…of Neal Stephenson.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The New Season
An interview with the creator of the Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Of Course It Does
Restricting the top speed on automobiles “seems reasonably sensible” to Matthew Yglesias:
…of course the reason you’re not allowed to go super-fast is that it isn’t safe. A large proportion of car accidents are related to people driving too quickly. Thus, via Ezra Klein comes Kent Sepkowitz’s suggestion that we design cars so as to make it impossible for them to drive over, say, 75 miles per hour.
Clearly spoken as someone woefully ignorant of the cause of accidents, and who probably doesn’t drive much, at least outside a city, or in the west, or in mountains, or on curvy roads where rapid passing is occasionally necessary. Or someone to whom time (at least other peoples’ time) has no value. I suspect that he agrees with Al Gore that cars are intrinsically evil, and wishes that everyone would ride a train, like those enlightened Europeans. It’s similar to the idiocy (and yes, there’s no other word for it) of a double nickel speed limit (something to which even Charles Krauthammer, who doesn’t drive at all) has fallen prey.
Fortunately, most of his commenters take him to school.
Worth Its Weight In Gold
A list of items that have a higher value density than gold. This is a characteristic of any viable product of space manufacturing, at least one that will have a market on earth, because transportation costs are so high.
Impact Of New Space
There’s an interesting discussion in comments between Clark Lindsey and Dwayne Day (and others, though those are less interesting) on how much progress we have made in achieving the goals of the new private space industry over at Space Transport News.
Clark tends to be a glass-half-full kind of guy. Dr. Day thinks there are a few drops in the bottom, and they’re poisoned.
Breaking Windows
How much should Microsoft fear Google Chrome?
Who knows? We’ll see.
Sea Versus Space
Dwayne Day has an interesting history comparing undersea exploration technology with space exploration technology.
One other point of coming convergence–the increasing use of underwater suit concepts for space suits (particularly for high-pressure suits that can eliminate the need to prebreathe). Historically, NASA has generally ignored the undersea folks, though there has been a lot of private interaction (Phil Nuytten of Can-Dive has been developing hard suit concepts for decades). It looked like that might be changing with the selection of Oceaneering for the new EMU program, until NASA cancelled the contract and reopened the competition. We’ll see what the future holds, and if Hamilton Sunstrand retains their grip on the agency space-suit budget.
For Our Own Good
The government doesn’t want you to have access to your own genome data.
Sorry, I outgrew my nanny many decades ago.
[Via Geekpress]
I Can Live Without The Flying Cars
…as long as we get disease cures, including anti-aging, from pills. This was certainly a part of the twenty-first century that I’d been hoping for.
More On The “CAD Problem”
Jeff Finckenor responds to some of his critics in the comments section:
“He’s a whiner who didn’t get his way and went to the IG”
Not a terribly polite way to put things, but I suppose it is somewhat accurate. Of course “my way” which I was always advocating was a call to do a technical evaluation to determine what we really needed to do. You know, things like writing requirements, then making selections based on those requirements. Some people would call that good engineering. Some would call it federal law. It never happened. Had it happened then I wouldn’t have had any arguments to make and would have been shut down a long time ago. Had it happened and there were real reasons for MSFC and Constellation making the decisions they did, then I could have supported them even if I was less then thrilled. You go to the IG to report waste, fraud and abuse. I was duty bound to report what I saw as both a taxpayer and a government employee. If there wasn’t any meat to what I was saying, then the IG would have sent me away. They didn’t. Those who want to do the search may also want to look up a letter from Senator Grassley to NASA. It was a very powerful letter and appears to have been soundly ignored. It takes a lot of chutzpah to blow off the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but NASA got away with it.
Those who argue with me will trot out an “evaluation” that was done in 2002, except that that evaluation was based on a CM tool ONLY (not CAD management), and it was fatally flawed in how it was performed. And yes, all you’re getting here is an opinion, and again my information has been documented and given to the appropriate authorities.
Was I asked to “stop working against management”? I guess that’s one way to put it, if I was willing to ignore reality, give up on the vision of what NASA needs to succeed, and toe the party line.
It was wrenching deciding 3 years ago that my job wasn’t worth the mess that I was seeing. I had basically decided that a NASA that could make a decision so badly (which is not quite the same thing as a bad decision, though in this case I believe it is the same), and not be able to correct itself was not a good place to work. So I committed to supporting good engineering practice and federal law, knowing that I might be forced out. 3 years later, I have given up, which was again wrenching for me. The politics are too overwhelming, and it is indeed not a good place for me to work.
Go read the whole thing.
All of the comments have to be very disquieting to fans of business as usual at NASA. It’s not about CAD. It’s about whether this is an institution that, despite the many talented people working for it, is capable of getting us into space in any serious way.