…is apparently dying. There are a lot of people we could do without, but who thinks that this would be a better universe without Art Buchwald?
Cowabunga!
Beware of flying female bovines.
Journalist Bloggers
In the previous post in which I introduced (some of) my readership to the new space blog over at Florida Today, I mentioned the kerfuffle going on between Todd Halvorson and NASA Watch, but it occurs to me that this is a good example of the difference between conventional journalism and blogging. Keith has a valid point when he writes:
Gee Todd, let’s read my post a little more carefully, OK? And wouldn’t it be useful for your readers to have a link to the actual post you are referring to – and not have them rely only on what you want them to think I wrote?
When I scroll down all of the blog posts at The Flame Trench, I see not a single link, to anything. It is all conventional “reporting” where the reporter has learned something, via whatever methods he or she has, and then broadcasts it to The Rest Of Us. The only difference is that the stories are shorter, and not put up on any kind of schedule. This is not blogging–it’s journalism in a different format.
There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it’s considered de rigeur in the blogosphere, when commenting on someone else’s post, to provide a link to it, so that the readers can, as Keith says, go look and judge for themselves if it’s being properly characterized. And over the years, I’ve noticed that mainstream journalists are very bad at this, because they tend to have a reluctance to reveal “source material”–a habit that carries over in many cases to their blogging, when they decide to try their hand at it. Of course, in some cases, it’s because the journalist is being duplicitous, and doesn’t want people to be able to easily discern that (though I’m sure that wasn’t the intent here). In this case, of course, it’s ridiculous, because the source material is on the web, and anyone with a little effort can go see for themselves anyway, because Todd does say that it’s at NASA Watch.
Just consider this friendly advice to people who, while they may be justifiably successful journalists, are apparently still novices when it comes to blogging.
[Update on Friday morning]
Now that’s a blog post. And I can see the links just fine.
Elevator Counterpoint
Rand points out that you can carry a lot to orbit without a space elevator for some number of billions of dollars. You can also carry a lot of people in a ferry for the cost of a bridge. But once traffic gets high enough, you get economies of scale. There are actually several confounded questions about the cheapest way to GEO and beyond here.
First, it is very cheap to go from GEO to the planets with an elevator since you are on the downhill side of GEO and you slide out to the planets without any lasers or propellant.
Second, optimal energy to obtain orbit might be better to be hauled along. Maybe a climber could generate enough electric power to climb itself by burning LOX and kerosene in an internal combustion engine. No energy lost to air resistance. No energy lost to following an imperfect trajectory.
Third, optimal propulsion system might be a rocket engine. A rocket designed to go up an elevator would be a lot more capable than one that goes in free space.
Fourth, staging can be used with elevators cars to increase payload fraction in elevator cars. Stage 1 could just slide back down the elevator. Stage 2 could hit the brake and do a full systems checkout before moving up. The occupants could even get out and manually disengage the stages or something.
Fifth, the thing could even be refueled at 50,000 ft by some kind of a hovering balloon or vto refuelling craft. The balloon could even make it so that the last 50,000 feet of elevator at the bottom wouldn’t weigh down the thing. This is analogous to air launch or balloon launch.
Finally, there is the economics question. Will there be sufficient demand to justify a high capacity lifter of any sort? The marginal cost of ELVs is high. But the average cost may be lower for low mass to orbit (and beyond). This gets back to the bridge vs. ferry question. If it can be shown that the bridge is more profitable than the ferry, it is worth the billions that terrestrial bridges cost. Or it might be justified anyway via tremendous national prestige and driving down marginal costs even if it is a money loser (like, say, the Chunnel which cost $15 billion or so). I think demand is surely a matter of when rather than if. Demand for orbital space tourism will grow as the number of centimillionaires grows even if nothing else does.
The business case for elevators has not been scrutinized nearly as much as the one for rockets. For example, why not leave the spool for the second strand at the bottom of the elevator and send a climber up unreeling from the bottom as you go and send another “zipper” unit up after? What about suborbital jaunts for folks that don’t want to go all the way to orbit? It might even be cost competitive with airplanes for skydiving. As long as you are sending a newspaper roller up, you might as well print something in ink that will evaporate before too long. How much to print a 100,000 kilometer long love letter? Point-to-point hypersonic drop ships.
It is not necessarily true that space cannot warrant two pork infrastructure projects: a cheap RLV and an elevator. If you put it in the highway bill, you only have to compete against the dubious last $500 billion of infrastructure where trillions have already been invested. Bridge to nowhere indeed. The GEO elevator stop could even be called “the Middle of Nowhere”.
A space elevator also can be thought of as a national work of art. A modern pyramid. The longest film strip. The longest playing highest fidelity 8,000 track tape. So Bill, would you like to say to Paul, “Keep your laughing gas and rubber, mine’s made of diamond.”? How many carats in dozens of twenty ton strands? Work it right and get the ends of the nanotubes to join up and the whole thing can start as a single molecule, a single CNT lightyears long.
