Discusses his new novel, and the role of science fiction.
He is one of the few authors whose books I always look forward to reading, though I was a little disappointed with Anathem. But this looks like a fun read.
I should also note that one of the points I make in my book (and in op-eds) since, is that our unwillingness to use the hardware we have on hand to get into space is an indicator of how utterly unimportant human spaceflight is (a point that is accentuated by the relatively poor sales of a well-reviewed book). Stephenson describes a scenario in which it suddenly becomes very important to become as spacefaring as possible, as soon as possible, and how society reacts.
Let’s force doctors to spend a lot of money to become technology dependent and adopt electronic health records when the old way of doing things was working just fine. And hey–as a bonus, our health information is now more vulnerable to hacking and we can lose some privacy along the way! Electronic health records haven’t saved a single life or a single dollar, but they have created a lot of expense, confusion, and tremendous demoralization for our health care providers. It wasn’t broken, and it shouldn’t have been “fixed.” If the Republican Congress was smart, it would repeal this onerous, useless provision of Obamacare.
There are a lot of things the Republicans would do if they were smart. On the other hand, I can understand why they don’t want to repeal this abomination piece meal. They need to scrap the whole thing and start over, but it won’t happen until we get someone in the White House who actually understands markets and actually gives a damn about others.
I wonder how much this (I assume, cost-plus contract) is costing compared to what Blue is spending on the BE-4? I predict that this LOX/kerosene engine will never fly.
Stephen Smith has a lengthy review of John Logsdon’s latest book.
As he notes, the dual myths of Kennedy as space visionary and Nixon as space villain don’t stand up to any sort of realistic historical scrutiny. In fact, with Apollo, Kennedy set us up for decades of failure, in terms of making spaceflight economically realistic.
Cold is much more deadly than heat, by an order of magnitude.
I have no more confidence in this prediction than I do of predictions for warming (and particularly predictions of catastrophic climate change). The lesson is a) the climate can always be counted on to change, b) we don’t really know what the future holds for climate, c) we need to be prepared for anything, which means maximizing economic growth and d) (related) we need to stop fantasizing that carbon dioxide is a magical climate-control knob.