My Fox News column is up, and as I promised, it’s the solar sail story. But I just noticed that I wrote:

Imagine that the sail is at an angle with respect to the sun. Some of the thrust is directed radially along its orbit…

Rather than “radially” it should have been “tangentially.”

That post has been up there with that error for days. I thought you guys are supposed to be fact checking my ass! Falling down on the job again, eh?

[Update at 11:54 AM PDT]

The Fox News folks have fixed it. Down the memory hole…

Mark Steyn explains the difference between Americans and, well, pretty much the rest of the world.

Everyone’s playing Monday morning quarterback about the failure to pick up on the Osama hijacking threat prior to September 11. For me, there are two points here.

First, I don’t blame Bush for the failure to prevent it, for reasons that I’ll go into in a minute. I do blame Bush for failure to really address the incompetence afterward, and in fact to augment it, with Tom Ridge, and Norm Mineta. I continue to be frustrated with the lack of willingness to confront the issue that there was then, and continues to be now, massive incompetence and bureaucratic turf tending that is going to make it less likely that we will prevent future attacks. I am furious that George Tenet still has his job, that Mineta still has his, that no one has yet been held to account, and there’s no seeming willingness to see that anyone is.

My blood boils when I continue to hear nonsense about how this simply proves that we need bigger government, and bigger budgets, instead of the reality, which is that we instead need smaller government, more focused on our security, and less so on transferring wealth from the top down, and indulging the American people in their desire to make someone else responsible for their own lives, and protecting them from their own behavior.

Was this even avoidable? In theory, yes. I wasn’t really surprised when it happened. When the first plane hit, I was wondering if it was deliberate, and if so, how it could be pulled off. I ran through the possibilities in my mind, and the only one that made sense was a hijacking. When the second plane hit, the thought jelled–clearly that was what happened. Was it unthinkable? Not to me. The WTC had already been targeted by these nutballs. We had already seen a plane taken down by a suicidal pilot (in the Egypt Air case). So why not?

But in practice, it probably couldn’t have been prevented, even had the dots been properly connected. We were simply culturally unable to deal with it until we had the bucket of ice water splashed in our collective face last September.

I agree with “E. Nough”s comments over at Charles Johnson’s site:

…assume that the FBI had information on the exact date, time, flight number, and descriptions of suspects. So they raid all the planes, and arrest the 19 dirtbags.

…And then what? Not much, I imagine. Oh, CAIR and its ilk would be having a fit, of course, complaining to everyone, including George W., about profiling and unfair targeting of Arab-Americans. After all, just what did the FBI find? Some box cutters? Those aren’t illegal on airplanes. Flight manuals? These men were all attending accredited flight schools, trying to achieve the American dream, etc. etc. So they had one-way tickets: is that a crime? Funeral shrouds? Are you honestly arresting these men for bringing white sheets onto a plane? Korans? So because these men are pious Muslims, you dare to assume…! And really, folks, come on: flying a Boeing into a skyscraper? You’ve been watching too many movies! Who would come up with something this complicated, when a truck bomb in a garage would do just as well?

And so on and so on. I’m sure at least half these men would have been released within a couple of days. Profiling would be discussed at length on CNN and PBS. Several specials would be made, with weeping, hijab-wearing photogenic young women, describing in perfect Midwestern English the ordeal of being singled out by airport security. American Airlines would issue an apology, and make a contribution to the Arab-American Anti-Defamation Society, with a promise of more “outreach efforts.” Norman Mineta would be outraged! and put in all sorts of new restrictions designed specifically to avoid giving extra scrutiny to “people of Middle Eastern appearance.” (hey! wait a second!) George W. would go on the record saying that “pro-filling” is “discriminatational” and against everything he holds dear. Clinton would tell a story of his Lebanese-American great-uncle who was once denied entry into the White House. Al Gore would talk about his years of service under Lawrence of Arabia. Pretty soon, the whole thing would be forgotten as another embarrasing example of the Latent Racism in American Society.