The promise if we can get orbit and deorbit down to a small multiple of the fuel cost whether via awesome RLV or awesome elevator is substantial. The cheapest way to get there will be a matter for competition to solve. Whether it is competition for Government projects or commercial service will hopefully be decided in favor of the market by capitalizing both projects in the st0ck market and proceeding to get them built.
More Decline In The “Giggle Factor”
Not about space tourism. About anti-aging therapies. From Reuters:
Olshansky and his colleagues have called on the U.S. government to inject $3 billion a year into the field, arguing the benefits of achieving an average seven-year delay in the process of biological aging would far exceed the gains from eliminating cancer.
Ethically, the extension of life is controversial, with some philosophers arguing it goes against fundamental human nature.
But John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, said any society that applauded the saving of life had a duty to embrace regenerative medicine.
“Life saving is just death postponing with a positive spin,” he said. “If it is right and good to postpone death for a short time, it is hard to see now it would be less right and less good to postpone it for a long while.”
Yes, this is the logical dilemma that the Kassians and other deathists find themselves in. Who are they to decide how long other people should live?
I was talking about this with someone last summer in DC, and he asked an interesting question. There’s a respectable argument to be made that, while not every individual requires religion to be good, society itself does, because not everyone will be moral without a belief in a divine lawgiver and retribution in the afterlife. Similarly, he asked me, though no one wants to die, isn’t it good for society that we do?
My trite response, a la Groucho, is “what has posterity ever done for me?”
Unquestionably, death has some beneficial consequences for society. For one thing, it’s currently the most effective means of defeating dictators and tenure (which are often the same thing). I think the answer to that, though, is to come up with more effective means of dealing with dictators than the UN, and once it’s recognized that people are effectively living forever, or at least as long as they want to, tenure will have to face reform as well (in addition to an end to life-long appointments in general). Death also promotes innovation (as the old saying goes, science progresses, funeral by funeral).
But I’m not aware of any benefits that are worth sacrificing my life for. Risking, yes, but not sacrificing it. If death taking a holiday causes problems, I’d rather spend my life coming up with better solutions to those problems, rather than arbitrarily deciding that three-score and ten, or any other number, is the right one. After all, if one is going to argue that we should only live for a finite period of time, how would one come up with the right length? And how does this differ from mass executions, for the mere crime of living too long? It seems to me that the slope on which folks like Leon Kass and Eric Cohen tread is very slippery, with extremely ugly terrain at the bottom.
More Decline In The “Giggle Factor”
Not about space tourism. About anti-aging therapies. From Reuters:
Olshansky and his colleagues have called on the U.S. government to inject $3 billion a year into the field, arguing the benefits of achieving an average seven-year delay in the process of biological aging would far exceed the gains from eliminating cancer.
Ethically, the extension of life is controversial, with some philosophers arguing it goes against fundamental human nature.
But John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, said any society that applauded the saving of life had a duty to embrace regenerative medicine.
“Life saving is just death postponing with a positive spin,” he said. “If it is right and good to postpone death for a short time, it is hard to see now it would be less right and less good to postpone it for a long while.”
Yes, this is the logical dilemma that the Kassians and other deathists find themselves in. Who are they to decide how long other people should live?
I was talking about this with someone last summer in DC, and he asked an interesting question. There’s a respectable argument to be made that, while not every individual requires religion to be good, society itself does, because not everyone will be moral without a belief in a divine lawgiver and retribution in the afterlife. Similarly, he asked me, though no one wants to die, isn’t it good for society that we do?
My trite response, a la Groucho, is “what has posterity ever done for me?”
Unquestionably, death has some beneficial consequences for society. For one thing, it’s currently the most effective means of defeating dictators and tenure (which are often the same thing). I think the answer to that, though, is to come up with more effective means of dealing with dictators than the UN, and once it’s recognized that people are effectively living forever, or at least as long as they want to, tenure will have to face reform as well (in addition to an end to life-long appointments in general). Death also promotes innovation (as the old saying goes, science progresses, funeral by funeral).
But I’m not aware of any benefits that are worth sacrificing my life for. Risking, yes, but not sacrificing it. If death taking a holiday causes problems, I’d rather spend my life coming up with better solutions to those problems, rather than arbitrarily deciding that three-score and ten, or any other number, is the right one. After all, if one is going to argue that we should only live for a finite period of time, how would one come up with the right length? And how does this differ from mass executions, for the mere crime of living too long? It seems to me that the slope on which folks like Leon Kass and Eric Cohen tread is very slippery, with extremely ugly terrain at the bottom.
More Decline In The “Giggle Factor”
Not about space tourism. About anti-aging therapies. From Reuters:
Olshansky and his colleagues have called on the U.S. government to inject $3 billion a year into the field, arguing the benefits of achieving an average seven-year delay in the process of biological aging would far exceed the gains from eliminating cancer.
