I’ll certainly drink to that.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Parachutes
Why commercial jetliners don’t have them.
I discuss this in the book. Many safety measures proposed for new space vehicles may be similarly pointless. Certainly the Shuttle “rescue pole” was. It was just for PR.
Israel On The Moon
Could they win the Google Lunar Prize?
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
We’re Better Off Now
And we’ll be much better off in the future. At least technologically.
The Future Of Electric Cars
Another green (and Obama) fantasy, goes up in smoke. I do think there will be a huge move toward natural-gas vehicles, though, with the new cheap supplies from fracking.
[Update on Sunday]
Funny thing. Electric cars depreciate much faster than conventional ones. Huh.
Weird Linux Problem
After a reboot, I was trying to save a file to a subdirectory of my $HOME directory, and getting an error that it was a read-only drive. When I look at permissions, I’m seeing something like this:
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 May 29 2013 Alaska
drwxrwxr-x. 5 simberg simberg 4096 Apr 26 2012 Blog
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Jun 19 2012 CA_Enterprise_Zones
drwxrwxr-x. 7 simberg simberg 4096 Jun 19 2012 Conservative_Space
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Aug 9 2012 Depots
drwxr-x—. 6 simberg simberg 4096 Dec 21 14:49 Interglobal
drwxrwxr-x. 3 simberg simberg 4096 Dec 3 2010 LaunchSpace
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Nov 5 2012 LEO_Adventure
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Jun 19 2012 Liberty
I’ve never seen that dot after the permissions before, and it seems to be an ACL-related thing. Does anyone know how this happened, and how to undo it?
[Update a couple minutes later]
Also, could this be related to an inability to print? It thinks it’s sending something to the printer (which it sees), but it never actually happens.
[Update a while later]
Well, whatever the problem was, a reboot fixed it, as well as the printing problem.
NASA’s 35-Year-Old Suits
…have cut short another EVA.
Olives
I share Lileks’ attitude:
Wife wanted Olives for the Christmas snack tray. There is an Olive Bar. I hate olives, so the olive bar is interesting: so many things to dislike and ignore. Just like the DirecTV options. The amount of choices you can passively reject is just astonishing; it’s a defining feature of modern life.
I suppose I should try a couple different ones, just to see if maybe there’s one I like, but I’ve never gotten into them.
MRSA
…has escaped the hospitals.
In the book, I talk about how potentially useful research in this area on the ISS is being held back by NASA’s obsessions with safety.
Creativity
Most people, and particularly teachers, don’t like it much.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but I think that this is one of the reasons that people can’t let go of the Apollo cargo cult. They see doing it in any other way as too risky, even though it has been thoroughly demonstrated that the big-rocket approach is unaffordable.