As a grieving widow, I wonder if Lisa Ramaci-Vincent has absolute moral authority? Maybe she should camp out in front of Tisch Hall in Ann Arbor until Professor Cole meets with her. I’m sure that the media would give it big coverage…
Moveable Type Problems
Is there an MT doctor in the house? When I put up a post, it gets stuck on the “Rebuilding Page” page. And I’m no longer receiving emails of comments.
[Update a few minutes later]
I’ve disabled both comments and trackback until further notice by changing script names (otherwise I could be getting bombarded with spam, and I’d never know it). If anyone has any suggestions as to what to do, please email me ASAP. Also, is there some way to globally turn off comments on old posts?
[Update at 2:30 EDT]
OK, I’ve closed comments and trackback on all posts older than five days, and reenabled comments.
[Update at 3:30 EDT]
Well, I’ve reenabled comments, but it seems to be to no avail. It just times out now…
[Another update a couple minutes later]
OK, this is really screwed up now. Comments are working, but it doesn’t return any feedback that it is, so now I can expect a lot of multiple comments. And apparently they aren’t closed on older posts, so I’m going to disable them again.
Going For The Brass Ring
It’s not a surprise, really, but Virgin Galactic has publicly announced that the next goal after a successful SpaceShipTwo commercial suborbital service is an orbital system. I wonder what the projected schedule is for first service, and if it will end up beating the CEV into space?
Stuck In The Past
Clark Lindsey has a powerful rejoinder to a recent pessimistic article about our future in space in the Wall Street Journal, which they printed.
Recreating Art
Alan Boyle has an interesting story of forensic art history, with another demonstration of the power of the scientific method.
Death Of A Music Pioneer
Bob Moog has died. It’s hard to overestimate how much he changed the face of modern music.
In The Womb?
Via Geekpress, here’s a long but interesting article on the current state of research into the question of the origin of homosexuality. It’s also an example of pretty good science reporting in the MSM.
Too Strong A Claim
Glenn points out an article touting space elevators at IEEE Spectrum. I like space elevators, but I think that their proponents overstate the case when they say things like this:
SO WHY CAN’T WE DO ALL THIS with rockets? And why is the space elevator so cheap?
The answer is that chemical rockets are inherently too inefficient: only a tiny percentage of the mass at liftoff is valuable payload. Most of the rest is fuel and engines that are either thrown away or recycled at enormous expense.
Well, it’s a myth that “WE CANT DO ALL THIS with rockets.” Space elevators are clearly better, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t open up space without them. They are a sufficient technology, but not a necessary one. Rockets are still far from a mature technology, and the costs that he claims for the initial space elevator ($200/kg) are achievable with rockets as well, once we start flying them enough to get suitable economies of scale.
Has Howard Dean Been Visiting Ohio?
It’s a mystery in Cinci.
Next Trillion Dollar Colonization
Today’s NYT reports that Iraq and Afghanistan if they drag on for another five years will comprise, “The Trillion Dollar War”. World War 2 was a multitrillion dollar war. Every war with more than a million casualties is a trillion dollar war if you take the value of a life at a million dollars. That might not be reasonable some time and place where the median income is less than ten thousand dollars, but I would call for measuring by purchasing power parity. While the article is a pretty poor analysis considering opportunity costs. First, that veteran’s health costs would have been big without the war. Second, that salary and so on would have to be paid without the war. Third, that there would be some major price to pay in blood and coin keeping the prior regimes in place in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Seen in that light, a trillion dollar war is a bargain. Especially if it results in friendly economies (if not friendly polities) in Iraq and Afghanistan going forward.
As I have stated before, we should step up to the plate and spend the next trillion colonizing the Moon and Mars. $50 billion a year could launch 20 times as much stuff into orbit as was launched last year and colonists could pay for their own payload. With the long bond rate at 5%, the net present value of $50 billion a year forever is a trillion dollars.
There are a bunch of good reasons why the Moon would be a better bet than Iraq. Colonizing the Moon would not face any guerilla warfare. There are no existing users of Lunar resources. There is no government worthy of note to displace. There are no Lunar sympathizers that would start violent revolution if we went. (If you are out there, keep quiet until after the colonization gets going so you can have your fifteen minutes while I have my colonization.)
No air on the Moon? Oxygen is there and nitrogen costs $0.50/gallon on Earth. Let’s say we imported 11,000 liters of air a day and just vented it into space. A liter of air weighs about 1.25 grams. Importing your 14 kg of air a day is not a big deal. $50 billion a year could deliver enough air for 1,000 people to just vent every single breath to space at today’s launch rates. Don’t you think a thousand people could work out a way to recycle and replace air from local materials? There are 4000 kilograms of nitrogen in every 1000 tons of regolith. At 1300K, some of it will come out as Nitrogen gas (a ton worth of various gases). If I could get $50 billion a year for selling air on the Moon, I would sure as heck work hard to figure out how to do it for less.
So we could have our lunar colony and if people consumed two pounds of earth imported food per day (which should be plenty) and we can get air and water recycling down pat, we could support 7,000 folks. If we can get food production going then we can support a lot more for $50B/year. We would need to get the cost of the mass to the Moon down to $100,000 per year if we wanted to support 500,000 on the Moon like we have in Wyoming for $50 billion/year. That would either mean just 5 kg in Earth imports at $20,000/kg to the Moon or about 20 kg at $5000/kg to the Moon which is roughly what Elon Musk is promising by 2010.
By Sam, not Rand