Transterrestrial Musings

March 31, 2008
The New Space Race

Jeff Foust has a story today on the current real space race (as opposed to the fantasy one between the US and China)--the new race for customers in the suborbital market. It's basically a compilation of last week's XCOR press conference announcement and this past weekend's Space Access conference, both of which I attended. This to me is the key point:

"Quietly, this has turned into a horse race," said conference organizer Henry Vanderbilt during a wrap-up panel at the conclusion of the Space Access conference. "There are a lot of people who could be the first to fly a passenger to suborbit at this point. Two years ago I'm sure the money would have been on Virgin Galactic. It isn't necessarily so at this point."

"What struck me about the events of this week was that we have finally, with all due respect, broken the mystique of Burt [Rutan]," Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer and blogger, said. "He has had setbacks"--referring to the engine test accident last July that killed three Scaled Composites employees--"and, this week, now he has a competitor." The growing awareness of companies other than Virgin "is going to be very good for the industry."

"This perception of a horse race is probably a really, really good thing for investment," said Joe Pistritto, an angel investor. "Ninety-nine percent of the people who could invest in this industry don't know about this industry" but may start to learn about it as the find out about these competing companies.

If it is a horse race, who will win the ultimate prize: not just the first vehicle to enter the market, but the one that wins the market in the long run? The diversity of technical approaches, from the takeoff and landing techniques to the number of passengers, makes any predictions difficult. "If there's four different operators flying people into space, their offerings are going to be a little different," said Pistritto. "So you see an actual segmentation of the market around the experience you want, how much money you have, and where you are."

What I meant about the "mystique of Burt" was the notion that the winning of the X-Prize was some kind of fluke, enabled only because the most brilliant aeronautical engineer in the world applied his genius to it. Many have used this as an excuse to denigrate the efforts of others building suborbital vehicles, which hasn't made it any easier to raise money for such ventures.

Many seem to believe that it really takes the genius of a Rutan to build a suborbital vehicle. As evidence of this proposition, they point out that no other suborbital vehicles have been flown since 2004.

But in so doing, they display a fundamental ignorance of the nature of the technology and the requirements. There is no "one way" to skin that cat, and never was. Burt's design was clever, and perhaps intrinsically safer, but it was not necessary, and there are other, better ways to do the job that are safe enough. It's not at all clear that the SS1 approach is the best one for a commercial application, and if one includes in that the hybrid propulsion, it's already caused delays (though those are partly due to Scaled taking on a project outside their area of expertise--they're an aircraft manufacturer, not a propulsion house) in their development program, and it's certain to result in higher operational costs and increased turnaround time.

The real point is that if only Burt could win the X-Prize, it wasn't because he was the only guy smart enough to design a vehicle to do it. It was because he was the only guy with the reputation of being smart enough to be able to raise the money to do it. When it comes to space ventures, the hardest part is always raising the money. The technical challenges generally pale in comparison.

So, with schedule delays in SS2, now comes XCOR. XCOR has a reputation of its own, hard won over the past eight years, of underpromising and overdelivering. So when they have a (rare, almost unheard of) press conference announcing that they have the design and the cash to build a suborbital vehicle, with an endorsement from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the world listens, and suddenly it's a real race.

Evidence that the mystique has been broken is this CNBC story by Jane Wells from last week, after XCOR's announcement, with the hed "Branson And Northrop May Be Backing "Wrong" Rocket Man!"

Burt is no longer God, other companies are getting serious attention from both business journalists and investors, and it's been a very good week for the new space industry and space age.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:24 PM

The Evidence Continues To Mount

I remember when I first started blogging, over six years ago, it was considered quite controversial to state that being hit by extraterrestrial objects was a legitimate concern, and one in which we should invest resources to prevent. But over the past few years, evidence continues to accumulate that there have been significant events within historical times that, had the occurred today, could cause millions of casualties. For example, some researchers are now quite confident that if God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, He did it with an asteroid.

On the other hand, a half-mile-wide object would make a hell of a bang that should be pretty obvious from orbit today, so one has to be a little skeptical. I'd like to see how they arrived at that diameter.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:55 AM

Sam on Suborbital

Virgin

It occurs to me that with hundreds of millions being spent on crewing Virgin's air fleet that spending a few tens of millions to build and operate Space Ship Two might be justified on personnel policy grounds. Giving the Virgin airlines pilots a chance to go to an elite school to learn to be White Knight pilots or Space Ship Two pilots might make them happier, more productive workers who spread good cheer and promote good labor relations. The same could be true for customer and aircraft ground personnel. So the Virgin Galactic investment might make sense for labor morale and not just for marketing and to keep the owner happy.

XCOR

I like Lynx (see The Space Review this week). At $17 million, it needs operating profit of $4.25 million to achieve a 25% return for investors. I don't think XCOR has been seeking debt financing (contrary to the philosophy of take the smallest possible risk) so strategic investors can invest with their heart and be happy seeking a slightly lower monetary return. $4.25 million assuming 1/3 going to the space line and 1/3 going to cost would leave 1/3 to pay investors so XCOR would need to capture $12.75 million/year of the market. At $100,000/flight that's 128 flights or about 5% of their annual capacity assuming three vehicles and 50% up-time for each vehicle and 4 flights/day.

With some predicting a 15,000 seat market ($3 billion/year at $200,000 which is closest to EADS's estimate) and Futron at 500 seats growing to thousands of seats over a couple of decades ending at about $700 million/year in 2021, XCOR's required fraction of the market to achieve a 25% investor return is about 25% of seats or 14% of money given their initial price point in a 500-seat/year market 2% of the money in a $700 million/year market or 1% of a 15,000 seat market (0.5% of the money).

If either of these teams is to begin test flights in 2010 and service in 2011 or 2012, I'd look for announcements like "fully funded", regulatory hurdles met, various announcements about engineering hurdles, then an actual test flight program. It would be nice if they gave a public timeline of minimum time from each event to first paying participant flight. I don't think more secrecy than is necessary for mystery and buzz is beneficial with each team taking a different approach and offering a well-differentiated product that requires extensive disclosure to meet regulatory hurdles and attract customers.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 10:35 AM

America's True Shame

I don't often agree with Ezra Klein, but he hits this one out of the park:

Criminals aren't sent to prison so they can learn to live outside of prison; they're sent to prison to get what they deserve. And that paves the way for the acceptance of all manners of brutal abuses. It's not that we condone prison rape per se, but it doesn't exactly concern us, and occasionally, as in the comments made by Lockyer, we take a perverse satisfaction in its existence.

Morally, our tacit acceptance of violence within prisons is grotesque. But it's also counterproductive. Research by economists Jesse Shapiro and Keith Chen suggests that violent prisons make prisoners more violent after they leave. When your choice is between the trauma of hardening yourself so no one will touch you or the trauma of prostituting yourself so you're protected from attack, either path leads away from rehabilitation and psychological adjustment.

I think that we have a lot too many people in prison, but that aside, with the possible exception of rapists (for whom it might be an appropriate eye-for-eye punishment) no one should have to fear being raped in prison. I think that it's shameful that our society tolerates this. If we want to be explicit and openly declare that we are sentencing drug offenders and others to be raped, then we should do that, but if not, then we should put an end to it. I accept no excuses from the penal community. If they didn't want it to happen, they could stop it.

Unfortunately, this isn't the first time someone has pointed this out, and sadly, it won't be the last, either. I see no groundswell of support to do anything about it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:19 AM

March 30, 2008
Back In LA

I took a little longer to drive back from Phoenix because I did two things that I've never done, in all the times I've made that trip over the past thirty years. I stopped at the Colorado River in Blythe and walked across, and I stopped and did a quick tour of the Patton Museum at Chiriaco Summit. I'd show the pictures, but I don't seem to have my card reader with me. I might pick one up at Fry's tomorrow.

The latter was more impressive than I expected, considering that it's private, not official. More so on the interior than outside, though. They have a number of tanks out there, in various states of decrepitude and disrepair, and no signs to provide any useful information about them. Still worth a visit, though, for anyone interested in military history.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:02 PM

Heading Back To LA

Had a decent night's sleep for the first time in over a week. I'll be driving back through the desert to what looks to be a chilly and damp Los Angeles. See ya later.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:25 AM

March 29, 2008
Wrap Up

Joe Pistritto: We have a couple teams (Virgin and XCOR) that are planning to fly in a couple years, about the same time as the Shuttle is retired. At that point, the NewSpace industry will be the only way that Americans can get into space, and in that first year more people may fly into space on the new vehicles than have flown in space to date. At that point everyone in the country will have a better idea what this new industry does.

Henry Vanderbilt: Also, they'll see that there is a horse race. A year or two ago it was assumed that Virgin would be first to market. That's no longer the case.

Joe: There are going to be different types of experiences at different price points, and as the horse race becomes more clear, it will expose the business to a lot of potential investors who haven't been paying attention up to now. This is good not just for investment, but for creating a supply chain of suppliers that are needed. Still thinks that this is an individual investor market. Venture funds can't justify this investment in the current business environment. Can do it with their own money, but not someone else's. For someone with their own money, there's no industry that is more exciting than this one.

Henry: Not important who comes in first. Emphasis needs to be that there is competition and that we're in for exciting times.

Muncy: Difference between spaceflight participants (passengers) and Russ Blink strapping on an oxygen tank and flying out of the atmosphere on an Armadillo vehicle. Markets are wonderful magical things. We have no idea what the possibilities are (who knew that someone would program Doom eventually when Bill Gates said 640K would be plenty). Smart guys in the military might figure out what to do with these things once they're flying. NASA may want to replace the T-38s now that they're not flying the Shuttle any more (I think he means Gulfstream), or they might want to practice lunar simulations.

Challenge is to figure out how to get customers interested beyond the tourist flights. It will be different flying in the back of SpaceShipTwo than flying in the cockpit of the Lynx. We'll see what the market wants. Lord willing the market will want both, and other flavors. The good things about markets is that if you offer something out there of value, it will be rewarded. Thinking about package tours of all the vehicles: Grand Slam of rockets.

[Update]

At that point, I got pulled up to join the panel by Muncy, so I couldn't blog it.

Anyway, another conference is history. More thoughts later.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:35 PM

Want To Poke Anti-War Hollywood In The Eye?

Go here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:56 PM

Endings Versus Beginnings

Jeff Foust has a report on an interesting talk by Charles Miller that I missed yesterday.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:45 PM

Jim Muncy Speaks

Says that we have to engage SEDS, both because it's a good source of enthusiastic people who will work cheap, and more importantly because we aren't getting any younger, and we have to start nurturing young people.

He's here from Washington, and he's here to help.

Depressing to sit in meetings in Washington listening people talk about The Vision, and hearing the same things he heard about X-33, SEI, Space Station Freedom, etc. They don't even seem to learn any new lies.

It is silly season in Washington. Working on the budget. It's an election bill so they won't even finish the budget before the election. Wants the election to be over, and has wanted it to be over for months.

Does it matter? Probably not. He and Lori Garver did a "debate" (really an assessment of the candidates at the time) a month and a half ago. Hillary is probably the most supportive of space spending. Fairly pro defense for a New York Democrat. Has in tepid words endorsed the idea of the vision. Also said positive words about private companies and working with them. Has not specifically endorsed Ares.

McCain's experience with space has been primarily concerned with cost control and getting the job done right.

Obama is the most interesting, and unclear what he thinks. But there is potential for something different, because he says Shuttle is boring. Instincts are not to support current NASA approach. But worst thing would be to continue Ares I and Orion and delay lunar missions. Could create opportunities, or not. Crisis is coming, and crisis represents opportunities. NASA and Air Force are not monoliths.

"You should see the list of things that Orbital wants from Florida to get them to move ther e from Wallops." There are figures inside the establishment calling for different approaches. Senator Nelson is writing a bill that increases COTS by several hundred million dollars to augment SpaceX and bring in an additional provider for crew transport. He recognizes that this is the only way to have a chance of closing "the Gap." Senator Shuttle recognizes that he has to bring private space companies to Florida.

We've seen NASA put out an RFI for human suborbital science from the private sector. Things are changing. But don't assume that NASA and the Air Force have come around in general. Also don't assume that NASA or the Air Force are going to write you a check. Have to figure out what their real mission/requirements are.

We are the PC industry of space. It wasn't just the people running the computer centers and mainframes thinking that PCs were choice. The challenge was getting the people who used computers then to think through what they did, and how they did it, and imagine doing it differently, and how they could use these new small computers. There are half a dozen people like Ken inside of NASA, but that's not enough. We have to do their job (which is also our job) which is to figure out how to provide value to them
from their perspective. What he does for a living is help companies do that.

We have to figure out how we play a role in this future, and if an Obama becomes president, and we can't continue to fund space on an ICBM budget, and we want to continue to send people into space, we will have to come up with new ways.

ESAS is not the same as the Vision. The Aldridge Report is right. It's not perfect, but it's largely right. It's not a blueprint, which is why Griffin was upset with it, and wrote one of his own instead.

Work together, build alliances, come up with concepts to get to market sooner. As the dinosaurs die off, there will be some scraps for the mammals, and room to grow. We are coming to the attention of powerful people, which is a good thing. There are good times ahead, and people are figuring out that there is something wrong. The house of cards is going to fall. Can't say well, but it's going to fall.

Mike Griffin might be arrogant (and he has enough degrees to justify that) and he may be building the wrong rockets, but he has also been putting money into commercial activities while he builds das rocketz. We haven't proven ourselves. Elon still hasn't launched a payload to orbit. John Carmack still hasn't won his two million dollars. Only Burt has an accomplishment to date. We can't just be intellectually correct. We have to show the world that we can do it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:07 PM

Rocketplane Global

Chuck Lauer starts by informing us that Kistler and Rocketplane have been split off into separate companies. Still want to resurrect Kistler--only two-stage reusable out there.

Bottom line was that markets didn't buy the value proposition that NASA could be a reliable anchor customer.

Drawing contrast between their max gees and Virgin's. Rocketplane is four, Virgin is six. Thinks it will be a significant difference. In terms of market research, early studies had to spend a lot of time educating the customer. Now there's a lot more awareness of various products (runway takeoff and landing single vehicle, versus air drop versus vertical) and it would be useful to update the market research.

Need public/private partnership unless you're a billionaire like Jeff Bezos. They are continuing to partner with Oklahoma, and the action is primarily between the companies and the states, not the federal government. Even Florida is waking up the fact that the entrepreneurial space community is the future.

Marketing strategy is to work with partners all over the world. Going after one third of the tourist market. Expect 80/20 tourism/other (microgravity science and microsatellite), but the latter may be a bigger market than they think. Looking at charter flight model with things like reality teevee shows, sponsorship of contests (currently have one going with Nestle--paying full price for two seats and giving them away). Can see the Kitkat promotion at nestle.fr. Another contest in India for a multi-media company with a four-episode show to pick the winner. Winner's sound bite: "I want to see what it's like to pee in space."

They can provide a blank canvas for corporate customers without having to compete with a brand (as they do with Virgin).

Lost a year plus of schedule in 2005/2006 as a result of the focus on COTS. Original plan was to build a couple four-place Learjet version, and then build a bigger version for more throughput. Since then have taken a step back and decided to go directly to the larger vehicle, built from scratch. New vehicle is pure cylinder fuselage, cabin the size of a large SUV 2+2+2 seating, with more revenue per flight but no increase in ops costs. Upgraded to an after-burning turbo jet with higher thrust, shorter takeoff roll, higher air-breathing altitude.

Frank Nuovo designed the interior of the aircraft (former head cellphone designer for Nokia). Everyone sees out the front (even in the rear seats), has their own window, and a personal video display. Will show tail camera view during ascent. Video screen will also be selectable for different angles. May use Google Earth overlay on monitor to know what you're looking at.

[Update at 11:30 AM MST]

I got pulled away from the rest of the Lauer talk, but Clark Lindsey has some good notes, as well as more from the Frontier Astronautics talk.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:18 AM

March 28, 2008
Moral Courage

Does Obama lack it? I could never find anyone who could explain to me why his "race speech" was so courageous, though it was acclaimed as such in the media.

As one commenter notes, he's no Ward Connerly.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:36 PM

True Love

Was it consensual? Here's a story about a man who enjoyed conjugal relations with a picnic table.

Hope he used a c0nd0m. Those splinters can be rough.

[Update a minutes or so later]

Upon more careful reading, I guess he'll be OK. It's metal.

But still, you don't know who else that picnic table has been with.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:37 PM

Armadillo

John Carmack is starting off with a video of Lunar Landing Challenge, showing the failed attempt to win last fall.

Likes the new single-tank design compared to the old quad. It's easier to service, though a little harder to transport because it's much taller.

Seeing views that we hadn't seen at the time, from the three on-board cameras.

Now showing a burn of methane engine that they've been developing with NASA.

Now have four modules of the six that they plan to build their suborbital vehicle. Landing gear turns out to be one of the heavier items, as heavy as the tank. Sticking to dual tanks and single engine on each module. 800 psi pressure tank, with rubber landing pads. Thus tank is also landing gear.

Steps to commercial vehicle. Some debate whether differential throttling will work for control. Recent experience indicates that it is sluggish to respond, because throttling can't be done fast enough on a peroxide engine, but a bi-prop engine may be more manageable.

Definitely disappointment after losing the cup. Thought they'd done everything they needed to prepare for. They'd done many test flights, including five 180 second flights (long enough to go to space). Had three vehicles, any one of which could do the ninety-second challenge. But they had five starts with three wrecked engines. Still not sure what the problem was, but think that (sorry, going to fast to capture it all), but think it had something to do with cooling jacket capacity and start-up processes that resulted in fuel entering the chamber prematurely. BIggest difference was that they turned the vehicles faster at the cup than during normal tests, and there could have been slight differences in chamber pressures or fuel ratios at a given point in time that had catastrophic results. May have had an assembly error (leaving out an O-ring that resulted in a fuel leak), but can't be sure.

Disheartening, but compared to all the other hardware at the airshow with thousands of flights, they couldn't have the statistical confidence as those military aircraft. Learned a lot of lessons. Don't expect it to work the first time. Even with modern engineering practice, it won't happen. Not arrogant enough to think they've solved all the problems, or even know what they are. Expect to lose several of the modules in flight testing. But once they find the problems, they're confident they can solve them. On propulsion, engine now starts and stops like a light switch. Expecting high-speed aero problems.

On business scale issues, things are accelerating. Half a million in contract work, NASA and a commercial customer not to be disclosed. Starting to talk more like Jeff Greason now--transitioning from hobby to business. Won't sell components, because integration is critical. Will sell functional systems (such as propulsion). Currently at around 5000 lbf thrust, will sell for a couple hundred thousand bucks. Will sell complete vehicle for half a million. Talking to Lunar Google X-Prize teams. Won't warrant that it will land on the moon, but if they want to buy one for testing, he'll sell it. Has very little confidence in Google Lunar X-Prize--doesn't think anyone has what it takes. Talking to aerospace companies about sensor suite testing and lunar simulations. Still thinks highly of suborbital passenger market. Thinks there's a market, and has all the pieces: propulsion, control, insurance, etc. Not worried about schedules, because SS2 continues to slip.

Had hoped that he was past the point where he didn't have to invest any more, but did recently. However, more of a float issue, or loan, until some other things come in. "Perseverance and determination will get us there."

Problem with LLC: once a year demonstration is the worst thing for a technical challenge. Adds pressure for tough decisions that can distract from main commercial goals. Afraid to do boosted hops at higher altitudes because they don't want to risk if for the challenge. Have three vehicles, but last year's experience shows that's not enough for redundancy. Ready to do it now, but have to wait until end of year and keep hardware available for it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Clark Lindsey has more on Armadillo, and a report on the previous talk on laser launch by Jordin Kare.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:46 PM

Damn You, Global Warming

Damn you! It's interfering with the Canadian seal hunt

"It's a very slow start," said Phil Jenkins, spokesman for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, noting that sealing boats were finding it difficult to get to the herds because of thick ice.

Emphasis mine. Just another one of those insidious effects.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:43 PM

No Peak Oil?

