This guy needs to turn in his man card:
A man used his cellphone to call from Connors Farm in Danvers at about 7 p.m. Tuesday after he, his wife and two children became lost in the maze, police said.
You’d think his wife would have asked for directions.
Sorry, but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this woman:
…the situation has pitted Ms. Douceur and her family against Raytheon Polar Services, which manages the station through a contract with the National Science Foundation. Both Raytheon and the science foundation say that it would be too dangerous to send a rescue plane to the South Pole now and that Ms. Douceur’s condition is not life-threatening.
“During the winter period, extremely cold temperatures and high winds make an extraction dangerous for all involved, passengers as well as crew,” said Jon Kasle, a Raytheon spokesman, “and such an extraction is considered only in life-threatening conditions.”
So, here’s my question. NASA was recently considering abandoning the International Space Station because they didn’t have a reliable lifeboat to extract astronauts in an emergency. But Amundsen-Scott is inaccessible for half of the year, every year, and yet people winter over there. Why isn’t the NSF spending billions to develop an Emergency Crew Extraction Vehicle for the south pole? Or, why are astronauts’ lives worth so much more than those of Antarctic researchers? Or is the research they’re doing on ISS worth so little that they’re unwilling to risk lives on it?
This to me is a perfect example of the irrationality of our space policy.
…was Steve Jobs.
I remember that Popular Electronics cover well. I was a subscriber, and I wanted one to play with, but couldn’t justify the money for it at the time (I had just been laid off from my job as a VW mechanic in the 1973 recession, and had decided to go back to school). I remember wondering what I would actually do with something that could only be programmed by toggle switches from a front panel in assemblermachine language.
No, I can safely say, with conscience clear, that I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I never asked him to make a concert tour, I never bought any of his music, I never encouraged him to do anything he ever did in any way whatsoever. My hands are completely clean. I just wish we could stop hearing about him.
[Update a while later]
You know the bit about how he claimed that he never had a childhood? It appeared to me that he had a childhood that lasted for five decades.
It’s never been one of my strengths. I always liked math and physics because they didn’t require much memorization — I could just rederive formulas on the fly. One of the reasons that I never seriously considered being a doctor was the amount of memorization required. And I think that for that profession in particular, memory is important, and apparently more so than intelligence or processing capability, because I’ve met doctors who I didn’t think were all that smart, and I don’t intrinsically respect them just because they’re doctors. At least not as much as they and society thinks I’m supposed to.
More thoughts from Rich Lowry:
The government can care for the needy; it can field a military and do much else besides. But it can’t dream. It can’t let its imagination run wild and pursue an individual vision with a ruthless determination. It can’t conjure new and profitable industries out of nothing.
Again, contrast NASA with SpaceX.
Don’t try this at home, kids — a chili contest sends two people to the hospital.
[Via Geek Press]
…never dies. It’s unfortunately a basic feature of human nature that requires logic to overcome, and it’s a battle for every generation.
Modern rocket engines are much safer than the historical examples he cites (e.g., XCOR has never had a hard start, let alone an explosion), and it makes no sense that a single accident would end the industry, any more than deaths on Everest stop people from climbing.