People are getting divorced at much later ages, as a result of (probably among other things) increasing longevity.
Hyperbole
Last night I heard some Democrat flack claim that the current economy is the worst since Herbert Hoover.
Are people so historically ignorant that this kind of stuff is effective? For me, it’s totally counterproductive, and just makes me want to see Kerry, and all Dems lose all the more.
Alvin to be Retired
Via a story on NPR’s All Things Considered (last story on the page: audio link) the intrepid research submarine Alvin is going to be replaced with a larger sub capable of deeper dives and longer stays at depth.
Alvin is a truly storied scientific instrument, one of those few machines that almost singlehandedly revolutionize a scientific field. I’m looking forward to seeing what her successor will do.
This post isn’t entirely about the excellence of Alvin – I also have a little bit of an axe to grind. Let me point out that, in this day of submarine ROVs with ever increasing capabilities, the thing that oceanographers and deep ocean biologists want is a machine that will enable them to go in person into the depths. A dive in the new sub will take up to ten hours, cramped up in a space about the size of the interior of a VW beetle, with all manner of projections and angles to increase the discomfort. Internal temperatures during a dive hover in the neighborhood of zero celsius, and if something goes seriously wrong, you die. Much better to send a machine, don’t you think? But no: the people best equipped to make the judgement, the people who will be trading sitting in front of a computer in a climate controlled room, sipping fresh brewed coffee for a cramped, cold, dangerous machine that will put them right next to what they want to study – they choose the sub. Why? because you simply do better science on site than you can remotely, and it’s going to be that way for the foreseeable future. The lessons for space exploration should be obvious. I’m looking at you, Bob Park.
Dismounting my hobbyhorse and returning to Alvin, there’s an interesting story in the book Water Baby. When Alvin was under construction three pressure spheres were made and tested. The best (no. 2) was used on the sub, and sphere no. 1 was to be tested to destruction. The test vessel was a large oil filled tank which could be pressurized to simulate dives to various depths. The 40,000 pound lid of the vessel screwed into place on top. The crush test of sphere no. 1 was also going to be the first test of the pressure tank above 4000 psi. From the book:
At 4300 psi there was an explosion. In the next second the engineers calculated the probable trajectory of the tank’s lid, concluding that 40,000 pounds of steel were headed for the tin roof above them. They ran, all of them headed at once to the only other door at the far end of the building. “I remember the instantaneous transport of myself, like a Tibetan monk using the mind to will myself out of that building” Walsh said.
[…]
The super tank looked oddly untouched and its 40,000 pound lid, undamaged, was in place. The deadman was broken and its 40 foot cable was gone. When they removed the cover, they saw that the shrapnel had come from the upper threaded portion of the tank. The lid had shot up at least 40 feet and dropped back onto the tank, driving it about three feet deeper into the ground.In the tank sat sacrificial sphere no. 1 undamaged.
The test tank failed at a pressure equivalent to 9600 feet, testing the sphere judged to be of the lowest quality.
Changing Faith
Via Allen Thomson, here’s a long essay on how a Christian came to become a non-believer.
Clintonesque
That’s how I’d describe Kerry’s response to the Swift Boat vets.
It reminds me of when Clinton sent his lawyer (who would not be in any position to know) out to deny that he’d raped Juanita Broaddrick, but would never deny it himself.
Space Law
The Christian Science Monitor has an article up on space law (pointer from Michael Wallis). Most of it is the usual stuff that many readers will be familiar with, and they miss the most important contemporary development in law and space, namely HR3752, which will make major changes in how spaceflight is regulated in the USA.
There’s the usual fluff like this:
“Outer space is a province of all mankind,” says Sylvia Ospina, a member of the board of directors at the International Institute of Space Law. “There is not, and should not be, any privatization of outer space. It is a common thing that should belong to all.”
Which is unfortunately a view that has significant traction even within spacefaring nations. I’m quite sympathetic to concerns that a land grab by spacefaring nations would leave huge chunks of the solar system in the hands of a few countries, effectively excluding most of mankind from the opportunities available offworld. The solution is simply to require actual working of resources in order to stake a claim, not to declare everything to be owned by the UN. In effect whichever body makes the laws regarding extraterrestrial resources is laying claim to the bodies in question, but there’s a substantial difference between a claim which only becomes active when a body is being worked and a claim which effectively forbids working a body without explicit permission.
It’s important for the long term future that we work out a method of assigning ownership and jurisdiction for extraterrestrial bodies that is widely accepted as fair. The alternative is to plant the seeds of future conflicts like the range wars which marred Americas westward expansion.
