this cushion at extremely high velocities, ripping it apart and causing it to flutter harmlessly to the ground.

No news about whether or not they'll patent the idea.

The guy who patented one-click shopping is a picker compared to the audacious fellow who patents ballistic reentry.

That's not heat, that's money you see being generated!

Cross-posted at Liftport.

Firearms training in the Air Force

My MOS school (4066) at MCDEC Quantico had several instructors from the Navy and Air Force. Good guys. The Air Force Tech Sergeant was a fine speciman of physical fitness, but he generally would not do PT with the troops in the morning. Why? "It's optional in the Air Force".

Fine. But I had no idea that firearms training was not just optional but not available until I read this from the Chair Force Engineer;

During a recent meeting, I had to pose the question why Air Force
Research Lab doesn't offer firearms training for its officers. (I think
I phrased it "We're in the freaking Air Force. Why don't we get to
shoot shit?") The people in the meeting didn't seem to appreciate my
gripe; they were of the mindset that engineers don't get to shoot shit
(at least not on the Air Force dime) and shouldn't have a desire to
shoot shit.

Good question. Yes, they don't have to 'shoot things' but in theory my MOS in the Marines had little to do with shooting things and I got spend many many hours on the range shooting not just the M-16 but a few belts from an M-60 and a few memorable live rounds from an AT-4. It's fun and educational.

Note the belt draped over shoulder - a sure way to spoil the feed. Lack of an assistant gunner to carry more ammunition and a spare barrel. And she's in for a nasty burn if hot brass drops on her shoulders ...

Turn the Other Cheek

Attention, Cries of the Heart Ministry at 5 Main Street Mxxxxx, Wisconsin.

Your paster - Jimmy Barham - was gracious enough to plow the sidewalk of the mall building my wife's store shares with your church. However he also pushed a metric ton of snow into one of two retail parking stalls on the street, which is inconvenient to customers.

Today, after your church service, y'all locked the mall door in the rear of the building. You know, the one that customers using the main parking lot use. We wondered why it was so quiet today.

Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, three times ...

Update: I'm sorry if I upset anyone at the Ministry. The stall was not blocked, but access to the sidewalk was. I've changed the title as well. These people do a wonderful ministry helping other people. I'm certain the back door was locked by accident. These things happen.

Dogone bums - get a job!

Sad, just sad.

From - Via

Mars or Bust - A mess from Rolling Stone

It's hard to say where this article from 'Rolling Stone' goes wrong. Well, no. The second sentence gives you a clue that Benjamin Wallace-Wells either has a terrible editor or has no idea what he is talking about.

The spaceship that will launch six astronauts to Mars is a single, spare room just fifteen feet wide. Known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle ...

Sounds horrible. Except the CEV is destined to lift missions to orbit for exploration on the Moon. One imagines he was shown CEV as an example of how they'd lift crew to the vehicle that will take them to Mars and he just wasn't paying attention.

The simulators for the space station and shuttle are the same ones the astronauts used twenty years ago, full-size mock-ups that look -- with all their curved white parts -- like something Darth Vader would walk through. The instrument panels resemble those on a small plane, only with more screens. And when the astronauts practice weightlessness, they do it, wearing space suits, in what is basically a twenty-foot-deep swimming pool.

It is possible that the simulators for Shuttle and ISS are the same because the vehicles have not changed in gross detail. I do know that NASA ordered an anti-gravity machine to simulate weightlessness but it was canceled by a penny-pinching Clinton administration.

If one gear freezes or the navigation system slides off course, the astronauts could end up stranded on a planet 35 million miles from home.

Unless they have backups. And backups for the backups. Perhaps they are just going to wing it like a guy determined to see how far he can drive while the gas gauge reads 'E'.

And if there is any interstellar sex, or even an unrequited crush, the situation could spiral out of control. This point was underlined last year, when a male cosmonaut on the space station tried to kiss a female Canadian colleague. She, quite literally, ran the other way. Mission Control had to remotely lock the door to the Canadian's quarters so the Russian couldn't get in, and wait for everyone's tempers to cool.

