Alan Jacobs

[gallery] brucesterling:

*Still not enough to physically drown all the Global Warming denialists in Texas, but getting there

Two notes for Bruce Sterling: (a) You think it would be good for people to set their views about global warming based on what happens in one month in one place? I believe in global warming for scientific reasons, not because of local personal experience. (b) Floods don’t drown people selectively, based on whether an asshole like you approves of them or not. It would be good for you to remember that while people are mourning their dead.

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According to Conway, there is a “disconnect” between the desire to travel into space and the desire to understand it. This “disconnect” is a more fundamental difficulty for NASA than decades’ worth of budget cuts. It’s a contradiction that’s built into the agency’s structure, which includes a human exploration program on the one hand and a scientific program on the other. The planning for Mars missions so far has been left largely to the science types, but sometimes the human-mission types have insisted on getting involved. Whenever they’ve done so, Conway writes, the result has been “chaos.”  

Conway puts himself on the side of science, and, as far as he’s concerned, humans are the wrong stuff. They shouldn’t even be trying to get to another planet. Not only are they fragile, demanding, and expensive to ship; they’re a mess.  

“Humans carry biomes with us, outside and inside,” he writes. NASA insists that Mars landers be sterilized, but “we can’t sterilize ourselves.” If people ever do get to the red planet—an event that Conway, now forty-nine, says he considers “unlikely” in his lifetime—they’ll immediately wreck the place, just by showing up: “Scientists want a pristine Mars, uncontaminated by Earth.” If people start rejiggering the atmosphere and thawing the regolith, so much the worse.  

“The Mars scientists want to study won’t exist anymore,” Conway writes. “Some other Mars will.”

”

- Rather odd that this essay on different ideas about colonizing Mars doesn’t mention that every one of these different scenarios, and different attitudes, is explored deeply and brilliantly by Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars Trilogy.

via tumblr [ift.tt/1HCfOeV](http://ift.tt/1HCfOeV)

According to Conway, there is a “disconnect” between the desire to travel into space and the desire to understand it. This “disconnect” is a more fundamental difficulty for NASA than decades’ worth of budget cuts. It’s a contradiction that’s built into the agency’s structure, which includes a human exploration program on the one hand and a scientific program on the other. The planning for Mars missions so far has been left largely to the science types, but sometimes the human-mission types have insisted on getting involved. Whenever they’ve done so, Conway writes, the result has been “chaos.”  

Conway puts himself on the side of science, and, as far as he’s concerned, humans are the wrong stuff. They shouldn’t even be trying to get to another planet. Not only are they fragile, demanding, and expensive to ship; they’re a mess.  

“Humans carry biomes with us, outside and inside,” he writes. NASA insists that Mars landers be sterilized, but “we can’t sterilize ourselves.” If people ever do get to the red planet—an event that Conway, now forty-nine, says he considers “unlikely” in his lifetime—they’ll immediately wreck the place, just by showing up: “Scientists want a pristine Mars, uncontaminated by Earth.” If people start rejiggering the atmosphere and thawing the regolith, so much the worse.  

“The Mars scientists want to study won’t exist anymore,” Conway writes. “Some other Mars will.”

The great Jimmy Rushing — Mister Five By Five — along with Count Basie, for whom he did his best singing. What a master.

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[gallery] The great Jimmy Rushing — Mister Five By Five — along with Count Basie, for whom he did his best singing. What a master.

This astonishingly advanced and beautiful car was also known by the punning pronunciation of the initials DS in French as “La Déesse” – the goddess. The philosopher Roland Barthes, who was later killed in a car crash, compared the genius of the design of the Déesse to the building of the great French medieval cathedrals as a supreme expression of the spirit of the age. He mentions the many-spired cathedral of Chartres, an ever-fixed mark to which we steered across the yellow oceans of maize and sunflowers from Rouen, and in which I once spent the night hidden between pews in a sleeping bag. Modern France’s new religion of mobility was all there in the Déesse.

