Paul Hsieh has some thoughts on the immorality of forced wealth redistribution.
Demasclerosis
…and the disaster of the “stimulus.”
The Empire State Building was erected in less than two years. It’s now been a decade since 911 and the site hasn’t been completed. It’s a wonder anything gets done any more. And I found this particularly interesting:
I was among the last group of engineers and surveyors laid off from my company in June and have only found one temporary job since then, with almost all the companies in my area (Nashville) treading water or downsizing since then. (In my job search, I’ve been told more than once that people are not planning on adding staff until after next year’s election.)
There’s a lot of that going around, I’ll bet. And if the election goes the wrong way, staff may not be added then, either.
How Smart Are Octopi?
…octopuses are neither long-lived nor social. Athena, to my sorrow, may live only a few more months—the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years. If the aquarium added another octopus to her tank, one might eat the other. Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind.
So why is the octopus so intelligent? What is its mind for? Mather thinks she has the answer. She believes the event driving the octopus toward intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell. Losing the shell freed the octopus for mobility. Now they didn’t need to wait for food to find them; they could hunt like tigers. And while most octopuses love crab best, they hunt and eat dozens of other species—each of which demands a different hunting strategy. Each animal you hunt may demand a different skill set: Will you camouflage yourself for a stalk-and-ambush attack? Shoot through the sea for a fast chase? Or crawl out of the water to capture escaping prey?
Losing the protective shell was a trade-off. Just about anything big enough to eat an octopus will do so. Each species of predator also demands a different evasion strategy—from flashing warning coloration if your attacker is vulnerable to venom, to changing color and shape to camouflage, to fortifying the door to your home with rocks.
Such intelligence is not always evident in the laboratory. “In the lab, you give the animals this situation, and they react,” points out Mather. But in the wild, “the octopus is actively discovering his environment, not waiting for it to hit him. The animal makes the decision to go out and get information, figures out how to get the information, gathers it, uses it, stores it. This has a great deal to do with consciousness.”
So what does it feel like to be an octopus? Philosopher Godfrey-Smith has given this a great deal of thought, especially when he meets octopuses and their relatives, giant cuttlefish, on dives in his native Australia. “They come forward and look at you. They reach out to touch you with their arms,” he said. “It’s remarkable how little is known about them . . . but I could see it turning out that we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self.”
“I think consciousness comes in different flavors,” agrees Mather. “Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”
We probably won’t find more fascinating creatures to study until/unless we find extraterrestrial life.
[Via Geek Press]
End All Corporate Welfare
A cause to unite the Tea Party and #OWS (subscription required).
Debut Of The Lynx
XCOR is going to diplay a full-scale model of it in May at the Space Tech Expo at the LA Convention Center.
Diverting Asteroids
Any sufficiently precise gravity tractor is a WMD.
Space Guard
For those interested in the topic, Jim Bennett, the author of this piece about it, will be discussing it on The Space Show this afternoon from 2 to 3:30 PST.
Orion On Delta IV
Clark asks a question:
No word on how to keep the public from wondering why we need a multi-ten-billion dollar SLS if an Orion can fly on existing launchers.
Well, to be fair, that’s an unmanned launch, with no escape system, for an entry test, right? The Delta might not be capable of handling the full mission. Here’s a question that I have, that perhaps one of my readers on the program knows. Are they still using the monstrosity LAS that they had designed (and tested at WSMR) for Ares I, or have they redesigned it to something less heavy and costly now that they don’t have to get away from a giant firecracker underneath them?
Of course, it still doesn’t justify SLS, which is grossly oversized for an Orion per se.
Mad At The Market?
Turn your ire toward Washington. That’s almost always the way to bet. Sometimes a business will do something boneheaded or evil, but most of the time the problem is caused by some idiot law with unintended (or as in the case of Obamacare, at least partially intended) consequences. And of course, the same people blame it on “the market” as an excuse for further meddling.
And this is also something that the Fleabaggers, and other anarchists for big government should be aware of, but if they were, they’d be occupying Lafayette Park instead of Wall Street.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s an excellent example. Even amidst all of the government stupidity of the past few years, Cash for Clunkers stands out in an incandescent way, and it turned out to be a disaster on every front, including its disparate impact on the poor.
Where Have All The Chemists Gone?
Thoughts on STEM from Walter Russell Mead. Part of the problem is grade inflation in the softer courses and overemphasis on GPA as part of the faux credentialing of modern academics, which chases students away from real degrees and courses. And I agree completely with this comment with regards to engineering:
Engineering is difficult. And if you’re going to stay the course you really must want it in your gut with a passion not far from love. It helps if you were one of the kids who tinkered with radios or with automobiles or even blowing up “spare” stumps with strange concoctions. Experience made college easier. Those who got into it because daddy was an engineer and expected the son to be an engineer mostly didn’t make it. The fire in the belly was missing.
So what’s new today? Manufacturing in the US is a faint shadow of what it used to be. And computer aided design is doing away with the need for large teams just to build a small subassembly for a product like an airliner. You don’t need several passes trying to determine the proper airfoil for a Dreamliner. The computer performs an awful lot of the preliminary testing neatly and cleanly. The final product is then built and tested to confirm performance with little more than some computer drafting needed to tweak performance to specification. A small team can do what many larger teams did in the past.
Despite a long career in engineering I don’t recommend anybody get into engineering these days, particularly if they want to do it for the money. If you must get into engineering do it because you build things, love it, and want to understand how to build them better. Go into it because your hobby is engineering. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.
I’ve commented in the past that when I was growing up, engineering was what a lot of lower-middle class kids whose parents didn’t go to college went into as a way to step up in life, and they were the kids (mostly boys) who tinkered with radios and cars (my uncle was in this class). I think in the eighties, a lot of young women who were good at math steered into it, post-lib, but many of them didn’t have a natural affinity for it. But no one should go into it only with the expectation of financial reward — as other commenters note, most engineers who do really well financially go into management or become entrepreneurs.
I would also note that one of the things that drives New Space, and it’s dramatically lower costs, isn’t just the difference in incentives and business structure, but the fact that the tools available allow small teams to do what large ones used to.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is a good comment, too:
Being an engineer for over 50 years, I note the difference between the liberal arts and engineering grading systems. As was stated to me by Dr. R. F. Mehl, the engineering program does not grade on the curve. It uses real numbers. If you are driving cown the highway, you don’t want to cross a bridge built by an engineer that was graded on the curve. Grading an engineer on the curve can cause disasters later. However, grading a liberal arts student on the curve can only cause a social disaster like Obama. And the unintended result is that the liberal arts person feels so good about him/herself that they can’t be corrected.
Just like Obama.
[Late morning update]
Heh. “Hey, my major is ‘real,’ too.” It’s hard to tell initially whether or not it’s satire, but it becomes more clear as you get further into it.