Three months ago, we successfully flew our second test vehicle in a short hop mission, and then last week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet. A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle. Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We’re already working on our next development vehicle.

Nobody wants to lose a test vehicle, of course, but this can actually be a useful development — as anyone who has read Henry Petroski’s books understands, you learn more from your failures than from your successes. It has always struck me as the wrong approach that Orion didn’t budget and schedule a bunch of simple test vehicles, with potential failures and learning from them in mind. Yes there are test vehicles, but they’re each quite complex and expensive, and the failure of any one of them will be seen as a major black eye to the whole program (regardless of what might be learned).

Fortunately, given Bezos’ ability to fund the project, NASA getting cold feet over COTS or CCDEV after a failure probably isn’t much of a threat to the ongoing efforts he mentions in the post.

So, a few weeks back, I bought a Kindle 3G to test out the platform.

So far, I like it. It takes a little while to get used to it, but it grows on you fairly quickly. I had seen previous versions owned by friends, so I had an idea of what to expect, but I was still pretty impressed with it. The first thing that wowed me when I took it out of the box was the thinness of the thing — I was almost afraid to handle it, for fear of slicing my fingers off. The second thing was my mistaking the default display image for a printed shipping overlay — I had to look very closely at it, from several different angles, to convince myself that what I was seeing was really on the screen, such is the visual novelty of “electric paper” displays.

Turned it on, set it up in short order (added my home wifi info, which is actually optional with the 3G version), and it was ready to go. The only other setup I had to perform had to do with uploading of documents, and involved simply adding my personal email address to a list on my Amazon account so that the conversion server would accept documents sent to it from that address. With only one false try (using PDF format, which produced unsurprisingly dodgy results in formatting) I was able to upload the manuscript to my Kindle flawlessly. I had expected it to require a lot of online fussing and fixing to make it look right, but it digested the native .docx file with nary a burp.

One thing I have not yet done is paid to download any new books (for lack of time). I did download a few freebie classics I was familiar with (Machiavelli’s The Prince and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations…not kidding about the “classics” part), and have been poking around in them as time permits since their short, self-contained chapters make them more amenable than novels to reading in small increments. The feature whereby passages highlighted by other readers are highlighted on your own screen is a nice touch — it’s like a social-media version of buying a used book at the college bookstore, with the importance of a passage indicated not merely by the electronic equivalent of underlining or a highlight pen, but also by the number of other people who thought it significant>

One thing I didn’t like about it is the way the screen flickers when you “turn the page”, but this is where that “getting used to it” thing comes in — after a few minutes, you don’t notice it.

Time permitting tomorrow, I may be able to start posting sample chapters as an appetizer for the full novel, which we expect to have available via Kindle in the next two weeks or so.

For those who don’t know, the Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature two weeks ago passed what have come to be called the “Dirty Dozen” tax increases – blatantly ignoring the Taxpayer Bill of Rights amendment to the state constitution by raising taxes without a vote of the citizens. Among the items subjected to new or increased taxes, including soda and (some, weirdly-defined) candy, doggie bags, software downloads, and bull semen (!), are all online sales.

In the case of the latter, the tax increase mandated onerous and privacy-invading reporting requirements onto online retailers. Amazon announced early on that they would suspend all affiliate accounts for Colorado residents if the measure passed, and over the weekend made good on that promise, sending cancellation letters to all of its Amazon Affiliates in the state.

In other words, a company had the guts to stand up in a small, symbolic way to the anti-constitutional taxation policy and invasive reporting requirements of the state of Colorado – and Senator Morse won’t stand for it. How dare Amazon not meekly accept the dictates of Senator Morse and his pals in the Colorado legislature? Who does Amazon think it is?

Me? I say “Hooray for Amazon!”

What amuses me is that he is now going to ditch his Kindle, boycott Amazon, and take his custom to more statism-friendly Apple. While I applaud Amazon’s actions, I firmly believe that they will lose far more business from people like me, who will no longer purchase anything online, from any retailer, so long as this taxation and reporting law is in effect. Indeed, even though I am a shareholder and the move would cost the company money, I would have preferred to see Amazon go all the way, and refuse to accept any orders for delivery to or with a billing address in Colorado (or at the very least the addresses of the governor and every legislator who voted for the bill).

What’s not funny about Senator Morse’s dramatic soliloquy, though, is the unquestioned assumptions that lie behind it. The notion that Amazon being a $900 million “corporate customer [sic]” is something shameful, a sin that requires the redistribution of their profits to assuage. Or the assumption that the targets of an objectionable piece of legislation ought to know their place, and accept the imposition humbly without uttering a word of protest. Or the apallingly ignorant assumption that he and his equally-economically-ignorant colleagues can blithely pass tax increases without altering economic behavior in the private sector whatsoever.

