Private Mars Rocket II

Ebola and Wolves

What bothers me about the current flap over Ebola quarantines is the "boy who cried wolf" effect. Basically, imposing clearly unnecessary quarantines risks setting a trend where people ignore all quarantines, needed or not.

Rockets

This article appeared the day before SpaceShip Two blew up. It's very prescient writing. Apollo, Ansari and the Hobbling Effects of Giant Leaps. As I said on Facebook, unfortunately building rockets is rocket science.

Plus, A Cool Video

I couldn't embed this, but go watch this video of scientists dropping a bowling ball and a feather in vacuum.

Thought #1 - Ebola

The writer Elizabeth Moon is dead-on (pardon the pun) about Ebola and the US response thereto. Her six lessons are:

1) A stitch in time saves nine. the time to prepare is before the excrement hits the air-moving unit.
2) Hubris kills. Incorrectly thinking you're ready can be worse then not being ready.
3) Privatisation is no guarantee of quality performance. In this case, the fragmented US system means some hospitals are good to go and others are clueless.
4) Fear is faster than facts.
5) Change takes time. People need training and gear, both of which need time to develop.
6) Everything is connected to everything else. As she says, "There is no bunker deep enough, no ivory tower high enough, no wall stout enough, or weapons system powerful enough to keep what happens "there" from affecting life "here."

Thought #2 - Gamergate and Subtractive Masculinity

Over on Obsidian Wings, Doctor Science talks about subtractive masculinity. This is the idea that one defines a characteristic (masculine, in this case) by the actions of some other group. For example, saying "girls don't shoot guns, I do, therefore I'm a man." There's an obvious problem with that, namely that the guys have no control over what the girls do.

The tie-in to gamergate is this - a certain subset of gamers define their masculinity by what women don't do. Except women do play (and develop and review) video games. This threatens them, and since they are powerless to actually stop women from being involved in games, they react by making threats.

Threatening somebody is a sign of inherent weakness, which makes those issuing threats even madder. (Something I noticed in the Navy - Admirals don't yell. They don't have to - because of their power, people make an effort to listen to admirals.) To be clear, threats followed by action can have some power, but it's not nearly as powerful as just doing something.