After sort of inviting myself in a comment to this post, I actually received a very gracious invitation from Jinnderella to start posting over at GNXP SciFi. Its parent blog, Gene Expression, has been one of my daily reads since before I even started blogging, so I am extremely happy about this development.

I look forward to adding some appropriate commentary over there very soon (in fact I am working on a book review of recently-read Calculating God by Robert Sawyer and plan to post it over there). This should not impact my lackadaisical pace of posting here in any way; I'll cross-post when appropriate, or just put a link from here to there.

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The Sunday Times (UK) ran a profile/interview of Burt Rutan on March 13, 2005 (found via X-Prize Space Race News).

Mr. Rutan comes across like a character out of an Ayn Rand novel (and I mean that in a good way):

Apollo 17 landed on the moon on December 11, 1972, and thereafter the US space effort ground to an undignified halt. Nasa invested in the Space Shuttle, the ugliest and most pointless machine ever built. They told the US government it would be 10 times cheaper to put payloads in space with the shuttle than it had been with ApolloÂ’s Saturn V rocket. In fact, it turned out to be 10 times more expensive....

“You can’t fix it by throwing money at it,” says Burt, “because you make something that’s bad because it’s too complex even more complex.”

On top of all that, Nasa, having become an insanely defensive bureaucracy, went out of its way to crush all opposition both within and without. Any rival trying to get into space more safely and cheaply was either absorbed or drained of cash and talent. With the collapsing Soviet Union all but dropping out of the space race, and China just clinging onto a precarious toehold, the whole extraterrestrial adventure seemed to be over. A sci-fi generation, now in their fifties and sixties, realised that their childhood dream of roaring rockets taking them up to wheeling orbital space stations and beyond was dead.

Burt made sure that Nasa only heard about his project at the same time as everybody else — when he wheeled SpaceShipOne out on the tarmac at Mojave to be photographed by Aviation Week. He points out sadly that, but for Nasa, we’d be holidaying in orbital if not moon-based hotels already. He has no faith in George Bush’s new decision to spend the next 20 years going back to the moon and then on to Mars, because it uses the same old dumb technology and keeps the government monopoly intact. But it doesn’t matter, because Nasa won’t survive the next 20 years. Burt thinks it is about to be wiped out by a sudden space explosion in the private sector. And so now, at 61, he expects to live long enough to see the first moon resorts.

According to the author, the first flight into space aboard a Virgin Galactic spaceship should take place in about three years and contain some interesting characters:

It will carry — and this is very informed guesswork — William Shatner and Sigourney Weaver. Shatner is the favourite, as he will officially name the ship the VSS Enterprise. So both Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise and Ripley of Alien have signed up to pay $200,000 (just over £100,000) for the trip, but they don’t yet know who will be on the first flight. If Ripley has anything to do with it, there will certainly be a giant, homicidal lizard. Victoria Principal, the former Dallas star, has also signed up. Burt and Sir Richard Branson will be on board, as, I think, will Branson’s dad, Ted. Bill Cullen, the 63-year-old chairman of Renault Ireland, might be there too; he’s the only one of the 21,000 applicants for tickets who has paid the whole sum upfront....

I can't do the interview justice with excerpts, so go read the whole thing.

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Today, Virginia Postrel talks about too many choices on her blog and at Forbes. More accurately, she deconstructs the negative take on freedom of choice propounded in Barry Schwartz's recent The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, as applied to the current debate on giving Americans more control over their Social Security.

In his book, Schwartz takes a hard look at the multiplication of choices available to Americans, and contends that the overload on our psyches requires us to eliminate choice. According to the Publisher's Weekly excerpt at Amazon:

Like Thoreau and the band Devo, psychology professor Schwartz provides ample evidence that we are faced with far too many choices on a daily basis, providing an illusion of a multitude of options when few honestly different ones actually exist. The conclusions Schwartz draws will be familiar to anyone who has flipped through 900 eerily similar channels of cable television only to find that nothing good is on. Whether choosing a health-care plan, choosing a college class or even buying a pair of jeans, Schwartz, drawing extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that more options ("easy fit" or "relaxed fit"?) will make us happier, but Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being. Part research summary, part introductory social sciences tutorial, part self-help guide, this book offers concrete steps on how to reduce stress in decision making. Some will find Schwartz's conclusions too obvious, and others may disagree with his points or find them too repetitive, but to the average lay reader, Schwartz's accessible style and helpful tone is likely to aid the quietly desperate.

As Ms. Postrel points out, Schwartz does not prescribe any governmental policy solutions to this perceived problem in his book, but in a recent op-ed on Social Security, he wrote: "[w]hether people are choosing jam in a grocery store or essay topics in a college class, the more options people have, the less likely they are to make a choice."

