1. I have discovered the one good argument for the US not negotiating directly with the Iranians: they would hand us our ass. I reached this conclusion after reading the Q&A after Bush’s 10 April speech at SAIS. He said: One of the decisions I made early on was to have a multinational approach to …
Science is Fun!
by | 2006-04-30 | 1 Comment
After reading much of Ann Finkbeiner’s The Jasons, I found myself with several people swapping stories about Dick Garwin. Matthew Bunn had the best of the bunch, which involved Garwin explaining to him how the conservation of kinetic energy might allow a certain type of ball to return after being bounced on the floor and …
DART Mishap Report
by | 2006-04-27 | 2 Comments
When NASA’s DART satellite bumped into another spacecraft during an attempted a “proximity operation”—think the docking sequence to The Blue Danube Waltz in 2001: A Space Odyssey , only clumsy—some folks were pretty embarrased. As usually happens with a high profile failure, NASA convened convenes a blue-ribbon panel of graybeards … oh you get the …
Communicating with SSBNs
by | 2006-04-24 | 2 Comments
I’ve been reading, and enjoying, Ann Finkbeiner’s The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite, an account of the Jason scientific advisory panel. One chapter details a Jason study that led to the deployment of two extremely low frequency (ELF) radio transmitters in Wisconsin and Michigan to communicate with submarines deep underwater: Besides nonattenuation, …