If this is true, it's a huge story. It certainly seems plausible. I've always claimed that oil reserves are driven much more by technology advances than by consumption rate:

n the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.

It was not until 2007, when EOG Resources of Texas started a frenzy when they drilled a single well in Parshal N.D. that is expected to yield 700,000 barrels of oil that real excitement and money started to flow in North Dakota. Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion and drilling 300 new wells in what is expected to be one of the greatest booms in Oil discovery since Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

It's also a story that will enrage those who want us to tighten up our hair shirts.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:32 PM

More Conference Blogging

Clark Lindsey (who is now sitting next to me) has a summary up of the morning sessions that I missed.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:18 PM

XCOR Presentation

Dan DeLong starts off by telling Paul Breed that they learned a long time ago at XCOR that green is bad, stop right now.

This talk is more than just Lynx, they'll be talking about the other things they're working on as well. Can't talk about the Rocket Racer, because Rocket Racing League controls information on that. The piston pump is working well on it, though, and it's the same pump that will be used on the Lynx, for both fuel and LOX.

There is no more Xerus. The concept has been changing, business model changing, aero changing, and they decided that they have a new stable configuration that they can give a name to. That is Lynx.

They're having trouble with the computer display. Making jokes about Microsoft, and saying that their flight software won't be windows. Dan talking about conversation he had night before with Russ Blink of Armadillo, with Russ saying that he'd rather fly a rocket controlled by a computer than one controlled by a human. Dan responded that while it made sense to do a vertical vehicle with computers, but it didn't seem that good to do it with software based on a package called "Doom."

Showing a flow chart of a meat hunt, with overanalysis. Their emphasis is analyze a little, and test a lot.

Showing various past projects--NRO thruster, DARPA LOX pump, methane engine.

Showing video of putting bomb inside of a methane engine to test combustion stability. Four bomb tests, all successful.

Talking about the valves that they've developed, because none were available that met their needs. Also doing own composites for the Lynx. They've come up with a glass-fibre and teflon resin, neither of which will react with oxygen.

Not talking about Lynx. Sunk cost so far $7m, with an estimate of $9M to complete. Showing a video of 50-lbf attitude control thruster, running nitrous/ethane, that will sit in the strakes. This video wasn't shown at the press conference.

Mark II will have hard points on outside. Will carry upper stage dorsally, that can put 10-20 kg payload into LEO. Purpose of the contract is not to help build vehicle. It's for analysis, demonstration and knowledge sharing of its responsive features. Air Force is looking for Operationally Responsive Space (ORS). Air Force has space they need the "OR." XCOR has the "OR" but not the "S." Everyone understand that you can't be cheap at nine times per year, but because XCOR is commercial, they have to make it cheap, which happens by flying often. So Air Force gets the benefit.

Lynx requirements:

Supersonic
Two people
Fly under FAA-AST rules

Goal was to build smallest vehicle that met those requirements.

Showing video of firewall test stand, successive engine runs with increasing pauses, with minimum off time of two seconds. About a half second to start up.

Showing video from press conference now.

Fuel is carried in wing strakes, LOX in fuselage. About two gees at burnout, heading straight up at Mach 1. Mark II will be three gees. Landing speed about 95 knots, takeoff about twice that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:31 AM

Unreasonable Rocket Update

Paul Breed is an entrant in the Lunar Landing Challenge. He didn't make to last year's attempt, but expects to do so this year.

They are literally doing everything in their garage. Last year, they built an engine and ran it and it was perfect. They built four more, and it didn't work so well. Showing a film, taken on one Saturday..On the first burn, they saw a green flash, which meant a meltdown of the copper combustion chamber. It turned out that they used a different kind of solder. Then he showed a stability and control test vehicle that was neither controllable or stable. Then their four-quadrant vehicle turned out to be too complex, with too many valves.

This year, they've switched to a monoprop vehicle using peroxide, with sodium permanganate decomposition. New vehicle is spherical tank, using McMaster car parts. Will be tested next week. Doing testing of stability and control unit with a large RC helicopter, which they don't have to go out to the rocket test site (four hours away) to test. Vehicle will be aluminum. Expect to static fire full vehicle in two to four weeks, with first flight test in eight weeks.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:03 AM

March 27, 2008
Off To Bed

...and hopefully, to sleep. More conference blogging on the morrow.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:30 PM

New Wyoming Space Company

Tim Bendel, of Frontier Astronautics, is giving a presentation on how to address the gap between the ability of garage-based startups and larger companies to raise money. Not very many angels with money who are interested in space who aren't already doing it.

Giving a history of the Zeppelin. After the count lost his first ship, he threw in the towel, because he's lost all his money, but a lot of Germans sent him money, and he ended up with more than he had started with. Are there space enthusiasts who could do the same thing?

Talking about Warren Buffett's stock, and its high value that he refuses to split. Independent holding companies evolved by purchasing a few shares of Berkshire stock, and then issuing new, lower-priced stock based on that asset.

His proposal is to gather small investors for the holding company, put their money into escrow, and fund start-up space companies off the interest. Different "flavors" or classes of stock would be issued, with different Class A escrow accounts, which could be associated with specific start ups.

Unfortunately, most of the info is on his charts, which I can't read because I'm all the way in the back (where the laptop power is), and too dense for me to quickly transcribe even if I could.

He claims that it avoids sunshine laws, according to SEC lawyers that they've talked to. The basic idea is to provide a means for small investors to invest in small companies, albeit indirectly.

Issues: Have to pay for licenses, need to be broker/dealer, etc., a lot of paperwork. Probably about a hundred thousand bucks to get started. Goal is to do it for profit, in addition to helping space industry. Makes money on trades, but could also use other investment tools, such as puts and calls.

Has a business process patent on it, needs about a quarter million to start up.

Hard for me to evaluate it, given my funky state of consciousness, and inability to look at the numbers. I'll talk to TIm about it later.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:07 PM

Liberating The Press From Hillary

Kimberly Strassell writes that Snipergate is a proxy for all of Hillary!'s lies and crimes that the press refused to cover properly in the 90s:

The real beauty of Mrs. Clinton's Tuzla torture is that it's self-inflicted. Up to now, Team Clinton had done a surreal job of keeping the scandal genie in its bottle. Think about it: Most of 1990s politics was defined by the Clinton White House, which in turn was defined by the Clintons' endless ethical firestorms. The American public remembers this, one reason why a majority consistently says in polls that Mrs. Clinton is "untrustworthy." And yet even as the former First Lady has lobbed ethical accusations at Mr. Obama -- slamming him for "plagiarizing" speeches, hitting him for his relationship with "slum landlord" Tony Rezko or the Reverend Jeremiah Wright -- her own past has remained a no-go zone for most of the press and for her rival.

This is hangover from the remarkable job the Clintons did in painting themselves as the victims of the so-called "right-wing attack machine." They, and their devotees, have carried that victim mentality into the present, and have made clear that anyone who revives the issues of billing records or cattle futures is little more than the second coming of Ken Starr. They've done such a remarkable job of portraying any investigation into their undeniable shenanigans as a "partisan" venture that even the press has looked away and whistled.

I think that as time goes on, and we get more distance from it, the Clinton administration is going to look an awful lot like the Harding administration, in more than one way.

[Update a few minutes later]

Peggy Noonan, Strassell's Journal colleague, has further thoughts:

I think we've reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don't. There's no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don't. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don't, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.
What struck me as the best commentary on the Bosnia story came from a poster called GI Joe who wrote in to a news blog: "Actually Mrs. Clinton was too modest. I was there and saw it all. When Mrs. Clinton got off the plane the tarmac came under mortar and machine gun fire. I was blown off my tank and exposed to enemy fire. Mrs. Clinton without regard to her own safety dragged me to safety, jumped on the tank and opened fire, killing 50 of the enemy." Soon a suicide bomber appeared, but Mrs. Clinton stopped the guards from opening fire. "She talked to the man in his own language and got him [to] surrender. She found that he had suffered terribly as a result of policies of George Bush. She defused the bomb vest herself." Then she turned to his wounds. "She stopped my bleeding and saved my life. Chelsea donated the blood."

Made me laugh. It was like the voice of the people answering back. This guy knows that what Mrs. Clinton said is sort of crazy. He seems to know her reputation for untruths. He seemed to be saying, "I get it."

Well, some of us have gotten it for a long time. Glad to see that at least some of the country is finally coming to its senses.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:20 PM

First Session

Clark Lindsey has his notes up from the first afternoon session of the conference.

[Update a few minutes later]

Henry Cate (who I'm sitting next to) has some posts up as well (no permalinks, just scroll).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:36 PM

"The Disgrace Of Liberalism"

Some thoughts:

It's often overlooked -- thanks in large part to the Clinton "legacy" -- that such misbehavior is almost always accompanied by corruption in other spheres. Insistence by Clinton's defenders that his various lady troubles were "personal matters" succeeded in obscuring the moral connection between Big Bill's follies and the endless bribes, kickbacks, suicides, illegal mass firings, and vanishing files that made the "most ethical administration in history" so entertaining to watch.

So it needs restating as a simple truth that a man who cannot control his sexual impulses is unlikely to succeed in more complex matters. In little over a year, Spitzer threw away the goodwill engendered by his landslide victory through a series of petty conspiracies and dirty tricks, bringing New York state government to a standstill in the process. While McGreevey was a better governor than he's ever likely to get credit for (he solved the longstanding auto-insurance "crisis" that made New Jersey a laughingstock for half a dozen previous administrations), his penchant for putting his muscle boys on the state payroll undercuts any other claims for his record. The same can be said for Paterson. Though, being both blind and black, he may likely survive, revelations concerning his practice of awarding jobs and positions don't bode well for the future.

These men are clearly representative of the post-Clinton Democratic Party. They set out to follow in Bill's footsteps, have ended up much the same as he did, and have dragged their party and political doctrine along with them. (At this point somebody will bring up the names Foley and Craig. But neither stood anywhere near the center of American conservatism in the way that the Northeastern governors do with liberalism as a matter of course. Foley and Craig were rotten apples. With the Democrats, it's the whole barrel.)

That's sure the way it seems lately. And it's taking its toll on the superdelegates.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:03 PM

The History And Future Of Spaceplanes

Jess Sponable of AFRL is giving a talk with the post title.

Jess starts out by noting the upcoming fifteenth anniversary of DC-X flight tests.

Common vision between industry and government of reliable, routine, diverse and affordable space access. Confident that it is coming at us, though not sure when.

Discussing HAVE REGION program of the 1970s, which was to develop structural concepts for potential space planes. Subject to thermal and aero loads in test chambers on the ground. All airframes came in within three percent of estimates. Validated loads, with some articles tested to destruction, some deliberately, some otherwise. Best vehicle was Boeing RASV. Honeycomb structure, with very little metal. Highly classified at the time, but now all declassified. Came very close to SSTO weightwise, but concerns were about durability and operability.

Talking about NASP, now. We learned that it's really really hard to get an airbreather all the way to orbit. Have to spend too much time in the atmosphere to take advantage of the scramjet. Had high ISP, but horrible engine T/W--even worse than conventional aircraft engines, and hydrogen fuel was required, which required very large tanks because of its low density. It was a very complex vehicle in terms of shapes, and the heating problems of flying that low in the atmosphere at such higher velocities were very challenging. It would have been a very large vehicle.

Now going on into other SSTO projects. Points out that Mike Griffin actually started the DC-X program while at SDIO. DC-X/XA was the best program he ever worked on. It didn't have to work because it was a test vehicle. They had a 26-hour turnaround time. Pete Conrad was determined to demonstrate three flights a day. Very low infrastructure required (~$600K). First ever composite linerless oxygen tank, long before X-33 tank failed a few years later. NASA tried X-34 and X-33 which both failed.

A missed opportunity was not extending the DC-X program with a more integrated airframe and fly to Mach 8, for about $90M. Once you've flown something and developed that experience base, it's cheaper to extend it. Had they gone for Mach 8 from the beginning of DC-X, it would have been a billion dollar program.

Lesson learned was that two-stage, hydrocarbon fuels is a winner, despite the loss in Isp, because the vehicles are so much smaller. Isn't saying that SSTO isn't the right answer, and that you couldn't build a demonstrator, but it might not be operable.

The reason that the commercial sector is important is because we don't have any choice. We don't have the money to do it the way the government does. Build quick, reduce risk will be a quarter of the cost of government program business as usual.

The good news is that the entrepreneurs are starting to engage, and they're putting a lot more into it than either NASA or the Air Force are interested in. Talking about Bezos, Branson, Musk, Carmack. John Carmack has a great approach--just go build it.

As naval power was built on the back of maritime power (ocean commerce) the Air Force will have to engage with the private sector. AF is continuing to engage in technology push toward operability. Will trade performance gains for operability, which also pushes toward two-stage. Building a ground-based demonstrator tank (common bulkhead) that they want to evolve into a Mach 7 test vehicle. Technology will support wide range of applications.

Mach 12 vehicle will be about the size of an F-15. Not big vehicles with hydrocarbons--lots of room for growth.

Pure energy price to put a person into orbit is about $76. To actually approach that cost will require much higher flight rates than are required by the Air Force, which is why they have to partner with the private sector and private markets.

In giving XCOR the contract, they're not paying them to build a flight test vehicle--they're doing that with their own money. They're paying them for technology development, and it will be shared with the industry. "Build an industry, not just a government program."

Increase in the of knowledge doubling dramatically increasing. By 2020 knowledge will be doubling every 73 days. Time is on our side. AFRL will be continuing to push and mature technology that are beyond our horizon, but some of them will be helpful to us now.

Technologies are more complex than initial Wright work for airplanes, but we are getting to the point that we can do amazing things with small teams. Discussing technology exchange forum in Dayton where they will present their technologies to private developers to make them aware of what the Air Force has. Also a three-day workshop in New Mexico for the DC-X anniversary to discuss lessons learned for the future.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:19 PM

TIVO'd Live Blogging

This is what I would have live blogged at yesterday's XCOR press conference if I'd had an Internet commercial.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Doug Graham gives an introduction. Leads off by introducing Esther Dyson.

Took it for granted that she would be going to the moon, but space was like a priesthood, for NASA and big companies, not for ordinary folk. If you wanted to go into space you went into industry and lost your entrepreneurial initiative, or you wrote science fiction (Pournelle). PCs have made computing cheaper by orders of magnitude. The Internet was developed by the government, but its potential didn't explode until it was turned over to the commercial sector. In the software world, you can build a business by copying software, but you can steal XCOR's plans, and not be an XCOR and not build a Lynx. Not qualified to judge the technology. But she can judge the customers, and the people and their approach. She's investing in Jeff and the team that he surrounded himself with. Real-world company. Not making wild-eyed promises, but transparent and making promises they will be held accountable for.

Greason: Just notified that Air Force wants to continue to fund their SBIR, and the process would make parts of the vehicle public over time, so announcing now. Most people wouldn't be able to tell the last few versions apart. Also wanted to let potential travelers know what else was out there. Airframe designed from scratch to be optimized for the engines. Fly from the ground out into space, see stars, earth curvature, earth below, experience weightlessness. Looking at different ways to package people in vehicle, and shifted from Xerus to Lynx about three years ago. Referring to Metacomp Technologies CFD support. Started with engines in 1999, because it was clear that this was the critical technology at the time for building these kinds of vehicles. High flight rate is critically important. Allows a much smaller vehicle, with single passenger, and still fly as many people with a smaller vehicle that flies less often. Regulatory regime is unique in the world. By requiring developers to release safety records, there wil be competitive pressure for safer vehicles. High flight rate, low cost propulsion systems will be able to offer prices at roughly half the price of competitors. Smallest vehicle that they can build--if they could figure out a way to fly half a passenger they would do that. Not that last step--just one more step on a roadmap they laid out years ago: low suborbital, high suborbital, orbital. Thinks that this business is important, and that demonstrating a vehicle like this can make money will bring new capital into the market.
rt
Rick Searfoss: Was convinced would never fly into space again after leaving NASA. After working with XCOR, became convinced that it was possible, except this time can take wife (if she wants to go). Showing video of virtual vehicle being rolled out of hangar, checking out engines on runway, lighting it up, and on its way. Similar to high-performance fighter aircraft. Flight test and ops will take place same place (initially) as Yeager's first flight. All-liquid rocket propulsion technology. Using same approaches as X-15 and Shuttle--dead stick landing. Well proven and easy to do, except they have the ability for go-around, reducing risk. Absolutely enthralled with the prospect of flying Lynx through test phase to the point that they can safely fly the paying public. XCOR an impressive organization. Lots of people want to get into the game, but very few really have capability to make it happen--XCOR is one of those. Scalable, developable, vey amenable to flight-test regime. As a test pilot he loves it. Flight test isn't about taking risk--it's about mitigating and controlling them while expanding the performance envelope. Most impressive thing about space is the view (riding up front, next to piot). Weightless experience is more different than you can imagine, but still second place to the view. Excited about working with this technical team to make it a reality, and open up space to many people in the future.

LA Times: What is state of vehicle.

Vehicle is sufficiently designed that they can start to build.

Pressurized cockpit, suit?

Yes, pressurized cockpit with life support, but will have pressure suits for additional layer of safety. Searfoss: Developing suits with Orbital Outfitters, which will be lighter and more manageable to wear. Not pressurized, and can fly with faceplate open. Dyson: You get to wear a space suit, and keep it.

Will passengers need physicals?

Missed the response.

Can't address price point, because they are not the retailers. "our price to them is sufficiently low that the can charge about half the competition.

How large is the market. Jeff know one knows for sure, but a lot of research has been done. Dyson: a lot of people with more money than time. They can't do a safari in Africa, but can do this in a day.

some training needed for suit operations, but shouldn't take more than a few days and doesn't have to happen right next to the flight.

Is 200,000 feet high enough? "More than high enough to satisfy the people who haven't flown at all. By the time that market is worked off, will have higher vehicles. Direct competitor is Scaled/SSCompany. Very different concepts. Doesn't think that any one will be the way to go. Different vehicles for different experiences. They only have one passenger with a co-passenger experience. Theirs is direct from runway to space, with no mother ship.

Test flights first half of 2010.

Why not carried aloft, to shorten rocket burn, like SS2? Expect that there will be competition on cost, so rather than focus on how fast to get there, but how to design a system that's cost effective to operate, but be able to compete as well. That led to the engineering choice of doing it in a single vehicle. Trade off is to have more advanced rocket propulsion, which is why there started there.

Why suborbital when the problem is orbital. Esther: likes speciation--going after a real market niche in the short term, with real technology that will continue to involve over time. It's a good business case. Jeff looks forward to the day that he can announce an orbital system, and you'll be able to see the heritage from what we're doing today, and obvious that a step-wise approach is better than "hail Mary" to orbit.

Air Force contract more important psychologically than financially. Very validating to have them watching over shoulders and trusting them. Don't have all the money yet, but don't expect any problems based on current discussion with investors. Ride is about thirty minutes, with last twenty a glide home. Only difference between Lynx one and two (none external), but 2 will be full-performance version. Can fly one without waiting for ultimate perfect vehicle.

Is it high enough to be in space? Tee-shirt factor is an issue, but still a big market for early adopters. Not technically in space (50 miles, 100 km), and that will obviously be worth more, but they will get to that point. Price allows multiple flights. In terms of passenger sizing, Greason is the model (because he wants to fly, and because he's 95th percentile).

Total burn time is about three minutes, weightless about a minute and a half.

Start with taxi tests, then runway hops, then fly arounds, then subsonic (thirty or forty), then carefully through transition, then take it to the limit. Fifty to seventy to a hundred flight tests.

What infrastructure required? Franchise to other places in the world? Do you expect Mojave to be upgraded to New Mexico class?

No infrastructure required except runways and air space. Doesn't expect California taxpayers to build them new facilities. Expects to fly all over the world, because people want to operate from their own turf.

