She is clearly less than thrilled with the pick of Bill Nelson.
Note the implicit assumption that having an administrator that can get more funding for NASA is intrinsically a good thing.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
O’Reilly Auto Parts
I need to do more shopping there. They have everything.
Glynn Lunney
RIP.
I think he got short shrift in the Apollo 13 movie (as did Milt Windler). Very smart guy, and he was arguably more responsible for getting them back than Kranz.
Read It And Weep
Bill “Ballast” Nelson is going to be head of NASA. This is almost the worst possible pick. Is there any level on which this administration is not a disaster, with less than two months in?
[Friday-morning update]
Five questions that Nelson should be asked (but probably won’t be).
The last is the most important. He’s never given any inkling of having anything resembling a vision for humanity’s future in space.
SLS “Affordability”
This new “study” may be the beginning of the end for the program. This graf stuck out, though: “McConnaughey is leading the study for Kathy Lueders, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight. Even before the study’s initiation, McConnaughey had been pushing for the SLS program to become more cost-effective. One goal of this analysis is to find ways for the large NASA rocket to compete effectively with privately developed rockets as part of the agency’s Artemis Moon program.”
No one seems to ask the question: Why should NASA even be attempting to compete with private industry? This is not a proper role of a government agency, but we’ve been stuck in this mode since Shuttle.
NASA And The Rise Of Commercial space
This looks like an interesting symposium this week. Hard to believe that it’s been eight years since my book was published.
The “Covid Relief” Bill
…is (among many other things) an IRS assault on low-income people.
De Jure And De Facto Censorship
Why we have to be worried about both.
Piano Problem
We have an older-model electronic Yamaha piano. While I had the living-room wall open for various wire run, I decided to run an RCA cable from the piano location to our home-theater receiver, so we could hear the piano output in the home-theater speakers, instead of the built-in ones.
Lo and behold, though, when I plugged it into the headphone jack on the instrument, there was a distinct delay between hitting the key and hearing the sound, which makes it difficult to play. Why would there be any latency? This seems like it would be a problem using headphones with it as well. It seems like the only solution may be hack into the thing, to tap the speaker wires directly, and match the impedance somehow, maybe with transformers.
21st-Century Problems
Remote hijacking of “smart” sex toys?