The New America Foundation has put together a cartoon guide to Federal Spectrum Policy. Quite apart from being a fan of cartoon guides to whatever, I’m a fan of rational technology policy, which the Federal policy towards spectrum allocation isn’t. I don’t know much about the New America Foundation other than what’s on their website, but the analysis of spectrum policy is basically right, if a little, um… cartoonish.
Hat tip: Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber
These guys are trying to stop a series of idiotic lawsuits which threaten to kill general aviation. Their opponents are the usual NIMBY morons who won’t get a link out of me because I refuse to move them up Google’s page ranking. Check out their quotes page for some astonishing statements by the NIMBYs. I’m sympathetic to concerns about noise, but there are ways to deal with it without stomping on other people’s liberties.
The post Rand links to below brings up some issues that have been floating around in the amateur rocketry community for some time. There are some people within the community who claim that there is no realistic problem, but they are simply wrong. If amateur rocket scientists are to have any relevance to opening the high frontiers they will develop weapons relevant technologies. The simple and obvious reason for this is that rockets are a transportation technology, and as such they can be used to transport harmful payloads just as aircraft, boats, and trucks can.
Dumbass siphons gas from camper, gets sewage instead. Hat tip: Dave Barry.
Title says is all. Check out Making Light for links to details and fixes. It’s a Doozy.
Edward Tufte has a famous essay on the Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, which should be required reading for anyone involved in communicating basically anything. I think Rand has already linked to this essay elsewhere, but I’ll link again just for emphasis. There’s an excellent, if a little technical, essay here which covers some similar issues in word processing (hat tip to an anonymous commenter on this post).
SubOrbital Day went off pretty smoothly today. We basically walked around in teams briefing Senate staffers on issues of importance to the emerging suborbital launch services industry (see below for our talking points, which pretty much cover everything we talked about). The message was well received for the most part.
We were a little disorganized due to the fact that the principal players are busy building hardware (woohoo!), but everything came together in the end. One kind of cool thing that happened while I was briefing Landon Fulmer, a legislative correspondent for Sam Brownback – the door to the conference room opened up and in walks General Pete Worden, who is working as a Congressional Fellow in Brownback’s office. While I was recovering from my surprise, Pat Bahn (who was my teammate) showed up from his previous appointment (we’d split up to make up some lost time). Fortunately Worden and Pat know each other, as evidenced by the fact that Worden offered to deliver Pat’s canned SubOrbital background briefing. He did an excellent job of it, too. It’s nice to have people who really get it in positions of influence.
I had a similar surge of hope when Steve Parker, a Legislative Fellow in Bill Nelson’s office, started asking about the Black Armadillo. Very encouraging, especially considering we were meeting in a room covered with Space Shuttle pictures – I thought making the SubOrbital pitch would be like trying to sell Linux to Bill Gates. A pleasant surprise indeed.
It was nice to catch up with the SubOrbital Institute usual suspects, though Neil Milburne of Armadillo wasn’t there, most likely since they are building and testing hardware at a furious rate. There’s going to be some interesting news in the coming months, not just related to the X Prize. Unfortunately I can’t divulge everything, but stay tuned.
Today is SubOrbital Day, a lobbying event for the SubOrbital Institute. I’ve cut ‘n’ pasted the talking points for the day below the fold. I’ll post more later, possibly tomorrow if the evening wrapup is especially festive. We’ll be walking around Capitol Hill briefing Senate staffers on the issues below, trying to encourage them to take action that will make it easier for you and me to get into space.
Anyone who is interested in technology policy and security ought to subscribe to Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram. It’s an excellent monthly newsletter written by one of the foremost experts in computer security, and it’s free. RTWT, as they say. One thing that stood out in this latest edition is the Brief Safe (fair warning – it’s kind of gross).
I’ll probably post more on some of the items in the latest Crypto-Gram later in the week. Right now I have to get my wife safely off to Wood’s Hole.
My wife’s boss (a biologist) got a book in her inbox a couple of days ago put out by the North Dakota Bible Society – the grandiosely titled Evolution Cruncher. Apparently someone mailed these to all the biology faculty at the university of Maryland. I had a brief look through last night. I’ve been exposed to creationist literature before, so I sort of knew what to expect. I was nonetheless surprised by how blatantly dishonest this book is. I guess it’s been a while since I read anything by young earth creationists, so my memory had faded somewhat. Take a look at the site. It’s scary that these guys are a significant political constituency in some parts of the country.
I should clarify that I’m not hostile to all creationists – there are sincere and honest people who are creationists. I am, however, extremely hostile to blatant manipulative liars, which the North Dakota Bible Society apparently are.