When speaking or writing in the third person, sir was used as a prefix to names of knights and priests. In direct address it was used much more broadly: in the Canterbury Tales the innkeeper is addressed as sire hoste, and a monk, friar, canon, summoner, cook, doctor, man of law, yeoman and Chaucer himself are all addressed as sir.
In the Paston letters master is used as a third person prefix for clerks, either lay or religious, as well as when the writer is an employee of the person described. Where the individual is identifiable these seem to have been the only uses in the letters. The records of Mercer's Company of London used master in the same way, and as a prefix for officers of the gild: the masters of the gild, aldermen and wardens. Ordinary masters of apprentices who were not officers were named without the prefix. Civic aldermen and mayors also received the prefix of master.
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Newt on Space Policy
Gingrich has good and original ideas. Unfortunately, his good ideas aren't original and his original ideas aren't good.
This snarkiness is not original, but it seems apt.
Good but not original:
1) Incremental development is better than betting everything on your initial design working perfectly.
2) Space Exploration can cost less with greater use of private enterprise.
3) A permanent base on the Lunar surface is a reasonable and achievable goal.
Original but not good:
1) Lincoln was grandiose.
2) The Wright brothers were grandiose.
3) "We had enormous breakthroughs in aviation in the 20s and 30s at very little cost to the government"
4) We build fewer new airplane designs than during the WWII era because of "how slow and cumbersome and bureaucratic we’ve become." As opposed to because a state of the art airplane today is enormously more capable, sophisticated and challenging to design than one was in 1940.
5) The Apollo program is one we should emulate today, because it achieved ambitious goals on a tight deadline. (It did so being willing to waste anything but time, building an enormous new Federal bureaucracy. It did so by so ruthlessly subordinated the program to the national prestige goal of getting a man to the moon on schedule that the wonderful hardware was unsustainable for other purposes and was abandoned)
6) Orbital manufacturing will be commercially viable by 2020.
7) We can afford to develop an enormously challenging "continuous propulsion system in space capable of getting to Mars in a remarkably short time" by 2020, at the same time as we build a permanent base on the moon.
8) Prizes are an awesome idea of broad application. Private enterprises will often be willing to spend billions of dollars of their own money to win a government prize worth a fraction of their investment.
The man flits from idea to idea like a gigantic over-caffeinated hummingbird, sipping briefly to decide if the idea is sufficiently bold and grandiose.
I think he's very right on good idea #2. However, that one is going to very difficult to get through Congress, who have the final say on if it gets funded. Does he have the temperament and focus to get that one passed if elected? Or will he be off to the next bold idea, good or otherwise? He has so many, and so many are wrong.
This snarkiness is not original, but it seems apt.
Good but not original:
1) Incremental development is better than betting everything on your initial design working perfectly.
2) Space Exploration can cost less with greater use of private enterprise.
3) A permanent base on the Lunar surface is a reasonable and achievable goal.
Original but not good:
1) Lincoln was grandiose.
2) The Wright brothers were grandiose.
3) "We had enormous breakthroughs in aviation in the 20s and 30s at very little cost to the government"
4) We build fewer new airplane designs than during the WWII era because of "how slow and cumbersome and bureaucratic we’ve become." As opposed to because a state of the art airplane today is enormously more capable, sophisticated and challenging to design than one was in 1940.
5) The Apollo program is one we should emulate today, because it achieved ambitious goals on a tight deadline. (It did so being willing to waste anything but time, building an enormous new Federal bureaucracy. It did so by so ruthlessly subordinated the program to the national prestige goal of getting a man to the moon on schedule that the wonderful hardware was unsustainable for other purposes and was abandoned)
6) Orbital manufacturing will be commercially viable by 2020.
7) We can afford to develop an enormously challenging "continuous propulsion system in space capable of getting to Mars in a remarkably short time" by 2020, at the same time as we build a permanent base on the moon.
8) Prizes are an awesome idea of broad application. Private enterprises will often be willing to spend billions of dollars of their own money to win a government prize worth a fraction of their investment.
The man flits from idea to idea like a gigantic over-caffeinated hummingbird, sipping briefly to decide if the idea is sufficiently bold and grandiose.
I think he's very right on good idea #2. However, that one is going to very difficult to get through Congress, who have the final say on if it gets funded. Does he have the temperament and focus to get that one passed if elected? Or will he be off to the next bold idea, good or otherwise? He has so many, and so many are wrong.
