Potpourri CLIII

Diving in...

I will do a more detailed analysis of these two articles at some point, but it is interesting to contrast the views of Kim Stanley Robinson, who believes that scientists should assert themselves as some sort of scientific leftist elite while Anthony Gottlieb believes that scientists need to be more humble about forcing their conclusions on people.

From Hu, the latest proposed outrage from the airline industry: even less leg room.

The only thing more arrogant than asserting that human beings alone are capable of "destroying the planet" might be human beings asserting that we can fix the planet. Makes for interesting science fiction, but we're a ways off at this point from doing either.

Here's an editorial from The Space Review on the Space Shuttle's imminent demise and the programmatic mistakes made along the way.

Feeling snarky? Sarcastic? Pessimistic about the state of humanity or the world in general? This site might be for you.

From Twila: an editorial on bringing back the manned space program. Caveat visor: I haven't read this one yet.

This amuses me greatly: a terrorist made the mistake of asking one of his captives to help him set up his smart phone. This is a truly Ayn Randian moment--or at least a teachable moment, to use the current political lexicon. The assumption on the part of the terrorist is that the civilized person will comply with his wish to keep the machinery of civilization working at the point of a gun. This stuff needs to stop.

Melissa forwarded me this site of videos about the Periodic Table of the Elements after I explained that I was learning about them via another class-on-CD from The Teaching Company, "The Joy of Science." You know: because I don't have anything else to dod with my free time.

From the MSN Lifestyle section, a little helpful primer for women on rejecting men who ask them out.

I was feeling pretty good about my salami and provolone sandwich I was eating the other day, then I ran across this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1310805/TV-chef-Martin-Blunos-creates-cheese-sandwich-costs-incredible-110.html

From Lin:

• An editorial pointing out that private property rights in the U.S. are deteriorating. How badly? Well, when China and Ghana(?) are ahead of us on that score, you've got to wonder.
• An editorial on the fact that the U.S. is now getting cozier with Vietnam, a place where we once had quite a nasty war. This isn't terribly surprising. I see it as part of an ongoing effort to surround China with U.S.-friendly nations on the Asian mainland: Vietnam, Thailand, India, and some of the Central Asian republics. The Spanish Hapsburgs tried to rein in France in the 16th-18th centuries in a similar fashion, much as we tried to hem in Germany after World Wars I and II and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and Iran today. The enemy of my enemy is my friend...at least for the moment. Or so the thinking goes. This is how we ended up giving arms to Saddam Hussein, then turning on him when he started messing with our interests in Saudi Arabia. Lin quoted Lord Palmerston aptly on this: "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests."

I have more, but that will do for now. I simply must get caught up on my sleep at some point.

Potpourri CLII

Let's get to it, shall we? I've got a lot of junk clogging up the arteries of my inbox.

This one came to me via Lin and Father Dan. Food for thought as we continue to debate the Ground Zero Mosque.

From Greg: It's a little old (2008 or so), but this story purports to cover Spain's efforts to give apes and similar non-human hominids "human rights." Assuming the story is true (and one wonders about anything one sees on the internet these days), I think it's a bit of a legalistic stretch regardless. Can laws be made to protect animals or punish crimes against animals more severely? No doubt a convincing case can be made. However, granting animals the same "rights" as humans presumes the capacity of said animals to accept, appreciate, and act upon such rights. Can animals enter into legally binding contracts, for instance? Would they know how to sue if that contract was violated? Can animals be held liable for crimes if they commit them? Oh, they're not liable? Why is that? Are we going to give them special status without any strings attached? Rights also have responsibilities attached to them. Or don't we believe that anymore?

Also from Greg: deep-fried beer. Really.

A few items I found while surfing:

• Role models for boys down to “superheroes and slackers.”
• The art and science of whiskey making.

Karen in Bay Hill sent me an interesting bit of political thought. I've deleted the extra rambling around it so that you can focus on the heart of the matter:

This law (or amendment) makes eminent sense to me. Which means that someone with a J.D. will probably tell me why such a law would be a BAD idea and shouldn't even be considered. I read somewhere awhile back that 90% of the Politburo of the People's Republic of China has an education in science or engineering, vs. the U.S. Congress, where I'm pretty certain that a large chunk of them have degrees in law (actually, it's 179 members of the House and 57 senators). Food for thought.

