Category Archives: Technology and Society

Popular Culture, Technology and Society

Thoughts On Improving Baseball

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This one is a good idea, but the technology is wrong:

Balls and strikes should be determined by lasers (only those we can spare from volcano-lancing, of course). There’s no excuse for allowing the imprecision of a home-plate umpire in the 21st century.

It’s not just imprecision — it’s subjectivity. But I’m not sure how lasers would work. The strike zone varies from batter to batter (e.g., different knee and shoulder heights, and stance). I think it would be better to put in miniaturized GPS-type transponders in the balls, shoulders and knees of the uniform, and have a computer determine whether it was a ball or strike. The one in the ball would obviously have to be capable of enduring high impact… You could get adequate precision if you put a lot of transmitters in the stadium. It would also be used for ruling fouls, homers, whether the throw beat the slide, etc. It would be nice to get fallible humans out of the loop as much as possible.

The same would apply to football. Put one in each end of the ball, and an array on the players’ uniforms. There would no longer be much dispute as to where to spot, whether or not it is a first down, whether it broke the plane of the end zone, etc.

Space, Technology and Society

A Warning Shot

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…it’s just the latest one:

On 8 October an asteroid detonated high in the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, releasing about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That’s about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed.

However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth’s surface, says astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada.

Brown and Elizabeth Silber, also of UWO, estimated the explosion energy from infrasound waves that rippled halfway around the world and were recorded by an international network of instruments that listens for nuclear explosions.

Emphasis mine. We get hit a lot more often than people realize. And we’ve been very lucky so far that none of them have hit populated areas.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Whales, Fish And Minnows

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Roger Pielke explains how the left-blogosphere works. I would note this in particular:

In the case of Romm and Delong they also engage in outright lies and character assassination. Neither links to my own words on my blog, apparently afriad of what might happen if people view what I have to say directly, rather than their cartoonish caricatures. Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate contacted my university once and demanded that they sanction me for opinions that he did not like on my blog, under a vague threat of harm to reputation. Joe Romm has ordered the media not to talk to me (given the response, I assume that the folks who listened to him were the same folks who feed him quotes;-). What is even more disturbing is how these folks interact on a personal level. I was completely taken aback by the unprofessional email responses I received from Brad DeLong yesterday. I have occasionally seen faculty members throw hissy fits in a faculty meeting, but never have I seen the degree of unprofessional behavior displayed routinely by professionals in the liberal blogosphere. What is with these guys?

I’ve noticed this, too. While obviously the exceptions are many, I’ve noticed in general that leftosphere bloggers are much less professional and much more incivil in both public and personal communications than those on the so-called “right,” who tend to be more courteous even in disagreement. For example, some have done studies that found use of the F-word and other crudities much more prevalent to port than starboard. And I (and Roger) are not the only people who have noticed this, which makes me think that it’s something more than anecdotal. As to theories of why that may be, I’ll let others speculate.

Technology and Society, Weird

Don’t Try This At Home

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A six-year-old boy has floated off in a balloon in Colorado. I’m guessing no flight plan was filed with the FAA. This sounds like one of those “Honey, I shrank the kid” things. I’ll bet Mom’s not happy. Here’s hoping for the best.

But the story seems to be updated sort of weirdly. It’s not clear that he was ever in the balloon. Maybe he ran away after accidentally releasing it, afraid that he’d be in trouble.

[Late afternoon update]

Fortunately, it looks like my guess was correct. He was hiding, safe and sound.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Saving Scatterometers

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I haven’t dug into either the programmatics or the politics of this, but Jeff Masters says that the Senate is about to cut NOAA’s budget and move the funds to criminal alien assistance. I don’t live in south Florida any more (hallelujiah!) but I think that tracking hurricanes is a higher priority for that money. I do think that if I did dig into this, I might find more innovative and cost-effective proposals to do it than another QuickSCAT (like data purchase), but I’d rather have that than nothing.

I would also note that if the satellite had been designed to be serviced, and Shuttle had lived up to its initial program goals (including, of course, west-coast launch capability), we wouldn’t have to launch a new satellite — it would be an excellent candidate for repair, with its instruments still in good shape. But because Shuttle didn’t, it wasn’t. And because satellites aren’t designed to be serviced, there is less market to justify systems capable of servicing them. Chicken and egg. Such are the ongoing consequences of not being a spacefaring nation.

I wonder if this would have been more in the news if we’d had a more active hurricane season, and were still in the middle of it? Timing is all.