Thursday, September 4, 2014
New job for Ed Moses!!
"Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab Appointed as President of Giant Magellan Telescope Organization
Ed Moses will begin his new role effective on Oct. 2, 2014."
see
http://patch.com/california/livermore/scientist-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory-appointed-president-giant-magellan-telescope
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72 comments:
"Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab Appointed as President of Giant Magellan Telescope Organization"
He will crash and burn that *** down as well, but he will make a lot of money as it goes down in... flames...flames...flames!!! I got to hand it to this guy he is the OJ Simpson of science. Pure genius.
Anonymous said...
I wonder how Ed will do with real scientists. It's easy to push around a labbie lifer who has no prospect of getting another job outside LLNL. A respected scientist from a university is another matter.
September 4, 2014 at 6:13 AM
Anonymous said...
"...I wonder how Ed will do with real scientists. It's easy to push around a labbie lifer who has no prospect of getting another job outside LLNL. A respected scientist from a university is another matter..."
No more Power Point and no more Madonna microphone for Ed?
NIF being one of the most expensive colossal failures in US history matters not. LLNS protects and honors the brotherhood of elite managers at all cost.
September 4, 2014 at 8:15 AM
Anonymous said...
"NIF being one of the most expensive colossal failures in US history matters not. LLNS protects and honors the brotherhood of elite managers at all cost."
It's not about the managers, it's about the credibility of LLNL. NIF is a success, by definition. Anything else would mean that LLNL is not credible as a National Lab.
September 4, 2014 at 2:08 PM
Anonymous said...
Ed's antics won't go over well in Chile. It won't be long until they get some of Pinochet's former security forces to make him disappear.
September 4, 2014 at 2:40 PM
Ed has nothing but contempt for scientists, those brainiacs who are too narrow minded to understand his genius, and good technical people are a dime a dozen. In fact he has very little but contempt for most people, and is one the most caustic and unpleasant people I've ever worked with. He an effective if ruthless project manager, if you give him as much money and time as he wants, but he does not know how to do things cheaply and simply; everything he does is leveraging more and ever more money from whoever is paying the bills, while maneuvering himself to be perceived as the only savior who can clean up after the incompetent people who preceeded him. In this job, expect him to alienate everyone he interacts with who does not have something he needs, and expect vast cost and schedule overruns on a NIF-like scale.
Wow, President Moses, next stop God.
Congratulations on removing a major part of the cancer at LLNL. And, like 100 lawyers at the bottom of the sea, it is a good start. I suggest a thank you note to the GMTO.
At least in his new job Ed has some hope of finally seeing those tiny stars he's been advertising.
Finally Bringing Star Power to Earth!
I find it interesting how you gotta have a "New York" skill set to become someone at the Labs. Anastasio (earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in theoretical nuclear physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook), Ed Moses (bachelor’s degree and doctorate from Cornell University in New York), Goldstein (doctorate in theoretical physics from Columbia University in New York, and a bachelor's degree in physics from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania). Others, Goodwin?
These little town blues, are melting away I'll make a brand new start of it In old Livermore
If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere
It's up to you, Livermore..Livermore.. Livermore!!!
Settle down. Liza Minelli gives her regards to the lab.
Liza also knows that money makes the world go around, like Ed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkRIbUT6u7Q
I wonder if they'll give him the giant "Bringing star power to earth" banner from the NIF building as a going away present.
Ed took a bad situation and prevented it from hitting the fan. He should be lauded for doing his part while blame be cast on those so-called "physicists " and their "computer codes" that they worshipped.
Ed took a bad situation and prevented it from hitting the fan. He should be lauded for doing his part while blame be cast on those so-called "physicists " and their "computer codes" that they worshipped.
September 6, 2014 at 10:43 AM
Actually he personally made sure it would hit the fan by believing in and trusting those same code jockeys, and even handing them total control over the program of experiments. They successfully played to his ego, Lindl especially, so at the end the blame comes back to Moses and his arrogance.
Moses is coming out from behind the fence at LLNL, the "North Korea of American Science and Technology",
and out into the real and transparent world of science and technology. I give him 3 years at his new gig.
Ed was conned. He is not trained in plasma physics. He could not have known. He had to rely on his experts and all those independent review committees. On top of that, he made sure the build was successful. It is the butthurts who want to blame him for the code-worship culture that others created.
Moses picked the "experts" he listened to, steamrollered dissenters inside and outside the lab, stacked the review committees and micromanaged all the presentations, and arrogantly took over the whole target physics effort despite not having an appropriate background. It's laughable to portray him as a poor innocent victim, when he's the central bad guy of the whole ignition fiasco.
