I’ve always thought it’d be cool if we had giant turbines powered simply by brawn, sort of like that mill-thingy that made Conan so strong in the first Conan movie. I’m not talking slave labor, but if we could work out the technological kinks we could hire people at minimum wage to push a giant wheel around and around generating electricity much the same way dams do. Teenagers who couldn’t find other work could do it. They’d get in shape, stay out of trouble, and earn a few bucks. Unemployed people would always have at least one fall back job available to them. It would help with health care costs as it would provide ample exercise. There would be no damage to the environment and pretty much the only foot print would be, well, footprints. People who worked nights or in bad weather would be paid a bit extra. PIRG hippy volunteers could do it too, in their spare time. Every human turbine spin is one less gallon of oil pumped from the ground.
Though, as he notes in the preamble graf, he’s not sure about the economics of it. I can assure him that it’s nuts.
But it reminds me of an idea I and some colleagues at Rockwell had back in the eighties about how to get the public more involved in space. Since one can view the space program as the modern-day equivalent of a cathedral, or building pyramids, why not get the masses into the act? Instead of using those big diesel engines on the Crawler at the Cape, why not harness human muscle power? We could have hundreds of people–volunteers–pulling on ropes, hauling the giant vehicle down the causeway. I think that it would be quite symbolic of…something.
So, China is going to wait another two and a half years before their next, and third human spaceflight. That makes it one flight every two and a half years. And we’re supposed to be worried about them denying us the moon?
This decline in death rates was so big it offset the increase in population, so the number of total deaths actually dropped by about 50,000 to 2,398,343 in 2004 from 2,448,288 recorded for 2003. Declines are rare — the last one was in 1997 — and this one was huge — the biggest decline in 6 decades.
Would it just be easier to drive a hybrid instead of having all this killing? No, it wouldn’t, because hybrids are gay. If our military can’t keep us from being forced to drive gay little cars, then what exactly are all these gasoline taxes going towards? You better not tell me poor people, because I did not get an SUV to help the poor. It should be obvious that our military must be deployed with the sole purpose of stealing all the oil worth getting our hands on. It is a risk of lives, but I risk lives everyday I drive my SUV anyway.
Clark Lindsey has updated his Space Access Conference page with his reports from this past weekend. For those interested, this also has his reports from past years.
Saying that there are no stupid questions devalues the process of inquiry. Questions are the engines that power the growth of knowledge, and we cannot rely solely on a random interrogatory process. Although unstructured strategies such as brainstorming and free association have their uses, we need to balance them with a disciplined approach to questioning. Students must learn to expand on initial answers as they ask new questions.
I think that this subject relates to this one, at least remotely.