All posts by Andrew Case

Political Commentary

Penal code reform

There’s an important story that’s not getting enough press, so I figured I’d blog it to try to raise the profile a bit. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy just accepted a report from the ABA on the dysfunction in the US penal system. The upshot is that we are pissing away huge amounts of taxpayer money incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders thanks to mandatory minimum sentences created by politicians trying to seem tough on crime. The same political dynamics lead to the idiocy of alcohol prohibition. The ABA commission website has the text of the report, summaries, and some other useful material on the subject.

The system is deeply flawed, even if you think drug laws are a good idea. It makes no sense whatsoever to sentence a street level dealer to twice the amount of time given to someone who commits assault, but that’s the way things are right now. We desperately need reform of the whole penal system – perhaps this report can begin the process.

Space

A Pleasant Evening

I just got back from a pleasant evening hanging out with some of the local space geeks (Clark Lindsey, Jeff Foust, Phil Smith, and Pat Bahn). The main topic of conversation was obviously SpaceShipOne and the ramifications of the flight. Two noteworthy things came up. First of all, Pat confirms that the giggle factor is pretty much dead as far as investors are concerned. He can’t go into details for obvious reasons, but he speaks from direct experience. Everyone suspected this would happen, but it’s nice to have real data. The second point that came up which I thought I’d mention is this: In the SS1 development program so far there have been four incidents in which the pilot saved the plane. The landing problem on the December 17th test, the uncommanded nose rise on the August 27th test, the computer failure on the May 13th shot, and the roll problem on the most recent flight. In an unmanned system each one of those would most likely have lead to loss of vehicle. The lesson is clear – pilots are good. Again, no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to alt-space, but it’s nice to have further confirmation.

Political Commentary

Education Reform

Via a comment on this post, I came across an interesting blog that I hadn’t seen before. The topic is k-12 education reform, something close to my heart since both my parents were high school teachers, my Mom for her whole career, and my Dad while he was in the Peace Corps[*].

I came out of an education system with high stakes testing, so I’m fairly comfortable with it. It seems to me that some sort of testing is necessary in order to measure teaching effectiveness. The stakes for the student should not be all-or-nothing, though. The ideal is testing that measures school performance, but which constitutes only a part of the student’s grade. The teacher and school should be assessed on aggregate test scores across all students, presumably with some cross comparison with other schools in similar circumstances (since it doesn’t make sense to compare inner city schools to suburban magnet schools, for example). The process of actually measuring school performance isn’t simple, but it is necessary to have some sort of feedback mechanism that focuses teacher and administrator attention on a meaningful performance metric.

Testing is a bit of a fad these days, which is a mixed blessing. At least some testing schemes are stupid and destructive (all or nothing tests that track students into the smart kids track or the regular track, for example). The diversity of schemes being tried suggests that at least some will work, and hopefully the good ones will be adopted by other states and school districts. In the meantime some of the kids being experimented on will suffer needlessly thanks to political stupidity, but the alternative is kids suffering due to political neglect, so it’s not obviously a losing proposition.

Anyway, go dig around the site a bit. Even if you don’t have kids, you are directly affected by this.

[*] incidentally, IMO the Peace Corps is probably the best investment in foreign relations that the US has ever made. High level bladiblahblah doesn’t last longer than the leadership of the foreign countries being engaged. Massive aid projects line the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats. Actual US citizens interacting one-on-one with local people and materially improving their lives spreads American ideals into the grassroots, and inoculates at least some people against rabid anti-Americanism in a way that lasts long after the volunteer has gone home.

General

Painting & Drawing on Mac OS X

I’m running into some pointless frustration trying to put together simple illustrations for a talk I’m going to be giving. The software I have access to is simply too powerful for the task. I’m using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to knock out simple technical illustrations. The crapware paint program that comes with powerpoint is too crapware for the task, but the learning curve required for Illustrator and Photoshop isn’t worth climbing for tasks I’ll be doing maybe once every couple of months.

