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View 708 Friday, January 13, 2012

FRIDAY THE 13^th FALLS ON FRIDAY THIS MONTH

Hot Fudge Sundae falls on Tuesdae

You may rest easy. The government has borrowed money from China, handing the debt to your grandchildren, in order to keep you from being radioactive, and it worked. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found that a particular brand of Bed, Bath and Beyond tissue holder is contaminated with Cobalt 60. If you put it on a shelf in your bathroom and spend half an hour a day in there near it, you might get a whole body equivalent of a chest x-ray – perhaps two – over the year.

Of course if you move to Denver, or take a couple of transcontinental flights a year you’ll get the same effect, and that’s not counting the radiation the TSA will subject you to before you begin your flight. I don’t know what this protection by the NRC cost but I suppose it is more valuable than bunny inspectors. But should we be borrowing money to do it?

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/radioactive-tissue-box-holders-yanked-bed-bath-shelves-article-1.1005746

http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/story/2012-01-13/Radioactive-tissue-holders-pulled-from-stores/52528908/1

http://enenews.com/no-imminent-public-threat-bed-bath-beyond-pulls-radioactive-items-from-stores-cobalt-60-detected-in-tissue-holder

I am told those Marines had bacon for breakfast that day. What will the Secretary of State say to that? But Taliban beware. The US often serves bacon to the troops.

Meanwhile our allies in Afghanistan have allowed a 13 year old girl to leave jail where she was being held for adultery, but only on condition that she marry the uncle who raped her.

Dr, Jim Busby and I had a discussion of reusable spacecraft at LASFS last night. Most of it rambled through history, which is probably my fault, but we did look a bit at what Space X is trying to do. There are a number of paths to reusable space ships, You can find a discussion of that in my SSX Concept papers written, alas, a very long time ago. www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/SSX.html

I never really thought of it before, but the irony of what happened to SSX came to me during the discussion. The Council I chaired submitted space policy papers to President Reagan. The most recommendation made in Fall 1980 as a Transition Team paper talked about strategic missile defense, which Reagan adopted, and when he came out with his Strategic Defense Initiative it was instantly labeled Star Wars by Ted Kennedy and many Democrats. SDI turned out to be a significant factor in the economic war with the Soviet Union, and is generally credited with a major role in Soviet Collapse and the end of the Cold War.

Alas, the major funding for SSX came from SDI, and with the end of the USSR the major driver for reusable spacecraft was ended. Shuttle was designed to be reusable but performance requirements forced NASA to run the Shuttle Main Engines at 110% of their rated capacity. At 95% performance the engines were reusable – just fill the tank and fly again, next day – but at 110% they became rebuildable. They had to be taken apart and refurbished because of the strain on parts such as the impellors. Thus we had no reusable ships to fly a hundred missions a year. We did well to fly three.

So the success of the SDI policy recommended by the Council that also recommended SSX (scale model was DC/X) was instrumental in winning the Cold War and ending one of the major drivers for X programs to develop reusable spacecraft. And so it goes…

It’s lunch time.

We are not alone.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1201/11exoplanets/

But will we find them?

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1201/12jwst/

And should we be borrowing money from China to do it with? I am of the opinion that good technology research always pays off, but some payoffs are much better than others, and much more likely. It’s a matter of allocation of scarce resources. I’d rather build telescopes than pay people to watch stage magicians to be sure their rabbits are licensed, but how urgent is the telescope?

View 708 Thursday, January 12, 2012

I have a lunch appointment regarding a speaking engagement, and I am still going through Lucifer’s Hammer to check the formatting of a new release of the book.

I put up some mail last night, and found I had to do several adjustments this morning. Bad typoes, and I had posted the wrong letter on phonics; I have a new one up that was what I had intended, It’s pretty funny, and there’s an actual lesson in it as well. If you haven’t seen that mail yet it’s fine; if you have and any part puzzled you, it was probably one of the errors I fixed. Apologies. It’s pretty good mail, and the fault was all mine, and it’s fixed now anyway.

