We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Sometimes there are unexpected side effects of Samizdata posts. My discussion of the Blackstar project last week had that in spades. When Mike Lorrey posted some technical information defending the possibility such a vehicle might be real, I sat up and took notice. Amongst things I knew about he described something I was completely unaware of. There is a safe Boron gel fuel. This led to an exchange of emails and Mike kindly produced a paper on that and several other important technologies and basic concepts of spaceplane design.
NASA got the spaceplane design so badly wrong on the Space Shuttle one hardly knows where to start. Mike shows the science behind some of those truly awful design choices. First off is wing loading. Virtually everyone in the business knows high wing loading on a manned re-entry vehicle is not just a bad idea, it is almost criminally insane. Once you go down that route you are forced into ever more dangerous and ever more marginal design decisions. High wing loading means there is a lot of vehicle weight per square foot of wing. It means more kinetic energy has to be dissipated over a smaller area. It means the re-entry interface happens much deeper into the atmosphere. It means you cannot skip and bleed off heat. It means you need heavy thermal protection systems… and on and on.
The key bit in his paper though is the Boron Gel. I must say this mythical substance was one I knew very little about and what I had heard was it is more closely allied to a chemical weapon in toxicity than a rocket fuel! But according to Mark there is more than one way to gel a boron, and this one is a boron/keresene slurry.
Why does this get me excited? Another factor pretty much everyone knows is liquid hydrogen is a really bad fuel. Yeah, it has a high ISP (a measure of how good a fuel/oxidizer combination is) when used with oxygen, but the problem is density. It is horrible for density. You need gigantic tanks to carry a reasonable amount and the tankage and associated structures weight eats up all the gain from using the stuff in the first place. On top of which, it bleeds off. You can not make hydrogen stay put. It is useless for long voyages or for a long stay in orbit. That is why upper stages use really nasty, evil and deadly fuels that happen to be liquid at room temperatue and are hypergolic (ignite when mixed).
Even if your fuel is not as ‘good’ as hydrogen in absolute terms, it can be better in practical ones. A very dense fuel means smaller structures to hold it and that means less weight to orbit which means less fuel to carry the fuel… you win points in your rocket equation. Dense fuel is a big win. Dense fuel that also has a very good ISP is a very big win. The Boron/Kerosene mix appears to be just what we need.
What I look forward to finding out now is: what is required to handle the stuff safely? Is it truly not in the high danger category of the other Boron Gel technologies?
If you feel yourself called to the label ‘rocket scientist’, go read Mike Lurrey’s paper. I await your comments.
I am organising a NYC Geek Dinner on 23rd March as the last one was fun (at least for me!). The venue is the Sly Bar in SoHo.
This is what Gothamist has to say about it:
The blue lights above the outside door continue inside and flicker throughout the space – everyone looks good in this light, remember that. Our favorite part, though, might be the the back smoking patio, it’s a lovely view that often gets neglected being so far from the subways and it proves that not everyone in New York hates smokers.
Also, the blogosphere-famous Stormhoek wine will supply wine for the evening as part of their US launch and the meme 100 dinners, 100 conversations…
The festivities start at 7.30pm – all bloggers, geeks and Samizdata.net groupies are welcome. You can sign up here or email me at samizdata at gmail dot com.
Rand Simberg pointed me to the prototype of a real tricorder which may be on the Christmas gift list for 2010.
Tessa Jowell is the first British minister in recorded history to retire from her family on order to spend more time with her government.
– Andy Hamilton
There has been much gnashing of teeth at the death of Slobodan Milosevich. Apparently justice was not served. So what is justice? The man was ignominiously removed from his position of authority, forced to cower in safe houses until the time came when his people sold him out because they valued engagement with the outside world more than his worthless hide. He spent the rest of his days in a prison cell interspersed with trial appointments at a court with questionable legitimacy. He is dead now. If there were any direct positive benefits culminating from his rule, they will almost universally be forgotten and at the very least massively overshadowed. Those that openly claim to admire him will be shunned by wider society. Billions upon billions will learn of him and regard him odiously, even though he died before their birth. History will curse his existence – each and every unchoking breath he took upon this earth.
Hitler was never tried. Does anyone lament this fact? What do people like Hitler or Milosevich gain by not being tried after their downfall?
For the last ten days or so, and for about another week, I have been and will continue to be semi-unplugged. Unplugged because my pay-by-the-month internet connection was disconnected a while ago, by some insonsiderate person pushing the wrong button at my internet service provider, but only semi-unplugged, because I have at least been able, thank goodness, to revert to the previous pay-by-the-minute arrengement which preceded my current although currently interrupted arrangement.
I am, therefore, able to link to particular places on the internet that I already know how to get to quickly, such as to this blog posting which I did for the Adam Smith Institute, in which I explain the effect of my present internet miseries, but I am not, as I explained at greater length in that posting, comfortable about just going a-wandering. I can switch on, go somewhere, download it, switch off, and read it. But, I deeply fear switching on, going somewhere, reading it, going somewhere else, reading that, looking something else up, deciding to write something, looking up other stuff, deciding to write something else and making a start with that, . . . you get the picture. It might not cost all that much, especially at the weekend, but in sad old Britain where local phone calls still cost, it could cost me a whole lot too much for comfort. If I did the sums, I might well decide that my state of only semi-linked-ness is a false economy, and that I should just plug myself in regardless and do whatever I feel like doing. But I do not want to have to be worrying.
