Hopefully Interesting

Here's  some speculation that Tesla's new Model X is mostly about developing an automated electric taxi. James Lind  pioneered medical trials in figuring out that limes can prevent scurvy.  But by 1911 the measures used to fight scurvy had become ineffective without anybody realizing it because they changed how the lime juice was prepared without checking to see if it was still effective.  Nobody knew what vitamins were and nobody was going to give someone scurvy and then see if the new preparation cured it. But in more optimistic news, this month the United Launch Alliance completed 100 satellite launches in a row with no failures.  Considering that this is rocket science and that somewhat more than one out of every 20 satellite launches fails that's really impressive.  So happy 100! In other space news that doesn't actually take place in space The Martian came out and I loved it.  It captured most of what I loved about the book, was really p...

I recently read a blog post   talking about the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular. Jai then goes on to list a bunch of examples which it would probably be worth your while to read through but that's the important part there.  It's a thing I had noticed before in a few places.  Here's a short passage from Debt: The First 5000 Years: In the early decades of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in an attempt to prove that "natives...

An alternate possibility is to locate a colony on the surface of another planet. Most recently, the case for colonizing the surface of Mars has been argued by Zubrin [1996]. However, at least compared to the benign environment of Earth, the surface of Mars has several disadvantages. It has a low atmospheric pressure, low temperatures, and high exposure to cosmic radiation, and, while it is not a zero-gravity environment, it is not yet known whether the roughly one-third Earth-normal gravity of Mars is sufficient to avoid the bone decalcification and muscle tone loss experienced by astronauts in microgravity. So let's colonize Venus  (pdf) Here's a blog on art at Burning Man .  Here's some more . Sort of makes me want to go. There was a recent quiz  on Vox to help people figure out how much their political beliefs influence their factual beliefs.  I'm reminded of  this . This  huge photo of Pluto is gorgeous.   This  has a lot of good p...