Here‘s the (long) list.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
How Much Would A Death Star Really Cost?
To the disappointment of thousands who signed the petition, the Obama administration recently informed us that it has, and will have no plans to build a Star-Wars-style death star. Now, there may indeed be good reasons to forgo this addition to the nation’s defense, but the first one listed, that it would cost 850 quadrillion dollars, was based on an extremely flawed estimate. Which isn’t surprising, because among the people doing the estimating, only one has any experience in aerospace engineering (and probably none in costing of such projects). Continue reading How Much Would A Death Star Really Cost?
Growing A Neanderthal
Bummer. That scientist says he’s not seeking a mother to bear one.
AR-15s
Imagining ourselves in a high-stress, violent situation, we want a gun with enough ammo, and more, to get the job done. Sometimes, you only get one shot. At other times, you may need more. When you don’t have time to reload in the heat of a home invasion, the AR-15’s 30-round magazine gives you the flexibility and security a handgun will not.
High-capacity magazines serve as a life-saving insurance mechanism, a self-defense back-up if something doesn’t go according to plan. Yet you would never think of these guns in this sense by listening to anti-gun zealots and their allies in media.
Assault rifles and high-capacity magazines have been under fire from our nation’s legislators since the Newtown massacre. It only took Senator Dianne Feinstein two days to announce her intention to reinstate the Clinton-era assault-weapons ban to get “these dangerous weapons of war off our streets.” New York governor Andrew Cuomo took it upon himself to make his state the first to tighten gun laws post-Newtown, proudly outlawing magazines over seven rounds because “no one needs ten bullets to kill a deer.”
Senator Feinstein and Governor Cuomo: We may not need ten bullets to kill a deer, but we sure need them in our own defense. Criminals rarely use assault rifles. Nearly ten times as many murders are committed with hammers and clubs, and 35 times as many with knives. Does that mean we need to ban those too, Senator Feinstein? Banning assault weapons will only take weapons away from my house — not from criminals on the street.
God made man and woman. Sam Colt made them equal.
Of course, it’s not really about keeping them away from criminals, unless you consider free men and women who might thwart your plans for them to be inherently criminals.
Jared Diamond’s New Book
Kori Schake isn’t impressed.
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.