For anyone interested, I’ve never participated in this, primarily because in my experience, they’re not really carnivals of space — they’re carnivals of space science, a subject in which I have little more interest in than other kinds, except to the degree that it provides knowledge of how to develop and settle it. This is a specific instance of a more general irk — when many people learn that I’m an expert on space policy and technology, or I do a radio interview, they assume that I’m both an expert on and interested in space science and astronomy and (even more annoyingly) UFOs. It’s the same kind of general public level of (lack of) knowledge that leads to phrases such as “rocket scientist.”
There are documentation problems at NASA. It’s endemic to the industry. It’s one of the causes of high costs. And failures. Be sure to read the comments.
One of the advantages that SpaceX has is that with a tightly integrated co-located team, the knowledge is much more accessible, though individuals become more critical
Megan McArdle discusses a tough problem. I don’t know what the solution is, but it seems to have happened since the sixties, so to figure out how to fix it, we need to examine what broke it.
Look, if Godzilla appeared on the Mall this afternoon, Al Gore would say it’s global warming…
[Laughter]
…because the spores in the South Atlantic Ocean, you know, were. Look, everything is, it’s a religion. In a religion, everything is explicable. In science, you can actually deny or falsify a proposition with evidence. You find me a single piece of evidence that Al Gore would ever admit would contradict global warming and I’ll be surprised.
OK, so how is the global warming religion falsifiable? What would it take?
Overall, the literature does not offer much support for the idea that long term saturated fat intake has a significant effect on the concentration of blood cholesterol. If it’s a factor at all, it must be rather weak, which is consistent with what has been observed in multiple non-human species (13). I think it’s likely that the diet-heart hypothesis rests in part on an over-interpretation of short-term controlled feeding studies. I’d like to see a more open discussion of this in the scientific literature. In any case, these controlled studies have typically shown that saturated fat increases both LDL and HDL, so even if saturated fat did have a small long-term effect on blood cholesterol, as hinted at by some of the observational studies, its effect on heart attack risk would still be difficult to predict.
Actually, I have a simpler explanation — it’s simply an appealing theory, from a common-sense standpoint. You are what you eat, right?
Of course, it’s always dangerous to rely on “common sense” when it comes to complex topics like biochemistry. And yet the FDA builds such murderous concepts as the food pyramid on such shoddy research and thinking. Not to mention agri-industry lobbying, of course.
When I was growing up, it never occurred to me to aspire to get an Ivy League degree. Of course, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to college, and my high school grades (and lack of even taking the SAT) showed it.
This is a frightening commentary, not just on Internet literacy specifically, but the complete failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking. Because thinking is hard.
It is odd that the soft firms, which market themselves to clients as being super-smart repositories of brainpower (of course this is largely a fiction; see point 3 above), would rely so heavily on university admissions committees. They effectively outsource a big chunk of due diligence on their most important investment (human capital) to a group of people whose judgement they somehow trust, but perhaps without detailed understanding. When I was on the faculty at Yale I knew people in admissions and it’s not clear to me that they were the best able to spot potential in 18 year olds. In studies of expert performance admissions people are less good at predicting UG GPA than a simple algorithm. (The “algorithm” is simply a weighted sum of SAT and HS GPA!)
I’m a lot less impressed by Ivy degrees than I’m supposed to be. And I think that the current occupant of the White House is a great example of why.