Soapbox

And now for a slightly different take on the Columbia disaster, and the recriminations that started soon after.

After the Challenger accident in 1986, a commission was convened to investigate. One of its members was the Physics Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman, who recounts the commission’s work, and the obstacles entrenched NASA administrators put in its path, in his second book of memoirs What Do You Care What Other People Think? (a sequel to Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, both make for a rollicking good read and are included in the anthology Classic Feynman).

I am sure many of Feynman’s trenchant observations will remain relevant as the various commissions reveal the tensions between (expensive) safety requirements for the shuttle (specially in terms of the shuttle project’s human infrastructure), and the cost overruns of that white elephant in the sky, the International Space Station…

Many NASA critics question the need for human involvement for tasks that could be done just as well by cheaper and expendable robots (no life support systems needed). But apparently NASA’s bureaucrats have decided only the drama of humans cavorting in space will hold the public’s attention long enough to fund the space program. To quote Jerry Pournelle (I don’t usually agree with his politics, but here I think he is right):

Saturn was the most powerful machine ever made by man; and NASA took two working Saturns and laid them out as lawn ornaments so that they would not compete with Space Station and Shuttle. This was deliberate destruction of the people’s property, but those who did it were promoted, not sent to prison where they ought to be. Perhaps that is too strong: but they ought to be dismissed with prejudice, barred from ever working on any government or government financed or government approved project whatever. It was done for pure politics to ensure the need for Shuttle. And it was criminal.

A wacko sect called the Raëlians claimed it has successfully cloned a human being. When I was an undergraduate in Paris, I saw some posters of the then nascent sect, with such fascinating captions as “Raël – the stars’ messenger” and such amazing feats of circular reasoning as “If Raël is not a major prophet, the equal of Christ, Muhammad or Buddha, his revelation is false. That is impossible.” Poking fun at them used to provide us with hours of entertainment in our dorm (granted, we were easily amused).

This isn’t amusing any more. While these people are not homicidal maniacs like the Aum Shinrikyo sect (which launched Sarin nerve gas attacks against the Tokyo subway), they must be stopped, and a comprehensive, global ban on reproductive cloning instated by the United Nations.

I moved in August 2001. My entry in the white pages still points to my old address, both in the paper and online version. When I called Pac Bell’s customer service, it took 3 transfers and 45 minutes for them just to figure out what happened.

Apparently, it takes two or three billing cycles before the change of address percolates to the white pages database, and the online database is a mirror of the paper directory, i.e. updated only once a year in November.

In France, France Telecom guarantees three days between a change of address and its update in the online directory service. Apparently, in California, even 15 months is too much to ask for.

This leads to an average time of 9.7 months before updates (the seasonality of moves from US Bureau of the Census report SIPP P70-66 does not change this figure much). About 15.9% of the US population moves each year (source: Census report P20-531), and thus we can expect about 13% the addresses in the phone book to be incorrect.

Conclusion 1: batch processing is bad. Just say No.

Conclusion 2: don’t expect big, fat, happy, dumb and technologically challenged Baby Bells to lead the way into the broadband future…

Update (2002-12-19):

I learned yesterday that over half of California households have unlisted numbers. That figures…

Hypothetically, what would you say if you learned Bavaria proudly flew the nazi swastika over its capitol? And if they asserted the nazis were misunderstood, that World War II was fought for European unification, not racial supremacy and genocide?

Your reaction would be outrage, obviously.

Nazi flags do not fly over Munich because, after the war, Germans had to confront the sheer horror of what they had done and atone for it (unlike many Austrians who eluded this soul-searching with the convenient fiction that nazism was imposed militarily by Germany onto Austria). And the Germans do not fly nazi flags in their World War II military cemetaries either.

To this day the state flags of Mississippi and Georgia contain the “southern cross”, the battle flag of the Confederacy. And that flag still flies in a place of honor in the South Carolina capitol. Southern revisionists try and claim the Confederacy was about states’ rights, and that the Union was less than pure in its motives.

While it is certain the Union was less than ideal (the abolition of slavery was belated, and driven more by foreign policy than moral considerations), it is also equally clear the Confederacy’s motives were unambiguously evil. Unfortunately, the short-lived Reconstruction never forced the southerners to confront the true nature of slavery, which is why neo-confederates can deny slavery had anything to do with their cherished Confederacy, the same way too many Austrians unapologetically vote for Jörg Haider.

Recently, campaign billboards have been flowering here about the issue of homelessness. A look at the website www.wewantchange.com shows it is run by a Hotel industry group, and leans heavily towards harsh Giuliani-style enforcement. One statistic is arresting, however: 100 homeless people died in San Francisco last year, compared to 6 in Chicago. San Francisco’s weather is mild all year round, quite unlike Chicago’s freezing winters and stifling summers, and you would expect the opposite.

San Francisco has famously dysfunctional local politics. Thirteen years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, politicians were still squabbling about how to ensure the seismic safety of the Bay Bridge.

In this case, the posturing and special-interest pandering of the Mayor and Supervisors is leading to avoidable loss of life.