Elon has had enough of California, at least when it comes to making cars, if not rockets.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Starship’s Static Fire
It appears to have been a success. Now on to another one, or a hop.
Sure, The Velociraptors Are Still On The Loose
…but that’s no reason to not reopen Jurassic Park.
Obama Was In On it
There is nothing surprising about this to people who have been following it, but it’s certainly confirming a lot of what has been suspected.
Taking Down The Hair Salons
…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.
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.