Category Archives: Technology and Society

Space, Technology and Society

No Ten-Year Plans

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Ron Bailey has some thoughts on top-down government-driven technology programs:

The motivation behind the Apollo moon shot program was largely geopolitical. The Soviets had launched the first artificial satellite in 1957 and orbited the first man around the planet in 1961. As a NASA history explains, “First, and probably most important, the Apollo program was successful in accomplishing the political goals for which it had been created. Kennedy had been dealing with a Cold War crisis in 1961 brought on by several separate factors–the Soviet orbiting of Yuri Gagarin and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion only two of them–that Apollo was designed to combat.” The Apollo program cost $25.4 billion (about $150 billion in current dollars) to land just 12 astronauts on the moon. It is curious that Shellenberger and Nordhaus cite the Apollo program as an example of transformative technologies since it was basically a technological dead end.

Yes, and one that NASA seems determined to repeat.

Technology and Society

What A Great Job To Have

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Some people get all the fun. You could charge admission to watch a test like this:

The secret payload traveled a distance of 3.61 miles in about six seconds on three sleds. Each sled ignited in stages to propel the cargo down the track. A helium tent enclosed nearly three miles of the 10-mile track in order to reduce the aerodynamic heating and drag on the payload.

Despite our earlier speculation, no one is saying what it was that traveled so fast. Navy sources did admit that, on top of the multiple sonic booms heard in the desert, the payload itself detonated at the end of the track.

I’ll bet it did.

Science And Society, Technology and Society

We Need Science In Medicine

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One of the prevailing myths of modern life (I use the word here in the sense of something that everyone believes, not necessarily something that is false) is that cholesterol causes heart disease and stroke, and that reducing it will reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke. But the recent Vytorin issue should give us cause to question this conventional wisdom.

Whenever I’ve looked at the research, I’ve never been able to see any clear indication that taking cholesterol-reducing medication actually reduces risk, per se–all that the clinical studies that I’ve seen seem to indicate is that cholesterol reduction is taking place. But correlation is not causation. It could be that both high cholesterol and vascular disease are caused by some third factor that hasn’t been identified, and that in reducing cholesterol, whether by diet or medication, or both, we are treating a symptom rather than a cause.

My point is, that I don’t know the answer. But I don’t have a lot of confidence that the medical community does, either. And I remain wary of taking medications with unknown side effects and potential for interaction with other things I ingest, when the benefit is unclear. And I write this as someone who lost both parents to heart disease (my father’s first heart attack occurred when he was about forty five, and he died from a second one about a decade later). But they also had much different lifestyles than I did–they grew up with poor diets during the depression, they both smoked like chimneys, and they were both overweight. So I don’t necessarily believe that genetics is destiny, at least in this case.

Technology and Society, War Commentary

Radar Breakthrough

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This looks like a pretty slick technology:

Lockheed for the first time has been testing a digital beam array to locate and track live targets–in this case, commercial and military aircraft coming in and out of the Philadelphia area. “The hard part was how we combined all the data … to form the individual beams,” Scott Smith, program manager for the radar system at Lockheed, tells PM. Commercially available high-speed digital electronics and advanced signal processors have become advanced enough to allow this data processing to occur, and that in turn has enabled digital beamforming to become practical for use outside a lab.

It will be helpful for ATC, but it has obvious military applications:

Digital beamforming radars will likely find their first homes on ships that track missile threats to U.S. fleets. Those threats will come from ballistic launches hundreds of miles away or from high-speed missiles launched from submarines or warplanes. The Russian government has been busy selling sea-skimming, antiship missiles to China that are designed to overwhelm the U.S. fleet’s radars, so the ability to track multiple, fast-moving threats could become vital in the Taiwan Straits. But a digitized phased array radar can handle many incoming signals at once, and should be able to discern real threats from bits of metal or shaped decoy balloons.So somewhere a Chinese admiral is frowning at Lockheed’s news, and a Taiwanese general is smirking.

Expect the usual suspects, any minute, to claim that it is “destabilizing” (a phrase they use any time the US comes up with a better way to defend itself).