Do you need to be supersuper wealthy? Comparable to Everest operation. Had two teachers who bought flights on Zero Gee at 3500. Was it worth it? Absolutely, will share with students and remember forever. Greason: Of course price will come down. Aren't we glad that people bought plasma teevees and cell phones so that now we can all afford them? Never be dirt cheap, but could come down to the price of a cruise.

2700-3000 lb class engines for engines, with three of them. Weight of vehicle commensurate with that thrust. One of differences between Mark 1 and Mark 2 will be leading edges on nose for entry, but it's a lot easier than orbit. Peak temp about 1200. Will use commercial for of RP-2.

Not four flight a day per pilot, but perhaps two. Methane interested for upper stages, not for suborbital.

Nice to be first in the marketplace, but better to be right. Multiple parties will be entering this market, and that's great.

How far off is orbital flight? Can it scale up?

Orbital flight is where we want to go. selected this approach because it fits it a roadmap that leads there. That doesn't mean that the vehicle design itself will carry over. It's the systems concepts that will.

Does the vehicle require a sophisticated flight director? Jeff: A very sophisticated one, and he's standing right here (referring to Searfoss). Very simple flight profile required to military vehicle, but expect the vehicle to be flyable by a pilot without a lot of need for automated flight control. Just took a dig at Scaled: "not like we're going to just light off a hybrid rocket motor and we're off on Mr. Toad's Wild Right. "Digital throttle--on or off." Throttling adds complexity and failure modees, and isn't necessary.

How to reassure customers or investors that a cataclysmic failure by them or a competitor won't destroy the industry? ME-163 bad example, but understand that safety has to be high priority. Never find anything in advance, will test, and test, and test. Will have more flights on it than anyone has put on a rocket vehicle before they put passengers in it. In a lot of ways the traveling public are a lot more sophisticated than people judging from the outside. Esther: If it's inevitable, delay it as long as possible, set expectations properly, and realize that part of the appeal is that it is real. People die climbing Everest, often. Don't make light of it, but doesn't have to be a major blow to the industry.

Question to Esther: How important beyond military contracts and private travel, how much business beyond does she need. Not expecting asteroid mining or Mars colonization, but she expects them to develop this spacecraft and its descendants, but wouldn't be surprised to develop new generations of technology and become part of the establishment. Not a long-term prospect. They are disruptive because they're small and quick. Generating reasonable returns from the POV of a VC.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:00 PM

At The Conference

The trip was uneventful, except for an excruciatingly long and slow detour out in the desert in a long line of trucks and cars due to blocking off eastbound I-10 for and accident investigation about thirty miles west of Phoenix.

Obviously, I have an Intertube connection. I came in late due to the above, in the middle of a discussion of a tether system for earth-moon transport. I'm sitting next to Henry Cate, Jr. (who started the Carnival of Space series after last year's conference) and am staring at the backs of Clark Lindsey's and Jeff Foust's heads.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:46 PM

March 26, 2008
So I Attended The Press Conference

Did I live blog it? Obviously not.

I couldn't see paying fifty bucks for a slow wireless connection, which was what was on offer. If I have the energy later, I may post what I would have live blogged, had I had an Intertube connection. Still kind of beat from recent travails for now, though. I need to get some dinner, pack, and take it easy tonight, so I can get up early to drive to Phoenix in the morning for a mid-afternoon conference start.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:45 PM

It's Not Like This Is Anything New

OK, so Hillary dissed the military when she lied about being shot at. I'm sure that it was just a slip of the tongue--surely she didn't mean to.

Well, actually, since she's running for president, I am sure that she didn't mean to. But it's indicative of her cluelessness about the armed forces over which she viciously ambits to become Commander-In-Chief. When he came into office, her husband was similarly clueless. It took him a long time to learn to salute properly, and he never really got it down (though it should be noted that there is no requirement that the President salute to the troops--that was a tradition started by Ronald Reagan, and one that both Clintons no doubt wish that he hadn't). But this goes beyond simply basic lack of understanding of how the military works. Underlying it is a contempt for the military, and authority itself, other than their own.

Consider this passage from Unlimited Access:

Another close source, this one in the Secret Service, told me that she had ordered her Secret Service protective detail to "stay the f--k away from me!" and to keep at least ten yards of distance between her and them at all times.

The Secret Service agent told me that it was much harder to protect her from a distance of ten yards, and she was told this, but she didn't seem to care what the Secret Service said. He also told me that she had a clear dislike for the agents, bordering on hatred, in his opinion.

Along those same lines, another source told me that two Secret Service agents heard Hillary's daughter, Chelsea, refer to them as "personal trained pigs" to some of her friends. When the friends were gone, the senior agent tried to scold Chelsea for such disrespect. He told her that he was willing to put his life on the line to save hers, and he believed that her father, the president, would be shocked if he heard what she had just said to her friends. Her response?

"I don't think so. That's what my parents call you."

As is noted there, if true (and frankly, I certainly have no reason whatsoever to disbelieve it in light of their general history*), it makes sense, because Bill and Hillary were sixties campus radicals, and did indeed come from a culture that considered law enforcement officials "pigs."

And we know, going all the way back to the first Clinton campaign that, no matter how he chose to spin it at the time or now, his letters about his draft deferment indicate that he did indeed "loathe" the military. There's no reason to think that Hillary felt differently, then or now. And when you loathe something, you're unlikely to invest much time in learning about it, or becoming familiar with it. The military culture is completely alien to this woman, and this incident is just one more bit of evidence for that.

And beyond that, even for someone unfamiliar with the military, it would seem obvious that when you tell a tale of running under fire on an air base where the people are dedicated to providing for your safety, that doesn't reflect well on their performance. Obvious to anyone but Hillary Clinton. And she probably thought that showing her bravery under fire would be politically advantageous someone who probably knows nothing about the military other than action movies (many of which depict American troops as depraved) by her Hollywood pals.

But insulting the troops? Telling blatant and repeated lies? What does it matter, as long as she gets back into the White House? The hilarious thing is that it has blown back so badly on her.

The most brilliant woman in the world.

Right.

*Yes, before the trolls drop by and tell me that Aldridge's book has been thoroughly discredited because of the story about Bill Clinton being sneaked out for trysts through a White House tunnel, I give that argument about as much weight as that OJ was innocent because Mark Furhman made some racist remarks--you don't throw out an entire body of evidence because some of it has proven to be suspect.

And, of course, for those who are going to argue that I'm being unfair in ignoring Pastor Wright's good works in condemning his lunatic remarks, I'll just say that the two situations are not in any useful way equivalent, and if you're too dim to understand why, I'm not going to waste time attempting to explain it to you.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:45 AM

The Lynx Is Out Of The Bag

While I slept, XCOR lifted the news embargo at midnight PDT (presumably to allow coverage in today's WSJ).

I'm still a little bleary (and of course still attending the press conference later this morning), but Clark Lindsey has a lot more. Just scroll down.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here's more, from east coaster Jeff Foust, here and here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:32 AM

March 25, 2008
Crashing

I'm in California, but I essentially have had no sleep for over forty hours. Explanation on the morrow, but it primary involves a combination of being sick and a cross-country plane trip. I'm pretty sure I'll sleep tonight...

[Update in the early morning]

Well, I was right. I finally did sleep. Which was a relief, because I hadn't been able to for a long time, and not been able to sleep well for a longer time. Ever since I came down with this thing (Thursday night, when I woke up in the wee hours shivering almost uncontrollably, and then shifting over to sheet-drenching sweats) I'd only had one night where I had uninterrupted sleep of more than a couple hours. On Sunday night, I woke up about 3 AM, and never got back to sleep (for no obvious reason--while my temperature was still wandering around, I didn't feel that bad).

On Monday I had to get ready for the trip, and I wasn't really tired, anyway. On Monday night, I went to bed in anticipation of the morning flight to LA, and expected to sleep well, given how little I'd had the previous night.

Wrong. I went to bed at ten, and lay there. And lay there, and eventually ended up laying there, not sleeping (and mind racing with various topics), until I eventually got up at 5 AM (the alarm had been set for 6), and checked email and took care of some last-minute packing. At this point I had been awake about twenty-six hours.

At 7:30 Patricia dropped me at the Boca station to take the Tri-Rail to the Fort Lauderdale airport. It was hot on the train, and I took off the jacket that I was wearing in anticipation of the much cooler weather in California. And left it on the train.

Got on the plane. I had a window seat in the emergency row, and was fortunate to have an empty seat next to me in an almost full plane, but the armrest wouldn't lift (though the seat did recline), so I had no option than to sit upright, which is never conducive to sleep for me. I envy people who can sleep on a plane. In addition, while it normally doesn't both me, windows tend to be colder, and this one had a very cold wall and floor (I took my shoes off for comfort, but eventually put them back on because my feet were so cold, except that the soles of the tennis shoes were almost frozen, so it took a while to warm them back up). Short version--no way was I going to sleep on the airplane, for a 5+ hour flight.

Got into LAX at noon, rented a car, checked into motel (not a bad room for the price, other than the neighborhood--it's in east Gardena, which is almost the same as west Compton...). But I didn't want to go to bed yet, because I wanted to get on a California schedule, and if I'd crashed then, I'd have really screwed things up. In addition, I had to replace my jacket, and I also decided that I really, really needed a haircut.

So I went over to Del Amo Mall, made a stop at Burlington Coat Factory, and found a walk-in place. Then I drove over to the beach, with the thought of taking a little walk, but at that point I was starting to feel like a zombie, including the without-the-brains part. So I stopped at Trader Joes in Manhattan beach, picked up some water, balance bars and peanuts, and headed back to the room, where I took a soak in a hot tub, and finally called it a (very long) day. Not as long as Bill Murray's in Groundhog Day, but at least he got to sleep every night. Now that I think about it, I miscalculated the duration last night (no doubt due to my sleep-deprived addledness). It was actually forty-four hours.

Anyway, I slept for seven hours, woke up, couldn't get back to sleep. Which is OK. It's 6 AM, PDT, and I'm ready to start a California day, and get a good night's sleep tonight for the drive to Phoenix tomorrow.

It's kind of amazing, really, how adaptable the body is.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:50 PM

March 24, 2008
Heading Off To The West

No, not like the Elves. At least I hope not--though on the other hand, they do get to live forever.

But then I'd miss the press conference in Beverly Hills on Wednesday, and the Space Access meeting next weekend in Phoenix.

I'm not completely over my ailment, but I'm well enough to travel, I think, and I'll probably take it easy tomorrow when I get into LA.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:28 PM

What A Difference Three Years Makes

In 2005, Obama said of himself the same things that Gerry Ferraro said about him:

Obama acknowledges, with no small irony, that he benefits from his race.

If he were white, he once bluntly noted, he would simply be one of nine freshmen senators, almost certainly without a multimillion-dollar book deal and a shred of celebrity. Or would he have been elected at all?

This is outrageous, and racist. Right?

Will Obama demand his own resignation?

Or will he say, "I can no more disown Barack Obama than I can my bigoted, America-hating lunatic pastor"?

[Update a few minutes later]

Hitchens, on Obama's political cynicism:

"If Barack gets past the primary," said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, "he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen." Pause just for a moment, if only to admire the sheer calculating self-confidence of this. Sen. Obama has long known perfectly well, in other words, that he'd one day have to put some daylight between himself and a bigmouth Farrakhan fan. But he felt he needed his South Side Chicago "base" in the meantime. So he coldly decided to double-cross that bridge when he came to it. And now we are all supposed to marvel at the silky success of the maneuver.

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily. (Yet why do I say I am surprised? He still gets away with absolutely everything.)

Looking for a moral equivalent to a professional demagogue who thinks that AIDS and drugs are the result of a conspiracy by the white man, Obama settled on an 85-year-old lady named Madelyn Dunham, who spent a good deal of her youth helping to raise him and who now lives alone and unwell in a condo in Honolulu. It would be interesting to know whether her charismatic grandson made her aware that he was about to touch her with his grace and make her famous in this way. By sheer good fortune, she, too, could be a part of it all and serve her turn in the great enhancement.

More and more, it is clear that this is 2008's Bill Clinton of 1992, in the way that he is treated by the press and his acolytes. We aren't supposed to be judgmental about his mendacity and ability to spin and prevaricate. No, we're supposed to admire how good he is at it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:58 PM

Idiotic Phishing Attempt

I just got an email from the "IRS" with the below content:

We are pleased to inform you that upon reviewing your fiscal activity, we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $439,54.
To access the online form for your tax refund, please click here

Your Individual Taxpayer Identification Number: 217 53 3569

Needless to say, that's not my social. I didn't go to the site, but I assume that they ask you to verify the SSN, so they can harvest it. But what kind of moron would be fooled by a letter that doesn't even seem to understand the proper format for numbering in the English language?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:24 AM

Get Ready

For the end of Windows XP.

I'm still using Windows 2000 myself. And I'm transitioning over to Linux.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:27 AM

March 23, 2008
The End Of Reporters?

Can't happen soon enough, in my opinion.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:04 PM

Why Space Policy Is A Disaster

This opinion piece by Republican Doug McKinnon has every false trope and misplaced assumption in the debate on display. As is often the case with opinion pieces, opinions are put forth with the certainty that should be reserved for actual, you know...facts. It starts off wrong in the very opening sentence:

Because of the 2008 presidential election, our nation's human spaceflight program is at a perilous crossroad.

The implicit assumption here is that our nation's "human spaceflight program" would be just fine if we weren't having a presidential election, but anyone who has been following it closely knows that it has many deep and fundamental problems that are entirely independent of who the next president will be, or even the fact that we will have a new president. NASA has bitten off an architecture that will not be financially sustainable, and may not even be developable, and for which it doesn't have sufficient budget. That would be true if the president suspended elections this year (as some moonbats still probably expect him to do).

Beyond that, by framing it this way, there is an implicit assumption that "our nation's human spaceflight program" is identically equal not only to NASA's plans for human spaceflight in general, but for the specific disastrous course that they've chosen. This false consciousness comes through clearly in the very next sentence:

While Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all have made allusions to supporting the program, none has made it a priority.

Emphasis mine. I don't expect any better from Democrats--they are, after all, the party of big government, but just once in a while, I wish that I could hear something from a Republican (other than Newt Gingrich) on this subject that isn't brain dead.

Just once, I'd like to hear a Republican talk not about "the program," but rather, about the nation's human spaceflight industry, and how we implement new policies to make this nation into a true spacefaring one. The latter doesn't mean building large rockets to send a couple crew of civil servants up a couple times a year, at horrific cost per mission. It means creating the means by which large numbers of people can visit space, and go to the moon, and beyond, with their own funds for their own purposes. It means building an in-space infrastructure that allows us to affordably work in, and inhabit, cis-lunar space. It should be (as it should have been when the president first announced the new policy a little over four years ago) about how America goes into space, not about how NASA goes into space. But Mr. McKinnon is clearly stuck in a sixties mind set, as evidenced by the next graf, admonishing Senator Obama's apparent (at least to him, if not the rest of us) short sightedness.

Perhaps now would be a good time to remind Sen. Obama of the sage and relevant words spoken by a president with whom he has been compared on occasion. On Sept. 12, 1962, at Rice University, President John F. Kennedy addressed the importance of the United States having a vibrant and preeminent space program. "We mean to be part of it we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond. Our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to become the world's leading spacefaring nation."

Hey, I'm all in favor of us becoming (or remaining) the world's leading spacefaring nation. But I don't think that the word "spacefaring" means what he thinks it means. Clearly, he is stuck in the Apollo era (hardly surprising, when the NASA administrator himself describes his plans as "Apollo on steroids"). His myopia and Apollo nostagia is further displayed in the next paragraph.

No matter who is our next president, he or she is either going to have to buy in completely to the premise of that young president, or stand aside and watch as other nations lay claim to the promise of space. There is no middle ground. John F. Kennedy understood it then, and the People's Republic of China, with its ambitious manned space program run by its military, understands it now. Preeminence in space translates to economic, scientific, educational and national security advantages.

Sigh...

"There is no middle ground." What a perfect encapsulation of the sterile nature of space policy debate. Ignoring that sentence, and the nonsensical unsupported characterization of the Chinese "program" (there's that word again) as "ambitious," one can agree with every word in this paragraph and still think that the current plans are not going to result in, or maintain, "preeminence in space." And particularly, the notion that ESAS/Constellation provides anything with regard to national security advantages is ludicrous. This is one of the two key areas on which it has been most harshly and appropriately criticized as completely ignoring the Aldridge Commission report.

Sorry, I don't accept that "there is no middle ground." There are many potential policy initiatives that could be implemented that would be vastly more effective in giving us "preeminence in space," than the current one. It's not ESAS or nothing, despite the next paragraph. This is called the fallacy of the excluded middle. This is stealing a rhetorical base.

And what to make of this next?

With regard to the space shuttle, the International Space Station, Orion and Ares, the new president must make three words part of his or her space policy: "Stay the course." On Jan. 14, 2004, President George W. Bush announced a "new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system." With Orion and Ares as the centerpiece of this new direction, it is essential that that there be no delays caused by partisan politics.

What does this even mean? Is Mr. McKinnon unaware that the Shuttle is due to be retired in two years? Does he know that there are no plans for ISS beyond a decade from now? What "course" is he proposing that we "stay"?

And again with the false assertion that only Ares and Orion can allow us to "explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system." Not only is this not true, but there are many much better ways to do so, most of which were extensively analyzed by some of the best people in the space industry, but which were completely ignored when the new administrator came in to implement his own pet ideas. Those ideas remain out there, and will probably be reexamined under a new administration and a new administrator.

I do agree with this next statement, as far as it goes:

If a Democrat is our next president, he or she cannot look at the Orion and Ares programs as a "Bush" or "Republican" initiative to be scrapped.

Though not being a great fan of George Bush, I agree that to scrap a program simply because it is his would be stupid and partisan (not that this would keep it from happening, of course). But there are so many other, better reasons to scrap these plans, that the point is probably moot.

Should the next president decide to delay or cancel our next generation spacecraft and rockets for partisan reasons, he or she will be condemning the United States to second-class status in space for decades to come.

To this, I can only say "horse manure."

Delays or cancellations will cause a massive loss of capability as the work force with the knowledge and expertise to take us back to the moon and beyond will retire or move on to other careers.

Again, he seems to ignore the fact that delays (and potential cancellation) are already cooked into the dough of "the program." They will happen completely independently of who the next president is, because "the program" is fundamentally flawed.

And as for worrying about "the work force with the knowledge and expertise to take us back to the moon and beyond" retiring, this is sadly hilarious. That horse left the barn many years ago. There is almost no one remaining in industry who knows how to get us to the moon, let alone "beyond." Everyone who was involved with Apollo (the last flight of which occurred over thirty-five years ago) is dead, or retired. This is, in fact, one of the reasons that the program is floundering. Rather than sit down and take a fresh, twenty-first century approach to space exploration, and (much more importantly) space utilization, the kids who grew up with Apollo are simply trying to replicate what the Great Space Fathers did. They imagine that by building their own big, new rockets, they can somehow recreate the glory of their childhood. But they weren't involved--they were just observers. I've likened this attitude of redoing Apollo to cargo cult engineering. I think that remains a pretty accurate assessment.

The United States has committed itself to this new direction. The next president must ratify such a commitment.

Again, this false equating of ESAS with "this new direction," is nonsensical. And we aren't even committed as a nation to the Vision for Space Exploration itself. It would certainly be nice to see the next president continue the support of sending humans beyond earth orbit, but it would also be even nicer to see him (or, in the unlikely event, her) reexamine the specific implementation of such a plan, and to expand it far beyond NASA budgets, to encompass federal space policy in general, including military and commercial aspects, as the Aldridge Commission urged, and which NASA has utterly ignored, with the Bush administration's apparent acquiescence.

The piece cluelessly ends up with one more attempt at scaremongering the rubes who are not familiar with the nature of the Chinese space program:

Should our space program flounder, Chinese astronauts will establish the first bases on the moon, and the American people will be the poorer for our lack of leadership.

