Lstrblg

Good stuff to know if you are interested in the course of science under the Obama administration at ScienceInsider.

This is the first I’ve heard about asking the Chinese to shuttle our astronauts to space. I wonder where this came from…or if Holdren was just speaking off the top of his head. But why the Chinese when we have a number of home grown outfits, like SpaceX, looking to do the job? Why the Chinese over the Russians, who are particularly good at getting people safely to orbit?

The other question I have is about nukes. I don’t believe we necessarily need new nuclear weapons, but is that the job of the science advisor to decide and not, say, the military? Of course, as Holdren points out, our national labs have a broad research portfolio, not just nukes.

But that’s just one bit of the interview, its fairly in-depth and well worth the read.

And, in other Holdren news, AP is reporting that he has an interest in geoengineering .

I’m a little nervous about fiddling with the global climate, especially before we know exactly how everything plays out. What if we make matters worse? Why not wait until the damage is done? I don’t believe in irreversibility, that just doesn’t make sense…not on a geological scale, at least, but maybe that’s only irreversible on a human scale.

Here’s my plan, millions of acres of space solar panels. We’ll block out a fraction of the sunlight reaching Earth and generate safe, clean power. Sure, you say, we’d never be able to build the x gazillion solar panels we’d need to block the sun. Maybe they don’t have to all be solar panels, maybe its just a few gazillion acres of some sort of dimming fabric…in addition to the solar panels. Think of all the stimulus money that could be spent on the solar/space industry!

Click to listen. This is a test post, so forgive me in advance if it doesn’t work.

Seems to work. And not too shabby for someone who has never, ever done anything like that before.

OK, that’s a lie, actually. Good luck finding the actual podcast, though.

I created this blog as a dumping ground for thoughts and websites that I accumulate each day, not necessarily as a place for confiding my innermost secrets. My innermost secrets are, on the whole, rather lame.

But I saw a squirrel outside today and it reminded me of something stupid that I said in, oh, 1998 or so. I was in my graduate program’s shared workspace and I had gotten into a (not terribly heated) argument about gray squirrels.

For some reason I argued that gray squirrels were not a destructive influence on populations of European reds. In fact, I believe I stated that gray squirrels were a European import that had run amok in the US. That was just plain stupid and I knew it even as I said it. I had conflated in my mind European red squirrels with fox squirrels, an American variant that I remembered from a zoo placard was also endangered from gray squirrel competition. But refused to apologize once I realized my error…and my opponent either conceded or gave up. I feel tremendous guilt over that incident. It was a valuable lesson in shutting up already.

I never apologized to that woman — and I would now if I could remember her name.

I am sorry.

Also, when you think about it, “squirrel” is a weird word. That part wasn’t a confession, just an observation.