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution:

"Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States .."

What's the biggest threat to our national defenses? Al-Qaeda? North Korea? China? Nope. Guess again.

This is now old news, and the perpetrator has since been moved on to his eternal fate, but here are the demands of the man who held employees at Discovery Communications hostage last week. As with the equal-rights-for-apes story, this begs a serious question: are some of these folks really serious about elevating respect for the Earth and other living creatures in it, or is their real purpose to denigrate the value of human beings--and if so, to what end? If you downgrade the value of human beings individually or collectively, who stands to gain from that stance? My guess: anyone who wants to reduce the freedoms of said human beings in the name of "the planet" or some other equally general notion. It's a shame, really. Some of my favorite people are human beings.

From Lin:

• What now passes for "scandal" if you're a conservative. Wow. Some reporters need to get a life.
• A Charles Krauthammer editorial on governing liberalism and its reactions to (or against) the people it means to rule. One of the most difficult things about interacting on the internet is the knee-jerk reactions of some folks if you politely state that you are for one position or against another. The assumption is not that you disagree and therefore have a worthy point of view but that you are OBVIOUSLY evil, corrupt, stupid, bigoted, etc. I find this method of attack (which seeks to humble, humiliate, or beat back, not argument, which would seek to convince) offensive. As I've said before, disagreeing with the President does not automatically make you a racist. If liberals want to win more of the electorate's hearts and minds, they might stop assuming or baldly stating that this is so.
• A TED video on the cultural roots and effects of choice. Caveat visor: I haven't watched this yet.

From Martin:

• A "manly" reading list. Great. More stuff for my Amazon wish list. On the plus side, I have at least read some of these already...oh, well. I've got another 40 years or so. Certainly the time will come up, right?
• An argument against the X-20 spaceplane.

From Gwen: a Star Wars shower curtain.

From Twila: a discussion of the effects of NASA stimulus spending.

Speaking of the stimulus, government spending on such things has now exceeded the seven years of the Iraq War, which certain friends of mine assured me would destroy or bankrupt the country.

Some amateur rocketeers in Denmark want to launch a human being into space on their rocket. Um, eek?

This interested me: how faculty authors can implement an open access policy (to reading their papers) at their institutions.
From D2: another TED talk on civilizational ethics.
 
From Father Dan: the world's top 50 resorts.
 
Okay, that'll do for now. Have a good, short, week.

Potpourri CL

I haven't done one of these in awhile, but I'll keep the links to a minimum, for your sanity's sake, and mine.

Science fiction writer Charles Stross has a provocative essay on why space exploration is inherently incompatible with the libertarianism that seems to pervade so much of the pro-space community.  It's not that I disagree with most of Stross's individual points, but I think he's missing a crucial aspect of the appeal of space exploration, even among non-libertarian white males, which is simply the romantic notion many human beings have of going "where no one has gone before," which includes more than a little "frontier narrative."

I found an intriguing paper via Facebook that links creativity to law-breaking. I have a very long response to this paper in the works, but I'm a little on the sleepy side to finish it this evening. The truth is out there.

From Lin: Interesting conflict of values in the whole "green power" debate: if those giant windmills kill hundreds or thousands of bats, birds, etc., which faction of the environmental movement wins that debate?

From Karen: a personal website for one of folks who designs cool things for Hollywood.

From Martin: a wiki for those interested in commercial space.

Oh, here's a shock (sarcasm font ON): Huntsville has been rated among the top 10 geekiest cities in America.

From Antoinette: celebrity commentaries on the stupid stuff you see on TV.

From OpenCulture:

• An interview with Jorge Luis Borges recorded before the eminent SF writer died.
• Harvard University has released an open-source program to help scholars create project-related web sites in a hurry.

From Jerry Pournelle: some remarks on the Tea Party movement and its effect on the American political scene, as well as other matters.

From Jim P.: The top ten human-hating ecologists.

From Mom: a time-lapse video showing the "progress" of unemployment across the country. Note the "bright" spots in the underpopulated Great Plains and just outside Washington, DC. If those are the choices...think I'll tough it out here in Huntsville. The taxes are lower and the weather's warmer.

