The False Dawn of Apollo

In a comment on the previous post, Hugh Knight quotes Buzz Aldrin:

History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.

Man's first visits to the moon were like his first visits to the South Pole: heroic efforts driven by national pride and prestige that pushed the limits of what was possible with contemporary technology. leaving little behind but flags and footprints. After Scott and his men left the South Pole, we would not return for 44 years.

When we came back it was with radically improved technology developed for other purposes: a DC-3 with JATO bottles instead of muscle powered sleds.

The slowed pace of manned spaceflight since Apollo isn't a failure of will, it's just an adjustment to an environment in which manned spaceflight no longer comes out of the lavish Showing the Damned Commies We're Awesome budget.

NASA's budget for 2010 is over $18 billion. Putting canned primate into space is expensive, and making it less expensive is expensive. We can be patient: the Solar System is not going away.

We Live in an Age of Marvels

I was born half a year before Sputnik, back when we and all our machines were trapped at the bottom of Earth's gravity well. Back then, we thought Venus might be habitable by humans and Mars might be covered with canals. Because the bottom of a well is not the best place to get a view of the neighborhood.

And now we can watch the moon Daphnis plowing through the rings of Saturn, trailing a wake like a speedboat. Awesome. And see splendid views of Mimas, that bears the scars of a titanic collision long enough ago that the crater is pocked with craters.

And we can read Elizabeth Bear's remembrance of first seeing Voyager's images of Io's sulphur volcanoes:

I remembered those images as if it were yesterday. Io's dragonskin colors, the plume of the volcano--the first active exovolcano ever witnessed--rising from its surface huge and spherical as a partially eclipsed sister moon. The false-color images, painstakingly chicken-pecked across interstellar distances and long minutes of light-speed lag by a data recording and transmission system that basically consists of an 8-track tape deck and a 160-baud modem.

And that was over thirty years ago. Some of you weren't born then.

Listen. We went there, but not in person. Some of the hands and minds that launched the craft are dead, but we bound what the machine saw, and you can see it. Long ago, one of our ancestors learned to bind what he learned and pass it on beyond his lifetime. Or hers.

That's our inheritance. We add to it, and pass it on.

And this is what we do.

Improving the Affordable Care Act

The Republicans don’t like it, but they like parts of it. The electorate doesn’t like all of it, but they like parts of it. The Democrats can expect some backlash on the unpopular parts, and want to keep as much of it as possible.

What changes might a Blue Dog Democrat or a principled libertarian Republican offer, knowing that Republicans will campaign against the unpopular bits, and as long as Obama is in office the Democrats have a veto?

Some reasonable options:

1) Harmonize the tax exclusions and subsidies so that employer provided insurance has no advantage over what individuals buy, and vice versa. It’s the just thing to do, and if you don’t there will be endless efforts to game the system.

2) Move the “Cadillac Tax” on expensive insurance plans forward to 2014. If you don’t, item 1) will be a lot more expensive.

3) Let employers that offer health insurance as a benefit count their cost for that towards satisfying minimum wage requirements.

Dawn Chorus

Dawn Chorus comprises films of 19 singers that uncannily recreate birdsong in their ‘natural habitats'. The individuals are located in various situations such as an underground car-park, an osteopathic clinic and a bath-tub, the project is as much a portrait of British idiosyncrasies as it is of the natural world.

During rigorous fieldwork 14 microphones were placed around woodland to record birds during one morning of birdsong in Northumberland. From this multi-track recording each song was slowed down up to 16 times, then human participants were filmed mimicking this slowed down song. Finally the resulting video footage was then speeded up, returning the bird mimicry into its ‘real' register. The films are presented on screens in the gallery relative to the position of the birds when they were recorded.

When Less is More:

The Case for Teaching Less math in Schools

Thomas Watson's Computer Image Collection

Awesome clockpunk goodness: images of computing devices from the 14th century to the 1950s.

