| Friday, May
30, 2007
La Scala to present Opera based on Gore's "An
Inconvenient Truth
Jerry,
Maybe by the time this happens, 2011, it will be cold
enough to have it be seen as a comedy.
http://www.mcall.com/entertainment/
sns-ap-al-gore-opera,0,310738.story ,
Bob Holmes
Hoo Hah!
=================
1240: Fiction today. My head seems full of cotton wool and
the tinnitus is worse today. Not sure why. Also sleepy. What I really want
to do is go back to bed, but there's work to do. We managed our 1.8 mile
walk, I have taken my pills, and it's time to get to work...
corner of inferno & purgatorio
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/
blog/2008_05_01_archive.asp#5694661463506971776
Wade
Heh. I missed seeing that when I was in Florence,
but it hardly astonishes me that there are those streets....
============
A Modest
Proposal for US Education
I had a thought while walking.
Our education system says that we must mainstream
the disruptive, the crippled, the stupid, the uncaring, and the
undisciplined, lest we condemn someone among them to a life of perpetual
discrimination. The practical effect of this is to devote most of our
educational resources to the left side of the bell curve in the hopes of
getting everyone up to some average; while, of course, neglecting the right
side of the bell curve.
It is as if a gemologist were required to polish
coal up to some standard shine even if that meant giving only a cursory
tweak to the garnets in his collection (not to mention the diamonds and
rubies). This is probably not a very good analogy, but I think it's pretty
clear what I mean. The future of civilization depends on getting the most
out of the bright kids, so we have devised a system that insures that the
bright kids will be neglected in favor of those who don't want or can't
absorb an actual world class university prep education. Does this make
sense?
I have a modest proposal: we spend about $10,000 per
child per year in our education system. Could we have schools in which we
will spend only $6,000 per child? The rules are: both teachers and pupils
are volunteers. The budget is fixed; if this requires two grades per
classroom so be it. Teachers and principals have full disciplinary authority
including the authority to send disruptive and unresponsive students back to
the mainstream. No one has a "right" to be in these schools, which are, by
definition, "inferior" in that there is less spent per pupil here.
Principals have real control over which teachers are
retained in these schools. There is no "tenure". Teachers who are removed
from these schools go back to the "mainstream" schools.
Pupils who flunk out of these schools go back to the
mainstream.
Parents and PTA and so forth are free to augment
what's spent on the schools by fund raising.
The point is that we provide "inferior" schools for
our bright kids; but it's voluntary. You don't have to go to these
"inferior" schools; indeed, you have to compete to get into them if there
are more applicants than spaces for them.
I recall that for my first 8 years in school, 1-3 in
Catholic school, the rest in Capleville consolidated in rural Tennessee
(half an hour on a school bus to get there in the morning), we had two
grades to the classroom and about 30 pupils per grade. We also had strict
discipline and fairly strict standards. In my case, I didn't get a lot of
attention from the teachers, but I did get some from the librarian, and no
one bothered me if I read a book during the half of the time when the
teacher was concerned with the other grade.
Now I am sure we can do better than that for $6,000
per pupil, but my point is that if it were that bad it would still be better
than what we have now.
Or have I lost my mind?
===========================
It is of course possible to muck
anything up.
Lunar X Prize
Bob Cringley has a very interesting post on the iron
law of bureaucracy and the fellows running the Lunar X Prize.
In Summary - micromanagement, rule changes, too many
rules, some of which make no sense...the iron law in action it seems. So
Team Cringley is going to the moon without Goggle's prize money and plans to
do so profitably to boot!
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080530_004991.html
Jim Coffey
I thought of forming a Lunar X-Prize group, but it
was pretty clear to me from the beginning that the rules were not likely to
be conducive to making the effort. Cringely's solution, to go it alone
without reference to the X Prize Foundation, is probably correct, and using
media money expectations for finance source makes sense.
I can recall way back in the 50's that the first
earth orbiting satellite could have been done as a Disney special effect --
that it, the Minimum Orbiting Unmanned Satellite Earth (MOUSE) could have
been financed and built as a private venture, but it would have taken some
technology releases that government was unwilling to do, and while
negotiations were continuing the Russians sent up Sputnik. But it
wasn't impossible, and it might well have happened.
Rocket science is public. R0cket technology tends to
arcana. Combustion chamber geometries are tricky. And so forth.
I haven't done the costing for soft landing a
package on the Moon, but my first WAG is that $5 million is not enough
unless you start with a company with considerable experience. John Carmack
has spent about half a million a year for some time now and has learned a
lot about rockets. There are other private companies (other than the Big
Guys, who can't even write a proposal without spending $5 million) with some
relevant experience.
We know the delta-vee for getting from here to the
Lunar surface, and we can figure the mass ratio given the payload size.
Indeed, I recall doing some of that back when we were doing some rough
designs on Pilgrim in the 60's. (We also looked at preliminary design
descriptions for hard landing supplies directed to a beacon.) It seemed
marginally possible then with kerosene and LOX, and we have better guidance
and control now; but I think it likely that the costs are going to be a lot
higher than the estimates I have seen.
What I would really like to see is a $10 billion
private effort to build a Lunar Colony. It could be the Microsoft Lunar
Research Facility. There was a time when I was certain I could make that
happen: not that I know so much, but those who can do it would work for me.
I said a long time ago that the philanthropist or
statesman who successfully takes mankind to space will be remembered when
Columbus and Isabella the Great are long forgotten...
Alas, I'm a bit old to take on such responsibilities
now; but if anyone wants to go down in history and has the money, I could
arrange to make it happen. I still know the people who know how to do it.
================
And now it's time to go help Rick organize Roman
Marines and do some navy stuff on Tran...
=============
About 700 words.
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