It really is harder. It’s a consistent winner of worst state in which to do business. Patricia was thinking about doing a franchise, but the thought of being an employer here is frightening to me.
Planetary Protection
There may be some useful changes coming to NASA:
JPL has butted heads with the office over the next big mission, the Mars 2020 rover, which will gather rock samples for later retrieval to Earth. JPL is interesting in having the rover target areas with subsurface brines, an activity that would not be allowed with its planned level of cleanliness. Moreover, the planetary protection office has not yet agreed on the efficacy of the techniques JPL will use to sterilize the tubes in which the rover will cache rock cores. If the issues aren’t resolved, Rummel says, the rover could be headed for a bureaucratic “train wreck”.
The office, which has always been limited by a small budget and staff, continues to gauge a spacecraft’s “bioburden” based on a classic measure—the number of cultivable microbial spores it carries. “Some of the numbers we’ve been operating on date back decades, and it’d be great to revisit them,” says Sarah Johnson, a planetary scientist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She thinks the office should take advantage of two innovations: chemicals that can separate DNA from dead and living cells, and genomic sequencers that can classify the living ones by type. Scientists could then, for example, assess their individual likelihoods of surviving on Mars.
As a member of the Curiosity team, Johnson would like to see a change in policy that would allow the rover to sidle up to the wet streaks to give them a close look, even if the drill itself—currently on the fritz since December 2016—could not be used. In their op-ed, Fairén and his colleagues go further, saying NASA should slightly lower its sterilization standards so that robots as clean as Curiosity could explore special regions. Fairén says there is growing evidence that the harsh environment on the martian surface—a combination of frigid temperatures, caustic chemicals and deadly cosmic radiation—would kill Earth’s microbes quickly, especially in the limited numbers that ride along with robots. Even if some survive, he adds, future missions could distinguish between earthly and martian microbes by sequencing their genomes.
As the article notes, it’s inevitable that humans are going to go there. If they want to look for non-terrestrial life, they need to start doing it now.
Ageism
I thought it was a Silicon Valley thing, but apparently it’s a general tech-industry problem. This seems really stupid to me.
Hyperloop
Is Elon planning to get back in the game?
A Warrior For Freedom Of Expression
He’s (sort of) hanging up his spurs, but it’s heartening to see that we can win fights against these campus fascists.
Women Workplace Bullies
I know this will raise screams from the usual suspects, but it’s surely an evolutionary thing. Oh, and men and women are different.
Another Vector Launch
This is the first rocket launch out of Camden, Georgia in many decades.
Hot of the press… amazing video of our launch today at @CamdenSpaceport pic.twitter.com/QBtPlCs8zs
— VECTOR (@vectorspacesys) August 3, 2017
Calexit
Does anyone have a full transcript of this lunatic’s interview with Tucker Carlson? I had the same expression watching it as Tucker usually does when listening to one of the nutballs he has on.
The Value Of Trump
George Will finds a silver lining:
Executive power expanded, with only occasional pauses (thank you, Presidents Taft and Coolidge, of blessed memory), throughout the 20th century and has surged in the 21st. After 2001, “The Decider” decided to start a preventive war and to countenance torture prohibited by treaty and statute. His successor had “a pen and a phone,” an indifference to the Constitution’s take care clause (the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed”) and disdain for the separation of powers, for which he was repeatedly rebuked by the Supreme Court.
Fortunately, today’s president is so innocent of information that Congress cannot continue deferring to executive policymaking. And because this president has neither a history of party identification nor an understanding of reciprocal loyalty, congressional Republicans are reacquiring a constitutional — a Madisonian — ethic. It mandates a prickly defense of institutional interests, placing those interests above devotion to parties that allow themselves to be defined episodically by their presidents.
Furthermore, today’s president is doing invaluable damage to Americans’ infantilizing assumption that the presidency magically envelops its occupant with a nimbus of seriousness. After the president went to West Virginia to harangue some (probably mystified) Boy Scouts about his magnificence and persecutions, he confessed to Ohioans that Lincoln, but only Lincoln, was more “presidential” than he. So much for the austere and reticent first president who, when the office was soft wax, tried to fashion a style of dignity compatible with republican simplicity.
Fastidious people who worry that the president’s West Virginia and Ohio performances — the alpha male as crybaby — diminished the presidency are missing the point, which is: For now, worse is better. Diminution drains this office of the sacerdotal pomposities that have encrusted it. There will be 42 more months of this president’s increasingly hilarious-beyond-satire apotheosis of himself, leavened by his incessant whining about his tribulations (“What dunce saddled me with this silly attorney general who takes my policy expostulations seriously?”). This protracted learning experience, which the public chose to have and which should not be truncated, might whet the public’s appetite for an adult president confident enough to wince at, and disdain, the adoration of his most comically groveling hirelings.
Anything we can do to reduce the power and overreach of the presidency, and restores Congress’s sense of its own prerogatives and diminishes party, is to be lauded, even if it results from the behavior of an ignorant narcissistic lout.
Space Aliens
No, NASA is not hiring someone to protect the planet from them:
Though this should be abundantly clear by now—that NASA isn’t planning to launch an attack on aliens they don’t know exist—Shostak gets some colorful phone calls from those who want to believe.
“I have to say, people do call [me] and say, ‘Do you know anything about the Pentagon’s plans to defend Earth?’” he said. To be clear, Shostak does not know anything about ‘the Pentagon’s plans’ and thinks that even in some alternate reality where he did, the Pentagon wouldn’t waste time or money trying to save us. So please stop calling him.
Sigh.