I got in late last night, maybe more blogging later, but I’ve got a lot of catch-up to do with work.
Change!
I guess that dissent is no longer the highest form of patriotism:
”The Secret Service called and said they were at my house,” Harrison said.
After talking to his attorney, Harrison went home where he met the Secret Service.
”When I was on my way there, the Secret Service called me and said they weren’t going to ransack my house or anything … they just wanted to (walk through the house) and make sure I wasn’t a part of any hate groups.”
I suspect that it won’t be long until people who don’t go along with the party line are part of a “hate group” by definition.
[Update a while later]
The ever-expanding definition of “hate speech.”
Whenever I hear anyone use the phrase, I automatically cease to take them seriously. The word “hate” has become as devalued as “racist.”
Reconstructing the Ancestral Routes to Nucleobases
A few weeks ago, I linked to a very interesting paper on how life may have evolved. In response to some comments here, the abstract has been revised. Here is the note to me in email:
The abstract was revised to (hopefully) eliminate ambiguity and make it clearer that Sylvain’s proposed chemical steps are not just a partial solution, but rather, go from the first reaction all the way to all the biomolecules necessary to “usher in the RNA world.” The full-picture illustration was also added on the home page to help readers grasp the scope of what is being offered.
To me, one of the compelling aspects of this is that all the relevant biomolecules form in one location through ‘room temperature’ chemical steps that do not require anything exotic.
Topics relevant to the Origin of Life that are addressed in this paper:
- Why the relevant amino acids are all left-handed
- Why there are 20 standard amino acids, and why those 20
- Why the relevant amino acids are all “alpha-amino”
- Why the relevant sugars are right-handed
- The origin and preservation of homochirality
- The origin of nucleobases A, G, C, U
- The origin of RNA
- The origin of the lipids
To put this into perspective, each one of these topics is a major big deal. That this model shows them as possibly being parts of interrelated cascading chemical steps is stunning. It is interesting to note that these chemical steps take place, not in a “primordial soup,” but in a sheltered microenvironment of a mineral host structure. Since these proposed reactions do not work in water, the concept of life originating in a “primordial soup” may have mislead Origin of Life chemists for many decades.
We’ll see where it goes. If it can actually tackle abiogenesis, it is a big deal.
The Liberaltarian Discussion
…continues, with thoughts from Ilya Somin. And this continues to make me crazy:
In a strange way, the Bush record of massive expansions of government has also shifted the goalposts for liberal Democrats. They seem to assume that anything Bush and the Republicans did must have been “laissez faire” (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) and that the current Democratic agenda represents a needed course relative to failed free market policies rather than a continuation of Bush-era trends of greatly increased government spending and regulation.
I continue to be both appalled and dismayed at this inability of the Democrats to recognize (or to be honest about their recognition) that the last eight years bore no resemblance to free markets, or laissez-faire. We overspend, and overregulate, and when it goes south, it gets blamed on tax cuts and underregulation. Madness.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Randy Barnett follows up.
John? Who’s John…?
It’s not new, but I’d never seen it before, and maybe you haven’t, either. Twenty-five inappropriate things that Objectivists say during s3x.
Here’s What I Mean By “Misleading And Deceitful”
From today’s Journal:
In a passage from his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” he sounds like a Republican complaining about the stimulus. “Genuine bipartisanship,” he wrote, “assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained — by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate — to negotiate in good faith.
“If these conditions do not hold — if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs . . . are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so — the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100% of what it wants, go on to concede 10%, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this ‘compromise’ of being ‘obstructionist.’
“For the minority party in such circumstances, ‘bipartisanship’ comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled, although individual senators may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently going along with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being ‘moderate’ or ‘centrist.'”
Sound familiar?
The hypocrisy kind of makes me sick. As do the people who remain willfully blind to it. Because he’s going to bring “hope.” And “change.”
[Update early afternoon]
A Great Comment
In response to this post:
How come the Left always preaches ‘sustainability’ or ‘it’s for the children’…until it comes to their economic plans?
How come, indeed?
Ad Astra To A Visionary
I’ve just learned that Tom Rogers, former head of the Space Transportation Association, has died. I hadn’t talked to him in a few years, and deeply regret now that I hadn’t. There is so much more to say about him than that he is the former head of the STA, and I’ll make a probably pathetic attempt to do so on the morrow. All that I can say now is that I am more frustrated than usual with this news by the boneheaded space policies that the nation has had for half a century, and all of the dreams that they have crushed, and all of the hard-working and far-sighted people who couldn’t live long enough to see better.