Since Moses couldn't make a star, he's making a big telescope to look at them from earth.
"...Ed was conned. He is not trained in plasma physics. He could not have known. He had to rely on his experts and all those independent review committees..."
On Ed's PA he can comment "it was the other guys fault". This response however, is not a compelling argument for "worker bee" PAs. Royalty has its perks.
There are very few review committees that are truly independent. They are allowed to offer one or two suggestions for improvement but always they say that good progress is being made. If some member of the committee does not agree, he or she will not be back for the next review. I have talked to several managers, only one at Livermore, and they were proud that they could handle the reviews of their organizations so well.
"...There are very few review committees that are truly independent. They are allowed to offer one or two suggestions for improvement but always they say that good progress is being made. If some member of the committee does not agree, he or she will not be back for the next review. I have talked to several managers, only one at Livermore, and they were proud that they could handle the reviews of their organizations so well..."
Well said. Sometimes a "review committee" is just a procedural go through the motions effort for 20,000 ft. fly overs and a future insurance policy if needed.
I would like to hear what evidence the dissenters where supposedly prevented from using by Ed. Not the 20/20 hindsight bs but the evidence from pre-alpha heating milestone failure. What did you say? There was no evidence? Then there were no credible dissenters. Bitching about a man for his rudeness is not valid dissent.
Our Ed Moses defender returns. Must be lonely, there are only about three of you.
Just calling out bs gripe for what it is. Yeah Ed is an ahole. But you guys are being tacky for using that to explain away the failures of NIF.
9:35 PM makes falls into several fallaces, with aspects of the argument from ignorance, the argument from silence, shifting the burden of proof, and others.
I have known Ed since the day he came to the lab. He pours his heart and soul into everything he does. For all of you Ed haters, you do not know the real Ed. He has many strong supporters and I fully believe he will do well at his new job.
Coming soon.... Cheap FUSION POWER through giant optical telescopes aimed at the sun!!!
We'll need to start pumping billions into this new idea of Ed's but I'm sure it will pay off in just 3 or 4 years, maybe a bit longer. All the "Doubting Thomas" types, of course, must first be crushed to make way for his true genius.
NIF is an institutional failure, not the making of a single man. The institution must bear the full responsibility for conning billions from hard-working taxpayers to support this folly.
I guess the only question is how long will LLNL continue to embarrass itself with this "high foot" sham path to nowhere.
Ed is good leading big engineering builds, he should have jumped ship after NIF's successful completion. He is not responsible for the high pressure plasma physics. Ignition was going to fail no matter who led the science. Ed did his job well.
Ed killed smaller non NIF efforts to free funds for NIF. You may think of him a bastard if you were negatively affected by this. But he was doing his job. Not out of maliciousness or sadistic tendency but out of duty to his job. Maybe if some of you can comprehend this, you will not feel as "hurt" by him as you had been.
Adolf Eichmann also operated out of strong sense of duty to his job.
Where else have I heard the words "I was just doing my job" or "I was following orders" or "It was out of duty" to whatever? You know the people on those smaller efforts had a duty to deliver and some were blocked from such. Ed was not just in charge of NIF but also NIC and more. After all, the "I" in NIF is ignition. So NIF is not yet completed. He had a totally unbalanced engineering program that focused on the lasers, neglecting the remainder. Parts of the remainder were some of those small
efforts he hurt.
The extent of the rationalization in some of the above comments is quite amusing.
For orientation. I am a scientist. I have never worked at LLNL. I have colleagues at Livermore, some connected with NIF.
Arendt calls him the embodiment of the "banality of evil", asserting that he appeared to be ordinary and sane, yet displayed neither guilt nor hatred.
Simon Wiesenthal said: "The world now understands the concept of 'desk murderer'. We know that one doesn't need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one's duty."
This thread is absolutely laughable. You first define Ed as the baddest of the bad, and then you concoct a backstory that is so outlandish that it wouldn't make it onto a Sasquatch documentary. I don't know what planet you guys have been on, but it isn't earth.
Remember that Ed wasn't even AT LLNL when NIF was started. Everybody remember Mike Campbell (Mr. Almost-PhD)? He was the guy that sold NIF and the physics that went with it (for better or worse). By the time Ed and Mary arrived, it was pretty apparent that NIF was sold for a lot less than it would really cost. Ed was the guy who took on that problem on behalf of and with the full support of LLNL and DOE. And by god, he delivered a system that works better than required and better than most people hoped.
