William Gerstenmaier knows the U.S. space program inside out -- both literally and figuratively. As a 30-plus year veteran of NASA, Gerstenmaier has managed the operational dimensions of the space shuttle, international space station, and other space flight missions. For this talk, he dissects a problem that recently grounded the shuttle, coming at it from the perspective of both an engineer, and a top-level manager with responsibility to the highest levels of government.

Gerstenmaier presents his case “as it unfolded,” for a behind-the-scenes view of how NASA keeps its aging shuttles aloft. His account begins in 2008, after a shuttle flight revealed something wrong with flow control valves essential to the shuttle’s hydrogen system. These valves are connected in a closed loop to the main engines, via a 170-foot length of pipe, through all manner of twists and turns, and frequently subjected to very high pressures. Gerstenmaier describes the series of tests his engineering teams performed, over long days, weekends and holidays, to determine what precisely had gone wrong, and the risks posed by potentially faulty equipment.

Transitioning from the Space Shuttle to the Constellation System

Minor drama at the Apple Store:

If you’re wondering why Eucalyptus is not yet available, it’s currently in the state of being ‘rejected’ for distribution on the iPhone App Store. This is due to the fact that it’s possible, after explicitly searching for them, to find, download from the Internet, and then read texts that Apple deems ‘objectionable’. The example they have given me is a Victorian text-only translation of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. For the full background, a log of my communications with Apple is below.

Apple's explanations are about as credible as Maureen Dowd's.

Tell Apple what you think:

Can’t find something on the iTunes Store? We’re constantly improving our catalog of music, audiobooks and videos. Use the form below to let us know what you’re looking for.

From the archive, Teresa DiFalco:

Minor drama is the lifeblood of suburbs.

Update: The drama subsides, with Apple finally acting sensibly.

Whither Eucalyptus?

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Moral Animal) has a new book.

In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright's findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony.

Nearly a decade in the making, The Evolution of God is a breathtaking re-examination of the past, and a visionary look forward.

An extended excerpt was published in The Atlantic:

It’s increasingly apparent how analogous a globalizing world is to the environment in which Christianity took shape after Jesus’ death.

If you view Paul not just as a preacher but as an entrepreneur, as someone who is trying to build a religious organization that spans the Roman Empire, then his writings assume a new cast.

In the days before modern anesthesia, requiring men to have penis surgery before they could join a religion fell under the rubric of disincentive.

Paul grasped the importance of such barriers to entry.

In the Roman Empire, the century after the Crucifixion was a time of dislocation. The situation was somewhat like that at the turn of the 20th century in the United States, when industrialization drew Americans into turbulent cities, away from their extended families. Indeed, Roman cities saw a growth in voluntary associations. The familial services offered by these groups ranged from the material, like burying the dead, to the psychological, like giving people a sense that other people cared about them.

If some people find it dispiriting that moral good should emerge from self-interest, maybe they should think again.

Decius, from an earlier Robert Wright thread:

There are two reasons that people act: Carrots and Sticks. Lowering the barrier to entry might be a carrot, but the sticks are much more effective and come when the political situation makes it impossible for people to go about their lives without acting.

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

From Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive:

I send you my greetings from beyond the swamps to... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Evolution of God

Jonah Lehrer:

"I've always been really good at waiting," Carolyn told me.

Craig, a year older than Carolyn, still remembers the torment of trying to wait. "At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls.

Low delayers are more likely to have behavioral problems. Low delayers have lower SAT scores.

Intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control.

The key [to self-control] is to avoid thinking about it [the thing you want to delay] in the first place.

Last August, I observed to my Moleskine:

They say delayed gratification isn't all it's cracked up to be.

"We'll see", I tell them. "We'll see."

From March:

Santino, a male chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo, planned hundreds of stone-throwing attacks on zoo visitors. The chimp collected and stored stones that he would later use as missiles. The chimpanzee collected the stones in a calm state, prior to the zoo opening in the morning. Hours later, in an 'agitated' state, Santino launched the stones at visitors.

Why don't people pay more attention to the archives?

People who love camp say that non-camp people simply don't understand what's so amazing about camp. In this program, we attempt to bridge the gap of misunderstanding between camp people and non-camp people.

There is no spoon.

As cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy.

Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention.

If children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

If you're a policy maker and you are not talking about core psychological traits like delayed gratification skills, then you're just dancing around with proxy issues. You're not getting to the crux of the problem.

Don't!

Jonathan Pfeiffer:

I have come to imagine the classical university as being a prototypical T.E.D. conference, a place where the power of an idea was carried not only by its intellectual content, but also by the theatricality of its presentation.

Fast forward to the present in Santa Barbara, California, where I am a graduate student. Are people filled with a spirit of learning at the university? The answer is yes only if by the word, "spirit," one really and cynically means, "weariness."

Some of the most capable people in the post-graduate ranks feel uninspired or disempowered. They may enter graduate school full of creativity and find that after about a year, the light within them no longer burns as brightly as it once did.

