Counting calories is mindless, and generally useless, if not actually counterproductive. The calorie counts on fast food menus are pretty much meaningless.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Apollo, I Love You
…but:
So maybe Apollo went too far too soon and set an impossible target against which everything since has been measured. It wasn’t about primarily about exploration, although that did happen, and it certainly wasn’t about sustainability, but it has cast a long shadow over what has come since.
Am I committing some sort of heresy by saying these things? Well, all I can say is that the people who made Apollo happen are still my heroes. I still get a lump in my throat when I think what they did, the risks they took and the certainty they had in their belief that it was worth it. Armstrong himself has now left us, his surviving fellow moonwalkers are now old men – still active, still advocating the next big step, but a vivid reminder of the time that has passed since Apollo.
I guess my conclusion is that the further we get from those days, the more anomalous Apollo appears – an amazing adventure that will stand out as future generations look back on the twentieth century, but not something that can be repeated. We live in a different world now.
Yes. We need to stop trying to do Apollo to Mars. It isn’t going to happen, and moreover, it shouldn’t.
Driving In Snow
How to do it in a regular-ass car without freaking out.
Yes. I grew up driving in all manner of winter conditions. The most important thing is to go out to a vacant parking lot and practice, so you’ll know what to do in an emergency.
Forget Blue Origin Versus SpaceX
It’s a battle of new ideas versus old ones.
Sad Space Anniversaries
The end of January is a time of remembrance for NASA human spaceflight, starting with the Apollo 1 anniversary on Wednesday, the Challenger anniversary (30th) on Thursday, and Columbia a week from tomorrow. Here’s one of the first pieces at Florida Today, by James Dean, on the Challenger anniversary, with some quotes from Yours Truly.
Hillary’s Server
So her staff cut and pasted data off a top-secret server so they could send it in the clear to Hillary’s email address on her unsecured server?
Someone will be or is being threatened by the FBI with a long vacation in Club Fed over this. I suspect that someone isn’t going to be willing to take the fall for Her Highness.
The Key To Coffee
The mineral content of the water? I could see a market for specialty waters for brewing.
Blue Origin
They seem to have launched, and the NOTAM has ended, but no word on landing(s) yet.
[Saturday-morning update]
[Update a while later]
Here is the story from Jeff Foust, and one from TechInsider.
Orion
Construction in slow motion; Bob Zimmerman notes the snail’s pace:
Orion’s budget these days is about $1 billion per year, with a total cost expected to reach $17 billion by the time the fourth capsule is built and launched in 2023, for a project first proposed in 2004.
In other words, it will take NASA and Lockheed Martin almost 20 years to build four capsules for the cost of $17 billion. That is absurd. Compare it to commercial space: The entire budget for all the commercial crew contracts, including both cargo contracts and the manned contract, is about half that, and will produce four different vehicles, all of which will be built and flying by 2019 at the latest. And in the case of Dragon and Cygnus, more than a dozen capsules have already flown.
Is there no one in Washington with the brain power to read these numbers and come to a rational decision about SLS/Orion? It costs too much and isn’t getting us into space. Moreover, at its pace and cost it isn’t doing anything to help the American aerospace industry. Better for Congress to put money into other things, or save it entirely and reduce the deficit and thus not waste it on this pork barrel garbage.
It’s not about building a capsule, or going to Mars. Or even beyond earth orbit.
History, And Consensus
Judith Curry has found an interesting paper:
The participation of historians in the climate debate is critical. This is a topic that I am extremely interested in, and we have all been highly appreciative of the original posts by Tony Brown, at CE and also at WUWT.
Apart from the eloquent comment sense in this Jenkins’ essay, he raises the issue of the Goldilocks Principle – what climate do we want? Does anyone want the cold miserable climate of the 17th and 18th centuries? I’m not even sure we want the climate of the 1930’s or 1950’s. Historians have a huge role to play in articulating what constitutes a desirable climate, both regionally and globally.
Yes, the easiest way to stump a warm monger is to ask them what the ideal climate is, what is the magic year we want to return to?