July Links

The big news a month ago was Justice Anthony Kennedy stepping down from the Supreme Court, which led to a big discussion of what the Court will look like without its moderate tie-breaker. Reason Magazine countered that Gorsuch was more liberal than Kennedy last year. 538 can't even agree with itself about Kennedy's politics and how the President's nominee would change the Court.

The hunt for Planet Nine turned up results closer to home with the discovery of twelve new Jovian moons. This brings the total count to 79.

India tests a crew capsule abort system. Their human space program is a long way from orbital test flights, but it's reassuring to see another nation taking steps to join that exclusive club. Scott Manley discusses the test and its context.

The UK, meanwhile, is finally planned to resume launching from their own territory with a new spaceport in Scotland. The United States is also inching closer to launching crews from American soil, with the first commercial crew assignments to be announced next week.

Underreported old news: improved planetary science models explain the asymmetrical Martian magnetic field.

Scott Alexander reviews the latest attempt to resolve the Fermi Paradox. This argument is strongly early-Filter, i.e. intelligent life is extremely rare. I don't have the statistical background to comment on their reasoning, but research to pin down the base numbers continues. For instance, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is warming up before it takes over the search from Kepler.

Alyssa Vance discusses the doublethink of "meritocracy". Simply put, institutions like to play favorites while also maintaining that their scions are selected on objective merits. You obviously can't have it both ways, but realizing that this is what most people think constitutes meritocracy explains their previously-unfathomable opposition to it.

For a more extreme example of institutional failure, here's a first-hand account of cult-level abuse arising inside a college department. It's a painful read, but ultimately not very surprising given that the school provided all the risk-factors by conscious decision.

Liberal Currents tackles the claim that racism arose from the Enlightenment.

May/June Links

Recent analysis of Magellan data suggests that Venus may have plate tectonics unlike those observed on Terra and Mars. This intermediate form may be a product of Venus' unusual atmosphere-interior combination, which makes the crust a lot more fluid than on other terrestrial planets.

After 46 years out-of-print, new copies of John D. Clark's rocketry history Ignition! are finally available. Get your copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or directly from Rutgers University Press.

Scott Alexander and his readers discuss basic income versus basic jobs.

Here's an interesting optical illusion: the Troxler effect. Stare at this fuzzy image long enough, and your eyes or brain will edit out the entire thing. Wikipedia says that the cause is still uncertain.

Does studying ethics increase ethical behavior? There's not enough research to tell for sure, but initial results aren't exactly promising. Depending on what future studies find, this may help open up some space in undergraduate curricula.

Speaking of opening up space, Falcon 9 fairing recovery is coming along.

NASA extends the Juno mission to 2021. The spacecraft was supposed to enter the Jovian atmosphere later this year, but that timeline was based on a 14-day orbital period. Propulsion system issues in 2016 precluded this, however, and Juno remains on its initial 53-day orbit. This extension will allow scientists to complete their observational plan.

How to talk like Mr. Rogers.

Charles Stross explains why books are the length they are. Unsurprisingly, the answer has more to do with technology and economics than literary tastes and artistic merits.

Supreme Court rules that cell phone location data requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment.

Political Endorsements: What Gives?

I understand the overall concept of political endorsements—one states their opinion on who would make the best candidate for a particular office. This makes perfect sense.

During the 2016 Presidential primaries, however, I noticed something odd: all the discussions of the endorsement primary assumed that each endorser would endorse one, and only one, candidate. This seemed a bit weird because there were really three races going on (for the nomination of each major party¹). Once the nominations are in, it makes sense to endorse one of them, but until then it make ssense to endorse a candidate for each nomination.

Look at it this way: I would rather have the best possible candidate from each party in the final race.² Elections would be a lot less stressful if I liked all the candidates, and had to choose the best rather than the least-terrible. Party officials should like this, because tempting swing voters and moderate members of the other Parties would improve their odds of winning.

Endorsing a candidate for each nomination is a potential way of communicating this information. It's gameable, certainly, but also improves the odds of the final office-holder representing the wider values of their constituents. Letting the opposition parties know which of their candidates you prefer seems like a net-beneficial disclosure.

Maybe this is my idiosyncrasy as an independent showing, though. I'm no longer a committed partisan and vote for candidates that can be expected to reliably represent my values in office, regardless of the letters after their names. Party officials aren't generally receptive to their elected members deciding for themselves—they'd rather everyone vote with the Party line than entertain the possibility of internal dissent. This is the biggest issue with the idea, I suspect. No one in the major parties would like to give up a seat to a candidate outside their organization, even a sympathetic one.

