Tim Ferris, at his Four Hour Work Week blog, discusses the roller-coaster curve of the entrepreneur, and starts off comparing it to the current economic roller-coaster.

Ever since the media’s Chicken Little response to the tremors in the financial markets, I’ve felt like shouting from the rooftops “now you know how it feels to be an entrepreneur!”

I just lost 9% overnight?! Fill a bathtub and get the toaster. I’ve had enough.
Wait… I actually gained 13% while in the bathroom? I’m f**king Superman!

This is a guest post on capitalizing on — vs. countering — the “entrepreneur’s disease” (manic depression) through 4 cyclical stages. This is done by pairing appropriate activities to specific — though not necessarily positive — emotional states…

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business, economy

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Robert X. Cringely has this post dealing with the current economic situation. Someone finally makes sense in a policy that could actually work. Don’t expect the politicians to attempt it, though. They’d have to keep their hands off, something politicians can’t seem to do.

I don’t necessarily agree with his use of government rules on lighting and power, but since governments seem to have to do something, this is better than what they’re likely to do, you know, things like $700 billion bailouts.

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Energy, economy

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Apparently many people like to say that the current economic situation is the worst since the great depression. While that makes for great headlines, and plays to the Democrats story, it’s not the truth.

Small Business Labs has a blog post that compares the current conditions with the 80’s, with graphs.

Unemployment was very high in the early 80s. The industrial Midwest was referred to as the “rust belt” due to foreign competition wiping out manufacturing jobs. Japanese car imports captured a substantial share of the US market, Chrysler required a bail out and many manufacturing companies went bankrupt.

The unemployment rate peaked in 1982 at 10.8%, which was no where near depression levels but substantially above where we are today.

Inflation and interest rates were also high compared to today. At the beginning of the 80s inflation was over 10% and mortgage interest rates were over 16%. GDP growth was negative in 1982 (-1.9%) versus positive growth so far this year (+2.1%).

The 80s also featured a number of economic shocks. At the beginning of the decade we had the bursting of the energy bubble. While positive overall for the US economy, this decimated the energy industry and cities like Houston.

Read the whole thing.

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business

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Tim O’Reilly pointed out this blog post, how a music downloading application was denied entry into the AppStore because it, “…duplicates iTunes functionality…”. Except it doesn’t duplicate anything on the iPhone.

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Apple, iPhone

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Stanley Schmidt had another interesting editorial in the November 2008 Analog magazine. he discusses disruptive technologies and ideas that seem to have a life of their own without any rational for their continued existence. Overall, the article was good and thought provoking.

What I found interesting was his assertion that the marketplace sometimes makes bad decisions that are hard to reverse, and uses examples that seem to me to run counter to his point.

First he discusses the replacement of incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. Sure, the fluorescents use less electricity, which is a good thing. But they also contain a small amount of mercury, which will become a bad thing when they start ending up in landfills in large numbers.

His second example involves the replacement of some gasoline with ethanol. the main result of this, at least for the short term, is to drive up the cost of food for humans, as agricultural production for human and animal consumption is replaced with production for fuel.

Now, in the first case especially, and also in the second, we see not market forces, but political forces combined with a non-thinking political correctness among the particularly liberal set of our society driving decisions. It is politicians, not marketers, telling people to replace incancesdents with compact fluorescents. It is politicians, with their subsidies to the farm lobby, that are encouraging the use of ethanol, particularly corn, possibly the worst possible source of biofuel, as an energy “solution.” The marketers are taking advantage of the PC thing to do, and supplying the products, but its the politicians this time, not the markets, that are causing the potential problems.

The best solutions come not from government agencies or regulators, or politicians, but from allowing markets to provide people unique solutions to problems, and allowing the free flow of information, even when you disagree, to arrive at positive solutions.

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Analog, Stanley Schmidt, Politics

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Adam Savage has a great demonstration of the speed of sound in gasses.

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I found this post by StarStryder (Dr. Pamela Gay) discussing her position as a Christian and a scientist.

