Let’s do a crowdsourcing review of it.
Category Archives: Business
Upgrading My Phone
I’ve sworn that I’ll give up my mechanical keyboard when they take it from my cold, dead hands, but my Droid 4 is on its last legs, with an OS that’s becoming incompatible with too many apps. I’ve given up hope of continuing to have one, and am shopping for a new (used) phone. I’m not a power user, and can’t see spending $500+ on the latest and greatest, but I would like to get an older high-end machine. I was looking at the Moto G4+, but when I asked Verizon if the network supports it, they said no (which surprised me). They have a web page that says “Bring your own device,” but in order to check compatibility, you have to enter the device ID, which is kind of hard when one doesn’t actually have a device.
Anyway, I had a chat session with someone else at Verizon, who finally came up with a list of compatible devices for the past few years. I don’t know why it should be this hard, though.
This Week’s Vandenberg Launch
Even though they have enough performance for a return to launch site, they’ll still be landing downrange on the ship (or perhaps closer to the site). Chris G. explains why.
The Lancet
…has reviewed Nina Teichholz’s book
Many readers will be incensed by this book. If you think saturated fats and cholesterol are bad for you, you’ll be incensed. If you think the fat story is exaggerated, you’ll be incensed. If you trust in the objectivity of science to inform health policy, you’ll be incensed. Stories of shocking scientific corruption and culpability by government agencies are all to be found in Nina Teicholz’s bestseller The Big Fat Surprise. This is a disquieting book about scientific incompetence, evangelical ambition, and ruthless silencing of dissent that has shaped our lives for decades.
Good for her.
Regulating Commercial Space Companies
Laura Montgomery says that Congress and/or the White House could ease the burden of Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty. Some at the COPUOS and UNOOSA will bitch, but Washington should team up with Luxembourg, who is taking the lead in Europe, on this.
TDRS
Today’s Atlas launch heralded an end of an era:
Younes suggested that those future data relay satellites might be owned and operated by commercial entities rather than NASA. “NASA’s optimum goal is to push the technology to enable the commercial sector such that these services can be provided by commercial providers, and NASA will not need in the future to build these kinds of capabilities,” he said. “They can become a user, like any other user.”
In general, NASA needs to move to procuring services, rather than hardware.
Moon Village
The brilliant and lovely Angeliki Kapoglou (Ms. #MoonVillage on Twitter) has set up a new web site. She’ll be putting out a monthly newsletter, which you can subscribe to there.
Hill Republicans To Trump
“It’s just frustrating to be constantly reacting to his sh*t,” a GOP Senate aide explained.
And growing discord between the White House and Capitol Hill won’t prove helpful when lawmakers return in September with a lengthy to-do list.
“The president has torched whatever political capital or moral authority he ever had,” a GOP aide told IJR. “He is uniquely incapable of political leadership. If we get tax reform done, it won’t be with his help. It’ll be in spite of him and his vortex of incompetence and destruction.”
“The more distracted [Trump] is tweeting about Mika [Brzezinski] or his historic victory or the 4 million illegal votes, the better the odds are that we get tax reform. If he gets interested in tax reform, it will probably die just like everything else he touches,” he added.
When it comes to legislation, like Obama, he has the reverse Midas touch.
The Google Lunar X-Prize
There’s a lot of talk today about their having “extended” the deadline to March 31 of next year. I have a clarification in email from Katherine Schelbert:
To clarify, this is not an extension. In this case, this is more of a re-focus. The most recent Dec 31, 2017 date was established as the date by which teams needed to initiate a launch, and was used as a means to down select to the current 5 finalists. Now, what is more important to teams, who all have different mission profiles (and paths to the moon, length of time in orbit) is the deadline by which they need to complete the mission, which is now the only date that matters. This competition is designed to not just inspire teams to launch, but to complete the mission, which is also why we are further incentivizing teams with the in-space Milestone Prizes, which are important achievements that will occur post-launch, on the way to fulfilling the competition requirements.
FWIW.
Postmodernism
It’s the cause of the mess in academia, and it’s starting to collide with its own internal contradictions.