There’s a nice profile of Tim Pickens over at Air & Space. It includes some good X-Prize history, including the ongoing dispute over who built the engine for SpaceShipOne.
All posts by Rand Simberg
How’s Mike Doing?
A lot of great discussion on Griffin and ESAS over at Space Politics. Consensus is that he and it are a disaster in the making, with the only defender of this ongoing slow-motion train wreck being Mark Whittington, who doesn’t even seem to be aware of the difference between ESAS and VSE. From “anonymous” (who unlike many of the anonymouses here, is the opposite of a moron):
How’s Mike Doing?
A lot of great discussion on Griffin and ESAS over at Space Politics. Consensus is that he and it are a disaster in the making, with the only defender of this ongoing slow-motion train wreck being Mark Whittington, who doesn’t even seem to be aware of the difference between ESAS and VSE. From “anonymous” (who unlike many of the anonymouses here, is the opposite of a moron):
How’s Mike Doing?
A lot of great discussion on Griffin and ESAS over at Space Politics. Consensus is that he and it are a disaster in the making, with the only defender of this ongoing slow-motion train wreck being Mark Whittington, who doesn’t even seem to be aware of the difference between ESAS and VSE. From “anonymous” (who unlike many of the anonymouses here, is the opposite of a moron):
An Early Warning System
…for pandemics.
What’s News?
And what isn’t news?
What’s News?
And what isn’t news?
What’s News?
And what isn’t news?
Oler Update
I’ve had enough. More than half the comments on this post were from Oler, and they were generally nonsense, and generated a lot more unnecessary posts to respond to him. When I compared it to this post, in which he didn’t participate, and there was a reasoned and intelligent discussion, I just wondered, “why”? I can’t help but think that the correlation is meaningful.
The signal/noise ratio from him being zero, to first order, I’ve banned him from this blog. I, and my readers just have better things to do with our lives than to respond to his fantasies.
Wow
I decided to pull this up into a separate post, because I think it illustrates exactly the problem that Frank Tipler was identifying. Two comments:
“I’ll add that General Relativity is sort of a “dead end” in physics in the sense that practically nothing depends on it. You can’t really use it for anything.
and
Rand, I think you just cited the exception that proves the rule when you referenced GPS. Where else do you use general relativity on a regular basis? It’s an interesting topic, but doesn’t seem to be core to a physics degree.
Well, I provided at least one more example–tracking NEOs that might hit us in the next few decades.
But the point is that if you don’t understand general relativity, you won’t even know whether or not you need to consider it. I’m simply staggered by the notion that it’s an esoteric field that has no use.
Any time you do an orbital calculation, you have to know whether or not you can get by with Newton, or whether or not you need to incorporate Einstein. It may be that in many cases you don’t need to, but to not even consider it would be professional malpractice, just as someone doing a suborbital rocket would need to decide whether a flat-earth (i.e, Galileo) model was good enough, or if they had to do it Newtonian, and consider the differences in the model. And how could you possibly make such an assessment if you don’t understand General Relativity?
To me, this simply reinforces Tipler’s point.