| Friday,
13 December, 2002
Friday the
Thirteenth
falls on a Friday this month...
I now have enough data to say regarding the SRB: they do reuse them,
and apparently did reuse on on Challenger -- totally contrary to my
recollections, and I was aware of this stuff then because I discussed it
with Dick Feynman and NASA officials -- but they probably shouldn't be
reusing them. The cost of recovery plus the cost of refurbishing is close
to or greater than the cost of reuse, and operations to allow recovery
actually have a negative impact on the mission and mission safety as well
as adding to complexity of mission planning. For political reasons we
continue to send the fleet out and recover the falling SRB's, but it is
only because Shuttle is supposed to be "reusable." See
mail.
Regarding Shuttle: the story of the Russian Buran, which was a Shuttle
look-alike, is now coming out: they built it because our Shuttle was such
a silly design that they were certain it had to have some military
implications and abilities, and thus they had to have one also, trusting
in the GRU to find out, eventually, what good it would be. So they built
one and flew it, unmanned, once. A fascinating bit of that story is that
when our intelligence people saw the USSR was building a shuttle
look-alike, we knew it was such a silly design that we were certain the
Buran had a military mission we didn't understand.
In fact, of course, Shuttle was designed to be a full employment system
for everyone hired during the Apollo surge, and to be a high tech
employment subsidy system; the USSR didn't realize this (not having as
many high tech drones to support) so they thought the thing must have a
military mission. But our own military and intelligence technical people
knew that Shuttle was a silly design, and that the USSR didn't have the
problem of employment stability among a lot of people hired for Apollo, so
we were convinced that Buran had military missions, and a fair amount of
resources were expended in trying to figure out what Buran's military
mission was...
The Great Game, Cold War High Tech division...
See mail for other stuff.
Dragon Naturally Speaking was the best speech
recognition software ever done. They also had a small hand held recorder
that did a good job of recording dictated messages which could then be
fed, through an odd cable that looked like a USB cable on one end and a
normal DB9 serial cable on the other, into a PC, where they could be
played, or fed into the Dragon program for transcription.
It worked pretty well, too. Now I have two of the hand held recorder
devices, and I have decided I'd like to start carrying one to record
random thoughts. If all I want is to carry it and play back I have no
problems, but I find that I have lost -- possibly in the Death
Valley Crash -- the cable that connected the Hand Held Thingy to the
computer. I also seem to have lost -- again it was on the machine that
died in Death Valley and was never reinstalled on anything else, or I
suspect so -- the software that sucked the files off the Naturally Mobile
recorder and into the PC.
Looking quickly on line I find that there are third party outfits that
want to sell me the whole package for several hundred dollars. I am not
sure it's worth that just to get a cable. If anyone knows how I can get
one of those cables, or even knows the pin connections between the USB
connector and the DB9, I'd appreciate it.
Or, does anyone know another system that works for taking random
dictated notes and turning them into Word documents?
Looking up the link to the Death
Valley story I was reminded that there are a bunch of reports, some
worth reading, hidden away over in that folder. For a list see the CMReports
page.
The Trent Lott Affair
Well, North Korea is running a reactor that can produce weapons grade
plutonium, Iran seems to have uranium refining plants in operation, we're
sending more and more of the fleet to Iraq, and everyone's talking about
Trent Lott and how he said something nice to an old man on his birthday.
What no one is doing is thinking about what the county might have been
like if Strom Thurmond had won more of the Southern vote for his States
Rights Democrat slate. Since that slate couldn't have won in the North,
the chance that Thurmond would become President was nil. Truman might have
been kept out of the White House. As it was, Truman beat Dewey (a liberal
Republican) and won a term in his own right. The Democrats had been the
party of segregation and Jim Crow and separate but equal, and the GOP was
the party that freed the slaves. Black votes did not automatically go to
Democrats in the North (and almost as automatically did go to Republicans
in the South when there were Black votes cast at all).
On another level, most countries managed to end slavery without a civil
war; it seems reasonable to assume that it would have been better if we'd
managed it as well. The War Between The States, or The Civil War, cast a
long shadow over American politics and over race relations. It still does.
Similarly, had legal segregation been ended without the federalization
of so very many other matters, might the nation not be better off even if
it had taken a few years longer? I doubt that Trent Lott thought that far
when he made his careless remarks about about how better off we'd be if
Strom Thurmond had won in 1948. After all, Lott and everyone else in the
room knew that Thurmond never had a real chance of winning the presidency,
and he was just saying something he thought might please an old man born
in a different era. And of course it's absolutely political idiocy to
wonder if the country would be better if we'd moved just a bit slower in
desegregation, and done it with more local elections and local democracy.
But I do wonder. Yes, it would have taken federal intervention to force
the Deep South into letting their black citizens vote -- but that would
have been completely Constitutional. Congress has the undoubted right to
enforce a voting rights act. It also had the right and power to demand
"equal protection of the laws," which I would have thought meant
that the law ought to be color blind.
And had the South desegregated through the usual political process in
which politicians built coalitions of voters and worked through
legislative means, would we now be in our present situation where the law
is still not color blind? I don't know. But I don't think it's beyond the
pale of civilization to think about it.
When I was a young man in high school I didn't really think much about
segregation. Most southerners of my social class tended to paternalism in
race relations, and would have voted to end legal segregation while
arguing for rights of association in private clubs and such. As I got into
my senior year in high school I became convinced that the law ought to be
color blind. That made me a hopeless radical, and probably a Communist,
among most of my friends.
I still think the law ought to be color blind, but now apparently that
makes me a hopeless right wing extremist. So it goes.
I do think this country has more important matters to concern itself
with. Trent Lott was seven years old when Strom Thurmond tried his
Dixiecrat rebellion within the Democratic Party. Strom Thurmond is
retiring, having seen the world he lived in for a hundred years change
beyond his recognition.
And I still think the law ought to be color blind, and governments
derive their just powers by consent of the governed, and the best way to
achieve that is to have lots of jurisdictions with different laws and
customs. Ah well.
You will love the view of the
Universe! See mail.
TOP
Current Mail
|
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
