My thoughts over at Popular Mechanics.
How The GOP Should Explain Climate Change
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.