Abu Nidal was found dead, reportedly by his own hand, in Baghdad. Hard to know for sure what the cause truly is, given the location and sources (PLO) reporting it, but it’s even harder to care.

It’s pretty easy to be glad about it, though.

Abu Nidal was found dead, reportedly by his own hand, in Baghdad. Hard to know for sure what the cause truly is, given the location and sources (PLO) reporting it, but it’s even harder to care.

It’s pretty easy to be glad about it, though.

When Qwest wouldn’t provide broadband service to a rural Colorado community, they set up a cooperative and did it themselves.

Richard Cohen has a little screed against Ann Coulter in the WaPo.

May I say something about Ann Coulter? She is a half-wit, a termagant, a dimwit, a blowhard, a worthless silicone nothing, physically ugly and could be likened to Eva Braun, who was Hitler’s mistress. As it happens, these are all descriptions or characterizations Coulter uses for others in her book, “Slander.” It ought to be called “Mirror.”

The book is now the No. 1 bestseller in the nation. If I were writing this column as she has written the book, everything I wrote above would be footnoted. For instance, the deft Eva Braun crack was aimed at Katie Couric. Coulter calls the “Today” host “the affable Eva Braun of morning TV.” You can, as they say, look it up (p. 181).

Well, Richard, that’s the point, isn’t it? When she makes those charges, she at least attempts to back them up. You may say it, but don’t expect anyone to take you seriously, because you offer no evidence for them. “A worthless silicone nothing”? On what basis would you make such an accusation?

Whatever you think of Ms. Coulter’s stuff, this is just playground tactics, e.g. “I know you are, but what am I?”

He goes on, in his blind way, to once again laughably attempt to put up a defense against the notion that he and his colleagues are overwhelmingly left liberal.

Is it time for an intervention? I ask this because such anger, such intolerance, such rage, such a compulsion to denigrate and to distort is hardly based on any reality. If, as Coulter says, liberals control the media and much of the animal and plant kingdoms, then how is it that the president du jour and others of recent times — Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush the Elder — happen to be conservatives? I must be missing something here.

Yes, Richard, you are. You’re missing the fact that there’s a difference between a Republican and a conservative.

Eisenhower a conservative? He who cautioned us against the military-industrial complex?

Nixon a conservative? He of wage and price controls, and fifty-five mile-per-hour speed limits? He of “we’re all Keynesians now”?

Pro-choice Gerald Ford a conservative?

Bush the Elder a conservative? He of the broken tax pledge?

Bush the Younger a conservative? He of the increasing federal takeover of education, of steel tariffs, of disarmament in the cockpits, of huge government growth?

There’s only one conservative in that list–Ronald Reagan. But when you’re steeped in a leftist stew, you see anyone to the right of yourself (who you of course view as a reasonable, middle-of-the-road type) to be conservative.

Yes, Ann can be quite caustic, but she’s also often funny and clever, unlike this lackwit column by Mr. Cohen.

Everyone’s been talking about John Ponte’s recent essay on the global ideological battle in which we are engaged with what he calls “transnational progressivists.” It’s a very interesting thesis, and one that resonates with me, but I do have a nit to pick.

I’m not sure why he chose “trans”national as his descriptor, other than that they describe themselves that way. If so, then we shouldn’t allow them to get away with it, any more than we should have allowed people to call themselves Bolsheviks when they weren’t truly a majority, or to appropriate words like “progressive” or “liberal,” when their views were in fact often exactly the opposite, and a throwback.

The prefix “trans” means (if I recall my eleventh-grade Latin correctly) “across.” So transnational would mean across nations. But the people that he describes are, in fact, extremely antipathetic to the very concept of nation. It seems more appropriate, and accurate, to call them postnationalists (after nationalism), or praetornationalists (beyond nationalism), or even, to be most accurate, antinationalists, assuming he wants to stick to his Latin roots.

Alan Boyle has a useful set of links over at his MSNBC blog.