In her Forbes article, Virginia examines the experiment supporting Schwartz's "jam" thesis and discovers that he has conveniently omitted one of the three outcomes -- the one that would undermine his argument about Social Security. According to Ms. Postrel's summary of the experiment, the subjects had to select a chocolate from a group of Godiva chocolates, based on the name and appearance of each type of chocolate. One half had only 6 chocolates to choose from; the other half selected from 30. Then, half of each group (i.e., a quarter of the overall subjects) received the chocolate they'd picked, while the other half got a different sample, which was chosen for them by the experimenter.

The results showed that the people choosing from the group of 6 who received what they wanted were most satisfied. The ones receiving the chocolate they chose out of the group of 30 were less satisfied, as they were worried they hadn't selected the best. But the result omitted by Schwartz was that the group who received the chocolate chosen for them by the experimenter were the least satisfied of all.

Kind of knocks the legs out from under the one-size-fits-all ponzi scheme we have for Social Security right now, doesn't it?

I think it important to note that at some level I sympathize with Schwartz's thesis that we are faced with many many choices, and that learning to distinguish where there may be no real difference can cause fatigue. But I am not a passive consumer. When word-of-mouth fails, I can educate myself online, whether shopping for the best combination of price and features in a gas grill or checking out reviews at epinions.com on digital cameras. Virginia specifically points this capability out in her Forbes article as an entrepreneurial opportunity. Services like Amazon.com's reader reviews and, heck, blogs help give us new means of making informed choices.

The only real frustration I have with new choices is when they eliminate some of my old ones. But that's just the looming old fogey in me. And, ending on this personal note, I can state with certainty that my family is not afraid of choices. Check out the toothpaste we keep in our bathroom drawers:

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This week's poll features the supporting actresses from the same FOX science fiction shows whose leading ladies faced off last time. The next poll will pit the winner of this poll against last week's winner and the winner of the Firefly poll, so that we can crown the champion FOX fox.

During the ninth season of The X-Files, the T2 android teamed up with Special Agent Monica Reyes (portrayed by Annabeth Gish) in a sort of bizarro-world Mulder/Scully arrangement:

On Space: Above and Beyond, the lovely Lanei Chapman portrays Lt. Damphousse:

Finally, on Dark Angel, Jennifer Blanc (portraying the character Kendra Maibaum) challenged Jessica Alba's overall hubbaliciousness (to borrow a Lileks coinage):

As always, vote early and often, and thanks for your continued patronage!

Results (Posted 22 March 2005):

Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) 17 of 47 votes for 36%
Vanessa Damphousse (Lanei Chapman) 10 of 47 votes for 21%
Kendra (Jennifer Blanc) 20 of 47 votes for 43% -- WINNER

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I haven't had a chance to see the new Doctor Who, but Eric Akawie has. Go read his review of the first episode.

N.B. Of course I have previously mentioned the new Doctor's lovely companion, Rose Tyler.

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I first learned about the card game "Set" from my mother-in-law this past Christmas. It turns out that my older kids had already been playing it at school for awhile. Now we all like to play it, and my wife spends about five minutes a day on the online version here.

Read the rules carefully, as you might find them confusing at first. The easiest rule to remember is the "magic" rule: if two are and one is not, then it is not a set.

Have fun!

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Here's a pic I took of the Lady Lex's F2H-2 Banshee last weekend:

Here's an archival photo of the plane in flight (found here):

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This month's Heinlein Quote of the Month (mentioned here), prompted an interesting comment from new-to-me reader [the best kind!] Tommy Hall:

"...conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate [the doctrine that 'violence never solves anything']. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon."

There seems to be some unintentional irony in the Heinlein quotation. He has Bonaparte pleading the case for pacifism while Hitler acts as impartial moderator. Logically someone like Ghandi or Martin King should argue the effectiveness of soft power, but of course Indian independence and the passage of the voting rights act undermine the point Heinlein wished to make.

Napoleon and Hitler were among the staunchest champions of naked force the world has seen during these last few blood-soaked centuries, to their everlasting regret. All their example shows is that those who rush to plead their case before the bar of violence run the risk that justice will hand down the harshest of verdicts.

First, I wouldn't agree that Bonaparte is pleading the case for pacifism, unless it's the case that his enemies should be pacifists.

Second, I don't really see any irony in Heinlein's choice of Napoleon or Hitler to illustrate his point. They were both initiators of violence who were stopped (and only stoppable) by violence. Sweet talking, negotiating, cajoling, and conceding would not have ended Napoleon's or Hitler's respective reigns over continental Europe. Only the use of overwhelming violence stopped them.