And Barthes was right. The Déesse was a kind of miracle, and a lift in one after a long, dusty vigil in the sun could feel like divine providence. Perched on the Déesse’s sighing white leather seats, hugging our rucksacks, we marvelled at the way the steering wheel appeared to float like a halo, magically suspended by an almost invisible stalk. Shakespeare wrote “My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.” You’d never say that about the Déesse. The car floated, gliding forward effortlessly, having levitated with unhurried dignity from its parked stance, slumped on all fours. You wouldn’t choose a DS for a bank robbery. And there was so much glass. No car had ever been this transparent. Even the headlights swivelled about like two eyes, mysteriously coordinated with the steering, so the Déesse had the uncanny, almost supernatural ability to see round corners at night. The ineffable design still remains outside time, more modern, more confident, than anything that has come since.

— Roger Deakin

via tumblr [ift.tt/1HTw00W](http://ift.tt/1HTw00W)

[gallery]

This astonishingly advanced and beautiful car was also known by the punning pronunciation of the initials DS in French as “La Déesse” – the goddess. The philosopher Roland Barthes, who was later killed in a car crash, compared the genius of the design of the Déesse to the building of the great French medieval cathedrals as a supreme expression of the spirit of the age. He mentions the many-spired cathedral of Chartres, an ever-fixed mark to which we steered across the yellow oceans of maize and sunflowers from Rouen, and in which I once spent the night hidden between pews in a sleeping bag. Modern France’s new religion of mobility was all there in the Déesse.

And Barthes was right. The Déesse was a kind of miracle, and a lift in one after a long, dusty vigil in the sun could feel like divine providence. Perched on the Déesse’s sighing white leather seats, hugging our rucksacks, we marvelled at the way the steering wheel appeared to float like a halo, magically suspended by an almost invisible stalk. Shakespeare wrote “My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.” You’d never say that about the Déesse. The car floated, gliding forward effortlessly, having levitated with unhurried dignity from its parked stance, slumped on all fours. You wouldn’t choose a DS for a bank robbery. And there was so much glass. No car had ever been this transparent. Even the headlights swivelled about like two eyes, mysteriously coordinated with the steering, so the Déesse had the uncanny, almost supernatural ability to see round corners at night. The ineffable design still remains outside time, more modern, more confident, than anything that has come since.

— Roger Deakin

Have you heard of the Benedict Option? If not, you will soon.

It’s the name of a deeply pessimistic cultural project that’s capturing the imaginations of social conservatives as they come to terms with the realization that the hopes and assumptions that animated the religious right over the past 35-odd years have been dashed by the sweeping triumph of the movement for same-sex marriage.

—Damon Linker. I am not a member of the Benedict Option magisterium, so what I think has no authority, but as someone who’s interested in some form of the Benedict Option I have to say that I don’t agree with any of this. I don’t think it’s “a deeply pessimistic cultural project,” I don’t see it as having anything to do with the Christian right, and same-sex marriage is at most a triggering issue, not fundamental. To me, it’s an opportunity to get more people on board with a project that I’ve been devoted to for thirtysomething years: shifting Christian energy and resources away from electoral politics and towards the strengthening of institutions and communities.

“In a statement conceding defeat, the Iona Institute, the main opposition group, said it would continue to affirm ‘the importance of biological ties and of motherhood and fatherhood.’ The absurdity of that statement speaks for itself.”

- The Victory for Same-Sex Marriage in Ireland - NYTimes.com. I can’t tell exactly what the NYT editorial board thinks is self-evidently absurd here: that “biological ties” are important? That “motherhood and fatherhood” are important? Both?

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Have you heard of the Benedict Option? If not, you will soon.  

It’s the name of a deeply pessimistic cultural project that’s capturing the imaginations of social conservatives as they come to terms with the realization that the hopes and assumptions that animated the religious right over the past 35-odd years have been dashed by the sweeping triumph of the movement for same-sex marriage.