I don’t see any details, but apparently he died late last week. I hadn’t seen him in a couple decades, but I know that he’d been ill for quite some time. I imagine many younger people in the space movement haven’t heard of him, but he was one of the luminaries back in the seventies, creating the potential economic driver for O’Neill colonies. Anyway, John Mankins seems to have taken up the baton from him for space solar power.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Grant And Lee
“These guys needed cell phones.”
All summer we’ll see the sequicentennials of that bloody summer of 1864, as Grant marched down toward Richmond, after (unlike his predecessors) not retreating after the bloody battle at The Wilderness, as Sherman was in turn moving down into the deep south. The two campaigns ended up saving Lincoln’s presidency in the fall election.
Cold Harbor was one of the bloodiest, complete with the beginnings of trench warfare that was ultimately a presage to the first world war. The European observers, used to Napoleonic tactics, were appalled at the butchery of rapid-fire weaponry, a technological advance (if one can call it back) to which took decades for tactics to adapt. The only major change in the half century afterward of carnage, really, was the tank.
Google Chrome
Go home. You’re drunk.
This is not atypical. After a while, every page starts to refuse to load, or becomes unreadable, and you can paint weird things on it by just waving the cursor over various areas. It’s version 35.0.1916.114 stable, running in Fedora 20.
In frustration, I uninstalled and tried running the current beta. It had its own problems, with continual tab crashes and freezing the machine.
I switched a while ago from Firefox, for various reasons. Opera starts chewing up half my CPU after being up a for an hour or so. It just seems like every browser sucks.
The Dragon Unveiling
I was there. I’ve had a cold for a few days, so it got a little grueling toward the end (not much in the way of seating for four hours) but it was pretty impressive, as you’ve probable seen from pictures and video. Alan Boyle was there, and has already posted the story.
[Friday-morning update]
Megan Geuss was there last night too. Here‘s her report.
Suspended Animation
Thoughts from Clark Lindsey on the latest developments.
Safety Is Not The Highest Priority In Human Spaceflight
I’ve started an on-line petition. I hope that the astronaut office will weigh in.
[Update a while later]
Due to some unhappiness about having to deal with Facebook (and a politically problematic petition site), I’ve set up a new one at the web site for the book. So please sign over there, and pass the word.
Hydrogen
A new way to store it? Could be useful terrestrially, but probably not for space vehicles.
Virgin Galactic’s Public Relations
Doug Messier has an open letter to them.
I have a bad feeling about this. But I don’t think that the fate of the industry rides on either their success, or failure.
Melanoma
I hadn’t realized that they’ve made great advances in treating it:
This seismic shift in melanoma care — largely brought about by enlisting the immune system in the fight — might eventually be used to treat other cancers, researchers said. Smoking-related lung cancers, among others, are now starting to respond to similar treatments, according to research to be presented at this week’s conference.
“We really are in a historical time right now,” said Dr. F. Stephen Hodi, director of the Melanoma Treatment Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “Cancer treatment five years ago compared to five years from now — it’s going to be completely different.”
Faster, please.
I found this a little sad, though:
“Someone with metastatic melanoma, I used to tell them to ‘eat whatever you want.’ Now, I’m saying ‘you should watch that cholesterol,’ ’’ said Dr. Patrick Hwu, chairman of the Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
It’s amazing and frightening how ignorant the medical profession is about diet and cholesterol.
A Space Cherry Tree
Of course, as they note, this is interesting, but not really a scientific result, since there is no control. It could be something big, or a fluke.