This is the kind of research that NASA should be doing, and would be if we were serious about space settlement. Instead, we waste billions on unneeded giant rockets. At least China is taking it more seriously.
Owning A Gun
I don’t know if it’s an act of patriotism, but I think that trying to prevent people from owning guns is the exact opposite of that.
[Late-morning update]
What does it mean to be patriotic? A nice collection of thoughts from various people.
Hobby Lobby Hysteria
Not all of the left melted down and lost its mind over the case.
Just most of it.
Though I’ve had an account for years, I’ve never really “done” it. I spend very little time there, except when I get an email notification that someone mentioned me there. I never manually post, but these blog posts do get automatically added there.
The BearCam At Brooks Falls
…has gone live. Salmon are being caught.
Colonizing Venus
The surprisingly strong case for it.
One of the many disappointments of the NRC report on human spaceflight is the almost total neglect of this topic. That’s at least partially because if was rooted in a neo-Apollo mindset, which must have boots on the ground, though it’s not clear what they’ll be doing.
Birth Control
If it’s not your boss’s business, why do you expect him to pay for it?
…the Hobby Lobby decision opens the door for closely held companies to deny coverage of all forms of birth control if they can plausibly argue that doing so would violate their conscience. The decision doesn’t apply to large, publicly held corporations, but even if it did, it is unlikely that many companies would go down that path. And even if they did, birth control would not be “banned” – employees simply would have to pay for it themselves. The notion that denying a subsidy for a product is equivalent to banning that product is one of the odder tenets of contemporary liberalism.
The cognitive dissonance required to be a leftist must be quite painful.
The EPA’s Empire Building
How it got in the way of its science.
It’s what happens to politicized bureaucracies.
Shelby’s Antics
The Houston Chronicle weighs in.
I don’t think this is quite correct, though:
Under the current Commercial Crew Development program, SpaceX contracts with NASA for a flat payment. If SpaceX comes in under cost, it gets to keep the profit. If it goes over budget, SpaceX has to make up the difference. This system gives SpaceX more flexibility to operate as it sees fit.
Shelby has inserted language in a Senate appropriations bill that would instead force SpaceX to work on NASA’s old cost-plus model. This would require the private company to track every step of its development, assign a cost to those steps and charge it to NASA, plus an additional fee. This stilted payment model forces engineers to be accountants and removes disincentives for bloated budgets.
Shelby isn’t forcing the company to cost plus. He’s doing something worse (and stupid), forcing them to account for it as though it were cost plus, but on a fixed-price contract.
Space
Without the space. XKCD stitched together all of the land area in the solar system.