bitpunk,

“ The world does need idealism and young people; but why waste your talents on FOSS? Go out and save the Siberian tiger; why not? Its absolutely beautiful and worth fighting for. What the world does not need is another buggy open source copy of Windows Media Player. ”

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Deciding NASA’s future gave Obama a chance to show visionary leadership. He could have replaced AresI/Ares5 with the simpler cost saving DIRECT/Jupiter rocket. He could have redirected the Moon/Mars effort towards a sustainable human exploratory presence on Mars rather than a lengthly lunar detour. He could have paid for the effort with cuts to the Pentagon’s bloated budget. He could have made a ringing call for international cooperation in a great new human adventure. After years of being disgusted and ashamed of our country, he could have given Americans a reason to feel proud again. Instead, he simply canceled Constellation with only vague references to developing new rocket technology and no plan or timetable for sending humans to Mars. Apparently, there’s now nothing left of American manned spaceflight except the dubious Reagan/Gingerich notion of privatizing it. It’s true that the robotic space program is currently much more scientifically productive than human spaceflight. However, we need to invest now for the long term future. In the long run, humans on Mars and beyond can do a much more through and flexible job of exploring than can any robots we are likely to develop in this century. There are other reasons besides science for manned spaceflight. Cooperative international manned flight provides a highly visible arena in which nations can work together towards a common goal. Binding nations together in a common endeavor is necessary to achieve other goals vital to the survival of global civilization, like stopping global warming and controlling nuclear weapons. The public space program is also one non-military way of investing in the development of new technologies that private investors consider too risky. I’ll grant that, given the unsolved problem of astronaut exposure to galactic cosmic rays, humans to Mars might not be the right visionary goal, just yet. There are lots of other visionary goals to choose from. What about a new generation of space telescopes to characterize Earth-like extrasolar planets, and test their atmospheres for the tell-tale signs of life? NASA’s terrestrial planet finder and life finder space telescopes are nothing more than design studies crying out for funding. How about implementing them with a definite budget and timetable? How about a robotic sample return from Mars within less than eight years (ie. before Obama’s putative second term is up)? Surely America can do *something* besides fight endless pointless wars and cut budgets on everything else.

I voted for Obama with hope and enthusiasm. Unfortunately, he’s repeatedly shown a lack of vision about reviving America. First, he made the abysmally bad choice of escalating Bush’s ruinously expensive war in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. On health care reform, he failed to make a strong push for a robust public health care option to control the costs of our corrupt and greedy private health care system. Where is his leadership on the critical issue of global warming? It surely wasn’t in evidence at the failed Copenhagen Climate Conference. Now, he seems to have failed at providing a renewed vision for America’s space program. In the face of crying public needs and a middle class in collapse, Obama has chosen to freeze domestic spending rather than to restore taxation of the wealthiest Americans to pre-Reagan levels. Obama seems to have forgotten that, as a supposed Democrat, he is heir to the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. I hope the Europeans are ready to take over as the leaders among the world’s democracies, because the US is no longer capable of anything except senseless militarism and private greed.

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“ It was at another conference some twenty-eight years ago, just before the moderator’s opening remarks, that the Rome-born architect and theorist Bruno Zevi pushed back from the roundtable and rose from his seat to declare, “I denounce the presence at this symposium of the fascist Philip Johnson.” The audience at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design shifted nervously in their chairs. ”

“ My late colleague Evsey Domar, who was, among other things, a student of the Soviet economy, told us how the planning bureau began by setting production quotas for paper factories in tons per year. The result was paper so thick that it could not fit in a Soviet typewriter or anywhere else. So the clever planning bureau changed to setting quotas in terms of square meters per year. The result was paper so thin that even a member of the planning bureau could see right through it. ”

“ Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors. ”

“ Eleven years later I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its efforts—and doubled Deep Blue’s processing power—and I lost the rematch in an event that made headlines around the world. The result was met with astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind’s submission before the almighty computer. (“The Brain’s Last Stand” read the Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world. ”

“ In a quality product, the incremental comfort value of thread counts over 300 is very little. A 300 thread count can feel far superior to a 1000 thread count. Thread count has become a simple metric used by marketing people to capture interest and impress with high numbers. The problem with mass produced high thread count sheets is that to keep the price down, important elements of quality must be sacrificed, meaning in the end the customer gets a product with an impressive thread count but that probably feels no better (or even worse) than something with a lower thread count. ”