I'm just finishing up 'Comm Check' right now, and the authors essentially agree with you. The best chance for a rescue in orbit would have involved the astronauts on the Columbia severely cutting activity in order to minimize oxygen consumption--that would buy them a week or so. Meanwhile, on the ground, prep work on Atlantis goes into overdrive so that they can launch as soon as a launch window opens. This assumes NASA is willing to launch Atlantis without knowing exactly what caused the foam shedding (which occurred on both Columbia and on the previous flight of discovery), which they might not have done. The astronauts would then have to spacewalk transfer from Columbia to Atlantis (risky, but reasonable) and then fly home with four astronauts sitting on the floor of the crew module with no restraints for return to earth. So, possible, but just barely.

Of course it's okay for his kid not to love a particular book or genre, but what would you set him up to fail by giving him something that's very likely to be over his head? That's the kind of experience that will convince him never to try sci fi again. Better to pick something more reasonable, though not dumbed down, so at least it's not a struggle just to get through it.

When I was about your son's age, I read Eleanor Cameron's 'The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet,' about two boys who befriend a scientist (who's really almost a wizard) and with his help build a spaceship to explore a small, hithero undiscovered moon populated by friendly mushroom people. It sounds wacky, but it was a lot of fun, and there are a few other books in the series if your son enjoys the first.

Depending on your son, some of Heinlein's fiction for children might also work. I remember loving 'Tunnel in the Sky' and 'Red Planet' when I was ten or so.

Contrary to your response, there's a substantial amount of research that could be classified as either bio-defense or biological weapon development depending on the perspective. Plenty of experts in the field (see Ken Alibek's 'Biohazard' or Judy Mikovits' 'Germs' for example) recognize this as a key difficult in trying to minimize proliferation. Other activities are a bit less ambiguous, of course: if you're studying the mechanical properties of anthrax spores in order to determine how to optimize aerosolization then it's hard to claim your purposes are purely peaceful.

I don't know--Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead,' which is arguably one of the most influential (if not the most influential) modern zombie film pretty strongly implied that anyone who died would rise. Zombie bites were still fatal, but any corpse with an intact brain would reanimate. I agree that this is more problematic from a 'scientific realist' standpoint (to the extent that an infectious disease turning people into brain-eating revnants is realistic), but it IS consistent with one of the foundational films of the genre.

And yet I imagine you pay taxes. So clearly some measure of imposition upon your freedom by means of coercive force is accepted.

Please explain the thought process here to me: if reliable computational methods for predicting drug effectiveness exist, why are drug companies still testing new compounds in people, let alone animals? Do you figure it's how we satisfy our mad scientist urges? Or is there some credible explanation you'd like for advance for why a profit maximizing company would spend such an enormous amount of money ($800 million to bring out one new drug is a figure commonly cited) when computers could do all the work?

If you think that it's possible to simulate human biology in a way that makes clinical testing unnecessary, then you're clearly ignorant about the state of computational prediction. Of course, based on your misunderstanding of how placebo controls in trials work, you're obviously ignorant about a lot of things. Seriously, this is medical ethics 101--if there's a known and accepted treatment for a condition, that's what the 'placebo group' in your trial gets. Any new drug in testing today doesn't just need to work, it needs to show it's at least as good as what doctors would already be doing.

If you don't understand that, then it's hard for me to treat anything else you say on this topic as credible.

This is wrong, I'm afraid.

First off, given the boundless evil and greed of Big Pharma, one wonders why they'd continue to spend money on animal trials if they achieve nothing more than the production of plausible deniability for the inevitable failures in clinial development. Given that they already blame their failures on the complexities of biology and the difficult regulatory environment, the benefit produced by pointing at animal test results seems pretty slim. How does your scenario work? "Well, shareholders, it's true that we've spent $50 billion this year and only put one new drug on the market, while we've had to withdraw three old drugs for unforeseen side effects, but, in our defense, we injected it into bunnies first and that seemed to work okay." Really, is that how you imagine it?

Second, do you by chance know how many potential compounds fail in animal testing before they even make it into people? If you start with 1000 compounds, and 900 are disqualified by preclinical testing (which includes animal testing) before the remaining hundred enter human trials, that's still a pretty substantial benefit. Indeed, that's about the proportion of compounds which are dropped prior to Phase 1, although the statistics I've seen don't break out animal testing specifically. The alternative to testing in animals, barring significant advances in computational predictive methods, would be to test each of those thousand compounds in people with minimal prior knowledge of safety. So for someone so concerned about animal welfare you're shockingly cavalier about the well-being of other human beings.

I wonder, do you resolve this apparent paradox by actually putting your own health and safety on the line by volunteering for Phase 1 studies? Do you keep your morals unsullied by refusing to take any medication which was tested in animals? Or are you a hypocrite in addition to being utterly ignorant?

You can't simulate with any certainty how a living thing will react in toto to a new drug--if that were possible we'd save ourselves the hundreds of millions currently spent in clinical testing and we'd just run simulations. But there are things you can usefully simulate even if you lack a full understanding of the biological processes involved. For example, it's fairly routine to simulate a drug's pharmacokinetics based on animal data and analogy to other known drugs. This helps us choose doses for clinical trials, it helps us figure out how many patients we need to test in order to produce robust results. Nothing about this is worthless--good sample size estimates minimize unnecessary patient risk and save money.

Then maybe, I dunno, explain to your parents that there's no a lot of value in sitting there while your child bashes at the laptop for 40 minutes a night. I mean, Jesus, seriously? NOTHING a two year old does is that interesting.

In one of Michael Collin's books he mentions what was referred to as the 'poor bastard' scenario for Mars exploration, in which they send up some poor bastard who does science for as long as he can until his supplies run out. As you can imagine, there was never a lot of political enthusiasm for the idea.

Type I diabetes is caused by the autoimmune destruction of the pancreatic islet cells which produce insulin. It has nothing to do with corn syrup or the FDA.

That position makes sense if you believe that other people will actually stand with you. Personally, when I observe the way people drive in traffic, or the way they leave a public restroom, it becomes very clear to me that you can't expect the average person to show the slightest consideration for his fellows unless there is some incentive for him to do so. The GPP is a clear example of that--if the other people at the checkpoint when the little girl ran away had refused to allow them to hold the parents, the screeners might have backed down. But they all considered the risk of missing their flights, or the chance of being detained or arrested, and they decided to do nothing.

My point being, if you're arguing that civil disoberdience in the solution to this problem, I'd like for you to explain what gives you confidence that other people will stand with you. I thought National Opt-Out Day was a great idea, but it probably wasn't enough to really hurt the TSA. Maybe an Occupy Airport movement, lasting days, would do the job.

I don't really see how air marshalls solve anything. Since 9/11 there have been several incidents of suspicious or dangerous behavior on planes, e.g., the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, even that pilot who flipped out in flight a few weeks ago. In each of these situations, the offender was restrained by passengers armed with nothing more than what they'd carried on to the plane. Having a big guy with a bean bag launcher wouldn't have changed that. I would go so far as to say it would be almost impossible to carry out a 9/11-type plot on an airplane at this point--hence the focus on explosives. Bruce Schneier said it nicely: the only two things that have improved airline security since 9/11 are reinforced cockpit doors and passenger awareness. We'd be better off relaxing the current security standards to pre-9/11 levels (minus box cutters and things of that nature) and using the money saved to fund better intelligence and investigation of threats.

That's why I usually just say 'measures of central tendency.' Precision ambiguity.