I don’t know if it will be webcast, but I’m going to be giving a talk tomorrow morning in Pasadena, as part of the final plenary of the Mars Society meeting.
[Update Sunday afternoon]
I think the talk went OK. The crowd was smaller than I expected; I think that the Mars conference in DC has pulled a lot of the audience that Bob used to get for his Mars Society meetings. I called people in the audience “mutant weirdos,” and made a lawyer joke.
[Bumped]
Eric Berger has this week’s round up.
I will say that I’ve never been very concerned about competition from China, but now that they’ve allowed commercial companies to engage, we may start to see a lot of innovation there.
An interview with Phil Metzger, including the most recent findings, on how to utilize it.
Bob Zimmerman says that the swamp is winning, big league.
Want power to the people? Then you want capitalism.
Well, it certainly resulted in the brutal premature deaths of many tens of millions of people in the last century. But maybe they weren’t doing it quite right. We’ll just have to keep trying until they get it right. For the children.
Was it normal, or abnormal?
One off the polling practices I find annoying is the “right track, wrong track” question, because it can be very misleading in its implications. It doesn’t provide any information as to what the respondent thinks what “track” we should be on. I have never in my adult life felt that the country was on the “right track,” and if polled I would always say it was wrong. And of course, if I said that whenn Republicans were in power, Democrats would infer that it meant that I wanted them to win, which would be stupid, because what I wanted continually was a more libertarian, constitutional government.
Anyway, I have to confess that, despite my dislike of Trump, I do feel, for the first time, that with all the regulatory rollback, and constitutionalist judicial appointees, we’re at least, finally, on the right track. But we still have along way to go down the rails. My fear is that if the Democrats get back in power, we’ll be off the rails entirely.
A history, as it approaches first air under the gear. As I noted in an email to the person who sent me the link:
“Stratolaunch has never made any sense to me as a business. Gary [Hudson]’s theory is that it’s the Glomar Explorer of space: a civilian cover for a black operation (in this case, perhaps as an X-37 launcher capable of single-orbit rendezvous). But it seems nutty to me to make your business dependent on a single carrier aircraft. Orbital got away with it with the Tri-Star but at least there they could have gone to the boneyard for another one if they’d lost it. Look how much time it’s taken to even do taxi tests with a single vehicle. And they only this week announced (again) their plans for the orbital launcher, now not to fly until 2022, over a decade after that press conference.”
I also think that Allen placed entirely too much faith in Burt, who is an aviation genius, but not necessarily a space guy.
He’s whining about SpaceX’s prices. Maybe he should get a trampoline.
And this is amusing:
Due to its geography, Russia is largely unable to make Falcon-style reusable boosters that would make vertical powered descent to a movable platform at sea, and so it has to follow an alternate path sticking to horizontal landings or relying on parachutes, he said.
Yes, because they couldn’t possibly land vertically down range, where they currently dump their expended first stages.
A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed. This credo usually maximizes the opportunities for charging sexism, yet it will be discarded in an instant if acknowledging the innate biological and psychological differences between men and women yields an additional trove of feminist complaint. The current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine shows how the game is played.
For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. “Historically, the narrative of medicine has been driven by data derived from white men around the age of 40,” the associate dean for curriculum at the Yale Medical School told the magazine’s reporter. Clinical trials only occasionally included females and when they did, the results were rarely analyzed by sex. It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.
It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting. . . .
Such discoveries should be the death knell for social constructivism. Along with many others like them, they buttress the possibility that uneven sex ratios in various fields are in part the result of males and females’ different average dispositions toward competition, risk, and abstract rather than people-centered work (an observation that got computer engineer James Damore fired from Google).
And yet, feminist social-justice warriors are perfectly capable of proceeding on several contradictory fronts simultaneously.
It’s almost as though they select these whacko theories only in order to serve an agenda.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: No, the professional engineering exam is not gender biased.