So, this has been what Americans call a “learning experience”, or what we know on this side of the pond as a considerable nuisance or words to that effect.
However, the particular combination of circumstances – not being permanently connected, but still being able to connect temporarily – has provided me with something you seldom experience in life, namely the contrast between two important stages in my life, with the full knowledge of what both states were like. It really has been a learning experience. → Continue reading: Semi-unplugged
It seems we will be reading Mark Steyn mostly on-line now in the UK. If the irascible New Hampshire based Canadian has indeed been axed from two UK media syndication outlets (The Telegraph and The Spectator), does anyone have any information on what caused this? Lionel Shriver of the Guardian ponders that it might be a case of ‘political self-censorship’.
As it happens Steyn was one of the few reasons I look at either of those sadly diminished publications (particularly the Spectator, which I find almost unreadable these days). Any industry insiders out there have any scandal they want to share on what happened? Leave a comments or drop us an e-mail, you know you want to…
I take the greatest of pride in reporting the Danish cartoons are to be republished in The Blanket here in Belfast over the coming weeks.
One of the two major papers in the city, The Belfast Telegraph, has published an interview with a representative of the site. They report Mr McIntyre expects this will provoke a reaction but told them it was important to stand up against religious fundamentalism:
“We are putting out one of these cartoons a week in response to the Manifesto Against Totalitarianism which has been published by a string of writers and can be seen as a defence of those who publish the cartoons,” he said.
“These writers are people who have had sanctions issued against them and they are still willing to speak out and it is right to put out these cartoons in defence of freedom of expression.”
The Belfast Telegraph says The Blanket journal is “known for its anti-establishment views and takes a wide range of contributions on the current political scene in Northern Ireland as well as other world events.”
Kudos to the Tele for making it news and to The Blanket for having goolies enough to lift a middle finger to the anti-liberal forces of darkness.
PS: Our more cowardly journalistic brethren on the other side of the Irish Sea don’t even have the guts to publish Mark Steyn!
It never takes too long for campaigners to set up a website providing all the information that you require to raise awareness and combat this perfidious Bill.
If this Bill passes, all that stands between us and an elected dictatorship is the restraint of our politicians. God help us!
Today, I was at a small conference called Turning the Tables on the State held by an organisation called A World To Win. I had been asked to give a presentation on the British government’s plans for Identity Cards and a National Identity Register, which I duly did, and got a few laughs. I’m glad they are supportive of NO2ID, I really am. But I also attended the rest of the conference, which was a strange, strange experience.
Here were all these fairly pleasant, not obviously mad or stupid, people, saying things I wholly agree with about threats to civil liberties. But at the same time most did not leave it there. The presentations were larded with nonsensical quotations from Marx yanked out of historical context and treated as eternal wisdom. The threat to liberty and the constitution could not be anything so mundane as the lust for power and institutional convenience. It must be driven by transnational capitalism’s need to increase its exploitation rate by invading the public sector.
And the ‘rights’ to be defended against monolithic global finance are apparently mostly not of the “first generation rights” – the liberties (correlative of no-right of others to interfere) that most readers and writers of this blog exalt. They are prescriptive rights, to free education, to work, to fair remuneration for that work, etc., etc. And that is what most astonished me.
While rightly distressed by the power of the state being used to impose expressible views and appropriate ways to live on the citizen, these kindly people see no irony in seeking institutions to force their values onto others, in the name of the people. Wish-lists abounded, their real implications for personal lives unconsidered. But the most startling positive right I’ve ever heard suggested was from the report of a discussion group:
We need a right to a rich interior life.
First off, as if it is not entirely obvious, I am not the least bit unbiased about the album and people who made it as I have known most of them for fifteen years. Some of them are amongst my closest friends. With that said… if you like Irish traditional music, watch this space for information on how to buy “Tripswitch” the new album by Johnny McSherry, Donal O’Connor and friends.
The tripswitch, by the way, was in a country town recording studio I know well. A ‘to remain un-named’ member of the band attempted to light a cigarette from the toaster and somehow managed to trip the main breaker. I have been led to believe the eponymous tune was composed in the dark whilst efforts were made to figure out what had happened.
While I am on the subject of album release parties, if you are in New York City, another very dear friend, NIamh Parsons, has a release show for her new CD ‘The Old Simplicity,’ on Tuesday March 14 7:30PM at the Cutting Room, 19 W.24th St.
But now back to Belfast on on with the fun and festivities! → Continue reading: Tripswitch album release party
SpaceX has been working towards the first launch of its Falcon since late last summer. First they were delayed by a blacksat launch window which caused them to shift operations from Vandenberg to Kwajalein Island. This winter they had the pressurization test accident that caused a fuel tank to crumple.
Everything I have been hearing says this month could finally be it. Best wishes and godspeed to Elon and his crew.
You can download their information pack (just published yesterday) on the upcoming maiden flight from here.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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