Remind me why we tolerate whips, again?

---

¹The Green Party's primaries weren't even remotely competitive, in contrast to the other major parties.

²Where "best" indicates alignment with my values, rather than probability of winning.

Some Things I Didn't Learn in Undergrad (And Really Wanted To)

Since graduating earlier this month¹, several people have mentioned to me that you should never stop learning. I don't object to this statement, but I find it somewhat puzzling. I went into aerospace engineering because I enjoy astronautics, and this field moves fast enough that the only alternative to maintaining technical competency is sliding into obsolescence. Naturally, that does not appeal to me.

But this biggest issue is that I don't think I really learned enough in college. I mentioned this in passing to one of my professors, who assured me that most students from our department pursue graduate studies. That helps, but not a lot, because there's more that a few areas that I want to learn more about. To better structure my thoughts on the subject, let's discuss some of the areas which we didn't really cover, but I had really hoped we would.

Nucleonics. Technically, this one is my own fault. I started at a school which offered a nuclear engineering minor, and I had the credit hours (thanks to AP) to pursue it. Unfortunately, I didn't really understand how the college course system worked, and blew those slots on entrepreneurship classes freshman year.² Trying to work ahead in my science coursework would have probably been a better use of my time.

Heat Transfer, on the other hand, strikes me as a widely-applicable subject for aerospace engineers in general. It does not appear to be standard in undergraduate plans of study. You can probably take it as a technical elective, but those slots are limited, and instead you're more likely to push it to graduate school. Letting M.E.'s have all the fun seems a bit strange, but whatever, there's a lot of ground to cover and plenty of heat transfer books out there.

Launch Vehicle Dynamics is a little more specialized but still something would would expect to discuss. Aside from a few problems with extremely unrealistic assumptions, we didn't cover this in any real detail, not even in astronautics classes. This is probably an artifact of KU's program being particularly airplane-focused, and other schools may handle it differently.

Manned Spaceflight. Pretty much everything we covered was unmanned, though "everything" at my school consists of two (2) space systems classes. Manned spaceflight builds on unmanned spaceflight, but there's a lot of material there which we simply did not discuss. Last year's class got some of it because their AIAA design competition involved a crewed mission, but mine didn't. I'm hoping to get my hands on a relevant textbook in the near future.

Advanced Propulsion—specifically, nuclear-thermal propulsion, which motivated my desire to study nucleonics. In retrospect, this was probably a touch optimistic and is a much more common subject to find graduate students learning, but a more flexible plan-of-study might have made undergraduates taking additional rocket classes plausible.³

Computational fluid dynamics and compressible aerodynamics represent the latest additions to this list, and were ultimately my own decision. Both are offered in most curricula, but undergraduates usually don't have room in their schedules unless that is the particular area they intend to specialize in. Taking these classes would have necessarily entailed giving up other electives. I cannot help but wonder, though, whether their stripped-down components could have been included in a more versatile plan-of-study.

If I were to offer any overall theme to this post, it would probably be that underclassmen generally have insufficient information to make intelligent decisions about their education. All too many students end up in the wrong major for their interests, or in the right major at the wrong school, or even at the right school yet mess up their plans-of-study in the first few semesters.

I don't see any easy solution to this problem beyond better advising to underclassmen and prospective students. Perhaps the best we can do is better explain the challenges and minutiae of engineering education, and hope for the very best.

---

¹That's three of my 2018 predictions satisfied, incidentally.

²To be clear, entrepreneurship was interesting and will probably still prove valuable, but nuclear engineering strikes me as a much better subject to study in a formal context.

³Note that whether additional classes are available depends on the school. It's worth looking into course listings and developing a preliminary plan of study before Decision Day.

April Links

Bryan Caplan on the monkey trap. Based on alleged behavior of monkeys (I've heard the same said about raccoons), it describes organizations' willingness to accept horrible results, rather than give up a much lesser positive value.

Related: David Chapman on navigating the medical system, which seems to be in the process of regressing to a pre-modern state.

Speaking of pre-modern states: are the Amish unhappy, super-happy, or just meh?

News I missed last fall: NASA is restarting research on nuclear thermal propulsion. This is really good news for the future of manned spaceflight, because sending astronauts to Mars and beyond with chemical propulsion alone really pushes the limits of technological viability.

Maine is voting again in June on ranked-choice voting. Citizens of the Pine Tree State approved ranked-choice voting in the 2016 election, but the legislature fought hard against the measure.  In a rare "people's veto", the issue is going back to the ballot box. Hopefully it wins again.