Until one day, another group of men board an airliner…

So, given the national mindset in place at the time, and (unfortunately, based on the continuing idiocies coming from the FAA and Ridge about guns in the cockpit and the random searches, and elimination of first-class security lines) perhaps to some degree today, it would have been tough. One thing that might have been effective, though, was the one thing that was effective that day–to change our attitude and policy toward hijacking. Flight 93 was operating under the new paradigm–the three flights before it under the old. And if Flight 93 had known even sooner, they might have been able to save the plane, and prevent the hijackers from getting into the cockpit in the first place.

I agree with Kathy Kinsley.

If there had been a public education campaign in place last summer, warning that, despite the best efforts of airport security, it wasn’t perfect, and that there might be hijackings, and that cooperation with the hijackers would result in the deaths of not only the passengers, but countless more on the ground, what happened on September 11 might have been prevented.

It’s a human trait to be fascinated with disaster. That’s much of the (secret) appeal of auto races and air shows.

For those ghouls who go to them with a secret hope of seeing a crash (you know who you are…), a friend passed on this sequence of the fatal crash at the Point Mugu Air Show last month.

I’m having trouble deciding what to do for my Fox News column tomorrow. I actually wrote the “Counting the Swimmers” post with the intent of running it, but it would make two NASA/SLI-bashing columns in a row, and I don’t want to sound like I’m in a rut, and all I can do is bitch and moan about NASA. I’m thinking of maybe running the solar sail piece instead, particularly since Layne liked it enough to link to it.

What do y’all think?

Over at Andrew Sullivan’s book club, where they’re discussing Lomborg’s book, one of the letter writers wrote the following:

I was preempted by at least two persons in what seems to be the key point of skepticism about the current global warming discourse, the extreme hubris involved in trying to forecast the long-term temperature of the earth based on primitive computer models, when we can’t even forecast local weather with any certainty…

I’ve heard Rush Limbaugh make this argument as well–how can we predict long-term climate when we can’t even forecast tomorrow’s showers?

While I’m a global warming skeptic myself, and it’s a seductive argument, it’s wrong. I believe that the reason that we can’t make long-term predictions about climate is because of the chaotic, non-linear nature and complexity of the phenomenon, but the ability to make long-term predictions is actually unrelated to our ability to make short-term ones.

To understand why (or at least to see another example of the two being unrelated), consider another similar phenomenon–the stock market. Most financial advisors will tell you to put your money into stocks, because over the long haul, they’re going to go up. And if you look at the sweep of finance history, such advice would have been borne out. But that doesn’t mean that they can predict what the market will do next week, or even tomorrow (if they could, they wouldn’t have to make a living providing advice…)

How can they make a long-term prediction when they can’t make a short-term one? Because the long-term one is not based on the short term–it is not a series of predictions adding up to a long one. While a broad trend can have a reasonable probability assigned to it from fundamental underlying causes, the various ups and downs as it gets there are subject to different, unforeseeable forces. There is “noise” in the pattern of climate, or markets, and this noise is what we experience as unexpected weather, or daily fluctuations in stock prices. And while we can extrapolate current data to derive a predicted signal, we can never predict noise with any reliability, by definition.

NASA is scrounging parts for the Shuttle on E-bay.

That is a consequence of our nation’s fundamentally-flawed space policy for the past thirty years. And there is nothing in the current plans that will change it.

NASA has trouble finding spares for the Shuttle for the same reason that Shuttle is so expensive to operate–because they just barely use it.

Boeing maintains a healthy array of subcontractors to support their aircraft fleet because they sell many hundreds of them, and their customers fly them many thousands of times per year. NASA flies four Orbiters a half dozen times a year (total, not per vehicle)–in a good year.

In order to keep their subcontractors alive to build parts that are either unique to the Space Shuttle, or are obsolete, but still used on the Space Shuttle (like 8086 computer processors used in the original IBM PC in 1981), it would cost NASA many more millions of dollars per year beyond the emperor’s ransom that they are already spending, and the cost per 8086 chip would be hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars per processor. Given their situation and minimal activity, it makes sense to simply find the parts used on the Internet, buy them at the bid price, and keep the system limping along.

And based on their ostensible plans for the “Shuttle replacement” from the Space Launch Initiative program, the future will be no better.

