Michael Belfiore describes what looks like a potentially great book on the new space age.
She Had A Certain Glow About Her
Maybe we’re doing a better job of monitoring for nukes domestically than I thought. A woman was pulled over in her SUV for being radioactive:
“These are very sensitive devices,” Seymour said, adding that some officers have reported them going off in buildings “because someone in the next room on the other side of the wall had a stress test.”
Doctors said they have heard of radiation sensors going off at nuclear plants after patients have had stress tests, but not along highways…
…”Nobody at my doctor’s office warned me this could happen,” the woman said she told the officer. “He said, `That’s because they don’t know.'”
Virgin Galactic Survey
Virgin Galactic mailed me a survey which you can access. Answer truthfully. I (owner of SpaceShot) am not like the competitors that Julian Simon talks about in his mailorder books that tries to muck up competitors’ surveys. They inquire about pricing for Virgin Galactic Quest in $10 increments from 0-60+. Drop me a line at transterrestrial@dinkin.com or comment what you think tournament entries for a trip to space should cost. Also tell me what kind of profit margin you think would be fair. And whether a bundle of more than one entry would be OK. Note that credit card fixed charges are $0.30 + 2-3% at paypal which has a restrictive skill games policy and $0.40 or more elsewhere so credit cards will eat up 6-7% of a $10 charge, but only 4-5% of a $20 charge. Can someone give me a quote for the cost of building and analyzing one of those surveys? (I don’t want to buy one, just validate my decision not to.)
Watching Claire Berlinski
, on the war that Europe seems to be losing against Islamism. I wonder if any of the other networks will pick Not Just Ignorance
I don’t know whether to categorize this as “Space” or “Media Criticism” (often the case, given how often the media get space issues, like most issues, wrong).
Jeff Foust has a follow-up on the Wired News article that said March Storm was a front for people who wanted to militarize space. I was originally willing to give the reporter the benefit of the doubt, and just consider it shoddy reporting, and him a shoddy reporter. But it’s clear now that he had an agenda (something that should probably have been clear at the time, given that he took a nutcase like Bruce Gagnon far too seriously). As far as I’m concerned, he has zero credibility from this point forward.
A Humble Suggestion
Lileks discusses a major decision at his newspaper:
Everyone was casting votes on new comics to replace Boondocks. It
WMD Mystery Solved?
This young man thinks so. Of course, here’s the key question:
Glazov: So if all this evidence is credible, why wouldn’t the Bush Administration take advantage of this information?
Mauro: There are multiple ideas out there. I tend to believe that the foreign policy implications of these revelations explain the Administration
Good Guys And Bad Guys
Tibor Machan writes that Hollywood only finds villains nuanced when they’re anti-American:
Let us not forget that most of the writers and producers in Hollywood — the ones who make a quintessential American institution, namely, business, look so terrible in their various vehicles — are politically sympathetic with the Left. They have been that for a long time. (Even today, after the true nature of communists has been clearly demonstrated — based on, among other things, KGB and similar archives — there is still far more hostility shown from much of Hollywood against Joe McCarthy than against Joe Stalin — for instance, in George Clooney’s movie, “Good Night and Good Luck”.)
No, there is no sudden discovery of subtlety and complexity within the minds of evil people by Hollywood writers and producers. Rather what we have here is apologetics, plain and simple. The folks who put out this stuff just cannot work up a genuine disgust of terrorists because, well, most of the terrorists share their anti-American point of view. That seems to suffice for them to place most terrorism — which, one must keep in mind, consists primarily of killing people who are innocent, among them civilians and many children, and whose only “crime” is to be Americans or Westerners, meaning, they belong to the tribe the terrorists want to wipe out — into a sympathetic light.
An Existence Proof
Clark Lindsey sees some reason for hope that the new rocket companies may be able to achieve their cost (and business) goals. It would be interesting to see what conventional aerospace costing models would have predicted for RDT&E and ops costs for a government Eclipse program. We have to break out of the cost-plus culture, and ESAS does nothing toward that end.
Lost Secrets
This is cool.
Some of the Enigma messages were never broken. Now, you can contribute some CPU cycles to attempting to crack the last ones.
Actually, I think I know one of them. I’ll bet it’s “DON’T FORGET TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE.”