When is the use of violence in foreign affairs appropriate? One of the fundamental principles of what we call "libertarianism" has always been that one should never initiate the use of force against another. At the same time, it is morally required to use violence to respond to the initiator of force. So the Waterloo and WWII examples make pretty easy cases.

But what about the current war? Whether a pre-emptive use of force is ever justifiable is one of the issues that has split libertarians over the war in Iraq (and to a lesser extent, in Afghanistan). I think that one of the great mistakes of the anti-war libertarians is in their conflation of individual morality with international law. While states are technically "persons" (like corporations) in classical international law, they are not people. They are not endowed with the natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

Indeed, to the extent that they dishonor those natural rights, they lose legitimacy. So in my view, an illegitimate state should not benefit from some abstract non-initiation principle designed to protect an individual. There's quite a bit more to write on this, but I can't do it justice tonight. I hope I get some good comments to help guide some future refinements of this idea.

Tommy's conclusion is undoubtedly correct: if you initiate violence, you should be prepared to be dealt with violently. Or, more pithily, "live by the sword, die by the sword."

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I've been out of town with my family since last Friday.

Naturally, it was during my absence that my main traffic draw, the weekly SF Babe poll, would go down and that a couple of big-time bloggers would link to me (Thanks, Virginia! Thanks Bill!)

I've got the SF Babe poll fixed now, though anyone who voted before will have to vote again (Pollhost lost everything, including the number of votes).

I hope to have some pictures and a story or two up tomorrow.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:32 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Go figure. Leave town for several days and not only does your direct link to the main page crap out, but Pollhost.com drops all of your polls for no apparent reason. So, we will now retry the same poll from last week, unaltered, and pretend that nothing happened:

This week's poll pits the leading ladies from three of Fox's SF series against one another. Next week, certain supporting actresses from these same series will face off. The week after that, we will have a championship, featuring the two winners, together with the winner of the already-conducted Firefly poll. On with the show...

One of my favorite female characters in all of science fiction is Dana Scully (portrayed by Gillian Anderson) of the X-Files. I am not normally partial to redheads, but I make an exception for this character. Tough, sceptical, and rational, she tries to reconcile her reason with the faith of her childhood and the bizarre phenomena she encounters. Scully is truly one of SF's super-heroines. And a babe, to boot:

I was a new dad and new lawyer when Space: Above and Beyond first aired, so I only managed to see a couple of episodes. I'll have to give it another try someday. The lovely Kristen Cloke portrayed Captain Shane Vansen:

And finally, yet another series that I must catch up on now that the DVDs are out, is the James Cameron-created Dark Angel. The beautiful Jessica Alba portrays the genetically-enhanced Max Guevera in this dystopian SF drama:

Results (posted 15 March 2005):

Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) 39% (28 of 71 votes)
Captain Shane Vansen (Kristen Cloke) 14% (10 of 71 votes)
Max Guevera (Jessica Alba) 46% (33 of 71 votes) WINNER!

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Could there be any doubt this week?

Burt Rutan's Global Flyer, piloted by Steve Fossett in his record-breaking flight this past week:

(Both images from Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer multimedia site).

Also, this little-known plane from very early in Rutan's career (courtesy of a family friend), the Rutan B-17X:

(Note for the clue-impaired: it's a photoshop).

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Steve Fossett successfully circumnavigated the globe in a single-engine jet airplane on a single load of fuel. Solo.

Details here. And here.

Frank Martin blogged a good deal of the flight.

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I'm sure glad that Vodkapundit Steve Green has returned to blogging. And over the past 24 hours, he has blogged with a vengeance. Just click over and scroll, but pay particular attention to this veritably den Bestean analysis of the Lebanese goings-on.

Just a couple posts later, he covers this hilarious summer project of a couple of British students who are planning a scofflaw vacation. That is, they intend to embark on a crime spree, breaking old and silly laws that are still on the books, though no longer enforced.

This reminds Mr. Green of the proposal in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to have a bicameral assembly in which one house would be the house of legislators and the other the house of repealers. The legislators would need a 2/3 majority to pass new laws while the repealers would require only a 1/3 vote to repeal existing laws. Great idea, I think.

Speaking of Heinlein, I have updated the quote of the month for March, with a Starship Troopers quote appropriate to the changes underway in the Middle East:

"Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral — doctrine that 'violence never solves anything' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms."

Update: I was referring above to Steve's month-long hiatus over December and into the New Year. Not sure if that was clear as originally written.

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Moved here.

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