Space

Preparation

Today is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the day that Apollo XIII developed the “problem” that they told Houston about, when a liquid oxygen tank overpressurized and exploded en route to the Moon. Via email, Jim Oberg points out an interesting article in IEEE Spectrum with the real story, for those familiar only with the movie.

Technology and Society

Brilliant Morons

Who are the geniuses who think that a web site has to use the latest and greatest technology in order to accomplish a basic function? There’s nothing I love better than going to some site (like, for example, Bell South’s) to test my internet speed, and then to wait a long time for a page to appear to be doing something, and then be informed that the test can’t be run because I don’t have plug-in “X” installed.

Now plugin X is obviously not required to test an internet connection speed, or to display it, because I can find numerous other sites that will do this for me without requiring a plugin. The poor benighted neanderthals who designed those web sites apparently figured out how to do it with standard HTML, because it seems to work in all my browsers.

Self-indulgent whiz kids who think they’re doing us some kind of favor by insisting on bells and whistles on their web sites should ask themselves: how many people visiting their site will be pissed off if they don’t encounter a need for zippywhammo plugin “X” on their site? I mean, this isn’t http://internetspeedconnectionthemovie.com we’re talking about here.

Now, ask how many people who are trying to get their technical question answered, but can’t because the poindexters who designed the web sites make them go off and download and install software (on a slow network connection, which is what they’re trying to diagnose and fix) before they’ll get the answer, will get pissed off?

Think about it, brainiacs.

Media Criticism

Do Journalists Need Editors?

The title of this post doesn’t actually mean what most people would think it means (i.e., the continual criticism about fact checking, and how MSM does it but bloggers don’t). No.

I ran across this post by Michelle Malkin, in which she republishes an email from Nick Kristof:

michelle,

thanks belatedly for your note about hillary and abortions. i was in zimbabwe, skulking around and pretending to be a tourist, and didn’t have web access. but now i did have a chance to look at your web link, and i’m afraid i disagree.

you’re right that it was stassen’s work that originally pointed me to this issue and that the data cover only 16 states. but stassen has considerable credibility, since he is himself pro-life and trained in statistics, and others in the repro health field have found his work sensible. moreover, while the data are incomplete, the states represented include a range of different geographic areas and seem representative. and among those 16 states, the trend was very clear. Stassen calculates that there are 50,000 more abortions a year than if the previous trend had continued.

I repost it here not because I have any interest whatsoever in the content (which is to say, the message), but rather (as McCluhan might have said) the media that is in this case the message. This is an opinion columnist for the New York Times, who doesn’t seem to know the location of the shift key.

I don’t want to single out Mr. Kristof here, but this just happened to catalyze my thoughts on this subject, that I’ve noticed in the past. Is it an email thing? Or does he submit columns like this, and let his editor clean them up? I’ve noticed the same thing when conversing with actual book authors–the email is often all lower-case. At least in Mr. Kristof’s case, the email is otherwise well-written and grammatical, but I’ve often received emails from so-called journalists for which this wasn’t even the case.

I would never send out an email like the one posted here–I’d be embarrassed for anyone to see my writing in such a form–and if I had no other knowledge of Mr. Kristof’s work, I wouldn’t be very impressed with him as a writer, or even thinker. Maybe this is an irrational prejudice on my part, but it seems to me that if you want to communicate as well as possible, you want people to focus on the message, and not be distracted by a poor presentation of it.

My point is that I suspect that many “professional” writers (which is to say that people, like reporters, who actually get paid to write, however amateurishly they may actually practice their craft, such as it is) also have professional editors, who serve as a backstop for them against grammatical and spelling errors. I can’t help but believe that this tends to make many of them sloppy.

I don’t have that luxury. Whatever I post is seen by no eyes except mine until it’s printed on line, for everyone who chooses to, to see. I know there are some blogs that disdain the use of the shift key, and perhaps if you can get past that, the writing is very good and interesting, but I have trouble getting past it. I figure that few people are going to be turned off by proper capitalization, and surely I’m not unique in that I’m turned off by a lack of it, so why not do it right, in both email and blog posts?

