On Friday, Russell Prechtl and George Whitesides respond to Steven Weinberg’s dissing of spaceflight in pursuit of science.
To sum up: Space settlement for species preservation, spinoffs, human spirit and human nature.
What are these worth? Depending on how long before the extinction event it could be anywhere from all of Earth’s discounted GDP to nearly nothing for species preservation assurance. If an extinction event is 1 in 26 million per year we can take our chances and still have an expectation of 99.99999% of our GDP next year. Spinoffs is weak. Human spirit is hard to quantify. How is ISS doing more for human spirit than Skylab or Mir? Human nature is more of a restatement of the human spirit argument that it is human nature to seek to raise the human spirit. But how? It’s not enough when someone says “ISS is worthless” to say “but if we don’t learn to live in space we’ll die!” We can learn to live in space with or without the ISS; what’s the difference?
I’m planning to take Steven Weinberg to lunch and see what he says to these arguments later this week. Let me know if there’s anything else I should ask him.
You may remember a couple of months ago a report that al Qaeda and its affiliates had abandoned their training camps in Pakistan along the Afghan border. The initial report caused quite a blog storm but soon the mystery was forgotten. According to AI, which links to references for all of this, the US got fed up with not being able to reach al Qaeda inside Pakistan. Then a few months back the US government told the Pakistani government that we had the coordinates for twenty-nine terror training bases and in a week we will be destroying them (perhaps on Cheney’s visit this summer). The intent was to drive the terrorists from those camps so we could get to them.
It worked. That’s why those camps emptied out.
So the US left the terrorists an escape route into Tora Bora. Once they had detected a large group of al Qaeda at the fortress and the likelihood of High Value Targets as determined by large scale security detachments, the US dropped the curtain on the escape routes back into Pakistan. We have been pounding the hell out of them for weeks in near complete secrecy.
But an observer may wonder why, if al Qaeda had to vacate the camps, didn’t they just go to other hideouts in Pakistan? According to this article in the Telegraph:
The Uzbeks are a surviving remnant of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an al-Qa’eda affiliate that fought with the Taliban against the Americans in 2001.
Its surviving members fled into Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt where earlier this year their hosts turned against them following a dispute. Afghan leaders say that the Uzbeks were recently given the choice to fight the Americans in Afghanistan or face annihilation by the local tribes.
At least one sizeable group of al-Qa’eda and Taliban fighters is continuing to resist despite heavy bombing raids and attacks from US Special Forces. American military spokesmen declined to corroborate the claim, saying the operation was ongoing.
As a reminder, “Uzbeks” is a synonym for al Qaeda in the Pakistani border region and what the locals call all foreign jihadists. So the reporting from Pakistan earlier this year was spot on. Some powerful Taliban leaders have turned on al Qaeda and when their terror camps were targeted by the US they had nowhere else to go.
It’s about time that he was held accountable for his vicious demagoguery. Being a Congressman doesn’t give you license to vilify troops in arms without basis.
Why are we so singularly focused on climate change when there are many other areas where the need is also great and we could do so much more with our effort?
He explains. (Hint: it has more to do with saving our souls than with saving the planet.)
Not surprising to me. He’s not the brightest bulb on the string, and probably wouldn’t hold up very well to people who actually understand it.
And no, contra comments, this is not an expression of “hate for Al Gore.” It’s simply a dispassionate assessment of his intelligence, particularly considering that he flunked out of divinity school. How dim do you have to be to manage that?
So, I downloaded the latest driver from RealTek to attempt to solve my problem. I removed the old r8169 with rmmod, but when I do a “make clean modules” from within the directory with the Makefile, I get the following errors:
Apparently, he was killed in Needham, Massachusetts (near the college he was attending, and coincidentally, the current home of one of my former college roommates), and no other vehicles were involved. Sadly, he had a passenger with him on the bike. She died of her own injuries a day later. My deepest condolences to both families.