Knowing exactly why this happens is difficult, but one cannot help but suspect that it has something to do with academic culture.

Perhaps someday I will speak as well as Demosthenes. But if I do, then it will be a skill I will not have learned in graduate school.

Mark C. Taylor:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.

Peter Drucker:

Managers have to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: "If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?" If the answer is no, the organization has to ask, "So what do we do now?" And it has to do something, and not say, "Let's make another study."

Warren Buffett:

Do what you love, or your boss will decide for you.

Reforming Graduate Education

Carolyn Johnson in the Boston Globe works the medical angle on DIY-bio:

Katherine Aull is searching for a killer that has stalked her family for generations. The 23-year-old MIT graduate uses tools that fit neatly next to her shoe rack.

Speaking of shoes ...

Lisa: Look at all those beautiful shoes! I know they're made from animals but WOW!
Marge: Mmmm, If only I didn't already have a pair of shoes.

George Church:

"There seems to be a very deep and growing curiosity about genetics that might dwarf electronics."

From last year, another Globe story about Zack Anderson, a curious MIT student:

"If a lot of people think hacker, they think of someone who illegally breaks into systems," Anderson said. "I don't at all think that's what hacker means. I think hacking is a culture of curiosity and exploration and learning and building and creating new things."

Also from last year:

Science brings uncertainties; innovation successfully copes with them. Society calls for both the passion for knowledge and its taming. This ambivalence is an inevitable result of modernity.

Neil Postman:

If we had known the impact the motor vehicle would have on life, would we have embraced it so thoroughly?

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

William Deresiewicz:

I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Do-it-yourself genetic sleuthing

Jeanne Whalen in the Wall Street Journal:

Are biohackers a threat to national security?

A few months ago, Katherine Aull talked about her hobby on DIY Bio, a Web site frequented by biohackers, and her work was noted in New Scientist magazine.

That's when the phone rang.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

How could Whalen write this article without mentioning Freeman Dyson:

I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

Can it be stopped? Ought it to be stopped?

You might be able to guess his answer:

Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture.

George Church:

"The younger generation need something they feel they can do."

Some people are what you might call risk-averse:

Marge: I'd really like to give it a try!

Homer: I don't know, Marge, trying is the first step towards failure.

What are you waiting for?

Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius.

In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein

Netflix is the new breadline.

Mark Clothier and John Heylar:

In early 2008, David Roberts' morning routine at the Ridgewood train station was as unchanged as the view from its platform, which overlooks a downtown anchored by the Daily Treat diner and a 77-year-old movie theater.

Roberts would sip coffee, eat a corn muffin, scan the Financial Times and step aboard the 7:50 train. This was not the same trip he had made for the 14 years he worked for three Wall Street firms.

This was a commute to nowhere.

Like many of his neighbors in Ridgewood, Roberts had been thrown out of work after the credit markets seized up last year, joining thousands of commuters in the competition for jobs that don't exist anymore.

Have you seen Tokyo Sonata?

Robert Shiller:

The ability to short is essential to an efficient market, otherwise there's nothing to stop zealots from pricing things abnormally high.

I'm worried about the anger that's developing. People have tolerated a lot of inequality, but in light of recent events, I could see social changes.

A note from Mike Rorty:

There’s a real tendency to Other subprime mortgage holders. They are idiots, crooks, dupes, minorities, single mothers, easily mislead, liars and criminals, etc. But right here, 28% of all mortgage foreclosures, and 60% of subprime foreclosures, are from people who started with a prime mortgage. Those are the Us – good credit scores, 20% down, pay the bills on time.

A mind grenade from Gertrude Himmelfarb:

It is said that we need the best as a measure against which to test the second-best, to show us how far we are deviating from the best. In this sense, the best is the ideal to which the second-best aspires. But if the ideal is impractical because inconsonant with human nature, how or why should we aspire to it? The case for the second-best goes beyond practicality. More serious is the fact that the attempt to realise the unrealisable is likely to be pernicious.

Rattled in Ridgewood

George Cochrane:

Most days from 9:30am to midnight or later, I’m working on *something*. Some days the work is really engaging, some days it can be boring and pedestrian, but it keeps the habit of always pushing out ideas, always thinking and creating and shaping, in motion.

There’s a section in Anne Lamont’s "Bird By Bird" that talks about the cruciality of writing "Shitty first drafts."

The difference between you, the “not-creative” and people who seem to always have something new springing forth from them? They do their thing. It might be painful, especially at first. It might be frustrating. You might throw out the first 20 things you make, hate them, hate yourself, and curse the day anybody encouraged you to try.

But at least you’re starting.

Regular creative throughput tips the scales in your advantage, keeps the bearings smooth, and quells fear, letting you, once again, surprise yourself.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap."

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

Digging, Or The Importance of Creative Throughput

Normal trojans are a known threat, and we know how to mitigate them. But what about virtual machine trojans?

vimtruder