Oh my - sexual titillation for the RS reader. Who will have no way of knowing the story is (tip to James Oberg) bogus.  Or indeed that the entire article is bogus from tip to tail.

Krep. Krep from the first sentence to the end. Why in the name of Mike, Ned and all that is holy is RS slagging on NASA - the one agency in the federal government that does good, and puts more back into the economy than it consumes? What next, RS, going to write a slag-fest on Mother Teresa?

Bring back P.J. O'Rourke you bastards.

Hero

Greg Boyington was not the kind of man you would want your daughter marrying. Hell raiser, rake, bum - he fit all of those tags and more.

And so? I'd rather buy Colonel Boyington a beer in a dive than sit in the finest establishment and listen to people who earnestly and with an utter failure to understand their own culture spout drivel as quoted in the minutes of their meeting;

Jill Edwards said she "didn't believe a member of the Marine Corps was an example of the sort of person UW wanted to produce."

Jill. Sweetie pants. The Marine Corps doesn't need UW. But UW could do with just a smidge of the sense of history your average Marine is steeped in.

Via.

The fascination with 'Mike Mulligan' - explained

This reimagining of the cover explains it all ...





Via.

The mountain man and the surgeon from The Economist

Excellent - but brief - article on poverty.

The point of this article is neither to mock Mr Banks nor to praise Dr Kabamba. Both have their virtues and flaws, and your correspondent cannot reliably judge which is the happier. But here are two concluding observations. First, if poor Americans were to compare their standard of living with what is normal elsewhere in the world, let alone in Congo, they would see they have little cause for discontent. Then again, were Americans not so incurably discontented with their lot, their great country would not be half as dynamic as it is.

Via.

The internet. Bringing us all together in peace and harmony

Or not. Back in January Travis blogged a New York Times article about one Ms. DeCambra, 38, taking solace in having the gun that murdered her son destroyed.

Maybe instead of trying to “get closure” through destroying inanimate
objects, this clan should improve their lot in life by welding their
zippers shut and not having sex at the age of 13 (and, conversely, not
having sex with 13 year olds).

A month later Ms. DeCambra found the blog and objected to being judged.

Some people have the benefit of not being born into a dysfunctional
family, I did not have that luxury, so I did the best I could as child
myself. But, that does not make the death of my son any less important
or painful. Until you walk in my shoes, you do not have the right to
judge, only God does. And He will.

And it all went downhill - or uphill if you enjoy this sort of thing - after that.

Accusations of pedophilia

I would like to know how you are so perfect in a religon the the
priests molest little unsuspecting boys! I would be proud of that! are
you really a virgin or have you been playing with the boys to? Maybe
thats why you know so much about it!!!!

Snarky counters

No, there’s no child raping going on in the Corcoran family. In the
context of this discussion, that seems to be a DeCambra specialty.

And the best friend puts in an appearance

Well I am miss Decambra's best friend. What right do you have to sit and bash people who you don't know. You might be a good person and so is she but you have ventured into something that was never asked upon you, so why the opinion, I guess their like assholes everyone has one you apparently have two in any case.

Sounds like your average white trash bitch fest, jazzed up with learned commentary from the smart guy down the block.

Best explanation for the twenty-four hour pause

From Bro. Bartleby on Crooked Timber. Cheney had to make a phone call ...

Dick: Now what?
Teddy: You have 24 hours to come up with something, a minute over and then ‘you’ set precedence and you’ll be free game.
Dick: Thanks Ted, and thank god I didn’t have to swim out of this mess.
Teddy: Tell me about it. Well, the clock is ticking … and by the way, did you know that the insurance covered the water damage to that 67 Oldsmobile Delta 88.
Dick: A Delta 88!? You know what that would be worth today!
Teddy: Tell me about it … my loss.

Via.