Ethically, the extension of life is controversial, with some philosophers arguing it goes against fundamental human nature.
But John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, said any society that applauded the saving of life had a duty to embrace regenerative medicine.
“Life saving is just death postponing with a positive spin,” he said. “If it is right and good to postpone death for a short time, it is hard to see now it would be less right and less good to postpone it for a long while.”
Yes, this is the logical dilemma that the Kassians and other deathists find themselves in. Who are they to decide how long other people should live?
I was talking about this with someone last summer in DC, and he asked an interesting question. There’s a respectable argument to be made that, while not every individual requires religion to be good, society itself does, because not everyone will be moral without a belief in a divine lawgiver and retribution in the afterlife. Similarly, he asked me, though no one wants to die, isn’t it good for society that we do?
My trite response, a la Groucho, is “what has posterity ever done for me?”
Unquestionably, death has some beneficial consequences for society. For one thing, it’s currently the most effective means of defeating dictators and tenure (which are often the same thing). I think the answer to that, though, is to come up with more effective means of dealing with dictators than the UN, and once it’s recognized that people are effectively living forever, or at least as long as they want to, tenure will have to face reform as well (in addition to an end to life-long appointments in general). Death also promotes innovation (as the old saying goes, science progresses, funeral by funeral).
But I’m not aware of any benefits that are worth sacrificing my life for. Risking, yes, but not sacrificing it. If death taking a holiday causes problems, I’d rather spend my life coming up with better solutions to those problems, rather than arbitrarily deciding that three-score and ten, or any other number, is the right one. After all, if one is going to argue that we should only live for a finite period of time, how would one come up with the right length? And how does this differ from mass executions, for the mere crime of living too long? It seems to me that the slope on which folks like Leon Kass and Eric Cohen tread is very slippery, with extremely ugly terrain at the bottom.
For Those Who Were Confused
A clarification on today’s festivities in Samarra:
I’ve received several emails this morning from people wondering why we’ve launched a “massive bombing campaign” in Iraq. And they’re saying, “won’t that kill a lot of innocent civilians?” But they are confused by the term, “air assault.”
An “air assault” is actually a helicopter-borne infantry assault. In this case, large numbers of helicopters are ferrying airborne-infantry soldiers to enemy targets.
New Blog On The Block
Some of the reporters over at Florida Today have started a new group space blog, called The Flame Trench. The name seems appropriate, because they seem to have gotten into a little pissing contest with Keith Cowing (via whom I learned of its existence). Though, as I mentioned in a comment there (unpublished as of yet), I wish that people would learn the difference between “infer” and “imply.”
Anyway, welcome to the neighborhood, guys (and gals, if there are any).
[Update at 1 PM EST]
I just got an explanatory email from John Kelly:
Sorry it took a pissing contest for some folks to find us. But we’re always glad if people are reading and visiting.
There’s three guys, one lady, writing for the Flame Trench. Our space team is veteran aerospace reporter Todd Halvorson, space, science and tech writer Christine Kridler, our Washington correspondent Larry Wheeler, and myself, the humble space editor. The blog is an add-on to our existing space news site.
Now, if they could just fix their commenting software so that it will capitalize my first and last name…
Beginning Its Deployment
The army of analysts has started to work on the captured Iraqi documents.
This document is a letter written by a member of Saddam Intelligence apparatus (Al Mukabarat) on 9/15/2001 (shortly after 9/11/2001) where he addressed it to someone higher up and he wrote about a conversation between an Iraqi intelligence source and a Taliban Afghani Consul. In the conversation the Afghani Consul spoke of a relationship between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden prior to 9/11/2001, and that the United States was aware of such a relationship and that there is a potential of US strikes against Iraq and Afghanistan if the destructive operations in the US (most probably he is referring to 9/11 attacks) were proven to be connected to Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban.
I don’t understand why the administration hasn’t been working harder to get these documents analyzed and public. Also, this treasure trove just makes the actions of the government in firing Arab language experts for being gay look all the more stupid. We need all the translators that we can get right now. And what’s even dumber is that, with everything else they have to worry about, the White House continues this nonsense.
President Bush’s updated language says security clearances cannot be denied “solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the individual.”
If sexual behavior is “strictly private, consensual and discreet,” that could lessen security concerns, according to the regulations that came as part of an update to clearance guidelines distributed in December.
This makes no sense. There are no intrinsic security concerns associated with someone’s sexual orientation. Security concerns arise only in the context of the potential for blackmail. If someone is openly gay, there is no security concern. Sexual behavior that is “private and discreet” is in fact the behavior of someone in the closet, which would be a security concern. I don’t often agree with the likes of Barney Frank and Henry Waxman, but I’d sure like to see a better explanation than this.