Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Scott Pace

9 Comments

Lee Billings has an interview with him. This is Scott’s (whom I’ve know well for 35 years) standard response when asked about SLS:

Heavy-lift rockets are strategic national assets, like aircraft carriers. There are some people who have talked about buying heavy-lift as a service as opposed to owning and operating, in which case the government would, of course, have to continue to own the intellectual properties so it wasn’t hostage to any one contractor. One could imagine this but, in general, building a heavy-lift rocket is no more “commercial” than building an aircraft carrier with private contractors would be.

He never explains how a rocket that almost never flies, and costs billions per flight, if and when it does, is a “strategic national asset.” It seems more like a liability to me, in the modern age of commercial spaceflight.

[Update Tuesday morning]

More thoughts from Eric Berger.

[Late-morning update]

NASA’s safety Kobayashi Maru.

This is insanity.

[Update mid-afternoon]

Bob Zimmerman righteously rants. I really find it hard to believe that this thing will ever fly with crew.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

The Middle East

7 Comments

Things are heating up there, and I don’t think it’s being covered much, particularly given all the coverage of the Texas shooting. First, the Huthis fired a Scud missile at Saudi Arabia from Yemen, which the Saudis shot down, and are blaming on their puppetmasters in Iran, declaring that it may be an act of war.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese Prime Minister has resigned. In Riyadh. Because he fears for his life and that Iran is now effectively in control there. And there’s a huge shakeup going on in the House of Saud. The ancient rivalry between the Arabs and the Persians may be reaching a boiling point.

All this as Israel has been engaging in the biggest war games in almost two decades.

But nothing to worry about. No more peaceful, stable region in the world, historically, than the Middle East.

[Update a few minutes later]

And the deputy governor of Asir province was killed in a helicopter crash. Could be a coincidence, but there’s a lot going on over there.

Administrative, Popular Culture, Technology and Society

Busy

7 Comments

Watching football while replacing all the plumbing under the kitchen sink. Trap is clogged, and while we were renting it a decade ago, some idiot glued in two-inch ABS down there that’s impossible to get apart without cutting it off. It will give me a chance to get the disposal off to replace the old web in its throat, and put in separate traps for each sink, plus make it much easier to work on in the future.

[Monday-morning update]

Well, that turned into an adventure. Ended up replacing everything under the sink, including disposal, and still not sure I solved the drain problem, and won’t know until I go get an extension for the dishwasher drain hose.

[Monday-morning update]

Got all the plumbing put together, and determined that the drain problem was indeed downstream. Just paid a plumber $160 to snake it, and now it’s running clear. All in all, job cost about $450, but that included a powerful quiet new disposal. Hate to think what a plumber would have charged to do everything I did.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Yesterday’s Idiotic Hearing On The Hill

Marcia Smith has a good write up of the nomination hearing for Bridenstine, which has very little to do with aeronautics or space. I would also note, as always, that SPLC is not a judge of hate groups; it’s itself a hate group that should not be relied on for anything. And Senator Bill “Ballast” Nelson is an idiot, if he thinks that Jim Beggs would have prevented the Challenger from launching.

[Friday-morning update]

Bob Zimmerman isn’t impressed.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Jihad

17 Comments

…on the bike path:

But they are changing us. I’ve written before about what I’ve called the Bollardization of the Western World: the open, public areas of free cities are being fenced in by bollards, as, for example, German downtowns were after the Berlin Christmas attack, and London Bridge and Westminster Bridge were after two recent outbreaks of vehicular jihad. This is a huge windfall for bollard manufacturers – Big Bollard – and doubtless it’s a huge boost for the economy, if your town’s nimble enough to approve the new bollard plant on the edge of town, or if your broker is savvy enough to divest your tech stocks and go big on the bollard sector. As I write, Geraldo is on Fox demanding to know why this bike path wasn’t blocked off with concrete barriers.

Why? Why does every public place have to get uglified up just because Geraldo doesn’t want to address the insanity of western immigration policies that day by day advance the interests of an ideology explicitly hostile to our civilization? Instead Geraldo wants to tighten up vehicle rental. Why? Why should you have to lose an extra 15 minutes at an already sclerotic check-in counter because Hertz and Avis and UHaul have to run your name through the No-Rent list? Why should open, free societies become closed, monitored, ugly, cramped and cowering?

And Bollardization doesn’t even solve the problem, does it? Last week I was tootling through Williston, Vermont, which has just reconfigured its highway system to run green-painted bike paths down the center of the streets. And the thought occurred to me that, once you’ve bollarded off every sidewalk, what’s to stop jihadists mowing down cyclists? After all, if the eco-crowd are installing them in the middle of the roadway, they’re kind of hard to bollard off. And then a second thought occurred: As inviting a target as bike paths are in enviro-poseur communities, they’re even more inviting in genuine bicycling cultures such as the Netherlands or Scandinavia.

And now eight people are dead and dozens more injured – at the hands of a guy who came here in 2010 because he won a Green Card in the so-called “diversity lottery”. Why was that stupid program not suspended on September 12th 2001?

So Uber and truck-rental places are expected to do background checks on people to whom we give “diversity visas.” Wonderful.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Idiot Conservatives

21 Comments

Eric Berger has the story on how, in attacking SpaceX, they’re ripping off the taxpayer and actively damaging national security.

[Update a while later]

Meanwhile, the target launch date for Falcon Heavy is now late December.

Business, Technology and Society

Libre Office And PDF

8 Comments

So, I’m trying to convert a Libre Office Writer document to PDF. When I do so, it loses the right justification. Microsoft Word does a better job of it, but when I save the document in Libre Office as a *.docx, and reopen in Word, it loses the page templates. Anyone have any ideas?

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I played around with the export settings, to preserve document structure, and it’s better now.

[Update a few more minutes later]

OK, I found the problem. It exports it just fine. The problem arises when I try to edit the PDF with Libre Office. It undoes the justification when it pulls it into Draw, and then it re-exports it that way.

[Update]

Here is my real problem. I wouldn’t have to edit it if I could make it do what I want in the first place. I’m trying to start the first page of the document in a certain style, and it refuses to do it. I can only start that style on the second page, with a blank first page. If I had a good PDF editor, I could just remove the first blank page after the conversion, but apparently I have to lay out money for that. It may ultimately be my only solution if I can’t get Libre Office to do what I want, though.

[Update late morning]

Someone on Twitter helped me figure out how to do it. I’ve finally got the document looking the way I want.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Mike Griffin

6 Comments

The guy who ignored the advice of the Aldridge Commission and industry to utilize commercial providers for the Vision for Space Exploration, instead issuing no-bid cost-plus contracts for Constellation, that were overrunning and slipping more than a year per year when it was canceled, seems like an odd choice to be put in charge of reforming procurement at the Pentagon.

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

Computer Problems

17 Comments

Did a kernel upgrade in Fedora yesterday. Rebooted today. Wouldn’t boot, had errors. Rather than simple reboot, I decided to shut the whole machine down, then turn it on again. Now it’s dead.

Guess I’ll try swapping the power supply first. If that doesn’t work, sounds like a motherboard or CPU problem.

[Update a few minutes later]

Aaaaaaand, I can’t find any spare supplies. Have to run over to Fry’s to buy one, that probably isn’t the problem…

[Update after returning from Fry’s]

Welp, before I opened the new PS, I tried firing it up again. It booted without complaint. I guess I scared it with the new PS. #HappyHalloween

Seriously, though, it’s probably still a symptom of an incipient problem, probably from overheating.