We’re still not approaching “peak oil”:
A landmark study of more than 800 oilfields by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera) has concluded that rates of decline are only 4.5 per cent a year, almost half the rate previously believed, leading the consultancy to conclude that oil output will continue to rise over the next decade.
Peter Jackson, the report’s author, said:
Ralph Peters is less than impressed (to put it gently) with the New York Times and its apparent war against veterans:
in the Middle Ages, lepers had to carry bells on pain of death to warn the uninfected they were coming. One suspects that the Times would like our military veterans to do the same.
The purpose of Sunday’s instantly notorious feature “alerting” the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was to mark those defenders of freedom as “unclean” – as the new lepers who can’t be trusted amid uninfected Americans.
Anyone want to make book on whether there’s anything resembling even a recognition of how egregious this was (forget about an actual apology) from the “public editor”?
Lileks has thoughts on the continuing slide of the Brits into a multi-culti PC hell:
“Pc Mahmood believes it was ‘not meant in a malicious way, just a bit of banter’. He told a sergeant, who was ‘really disgusted’, that he knew it was meant as a joke and did not want to make a formal complaint.
‘I just took it on the chin. But someone else in the room must have thought it was a racist incident, and reported it,’ the officer said.”
So the officer who got the
I have often been accused of being “lazy.” Even by people who I know and love. Even, on occasion, by myself.
But what was the basis for the accusation?
Apparently, that I am not continually busy. That I often indulge in the very effective technique of “management by procrastination.” That I often do what needs to be done without breaking a sweat, and while waiting until the last minute to do it.
Once, in college (in the dark ages prior to word processors), I wrote a term paper, that I had known was due for many weeks, due the next day at the end of the semester, in an all-nighter, on a manual typewriter, with no notes, no citations, no…nothing. I had just been thinking about the subject for weeks, and the night before it was due, I sat down, and knocked out a twelve-page typewritten paper, with minor erasures, in a night. I got an A minus.
So I have mixed feelings when I hear that Fred Thompson is “lazy.”
Now, I don’t think that Fred Thompson is lazy. I just think that, despite the southern drawl, which many (mistakenly, as anyone who has worked with smart NASA employees and contractors in Houston, Huntsville and the Cape would know) think is a mark of a slow mentality, that he works smart, and cheap. Robert Heinlein once wrote that: “Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”
I believe that.
I don’t want a president, or a presidential candidate, who is frenetically scurrying around, appearing to be doing something, particularly two years before the swearing in. If he’s really a conservative (as he claims to be, though I’m not necessarily), I’m perfectly happy with a president who, when demanded to do something, just stands there. And as a libertarian, opposed to big government, I’m happy to have a president who will think before acting, and who believes that the first instinct should not be to pass yet another federal law.
I’m actually quite pleased with Fred Thompson’s campaign style to date. It saddens me that so many others, who would be otherwise disposed to vote for him, are not. I’m saddened that they think that he needs to stoke a “fire in the belly,” rather than simply employ the minimum resources needed to win the election. You would think that the warm-mongers would be pleased at Fred’s lack of energy and want to vote for him, to help save the planet. As an engineer, I’m extremely impressed with his efficiency. As a result, it’s very frustrating to know that, if everyone who would vote for him “if he only had a chance” would actually vote for him, that he’d have a chance. It’s kind of the reverse of Yogi Berra’s old saying that “no one goes downtown any more; it’s too crowded.”
So here’s where the mixed feelings come in. As an engineer, one needs margins. I’m concerned that he cut it a little too close. I’m afraid that in waiting just a little too long to get in, and in waiting just a little too long to finally go after the Elmer Gantrys and other pretenders to Republicanism and conservatism, that he’s just missed the boat.
Despite this fear, I will continue to support him, and hope that I’m wrong, into South Carolina and beyond. Because if so, he will prove to be the most parsimonious president in American history. And I think we could use not just a little, but a lot of that right now.
From Tim Noah:
It was 10 years ago on Jan. 12 that Linda Tripp notified Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s office that she had audiotapes of Monica Lewinsky telling her that she’d had an affair with President Bill Clinton, and that he’d urged her to lie if asked about it under oath.
Hint for the terminally clueless. This wasn’t “getting a BJ.” It wasn’t “lying about getting a BJ.” As clearly stated by Noah, it’s called suborning perjury, in order to prevent a vulnerable young woman from getting a fair trial in a civil suit under a law that the suborner had signed with his own pen. Not to mention bribing and/or intimidating a witness to perjure herself, which is a more egregious instance of same.
Maybe I’m weird, but it seems very hard to reconcile that with upholding an oath to see the nation’s laws faithfully obeyed. King William didn’t think that the law should apply to him, either when in Arkansas when he allegedly raped a woman as the state Attorney General, or as President of the United States.
That was what the Lewinsky scandal was about.
And when considering whether or not to elect his wife, who helped orchestrate the attacks on the women that he wronged, to the highest office in the land, that is something to be considered. Particularly if one considers oneself to be a feminist.
I would also point out to Mr. Noah that, there is one person who, throughout, told the truth in this affair, and was never caught out in a lie, or lack of probity, despite all the attacks on her weight, her looks, or her “infidelity” to the “friend” who asked her to commit perjury. Her name was Linda Tripp.
And his comments about Jonah Goldberg are pathetic. If he doesn’t like the idea of the book
ESMD has finally responded to Keith Cowing’s questions to NASA PAO.
One bit of explanation is required, I think. When Keith refers to a “five-by-five” matrix, he’s talking about the standard risk assessment tool that NASA (and ARES Corporation, for whom I casually consult, and others) use to track program risk.
