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The Moon, Bitches!
The San Jose Merc embarassed itself with a column by noted "science journalist" Charles Krauthammer. In a jumble of illogic, bad science and innumeracy, Krauthammer advocates colonizing the moon.
Krauthammer criticizes the the international space station saying that the inspiration it provides has no utility, and implies that therefore it doesn't justify government expenditure.
There's nothing quite as beautiful as the space station and the shuttle that services it, and nothing quite as useless. Now, that can be said of many things: a balance-beam dismount, a Shakespeare sonnet, a chess problem by Nabokov. But none of these is financed by taxpayers and none makes a claim to utility. They are there for reasons of aesthetics, and perhaps amusement.
Yet the inspiration provided by a trailer park on the moon
would justify government expenditure.
If you find any value, any lift of the spirit in a beautiful mathematical proof, in an elegant balletic turn, in any of the myriad human endeavors that have no utility but only breathtaking beauty, then you should feel something when our little species succeeds in establishing new life in a void that for all eternity had been the province of the gods.
So which is it Chuck? Are science and exploration worthy of tax dollars or not?
Krauthammer points out beyond the inspiration provided by a lunar base, there's material value.
Moreover, the moon base is not pointless. The shuttles were on an endless trip to the nowhere of low Earth orbit. The moon is a destination. The idea this time is not to go plant a flag, take a golf shot and leave, but to stay and form a real self-sustaining, extraterrestrial human colony. ... There are all kinds of materials to be exploited, observations of the cosmos to be made, and knowledge to be gained on how best to live off the land away from Earth.
Krauthammer is evidently completely ignorant of how astronomy works these days. Astronomers don't need to bundle up for cold nights spent staring through an eyepiece. They use fricking computers. Images are captured with digital sensors, and are transmitted through computer networks. This applies whether the telescope is in Hawaii, earth orbit, or somewhere else in the solar system.
And the concept of a "self-sustaining" colony, living off the land? My oh my! What can I say? First, there's this little project called Biosphere 2. That's a hell of a lot cheaper platform for doing self-sustaining experiements than a colony 240,000 miles from the surface of the Earth. Second, the goal learning how to create a colony assumes that human space travellers have a valuable role to play in extra-planetary exploration. Krauthammer gives the justification that people are better than robots.
But it still brings back science. Humans can discover things through intuition and pattern recognition that machines thinking in algorithms cannot. Imagine the scientific possibilities if today we had humans patrolling Mars rather than the brilliantly programmed but still limited golf carts now roaming the surface.
I don't have tolerance for ignorant people expounding on technology policy. Krauthammer is making an ass of himself. A valid comparison is not a team of humans vs. the carts now on Mars. For the cost of sending humans to Mars, we could send thousands of robotic missions. What's better, a small group of fragile humans who can visit for a short visit, or thousands of semi-autonomous devices that can study vast stretches of Mars for years, and years?
If travel to the Moon and to Mars make no sense from a science and technology policy perspective, then what's the motivation. Could it be that the Air Force Space Command needs a new vehicle to maintain superiority on the high frontier? Why aren't the proponets honest about their motivations? Why do they need to hide behind the marketing message of missions of discovery?
iPod 2nd Generation Shuffle Dock
While there are all sorts of Apple and third party accessories for iPods, the 1st and 2nd generation shuffles sometimes get the short shrift.
The 2nd gen has a 3.5 mm jack that has contacts for left, right, power and ground. Somewhere in there is the serial connection for USB up/download. It's easy to hook up either audio or power + USB, but it's hard to find a device that allows hooking up audio + power.
After a lot of googling, I found the right 2nd gen shuffle cradle. (They have a goofy frame-based web site, so you have to drill down through iPod accessories, and iPod cradles to get to the link.) I ordered it direct from that web site. It arrived in a week or so USPS. I tested it with an Apple HiFi connected by a 3.5 mm male-to-male cable, and it worked fine.
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