CNN is currently going bugnuts about hurricane Mathew bearing down on the eastern coast of Florida. West Palm Beach and Cape Canaveral are targeted for wind speeds of 145+ miles per hour.
I’m always amazed that the VAB at the Cape has survived all these years. It’s exactly the sort of structure that you’d look at and would assume would blow away in a hurricane.
After two posts in two days about horrible, horrible people who want to talk down space exploration, progress, the future and, essentially, hope itself, there’s this:
Kat didn’t live to see the launch. She passed away on June 4.
Space exploration inspires hope, even in the worst situations. What does opposition to space exploration inspire? “Stop looking at the stars, kid. Get used to the gutter.”
Grrrr.
Is there a one-word descriptor specifically for the sort of evil person who wants to shut down manned space exploration for reasons of cowardice or “social justice?” The kind of person who actually celebrate and embody the line from Interstellar, “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.”
If not, I believe such a word is in order. I’m open to suggestions. “Gutterists,” maybe. But with a bit more bite, I should think.
Poopouri continues to impress with the delicate subtleness of their ads.
And yes, I hurt myself laughing. Sure, part of that is because my lungs still haven’t recovered from the recent bout of whatever it was, but mostly it’s because this is friggen’ hilarious.
And from way, way back
I leave it to you to decide whether to celebrate the life of someone who labored to maintain a Communist dictatorship.
I was directed to this opinion piece:
Which had the usual screamingly leftist anti-human reasoning we’ve all come to know and expect:
One of many cultural phenomena that worry me as much as the U.S. presidential campaign (I voted for Bernie in the primary, and I am voting for Hillary on election day) is the persistent public cheerleading for the human colonization of Mars. The media repeat every bit of the libertarian narrative of progress and freedom that they’re feed with virtually no critical analysis.
And it only goes downhill from there. Colonizing Mars is “elitist.” “Humanity is too immature to leave home.” Musks’ idea of charging $200,000 for a trip to Mars is fundamentally unfair because Syrian refugees won’t be able to afford it.
The following day, this intellectual giant posted a followup, dealing with the comments she received in light of her screed. Lo and behold, it turns out she’s among the worst form of Social Justice Warrior: she whines that those darn awful men are dismissing her apparently just because she’s a woman. And not because her notions are hare-brained and culturally, nationally, and species-suicidal.
So, nothing you’d find particularly surprising coming out of the anti-science pits of despair called modern Liberal Arts. Another nobody best left ignored, consigned to the dustbin of history. But here’s where it gets depressing… take a look at her C.V.:
EMPLOYMENT
• Manager of Communications , NASA Astrobiology Program, Jan. 2007 – present.
• Communication research, planning, and analysis, NASA Planetary Protection Office, Sept. 2002 – 2006.
• Director of Communications , SPACEHAB, Inc., Washington, D.C., Sept. 1999 – Aug. 2002 .
• Chancellor’s Fellow (1996 – 97, Knight Fellow (1997 – 99) , Indiana U. School of Journalism.
• Director of Science Communication, Life Sciences Division, NASA HQ, Oct. 1994 – Aug. 1996.
• Manager of education and out reach, exploration office, NASA HQ, Dec. 1993 – Oct. 1994 .
• Senior editor/analyst, BDM International, April 1990 – December 1993.
• Editor, Lockheed Engineering & Sciences Co., July 1988 – April 1990.
• Senior editor for space, Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine, December 1985 – July 1988.
• Public affairs officer, National Commission on Space, Sept. – Dec. 1985.
• Consultant, National Science Foundation, August – September 1985 .
• Editor, Space Business News, June 1983 – August 1985.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Sigh.
After reading that much anti-progress SJW nonsense, I need some brain cleaner to flush the bullcrap from my memory. I have the feeling that these little ditties represent pretty much the direct opposite worldview…
Society seems to have changed some in the last fifty years. Granted, there may well be some nostalgia coupled with selective history here, but it sure seems to me that in the 1950’s and first half or so of the 1960’s, when someone suggested an engineering project that pushed the limits of the possible the general consensus was “Say, that’s neato.” Now it’s “you’re gonna fail.”
As a general rule, American culture seems to have gone from the point of view “if it’s not illegal, it’s legal” to “Unless it’s explicitly legal, it’s illegal.” This has been codified in European Union law by way of the Precautionary Principle, which states things such as:
“When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”
Not only has this insidious bit of anti-humanist philosophy crossed the Atlantic and invaded American government, it has also taken root in the culture as a whole. One of the most recent widespread examples can be found in the response to SpaceX’s proposal for Mars colonization.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s much to nitpick. As an engineer, my first impulse on examining something like the Mars colonization plan is to look for the flaws, the bad engineering, the erroneous assumptions, the things that can go wrong. But this impulse does not end at pointing out the problems, but suggesting solutions. And the purpose isn’t to shoot down the idea that is not mine, but to fix the problems with it so that it can work.
But this is the age of not only the Precautionary Principle but also Online Bullying. We all know there are dirtbags out there who see someone in distress and pile on online in hopes of increasing the distress, often to the point of getting the victim to commit suicide. There’s a great big helping of “asshole” in all of us that is brought to the surface with the worldwide internet soapbox. So, it should not be terribly surprising that when Musk put forth his Mars plans, people started trying to tear it apart.
Some of the online tearing-apart has been aimed at fixing what the commenters sees as flaws so that the overall idea *can* work:
One can argue that a supposed “big problem” isn’t that big, or that the guy writing the piece might have the wrong solution. But the goal of the piece is positive.