Anybody older than about 25 knows that you don't do anything big without stepping on a few toes. All programs have, and all will, until resources become infinite. If you happened to be responsible for a lower-priority program that was raided or cut, and you blame Ed for that, then it's time for you to grow up and realize that it's just business; if DOE, LLNL, and everybody else didn't develop and follow their priorities, they wouldn't survive long. For better or worse, NIF was a top priority at LLNL and within DOE, and Ed did business accordingly.
And to argue that he stacked the deck for all of the hundreds of reviews really stretches credulity. What do think is more likely; that he somehow influenced every one of the thousands of reviewers over more than a decade, including some of the most prominent scientists of our age....or that the committees were basically legit, and some of the ignition science is actually not completely known yet?
And I'll go one further. Which is more likely: that Ed somehow influenced or deceived every one of the thousands of reviewers over more than a decade, including some of the most prominent scientists of our age...or that the "reviewers" on this blog know very little about what they're anonymously commenting on (like the person above who is commenting on data from a friend who works at LLNL) and are just wrong?
Ed could be a real pain in the ass, no doubt about that. Especially if you didn't know what you were talking about. He had very high standards, and was not afraid to question & reassess anything.
So what about ignition? The mistake made by Ed and LLNL was to allow a milestone to be attached to it. Did LHC say: we're going to find your Higgs for you by December 2011? No, and it was good thing since their machine had some very serious, very deep design flaws, which took years of complete shutdown to correct. Where were George and Parney while evil Ed was running amok with fusion physics? The truth is that George was completely on board, and Parney wouldn't know fusion if he stepped in it. Fusion is just hard. It will take some more time. The MFE folks have been blundering around for 3 times as long as ICF, and they're nowhere near achieving what is pretty routine on NIF nowadays.
And just knock off the "evil" comments, and the supposed Nazi parallels. You know that isn't true at all, and if you don't, then you're lucky indeed because you have no idea what evil is.
And just knock off the "evil" comments, and the supposed Nazi parallels. You know that isn't true at all, and if you don't, then you're lucky indeed because you have no idea what evil is.
September 9, 2014 at 4:47 PM
Breathe, bro, breathe........
The Nazi comparison is unfair. Eichmann never ran his program over budget.
About 4:47, I think he should create a musical a la Mel Brooks' "The Producers" called
Springtime for Moses in Chile
Ed was so misunderstood.
Poor Ed. I'm sure someday, some left coast historian will claim he was just ahead of his time.
OMG, 4:47 wrote such a book I couldn't even read it. A man with too much time on his hands.... A lab lifer.
Rationalization, rationalization, rationalization. As I alluded to above, 100 lawyers on the ocean floor being a good start, Ed is not the only culprit. He is just the central one. He and others are now gone but there are still plenty remaining.
And 4:47. You do go on. I cannot hit everything, there is just too much. But you refer to hundreds of reviews and thousands of reviewers. And that Ed would have had to influence every one of them. That is ridiculous and you insult me if you think I accept your argument. There were dissenters, for example, the Jasons and a few on other committees that resisted the rules for review committees. Also, nobody had to influence the review committees; they know what is expected of them. There were not thousands. Very often the same committee, with maybe a change or two, was used. There are not thousands out there to fill the slots on committees. Just look at the names of the committee members.
But enough for the moment.
Sounds like "September 9, 2014 at 4:47 PM" became so infatuated with Moses that he fell in love with him.
Oh dear, "Ed and Mary"... Two of the densest, most egotistical and process-focused people I've met. That's great for project managers, not so great for insightful scientists chasing ignition. If they would leave things they know nothing about to people who do, it might work out, but neither of them have the capacity to relinquish total control even when they are in way over their heads. They don't know when they are in way over their heads.
4:47 forgets about the LIFE program which was concocted by Moses and De La Rubia. Managers at the lab used to brag about how that program was going to bring in billions of $ to the lab. Now it is cancelled.
Lab lifers are "true believers" like the loyal followers of Stalin and Hitler. They depend entirely on the lab for their livelihood and ego gratification. They cannot see the outside world or reality for that matter.
This is the reality. The lab is a 20th century artifact. A product of the Cold War which will soon be relegated to the trash heap of history. Nuclear weapons are useless as a deterrent or anything else. This reality was exposed when Russia invaded Ukraine. They have no military value and are forcing military leaders into a box because of their great expense. Scottish independence may actually force the British to give up their costly Trident program. The ICF program is the last gasp of Teller's Plowshares program that tried to put a happy face on nuclear weapons by claiming they had peaceful applications.
It's time for LLNL and it's workers to accept reality and the consequences of years of bad decisions.