Even accepting the nonsense that the Chinese are going to establish bases on the moon at all, let alone the first ones, there is no support at all for why this will make the American people poorer. It's easily seen how it makes the Chinese people poorer, given that the Chinese, to the degree that they plan to go to the moon at all, are using a ridiculously high cost and very slow approach, but since NASA's approach is similar, it seems that continuing on this flawed path is what will make the American people poorer. And keep them earthbound.

As I said, this is a perfect example of the false assumptions and false choices that permeate what accounts for the moribund state of the space policy debate in this country. Until we start to discuss space intelligently (including a bedrock discussion of the actual goals, which should not be to do Apollo again), it's unlikely that we'll ever get sensible federal policy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Shorter Doug McKinnon: The president's space policy is not only wonderful, but it is our only chance to lead in space, and anyone who opposes it, for any reason, partisan or otherwise, is dooming Americans to toil in the Chinese rice paddies. So get with the program.

Is that succinct enough? It doesn't matter that it's complete nonsense. And completely unsupported by anything resembling actual policy analysis, and displays no evidence that he even understands the policy. Doug wrote it, and he's a Republican, so it must be so.

While I don't agree with their posts necessarily, (and the chances that I will be voting for a Democrat for president, regardless of what lies they tell me about their space policy, are nil), at least Bill White and Ferris Valyn have applied a little thought to the situation, unlike Doug. But then, they have the advantage of actually being interested in seeing us become a spacefaring nation. It's not at all clear what Doug's motivations are. Perhaps (as noted in comments) his being an aerospace industry lobbyist has something to do with it. I wouldn't normally indulge in such an ad hominem attack, but I can't find anything else in the piece that might explain his strange positions. That one makes the most sense, by Occam's Razor.

[Late evening update]

Mark Whittington (who loves the piece--more solid evidence, if not courtroom proof, of its cluelessness) once again demonstrates his inability to comprehend simple written English:

Apparently there isn't a single syllable of MacKinnon's piece that doesn't make Rand Simberg spitting mad.

In other words, in his hilariously stupid hyperbole, he didn't understand the meaning of this sentence, from above:

Though not being a great fan of George Bush, I agree that to scrap a program simply because it is his would be stupid and partisan (not that this would keep it from happening, of course).

While most of my readers don't need the clue, Mark clearly does. That's what's called "agreeing with a part of the piece." Which means that there were at least a few syllables that didn't make me "spitting mad" (not to imply, of course, that there were any syllables that made me that way, let alone every one).

And of course, as also usual, he can't spell, being unable to distinguish "complimentary" from "complementary." Not to mention "unweildy." But I guess he doesn't mind beclowning himself, as usual. Mark, get Firefox. It has spell check built in. It won't help with the homophones, but it would have caught the other one.

And that's the Mark that we all know and (OK, not so much...) love.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:05 AM

A Job For Diogenes

Ah, New York:

...should Governor Paterson resign, his place will be taken by Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno ...

...who is still, I believe, under investigation by the FBI for his business dealings.

Somewhere down there in the chain of command of New York State politics, there must surely be an honest person. It could take a while before we work our way down to him, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:57 AM

March 22, 2008
War Critics Decry Interminable And Unwinnable Conflict

January 15th, 1945

WASHINGTON (Routers) With the "Allied" forces continuing to be bogged down in the Ardennes Forest, many are questioning Roosevelt administration war policies, the unreasonable length of the war, and even whether or not it can be won.

The 7th Army's VI Corps is waging a desperate, and perhaps futile battle with German troops, surrounded on three sides in the Alsace region. A whole month after the beginning of the renewed German offensive, with almost twenty-thousand American troops dead in this battle alone, there remains no clear end in sight, or hope that the American lines can be closed.

There are serious questions about the competence of Generals Bradley and Patton, concerns that were only heightened shortly after the beginning of the battle, when two armies from Bradley's army group were removed from his command and placed under that of the British General Montgomery. General Montgomery's comments in a press conference a week ago have served only to buttress such legitimate doubts. He didn't even mention their names in describing the limited efforts to recapture lost ground, that remains unsuccessful, with the Germans continuing to take the initiative.

Many point out that these lengthy battles, and lengthy wars, are somehow indicative of a fundamental failure of American policy, not just in waging the war, but in the very decision to enter into it.

"It's not just that we're a whole month into this battle with no clear resolution or exit strategy. In a few more months, this war will have gone on as long as the Civil War," said one Republican critic of the administration. "And that one was Americans against Americans. We should have expected to do much better against Germans. After all, this war has now gone on twice as long as World War I, when we mopped up the Kaiser in a year and a half." He went on, "It's clearly the fault of this Roosevelt administration, that lied us into war, and then botched it. I'll bet that had Tom Dewey won the election a couple months ago, he would have exercised his judgment by immediately implementing his policy of not having entered the war."

Others disagree. One administration spokesman has said on background that this seems like flawed logic.

"One can't judge war progress by a calendar. Wars aren't run on a schedule, and every one is different," he pointed out. "And neither can one judge the progress of a battle that way, or by the casualty count. Often the heaviest fighting occurs just before victory. Our heaviest losses at Normandy were just before we took the beach and the cliffs."

"Yes, the fighting is fierce in the Ardennes now, but Hitler is waging a war on two fronts, and he's down to young boys and old men as soldiers. We will simply have to outlast him, and I'm confident that we will start making serious progress into Germany in a month."

But war opponents will have none of it.

"This administration has been telling us we've been winning for two and a half years, ever since Midway," said the leader of one of the prominent anti-war groups. After over three years of killing and terror, it's time to stop the lies, and the war."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:52 PM

Under The Weather

Blogging may be light this weekend. I came down with some kind of crud yesterday morning. Nothing major--just a general achiness, with a slight fever and alternating chills and sweats. And severe gumption shortage. I'm hoping that today is the worst day. I'd really like to be better for my trip out west on Tuesday.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:49 AM

March 21, 2008
Another Strike Against Him

Why is Barack Obama against drug legalization?

I'm running through the issues, and I can't find a single one on which I agree with him, other than that blacks should take more responsibility for their own lives.

That's great but, sorry, it's just not enough. Just another non-federalist fascist.

This comment probably explains his position:

The only black dude and admitted former drug experimenter in the race cannot afford to look soft on drugs.

Yup. New politics.

Can someone pass the Kool-Aid?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:25 PM

Last Chance

Less than a week before the conference, Clark Lindsey has posted the final (or at least, as final as it can be at this date) program for next week's Space Access Conference. Hope to see you there.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:20 PM

John Kerry, Nuanced Foreign Policy Analyst

I never understood back in 2004 (or any other time, for that matter) why people told me that John Kerry was such a brilliant man, when it was always clear to me that he was a pompous, arrogant windbag, and a certifiable moron.

I think that this bears out my thesis:

Kerry isn't just stereotyping blacks. He is stereotyping Muslims too. And he is drawing an equivalence between American blacks, a racial minority in one country, and Middle Eastern Muslims, a religious majority in a whole region. To John Kerry, it seems, all "disenfranchised" people look alike.

Never mind that, as Greenwald points out, "Arab Muslims [are] none too happy with their black countrymen in northern Africa." Never mind that in some African countries, notably Sudan and Mauritania, Arab Muslims still enslave blacks.

To Kerry, it seems, all "oppressed peoples" look alike. The man has all the intellectual subtlety of a third-rate ethnic studies professor.

I think that "third-rate" is an overrating.

And on a related subject, can anyone explain to me how blacks have somehow acquired this bizarre mythology that Christians enslaved them, and that Muslims are their liberators?

Anyone familiar with the history of slavery know that the blacks were sold into it by the Arab traders, and that it was only abolished due to moral pressure from (wait for it) Christians.

Which brings me to the next subject, which is the general disconnect from reality of the so-called "black liberation theology" of which, apparently, Obama's church is one of the biggest proponents.

So. OK. The Senator says that he doesn't agree with everything preached in his church. Let's get down to brass talks.

What journalist has the stones to call him on it?

I'd like to see someone ask him questions like this:

Senator, your church believes that Jesus was black. Do you agree? If not, what do you believe his ethnicity was?

Your church believes that the "white church in America" (whatever that means) supported slavery and segregation, and that it is the Anti-Christ. Do you agree with that assessment?

Your church supports a "liberation theology," which is generally understood to be a form of Marxism justified by the Bible. Do you share the support of your church for that ideology?

If you don't agree with your church on these issues, which seem both extreme and fundamental, how can you remain a member of it, when there are so many alternatives? Certainly most Americans would not.

Do you believe that nurturing these sorts of beliefs are helpful to African Americans? If not, why do you continue to implicitly support them by continuing to attend and donate funds to your church?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:43 PM

Redefining Dead

It's a couple weeks old, but here's a very interesting article on the current debate among medical ethicists of when someone should be considered dead for the purpose of organ donation:

Truog is one of a handful of vocal critics who believe the medical community is misleading the public -- and deluding itself -- with an arbitrary definition of death. The debate, which is being fought largely in academic journals, has important implications for the modern enterprise of transplantation, which prolonged the life of more than 28,000 Americans last year. Truog and other critics believe that changing the rules -- and the bright-line concept of death that underlies them -- could mean saving more of the 6,500 Americans who die every year waiting for an organ.

...This debate exposes a jarring collision: On the one hand, there is the view that life and death are clear categories; on the other, there is the view that death, like life, is a process. Common sense -- and the transplant community -- suggest that death is a clear category. Truog and other critics suggest that this is to ignore reality.

"They think, 'We can't remove these organs unless we decide that you're dead,"' says Truog, "so the project becomes gerrymandering the criteria we use to call people dead."

Many people assume that we have good criteria for determining when someone is dead, but we don't and never have. I wrote about this several years ago, during the Ted Williams cryonics controversy:

There's no point at which we can objectively and scientifically say, "now the patient is dead -- there is no return from this state," because as we understand more about human physiology, and experience more instances of extreme conditions of human experiences, we discover that a condition we once thought was beyond hope can routinely be recovered to a full and vibrant existence.

Death is thus not an absolute, but a relative state, and appropriate medical treatment is a function of current medical knowledge and available resources. What constituted more-than-sufficient grounds for declaration of death in the past might today mean the use of heroic, or even routine, medical procedures for resuscitation. Even today, someone who suffers a massive cardiac infarction in the remote jungles of Bolivia might be declared dead, because no means is readily available to treat him, whereas the same patient a couple blocks from Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills might be transported to the cardiac intensive-care unit, and live many years more.

I find it heartening that this debate is finally occurring, rather than the medical community dogmatically keeping its head planted firmly in the sand. Because it lends further credence to the concept of suspension (cryonic or otherwise), and clarifies whether or not cryonics patients are alive or dead. The only useful definition of death is information death (e.g., cremation, or complete deterioration of the remains). As long as the structure remains in place, the patient hasn't died--he's just extremely ill, to the point at which he's non-functional and unable to be revived with current technology.

In fact, given that this debate is about organ donation, it's quite applicable to cryonics. In a very real sense, cryonics is the ultimate organ donation (and in fact it's treated that way under some state's laws). You are effectively donating your whole body (or just your head, in the case of a neurosuspension) to your future self.

But it will continue to tie the legal system up in knots, and declaring cryonics patients to be alive would be a problem under the current cryonics protocols, because unless one is wealthy, the procedure is paid for with a life insurance policy. If you're not declared dead, then you don't get the money to preserve yourself. But if you don't preserve yourself, you'll eventually be clearly dead by any criteria, as your body decomposes. At which point the policy would pay off, far too late to preserve your life.

And of course, if a cryonics patient isn't considered dead, then the heirs won't get any inheritance at all. Cryonics patients already have enough fights with relatives over the amount that they'll inherit due to the cost of the suspension. Keeping them legally alive will only make this situation worse. We really need to come up with some creative new laws to deal with this, but I suspect it's not a very high priority among legislatures who, when they deal with cryonics at all, generally instead of facilitating it, attempt to outlaw it or regulate it out of existence. And that's not likely to change any time soon, regardless of the state of the debate in the medical ethics community.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:29 PM

A Disaster Brewing For The Democrats?

In Denver.

Denver is not equipped to handle any convention scenario other than a coronation, and certainly not the most (potentially) contentious national convention in 40 years.

It is important to point out that the state of Colorado, and the city of Denver, is currently nearly completely controlled by Democrats at every level of government. This puts these locals in a box, politically and from a law enforcement standpoint. This sets up a scenario similar to Seattle 1999 WTO debacle. I happened to be living in downtown Seattle during that awful experience, and what stands out is that the city and state (even the Federal Government at that time) were all controlled by Democrats at every level, even police chief. That meant they were politically unwilling to confront their own in the days leading up to the summit: that is, the anti-globalism/WTO protestors, greenies, and union members that were planning major marches, civil disobedience, and even outright mischief.

The reason is simple, they didn't want to alienate their own constituencies by seeming too heavy handed. The result was that by the time they had to crackdown, it was too late and with police state tactics, water cannons, gas cannisters, police in riot gear, and dusk to dawn curfews on the streets. There is still a lot of these scenes on YouTube and many disenchanted lefties are promising a repeat in Denver this year. Any variation of this would be a potential public relations disaster for the Democrat nominee in trying to win Colorado, and one that would virtually ensure not only a McCain victory in the state, but a stigmatization that could likely lead to major setbacks for the Democrat party in Colorado for years to come.

[Early afternoon update]

It's already starting, and it's still March:

Spagnuolo has been meeting monthly with city officials for a year, hoping to win the right to use Civic Center throughout the convention. He says 50,000 war protesters are coming for a march from Civic Center to the Pepsi Center on Aug. 24.
He said Thursday that he would not respect the host committee's permit and would occupy the park, even if it forced police to intervene.

Referring to the $50 million in federal security money slated for the convention, Spagnuolo said Denver police would need "$25 million to protect the Pepsi Center and $25 million to protect Civic Center."

I have no sympathy. When your political party encourages and welcomes brown shirterry (as long as it's aimed at "neocons" and "globalists," and "capitalists," and other evil people), this is what you get. Lay down with dogs, get up with fleas.

[Update at 1 PM]

More bad news for the donkeys:

In a sign of just how divisive and ugly the Democratic fight has gotten, only 53% of Clinton voters say they'll vote for Obama should he become the nominee. Nineteen percent say they'll go for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and 13% say they won't vote. Sixty percent of Obama voters say they'll go for Clinton should she win the nomination, with 20% opting for McCain, and three percent saying they won't vote.

That's already starting to show up in the national polling, where McCain is way ahead of both Hillary! and Obama. As I've been saying for months, the Dems have set themselves for a shellacking, because both of their lead candidates are unelectable in the general, and the internecine strife just makes it worse. Their only hope lies in a brokered convention, and a different candidate, and even then, it's unlikely that they'll recover.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:00 AM

March 20, 2008
How Easter Eggs Are Made

I think that this is just...wrong.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:07 PM

XCOR Announcement

A press release:

A Press Conference will be held Wednesday, March 26th at 10 am PDT at:
The Beverly Hilton
9876 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Ph. 310 274 7777

PRESS CONTACT:
Doug Graham
Media Relations
XCOR Aerospace
Office: 661-824-4714 ext. 138
Cell: 661-742-7514
dgraham@xcor.com

I'll be in LA next week, so I'll likely attend. I know what the announcement will be, but I'm under a non-disclosure. I think that people interested in alt space will find it a significant milestone. I'm sure that it will be discussed extensively at Space Access at the end of the week as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:21 PM

Sauce For The Gander

Clarice Feldman has some useful advice for Howard Dean:

Have Carter rerun the entire damn primary before June 7. Really, Carter can do this.

I suppose right now you're saying," Where did he get this idea?" I'll tell you, friend. it came to me listening to Carl Levin who asked, "How can you make sure that hundreds of thousands , perhaps a million or more ballots can be properly counted and that duplicate ballots can be avoided?"

See, I read that and remembered that Carter does this all the time. He's the election certifier extraordinaire. From his supervision of the 1990 election in the Dominican Republic to his oversight of the Chavez recall collection in Venezuela he's become the one man in the world who can, with the acquiescence of the entire world, put a gold stamp of approval and purity on a completely unfair and corrupt election. Fraud in counting votes? In registering voters? Discrepancies between the number of cast ballots and voter registration lists? Jiggered machines? Doesn't matter. The guy will keep his eyes and ears closed and stamp the entire thing kosher.

See, what I'm saying, is that there's no way you can resolve the present contretemps without at least half your party claiming the result is unfair. They will always believe the nomination was "stolen" from their candidate and given the players and so-called rules of your party's nomination process, they will have a point. So why not go whole hog. Have the process planned, overseen and supervised by the man who's given his stamp of approval to crooked elections everywhere else on earth. He was YOUR president, after all. He's good enough for East Timor and not for his own party?

Maybe he could even win another Nobel Peace Prize.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:38 AM

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

John Tabin writes that, regardless of the election outcome, the next president will be a fascist:

JOHN McCAIN IS a huge admirer of TR. His career has been marked by an instinctive enthusiasm for regulation. He brags of a military career chosen "for patriotism, not for profit," clearly viewing civilian life as debased.
Goldberg's Afterword, "The Tempting of Conservatism," holds up McCain and the "National Greatness Conservatives" who backed him in 2000 as an example of how progressivism can enthrall conservatives. (Possible good news: McCain has praised free markets in the course of this campaign -- for the first time in his political career, according to McCain biographer Matt Welch.)

Hillary Clinton's calls in the '90s for a "new politics of meaning" and for the state to act as the "village" that raises our children has deeply totalitarian implications that Goldberg discusses at length. In 1996 she declared that "there isn't really any such thing as someone else's child." Assessing her worldview, Goldberg labels Clinton "The First Lady of Liberal Fascism."

Barack Obama's enormous rhetorical talents have already earned him an extremely creepy personality cult. His wife declares that her husband "will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism... And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:20 AM

March 19, 2008
What's Going On?

The oceans don't seem to be warming. Even NPR says so.

This is obviously one of those many insidious effects of global warming.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:34 PM

I Wouldn't Have Guessed That

The last Soviet premiere was a Christian.

I find arguments (such as Dennett and Dawkins, and Hitchens) put forth that religion is the source of all evil in the world to be tendentious. Much evil has been (and continues to be) done in the name of a god, but the most nihilistic, murderous regimes in history, in the twentieth century, were godless. Belief in God (or lack thereof) is neither a necessary, or sufficient condition for evil acts. The real dividing line, as Jonah points out, is not whether or not one is a deist, but whether or not one is an individualist. Say whatever else you want about a classically liberal society--it might leave some behind, but it won't murder them wholesale.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:23 PM

News You Can Use

And just in time for Easter, too. Crucifixion is bad for your health.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:15 PM

Space Visionary

I don't remember the first book I read by Arthur Clarke, or my age when I read it, but I would imagine that it was less than ten. But I do remember that, whatever book it was, it spurred me to go find more.

In the 1960s, Flint's auto industry was booming, and one of the founders of General Motors, Charles Stewart Mott, still lived there. He was worth a couple hundred million at the time (equivalent to a couple billion today), and he had established a foundation for education that had rendered the Flint public school system one of the premiere ones in the country at the time. Part and parcel of this was the public library system. I lived within walking distance (and a trivial bike ride) of the main branch. I would haunt its science fiction section daily, in hope of finding a new Clarke (or Heinlein, or Asimov) book that I hadn't read, and I recall the anticipation when I would discover an unread one that had just been returned by the previous borrower. I often wouldn't even wait to get home, instead sitting down in a chair to devour it in the library.

More than Heinlein, more than Asimov, both of whom were strong influences on me, Clarke taught me about the precision and beauty of science and engineering, and of the importance of making science fiction plausible. I liked all of his work (including the non-science fiction, such as Glide Path, a story of the development of radar during WW II), but I liked the solar fiction the best. It realistically presented me with an exciting future in space into which I could imagine growing up. When 2001 came out (sadly, he died only a month before the fortieth anniversary of its initial screening), it redefined science fiction movies in a way that no other did, before or since (and no, sorry kids, Star Wars doesn't count--despite the space ships and flying vehicles, it's fantasy, not SF). Barely a teenager, I watched, enraptured, as Clark and Kubrick took me first into earth orbit, on that spinning space station, then on to the moon, then on to Jupiter in that amazing nuclear-powered spaceship that had no fins, no streamlining--just ungainly, but realistic-looking and functional hardware that would work in the vacuum and darkness of deep space. (Sadly, as an aside, we seem much closer to Hal the talking computer today, seven years after the movie was supposed to take place, than to even the Pan Am space transport or space station, let alone moon bases and manned Jupiter missions.) It was a future that I could envision, and one toward which I could work, by studying math and science.

