Lessons learned. A long essay from Doug Messier.
Category Archives: Business
Growing Metal Structure
Modumetal uses nanotechnology — manipulation of matter at the molecular level — to micromanage at a very small scale to better control the conditions and substances through which electroplating occurs. Basically, the company grows metal on a surface in a way that makes it easier to shape and tinker with the material’s characteristics. Lomasney says it’s similar to how nature controls the environment related to a tree’s growth— sunlight, soil, location, temperature—and then creates a tree that is a product those conditions.
This is the sort of thing that Eric talked about in Engines of Creation almost thirty years ago. It’s one of the reasons that any plans NASA has for Mars missions decades from now are already obsolete.
Space Advocacy
This post is a few days old, but I didn’t link it at the time. I think that Keith is right. It’s largely been a failure, and will probably continue to be. We have to make it profitable.
Carbon Offsets
Fusion
…burning hydrogen-boron fuel requires truly enormous temperatures, more than 3 billion degrees Celsius, and that will be “very challenging,” says plasma physicist Jon Menard of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey, who is not involved in the project. He says it’s very hard to predict how the gas will behave at higher temperatures. “I’m a little concerned that their [simulations] lag behind their experience,” he says, but the approach “is worth further investigation.”
I hope that one of these ideas works out at some point.
NASA’s Response To Congress On SpaceX “Favoritism”
I haven’t read it yet, but they’ve posted it.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, I read it. It seems like a reasonable approach to me, but of course, the initial inquiry from Congress was completely disingenuous.
Punching Back Twice As Hard On Campus
Instapundit has some good advice for a fraternity under siege:
(1) Immediately complain to the Department of Education and the Department of Justice that you’re being targeted because of your race and sex, and denied your First Amendment rights. No, nothing will come of this, but that’s not the point. The process is the punishment. (2) Sue on the same grounds. (3) The real killer: Go to the Virginia Legislature and tell them they should cut Old Dominion’s budget. Come prepared with figures on the number of administrators on campus now, versus 10 and 20 years ago. File freedom of information requests and get the travel expense figures for the folks in the administration. Look over them for suspicious and large expenditures. (You’ll find them!) Make a big stink about those.
Administrative bloat leads to large numbers of “student life” educrats without enough to do, so they’ve created a quasi-police-state to fill the time. State legislators are looking for things to cut anyway, and higher ed doesn’t have the clout it used to have. This will hurt them more than anything else you can do.
I would love to see that happen.
Computer Problems
I’m having to periodically (as in approximately daily) reboot, and repair root with e2fsck. Is this a sign of a memory issue, or something else?
Income Inequality And Poverty
No, they’re not the same thing. And Glenn makes a good point: “Notice how little we hear about ‘wealth inequality.’ There’s a lot of untaxed wealth in foundations, university endowments, family trusts, etc. A populist who wanted to put Democrats on the spot might propose taxing that. You know, for the common good. Only working stiffs have more income than wealth.”
[Update a few minutes later]
The plan to further enrich the wealthy left at the expense of the middle class.
And yes, there probably is nothing more corrupt, both in the US and internationally, than the environmental movement.
Silicon Valley
…is headed for disaster:
America will always plant crops and need chemicals to service those crops. And it will always need payment, delivery and data services. But will it always need Facebook and Twitter? Cisco runs a large proportion of the Internet; Facebook hosts your grandma’s pictures. You do the math.
There won’t be any suicides in Silicon Valley – the most dangerous thing to happen in northern California occurred last month when an angel investor’s Birkenstocks got caught in the BART elevator – but the whole edifice on which the delicate San Francisco ecosystem is based is about to come crashing down all over again.
If so, I won’t shed a tear, after all the damage those people have done to the state of California and the country.