Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Progress resupply ship crashes into Siberia

I am in a BAD mood. I mean really dark. Grrrr. I got up this morning to go take pictures of my friend's house and to measure to make a floorplan to help him sell it and before I left the house I got the news that the resupply ship bound for the space station crashed into Siberia instead of going into orbit. Fucking great. Way to go. Glad Atlantis dropped off so many extra supplies. But dammit this just sucks. We have no capacity for contingencies anymore. And by we I mean the whole fucking planet's worth of engineers and scientists that are unappreciated and hindered by the economies of idiots.

Spending three hours trying to sketch up a simple floorplan in Google Sketchup did nothing to improve my mood. I guess considering it's free and I didn't bother to learn it I got what I deserved. Fortunately I have a high resolution 27" Apple monitor so I was able to get decent output by taking a screenshot. I quickly abandoned trying to print to a PDF file. No idea what it thinks is the part I want to print. And why it pans the drawing and leaves the text where it is makes no sense. I guess I was supposed to place it on a surface or something. I just wanted lines and words and the convenience of feet and inches. Nothing is easy.

Then it was too hot to stay upstairs because it's FUCKING 105°F outside and forecast to be 109°F on Friday and Saturday. So I went downstairs to find some food and found out Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. Had to come back to the computer to check the news. Concern and worry on MacRumors.com in the comments and then I looked at some business websites and was just horrified by the terrible things people were saying. He's a man dying of pancreatic cancer! Don't be mean! Damn you jealous bastards! I had pancreatitis once. It was the most pain I have ever experienced. I have no idea what Steve Jobs is going through but it must be bad and I feel terrible for him. I appreciate him making it possible for me to have beautiful machinery in my life. I am not interested in the least what happens with Apple's stock price. But I hope some of those mean bastards guess wrong and lose money.

And there's this. Just... dammit all to hell. What are we going to DO?!



*Update: Senator Hutchison released a statement related to the Progress crash. Pats herself on the back for funding STS-135 and wants to halt layoffs? Really? Can that happen?

"We strongly encourage NASA to immediately announce this week - not next month - the design for their next launch vehicle, which will halt the further loss of skilled aerospace workers now poised to be laid off from the NASA manned spaceflight program."

Dare I say, yay?

Thanks to @astroengine for the RT

2 comments:

  1. Wow, we go from "this sucks" to "THIS @*!%#!@*! SUCKS BIG TIME!" in just a couple of paragraphs.

    Steve Jobs has managed to do so much better than what is expected of a patient with Pancreatic Cancer. I'm amazed. Happy for him and hopefully for whatever clinical trial he's (must be) enrolled in.

    Been there with pancreatitis. Ditto on the pain. I was hospitalized at the time anyway. Worst week of my life, in that place.

    I commented tonight to my wife about how the markets will react to the announcement at Apple and how freaking sad that is.

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  2. That poor chemist is so obviously frustrated in his knowledge that his field is so crucially important but also knows how nearly impossible it is to convince people who are already set against him of this fact. This is what it makes me think:

    There was a time when politicians deferred to nerds, chemists, and people who knew their fields deeply. Their advice on how to do new and big things was followed and funded as much as needed because of the benefits it brought people. This stopped when the advice from the nerds started being "Hey, you're fucking up a lot of shit, you should stop." No one likes a party pooper.

    The politicians' and businessmen's response then went from "You must be right, you're infinitely more knowledgeable in this than us" and became "Maybe, but we're still making lots of money. Can't you just fix it?"

    To which the nerds replied "You're fucking it up too badly and fundamentally to fix if you're gonna keep doing that, you just need to stop doing it so much."

    So politicians and businessmen replied, "No, see, the thing is we're still making loads of money, and money feels good, so we must be right, you're either wrong or just not trying hard enough."

    To which some nerds some nerds retorted with things like "You can't just try hard enough and 'fix it' when someone's head is squished in a car crusher… Well maybe theoretically you could reassemble the atoms, but it's neither practical or feasible with what we can do right now or in the foreseeable future. It's much better to just not crush someone's head in the first place."

    At which point politicians and bussinessmen rejoiced triumphantly, "AHAH! You said it is theoretically possible, so you admit it can be done! You're just not trying hard enough!" They then smugly decided that since the scientists weren't going to even try to fix the problem they could continue to make it worse until the scientists decide to be serious and fix it.


    I think I'm learning where Douglas Adams and Vonnegut got their humor from....

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