Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Growing The Energy Supply

6 Comments

It comes from markets, not bureaucrats:

There is a lesson here for public policy generally, including health care. No centralized government expert predicted the vast expansion in energy supply from hydraulic fracking. It was produced by decentralized specialists in firms subject to market competition.

Just as Friedrich Hayek taught, no central planner can know or foresee enough to produce the beneficial results regularly produced by competition in free markets regulated in accordance with the rule of law. And no central planner can accurately predict the course of innovation that can be achieved in decentralized markets. That’s something you might want to keep in mind when someone tells you that Medicare costs can be controlled by 15 members of an unelected board created by Obamacare. Better results and lower costs can be expected with the kind of market competition set up by the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law.

We can’t get rid of these unjustifiably arrogant ignorami soon enough. But it’s less than a year and a half to judgment day.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Weinergate

27 Comments

…and the Twitter numbers. It’s OK, though — he’s a “liberal” Democrat.

[Update Monday morning]

“I demand an official investigation of the hacker who broke into Congressman Weiner’s Twitter account.” Me too. It’s an outrage.

[Update a couple hours later]

Mickey Kaus agrees with Jim Treacher and me:

So a liberal Congressman basically stands accused of sending a highly inappropiate tweet, while a right-wing blogger basically stands accused of setting him up. They could both be innocent, of course. Or not. But this isn’t a case of he said/he said. There are electronic records of all these actions. If both of the accused open up their computers to a neutral, third party tech nerd–-who doesn’t have to be in law enforcement–-it should be possible to find out fairly quickly if either/both/none of them is culpable, no? The truth is in there!

I wonder if the congressman can handle the truth?

[Tuesday evening update]

The Democrats are circling the wagons, as they always do.

Technology and Society, Uncategorized, Weird

A Posting From Bizarro World

18 Comments

So I was reading comments at Paul Spudis’s Apollo anniversary post, and I saw a trackback to this:

As we contend there, if we can put a male on a moon, because can’t we get people to stop creation bad analogies with putting group on a moon? But on this anniversary, a some-more touching defence is, if we can put a male on a moon, because can’t we put a male on a moon? We did, after all, have a devise to do so until Constellation was canceled final year. But there was a good reason it died — it was an try to repeat Apollo (quite literally — NASA director Mike Griffin described it as “Apollo on steroids” when he rolled it out over 5 years ago– a word he no doubt came to regret). The problem was, it was function though possibly a coercion or the bill of that project. As heavenly scientist Paul Spudis points out during Smithsonian Air and Space magazine, a genuine problem is that we have never figured out as a republic because we have a space program.

It’s as though someone took my anniversary piece and put it through a word blender. Does anyone have any idea what’s going on here?

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

So Much For That Excuse

20 Comments

The EPA administrator admits that fracking is not a threat to groundwater.

I think that natural gas is going to get very cheap, and here in California, I expect electricity prices to continue to go crazy, particularly with the batshit new carbon law. Probably time to invest in a gas heater for the spa. I think it would pay for itself in a year. In fact, I might look into a gas generator, and not just for emergencies. I’ll probably have to hide it from the carbon police, though.

Technology and Society

The Manhattan Project

20 Comments

….was it a fluke?

I think there are some category errors here:

In the vast majority of mechanical inventions, there have been thousands of trials at a component level, hundreds of partial (e.g. static tests of a rocket in which the engine is run but the rocket is not actually flown) or complete trials of a full system. It usually involves many attempts before a full system such as an atomic bomb actually works. Mechanical inventions that work right the first time are clearly the exception in the history of invention and discovery. Some possible exceptions are Tesla’s alternating current motor (if Tesla is to be believed), the atomic bomb, and the first flight of the Space Shuttle. Inventions that work right the first time do appear to occur, but they are rare, exceptions, outliers, flukes. They probably should not be treated as typical or likely for planning purposes or investment decisions.

…projects that succeed on essentially the first attempt are rare; in this, the Manhattan Project is quite unusual. Yet, this success of the Manhattan Project has greatly helped fund scientific R&D megaprojects that implicitly assume that the full system will work on the first try or with only a few attempts, something that is historically rare. Full scale systems like the ITER tokamak, particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and so forth are both extremely expensive and each trial of the full system is likely to cost anywhere from millions to billions of dollars. Thus, one hundred full system trials, perhaps a more realistic planning number, implies vast costs. Not surprisingly, many scientific megaprojects like the NASA Ares/Constellation program recently or the Super Conducting Supercollider (SSC) have foundered in a sea of rising costs.

Ignoring the fact that Constellation wasn’t a “science” project, one of these things is not like the other. Rocketry isn’t really rocket science any more. If you consider Falcon 1 a “training rocket” for SpaceX, consider that Falcon 9 worked almost without a hitch the first time (the only issue was the upper-stage roll), and Dragon worked the first time. If you do enough simulations, it is in fact possible to get it right the first time (though Shuttle had a pretty bad first flight — I’ve learned recently that Young and Crippen actuallywould have considered ejecting due to concern about the body flap damage from overpressure, had they known about it). The problem with vertical takeoff expendable rockets is that they pretty much have to work the first time, or at least in as few a number of tries as possible, because tests are expensive, and they’re not possible to incrementally test. I can’t emphasize enough what a breakthrough the new reusable suborbital vehicles are going to be, in their ability to incrementally test and do gradual envelope expansion. But in the context of incremental development and testing, I’m not sure what “work the first time” even means.

I would also note that Constellation’s problems were cooked in from the beginning, given what an awful design concept, and incompetent management it had. Combine that with the pork aspects, and its failure was inevitable, as many (including me) predicted at the time.

Anyway, despite the mixing of apples and oranges, it’s an interesting, albeit long, read.