Damaged Soyuz descent module being replaced
Because of damage sustained during the railroad trip from Russia to Kazakhstan, the Russians are flying in a replacement descent module for the Soyuz capsule scheduled for launch to ISS on December 13.
Year: 2010
Chinese embargo of rare earth minerals expands
China is expanding its embargo on exporting rare earth minerals, blocking shipments to Japan, Europe and the United States. Key quote:
China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, which have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of products as diverse as cellphones, large wind turbines and guided missiles. Any curtailment of Chinese supplies of rare earths is likely to be greeted with alarm in Western capitals, particularly because Western companies are believed to keep much smaller stockpiles of rare earths than Japanese companies.
Loch Lomond
An evening pause:
Hubble marches on: Pinwheel of star formation
Despite its age (20 plus years), the Hubble Space Telescope continues to produce amazing images. The mosiac below shows the beautiful pinwheel galaxy NGC 3982. From the caption:
NGC 3982 is located about 68 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The galaxy spans about 30,000 light-years, one-third of the size of our Milky Way galaxy. . . .The arms are lined with pink star-forming regions of glowing hydrogen, newborn blue star clusters, and obscuring dust lanes that provide the raw material for future generations of stars. The bright nucleus is home to an older population of stars, which grow ever more densely packed toward the center.
Fuel leak on Discovery plugged
It appears that the fuel leak on the space shuttle Discovery has stopped.
It’s the out of control spending, stupid!
Watch this so-called panel of expects on MSNBC as they desperately try to figure out why why women play such a large part in the tea party movement. Totally baffled, the best these out-of-touch “gurus” can come up with is “taxes” and “women pay the family bills.”
Putting aside their blatent bigotry (“Women as we all know are smarter than men.”) and childishly shallow generalizations (“Something about finding a voice.”), these empty headed fools, emblematic of most modern elite intellectuals, can’t see the obvious elephant in the room.
It’s the out-of-control government spending, stupid! On Monday the Treasury Department released numbers showing that since Barack Obama took office just two years ago, the debt of the federal government rose by $3 trillion.
This graph, courtesy of Gateway Pundit, gives some context to the increase in the debt:
Spending was horrible under George Bush. The public was worried about it. Now spending has gone insane under President Obama, and the public is more than worried, the public is outraged and spitting nails. That these elites don’t see this either means they are incredibly stupid, or they want the country to collapse in a sea of debt. In either case, they shouldn’t have the jobs they do.
Dead Sea scrolls going digital on Internet
The custodian of the Dead Sea Scrolls is working with Google to put them on line for all to view.
Bigelow Aerospace Begins Testing Life Support Systems with Crew
The private space station company Bigelow is beginning the testing of its station life support systems, using human subjects.
Republicans weaseling out already?
Republican senator Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire) suggested Monday that it would be better to restructure the healthcare bill than repeal or defund it.
Idiot. I think he and the rest of the Republican Party are being as clueless as the Democrats if they think this strategy will work. They should instead pay very close attention to what Sarah Palin said on the same day about a third party threat:
“Some in the GOP, it’s their last shot,” Palin said Monday evening on Fox News. “It’s their last chance, and we will lose faith and we will be disappointed and disenchanted from them if they start straying from the bedrock principles that can grow our economy.”
I am also reminded of this prescience Iowahawk post. As he says so eloquently, “Retards.”
Bankrupty for TerreStar?
It ain’t just the government in financial trouble: With $1 billion in debt, the satellite wireless company TerreStar is rumored to be considering bankruptcy.
Halfway to Pluto
The New Horizons space probe has now passed the halfway mark on its journey to Pluto.
One way trips to Mars?
Fuel leak on Discovery
Engineers are trouble-shooting a fuel leak on the space shuttle Discovery. At the moment NASA does not expect this to delay the planned November 1 launch.
Zenyatta
An evening pause: The commenter Lino already posted a link to this video, but I thought it deserved more prominence. It shows the final stretch of all 19 wins by the race horse Zenyatta. In every case, she hangs back and comes from behind, sometimes at the last second. I don’t really know much about horse racing, but anyone who watches this video will be as amazed as I am by this horse.
She runs her 20th and last race on November 6 at Churchill Downs in Louisville. If she wins, Zenyatta will have had the most spectacular record of any race horse in history, 20 wins out of 20 races.
Swiss engineers break through the last stretch of rock to create the world’s longest tunnel
Swiss engineers broke through the last stretch of rock on Friday to create the world’s longest tunnel, 35.4 miles long!
Beating the European ban on 75 watt bulbs
Here’s some European Union madness: Because the Union banned light bulbs of more than 60 watts, a German entrepreneur is legally marketing his 75 and 100 watt bulbs by having them made in China and then importing them as “small heating devices” dubbed “heatballs.”
Dems find careers threatened by Obamacare votes
This is only the beginning. The political careers of almost all of the bluedog Democrats who voted for Obamacare appear to be ending with this upcoming election.
Have global warming scientists admitted that carbon dioxide is not the main greenhouse gas?
In a paper published on Saturday in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres of the American Geophysical Union, scientists from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (where scientists have generally been strong advocates of human-caused global warming) outlined the key atmospheric molecules that contribute to the greenhouse effect. Key quote from the abstract:
We find that water vapor is the dominant contributor (∼50% of the effect), followed by clouds (∼25%) and then CO2 with ∼20%. All other absorbers play only minor roles.
The scientists also noted that even if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were to double, these percentages would not change significantly.
Does this mean that carbon dioxide is a minor player in creating global warming? This remains unclear. First, the above research is essentially only modeling, not actual data. Second, the scientists themselves note that the interplay of any two of these molecules (such as water and carbon dioxide or water and cloudiness) can have a greater effect than just one molecule alone, which makes these percentages by themselves incomplete.
Nonetheless, these results are important politically. These global warming scientists have placed themselves on record as admitting that cloudiness appears more significant that carbon dioxide in creating the greenhouse effect. And since the combination of water and clouds can have an even greater influence on the climate than either alone, the scientists are also admitting that water is by far the most important greenhouse molecule. Any future climate models as well as political action must take this fact into consideration.
Was T. Rex a cannibal?
IPCC meeting ends with few changes or reforms
You call this reform? At the just completed annual meeting of the IPCC in South Korea, the panel refused to remove its controversial chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, while recommending a few minor reforms in how the panel writes its reports. This quote indicates just how unserious the IPCC is about reform:
In the past, he said, IPCC reports sometimes projected the likelihood of potential climate-change effects, such as melting glaciers, without enough evidence. “There were some weaknesses in the application,” said [Chris Field, a U.S. scientist and a leader of the panel’s 2014 report].