Jinn of Quality and Risk

Our itinerary is shaping to be: Cornwall (St Ives, done), Morocco (Marrakech and the High Atlas, where we are now), Ireland (West coast), India (Delhi, Rajastan, Rishikesh), Nepal (Pokhara, Kathmandu), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and LA. We're still working on the details, trying to plan 1-2 countries ahead. Anyway, a lot will end up being inspired by local conditions, opportunities, and advice. 

Philip Greenspun: On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin ushered in an era of government-operated manned space flight. ... Perhaps it is time to ask the question Why should NASA operate manned space flights?  I.e., is sending a human into space an inherently governmental function? ... It was a national tragedy when Christa McAuliffe died on the Challenger.  It is only a minor local news event when an adventurous soul crashes his or her small aircraft.

Does one need to ask whether making shoes, baking bread, shipping cargo across oceans, making steel, manufacturing computers, or designing software are proper government functions? space flight is not different in principle from such peaceful, productive, and free human activities. 

Just finished reading Travels in Nepal, by Charlie Pye-Smith (1988); it's a passionate, sensitive, eloquent, and angry work. Speaking beautifully of the magnificence of the land and its people, it also reveals various aspects of irrational development aid projects, showing their deleterious impact on a poor country and its caste-bound inhabitants. 

Some scientists are more honest than others: Depending on which pair of estimates we chose, we could have whatever kind of spiral we liked... the quantitative data can give us no guidance as to whether the spiral, if indeed it exists, is upward or downward. [Thompson 1986]

The quoted paper refers to Nepali fuelwood consumption and its alleged consequences (generally assumed to be negative, of course). Expert estimates were found to vary by a factor of 67 for per-capita fuelwood consumption, and by 150 for sustainable forest yield. In other words, depending on which pair of estimates you take, you can show that (a) the Himalaya will be washed down to the Bay of Bengal next week; (b) the mountains will sink under the weight of vegetation; (c) something [anything --mk] between these two extremes. [Pye-Smith 1988]

Reference: Uncertainty on a Himalayan Scale by M. Thompson, M. Warburton, and T. Hatley (1986); via Travels in Nepal: The Sequestered Kingdom by Charlie Pye-Smith (1988).