Well, everything went according to plan. Though from a pain standpoint, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better, because they shot up the area with a local, and I’ll probably be unhappy when it wears off (I do have decent meds, though). But at least for now, I’m ambulatory, up and down stairs, and can sit at the computer.
It was probably good to get this out of the way in front of a three-day weekend…
[Friday mid-morning update]
Just to end all the speculation in comments, it was not an “@n@l spelunking” (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I had to patch up (literally) an inguinal hernia on the right side. I was trying to avoid TMI, but…
I’m going under the knife tomorrow, for some long-overdue minor (or perhaps more than minor, but routine) surgery. Not sure how long it will be until I’m at the computer again, but if you don’t hear from me for a few days, that’s why.
[Update a few minutes later]
For those concerned, it really is routine. Nothing life threatening — just some repair to the structure. I am very fortunate that this is the most major medical situation with which I’ve had to deal in my life. For instance, I’m sure that childbirth would be much worse. One of the reasons I so admire women.
I think that this guy is asking the wrong question. “Forever” isn’t the option, it’s “indefinitely,” or “as long as I want to live.” No one is going to live forever, unless you think we’ll get around the heat death of the universe somehow, and there will always be accidents, regardless of how advanced biomedical technology becomes. But ignoring that issue, given my experience with cryonics, the numbers don’t surprise me at all. Of course, it’s one thing to say you only want to live to be eighty when it’s a theoretical issue, decades from now. A lot of those people change their minds when the time actually approaches.
ICBMs were never designed to be highly reliable, because to do so would have dramatically increased their costs (many hundreds of them were built), and it wasn’t necessary for their mission. They were designed to be launched in massive numbers, and if a few out of a hundred didn’t make it through, that was all right, because they were often redundant in their targeting (that is, more than one missile would be aimed at a key target). Some estimates at the time of the reliability of the Titan II was only 80% or so (that is, one in five would not deliver its payload to the designated target), based on the fact that eight of its initial thirty-three test launches were failures. The early manned spaceflights were performed on modified versions of them (specifically, the Redstone and Atlas for Mercury and Titan II for Gemini). But what was good enough for a weapon as part of a fusillade of dozens or hundreds wasn’t perceived to be for a single flight carrying a human, particularly with recent memories of nationally televised ignominious failures of rockets on the launch pad. Thus was born the pernicious (and now obsolete) concept of “man rating,” which confuses the space industry and obfuscates policy down to this very day.
Anyone out there familiar with targeting strategy in the fifties and sixties? I’m assuming that multiple missiles were aimed at single targets, for redundancy, at least for critical targets. True or false?
[Evening update]
Folks, I honestly appreciate all of the info in comments, but I should have said that I need citable (i.e., non-classified) sources. They will go into footnotes.
Mann is going to face similar problems in his legal action against NRO. (Not to mention the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which he is also now threatening to sue). NRO’s defence lawyers are going to demand full disclosure of any number of hitherto private documents which Mann would probably have preferred to remain private. Furthermore, they are going to have the fish-in-a-barrel-style target of Mann’s Hockey Stick which has been so thoroughly rebutted so many times that there is no way on God’s earth Mann will be able to claim, straightfaced, that it retains the merest scintilla of scientific credibility. Ditto the various sham enquiries supposedly clearing the Climategate scientists of wrong-doing: an even half-way decent lawyer is going to make mincemeat of their verdicts.
So why, against all logic and reason, is Mann planning to go ahead with his defamation action?
My bet is that he won’t. But in the unlikely event that he does it will be because:
1. As I argue in Watermelons, the climate alarmist industry is so richly funded that it can easily afford to pursue cases like this.
2. Because this is what happens when you live in a bubble. And the “Climate Science” community is a bubble in much the same way that the Westminster and Washington DC villages are bubbles: these people spend so little time living in the real world that they lose the plot completely. In the weird, weird world of Michael Mann and his fellow climate “scientists”, Climategate was just a case of ordinary decent scientists doing their job, the IPCC remains the gold standard of international climate science, the Hockey Stick is not a standing joke and man-made global warming remains the greatest threat to the planet ever. The facts speak otherwise. But when you’re working in a business as awash with cash as the Climate Change industry, why would you ever let facts get in the way of a good story?
Why indeed? The irony, as always, is that it is the climate scientists, not the skeptics, who are well endowed, financially, and engaged in internal discussions of how to fight their perceived enemies.