Reviewing Caplan's new book, The Case Against Education.

An interesting physicist startup tries to help autodidact scientists get a better understanding of the fields they're trying to work in. Good insight into the failings of science communication to the non-technical public.

A Mars sample return mission inches towards reality.

March Links

MIT is taking some actions to deal with credentialism in higher education, though we'll have to wait and see how it plays out.

Megan McArdle discusses the ways that adults exploit youth activism to support favored causes while ignoring kids' needs when it's no longer convenient.

An old article from PEW Journalism on how the media covers topics disproportionately to their real-life implications and importance. Related: who fact checks the fact checkers?

Rationalist bloggers review Twelve Rules for Life.

The European Space Agency is testing an air-breathing electric engine. It's not quite a jet engine that works in space, but it's surprisingly close. NASA, meanwhile, is working on 3D-printed rocket nozzles.

Planetary Resources is struggling after funding setbacks. It's unclear what their new strategy will be but the soundbytes don't inspire optimism.

People had some weird ideas about averages in the first half of the 20th century, with implications ranging from airplane design to fashion. Unsurprisingly, the fields where mistakes had measurable consequences learned the lesson faster. We're still beholded to those lessons today, with most aircraft dimensions sized to accommodate 95th percentile males and 5th percentile females.

Ethereal art, made with drones.

February Links

One of the things I missed during senior design: Scott Alexander continuing to hack at a Bayesian theory of mind. Worth comparing to Objectivist epistemology and related, realist theories.

Jacob over at Put A Number On It has some interesting advice for being lucky: instead of trying to improve the base rate, increase your variance. The post includes examples from both sports and politics, and I'm sure you can generate a few more yourself.

Slate Star Codex celebrates five years of blogging.

The Mars 2020 rover will be taking at least one Martian meteorite sample for instrument calibration. This isn't the first piece of the Red Planet to head back, however: Mars Global Surveyor still has a small piece in orbit. We could still get that one back if we rush things.

I'm not sure how you could miss it, but just in case: Falcon Heavy test flight went mostly successfully. I'm counting this toward my 2018 predictions, despite a hard landing on the central core, because the basic architecture functioned properly.

Speaking of space, everyone finally noticed the NASA plutonium shortage, because the Department of Energy recently restarted production. The KiloPower Reactor project is still progressing, with reactor tests now underway in Nevada.

Scott Sumner on Overton Window shifts in mainstream economics and the continued question of housing prices.

NVIDIA releases a "fast photorealistic style transfer algorithm" that will apply the style of one image to another. According to the paper, it purports to be significantly better than previous approaches. The code is available under Creative Commons with some honestly impressive examples.

January Links

2017 was the safest year for aviation in decades. A lot of people have tried to politicize this, but I'm pretty sure aircraft engineers and operators get 99% of the credit.

Arguably related: Why did everything take so long?

Visualization of the music from Interstellar.

Astronaut John Young passes away at 87. On a related note, a longevity research FAQ.

Falcon Heavy gets a launch date: February 6th. It'll be exciting to see whether my prediction proves correct.

An older article on dolphin intelligence.

Scott Alexander on bitcoin and bias.

Speaking of bias, NY Times opinion piece on how social media is making us dumber. Specifically, how soundbytes and decontextualized quotation lead people to believe that public figures advocate the polar opposite of what those public figures are actually advocating.

Shifting Registers

Epistemic Status: Probably re-inventing the wheel

Epistemic Effort: Regular ruminations over the span of several months

In linguistics, a register describes the differences in word choice, pronunciation, sentence construction, etc. that we use in various social settings. For a simple example, you would use a totally different register talking to your boss in a meeting than your spouse after dinner. 

Probably. It wouldn't surprise me if some people use the same register everywhere. I definitely have trouble shifting to a friendly register, even with people I'm sorta comfortable with. But that's not the point of this post. Rather, I want to steal the term to describe a more psychological phenomena.

First, though, let me tell you a story.

Back during my last semester at Purdue, my mom had some inkling of how serious the situation was, and decided to sign me up for a session with her therapist when I was around for spring break. The session was largely forgettable, in no small part because you don't really need a hypnotist to put you to sleep when you're as tired as I was, but one thing I remember saying stuck out.

I was trying to describe how my stress response worked, and ran into an issue explaining it. You see, how I operated when I was in West Lafayette was almost entirely divorced with how I operated in Kansas City.

This makes perfect sense when you think about it. When I was at home, I was sleeping all day and didn't have class. When I was at school, I had classes and homework and exams and so on. At school, I lived in a dorm, with a roommate, showered and brushed my teeth in a communal bathroom, etc. At home, I had dramatically more privacy. I rode in cars instead of walking or taking the bus.

