The Secure World Foundation has a released a report from the April workshop in Germany. Haven’t read it yet, but I’d suspect it’s a useful read.
Andy Weir’s New Book
The first chapter has been put on line. I haven’t read it yet, perhaps I’ll have thoughts when I have.
[Update a while later]
I’d think they’d make their coffee in pressure cookers.
The Kurds
Arming them is long overdue. They’re our second-best ally in the region, after Israel. Screw Erdogan.
Mocking The Snowflakes
The media hates it.
Admittedly, many of them are snowflakes themselves. Or just flakes.
Methylene Blue
…may slow or reverse aging in skin.
Sounds good to me, if there are no side effects.
Dr. Manny Is An Idiot
There may be reasons not to eat organ meat, but sat fat and cholesterol are not one of them:
While there is new research questioning the role of dietary cholesterol and saturated fat in heart disease, there are still decades of research suggesting that they may be contributing factors. And the American Heart Association hasn’t changed its recommendation that saturated fat be kept at less than 5-6 percent of daily caloric intake.
The American Heart Association has (at best) its head up its fundament.
More SpaceX Reusability
For years, it was understood that NASA wanted new Dragons for its CRS missions. But today SpaceX is going to fly a used one, with the agency’s permission.
As I’ve long said, there will come a point at which a launch customer will say, “Wait, you want me to trust my ass or my payload to an unflown vehicle?” We’ll look back in amazement at the first seven decades of spaceflight, when we thought it made perfect sense to put payloads on untested systems, and then throw them away after a single flight.
[Update a few minutes later]
Note that NASA allowed this for a cargo mission. I’ll bet they’ll still want new capsules for crew for a while. Speaking of which, NASA is admitting that Boeing and SpaceX are going to have a hard time meeting the totally arbitrary LOC goal of one in 270. I love this:
“The number one safety-related concern for the program is the current situation with respect to the estimate of loss of crew,” Donald McErlean, a former engineering fellow at L-3 Communications and a member of the panel, said at the meeting. “The threshold values were considered to be challenging, and both contractors currently have a challenge to meet that precise number.”
Got that? They’re going to have difficulty meeting that “precise” number. As I noted in the book, the precision with which they calculate these utterly arbitrary numbers, given the state of knowledge about the system, is absurd. And this is the sort of thing that keeps us dependent on the Russians, when neither we nor they have any idea what their reliability or LOC number is.
Dilbert One
…”scientists” zero:
…in a sense, the video doesn’t even refute the straw man it set up. It’s not that climate science consists only of models: obviously there are observations too. But all the attribution claims about the climatic effects of greenhouse gases are based on models. If the scientists being interviewed had any evidence otherwise, they didn’t present any.
When you can’t even knock down your own straw man, you don’t have much of an argument.
So how did the video do refuting Scott Adams’ cartoon? He joked that scientists warning of catastrophe invoke the authority of observational data when they are really making claims based on models. Check. He joked that they ignore on a post hoc basis the models that don’t look right to them. Check. He joked that their views presuppose the validity of models that reasonable people could doubt. Check. And he joked that to question any of this will lead to derision and the accusation of being a science denier. Check. In other words, the Yale video sought to rebut Adams’ cartoon and ended up being a documentary version of it.
They would appear to lack self awareness.
The Nutrition Tide Is Finally Turning
Eat fat to lose weight.
The Gender Warriors
They’re America’s new Puritans.
It’s worth noting that the American Left are in fact the ideological descendants of the people who originally populated New England from old England. It’s why Massachusetts and the northeast in general are such a blue region. The primary difference is merely what they’re puritanical about.