People who insinuate that the review committees are stacked and just stamps could never point to any of the publically released findings to support their conclusion. The responsibility sits on the accusers and the Ed haters. To just make general inane comments like "oh Ed created a bad environment" or "people are butthurt because Ed gave them a dirty look" doesn't hack it. There was no credible dissent to the NIF ignition campaign at the time of the alpha heating milestone failure. None. Only the bitching by people who hated Ed. You unhappy people need to get over it. Move on. Move on.
Ed is definitely not the central culprit. It was the one who came up with the original design saying that 2MJ would ignite. He was wrong, blinded by hubris and confirmation bias.
"...Ed is definitely not the central culprit. It was the one who came up with the original design saying that 2MJ would ignite..."
Wasn't the initial number of beams and delivered energy greater in an earlier conceptual design? What was the estimated margin for ignition with the current NIF design?
4:05, I assure you there was vast and very credible dissent many years before the milestone failure, it would only look uncredible to a biased individual who did not pass sophomore debate class. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance There is absolutely no relevant data, in a relevant regime, that supports the notion that NIF can ignite anything, and that is just truth. That should have motivated a cautious stepwise approach that many others advocated, but instead Moses believed the code jockeys and let visions of Nobel Prizes cloud his judgement.
So all we have are some anonymous assurance with no followup on names, reasoning, relevance, etc. And we are supposed to believe you? And you have the nerve to call yourself a scientist? Random grumblings that have no relevance to the failure doesn't count for squat. You 20/20 hindsight armchair quarterbacks are really funny though. All the unsubstantiated furor and griping over the wrong guy. Keep it up. It gives me my daily laugh.
It wasn't Moses' created vision of code worship. That culture was pervasive at LLNL long before Moses came along. And on top of that, he is a hands-on engineer, not from the post-test-ban world of weapons mental masturbation.
Ed: I have existed from the morning of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night. Although I have taken the form of Edward Moses, I am all men as I am no man and therefore I am a God.
7:47 PM, that would be a red-herring, specifically an abusive fallacy. You must be a code jockey.
September 10, 2014 at 7:47 PM
I agree, every time someone says anything bad about Ed, I laugh at how deluded they are in not seeing the truth. It is more sad than funny but I always find humor where I can. Ed is a hero, he may have stepped on a few over-inflated egos but he is still and always will be a true hero who fought against the odds and never gave up what he believed in no matter what others said.
please tell us about how the review committees rubber stamped the reviews. they must have falsified information and hidden lots of dead bodies, according to your conspiracy theory. please tell us. we need more laughs.
Ed is a hero....
September 10, 2014 at 9:39 PM
Excuse me, I need to puke. By the way, it is bad form and childish to answer your own posts and pretend they come from two different people.
Lol, 6:53PM, my high schooler isn't even allowed to cite Wikipedia in an argument. Awesome credibility dude.
9/9 4:47pm: "Parney wouldnt know fusion if he stepped in it." Maybe true. But he understood scientific dysfunction when he saw it, and brought in WCI and "team 2" over Ed's and George's loud objections. He dumped the SCAP when Ed and George wanted to force NNSA's hand. He went after the financial books at NIF, and began weaning them off their huge hidden overhead. He cut LIFE to almost nothing. He took NIF governance away from Ed to the cheers of LANL and the ICF community. And finally he fired Ed, and fell on his sword to do it.
This thread is a great rehash of the greatest scam at LLNL since x-ray lasers.
Let's get real here.
1. Ed sucks.
2. LLNL's fusion scientists (**scientists**, not managers) are awesome.
3. NIF is awesome.
4. 90% of the "lifers" are, in fact, incredible scientsts. The fact that they didn't have to worry about money is what MADE them awesome.
5. NIF would have been even more awesome, were it not for the out-of-this-world-ridiculous management they had running the place.
Cut 3/4 of the managers, let the scientists do their jobs, and it will all work out, if it is physically possible.
The fact that we don't KNOW if it is physically possible is WHY it is SCIENCE.
End of story.
"The fact that we don't KNOW if it is physically possible is WHY it is SCIENCE."
Not exactly, it is a bit more subtle than that. I am not a NIF scientist but for over 10 years I have heard many people who are indeed good scientists say they have real doubts about NIF.
It is one thing if you have a few total crackpots who are naysayers like the intelligent design folks who account for 0.1% of biologists but it is another when you have about 1/3-1/2 experts saying something is wrong. I am not sure what the real story is however I know for a fact that many people said that aspects of NIF where going to be real trouble. I would add that I have heard a few ideas there are rather dubious like no one really ever believed NIF would work or be any value whatsoever but that was not to point. The point was to be very very big so that congress would fund it since congress only funds BIG things, Iraq, Space Shuttle, Obama Care...NIF. It is not suppose to work it is just suppose to be big, and the public gets "big" however the public does not get "relevant".