Liftport - Second round of tests

You know how work is ... there you are just doing what you always do .. ho-hum just another day. Liftport for me is a second job that pays-not-so-well and the day job is sometimes .. just a job. Then you get home and read your email.

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 13, 2006--LiftPort Group, the space elevator companies, today announced that it has successfully completed its second round of preliminary tests of its high altitude platform and robotic lifters. The tests, which were conducted under a waiver to use airspace granted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), used prototypes of proprietary technology the company is developing for use in the LiftPort Space Elevator, the company's revolutionary way to ferry cargo into space.

In this phase of testing, conducted earlier this month in Arizona, LiftPort successfully launched an observation and communication platform a full mile in the air and maintained it in a stationery position for more than six hours while robotic lifters climbed up and down a ribbon attached to the platform. The platform, a proprietary system that the company has named "HALE" (High Altitude Long Endurance), was secured in place by an arrangement of high altitude balloons, which were also used to launch it. The robotic lifters measured five feet, six inches and climbed to a height of more than 1500 feet, surpassing its last test record by more than 500 feet.

"We're pleased at the success of this round of testing," said Michael Laine, president of LiftPort. "Testing our technology in real world settings is critical to the ultimate success of our space elevator, and we appreciate the FAA's willingness to work with us on this."

In addition to the LiftPort Space Elevator, the LiftPort HALE system has other near term commercial applications that the company plans to develop and market. These include security, high altitude observation cameras, acting as a relay station for radio, cellular or Internet access during natural disasters, or for real time surveillance over the damaged region.

A revolutionary way to send cargo into space, the LiftPort Space Elevator will consist of a carbon nanotube composite ribbon eventually stretching some 62,000 miles from earth to space. The LiftPort Space Elevator will be anchored to an offshore sea platform near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, and to a small man-made counterweight in space. Mechanical lifters are expected to move up and down the ribbon, carrying such items as people, satellites and solar power systems into space.

Headquartered in Bremerton, Wash., LiftPort Inc. is a privately held company dedicated to the development of the first commercial elevator to space. For more information, or to sign up for a free subscription to the company's newsletter on the LiftPort Space Elevator, visit at the company's web site at www.liftport.com.

Oh ya .. that.

I am biased, ymmv, and it's not stop-the-presses news but is pretty keen.

Power Law Curve, homeless, smog control

Excellent article from the New Yorker - Million-Dollar Murray

The homelessness problem is like the L.A.P.D.’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard. They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.

There are ethical problems with this. It's not fair to hand guys like Murray an apartment while ignoring - say - the guy working two jobs with three kids at home in a dumpy apartment. It is however economical.

Something to like about Phillip Mangano - the leading exponent of power-law theory of homelessness - he wants a solution not an empire

“I am an abolitionist,” he says. “My office in Boston was opposite the monument to the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common, up the street from the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison called for immediate abolition, and around the corner from where Frederick Douglass gave that famous speech at the Tremont Temple. It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.”

Sounds great - sign me up. One problem

Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis. Even the promise of millions of dollars in savings or cleaner air or better police departments cannot entirely compensate for such discomfort.

Ah.

Via.

Garfield - now funny

Dean finds a forum there where they've tumbled on a way to make Garfield funny. Edit out his thought ballons.

This is quite brilliant. The most craptacularly unfunny comic in the world for several years now has been "Garfield."

To be clear, it was funny at one time. During its first year or two. But I've never seen a strip devolve so quickly into such putrescence. Yet someone may have figured out how to make Garfield funny: simply remove all of Garfield's dialogue.

Science Friday - What will the next era of human spaceflight look like?

This is a very good program - Science Friday always is, would that more of NPR be like this!

This week marks the anniversaries of two deadly shuttle accidents: the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster 20 years ago, and the destruction of Columbia in 2003. The shuttle, slated to fly again in May, is due for retirement in 2010.

In this hour of Science Friday, Ira and guests talk about the future. What will the next era of human spaceflight look like? And what roles will government and private industry play in that future?

