An interesting article on human psychology. I may think about how this plays into issues of human spaceflight safety, for both professional and recreational space travelers, for a couple papers I’m working on.
[Via Geek Press]
What Really Happened To Air France 447?
It was pilot error. As the article notes, humans will always be fallible (it’s one of the defining characteristics) and you can never build a guaranteed safe system. There are probably lessons to be learned here for the design of space transports as well. But I don’t think that “automated systems will be safer” is one of them.
The Latest Space Quarterly
Two articles from the current issue have been put on line for non-subscribers. One is a piece by Jeff Foust, discussing the stakes for commercial spaceflight in the upcoming COTS demonstration flights, and the other is a longer essay by Marcia Smith (who I first met at a AAS conference in Boston about thirty years ago) on the past and future of space policy, including human spaceflight. It’s a good overview, but I don’t think she’s sufficiently critical of the damaging role that Congress has played, and the role that pork, rather than actual accomplishments in space, plays in the SLS mess. She is justly harsh on the administration, whose policy making with space has been just as inept as in all else, though at least it had a more sensible policy even if it is unable to coherently articulate it. I’ve spent the last two years trying to make up for it, defending the new direction with numerous essays in various venues, but it’s hard to break through the FUD, noise and parochialism, particularly given how unimportant space policy is, as she notes herself.
NPR
Well, doesn’t that depend on what one thinks their job is? If it’s their job to whitewash the anti-semitism among the Occumorons, they’re doing it very well.
Seventy Years Since Pearl Harbor
Some thoughts on imagination, deception, audacity and 911. I recall on the thirtieth anniversary, my mother saying that she couldn’t believe that it had been thirty years. she went to work in Flint building machine guns in a converted auto plant, and later joined up as a WAC and went to Egypt. She’s been gone for twenty years now, and my father for thirty. Now the event is passing beyond living memory as their generation departs.
[Update a couple minutes later]
We failed to protect American soil from attack, however, which is the hard shock 9-11 shares with Pearl Harbor. Sept. 11 was another egregious failure of imagination linked with dismissive assumption. Al-Qaida declared war on the U.S., but American leaders preferred to treat the threat as criminal rather than military. Violent cults waging long-term cultural and theological struggles with the terms of social and technological modernity aren’t new. Their ability to employ massively destructive power at strategic distances is, however.
We continue, at our peril, to pretend we aren’t at war, and the current gang in the White House is particularly bad in this regard. Thinking that we defeated Jihad because we killed bin Laden is as mindless as thinking that we defeated the Japanese when we killed Yamamoto.
[Update a while later]
Memories of the Doolittle Raid. Note that they’re in their nineties now. I met Jimmy Doolittle about thirty years ago, when he was given an award at the Aerospace Corporation, where I was working at the time.
The Fed
…is financially ruining an entire class of investors. I agree with Ron Paul that it needs an honest audit.
What Doesn’t Kill Christopher Hitchens
…doesn’t make him stronger. A mordant and sobering essay on his cancer treatment, and mortality. It remains tragic that we can’t do better than this in the second decade of the third millennium.
Why Men Have Bigger Brains Than Women
Spatial reasoning. Really, is this a surprise?
We Lazy And Soft Americans
…just don’t deserve a demi-god like Barack Obama:
Maybe it’s time for us to really take a look at ourselves and ask: Is Obama actually a great president, and we’re just a lousy country?
It’s not really that radical a question. I mean, look at him: He’s a bright, Harvard-educated man who’s not only been to other countries but has actually lived in them — he knows cultures and viewpoints beyond the narrow ones we have here. And he surrounds himself with the greatest minds on earth. And who are we, compared to him? We’re a bunch of slobs, really. Kind of ignorant. Maybe a little racist. And we surround ourselves with bowls of flavored corn chips. But the country’s problems are supposed to be his fault? Does that make sense?
Look at what Obama did to try and get our economy going. He had this big, hundreds of billions of dollars stimulus that was designed by all the great economists who work in his administration — the top minds. It should have worked. The economy should be roaring right now and unemployment a thing of the past. America should be a utopia. So what was missing from the equation? That the people the stimulus was used on are a bunch of lazy dimwits. Obama did everything he possibly could, but apparently Americans just aren’t very good at running businesses and creating jobs. Obama has given us so many advantages that even chimpanzees should have been able to create jobs, but we just sit there like useless blobs while our companies crumble around us. We’re failing the country. We’re failing him.
I’ve been saying for years that we’re just not worthy of him.
The Tebow Phenomenon
Dan Foster and Rich Lowry have some thoughts on why there is so much hostility to the openly Christian quarterback.
As a non-believer (but not a fundamentalist atheist), I think that he raises hackles in two different groups of people — those who are bigoted against Christians in general (and they are legion — it is the last acceptable bigotry in our society) and those Christians who feel guilty because he sets the bar too high (and there is actually a non-zero intersection of those two sets). I would think of him as the Ned Flanders of the NFL, the completely unironic guy who is made fun of because in living up to his beliefs rather than down to his impulses, he makes everyone else look bad. And because he’ll continue to do so, he won’t care. Which will just make them all the angrier.