Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Lunar-tics
Must admit I was thinking of a snide cartoon about the astronautess in diapers, but when I saw Nowak's face in the courtroom, I just couldn't do it. Her face showed more clearly than any words could say, that she had been in the grip of a hormonal delusion and that the delusional bubble had been well and truly popped.
Happens to all of us, though generally around age 18 instead of age 40.
One broad comment: Any time you set up a tightly-knit caste with specialized training and a code of silence, whether priests, astronauts, spies, or elite paramilitary, you need to keep those folks busy. You need to give them a well-defined and clear mission that holds their attention and excitement. When you see priests diddling the altarboys, or astronauts pursuing delusional love interests with mallets and saws, or spies leaking to newspapers, it's a pretty good sign that the caste has too much time on its hands and not enough clarity of mission.
For NASA, it's obvious that the mission of manned spaceflight has gone stale. There's no scientific purpose and no public excitement in going to the fucking MOON one more time. As I've said a dozen times, weather control would be scientifically interesting, exciting and understandable to the public, and quite possibly the most heroic and life-saving effort by science since vaccination. ¶ 12:44 PM
Happens to all of us, though generally around age 18 instead of age 40.
One broad comment: Any time you set up a tightly-knit caste with specialized training and a code of silence, whether priests, astronauts, spies, or elite paramilitary, you need to keep those folks busy. You need to give them a well-defined and clear mission that holds their attention and excitement. When you see priests diddling the altarboys, or astronauts pursuing delusional love interests with mallets and saws, or spies leaking to newspapers, it's a pretty good sign that the caste has too much time on its hands and not enough clarity of mission.
For NASA, it's obvious that the mission of manned spaceflight has gone stale. There's no scientific purpose and no public excitement in going to the fucking MOON one more time. As I've said a dozen times, weather control would be scientifically interesting, exciting and understandable to the public, and quite possibly the most heroic and life-saving effort by science since vaccination. ¶ 12:44 PM