Americans Outraged by Democratic Health Care Bill (If They Are Republican)

The latest Gallup poll gives some indication of the reaction of most Americans to the health care bill the Democrats have rammed down the throat of the revolted American people. They are outraged. At least, the Republicans are outraged. Democrats rather like it, but of course they would, wouldn’t they? Independents seem pretty evenly divided.

The Republicans made a calculated gamble that they if they presented a united front of refusal the bill would probably fail, and they would benefit. This was a reasonable bet: Intrade betting was offering worse than even odds of passage until early March, and later in the month odds dripped below 50% twice.

The gamble failed. What now? A crusade for total repeal and return to the status quo? Not bloody likely. Too much of the bill is simultaneously popular and consistent with things Republicans have already advocated.

Plan B: a cynical panderfest. Republicans have always stood for smaller government, so they propose to spend more on Medicare and have bigger subsidies for student loans. They have stood for fiscal responsibility, so they propose to cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes and cut taxes without cutting spending.

Now, the Platonic ideal of a Republican leader could argue, justly, that the new taxes on high income households will discourage investment and hard work and violate the idea that Medicare should be structured as social insurance rather than a redistributive levy.

If we eliminate that, however, we eliminate a big chunk of the funding for the program. The Platonic ideal leader would refuse to worse the deficit and make our children effectively pay for our benefits.

That leaves two choices: greatly reduce access to affordable health insurance, or raise taxes on middle-income households. That's the honest argument to make when Republicans run on "replace and repeal".

It will be interesting to see if the Republicans propose either, or something more expedient.

Arms and Armor's Fechterspiel Sword

Arms and Armor's Fechterspiel sword has attracted favorable comments. Here is another review.

Medieval fighting schools developed blunt practice swords that that simulated the medieval longsword in much the same way a fencing foil simulated the 18th century smallsword. They are shown in the the 15th century Solothurner Fechtbuch, and examples have survived from the 16th century: a pair have been preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Arms and Armor have recreated this sort of training weapon. You can choose between the training grade, which they describe as follows: "the finish on the blade is not taken to as high a polish and the hilt parts are finished with a smoothed cast surface". In the higher grade version "The pommel and guard are finished in brushed steel"

As I write this, the training grade costs $40 less. Hugh Knight, who has used them, suggests "Frankly, they're the better buy unless you intend to do demonstrations for the public at which you want to display nicer equipment."

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

The 3D is not as perfectly executed as the best contemporary 3D films, but the 3D version adds enough to the experience that it's worthwhile trying to see it in a 3D theater if you can. So says my eldest daughter, who saw it both in 2D and 3D. I only saw it in 3D, but I believe her.

I enjoyed it thoroughly. The film takes Lewis Carroll's books as backstory, and is set about ten years later.

If you watch it, keep an eye on Anne Hathaway's White Queen. Always remember that she is her sister's sister.

Medieval Lanterns with Horn Panes

Recently, I was able to view the Parement of Narbonne in person, and noticed a detail that wasn't visible in reproductions available to me earlier. A lantern is shown in the panel showing the betrayal of Jesus. In a good reproduction, you can see that each pane is divided by a horizontal line. In the same scene on p. 181 of the Tres Belles Heures, each pane is divided by a double horizontal line.

Viewing the Parement closely it is possible to see a small pair of circles below the horizontal line on each pane, as though each pane was made of two pieces of horn riveted together.

This site has a useful 15th c. view of a similar lantern from the 15th c. Lyversberg Passion. In that lantern the seam appears to be covered on the outside with a metal strip, with the heads of rivets visible on the inside of the pane. Note the lace or thong for opening the door.

Note also the importance of making a door wide enough to allow comfortable access to replace candles: the Tres Belles Heures lantern seems to use eight vertical panes (each composed of two pieces of horn joined together.) The door is two panes wide. The lantern in the Lyversberg Passion seems to use half as many panes, so a door using a single pane is practical.