Ken Silber explains. My main problem with it is that it gives far too much credence to AGW theory.
Newt Versus Mitt
I keep hoping for a brokered convention.
The President Uses The Pearl Harbor Anniversary
…to push his big-government agenda. Shocking, I know.
Alec Baldwin
Tech moron. No, I am not surprised.
As a frequent American flyer I, like Josh Trevino, look forward with great anticipation to guaranteed Alec-Baldwin-free travel.
Another December 7th Anniversary
Thirty-nine years ago today, the crew of the last mission to the moon took this picture in their rear-view mirror.
Biases Of Risk And Reward
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.