General

Unbalanced Transfer Offer

I got a call claiming to be from my Discover Card. The caller asked me if I wanted to make a balance transfer at an attractive rate. I said, “Sure, but I won’t give you my credit card numbers since you can’t authenticate that you really are Discover Card.”

Triumphantly, the agent told me the last four digits of my credit card number, my “member since” date and my last transaction. While this does indicate that the caller has access to my bill or account (or did at one time), it does not authenticate them as Discover Card because they could have stolen a bill from my mailbox.

More insidiously, they could have dialed a wrong number or a house guest or sitter could have picked up the phone. They did not authenticate me before giving me the personal information that they were so proud of. Not that they could have authenticated me since I would be reluctant to provide any personal information to someone who I did not already know was authentic and authorized.

I asked if there was a way to contact them through my number on the back of my card. They said no, but “I can make a notation on your account and customer service can verify its authenticity and you can call me back on a separate number.” While just possibly securely authentic (if the employee isn’t steering me to an illegitimate outsider), it requires me to make two calls. Why not just call the credit card directly and speak with someone else? I could, but my guy would have trouble getting a commission on the transaction. Maybe they should arrange for a share of any transfers I initiate in the next few minutes or ask for me to do a three-way call to my issuer.

I like checks better. They only go back to the offering party after they have been cashed and even then there might not be any evidence of what account I paid off.

Administrative

Continued Light Blogging

I’m in Columbia, MO, attending a wedding, and visiting family. Weather’s decent today (probably low nineties, but humidity’s not bad), but that’s because there seems to be a major drought here, with less than an inch of rain in the last few weeks. Corn crop is down by half.

Transterrestrial–your source for space policy, and farm reports!

Space

One More Thought On Fleet Grounding

I earlier noted the irony that the one part of the Shuttle that has actually been reliable (the Orbiter) is the one that Mike Griffin wants to retire. Both Shuttle disasters were caused by the non-Orbiter parts (SRB in the case of Challenger, ET in the case of Columbia), and those are the pieces that he wants to build the new vehicles out of (SRB as a lower stage for the crew vehicle, and SRB and modified ET for the heavy lifter).

Of course, the response will be that the only reason those failures were a problem was because of the overall system configuration with the Orbiter. Since both the new concepts will have the payload on top, where blow torching from joint leaks, and falling foam won’t cause problems, that makes it OK (though that’s actually not true with the heavy lifter, since the ET was the first casualty from the SRB failure, before the Orbiter broke up).

Which brings up a question: how much side forces were detected during the Challenger launch from the SRB leak (presumably from attempts by the TVC to keep the vehicle straight)? Does anyone know (I assume that the data may be in the Rogers Commission Report)? Would it have caused a problem with “the stick”?

Technology and Society

Complex Failure Bleg

One of the things that I’m working on is a series of case studies for failure of complex technological systems, particularly where a failure cascades (perhaps inevitably) into others. Columbia is a good example, in which the fragile leading-edge TPS was damaged during launch, which resulted in initial burnthrough during entry, which caused more internal damage, which resulted in a bigger hole in the wing, which resulted in increasing asymmetric forces on the vehicle, which resulted in eventual inability to keep the nose pointed forward, which resulted in the destructive breakup of the vehicle from aerodynamic forces.

Is anyone aware of similar cases (preferably non-space, e.g., the Bonefish fire)?

Space

Grounded Fleet

Just a few random thoughts before crashing.

I haven’t had time to read much about the fleet grounding thing, but I’ve often said that when government occasionally does the right thing, it’s almost always for the wrong reason. If we end up retiring the Shuttle now, it won’t be because it costs too much for what it does, and soaks up a lot of money that could (at least in theory, though probably not in practice, given the way our space policy seems to work) be used for something more productive in terms of moving humanity into space. It will be because we got better cameras so that we could finally see the rain of debris that’s been falling from every ET every time we fly, and we’re nervous about killing astronauts (even though taking such risks is, at least in theory, part of their job description). Ignorance was bliss, at least if you make a healthy living off operating Space Shuttles.

