Category Archives: Technology and Society

Administrative, Technology and Society

What Am I Doing Wrong?

23 Comments

I bought an HD-DVR receiver for Christmas. Which means additional cable runs, because it needs two satellite signals to record while playing real time. I’ve always used the twist-on F connectors for RG-6, but the last time the DirecTV guy came he recommended crimp-on compression connectors, for a better water seal (we always have LOS in heavy rain, which is a problem in south Florida).

So I spent the money on a DataShark crimper and a package of ten connectors. I followed the instructions, stripping the right lengths of both center conductor and plastic inner insulator (even though it looks to me like if you only do a quarter inch of bare wire, it won’t stick out enough to make contact). I’ve now wasted four of the things. None of them stay on the cable after crimping. They don’t even try. I take it out of the crimper, and it almost falls off. And of course, you can’t uncrimp to try again, so it’s a waste of almost a buck with each one. I have no clue what the problem is. I’m using standard RG-6. I can’t quite figure out what they’re supposed to be crimping to, even after looking at a crimped and uncrimped one. Anyone out there have any experience?

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Smarter Now?

15 Comments

John Tierney wonders if Dr. Holdren learned anything from his misguided bet with Julian Simon:

Dr. Simon’s victory was not (as some Lab readers suggested) a fluke based on exceptionally lucky timing, as you can see from this Wikipedia graph showing the inflation-adjusted prices for the five metals in the bet from 1950 to 2002. (Since 2002, metal prices rose sharply for several years but have since plummeted back to familiar levels.) Prices do sometimes shoot up for natural resources, but people react by finding new sources and substitutes, and prices come back down. If you look back over the past several centuries, as Dr. Simon demonstrated in his book, “The Ultimate Resource,” you’ll see that the trend was downward long before 1950, too.

What lessons Dr. Holdren learn from that bet? The only one I’m aware of is: Don’t test your theories by betting on them. After Dr. Simon collected his winnings in 1990, he offered to make another bet not just on natural resources but also on any measure of human welfare, like life expectancy or food per capita. Once again, Dr. Simon predicted that humans would adapt to new problems (like global warming) and end up better off in the future — by any measure at any future date that Dr. Holdren or Dr. Ehrlich cared to name. They refused his offer. They did, however, go on making more gloomy predictions and calculations about the problems of sustainability, as in this 1995 essay discussing how to avert future shortages of resources.

I find this particular appointment disquieting. As one of my commenters said earlier, I’d much prefer a “science advisor” who sees technology as a solution, rather than a problem. And, again, I have no idea what the implications of this pick are for space policy.

Science And Society, Technology and Society

Better Climate Control

19 Comments

Through nanotech. J. Storrs Hall (aka JoSH) has some ideas. I have a problem with this one, though:

So you have this balloon and it floats up there twenty miles. They all have a little GPS and receiver so they can turn themselves. That’s all there is to it. What can you do with a machine like this? The machine is essentially a programmable greenhouse gas. If you set the mirrors facing the sun, it reflects all the sunlight back. If you set them sideways, it allows the sunlight to come through, and similarly for the longwave radiation coming from the back side of the earth at night.

He seems to be implying that GPS can be used to determine attitude. It can’t. It only provides velocity and position. Now it may want to know that information for other purposes, but there will have to be some other means of attitude knowledge. It seems to me the simplest way would be to just measure the sunlight hitting the mirror (which would actually be a solar cell). As you adjust your attitude, the power available will grow or shrink, and it can use the rate to control the angle. As for how to physically control the attitude, I would guess that little reaction wheels would do the job.

Of course, many of the warm mongers hate technical solutions like this, because they don’t require us to piously tighten up our hair shirts, and they don’t allow for sufficient control of the global economy.

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

The New “Science” Advisor

16 Comments

Ron Bailey has some background on Dr. Holdren.

I put the “science” in quotes, because I’ve always thought the position misnamed. It’s really about science and technology (as indicated by the name — the Office of Science and Technology Policy), and the science advisor should also be a technologist, not just a scientist. Either that, or get a different and separate advisor for technology. When you put a “science” advisor in charge of providing advice on NASA, it reinforces the false perception that NASA is primarily about science, which results in all manner of policy ills.

In any event, I hope that Dr. Holdren has modified his environmental views from the seventies, and no longer allies himself with Paul Ehrlich.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Yuval Levin has more thoughts and concerns:

Perhaps more striking is his activism well beyond his own academic specialty, arguing, for instance, that scientists have a responsibility to advance the cause of the elimination of all nuclear weapons and seeking controls on population growth. And he didn’t say all this in the 1970s either—have a good look at the speech he delivered when he assumed the leadership of the AAAS in 2006. It describes a fundamentally activist liberal mentality about the very purpose of science and its place in our kind of society. My favorite part of that speech is his call for ending population growth which, in the published text of the speech, is accompanied by this footnote:

This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown’s prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man’s Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.

The Population Bomb was the book in which Ehrlich predicted that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death,” because all the world’s resources were running out while population was growing out of control, and there was simply no way we could sustain our civilization at modern levels of consumption and growth. Just about every one of the book’s predictions has proven wrong, and its empirical claims and methods have not held up well under later scholarly scrutiny. It certainly made a useful political point for the left, though.

I wonder if all those who complained about the supposed “politicization of science” by the Bush administration will raise worries about Holdren…don’t you?

No, actually, I don’t wonder at all. I think we know the answer to that one.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s more from John Tierney:

Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday.

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and
resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.

I hadn’t realized that there were other bettors besides Ehrlich, or that Holdren had made the pick. To be honest, I had never heard of the guy until Obama named him. So now we shift from a “Republican war on science” to a “Democrat war on science.” Or, perhaps, a Democrat war on the economy and freedom in the ostensible name of science. And I have no idea what this portends for space policy.

[Late afternoon update]

“Solve Climate” has an extensive set of Holdren links. I sure hope that he at least gets some tough questioning in confirmation hearings.