I tried to explain that my behavior, mindset, whatever you want to call it was very different when I was at home for a break, even a mid-semester break, than at school. I don't think I did a very good job. But that realization has stuck with me.

This is what I'm describing as a register. Even now, I'm in a very different register when I'm at home or at school. Yesterday I was in Kansas City, today I'm in Lawrence. In KC, I'm mostly killing time because I literally never know when I'll be interrupted for whatever activity my parents want me for. My most productive hours were monopolized by manual labor in the continuing move process, and then, exhausted, I couldn't exert decent discipline in a non-optimized environment.

Today, I am the only person ultimately controlling my daily schedule. When I finish writing this blog post, I'll finish my grocery list and go to the store, put in laundry after I come back, and start reading up for this semester. I still don't have great self-discipline, but my routine is designed around my needs and apartment layout.

Concrete examples don't really get at the underlying difference, unfortunately. I'm not trying to describe the way my routine varies, but rather the way my mindset varies. At school, I'm focused on more optimal forms of recreation between churning out assignments. That's the ideal, at least; I frequently still fall short. But that's a hell of a lot better than waiting for the largely-unpredictable parental help requests. It's difficult to get anything done, so after all these years I've basically stopped trying. It's not a mindset I like, so naturally I try to minimize my time there.

Shifting registers isn't quick or easy. Part of the reason I went back to school early this semester was to begin the process early. All too often, during what non-engineers call "syllabus week", I'm still operating primarily in the home register than the school register. I slack off out of habit instead of clearing out easy assignments quickly and efficiently. I don't like that but there's only so much that BRUTE STRENGTH can do for it. Putting myself back in the correct habitspace is a much smarter tactic.

If I didn't get the idea across well-enough, well, maybe I just need to switch registers.

Predictions for 2018

The New Year is a time for reflection and self-improvement, and in that spirit I'm putting out my predictions for 2018. The rules are the same as they were in 2017. At the end of the year, I'll come back and see how accurate I was.

PERSONAL/ACADEMIC

I will read 15 books this year: 95%
....20 books: 80%
....30 books: 60%
I will write an average of two blog posts per month: 80%
....three blog posts per month: 70%
....four blog posts per month: 60%
I will not experience a major political/religious/philosophical conversion: 95%
I will write more than 10,000 words of fiction this year: 70%
I will still be using Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr: 90%
I will remain single this year: 60%
I will vote in the 2018 midterm elections: 95%
I will not be hospitalized: 95%
I will not have my wisdom teeth removed: 90%
My French will improve this year: 60%
Jayhawk Rocket Design will begin constructing the hybrid rocket engine: 70%
I will graduate with my degree in aerospace engineering: 95%
....in May: 90%
....with a GPA 3.2 or above: 80%
KU Aerospace will place in at least one AIAA Design Competition: 90%
....two AIAA Design Competitions: 80%
I will no longer be living in Kansas: 60%
I will either find an engineering job or enroll in grad school by December: 95%

SCIENCE/SPACE

No successful human clones announced: 80%
No major progress on figuring out the "EM Drive": 70%
Falcon Heavy successfully launches this year: 80%
SpaceX Dragon 2 test-flown this year: 90%
....successfully: 80%
Boeing Starliner test-flown this year: 90%
....successfully: 80%
Astronauts will launch from American soil: 70%
Virgin Galactic tourist flights won't begin this year: 60%
Blue Origin begins crewed tests this year: 60%
No crewed flights beyond Low Earth Orbit: 90%
NASA Orion will remain on-schedule: 70%
No deaths in space this year: 90%
No country leaves the ISS Treaty: 90%

POLITICS/WORLD

Donald Trump will still be President at the end of 2018: 95%
Mike Pence will still be Vice President: 95%
Republicans will lose the House and/or Senate at midterms: 90%
Theresa May will still be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 90%
UK will remain on track to leave the European Union: 80%
No additional countries will leave the European Union: 70%
US Nominal GDP will finish ahead of the EU and China: 80%
Bitcoin will end the year valued $500 or above: 80%
....$1000 or above: 70%
....$10,000 or above: 60%
Fewer than 10 cases of wild polio will be contracted: 70%

META

I will remember to score these predictions: 95%
I will have been overconfident in these predictions: 80%
I will have been less overconfident than in 2017: 60%

This year I am making a total of fifty predictions, and attempting to be more conservative than last year. That said, I still expect to be overconfident. See you back in twelve months to see whether I was successful.