The Lance Bass yoyo continues. He’s back in training. The Russians have given him one more chance to come up with the money by the end of the week.

Boy, a lot of space stuff today. There’s a story over at Yahoo about treating astronauts for depression during long-term space flight.

“Astronauts in some ways are a lot like prison inmates, they are cooped up in small spaces, have limited access to their families and see the same people everyday. And like prisoners, tasks which merely fill up time are not enough, what is really needed is work which occupies the mind and passes the time quickly.”

While this is a legitimate concern, I have a couple comments.

First, the implications of this for space tourism are zero. They are talking about long-term flights, not short vacations.

Second, some of this is a result of the cramped quarters, which in turn is a result of design choices made early in the program, in which it was more important to justify the development of the Shuttle by using it to launch the station, than it was to build a good station. Having to essentially extrude the entire structure through a fourteen-foot hole (the effective diameter of the Shuttle payload bay), resulted in the lack of spaciousness. Skylab had much more room than the current station did, because it was based on the upper stage of a heavy-lift rocket, rather than being assembled from small pieces that had to fit into the Shuttle.

While having pleasanter quarters wouldn’t eliminate this problem, surely it would alleviate it.

Speaking of rockets versus airbreathers, there’s a nice interview with Aleta Jackson of XCOR over at the Objective American. They get the company name wrong, though–there’s no “C” at the end of the name.

[Thanks to Thomas James who gave me the heads up via email.]

I’m still busy, but I’ll try to get up a few posts today. I’ll see how long I can go before my outrage boiler is about to blow, and I have to vent some steam…

Australia has beaten the US at one of the holy grails of aerospace technology–on a shoestring budget, they’ve demonstrated a supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet) in flight, for the first time in history. NASA has spent many times as much toward that end and never flown anything.

It’s not that big a deal for space, however, at least in my opinion.

While Leonard David’s article states “scramjet vehicles could launch small space payloads at substantially lower cost” as though it were an established fact, there are actually a lot of reasons to think this is not the case. That people (even otherwise smart engineers) believe this is due to a misunderstanding of the source of the high costs of launch.

If you believe that launch is expensive because rockets have to carry a lot of propellant (needing both oxidizer and fuel), then it makes sense that if you have a vehicle that can get its oxidizer from the atmosphere, it would be much cheaper to operate.

Unfortunately, the underlying premise is false. Rockets aren’t expensive becaue they have to carry a lot of propellant. The propellant costs for a typical rocket is a tiny fraction of the launch cost. Even the fact that the rocket has to be larger in order to carry them is a minor contributor.

As I’ve said repeatedly, the primary driver behind high launch costs is low flight rates, and lack of vehicles specifically designed for high ones. Scramjets are sexy for the “technology uber alles” crowd, but there’s no reason to think that by themselves they can reduce the cost of launch.

Even for a high-flight rate vehicle, it’s likely that their disadvantages will vastly outweigh their benefit of not having to carry oxygen. In order to get their oxygen, they have to spend a lot of time in the atmosphere. Airbreathers moving at hypersonic speeds in the atmosphere have a lot of drag, including the drag of the inlet to the engine itself, and it’s an extremely intense heating environment, as bad or worse in many ways than entry. And once they get out of the atmosphere, they have to fall back on rocket propulsion anyway.

Rockets, on the other hand, get out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible, because they tend to perform better in vacuum, and it reduces the drag and the need for thermal protection during ascent.

Also, airbreathing engines tend to optimize at a certain cruise speed, and perform very poorly in off-design conditions. That’s exactly the propulsion system that you don’t want in a launch system, which is under continuous acceleration. Rocket engines are indifferent to vehicle speed (they’re sensitive only to atmospheric pressure).

Scramjets may have some interesting military applications, but I think that they’re unlikely to play any role in commercial flight, or space launch, for a very long time.

But congratulations to Oz anyway–it’s still a great technical achievement.