It’s dead, Jim.
Or if not, it’s mostly dead. I hope we can bring it back.
[Update Monday morning]
More from David Bernstein.
The Nutrition Scam
If you have forty minutes or so, watch Nina Teicholz.
Nerve Stimulation
…may help with female sexual dysfunction.
Isn’t sex itself nerve stimulation?
[Friday-evening update]
This seems sort of related: Custom sex dolls.
This seems to me like the ultimate expression of free-market capitalism. I found the kicker interesting:
“You have to find beauty in imperfection,” Krivicke says as he takes the mannequin head back from me.
I’ve noticed over the years that, when I get to know someone, and I come to like them, they grow increasingly interesting and physically attractive, even if I didn’t find them so initially.
Space Force
That was then, this is now:
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson asserted on Wednesday that the service is not pushing back on President Trump’s idea to create a Space Force. She offered no new details on how the process of forming a new service might unfold but insisted that this “has to be done the right way.”
I’m old enough to remember when she opposed Space Corps, let alone Space Force.
And are people really talking (again) about a Department of Space? Please, no.
Sextortion
I got two of these types of emails last night. While I have occasionally viewed a raunchy video, it was pretty clearly hinky, for numerous reasons (misspellings, fact that the password is not associated with either my email of Facebook, and I don’t even have a Messenger account, I rarely allow a webcam to see me, etc.). If it was a serious threat, they’d send a sample video.
This is a federal felony, but I find it kind of amazing that if you want to report it to the FBI, you do it by phone, instead of forwarding to an email address. The country’s in the very best of hands.
Space Resources
Florida Weather
Almost exactly a year ago, we flew to Florida to start to prep a house to sell. Instead, we had to prep it for a major hurricane. Fortunately (for us, not the west coast of the state), Irma’s track shifted to the west, and we didn’t get the brunt of it. A year later, we’re here again, this time in the last throes of renovation. But now Gordon just formed in the Keys, and we’re getting a washout here today in Palm Beach County, so no progress on the house today. Our major goal for the day is managing to get down to Plantation for dinner with Bob and Lou Poole (as in the Reason Foundation). Fortunately, things should be calming down by then for southeast Florida, and the storm will be moving off into the Gulf, where it may threaten the northern Gulf Coast.
Reusability
Jeff Foust writes about the unheralded 25th anniversary of the DC-X flights, and what has happened in the past half decade to see the promise that it offered a quarter of a century ago finally coming to fruition. I attended the 20th anniversary, but the only thing happening this year is a dinner in LA later this month.
I would note, per the criticism of the “purists,” that SSTO is highly overrated. Two-stage systems are much more flexible and efficient, particularly for off-nominal missions (e.g., high inclination or high altitude). SSTO would make sense only for a large traffic model to a single destination, probably equatorial.
Airworthiness For Spacecraft
I missed this earlier in the week, but Mike Snead has a long essay on passenger safety over at The Space Review. It’s a useful history, that touches on many of the themes of my book, but I believe that it’s technologically premature to apply the principles to human spaceflight. Spaceflight participants (not passengers) must be aware of the risks of the varied methods of building spaceships, and accept them accordingly. No one should, at this point in history, get aboard one with the same expection of getting safely off that one does with an airliner, particularly because different people have different risk tolerances and goals. There will come a time when trips to space will be considered common carrier, on certified vehicles, but we are years from that time.
Russian Rocket Development
So much for them being competitive on the world market. One wonders what it is about Rogozin that results in Putin continuing to keep him in charge.