But it wasn't just one side of Snow's two cultures--Clarke had his spiritual and artistic side as well, and he inspired one to think deeply about the meaning of existence. One of his best books is much less hard science than most: Childhood's End, a book about how humans evolved, and where we are evolving to, a subject that becomes ever more relevant and prescient as (or if) we are truly approaching a Vingian singularity. I've always thought that it would make a great movie, if Clarke were involved, but there's no chance of that now.

He didn't just have interesting stories and themes--he was a beautiful, eloquent, emotive writer. As I mentioned in the previous Clarke post, we stole some of his words for the foreword of our space ceremony, of which he was one of the major influences that caused us to create it:

Five hundred million years ago, the moon summoned life out of its first home, the sea, and led it onto the empty land. For as it drew the tides across the barren continents of primeval earth, their daily rhythm exposed to sun and air the creatures of the shallows. Most perished -- but some adapted to the new and hostile environment. The conquest of the land had begun.

We shall never know when this happened, on the shores of what vanished sea. There were no eyes or cameras present to record so obscure, so inconspicuous an event. Now, the moon calls again -- and this time life responds with a roar that shakes earth and sky.

When the Saturn V soars spaceward on nearly four thousand tons of thrust, it signifies more than a triumph of technology. It opens the next chapter of evolution.

No wonder that the drama of a launch engages our emotions so deeply. The rising rocket appeals to instincts older than reason; the gulf it bridges is not only that between world and world -- but the deeper chasm between heart and brain.

Rarely do I get tears in my eyes from reading, but one of the most moving short stories of his that I ever read won a Nebula Award¹. And justly so. It has an ending poignant and tragic, not just for an alien civilization, but for a man's faith in his God.

I only met him once, though I suppose that still makes me fortunate, in that most never got to meet him at all. It was not long after I graduated from Michigan with two engineering degrees--the product of his influence (and that of others as well, most notably Gerard O'Neill). I was working at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California (near Los Angeles), and I had just written a paper on a concept that I'd come up with, called a "tidal web," that I presented to the Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing in 1981. It was a geostationary structure consisting of a series of tethers in gravity gradient, connected together in a ring, to create a huge platform on which sensors and transponders could be placed. This would in theory eliminate the need for station-keeping satellites, and allow a much higher density of GEO usage, with it being limited only by spectrum and EMI interference issues, rather than physical concerns about collision. (Unfortunately for me, it later turned out, based on calculations performed by Dan Alderson for Larry Niven while researching Ringworld, that it would be orbitally unstable, and eventually fall to the earth.)

Not long afterward, Clarke gave an evening lecture at TRW in Redondo Beach, not far from where I worked and lived. I attended it, and afterward, met him briefly and, knowing of his interest in geostationary structures, gave him a copy of the paper. I later got a brief, but gracious note from him, postmarked from Colombo, Sri Lanka, indicating his interest and gratitude, and that he had added it to his collection of such things. I still have, and treasure, that letter.

I'm sure that he was disappointed, as were many of his readers, that his 2001 vision didn't come true, even without the monolith. After all, in the 1940s and 1950s, he probably would have been astonished (or incredulous) if someone had told him that we'd have landed a man on the moon in 1969. When we appeared to be doing so (which was the case while the movie was being written and produced), it was seductively easy to extrapolate it to lunar bases in the 1970s and Mars missions in the 1980s, as the space station was being constructed in earth orbit. But he'd have been even more astonished, and appalled, to think that we would never go back after 1972, and spend the proceeding decades in low earth orbit, very expensively.

While he lived a long life, it's sad that he died just as interesting and different things are happening that may finally have the prospect of turning at least some of his space stories into reality. Clarke had three well-known laws about technology (though J. Porter Clark has a good related one of his own). But one of his lesser-known ones (at least I think it's his--I can't find a link with a quick search) is that we tend to be optimistic about technological progress in the short term, and pessimistic in the long term, due to the exponential nature of technological advance. I try to use this law to temper my expectations in both directions, and (at least) be optimistic about the long term, as long as it's not long-term enough that (in the famous words of Keynes) we're all dead. The long term was too long for Sir Arthur, but if and when we do have the lunar bases, and the nuclear cruisers to Jupiter, it will be in no small part due to the role that he played in challenging minds, young and not so young, and painting vivid and credible pictures of the future in their heads that motivated them to go out and attempt to create it.

So remember him, and go reread some of the classics. And if you've never read them for the first time, I'll cast my mind back to my childhood and youth, remember the thrill I felt when I opened up a new, unread one, and envy you.

[Early evening update]

One other point about his prescience in the sixties (or at least, I hope so--it seems likely to me as a general point, if not the specific company). The clipper ship that went up to the space station in 2001 didn't have a NASA logo on it. It was Pan Am.

1. I just noticed in rereading it, a failure of imagination that wouldn't strike one reading it in the 1960s. It's interesting that, in the late fifties, he thought that a starship would be bringing data back to earth on magnetic tape and photographs. It just shows how hard it is to get the future right.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:49 AM

Do They Come In Peppermint?

Striped icebergs. Must be global warming.

I don't think they have them in Lake Michigan, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:59 AM

I Hate When That Happens

This is really a horrible story, but it's also hard not to laugh at it, and be a human:

A German retiree is taking a hospital to court after she went in for a leg operation and got a new @nus instead, the Daily Telegraph is reporting.

Talk about tearing someone a new one. Ah, the jokes just write themselves.

It's also a lesson that you really need to have an advocate when you go to the hospital, though it's not clear if it would have helped in this case.

[Afternoon update]

And they're off:

"When she's done, she'll have money coming out of the 'wazoo.'"

"Sort of reminds me of what is going to happen in the USA next January 20."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:51 AM

Breaking Moore's Law

An interesting new data storage technology:

Lai said that in principle, Nanochip could develop the ability to move the probe a single atom at a time. The company said its current generation of probes has a radius smaller than 25nm, but it projects that eventually the probes could be shrunk to two or three nanometers apiece. That scale, said Knight will enable development in 10 to 12 years of a memory chip greater than 1TB. For a first generation, anticipated in 2010, Knight says he expects a small number of chips to be in excess of 100GB, but a more realistic number is "tens of gigabytes" per integrated circuit, a capacity comparable to the current generation of flash devices.

I don't know how long it will take, but I do think that mechanical drives will eventually become obsolete.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:22 AM

I'll Second That

Derb again:

At the Olympics, the Maoists will be dealing with free people from free nations, and there is only so much they can do to control them. It's not clear they understand this. They've been living for decades in a bubble of unchallenged power, and are not very imaginative. The opportunities for embarrassment are endless, and the prospect of it very delicious to anyone who loves liberty. Personally, I hope their stinking Olympics is a huge fiasco, and I see encouraging signs it may be.

I wouldn't shed a tear if there was never another Olympics. Not that I care that much, one way or the other, because I don't care about the Olympics, but I think that it demeans the event to hold it in dictatorships. But maybe that's just me. Maybe we ought to have a democratic Olympics. Any country could send a team, but it would never be hosted in a place like China. Or most countries in the Middle East (not that there's much prospect for that).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:06 AM

More Clarke Thoughts

From John Derbyshire:

It is plain from his life and his work that Clarke was deeply in love with the idea of space. In 1956 he went to live in Sri Lanka so that he could spend his spare time scuba diving, the nearest he could get to the silence, weightlessness, and mystery of space. That profound imaginative connection with the great void is one of the things that separates science fiction writers and fans from the unimaginative plodding mass of humanity -- the Muggles. Clarke had it in spades. The other thing he dreamt of, and wrote about, constantly was alien civilizations: how incomprehensibly magical they will appear to us when we encounter them, and how they will deal with us.

He mentions Bradbury in his remembrance. Some thought of them as four: Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury. I never did. I like Ray Bradbury, both as an author, and personally (I met him occasionally when I lived in LA), but I never considered his work science fiction, at least not hard science fiction. It was more in the realm of fantasy and poetry to me (and of course, Fahrenheit 451, which was a political dystopia).

[Late morning update]

Bruce Webster agrees:

I'm not sure I've ever met, talked to, or read of an engineer or scientist who was inspired to become such because of something Bradbury wrote. I'm not saying they're not out there -- I just think it's a very small number, especially when compared to Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Yes. I enjoyed some (though not all) of Bradbury's work, but I was never inspired by it. It just seemed too far from an attainable reality to me.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Even Bradbury himself agrees:

First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time--because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:09 AM

Troubling Equivalences

Mickey Kaus dissects the Obama speech. I think that he hurt himself with it more than helped, though obviously the Obamaniacs will disagree. One way to know is to see if he recovers in Pennsylvania, where he's down twenty-six points (before the speech).

My bottom line (still not having read the whole thing).

There would seem to be four, and only four possibilities.

He didn't understand how offensive this kind of speech was until someone pointed it out a few days ago.
He understood, but didn't have the courage to confront his pastor about it.
He understood, but felt it important to his Chicago political career to go along with the racial grievance crowd.
He understood, and agreed with it, until it became politically inconvenient to do so.

If (1), it seems like a political naivety that is inexcusable in a presidential candidate. If (2), what does this say about his ability or willingness to stand up to a dictator? If (3) this isn't "new politics." It's the same old cynical pandering. If (4), do we really want a president that believes this kind of thing in his heart?

As I've said, take away this whole issue, and I'm still not going to vote for Obama, for a lot of reasons. But if I were, this would be a deal breaker for me. I pity the choices of Democrats this year (and generally, every year). But then, no one made them be Democrats.

[Update at 9 AM EDT]

Victor Davis Hanson has some related thoughts:

Two corollaries always follow the Obama victimology: moral equivalence and the subtle suggestion that any who question his thesis of despair are themselves suspect.

So we hear of poor Barack's grandmother's private fears in the same breath as Wright's public hatred. Geraldine Ferraro is understood in the same context as Reverend Wright. The Reagan Coalition and talk radio are identical to Reverend Wright -- albeit without similar contexts for their own purported racism. Your own pastor, priest, or rabbi are analogous to Rev. Wright.

And then, of course, your own motives are suspect if you question any of this sophistry. For Michelle it is always "they" who raised new obstacles against this deprived Ivy League couple and their quest for the Presidency; for Barack it is those who play "snippets", or the system of "corporate culture" that has made Wright the object of anger to similarly victimized poor white pawns.

The message? Wright's motives for espousing hatred are complex and misunderstood; your motives for worrying about Obama and his Pastor are simple and suspect.

I don't think that Obama understands how offensive this speech was to many listeners, and listeners that he needs in a general election. A lot of people have pointed out that it was a speech to the super delegates, which is probably right. I guess he'll worry about binding the wounds of the rest of us at or after the convention. But the bloom is definitely off the rose.

Oh, and he can't even keep his story straight:

Barack Obama's campaign is not premised on making history? Could have fooled me. Let's go to the tape.

...there's only 563 mentions of the phrase "make history" on barackobama.com and another 1,750 mentions of "making history" on the candidate's website alone. How on earth could anyone have gotten the idea that Barack Obama was suggesting that a spectrographic analysis of his skin color proves that his mere election as president would be a positive historical event? In fact, one might say that "making history" was a successful campaign theme for Obama precisely because it used race to his advantage, making the subtle suggestion that electing a black man would make Americans feel better about the state of race relations. And isn't this exactly what Geraldine Ferraro was eviscerated for pointing out?

[Update at 10 AM]

Obama's double standard:

So Imus, who peddles "toxic information," "stereotypes," and "degrading comment[s]," should be deprived of his livelihood. While Reverend Wright, who peddles in "incendiary language," a "profoundly distorted view of this country," "racially charged" remarks, and views that "rightly offend white and black alike," gets the honor of baptizing Obama's daughters.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Stanley Kurtz writes that Obama is just a moderate Wright:

Obama's relationship to Wright is paradigmatic. Obama's own views are not precisely Wright's, but Obama understands and is attracted to Wright's radicalism and wants to win at least a gruff sort of understanding and even acceptance of it from Americans at large. What's scary is that this is all-too-similar to the way Obama thinks about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bashar Asad. Obama may not agree with them either, but he feels as though he understands their grievances well enough to bridge the gap between these leaders and the American people. That is why Obama is willing to speak to Ahmadinejad and Asad without preconditions.
Can we fairly make analogies between internal American splits and differences between nations? No we cannot. But that is precisely Obama's error-and it is pervasive on the dovish left. The world of nations is in fact a scarcely-hidden anarchy of conflicting interests and powers. Yet liberals treat the globe as if its one great big "multicultural" nation in which reasonable folks can simply sit down and rationally iron out their differences. Obama sees himself as a great global reconciler, on exactly the same pattern as he sees himself as a national reconciler-the man who bridges not only all races, but all nations. Unfortunately, what reconciliation means for Obama is getting Americans to accept folks who don't like them, and to strike bargains (on disadvantageous terms, I would argue) with those who mean to do us serious harm.

...Obama is the appealing face of American radicalism -- the man who unites the leftism of the professors with the radicalism of the Afrocentric clergy, and ties it all up in an only slightly more moderate package. And that is exactly the sort of "unity" we'll get, when and if Barack Obama becomes president of the United States.

Yes, this is one of the many reasons that I would never vote for Obama. And the wrongs of Wright only highlight this problem.

[Update late morning]

VDH says that Obama can fix the double standard:

The new sophistic Obama, however, would recount to us all the charity work and good that Imus had once done and still does, that we don't understand the joshing of the shock-jock radio genre that winks and nods at controversy in theatrical ways, that Imus was a legend and pioneer among talk show hosts, that Obama's own black relatives have on occasions expressed prejudicial statements about whites similar to what Imus does, that we all have our favorite talk shows, whose hosts occasionally cross the line, and that he can't quite remember whether he'd ever been on the Imus show, or whether he ever had heard Imus say anything that was insensitive -- and therefore he could not and would not disown a Don Imus.

This is the real message of the Obama racial transcendence candidacy.

Don't hold your breath.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:10 AM

No DiCaprio In This One

Lileks:

National Socialists chose the second part of their name for no particular reason - it's anti-capitalist propaganda. The movie begins not on the dock, or on board, or in a boisterous café by the quay; no, it starts off in the White Star boardroom, where the eeeevil investors are figuring out the best way to manipulate the stock. Yes, that's correct: insider trading sunk the Titanic. The head of White Star - a tall, dashing, cynical, cunning, selfish Bruce Ismay (snort) pushes the captain to reach New York in record speed to boost the stock, which had gyrated up and down prior to departure, and had been subject to large block purchases by other characters on the ship - oh, don't ask. The interiors looks nothing like the Titanic, but the special effects aren't bad, and it's impressively shot. It's just all wrong. Every frame is just saturated with a strong dose of Wrong.

Forgot the best part: the hero is a German. He's a fictional officer who tries to warn everyone about the ice. He's cool, composed, devoted to duty, and scornful of the capitalists. At least the Soviets had that Russian-soulfulness thing going, so their movies would be soaked with sloppy emotion and Slavic hymns; the Nazis were tin-eared thick-thumbed boors when it came to art. God help us if they'd won; I cannot imagine their sitcoms.

I just got my copy of Jonah's book. It's pretty good so far.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:54 AM

March 18, 2008
The Last Of The Giants

I'm hearing that Arthur C. Clarke has passed. I assume that it's true, but I'll have more thoughts later. In several ways, he was my favorite author--not just science fiction author, but author, period, growing up. Currently at a loss for words.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here's a link to the story.

Among many other things, he wrote the foreword to our July 20th ceremony (though not for that purpose--it was fair use).

[Update a couple minutes later]

Instapundit has some instathoughts.

[Update a few minutes later]

Bruce ~~Henderson~~Webster already has a requiem up. He must have had it preprepared, like the MSM.

I have to dispute this, though:

The irony is that Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein would all have loved to go into space personally, but obviously were never able to.

He's joking, right? When it comes to Asimov, the man wouldn't even get on an airplane, let alone a rocket. If he had to travel long distances, it was always by train. The notion of the actual man going into space, regardless of his fantastic imagination, is ludicrous.

Meanwhile, Clark Lindsey has a link roundup.

Also, I should note that Bruce explains my post title in a way that I didn't, for those who didn't get it. And the fact that I have to explain it makes me feel old. More when I write a serious post about it.

[Update on Wednesday morning]

Sorry, wrong Bruce. It was Bruce Webster, not Bruce Henderson, who emails that Asimov would have loved to go into space, if he could do it via train. It must be a mite confusin' to have a Bruce blog. Do they sing the Australian philosopher's drinking song over there?

[Another update]

Bruce also notes that he didn't have the eulogy in the can:

I made my living as a writer for several years (see http://brucefwebster.com/publications/), mostly in computer journalism, and have published over 150 articles, columns, and reviews, plus a few books. Because of my tendency to, ah, wait until the last minute, I often wrote those articles, etc., the night before (or the night after) they were due. For example, during the two years I wrote a column for BYTE, I typically wrote that column -- usually 3000 to 4000 words and sometimes as much as 7000 words -- in one sitting, late at night, the day before deadline. So a 540-word post about something near and dear to my heart is hardly breaking a sweat.

Actually, being a major procrastinator myself, I can (strongly) identify with that. Apologies for the mistaken assumption.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:59 PM

Will Obama Be A Genius?

Mark Steyn:

...as things stand, Obama is damaged. If, as some folks are arguing, hanging with Uncle Jeremiah is simply the price of doing politics in black Chicago, that makes the Senator not the change you can believe in but just the same-old-same-old. And at least a sliver of the electorate will find it hard to accept that even the political realities of Illinois require a man to raise his daughters in a church led by a vulgar kook who makes humping motions from the pulpit when he discusses Bill and Monica. Jeremiah Wright is not most Americans' idea of a pastor, and the longer he's in the spotlight the more he distances Obama from the electorate. Accepting (as everyone assures us) that the candidate himself is not an Afrocentric liberation theologist who believes every crackpot conspiracy of the last 70 years, every other explanation as to why Barack Obama spent two decades in the company of a profane race-baiter leaves the Senator looking either weak or weird. If he can wriggle out of this tonight, he's some kind of genius.

We'll find out. This may be a bridge too far.

[Update a few minutes later]

More trouble for Obama:

Despite his track record of controversy, Obama appointed Sanford as a member of his Hope and Unity central advisory committee. He dismissed complaints about Sanford's earlier statements, calling them "isolated comments of an elderly man with a heart condition who likes to speak his mind."

Harder to dismiss were Sanford's increasingly controversial statements directed toward Hillary Clinton, Obama's rival for the Democratic nomination, which were caught on video and spread throughout the internet. In one speech, Sanford says "I'm gonna push her face in some dough and make some gorilla cookies," and later says "that woman look like a fish head sandwich." In another, Sanford holds up a clear sheet of plastic and taunts Mrs. Clinton to "wear it fo' a Godzilla mask."

At first Mrs.Clinton laughed off Sanford's remarks, and even said she would "welcome Mr. Sanford's help after I am nominated." Mr. Sanford replied that "I'm a junkman, not a plastic surgeon." As the campaign wore on and her lead disappeared, she began responding testily, issuing statements that "God's gonna strike you down Fred Sanford," and "shut up foo'."

Will the controversy never end?

[Update late morning]

Well, if these two snippets are any indication, the speech is less than genius level, at least to me:

For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

...Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

The nagging questions remain. He's not merely "an occasionally fierce critic of US foreign policy." He's a man who believes that the US government was behind 911. He didn't merely say things that were "controversial." He accused the US government of deliberately creating AIDS and importing cocaine, in order to kill and injure black people. He didn't merely have political views with which one might "disagree." He held (and as far as we know, continues to hold) views that are vile, hateful, and by most lights, insane. I find this minimization and mischaracterization of the remarks to be utterly disingenuous.

