The man I know has considered moving to a new job, several times, but friends of his who have moved report that it is the same everywhere: there is a class divide, and the urbane upper-management sorts seem not to understand that managing people means more than making sure you have an appropriate women-to-men ratio. It means valuing not just an employee’s skill, but the whole, human person. It means understanding that sometimes passion trumps policy, and should be encouraged; that every raised voice should not require a negative notation to the personnel file; every case of “hurt feelings” should not require three-days of “sensitivity training,” until your fed-up employees choose to divest themselves of anything smacking of personality, color, emotion or enthusiasm, simply to avoid the grim “facilitated interface,” full of meaningless corrective language, that will send him back to his cubicle feeling frustrated, confused, emasculated (even if “he” is a female) and ultimately defeated.

How can anything great be born of such sterility? How can anything hopeful and alive be harnessed in a stream full of dead things, going with the flow?

Indeed. Even before such travesties as “microinequities” I regarded most of what HR was putting out as useless at best, when not actually directly harmful to the success of the company in its stated business purposes. I could write a whole post on my thoughts about corporate performance review processes and what a joke they are, but I’ll simply say that I was immensely relieved to have changed jobs a week before my last “self-appraisal” input was due, and found that the more they “improved” the process, the more it seemed to stay the same in any meaningful elements, and the more it demotivational I found it.

The post actually ties into a bigger theme I’ve been thinking about than mere performance appraisals: the overall culture of ineptitude that has arisen over the past three decades. It’s something that I can see in operation almost everywhere, from the space program to road paving to political leadership to art to retail clerking, but something I can’t quite articulate to others (I’ve tried). At some point, American culture (if not the entire Western world) passed an inflection point where ineptitude began to overtake capability…we continued on an ascending trajectory for some time due to the continued-but-dwindling presence of those who predominated before this transition took place, but from that point on things proceeded to a peak and then began to decline. It’s not just in one discipline or industry, but everywhere.  We’re coasting, but the initial velocity is falling off at an increasing rate, with nothing in sight to restore it.

It’s hard to explain it, but once you see it, you see it. Things are not done the way they were successfully done even in the relatively recent past (either in method or in quality of results), the people doing these things don’t seem to notice or to be interested in fixing things if they do notice, and the resulting decline is perversely interpreted as a need to double down on the same ineptitude or the adopt the latest unhelpful management fad-of-the-week, continuing if not accelerating the decline. The focus is instead on the bullshit the linked post highlights, ensuring that no improvement will occur. Meaningful criticism and accountability are absent, so no meaningful correction is possible.

The spaceship and its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port at 7 a.m. PDT (10.00 a.m. EDT), heading to an altitude of about 46,000 feet, where SpaceShipTwo was released.

Two pilots then ignited the ship’s rocket engine and climbed another 10,000 feet, reaching Mach 1.2 in the process. Additional test flights are planned before the spaceship will fly even faster, eventually reaching altitudes that exceed 62 miles.

“Going from Mach 1 to Mach 4 is relatively easy, but obviously we’ve still got to do it. I think that the big, difficult milestones are all behind us,” Branson said.

About 10 minutes after the launch from Wallops Island on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles declared the test a success after observing a practice payload reach orbit and safely separate from the rocket…

The company from the Washington suburb of Dulles was one of two, along with California-based competitor SpaceX, chosen to supply the space station after NASA ended its three-decade-old shuttle program in 2011. The space agency turned to private companies for the job, saying it would focus on getting manned flights to asteroids and to Mars.

It’s almost like we’re watching the “giggle factor” dissolve away in real-time.

New F-1B rocket engine upgrades Apollo-era design with 1.8M lbs of thrust

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life

The former details the efforts by Pratt & Whitney and Dynetics to evolve the F-1/F-1A designs into the F-1B: a new engine derived from the old, using modern manufacturing methods and control systems where beneficial. It’s especially interesting because I’ve long thought calls by laypeople and Congressmen and the like to bring the Saturn V into production would (if heeded) lead to exactly this…by the time you take advantage of the cost-saving technological improvements (and the loss of certain outmoded manufacturing capabilities) since 1960, you may end up with a machine that looks and performs much as the original, but shares only a partial pedigree with it. The temptation/opportunity to make it better is too great, and one would be foolish not to do so. Efforts on the F-1B are an impressive example of this.

The latter is an example of something I think we need a lot more of: hands-on experience for younger engineers. Building something new or reverse-engineering something old, doesn’t matter, it’s a great opportunity for learning that simply making CAD models and PowerPoints of “paper rockets” will never get you.

And check out those welds – wow.

What? For the kids? Forget the kids – I’d do this for me! I’m still amused that while working on Orion I got to play in personally inspect Apollo 17′s CM, a Soyuz trainer, and two different Orion CM mockups.

The humanoid robots are a little creepy in an uncanny valley way, but quite impressive for what they can do if even part of it is autonomous (it looks to me like the Petman demo involves someone driving the device in realtime, possibly by mean akin to motion capture, yet still with autonomous responses/reflexes at work in maintaining its balance). I found the robotic pack-mule the most impressive, probably because it (and the hexapod thing near the beginning) appears to be the most versatile and mature design – one can already imagine a production version being used in the field for a variety of applications (with or without cinder-block-tossing appendages). Or, imagine a future Mars “rover’ based on a similar platform, able to wander into more interesting areas of the planet’s surface than the current wheeled designs can reach.

