Here are some pretty pictures of their proposed space hotel. Still no explanation of how they get the price down below a million dollars (I don’t think anyone is going to get to orbit cheaper than SpaceX in that time frame, and they’re charging twenty million a seat). I also wonder when the “space tourism season” begins and ends. And where does it get its power, and how does it get rid of heat?
If you’re guessing I’m skeptical about this proposal, you’re correct.
Linux. It was actually earlier in the week.
Open Office, that is, on Fedora 14. I click on a document to open it, or try opening from the menu, and it says “starting open office,” spins an icon for a few seconds, and then nothing. I tried removing and reinstalling, and no change. I recently did an update on my Nvidia drivers, which included a new kernel. I of course had to reboot (something I am always loathe to do). I think that’s when the problem started. Any ideas out there? This is really an emergency. If I can’t get it fixed, I may have to do a lot of my writing on a different machine, maybe even a Microsoft one, and one not in my office.
The greens lobbying President Obama to block the pipeline are asking him to forgo thousands of jobs (in an election year in which jobs will could well be the major issue!) and billions of dollars in economic advantages — not to save the planet or reduce the carbon in the atmosphere, but to confer an economic and political advantage on China. If President Obama takes the green advice, the US will get almost all of the disadvantages that come from using the oil ourselves, and lose out many of the benefits.
There’s another factor that has to be weighed. Getting secure oil sources for the United States isn’t just a matter of convenience; reducing US exposure to foreign blackmail, and reducing our need to consider military interventions and other actions to protect our energy supply helps make war less likely — and allows us, all things being equal, to get along with somewhat smaller armed forces than would otherwise be required.
More, forcing China to look to less stable places than Canada for its oil transfers some of the costs of global energy security to the Chinese, and also helps tie them into the development of a rule driven global system. If the US oil supply comes largely from friendly neighbors, while China (and other US competitors) must rely on unstable, far flung sources, we are going to have more flexibility in our foreign policy and China will have so many fish to fry and cats to herd that it will be less likely to think about mounting a global challenge to the US.
Don’t expect the enviroloons to think rationally about this. We should prefer ethical oil over conflict oil. Of course, in their unrealistic fantasies, we would use no oil at all, and just power everything with windmills (ignoring the bird kill) and unicorn flatulence.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of green madness (and now anger) it looks like climate models will have to be revised. Damn those extraterrestrial causes! Can’t you just leave us green Ptolemaians alone?
From stem cells. Within five years?
The sooner the better.
Is anyone out there familiar with Nuxeo?
I find this story kind of incredible. The hotel itself seems feasible enough, but how in the world do they expect to get the cost down to less than $200,000 per person? And the comments are hilariously clueless. I particularly liked this one:
As much as I would love to go to space, I think it would get very boring after about 5 min of looking out the tiny window. you would be seeing the same view for 5 days, and who seriously is going to look out of the window the whole time? the rest of the time you’re spending it in cramped quarters. I really feel humans do not belong in outer space.
“Feel” is the operative word here. This is clearly a person who doesn’t do much in the way of real thinking.
Some useful thoughts from Jim Manzi.
You know who else liked them?
The Nordic landscape cries out to be traversed by rails over which express trains can speed. It is a characteristic of all Nordic vehicles to increase their speed. Ever-increasing velocity is a built-in characteristic of the rails themselves, the rails by which, in the Nordic experience of the world, the whole world is penetrated. Rails that are already in existence and those that must constantly be constructed for ever newer, ever faster vehicles on which men who experience the world Nordically may strive toward ever new goals. The Nordic soul experiences its world as a structure made up of countless thoroughfares — those already at hand and those still to be created — on land, on water, in the air, and in the stratosphere. It races like a fever through all segments of the Nordic community, a fever of speed which, infectiously, reaches out far beyond the world of the north and attacks souls who are not Nordic and for whom, at bottom, such action is contrary to their style and senseless.
Take a guess. Of course, he was militantly opposed to smoking and a vegetarian, too.
[Via Althouse]
…a million-year one. If we can’t come up with superluminal ships, this is probably the best solution for anyone who wants to see other star systems.