As to the last graf, so what if he was a Marine? So was Lee Harvey Oswald. Who cares what other universities and seminaries he lectured at? They are no doubt the same ones that welcome Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky. And Ahmadinejad.

As I said previously, even if I were a church goer, there are no amounts of good works that would allow me to hold down a pew in the presence of someone who spewed such lunacy from the pulpit. There is simply some bad that cannot be balanced against the good, when it comes to being a member of and donor to a church, and exposing children (of all ages, apparently, to judge by audience reaction) to such bigotry, hatred and idiocy. It's like praising Castro because Cuba has universal health care (ignoring the issue of how good the health care actually is in Cuba--I don't see many people flocking down there for the clinics). But then, many of the people who get funny feelings up their legs listening to Obama are exactly the sort of people who do that, so maybe I'm not the target audience here.

I understand that it's not the whole speech, and I understand that I'm only reacting to the actual words, and not his golden delivery with the halo above his head. (This latter "argument," such as it is, reminds me of people who, to my great amusement, told me that I couldn't and shouldn't judge or criticize Michael Moore's "masterpiece," Farenheit 911 by the screenplay that I read, but that I should instead watch it, as though that would somehow render nonsense sane.)

I doubt it would make a difference. The question for me remains: what was he thinking? And if this is a reliable guide to his judgment, then my judgment is that he would be a disastrous president, probably Carter-like, and an eager coddler and appeaser of dictators.

[Update a few minutes later]

Some Cornerites find some things to like about the speech:

...here was Obama praising the Founders for their ideals. Here he was noting the stain of slavery, but not letting it become THE story of the Founders, but only a part of the story, not letting it press out the reverence the Founders are due.

That might be the lasting legacy of this speech. The Jeremiah Wright controversy will eventually become a footnote in American political history. But the moment of the first serious black contender for the Oval Office speaking with reverence and admiration for slave-owning Founding Fathers, and dismissing explicitly the idea that the United States is, by virtue of the nation's Original Sin of slavery, a fundamentally racist nation, has the potential to become a turning point.

And "he's so clever":

By framing his Rev. Wright problem as part of the unfinished business of America's founding principles, he makes it unpatriotic to turn away from him now. This isn't a Barack Obama problem; it's an American problem that only he can help solve.

Well, no one has accused him of not being a talented orator or politician. But sorry, I'm still more inclined to see it as Obama's problem rather than America's.

Jonah writes:

I thought it was a much better speech than I thought it would be. It had some lovely movements and he came across as a remarkably classy and decent guy. But I think there were some serious logical, philosophical and political flaws to it.

Yup.

Charlotte Hays shares my opinion about his minimization of the remarks:

Obama is no longer a post-racial candidate. In his speech (it's still going on, but I've heard enough) today, he has embraced the politics of grievance. He says that the Rev. Wright has "elevated what is wrong" with America -- elevated?

Not fabricated but elevated. Does that mean the Rev. Wright is correct about America's deserving the attacks of Sept. 11 -- but he just elevates it to undue prominence? Obama says that we shouldn't "condemn without understanding the roots" of remarks like those Wright made. Whatever the roots, these remarks are to be condemned. Within what context is it correct for the Rev. Wright to say "God damn America?"

Or does it mean that he's correct about the US government deliberately creating AIDS? And he just "elevated" that "issue"?

Sorry, just doesn't wash, no matter in what dulcet tones it's spoken. And it's a good point, as Mark Hemingway expands on, that the real problem is that, no matter how good the speech, the days of Obama as a "post-racial candidate" are over.

[Update in the early afternoon]

Here's the full text. I'm not sure I'm interested or unbusy enough to read the whole thing, but if I get around to it, I may have further comments.

[Update at 3 PM EDT]

John Derbyshire:

The speech is slippery, evasive, dishonest, and sometimes insulting.

Yes, it pays to actually read what he says, rather than just bask in the glow of the flowing oratory.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hmmmm...the Derbyshire post seems to have disappeared. Not sure why. Too bad I didn't grab the whole thing. He provided several examples.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:41 AM

March 17, 2008
Murderous Businessmen

Jonah is wondering why Hollywood types always imagine big businessmen knocking off their enemies, when this seems to happen so rarely (if ever) in real life.

I know I've blogged about this before, but a diligent search doesn't turn up the post, so I'll just repeat it.

Here's my theory. Even ignoring the fact that a lot of Hollywood writers tend to be leftist, some of them may actually have personal reasons to hate "big business" and think it venal. For them, it often is.

First of all--they work in Hollywood, for those well-known paragons of probity and above-board accounting, television and film studios, and production companies. And horror stories about them abound. One could easily see why, if that was the only experience one had with the business world, one would have a pretty jaundiced view toward business and businessmen.

But there's another part that is less obvious. People tend (rightly) to write what they know. And when screen writers are between screen-writing gigs, who do they work for?

Well, here's a clue. What is one of the most common businesses to be depicted in television and movies? Think, for example, "Bewitched." Or "Thirty Something."

That's right. Ad agencies. I haven't done the research (it would be a good thesis project), but I'll bet that television and film characters work at ad agencies vastly out of proportion to the number of people who do so in the real world.

After all, it's a natural fit for a creative writer.

But it's also (based on a lot of stories I've heard from people who have done it) one of the most vicious, back-stabbing industries in the nation, dominated by creative types rather than rational businessmen and good managers.

So, it only makes sense that if your only employment experience with business, big or otherwise, is working for the entertainment industry or the ad business, you're not going to have much appreciation for how a real business, where you have to actually develop and manufacture things that people go out and willingly buy, and has to be run by people with a talent for business (not murder and skullduggery), actually works. It's actually quite similar to the reason that life in the military is rarely depicted accurately. They have no real-life experience.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:35 AM

Time To Turn The Rat?

Has Obama taken a torpedo below his water line? His numbers have dropped significantly through the weekend, relative to Hillary!, no doubt due to the (not so) Wright Stuff.

So what do those who wish no good for the Democrat Party, at least in its current form, do now? Many thought that the reason that Rush Limbaugh was urging people to vote for Hillary in crossover primaries was because he really wanted to see her in office in preference to McCain, which (despite all of his fulminating against him over the past months, and years) is of course silly. Others thought that if was because he thought that she would be a weaker candidate against McCain in the general election. There may have been something to that, but it's not at all obvious who will do better in an election that is still eight months out.

No, the primary reason that he wanted to do so was the same reason that the Reagan administration provided some support to Saddam Hussein during the Iran/Iraq war. They wanted to bleed both sides, and hope that they both lost. Iraq seemed like the underdog, so they propped it up to keep it going and prevent Iran from winning, and capturing the Iraqi oil fields. As in that case, the goal is not to choose one side or the other, because Republicans (and other non-Democrats, such as myself) have no dog in the fight. The goal is to ensure that the race remains in chaos, and to keep the Dems divided right up to the election.

Unfortunately, the timing on the Wright revelations wasn't optimal. It would have been better if it came out after the last of the voting, or (if Obama left the convention as the nominee) in the fall.

Someone over at Free Republic used an apt (albeit disgusting) metaphor. When you're roasting a rat, you have to turn it over occasionally. Now that Obama is slipping, and potentially losing his grip on the nomination, for those who want to cause maximum mischief, it's time to throw support to him, to prevent Hillary from somehow wrapping it up before August, as both voters in the upcoming primaries, and the super delegates panic over the Wright imbroglio and start taking a second look at electability. Thus, don't be surprised if Rush switches to Obama this week.

[Update in the evening]

Here are some thoughts from Amy Holmes that might be of interest to my clueless commenter.

...the first black president will more likely be a conservative -- someone who has already grappled with, and rejected, victim based politics. Can you picture Michael Steele, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, Condoleezza Rice or any number of thoughtful black conservatives listening to Pastor Wright's sermoninzing for one afternoon let alone years on end? Maybe for research purposes.
Barack Obama is not being tied in knots by black middle-class alienation. He's being tied in knots by left-wing grievance politics with which he chose to align himself. Moreover, plenty of black voters have been willing to vote for Obama in primary after primary on the message of unity and racial reconciliation without any particular knowledge of Obama's association with Pastor Wright and his extreme views.

While it may be true that Obama will be more likely to heal the divide than any of the other candidates, he's not more likely to heal the divide than a true post-racial black candidate, such as Rice, or Jindal, or Steele. That's where my clueless commenter goes off the rails. And of course, as I point out, the country has much bigger problems right now than healing the "racial divide." The only people being damaged by the "racial divide" are the people who continue to indulge themselves in the politics of victimhood and grievance, such as Senator Obama's pastor.

Just as an aside, one of the reasons that I'm so hard on him (or her) is that I find the use of oh-so "clever" screen names annoying in the extreme. If you're too cowardly to use your real name here, then just be anonymous. If you want to get any respect from me, or my other readers, don't try to make some kind of point with a fake (and usually stupid) "handle."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:47 AM

An End To Journalism Schools?

Let's hope so. A key point that the author misses, though, is that one doesn't really learn anything in them, other than how to report things. It's a metadegree, like a degree in education (though not quite as bad).

One of the reasons that much reporting is so bad, and that many bloggers can run circles around so-called journalists, is that they actually have knowledge to impart, and they can usefully analyze events in a way that a generalist, or "journalist," simply can't.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:11 AM

March 16, 2008
What Am I Missing?

Could Jeremiah Wright explain to me how boycotting Walmart improves the quality of life in the third world?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:15 AM

Irrational

Mike Griffin is worried about losing a Shuttle crew if the program is extended:

"Given that our inherent risk assessment of flying any shuttle mission is about a 1-in-75 fatality risk, if you were to fly 10 more flights, you would have a very substantial risk of losing a crew. I don't want to do that."

If we accept his risk number, that translates into a 13% chance over ten flights. That doesn't seem "substantial" to me. There are a lot of good reasons to not extend the program, but risk of crew loss isn't one of them. I'm sure that most of the astronauts would be happy to take the risk, and the real loss wouldn't be astronauts (of whom we have a large oversupply), but the loss of another orbiter, which would almost certainly end the program, because they probably couldn't manage with only two left. If what they're doing is important enough to risk an orbiter, that is almost literally irreplaceable, it's surely important enough to risk crew, who are all volunteers, and fully informed of the risk.

When I was watching coverage of the cranewreck in Manhattan yesterday, they cited a statistic from the Bureau of Labor statistics that there were forty-three construction deaths last year (I think in New York alone). Can someone explain to me why is it acceptable to kill construction workers, but not astronauts?

On the other hand, here's one thing that I do agree with Mike on: the last thing we need is another space race.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:11 AM

The Code Has Been Broken

The media style guide for defending Obama.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:57 AM

March 15, 2008
Very Cool

Literally. There are icebergs in Lake Michigan. Must be global warming.

Hope they aren't a problem for the whales.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:43 PM

What Has Wright Wrought?

Well, we don't know yet, but I just wanted to be the first to ask the question. You can bet it will be the hot topic amongst the talking heads tomorrow morning, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:21 AM

March 14, 2008
The Meaning Of "The Statements"

Obama is being Clintonian:

What I think he's saying here is that he didn't hear these particular statements because he didn't happen to be in attendance. He's not saying that he never heard Wright say these kind of things, although he wants to leave that impression.

Well, it's not like that's the only thing they have in common.

[Update at 6:40 PM EDT]

Here's a lot more from "Allahpundit":

Now that we're into "what did the Messiah know and when did he know it" territory, watch for the left to move the goalposts by wondering what it is, precisely, that's so terrible about what the old man said. So he thinks America's responsible for HIV. A lot of people think a lot of things, y'know? Can't "an old black man have his anger in the privacy of his church"?

Looks like Obama's in full damage-control mode.

[Late evening update]

Another Clinton parallel:

I sat in his church, but I didn't inhale.

Heh.

[Saturday morning update]

A few weeks ago, I said that when it came to Obama's speeches, there's no "there there." Now Instapunk says that's true of Obama himself:

Regardless of how the campaign war turns out, both sides have been crippled. Obama cannot win because there is no one inside the gauzy, unreal image to battle through the contradictions to a mandate based on character rather than a mosaic of sliver identities. His white vote will shrivel as ordinary Americans discover they can't determine where his allegiance lies, unless it's to himself only. Women will sit on their hands because they've seen enough of the slick young operator who waltzes in at the last moment and swipes the opportunity from the deserving veteran female (and being half-white doesn't help him in this respect). But Hillary can't win, either, because of the one-drop rule. Even though Obama is not and never was an African-American, he has always been black enough to benefit from the superannuated slave culture that forgives every corruption and hypocrisy in those who have any claim on being black. If Hillary is the nominee, African-Americans will stay home in significant numbers. Unlike Jeremiah Wright, John McCain is the irascible uncle we'd go to for help in a pinch, not hide from because of the revolver he keeps in a cigar box.

At the end of the day, Reverend Wright is a self-fulfilling prophecy, the poison in the well. Like Moses, he can never accompany his chosen ones to the promised land When his people finally learn to stop following his like, they will find what they seek, as if by magic. But for now, the horse he groomed for them is scratched at the gate.

The Democrats have set themselves up for a well-deserved electoral catastrophe this fall. And it didn't just happen this year. It's been building for almost half a century.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:55 PM

No Domestic Aircraft Producers

David Freddoso has some thoughts on Boeing's loss of the tanker contract, and free trade.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:52 PM

An Equine Aria

There's an old fable about a condemned prisoner, who makes a deal with the King. He promises that, if his life is spared for a year, he will teach the King's favorite horse to sing. The King, amused, decides to give him a shot.

As he's being led back to his cell in the stable, the guard asks him, "What are you doing? Are you crazy? You'll never teach that horse to sing."

The prisoner replies, "I have a year. Much can happen in a year. The King could die. I could die. The horse could die. Or, the horse might learn to sing."

After Super Tuesday, many viewed Hillary's campaign as condemned, and many urged her to pull out for the good of the party. But the good of the party will always come second (or third, or fourth, or...) to what's good for Hillary, and her ambition, and sense of entitlement to both the nomination and the presidency. And anyone who doesn't think that she has such a sense only has to go rewatch that interview with Katie Couric, in which she confidently asserted that she has not considered what she will do if she is not the nominee, because she is going to be the nominee (note: this is why her campaign didn't have a plan for after Super Tuesday--they didn't think that they needed one). She is not going to give up, any more than when Bill was under fire, and impeached. As John Podhoretz notes:

Hillary Clinton is not stupid. She knows perfectly well that she's not going to catch up with Barack Obama when it comes to delegates or the overall popular vote in the primaries, and that her lead with superdelegates is not at all secure. She's staying in the race to see what happens -- to lengthen it so that there is a chance Obama will implode for some reason or combination of reasons, leaving her to pick up the pieces.

Exactly. She has nothing to lose by staying in, except for the potential wrath of some in her party, to which she is indifferent. And now that Obama's media bubble is finally popping, it doesn't look like that bad a bet. She may not be able to tutor singing horses, but it looks like she's finally taught the press to cover Obama more objectively, which may be all that she needs.

But even if it doesn't pan out, I've predicted before that if she doesn't get the nomination, she'll figure out how to sabotage Obama's candidacy, because she'll figure that her only hope is to run against McCain in 2012. I still think that's true, and I'd say that the fact that she's willing to tear the party apart by fighting so hard for a poisoned chalice is pretty strong evidence of it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:21 PM

Having It Both Ways

Well, he may not be able to do it much longer:

...there's no cherry-picking occurring here. Furthermore, the cherry-picking defense, even when plausible, has never been accepted when it comes to racism. Don Imus, for example, has received widespread condemnation for very occasional statements that showed racial insensitivity. Trent Lott was condemned for one statement praising Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign.

Obama appears to be playing a double game here, distancing himself from Wright without really denouncing him. It's essentially the same game Obama (we now see) has been playing for years -- cater to racist black nationalists at home while presenting himself as "post-racial" nationally.

Ah, but you see, according to the narrative, Reverend Wright can't be a racist, because it's not possible for blacks to be racist. Only the Man, with the power, can be a racist.

You know, this double game kind of reminds me of when Yasser Arafat would give one speech in English, talking about peace and negotiations with Israel, and then the very same day, give another one in Arabic, calling for the destruction of that nation and the death of the Jews. But in this case, the media doesn't even have the excuse of not understanding the language.

[Update a few minutes later]

Another good point, from Mark Hemingway:

How many times has Obama used "judgment" as a cudgel against his opponents this campaign? Well, choosing someone to offer your family spiritual guidance that isn't an anti-semite coddling, America-hating, race-baiting crazypants would appear to be a far easier decision than deciding whether to go to war. I anxiously await to see how Obama explains this aspect of his celebrated decision-making ability.

Don't we all.

[Update a while later]

New readers who came via Instapundit might want to see my follow-on thoughts on Hillary teaching a horse to sing. Or just click on the main page in the link above, and check out the place in general. Anyway, welcome to all.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:12 PM

Modern Socialist Realism

Gerard Vanderleun has some thoughts, with implications for the Obama campaign. As Iowahawk notes in comments, they're brutal.

Hey, somebody should write a book about this stuff.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:09 AM

And Now For Something Completely Different

A paper on interstellar trade, three decades old. By Paul Krugman, back before he went nuts.

[Via occasional commenter Jane Bernstein]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:58 AM

"Cry Me A River, Mr. Wright"

A screed, over at the Navlog:

That's it for me. I am no fan of Ms. Clinton. And as a conservative I have become used to perpetual abuse and viciousness from a Left my mother would neither recognize nor stand for, despite her politics of 40 years ago. But enough is enough, Mr. Wright, you whiney candyass. The fact is that you, Mr. Wright, will never know what it is like to step out of school as a kid and year after year, hear someone yell, "Get the kike!" and have four or five kids jump you and beat you up, sometimes leaving you unconscious by the side of the road. The difference, Mr. Wright, is that Jews -- and Mormons and Catholics and Adians -- who suffered through such a childhood 40 or 50 years ago never called a press conference, never demanded 'reparations,' never went to the press with demands, never just sat on their asses and complained. They just determined to work even harder to succeed and learned to fight. Mr. Wright, you are a poisonous embarrassment to the United States and to black America. That Mr. Obama refuses to call you for what you are and continues to seek your support should be all that a voter needs to know this November.

He not only "refuses to call him for what he is," but he gives him thousands of dollars (while Michelle whines about what a terrible world it is in which she has to pay back her loans that got her through the Ivy League and into her multi-hundred-thousand-dollar job), and he takes his young children to church on Sundays to poison their minds with this America hatred.

I can understand why the Clinton campaign is so furious with the media, when they could have been reporting this stuff months ago. On the other hand, I have no sympathy, since Bill Clinton could never have gotten elected without similarly fawning and myopic press coverage. If I were a Democrat, I would be very, very concerned about what's going to happen this summer and fall. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving political party.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:01 AM

Actually Reading The Report

One of the prevailing myths (though that's a generous term--perhaps Big Lie would be more accurate) of the left was that Saddam had no ties to terrorism prior to his removal (Obama has used it as a central theme, in fact, of his campaign). Many in the media reported a few days ago that a recent Pentagon report had substantiated this template. However, as Ed Morrissey notes, they could have done this only by not reading the report, relying instead on spin and leaks from the Pentagon. Those who did actually read it would come to an opposite conclusion:

The report, released this week by the Institute for Defense Analyses, says it found no "smoking gun" linking Iraq operationally to Al Qaeda. But it does say Saddam collaborated with known Al Qaeda affiliates and a wider constellation of Islamist terror groups.

And why would anyone be surprised that this was the case? He hated the US, and Israel, and was rewarding Palestinian suicide bombers' families with cash. Other than the other myth (that he was secular, and they were extreme Islamic fanatics, and would have nothing to do with each other), why wouldn't he collaborate and cooperate with them against a common enemy?

