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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I have read more about the Che and flag incident in the Houston Obama office today and my biggest concern over this affair now is the poor woman who was to ‘blame’ for it. We really have to be careful in the blogger world about building mountains out of molehills and using verbiage to turn neighbors into ideological enemies.
From what I have read via Little Green Footballs, I see someone very much like many close and dear friends of mine. People who I disagree with but whom are nonetheless good people with whom you would not at all be averse to spending an evening arguing ideas over some good wine.
She did something really dumb and probably never even considered setting up ‘her space’ with a familiar and comfortable decoration would actually mean something in the real world. Many people spend much of their lives without learning that lesson and are surprised when it happens. She possibly managed some minor and unintentional damage to her favoured candidate and in punishment is cowering in her home in fear of all those hateful people who are sending venom her way.
This is certainly not the Samizdata way as you all well know. Ideas can and should be argued… but one must recognize the humanity and very often the basic decency of the people you disagree with.
I sincerely hope her McLuhan fame is soon over so she can get back to her normal life.
PS: I have intentionally not mentioned her name or given a link.
You have heard about the captured ‘Diary of a Despondent Al Qaeda’ but have you had a chance to actually read the whole thing?
I also recommend you download this DOD Blogger Press Conference Audio which includes well known war bloggers such as Austin Bey talking to USAF Col. Donald Bacon, live from Iraq.
Enjoy!
This article on the Ron Paul news site has a very interesting photo of the Obama Houston Campaign office. You really want to take a look.
It would be much improved by a propeller beanie.
In a recent article I noted my surprise at the apparent progress made in fusion by the Bussard team and stated I had not heard of them before.
it turns out I was wrong. I did indeed run across them before but the importance did not register so it did not stick in my consciousness. I even have a photo:
EMC2 exhibit at the 2007 International Space Development Conference in Dallas.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
In my defense, I am rather occupied with Society management duties at these events so I do not have much unscheduled time to talk to exhibitors.
A friend of mine in San Francisco passed along this video of a marvelous arrangement performed by a classical Japanese orchestra.
It is well worth four and a half minutes of your time.
In yesterday’s Pentagon Press Briefing, Commander, Nato International Security Assistance Force Gen. Dan McNeill had this interesting comment:
I’m also reminded of the headlines that said there was a resurgent Taliban, there was a coming spring offensive, and they were going to hold sway on the battlefield. And I think a retrospective look at calendar year ’07 says that clearly was not the case. They did very little on the battlefield. They were very successful in staying in the press, and they continue to be, but they have done little on the battlefield.
Do the Taliban have sufficient strength to pull off another Spring News Offensive or have we precluded this by sufficiently weakening the elite al allah al Press Relations over the preceding year?
One of our commentariat mentioned ‘Bussard Fusion’ several times and I did not at first pay much attention. I assumed it was yet another of the long line of ideas which might work out but probably will not. Still, with the name Bussard attached to it, I thought a quick look might be worthwhile.
It was. I did not realize that not only is Dr. Bussard still around: he has been developing his ideas with ‘under the radar’ money from the Navy for fifteen years and he took it far enough to show the physics is understood and works. They blew up the demo machine but when they analyzed the data they found it had managed to do what it needed to do before it performed its self-disassembly.
Another interesting facet is the radiation free P-11B fusion path. I never paid any attention to it in my own readings because even the D-3He I am familiar with requires perhaps a hundred times the confinement constant of the D-T fusion everyone has been working on for 50 years.
It turns out there is another way to fuse an atom. It is cheaper, smaller and avoids the basic problem which makes the whole Tokamuk family of fusion reactors into eternal research cash cows.
If you want to learn more, not only about the physics behind it, but also of yet another way in which the State screws up everything it touches, set aside the next hour and a half and listen to “Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)” presented by Dr. Bussard himself.
For those who have not spent a lifetime watching the world of Physics, Dr. Bussard is one of the elders of the field. He is no outsider and no crank. He is one hell of a serious physics dude.
Hayek? …. Check!
Hazlett? …. Check!
Von Mises? …. Check!
Ron Paul gave an extremely cogent economics talk to Seattle Business leaders which you can watch here.
He even wants to dump Sarbanes-Oxley. What more could you ask?
It is a fast moving world we live in and much has happened in the week or so since I last posted on this topic.
John Carmack, head of Armadillo Aerospace, believes they have an understanding of and cure for the ‘hard starting’ problem their Pixel and Texel rocket test articles exhibited in their attempts at the Moon Lander prize at Alamogordo this last October. The hard starts damaged several of their motors and even cracked the bell in one of them. They have a new igniter they are testing which may solve the problems.
There is much news at SpaceX after a long period of silence. They have tested their Falcon 9 first stage on a test stand with two engines. They will soon test three engines and work their way up to the full complement of nine. This is a big rocket and requires a BFTS for testing. Elon Musk claims this stands for Big Falcon Test Stand: that is his story and he is sticking to it.
