Kori Schake isn’t impressed.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
A Plague On The Earth
That’s what misanthrope extremist David Attenborough thinks of humanity.
I suspect he also wants to confine the infection to a single planet.
And as always, my advice to such people is to lead by example.
[Update a while later]
Here’s another person who should lead by example. Paul Ehrlich, who’s been wrong about pretty much all of his predictions for forty years, says that no one has a right to twelve, or even three children.
Switching To Android
I’ve never been an Apple fan, partly because it seems like a cult, and partly because I’ve never liked their closed business model. It may finally be starting to bite them, for all but the True Believers. And perhaps their faith has been shaken by the loss of the cult leader.
No One Will Do Your Laundry
…in space. I’d say we raise angora bunnies, and everyone wears sweaters, except I hate sweaters.
The New York Magazine Ban
…is probably unconstitutional:
Whether by clever design, simple ignorance, or haste-induced inattention, these provisions in effect have turned the most popular handguns bought for self-defense and recreational purposes — 9mm and .40 caliber semi-automatic pistols — into expensive paper weights, unusable for their intended and wholly lawful purposes. That’s because, with the exception of a small number of small 9mm “pocket pistols” and a slightly larger number of .40-caliber pistols — there are no seven-round magazines produced or available (magazines produced for semi-automatic pistols normally hold eight or more rounds). Thus, although the most popular handguns themselves remain legal under the New York law, the magazines that are necessary for them to work have been declared illegal.
As he notes, this is a de facto ban of all hand guns other than revolvers, and as the court ruled in Heller, far too sweeping to pass Second Amendment muster. Also, expect the “assault weapon” ban to be challenged as well. The federal version expired prior to Heller, so it hasn’t been tested.
A Novel Means Of Cooking A Steak
Not a very effective one, though:
To break the sound barrier, you’ll need to drop the steak from about 50 kilometers. But this isn’t enough to cook it.
We need to go higher.
If dropped from 70 kilometers, the steak will go fast enough to be briefly blasted by 350°F air. Unfortunately, this blast of thin, wispy air barely lasts a minute—and anyone with some basic kitchen experience can tell you that a steak placed in the oven at 350 for 60 seconds isn’t going to be cooked.
From 100 kilometers—the formally defined edge of space—the picture’s not much better. The steak spends a minute and a half over Mach 2, and the outer surface will likely be singed, but the heat is too quickly replaced by the icy stratospheric blast for it to actually be cooked.
I think I’ll stick to my IR grill. Though it might be fun to apply for a NASA grant as a suborbital research payload.
A New Nanotech Fiber Breakthrough
This is going to really revolutionize things, including spacecraft.
[Via Geek Press]
Developing Laser Weapons
DNA
Precise multiple editing has arrived:
Just to get your mind around this feat, imagine taking about 5,000 different novels and reprinting them in normal font size on 23 very long cotton ribbons. Since each word takes up about half an inch, the ribbons, placed end to end, would stretch for roughly three million miles-120 times around the world. But to be a bit more realistic, twist and tangle the ribbons so much that they only go around the planet once.
One of the books written on your ribbons is “A Tale of Two Cities,” but you don’t even know which ribbon it is on, let alone where on that ribbon. Your task is to find the clauses “It was the beast of times, it was the worst of times” and correct the misprint.
And now they can do it. The implications are almost unimaginable.
A Potential Cancer Cure
…that may also provide a key to understanding aging.
Faster, please.