I'm probably going to lose my battle against my buying urges on this one: a Star Wars sun shade for the dashboard.

From Janel (a.k.a. FemiFist): some suggested links if you need to do web tracking of your marketing efforts.

And I think that'll about do it. Have a good week, everyone. Keep the chaos down to a minimum on your end, and I'll try to do the same on mine, 'kay?

Stuff from TED

A talk about finding meaning and purpose in life by Viktor Frankl.

Dan Meyer on giving math class a makeover. His blog can be found here.

Esther Duflo (who's that?) on social experiments to fight poverty.

Depressing, but timely: Jeremy Jackson on how we wrecked the ocean.

Bjarke Ingels on architecture.

TED is a worthwhile site. Give it a try!

Potpourri XLV

Speculation continues on the if-and-when of nominating Charles Bolden as the next NASA Administrator.

There might be hope for reporters in the mainstream media (that's a conservative term for the "Big Three" networks plus the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other related liberal-leaning media outlets). If they can't stay employed or hawk their wares in paper-based products, they can always get a job being the official reporters for the Obama White House. They're already in the tank for/with him anyway. Of course, if the newspaper business continues to head down the drain, Obama might bail them out, in which case they'll be nationalized regardless.

Scott had some more sites for buying gold:

• http://www.cmi-gold-silver.com/specials.aspx
• www.golddealer.com

Scott is also insisting that I go see a DC-3 and some other older planes at the Moontown Airport east of Huntsville tomorrow. I just might. It's been a draining week, and I could use the break.

Marshall Space Flight Center has centralized all of their social media sites on one page.

Congressman Parker Griffin is saying that Iran's latest missile test is proof that we need to maintain a missile defense capability. Well, duhhhhh.

A fellow writer and NSS Policy Committee person, Marianne Dyson, has a hopeful blog regarding Obama's space policy.

Want to live in an airplane? I must confess, I had some designs around those lines when I was in high school. Anyhow, there's a site for those of us who dare to dream.

Bjorn Lomborg writes about how some companies are using the "green" movement as a way to merely cash in. Again, duhhhhh.

Alka-Seltzer City, dude! A town in Ohio is about to have carbon dioxide introduced into the briny water below their fair city, turning that water essentially into seltzer water in an effort to sequester carbon. Certainly there are more effective, less ridiculous ways to do this...? Jerry Pournelle also offers a link to some individuals who are fighting the practice. My buddy Scott calls environmentalists "watermelons: green [environmentalists] on the outside, red [communist] on the inside." Gotta wonder sometimes, don't you?

Science fiction writers are continuing to help in the War on Terrorism. Someone's got to, right?

Humanity is Too Screwed Up to Inflict on the Rest of the Solar System

The first time I heard this argument, I was working at Disney, and I was utterly at a loss about how to respond. I'm still dumbfounded at the attitude, but then I'm also dumbfounded at people who think the United States was the worst nation in the history of the world, too. "For gosh sakes," I want to say, "If you hate life/America that much, leave it!"

More politely, I would say that I strongly disagree.

The source of this argument takes several forms:

• We've screwed up the Earth, so we'll only do the same to the Moon/Mars, etc. Have we polluted? Yes. But thanks in part to our own space program, the environmental movement got one of the best PR images ever: Earthrise over the limb of the Moon. Would the movement have gotten that big of a boost if Apollo 8 hadn't photographed that image? I leave that as an exercise for the reader. However, one can hardly argue with the political and environmental progress that the movement has had in the last 40 years. The Cuyahoga River no longer burns. You can fish in Lake Erie. I've even been told you can see Pittsburgh now and Los Angeles occasionally. Lead is gone from paint and gasoline. Cars are improving in efficiency and chemical emissions. We rail on about carbon dioxide as a pollutant, forgetting the sulfur dioxides and other nasty black stuff that used to come out of car tailpipes. We have safer nuclear reactors and smokestack scrubbers on coal-fired power plants. Are we perfect? Hardly. And China and India are not yet rich enough to afford the pollution-control technologies that we now take for granted and continue to improve. I cannot speak to the never-satisfied ethos of the environmental movement, but I cannot deny the improvements they've made in our world.
• Our culture is too screwed up to be allowed to expand. Take your perspective on this one--religious, intellectual, cultural, behavioral, social--and you can find plenty of reasons why particular activities we wouldn't want to see expand into space. But how much of that is the result of bad choices by individuals and how much of it is "the culture" as a whole? A culture is made up of individuals, with intelligences and abilities ranging up and down the Bell Curve. We have Stephen Hawking and Beverly Sills on one end, and the Octomom and Darwin Award winners on the other. Some of reader Allen's comments frankly disturbed me, but also made me think. Yes, there are people doing stupid things with their lives.
  