Guests:
Tom Jones
Former NASA Astronaut
Author, "Sky Walking: An Astronaut's Memoir" (2006, Smithsonian Books)
Fairfax, Virginia

Elon Musk
Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX)
El Segundo, California

Rick Tumlinson
Co-Founder
Space Frontier Foundation
Editor, "Return To The Moon" (Apogee Books, 2005) North Hollywood, California

George Whitesides
Executive Director
National Space Society
Washington, DC

Archived Audio:
RealAudio format
Windows Media format
mp3 download

Update: Dario from Los Gatos, California ... thanks for calling in and asking about the space elevator. George I'm biased but I think you had the right balance of enthusiasm and realism.

How to Lead - a quick tutorial by Jack Welch

This is worth the time it takes to read the article.

Here, he casts me in the role of underperforming lugnut: "'Your stories are too long, you ramble too much.' I'd edit you and I'd slice a little bit here and there, and I'd give it back to you. And I'd say, 'Look, I'm not going to spend two hours every day because you can't write well enough. So the next time, get it right!' And if I did that two or three times [without improvement], I'd call you in and I'd say, 'Look I'm sick of talking to you.' And you'd know it too. And that's the way it has to be."

He maintains that a real manager has to be comfortable having such conversation, but too many aren't because of a misguided sensitivity to their underlings' feelings. "That's the cruelest form of management," he continues. "You carry these people along. They get to be 50 years old. You have a recession. You say let's cut costs 10%, and you walk down the hall, 'Holman, you're going home.' 'Why me?' 'Because you weren't very good, Holman.' And Holman's reaction is: 'I've been here 25 years. Why didn't you tell me?'"

Via

Clark Lindsey - what he said

What he said

However, as has been argued often here and in many other sites, flying
capsules on Shuttle derived expendables and building a hugely expensive
and seldom launched heavy lifter just isn't going to lower the cost of
space very much over what it is now. While halting the Shuttle program
now would help to fund a handful of space science missions, it would
not help overcome the long term limitations to space exploration and
development caused by the extremely high costs of getting to space.


Dr. Friedman should show more support for the entrepreneurial
commercial systems, and the NASA COTS program that will support them,
in hopes that they will come and save the day for space science.

I think it is possible to have VSE - exploration of the moon and beyond - and a program that would lower the cost to space. Damned fool dreamer, that's me.

Via.

My youngest as a pudu

The pudu depicted in this week's Little Dee reminds me of my youngest. Same bouncy enthusiasm.

Run away! Run away!

Read this

A French magazine, "Charlie Hebdo", has reprinted the "Islamic Cartoons" much to the dismay of President Chirac.

"French President Jacques Chirac has condemned as "overt provocation" decisions to reprint cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.

Mr Chirac said any subject matter that could hurt other people's convictions should be avoided.

I know - it's not nice to hurt other poeple's feelings. It might be worse than cutting off their heads for agit-prop. Waa. Anyway, I thought of this, and what's a blog for if not to share?

ARTHUR: Halt! Hallo! Hallo!
GUARD: 'Allo! Who is zis?
ARTHUR: It is King Arthur, and these are the Knights of the Round Table. Who's castle is this?
GUARD: This is the castle of Our Master Ruiz' de lu la Ramper.
ARTHUR: Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail.
GUARD: Well, I'll ask him, but I don't think he'll be very keen... Uh, he's already got one, you see?
ARTHUR: What?
GALAHAD: He says they've already got one!
ARTHUR: Are you sure he's got one?
GUARD: Oh, yes, it's very nice-a [To Other Guards] I told him we already got one.
OTHER GUARDS: [Laughing]

The Knights of the Round table of course are the fools rioting and taking all of this far too seriously and blissfully unaware they are in a comedy and they are the objects of derision and fun. The rest of us are the French soldiers about to fling a giant wood rabbit at them ...

Wisconsin - a seething cauldron of sectarian violence

You've got your head down, working away, and you miss things. I had no idea ..

