As is noted there, Krugman told us Enron was working fine, too.
23 And Me
I think that the FDA is a much greater danger to public health than DNA testing. It needs to be reined in.
Inspiration Mars
…and its uninspirational end:
…as this latest episode demonstrates, unaffordable programs like the SLS are not a highway to the solar system. They are a roadblock.
Another mission destroyed by the big-rocket myth.
SpaceX SES-8 Launch
The webcast has started, and they’re currently go for launch in about half an hour. It will take a while before they know if they’re successful, because they have to do a restart this time — it’s a mission requirement.
[Update a couple minutes later]
This is a little annoying. The webcast stalls every few seconds, and I have to hit pause/play to get it going again.
Star Wars
Thoughts on when the franchise died.
Frankly, I was never that big a fan. I thought it was highly overrated by a younger generation.
Ten Questions For Al Gore
Earlier this year in an interview with the Globe and Mail you described Canada’s development of the oil sands as the equivalent of treating the atmosphere like an “open sewer.” What do you have to say about the findings of Canadian climate scientist and lead UN IPCC author Andrew Weaver, and his colleague Neal Swart, published in the journal Nature, that even if Canada developed all the commercially viable oil in the oilsands, global temperatures would rise by an insignificant 0.03 degrees?
It’s frightening how close this pompous hypocritical math-challenged fool came to being president.
Obama’s Legacy Of Betrayal
He builds on it with the Iranian deal. This is shameful.
Politicians And Technology
Why they don’t know how to deal with technical messes:
All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren’t dumb. But they come from a background — law and politics — where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.
What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don’t is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there’s no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.
When our country has accomplished great things in the past, there has usually been a great engineer running the program: Hyman Rickover with the nuclear submarine program, or Wernher von Braun with the Apollo space program, for example. Rickover and von Braun were famously stern taskmasters, but they did not substitute wishes for reality.
Which may be why they were able to launch submarines, and rockets that astounded the world. While today, we can’t even launch a website.
Of course, they ignore economic reality as well.
For OCD Sufferers
Thirty images that will drive you nuts.
I’ll confess to trying to end-zero a gas pump, but I’m not a fanatic about it.
But He’s “Likable”
Obama hits all-time lows:
Obama’s woes are not limited to honesty and his managerial skills. Fifty-six percent say he is not a person they admire, and an equal number say he does not agree with them on important issues. Fifty-six percent also say he does not inspire confidence, and 53% don’t view him as a strong and decisive leader. All of those figures are all-time records for Obama in CNN polling.
OK, so they don’t agree with him, they don’t believe or trust him, they don’t think he’s competent, they don’t admire him, or think him a strong and decisive leader. But they like him.
I don’t know how to explain this cognitive dissonance except it’s the last bastion of the fear of being thought a racist.