The hexapod device really caught my attention, partly because Carl and I dreamed up a similar device a few months ago for Ghosts of Tharsis – more sophisticated of course, but something that is recognizable as a 40-year evolution of the device shown, augmented with the wholly-fictional (?) simulacrum intelligence technology. And if you thought the diggers were dangerous…

If someone as transparently dishonest and histrionic as OnFire / PolitiComm is the best the Colorado Progessive Machine can do, it beggars belief that the center-right in the state does as badly as it does. Unfortunately, Colorado’s center-right is essentially unfunded, so its activists have regular non-political jobs. This tends to eat into the time we might otherwise spend (for instance) sending 100+ angry and hate-filled Tweets a day the way the Progressives here do.

As I noted in the article, though, it’s people like OnFire / PolitiComm who have been teaching me a lot about the deceptive and manipulative argumentation techniques employed by the left. For all his faults, OnFire / PolitiComm is a wonderful example of bad practice, presenting in one Twitter feed a continuous stream of unsubtle examples of the tricks, tropes, and tactics used by the left throughout social media and more traditional channels.

I suspect that this is one of those unexpected side-effects of the internet. It used to be that one would be confronted with or witness fallacious reasoning, hectoring, and the like in person or in public forums in only isolated incidents. Emotional appeals, bad information, spin, bullying, and the other methods the real-world counterparts of OnFire / Politicomm employed could go unchallenged – and all too often persuade people – because without some exposure to debate or philosophy, it was difficult for the Average Joe or Jane to see that someone was actively manipulating them. But now, the internet puts hundreds of public forums in front of us in the form of social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, blog and newspaper comments, etc.), and unlike the town square, watercooler, city council meeting, or other traditional forums these can be experienced in a rapid, continual flow on devices which afford us a degree of emotional distance from what is being said and how. The internet makes it possible to see the same patterns of thought and argument repeat themselves over and over, across many channels and platforms. Over time it’s like learning to ‘see the Matrix in the numbers’: one begins to recognize these attempts at manipulation and deception, and recognize the common motives behind each of them (the “Ds” I mention at the link). In short, when exposed to a larger set of data, the larger number of examples to compare make it much easier to recognize patterns and relationships. And recognizing and naming manipulative tactics, of course, is the key to diminishing their power to manipulate.

A few observations:

• Yes, it looks like they will employ some sort of mission/habitation module.
• While they have a reference mission in mind that appears to rely on SpaceX and Bigelow hardware, there are indications that they aren’t wedded to a particular company or component (besides maybe Paragon). This gives me a little more confidence in the seriousness of the effort – it says to me that they are about the mission, rather than cool new hardware (or new applications of existing hardware).
• I just knew when I saw this headline that it would prompt howls of outrage from the non-cisgendered and anti-heteronormative: Fancy a trip to Mars dear? A ‘tried and tested’ male-female partnership in focus for space mission. And so it did.
• Along with the above came the usual (especially for a UK paper) whinging about rich people spending their money ‘frivolously’ when it should be flushed on human uplift here on Earth, and resentment that ‘we’re paying for this nonsense’. Which illustrates a peculiar (and increasingly common) envy-rooted mindset that holds private wealth to be interchangeable with government money: sure it’s their money, but I should have a say in how they choose to spend it.
• I’m not a fan of IM’s focus on promoting STEM as a reason for doing this. Why not just admit that it’s a grand adventure, and be proud of that? Focusing on that aspect of it will do more to inspire people (kids included) than turning it into the same sort of pedantic, boring, and cringe-inducing “science class” outreach NASA already does (something we lampoon in the first few chapters of In the Shadow of Ares). One reason most Americans don’t give a crap about what NASA does anymore is precisely because NASA presents its entire value to the public as STEM outreach and science generally: space under NASA is not about adventure and frontiers any more, or achievements or new possibilities or big dreams, it’s all about science for science’s sake, a labcoat-clad abstraction disconnected from the day-to-day experience of most Americans and from the big goals and larger themes science fiction has encouraged them to associate with space exploration. Science is good, but it’s not what compels. STEM is important, but severely limiting if treated as the entire goal vs. being woven in seamlessly. NASA’s approach is fine if it really is generating useful basic science and effective STEM outreach, and doesn’t pretend to have a lock on the business of inspiring or adventuring when it compulsively shuns both. If Inspiration Mars creates the perception that they’re only doing the same things NASA does just bigger! and better! and bolder! and with private funding!, they will fail to distinguish their effort from the already-ignored efforts of NASA. I’m dead serious about this – if they focus on STEM going forward as much as they do on their website at the moment, they will KILL public interest in the project.
• They also need to be very, very careful about involving NASA or Big Aerospace in their project. There is much to be gained in terms of knowledge and experience from these parties, along with access to unique manufacturing, test, and operations facilities, but there is also great risk in letting these camels entirely into the tent through lack of vigilance.

We’ll apparently find out tomorrow, but this would have to include some sort of mission module or Bigelow habitat in addition to the Dragon capsule. They’d be incredibly lucky if they were to choose participants who could spend that much time together in such a cramped space without killing each other or themselves or both, for one thing, and I strongly doubt a Dragon alone could carry all the necessary consumables.

Which is not to poo-pooh the idea at all. I think it’s great if Tito and company go forward with this. If the participants survive the mission (and possibly even if they don’t), it will be a huge shot in the arm to private space efforts, putting to rest the “giggle factor” once and for all. Just imagine how impotent the usual sneers about how SpaceX and others are “merely repeating what NASA and the Soviet/Russian space program did decades ago” will become when a private endeavor manages to pull off (or nearly pull off) something no government program has done…or has even tried to do.

Something like this…

…which reminded me of the agricultural bubbles at the Green in In the Shadow of Ares.

In fact, they’re a set of agricultural greenhouses in the town of Hveragerði, and despite their size are each about a tenth as wide and about 1/15th as long as their fictional counterparts.

CLARIFICATION: No, we did not actually go to Iceland on a lark. We used an airplane.