[Update a few minutes later]
Konrad Dannenberg has died as well.
Do space pioneers go in threes, like Hollywood? If so, who’s next? I don’t even want to speculate.
[Late evening update]
Clark Lindsey has some Rogers-related links.
[Tuesday morning update]
There are some more encomia for Tom over at NASA Watch. Here’s one from Courtney Stadd:
I interacted with Tom for over 25 years – both in my capacity as a government official and in my various private sector incarnations. In speaking truth to power, he marshaled his data and did everything he could to persuade the government that the commercial space sector offered innovative and cost effective solutions. And if logic failed to penetrate the prefrontal cortex of his intended target – e.g., a Member of Congress during testimony or an agency official or the audience at a space conference – Tom was legendary for raising his voice to a decibel level that ensured that no one with functional hearing could possibly ignore his key arguments. His footprint was deep and wide – from early pathfinding work on GPS, among other leading edge research (during his tenure heading the Air Force and MIT R&D labs) to the first director of research at Housing and Urban Development. For many years his was a lonely voice in the wilderness as he organized fora on space tourism and funded a series of studies via his Sophron Foundation. (I was a happy recipient of one of his grants many years ago.) His Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) study regarding the issues and challenges of the International Space Station – issued during the Reagan Administration – is a classic in terms of clarity of thought and prescience regarding the cost and policy challenges that have confronted the Space Station in recent years. In a world increasingly populated with self-regarding incrementalists, Tom’s legacy is an inspiration to all of us who believe in the power of big ideas (based on sound principles) and the passion and courage to counter conventional wisdom in pursuit of one’s convictions. As Arthur C. Clarke once said, “The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.” Few embodied this philosophy as well as the late Tom Rogers. Godspeed, Tom.
I was also a grant recipient, about a decade ago. The results were this study on near-term prospects for space tourism. Also over at NASA Watch, Mark Schlather recounts (though he bowdlerizes) Tom’s stock response to anyone who asked him why he wanted to go into space: “None of your goddamned business!” The point being that no one should have to justify to anyone, government or otherwise, why they wanted to go into space or what they wanted to do there. Only if the government was paying for the trip should it care.
I had heard Tom give one of his fire-and-brimstone speeches on commercial space at the Denver ISDC back in the mid-eighties, but I didn’t actually meet him until I attended a conference sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the early nineties, on standardizing commercial space operations. He saw the dreaded word “Rockwell” on my name badge, decided to make me a surrogate for his big-aerospace nemesis, and proceeded to harangue me on everything that the industry was doing wrong, repeatedly calling my company “Rockwell North American.” It took several discussions over the course of the conference before he finally decided that I wasn’t one of those horned devils trying to hold America back in space for purposes of corporate greed. It was the beginning of a wonderful and productive friendship, with breakfasts at the Cosmos Club whenever I was in Washington. Sadly, though, it’s one that I’ve regrettably been remiss in upholding in the last few years on my end.
Tom was a raconteur (to dramatically understate), and he loved to tweak the establishment, though he was deeply of it. For instance, I never saw him not wearing a suit. On the other hand, one of his favorite (non-space-related) stories was when he was invited to a meeting at Orbital Sciences, and was informed that the company dress code was casual. He showed up out in Reston, as usual, in his suit, and walked up to the receptionist behind the counter inside the entrance. She signed him in, and then gently reprimanded him: “Mr. Rogers, you didn’t need to wear a suit. Didn’t anyone tell you that we dress casually here?” He replied, “You don’t understand, dear. I know you can’t see from where you’re sitting, but I’m not wearing any pants.”
Tom had decades of experience in the Beltway, and had learned through an accumulation of (as he often put it) “cleat marks in his back” the difficulty of the task that was laid out for us, and how long it would take. He always cautioned against impatience, and to not expect sudden shifts in policy, or overnight success. He would counsel, instead, to look for smaller signs of optimism, to consider the immense inertia of federal policymaking, and just look for “curvature in the wake” of the policy. It is pretty hard, on a day-to-day basis, to see it. But when one looks back over the past thirty years or so, the ship has changed course considerably, from an era in which it was almost inconceivable that a private entity could put up a satellite (let alone a human) to one in which the FAA is granting launch licenses to suborbital space tourism firms, with prospects on the horizon for private human spaceflight into orbit. And one of the heaviest shoulders on that stiff rudder was Tom Rogers. And wherever he ends up, whether with God or Beelzebub (the latter seems highly unlikely), either of them will have their hands full with him, and he’ll have a great time.
