Good question: Why is it more hateful and abusive to try to convert a gay to straight than to raise a child in ignorance of their gender?
Category Archives: Science And Society
Dance Crazes
Why “we” can’t resist them.
Speak for yourself, lady. I have a very high resistance.
How Delaying Commercial Crew Is Deadly
Jon Goff says that it could cost thousands of lives:
Just shaving 36 hours off of the availability date of commercial crew could potentially save more lives than would be lost in the worst case Commercial Crew crash. Even if expediting the process, dropping many of the NASA Human Rating requirements, dropping some of the abort tests, and sticking with Space Act Agreements instead of FAR Contracts really meant a massive decrease in actual safety (I don’t think it would) to say a 5% chance of losing a crew on a given flight, over the course of the ISS’s life you would have saved hundreds of times more US lives by taking that course than you would potentially risk in astronaut lives.
I’ll have to incorporate this thought into the book. I made the point, but not quantitatively, just that our approach is an indicator of how unimportant ISS research is, despite NASA lip service.
This is the problem that Bastiat described. Loss of crew is very publicly visible, while the people who die are anonymous and unknown to all except those closest to them, and their deaths aren’t understood to be a result of flawed government policy. This is the same problem that the FDA has, so it ends up inhibiting innovation, destroying jobs and killing people lest it be blamed for letting people die through underregulation.
When Scales Lie
Charlie Martin, who is making good progress on his goal toward healthier lifestyle, notes that the focus on weight is misguided:
In the first 13 weeks I lost two inches on my neck and two inches around my waist. In the following four weeks, I’ve lost another 3 inches (a total of FIVE inches) around my waist.
Obviously, I like the Army’s numbers better, so let’s use them — according to the Army, I’ve lost 5 percentage points of my body fat over the last four weeks, with my weight remaining stable. (Other methods give me somwhere around 29 percent, which is the most common value from the Withing body impedance too.) My weight is around 273, and 5 percent of 273 is 14 pounds close enough.
To have lost that much body fat, and still gained roughly 2 pounds over that four weeks means I’ve exchanged some amount of body fat for muscle, while also being around 32,000 kcals in arrears for that whole four weeks.
I’d remind Charlie that a lot of linebackers weigh more than him. I don’t think they’re necessarily fat.
The Green Dream
…is a nightmare for California’s middle class:
Unfortunately, California environmentalists are trying to turn much of the Central Valley’s farmland back into desert too. Thanks to the Endangered Species Act, federal courts have ordered farmers to divert hundreds of billions of gallons of water away from crops and into the Sacramento River, where it is supposed to help revive the delta smelt.
The diverted water has not helped the smelt much, but it has turned hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland fallow and sent unemployment in some farming communities as high as 40 percent.
California could solve this problem by building more dams, thus adding water capacity. But the state hasn’t built a major new dam since 1979 and none is on the drawing board.
One reason is the California Environmental Quality Act of 1970. Modeled after the federal National Environmental Policy Act, CEQA was intended to make infrastructure planning easier. As the accompanying chart shows, it is anything but an easy law to follow. Unlike most state environmental planning laws, CEQA allows plaintiffs to recover attorney’s fees from defendant infrastructure developers (whether they be state, city or private actors).
This has created an entire environmental lawsuit industry — a very profitable one that chills development. According to the California Chamber of Commerce, CEQA has become “a morass of uncertainty for project proponents and agencies alike.”
Local government smart-growth plans have made it next to impossible for developers to build single-family homes near job centers such as the Bay Area or Los Angeles. As a result, real estate prices along California’s coast are among the highest in the nation, forcing many middle-class families to downsize or move elsewhere.
But the moron voters keep reelecting these people.
The CRU Leaker
Is it time for him or her to step forward?
I have mixed feelings. As some commenters note, the retribution from the climate liars could be harsh, and it’s useful to have the mole in place. It would be delicious, though, if it was Briffa, from a combination of an attack of conscience and the attacks by Mann.
Unique English Tweets
How many are there? Randall Munroe is answering the important questions.
Not Just The Atmospheric Temperature
Ocean heat has paused, too. And the railroad engineer is admitting that there’s been no warming recently.
Men (Or Women) To Mars This Decade?
My thoughts on Dennis Tito’s expected announcement, over at PJMedia.
Nuclear Weapons As A Unit Of Measurement
“In general,” he added, “What I don’t like is … the idea that kiloton or a megaton is just an energy unit, that it’s equivalent to so many joules or something. Because you could do that. You could claim that your house runs so many tons of TNT worth of electricity per year, but it sort of trivializes the notion.”
While I agree that the notion of comparing a bolide explosion to a nuclear event is misleading, I think he misses the boat himself here. It’s not just about an “energy release.” It’s about how fast the energy is released. That is, talking about megatons of TNT is a discussion about power, not energy per se. This is the same confusion that people have with regard to rocketry. They often talk about how much “energy” it takes to get into orbit, when in fact it’s not much more energy than it takes for intercontinental aircraft flight. The difference is that the airplane deploys its energy over many hours, whereas the rocket must do so in a very few minutes. When the Shuttle took off, it generated more power than the entire nation’s electrical grid for the first two minutes. In fact, when I was working propulsion at Rotary Rocket in the nineties, we used to joke about what units we should use to describe the power output of the engine, and thought that “Hoovers” (as in the dam) would be a useful one.
In any event, radiation and heat or no, either exploding meteoroids or nuclear weapons city busters, and events to be concerned about.