One aspect of optimizing systems is that you don't get any performance boost by adding a resource you already have a surplus of.

Most database servers built from low end technologies have CPU cycles to spare. That's beause boatloads of CPU power is cheap, but I/O bandwidth is expensive.

And why had we been developing the engines in the first place?

The "We Choose to Go to the Moon" speech was given, if I recall correctly, in September of 1962. This almost a year and a half after Alan Shepherd went into space on Mercury-Redstone 3, and some four years after the Mercury program had been conceived under President Eisenhower. The purpose was to rally people around a goal that had already consumed almost 2 billion dollars and would consume well over a hundred billion dollars (in today's terms). But why was this important, and important to do fast?

Because putting a man on the moon would be the biggest, most decisive victory in a propaganda war that had been raging for nearly a hundred years.

If you read what people were saying from a hundred years ago, it's clear that many people thought capitalism was doomed. It's hard for people under 50 to believe, but "socialism" was a word associated with futuristic stuff, and progress. These attitudes toward the future of capitalism persisted into the Cold War and were a major thorn in the side of US foreign policy. When India adopted its constitution in 1950 that constituion declared India to be a socialist nation. Socialism played a major part in the foundation of the State of Israel, an Israel's first president David Ben-Gurion was a "Labor Zionist". And across the middle-east, the force radicalizing young Arabs wasn't fundamentalist Islam, it was Baathism -- "Arab Socialism". Across the world, capitalism was seen as an antiquated system imposed by colonial powers to keep people backward and subjugated.

Then on July 21, 1969, the leading capitalist (albeit welfare state) nation in the world put a man on the Moon. It put a stake through the heart of notion that capitalism is an antiquated, reactionary system. That's probably a hundred billion dollars well spent, considering what was at stake.

Looked at one way the goal itself did nothing practical for us, it was all the things we had to learn to be able to achieve it. But it is still amazing to me that nearly fifty years later people around the world see Neil Armstrong taking that last step as a kind of milestone in human progress.

You know men can raise children too. And some of us chose to put our careers on hold to spend more time with our kids. I did. When my oldest got to high school I decided to put my career on hiatus to spend the remaining years I could with them. Before that I workng 50-60 hour weeks and spending about 1/3 of my time traveling, and though my flexible schedule allowed me to stay involved with my kids when they were younger, my window of opportunity to spend a *lot* of time with them was closing. Quantity time *is* quality time. It communicates your priorities like nothing else.

Waay back in the day when my wife was a grad student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution by an odd fluke the sysadmins and programmers of the Vax/VMS systems they used for scientific data processing were women. Possibly their inability to grow beards disqualified them from Unix jobs. Anyhow, the nickname for them was "data dollies".

Of course there was a long, long history of women in scientific computing. The mom of one of my high school friends graduated from Wellsley during WW2 and worked programming the Harvard Mark 1 -- which meant (although I didn't realize it at the time) she must have worked with Grace Hopper. And of course there were the female code breakers of Bletchley Park. There were a lot of opportunities for smart women to do innovative things in WW2 while many of their equally brainy male counterparts were being fed into the war effort like scraps into a meatgrinder.

Anyhow, I don't think "data dolly" was meant to be as patronizing it sounds to us today. It was a cultural anachronism, like the drinking and smoking on the TV show Mad Men, which appears to us gauche but strangely fascinating. The common assumption back then was that even an intelligent, highly trained woman would quit her job when she got married to raise some man's children. My generation was the first to view automatically assuming that as patronizing. This new attitude was in its day called "radical feminism" -- which was a not too subtle way of associating us with Communists. But of course insensitivity is a two way street. A lot of older women felt insulted by the implication that they'd thrown their lives away.

And a lot better than Huygens, who they weren't even trying to keep alive at all and whose mission wasn't even designed suchly that Cassini could stay in touch with it until its batteries died.

The results of this mission have been invaluable in learning more about the challenges of landing on a low-gravity body. I look forward to whatever mission turns out to be the next followup that learns from all of the lessons of this mission. :) Maybe some sort of "hopper" probe that can sample all over an asteroid or comet by deliberately bouncing around?

Though to be honest, what I look forward to more than anything is the next dedicated Titan mission.. whether it's a hydrogen blimp, hot air balloon, helicopter, fixed-wing aircraft, tilt-wing aircraft, or whatnot, it's going to be bloody amazing. My favorite approach is that of a tilt-wing aircraft, which gains the high-speed / long range capability of an airplane, but can easily land and do surfacescience while its batteries are RTG-charged for the next flight. Even a sample return stage is a possibility, although difficult... an aerial vehicle can get extremely high in the atmosphere and the gravity's not very intense, so the escape stage requirements should be manageable, and then the escape capsule can use reverse gravitational slingshots and aerocapture to get samples back to earth with minimal additional delta-V. Can you imagine that - samples of the shoreline of an organic sea or cryovolcano from Titan, back on earth? Regardless of what sort of mission profile it has, though, the next Titan mission will have to be nuclear powered.