Here’s an example from the Mil Standard, but it’s a five by four (five levels of probability, four levels of consequence). Anything that is in one corner (low likelihood, low consequence) can be ignored, and anything that is in the opposite corner (high for both) should be receiving the bulk of the program resources. Things that are in between are tracked, and measures are taken to move them down to the 1,1 corner of the matrix. Though I can’t find an example of one at my fingertips, the five by five is a little more fine grained in consequence level.
It can be used either for safety issues (in which case, “catastrophic” corresponds to loss of mission or crew), or for programmatic issues, in which case “catastrophic” would probably be complete program failure. It’s a little harder to evaluate in this case, though, because that depends on how “program failure” is defined. Does it mean that the program is cancelled? Or does it mean that the program is restructured beyond recognition? Ares 1 seems to me to be vulnerable to either one.
What exactly is the issue? The problem is that any structure has a resonant frequency at which it naturally vibrates. If you excite the structure at that frequency, you can develop a positive-feedback system that will literally shake it apart (the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is the classic example).
Solid rocket motors don’t run particularly smoothly (compared to well-designed or even poorly designed liquids) and large solid motors provide a very rough ride. Everyone who has ever ridden the Shuttle to orbit has commented on how much smoother the ride gets after staging the SRBs.
Now, one way to mitigate this is to damp it out with a large mass. The Shuttle does this by its nature, because even though it has two of the things, they are not directly attached to the orbiter–they are attached to a large external tank with one and a half million pounds of liquid propellants in it, and it can absorb a lot of the vibration. Moreover, the large mass has a frequency that doesn’t resonate with the vibration.
As I understand it (and I could be wrong, and I’m not working Ares, but this is based on discussions, many off the record and all on background with insiders on the program), there is a very real concern that the upper stage on top of the SRB in “the Stick” will be excited at a resonant frequency, but that even if not, the stage will be too small to damp the vibrations of the huge SRB below.
If this is the case, there is no simple solution. You can’t arbitrarily change the mass of the upper stage–that is determined by the mission requirement. Any solution is going to involve damping systems independent of the basic structure that are sure to add weight to a launch vehicle that is already, according to most reports, underperforming. Or it will involve beefing up the structure of the upper stage and the Orion itself so that they can sustain the acoustic vibration loads. In the case of the latter, it is already overweight, with low margins.
So this constitutes a major program risk, that could result in either cancellation, or a complete redesign (that no longer represents the original concept, because the problem is fundamentally intrinsic to it).
Now, let’s take apart the response a little:
Thrust oscillation is…a risk. It is being reviewed, and a mitigation plan is being developed. NASA is committed to resolve this issue prior to the Ares I Project’s preliminary design review, currently scheduled for late 2008.
The problem is that NASA can “commit” to resolve it until the cows come home, but if it’s not resolvable, it’s not resolvable. They can’t rescind the laws of physics, and we’re approaching a couple of anniversaries of times when they attempted to do that, with tragic results.
Now this next part is (to put it mildly) annoying:
NASA has given careful consideration to many different launch concepts (shuttle-derived, evolved expendable launch vehicle, etc.) over several years. This activity culminated with release of the Exploration Systems Architecture Study in 2005. Since then, the baseline architecture has been improved to decrease life cycle costs significantly.
NASA’s analysis backs up the fact that the Ares family enables the safest, least expensive launch architecture to meet requirements for missions to the International Space Station, the moon and Mars. NASA is not contemplating alternatives to the current approach.
The problem is that NASA didn’t give “careful consideration” to the previous analyses after Mike Griffin came in. As far as can be determined, all of the analysis performed under Admiral Steidle’s multiple CE&R contracts, performed by major contractors, was ignored, and put on the shelf to collect dust while NASA decided to build what the new administrator, along with Scott Horowitz and Doug Stanley, were predisposed to build. I have never seen “NASA’s analysis” that supports this statement. Steve Cook made a valiant attempt to justify it at the Space Access Meeting last March, and was given kudos, at least by me, for having the guts to come in and defend it to a hostile audience, but no one was convinced, or even saw convincing data. He simply stated the conclusions, but didn’t show the numbers.
But the most troubling thing to me is the end:
Thrust oscillation is a new engineering challenge to the developers of Ares – but a challenge very similar to many NASA encountered during the Apollo Program and development of the space shuttle. Every time NASA faces an engineering challenge – and it faces many – agency engineers examine all the options for addressing the issue. NASA has an excellent track record of resolving technical challenges. NASA is confident it will solve this one as well.
The problem is that, in reality, despite its confidence (or at least its stated confidence) NASA’s record on this score is, at best, mixed. For instance, think about (as just two examples) the X-33. Or the OMV (I did a Google on it, and couldn’t come up with any good histories of it–one needs to be written). Or many of the original space station concepts, which required complete redesigns. Sometimes engineering challenges are just too great to overcome, and a new approach is required to overcome a flawed concept. I don’t know whether that’s the case with Ares 1 or not, but this response doesn’t instill in me any confidence that it’s not.
To paraphrase Euripides, those whom the modern-day gods would destroy, they first give too much oil and power.
We have today two stories of oil-fueled despots in alliance. First, Iran’s Ahmadinejad’s economic illiteracy is coming home to roost:
Ahmadinejad, with his peculiar and literal belief that he has divine backing, was not inhibited by this record of prudence. With a total oil revenue in the first two years of his presidency of $120 billion (
Marcy Kaptur is an idiot.
Marcy Kaptur is an idiot.
Marcy Kaptur is an idiot.