Month: June 2011

Orbital Science rocket engine sustains damage in test

9:33 pm

One of the rocket engines for Orbital Science’s Taurus rocket, to be used to supply cargo to ISS, was badly damaged in a fuel fire June 9.

The results of the investigation and prognosis for the engine and the Taurus II should come together by the end of this week or early next week, Beneski says. Two other AJ26 engines have completed hot-fire acceptance testing without mishap, according to the Aerojet website. Beneski said the engine mishap potentially affects the testing planned to get the Taurus II ready for operational missions to resupply the ISS.

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Democrats call for new spending in US debt deal

6:15 pm

In negotiations over raising the debt limit Democrats are now calling for more stimulus spending.

These guys just don’t get it. We don’t have the money, the federal government is broke, and it was their out-of-control spending and complete lack of responsibility that helped create today’s economic mess.

The one thing that worries me most however is that the public might not get it yet either, and might not vote these bums out of office. If that happens, we are really screwed, in ways that most Americans today probably can’t imagine.

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Cassini directly samples the plumes from Enceladus and finds an ocean-like Spray

5:57 pm

Cassini has directly sampled the plumes from Enceladus and discovered a salty ocean-like spray.

The new paper analyzes three Enceladus flybys in 2008 and 2009 with the same instrument, focusing on the composition of freshly ejected plume grains. The icy particles hit the detector target at speeds between 15,000 and 39,000 mph (23,000 and 63,000 kilometers per hour), vaporizing instantly. Electrical fields inside the cosmic dust analyzer separated the various constituents of the impact cloud.

The data suggest a layer of water between the moon’s rocky core and its icy mantle, possibly as deep as about 50 miles (80 kilometers) beneath the surface. As this water washes against the rocks, it dissolves salt compounds and rises through fractures in the overlying ice to form reserves nearer the surface. If the outermost layer cracks open, the decrease in pressure from these reserves to space causes a plume to shoot out. Roughly 400 pounds (200 kilograms) of water vapor is lost every second in the plumes, with smaller amounts being lost as ice grains. The team calculates the water reserves must have large evaporating surfaces, or they would freeze easily and stop the plumes.

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Conservative lawmakers push for pledge cutting spending across the board, capping government spending, and requires a balanced budget amendment.

12:46 pm

Conservative lawmakers are coalescing behind a pledge to cut spending across the board while requiring a balanced budget amendment.

This story once again suggests to me that the political winds are definitely favoring big cuts in government spending. Woe to the politician of either party who ignores these winds.

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King County, Washington, requires life vests for swimmers

12:25 pm

Big Brother rules! King County, Washington, has voted to require life vests for swimmers.

[The law] applies to people intertubing, rafting, using a surfboard, canoe or kayak. Swimmers or people wading more than 5 feet from shore or in water more than 4 feet deep would also have to wear life vests. The new ordinance does not apply to people at designated public beaches or for people who are skin diving.

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Mann and company write more science fiction

10:09 am

Junk science: Michael Mann and associates have just released a paper claiming “The rate of sea level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years–and has shown a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.” You can read the paper itself here.

For many, many, many reasons, I agree here with scientist Richard Mueller, who believes in global warming but also believes in good science, “I now have a list of people whose papers I won’t read anymore.”

Nonetheless, I have looked at this new paper by Mann and crew, and find its evidence so weak it ain’t worth the paper it’s written on. To look at the record of a single fossil and claim it is a sufficient proxy for sea level rise is downright laughable.

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The failed predictions of global warming activists

7:48 pm

The failed predictions of global warming activists.

In 2005 “the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations University declared that 50 million people could become environmental refugees by 2010, fleeing the effects of climate change.” Three years later . . . Srgjan Kerim, president of the UN General Assembly, said it had been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010. A UNEP web page showed a map of regions where people were likely to be displaced by the ravages of global warming. It has recently been taken offline but is still visible in a Google cache.

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Theft by TSA employees of passenger valuables a nationwide problem

5:31 pm

Doesn’t this make you feel safer? Theft by TSA employees of passenger valuables has become a nationwide problem.

According to TSA records, press reports, and court documents . . . some 500 TSA officers . . . have been fired or suspended for stealing from passenger luggage since the agency’s creation in November of 2001. The airports servicing New York City—John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark Liberty—harbor the most flagrant offenders, but virtually no city in the nation is safe from the TSA’s sticky fingers.

In 2009, a half dozen TSA agents at Miami International Airport were charged with grand theft after boosting an iPod, bottles of perfume, cameras, a GPS system, a Coach purse, and a Hewlett Packard Mini Notebook from passengers’ luggage. Travelers passing through the airport’s checkpoints reported as many as 1,500 items stolen, the majority of which were never recovered.

In May of this year alone, TSA agents were arrested on the suspicion of theft at airports in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

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The battle between global warming and the sun

3:59 pm

The revelation last week that the sun is very likely about to go into a period of little or no sunspot activity has made a lot of global warming advocates, both scientists and journalists, very nervous. For years these climate activists have declared that the Earth’s climate is getting warmer, and that this warming trend was going to do us great harm. Putting aside whether these claims are based on fact (they are not), the possibility that the Earth might instead become cooler because of a dimming of the sun puts this political agenda under threat, and requires some form of immediate action to defuse that threat. See for example this short podcast (with full transcript) from Scientific American. The key quote:

A cooler sun might mean a drop in global average temperatures of at most 0.3 degree Celsius. But the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere today will add 0.6 degree Celsius to global average temperatures by the end of the century. And more, since greenhouse gas emissions show no signs of diminishing. So the slightly cooler sun won’t counteract a much hotter Earth.

In order to discredit the threat that solar variation poses to global warming, the journalist here acts to minimize any danger from a dimming sun. Unfortunately, he does so by extrapolating a result (warmer climates) based on a very weak foundation: an unproven theory and our very limited knowledge of the climate.
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