I appreciated her position, because, after many years, I’ve arrived at a similar place in my walk through this life. I’ve spent many years in conservative evangelical/pentecostal churches. We left church a few years ago, finding that what organized religion teaches is more about maintaining organized religion than what Jesus taught.

Since then, I’ve found that most of the supposed evidence used by religious people to argue against particular scientific positions is either a result of bad science, or just plain lies. I’m not so much a scientist as an engineer, but the basic rationale is similar.

I think of engineering as applying scientific principles to create something new (machines, chemicals, energy sources…).

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Skeptics

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Yesterday I finished my assignment at Boeing on the P-8A program. It was a tremendous gig. The people were great, the program is exciting, and I had a great piece of code to work on.

I spent most of the past 11 months working on a java Swing-based tool that the Tactical Datalinks team used to test stimulate the TDL software. The tool existed when I started, so my job involved both making improvements to the tool, to make it more useful to the team, and fixing bugs. In the end, the tool has more capability than when I started. Including adding the capability to create scripts for testing in Python (Jython).

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boeing, P-8A, Jython, Python, Java, Swing

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Our son’s housemate had an idea that seemed to have considerable merit, involving an application and a website that allows the users to coordinate activities and communicate with each other.

For the back end, it seems that Google AppEngine is a good choice. My biggest concern with it right now is that it is a preview release at this time. I don’t know how long before they release the limits to allow applications full performance. Because of that, I’m tempted to consider another alternative, like maybe Amazon Web Services, since they don’t have these restrictions. The major advantage that Google adds is the theoretical ability to scale to large sizes seamlessly. The downside, they are capping that possibility at this time, with no indication when that may change. It would be a bummer to build a system to take advantage of the scaling, and then have it shut down just when you’re building momentum.

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John Ahrens, LLC, Software Development, eagle

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Here.

It was obviously a big disappointment not to reach orbit on this flight [Falcon 1, Flight 3]. On the plus side, the flight of our first stage, with the new Merlin 1C engine that will be used in Falcon 9, was picture perfect. Unfortunately, a problem occurred with stage separation, causing the stages to be held together. This is under investigation and I will send out a note as soon as we understand exactly what happened.

The most important message I’d like to send right now is that SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward. We have flight four of Falcon 1 almost ready for flight and flight five right behind that. I have also given the go ahead to begin fabrication of flight six. Falcon 9 development will also continue unabated, taking into account the lessons learned with Falcon 1. We have made great progress this past week with the successful nine engine firing.

Comments Later:

It’s good news that the upgraded Merlin engine worked flawlessly. They have to figure out what went wrong in the staging, obviously. But that really points up the issues with a multistage rocket. Two stages are more than twice the complexity of one. Unfortunately, the reality of modern rockets is that single stage to orbit (SSTO) is unlikely in any near term time frame. The mass fraction is just too small. Mass fraction is the percentage of the liftoff mass that can actually be payload.

One thing that I notice that’s different about SpaceX from the other “New Space” companies, most of the others are pursuing sub-orbital flight with highly reusable vehicles. These can be flown many times in a row, some of them even several times a day. And they are doing incremental development. Build a little, fly a little, make improvements and fly some more, gradually expanding the flight envelope until you reach the goal. For the current flock, it’s suborbital. And in doing that, you learn important things that can lead to orbital flight with the next round. There are many things you have to learn yet, but there is enough that you’ve reduced the risk going forward. Then again, moving from suborbital to orbital, you’d want to take baby steps along the way. Increasing the range and altitude of the suborbital flights, figuring out staging, thermal protection and all the other details along the way.

Some Background

For a fairly comprehensive review of the possible means of getting to orbit using RLVs, read Jon Goff’s series. He needs to create a list of these in a single place. It’s too good a list to let get lost.

1. Air Launched SSTO
2. Key Challenge of TSTO RLVs
3. Pop-up TSTO
4. Glideback TSTO
5. Boostback TSTO

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Elon Musk, Falcon 1, Falcon 9, New Space, SpaceX

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