Back in the early nineties there was a program for the Mac called SuperPaint. It hit the spot exactly. It had a drawing layer (vector based), a painting layer (pixel based), and the ability to copy stuff from drawing to painting layers. There was a modest selection of tools, an intuitive interface, and a trivial learning curve. I can’t believe that such a program doesn’t still exist somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it. It’s such a basic and useful thing that someone has to be making it. There’s no reason there should be a large gap between kiddie-style drawing programs and the full fledged professional graphical design software. I can’t be the only person who occasionally needs to put together a simple illustration that looks halfway decent.

If anyone in out there knows of a suitable program, please let me know about it, either in email or comments.

[update a few minutes later] Of coursee, as soon as I post this I discover how to do something in Illustrator that I’d been assured was impossible, by people who use the program almost daily. It occurs to me that a lot of high powered software would be made vastly more usable by have a Beginners Mode, or Simple Mode, in which much of the more sophisticated functionality was pushed into the background. My Illustrator learning curve is made considerably worse just due to the sheer number of menus and options I have to dig through to find what I’m looking for. We have this problem at the lab with ProE (CAD software) – the guy who really knew how to use it left, and now we have a detailed set of drawings of the machine that we can’t really work with because nobody has the time to learn the ins and outs. If ProE had a Beginners Mode we could just dive in and and at least get some basic use out of the drawings.

Space

More Thoughts On The Aldridge Report

I’ve had a chance to read through the Aldridge Commission report, and I’ve made some notes along the way. I have no doubt that much of this is duplicated by other blogging spacehounds, but I haven’t yet surveyed the blogosphere. After the usual suspects take a shot at it perhaps we can compare notes and put together a canonical list of kvetches, comments and compliments.

Continue reading More Thoughts On The Aldridge Report →

Space

Aldridge Commission Report is out

Available here. There will be more detailed discussion later, either by me or Rand.

One point that stands out is the picture of Mars on the cover. I for one am sick of Mars. It’s “Moon, Mars, and Beyond”. Mars is a middle step, and it’s one that provides enemies of the President and opponents of manned spaceflight with a convenient straw man to knock down. Frankly, I’d much rather see flights to NEAs before Mars, but the sex appeal of Mars for some outweighs other considerations. It’s just a cover, and you can’t judge a book, blah, blah,blah, but really, folks: we have a perfectly good planetessimal only a couple of days travel time from Earth, and a bunch of others equally accessible passing through the neighborhood all the time. Is it too much to ask that we focus our attention on the next step instead of the step after the step after the step after…?

On the plus side, a quick read through suggests the commission does have their collective head screwed on fairly straight. But the person who picked the cover picture should be slapped around a little.

Update a few minutes later: Yes, I saw the little chunk of moon at the bottom of the cover. It’s a nice image, standing on the moon looking at Mars (ignoring the scale issues). Still, the cover to me says Mars is the objective, which it shouldn’t be. There’s a better image a few pages into the report, showing not just Mars, but also earth and some of the gas giants. I particularly like the Gas giant pictures, because nobody has a serious plan for making them part of the program. It’s a straightforward acknowledgement that we really don’t know what the later steps of the process will be.

[Update in the evening]

Here’s a link to a follow-up discussion post, for those who’ve been linked to this post from elsewhere.

Space

Perfect Flight For Armadillo

Armadillo Aerospace had a perfect flight of their testbed vehicle yesterday. There’s video (7 MB MPEG) and some notes on the Armadillo website.

It’s a really impressive flight, reminiscent of DC-X, if a bit shorter (and a heck of a lot cheaper). Congratulations to the Armadillo crew.

Technology and Society

A couple of computer security issues

The latest Crypto-gram is out, and it’s got the usual good stuff in it. Two things that stand out are the Witty Worm, and a letter on computer security (the last one).

The Witty worm is particularly scary because it was so well written (700 bytes!) and so destructive (infected 100% of targeted systems in 45 minutes). The only reason it wasn’t a major story is that the worm targeted only systems running a particular company’s security software, and there were only a limited number of installations.