Tag: stupid

Nuclear space propulsion

Project Orion: Atom bombs as propellants. Those 50s guys had balls.

2007-05-04: Project Pluto

SLAM’s simple but revolutionary design called for the use of nuclear ramjet power, which would give the missile virtually unlimited range. Air forced into a duct as the missile flew would be heated by the reactor, causing it to expand, and exhaust out the back, providing thrust. Pluto’s namesake was Roman mythology’s ruler of the underworld — seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at 3x the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto’s designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto’s nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by


2014-11-23: The reason the Philae lander died after 60h is because the ESA couldn’t fit it with a nuclear battery, too much paranoia in Europe.
2017-12-04: A 10kw nuclear reactor for space exploration from nasa. bravo, especially considering the silliness of esa restrictions on nuclear propulsion in space.

2019-12-04: Pulsed Fission Fusion

Pulsed Fission-Fusion should be able to achieve 15 kW/kg and 30K seconds of ISP. This will be orders of magnitude improvement over competing systems such as nuclear electric, solar electric, and nuclear thermal propulsion that suffer from lower available power and inefficient thermodynamic cycles.

2022-01-30: How serious is NASA about nuclear?

Today’s push for nuclear power in space is a useful metric for measuring the seriousness of NASA’s—and the nation’s—lunar and Martian ambitions. In the context of human spaceflight, NASA has a well-known aversion to “new” (and thus presumably more risky) technology—but in this case, the “old” way makes an already perilous human endeavor needlessly difficult. For all the challenges of embracing nuclear power for pushing the horizon outward for humans in space, it is hard to make the case that tried-and-true chemical propulsion is easier or carries significantly less physical—and political—risk. Launching 10 International Space Stations’ worth of mass across 27 superheavy rocket launches for fuel alone for a single Mars mission would be a difficult pace for NASA to sustain. (That is more than 40 launches and at least $80b if the agency relies on the SLS.) And such a scenario assumes everything goes perfectly: sending help to a troubled crew on or around Mars would require 10s of additional fuel launches, and chemical propulsion allows very limited windows of opportunity for the liftoff of any rescue mission.

If, with a single technology, that alarmingly high number of ludicrously expensive launches could be cut down to 3—while also offering more chances to travel to Mars and back—how could a space agency that was earnest in its ambitions not pursue that approach? No miracles are necessary, and regulators and appropriators seem to agree that the time has come.

We can fly to Mars. Splitting atoms, it seems, is now the safest way to make that happen.

Family Values Film Criticism

Recently, when trying to find out about films I’ve wanted to rent, I’ve forgone the usual paganistic blogs, flesh-worshiping review sites, upside-down crucifix-wearing DVD listing books and also IMDB.com (which I’ve heard eats aborted human fetuses). I’ve cleansed my palate, and opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking when it comes to the art of film, while using the ChildCare Action Project: Christian Analysis of American Culture (CAP) movie review database. With it’s highly detailed reviews of 100s of titles, it’s a refreshingly different look at every movie I’ve ever loved. The key? It filters every title through it’s biblical-based value rating system and “society influence density” scoring chart while it theorizes, theorizes, theorizes away about how almost every movie is just plain wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s all some of the most refreshing film criticism I’ve ever read

ah the culture wars. too funny

The Malcolm Gladwell Problem

All of Gladwell’s tics are on display in service of an article that mostly feels bottom-drawer, like something rejected twice and then run out of sympathy.

An example: Gladwell cheerfully quotes Platinum Blue CEO (Mike McCready) on the wonderful job his software does separating hits from flops in the music business. His evidence? McCready claims to have ID-ed Norah Jones “Come Away with Me” album back in 2002 as a monster. How do we know McCready did this? He says he did, and Gladwell quotes him saying “a local newspaper in Barcelona” interviewed him then and he told them. But we are not told which newspaper, which day, etc.

