So many warnings, so many lies.
As Austin Bay says, anyone who has ever handled classified material knows that they be doing years in Club Fed for a fraction of what she’s done.
Will we ultimately see a Torricelli solution to this?
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Era Of The Expert
When it comes to putting them in charge of our lives, it’s the era of the expert failure:
The additional power that is being granted to experts under the Obama administration is indeed striking. The administration has appointed “czars” to bring expertise to bear outside of the traditional cabinet positions. Congress has enacted sweeping legislation in health care and finance, and Democratic leaders have equally ambitious agendas that envision placing greater trust in experts to manage energy and the environment, education and human capital, and transportation and communications infrastructure.
However, equally striking is the failure of such experts. They failed to prevent the financial crisis, they failed to stimulate the economy to create jobs, they have failed in Massachusetts to hold down the cost of health care, and sometimes they have failed to prevent terrorist attacks that instead had to be thwarted by ordinary civilians.
Ironically, whenever government experts fail, their instinctive reaction is to ask for more power and more resources. Instead, we need to step back and recognize that what we are seeing is not the vindication of Keynes, but the vindication of Hayek. That is, decentralized knowledge is becoming increasingly important, and that in turn makes centralized power increasingly anomalous.
Insufficient opportunities for graft in that.
British Diabetics
…rebel against junk-science dietary recommendations from the National Health Service, improve health.
It would sure be nice if government dietary advice was actually based on science.
Supersonics
I’m up at ArmstrongDryden today, getting an overview on NASA’s low-boom supersonics program. The focus seems to be entirely on noise reduction, but I’ll be interested in hearing what they’re doing to reduce wave drag.
Kevin McCarthy is here (I spoke to him briefly about some space regulatory issues), but he hasn’t spoken.
[Update a few minutes later
The QueSST aircraft has an L/D of 6 at Mach 1.4, in response to a question from me. In response to my question about what they’re doing about wave drag, the answer is “that’s a question for another day.” Peter Cohen from Langley actually shouted that from the back of the room, to my amusement.
A New Review Of The Book
Chris Petty has thoughts about it on his website.
In A World Of Self-Driving Cars
…we’ll still need the Miata.
Yes. Two counterpoints, though.
First, I don’t think I’d be able to read or write while being driven; in my experience that can make me car sick. I have to be in control.
Second, I very much fear that in a world of self-driving cars, it will be considered socially irresponsible and dangerous to drive yourself, and probably made illegal.
"so what did you do before self-driving cars?"
"we just drove 'em ourselves!"
"wow, no one died that way?"
"oh no, millions of people died"— Mel G. Castro (@MelGForever) May 29, 2016
“Violent Extremists”
They’re not “on the run” as the president says; they’re on the march:
“Today we worry about more than just terrorist cells — we worry about full-fledged terrorist armies as they capture territory and enlist thousands to join their ranks.”
In Syria and Iraq, McCaul said the world is witnessing “the largest global convergence of Islamist terrorists” in modern history.
Note: In “modern” history. This really has been going back for centuries. They just have better weapons now, and weaker-willed foes.
Antibiotics
In light of the news earlier this week of the discovery of a resistant strain of E. coli, this looks like good news from Harvard:
Erythromycin, which was discovered in a soil sample from the Philippines in 1949, has been on the market as a drug by 1953. “For 60 years chemists have been very, very creative, finding clever ways to ‘decorate’ this molecule, making changes around its periphery to produce antibiotics that are safer, more effective, and overcome the resistance bacteria have developed,” says Dr. Myers, Amory Houghton Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. “That process is semisynthesis, modifying the naturally occurring substance.”
In contrast, the process described in the Nature study involves using “eight industrial chemicals, or substances derived from them,” according to Dr. Myers, and manipulating them in various combinations and then testing the products against panels of disease causing bacteria. This allows us to make new “new compounds in fewer steps than was previously possible.”
For a host of reasons, from the difficulty of developing antibiotics to the relatively low return on investment they offer, by 2013 the number of international pharmaceutical companies developing antibiotics had dwindled to four. And in each 5-year period from 1983 through 2007, the number of new antibiotics approved for use in the U.S. decreased, from 16 at the beginning of that period to only five by its end.
One thing that has complicated antibiotic development is a perceived reluctance by federal agencies to fund the research. In fact, Dr. Myers says, his new antibiotic development system would have been impossible without support from a Harvard alum and his wife who are interested in science and Harvard’s Blavatnik Accelerator Fund, which provided support for the initial creation of Myers’s company Macrolide Pharmaceuticals.
“I was making a presentation to a group of visiting alumns interested in science and one, Alastair Mactaggart, asked me about funding. I told him I had no funding because at that time we didn’t, and he followed me back to my office and said, ‘this is ridiculous: we have to do something about this’.”
Gee, it’s almost as though the government is completely incompetent at its core functions while busying itself with things that are none of its business.
XCOR
It looks to me like Lynx is dead. It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, from the company shows up at the suborbital researchers conference in Colorado next week. Fortunately for those laid off, I think that a number of commercial space companies are hiring, including in Texas.
[Update a while later]
I would note that apparently Midland has joined the ranks of spaceports with no spaceships.
BEAM And SpaceX
They’re going to depressurize and repressurize the BEAM tomorrow morning. They seem to think that the material was just stiff from storage.
Meanwhile, less than a half an hour until today’s launch and landing attempt. The ship is on station, despite the growing tropical depression in the area. They don’t really have anything to lose from the attempt, unless the ship itself is at risk from the weather, but it’s not even a storm yet. The live feed is up, unlike yesterday.
[Update a while later]
OK, another perfect mission and landing. We’re rapidly approaching the point at which we’ll be surprised if they don’t recover the stage.