Gingrich Boldly Urges NASA to Do Stuff It Is Already Doing
...the Atlas 5 ought to be interchangeable, and ought to be as usable for NASA projects as it is for Air Force projects.
said Gingrich on January 25 in Florida, presenting it is one of his bold ideas for NASA. NASA has been using Atlas V as a launcher since 2005, for payloads like Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, New Horizons, Juno and Mars Science Laboratory.
It seems a strange thing for a self-described space enthusiast not to know.
Also, he gets the story of the Langley Aerodrome wrong on several counts.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
An Intermediate Plan for Manned Spaceflight Beyond Low Earth Orbit
Start with the mission. First beyond LEO crewed flight is around the moon, the second is to L2. Better yet, the first manned mission goes to to L2: we haven't been there yet and the potential scientific return much greater.
But at L2 we should plan to do work that's worth sending humans, so before that we send a simple man-tended Farside Station. It might be based on an ATV and Node 4. It would have more robust shielding than a capsule could carry and allow longer stays, and have more capable communications. It could have racks for lab animals, testing the effectiveness of the shielding and providing data on the affect of radiation beyond the Van Allen belts.
It would allow the testing of systems essential for long duration manned flight to deep space objects like asteroids and the Martian moons or surface, but still allow relatively quick return in the case of emergencies.
Once the station was in place, the first of a campaign of landers would go to the lunar farside. They would be able to land rovers and return samples to Farside Station.
At the station, crews would teleoperate rovers on the surface, collect samples sent from the Lunar surface and lab animals for return to earth.
A simple Centaur based cryogenic depot would either be attached or fly in formation, providing operational data for that environment. The landers might be reusable single stage vehicles that carried rovers down and samples up and refueled at the depot.
This mission would be less challenging than a manned Lunar landing or even a Plymouth Rock mission to the easiest NEOs, but still provide significant scientific value. I could get enthusiastic about this mission, certainly more so than a Lunar flyby.
Several expeditions could follow the first. International partners could participate by offering redundant logistic and crewed transport support in exchange for their own use of Farside Station without being in the critical path of the project. Additional equipment could be landed on the surface: Power storage or one or more radioisotope thermoelectric generators to enhance the effectiveness of the landed hardware, a drill for deep sampling, and perhaps prototype equipment to process the regolith for oxygen or buried water ice and a robonaut for more dextrous servicing.
Another valuable near term human space flight project would be a variable gravity habitat in LEO. The habitat itself could be a prototype for a lunar surface habitat berthed at one end of the structure. An expended rocket stage could serve as a counterweight at the other. A module at the axis of rotation could provide despun platforms for visiting spacecraft to dock or berth, and a platform for communications. Deployable masts would connect the modules, with suspension cables taking the primary loads when the station was rotating.
The goal would be to provide artificial gravity ranging from as high as Mars surface gravity of .38 g to Lunar gravity of .18 g, or the even lower gravity of Phobos and Deimos, simply by changing the rate of rotation.
Here is a NASA paper on the related problem of providing artificial gravity on a spacecraft bound for Mars.
The paper describes a system that produce 1 g in the habitat, which would require much longer masts and greater angular momentum for the entire system.
And that shows one example of the value of carrying out this program: we have very little information on the long term affects of environments less than 1 g and more than microgravity on the human body.
We know that the human body is pretty well adapted to Earth's gravity. This is not a supirise. Long term exposure to microgravity, on the other hand, has a lot of bad effects, and the human body takes a long time to recover from them.
We know very little about intermediate cases. For Apollo 17, the last mission, two men spent a little over three days on the Lunar surface, plus another nine days and 11 hours in microgravity. The earlier missions were shorter. That's not long term data.
While that happened the first manned asteroid mission would be prepared, more or less as described by HEFT: a deep space craft with a modest hydrogen stage for departure from L-2 and SEP for deep space delta-V, and capable of reaching more than the very easiest targets. The simple cryogenic depot at Farside Station would be sufficient to support this mission.
Alternatively, manned landers staging at Farside station could visit the infrastructure building up on the Lunar surface.
This series of missions could be launched in several ways. It could use the SLS so beloved by space state congressional representatives and MSFC, but the September 2010 HEFT report suggests that because of the enormous development costs and high fixed costs of SLS, the program would need to be stretched and slowed to meet likely budget limitations.
In that document, the first asteroid mission is delayed until 2031, and the program is still $14 billion over budget.
The launcher alone, not including ground operations and the infrastructure to launch it, consumes half the cost of the program. For a point of comparison, launch costs for NASA’s unmanned spacecraft, and for military satellites and commercial comsats rarely exceed 20% of the program cost.
