Bush Budget Boosts Military, Brings Record Deficits points to a new definition of “fiscally conservative”:
President Bush on Monday sent Congress a $2.23 trillion budget for next year that would expand the military, slash taxes for investors and overhaul government-subsidized health care, racking up record deficits even without the cost of a possible war with Iraq.
Shuttle Science Missions: Just Along for the Ride? further pushes the point that we don’t really need astronauts:
From studies of protein crystallization to the behavior of fire in zero gravity, “there is no experiment that has been done on the space shuttle that has made a significant difference to any field of science,” says physicist Robert Park of the American Physical Society in College Park, Md.
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“The results of shuttle experiments and space experiments are not published in refereed scientific journals” very often, says Alex Roland, professor of military history and the history of technology at Duke University in Durham, N.C. “NASA often has to publish the results itself because they’re not cutting edge science, by and large. There’s a lot of make-work going on up there.”
Medical care is far from standardized, and doctors demonstrate a surprising apathy toward the “best practices” supported by research. Doctors Slow to Adopt Tools To Standardize Health Care mentions one amusing study:
The study, done a dozen years ago but still on point, asked 135 doctors to evaluate the same patient, who had a urinary tract infection; they recommended 82 different strategies for treatment.
Granted, you have to ask how the study divvied up the doctors’ treatments into those categories, but still…82 different strategies?
Seniors can make a great resource, as The Granny Patrol: Florida Recruits Elderly Volunteers points out:
Senior citizens are volunteering for police forces in record numbers, says the Senior Corps, a federal service program. They’re aiming radar guns, taking fingerprints and watching out for terrorists. In recent years, hundreds of senior-policing programs have been created across the country, with retirees donating millions of hours.On many short-handed police forces, they’ve become indispensable, especially in Florida where some of the earliest programs started. Here in Boynton Beach, 1,537 seniors now volunteer, up 260% since 1998. Last year, they logged 45,113 hours on the Citizen Observer Patrol, freeing up officers for more crucial duties.
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In nearby Delray Beach, 70 senior volunteers now write 99% of the city’s parking tickets — about 10,000 a year.
Sometimes they do more than write traffic tickets — although the real cops still do the “heavy lifting”:
Delray seniors are already potent weapons against local criminals. Once, when condominium parking lots were hit by a rash of car break-ins, police flooded the city’s condo complexes with seniors in slow-moving patrol cars, their yellow lights flashing. One lot, though, was purposely left dark and seemingly unguarded. That’s where the real police waited in a hidden stake-out.“The burglars took the bait,” says Delray Police Capt. Ralph Phillips. “We channeled them right into that parking lot. It took just one day.”
After a manned space shuttle blows up, we have to ask, “Why are we sending people up there again?” — and Shuttle Crash Raises Questions Over Future of Manned Flights does just that:
“Any specific mission you can identify to do in space, you can design and build an unmanned space craft to do it more effectively, more economically and more safely,” said Alex Roland, a professor of history at Duke University and for eight years a historian at NASA. Manned space flights are more about capturing the public’s imagination than science, he said. “It’s circus, it’s just pure circus.”
For the past few months, I’ve been working my way through Malcolm Gladwell’s site, reading his numerous New Yorker articles. His Blowup article seems terribly apropros:
What accidents like the Challenger should teach us is that we have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life. At some point in the future — for the most mundane of reasons, and with the very best of intentions — a NASA spacecraft will again go down in flames. We should at least admit this to ourselves now. And if we cannot — if the possibility is too much to bear — then our only option is to start thinking about getting rid of things like space shuttles altogether.