William Stern provides a little more context for Scorcese’s Gangs Of New York, and points out some critical factors that the director missed (not surprising, considering how ill informed he is about current affairs).
A fascinating read for those interested in American history, and particularly the history of the Irish in America. It’s obvious once pointed out, but I’d never before considered the origin of the term “paddy wagon.”
Italians are abandoning the Euro for the lira.
The EPA has concluded that smog is not beneficial.
The EPA has concluded that smog is not beneficial.
The EPA has concluded that smog is not beneficial.
E. J. Dionne has an unintentionally hilarious column today about how Joe Lieberman is just too saintly to be our President.
Oh, and Bush “has become a deeply polarizing figure, winning near-universal support within his own party while sowing deep resentment in the opposition.”
Right. Well, maybe it’s true, for the most die-hard Dem partisans. But they’re not going to win any elections running on a strategy of resentment.
I’m starting a new series of posts here, in which I interview people whom I consider to be at the leading edge of space entrepreneurial activity.
My first victim is Jeff Greason, a founder and head of XCOR Aerospace.
Jeff is a Caltech grad, and a former project manager at Intel. After several years of doing damned good amateur work on rocket engine analysis and design, he left Intel to work for Rotary Rocket, as head of their engine design group.
We all know the old epistemological condundrum about trees falling in forests.
I have a similar one about the DPRK’s nuclear weapons. Some in Washington have reason to believe that they already have them, and are firing up their nuclear plants to build more.
But nukes are kind of like missiles. They’re finicky devices, and there are several things that have to be gotten just right. Ultimately (unless you have a lot of experience, and access to extremely classified simulation codes), you’re not going to know whether or not they work unless you try them.
Recall that we did so at Trinity, and one of the reasons that we didn’t do an offshore demonstration for the Japanese was that we couldn’t be a hundred percent confident in the bomb working, and we only had a couple in the inventory, and it would have taken a while to build up the fuel supply to build more. If we’d told the Japanese that we were going to show them how it worked, and it didn’t, it would have damaged our credibility. With the actual bombing, if it hadn’t worked, no one would have been the wiser–the airplane would have just turned around and flown home, and anyone who saw it would have just assumed that it had gotten lost.
The North Koreans are in the same boat, if they’ve built a weapon or two. They can’t know for sure that it will work. They’ve done missile tests, but if they’d tested a nuke, even underground, we would have noticed. They simply lack the sophistication to do an undetected test (difficult even for us).
So while they may have a couple of devices that, in (someone’s) theory, will create a nuclear explosion, I’m not sure that it’s quite right to say that they have nuclear weapons. As the saying goes, in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they’re different.
By the way, I suspect that the Israelis probably do have confidence in their weapons, even if they haven’t actually tested one, because they probably are capable of reliably simulating them. And it remains possible that the flash that the Vela satellite picked up back in 1979 was an Israeli test.
I’m not sure what the policy implications of this are with respect to North Korea, but it adds at least one more column to the game-theory payoff matrix.
Where is PETA? Why haven’t they protested this?
That’s what I hope that this story, saying that the removal of Saddam may be delayed, is. Either that, or disinformation from the Administration to keep Saddam guessing.
Of course, there’s no reason that it couldn’t be both.