The same program seems much more affordable using existing rockets and propellant depots.
.
But at L2 we should plan to do work that's worth sending humans, so before that we send a simple man-tended Farside Station. It might be based on an ATV and Node 4. It would have more robust shielding than a capsule could carry and allow longer stays, and have more capable communications. It could have racks for lab animals, testing the effectiveness of the shielding and providing data on the affect of radiation beyond the Van Allen belts.
It would allow the testing of systems essential for long duration manned flight to deep space objects like asteroids and the Martian moons or surface, but still allow relatively quick return in the case of emergencies.
Once the station was in place, the first of a campaign of landers would go to the lunar farside. They would be able to land rovers and return samples to Farside Station.
At the station, crews would teleoperate rovers on the surface, collect samples sent from the Lunar surface and lab animals for return to earth.
A simple Centaur based cryogenic depot would either be attached or fly in formation, providing operational data for that environment. The landers might be reusable single stage vehicles that carried rovers down and samples up and refueled at the depot.
This mission would be less challenging than a manned Lunar landing or even a Plymouth Rock mission to the easiest NEOs, but still provide significant scientific value. I could get enthusiastic about this mission, certainly more so than a Lunar flyby.
Several expeditions could follow the first. International partners could participate by offering redundant logistic and crewed transport support in exchange for their own use of Farside Station without being in the critical path of the project. Additional equipment could be landed on the surface: Power storage or one or more radioisotope thermoelectric generators to enhance the effectiveness of the landed hardware, a drill for deep sampling, and perhaps prototype equipment to process the regolith for oxygen or buried water ice and a robonaut for more dextrous servicing.
Another valuable near term human space flight project would be a variable gravity habitat in LEO. The habitat itself could be a prototype for a lunar surface habitat berthed at one end of the structure. An expended rocket stage could serve as a counterweight at the other. A module at the axis of rotation could provide despun platforms for visiting spacecraft to dock or berth, and a platform for communications. Deployable masts would connect the modules, with suspension cables taking the primary loads when the station was rotating.
The goal would be to provide artificial gravity ranging from as high as Mars surface gravity of .38 g to Lunar gravity of .18 g, or the even lower gravity of Phobos and Deimos, simply by changing the rate of rotation.
Here is a NASA paper on the related problem of providing artificial gravity on a spacecraft bound for Mars.
The paper describes a system that produce 1 g in the habitat, which would require much longer masts and greater angular momentum for the entire system.
And that shows one example of the value of carrying out this program: we have very little information on the long term affects of environments less than 1 g and more than microgravity on the human body.
We know that the human body is pretty well adapted to Earth's gravity. This is not a supirise. Long term exposure to microgravity, on the other hand, has a lot of bad effects, and the human body takes a long time to recover from them.
We know very little about intermediate cases. For Apollo 17, the last mission, two men spent a little over three days on the Lunar surface, plus another nine days and 11 hours in microgravity. The earlier missions were shorter. That's not long term data.
While that happened the first manned asteroid mission would be prepared, more or less as described by HEFT: a deep space craft with a modest hydrogen stage for departure from L-2 and SEP for deep space delta-V, and capable of reaching more than the very easiest targets. The simple cryogenic depot at Farside Station would be sufficient to support this mission.
Alternatively, manned landers staging at Farside station could visit the infrastructure building up on the Lunar surface.
This series of missions could be launched in several ways. It could use the SLS so beloved by space state congressional representatives and MSFC, but the September 2010 HEFT report suggests that because of the enormous development costs and high fixed costs of SLS, the program would need to be stretched and slowed to meet likely budget limitations.
In that document, the first asteroid mission is delayed until 2031, and the program is still $14 billion over budget.
The launcher alone, not including ground operations and the infrastructure to launch it, consumes half the cost of the program. For a point of comparison, launch costs for NASA’s unmanned spacecraft, and for military satellites and commercial comsats rarely exceed 20% of the program cost.
The same program seems much more affordable using existing rockets and propellant depots.
.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
The Problem with Prizes
Newt Gingrich has proposed devoting 10% of NASA's budget to prizes to spur the development of space technology, using the early 20th century Orteig Prize and Schneider Trophy and the Ansari X Prize as models.
I think this will be a lot harder to make this work than he seems to think.
