Category Archives: Technology and Society

Blue Origin

The company announces that it’s completed a hundred successful tests of its staged-combustion turbomachinery. It’s a little misleading to show a full-engine test, with shock diamonds, though. Also, they don’t say if there have been any failures. Particularly of the rapid-unscheduled-disassembly type.

Meanwhile, Aerojet Rockedyne continues to beg for money.

[Update a few minutes later]

George Sowers just tweeted to me that these were subscale tests, not full scale. Hopefully, that’s next.

Filthy Meatbag Bodies On Mars

As Keith Cowing points out, the Planetary Society is in no hurry to put anyone on the surface of the Red Planet. They want to do Apollo to Mars, but take almost three and a half decades before the first boots on Mars, and almost four decades before long-term habitation. Though Firouz Naderi claims that keeping it under the cost limit makes it more likely, I’d say that it is doomed to failure. Something that takes that long, accomplishes so little, for so much money, is unsustainable in a democratic Republic. This is why Apollo to Mars is doomed in general. I’m discussing this in the Kickstarter project. We need to have a different approach, starting with an end to the phrase “space exploration” as the reason we send humans into space.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s the link to the report. I’m reading it now, hoping it will have some useful cost data from Aerospace.

JPL Mars Mission Schedule

[Update a while later]

Even Chris Carberry recognizes that we won’t ever get another “Kennedy moment.” I’m not sure, though, how one “stays the course” to Mars, when there is no course.

[Late-morning update]

Over at Sarah Hoyt’s place NASA employee Les Johnson proposes (wait for it) Apollo to Mars.

It is not going to happen, and it should not happen.

Ending The War On Dietary Fat

More and more people are figuring out that the low-fat diet recommendations have been making things worse:

Now when we hold our annual sixteen-week Greater Fall River Fitness Challenge, the longest-running event of its kind in the country that draws over hundreds of people each year, we tell participants that they won’t see any significant weight loss unless they also make substantial changes in what they eat. A low-carb information and support group follows each weekly hour-long work-out, and our cooking demonstrations show people how they can switch to a low-carb lifestyle and lose weight without going hungry as they used to with low-fat, calorie-restricted diets.

Diabetic and overweight patients in a local hospital are already getting terrific results following a low-carb, high-fat approach. While it’s too soon to see measurable changes in overall obesity rates in our city with our new approach, we think we are now on the right track in advising our residents to stay away from low-fat products and diets and to incorporate healthy fats while limiting sugars and refined grains. For those who are already following this advice, we are seeing terrific results.

Interesting that they’re also backing off on the recommendation to exercise, at least with regard to weight loss.

Anyway, someone should tell Michelle Obama, on the slight hope that she’ll end her nationwide industrial-grade low-fat child abuse in the schools.

[Update late morning]

CSPI strikes back. Stupidly (as usual).

In a just world, CSPI would be sued for all of the premature deaths it has helped cause through its long-time promotion of junk science.

Fedora Question

I was thinking of upgrading to 22, and I belatedly discovered that I was still running 20. Do I have to fedup to 21 first, or can I safely just go straight to 22?

[Update a while later]

OK, just discovered why I’m running 20 when I thought it was 21. All this time I’d been thinking that I was booting from my SSD, but it turns out that I’ve been booting from my hard drive, with the older OS on it. I went in to change the boot order, and I can’t find the SSD. The OS can see it with pvdisplay, the BIOS shows it in system status, but it doesn’t appear anywhere in the boot menu. Anyone have any idea what’s going on, or how to get it to show up?

[Update a few minutes later]

Wow, weirder and weirder. I unplugged the hard drive, then rebooted. It booted with the SSD. I went back into the BIOS, and now the SSD is a boot option. I made it highest priority, then shut down and plugged in the hard drive again. Now in the BIOS the hard drive won’t show up as a boot option. Which is OK, because I didn’t want to be booting from it, but it seems like strange behavior from the BIOS.

Anyway, I’m booted into 21 now, and doing a ton of updates. It had been booting from the wrong drive for weeks, and I hadn’t realized it.