Which is a nuclear reaction.

No, it's the solar wind turbines that are killing them. We should be burning good old-fashioned Space Coal instead.

The entire system is designed to operate in peak loads much of the time with long idle periods between, you can't downsize the battery that much.

And RTGs are heavy compared to their output in the inner solar system. A SNAP-19 fits the generation bill (30 watts at beginning of life) but that's 12 kilograms, which is almost certainly heavier than the solar panels.

But the real reasion is, what others have mentioned, cost. And no, it's not a case of "the cost part itself is largely due to politics", it's that plutonium-238 is simply expensive, period. You're talking a product only produced in a few parts of the world from a raw material (neptunium-237) that's only extracted in a few parts of the world in very small quantities from a raw material (nuclear fuel rods) that's already very expensive and difficult to transport. The neptunium takes years to accumulate in its reactor and must be handled with extreme safety protocols during the extraction, and properly secured against misuse. It then must be irradiated for long periods of time, converting it one atomic collision at a time to plutonium 238 using a tremendous amount of energy. Only then can the plutonium be extracted - and once again, you're talking the need for extreme safety protocols during the process, and proper security. None of that is "politics", it's simply the way it is plus very rational handling procedures.

I too missed the transcript link. It's not exactly that noticeable. And I too find the current trend of "putting everything in a needlessly long, unskimmable video" highly annoying.

I personally feel the solution to the "exporting pollution to other countries" problem is PAT - Pollution-Added Tax, implemented in exactly the same manner as VAT except for taxing the pollution emitted during that stage of manufacturing (based on a standardized set of rates) rather than value added at that stage. "Pollution" being everything from arsenic dumped into rivers to carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere. Just like VAT, goods produced outside the PAT zone would get PAT levied upon import, and goods inside the PAT zone would get rebate upon export - hence, there's no "I can make goods cheaper by producing them somewhere with little environmental controls" advantage. And because we know that VAT is legal and functional in today's global environment, we can be comfortable that PAT would be as well.

That would be because the problem was by and large resolved.

Metal prices can fluctuate by several orders of magnitude in the short term. They can fluctuate to a moderate degree in the mid-term. But the long-term trend of metals as a whole is almost always downward (excepting "investment metals", which are inherently distorted by investors). There's no shortage of anything in the crust. The crust is unimaginably massive. It's always a question of what you've found, what extraction processes you've gotten mature enough to compete, and what infrastructure you've actually built. As a general rule, most resource "reserves" rise over time, not drop, because each tech advancement tends to put exponentially more resource into play.

IF: you have a moral compass.
THEN: having a moral compass is a help to your achieving your ends.

On the other hand,

IF: you don't have a moral compass.
THEN: not having a moral compass is a help to your achieving your ends.

In other words the question is meaningless unless you stipulate "help or hinderance to what". Also you need to specify the behavioral flexibility of the people in question. Someone who is strictly immoral -- that is to say he never does anything moral if he has an evil alternative -- would have to be irrational. The eviler alternative is not always the rational choice.

Also moral/amoral doesn't capture everything about somebody's thinking and character. Some people are amoral and shortsighted. Others are amoral but can see the long term value of curbing their behavior. On the other hand some people are strictly moral but rigid and unimaginative. Others are highly moral and creative. To a creative person an obstacle is often an opportunity.

Ultimately you are who you are: goodie-two-shoes or amoral bastard or something in between. Whatever you are you have to make that work for yourself.

Corr: That should read "more than that for mined coal", not less.

I certainly remember when Klein's bikes came out; he was a few years ahead of me at MIT. I don't know if the larger tubing idea was actually his; he was part of a group of students working on an aluminum frame. The relationship of diameter to stiffness had neen known for centuries; I think Euler originally worked out that the bending stiffness of a beam is proporitional to the moment of inertia of its cross section. I expect a lot of engineers realized the potential of aluminum. What stands out about Klein is is entrepreneurial energy.

My take on the bike in question is that it's interesting in that it shows the potential of the tools used to make it, but not quite as interesting in terms of what it shows about the potential of wood as a material. I'm hoping that somebody, someday will come up with a very interesting and surprising wood bike that really makes the most of the material and probably won't look much like a conventional bike.

Until you can "STORE" the power the fucking windmills and solar shit are just subsidy milking machines.

You mean by, say, drawing more from Ontario's 8.5 GW of hydro capacity during low-renewables times times and less during high times? Something along those lines?

(and not to mention, those plants were designed for relatively constant use... you can upgrade the powerhouses without having to rebuild the dams (aka, at a very low cost per MW) to be able to give significantly higher peak outputs if you ever decide you need them)