CATO
choofnagle | August 16, 2012In his non-book-review of Garret Keizer's new book, Privacy, "Reason" Magazine correspondent includes this ill-informed quip on privacy:
With regard to modern commerce, Mr. Keizer grumps: "We would do well to ask if the capitalist economy and its obsessions with smart marketing and technological innovation cannot become as intrusive as any authoritarian state." Actually, no. If consumers become sufficiently annoyed with mercantile snooping and excessive marketing, they can take their business to competitors who are more respectful of privacy. Not so with the citizens of an intrusive state.…
choofnagle | March 28, 2012Writing in today's Times, Richard A. Oppel asks, "Whatever happened to Ron Paul?"
Ron Paul has fans, in the traditional sense of the word--fanatics. They foam over this small and strange man, whose career in Congress has largely been ineffectual. Thousands go to his rallies, but as Oppel observes, "A Feb. 27 event at Michigan State University drew 4,000 people. But at polling places the next day, Mr. Paul finished third -- with 3,128 votes -- in Ingham County, where the campus is. Mr. Romney got more than three times as many votes." Paul's supporters attribute this to a failure in…
hrynyshyn | April 29, 2010One last look at Judith Curry, before I shut down the Island of Doubt and launch my new blog tomorrow. I, and many other climateers, remain fascinated by what she has to say, largely because we've never seen a respected climatologist be so publicly critical of her peers and so tolerant of the pseudoskeptics, but also because what she's talking about goes straight to the heart of the battle.
The latest volley comes in the form a comment at Keith Kloor's Collide-a-scape blog:
The people slagging off on McIntyre, Watts et al. have probably spent no time over at their blogs or made an effort to…
sjurvetson | June 17, 2009The pop of a supersonic shred, scattering fins below...
and the beginning of a sparky spiral dance in the sky...
Here's a rare catch of a fleeting midair moment - the forward retention for the solid-fuel motor has failed and so it thusts forward up through the rocket, pushing the parachute and nose cone out prematurely:
Even the little Estes motors can have a forward closure failure, with glorious results:
Sometimes the nozzle pops out the back, lowering thrust dramatically... and triggering premature separation and release of the smoke grenades:
The early parachute deployment creates…
sjurvetson | June 14, 2009Near the ground we call them land sharks:
My rocket buddy Erik and I have developed a knack for spotting a likely train wreck in the sky. There was a certain lack of craftsmanship in this Sonotube build that cued us to be ready with the camera:
I just held the motor drive down for this one... Click...click...click... It does a hop over Black Rock in the first frame, and the O-size motor separates from the body in frame 14/15:
And a couple close ups of this Twisted Firestarter:
Pop goes the motor.
sjurvetson | June 12, 2009Ka-pow. Bing, Bam, Boom.
For launch shots, I shoot with timing priority at 1/3000 seconds or faster to catch the action. This helps freeze the shrapnel in sharp focus. Typically, I am tracking the rocket by hand with a 400mm zoom.
Rockets bursting in air... In this example, a home-brew motor mixed with 8 pounds of black powder hit a bit of a burp midair:
As the solid propellant motors rapidly rise to full pressure and sufficient heat to melt aluminum, a motor casing rupture can burst a rocket apart from within... leading to a shower of rocket confetti overhead. Or at the pad...…
sjurvetson | May 31, 2009The long exposure presents all kinds of interesting visuals, from simple Estes propellant grains showering down...
...to the errant path of an unstable rocket:
Here's another example of an unstable flight followed by the fiery forward spray of a motor closure failure under pressure:
And different propellant grains provide wonderful lighting:
And of course, all kinds of high jinks come out at night in the deep desert, like the washing machine tub full of scrap propellant:
Pyro bliss.
sjurvetson | May 26, 2009Gene Nowaczyk is aiming for the big prize - a successful launch to 100,000 ft. After 50 hours/week over two years, he drove his custom airframe from Missouri in a huge truck.
Here is prepping the upper section, packed with electronics. He put an incredible amount of work and craftsmanship into this machined metal rocket. Video camera, x-ray measurements (for atmospheric air quality), avionics for GPS, barometric pressure, accelerometer and other sensors, telemetry...
The complexity of this 17 ft. tall rocket even captured the attention of WIRED magazine:
Gene has had his share of failure…
sjurvetson | May 25, 2009A pair of Army scale rockets line up in the desert...
Five sparky research motors clustered together (four M's and an O) in the Little John give quite a show:
and then a another Deep sub-woofer blastoff with a cluster of five AMW motors. Jack's Nike Smoke is 19 ft. tall, and 422 lbs.
