An unofficial assessment from a submarine captain.
Rickover built a hell of an underwater navy, but basing the nuclear-power industry on submarine designs has been a mess.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Computer Weirdness
Since a recent update, my desktop has quit booting. I just says “Loading kernel,” with kernel number, and does nothing else. What’s worse is that I can’t even boot it from an external drive that I boot a Windows laptop with when I want to run Linux on it. The desktop doesn’t even recognize it as boot media, though it continues to work fine with the laptop.
[Sunday-afternoon update]
Patricia’s Windows 10 machine is the same MSI motherboard as mine, and I confirmed that it, too, does not recognize the external drive as bootable. I went back into Windows, and created a live-USB for Fedora, which did boot into both her machine and mine.
So, I decided to just create a new installation. I put it on a spare Samsung 250G SSD that I had. It has no problem installing it, but when I tried to boot from it, at first I couldn’t even see it in the boot menu in the BIOS. I changed from UEFI to CSM, at which point it appeared, and I made it the first boot. But when I tried to boot it, I got the same error message as when I tried to boot from the external drive. The machine continues to not recognize a Fedora boot disk as bootable.
[Bumped]
[Update Monday afternoon]
OK, after talking to MSI, I found out that I had been setting the boot order wrong, and finally got it working. I’m pretty much back to normal, except I need to clone the Samsung over to my M.2. If I didn’t keep /home on a separate drive, though, I’d be in a world of hurt.
[Bumped]
After College
Is higher ed in a death spiral?
If so, history will record that it was a suicide.
The Various Takes On The Submersible
Glenn has thoughts.
NASA’s Latest Budget Issue
Now Mars Sample Return threatens the planetary science budget.
I agree that JPL should be soliciting bids from contractors.
Our Titanic
Thoughts on the complexity of modern technology.
The Titanic Submersible
It has ties to space exploration.
There are a lot of parallels with space tourism here. It is a high-risk, high-cost activity for wealthy individuals, that is currently unregulated. It is a visit to a harsh environment (worse than space in some ways), where life support is required, and finite. I hope that this incident doesn’t result in clamoring for regulation, of either submersibles, or space adventures. In the case of the submersible, it’s not clear who would regulate something that’s taking place in international waters.
[Update a few minutes later]
[Noon update]
One of the people on the boat is an adventure addict.
Well, that’s the sort of people who do this sort of thing.
[Wednesday-morning update]
It’s looking more and more like this was negligence, and the people who did it were daredevils.
And then there’s this.
[Bumped]
[Noon update]
The company was warned twice of potentially catastrophic consequences. It will be ironic if Rush is killed by his own decision, but it shows his misplaced confidence in it.
[Thursday-afternoon update]
“They likely didn’t know what hit them.”
[Bumped]
[Update a while later]
Thoughts from James Cameron:
Lab-Grown Chicken
…has been approved by federal regulators.
I wonder how much it will cost?
Henry Petroski
RIP.
I have several of his books on my shelf.
A Question For The Climate Crazies
What evidence would it require for you to change your mind, and for you to realize that it is not a crisis, and that we don’t have to destroy the economy in the name of climate?
This is a (semi)serious question, but mostly a note to write a longer essay about science and falsifiability, that I didn’t have time or gumption to write tonight.