Or maybe not. Let’s hope not. Anyway, Bigelow deserves our support in his valiant effort to make ITAR sane. Not sure off hand what we can do to help, though.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Battle Of The Featherweights
Here’s a comparison of the ASUS Eee and the Everex Cloudbook.
I’m not really in the market for either of them–I can live with my full-service laptop for now. I don’t tend to be an early adopter, and will wait until they get more function and lighter still. But it looks to me like the Eee would definitely have the edge for me if I was going to get one.
Molecular Computing
Alan Boyle reports on what appears to be a breakthrough in molecular machinery. Bring it on, at least as far as the medical applications go.
The Solar Singularity?
Arnold Kling has some thoughts on our near-term (in the next couple decades) energy future.
Guitar Heros
Michael Yon has a long but interesting post about helicopter combat in Iraq:
Sometimes I sit up on a hill and watch them in the air. The other day two Kiowas were screaming low right over the rooftops and doing hard turns. I couldn’t see the combat because they were too far away, but I knew they were toe to toe and there was plenty of shooting going on or they wouldn’t have been flying so violently. It’s scary watching them because I’ve met them and know they are mortals doing the work of immortals. At any second there could be a fireball. A “fallen angel.” I remember the call over the radio last year of a “fallen angel” down by Baghdad. All aboard had been lost.
Blackbird Memories
From a former pilot.
…the plane was dripping, much like the misshapen model had assembled in my youth. Fuel was seeping through the joints, raining down on the hangar floor. At Mach 3, the plane would expand several inches because of the severe temperature, which could heat the leading edge of the wing to 1,100 degrees. To prevent cracking, expansion joints had been built into the plane. Sealant resembling rubber glue covered the seams, but when the plane was subsonic, fuel would leak through the joints.
One of the sayings of the program was that if the plane wasn’t dripping, don’t bother to get in–someone forgot to fuel it.
Busy
The next house project (not counting landscaping, which we may be hiring someone to do) is molding, both replacing base and installing crown. It was a nice excuse to go out and buy a nice Craftsman 10″ compound dual-bevel laser miter saw, because Sears was having a sale. I thought about getting a 12 inch, because it wasn’t that much more, but it took up more room, and the blades were a lot more (though with carbide, it might have been a one-time purchase, given my low usage level). And I couldn’t really justify it–the ten-inch will do just fine for almost anything I need to do in terms of beveling or mitering. If I need to bevel bigger things, a table saw will do the job. I guess I’m not Tim the Tool Man, even though I am from southeast Michigan.
I continue to be amazed at how low cost good tools have become–particularly tools (and power tools) that didn’t even exist when I was a kid. I suspect that this isn’t factored into inflation much, but it really does add to the national wealth when people can improve their productivity at little cost. In California in the nineties, I did some base molding with nothing but a circular saw, but it was a pain in the ass, and I’m sure that this will do a much better job. Anyway, if blogging seems light, that will be one of the reasons.
I Always Suspected It
I’ve always thought that Monster cables were a scam, and that the supposed quality improvement couldn’t justify the ridiculously high prices, and that it was quite annoying that they’ve monopolized so much shelf space in the electronics stores. It’s hard to get reasonably priced audio cables (though things are better at Home Depot). But really, I’ve always figured that most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Monster and lamp cord.
Well, it turns out that supposed audiophiles couldn’t distinguish between Monster and coat hangers. But I suspect that the scam will continue, with salespeople continuing to push them. There are probably great margins for both the manufacturer and the retailers.
[Via Geek Press]
Space Arms Control Speech
Would a ban on space weaponry be verifiable? It seems intuitively obvious to me that the answer is “no.”
I think that this is a key point:
The President’s Space Policy highlights our national and, indeed the global, dependence on space. The Chinese interception only underscored the vulnerability of these critical assets. Calling for arms control measures can often appear to be a desirable approach to such problems. Unfortunately, “feel good” arms control that constrains our ability to seek real remedies to the vulnerabilities that we face has the net result of harming rather than enhancing U.S. and international security and well-being.
I always trust hardware over paper and good intentions.
More On Cholesterophobia
A few weeks ago I said that we don’t do enough science when it comes to heart disease, and may confuse correlation with causation. Here’s another interesting bit of data that reinforces the notion that cholesterol levels don’t necessarily cause heart disease.