Jeff Foust reviews an overpriced and inaccurate space book, based on a flawed premise.
[Update a few minutes later]
A long essay on the purpose of deep “space exploration.” Lord I hate that phrase.
[Afternoon update]
Second link was wrong, but fixed now. Sorry!
Is the regime on the verge of collapse?
I hope so (though it will be a mess), but I’ll believe it when I see it.
He wants to tunnel from his office at Hawthorne Airport to LAX.
Just when they finally seem to be almost ubiquitous on American, the airline is starting to phase them out:
“More than 90 percent of our passengers already bring a device or screen with them when they fly,” American told workers Tuesday in a message. “Those phones and tablets are continually upgraded, they’re easy to use and, most importantly, they are the technology our customers have chosen.”
The move marks a reversal for Chief Executive Officer Doug Parker, who said less than a year ago that American would have seat-back screens on all of its planes to remain competitive. The carrier this year will receive the first four of its 100 Max aircraft. A decision hasn’t been made on whether to extend the policy to other new planes.
What I hate about them is that it’s almost become a crime on the planes to have a window open in daylight. Being able to look out the window is one of the main reasons I prefer window seats. I hope that bandwidth and cost improve on the in-flight Internet, because I hate Gogo.
…with pancreases grown in rats:
“These results demonstrate not only that the rat-grown mouse pancreas is functional, but also that it is readily accepted by the immune system of the genetically matched recipient,” said Nakauchi. “In the future, any human organs generated in this way may also be functional and accepted by the immune system of the patient who donated the pluripotent stem cells.”
These results are exciting, but it’s ultimately a proof of concept if you look at what scientists hope to accomplish in the long term. “Their study is well executed and we’re happy to see the result,” Jun Wu, a research associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California who was not involved in the study, told Gizmodo. “But that’s rats and mice. To move to humans you have to take another step forward.” Rats and mice are much closer on an evolutionary scale than say, rats and people, or people and sheep, though scientists are working on growing human cells inside pigs as we speak.
Faster, please.
We need an FDA commissioner who sees it. That also would apply to criminally terrible government dietary advice.
Gee, so it turns out that it won’t kill you after all:
Even short-term consumption of a Paleolithic-type diet improved glucose control and lipid profiles in people with type 2 diabetes compared with a conventional diet containing moderate salt intake, low-fat dairy, whole grains and legumes.
The biggest nightmare for Big Pharma is that we can treat Type 2 diabetes (which seems to be a diet-related “disease”) with an improved diet.
Tomorrow is the deadline for filing amicus briefs on our behalf. Judith Curry has filed another one. I haven’t read it yet, but I expect it to be good.
[Update a while later]
Reading through it, it would seem to make a strong case for her own defamation, though she’s above that.
[Update late morning]
Some thoughts on “alternate facts” in the climate debate:
My tweet asked the climate scientists on my feed whether they agreed with the statement specifically the use of the word “all”. My expectation was that a reasonable core of climate scientists would agree that Dr. Mann had overstepped the science. This was not the case. Instead, what I got was overwhelming support for Dr. Mann with not a single non-skeptic initially commenting negatively. It was as if Dr. Mann was the pope and the climate community his congregation. Nothing he said could be considered to be anything less than the truth, even if it took huge convolutions of logic to make it true. In the last couple weeks the term “alternative facts” has entered our lexicon. Well in the next few paragraphs I want to unpack Dr. Mann’s “alternative fact” and see if it is indeed defensible. Then I will go into what I feel this means for the climate change debate.
RTWT.
No, it is not inevitable that their “south will rise again”:
Why are the left’s public demonstrations more impressive than its voter turnout? Because there are a whole lot of Democrats in the large population centers where such demonstrations are generally held. People can join a protest simply by getting on the subway; it’s an easy show of force.
But there are a lot of small towns in America, and as Sean Trende and David Byler recently demonstrated, those small towns are redder than ever. Effectively, the Democratic coalition has self-gerrymandered into a small number of places where they can turn out an impressive number of feet on the ground, but not enough votes to win the House. Certainly not enough to win the Senate or the Electoral College, which both favor sparsely populated states and discount the increasingly dense parts of the nation.
The Senate map in 2018 is brutal for Democrats. If Democrats want to get their mojo back, they’re going to need to do more than get a small minority of voters to turn out for a march. They’re going to need to get back some of those rural votes.
To do that, they’re probably going to have to let go of the most soul-satisfying, brain-melting political theory of the last two decades: that Democrats are inevitably the Party of the Future, guaranteed ownership of the future by an emerging Democratic majority in minority-white America. This theory underlay a lot of Obama’s presidency, and Clinton’s campaign. With President Trump’s inauguration on Friday, we saw the results.
Why was this such a bad theory? Let me count the ways.
I hope that the shock treatment of Trump will ultimately result in at least one party with actual liberal values, as opposed to the divisive, violent, race-baiting mess that is the modern Left that has largely hijacked the Democrats.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Yes, if the economy grows during Trump’s presidency, his opposition will dwindle.
[Update a few minutes later]
This related piece on the Democrats’ plight is from a couple weeks ago, with a bonus Space Shuttle analogy (not sure how apt it is).
[Late-morning update]
Trump’s revolution has been a long time brewing:
As Amity Shlaes shows in her 2008 book The Forgotten Man, that term, which Franklin Roosevelt applied to the man on the breadline in the Great Depression, “the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” more properly applies to those unhappy-if-silent taxpayers who funded the New Deal’s social-welfare schemes. And these are the forerunners of the Tea Partiers, another key class of Trump voter: the widow on a fixed income whose property-tax payment helps house a public-sector retiree comfortably but whose inexorable rise is making her own paid-off home unaffordable; the retiree whose IRA savings the Great Recession eroded or who can no longer get an adequate income from safe bond investments, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policies; the small businessman or farmer ruined by undemocratic government regulation lacking even the pretense of due process; the ex-soldier abandoned by a dysfunctional Veterans Administration; the parent disgusted with public schools that impose ideologies she abhors on her children, while leaving them inadequately educated; and all those sincere believers in God or traditional values whom Obama dismissed as clinging desperately to outmoded pieties, as the arc of history, which the elite professor-president claimed to understand and direct according to his politically correct enlightenment, swirled them down the drain.
Honestly, it seems to me that it’s been brewing my entire adult life.
..of public employees: A quick cheat sheet.
What I found amusing about the tweets from Badlands National Park yesterday (which were cheered by the supposed fans of “science”) were how either they weren’t “scientific facts” (no, it is an opinion, not a fact, that last year was the “hottest on record”) or trivial and irrelevant chemistry (“A gallon of gasoline puts X pounds of carbon into the atmosphere when burned). But I was also amused at the concern that the employees who had done so had probably been fired.
One of the many reasons federal employee unions are terrible. It's almost impossible to discipline people. https://t.co/quxjqIG9t6
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) January 24, 2017
@michelelfrost A high-level friend of mine tells stories about how he couldn't get rid of bad secretaries, except to promote them.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) January 24, 2017
Badlands National Park, fully sentient now, lumbers towards Washington, DC to exact its revenge. pic.twitter.com/ZLoL6ajq6t
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) January 24, 2017
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the story for those who don’t know what I’m talking about.