This is cool. One of the ships has been found. I write about this in the book.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Orbit And Suborbit
It’s not the height, it’s the velocity.
It’s also worth noting that a suborbit can be accurately defined as an orbit that intersects the earth or its atmosphere. So even if you have orbital speed, if there’s not a sufficient horizontal component to it, you’ll still end up back on the earth before you go around.
Anyone Who Wants To Suppress Personal Firearms
P. J. O’Rourke At XCOR
Click on it. You know you want to.
And yes, before anyone complains, there are many inaccuracies. It’s entertaining nonetheless.
Outer Space Is Trying To Kill You
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but this looks like an interesting master’s thesis.
Stick Shifts
If and when we ever sell our (silver) 2000 BMW, I suspect we’ll be happy that it’s got a clutch in it.
Which is another peeve. Almost every car now (including our new RAV-4) comes with a “manual” option for the transmission, but there’s no shift pattern. It’s like a motorcycle — you have to go through the gears sequentially. And the lack of clutch really defeats most of the purpose.
One other related gripe:
Since dealers are ninety-nine percent of the customer base at an auction, dealer preferences dictate what sells for good money. Fast-turning automobiles in high demand sell for good money, period point blank. No dealer wants to take a risk on an odd color or an unusual equipment group (think: Sebring convertibles with the expensive folding hardtop, stripped-out Explorer XL trims from the Nineties, loaded short-wheelbase S-Classes) or manual transmissions. They’d rather buy what sells easily and go home. Therefore, auction prices reflect dealer desires, not customer desires.
This disconnect between dealer and customer desires punishes the customer at every turn. It’s why Honda and Acura make you take a non-color with a stick-shift Accord or TSX: the dealers don’t want to stock a brown Accord V6 six-speed even if there’s a guy (YO!) willing to buy it. It’s why you see interesting combinations of colors and options in the order brochure but never at the dealers. It’s why the flotilla of individual options that marked the Detroit era of new cars has become a maze of packages and mandatory tie-ins, even when the car in question is manufactured in the same state as the selling dealers.
The dealers want the stuff that turns quickly. That means silver Camrys and red Ferraris and automatic convertible Corvettes and all-wheel-drive S-Classes. Your desires have nothing to do with it. They aren’t listening to you. They don’t care. While you’re busy displaying your autism spectrum disorder by lecturing the salesman about the actual cam lobe profile on a car you’re thinking about buying two jobs from now and for which you expect to pay invoice minus holdback, three families in used SUVs have come in and bought new SUVs and the store has grossed them front, back, used, and F&I. You mean nothing to a dealer. Period.
It drives me nuts that I can’t get a clutch in a car with horsepower, at least with the Japanese. For example, Honda won’t give you a manual transmission unless it’s mated to a four cylinder engine. If you want it on the six you’re out of luck. The only reason I can think of for them to do this is that they don’t want to have to have a beefy enough gearbox to handle the extra power, but I’m not sure that’s the reason.
Another Close Approach
An asteroid will pass us on Sunday at about a tenth of the distance to the moon.
There are a lot of natural disasters we won’t be able to prevent (e.g., supervolcano explosions, or a nearby gamma-ray burst). But this is something that we could, if we were willing to devote more resources to it. And it wouldn’t take a lot more. In fact, it could be done for a lot less than we’re wasting on SLS/Orion.
The Missing Libyan Aircraft
Jon Ostrower and Gavin Werbeloff have done us the service of putting together a status spreadsheet.
[Thursday-morning update]
Are we really in danger? Probably not.
[Bumped]
Echopraxia
Ferociously intellectual pulp fiction.
Sounds like fun. I may check it out.
Artificial Intelligence
Will it literally kill us with kindness? Paging @elonmusk.