Rudy Giuliani has said that Newt Gingrich sounds more like Saul Alinski than Ronald Reagan in his attacks on Romney. I don’t know that I would go that far, but I know that the Reagan I knew wouldn’t have been running those ads.

I note that some Rush Limbaugh callers are saying that Newt has lost their vote due to these attack ads. They seem quite sincere.

I must confess that I am confused to hear Romney being accused of being a capitalist. Yes, I understand, conservative does not mean unrestricted laissez faire capitalism; that left to itself without regulations the maker will sell anything including human flesh (both as slaves and meat); but that is not what happens in America, and has not. I know that Newt has read  Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, but I do wonder if it is not time for him to read it again.

I note that Tony Blankley, Newt’s long time friend and advisor, died recently. Tony was dedicated and devoted, and served Newt well during his days as Minority Whip. He will very much be missed. RIP. http://townhall.com/columnists/tonyblankley/

Back to work. I am also working on Chaos Manor Review and the year end/beginning column. I have neglected all that but I’m back on it. Now off to work.

View 708 Wednesday, January 11, 2012

I am reading Lucifer’s Hammer over for proper formatting to get up a better edition of it for Kindle and other devices. That is eating my time, and I had to get a haircut and do some other errands today. It was cold out this morning making our morning walk a bit more strenuous (although Sable finds that delightful; colder the better for her. She acts like a puppy.)

The problem with the formatting is that Lucifer’s Hammer is a multi-viewpoint novel, and there must be a distinct way to show the reader that the viewpoint has changed, else the reader will be confused and have to think about the book as a book rather than as a story the reader is immersed in. That is Not Good. We did that with ornaments, spacing, and other such. On some Kindle apps on some devices such as my PC, a lot of the extra line spaces vanish, so you have a page that seems to be taking place in Burbank and suddenly you are in the next paragraph on Mount Prophet Elias on Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea. That makes you stop reading to figure out what is going on, and I don’t want you to do that.

We’re fixing these things.

The news tonight is going to be about a bunch of Marine urinating on dead Taliban. I don’t have time to do a long essay on this, but some things are pretty clear. First, they allowed a comrade to tape this, and he put it up on a social medium, and it got loose. Is anyone here astonished? Which says several things about these particular Marines.

First, they won their battle. It’s them that’s doing the urinating, not being urinated on. Urinating on the enemy is a practice of war from at least 3,000 years ago, and probably a lot longer. It’s better to be the guy letting fly than the recipient. When you send young men into combat and they win this is what happens.

Second, none of these guys is ready for promotion to any kind of command NCO level. They may be good as combat leaders and may not – they did win this fight, after all – but they don’t think through enough. This hands the Taliban a bit of a propaganda device, but then we have plenty of tapes the Taliban made about themselves.

Third, this is a Marine matter, and if it were left to me I’d leave it to the Company Commander. That’s what company grade officers are for. There will be howls from the media, of course. It’s a free country. Of course it’s free because we have troopers like these.

And fourth, if nobody else wants them, in the extremely unlikely event that they post me to a combat command over there, I’ll take them. They look like good troops to me.

View 708 Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Still working on other stuff.

The New Hampshire election had no real surprises, although Romney did manage to get well above the 30% limit that has plagued him. More on this another time.

CES is going on and there is a spate of material on that, so you have got plenty to read about. And thanks for all the mail about TWIT. <http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-tech/335>

I’ll try to do a real essay tomorrow.

I’ve been proof reading a new eBook version of Lucifer’s Hammer, and thus have had to read it over again. It’s still one heck of a book. Considering that it was written during the Cold War and still has the USSR in it, the story still holds up very well indeed. I keep getting caught up in the story. It read well on a Kindle. http://www.amazon.com/Lucifers-Hammer-ebook/dp/B004478DOU