…for delivering so little and sending students into a lifetime of debt.
The Occumorons were protesting in the wrong places.
DNA
Precise multiple editing has arrived:
Just to get your mind around this feat, imagine taking about 5,000 different novels and reprinting them in normal font size on 23 very long cotton ribbons. Since each word takes up about half an inch, the ribbons, placed end to end, would stretch for roughly three million miles-120 times around the world. But to be a bit more realistic, twist and tangle the ribbons so much that they only go around the planet once.
One of the books written on your ribbons is “A Tale of Two Cities,” but you don’t even know which ribbon it is on, let alone where on that ribbon. Your task is to find the clauses “It was the beast of times, it was the worst of times” and correct the misprint.
And now they can do it. The implications are almost unimaginable.
The Constitution
A readable version, for the 21st century. I haven’t looked at it in detail, but it seems like an interest project, at least in theory. Maybe people like Ezra Klein should give it a whirl.
That Racist Tea Party
…goes wild over a black senator, the only one in the Senate. And he’s a Republican.
No one tell the (increasingly execrable) Colin Powell.
A Potential Cancer Cure
…that may also provide a key to understanding aging.
Faster, please.
Snow-Melting Satellites
Patrick Collins, a PhD economist who lives in Japan, has been a long-time promoter of space tourism, but he has also been interested in solar-power satellites. Many have promoted them as a means to mitigate greenhouse gases, but three years ago, he presented a paper in Nagoya on their use in preventing the next glacial advance, which would be much more catastrophic than any of the climate frights conjured up by the warm mongers. He writes:
The webmaster of spacefuture.com [presumably, Peter Wainwright] refuses(!) to put this paper into the Space Future library which we founded together! Living and working in NYC seems to have made him “politically correct” (i.e. unscientific) – and also “warmist”! This despite the fact that any arguments that once existed for the theory that human emissions of CO2 could lead to catastrophic “global warming” (now morphed into “climate change”) have been totally destroyed by ever-growing scientific evidence – including notable work by Burt Rutan.
This evidence has grown by leaps and bounds in the three years since this paper was written. For a taste of the power of private citizens dedicated to scientific truth, and armed with the Internet and Freedom of Information laws, wattsupwiththat.com is hard to beat.
When we wrote this paper, neither of us had read Fallen Angels
, in which Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn – back in 1991 – prefigured both the key ideas: that the coming of the next Ice Age is a far greater threat than any possible warming, and that solar-generated microwave beams from orbiting satellites offer a unique means of combatting the spread of glaciers. NB it will require a massive “crash program” to ramp production up to a scale that could save western civilisation – a cool 1 million square kilometres of solar panels in various orbits! Sadly they were also prophetic about the degeneration of the US government. Perhaps holding back the glaciers could become the trigger to wake people up and develop space at last? Their book receives honourable mention in the follow-up paper being published soon.
I’ve uploaded the paper to my own site, for anyone interested, despite Peter’s truculence in that regard.
Climate Change
…doesn’t have to be all that bad.
Of course it does. How else can they justify their collectivist power grabs?
Too Little, Too Late
Wayne Hale continues to recall the events of a decade ago, when Columbia was lost, here, and here. And as I suspected at the time, they took the attitude that Gene Kranz did in the movie:
Jon Harpold was the Director of Mission Operations, my supreme boss as a Flight Director. He had spent his early career in shuttle entry analysis. He knew more about shuttle entry than anybody; the guidance, the navigation, the flight control, the thermal environments and how to control them. After one of the MMTs when possible damage to the orbiter was discussed, he gave me his opinion: “You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS. If it has been damaged it’s probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don’t you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?”
I was hard pressed to disagree. That mindset was widespread. Astronauts agreed. So don’t blame an individual; looks for the organizational factors that lead to that kind of a mindset. Don’t let them in your organization.
As I wrote:
…you’re asked to make an assessment, in the absence of any data except a launch video showing some insulation hitting the vehicle, as to whether or not the damage could be catastrophic. Others around you, whom you respect, are saying that it won’t be. You have a bad feeling, but you can’t prove anything with the available data.
What do you do? What’s the benefit, given that there’s no action that can be taken to alleviate the problem, in fighting to get people to recognize that we may have a serious problem?
Moreover, suppose that we do believe that there’s a problem.
Do we tell the crew? What can they do, other than make peace with their God and say goodbye to their families?
Add to that the fact that it would disrupt the mission, perhaps for nothing, and sadly, deliberate ignorance looks appealing.
Affirmative Action
The sad irony:
The biggest change since Grutter, though, has nothing to do with Court membership. It is the mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good — even for their supposed beneficiaries. If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.
As do many “progressive” policies. And it’s sometimes not clear what the real intentions were.
The Ethanol Scam
It’s long past time to end it.
This by itself is reason enough to end the nonsense of letting Iowa be so crucial to nominating presidential candidates.
Better yet, of course, would be fixing the Constitution (perhaps by overturning Wickard) to end all kinds of nonsense like this.