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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We all have a vision of Medieval justice as violent and barbaric. According to Cambridge historian Helen Mary Carrel, this was simply not true:
“The common view of the medieval justice system as cruel and based around torture and execution is often unfair and inaccurate,” said University of Cambridge historian Helen Mary Carrel. Most criminals received gentle sentences merely meant to shame them, Carrel said, with the punishments often carried out in the open so townspeople could bring them charity.
Her work covers only medieval English civil society: punishment traditions in other parts of Europe were perhaps nastier and more closely aligned with our Hollywood induced image of the era.
This just in! Our ever vigilant illuminati underground has just uncovered the little known fact Adnan Hajj photographed early shuttle flights. As a Samizdata exclusive we have this spectacular shuttle landing photograph.
Ms. Ima Fake, a senior Reuters representive, has assured us this photo is absolutely genuine.
This just in from the US Defense Department:
WASHINGTON, August 2, 2006 – The National Guard has exceeded its troop requirement along the southwestern U.S. border by almost 200 servicemembers and is assisting U.S. Border Patrol activities there, a senior Defense Department official said here today.
We were obligated, by Aug. 1, to have 6,000 National Guardsmen deployed to the four-state southwest border region. And, in fact, as of close of business yesterday, we had 6,199 soldiers, Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, said in an interview.
Now if they had not met the stated goal, that would naturally have been newsworthy…
Kevin Connors mentioned this blog story about the fascinating new small jet from Honda to me a few days ago and I remembered it when I ran across this today:
Honda announced today it will begin taking orders for a new, small jet aircraft later this year.
The HondaJet, unveiled last year, will enter the “very light jet” market in the United States, the company said.
It sounds like quite a nice piece of kit:
The sleek jet has an an all-glass flight deck. An over-the-wing engine design maximizes space in the fuselage for passengers and luggage, the company said. The configuration is also said to reduce drag at high speed to improve fuel efficiency.
The prototype jet, which seats up to seven, has completed more than 240 hours of flight testing, flying to 43,000 feet and hitting 412 knots.
I am much afraid I will not be running out to buy one myself, but I will certainly have my camera ready to click on it at first sight!
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic expects to start flying in 2008.
Designer Philippe Starck, former soap star Victoria Principal and ‘Superman Returns’ director Bryan Singer have booked their flights for tourist trips in outer space, an official from the company selling the galactic voyage said Monday.
Virgin Galactic, a Virgin Group company, has sold some 200 tickets to passengers for suborbital flights, starting in 2008, said Will Whitehorn, the company’s president.
It has collected 8.5 million pounds (US$15.6 million, euro12.4 million) in deposits for the flights that cost 109,000 pounds (US$200,000, euro158,000).
Despite the seemingly hard scheduled time here, I have heard Virgin Galactic officials state emphatically they will not fly until Burt Rutan says SpaceShipTwo is ready nor will they put pressure on him to rush the job. Branson is in this for the long haul, and that means he has to ‘Bring ’em Back Alive’.
The official report on the SpaceX Falcon-1 launch termination at Kwajalein in the Pacific has been released and as it turns out, the problem was not human error after all. it was subsurface corrosion, possibly due to the tropical ocean climate and galvanic action, of a single nut on a fuel pump.
You can read more about it here.
Elon Musk’s next launch is now scheduled for November.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame is moving his spaceship company, Blue Origin, forward through the high hurdles race called government regulations.
The Blue Origin craft is slated to fly regularly by 2010. While this is indeed an aggressive schedule, I find it more reasonable now that I know a bit about the spaceship. It is the next step in development of the McDonnell-Douglas DCX. The test article for this was built and flown at White Sands for under $60M in under two years by Dr. Gaubatz and his team in the early to mid nineties. Takeoffs required a ground crew of less than a dozen people and they were perhaps the first to ever fly a Vertical Takeoff/Vertical Landing craft or “A spacehip like God and Robert Hienlein intended”, as one pundit put it, multiple times in a day. They also proved DCX could carry out a safe emergency landing after a major problem on takeoff and proved out the flight software for the complex flipover maneuver to rotate from pointy end first flight to ass end first for landing.
For those interested in such things, the McDonnell-Douglas master control console inside the single control van on site was… an Apple computer.
I am now wondering if Blue Origin will show up at Las Cruces this fall to compete for the NASA moon lander technology challenge prize I wrote of a few months ago. The beauty of a VTVL spacehsip is it works anywhere, whereas spaceplanes are rather limited in their choice of landing worlds. I know Dr. Gaubatz is going to be there and if they do, I am sure he will shed a tear of grandfatherly pride.
Hot Jets and Good Luck to Blue Origin!
There are a bunch more photos from inside the Genesis 1 space station prototype with all sorts of fun stuff floating about. I would have loved to have been sitting in the meeting where they came up with the idea of flying a container full of Mexican Jumping Beans!
The external shot is also far clearer then the post-launch quick look shot I posted a week or so ago.
Nature seems rather inventive in the creation of parasites. Virtually every species on the planet has several and they can be specialized to the point where a single species is almost an eco-system unto itself.
Life requires energy and there are quite a number of ways to get it. There are primary producers that take solar or chemical energy and use it to create biomass; there are species which eat the primary producers and others which in turn eat them. The most common terms for these are plants, herbivores and carnivores. There are animals which feed on dead plants or animals and there are animals which have discovered the trick of extracting energy from their host without quite killing it.
Parasitism has a number of advantages to a species. The host does all the work. Since the parasite does not kill the host like a carnivore it can continue feeding for so long as the host lives. It is clear the host would be better off without the parasite in the vast majority of cases, but since all of its neighbors are also hosts, it has no particular relative disadvantage to them.
As in any other biological niche, there will be competition. If a parasite extracts too little from its host, another which takes more will produce more offspring and take over. On the other hand, if it extracts too much, the host will weaken and a competitor who takes just a little bit less will again be able to extract more energy and produce more offspring.
In economics we call this the Laffer curve.
If you have just purchased your trip to Space Station Alpha from Space Adventures for $20M and still have money burning a hole in your pocket, you can now take a walk in space for a mere $15M extra.
According to Astronaut Tom Jones:
During a 90-minute EVA, which is the time it takes the ISS to make one complete orbit around Earth, a spacewalker would experience orbital sunrise and sunset, Jones said.
“That 90 minutes is like gold to a real spacewalkers,” Jones said. “I got a total of five or 10 minutes of doing that in my 19 hours in terms of just unstructured time, so it’s literally that precious an experience.”
Now if my next venture works out and makes me a billionaire…
You simply have to watch this if you are into affordable jet aircraft!
One way or the other, we will see the private flying transport before the end of this century. Materials and information technology advances have brought the idea to the edge of viability and this venture between Bell and an Israeli company might just be enough to push it over the edge.
On Monday at the Farnborough International Airshow, Bell Helicopter announced that it will team with an Israeli company to develop a futuristic aircraft that would allow soldiers and police far greater mobility in cities.
The X-Hawk, as envisioned by Bell, could hold a pilot and up to 11 troops. It could navigate congested urban areas by flying above narrow streets and between closely spaced buildings.
Propelled by two jet turbine engines that would drive pusher propellers and downward-thrust lift fans, similar to those on the short-takeoff-vertical-landing version of the F-35 Lightning II, the X-Hawk could operate in spaces far more confined than a helicopter can.
If they do not do it, someone else will. There are multiple ‘flying car’ projects out there and someday someone will cross the threshold into commercial viability.
Ed:Thank reader Steven Peterson for pointing us to this article
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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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