Those prizes, as well as the Kremer Prizes for man-powered flight, were effective because in each case the entrants saw a clear way to profit from their hardware beyond the prize itself. Winning the Orteig Prize demonstrated the reliability of long range aircraft, which had obvious commercial application. Two of the losing aircraft became or were developed into successful commercial aircraft.
The Schneider Trophy entrants were valuable test-beds for their builders. The winners of the Kremer Prizes put what they learned about lightweight and efficient airframes to develop a successful line of lightweight and efficient aircraft. The technology used to win the Ansari X prize is now being used in a larger vehicle intended to carry paying passengers on suborbital flights.
Prizes can work well when the prize gives a nudge to someone who already sees a likely or probable market for the technology needed to win.
They can also work well to motivate small teams of volunteers working in their spare time. NASA's Regolith Excavation Challenge seems like a good example of this kind of project.
When neither case applies, the prize model breaks down.
Imagine a 21st century version of the Orteig Prize. It is awarded to the first person since the Apollo program to make a round trip from Earth to the Lunar surface and back.
(We require a round trip because otherwise the easiest way to win is find a terminally ill volunteer for a one way trip)
How much do we have to offer?
The Orteig prize offered $25,000 for the first non-stop flight between new York and Paris. Several entrants spent more than that, but this was rational. If you spent, as one team did, $100,000 for a Fokker triplane, they expected to be able to get most of that back if they lost the race without crashing the plane. It was still valuable for other purposes.
Now, the 21st c. version is much harder. Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in one vehicle. A Lunar mission needs at least three: a lander to reach the lunar surface, a capsule to return to the Earth's surface, and a stage to send these from Earth orbit to the moon.
Also, if you want to use existing launchers, you need the ability to transfer propellant in Earth orbit. This requires some hardware as well, probably a tug and a propellant depot.
Avoiding this requires also developing a much bigger launcher than currently exists.
To win the prize you need to develop, approximately, four new transport systems. At best, three plus some money to modify the existing Soyuz capsule for reliable return at the higher velocities for return from Lunar orbit.
And none of them have a reliable salvage value, because Congress could decide at any time that the Moon is too expensive after all.
Now, suppose you think you can do all this for a mere $10 billion. The prize needs to be a lot bigger than that, because you need to allow for the chance that someone else will get there first, and you will get nothing.
I think this will be a lot harder to make this work than he seems to think.
Those prizes, as well as the Kremer Prizes for man-powered flight, were effective because in each case the entrants saw a clear way to profit from their hardware beyond the prize itself. Winning the Orteig Prize demonstrated the reliability of long range aircraft, which had obvious commercial application. Two of the losing aircraft became or were developed into successful commercial aircraft.
The Schneider Trophy entrants were valuable test-beds for their builders. The winners of the Kremer Prizes put what they learned about lightweight and efficient airframes to develop a successful line of lightweight and efficient aircraft. The technology used to win the Ansari X prize is now being used in a larger vehicle intended to carry paying passengers on suborbital flights.
Prizes can work well when the prize gives a nudge to someone who already sees a likely or probable market for the technology needed to win.
They can also work well to motivate small teams of volunteers working in their spare time. NASA's Regolith Excavation Challenge seems like a good example of this kind of project.
When neither case applies, the prize model breaks down.
Imagine a 21st century version of the Orteig Prize. It is awarded to the first person since the Apollo program to make a round trip from Earth to the Lunar surface and back.
(We require a round trip because otherwise the easiest way to win is find a terminally ill volunteer for a one way trip)
How much do we have to offer?
The Orteig prize offered $25,000 for the first non-stop flight between new York and Paris. Several entrants spent more than that, but this was rational. If you spent, as one team did, $100,000 for a Fokker triplane, they expected to be able to get most of that back if they lost the race without crashing the plane. It was still valuable for other purposes.
Now, the 21st c. version is much harder. Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in one vehicle. A Lunar mission needs at least three: a lander to reach the lunar surface, a capsule to return to the Earth's surface, and a stage to send these from Earth orbit to the moon.
Also, if you want to use existing launchers, you need the ability to transfer propellant in Earth orbit. This requires some hardware as well, probably a tug and a propellant depot.
Avoiding this requires also developing a much bigger launcher than currently exists.
To win the prize you need to develop, approximately, four new transport systems. At best, three plus some money to modify the existing Soyuz capsule for reliable return at the higher velocities for return from Lunar orbit.
And none of them have a reliable salvage value, because Congress could decide at any time that the Moon is too expensive after all.
Now, suppose you think you can do all this for a mere $10 billion. The prize needs to be a lot bigger than that, because you need to allow for the chance that someone else will get there first, and you will get nothing.
