As Jeff Foust tweets, if you’re looking for a 2500-word essay on the subject, today is your lucky day.
In Praise Of Capitalist Inequality
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.