[Bumped to Tuesday morning]
[Update a little later]
Some more thoughts over at NASA Watch from Alan Ladwig (Obama administration space adviser), which I also remember:
He was a great mentor and always had time to share ideas and dispense advice. At various points in my career he would stop by my office to admonish me for focusing on non-priority issues. ‘Ladwig,” he proclaimed, “stop screwing around on page two and page three issues and concentrate on page one!”
I think about this proclamation constantly and although I still get bogged down on the back pages, he gave me a goal to strive towards that I’ll never forget.
The problem with space policy is that it remains on the back pages in general. Tom always advocated a complete scrape-down-to-the-paint approach to remaking space policy (as have I, and even more since meeting and being influenced by him) that the politics and policy inertia simply will not allow.
Why The New Deal Didn’t Work
This is an important point:
The New Deal prolonged the Great Depression because of not one but a combination of misguided policies that made it harder for employers to create jobs and harder for consumers to buy things. Keynesian commentators talk as if FDR made a single key mistake, like not incurring big enough budget deficits. This ignores the tripling of the tax burden during the New Deal period (1933-1940). Also ignored is the fact that New Deal spending was mainly paid for by the middle class and the poor, because the biggest revenue generator for the federal government was the excise tax on beer, cigarettes, chewing gum, and other cheap pleasures disproportionately enjoyed by the middle class and the poor. Moreover, several New Deal laws made everything — especially food — more expensive when Americans desperately needed bargains.
There’s a lot more.
Notions that the New Deal didn’t work because they didn’t do enough of it (particularly based on the absurd notion that the war was “the New Deal on steroids” which was why it did) are just the kind of rewriting of history that I was talking about.
[Update on Tuesday morning]
There are few things I enjoy more than dealing with history-challenged simpletons who stupidly assume that because one doesn’t accept the gospel that FDR Saved Us From The Breadlines, that one must therefore think that Herbert Hoover was (in the parlance of the times) the cats pajamas, and that if we’d only stuck with his (non-existent) laissez-faire policies, all would have been well with the world. Larry Kudlow had a guest on his show who made this idiotic assumption last week, when he talked about Larry’s “hero,” Herbert Hoover. Kudlow quickly put him in his place (as I did here with my own idiot in comments). It’s the same (or at least related) pigheaded mindlessness and false choice that causes people to foolishly assume that because I’m down on Democrats I must be a Republican.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Michael Barone, on the real lessons of the Great Depression. Of course, those pushing “stimuli” don’t want to learn the real lessons, because it would remove much of the justification for their efforts to grow government and take over more and more of our lives as individuals.
[Bumped to Tuesday morning]
Return Trip
Jeff Foust has an interview with Charles Simonyi, who is about to become the first space tourist (and unlike many, he doesn’t dislike the phrase) to do it again.
There are two interesting points to me. First:
If you look at professional astronauts and cosmonauts, it’s astounding how many of them fly multiple times. It was something I never quite understood: I would see the same names again and again, and I would wonder why this person is flying again when there are others who would probably want to fly too.
The answer is that space agencies see that people with experience do much better. The “start up” time on that first flight takes away so much from the overall performance compared to the second and third flights. The top ten people have 60 flights among themselves, which is a lot of flights. It shows that, with experience, you can do so much better. In my case, I hope to accomplish more, in terms of experiments and amateur radio communications with schools and so on.
To me, while you obviously want to use the best candidates for a mission costing hundreds of millions of dollars, this validates the theory that George Abbey grew the astronaut office to a high surplus in order to maintain control over them, by forcing competition among them for the limited flights available.
As for the frustration of some in the space community with these millionaires who buy rides for themselves, but don’t otherwise help the nascent industry with their millions:
I’m not an investor, I’m a customer of these industries. I recommend it to everyone else to be a customer. Whether it’s a good investment is a completely different question, and one I’m not qualified to talk about.
Well, we do need customers, so he is playing a key role. It’s just a shame that, at least for now, “everyone else” can’t afford it. So we’ll need investors too.
[Monday evening update]
Here’s another interview with Simonyi over at Popular Science.