Well, at least slower living. Researchers have put mice into suspended animation using hydrogen sulfide. And, the key part of course, brought them back.
End of Newspapers
The Economist quotes Rupert Murdoch saying so. I predict a set of better paid part time specialist bloggers taking over for the generalist newspaper journalists. It may happen soon:
Whereas 56% of Americans haven’t heard of blogs, and only 3% read them daily, among the young they are standard fare, with 44% of online Americans aged 18-29 reading them often, according to a poll by CNN/USA Today/Gallup.
The Sin of Inaction
There is an interesting argument going on here about my article on Orion. I am cc’ing you the following:
I always thought the active-passive distinction in philosphy and law was a cop out. We are just as responsible for the millions who die from our inaction as we are for murder. If you are consciously not donating to a hunger fund with the understanding that the inevitable consequence is that an additional person will die of hunger, it is tantamount to first degree murder.
There is an active choice to be part of coal deaths. Every time we turn on a light switch, we actively increase the coal output that kills tens of thousands per year or more. So each flick is increasing the likelihood of death. It is therefore self-deception to suggest that moving in the direction of safety is a sinless course. It is just murder too common to prosecute.
So if we can all agree that we are a civilization of murderers, then we can get on to real questions like is it better to kill people with atmospheric nuclear explosions to colonize the solar system or kill each other through inaction.
Sticking with spending $15 billion/year on chemical rockets instead of half on nuclear rockets and half on defibrillators is killing hundreds of thousands.
I would give my life to colonize the planets. Our focus on saving every life is penny wise and pound foolish.
Do people avoid having children so that all their cells can die a natural death? Envision all humanity as cells of a greater organism, the global species. Envision that it is time to have a child species on another planet. Isn’t that worth the death of millions or hundreds of millions if new billions will spring into existence? I am asking for dozens possibly killed offset by savings thousands of others that would otherwise be killed.
I don’t expect to fundamentally change dinosaur thinking. “I will not kill anyone to save the species from the asteroid that has our species’ name on it.” But be aware of the systematic cost of the capricous risk aversion we impose in the name of morality.
His First Misstep?
Mike Griffin wrote Marshall a blank check yesterday.
As Keith points out, this doesn’t exactly square with his previous (laudable) statements about having more (needed) competition between centers.
[Afternoon update]
Clark Lindsey isn’t very impressed, either:
MSFC is rewarded for all those successful launch vehicle development projects it carried out in the past couple of decades
Will This Pope Be The Last Pope?
My thoughts on that subject, at TCS.
Stingy American Update
Chuck Simmins says that Americans have now raised over a billion dollars in private aid for the tsunami victims.
Damned unilateralists.
The Abolition Of Nature?
Some of my recent reading material has caused me to return to the question (upon which I’ve pondered off and on for decades) of what it means to be human. Along those lines, I have to confess to being a little perplexed by a post at Powerline today, in which Scott Johnson writes:
One of the great projects of the Progressive movement is the abolition of nature as supplying the standard of human conduct — the kind of standard to which the Founders appealed in adverting to “the Laws of Nature” in the Declaration of Independence.
Now, certainly progressives are opposed to the very notion of human nature–no dispute about that–but whence comes the notion that nature per se should “supply the standard of human conduct”? I assume that Mr. Johnson considers himself a conservative, and so I wonder if he’s actually thought through the import of this statement.
If he really believes this, he’s indulging in the naturalistic fallacy. I’m not sure what he has in mind here, but if we were to use nature, even human nature, as a guide to conduct, then rape would be perfectly acceptable, since this is a natural human behavior. As would homosexuality, since there’s nothing particularly unnatural about that, either. It may not be useful in reproduction, but there’s little doubt that there are people born to be attracted exclusively to members of the same sex, and like it or not, such behavior has been observed in other species as well (some very closely related to us).
I wouldn’t claim to be a conservative, but I had thought that conservativism was about operating from higher principles (e.g., divine, or otherwise), and rising above our animal tendencies. I’d like to see a little expansion on this topic from him, because as barely stated, it doesn’t make much sense to me.
Dim-Witted Pomposity
…the Senate, as currently composed, seems to attract people who have that potent & fatal combination of dimness and self-regard, and when you elevate those sorts to the Great National Saucer, you get idiocies like the Bolton hearing. On one side, a charmless babbler like Joe Biden, whose instinct upon finding a bad metaphor is to attenuate it until it is three microns wide; on the other side, George Voinovich, who finally showed up for a hearing and pronounced himself Disturbed by the allegations. This is like a guy skipping class on the origins [of] WW2 for a month then raising his hand to ask why they haven
Confused
For some reason, I don’t think that these people are taking the new government food pyramid seriously.
A Rose By Any Other Name
Here’s an interesting bit from Will Whitehorn’s (of Virgin Galactic) testimony this morning on the Hill:
Mr. Chairman, let me now turn to the question the Subcommittee asked about what preparations we presently are undertaking for the use of the spaceships we plan to purchase from Mr. Rutan. We are focused on complying fully with the letter and spirit of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004. Scaled Composites will have sole responsibility to certify the spacecraft. However, together, we are engaged in an active dialogue with the Federal Aviation Administration on other aspects of our business.
Emphasis mine.
This does not compute. If he complies with the CSLA, there will be no spacecraft certification–just a launch license. So the question is, was this a deliberate attempt to insert the C-word into the discussion (since Burt has been agitating to do this for some time), or was it simply sloppy usage by someone who doesn’t know better? One would think that company lawyers would vet a submitted Congressional testimony from someone representing a company like this, but it could be that they didn’t realize the significance of it. And in fact, it may have no significance at all, and I’m just being hypersensitive.