If the McCain campaign is smart, they'll use this to school Obama again. Particularly since his proposed solution--to not have invaded Iraq--involves the need for a time machine.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:32 AM

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Not that he's ever been optimistic, but "Rocketman" thinks that the end of ESAS is in sight:

MSFC and contractor engineers are looking at all sorts of band aids for the vibration problem that ARES is most prone to. The leading candidate this week is a "D" strut system between the first and second stage to reduce the vibration that will literally shake the crew to pieces. The Emperor is putting all of his chips on the table betting on the strut. But the contractors are forlorn. They know the strut has issues...and they know ARES will go away with the Emperor in short order. Its hard to work on something you know is headed for the trash heap of history.

I haven't worked on the program for a year and a half, but I can imagine that a lot of people are eying their options to bail.

[Update in the afternoon]

Once again, Mark Whittington demonstrates his lack of comprehension of the English language.

exalt (g-zôlt)
tr.v. exalted, exalting, exalts
1. To raise in rank, character, or status; elevate: exalted the shepherd to the rank of grand vizier.
2. To glorify, praise, or honor.
3. To increase the effect or intensity of; heighten: works of art that exalt the imagination.

No one familiar with written English could imagine that my above words do any of those three things, in any way.

If and when the program does die, I will not be rejoicing. I will be grieving over the lost years and lost billions. But my grief will be tempered by the hope (though, sadly, not expectation) that we will finally start doing something sensible.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AM

March 13, 2008
Too Big A Hurry?

Rob Coppinger writes that the Chinese are taking big risks rushing their human space program.

We'll see. They may be going too fast for safety, but at their current general sluggish pace, they're not going to beat us to the moon any time soon, despite Mike Griffin's cynical scare mongering.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AM

March 12, 2008
Apres Spitzer, The Deluge

Iowahawk is on the case. First, he talks about the damage to the brand of high-priced courtesans, and then, to commemorate, he has a new song: Love Client #9 (warning, strong content).

And just for the record, he takes a little poetic license. I won't say how I know, but what he says about Jewish girls isn't necessarily true.

I mean, hey, the Happy Hooker is Jewish...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:57 PM

Tilting At The Windmill

Or maybe not. Let's hope not. Anyway, Bigelow deserves our support in his valiant effort to make ITAR sane. Not sure off hand what we can do to help, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:59 PM

Only "Suspended"?

Why isn't this guy doing hard time?

Michael Sheridan was stripped of his title as class vice president, barred from attending an honors student dinner and suspended for a day after buying a bag of Skittles from a classmate.

What is the world coming to when people can openly buy and sell candy on a school campus?

I guess his big mistake was paying money for it (you know, like prostitution?):

The policy also prohibits bake sales and other food sales during school hours. The policy does not say anything about students sharing snacks when no money is exchanged.

So, if he'd given it away, things would have been OK. But I have no sympathy. The only way to clean this up is to go after the johns.

You know, I think that someone should write a book about this kind of thing.

[Friday update]

Saved by Mark Levin:

Levin gave out the phone number of the spokesperson for the New Haven school district, but asked his listeners to be civilized about the calling. The civilized part was easy. Getting through was another matter. Within ten minutes of the number's being given out, the New Haven school district's phone system crashed, as did its website.
Within an hour of that, the wheels were already in motion to clear Sheridan's name and restore his and the other student's good standing.

What kind of conservative is he, anyway, coddling criminals like that?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:46 AM

So Many Questions

How and why does a woman sit on a toilet for two years? How does her "boyfriend" take two years to notice that there's a problem? There's obviously a lot more to this story--what's reported here is merely a tease.

[Late evening update]

As usual, Mark Steyn has the last word:

Whipple said investigators planned to present their report Wednesday to the county attorney, who will determine whether any charges should be filed against the woman's 36-year-old boyfriend.

The boyfriend? What about the bathroom? It's like when Spitzer broke up NY prostitution rings: They never go after the john.

Is a groan really necessary?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:05 AM

The Democrats' Future, And Past

Kimberly Strassell writes about how a fawning media enabled Eliot Spitzer:

...from the start, the press corps acted as an adjunct of Spitzer power, rather than a skeptic of it. Many journalists get into this business because they want to see wrongs righted. Mr. Spitzer portrayed himself as the moral avenger. He was the slayer of the big guy, the fat cat, the Wall Street titan -- all allegedly on behalf of the little guy. The press ate it up, and came back for more.

Time magazine bestowed upon Mr. Spitzer the title "Crusader of the Year," and likened him to Moses. Fortune dubbed him the "Enforcer." A fawning article in the Atlantic Monthly in 2004 explained he was "a rock star," and "the Democratic Party's future." In an uncritical 2006 biography, then Washington Post reporter Brooke Masters compared the attorney general to no less than Teddy Roosevelt.

...What makes this history all the more unfortunate is that the warning signs about Mr. Spitzer were many and manifest. In the final days of Mr. Spitzer's run for attorney general in 1998, the news broke that he'd twisted campaign-finance laws so that his father could fund his unsuccessful 1994 run. Mr. Spitzer won anyway, and the story was largely forgotten.

New York Stock Exchange caretaker CEO John Reed suggested Mr. Spitzer hadn't told the truth when he said that it was Mr. Reed who wanted him to investigate Mr. Grasso's pay. The press never investigated.

Actually, I think they were right. Eliot Spitzer does represent the party's future. Which is to say, that it is facing a massive meltdown resulting from its own internal contradictions and self-righteous coddling of corruption.

I have to be amused at the charges being flung in the presidential race between the two identity-politics-based campaigns of Obama and Clinton. Her people say that Obama's campaign is behaving "like Ken Starr." His people say that they're using "Republican" tactics. All of this projection is hilarious, since it is the Clintons who refined the "politics of personal destruction" to a high art, particularly when it came to destroying anyone with the temerity to tell the truth about them.

Poor Gerry Ferraro is now being pilloried for stating an obvious truth--that Barack Obama wouldn't have a prayer of almost having the Democrat nomination sewed up if his skin had a lower melanin content. I listened to her this morning, having to defend herself against accusations of racism. The delicious irony, of course, is not that they're "acting like Republicans." No, what's really happening is that they're behaving toward each other the way Democrats and the left have always behaved toward Republicans--accusing them of "hate" when they simply want people to obey the law, accusing them of "racism" when they want the law to be color blind, accusing them of "fascism" if they oppose the latest "liberal" fascist project.

And funny thing, they don't seem to like this kind of treatment any more than Republicans have enjoyed it when they've been on the receiving end for decades. But I doubt that they'll take any lessons from it. I expect them to continue to engage in it, and I hope that it shreds the party, and causes it to finally implode from its own toxic politics, just as Eliot Spitzer has.

But in another way, Spitzer also represents, or is on a continuum with, the party's past.

There was another Democrat politician, who was vaulted to power by an adoring press that ignored (and even helped cover up) his negative aspects. He was another politician who was all in favor of laws that would help "the little guy (or gal)," but apparently didn't think that they should apply to him. He signed a bill with his own pen, to much applause at the time from the so-called feminists, that made sexual harassment (which was broadly defined to include any sexual activity between a boss and subordinate, even consensual, particularly when the power was greatly disparate) a federal affair, subject to federal civil law suits. Beyond signing the law, he was the person who had taken an oath of office to defend the Constitution, and see that the laws of the land were faithfully executed.

Yet, when sued under that same law by a state employee for an incident that occurred when he was a governor--having a state policeman escort her to his hotel room, where he allegedly demanded oral sexual services from her--he brazenly declared that the law didn't apply to him. Fortunately, the Supreme Court ruled otherwise.

And when the law suit progressed, he not only lied under oath, but suborned perjury from others, both through bribes, and through threats, both direct and relayed through others, to prevent her from getting a fair hearing in court. It came out that he had not only engaged in the incident for which he was being sued, but had also indulged in sexual activity with another extreme subordinate, on company time at the work place, and (as the most powerful man in the world) exposed himself to potential blackmail through this reckless behavior.

And all throughout, much of the press defended him, and stenographed the spin and lies, and attacks, of his defenders. A woman who was one of those who had had her family threatened if she didn't perjure herself, but who despite that told the truth in the affair was vilified, and called a liar, and mocked for her morality and even for her physical appearance. And in the end, with the aid of the media, after all the mendacity, after all the hypocrisy, after all the continued arrogance, the man survived politically, and even maintained a positive approval among many in the public.

And Eliot Spitzer no doubt observed all of this, and took what he thought to be a valuable lesson from it. Why in the world wouldn't he have thought that he could do exactly do the same thing and get away with it? After all, the press loved him, too.

This morning, as he is about to announce his resignation, he's got to be wondering, how did this happen to him? What did he do wrong?

[Update early afternoon]

Well, there are a few attempts to defend him from the left. They're pretty lame, though. But then, so were the defenses of Bill Clinton, so maybe hope springs eternal.

[Evening update]

As a commenter notes, I was mistaken above about Bill Clinton signing the law that expanded sexual harassment law suit discovery procedures (how did that myth start?--I've believed it for years. No doubt some of the detritus from the hyperbole of impeachment years).

President George Herbert Walker Bush caved and did it the year before Clinton's election, as a result of bullying in the wake of the Clarence Thomas imbroglio. But there's no reason to think that Clinton wouldn't have signed it, and Bill Clinton was just as obliged to obey laws signed by his predecessors as he was to obey those he signed himself. Despite his ongoing narcissism, arrogance, and corruption, he was not a king.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:47 AM

Battle Of The Featherweights

Here's a comparison of the ASUS Eee and the Everex Cloudbook.

I'm not really in the market for either of them--I can live with my full-service laptop for now. I don't tend to be an early adopter, and will wait until they get more function and lighter still. But it looks to me like the Eee would definitely have the edge for me if I was going to get one.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 AM

Molecular Computing

Alan Boyle reports on what appears to be a breakthrough in molecular machinery. Bring it on, at least as far as the medical applications go.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 AM

March 11, 2008
Just A Delayed Reaction?

Yesterday, I speculated that Spitzer's downfall would cheer up Wall Street. Well, I guess they finally decided to party today. Of course, that potentially inflationary gusher of liquidity today probably didn't hurt, either.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:08 PM

Heading Back South

Which in Florida, really means that I'm heading north, culturally. I'll be back down in Boca from Orlando this afternoon, God willing and if the creek (in this case, the St. Johns River) don't rise.

Though I'm not a believer in God.

And actually (did you know this?) the expression isn't referring to a trickling and burbling body of water, temporarily making its glass more than half full but, rather, an Indian tribe that was given to the occasional uprising, with a tendency to hinder travel, either temporarily or permanently. So I guess the word should have been capitalized. But that would have given away the game.

Or is it really just about flooding? Who knows? What would we do without the Intertubes?

Anyway, enough philosophy for now. See y'all later (I can still say that while I'm up south).

[Afternoon update]

Back in Boca, but busy (he alliterated).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:30 AM

Why Is Earth Here?

Lileks seems to be a co-religionist with me:

You know, every so often I run across comments on message boards from the "12 Monkeys" demographic, the people who wish people would just disappear and leave the earth alone. If the Aftermath show has any message, it's how useless the world would be without people. Without humans it's just hunting and rutting, birthing and dying, a clock with no chimes. It's always interesting how people romanticize Nature, and ascribe all manner of purpose and intelligence to it, lamenting the injuries people wreak on the innocent globe. I'd love to read an interview with Gaia in which she says that her goal all along was to come up with a species that could produce Beethoven and make rockets to send the music deep into space. Now that's something to make the other planets sit up and take notice. You think the point is merely to provide a home for thirty billion varieties of insect? I can't tell you how much they itch. Sorry about the earthquakes, but it's the only way I can scratch.

I do believe in a teleology, and this belief is not scientific at all.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:06 AM

March 10, 2008
Night Launch

Don't know how many more night launches there will be for the Shuttle, I've never seen one up close, it's 90% go weather wise for the flight tonight, and everything else seems on track, so we're going to drive up and stay in Orlando tonight. Blogging may be light until the morrow, when I'll be coming back down (Patricia has business up there).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:08 PM

Am I Happy That Spitzer Is Resigning?

Indeed I am. That's great, great news. And that he goes down in such flames of hypocrisy is all the more delicious. The Greeks had another H-word for this, ending in "ubris."

And when he does, New York gets its first black governor. I wonder if he'd be able to win reelection? We may find out.

And you'd think that Wall Street (which hated him, with good reason) would be celebrating, but the Dow is down. I guess that higher oil prices overrode any "Ding Dong, the witch is dead" feelings.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:50 PM

Beware The Experts

Michael Totten has a report from an interesting area of Iraq, with some cautionary words:

Be wary of any "expert" who says they know what's going on everywhere in Iraq. It's impossible to have both a general and a granular understanding of that country in real time. You can know one area well, or you can know several areas superficially, but you cannot have an intimate understanding of the entire country while it's in upheaval and flux. It doesn't matter how many times you've been there or how how many articles and languages you read.

One of the reasons I don't pay much attention to the trolls in the comments section.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:11 AM

Some Progressive Thoughts On Immigration

Over at Jonah's place:

"We must know our IMMIGRANT's pedigrees. They are flooding our shores with actual and potential Insanity, Imbecility, Pauperism, Prostitution, Alcoholism and Crime"
"When the low immigrant is giving us three babes while the Daughter of the Revolution is giving us one it means the Gibson and Harrison Fisher Girl is vanishing. Her place is being taken by the low-browed, broad-faced, flat-chested woman of lower Europe. "

This guy must have known different European women than I do.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:41 AM

Everything You Know Is Wrong

...about greenhouse theory?

Miskolczi's story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution -- originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today -- ignored boundary conditions by assuming an "infinitely thick" atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.

So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.

And why is there resistance to his theory? Follow the money:

NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. "Money", he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.

Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, "Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results."

It's always amusing, and frustrating, to hear people who attack skeptics ad hominem because they're on the take from Big Oil or Big Coal, when places like the Competitive Enterprise Institute actually get very little of their funding from such sources. But climate researchers are always portrayed as objective, noble and selfless, unswayed by the need to maintain their grant funding stream from Big Climate Change. All I know is that I wish I was getting paid as much to be a skeptic as some apparently think I must be. Or getting paid at all, for that matter. But so far, not a single check has shown up in the mail from Exxon-Mobil or Peabody. It's also an interesting story, in light of Hansen's complaints that he was "muzzled" by the administration, all while he was going around giving speeches evangelizing to the faithful.

I also found this criticism underwhelming.

Dr. Stephen Garner, with the NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), says such negative feedback effects are "not very plausible". Reto Ruedy of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies says greenhouse theory is "200 year old science" and doubts the possibility of dramatic changes to the basic theory.

Yes, can't be overturning two-hundred-year-old theories. That would be completely unprecedented in science.

[Update in the afternoon]

This cautionary essay about science journalism seems to be relevant: beware the underdog narrative.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:14 AM

Hang Together, Or Hang Separately

Paul Eckart, of the Boeing Corporation, writes about the benefits of cooperation in entrepreneurial space. Paul has been dong a great job of bringing investors and entrepreneurs together for the past few years, and it's great that Boeing is supporting this activity.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AM

The Solar Singularity?

Arnold Kling has some thoughts on our near-term (in the next couple decades) energy future.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:02 AM

Guitar Heros

Michael Yon has a long but interesting post about helicopter combat in Iraq:

Sometimes I sit up on a hill and watch them in the air. The other day two Kiowas were screaming low right over the rooftops and doing hard turns. I couldn't see the combat because they were too far away, but I knew they were toe to toe and there was plenty of shooting going on or they wouldn't have been flying so violently. It's scary watching them because I've met them and know they are mortals doing the work of immortals. At any second there could be a fireball. A "fallen angel." I remember the call over the radio last year of a "fallen angel" down by Baghdad. All aboard had been lost.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:00 AM

Back To Blogging

Virginia Postrel had successful surgery, and is posting again, including one on John McCain, non-conservative:

McCain is an instinctive regulator who considers business a base pursuit. It doesn't help that the senator's personal connections with commerce are largely limited to a highly protected local industry (distributing beer) and outright corruption (the Charles Keating scandal). And he's every bit as moralistic as Hillary Clinton, our would-be national nanny. His first response to something he doesn't like--particularly something commercial he doesn't like--is to ban it.

This year's presidential options are the most depressing in my memory (and that's saying something).

Anyway, here's to a continued full recovery.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:34 AM

March 09, 2008
More Marburger Thoughts

From Jon Goff (related to my previous post). I thought that this is a very key point, that demonstrates the absurdity of Mike's (or at least, people like Mark Whittington's) thinking:

There's been talk from NASA and some of their less discerning fanboys of a "Lunar COTS". Basically the idea is to waste $100-120B on using Constellation to setup a small ISS on the Moon, and then once its there start paying commercial entities to service said base. This creates an interesting situation. Since NASA won't have done anything for over a decade to help make it easier for commercial entities to actually service the moon, they'll either have to keep sustaining the base themselves while they spend the money to belatedly help develop that commercial capability. Or, if the commercial market has independently created that capability anyhow, that NASA base will likely be only a small niche market in the cislunar space.

Yes, there's a huge logical disconnect here. Either NASA will have developed technology that makes it easy for the commercial folks to access the moon (which they currently are not) or they are counting on the commercial folks to have done that on their own, in which case, that means that there's already a thriving lunar market, of which NASA will be a trivial part, because otherwise, it won't have happened commercially. NASA's current high-cost, low-activity plans really do have the effect of ensuring the worst of all worlds for them, and us.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:04 PM

A Pet Rock

Is that what Obama is?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:21 AM

Blackbird Memories

From a former pilot.

...the plane was dripping, much like the misshapen model had assembled in my youth. Fuel was seeping through the joints, raining down on the hangar floor. At Mach 3, the plane would expand several inches because of the severe temperature, which could heat the leading edge of the wing to 1,100 degrees. To prevent cracking, expansion joints had been built into the plane. Sealant resembling rubber glue covered the seams, but when the plane was subsonic, fuel would leak through the joints.

One of the sayings of the program was that if the plane wasn't dripping, don't bother to get in--someone forgot to fuel it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AM

Rewriting History

Is it possible that Hillary! is being less than truthful about her and Rwanda?

I think it's a lot more likely that she either didn't advocate action on Rwanda at all, or did so only in passing. If so, this would have to be the definitive example of her attempt to claim responsibility for everything good that happened during her husband's presidency, while disavowing all responsibility for his mistakes. This was, in my opinion, the most shameful moment of the Clinton administration. It ought, by rights, to have a place in Hillary Clinton's "thirty five years of experience working for change." Or perhaps she might claim that she wasn't that interested in foreign policy at the time, or that for whatever reason she just didn't pick up on the genocide in Rwanda until it was too late to act. That would at least be honest.

But if, in fact, Clinton missed the chance to urge her husband to help stop the Rwandan genocide, then she should not pretend that she was, in fact, right there on the side of the angels all along. That's just grotesque.

In a related question, do bears defecate in the sylvan wilderness?

"Grotesque" doesn't start to describe the former First Couple.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:59 AM

March 08, 2008
First Poppy

With all the rain they've had in southern California this winter, I would expect the poppy season to be gorgeous up in Lancaster. This is a good harbinger of that:

Overlooking the first poppy at the reserve would have been easy. The stem was only a couple of inches high and wind gusts bent the young flower almost sideways. The flower was just off the exit road beyond the park's kiosk.

"I hope it's a sign of a good bloom that's coming," Scott said after she learned of the sighting.

Elgin said she hopes to pass on poppy updates to enthusiasts who phone the information center.

"I figure in the next couple of days there will be five or six more poppies show up, and each day a few more until the full bloom," Elgin said.

"There's indications we'll have a decent season, but I can't really predict one that will be exceptionally good because Mother Nature can turn right around and prove me wrong."

Elgin said the only thing predictable about poppies at the reserve is that they're unpredictable.

