OK, but Why?.

Titled “4 (Million) Eyes”:

This is a publicity shot for Micreon GmbH of Hannover, Germany. It took a pulsed titanium-sapphire laser to cut the eyeglass frames from an itty-bitty, thin sheet of tungsten, and then a pair of tweezers, a microscope, and two weeks of labor to get them on the (very dead) fly.

It’s supposed to “demonstrate the precision possible with femtosecond lasers.”

Ooookay.

Hey! You Kids! Get Off the Planet!

(Blogging from work again. Left last night at 7:00PM, back again at 6:15AM.)

Physicist Stephen Hawking recently declared that humans must go into space if we want to survive as a species. I’m pretty much with him on that one. I’d hoped (since I grew up on Florida’s Space Coast during the race to the moon) that we’d already have colonies on the moon and a significant presence in space.

Two guys floating around Earth in a Greyhound Bus is not a “significant presence” in my book.

There are two hurdles that have to be overcome for this to happen, though. One: we have to have the will to do it. Two: we have to have the money. To some extent will equals money, but even if the ready cash was on hand, if you’re not willing to spend it on getting out of here, then it might as well not exist. Leaving the planet is expensive – or at least it will be until we develop technologies that reduce the cost.

Right now it costs (officially) about $5-10k to put one pound into low Earth orbit. The real cost, when you add in the expense of the support infrastructure behind a launch and ground support during a mission, is probably more on the order of $40-50k. Assuming your average buck-naked human being weighs 150Lb (obviously we’re not talking about your average American here) and you’re looking at between $1.5 and $75 million dollars just to put someone into a not-too-stable orbit around the Big Blue Marble. Getting to escape velocity costs a lot more. (The $1.5M price tag obviously ignores things like life-support.)

There are other ways to get into space. Glenn Reynolds thinks that a Space Elevator is a good idea, and the idea of a gigantic magnetic-induction catapult has been floating around for decades, but both are multi-billion dollar investments with engineering, safety, environmental, and materials problems of their own.

I’m not sure the United States has the political will to do the job. At this point, I’m not sure we have the political will to defeat the forces of Islamism. I’ve written before that it’s possible that China may be the country that first succeeds in colonizing off-planet. Dictatorships don’t have as much of a problem with “political will” as democratic forms do, and they can wring the money out of the rest of the world, so long as we keep buying from what are largely State-owned industries.

In the same speech, Hawking said,

We are getting closer to answering the age-old questions: Why are we here? Where did we come from?

That’s great, but I’m more interested in “Where are we going, and how will we get there?”

OK, THIS is FUNNY!.

From AR15.com, I bring you Weekend at Zarqawi’s:

And it goes very well with Iowahawks’ last missive from the Zarqman, Paradise is Overrated, which is worthy of a spew warning: Drink no beverages while reading.

And yes, I’m taking pleasure in the ridicule of the death of a (notional) human being.

Scraping Off the Rust

I was listening to talk radio the other day. I can’t even remember which show it was, but something was said that caught my attention. The speaker said that, while the Right has got talk radio and (to some extent) Fox News and the Right side of the blogosphere, this is a long-haul thing. This is something I’ve alluded to here, when speaking about the cockroach resilience of the Left – they that scatter, mumbling about “repression” and “free speech” when hit with the light of truth and fact, but who come back out once the light has passed, and continue on unscathed and unrepentant.

This person, either an interview subject or a caller, I can’t remember, likened the job to that of keeping the rust on a ship at bay. It’s a job that requires constant labor; sanding, scraping, painting, in order to maintain the ship. If we stop, the rust eventually wins. Well, I’ve been taking a break, at least from the blogosphere end of it. Since I started blogging three years ago, many others have joined their voices, added their scrapers, sanding blocks and paintbrushes to the job. But the force of corrosion haven’t slacked off any, nor do I expect them to. We’ve discussed before the “true believer,” and the opposition is, if nothing else, true believers.

Anyway, I just wanted to post this note to let you know that, even though I’m not posting much, I’m not quitting either. I’ve been spending my downtime (what there is of it) reading and thinking. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time reading up on the philosophers Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. I’m trying to finish David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, and I have two more books lined up after it, Victor Davis Hanson’s Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the past Still Determine how We Fight, how We Live, and how We Think, and Gordon S. Wood’s Revolutionary Characters: What Made The Founders Different. I’m going to have to order a copy of James Bowman’s Honor: A History because my local Barnes & Noble doesn’t carry it. Before too much longer, I’ll start writing again. For those of you hanging in there, checking in periodically: Thanks. I appreciate it.

I’ll be back.

But, But, It’s Not a Religious War…

So, we whacked Al-Zarqawi. Good for us. Really. There’s not too many people out there who need to be dead more than he. But the opposition’s response?

The death of our leaders is life for us. It will only increase our persistence in continuing holy war so that the word of God will be supreme. – Abu Abdel- Rahman al-Iraqi deputy “emir” of al- Qaida in Iraq

Nope. If we just leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone, right? They only hate us because of our political interference in the Middle East!

I don’t think so. And I have yet to figure out why the Left refuses (not failsrefuses) to recognize this.

I Hope He was Playing “Amazing Grace”.

A lone bagpiper plays a lament overlooking
Juno Beach in Courseulles-sur-Mer (AP Photo)

I Am Not a Great Fan of Nuclear Power.

Someone once said, “Using nuclear fission to boil water is like cutting butter with a chainsaw.” In large part, I’m in agreement with that assessment.

If you’re going to use radioactive materials to produce power, however, it seems to me that it would be logical to standardize on a design. The French have done that, and produce 62,466 MW – about 78% of their total production – using 59 identical reactors. The U.S. generates 96,245 MW with 103 reactors – no more than three of which, to my knowledge, are identical to any other. The latest to be commissioned, Watts Bar Unit 1 in Tennessee, was licensed for construction in 1973, and finally came on line in 1996 – 23 years later at a cost of $6.8 billion. It has a maximum output 1,167MW of power. Its operating license expires in 2035. Construction on Unit 2 was stopped by the utility – no word on how much money that ate. The price of power varies with demand, but $60/MW-H is a reasonable working figure.

You calculate the payback.

But nuclear power appears to be, in all honesty, our only option for increasing demands for power generation. Even Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, has not only written a strong defense of nuclear power plants, he has become co-chair of a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, to support increased the use of nuclear energy.

It says something when even a staunch tree-hugger embraces the atom.

The only really bad accident the nuclear power industry has suffered is Chernobyl, twenty years ago last April. Three Mile Island was bad, but the containment structure did its job. Chernobyl, however, was a disaster of a plant in the first place – an inherently dangerous design, everyone agrees. However, I’ve seen lately some pieces saying that perhaps the Chernobyl disaster wasn’t all that bad. For example, the Kid of Speed site where a young woman from Kiev motorcycles through the area, and this BBC piece on the hardiness of the local fauna.

Pardon me if I’m a little bit more humanocentric, though. Before we enthusiastically embrace the atom ourselves again, I’d like it if members of Congress, the Executive branch, and the nuclear power industry would sit down for a few minutes and watch this slide show by photographer Paul Fusco concerning the human cost of a serious accident.

I believe nuclear power is necessary. We’ve got to get the cost and time required to build such plants down closer to the range of normal coal or gas plants. But they’ve got to be safe.

I can’t imagine anything better at emphasising that fact than Paul Fusco’s photographs.

Warning: Some of those photographs are disturbing. And they should be.