Friday, January 27, 2012
The Peculiar Love of Paleolibertarians for an Unlimited Right to Secede
Ron Paul and his fellow travelers think this would be totally awesome. I see at least three problems:
1) In 1869 in Texas vs. White, the Supreme Court ruled that there was no Constitutional right to unilateral secession.
2) As Lincoln noted in 1861, agreeing to this principle would allow a minority in the larger polity to overrule the majority whenever it had a local majority according to the local voting laws.
a) which incidentally, in the case of the antebellum South, sometimes disenfranchised the majority of human beings in the state most likely to object to being treated as property.
3) Had this principle been genrally accepted in 1861, it would have resulted in the unopposed transfer of 3.5 million human beings, held as slaves, from a country that was seriously considering restricting slavery in the immediate future to a country run by unrepresentatively elected slave owners that thought slavery was so obviously wonderful that it needed constitutional protection.
Not, I think, a net gain in liberty.
1) In 1869 in Texas vs. White, the Supreme Court ruled that there was no Constitutional right to unilateral secession.
2) As Lincoln noted in 1861, agreeing to this principle would allow a minority in the larger polity to overrule the majority whenever it had a local majority according to the local voting laws.
a) which incidentally, in the case of the antebellum South, sometimes disenfranchised the majority of human beings in the state most likely to object to being treated as property.
3) Had this principle been genrally accepted in 1861, it would have resulted in the unopposed transfer of 3.5 million human beings, held as slaves, from a country that was seriously considering restricting slavery in the immediate future to a country run by unrepresentatively elected slave owners that thought slavery was so obviously wonderful that it needed constitutional protection.
Not, I think, a net gain in liberty.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
If Newt Became President,..
...how could we be sure he wouldn't leave us for a younger and more attractive country?
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Newt Is Still Newt
MR. GINGRICH: Every person in here knows personal pain.
Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine. (Cheers, applause.)
What's remarkable here is the complete evasion of moral agency. In his life, the Personal Tragedy Fairies came in the night and inserted Callista into his bed. For six years.
MR. GINGRICH: Now, let me be quite clear. Let me be quite clear. The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period says the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren't interested, because they would like to attack any Republican. They're attacking the governor, they're attacking me. I'm sure they'll probably get around to Senator Santorum and Congressman Paul. I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans. (Cheers, applause.)
This appears to be false.
On Friday, ABC senior vice president Jeffrey W. Schneider said that Gingrich's account was "just not true." He said in a statement, "His daughters were interviewed for our 'Nightline' story last night and we sought interviews with Gingrich or surrogates very aggressively starting Tuesday morning. We would have been happy to interview anyone they put forward."
There are several reasons to think that ABC's version is the correct one. Newt's daughters were interviewed by ABC as well as Fox. It would have been very helpful to their father for them to present any proof they had that their stepmother's account was false, but their only evidence that her claims were false was that their father said so. Likewise any personal friend of Newt's who could vouch for the correctness of his version would have done him a lot of good by doing so. Even is we accept Newt's claim the ABC refused them, their failure to appear on Fox is the dog that didn't bark in the night.
Further, it seems very unlikely that such proof exists. You would need a third party present at the conversations his second wife alleges occurred and willing to testify to what was said, which seems profoundly improbable. And Newt would certainly know if he actually had such witnesses or not. Occam's razor says that Newt was being untruthful again, and knew it.
This brings us to this question. If it comes down to a question of he said, she said, who is the least unreliable witness? Gingrich's spokesman makes much of the plausible bitterness of his second wife, but she doesn't sound particularly bitter in the Esquire interview or her recent Washington Post interview. And Newt has his own reasons to be an unreliable witness: he clearly regards her allegations as damaging if believed to be true, and he has a history of being less than entirely truthful when this was expedient.
Also, his second wife made very similar claims in a 2010 Esquire article, and Newt did not dispute them at the time.
At best, Newt was deceptive in claiming that he had evidence to refute ABC's report that did not actually exist.
At worst, he was willing to imply that his second wife was a despicable and tawdry liar because she made claims about his behavior that were true, less odious than what he has already admitted, but politically inconvenient for him.
His daughters have made the argument that his behavior in 1999 happened in the distant past, and should be be given little weight today.
In response I ask why he's still bragging about the things he did in 1994.
And further, if what he did in 1999 is now irrelevant, why is he so annoyed that anyone would mention his behavior at the time?
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