Will Saletan has a disquieting report on a recent biotech meeting.
I am largely in favor of the kinds of advances proposed here, but the community is indeed going to have to learn to respect the views of people who are concerned about it, and lighten up on the condescension, if they don’t want to see progress shut down out of ignorance.
Will Saletan has a disquieting report on a recent biotech meeting.
I am largely in favor of the kinds of advances proposed here, but the community is indeed going to have to learn to respect the views of people who are concerned about it, and lighten up on the condescension, if they don’t want to see progress shut down out of ignorance.
Here’s an interesting read from Christopher Hitchens on hippies:
Eleanor Agnew’s lovely memoir of this movement of primal innocence is at once honest and hilarious. She recaptures the period with unerring skill: a period when the Apollo mission had shown us our fragile, blue planetary home from outer space, thus promoting (first) ”The Whole Earth Catalog” and (second) a mentality that despised the science and innovation necessary for the taking of that photograph in the first place.
RTWT
I’m originally from Popland, but I’ve been living in Sodavania for the past quarter century.
And they missed a category. In some parts of the south, it’s actually “cocola.”
The sharp division between the UP and eastern Wisconsin is fascinating. I remember back in the seventies when my cousins moved to Milwaukee from where we lived in southeast Michigan, they told me about having to get used to the new vocabulary (they also called water fountains “bubblers”–weirdos).
I’m curious about the “other.” What do they call soft drinks in New Mexico?
Further thoughts: harkening back to Albion’s Seed, it would seem that both Puritans and Quakers are soda drinkers, whereas the Presbyterians opt for coke. And the Cavaliers seem to be a mix between the two. But which folkway created the pop drinkers? (Note that it really was culturally appropriate to split off West Virginia from Virginia way back when).
I’m originally from Popland, but I’ve been living in Sodavania for the past quarter century.
And they missed a category. In some parts of the south, it’s actually “cocola.”
The sharp division between the UP and eastern Wisconsin is fascinating. I remember back in the seventies when my cousins moved to Milwaukee from where we lived in southeast Michigan, they told me about having to get used to the new vocabulary (they also called water fountains “bubblers”–weirdos).
I’m curious about the “other.” What do they call soft drinks in New Mexico?
Further thoughts: harkening back to Albion’s Seed, it would seem that both Puritans and Quakers are soda drinkers, whereas the Presbyterians opt for coke. And the Cavaliers seem to be a mix between the two. But which folkway created the pop drinkers? (Note that it really was culturally appropriate to split off West Virginia from Virginia way back when).
I’m originally from Popland, but I’ve been living in Sodavania for the past quarter century.
And they missed a category. In some parts of the south, it’s actually “cocola.”
The sharp division between the UP and eastern Wisconsin is fascinating. I remember back in the seventies when my cousins moved to Milwaukee from where we lived in southeast Michigan, they told me about having to get used to the new vocabulary (they also called water fountains “bubblers”–weirdos).
I’m curious about the “other.” What do they call soft drinks in New Mexico?
Further thoughts: harkening back to Albion’s Seed, it would seem that both Puritans and Quakers are soda drinkers, whereas the Presbyterians opt for coke. And the Cavaliers seem to be a mix between the two. But which folkway created the pop drinkers? (Note that it really was culturally appropriate to split off West Virginia from Virginia way back when).
A high-school dropout computer designer who builds retro machines has put a Commodore 64 on a chip. Only in America.
For sounds going extinct. It’s an interesting article, and a little disconcerting that there are many sounds with which a certain generation (mine) is familiar that kids today may have never heard, except in the movies. It brings to mind this post from last summer, when I heard a sound that was familiar to me only from WW II movies, though my father heard much more of it than he ever imagined wanting to.
On Friday, I threatened to write a review of the year in space. Jeff Foust has preempted me this morning, over at The Space Review, and it’s unlikely I’ll do any better.
Lots of other good stuff over there as well, with items on Bigelow, and a well-deserved slapdown of Alex “Eeyore” Roland by Dwayne Day.
The GAO has released a report on Hubble servicing costs:
At our request, NASA prepared an estimate of the funding needed for a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble. NASA estimates the cost at between $1.7 billion to $2.4 billion. However, documentary support for portions of the estimate is insufficient.
What a surprise.
NASA, an agency that has already internally decided that it isn’t going to use Shuttle to save the Hubble, comes up with an outrageously high cost number to do so in order to help justify its decision, but doesn’t substantiate it.
This number is simply incredible. I’ll bet they’re using a cost per flight of between half a billion and a billion dollars (which is the average cost, but isn’t the appropriate number to use when estimating the mission cost, which should be the marginal cost–between one hundred and two hundred million). I’ll also bet that they’re including the cost of Hubble replacement hardware that has already been built and paid for. I’ll also bet that getting the basis for this “estimate” from NASA will be like pulling teeth from an unanaesthetized elephant on crank.
The only costs that need to be compared are the cost of developing the robotics necessary to do this mission without Shuttle (already estimated to be hundreds of millions, if not over a billion), the cost of any modifications necessary to allow the equipment originally designed to be serviced by astronauts to be instead replaced by the aforesaid “robot” (which is really not a robot, but a teloperator, and which will up costs even more), to the cost of launching another Shuttle mission, training the crew, and using the equipment already designed and built to do so. I would truly be shocked if any honest analysis would indicate that the Shuttle mission isn’t the cheapest way to go.
[Via NASA Watch]