I wanted to write something about it, but given how busy I am, I figured it would be better to just wait for Mark Steyn to weigh in.
It was worth the wait.
In 1992, pictures of a baffled George Bush p
Uncertainty, Global Warming, and public policy
Another item in the latest Industrial Physicist is a piece on understanding the uncertainties in global warming models, and the public policy implications of those uncertainties. It’s well worth a read if you care about global warming in particular or science and public policy in general.
One of the hardest things about ensuring that public policy is based on sound science is that sound science inherently involves uncertainties. Politicians like yes or no answers, but science only gives really reliable answers in the very long term, far longer than the relevant political timescales. In order to make policy based on sound science, politicians have to take uncertainty into account, and allow for the possibility that the policies may need to be adjusted as new information becomes available.
Scramjets
There’s a fairly in depth look at scramjets in the latest edition of The Industrial Physicist. It’s got enough meat on it to be worth reading, though I have a visceral dislike of scramjets. It’s nothing to do with the technical merits – it’s just that they are yet another technology that’s constantly being held out as the technical breakthrough needed to bring down launch costs. Someday I suspect scramjet powered vehicles (at least missiles) will be practical. In the meantime they are a kind of interesting technology that’s worth understanding just for curiousity’s sake.
Incidentally, I’m not singling out scramjets here – space elevators also trigger my “here we go again” reaction. Ditto electromagnetic accelerators.
Irony
An eco-cruise ship ran aground in Alaska, spilling 5000 gallons of fuel in the water.
This is almost as good as the environmentalist who was brutally killed by a rampaging tree a few days ago.
Still Hope For Iraq
Despite the church bombings this weekend.
Ayatollah al-Sistani has condemned them:
Iraq’s top Shiite Muslim cleric condemned as “hideous crimes” the coordinated bomb attacks on five churches in Baghdad and Mosul that killed at least seven people and marked the insurgency’s first major attacks on Iraq’s minority Christians.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani said in a statement that Sunday’s assaults on churches “targeted Iraq’s unity, stability and independence…”
“…We assert the importance of respecting the rights of Christian civilians and other religious minorities and reaffirm their right to live in their home country Iraq in security and peace.”
It looks like he understands the problem. Amazingly, even Mooky al-Sadr’s guy got into the act:
“This is a cowardly act and targets all Iraqis,” Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, spokesman for radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Al-Jazeera television.
Unfortunately, I’ll bet we won’t be hearing this from the imams across the border in Iran, or from the loony bins that are many of the mosques in Saudi Arabia. This is why Iraq is so fundamental in the war on the fundamentalists.
Busy
I’m on a deadline crunch today, trying to wrap up some consulting work, and a long essay for The New Atlantis, but it’s Monday, which means Jeff Foust has lots of good stuff up over at The Space Review, including a book review of New Moon Rising, a slapdown of Professor Van Allen (something apparently required every few years, ever since the dawn of the space age, yet he never seems to learn), and a proposal to send a Soyuz to the moon.
Who is Jeff Bezos?
Fast Company has an article on Jeff Bezos, famous as the founder of Blue Origin – apparently he’s also been involved in some wacky scheme to sell stuff on the Internet. Who Knew?
Anyway, the article has some of the usual business ‘zine puff piece aspect to it, but it’s fairly in depth, so worth a read if you’d like to get a sense of the man. He comes off fairly well, even allowing for the reporter’s need to be nice in order to maintain access. I’m encouraged that he’ll push Blue Origin towards a successful business model, and he seems willing to spend real money up front before seeing returns, which is probably a necessity in the suborbital launch services industry.
The two really deep pocketed players in the industry are Bezos and Allen. Of the two I suspect that Bezos has the better approach to business (based on little information, unfortunately). The article suggests that his business orientation places a premium on customer service, which I’d always thought was sort of the obvious thing to do until I started paying attention to the way many businesses actually work.
What We Fight
…and who we fight, in Iraq and the Middle East.
Steven den Beste has been thinking a lot about the nature of terrorism.
Syntactic metal foams
Here’s an interesting article on syntactic metal foams, with a brief mention of RLV applications. As materials continue to improve SSTO becomes more and more achievable. It’s still not trivial, but it certainly seems within reach for vehicles that aren’t loaded up with pet hobbyhorses like lifting reentry or linear aerospikes.
Dead Hamster Bounce
Gallup says that the convention cost Kerry support:
In the survey, taken Friday and Saturday, the Democratic ticket of Kerry and John Edwards trailed the Republican ticket of Bush and Dick Cheney 50% to 46% among likely voters, with independent candidate Ralph Nader at 2%.
Before the convention, the two were essentially tied, with Kerry at 47%, Bush at 46%.
The change in support was within the poll’s margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points in the sample of 763 likely voters. But it was nonetheless a stunning result, the first time in the Gallup Poll since the 1972 Democratic convention that a candidate seemed to lose ground at his convention.
That may be because there are some other similarities with the 1972 Democratic convention.
The really bad news is that this was a partial weekend poll, which usually tend to favor Democrats (they seem to be home more for surveying on the weekends than Republicans).
Speaking of hamsters, there’s some pretty phunny photoshopping here. I can’t decide which I like better: “Saving Private Hamster” or the operating room scene with the bunny suit.