War Commentary

Is The War Starting?

Probably not, despite the fact that two Katyushas launched from Lebanon fell near Kiryat Shmona. So far, the Israeli government is downplaying it as not being the work of Hezbollah. I think that Hezbollah and Iran are preparing for war, but they’re not ready yet. They probably want to consolidate things in Gaza and arm Hamas first, so they can attack on two simultaneous fronts.

[Update after noon]

This report from the Jerusalem Post says that there were four rockets.a

Space

Pessimism

Charlie Stross isn’t very sanguine about the prospects for space settlement. My main criticism of his argument is that it seems to assume that all materials will come from earth, and that there are no resources available in space. When he writes, for instance:

Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand … except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn’t sound all that serious

Political Commentary

ACLU ACU

I just got a call purporting to be from the American Civil Liberties Union. Before they got going, they said, “This call may be monitored for quality assurance.”

I said, “That’s ironic.” Then asked them not to call again. If one can’t have privacy from other ACLU people talking to the ACLU, then there is no worthy defender of privacy left.

I know Rand doesn’t like me to mistake loss of liberty (“freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control” according to dictionary.com) for loss of privacy. But a great way to curb control is to curb monitoring. I also mourn freedom from waiting in long airport security lines and freedom to keep my hair gel in my carry-on bag.

There were 360 million US one-way airplane trips taken last year. That’s 360 million half hour delays for “increased” security. Let’s express that as lifetimes lost–wasted–due to boredom: 250. Let’s express that as number of trips that took 15 minutes too long: 100%. After 6 years of increased security, we have now lost 1500 lives worth of time from waiting in airport security lines. That’s a higher flux than terrorism for five of those years.

It’s time for the FAA to start keeping statistics on wait time in airports and TSA revamping security procedures so that the cost no longer exceeds the benefit.

Space

Software Testing Hard

Who watches the watchmen on software testing? SpaceX’s control issue might have been found with better testing, but the test case writer didn’t start with a big enough perturbation for the problem to appear. It’s also not clear that the tester software is sufficiently good to tease out problems with the control software. That’s especially true if the same people are writing the control software and the tester software.

The rest of the entry reads like technobabble from a movie like Failsafe. Nevertheless, this is the $64 billion question that can make SpaceX another of Musk’s successes or ground his Mars colonization plans altogether.

Continue reading Software Testing Hard →

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!