I frankly think that it’s a dumb reason, but if it happens, I also think it’s a good outcome, so I won’t complain too much. But here’s the problem. There’s an old saying about some businesses being “too big to fail” (e.g., Lockheed, various banks in the eighties, perhaps GM)–that is, the political consequences of letting them go out of business are viewed as sufficiently dire that the government will continue to prop them up, a la Weekend at Bernies, even when the carcass begins to stink. Shuttle, I’m afraid, is like that.

What I suspect is going on is that the declaration of fleet grounding is to piously show NASA’s contrition over Columbia, and to demonstrate that they have a new “safety culture.” What it really means is that they’ll do some kind of kabuki dance to come up with another “solution” to the foam-falling-off problem, and then launch again. And when it falls off again, they’ll say, “time to ground the fleet again, back to the drawing board.” And then they’ll do another test flight. It could plod along in this manner for years, if JSC and Huntsville are lucky, and the rest of us (those who pay taxes and care about a serious space program, anyway)…less so.

Anyway, off to bed, and (oh, joy) another airplane ride at the crack of dawn.

Administrative

As For The Light Posting

I’m just recovering from a harrowing travel nightmare. I was supposed to fly back down to Florida from DC last night, getting in after midnight, and then get up in the morning for a flight to LA.

That’s bad enough, and that was if things went according to plan. However, this trip was one of the least “going according to plan” types I’ve experienced in a long time. A front came through northern Virginia just as I was arriving at the airport, and I found out my flight to Atlanta was delayed. The first delay would have allowed me to still catch my connection to Fort Lauderdale, but the delays kept piling up (apparently the plane on which I was to depart was stuck at JFK, as a result of bad weather in New York). I talked the situation over with Delta, and they assured me that not only were they not going to be able to get me home that night, but they wouldn’t be able to do so (at least with any confidence) in the morning either, not in time to catch my flight to California, anyway.

So like Jim Lovell (not to make too grandiose a comparison to our respective situations), I gave up the moon, i.e., I resigned myself that I wasn’t going to get home that night, and determined instead to find an alternate route to California that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. I negotiated an exchange with American for a non-stop from Dulles to replace my non-stop from Fort Lauderdale in the morning, and got vouchers from Delta. The big problem at that point was that until my flight in the morning, I was stuck in DC with no room, or reservation. I schlepped my luggage up and down non-functional escalators at the Metro to get back to Crystal City, to discover that not only did I have no room, but there were no rooms to be had, due to all of the other people in the same boat who had been possessed of more sense than me, and got rooms as soon as they figured out the score instead of wasting time on the phone worrying about an unrelated flight the next day. Oh, and did I mention that my cell phone was almost dead, and that I’d forgotten to pack a charger, which was one of the things that I was going to retrieve on my brief visit home?

So anyway, I reschlepped luggage up and down non-functional escalators back to Reagan on the Metro, and looked for a rental car with which to hie myself out Dulles way and procure a room. The only one available was a full-size for seventy bucks a day, before tax, though she was kind enough to waive the drop fee for returning it to Dulles instead of Reagan. A taxi would have been cheaper, but not having a room, I didn’t know where to tell a taxi to go.

Anyway, long story short, I did find a room in Herndon, got a few hours sleep that (considering the cost of both car and room) cost me about forty bucks an hour, and I did manage to finally get to LA, though we sat on the tarmac for half an hour after arrival due to the fact that another aircraft was having minor maintenance problems at our designated gate.

I know I’m making this sound pretty bad. It was actually much worse–I’m just too beat right now to expound on the whole odyssey at length.

And why, you ask, was it so consarned important that I get to LA today?

Because I have a flight to St. Louis at 6:30 from here in the morning.

Don’t ask.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!