Development of the Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine has been completed. The third Falcon 1 test flight will use this engine instead of the ablatively cooled engine used on the first two test flights. An exact date for the Kwajalein launch has not been announced but it is now scheduled for somewhere in the April-June time frame.
Ground breaking has occurred at SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral site, the former SLC-40 pad , once used for Titan-IV launches.
SpaceX has passed the Critical Design Review (CDR) with NASA on their COTS (Cheap Orbital Transport Systems or Commercial Off The Shelf) contract to perform resupply to Space Station Alpha. By 2010 SpaceX is to demonstrate cargo deliveries using the combination of a Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon capsule. The Dragon capsule will carry passengers after it has flown a few times.
I could go on. but there is just so much happening at SpaceX I can only recommend you read their update and if you have any questions about the technology, come back here and ask.
But wait! There’s more!
Bigelow Aerospace, which already has two inflatable space station test articles in orbit, is making its move:
Industry sources said Bigelow Aerospace is ready to place an order that includes six launches starting in 2011 to begin assembly and early operation of the new station.
“Those [first] six launches will be comprised of two missions to deploy hardware such as Sundancer itself and our node/bus combination and four missions to dedicated to transporting crew and cargo,” Robert Bigelow, president and founder of Bigelow Aerospace said in a written statement.
“Subsequently our launch rate will double, and we will require a dozen launches, all for crew and cargo transportation missions over the next 12-month period. Our third year of active operations will again require another dozen crew and cargo mission launches and, in our fourth year of operations, we anticipate needing 18 such launches.”
Things are moving so quickly it is just astounding to an old spacer like myself.
If you are of a conspiracy orientation, you are going to love this report I just picked up off a network admin mail list:
A fourth submarine cable in the middle east was damaged Sunday between Haloul, Qatar and Das, United Arab Emirates.
This is in addition to the damage affecting FLAG, SAE-ME-WE4, FALCON cables.
After reviewing surveillance video of the area, Egypt’s ministry of maritime transportation is reporting no ships were near the FLAG or SAE-ME-WE4 cables 12-hours before or after the cable damage near Alexandria, Egypt. The reason for outage of the cables has not been identified yet.
Did anyone notice the NSA black-ops sub leaving the area (I should add a smiley here… I think)?
More information can be found here. There has also been a suggestion this report may be an ‘echo’ of a previous report caused by mis-communication across language barriers. I have no idea myself.
We now cue the Secret Squirrel theme and search for our tin hats as ‘The Galloping Beaver’ asks: “Where is the USS Jimmy Carter?”
The US Navy has tested its rail gun at 10 MegaJoules. Railguns will one day become the main armaments on US Navy vessels:
The technology uses high power electromagnetic energy instead of explosive chemical propellants (energetics) to propel a projectile farther and faster than any preceding gun. At full capability, the rail gun will be able to fire a projectile more than 200 nautical miles at a muzzle velocity of mach seven and impacting its target at mach five. In contrast, the current Navy gun, MK 45 five-inch gun, has a range of nearly 20 miles. The high velocity projectile will destroy its targets due to its kinetic energy rather than with conventional explosives.
A very big advantage of kinetic energy weapons is the reduction in size of a warships Achilles heel: the explosives magazine. With a railgun you would not need propellant charges.
The safety aspect of the rail gun is one of its greatest potential advantages, according to Dr. Elizabeth D’Andrea, ONR’s Electromagnetic Railgun Program Manager. Safety on board ship is increased because no explosives are required to fire the projectile and no explosive rounds are stored in the ship’s magazine.
I am not sure I believe you would get rid of all explosives as you might still want to lob an HE shell over the horizon and downwards on a target. If you are firing on a target 200 miles away, you cannot use direct fire unless you intend to blast a tunnel through a whole lot of water. That means the impact velocity on another ship using indirect fire would only be the normal terminal velocity of the falling shell. Nonetheless, the chance of a repeat of the HMS Hood disaster is much decreased.
What I would like to know is: has anyone done the calculations about direct fire at high elevation? Aircraft are naturally one of the targets. One wonders if it could reach out and touch something at a rather higher altitude.
For those unfamiliar with naval battles of WWII, the HMS Hood was sunk by one lucky salvo from the Bismarck that came straight down into the aft magazine. The ship was on the way to the bottom almost before the smoke cleared. There were (I believe) only 4 survivors.
Correction: It was 3 survivors.
Iraq is still in a descent to normalcy according to this DOD report:
Weekly attacks in the Baghdad security districts for the past 15 weeks matched levels last seen consistently in 2005. Bombings increased last week, but remained below the long-term average for the 23rd week in a row, he said. Throughout Iraq, weekly casualties decreased by three percent last week, continuing to remain below the long-term average for the 21st week in a row, Anderson said. Civilian casualties have dropped from 1,700 in January 2007 to 170 this month.
I think I can speak for the rest of the Samizdatistas when I raise my glass and say to our armed forces: “Well done lads!”
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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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