The requirements (as estimated under contract to NASA) for “the new launch system” (note that it’s singular, not plural, just as the disastrous Shuttle decision was) seem to be based on (as usual) the existing market, with linear projections. They basically describe the current geostationary communications satellite market, linearly extrapolated out many years. There has been no other market data put forth (at least publically, as would be expected of a civilian government agency) as guidance to NASA’s notion of the future need for launch vehicles.

The implications of this are that the new launch vehicle (singular) must be capable of delivering twenty thousand+ pounds to geostationary orbit, which means at least twice that to low earth orbit, to account for the stage and propellant to deliver it the rest of the way (i.e., it must have performance similar to the Shuttle).

In addition, since there is no market other than this and the space station market (a few Shuttle-class flights a year), and there is a limit to the GEO market due to bandwidth and slot limitations, the market for a new vehicle is…the market for the existing Shuttle, with a few more flights for the commercial launches that it must steal from the commercial launch market, and it must be sized to satisfy both those markets.

That means that the new “vehicle” (not vehicles–sorry to keep hammering the point, but I have no alternative) must be oversized like the Shuttle, and underflown like the Shuttle. And thus overpriced…like the Shuttle, because it will have too little activity to amortize its annual operating costs (like the Shuttle), let alone its development costs.

What’s the point? Other than, that is, to continue full employment in northern Alabama, and the locales in which the contractors live?

It’s been said that, had the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge based the demand for it on the number of swimmers between San Francisco and Marin County, it would have never been built. But that is the official position of NASA and its contractors for SLI. The market is a straight-line projection of the existing market, and no unforeseen markets shall be considered.

Such a projection ignores the following (likely) possibilities that might result from lower-cost access:

• a vast increase in public space passenger travel;
• routine servicing of low-orbit satellites and platforms
• a huge increase in the number of flights
• the potential for on-orbit assembly and fueling of stages to GEO and points beyond.

A vehicle that is designed for a market that requires forty thousand pounds to low earth orbit in a single launch will be unlikely to take advantage of these markets, because it will cost too much to develop, and it will have too few flights to amortize its development or operational costs, thus increasing its per-flight costs beyond what will be possible to generate those new markets. The underlying theme is that NASA wants a (single) Shuttle replacement that can do exactly what the Shuttle does, ignoring the fact that there may be alternate, and superior, ways of achieving NASA’s true needs. The geostationary satellite market serves as a surrogate for the real agenda, allowing them to maintain the facade that it will be a “commercial” system, though this market is already more-than-adequately satisfied by the existing launchers.

Until NASA accepts that we need a new commercial space transportation industry, rather than a new launch vehicle, and that they cannot and should not attempt to predict what the markets and uses for it will be, we will remain mired in the same central-planning muck–the same five, and ten-year plans, that has been impeding our progress in space since the beginning of the Cold War.

But only from the “Moonie” newspaper. The Palestinians desecrated the church and brutalized their hostages.

Don’t expect to get the story from the mainstream press. It was all the Israelis’ fault…

Mike Todd, Jr., the innovator who gave us the late but unlamented Smell-O-Vision, has died.

There is an article in the Christian Science Monitor that describes the conlict of ostensibly Christian values over the Middle East situation.

To me, both are inadequate bases for judgment, to put it mildly:

“Jerusalem is suffering,” says Galen Bowman of Old German Baptist Brethren Church in Belkite, Ind. “We’re trying to help out. We need to support Israel” as visitors, he says, because Israel is God’s way of preparing the Messiah’s return.

and

“I think people [in my congregation] recognize the weight of the moral mandate is with the Palestinians, simply because they are occupied and oppressed,” says the Rev. Richard Signore of Bourne, Mass. “Some lay people say it’s too complex and we should leave it to the experts, but I don’t accept that. To me, this really is an issue of moral imperative for a people to have self- determination.”

The article summarizes the juxtaposition thusly:

Now, engaged Christians take sides largely according to one of two perspectives. One is that faithfulness equals pursuit of justice by ending Israel’s occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories. The other is that being faithful means supporting Israel to honor God’s prophecy as stated in Ezekiel 37:21: “I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from every quarter, and bring them to their own land.”

Sorry, but, from my perspective, both of these perspectives are loony.

My prism is democracy, pluralism, secular statism, and liberty. From that perspective, Israel has it all over the Palestinians, and the rest of the Arab world.