Finland’s experiment doesn’t bode well for it.
Category Archives: Business
Buzz And Mars
He calls for cyclers, which isn’t surprising, but he also calls out the waste of SLS and Orion, which is, a little.
Russian Sanctions
Rogozin is making new space threats (no trampolines this time).
All we need to do to end our dependence on the Russians is to stop thinking "Safety Is The Highest Priority." https://t.co/iGtd54u962
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) July 31, 2017
Lunar Cryonics
I accidentally started a Twitter conversation with Sandy Mazza as a result of this nice piece on markets being enabled by lower-cost launch, including space burial. I noted to her that it made no sense for the California Department of Public Health to be regulating it, and then mentioned that they shouldn’t have anything to do with cryonics, either. In the course of the discussion, I dug up an old piece I wrote for Cryonics Magazine back in 1990 (ctrl-F “Simberg” to find it). Given that things are finally looking promising for reducing cost of access to space in general, and likely the moon as well, I decided I’d resurrect it here. Note that I’ve been talking about the need for markets to drive down launch costs for three decades. Note also that it’s somewhat dated, in terms of its discussion of the NASP and American Rocket.
Acquisition At The Pentagon
It’s about to get an overhaul. NASA needs one, too, but Congress will never stand for it; insufficient opportunities for graft.
Space Policy Online
Marcia Smith’s excellent web site has gotten a nice makeover.
Robots
No, you cannot rape one.
Vegan Diets
Removing refined carbohydrates, such as sugar, flours, fruit juice, and cereals, makes ANY diet healthier. This is the most likely reason why plant-based diets appear healthier than meat-based diets in some clinical studies. All of the studies I’m aware of claiming that plant-based diets are superior to omnivorous diets suffer from the same tragic flaw. Researchers conducting these studies NEVER simply ask people to remove animal foods from their diet. They always change more than just that single variable—such as lowering fat content or adding exercise—and they always instruct people in the plant-based group to eliminate refined carbohydrates and processed foods. In almost every case, these special “plant-based” diets are then compared to a junky omnivorous diet loaded with sweets, baked goods and manufactured foodstuffs.
This is not a fair fight. How do we know whether it was the removal of the meat, refined carbs, industrially-produced oils, or artificial additives that was responsible for the benefits? I’ve engaged in countless social media conversations with plant-based diet experts in which I politely ask for scientific evidence that simply removing animal foods from the diet—without making any other changes—results in health benefits. None of them have ever been able to cite a single article for me.
The amount of junk science in nutrition studies is just appalling.
Splitting Water
A new efficient catalyst, from common elements. This could be useful in space, too, though platinum might be less rare there.
Ivy League
I didn’t even take SAT in high school. I worked for a year after graduating, then went to community college, then transferred to Ann Arbor. It would never have occurred to me to do all the crazy things kids do to get into these overrated schools.
[Monday-morning update]
This seems related: Targeting “meritocracy.”
The real solution to this problem is the one none of the anti-meritocracy articles dare suggest: accept that education and merit are two different things!
I work with a lot of lower- and working-class patients, and one complaint I hear again and again is that their organization won’t promote them without a college degree. Some of them have been specifically told “You do great work, and we think you’d be a great candidate for a management position, but it’s our policy that we can’t promote someone to a manager unless they’ve gone to college”. Some of these people are too poor to afford to go to college. Others aren’t sure they could pass; maybe they have great people skills and great mechanical skills but subpar writing-term-paper skills. Though I’ve met the occasional one who goes to college and rises to great heights, usually they sit at the highest non-degree-requiring tier of their organization, doomed to perpetually clean up after the mistakes of their incompetent-but-degree-having managers. These people have loads of merit. In a meritocracy, they’d be up at the top, competing for CEO positions. In our society, they’re stuck.
The problem isn’t just getting into college. It’s that success in college only weakly correlates with success in the real world. I got into medical school because I got good grades in college; those good grades were in my major, philosophy. Someone else who was a slightly worse philosopher would never have made it to medical school; maybe they would have been a better doctor. Maybe someone who didn’t get the best grades in college has the right skills to be a nurse, or a firefighter, or a police officer. If so, we’ll never know; all three of those occupations are gradually shifting to acceptance conditional on college performance. Ulysses Grant graduated in the bottom half of his West Point class, but turned out to be the only guy capable of matching General Lee and winning the Civil War after a bunch of superficially better-credentialed generals failed. If there’s a modern Grant with poor grades but excellent real-world fighting ability, are we confident our modern educationocracy will find him? Are we confident it will even try?
I’m quite confident that it won’t. As Glenn often says, these people aren’t educated, or competent. They’re just credentialed. They’re the very opposite of elite.
[Bumped]