I'm going to Space Access in about three weeks, in Phoenix. When I was looking for tickets, it turned out to make a lot more sense to fly into LA, for schedule and ticket price, and I have other business there anyway, so I'm going to fly out, drive to Phoenix and back, and then fly back to Florida. But I'll probably be going up to Mojave, so I think I'll take a still and videocam with me, and make the little side trip in Lancaster to the preserve. And hope that it's both sunny and not windy (an intersection of conditions that's unfortunately rare that time of year), because that's the only time that the flowers are really open and in full bloom.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:15 PM

Disconnect

John Marburger, the president's science advisor, apparently gave an interesting speech the other day, which can be somewhat summarized by this statement:

"Exploration by a few is not the grandest achievement," he said. "Occupation by many is grander." (Although he added that by "occupation" he did not necessarily mean settlement but instead "routine access to resources".) His long-term vision for the future is "one in which exploration has long since ceased and our successors reap the benefits of the new territories."

As I noted in comments at Space Politics, this is the most visionary thing that I've ever known a president's science adviser to say, and the other notable thing is that he himself says explicitly (as well as implicitly in the above comment) that space isn't just about science. (As an aside, I've always thought that "Science Adviser" was too restrictive a title for that position--it's always been science and technology.)

As I also noted over there, it's unfortunate that NASA's current plans are so completely unattuned to that vision, being specifically designed for "exploration by a few" (and rarely) rather than "occupation by many." One wonders if he's ever complained to anyone about that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:04 PM

Busy

The next house project (not counting landscaping, which we may be hiring someone to do) is molding, both replacing base and installing crown. It was a nice excuse to go out and buy a nice Craftsman 10" compound dual-bevel laser miter saw, because Sears was having a sale. I thought about getting a 12 inch, because it wasn't that much more, but it took up more room, and the blades were a lot more (though with carbide, it might have been a one-time purchase, given my low usage level). And I couldn't really justify it--the ten-inch will do just fine for almost anything I need to do in terms of beveling or mitering. If I need to bevel bigger things, a table saw will do the job. I guess I'm not Tim the Tool Man, even though I am from southeast Michigan.

I continue to be amazed at how low cost good tools have become--particularly tools (and power tools) that didn't even exist when I was a kid. I suspect that this isn't factored into inflation much, but it really does add to the national wealth when people can improve their productivity at little cost. In California in the nineties, I did some base molding with nothing but a circular saw, but it was a pain in the ass, and I'm sure that this will do a much better job. Anyway, if blogging seems light, that will be one of the reasons.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:50 PM

What Were They Thinking?

I mean, anyone could have predicted this: John Denver Karaoke Sparks Thai Killing Spree.

But I have to admit, I would have guessed "Thank God I'm A Country Boy" would have been the tune to send him over the edge. Oh, the humanity.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:39 PM

Why Do They Hate Us?

Apparently, that's what Ahmadinejad should be asking about the Iraqis:

Weeks of hard work by Iranian emissaries and pro-Iran elements in Iraq were supposed to ensure massive crowds thronging the streets of Baghdad and throwing flowers on the path of the visiting Iranian leader. Instead, no more than a handful of Iraqis turned up for the occasion. The numbers were so low that the state-owned TV channels in Iran decided not to use the footage at all.

Instead, much larger crowds gathered to protest Ahmadinejad's visit. In the Adhamiya district of Baghdad, several thousand poured into the streets with cries of "Iranian aggressor, go home!"

But, but... I thought that our foolish adventure in Iraq only created an Iranian puppet there?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:20 AM

March 07, 2008
All Mars, All The Time

Over at Phil Plait's place, where he's hosting this week's Carnival of Space.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:40 AM

The Problem With Health Insurance

It's not insurance.

Nothing new here to people familiar with the situation, but many don't seem to understand the problem. But this is the origin of it:

Health insurance started to change, though, during the Truman administration. (I hasten to mention that I wasn't actually there: I was born during the Eisenhower administration, when the process had only gotten started.) Truman wanted to implement the progressive new notion of a national health care plan, but couldn't get it through; at the same time, post-war wage controls were still on, so employers bidding for new workers had to find other ways to compete.

Through a sequence of compromises, what came out of it was a system in which companies and only companies could buy health insurance and health care for their employees, and deduct the cost as a business expense. My father's music store and the steel mill across town could buy health insurance, basically, at a discount. (My uncle the butcher couldn't; he wasn't a "business.")

Years pass. (Insert visual of wind-blown calendar leaves here.) Medical care becomes more complicated, legal conditions change, and a lot of things that used to be major medical issues that mostly affected the life insurance rates become things that could be cured, or at least managed. Increasingly, what was "major medical" insurance became, simply, health insurance; we expected the insurance companies not just to pay for unexpected events, but for the normal sort of day-to-day maintenance we all need.

People will pay to repair their car, or their pets, or appliances out of pocket, but somehow, over the past decades they've come to believe that it's a fundamental human right to have someone else pay for your doctor visits. Until we cut off this disastrous government policy of tying health insurance to employment, and allow everyone to deduct medical expenses on a level playing field, and get people to understand that we have to return to the model of health insurance the problem will not be solved.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:27 AM

Turning Up The Heat

I've been predicting for a while that this won't be another summer of love for the Democrats, but a lot more like Chicago, 1968. Apparently a lot of Obama supporters agree with me.

...if the Machine tries to give the Clintons the victory at the convention, I swear to God, [1968] Chicago's going to look like a Sadie Hawkins dance. People my age are going to be throwing stones. We all have transportation -- cell phones -- disposable income -- the Internet -- free time -- and Seattle as our example. Part of me is scared of a riot. Part of me isn't. The nomination belongs to Obama. Do you think we're going to let the Democratic Leadership Council take it? "God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time."

Between this kind of stuff, and the recruiting office bombing, this year is shaping up to give me a sixties nostalgia (and the King and Kennedy assassination fortieth anniversaries, both events that I remember clearly, are coming up soon).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:59 AM

Ares V Out Takes

One of the nice things about blogging is that, even for print journalists, it provides an outlet for information gathered that may be of interest, but for which there wasn't room in the publication. Here's a good example: interview notes from Rob Coppinger's discussion with Phil Sumrall on Ares V performance issues.

As noted, the vehicle has come a long way from the originally advertised "Shuttle-derived" system that was supposed to save us so much money and time, and utilize the existing Shuttle infrastructure (though the latter was always a politically-induced pork-driven bug, not a feature, if one wanted to actually lower launch costs). It (like Ares I) is now essentially a new vehicle, including components, though if Ares I ever comes to fruition, Ares V will probably be at least in part derived from it.

Of course, this part is what really has me grinding my teeth (and it's probably what I'll be talking about on Jon Goff's propellant depot panel at Space Access):

...once the EDS and Altair were in orbit there was a 95-day loiter in Earth orbit for the concept of operations. That was changed from 95-days when Griffin said it was not acceptable. Instead the new target date was four-days and this may also assume a launch of the Orion CEV prior to Ares V

Reasons for the four-day change are propellant boil off and electrical power requirements. For four-days fuel cells are sufficient and solar arrays not needed. Less than four-days and batteries could be used for EDS power. During Apollo they had 15% boil off over 3h so over several days Ares V would lose a lot of propellant. To stop boil off the choice is a passive system and "we have to eliminate heat leaks". The solution to boil off is seen as multi-layered insulation as they want to reduce the boil off losses to 1-2%, but MLI is very expensive in terms of money, not payload margin.

So, they're going to launch the Orion, with crew, on an Ares I, and hope that they can get a successful Ares V mission off within four days, because they can't afford the duration. They build this mondo grosso launch vehicle to avoid having to do multiple launches, and yet, they not only have dual launch, but it's one on a tight window. And if they can't get the launch off on time, the lunar mission is scrubbed, and the crew comes back home from LEO, having wasted the cost of an Ares I launch (and an Orion, if they end up not making it reusable).

This is an affordable, resilient, sustainable infrastructure?

All of these issues go away if you use orbital infrastructure. The propellants are brought up over a period of time, with a number of different vehicles, and vehicle types. The propellants are stored on orbit with a combination of passive and active thermal control systems, eliminating boil off completely. If MLI is expensive, that's OK, if you only have to manufacture/lift it once and then continually reuse it at the depot. If you have power at the depot, you don't have to worry about battery life at the vehicle (note: the next Shuttle mission will set a record for duration, because it doesn't have to rely on its fuel cells for power--it will draw power from the new solar arrays at the ISS while docked, allowing it to stay up for two weeks). And the same system will scale to a Mars mission (perhaps based in L1 instead), obviating the need to develop Ares XI.

Put the power/propellant/other-utilities infrastructure up once, and continually reuse it, instead of making each vehicle have to be a self-contained Winnebago, like the Shuttle. Even if the moon remains a wilderness, there is no longer any excuse for LEO to be so.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:16 AM

Faux Pas

Does anyone really buy this?

In her statement, Power said her comments "do not reflect my feelings about Sen. Clinton, whose leadership and public service I have long admired."

No, of course not. You don't really think she'll do anything necessary to attain power. You just said that for no reason at all.

Sometimes, to slightly paraphrase Freud, a cigar really is a cigar.

Of course, she's saying what non-Clinton-koolaid drinkers have been thinking for many years, but whose loyalty to their political party exceeds their loyalty to common decency.

I think that I'll just keep the corn a poppin.'

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:04 AM

The State Of Education In California

Lileks has some thoughts:

Of course, home-schooling Bolsheviks will have less reason to complain soon. "This bill would delete provisions that prohibit a teacher giving instruction in a school from teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or to inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism." Apparently the teacher's right to teach Communism trumps your right to school your kid yourself.

What a world. Sometimes, when I look at the educational system here--primary, secondary, college--I wonder if we really won the Cold War.

[Update mid morning]

Apparently the LA Times got the story wrong (What! Say it ain't so!) about not allowing unaccredited parents to home school, so the situation in California is not as dire as originally thought in regard to home schoolers.

Maybe it was just wishful thinking on the part of the Times' reporter and editor, since that paper has long been in the tank for the teachers' union.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:48 AM

March 06, 2008
The Chicago Way

Rick Moran explains.

The parallels with the Clintons in 1992 remain amazing:

We have people who have a record of corruption (almost by definition in the case of Obama, because it's not possible to come out of Chicago politics, particularly Democrat politics, without being corrupt). And the corruption involves (among other things) shady real-estate deals.
The couple both have law degrees.
The wife is loved by the left, and is problematic with the non-left.
The media swoons for them, and doesn't bother to ask any of the local journalists about their local past which, if they had, would have provided a rich vein of ore that would provide themselves and the nation a lot of info about what we were all in for if they were elected.

The difference, and problem (of course) for them is that there is no Ross Perot this year to suck off squishy Republican votes. Neither of the Dems' candidates have a prayer of winning this year, but I'll enjoy watching the fratricide, which will just make the landslide all the larger, and perhaps provide coattails for the Congress.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:14 PM

Exciting Afternoon

But no blogging, until now.

About 1 PM, a huge cell drifted north out of Broward County, and hit us with a major squall. There were gale-force winds, and lightning. One bolt struck seemingly next door (I know that there was no delay between flash and boom, and it was pretty damned loud), and then the power went out.

When the rain and wind let up enough to see, I looked out in the front yard, and saw a line drooping in front of the house. Its end was in the next-door neighbor's yard. Fortunately, it had fallen from the live side, so it wasn't hot.

I called Florida Power and Light to report the downed line. To add to the fun, there was a work crew across the street putting cement shingles up on to a roof, with a huge truck sticking out of the driveway, with other workers' trucks around, making it harder to get the power company's cherry pickers down the street.

It wasn't that big a deal--we're always prepared for a hurricane here--but it meant no work involving computers or the Internet, which pretty much, for me, means no work, other than making a few phone calls. Also a good opportunity to hang out in the neighbor's driveway, drinking cold brews, King-of-the-Hill style.

Anyway, power's back up, obviously, and I'm back on line. And back to work.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:07 PM

I Always Suspected It

I've always thought that Monster cables were a scam, and that the supposed quality improvement couldn't justify the ridiculously high prices, and that it was quite annoying that they've monopolized so much shelf space in the electronics stores. It's hard to get reasonably priced audio cables (though things are better at Home Depot). But really, I've always figured that most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Monster and lamp cord.

Well, it turns out that supposed audiophiles couldn't distinguish between Monster and coat hangers. But I suspect that the scam will continue, with salespeople continuing to push them. There are probably great margins for both the manufacturer and the retailers.

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AM

Back To The Drawing Board

Lileks:

I just remembered that I called the Bob Davis show this morning to talk about the new theory re: Moses and the Ten Commandments: dude was high. Apparently a professor somewhere has suggested that the entire experience was the result of a mushroom or some such ceremonial intoxicant. I called to say I didn't believe it, because if Moses was tripping we wouldn't have ten commandments. We would have three. The first would make sense, more or less; the second, written half an hour later, would command profound respect for lizards who sit on stones and look at you, because they're freaking incredible when you think about it, and the third would be gibberish. Never mind the problem of getting the tablets down the mountain - anyone who has experience of watching stoners try to assemble pizza money when the doorbell rings doubts that Moses could have hauled stone tablets all the way down.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:51 AM

March 05, 2008
"Steny Hoyer Didn't Get The Memo"

This is highlarious. I liked this comment:

And we wonder why democrats can't get a damn thing done.

Every answer they give to a question sounds like a 16 year-old kid standing in front of a clerk at a liquor store trying to remember the address and birthdate on his fake ID he just acquired from some smelly hippy from the wrong side of the tracks.

I hope to God (whatever that is to you) that someone writes a period piece on the democratic-controlled house and calls it "Lessons in Stupid - the Pelosi years."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:08 PM

Super Sizing

Elizabeth Karmel has some thoughts on barbecue:

Restaurateurs don't necessarily want you to eat the whole thing; they are giving us what we've asked for. Americans don't like restaurants that serve small portions. Whether they eat it all or should eat it all is another matter; consumers vote with their dollars and like it or not, American consumers love and buy big portions.

I've discussed this before, but the reason that restaurants serve so much food is related to the reason that the Space Shuttle (and space launch in general) cost so much. How's that for a topic segue? It always comes down to marginal cost.

The Space Shuttle is expensive per flight, because they have to support all of the overhead in Houston and the Cape, but fly very few times. But the marginal cost (the cost of flying the next Shuttle flight, given that you're already flying) is probably about a hundred fifty million or so (the cost of the expended hardware, basically, and specific crew training) which is much less than that average cost (typically well over half a billion). Same thing applies to the space station. Back in the nineties (before Freedom became ISS) they were trying to cut five billion dollars out of the projected thirty-billion dollar development budget. Joe Talbot, the man at Langley who was tasked with coming up with a plan to do so, told me (in an exasperated tone), "that's the cost of the hardware." In other words, they could cut out the hardware, and only spend twenty-five billion, and have no station at all. Or they could spend a little more money (thirty-five billion instead of thirty billion) and double its size. Being a government program, the budget cutters tend to make more of the former sorts of decisions than the latter ones.

It's different for a business, even though the economic issues are exactly the same, because they're driven by actual customers.

Even if a restaurant served you no food at all, if all you did was come in and take up table space and staff time for a certain period of time, they'd still have to charge you quite a bit, because much of the cost of a restaurant meal is overhead to cover costs of rent, utilities, staff salaries, etc. The cost of the food itself (unless it's a very high-end restaurant, where you're eating lobster, and filet, and larks-tongue bisque with a truffle reduction) isn't all that much. They could cut the portions in half, but they wouldn't be able to cut the price of the meal by half. Conversely (and this is what the market drives, as Elizabeth says), they can double the portions while adding very little to the price. That's the economics behind "super sizing" soft drinks and fries--you're simply adding a little sugar and spuds, which are very cheap, to the meal whose overhead has already been covered by the basic order.

And of course, I think that one of the (many) causes of the obesity epidemic in the country is the fact that as we've grown wealthier, we go out to eat a lot more. When the portions are large, you're going to have a tendency to eat it. A lot of us would be better off simply sharing a meal with our dinner companions, but the restaurants discourage this, for obvious reasons--they don't get enough to cover their overhead costs if everyone does it. When you're cooking for yourself, you not only have a better idea of the cost of the meal, because you're using food that you purchased, but it's also easier to quit eating and just put the leftovers in the fridge, rather than have to ask for a doggie bag and hope that you get it home soon enough.

Bottom line, if you really want to lose weight (and save money) don't eat out.

[Update]

There's a good point in comments:

I have these same problems cooking for myself. It's hard to buy things in quantities for one or two portions. You end up with three or four servings.... (Re: try to cook a real meal for one).

Yeah, that's another overhead problem. Unless you're making something fancy where individual items are being created (e.g., home-made ravioli) or labor intensive (peeling/deveining shrimp) it doesn't take much more effort to cook for two, or four, than for one. The basic overhead of meal preparation is the same. It takes me about half a minute to clean/cut a potato, so adding a couple more for a lot more mashed potatoes, all done in the same mixing bowl, is no big deal, and baking a chicken is baking a chicken, whether for one of four. This is one of the benefits of marriage (or at least cohabiting).

I cook dinner almost every night, but interestingly, I rarely cook breakfast, because it seems like a lot of work, (frying bacon, making coffee, sectioning grapefruit, hashing browns, frying eggs, making/buttering toast, most of which all has to come out about the same time) for not that great a meal. I would never do it just for myself, and with the two of us, I still generally reserve it for weekends.

Another good point, from the same comment:

...the combo of A and B has been sending me to fast food format restaurants. I can pay little and buy by the item (re: any portion size I want). If I only want one chicken taco... I can buy one chicken taco (probably for $1-$2)... If I want two or three, they can do that too...

I've been noticing that, too. I've never ordered a "meal" at a fast food place, because they don't have anything I want to drink (I don't do soft drinks, and don't like iced tea--in restaurants, if I don't have beer or wine, I drink water). I generally order a sandwich a la carte, and sometimes a small fry. But I've seen that Taco Bell has a lot of individual, reasonably priced items, and other places have "dollar menus" as well, so perhaps they're also trying to satisfy that end of the market. One of my favorites is Checker's (around here, anyway, also known as Rally's in some parts of the country), where they sell a double fish sandwich for a little over two bucks. There are enough customers that they can afford to sell them to those who want them without fully amortizing the overhead, or if they do, at low margin, and it expands their potential customer base.

One other point. It used to be that Mexican restaurants were one of the best ones to have for exactly this reasons. You could charge a low price for a meal with very cheap ingredients (corn meal, ground...meat, rice and beans), but still have great margins. A lot of them have started to get greedy lately, though. You used to be able to find a really cheap, decent hole-in-the-wall Mexican place, but it's getting harder and harder, at least in my experience. Of course, since moving to south Florida, I don't have as much variety to choose from as I did in LA.

[Update at 5:20 PM EST]

This is another good point from a commenter:

Cooking for one or two can be done, but it involves cooking for four and freezing for three.

Yup. I've made a big pan of lasagna for myself (used to do it a lot in college). Eat some, put some in the fridge, freeze the rest. And this was in the pre-microwave (at least for struggling students) days.

[6 PM update]

One other point, that I should have made in the original post. The things that get supersized (high-glycemic carbs) are not just the cheapest things to add to the meal, they're the worst things for us to eat, from the standpoint of weight gain, inducement of diabetes and increase in artery risk. And the things that we need more of (proteins) are relatively expensive. The basic economics of food (at least at the current state of technology) militates against a healthy diet. This is also one of the reasons that the "poor" in this country are both overweight and malnourished (scare quotes because "poor" is relative. No one in the US is truly poor, compared to much of the world).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:30 PM

Space Arms Control Speech

Would a ban on space weaponry be verifiable? It seems intuitively obvious to me that the answer is "no."

I think that this is a key point:

The President's Space Policy highlights our national and, indeed the global, dependence on space. The Chinese interception only underscored the vulnerability of these critical assets. Calling for arms control measures can often appear to be a desirable approach to such problems. Unfortunately, "feel good" arms control that constrains our ability to seek real remedies to the vulnerabilities that we face has the net result of harming rather than enhancing U.S. and international security and well-being.

I always trust hardware over paper and good intentions.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:56 AM