I am expecting this to come along in a reasonable amount of time. I have lost my wisdom teeth, but I suspect that they’ll come up with other ways to find the needed stem cells.
[Via Mark Whittington]
Category Archives: Technology and Society
A Critical Space Technology Issue
Would entry heating from orbit pop a kernel of popcorn?
I don’t really have time to think about it much right now, but the answer is (as is often the case), it depends…
On The Radio
I’ll be on The Space Show tomorrow at 3 PM Eastern (noon Pacific), to discuss Ares, Shuttle, EELVs, alternate architectures, Mike Griffin’s job prospects, etc.
[Monday afternoon update, with a bump]
The podcast is now available.
Thoughts On Twitter
Particularly in comments. I haven’t figured out what the difference is between Twitter and a short blog post, and why I should have to deal with yet another channel of communication. Of course, I still haven’t figured out what Facebook is for.
Death From The Heavens
Was there a major meteoritic strike 13,000 years ago in North America?
That wasn’t very long ago (compared to, say, the sixty-five million years ago that the Yucatan was hit). Evidence continues to accumulate that we get hit a lot more than people have previously imagined. We really need to develop the capability to do something about it. We have technology in hand to do so, but apparently lack the will to deploy it. This by itself is reason enough to make the investment to become a real spacefaring civilization, but pork and maintaining existing jobs remain more important.
What Am I Doing Wrong?
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?
Smarter Now?
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.
Aerothermal Bleg
Does anyone out there know what the maximum speed is for aluminum skin as a function of altitude?
The Year In Space
Alan Boyle has a look back at 2008, and forward to 2009.
Better Climate Control
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.