Science And Society, Social Commentary

Lust Is Blind

Is anyone surprised by this?

Research involving a group of male students found that their levels of the hormone testosterone increased to the same extent whether they were talking to a young woman they found attractive – or to one they didn’t fancy much at all.

After 300 seconds alone in the same room as a woman they had never met before, and in some cases did not find particularly attractive, the men’s testosterone levels of the hormone had shot up by an average of around eight per cent.

It reminds me of the wisdom of Billy Crystal’s character, Harry:

Sally: You’re saying I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Harry: No, what I’m saying is they all want to have sex with you.
Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: How do you know?
Harry: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally: So you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive.
Harry: No, you pretty much want to nail them, too.

Science imitates art.

Space

“Research, Not Mitigation”

3 Comments

This (to me) amazing report on the status of the thrust-oscillation problem just has me shaking my head. If accurate, they don’t even understand enough about it yet to know which weight-increasing kludge may mitigate it, and by how much. And the vaunted Ares 1-X “test” next year won’t provide them with the information they need:

I see no discussion of the new failure modes that could be introduced by the addition of these systems, or their effects on first-stage reliability (which was supposedly the big feature of this approach). For example, if the active system has a failure (and I suspect that a failure of just one of the engines would be a failure, due to asymmetries), the vehicle will get shaken apart. It seems to be single point (unless they can still reach the oscillation-reduction goal with single engine out).

And now they’re going to put shock absorbers into the couches to further isolate the crew, which implies that the Orion itself is going to sustain a lot more rockin’ and rollin’ than the current requirement stipulates. Which in turn implies a heavier vehicle to handle the accelerations and stress.

No one will consider the possibility, apparently, that this is an unclosable design, though such things happen in real life, once one gets outside of Powerpoint world.

With the July status of the engineering efforts showing the issue to be an across the board high “RED” risk to Ares I’s development, the mitigation process is likely to continue until at least the end of the decade.

So months more, and billions more, without knowing whether or not the road they’re on is a dead end.

[Update a few minutes later]

More depressing news (again, assuming accuracy) here.

[Another update]

The Chinese seem to be having problems, too:

China’s English language state owned television channel CCTV9 has revealed the fact that on its past two manned missons the astronauts have experienced physical discomfort from the vibration of the rocket on its ascent

The tv news segment goes on to report that the rocket’s chief designer says that changes to the “frequencies” of the engines and the “electrical circuits” have been made to try to eliminate this vibration problem.

Whatever that means. I wonder if it’s POGO? And just how much “physical discomfort” was there? Not enough to end the missions, or the crews, apparently.

Space, Technology and Society

“Snarkyboy” Persists

18 Comments

In a follow-up to the original Orion worship post:

The Saturn V, the biggest thing we’ve ever launched (just go with me here) weighed in at 6,699,000 lbs, or 3,350 tons, and managed to put a measly 100,000 lbs (50 tons) into lunar orbit.

So lets pretend we want to build a classic L5 space colony. How big does it have to be?

Sorry, but we’re not going to “go with you there.”

This is an inappropriate methodology, and the assumptions here are completely nonsensical. The problem has nothing to do with scaling Saturn Vs, and no one in their right mind ever thought that a “classic L5 space colony” would be built completely out of materials launched from the planet.

There is no good reason that we can’t have launch costs of less than a hundred dollars a pound with chemical rockets, and give rides to millions of pounds of passengers and cargo. All that is needed is to make the investment into space transports, and set multiple teams of engineers loose on the problem, something that we have not done to date.

The cargo would be used to bootstrap production facilities for extraterrestrial resources, with high-value/pound payloads (i.e., electronics) coming up from earth. We do not need Orion to build space colonies. We need a lot of other things, but not that.

Political Commentary

Now That’s Intelligence

8 Comments

Did the Mossad help free the Columbian hostages?

Vanguardia’s Tel Aviv correspondent said the Mossad operation consisted of two agents unknown to each other separately infiltrating FARC.

The pair managed to penetrate the Marxist guerrilla group so effectively that they ultimately controlled what FARC did or didn’t know, the Catalan newspaper said.

All the more reason, of course, for the left to hate the “Zionists.”

General, Popular Culture

I’ll Try To Restrain Myself

2 Comments

The FDA says to not eat lobster guts:

Health officials for years have advised against eating the tomalley, the lobster liver some regard as a delicacy. The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention reiterated its advisory Friday, however, after some lobster livers tested positive for high levels of toxins caused by large blooms of red tide algae.

No problemo for me. I’ll stick with the meat, as I always have.

History, Political Commentary

Ich Bin Ein Dummkopf

6 Comments

Obama’s three hundred foreign policy advisors apparently weren’t enough. His new choice of location for his German sermon from the mount, to win over valuable electoral votes of the German people, seems to have backfired as badly as the attempt to emulate Kennedy and Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate:

Andreas Schockenhoff, deputy leader of the conservative bloc in Parliament, said Sunday that the choice of the Victory Column, also known as the Golden Angel, was an “unhappy symbol” since it represented so much of Germany’s militaristic past.

Rainer Brüderle, deputy leader of the opposition Free Democrats, said Obama’s advisers had little idea of the historical significance of the Victory Column. “It was the symbol of German superiority over Denmark, Austria and France,” Brüderle told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

The monument was built in 1864 to commemorate Prussia’s victory over Denmark. When it was inaugurated, Prussia had defeated Austria during the Austro-Prussian war in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71.

The column has been originally located near the Reichstag, now the Bundestag, or German Parliament, which is close to the Brandenburg Gate. But Adolf Hitler relocated it about two kilometers, or one mile, toward the western part of the city to the Grosser Stern, or Great Star.

Too bad Leni Riefenstahl isn’t around any more to film the event for him. Then later, he could reenact his grandfather’s liberation of Auschwitz.

Maybe if he gets a couple hundred more advisors, he can find one with a clue. I’ve never seen anyone have so much trouble getting good help. It must be tough being a messiah.

I do have to say, though, that watching this kind of thing for four years would be entertaining. I just wish that he wouldn’t be in charge of anything important during the show.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!