  When Columbus and Magellan sailed from Spain in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Roman Catholic Church was conducting the Inquisition while Isabella and Ferdinand were hounding Jews out of the country. Similar villainy could be found in Elizabethan England, which had its own festering religious quarrels but was also enjoying the plays of William Shakespeare. The difference between then and now is that there are more human beings in the world today and the tools of civilization, both benign and dangerous, are more widespread. So this means we need better education, better laws, better (idjitproof) technologies, or better people. I'd opt for the first three before screwing around with trying to make people "better." There are too many value judgments involved there.
• Capitalism will destroy other worlds like it's destroyed this one. I could say similar things about communism, and with greater cause. Consider Stalin's purges, Hitler's evil, or the bloodletting of China's Cultural Revolution or Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. All of these societies killed millions of their own people all in the name of some state-sanctioned idea of perfection. Anyone fighting those visions or even questioning them faced show trials, midnight knocks on the door, gulags, or much, much worse. And returning to the first point, environmental regulations and conditions are much worse in the former Soviet Union than the U.S. I'm sure someone will throw some other statistics at me showing all the evil capitalism has done. However, I would like to also offer, in comparison to the evil done by other contemporary social systems, what good capitalism has done. Through mass production and industrial technology, it has brought down the prices of thousands of goods that once belonged only to the very rich or royalty. It has brought about revolutions in communication, including this Internet that allows people to spread messages about the evils of capitalism to all corners of the world. It has brought human beings to the Moon, images of the far reaches of the universe to our TV screens, and economic and other aid to all corners of the planet within hours of nearly any disaster. One might rail against Enron or WorldCom or now AIG and the rest of the big banks, and perhaps with some justification. But it is capitalism that builds high-quality homes, cars, and cell phones, not governments. It will always be so, and if it is no longer so, well, expect poorer-quality products and rationing.
• Human beings have no business escaping to other planets when their primary duty is to make life better for their fellow men here on Earth. I caught a whiff of this sort of argument from some of my religious friends. Pro-space people are focusing too much on this life and other worlds, and not enough on the afterlife and redeeming themselves in this world. "Well, maybe, says I. But what about building asteroid defenses that protect life on Earth? If there's no life, there's no church to protect, right?"
  "If an asteroid strikes, that's God's will."
  "Yeah, but if we have the ability, we should build the defenses."
  "We could build the defenses, but whether they work or not is God's will."
  "But if we build the defenses, we're at least giving ourselves a fighting chance, right?"
  Get the feeling I've had this discussion before? Anyhow, I have yet to understand why some of my coreligionists have such a negative attitude toward science and technology, though I suspect it goes back to arguments having little to do with space itself. Still, it's an argument I've heard against building space hardware, and it disturbs me.
• Human beings were not meant to live on other worlds. This is a much harder argument to refute because we haven't done it yet...at least not long-term. But it's a simple fact: right now, Earth is the only place in the universe where Homo sapiens can live without need for artificial life support. Everywhere else, we face challenges related to atmosphere (or lack thereof), gravity, dust, and lifelessness. Barring some science fictional scenario where we find an Earthlike planet nearby and simultaneously develop "warp drive," we will only live on other worlds in this solar system, using the machines and life forms we bring with us. We might terraform Mars, cool down Venus, or build structures beneath the grey mountains of the Moon or the ice of Europa. In the meantime, we have those tuna cans and sausages that ensure structural stability and atmospheric integrity. To say we can't survive as unarmored, naked human beings is correct but also missing the point: we can do it, the question is, will we do it?