11:52 AM, even my high school dropout doesn't use the word "dude".
In particular for Sept 10, 7:47
In truth what is important is that there was a failure and the organization that has the duty to straighten out the causes of the failure is LLNL. It is an LLNL project and sometimes one learns from failure, both in the science and in the management. I see 7:47 that you agree that there was a failure and I think that almost all agree. From what I have observed it seems almost all agree, including those on this blog, that one starts first looking within LLNL for those causes.
Yes, from all that I have seen and heard and read, I have concluded that Mr. Moses is the central figure in all this failure. There are obviously others, after all you have a new lab director and the LIFE program is cancelled. But really for me the responsible players are not of importance. The failure is. A number of the higher level players are now gone anyway.
That's exactly like someone who blames Obama for all of the world's problems that were created by his predecessors. Sure it's one thing if you blame him for not performing a miracle and correcting all the wrongs of others. But simply to call him the "central figure" and them cast blame, without being able to point to root cause (or even atleast significant cause) is really just like the groupthink Obama-bashing.
8:47 did not read carefully, the causes are all here. Sounds a bit like Obama repeatedly saying the opposition isn't offering solutions, when in fact they are and he is just not listening.
If you are a NIF physicist and your suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, you might think NIF was a big success:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/next-generation/has-fusion-finally-solved-its-hype-problem-16675762
September 13, 2014 at 8:47 AM is a pathetic joke, and so is his God, Obama. Both are clueless about the way the world works and how to change it. To claim that Obama's difficulties are the result of his predecessors is just asinine and disingenuous. The country, and the free world, has been Obama's to control since 2008. What has he done? How has he improved anything, or made anyone more secure? He is a tiresome finger-wagger who is much less clever and knowledgeable than he imagines. 2016 cannot come fast enough.
The country, and the free world, has been Obama's to control since 2008.
Oh, we had a government shutdown because Obama told the House majority to not fund the government. Now I understand.
The tee party is the republican's gift to Obama and the democrats. The more power the tea party gains with republicans, the more the democrats, even Pelosi, look moderate and electable. Complain all you want about Obama. Thank the tea party for splitting the republicans, giving Obama his second term. It's like blaming Ed for all the problems when root cause lies with another bunch of losers.
"He an effective if ruthless project manager, if you give him as much money and time as he wants, but he does not know how to do things cheaply and simply; everything he does is leveraging more and ever more money from whoever is paying the bills, while maneuvering himself to be perceived as the only savior who can clean up after the incompetent people who preceded him. In this job, expect him to alienate everyone he interacts with who does not have something he needs, and expect vast cost and schedule overruns on a NIF-like scale."
Magellan sounds like a great project. Lots of funding for new boondoggles. Need "phased" mirror arrays, adaptive optics, guide stars ? So, where do I apply ?
"He an effective if ruthless project manager, if you give him as much money and time as he wants, but he does not know how to do things cheaply and simply; everything he does is leveraging more and ever more money from whoever is paying the bills, while maneuvering himself to be perceived as the only savior who can clean up after the incompetent people who preceded him. In this job, expect him to alienate everyone he interacts with who does not have something he needs, and expect vast cost and schedule overruns on a NIF-like scale."
Magellan sounds like a great project. Lots of funding for new boondoggles. Need "phased" mirror arrays, adaptive optics, guide stars ? So, where do I apply ?
Moses was fired from the lab, or as close to being fired as someone in his former position can get unless they do something horrifying, like get convicted of buggering little boys. It was in the cards for a long time, because he caused so much damage throughout the complex and made so many enemies, but what triggered it was deliberately burning through huge piles of money against DOE direction, in the face of possible upcoming sequestration and shut-down. That's what took out Albright too, for letting it happen on his watch. This stuff is all well known, so it's amazing anyone is willing to hire him for any sort of leadership or management role. The world would be better off if he just retired.
July 21, 2015
From Matthew Scott to OBS and DTM Staff Members:
The GMTO Board would like you to know that, effective immediately, Dr. Ed Moses is on leave for substantial and significant family matters that require his attention.
Dr. Moses will not return to GMTO. The GMTO Board thanks Dr. Moses for his important service to the GMTO.
The GMTO Board has appointed Dr. Pat McCarthy as interim President and looks forward to his leadership of the GMTO project.
A public statement will be made at a later date.
-Sent on behalf of Matthew Scott.
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