All posts by Rand Simberg

Anniversary

The Branch Davidians were incinerated eleven years ago today, and nine years ago, the Murrah Federal Building was bombed in Oklahoma City. We still don’t know everyone who was involved. In light of that this should stir things up a little.

[Update on Tuesday morning]

Clayton Cramer has more disturbing details from the trial.

How much else did the prosecution suppress in their effort to keep this case neat and tidy?

Good question.

[Another update, a little later]

As Jon Goff points out, there are some things to celebrate on this date as well–the beginning of the first American revolution.

A reminder of an event that makes Michael Moore all the more odious.

A War For Oil

By Jacques Chirac. I’m chiraced, just…errr…shocked.

…Chirac was defending something quite different when he sent his erstwhile foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, around the world to buy votes against America at the United Nations. Chirac was determined to maintain Saddam Hussein in power so that two extraordinarily lucrative oil contracts, negotiated by the French, could go into effect…

…during the first seven years alone, it would earn the French around $50 billion. Elf-Aquitaine negotiated a virtually identical deal with Saddam to expand the gigantic Majnoon oil field as well. Put together, those two deals were worth $100 billion to the French. That

Fear Of Flying

Leonard David (who I hope I’ll see at next week’s Space Access Conference) has an interesting article today on the prospects for returning Shuttle to flight, and the potential consequences, political and otherwise, of delaying or failing to do so.

There’s a fear expressed in the article that a NASA that’s afraid to risk a Shuttle launch isn’t a NASA that can accept the risk of sending people back to the moon, let alone Mars.

I think that’s right. The first step toward a bold new space program is defeminizing our space policy. And while Dwayne says that his intent was to point out the feminine language of the rhetoric of our policy, I do think that this irrational risk aversion is in fact a feminization of the policy itself.

I’m with Jack Schmitt. My position is that we should quickly decide whether or not we’re going to continue the program. If we are, then start flying now, so people don’t forget how to fly it, and we don’t wear it out in the hangar. Stop wasting all these hundreds of millions of dollars and all this time developing improvements for something that we’re only going to fly another couple dozen times and are probably just political bandaids anyway, and just get on with it, while putting into place a plan to develop alternative capabilities as soon as possible. Tell the nation to recognize that the vehicle has risks, to expect to lose another one, and to suck it up and stop crying about dead astronauts who, now more than ever, accept the risk with eyes open, just as do our troops in Iraq. Fly them until we either finish station (and fix Hubble), or lose two, at which point the remaining one goes to Dulles.

If we can’t do that, then just shut the thing down now, so we can take the billions that it costs to keep the standing army sitting around and apply them to something useful. As it is now, we have the worst of all worlds, with wasted money and time, and continuing uncertainty as to whether or not we’ll get any value out of the wasted money and time. Let’s just do it or get off the pot.

More Than Skin Deep

Here’s some research that confirms my own empirical experience–that people become more (or less) physically attractive to you the better you get to know them, depending on other aspects. I’ve noticed that women to whom I woudn’t necessarily have given a second glance upon first exposure become quite physically appealing over time and repeated exposure, if they have other desirable characteristics–they “grow on you,” as the old expression goes (for me, intelligence is a key enhancer).

This is probably a useful evolutionary trait, assuming that monogamy is a useful evolutionary trait.