(lots of detail in the original size; you can see the left motor was late to ignite.)
But, one of the five motors blew its forward closure, torching the flight electronics inside... and since the parachutes are deployed by computer... we get a ballistic return to the playa for this maiden flight.
In the…
sjurvetson | May 17, 2009It was hot at the Dairy Aire launch this weekend. 103°F, with cows.
What weather forecast is that? The cattle packed into the nearby Harris Ranch pens literally create local fog as they sweat into dusk. Mix with a little methane, and you get Dairy Aire.
Here was one of my favorite shots... 2.25 seconds after liftoff... screaming into the air, the big, fat Thumper rocket suddenly ruptured overhead:
It was part of lineup of ten M-size motor launches (the largest you can launch in California), and this gas-passer had a bit of a hiccup.
There's something about these nitrous oxide rockets that…
sjurvetson | May 15, 2009I was asked to give a three minute talk at the TED conference to try to convey some of the excitement about the hobby. I should have just quoted Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen:
"In terms of sheer coolness, few things beat rocketry."
Instead, I put together a photo montage, and commented on the stream:
The rocket projects have grown significantly since then, so consider this a teaser for future posts. Oh, and here's a sweet video montage from the last BALLS launch. It opens with a ground shot of our big QP rocket blasting off...
I am heading off to Dairy Aire tonight... to launch video…
sjurvetson | May 14, 2009I'll be launching this rocket again on Saturday... well, the upper half of it, which survived unscathed from this dramatic motor rupture a half-mile up in the moonlit sky of the Black Rock Desert:
I just love night launches as you can get a time-lapse capture of the entire rocket flight, especially when something goes haywire.
The Aerotech Green Mojave propellant burned brightly, lighting up the playa and the neighboring launch rails, but it also burned through the center of the forward closure (melting aluminum) and torched the electronics of the bottom section... and even burnt right…
hrynyshyn | April 7, 2009I was going to ignore the open letter-to-the-president advertisement placed in major papers recently by the Cato Institute. You've probably heard of it -- the one that says Obama should ignore global warming alarmism because the science says it isn't happening. The one signed by "over 100 scientists." But the response elsewhere has been interesting. It focuses almost exclusively on the expertise of those who signed the letter, not the merits of the argument it makes. I find myself agreeing -- ever so slightly, with the Cato Institutes' Jerry Taylor, who defended the letter last week in the…
denialism | March 10, 2008Also pissing me off this week is the continuing nonsense from Cato's anti-universal health care club which is suggesting that increasing health care coverage will lead to an increased number of deaths because of increasing medical errors.
Sack notes that "at least twice as many Americans are estimated to die each year from medical errors as from lack of access to care." He quotes economists Helen Levy and David Meltzer's conclusion that there is "no evidence" that expanding coverage would be the best way to improve health and save lives.
...
If there is no evidence that expanding coverage…
denialism | December 19, 2007I'm flattered that Pandagon liked our post on a terrible ad campaign for diamonds.
But if Amanda thought that was bad, she should see some of the latest "reason" coming from our libertarian friends at Cato. David Boaz writes a post for Cato entitled "All Those Who'd Like to Live in Rwanda, Vietnam, or Cuba, Raise Your Hands" in response to a Parade article complaining about the lack of female representatives in Congress:
Parade magazine frets:
In the current U.S. Congress, women account for only 16.3% of the members: 16 of 100 in the Senate and 71 of 435 in the House of Representatives…
denialism | August 30, 2007The NYT reports on the differing wait times between high-cost cosmetic procedures in dermatology, and low-cost potentially life-saving screenings for melanoma and other skin cancers.
Patients seeking an appointment with a dermatologist to ask about a potentially cancerous mole have to wait substantially longer than those seeking Botox for wrinkles, says a study published online today by The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
Researchers reported that dermatologists in 12 cities offered a typical wait of eight days for a cosmetic patient wanting Botox to smooth wrinkles, compared…
denialism | August 10, 2007The critical word being "think". Cato's Daniel Mitchell writes The More You Tax, the Less You Get . His stunning proof? Cigarette taxes. Wow.
An article in USA Today notes that big tax hikes on tobacco have dramatically reduced consumption of cigarettes. This is hardly surprising. Indeed, politicians openly state that they want higher tobacco taxes to discourage smoking, and their economic analysis is correct (even if their nanny-state impulses are not).
It is frustrating, though, that the same politicians quickly forget economic analysis when the debate shifts to taxes on work, saving…