A lot of space geeks look forward to a future in which the high frontier contains libertarian utopias and so forth. Chances are good that some of the earliest settlers offworld will be going with the explicit intention of founding new societies with new ways of living together. This requires ownership of the resources on which the new colonies are founded. The flipside of this is that it is virtually certain that some of the new societies will have much more in common with Jim Jones’ People’s Temple than they will with Heinlein’s visions of the high frontier. You and I may be comfortable with that, but the folks back home are unlikely to be willing to sit back and do nothing as images are beamed back from the lunar farside of human rights violations on a grand scale. If there isn’t already a regulatory framework in place which has international credibility before that happens, there will be one after, and it will not be favorable to the free frontier mentality.
No law at all on the high frontier is not a realistic option. The sooner we realize that the sooner we can work to make sure that what law there is stems from rational understanding of economics and human nature. The two main things to watch out for are statist overreaching (with homilies about “the common heritage of all mankind”) and corporate entrenchment in the regulations so that only megacorporations can plausibly be players. This second possibility is much more worrisome to me than the first, since I think most people are blind to the ways in which large corporations game the regulations to exclude competitors and create comfortable oligopolies for themselves. One example of how this could be done is simply by requiring a single large up-front lump sum payment to get into the game. The Dinocorps can afford to pay, but the little guy cannot. This sort of thing is relatively straightforward to arrange under the guise of either environmental protection or worker safety.
Throwing Their Hat In The Ring
As many speculated, the Da Vinci team announced today that they are in the race, with a first attempt on October 2nd. They claim to have gotten funding from a sponsorship by an on-line gambling site. I’ll bet that this sponsorship wouldn’t have been forthcoming absent Burt’s successful flight in June. More evidence of the diminishing giggle factor.
If they can really pull it off, it will make for much more excitement. There’s plenty of overlap on the dates, so if Burt gets his first flight off without a hitch, it may come down to turnaround time.
[Thanks to Andrew Gray for the tip, over at sci.space.policy]
[Update at 2:15 PM PDT]
Clark Lindsey has a lot more links, and points out that Burt is hinting that he’ll be a passenger on one of the flights.
Here’s the press release from the casino.
Cable TV Regulation
Via Technology Review, and article on the technical objections to a la carte cable service. Turns out the complaints by Comcast and Time Warner that it’s technically difficult are flat out BS. Surprise!
You’d think that the cable companies would stand to benefit by going to an a la carte model – I know I’d be much more likely to get cable if I could pick and choose, and pay for only those channels I’m interested in. Also, by letting customers pick channels for themselves the cable companies would have a much better read on what their viewers are interested in, which would help pitch advertising better.
I dislike government telling businesses how to run their operations, so I oppose forcing cable companies to go to an a la carte model. The fact that the media megacorps feel the need to shade the truth about the costs is interesting, though. Much more worthy of government intervention to my mind is the simple fact that media megaconglomerates exist. Concentrations of power are a threat to liberty regardless of whether they are governmental or private. Concentrations of power within the media are particularly dangerous, because they can shape our perceptions of the world. If there’s any area where heavy handed intervention in the marketplace is justified, it’s in breaking up media conglomerates.
Incidentally, I realize there’s a widespread view within the blogosphere that blogs represent a revolution in information accessability that make old media irrelevant. This is such a dumb notion that I have a hard time figuring out how to address it without insulting the reader’s intelligence. Blogs are a new, parallel information source (with a godawful signal/noise ratio), which offers access only to people who actively seek it out. Suffice to say the number of people reading blogs for information which challenges their preconceptions is small. If blogs become people’s primary information source about the world, the US will fragment into tiny groups of people whose worldviews are so different that meaningful communication between them is effectively impossible. We’re headed that way now, so maybe I should just stop worrying about it.
Hibernation
Over on Nature online there’s an article on inducing hibernation in humans, with applications to space travel. Long story short, it’s at least a decade away, and there are lots of unknowns. The first thing that springs to mind for me when I think about this is that before hibernation is applied to something like a Mars mission they’ll have to send some poor sap up to ISS and leave him passed out cold up there for 9 months, just to be sure there’s no unforeseen problems due to hibernation in microgravity. In practice the experimental subject would probably have to spend at least a couple of weeks up there prior to hibernating and also a month or so after coming out, so it wouldn’t be as bad as just flying up, going to sleep and then coming straight back. Still, being a mission specialist whose task is a nine month nap is a little shy of the image of the Right Stuff.
Big Talker
Burt Rutan says that NASA will be eating his dust.
“Thirty years ago, if you had asked NASA — and people did in those days — ‘How long would it be before I could buy tickets to space?’ the answer was, ‘About 30 years,’ ” Rutan told reporters in June.
“If you ask today, you’ll get about the same answer, ’30 years.’ I think that’s unfortunate. There’s been no progress at all made toward affordable space travel.”