I don’t know where to start with this ignorant burning of a field of strawmen.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
A Quiet Air Conditioner
I’m going to look into this, despite the fact that it’s “smart.” I hate things that are smart. My A/C does not need to talk to the cloud. It would be nice if they’d make a dumb one that was cheaper, but probably smarts don’t cost much.
“Rapid Fire Bullet Delivery Systems”
I just saw this tweet:
It reminded me of this old post I wrote in the early aughts. Here is the original, with comments at the time.
Lunar Ice
There may be a lot more of it than we thought. And we were already thinking there’s quite a bit.
Easing Drone Restrictions
I’d been wondering about this. We just bought one (small one, for a hundred bucks at Fry’s), and we certainly have no plans for it to go out of line of sight, or the neighborhood, but I need to look up whether it needs to be registered, legally.
Chris Kraft
We continue to lose the giants of that generation.
[Update Tuesday morning]
Heh. “Perhaps the New York Times’ obit for Kraft was already written, as it curiously fails to explore the seething hotbed of sexism and white supremacy that was the early NASA, according to the latest reporting by the New York Times.“
[Update a few minutes later]
Eric Berger remembers an inspirational friend.
Per a commenter there, I’ve also been wondering if he had been hanging on to see the 50th anniversary, and then let go.
The Next Fifty Years On The Moon
An interesting essay, but it has a few problems. First…
And they repeatedly use the phrase “lunar soil.” In fact we just update Evoloterra this weekend to fix this ourselves.
Finally, we have this comment, which seems gratuitous and almost a non sequitur in the context of this article:
The NASA Moon Base
What might it look like?
Still not clear to me that NASA will be the one to do it.
The Complete Descent
Apollo And The Treasure Fleets
Gary Oleson has a good op-ed over at Space News. A lot of space enthusiasts misinterpret the lesson of the Ming Dynasty. I wrote a similar piece seventeen years ago. As with most of my old space commentary, I’m always surprised at how well it holds up.
Speaking of old space commentary, I just read this for the first time, written by my former editor at The New Atlantis, in 2003. This was about the time that we first met, probably as a result of a comment I had at my blog about a post of his at National Review. I wrote my first essay for him about a year later.
[Update a few minutes later]
In searching for that blog post, I discovered something funny; it was based on that piece, so it wasn’t the first time I’d read it — I’d just forgotten, it was so long ago. I think what happened is that someone at The Corner commented about my blog post, which caused Adam to engage, and later call me to talk. The rest is history.
The original post, with comments, is here.