But I think that it points up just one more area in which (amateur) bloggers can (because they have to be) better writers than MSM journalists. It’s not just that we know more about specific subjects, but we also present it better, because we are our own editors, and we know that if we don’t get it right, in both fact and presentation, our hits will drop, or never appear at all. Contrast that to a writer in a one-newpaper town, like Los Angeles, to whom neither facts or grammar are important, because there are editors for that, and their stuff will get published and read regardless, at least until the owners of the newspaper finally decide to stop subsidizing incompetence and ideology.

Space

Yawn

Mark Whittington is appropriately skeptical of the notion that obscure astrophysical discoveries will energize the public and maintain support for the Vision for Space Exploration:

As interesting as such things [as a magnetar explosion] are, I’m afraid that NASA need something else besides that to sustain public interest. I had never heard of this discovery before I read it in Blandford’s piece. It certainly did not supplant the death of the Pope, or Terri Schiavo or (please God) the Michael Jackson trial.

However, like the scientist he criticizes, he’s much too unobjective and overenthusiastic himself when he continues:

A human return to the Moon this year would have done all of those things.

Why?

What’s so exciting about NASA sending a few government employees back to the Moon? NASA’s been there, did that, got the hat, a third of a century ago. The public found it boring then. Why, in the twenty-first century, amidst the explosion of technological wonders that we’ve seen since, would they get jazzed about it now? What would make it so newsworthy as to knock the death of a great Pope off the headlines? Why is NASA astronauts walking around on the Moon any more fascinating to a modern, jaded public than NASA astronauts circling the earth in a can, something that is never in the news unless something goes wrong?

I can tell you that, as a die-hard space enthusiast, I sure can’t get excited about it. In fact, I don’t think that the current VSE, at least as put forth by some of the major contractors (and like the Shuttle and ISS), is worth the money. And I (unlike most of the public) actually know what a tiny percentage of the federal budget it constitutes. If Mark can’t sell me on it, why does he think that those who don’t have that much interest in space (the vast majority, at least when it comes to relative depth of interest), and think that NASA consumes half the federal budget, will be excited?

I will tell you what might have knocked those other things off the headlines, at least temporarily (at least based on the response to the SpaceShipOne flights)–if Paul Allen walked on the Moon, with his own money, and was selling tickets so that others could do so.

[Update at 11:20 AM EDT]

Mark replies with a post that’s mostly straw.

The way the Vision for Space Exploration is shaping up will make it a bit different than Apollo. It will not, ultimately, consists of just “a few government employees.”

That remains to be seen. My point (and my only point, really) is that contra Mark’s claim, NASA astronauts walking on the Moon per se will not excite the public much more than space science discoveries, or knock other stories out of the news. I think that most people are pretty jaded about technological advances, unless they can see how they’ll actually affect their own lives. If NASA can show how astronauts on the Moon will do that, then it may be sustainable. If they can’t, it will be Apollo redux.

I do think he sells people short, projecting his feelings and assuming that most people share them. I think (again) the polling data backs me up.

That’s pretty amusing, considering that I think that’s exactly what he’s doing. I’m not aware of any polling data that backs him up. He’ll have to show some, rather than simply asserting it, if he wants to convince me or (I would hope) my readers.

By the way, he also has a new column about the promise of Mike Griffin.

[One more update, at 11:55]

I should add that when Mark writes in comments that “It’s virtually certain that the first human return to the Moon will be the biggest story of the next decade,” he displays a paucity of imagination about potential stories of the next decade (and once again confuses his own interests and preferences for those of the masses).

Bigger than a cure for cancer? Or indefinite life extension? Or artificial intelligence, or artificial life? Or the opening of a major LEO space hotel by Disney? Or a major terrorist attack killing thousands or millions? Or a 9+ earthquake in Seattle? Things like that will be knocked out of contention simply by a repeat of something we already did a third of a century ago?

I seriously doubt it.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!