Still, outside of the Dells and a handful of violent outposts near its western Mississippi River border, Wisconsin remained a relatively calm exception to the Midwestern maelstrom surrounding it -- a fact that experts attribute to subtle differences in culture and religion.

"Unlike the ultra-extreme, radical Lutheran sectarians of Iowa and Minnesota, most ethnic Wisconsinites belong to the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod," said Joseph Killian, a Midwestern Studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta. "And if you add in three Super Bowl titles, easier access to beer, and walleye fishing, and you're going to have a much calmer and more stable culture."

All that would change in November with the publication of four cartoons in a Texas office newsletter -- cartoons that today have brought this once happily beer-goggled society to the precipice of all-out culture war.

I'd better watch my step, least a Lutheran realize my Texas roots ...

Alarming candor from Elon Musk

In what sense could this be alarming?

"We have to do something dramatic to reduce the cost of getting to space," said Mr. Musk in an interview in his cubicle at SpaceX's offices here. "If we can get the cost low, we can extend life to another planet.

"I want to help make humanity a space-faring civilization," he said with disarming — or alarming — candor.

No .. really .. how is that alarming?

Failed Culture and misplaced enthusiasm

Mark Steyn nails it.

Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they'd have.

WSJ interview with Lakshmi Mittal

Who? He built Mittal into the world's biggest steel company. Amassed the third-largest fortune of any man. Currently honchoing a takeover of Arcelor.

A takeover of Arcelor would take Mr. Mittal a long way toward realizing his vision of a dominant global steelmaker in an industry for decades characterized, and brought low, by fragmentation. To pull it off, Mr. Mittal needs to break an Old World taboo against takeovers, hostile or otherwise, involving a company dear to Continental protectionists' heart. That this task falls to a man born in Rajasthan, and raised in Calcutta, is one of the more delicious gifts of globalization.

"so-called" Lagrange points

Asteroids near Jupiter are really comets

The pair orbit around each other while floating 465 million miles (750 million kilometers) from Jupiter in one of the gas planet's two so-called Lagrange points. At these points, the gravit ..

"so-called"? Who, exactly, is Ker Than casting aspersion at? J. Lagrange is probably beyond caring what a so-called science journalist at CNN thinks of him ..

via CosmicConservative.

Update: Note that the article came from space.com, not CNN, who, as Monte notes, probably don't harbor a bias against dead Italian-French scientists. I hereby retract the 'so-called' snark against both CNN and Ker Than. Ker was - and I am amazed, perhaps it was a slow day - nice enough to respond to my feedback at the space.com site.

Thanks Brian,
I've made the correction. It should have read two STABLE Lagrange points.

Also, I can see your point about so-called, but that term can also be
used to show that something is commonly designated by that name and
that's how I meant it to be read. Still, I'll try to limit my use of
the term.
-Ker

mad science by kelly zen-yie tsai

mad science
by kelly zen-yie tsai

if only artists
were more like
scientists

sharing notes
with each other

in the lab

one poem
in Bed-Stuy

could be replicated
in Humboldt Park
or Long Beach

given: proper conditions
result: same reaction

universal law

if only artists were
more like scientists

we could huddle around
each other’s experiments

glide stethoscopes along
shiny green alien skin

trace its wounded
drop from the sky

jump back in fear

as it leaps off the table
bumps burners and beakers

shakes its tail at the alarms
screaming down its path

if only artists were more
like scientists

we could stand
side by side

in lab coats
and goggles

for the crooked
photo meant
for posterity

not of how
beautiful
we are

or even
so witty
or so wise

but so
industrious
united
fearless

noses pressed
to the task
of dissection

cooking up
noxious
potions

able to crack
the gargantuan
with one touch
of its shell

if only artists
were more
like scientists

we could maybe just
get over ourselves

Power Point Company

Liftport sure is doing a lot of research, considering we're, you know, a PowerPoint company.

Criminy - there might be something to this space elevator stuff after all.