What does its future hold?
Category Archives: Technology and Society
I Know Where We Can Cut The Federal Budget
Last year, Kickstarter funded the arts more than the National Endowment for the Arts. And it’s funding things that people actually want to fund, rather than having bureaucrats give taxpayers’ money to women to smear chocolate on themselves.
Losing A Bet On Tesla
And here’s Elon’s response: “Thanks Dan, you are a good sportsman. I will still donate to DWB as though I’d lost.”
Want To Win A Thousand Pounds Sterling?
Explain why warm water freezes faster than cold.
Ric Locke
Terrible news. Go hit his tip jar if you have anything to spare, and help him finish the book.
Peak Oil
…is nowhere in sight.
NASA’s Strategic Direction
Check out the group of people determining it at the National Academies.
There are two problems, and they’re old ones. First is the lack of commercial industry participation. They’ve added former astronaut Bob Crippen who’s now at ATK, but that hardly counts. But the more fundamental issue (and reason for the first problem) is the assumption that NASA’s strategic direction should be established by the National Academies, with its own inherent assumption that it is about science and technology development, and not opening a frontier. This in turn may be another remnant of the agency’s beginning in the depth of the Cold War and the Space Act. But somehow, we can never have a serious national discussion about why we spend billions of dollars on human spaceflight, which will be necessary to get a new direction. And part of that discussion should be NASA’s role in the twenty-first century, and what other entities may be required as well.
Kickstarter Projects
Time to go help out John Mankins. His project for his book on power satellites is only a third of the way there, with only five days to go.
And unrelated, other than it’s Kickstarter, Patricia’s aspiring film-maker nephew is a ways from his goal as well.
…seems to be broken. Can anyone else get to it?
Space SF Art
…from the fifties.