Category Archives: Technology and Society

Science And Society, Technology and Society

A Modest Thought Experiment

22 Comments

Imagine the maximum discharge of the Mississippi (~20,000 m^3/s) being issued in Green River, Wyoming.

What would be the environmental impact?

I’m thinking it would green up the west pretty nicely.

[Saturday update]

I put this in comments, but decided to update the post:

Someone can check my math, but ignoring wall friction in the pipeline, raising a gallon of water 6000 feet takes a head of about 0.02 kW-hrs (a little over 7 kJ). So a tiny fraction of a penny. At a speed of half a meter, for 2000 km, I get about 0.02 watts to move it up the hill (again, ignoring wall friction), over a period of six weeks or so. Seems affordable to me from an energy standpoint. Rather than pipelines, actually, it would make more sense to have a series of aquaducts with pumping stations, for less friction, and probably lower construction cost. At that velocity, 200 meters deep and 200 meters wide would do the job. I’m sure it could be optimized for speed and dimensions.

Of course, max outflow of the Mississippi might be overkill, so a useful system might be quite a bit smaller.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Delay In Spaceport Brownsville

5 Comments

Joe Pappalardo has the story. I wonder how much of it is due to environmental impact assessment, and if so, if it would be as hard if they were doing an airport instead? Back in 2004, we tried to extend the categorical exception that the aviation industry gets from the National Environmental Protection Act to space transportation, but the result was weak tea, leaving waivers up the discretion of the head of the EPA. Something I’d like to see in an amended version of the Commercial Space Launch Act would be to make it a clean extension, with no discretion from Gina (or any future administrator). It would be interesting to see if that made it veto bait for Obama, though.

Business, Economics, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

The High Cost Of Space Access

9 Comments

Roger Launius has a brief history of the Shuttle, but this number is outdated:

The best expendable launch vehicles (ELV) still cost about $10,000 per pound from Earth to orbit.

As I commented over there (it’s awaiting moderation), Falcon 9 delivers ~30,000 lbs to LEO for ~$60M. That’s $2000/lb. Price, not cost. Falcon Heavy will roughly halve that. If they can reuse cores, they’ll drop the price further.

Business, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Immortality

2 Comments

No, Newsweek, that’s not what Silicon Valley billionaires are seeking. They’re seeking indefinite lifespan. Immortality, if achievable, could/would be a curse. People just want to live as long as they want to live.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, read it all the way through. The last graf shows a huge failure of imagination:

Perhaps the most worrying question that arises with the prospect of having millions (and even billions) of multi-centenarians running around on Earth is whether the planet can support this kind of growth. Current projections suggest that the world’s population will rise from 7 billion today to about 9 billion in 2050—at which point it will more or less level out. And abundant concerns have already been raised about what all these billions of people will do for work, not to mention where they will get safe drinking water and the food necessary to live healthily. But those forecasts don’t consider the possibility that we’ll stop dying. If we do, the next generation of innovative health-tech entrepreneurs will face perhaps an even greater challenge: redesigning the planet to accommodate its massive population of Humans 2.0.

Planet? Where we’re going, we don’t need “planets.”

Humor, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Satire, Space, Technology and Society

Star Trek Heresy

2 Comments

Matthew Continetti does not love Spock.

Last week, I tweeted that I was going to write a post about how Obama is not Spock like, but to the degrees that he is, I agree that it’s Spock’s most annoying traits.

[Afternoon update]

The gauntlet has been thrown:

Continetti just glosses over the sacrifice at the Battle of the Mutara Nebula, I assume because he knows it demolishes his case. What about the personal loss at the betrayal of Valeris? What about the hurtful but necessary decision — directly enforced by Spock — to let Edith Keeler die? How I hated him for that! But look, who among us wouldn’t let Hitler dominate the world in exchange for a lifetime of sweet sweet loving from young Joan Collins? Anyone? No one? Just me?

Heh.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Hillary Email Update

11 Comments

So, according to this story, the server was physically in her house. I wonder who actually set it up? It’s hard to imagine her being able to do it.

[Update a while later]

Why you should care about Hillary’s email:

A spokesman for Clinton says that her actions comply with the “letter and spirit of the rules.” To put it kindly, this seems to be complete nonsense. Federal officials are not supposed to have private e-mail silos that are their sole means of official digital communication and are reviewed only by their personal staff. And that should apply doubly to the holder of one of the most important cabinet roles. Moreover, the fact that she never even got a State Department address certainly gives the impression that this was a deliberate attempt to avoid the public eye. She didn’t just sloppily default to her own personal e-mail address, as many people do; she also made sure that it was not possible to accidentally send her an e-mail on a work account that government oversight groups could access.

Even more troubling is the fact that a large number of people in the White House and the State Department must have known that she was using a private address that wouldn’t leave copies on government servers. Why didn’t any of them gently suggest that this was not OK?

If this were a normal campaign, Clinton’s primary opponents would be cackling with glee as they fired up the oppo cannon. But this is not a normal primary season, and Democrats will instead devote their time to coming up with excuses for her behavior, or reasons that it’s really not a big deal that the secretary of state structured her communications to avoid leaving a checkable record. They have to, because jettisoning Hillary Clinton at this point would almost certainly mean losing the race in 2016. She has drawn in all the donor funds and media attention that would normally have been spread among several candidates. There is no one ready to step into that vacuum, and it is already too late to start grooming someone new.

As in the nineties, the Democrats’ utter contempt for us, and the rule of law, is palpable. That’s when I resolved I’d never vote for one again, under any circumstances.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Mark Steyn, and Jonah Goldberg:

Mrs. Clinton weighed in to somewhat greater effect. She tweeted, “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”

This was a reference to the “55,000 pages” of e-mails Clinton handed over to the State Department in response to a request. It’s also a classic bit of misdirection. Among the swirling issues at play is whether Clinton handed over all of her official business e-mails as required. (The State Department offers no clarity on this.) The whole point of having your own private server is that no one can check to make sure you didn’t selectively delete or withhold e-mails.

The number of pages is also meaningless. First, if you’ve ever printed out e-mail, you know that “pages” and “e-mails” are not synonymous terms. But even if they were, so what? I could release 99.99 percent of all my e-mails, and you’d see little more than boring work product, press releases, spam, and appeals from Nigerian oil ministers. My incriminating stuff could remain invisible — valuable snowflakes held back from a blizzard of chaff. If you don’t think the Clintons are capable of such legerdemain, I refer you to the Clinton-inspired debate over billing records and the meaning of “is.”

This points to another reason why I think Clinton will survive this mess. If there’s a damning e-mail out there, it’s been deleted, and the relevant hard drive would be harder to find than Jimmy Hoffa’s body. So critics are probably left with the task of proving a negative.

It’s worth noting, though, that given the apparent insecurity of the system, it’s likely that someone has incriminating emails. Maybe even Vladimir Putin.

[Mid-morning update]

Bruce Webster still isn’t convinced that the server was in the house. I haven’t seen any good evidence of it myself. As he notes, if true, this has implications for subpoenas. I should note that I have several domains, that I host on a server which is also my email server. But it’s a hundred miles away.