Posts from — July 2011

From The Pain

There’s a writeup with the comic, too, which is worth reading. From it:

I know a lot of people will raise the objection that the space program is a pretty frivolous and costly enterprise; shouldn’t we be spending that money on health care/education/poverty, etc.? To these well-meaning people, who do make a valid point, I would respectfully submit that you please go take a flying leap off a low-gravity planetoid. We weren’t ever going to spend that money on health care/education/poverty, etc. because no one in power in this country actually cares about those things. And as long as we’re not going to spend it on that stuff, why not spend it on science? So what if manned space exploration is frivolous? It’s harmless and beautiful and inspiring. It contributes to human knowledge and elevates our estimation of our own species. At least it’s not lethal. The Department of Defense, on which we blow a fifth of our Federal budget, is a gigantic and inefficient engine designed to kill people. So how come we always hear this argument made against the space program instead of the military? It’s like picking a fight with the class geek instead of the class bully. As my instructive chart shows, we’ve blown like three times more accomplishing it’s not clear exactly what in Afghanistan than we spent putting men on the Moon. I am not even counting Iraq, for the cost of which we could probably build a floating pleasure-dome on Io. So how about knock it off with the why-are-we-spending-this-money-on-space horseshit already and do something useful with your pipsqueak pious outrage instead?

Yeah.

And since I looked it up, according to wikipedia: “The final cost of project Apollo was reported to Congress as $25.4 billion in 1973″

I like this quote on creative work paraphrased from Ira Glass:

As far as I know, it’s extracted from a TV segment “Ira Glass on Storytelling”, which has more details and examples:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY)

I’ve written about this before, but it resonated more with me when I saw it tonight because I happened to have just finished spending some time doing comedy writing without getting much good stuff out of it. I’ll write more about that later.