Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Sequestration Will Cause Flight Delays?

4 Comments

Debunking one of the many administration liesscare stories:

…instead of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, LaHood could use the current budget cuts as an opportunity to do what Canada did 17 years ago when it also faced a severe budget crunch: fundamentally reform the air traffic control system.

But that wouldn’t satisfy the administration’s political agenda.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Raj Koothrappali Approach

14 Comments

…to Constitutional law:

I don’t know if you watch Big Bang Theory, but Raj is Indian of course, and he’s lecturing his sister from India on Hindu rules about modesty and sexual propriety, and she just looks at him and says, “You’re talking to me about this, as you’re eating a cheeseburger!” He just looks at her and says, “Some of it makes sense; some of it’s crazy – whatta do?!” And that’s basically the Seidman approach to the Constitution, right? The parts he likes make sense, and the others are crazy – whatta do?

This reminds me of cafeteria Catholics, who want to pick and choose which aspects of the religion they want to accept.

So if we’re going to start ignoring the Constitution, I’m fine with that. The first part I’m going to start ignoring is the part that says, I have to do whatever they say.

Yup. Particularly the part where we’re supposed to pretend along with them that the Second Amendment doesn’t exist, or that it’s about hunting, while they try to disarm us.

[Update a while later]

Whine, whine, whine. OK, here‘s the link.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Nuclear Weapons As A Unit Of Measurement

19 Comments

Some thoughts:

“In general,” he added, “What I don’t like is … the idea that kiloton or a megaton is just an energy unit, that it’s equivalent to so many joules or something. Because you could do that. You could claim that your house runs so many tons of TNT worth of electricity per year, but it sort of trivializes the notion.”

While I agree that the notion of comparing a bolide explosion to a nuclear event is misleading, I think he misses the boat himself here. It’s not just about an “energy release.” It’s about how fast the energy is released. That is, talking about megatons of TNT is a discussion about power, not energy per se. This is the same confusion that people have with regard to rocketry. They often talk about how much “energy” it takes to get into orbit, when in fact it’s not much more energy than it takes for intercontinental aircraft flight. The difference is that the airplane deploys its energy over many hours, whereas the rocket must do so in a very few minutes. When the Shuttle took off, it generated more power than the entire nation’s electrical grid for the first two minutes. In fact, when I was working propulsion at Rotary Rocket in the nineties, we used to joke about what units we should use to describe the power output of the engine, and thought that “Hoovers” (as in the dam) would be a useful one.

In any event, radiation and heat or no, either exploding meteoroids or nuclear weapons city busters, and events to be concerned about.

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