…are flawed. That’s putting it mildly:
Professor Curry said: “It’s not just the fact that climate simulations are tuned that is problematic. It may well be that it is impossible to make long-term predictions about the climate – it’s a chaotic system after all. If that’s the case, then we are probably trying to redesign the global economy for nothing”.
I’ve been saying that’s likely the case for years. I’ll look forward to reading her paper.
People are not rational about risk.
Tim Fernholz provides some perpsective.
I talked about the book in the context of recent events. The slides and audio are available for download now. There was a glitch partway through in which everything was echoing, not sure if they edited that part out or not.
I was amused to hear about the panic of “scientists” in the government “protecting” from the Trump administration data they’ve been hiding for years. But here’s a comprehensive round up of their rewriting the past.
This is a beautiful taxonomy. The root of a great deal of suffering is people believing their field is level 3, when it's actually level 4. pic.twitter.com/8yg2sRocNL
— Will Wilson (@WAWilsonIV) February 15, 2017
Climate science is currently somewhere between levels 4 and 5, but many (particularly ignorant adherents of the climate religion) think that it’s at 2 or 1.
Here’s a nice survey of advances in orbital manufacturing. What goes unsaid is that this further obviates the need for heavy-lift systems.
I didn’t make it to the conference in time to hear him, but I was told a couple weeks ago that Bill Gerstenmeier would be talking about many of the themes of my book. He apparently did. I would note though, that “loss of crew” isn’t just probability of killing crew; it also includes causing a career-ending injury.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: With new types of launch systems, we’re discovering new causes of launch failure, even after almost sixty years of orbital spaceflight.
A photo essay of the incompetence of California state officials, who are too busy building trains to nowhere to worry about properly maintaining the infrastructure they have.
[Update a few minutes later]
The threat of the dam failure prompts the evacuation of Marysville, and Yuba, Butte and Sutter counties. Funny, I don’t recall a nuclear plant ever having that kind of widespread effect.
The huge economic issue that no one in Washington is talking about:
Driverless trucks delivering goods to fully automated warehouses and loading docks. Drones delivering everything from pizza to furniture. Offices will become almost fully automated as work is farmed out to smart machines. There’s even speculation that AI could take the place of reporters and editors, writing copy with more speed and less bias than humans.
Most of these innovations are not far off. What’s worse, our schools are stuck in a time warp, teaching kids as if it was the 1970s, sending them to college where they major in English Lit or Environmental Management. How many of these young people would be better off going to a trade school and learning a valuable skill that would be useful in the new economy?
What’s needed is a revolution. Not rage against the machines, but a clear-eyed recognition in society from top to bottom that we can’t go back. The days when you could graduate from high school and go to work for 40 years in the local plant, earning a good middle-class wage and being able to buy into the American dream, are gone forever. Donald Trump can’t bring them back. The Democrats can’t bring them back. The unions can’t bring them back.
Nope.