Where gladwell is taken down a notch for his crappy analysis

Prediction Markets

Internet gambling is good for consumers. Too bad America wants to ban it

The spread of the internet has made the online gambler king. The emergence of large online gambling companies has slashed gaming operators’ margins and driven up payout ratios for gamblers. And the punters have embraced it in their millions, especially in America, where illegal gambling has long flourished. Last year 12m Americans placed about $6b in online bets, 50% the world’s total. You might have hoped politicians would greet such a demonstration of popularity with moderation—welcoming online gambling’s benefits and curbing its inevitable excesses. Instead they have put all their chips on red. Last weekend Congress passed a bill that will stop banks making payments to online gambling sites, adding to an already formidable legislative arsenal that outlaws most online gaming.

congress just killed a golden goose.
2006-12-03: uh crap i would have LOVED to attend this one. prediction markets is one of my permathreads.
2007-01-30: performance matters for betting markets too. to get even faster you’d have to factor out the humans clicking the buttons, but i guess that would require betting to grow up from being entertainment.
2007-04-24:

The key drivers in both filtering and consensus making in such systems is often positive feedback. For Digg, good stories get “dug” which makes them more likely to be seen and dug further. Poor stories do not get dug, rank lower, are less likely to be dug and slowly disappear. In ant trails, pheromone deposition stimulates further deposition if the food source really is good. Perhaps software developers should be given a cache of tokens. They can give the manager of a project 2 tokens each day if they think the project worth continuing. The manager can hire a programmer for the day [for 1 token] if he has enough tokens. Thus, crappy projects soon get filtered out by consensus. [The 2 vs 1 token prevents too much fluidity in the project and damps some random fluctuations].

2007-12-06:

In a new book, “Imperfect Knowledge Economics”, Mr Frydman sets out an alternative approach to prediction, in which the forecaster recognizes that his model will inevitably be less than perfect. Their work has received glowing praise from Nobel-prize-winning economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Edmund Phelps, who wrote the introduction to the book—though it is unlikely to have gone down so well with Robert Lucas, who won the Nobel for his work on rational expectations.

2008-01-07:

Despite the markets’ strong forecasting abilities, there is a slight optimistic bias driven mainly by new employees. On average, outcomes that were good for Google were overpriced by 20%. This bias was strongest on days after appreciations in Google stock and, ironically, for outcomes under our own control! We also find biases against extreme outcomes and short selling. Given a range of 5 outcomes, the middle ones were typically overpriced and unprofitable by comparison with the outliers.

hmm, i must have slept through that one.
2021-04-21:

are prediction markets doomed to repeat errors as grave as giving Trump a 15% chance of overturning the election in early December, and a 12% chance of overturning it even after the Supreme Court including 3 judges whom he appointed telling him to screw off? My answer is, surprisingly, an emphatic yes, and I see a few reasons for optimism.

2022-02-09:

In 2010, Philip Tetlock (one of the signatories on the pro-prediction market letter) did some pretty basic forecasting work, not even prediction market level, and proved that he could significantly outperform top analysts at the CIA with access to classified information. The government refused to hire him or use any of his methods, and continued shutting down new prediction markets as they arose. Polymarket is probably the biggest prediction market currently available. US law considers unlicensed prediction markets to be somewhere between illegal gambling and illegal futures trading, ie definitely illegal. The US is becoming the North Korea of forecasting. Every other civilized country allows prediction markets. In a perfect world, they could ignore our constant own goals and move on without us. But because America has a disproportionate share of money, users, coders, and entrepreneurs, a US-less prediction market ecosystem won’t be living up to its potential. That means decreased ability to gather and process information and worse decision-making worldwide.

Intrusive Canada

So … they promptly sent me off to secondary inspection and did a full search of my hard-drive for all images. All 19k of them, as it turned out, including family pictures and presentation silliness, but was mostly program images, clip art from Word, temp file detritus, etc. Who knew there was so much junk? But why the bug hunt? As most readers will have now surmised, which I didn’t straight away in my sleep-deprived state, they were looking for illicit pictures. In the digital age, laptops are apparently the new cross-border smuggling mules.

border control checking all pictures on a laptop. bizarre, and a losing proposition. i had no idea that the mullahs had come to canada, too.