What’s even worse is Morse’s astonishing and hypocritical attack on Amazon as being a “bully” and engaging in “egregiousness” and ”tyranny”. Senator John Morse, Democrat of Colorado Springs, may want to look in the mirror – after all, it isn’t Amazon who is pitching an over-the-top emotional fit, it isn’t Amazon who is throwing its weight around to take something it shouldn’t have or forcing people to do business with it, and it isn’t Amazon who is acting in blatant violation of the state constitution and against the loudly expressed wishes of the citizens of Colorado.

[via WhoSaidYouSaid]

ADDED: Senator Morse is getting called out on his BS in the comments at YouTube, and is (not at all surprisingly) responding with snippy and condescending remarks. How dare we proles question him! He’s a senator!

I visited Borders over the weekend to buy a gift certificate.  The first thing I noticed when I entered the store (having not been to this particular location in perhaps six months) was the vast expanse of empty racks in the middle of the place where CDs used to be displayed.  According to the counter clerk, they were in the process of phasing out most of their CD products — all but new releases — due to the rising popularity of iTunes and other internet-based digital music sources.  “Nobody is buying CDs anymore,” she explained.

Apparently, nobody is buying books at Borders anymore, either.  Something about the book racks also struck me as odd while I was standing in line, and as I was leaving I figured out what it was: the racks had been cut back to half their length. That is, the racks perpendicular to the walls used to be made up of two oak shelving units, but the units on the end had been removed.  Now, they may plan to simply reshuffle their existing book inventory into the space vacated by CDs, but this particular change didn’t look recent – and why would they remove a good portion of the existing inventory from the floor, rather than waiting until the new area had been prepared? 

Given the company’s financial situation, it may be that I was witnessing one small step in the slow demise of the Borders chain:

Borders (BGP) has struggled for several years as the No.2 operator of book store behind Barnes & Noble. When Border’s released its last set of earnings it said it would cut the number of Waldenbooks stores from about 300 to 50 or 60. With Border’s losses, that won’t be enough. The pressure from online book operations led by Amazon (AMZN) and new e-book readers is overwhelming Borders. In the fourth quarter of last year, sales at Border’s branded stores dropped 15.3%. For the full year 2008, Borders lost $157 million on revenue of $2.8 billion. Borders recently extended its $42.5 million senior secured term loan with Pershing Square Capital Management, moving the due date to April 1, 2010. That may be the day that Borders goes away. Border’s shares trade at $1.47, down from a 52-week high of $8.02.

Tale #2: A Visit to the Dentist

Two years ago, I was glad to finally have an excuse to get rid of my last unsightly amalgam filling. Unfortunately, there was some sort of material flaw in the porcelain crown that replaced it, and today I had it replaced gratis.

Only, they didn’t replace it with quite the same thing.  Or in quite the same way.

Rather than the two-visit process I had to go through the last time, with those gag-inducing trays filled with molding putty and seemingly-endless custom fitting of the crown made from the resulting molds, I was in and out in about three hours, of which maybe ten minutes involved fitting and polishing.  Best part: no molds.

The new process involved inserting a small scanning device into my mouth before and after the old crown was removed, to create 3D images of the perfectly-fitting existing crown and the cleared-out bonding surface along with the surrounding molars.  Immediately after the second scan, a 3D image of the tooth as-it-was appeared on the screen next to my chair, the dentist made a few adjustments to add some material at certain adjustment points and then fired it off  to a milling machine in the next room — just as if she were printing a document.

About fifteen minutes later, she returned with the new but uncured crown to make a few adjustments to the fit. After about five minutes of grinding and test-fitting, it was into the curing oven for about 40 minutes. Then it was bonded in, and after another five minutes of fitting, it was done and I headed back to work.

That’s a pretty neat bit of medical technology, I think.

This is the same dentist with whom I first experienced digital X-rays a number of years ago, and who (with improved resolution on the X-ray interface) determined at my last exam that I have extra roots on all of my teeth, and not just the molars…something the new technology is showing to be surprisingly common.  Even better – she’s bringing in a 3D digital X-ray system soon, which should provide images at even higher resolution.

While I figured out the bricks-and-mortar bookstores’ days were numbered the first time I ordered something from Amazon back in 1996, the rapid evolution of medical technology is pretty surprising.