Science And Society

Save Us, Saint Al!

I found this over at Free Republic. I also found it cute.

And Andrew Bolt talks about the problem with offsets, and the “do what we say, not what we do” hypocrisy:

…there’s a moral problem. Offsets are really best suited for people rich enough — like Gore — to afford them.

They let the rich pay someone else to use less so they can use more. And so the aristocrat can party on under the chandeliers, while the power-rationed peasants sit out in his dark.

Of course, one hypocrite like Gore shouldn’t discredit an entire cause. Yet it can’t be an accident that global warming attracts more hypocrites than most faiths.

There’s Tim Flannery, criss-crossing the world by jet to tell us to use less oil.

There’s British PM Tony Blair lecturing Britons to cut their emissions, but declaring it “unreasonable” to expect him therefore to stop flying off on his overseas holidays.

And there’s Prince Charles booking out all of a jet’s first and second class to fly to New York to accept a green award from Gore.

Ah, Gore again. Which reminds me of Laurie David, one of the producers of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

David, too, demands we save the world by cutting our gasses, yet turns out to be as addicted to private jets as her friend Al.

Asked recently to explain such inconvenient hypocrisy, David spluttered: “Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year.”

But — and here’s where she shows she’s nobler than you — “I feel horribly guilty about it.”

See? The global warming faith is more about how you feel than what you actually do. Even the makers of An Inconvenient Truth demonstrate that. What a circus.

Space

The Beginning Of A Rational Architecture?

Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on the Russian space tug:

A tug might also make practical a single stage to orbit RLV. Since a first generation SSTO will most likely provide a very small payload capacity, it would help if it only had to reach a low orbit where it would transfer cargo/crew to a tug and also pick up cargo/crew to bring back from orbit. Even with small payloads, the simplicity of SSTO RLV operations might lead to reduced LEO delivery costs when combined with a tug.

Yes, this will almost certainly be necessary, in fact, if SSTO is to become feasible with anything resembling current technology. Any SSTO vehicle has very poor off-design performance. That is, if it’s sized for a low-altitude (or a low-inclination) orbit, the performance drop off for it to go higher in either altitude or inclination is very large. For example, one could have a vehicle capable of delivering ten thousand pounds to a hundred fifty miles altitude, that would have zero or negative payload to ISS or a Bigelow hotel). This is an intrinsic problem with SSTO, by the nature of the beast. Since there’s only one stage, the entire vehicle dry weight has to be taken to the final destination, so any additional delta V represents a big payload hit. A two-stage (or more) vehicle suffers much less, because the upper stage is much smaller, and is thus less sensitive to off-design cases.

OK, I hear you saying, aha! Then just make the space station mission the nominal design case. OK, now you just increased your development costs quite a bit, because it’s now a much larger vehicle. And once you’ve done that, you’ll still never take it to the station, because you’ll quickly figure out that it now has humungous payload capability to lower altitudes, that can be transferred with the tug. Regardless of vehicle size, you’ll get a lot more payload to the station if you use the tug (some of the extra payload is used to refuel the tug).

This also allows the station to live higher, which it would like to do to increase solar insolation, and decrease drag and monatomic oxygen degradation (the current ISS altitude is an expensive compromise between the desire to have the station higher, and the need to be able to get to it with the Shuttle). That in turn will result in reduced operating costs (reducing reboost and maintenance issues, and providing more power). I in fact proposed such an architecture back in 1982, in a paper I wrote while at Rockwell. NASA wasn’t interested.

Economics

Inflation

Lileks writes about his trip to Trader Joe’s:

I bought some sauces, including a pasta sauce that turned out to be too brackish for my tastes, and a bottle of three-buck Chuck

I could swear that just last year, on my many trips to CA, it was still two-buck Chuck. When did it go up, and why by fifty percent? I know, it’s only a buck, but still.

[Update in the afternoon]

And speaking of Trader Joe’s, when are they going to start opening stores in south Florida? I’d think there’d be a huge market for them in Boca. I wonder if it has something to do with the state liquor regs? Looking at their site, it appears that the closest one is in Georgia.

Space

An Aerospace Industry Rant

For my entire career (going on thirty years now), I’ve seen the horrible adjective “detail.” As in “detail design.” Funny, I always thought it was a noun.

Why can’t these people use proper English, and call it a “detailed design”?

Was this ongoing atrocity on the language deliberate, and is there some rationale for it? Or is it an accident, a result of the fact that when someone says “give me a detailed design,” the two “d”s run together, and the engineers dutifully wrote down what they heard–“detail design”–and it’s become so embedded in the industry that it’s as impossible to remove as roaches in a Haitian kitchen (sorry, had trouble coming up with a PC simile there…)?

Why yes, as a matter of fact, I am going through an Orion schedule (which is apparently going to slip), line by (eye-crossing) line. Why do you ask?

Political Commentary

A Whiff

Apparently, John Kerry is as pathetic at kicking @ss as he is at everything else.

And Tom Maguire reminds us that the record of the Clintons’ perfidy and assault on civil liberties wasn’t the only thing about which the media showed a strange incuriousity. Kerry’s true service record remains a mystery, and a suspicious one. As a commenter notes, there are two Americas: a Republican one in which the media reports missteps and prevarications of politicians (even when they didn’t actually occur), and a Democrat one in which they’re ignored or the press aids the spin and coverup.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!