Deep Thoughts

Shawyer Space Drive…Arriving.

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A science fiction writer acquaintance of mine, John Ringo, is already going nuts about this “Shawyer Drive” on his Facebook page, because he
is friends with one of the scientists involved.

See power point page and the links below:

Magnetron driven, reaction massless, "Shawyer Drive"
Magnetron driven, reaction massless, “Shawyer Drive”

Magnetron powered EM-drive construction expected to take two months
http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/04/magnetron-powered-em-drive-construction.html

Emdrive Roger Shawyer believes midterm EMdrive interstellar probe could flyby Alpha Centauri
http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/04/emdrive-roger-shawyer-believes-midterm.html

The drive seems to be a quantum “zero-point energy” phenomena that you put electricity into and get reaction massless thrust out of.

_AND_ it looks to be both scalable and improvable with better magnetrons.

This is also dovetailing nicely with a Lockheed Martin compact fusion reactor that

1. Generates more power than it uses and
2. Produces something on the order of 7.4 megawatts

See:

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

Given the reality of Space X’s and Blue Origin’s reusable rocket successes, and it seems that Mankind is about to burst out from this planet in a very big way.

See:

http://www.spacex.com/news
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-just-launched-flagship-rocket/

And all of the above is driving John Ringo to despair on his science fiction writing career.

I Am Woman …

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… hear me roar … and then turn around and whine because some cis-male said something, or looked something, and I feel so … so threatened! Look, girls…ladies … possessor of a vagina or whatever you want to be addressed as this week in vernacular fashion; can you just please pick one attitude and stick too it? Frankly, this inconsistency is embarrassing the hell out of me (sixty-ish, small-f feminist in the long-ago dark days when there was genuine no-s*it gender inequality in education, job opportunities and pay-scales to complain about and campaign for redress thereof). This is also annoying to my daughter, the thirtyish Marine Corps veteran of two hitches. The Daughter Unit is actually is very close to losing patience entirely with those of the sisterhood who are doing this “Woman Powerful!-Woman Poor Downtrodden Perpetual Victim!” bait and switch game. So am I, actually, but I have thirty years experience in biting my tongue when it comes to the antics of the Establishment Professional Capital-F Feminist crowd.

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The End of the World?

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Sarah Hoyt  thinks not.

When I was thirty one, I sat on my back porch on a lovely summer day, reading Reason magazine.   The issue was devoted to debunking global warming.   And suddenly, like a weight lifting, I realized there really wasn’t proof.   That it wasn’t preordained that my generation would be the last to have a decent life on Earth.   That my kids and grandkids (I only had one kid at the time, and he was still nursing) wouldn’t necessarily be doomed.   That the future wasn’t all doom and gloom.

And I realized my entire life I’d lived in the shadow of the fear of decay and death.   First there was the cold war, and sooner or later, the bombs would fly.   We’d die screaming.   Then there was overpopulation.   If we escaped the bomb, we’d all starve to death.   Or thirst to death (thank you, Paul Ehrlich!)   Then there was global cooling.   We were all going to freeze in the ice age.   Then there was global warming.  Amid all these threats, how could we escape.  To watch the thing debunked and to see it pointed out that even the proponents of AGW don’t live like they believe in it lifted a weight from my heart.


Since then I’ve been skeptical of the end of the world prophecies.

RTWT

 

The Liquidation of Markets

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Every weekend I read Barry Ritholtz’s recommended reading and there are a lot of gems in there. Recently he posted this Credit Suisse graphic about markets at the turn of the 20th Century by market share and compared it with 2014 on the topic of global equity investing.

US_stocks

In his article he mentioned the fallacy one might fall into as a UK equity investor in 1899… why bother investing in the USA when the UK market is so much larger? And then this line of thought ends up missing the huge growth in US market share over the next century.

However, the real issue here isn’t the relative change in market share by the different countries; it is the fact that almost all of these markets were entirely extinguished at one time or another by political, economic or military events that wiped out the investors.

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Middle-Aged Ruminations About Mid-Life Crises, Self-Esteem, and Too Much Rumination

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Generalizing from his own experience, Jonathan Rauch finds evidence of a U-shaped happiness curve in life:

I was about 50 when I discovered the U-curve and began poking through the growing research on it. What I wish I had known in my 40s (or, even better, in my late 30s) is that happiness may be affected by age, and the hard part in middle age, whether you call it a midlife crisis or something else, is for many people a transition to something much better—something, there is reason to hope, like wisdom. I wish someone had told me what I was able to tell my worried friend: nothing was wrong with him, and he wasn’t alone.

I’m skeptical.

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