Ressurrecting the F1 rocket

Wired has published an article that ties the present space program to the highly successful Apollo program many decades ago. We might be on the verge of recreating the F1 rocket engine. Lots of amazing facts and figures here:

There has never been anything like the Saturn V, the launch vehicle that powered the United States past the Soviet Union to a series of manned lunar landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The rocket redefined "massive," standing 110 metres in height and producing a ludicrous 34 meganewtons of thrust from the five monstrous, kerosene-gulping Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engines that made up its first stage.

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Kokura, Japan: a wrenching story about luck

I recently stumbled across an article about the fate of Kokura Japan near the end of World War II. In a sentence, cloudy weather saved the people of Kokura from being consumed in the world's second nuclear bomb attack. Those same clouds doomed the people of Nagasaki.

A young man named Kermit Beahan peered through the rubber eyepiece of the bombsight, and he could see some of the buildings of Kokura and the river that ran by the arms factory, but the complex itself was blocked by a cloud. So Bock's Car gave up on Kokura and went on to its secondary target, Nagasaki. Clouds also partly obscured Nagasaki, but not quite enough of it. The plutonium bomb killed somewhere around 100,000 people in Nagasaki, and it was the most powerful blast the world had ever seen, significantly more so than the one three days earlier when a uranium bomb destroyed Hiroshima. Nagasaki was destined for the history books, and Kokura was forgotten.

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Modern paradox: Well-informed futility

SANDRA STEINGRABER (part of an interview with Bill Moyers):

Yeah. Well-informed futility is an idea that psychologists hit upon in the 1960s, specifically to explain why the people watching television news about the Vietnam War came to feel more and more futile about it. Whereas people who watched less television felt less futile. So it seemed like a paradox, right? The more informed you are, you think of knowledge as power. But in fact, there is a way in which knowledge can be incapacitating. And so the psychologists went further and now have applied this to the environmental crisis and point out to us that whenever there's a problem that seems big and overwhelming, climate change would be one, and at the same time, it's not apparent that your own actions have any meaningful agency to solve that problem, you're filled with such a sense of despair or guilt or rage that it becomes unbearable. And so my response to that is basically what the book Raising Elijah is all about. So I try to take well-informed futility as my starting point and let people know that there is a way out of this. But because we can't -- I can't honestly tell you that the problem is less bad than it is, the response has to be that we scale up our actions. So the problem is huge. And so our actions have to be huge as well.

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Detecting churnalism

Have you ever wondered whether a story is original journalism, or merely a tweaked version of a story that previously appeared elsewhere? The Sunlight Foundation has just released a new tool to detect "churnalism":

Today, the Sunlight Foundation has unveiled a tool that will help us all with this work. "The tool is, essentially, an open-source plagiarism detection engine," web developer Kaitlin Devine explained to me. It will scan any text (a news article, e.g.) and compare it with a corpus of press releases and Wikipedia entries. If it finds similar language, you'll get a notification of a detected "churn" and you'll be able to take a look at the two sources side by side. You can also use it to check Wikipedia entries for information that may have come from corporate press releases.

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We have lost our republic.

I just finished watching an inspiring TED talk by Lawrence Lessig, who implored:"We have lost our republic. We all need to act to get it back." What else can you say when only about .26% (don't miss the decimal) of American give any significant amount to federal candidates running for office. Also consider that only .00042% of Americans (that's only 132 people) gave 60% of the SuperPac money in 2012. Politicians spend 30-70% of their time seeking money for reelection. This corrupts the entire political process, in that our politicians vote so as to keep their funders happy, not the people generally. Thanks to corrupt federal laws and terrible rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, the entire political process is corrupt, and it is legally corrupt. Very few people run the political process. Lessig argues that we can no longer ignore the corruption because this tiny number of people can block any meaningful political reform on every major issue. Nothing is getting done in Congress anymore, and that is the future unless we force the system to change. thus, election reform might not be THE most important issue (there are many important issues), but it is the "First Issue." Nothing else is going to get done unless we address election finance reform. Reforming the system is not a conceptually difficult issue. All we need to do is make sure the funding for our candidates comes from a wider swath of people. We need to spread out the influence of the funders. There are many worthy proposals out there that do this, such as the Fair Elections Act, John Sarbanes' Grassroots Democracy Act, or optimally, the American Anti-Corruption Act put forwarded by the Represent.us organization. All we need to do is "change the incentives." Lessig implores the audience: "Prove the pundits wrong. If you love the republic, act. We have lost our republic. We all need to act to get it back." We need to restore our republic, our representative democracy, meaning "a government dependent on people alone. I would make one additional suggestion. We should either enact a meaningful grass roots campaign funding system, or we should stop celebrating the Fourth of July. Or alternatively, until we enact grassroots campaign funding, we should celebrate the "Anti-Fourth of July."

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