…with an MRAP (yes, I know it was a bar, big deal). One of the many terrible things that the Clinton administration did was to give military hardware to local LEOs.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Ferguson’s Imperial Model
A code review.
Good lord.
This reminds me an awful lot of the code that was leaked from CRU. S**t climate coding has done a lot of economic damage, but nowhere near as rapidly as this has, with tens of thousands of deaths to boot.
[Update a few minutes later]
A devastating conclusion:
All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.
On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves.
Same with climate modeling. Get it out of the universities. Particularly Penn State.
[Update a while later]
What Ferguson’s booty call tells us about our “elites.”
[Friday-afternoon update]
The model that panicked the world was junk.
Space Cinema
Tom Cruise is going to film a movie on the ISS.
First Fire
Viral Load
Thoughts on taking it seriously.
This would have a huge impact on policy.
The Artemis Accords
I haven’t talked much about this, but Bob Zimmerman has thoughts.
I’ve been working on this behind the scenes for a couple years, in both DC and London, and some of the ideas in the accords may be based on my IAC paper from last fall, but these are much more limited than my proposals there. They don’t really “supercede” the OST; the administration’s position is that they are not in violation of it, and that it is “permissive” in that regard.
The Wuhan Cover Up
The Lunar Lander Awards
Eric Berger has the story:
NASA is taking a two-pronged approach toward the Artemis program. The agency has a clear mandate from the White House to land humans on the Moon by 2024. This has been criticized by some as a “political” date, but supporters of the fast timeline say it has injected needed urgency into the program. At the same time, NASA also wants to avoid the pitfalls of the Apollo Program—which flew six missions to the Moon and then ended due to high costs—by designing Artemis to be sustainable for the long term.
Unfortunately, as long as NASA is forced to continue to use SLS, that’s an impossible goal. Speaking of which, they just awarded a contract to AJR for $100M/engine.
Plus, Eric has a story on the uncertainty of launch architectures.
[Monday-morning update]
OK, so it’s not a hundred million per engine. It’s $146M.
[Bumped]
The Masque Of Red Death
Thoughts from Lileks on web advertising, the history of miracle cures, and China.
Ventilators
Why is JPL building them?
On top of the point that they still have to be mass produced, we now have a surplus, and we’re finding out that in many cases we don’t need them (and may have been killing people with them).
[Update a few minutes later]
Related Twitter thread. Pronation seems to be more effective and safer than ventilators.