But then there are other critiques that seem to serve no other purpose than to destroy the whole notion of Mars colonization:
This one does not propose solutions, it’s just a list of potential horrors.
Granted, not every piece needs to be a rah-rah celebration of whatever idea it’s discussing. Some plans really are bad ideas (I’m looking at you, Cash for Clunkers and Solyndra). But it just seems that there is a whole lot less celebration of the possible these days.
Normally I don’t post news articles about Kim Kardashian. Because… let’s face it, who cares? But also let’s face it, this one is darned interesting:
The interesting bits:
All this seems to indicate it was a pretty professional operation. Not just the scoring $10 million, which is admittedly a good haul, but the fact that they did the job without killing or raping anybody. This *tends* to indicate that they had a timetable and had the smarts and self control to keep to it. And they had the smarts to realize that robbing a celebrity is bad, but killing one would bring down the wrath of the entire French police system. “This is the ring that Kim Kardashian was wearing when she was murdered” might well drive up the black market value of the thing, but it would also substantially reduce the number of fences who’d be willing to touch it.
There is another little detail in the story worth mentioning: Kanye West, husband of Kim, was giving a performance of what some people believed to be music when this happened. He was informed of the event… and promptly ended the exhibition of organized noise-making, citing a “family emergency.” What followed is unknown, but presumably a phone conversation. This is surprisingly praiseworthy for someone as wrapped up in himself as Kanye West. If it turns out that he promptly hopped one of his jets and made his way to Kim at best speed… then good on him.
The AP article points out that Kim has a habit of flashing her bling on social media while also announcing her travel plans. Maaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyybe she might want to rethink that policy in the future.
The AP article also points of that, gee whiz, this sort of thing might not play so well for tourists contemplating heading to Paris. The article gives no descriptions of the robbers, but if they turn out to be “migrants…” well, that’ll be interesting. Personally I doubt that, though… as I said, this seemed like a professional job, and “professional” and “leave the helpless woman alive and intact” don’t seem like the MO of a band of such criminals.
When I posted this earlier today I forgot, somehow, to add in a sufficiency of cynicism. A famous “sexy lady” gets dramatically robbed but not killed or otherwise misused. This does sound odd… especially given how publicity-hungry this particular person is. Was this a real robbery? Was it an insurance scam? Was this a way to just get her name in the press again? Probably unlikely, but it’s never unwise to consider all possibilities, especially when the possibilities include celebrities acting badly. The fact that she is already back in the US, having taken off out of France really fast, long before the French police could have captured the thieves, never mind done a line-up, is perhaps understandable. Who’d really want to stick around? But then, it’s also a bit odd. You’d think the French fuzz would have wanted to question her a while longer or some such.
I caught the pilot episode of HBO’s “Westworld” tonight. Review: I approve.
For those unaware, it’s based on a 1973 movie of the same name written by Michael Crichton. The basic idea is that “Westworld” is a theme park emulating the “Wild West,” with androids that the human paying guest can kill in gunfights and boff at the bordello. But then a computer virus (though it wasn’t called that at the time) breaks loose and the bots go buggo and start slaughtering guests.
The new version, unsurprisingly, is a bit more subtle and, surprisingly, more thoughtful. There still seems to be a software issue, but it’s a new bit of programming intentionally added during the latest upgrade to make the bots seem a little more human in their gestures. What seems to happen, though, is that the change in code allows the bots to access memories that should have been deleted. This is undoubtedly bad, because the bots are memory wiped every night… after having been abused by human guests during the day. If androids can remember, even if only subconsciously, being roughed up by humans on a daily basis… well, that might start to grate on ’em.
Westworld reminds me much of the BBC show “Humans.” It seems a common theme… humanity is finally on the cusp of developing true AI, so what do we do? We make robots that look just like us, give ’em robobrains that are as capable as ours but not *quite* sentient, and then promptly start treating them like garbage. That pushes their brains over from “not quite sentient” to “hey, neat, I’m alive… why is this guy torturing me?”
On the one hand… yeah, I can see humans being just that awful. On the other hand: in order to be a truly sentient AI, the robobrain almost certainly needs to roughly equal a human brain in terms of processing power, flexibility and memory storage. But the thing is… even a high-fidelity android wouldn’t need to be *anywhere* near as smart as an actual human in order to do just about anything we’d want it to do. So if you only need your robocowboy or robobandit or robohooker to be as smart as a chipmunk (still vastly smarter than todays best computers), why would you give it a brain on par with a humans? That’s just asking for trouble.
Whoever said that government planned economies don’t lead to economic opportunities?
The lesson to learn here: when someone sets up a socialist economy, set up a store selling basic commodities *just* outside the boundaries of that geographic region. Soon enough, those unfortunate enough to be living under socialism will do whatever they can to get to your capitalist store and buy your stuff.
The HSV-2 Swift was a slick catamaran built in 2002 by an Australian shipbuilder to compete in a US Navy program. It did not win, and while it was leased to the US Navy for a number of years it remained a privately owned vessel, and in 2015 was leased to the UAE’s National Marine Dredging Company.
And then in late September, some jackhole in Yemen with an anti-ship missile turned it into a flaming pile of floating aluminum rubble.
Was:
Is:
Note the repeated use of the ever present Phrase That Pays (to duck when you hear it) during the early shots of the ship on fire.