Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Father Of Global Warming
What a difference a few months make!
Just in time for holiday season, and for the Trump Administration, the father of the climate alarm, formerly a climate scientist with NASA/GISS, and now a full-time scientist/activist, has ameliorated his grand climate alarm. The 10-year ultimatum announced in 2006, made more dire in 2009 and since, is now moderated.
This October, we were told that the net emissions of of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must go negative. Now, “we don’t need to instantaneously reduce GHG amounts.”
A climate scientist might want to see Dr. Hansen’s math and model simulation to understand the revision in the last sixty days.
Maybe the climate can survive Donald Trump after all!
He’ll probably kill us all some other way.
Evolution
No, not the theory, the software. Is there some good reason why it won’t synchronize with an IMAP server? I have this crazy idea that if email gets marked as junk locally, it should be removed from the inbox on the server, but it doesn’t happen. I don’t see it in the local inbox, but if I look at the server with roundcube, it’s all still there, and I have to manually remove it. The only thing I can find in a search to deal with it is to use offlineimap to synch, and point Evolution at the local files. But that seems like a PITA to set up. Why does this have to be so hard?
Tardigrades
They’ve figured out how they avoid radiation damage, and humans may be able to do it, too.
Mark Whittington
His latest nonsense:
The problem, from the perspective of commercial space supporters, is that Shank represents an institutional, NASA-centric viewpoint where it comes to space exploration. While at the space agency he supported the Bush-era Constellation program which was subsequently canceled by President Obama. In Congress, Shank helped support the Orion spacecraft and the heavy lift Space Launch System. Many commercial space advocates find these views abhorrent, believing that NASA should simply outsource its space exploration plans to the private sector, to companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
I don’t know any commercial space advocates who believe that. What we believe is that there is no need for NASA to be in the launch business.
Shank’s association with Mike Griffin has also raised some hackles. Griffin has been blamed, unfairly for the most part, for the troubles that beset Constellation before it was cancelled. In fact many of these problems, including the fact that the project was underfunded, occurred above his paygrade.
There is nothing unfair about blaming Mike Griffin for choosing a terrible rocket design that was certain to cost more than was allocated for it in the budget sandpile, in the belief that he could somehow talk Congress into increasing his budget.
Whey Protein
…may reduce blood pressure. I may try this.
Russia’s Rockets
“The Russian space sector is short of funding, and may be having difficulties maintaining its quality control standards,” said John Logsdon, a Planetary Society board member and professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.
Additionally, Russia’s workforce is shrinking. Since the 1990s, the country’s population has steadily declined, despite an influx of more than 9 million immigrants. Those migrants have filled some of the country’s job vacancies, but the overall effect, according to the Brookings Institute, is that Russia faces a sharp decline in labor quality.
Worse yet, due to larger economic pressures, the country isn’t able to make large-scale education investments, said David Belcher, an analysis manager at the Washington, D.C.-based Avascent consulting group.
“The effect of that is that they have a skills mismatch in certain industrial sectors, that appears to include the launch industry,” he told me. “The fact that we’ve seen several instances of Russian rockets not working as designed the past few years seems to support that thesis.”
And yet we’re relying on them to get our astronauts to the ISS, because “safety is the highest priority.”
[Mid-afternoon update]
Looks like the stage went kablooey. Which is kind of bad, because it’s the same one they use for crew. Wonder if it would have been abortable?
[Update a few minutes later]
A reminder that Jim Oberg warned about this over a year ago.
Life In The Solar System
The top eight places to look for it. Not including earth, of course.
I think that Carolyn Porco thinks that Enceladus is a better candidate than Europa, but it’s a lot harder to get to.
Trump Space Policy
Lee Billings has a good piece on the current state of play.
Fortunately, given the vision being displayed by wealthy entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, we are approaching a day in which NASA and its budget will be largely irrelevant to humanity’s move into space.
An Android Hack
Apparently, my Droid 4 is vulnerable to this, but it’s unlikely it’s actually hit me since a) I don’t do much with my phone and b) I don’t rely on Google for my data storage, other than contacts. But I don’t understand why they can’t patch. I don’t think I should have to upgrade my phone/OS in order to protect myself from this sort of thing.